Agile Thoughts

The Falklands War, 1982, Diego Maradona and the Hand of God, 1986, Andreas my next-door-neighbor in London, 1993-99,  The ear-torturing Evita, 1978, German refugees, polo, the tango, red wine, high quality beef…  Yep, that’s about it, the extent of my knowledge of Argentina prior to this visit.  I have not learned a great deal more in the past two days, to tell the truth, but I have learned that Buenos Aires is a cool and funky city, with good food and great people.  Twenty-five of those people are currently engaging with me on a journey of discovery about Scrum.  We are half-way through the CSM course and no one has walked out yet, nor aimed the usual suspicious, accusatory and closed questions at me.  There is some healthy skepticism, mixed with confusion; that is to be expected, and indeed welcomed.  On the whole, there is a spirit of open-mindedness here that I greatly appreciate; there is a desire to learn and explore.

Language has not been too much of an issue.  Enough participants speak good English to assist in translating for those that don’t.  Once we got past the first couple of hours of lecture (to cover the basic introductory stuff) the course became nicely interactive, and the language thing became even less of a barrier, as I had anticipated it would.  There is movement, there is passion, there is energy.

The overriding image I have of yesterday is best summed up by the phrase “Bounded Chaos”.  That’s Scrum.  The teams are being asked to build a product where the requirements are vague and the technology unfamiliar to most.  I’ll write more at the end of the course about the product the teams are building, preferring to keep that under wraps for now.  Mapping to the Stacey Matrix¹, we were on the edge of anarchy.  The more the teams tried to talk themselves out of that space the worse it got, and the deeper they entrenched themselves.  Predictably, talking just put us in the Analysis-Paralysis space.  The only way out was through action.  The teams were encouraged to start sprinting, to stop talking and take action.  It was chaos, but it was chaos with some boundaries around it: time-boxed, collaborative environment, regular feedback loop.  From the chaos, order emerged in the form of working agreements and innovative product.  It took just thirty minutes (the first sprint) to go from despair to knowledge, to go from fear to excited anticipation, to go from nothing to something.  Emergence.  That’s Scrum.

More tomorrow.

1. Read about Complex Adaptive Systems and the Stacey Matrix here.