I’ve read, loved and learned from gems such as Artful Making, Free Play, Slack, The Reengeneering Alternative, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Montessori – the Science behind the Genius, and Open Space Technology. Most of these recommendations were bestowed on me by my great friend and mentor Toby Mayer. I treasure each on of them in my mind and heart. And yet I feel, especially as I embark on new readings, that a piece of my spiritual puzzle is missing. Perhaps it is the fact that my brain, shame on me, is not almighty. I forget things. Not that many, but yet I do. But then there’s the more distressing sense of selfish intellectual seclusion, so common these days. I can read, and smile while I read. And I want to share those smiles with the world.

So now, whenever I read a paragraph or chapter or book that strikes me as relevant to the art of loving Mondays, I will simply speak out. No, I will not review books. Or maybe I will, but simple by narrating, relating, digressing and highlighting. Paragraphs, chapters and books will randomly be read aloud. I sincerely hope you enjoy the experience. I’m pretty sure I will.

I used to take yoga lessons. The routine was almost the same every class. I loved the way my whole body felt after following it, so I decided to go over it every morning. After some months I managed to easily bend and reach the floor with my hands without feeling miserable. I was more than satisfied with my flexibility and strength. So I relaxed. Relaxing meant skipping yoga routines.

Exercising every morning effectively took time and that precious time could be used for more productive goals, such as watching TV, spending more time in bed or reading the newspaper. Skipping lead to suppressing, and suppression led to forgetting.

Yesterday I woke up with horrendous back pain. Yoga sounded like an interesting alternative. Thus I started my routine and I could hardly reach my ankles with my hands. There’s no such thing as perennial fitness. You only remains in shape if you exercise. If you don’t, you simple weaken you condition.

Curiously enough the same happens to process. If you don’t work on it regularly (say doing retrospectives quite often), process loses effectiveness. Teams think that by skipping retrospectives process will remain as good as it is today. Desirable, but just not true. Exercise your process by doing retrospectives and productivity will remain constant or even get better with time. Skip them and productivity muscles will silently stiffen. Forget about them and the team will one day be unable to get up from bed.

So I decided to read about Lean and grabbed a copy of Lean Software
Development, by the Poppendiecks. I’d heard so many times about Value
Streaming Mapping that I reckoned it must be good stuff. And so I read
about it. There goes quite brief a summary:

• Analyze your current software development process
• Write it down in a linear/sequential way, considering the average duration of each step
• For each step, decide the ratio of wasteful to productive time
• Productive: adds value to the customer – Wasteful: it does not

I don’t like it. At all. It simply feels awkward, at least
for a Scrum team. Or simply unrealistic. How can a Scrum team write
down their current development process on a piece of paper? It just doesn’t make sense. Scrum is about empirically designing product and process.

Yes, process must be optimized. Yes, it’s fine to try and find waste,
so that you can eliminate it. Yes, you can write down what you did ,
especially if writing it down helps you find useless steps. But it is
simply nonsense to ask a Scrum team to describe the process they
follow every time they develop software. The whole point of this thing
game we play is that we will adapt our process on the go.

Value stream mapping sounds cool for factories, but not so cool for consulting. Perhaps it is useful for software factories. Or perhaps software factories is yet another oxymoron.

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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