SCRUM | SCRUM GUIDE | DEFINITION
The bare essence of Scrum
(a three-step cadence)
I wonder why so much is happening online with people disagreeing over the meaning of Scrum. What is Scrum?, one asks. Another says: It is this. Says a third one: No, it is that. While a fourth one claims it is something different altogether. Then, we have a fight. Often, after a whole long while of monopolizing a certain thread on this or that social platform, the hottest debaters “agree to disagree” — which is as much as saying I have stopped listening to your arguments, however valuable, because I love disagreeing with you so much.
The result of all this bickering is that in the end nobody cares anymore.
It shouldn’t be so hard
Why do we bother? The answer to what is Scrum is right there in front of us. The very purpose of The Scrum Guide is to provide it.
(In case you wonder, I have written about the Purpose of The Scrum Guide here.)
The Definition of Scrum
The second chapter of The Scrum Guide is about The Definition of Scrum. The section has four paragraphs. The first paragraph is bold and concise, courageous, ambitious, emphatic and grand — and just one line long. It provides the definition proper. Verbatim:
Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.
Definition key words
Lightweight means weighing less than average. It also means lacking seriousness, depth, or influence. Counter-intuitively, I love this second meaning more than anything else. I think it is very meaningful to say that Scrum is so light that you’d hardly notice it. It’s there, but its being there doesn’t seem to have any influence on the proceedings. I love this because it shows how Scrum, in essence, is not an imperative, prescriptive, constraining, limiting, hard core, imperialist, must-comply kind of structure. Scrum is merely describing how working and creating value together happens in a bare, naked, natural state — disrobed from all the Emperor’s clothes and stars and stripes and positions and blingbling and clutterclatter and pitterpatter that humans so often load themselves with when it comes to so-calledly being professional. Scrum is being natural.
Framework means a structure underlying a system or concept. It doesn’t mean the system or the concept itself.
People, teams, and organizations are all plural forms. They are collectives. Scrum is nothing about egos. Scrum is about groups and communities.
Help generate value means that Scrum is an almost invisible natural underlying structure in service of value generation. If we feel that value is not generated, either we haven’t found Scrum or we have and Scrum is not helpful for our value generation. It never says that Scrum is always the answer.
Adaptive solutions for complex problems is the most important clause in the definition of Scrum. It means that Scrum is meant to help groups of people generate value in an environment of complexity.
So what in fact is an environment of complexity? Most of us working in circles of Scrum and other so-called Agile methodologies are familiar with Cynefin, a model developed by Dave Snowden when he worked at IBM Global Services. The readers who have been in workshops with me, or are familiar with my writing, here on Medium and on other platforms, know that I am no great fan of models in general and it is very a-typical for me to refer to them. I just happen to think that life and the world and human beings are too intricate and beautiful to be compressed in reductionist artifacts such as models and graphs. Another thing is that Snowden loves to intellectualize, which I congratulate him with, even if I think it isn’t always very helpful. But there. In Cynefin (originally a Welsh word pronounced Kunèvin, meaning ‘habitat’) Snowden describes the complex domain as representing the ‘unknown unknowns”’— where cause and effect can only be deduced in retrospect, and where there are no right answers. Now this happens to be the optimum field where Scrum emerges as a perfect trampoline framework, providing an lightly organizing beat for a cyclic pattern, with each jump generating increments of a recurrently re-aligned and therefore adaptive solution.
Keep it simple
I the above turns you off, give me a few more minutes. There is no need to get highbrow. Even the idea of complex problems can be imagined simply and clearly.
Suppose you have a family with children and you want to keep your house sorted and organized and suiting the needs and desires of all its inhabitants at all times. Now there is complex problem:
Impermanence: All family members grow, children and parents included. We change. More quickly perhaps than we would choose to if only we were in control. It is difficult for parents to stay in sync with what the children are up to — just as it is difficult to cope with ourselves getting older.
Uncertainty: It is unclear what your children will need and desire at any given moment in time. Neither do we really know about ourselves.
Interbeing: Your house is constrained by its size and number of rooms — and its inhabitants co-create their own and each other’s paths. Whatever space (physically or mentally) one of your children needs or desires to occupy, affects the space that is left for the others. Everything is interconnected.
