Scrum for Children?
This post was originally published on my Agile Anarchy blog, in 2011, almost five years ago. I'm reposting as I still stand behind the ideas. An Agile approach to work will always be a huge challenge if we have to contend with so much unlearning. Schools and universities are still tied in to old-think, still formulated around competition, rewards and punishments, and top-down control. Until the mavericks among us find a way to infiltrate the education system we'll always be battling a beast, that in all likelihood is bigger, and more vicious than we can contend with. Where's St George when you need him?
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My seventeen-year-old son Ty recently participated in a two-day Certified ScrumMaster course. He is not a software developer, and has little interest in that craft. He is a high school student and a musician. Still, he enjoyed the training greatly and learned a lot. After he completed the course he —along with the other 15 participants— was awarded the CSM certificate. He is now more certified in Scrum than I am.
A few days after the course we were chatting about it, and after waxing lyrical about the trainer (Alan Cyment) Ty asked why I didn’t teach CSM any longer. I said it was a long story… and then went on to give a precis’d version, ending up with asking him if he now felt qualified to work as a ScrumMaster. Of course not, he replied, how ridiculous! Indeed.
No self-respecting developer or other professional really thinks the CSM has any true value beyond a certificate of attendance, I explained, it is the middle managers who write job descriptions, and the HR recruiters seeking “resources” that have made it so important.
Ty’s take on this was that Scrum trainers should offer a similar two-day course to these middle mangers and HR folk, to show them how foolish they are being. Nice idea. But who would show up? Managers are far too busy crafting detailed job descriptions, and recruiters too busy with making sure all the latest certification acronyms are entered in their filter systems.
Talking with Ty reminded me just how natural a way of working Scrum is. Ty is untainted by corporate America. He attends school, composes songs and plays in bands. This is just how I work naturally, he said (referring to his creative work), and expressed bafflement over the whole “waterfall” command-and-control thing that he had learned about. To him, it sounded like school.
For us old people who have been indoctrinated in Tayloresque and theory X management styles, who have had hierarchical, command-and-control, reward-and-punishment systems hammered into us for years, Scrum is no longer natural. So the teaching of Scrum is not a process of adding information, but rather removing it, stripping out all the nonsense we have accumulated so we can once again see the obvious simplicity of the ideas offered to us by the Scrum framework and principles. Self-organization, collaboration, trust, transparency, emergence… these are not new ideas, they are just forgotten ones.
Wouldn’t it be great if future generations didn’t have to go through that painful learning-just-to-unlearn process? I suggest that taking Scrum into schools will seed future generations with the right mindset for the new world of work which is emerging.
A growing number of organizations, such as World Blu, The Plexus Institute,Waking Up The Workplace, Heart of Business, TED, Holacracy1, The Agile Alliance, World Cafe and Open Space World (to name just a few) are guiding us towards a new future. This movement is too big to ignore, or write off as a fad.
Harnessing the way of working that kids and teenagers naturally practice could give the world of work just the tidal wave it needs to level the old mindset and prepare the ground for a new beginning.
Related post: Millennials and Scrum by Lyssa Adkins, 2010.
Transformation Coach
9 年Funny you should post this today. I was just thinking this morning of my 10 year old and wishing I could apply some things in a way that would support her at school and at home in her learning. I think there are components of scrum which would give her a sense of structure and order where it is lacking and with her natural playfulness and love of learning it could be a good fit. That's what I was thinking.
Curating valuable patterns for customer-centric people driven Product cultures. Enabling flow in adaptive organizational ecosystems.
9 年Tobias Mayer. You do need to rename the article. :-) Perhaps call it "Scrum for adults - things that they need to learn the children already know"
Senior Cloud Architect at DoiT International
9 年As a software developer who has worked within every process imaginable, I really don't like any of them. And it's not so much an issue with the principles of something like Scrum; it's the application of the methodology. Far too many times the "command-n-control" tendencies of some individuals on a project will become evident when a project is not going as expected. And when things don't go as expected, then the whole "let's follow the process" speel is thrown around and can actually hinder self-organization, collaboration, accountability, trust, etc. that is needed for any group effort to succeed. And it's even worse when the person leading the group, the Scrum master or whatever you want to call the person, is not really knowledgeable enough to be a contributor to actually getting work done. The process quickly breaks down. I don't see this having any different outcome if we start applying this to working with kids. Figuring out how kids think, act, and learn as individuals and within groups and then harnessing that knowledge to better instruct them is a good thing, but can we just leave the term Scrum out of it? It's a real turnoff. Someone without kids and with no knowledge of and experience with dealing with kids will end up becoming the "Scrum master" and will quickly make a mess of things. I can see this happening. And it's exactly the reason why so many software projects get messed up.
Spot on! Self-organization, collaboration, trust, transparency, emergence may not be new ideas but they are certainly regarded with suspicion in the work place. Sadly this is often most intense among those whom would benefit most from it.