Scrum Thoughts #3
a collection of recent missives from the corporate badlands
Another collection of short LinkedIn posts, spur-of-the-moment thoughts, written between August and December 2024, sometimes thoughtful, other times reactionary. I invite you to comment here, or on join the conversation on an original post by clicking its link. I present the ten posts here, lightly edited, in chronological order, oldest first.1
Agile Is Dead
Actually, no, it isn’t. This statement is nonsense. For those who recognise not-knowing as the default state for starting new creative work, actual agility as a way of being is very much alive. The ones who believe they must know, well, agility is anathema to them.
Agile, the upper-cased nominalisation, cannot be dead because it was never alive. It was always a phantom. [original post]
What is Scrum?
Scrum is not so much a thing, as a lack of things. It is the spaces in between. When we look at a tree, we see leaves. Less noticed is the space between the leaves—empty air, leaking light that gives shape to the leaves, that provides depth and colour. Scrum emphasises a reflective mindset. This might be seen as space in our busy work days—space between the command and the compliance. It is the pause for thought, where we can connect with our intuition and slowly shed our learned habits. Scrum, done well, allows people to move at a sustained, even a leisurely pace, and get more meaningful work accomplished. [original post]
Don’t join my CSM
Where would you rather be—in picture 1, a typical corporate training, or picture 2, a creative, shared experience? Please don't join my CSM if you incline towards the first. If you desire instruction, or to be a mere recipient of information you are advised to find a different CSM. There are many.
My CSM—a workshop, not a class—calls on you to step into your creativity, and step up to the same kind of responsibility a scrum team member is expected to have in the workplace, in this case to take responsibility for your own learning.2
This workshop is centred on the belief that Scrum is a radically different way of working, and not some kind of superficial reframe of work-as-usual. Focusing on the principles and spirit beneath the framework and process, reaching into your own personal value system to draw out meaning, this learning will have you challenge how you show up for work, and what you believe it means to "do Scrum". [original post]
Paradox
The three Scrum accountabilities are—fundamentally and absolutely—unlike traditional corporate roles, and indeed play out in somewhat paradoxical ways: a product owner needs to release ownership, a scrum master needs to serve, and developers need to code less and talk more. The scrum team, as a whole, is a collaborative unit, both within itself and with other teams and stakeholders, and each member is responsible for its success. Doing Scrum is not work-as-usual. You are asked to show up in a completely different way. Your thinking and behaviour will change. Scrum may be simple (and it really is) but it is far from easy. [original post]
Sometimes it’s the people
I'm not keen on this trendy idea: it is never the workers, it is always the system (or the leadership). Sometimes it is actually a people problem (Deming suggests 5%). Some people, for whatever reason are full of fear, which manifests as a destructive force, tearing through an entire cohort. I teach, and for the most part the students enjoy the classes, are challenged, and learn new ways of thinking and doing, but occasionally there is one student who doesn't want to learn anything new, negates the work, and does their best to get others onside. One bad apple really does destroy the whole crop—if not thrown out early. People are individuals, not only a group—some will be amazing, some held back by circumstance, and others utterly miserable and on a course of self-destruction. Treat people as people, not as a workforce. And if, perhaps like the fictional CEO in this story3, you have a whole team who have become poisoned, you may well need to fire them all and start again—or leave yourself for pastures greener. [original post]
Extreme Agile
Extreme Agile? No thanks.4 AI cannot write code, any more than 4GL could back in the 1990s. Indeed the reason most software products are such a mess today is exactly because they were written by machine, rather than human. Exquisite, high-quality, clean, elegant code is just like poetry. Both require great love, both are minimalist, well thought out, edited, refined to perfection; both speak volumes through the fewest of terms. No machine can do that—indeed no unskilled person can do that. And unskilled people operating machines...God help us! Poetry and code, and almost all art generated by AI and its controllers is a facade of the real thing, fake, phoney, cold, devoid of meaning; it satisfies only our most superficial understanding of the world, the surface of the surface. [original post]
Agile Autumn
This time is the autumn of agility: a time to shed the unwanted appendages, the poorly implemented processes, the facades, the bloated frameworks, the misunderstandings, and hopefully the arguments too. All will fall away. Soon it will be time for sleep, a time where quiet, invisible, perhaps magical processes gently murmur beneath the surface, preparing to spring forth into new life, new ideas. Agile is quiet, but very much alive. Just have patience—and faith. [original post]
Product Lackey
If your product owner is not able to make their own choices on the essential issues of 1) business priority, 2) release date/s and 3) budget, then you do not actually have a product owner. You have a product lackey: one who behaves like a servant, by obeying someone else's orders or by doing unpleasant work for them. A lackey is one with very little, or even zero accountability—but too often the one who takes the blame when things go wrong.
"For Product Owners to succeed, the entire organization must respect their decisions." — The Scrum Guide, 2020
A real product owner is one with the full autonomy and trust to make all of the important decisions related to the product they are accountable for. Anything less and the spirit of your team will slowly (sometimes quickly) be chiselled away until all that remains is reluctant, disengaged compliance. Beware. [original post]
Motivation
I am often asked by managers, "how do I motivate my team?" My answer is always the same: "Please don't.” Instead, just stop doing those things—usually many!—that demotivate them. And watch what happens. [original post]
No Handoffs
There is no such thing as a "handoff" in Scrum. If people understood that, they may be able to practice Scrum in a way that is actually useful and beneficial to all—workers and customers alike. Instead though, we add designers and analysts upfront, testers at the end, and more recently devops people after all that, complicating what is essentially and beautifully simple.
There is no such thing as a "handoff" in Scrum.
Say it each night before you go to sleep.
Today I decided to back away from LinkedIn for a while. Read why here. For the next few weeks or months I may experiment with Substack Notes—or perhaps I’ll just be quiet.
This post was (clearly) promotional, but the underlying message is that you can’t teach an emergent idea in a pre-defined way—it is incongruous. More about that here. And back on the promotional track, my next online CSM is coming up on 4-6 Feb. Join me :)
The CEO was ready to fire his entire team, Jamie Smith
“Extreme Agile” is a phrase coined by Jeff Sutherland, and commented on by Stefen Wolpers.