History

The area of land that makes up the United Arab Emirates today has had human occupation for thousands of years. Groups of nomadic tribes survived through agriculture and the raising of animals for their milk, eggs, meat, and other products.

As European colonists expanded their reach, the likes of the British, Dutch, and Portuguese began arriving in the Persian Gulf leading to conflicts between the European powers and the local Emirati traders. The Portuguese conquered coastal communities in the 16th century, while British interest was in protecting the Indian trade routes which included military operations along other parts of the coast. It was in 1820 when the British signed a maritime truce with local rulers that led to the term “Trucial States” which came to be used to define the coastal area. Further agreements were made during the 1800s which effectively established an arrangement whereby the British provided protection of the Trucial coast in return for the Trucial sheikhs agreeing not to enter into relationships with any other foreign government without British consent.

Dubai itself is believed to have been established as a fishing village in the early 18th century with a population of 700–800 people. In 1901, Dubai was established as a free port with no taxation on imports or exports. It became particularly well-known for pearling and the export of pearls in the 1930s.

During the early 1900s, the British became aware of the potential for oil in the region. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), which was later to become British Petroleum (BP), had a large share in the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), and they led the IPC operations to drill for oil. Eventually oil was discovered off of Dubai’s waters in 1966, accelerating the plans of Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, to carry out massive infrastructure and construction projects. This boom led to a great influx of immigrant workers. Between 1968 and 1975, the city grew by more than three times.

By 1966, it was becoming clear that the British could no longer afford to protect the Trucial States. In 1968, then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced the government's decision, reaffirmed in 1971 by his successor, Edward Heath, to end the protection treaty that it had with the seven Trucial Sheikhdoms, Bahrain, and Qatar. The ruler of Abu Dhabi, at the time, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, tried in vain to persuade the British to keep the protection treaties in place by offering to pay the costs of keeping the British Forces in place, but the offer was rejected. The relationship with the British ended on December 2, 1971, and the United Arab Emirates became an independent nation, made up of the six emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Fujairah, and Umm-al-Qaiwain, with Abu Dhabi chosen as the capital. Ras al Khaimah became the seventh emirate in 1972.

Revenues from oil were poured into healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Dubai became an international hub. Economic growth in the United Arab Emirates has been impressive and steady over the last 50 years, with only a few blips along the way, such as during the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. Average GDP growth between 2000 and 2018 was around 4%.¹ In parallel, the population of the UAE increased from 550,000 in 1975 to around 10 million, mainly due to immigration, with expatriates making up around around 88% of the population.²

Insights

With a backdrop of tribalism and the country having been made up of seven distinct emirates, the United Arab Emirates has a very traditional and conservative society. Leadership is authoritarian. However, in 2016, the country appointed a Minister of Happiness,³ responsible for boosting the joy and mood of the country’s citizens. There is also a Ministry of Tolerance⁴ and 2019 was designated the “Year of Tolerance.”

There are attempts to diversify the economy away from the dominance of oil, with the country able to entice business with its political stability, forward thinking government, favorable economic conditions, improving regulatory environment, and generally good infrastructure, including that of Information and Communications technology. Dubai itself has become a hub for service industries and knowledge work, including finance and IT. Dubai Internet City⁵ along with Dubai Media City were set up as free economic zones. Rules here give companies a number of taxation and customs related benefits which are guaranteed in law for at least 50 years. IT companies with a presence in Dubai Media City include Google, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Dell, and Hewlett Packard. The UAE government also set up the world’s first Ministry of Artificial Intelligence.⁶ Dubai is at the forefront of the county’s efforts of technological advancement and has been in and around the top five fastest growing cities in the world in the last few years.⁷

The UAE has one of the world’s highest net migration rates, with the highest numbers of people coming from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Immigrants from Europe, Australia, North and Latin America make up about 500,000 people of the population. More than 100,000 British people live in the country⁸ and English is widely taught in schools as a second language. The United Arab Emirates also has close strategic ties with the United States.

Dubai is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, with people visiting it for its aquaparks, indoor ski slope, the world’s tallest building, desert tours, and of course the opulent shopping malls. The approach of attracting high spending tourists has evolved the Dubai culture to one of extravagance and luxury.

Private sector employers tend to be more inclined to hire overseas workers because of cost, but also because of employee rights. For example, foreign workers can be made redundant more easily. UAE locals tend to go into government or public jobs. However, there is a perception that pay is based on people’s nationality⁹ instead of competence, with some evidence emerging to back this up.¹⁰ Those from India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, China, and Africa would be paid at a much lower rate in comparison to someone from the United Kingdom to do the same job for example.

Getting On and Around

Where organizations in the United Arab Emirates already have a challenge of building effective teams from a pool of such diversity, the inequality in pay that we were told is common knowledge, must be a significant barrier to building team cohesion. Among the other anecdotes that we were told were stories where tensions were often caused by cultural clashes. Assertiveness and truth in some was incompatible with expectations of compliance and diplomacy in others for example. We heard stories where siloed groups had formed with a real reluctance to share knowledge – an obvious impediment to creating an Agile environment.

Another hurdle that we were told about, perhaps because of the autocratic nature of the culture, was that overseas companies operating in Dubai feel outside pressure to act in a command and control way. A fear of failure appears to be common within company cultures where there is a low tolerance for things going wrong. And with few employment rights as foreigners, the threat of losing a job carries with it losing the right to stay in the country. This is an unfortunate mix that means that values such as courage, transparency, and experimentation that are commonly advocated with Agile methods are repressed.

In one example, we heard about a software engineer, an expatriate who was part of a team that were being pushed to deliver more and more features on top of a product already saddled with technical debt. In what is a rare case, they stood up to the Product Owner and company managers, insisting on an agreement where 50% of development capacity be reserved to manage and tackle the technical debt problem over time. We can only imagine the courage that this took; however, people standing up for what they believe in like this rather than playing it safe is the exception rather than the rule.

When it was talked about, as acknowledged by those telling many of the stories that we encountered, Agile was referred to as being in name only, with waterfall processes in place but repackaged as Agile. Some teams in organizations may be “doing standups,” but it didn’t take long for us to hear anti-patterns emerge such as the segregation of the “development Sprint” and the “test Sprint.” Some of the blame is pointed toward a lack of maturity in the knowledge of Agile in the region, with a reliance and expectation on many of the people coming in. These people are judged on their Agile certifications and attracted by the money on offer, but in many cases have little or no actual practical experience, let alone a true understanding of agility. It is a common problem worldwide, but more acute here, whereby there is a shortage of experienced practitioners that understand agility, compounded by organizations, especially larger ones, not understanding what they are recruiting for and what to look for.

Dubai is an international hub with massive multinational companies operating in the city. Any large-scale organization that has established corporate cultures and embedded ways of working formed over decades is going to have struggles adopting Agile, especially when there is a shortage of practitioners. There are startups in Dubai, and they are proving to be successful by adopting an Agile approach,¹¹ and we believe this will gain attention and help build momentum.

The main need here is for education, gaining agreement for real change and for sharing experiences. For Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches going into any of the major companies, what is needed is a lot of patience and understanding what is possible.