Scaling Done Right 12: Doctrine, not Dogma

Hello and welcome to the Scaling Done Right podcast. This is episode 12 and my name is Gerrian Hermkes. This podcast, as you will probably know if you have listened to prior episodes, is a companion to the book that Lewis Cantella and I have written, which is called Scaling Done Right how to Achieve Business Agility with Scrum at Scale and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Today we are going to talk about the last chapter of the book.

And this chapter sits a little bit apart from the rest of the book in the sense that it is a bit more philosophical and it is somewhat connected to the thinking of Musashi, the famous swordsman of Japan that has never been defeated and who developed into a warrior philosopher. And he is very much concerned with learning the way. And in today's language we would probably talk about mastery. And this is something that we think is very relevant to Scrum and to Agile today.

Because one thing we notice is that in the book we call it Agile Shiny Object Syndrome, that instead of focusing on mastering their craft, a lot of agile people just, you know, squirrel, squirrel, they see something moving and they immediately turn their attention to it instead of just staying on the path and doing the hard work and learning how to do scrum, Kanban, DevOps, whatever it may be that you want to focus on, but practicing your craft so you can get good at it. I'm sure you have already seen people who after a year of experience call themselves Agile coaches, which does not really make sense.

OEF trainers in so called Agile systems that are able to train and certify Scrum Masters that have never worked as a Scrum Master for a minute of their life. And let's be honest, this really rubs me the wrong way because I think we're doing damage to a very beautiful thing, to a great thing that we're having. And to be honest, I think people are laughing at us in some instances, and rightly so. And I think the basis for this is a deep misunderstanding about Scrum with people who don't know it that well, but also with people who should actually know it better.

And so when I'm with customers, sometimes I hear stuff like, oh well, I could have taken a two day Scrum Master class. It's not like you really know anything more than I do, right? So the fact that you can do a Scrum Master class in two days is being taken and turned into an argument, a weapon against you that you might not even know what you're talking about. And honestly, they are right.

They are right in a sense. Two day class is not going to change everything, it's not going to make you an expert, it's the beginning of your journey. I actually believe that in those two days you can learn a lot of stuff because suddenly you're confronted. If you don't know what Scrum is and you're maybe into waterfall project management and you have an open mind and you're confronted with this new paradigm, it's going to change your world for sure.

You are going to change your views because your mind will be blown, provided that you're open. But what people get wrong outside of the industry and inside, inside the industry is I think that's where the journey ends. And that's kind of just the intro session. So if you think that you can go to a Scrum master class for two days, then work part time on a team and then you'll be a good agile coach after a year, you're mistaken.

And I think this mentality is doing damage to our whole industry. And if we are very honest with each other and look back a little bit about all those fads, all those trends that came before us, and actually I shouldn't say fads because they are not fads. Think about Six Sigma 10, 15, 20 years ago, it was all the rage. And it is a good system.

It's a good system, but nobody's talking about it anymore. Why? Because, well, there's probably many reasons, but one of the reason is that too many people just jumped in, didn't really understand it, didn't apply it correctly. Then the experience of the companies was, well, this isn't really working, which wasn't the fault of the system, but of the people implementing it, among others.

And so then it just fell by the wayside. And Dr. Sutherland has stated that in one of his videos. We're saying, well, if we don't change our ways, the same can happen to Scrum.

And I truly believe that to be the case. And you can actually hear it in companies, they have never actually experienced real Scrum. They have had proto Scrum, they have had pseudo Scrum, but they've never experienced real Scrum. And so they've tasted it and said, I don't like it, which is okay.

But the problem is they have never really tasted the real thing. So the decision they have come to, the conclusion they have come to is based on a bad example. And the problem is that we have too many bad examples in our industry. So what we like to convey to you is please don't think that your journey stops after taking a two day Class Scrum is easy to start, easy to learn, but it's difficult to master.

Think of boxing. You know how many punches are there in boxing? 3. It's not like some kung fu style where you have to learn 10,000 moves and 10,000 forms like katas in Japanese karate where you can spend your whole lifetime just memorizing the movements.

