There are moments in Scrum Mastery where it looks like they’re doing very little.
They’re quiet in a meeting.
They don’t jump in to fix a problem.
They let a conversation run longer than feels comfortable.
From the outside, it can look like inaction.
From the inside, it’s some of the most deliberate work they do.
One of the most persistent misunderstandings about the Scrum Master role is that it exists to enforce process.
Seen this way, the Scrum Master becomes a kind of process police officer – checking attendance, correcting behaviour and reminding people what Scrum says should happen.
But that framing misses the point of the role entirely.
Scrum does not exist to be obeyed.
It exists to help teams work effectively in complexity.
And complexity does not respond well to enforcement.
One of my favourite podcasts is Eat Sleep Work Repeat hosted by Bruce Daisley, the European Vice-President for Twitter. I was delighted when I heard earlier this year that he was publishing a book, The Joy of Work (2019).
The subtitle of this his first book promises a lot: “30 ways to fix your work culture and fall in love with your job again”. The book is arranged into three sections which he claims together create happier work environments:
Each chapter relatively short, easy to read and is packed with great, up-to-date research and ends with a few practical ideas about how you could implement that idea.
The first section offers 12 performance-enhancing actions to make work less awful:
At the Cegedim UK conference in Dundee on Wednesday 23 January 2019, Steve Bradley introduced us to the company goals around which the agenda was organised. The third goal was about people and culture:
To develop our talents and to promote an open, empowered, collaborative and energised working culture that embraces change, nurtures innovation and makes us a truly amazing and rewarding company to work for.
This excited me.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines culture as ‘the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society’. While I’ve not found the word ‘culture’ in any of the books I have on agile or any of its particular flavours (DSDM, Lean, Scrum, XP) this is something I came to realise very early on: agile development is not a process, it’s not a methodology, it is a culture.
This makes sense. The first statement in the agile manifesto reads, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.
Agile development is not a process, it’s not a tool, it is a culture. It is about the ideas, customs and social behaviours of a particular team or company that uses experimentation and validated learning to rapidly release quality software and that learns from its serious use with real users.
Continue reading Agile is about culture not processes
