Scrum is a methodology to organize team work. Created by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber in the early 1990s, it is a perfect example of combining tried and true ideas from the Orient and the Occident until you arrive at something novel. In the case of Scrum, the problem it sought to initially solve is how to develop enterprise software in a way that actually creates value to end users. Since its initial conception, the methodology has been recognized to be applicable to just about any human endeavour that requires both creativity and team work.
Scrum is one part ideas from Japanese industrial engineers and researchers. The gist is to de-emphasize the importance of unicorns, rainmakers, support functions, committees, consortiums and other abominations contrived by the corporate cabal, and focus instead on teams that get the work done from start to finish not unlike in the world of sports. The second part is to transform the workplace into an adaptive system where people “observe, orient, decide, and act,” following US Air Force fighter pilot doctrines. This leads to the idea of a Sprint which means a fixed time period during which the team tries to complete a particular objective, after which the team stops to reflect and adjust its Way of Working for the following Sprint.
The term Scrum itself is loaned from the sport of rugby. It describes a situation where the team packs closely together in an attempt to gain possession of the ball. A vivid image of what team work should look like!
I was inspired to write this blog post after my colleague, the Product Owner in our team, encouraged me to read Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. Published in 2015, the book seems be a modern classic at this point.
As Jeff Sutherland has us to believe, Scrum works because it captures how people actually work, based on experimentally verifiable results from psychology. It also works because it recognizes that doing anything well follows the shu-ha-ri path to mastery. Initially, a team obeys the rules by the book. Then the team starts to break them. Finally, the team transcends and achieves mastery. Mentioned only in fine-print in Kanji: a typical development from here is to succumb into complacency, after which the cycle starts again. 繰り返しは 勉強の母
Denial
One must always exercise vigilance for snake oil vendors. If something seems to be too good to be true, it most likely is. Doubly so if it is about a promise to make your life better. And Scrum is most definitely a promise like that. Just ponder about the title of the book. Doing twice the work in half the time?
I do not want to sound like a snake oil vendor myself, but I am not going to define what Scrum actually is. In doing so I am actually passing on a trauma of mine to you, my dear reader. I refer you to the appendix of the book that lays out the core tenets of Scrum very concisely. Instead, I am going to write about my experiences in the world of Agile and a critique of the book.
I remember being rather dismissive about the whole thing and Scrum in general. Indeed, cynicism has become a vice of mine as of late.
You see, I bet you are in the same boat as I am. All those years ago I was simply ordered to work in some agile framework that is associated with weasel words like Cadence, Value Stream, Velocity and so forth without anybody actually taking the time to explain a) what is the big idea b) how does this connect to what I already know c) what is there in it for me. To be more concrete, here is a short account of my first day following Scrum. I commute to work, discover I have to login to Jira, fight with the sysadmins to get my access rights only to discover that I am supposed to fill these web forms called tickets on a daily basis. On my way back from work I cannot but ask myself: “What the heck is an Epic?”
Anger
After ranting about Scrum, the only words of consolation I have gotten so far have been in Agile gibberish: “You should have seen the SAFe 4.0 times.” Scrum was forced upon me without a proper sales pitch whatsoever, and whatever sales pitch I received, I did not buy into. For a Cro-Magnon like me to change my ways, it takes more than that. It takes violence.
After the blunt and critical remarks to my Product Owner, I stopped to reflect for a while. Wasn’t there a TODO in my archives about Agile methodologies? What if I am just a silly grinch led astray by Scrum Novices. Being angry at the world and the inevitable, what if all I have to do is to get to first-hand sources, to the Grand Wizard of the order of Scrum Masters? Most daringly, what if my PO actually cares about me?
So, I walk into the Agile Coach section of our office, and there it is: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. I snatch the book for a read. It’s a page turner right from the start.
Laying out facts and first-hand anecdotes page after page, Sutherland is convincing. More than that, the consultant life the author has led sure seems sweet and exciting. A life filled with great successes and prosperity with the inevitable setbacks just serving as stepping stones to success. It’s the classic American optimistic mindset that we Europeans cannot but love and hate. To be a bit sarcastic, at times I felt that the author himself had achieved mastery in the realm of self-help books.