No, it has three punches. It's easy to learn. You can go to a class and you know it after two or three classes, you know all there is to boxing. But you won't be able to box well because you need to put in the practice, you need to put in the time, the sweat and the pain and the tears you to need in order to become a good boxer.

So what if then you get into a fight and somebody watches you? You know the punches on paper, you know boxing, but you can't fight. So the judgment on your boxing will be that you can't do it. But the problem is they are also going to judge boxing apart from you.

They're going to say boxing doesn't work, but it does. It's just a matter of are you on that path? Are you on that path to develop yourself, to develop your scrum, to help develop your team, your organization, in order to really make something out of it. And connected to that is one of the criticisms that is sometimes brought up against scrum, which is that it is too mechanistic, right?

So everything is changing at once. You have that new structure. We're not even talking about scrum at scale right now. We're talking pure team level scrum.

So everything changes. There are new roles introduced and the company has to change quite a bit or the team has to change quite a bit on that very first day, right? And so part of the criticism is that people sometimes wish that scrum would be softer, more humane. And we've talked about this before, scrum should not change.

If you're a coach or a scrum master, there's always way to improve how you introduce scrum. You should be humane in your way of introducing it. But in our view, scrum should stay the same and not be adapted to be softer, more humane. I'm doing air quotes right now.

And the reason for that is that people need structure, especially beginners. So I'm gonna go to a martial arts example again because I train and teach martial arts, so it's very close to me and very easy to do to make the connection. And so imagine you go to a self defense class and you want to learn how to defend yourself. Against somebody trying to choke the air out of you.

So you're standing in front of each other and the other person is just like grabbing your throat and just pushing, Right? And so what if the master told you, just relax, that's the solution. What can you do with that information? Probably nothing.

It's actually the right answer. And no matter what style you do, if you cramp up, you know, if you flex all your muscles, the only thing that you're doing is you're giving the other person leverage over yourself. So it doesn't even really matter what style you do. The answer in the end, the principle behind it is to stay relaxed.

But as a beginner, what's that going to do for you? Nothing. Because you don't know what to do with that. If you just relax as a beginner, then you still don't know what to do after that and you're just going to get choked out quicker.

And so what is good for the advanced student, for the master, isn't necessarily good for the beginner. The beginner needs to have structure. Because this formlessness that we try to achieve on our way, that's where we try to go, is really useless for the beginner. The beginner needs structure.

And if you're truly a master, I'm not talking about a year of being a scrum master, but if you're truly a master of scrum, it's fine if you make some modification, you still shouldn't, but it's fine. But try not to confuse the different levels of advancement the student. The beginner needs to have the structure. And we actually think that scrum is a very effective basic structure, right?

So sure, if you're a master of different systems and let's stay within the martial arts, as soon you know, you might think, well, maybe aikido isn't as effective, or maybe Thai boxing is super effective, right? So if you know something about it, you probably have an opinion on which is effective and is not. I think that holds absolutely true for the beginner level. But at the master level, there will still be significant differences depending on what style you do.

But I think they'll get much closer to each other. Even fairly ineffective art performed at a mastery level will bring results. However, how many people achieve true mastery? And so don't we want to have a system that is already effective for beginners, for the intermediate student, where it's not necessary to achieve a mastery level to achieve some kind of effectiveness?

If you go to a self defense class, do you want to be ready to defend yourself on the street after three months or after 15 years. And that's why we think it's really important to do scrum to stay on the path, stick to it in the beginning, but then also stay on the path of getting better and improving it to actually achieve mastery level to get better. So the book goes into more detail about how to stay on the path, a path to mastery in scrum and agile. But I think this point is as good as any to stop.

I hope, we hope that you have gotten some value out of this companion to the book. It was really fun for us to do because it's a completely different form than writing a book, obviously. And if you haven't read the book yet, you can find it at scalingdoneright.com or wherever you usually tend to buy books.

If you need some help in your transformation or you would like some coaching, you can find q@raskere.com r a s k e r e.com I recently found out that it means faster as in go faster in Norwegian, which I think is super cool. Or you can find me garyonflow.

net and yeah, that's it folks. We are very happy that you followed along this far. Hope to talk to you. So if you see us on LinkedIn, add us and hopefully see you around at some convention or some meetup.

Take care guys. It.