The Pavlova Guide
Pavlova, named in honour of the dancer Anna Pavlova, is a dessert created in either Australia or New Zealand (the two countries both claim ownership). It is made of a special kind of soft meringue, slow-baked and left to cool in the oven, then topped with whipped double cream, passion fruit, kiwi fruit and strawberries. Restaurants often serve a dessert made of regular crunchy meringue, and/or topped with stuff like bananas, pineapple, berries, or other fruit, maybe even covered with canned, low-fat spray-on cream. They call this Pavlova. But it isn't. It is something they made up, some adaptation of the original recipe. And it causes consternation. If I order Pavlova, I have an expectation. I want to eat Pavlova, not some imitation, not some other dessert loosely based on Pavlova.
Pavlova has some essential ingredients, and a method of combining them, that together create the dish. Leave out one ingredient, or change it to something else and you don't have a Pavlova. In fact, one might go so far as to write the following in a recipe book:
The Pavlova recipe is free and offered in this recipe book. Pavlova’s ingredients and method of creation are immutable and although using only some of the Pavlova ingredients is possible, the result is not Pavlova. Pavlova exists only in its entirety and functions well as a dessert to accompany other courses served before or after.
No one would take issue with that, right? The statement does not say you can't create your own dessert, or adapt the Pavlova recipe, experiment, add things, remove things, use cheap ingredients, change the recipe altogether, or do whatever you like in your own kitchen. And the statement does not say you can't also eat other dishes before, after (or even during!) the time you are eating your Pavlova.
Just don't serve the new thing you've made, wonderful or awful as it turns out, and call it Pavlova when it isn't. You might upset your guests who have an expectation for genuine Pavlova—which, by the way, is truly wonderful, a perfect blend of ingredients.
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Update, 18th June 2018
Many of the comments on this post showed a profound misunderstanding of the metaphor, to the point where the whole post became an incomprehensible mess. There's only so much explaining one can do—and I really didn't want to do any at all. As LinkedIn does not allow curating of comments I've decided to turn commenting off altogether, which deletes all previous comments. My apologies to those who actually wrote something valuable.
And I feel forced to reproduce something else I wrote on this topic [ref], to explain what this post is actually about.
I've noticed that when a person doesn't like Scrum, doesn't trust it, finds it dogmatic, restrictive, is bothered by the lack of prescription, or thinks it is old and out of date, then when that person reads (or hears about) the end note to the Scrum Guide the focus is on the second sentence:
- "Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and rules are immutable and although implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum."
Of course, this reinforces the bias. What's missed, or belligerently ignored is the third sentence—especially the second part:
- Scrum exists only in its entirety and functions well as a container for other techniques, methodologies, and practices."
Scrum is a container, a framework. It doesn't tell you what to do. You, the worker, have to figure that out, and you can draw from a multitude of sources, only restricted by your imagination. This is a call for innovation, for citizenship, for taking responsibility, for experimenting, for learning, and ultimately for improving the world of work. Personally I've always found Scrum to be 'the simplest thing that can possibly work'. So I use it.