But in all earnestness I learned that Jeff Sutherland had served as a fighter pilot in Vietnam. I respect that. There’s an interesting passage in the book about the difference between the Soviet and US fighter aircraft with Sutherland’s analysis on why the more nimble US jets beat the more performant Soviet ones and on how this observation also translates to software development. And I am glad that the author was no goddamn hippie. At least he knows how to cater to us “gimlet-eyed business people.”
Yet, a nagging voice in my head keeps on criticizing what I am reading. I keep on seeing flashbacks of agile rituals at work, many of them quite traumatic to be honest. Meetings in the afternoon disrupting hyperfocus, also known as sprint planning; best excuses for breaking promises, also known as sprint retrospectives; constitutional micromanagement, also known as dailies, and me being a bitchy son of a bitch for not knowing any better.
I see neither F-86 Sabres nor MiG-15s. I keep on seeing images of Papua New Guineans worshipping aeroplanes as gods. I bet you know about cargo cults, too. And I keep on seeing a scene in my head from a documentary film whose title I have forgotten. In it, a journalist and an anthropologist fly with a helicopter over the Amazon rainforest. The journalist notices human beings in the jungle and waves at them. The anthropologist is quick to grab his hand and pull him back. He then tells him off: “Those are the last remaining truly free people on Earth, we must let them be!”
As somebody trained to be a researcher, I have had a hard time with Scrum since I basically knew intuitively that it’s foreign imports sold to us by consultants not unlike Jeff Sutherland. First I had a hunch and then I knew it. And the people who set up the system, rigged it, and left us to our own devices.
Scrum leads to an unprecedented level of transparency, but it does not go the other way around. You can tally the net total of all the work I have ever done byte by byte thanks to tools like Jira. It’s there up for criticism. In contrast, I can only rely on tribal knowledge for the circumstances for adopting Scrum, or any other decision for that matter. At times, the whole thing seems to be a big game of broken telephone, or a cargo cult if you will.
I mean, good Lord, you should see us Finns in a Sprint Retrospective. It is like attending a funeral for a matchstick. I do not know about Jeff Sutherland’s stance on religion, but based on his writing I do not think he is a Lutheran.
So there are invisible power structures lurking in the shadows and the bastardization of the original meaning of Scrum. It is plenty enough to make a Cro-Magnon mad. Furthermore, am I not actually giving up the last bits of my freedom thanks to Scrum? It is ironic to ask this since one of the selling points of Scrum is to empower people. I suppose it all boils down to the question of whether empowering people equates to freeing them. This is an interesting question I want to develop further. But one thing is certain already at this stage. If you have an inclination toward anarchism, then Scrum is definitely not for you.
Bargaining
The third stage of grief is bargaining which involves entertaining unrealistic ideas that nonetheless soothe the mind. For me, it is all about travelling back in time to Stone Age — to a time period where everything was truer and simpler. I bet they did not follow Scrum in those days! If only I lived in the Stone Age, I would not need to write a critique of Scrum, for I would not have known work. I would have simply lived. The only Sprint I would have done was when I ran away from a saber-toothed tiger. In my Stone Age dreams my life is more like the highlight reel of my hikes, walks through meadows and some light mountain climbing.
When I come through from the naïvety of my fantasies, I remember a particular photograph of me. It is from the time I was a teenager. In it, I am sitting by the table in our summer cottage and show, very fittingly for this blog post, the emotion of grief. As our summer cottage is the closest thing to the Stone Age for me, the photo reminds me about the role of civilization in my life. As a matter of fact, I am sad in the picture because I would have liked to play Civilization III in my cozy room in the city and not put up with the incessant rain, mosquitoes and being basically exposed to the elements.
I hate summer cottages so I cannot but admit that I am a product of civilization. This is a vexing realization for someone who was nearsighted most of their life. Could I punch a saber-toothed tiger in the face? It is easier if you can see it, but then again how did I lose my sight in the first place if not by reading, the very invention of civilization. It feels I never actually lived except in my dreams. And to think that I then got my sight back after I got my eyes lased. I do not know what to make of this so it is better then to just admit to the fact, as it is the beginning of wisdom.
