Reblogged with permission from Jem D'jelal, the original author of this content, as a contributor to blogagility.com. Originally published on LinkedIn October 7, 2016.
Jem D’jelal Coaching individuals & teams to find “better” ways of working.
“Death to Kanban !”
“Scrum-butters should be exiled!”
“Scrum will save the world!”
It’s embarrassing but that was kinda me a few years back.
Misguided passion with the best intentions – but still misguided.
They say in rugby to have “ice in the brain & fire in your stomach” – I was more like a fuc*ing inferno with zero tolerance to anything but Scrum & to those Scrum-butting.
And even now, I stab myself with my pen when I catch myself thinking Scrum Zealot thoughts.
🙂
What took 5 years to do, won’t come undone over night…
I was a “nice guy” at the start, honest.
I was introduced to Scrum in 2006 & ironically the guy who showed me what Scrum was, wasn’t a fanatic.
Quietly spoken, open minded with no “selling” of the framework going on.
The idea of giving the people who do the work a voice, creating stuff which delighted the customer – working in a sustainable way…it all sounded good to me.
It connected with a career choice I dabbled with, Social Work. Empowering people, helping people. Serving people.
I couldn’t have gone more away from the spirit of such work.
I somehow missed the point of Scrum, the essence & became focused on all of the wrong things.
Common though, that makes me feel allot better it.
Dogma is an understatement
I could round up my ignorance with the following dogma:
-Scrum was “right” for every single situation
-ScrumMasters had the “right” to enforce Scrum onto teams using Scrum
-ScrumMasters who didn’t follow the Scrum guide to the letter were “soft”
If you couldn’t entertain the above, it was NOT because your choice was incorrect or your approach was incorrect….no!
It was because you “didn’t get Scrum” or you weren’t exhibiting the value of “courage to make Scrum happen”.
Courage to be an a**hole is not courage.
That’s ignorance with an unhealthy fixation on wanting everyone to drink the kool-aid.
Radicalisation begins with idols.
“Scrum with a bootstrap”
“Shock therapy Scrum”
More recently we have the uncomfortable term “aggressive Scrum”.
I began to read Sutherland’s papers & other pioneers in the field affiliated to Scrum and found myself feeling almost military like about Scrum.
I’m not allocating blame but to an impressionable newbie, terms like the above can create, I feel the wrong mindset.
“I’m the ScrumMaster & I’m the authority on this framework & yeah I’m a servant leader but I will kick some ass if you break the rules”
And this is justifiable because I’m there to “enforce Scrum right?”.
Aggression breeds aggression.
Imagine taking on such a persona & then meeting mangers who also share the same misunderstanding you have for Scrum.
They too see Scrum as a stick.
There you are, hired as an enforcer of the Scrum guide.
Fashion piece agile or Scrum where we have the buzz words & the tools but will “kick people’s asses” if they don’t follow the rules.
Rigid, unreasonably disciplined, over-assertive like some sort of concrete structure which can not bend according to context.
Servant leadership was just a veneer concept where expressions such ” we must ask the team” were contradicted by “you need to do as the Scrum guide says”.
How can you aspired to be a servant leader through a command & control approach?
You can’t.
And it wasn’t just the bosses who compounded my dogma.
It was at times my peers & the meet ups I’d attend.
Without doubt people may have challenged me but I was so lost in my own dogma, I’d probably think “they had a long way to go” or “were just Scrum hippies”.
Thinking for yourself.
Just because someone who created a framework uses terms & ideas which (I see) as enforcement at times – it doesn’t mean it needs to be that way.
Of course there is a pressure to conform to the thought leaders who are respected in the community but I have found a greater pressure to be more human in how I work.
It never felt “right”, unnecessarily quoting the Scrum guide to people breaking rules when what they may have benefitted from was “the why” behind what we do.
It never felt “right”, walking into a new team, not understanding where they currently are & just using the battering ram approach..” this is what we’re going to do now”.
It never felt right becoming obsessed with velocity as though software is a sausage making machine.
None of the above things are to do with Scrum, I do think they are to do with how thought leaders express ideas, the poor wording in the Scrum guide & of course my own interpretation.
Genuine confusion.
ScrumMasters are here to help teams use Scrum to be “better”.
Yet if they are not following the rules of Scrum, then how can we say they are doing Scrum?
Is your goal “doing” good Scrum?
That was my old way of thinking.
I have been breaking the Scrum guide for the past half decade – when necessary.
Unable to articulate when & why I would do this – many of my peers called me a Scrum-butter – I knew how it felt to be on the receiving end of dogma.
But. It didn’t bother me as I felt that servant leadership & helping the team improve trumped all things.
Just a week ago, in a Tobias Mayer workshop, I had an epiphany where I realised the letter of the law is not always as important as the spirit of the law.
See that blog here.
It’s SOOO easy to see why so many ScrumMasters fall into the Dogmatic Scrum trap – guilt, shame, feeling incompetence for breaking the rules of Scrum.
But there is a way – without dogma.
How, you ask?
….understand its value and purpose, and learn how to bend its framework to your own context, without breaking it.
-Tobias Mayer
No one has helped me understand the essence of Scrum better than Tobias.
It’s pretty special to have him back teaching the CSM classes, take a look:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/csm-london-26-27-october-tobias-mayer
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