I am taking a shower and my mind takes off. Or rather keeps flying insanely, soaring and plummeting between potential scenarios. Reality changes. People just don’t behave the way I expected. New information pours into my bewildered brain like a torrent of actuality. My elaborate and convoluted plan fails every single time I confront it with real life. It simply and horribly fails.

There goes the book whose introduction I was supposed to write yesterday. I feel guilty, disappointed with myself, drained of all energy by pointless recrimination. Intellectual omnipotence struck again. Life is just too complex to try and seize.

Illusion of control always blows like a traumatic bubble on our face when confronted with even the most delicate breeze. And yet we keep falling under its sensual spell. Trying is for the weak, we speculate. Trying implies things might eventually go wrong. Trying implies we can’t predict. And that plain truth stabs our rational view of the world. Of the wild, unbearably intricate world we happen to live in.

Apparently impenetrable ventures make us feel so impotent that we react by negating the facts we happen to have in front of our eyes; by considering them trivial enough to clutch, clench and steer. Until one day, that day, we realize just how ignorant we are about the intricacies of the project we are about to undertake. That is the moment, the exact moment, in which we embrace humble attempting.

Choosing to experiment implies we stand unassumingly in front of a complex problem. Imagine Copernicus devising a whole new way of seeing the universe by merely sitting inside a library for hours, days and decades, until one day he finally understands the whole system. The victory of logic, an intellectual epiphany. Everything is inside his head now, conclusions are obvious. All there is to do now is simply write on paper what his mind concluded after years of pure reasoning.

A laughable picture indeed. His life, his discoveries, his theories came about after years and years of combining observation with theorization and deduction. Think about it four times before attempting to write all those use cases and Gantt charts. Plan, do, check, act. You heard about it, now go do it. Empiricism. It’s not that hard.

Error. I hate it. It is cruel because it proves I am not perfect. It is baffling because it makes it obvious that I am not unparalleled. Previous triumphs forge expectations. No one expects me to fail. Then I succeed again and the sword of Damocles sharpens. One more time.

Until one day I fail to fulfill soaring demands for perfection. Maybe I miscalculate the details of a plan. Perhaps I am asked a question for which I have no precise answer. Perchance I read disappointment on a colleague’s expression. Or I simply realize I have just arrived in Mumbai having left my credit card at home.

At that point the guillotine raises slowly. Retribution is around the corner. Cold fear runs over my spine. There is simply no place to hide from guilt. Repentance is useless. I am and will ever be asinine. Time for the usual scheme: I conceal the mistake, like I did when I was an infant. Pretend nothing has happened, as the stench of sin begins to surface.

And yet someone might find out about the error. Life goes on, but with increased angst. And thus a crippling vicious circle perpetuates. Terror of failure spirals, making it harder to act freely. Excellence and creativity plummet. Pleasure and verve die out. Degrees of freedom to act plunge. A gloomy and yet recurrent tale for many a knowledge worker.

You are a knowledge worker because your métier involves solving convoluted problems. This means your craft entails creativity, deduction and interpretation. Software applications, marketing plans and financial planning are immensely complex endeavours. Punishing imperfect incarnations of such tools is not just naive, but also cruelly hypocritical. Lacerate your soul for your lack of perfection and learn to survive in a world of penance.

Somehow there must be a way out of this tail biting. Stop. Breath. Think for a moment. Meditate on how others do their creative jobs. Ponder over the way in which a theatre play is created. Picture a Romeo and Juliet production. Rehearsals will begin in a week. Romeo has been brushing his teeth trying to portray Romeo. Juliet has taken showers the way Juliet would do it. And now it is time for the whole ensemble to get together and do the first improvisation. “Romeo meets Juliet at the bus stop.” The scene lasts for a couple of minutes. And just like all opening rehearsals for the past two and a half millennia this one goes wrong. Neither the play director nor the actors like the performance. Romeo was not romantic enough when talking to Juliet. Juliet’s movements around the stage were somehow graceless. There was no clear bond between the actors. And yet they celebrate failure. Because erring is the only way to reach a creative result, they have just taken the first step towards a marvelous play.

