Scrum, Habits and Non-Technical Domains

My experience is that people become used to a certain way of doing it.
They build up habits so that they don’t have to think so hard about the
basics. Nothing is wrong with habits, habits let me move fast
(efficiently), like grabbing my wallet from the same place each day as I
can run out the door. However, they can become unintended calcification.
It is the willingness to acknowledge that we all form habits good or bad
and our willingness to knock the calcification off when we detect we
should that helps us be agile. Our brains are essentially lazy pieces of
meat that will favor doing the minimum necessary. Path of least
resistance

So, when a new technology compresses a feedback loop’s time horizon.
Then it is not surprising that people are often unwilling to adapt and
leverage the new time horizon.Why? “It stresses me out”, “I don’t want
to change” and ” nothing is broken”… I see scrum as a framework (or
detection mechanism) that makes finding these habits easier and calls
them to attention in such a way that people feel safe to face the
change. That is why I like to say Scrum is a pathway that when applied
with CARE, leads to a well formed team (a group of people working well
together) who maximize their ability to adapt in the face of their
challenges. You can call the above soft skills or whatever. The science
behind these views is becoming very supportive.

We typically realize scrum’s promise in development domains that require
a rich set of blended metaphors to consider the problems. Software
products typically demand strong well structured expressions that exceed
the limit of one person’s head; it is often done better as a group
activity and often more successfully. Software development has some of
the most rapid feedback loops available in complex development domains,
good teams maximize these loops. Soccer would be faster but, it does not
allow for the complex abstract thinking that software does.

Products that are made up of software, hardware, chemical systems,
mechanical, numerous embedded components and human interaction are what
I would call about as hard as it gets; helicopter anyone. We do all
kinds of things to shorten the feedback loops and learn as rapidly as we
can about stuff we don’t know about yet. At the end of the day, after it
comes together, are we ever really clear on how it happened? or where
were we simply successful enough at dealing with stuff we didn’t
expect. I believe we have some clarity but, mostly not.

A question I like to ask is “For conceptually complex development
domains, how can we get better at being adaptable in the face of things
we don’t know about yet?” This question fascinates, humbles and energizes me

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Douglas Shimp
Managing Partner and Senior Consultant, CST
www.3back.com

“Applied Scrum, where the rubber meets the road.”