Scrum Without Tears
A no-nonsense, coercion-free approach to creative work
Tomorrow (25th April) sees the more-or-less formal release of a new, much simpler guide to Scrum. The event is marked by an Agile Network conversation between its two primary creators: myself and Bob Hartman.
Read the guide | Join the webinar
A new guide for Scrum is needed because Scrum itself is in need of a refresh in light of current trends. At its core, it is still a beautifully simple approach to creative work, but since the release of the latest Scrum Guide (2020) with its focus on accountability, loss of servant leadership and developer autonomy, the force-fitting of commitments to artefacts, and what is perceived as unnecessary, prescriptive detail, this framework is more and more being reluctantly adopted as a burden rather than embraced as a release. Scrum, once the confronter of tyranny is now itself used as a tyrannical approach to ensure compliance in the workplace. So often today Scrum is enacted as a type of cargo-cult, with very little understanding from its participants about why they do what they do. Why meet every day? Why bother with reviews and retrospectives? Why take so long to plan?
Scrum has always been described as a simple approach to solve complex problems. But if it truly is so simple, why does it need a fourteen-page document to describe itself? Embracing that question, Bob and I (with the help of a few others) took on the task of reducing the guide to two pages, without losing any of its essential nature. The result is our simple guide to Scrum.
Our hope, as we discuss in the webinar, is that Scrum teams will adopt this simple guide to quickly understand the true, threefold purpose of Scrum, which is i) to generate engagement and purpose among workers, ii) deliver valuable products to customers, and iii) to create a learning organisation. Scrum is not designed to manipulate and control, but rather to unleash our innate creative abilities.
Scrum Without Tears
To encourage this revised approach to Scrum I am offering Scrum Without Tears workshops, to explore the new, simple guide. The workshops will help teams and individuals (including managers and executives) reassess their understanding of Scrum, and hopefully make a new, lighter commitment to this quintessentially agile way of working.
Please follow the links here to learn more, and get in touch if you'd like to explore further.