What brought the civilization into existence? Team work. The road to reconciliation must start by acknowledging that.
A big part of why I have struggled with Scrum or any Agile framework for that matter is that I have not been at peace with team work. It feels very tempting to side with the anthropologist. There is something highly enviable in the freedom of indigenous people untouched by globalization and something shameful about cargo cults. I think the anthropologist’s view of the Native Amazonians and my fascination about the Stone Age are nonetheless manifestations of the same fallacy. Both err in assuming that there is some pure state of human existence, a Way of Living instead of a Way of Working.
It is much safer to err on the side of universalism. Sure, the material reality might be vastly different, but if the subsistence of a group of people relies on team work across family boundaries, it counts as a civilization to me. Secondly, I think we all ultimately fall victim to mind’s biases. We perceive the world not as it is, but as it appears in mind’s eye. One person dreams about riches, and another about a KonMari project of societal proportions. Sometimes it’s the same person! Like…me.
It is suicidal to dream about becoming a wild child, given that one of their many cognitive impairments is their inability to dream. Life without team work is therefore an illusion, and it is a misguided idea to think that people in the rainforest are somehow freer than us. They are like us, and we are back to organizing team work in some productive way.
Depression
If I had to write a book on Scrum, I would approach it from the point of view of mental health. Here we have finally an evocative, if not even violent, angle to the topic. I would have titled the book Scrum: Stages of Grief and made it into a handbook on overcoming depression. To do that, I would have expanded the book’s content with silent truths about work that Sutherland is so clever to omit from his exposition. It is futile to do twice the work if the work is meaningless. Spoiler alert: most work is.
There’s an entire chapter in the book devoted to happiness and meaning. But all of it comes with a precondition of a profit to be made. This is dangerous. It is much better for mental health to actively acknowledge meaninglessness than to lie to oneself about it, and I am afraid the quarterly earnings do not really strike 99% of the workforce as meaningful. For one, understanding financial statements requires skills most people do not possess. For the second, corporate earnings is basically a random variable. It may be that you and your team made a stellar job with that project of yours, but since the accounting rules were changed due to some legal drama, the bottom line looks like you do not even exist.
I am not saying that Sutherland is not seeing the big picture. If anything, he seems like a smart man. The contract is for the people to not only do the work but provide a meaning to it as well. The consultant merely provides the methodology. It is not his job to lecture about matters of the heart or mock his trade. What an ingenious business idea!
But thanks to the way capitalism works, introduction of Scrum can actually just make matters worse. Scrum gone well provides a shimmering of hope and a sliver of dignity, but what good is it, if you happen to work in a desolate salt mine of the corporate world. I sure hope they do not give Sutherland a call in in the fledgling whale hunting business! Or in any other business that is built on exploitation.
It may seem naive to you that I am talking about whales. But ask yourself what is the core purpose of your work. We have all this man-made misery around us. Even if you are full of enthusiasm and conviction like Captain Ahab, are you more virtuous than him in his quest to kill Moby Dick?
Another hellish outcome of adopting Scrum has to do with the way people communicate with each other. Consider a team where it’s plain to see that Alice and Bob are getting constantly on each other’s nerves and this is hurting the team. Which question would you prefer? a) “Okay, guys, how can we increase our velocity?” b) “Okay, guys, can you just blurt out what’s gnawing at you?”
Thanks to its terminology, Scrum gone bad extends an open invitation to use Orwellian language that merely fills the void of purpose with pseudo-meaning. It is dangerous if the language at work starts to revolve around velocities, cadences or any other such nonsense. They are not entirely useless words in their abstractness, but the daily work should nonetheless use the domain language of the work in question. And since team work is bound to involve disagreements, the healthy way to approach them is using the language of emotions, not Agile gibberish.
Nowadays I often feel like the kid in the movie The 6th Sense: “I see depressed people all around me”. If a human being has ended up in a situation where they have avoided doing the hard home work of thinking about meaning in their life, a third of their day is spent on exploitation in the most efficient way possible, and emotions, the true driving forces of human behavior, are totally ignored, what other outcome can you really expect?
