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SCRUM | THE SCRUM GUIDE | VALUE SYSTEMS
About the Scrum Values
(like five jars watering a garden)
Many Scrum practitioners and teachers agree that the idea of having five values and devoting a chapter to them in The Scrum Guide, is somewhat weird and over-the-top.
There are many reasons for people’s uneasiness with the Scrum values. Not alone is speaking of values perceived by some as outlandish, seen that values are a moral and/or ethical subject if ever there is one, they are believed altogether to have no place in an environment of software and/or product development. Yet, by others, not the values per se, but rather the choice of precisely these five is debated — while others again question the fact that The Scrum Values section in The Scrum Guide is so short that it appears all but non-committal.
In the present piece I am addressing all of these and other refutations, while I attempt to shed some light on the values chosen, since The Scrum Guide, admittedly, does not.
In fact, the Values chapter in The Guide contains no more than three ideas:
(1) a list of five items
(2) five concise Scrum Team value statements
(3) a brief contextual description showing how the five values, when embodied by the Scrum Team, bring about, or are interdependently co-arising with, the sort of climate of trust required for the empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation to come to life.
The five items
The chapter starts with the assertion that successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living five values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage.
The opening sentence is pregnant with meaning: If Scrum is “a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems” (which is what The Definition of Scrum asserts it is, see my version here), and its success depends on the growing proficiency of its practitioners in these five values, we can only conclude that stagnant…