Error enables us to simplify a seemingly impenetrable challenge. The universe of potential solutions is axed when failure occurs. And something deeper occurs: a sliver of the final outcome is born. Maybe the way Romeo walked during the improvisation was captivating. Perhaps Juliet’s tone of voice was as sultry as expected from her. The resulting characters will have these traits. The staged play is now nearer. Out of failed interpretation comes not just learning, but also a piece of the resulting product. Celebrate error: it’s your only way out of sheer chaos.

I just called an airline call center to make a short little question on their mileage program. I decided to talk to a person, not a machine. Same result, or worse. I had to answer more than 10 personal questions in order to prove I was myself. After the first five, irritation materialized. I tried to make clear I only needed to make a simple, impersonal question. “Don’t worry Sir, it’s just a procedure”.

Procedures dehumanize activities. Their main goal is to deprive work of any traces of compassion, doubt or rage. Objectivity gets rid of people in order to install clear rules. They are neither good nor bad per se: they are just inert devices put into place by people who decided to deprive a given activity of human spice. They become positive or negative devices when analized in a context. And what is interesting is that, the simpler the context, the more fruitful the use of procedures. Having people produce batches of equally designed hamburguers, with similar raw materials and equivalent physical environments clearly benefits from having a well-defined methodology. Taking a script written hundreds of years ago and putting up a play with dozens of actors that manages to awe spectators usually does not.

You are reading this because you judged your current way of working as fruitless. You are either taking too long to provide a service, building the wrong product, hating to go to the office on Mondays, or maybe all of them together. Put your laptop aside for a second, try and grasp a tiny little piece of blue sky with your sight and think of the procedures that run your work. Think of how many times you fell that the procedure asked you to do things that had no meaningful goal. Remember how many times you knew you could do better. And most important, reflect for a moment on the times you felt relieved because you followed the procedure without caring for the real use of your actions.

Scrum is not a procedure. Scrum should not lead you to have a procedure. Scrum will not get rid of your current procedures, but it will rather help you see just how pointless and expensive they are. You decide to throw them away. You yourself.

Before embarking on a journey, it’s always wise to reflect on whether you want to depart from where you are right now…or not. If your job is easy, obvious and repetitive you don’t need Scrum. If your current way of working is effective, don’t change. If you feel at ease with your colleagues and your current structure, just stay where you are.

Fortune favors the bold, but boldness has a price. The journey of a hero is usually painful and unthanked. You firmly walk towards the darkness that lies beyond your zone of comfort, or you just don’t. Change is bitter. Inertia sounds sweeter. Shame it is usually the precursor to death.

How is a judge to decide on a case? Written law is general, abstract, concrete but not comprehensive. Particular cases, context, subjective issues are not considered in the text. Why is it not trivial to be a judge or a jury member? Because they have to interpret the law. And what have they used for centuries now to support their interpretation? Cases and spirit. Examples and intuition. Both ends meet. And what about Scrum?

Scrum is simple and hard. Why so? Because the definition is clear and concise, but in order to use that definition we need to interpret it depending on the context. We clearly got the equivalent to case law: case studies and good practices have served us well for years now. Examples let us map, consider deltas and readjust for our context. But spirit has somehow been absent. Or at least it has not had the prominent and explicit role I dare say it deserves. But can spirit be portrayed?

Let’s try and sketch it at least. Maybe spirit is like good code: you can’t define it, but you can definitely cry out loud that some piece of code is horrid. What do you think about this list? I promise I will detail its members in upcoming posts:

• Trust
• Self-organization
• Empiricism
• Pragmatism
• Idealism/Kaizen
• Discipline
• Rythm
• Constructive Feedback
• Simplicity
• Technical Excellence
• Ludic spirit
• Commitment
• Responsibility
• Focus
• Humbleness
• Balance
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