I would therefore formulate my main critique of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time as the following sales pitch: “Scrum. Great success! Guaranteed results! Only add leadership.”
I meant to write that only add empathy and meaning, but what other concept combines the two better than true leadership. The proper job for a leader is to sell a meaningful vision, a better future, or communicate the meaninglessness of the present in a humane way. It takes a leader to say: “Our work is a shit sandwich we all have to take a bite of. I’ve heard of way to minimize its shittiness. People call it Scrum. It is what is left when you remove all the unnecessary shit.”
Acceptance
In reading Sutherland’s book and writing this blog post, I could not limit myself to Agile methodologies. I had to articulate to myself what work means to me in the first place. Now, all that is is left to do is to accept the conclusions. What I discovered is the need for team work and leadership, latter of which we are sorely lacking and without which no methodology to organize team work is any good.
I discovered that the circumstances for my first encounter with Scrum were quite unfortunate. I have a vague understanding that they read material like Sutherland’s book as a part of MBA degree curriculum. As I come from natural sciences, I was hit hard by Agile as I had no preconception of it. Researcher’s life tends to be quite solitary, too. We had some team sport activities at the university, but then again, most of us were nearsighted and ran around in our separate ways.
One silent truth that about Sutherland’s book is that you can stop reading it after it introduces the notion of a cross-functional team. The term refers to a situation where all the know-how for getting things Done resides within the team. In my experience, all the pain points that I described in anger simply go away when everything that is expected for the team to accomplish can be realistically accomplished by the team. A daily can be like card game where a team tries to close as many tickets as possible. Sprint plannings and retrospectives can be about enforcing a vision and getting rid of waste. Reaching the objective becomes practically inevitable. There is then no need to ponder what an Epic is. You know it when you complete one. It’s epic.
Having a true cross-functional team in place is basically winning half the battle when it comes to organizing team work. In my experience, most organizations nonetheless almost consciously avoid building teams with the Scrum mindset. It is almost like they view themselves as an actual collection of organs. One set of experts are permitted to use their left and different set their right hand. As a cross-functional team is a bit like an aggressive tumor and consumes a lot of expertise, I suppose the powers that be view them as unattractive, if not even invasive. But they still want to adopt Scrum!
I also discovered that I have been fortunate because I made the connection between sanity and work early in my life. I once asked my parents what insanity is. They replied with a counterexample. To be sane is to be able to work and love. Their reply contains the idea that you need something that provides you pleasure and prosperity, and that you do not want go directly after either of them. Their reply also contained the idea that you should not try to love your work. You should love people. A silent truth not contained in Sutherland’s book.
Even though I did not know about Scrum at the university, the lessons on the connection between work and meaning have been easily more profound and have further shielded me from depression. It is fascinating to see the passage of time when looking for example at prehistoric burial sites. It is not difficult to put them in chronological order. Just go from simpler to more intricate and that’s it. Everybody died in the end, but every generation still got a little bit craftier.
Where is then the meaning? I think it is more important to accept
meaninglessness. It may seem depressive, but I mean it more like in Douglas
Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In it, the meaning of life is 42.
Executing man ascii in your shell reveals that 42 is the decimal
representation of the asterisk character (*), or the wildcard symbol. It is
what you decide it to be.
One old professor I assisted had a particular influence on me. I remember him revealing his “secret sauce” to success once. It was simply “just do some meaningful work.” You can then understand my relief when I stumbled on the number one, scientifically proven preemptive action to avoid depression: “Just to do something meaningful”. I learned to associate success to the absence of depression.
Here’s then a proper reason to work: “Just do it!”
After realizing this, answering the big points about Scrum becomes easy. The main point of Scrum is to get the job Done. It was impossible for the twenty-something old me to connect the dots because I only knew what work is in theory, not what team work actually is. You live and learn.
There is finally a big reward to be had.
In closing, I want to paint a picture of my last day in the army. With the warm July winds blowing through my soul, I was high on life. I could not fathom it at the time but now I know why I was so happy. At that moment I had become a free man. If I was not to be a free man, I would get to my tribe, we would hide in the jungle…do what they do in the army. And then I would be a free man again. It is therefore the case that empowering people to work together sets them free.