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If you see Scrum as a set of mechanics, you'll never get the value from it that's intended. It's possible to have every job title, every ceremony and every jira board set up to look just like Scrum, and still not be practicing true Professional Scrum *at all* Scrum is not a process for managing work. It tells you absolutely nothing about how to develop software, or deliver your relevant product. Scrum is just a starting point to solve the human collaboration challenges on complex, emergent work. It's not about the mechanics. It's about the inspection loops. The transparency of the work. The constant adaptation based on what is learned. It's about cultivating an environment where people can be open and courageous. It's about building teams that are able respect themselves and each other enough to focus and commit to delivering value. Mostly, it's just about understanding that we will never have a perfect plan or a perfect process, but we can have a structure that helps us learn from unknown unknowns.

On the weekend, I decided to 'tidy' my office. What started as quick task of putting away some clutter quickly spiralled into moving desks, re-cabling monitors and running network cables. Today, I'm sat in the corner of my office on a small laptop screen because I never got my task finished before the work week came around again. Other ADHDers might be immediately familiar with the problem and understand what rookie mistake I made. I didn't limit myself to a specific outcome or timebox, and so my attention spiralled. If I'd have limited myself to 30 minutes of tidying up, with a goal of getting rid of the visible clutter, I wouldn't be in this mess. I would have focussed on the important stuff and left the rest for when I actually had the time. This is the power of timeboxing. It's not *always* necessary, but it's a great guardrail. Yes, they can be arbitrary. But that doesn't make them useless.

I found myself thinking about this picture again today as I was 'corrected' by someone on Linkedin about Scrum theory This was a drawing of Captain America that appeared in an old Captain America comic illustrated by Rob Liefeld. Rob was a prolific and very successful comic book artist at the time, but this image obviously drew a lot of criticism for it's clear lack of proper human form. You see, unlike a lot of comic book artists, Rob Liefeld didn't go to art school. He lacked proper training, and while he was still generally able to create fantastic works of art, he was also capable of making these sorts of monstrosities, seemingly without realizing the problem. This image isn't proof that Rob is a terrible artist, or incapable of addressing this shortcoming. But it's a massive reminder of what can happen when your skills are self-guided without any sort of external verification or support. You can make fundamental errors that you aren't able to notice because you lack the training to recognize what you're doing wrong. This is the problem we have with a lot of 'Agile experts', who honed their skills in dysfunctional organizations, and have done little to no external verification of their knowledge. Almost weekly, I find myself in a conversation with someone who confidently disagrees with my posts about Scrum. They often make incredibly obvious mistakes about concepts that are clearly written in the guide, and covered in Scrum classes. This is not a post intended to criticize people for being imperfect. We've all been there, and all ARE there in different domains. This is just a reminder that there are objective fundamental concepts that you should benchmark against reality. And if someone in the know calls out your picture for not respecting the laws of human anatomy, you can either self reflect.. Or insist that you're right and anyone who corrects you is just closed-minded. Only one of those things will actually lead to addressing the problem.

The other day I was the passenger in my wife's car when we were out for a drive. Someone at a roundabout didn't give way when they should have, nearly causing an accident. My wife screamed and cursed, and talked about how stupid and incompetent other drivers are, that this person 'shouldn't be allowed to operate a vehicle'. I laughed, and reminded her that last week, she had a brain fart at a roundabout and gave way in the 'wrong direction', doing exactly what this driver did. "Yeah but that was a mistake" Of course. This driver probably just made a mistake too. But this is so hard for humans to see in the moment, trying to empathise with a complete stranger. We all have a tendency to see the best in ourselves and the worst in others. When we fuck up, it's a 'mistake'. When someone else does it, they're stupid. 'Trust' is often considered an abstract concept, but it's really pretty simple; It's the thing that happens when we start seeing other people like we see ourselves. When our first instinct is to assume positive intent and to look for explanations for 'why' something didn't go to plan, instead of placing blame.

You can't "manage risk", you can only manage how you react to reality. Spending all your time trying to cover every base and know every outcome is a fools errand. Instead, make the impacts of risk smaller by shortening feedback loops and improving your ability to pivot quickly. Too many organizations try to manage risk by installing giant bureaucratic frameworks to capture and track everything that people think they know. The irony is that this slows down our ability to adapt and innovate when the unknowns actually show up, and so all our attempts to "manage risk" have simply made risks even more dangerous. I know, let's add MORE bureaucracy to solve the problem!..

A Daily Scrum that doesn't discuss the Sprint Goal is like a prostate exam that doesn't actually check your prostate. If you're gonna put a finger in there, you might as well actually check to see what's going on.