Transcontextuality: The organization of your house has an impact on other aspects of your family life. If the kitchen allows for togetherness, families tend to gather there during cooking and clean-up. It it doesn’t, you will find yourself cooking and cleaning up alone.
In brief, the components of complexity are four in number:
The program in three beats
The second paragraph of the Scrum Definition chapter in The Scrum Guide is as meaningful as the definition proper. In no more than three beats, it introduces (sometimes by name, sometimes by implication) the main players of Scrum (the Scrum Team, viz., the developers, the Product Owner, and the Scrum Master — later somewhat awkwardly called ‘accountabilities’), all three of its artifacts (the Product Backlog, the Sprint Backlog, the Value Increment), and three of the five Scrum events (the Sprint Planning, the Sprint, the Sprint Review).
Here goes:
Scrum requires a Scrum Master to foster an environment where:
1 — A Product Owner orders the work for a complex problem into a Product Backlog.
2 — The Scrum Team turns a selection of the work into an Increment of value during a Sprint.
3 — The Scrum Team and its stakeholders inspect the results and adjust for the next Sprint.
x — [Repeat]
In our example:
The whole family jots their ideas about the house on sticky notes. The parents order the work. The family decides on what to do first.
“The garden!” “Anna’s room!” “The attic!”
“No: Let’s first repair and repaint all the walls!”
“What delivers more value at once?”The whole family gathers on Sundays to discuss what’s done, and to realign and adjust.
Repeat.
Note how the three-beat pattern shown here differs from the three-beat pattern so beautifully identified by Tobias Mayer and described by me in another Medium piece. The reason for this seeming discrepancy is the scale. In the three beats of The Scrum Definition, the second beat represents the whole of the Tobias formula. To this, the Product Backlog and its refining phase are prefixed as the first beat, and the activities and outcome of a Sprint Review are affixed to make the cyclic pattern complete.
Scrum is people getting better by and in practice
The third paragraph in The Definition of Scrum reiterates the general idea of it being no more than a description of the main threads of a naturally emerging framework — leaving most of its efficiency to the creative imagination of its practitioners and their readiness to experiment. Most of us reading the current page are familiar with the “do it and help others do it” phrase in The Agile Manifesto: with Scrum, it is no different.
Scrum is simple because it is natural and affords for the practitioner’s imagination. Don’t take it as a model, the Scrum Guide says. Scrum has nothing in common with some business guru telling you what to do and how to do it. Incidentally, even the Sanskrit word ‘guru’ literally means ‘heavy’. While Scrum is light.
Scrum is not a belief system. Scrum is not for believers. There is absolutely no room for anybody to believe or not believe in Scrum.
Conversely, Scrum is for empiricists:
Try it as is and determine if its philosophy, theory, and structure help to achieve goals and create value.
Together, as a group, by doing it and helping others do it, teams have a tendency to rapidly become better in their praxis:
The Scrum framework is purposefully incomplete, only defining the parts required to implement Scrum theory. Scrum is built upon by the collective intelligence of the people using it. Rather than provide people with detailed instructions, the rules of Scrum guide their relationships and interactions.
The art of being a host and a guest
The fourth and last paragraph of The Definition of Scrum is about artful hospitality — both provided and enjoyed. Scrum, it pertains, has the unique affordance of wrapping in itself a (pun intended) host of different processes, techniques and methods, allowing them to be employed within its framework. Sometimes Scrum proves to be a friendly ecosystem, a womb-like biotope for non-Scrum ways and practices that have taken shape in an organization during its pre-Scrum phase. At other times, organizations may find reassurance in the recognition that their ways and practices have been Scrum-like all the time.
Conversely, hosting guests requires courage: when newcomers bring to the surface the knowledge that one’s processes are not hospitality-proof or cannot endure the scrutiny of a well-wisher's test. Sometimes, it says in The Scrum Guide, Scrum makes visible the relative efficacy of current management, environment, and work techniques, so that improvements can be made.
So What is Scrum?
With all this, just four short paragraphs in The Scrum Guide, I think the question of What is Scrum (and what isn’t) has been answered reasonably well.
If so — can we stop this endless arguing about it and get on with our work?
