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Re-Imagine Your Scrum to Firm up Your Agility

Happy workers come from true agility.

Many of today's enterprises are hardly fit to play a leading role in today's world. They are designed on the past-world premises of stability and high predictability, of repetitive work with easily scalable results. They experience profound difficulties having to navigate the predominantly uncertain and unpredictable seas of today's world.

An increase in agility is needed. They adopt Scrum. But rather than updating their past-world structures while introducing Scrum, they twist Scrum to fit their current organization. An illusion of agility is created as a result.

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What (Really) Is Velocity in Scrum?

Unlike most other races, measuring velocity isn't always beneficial in Scrum.

In complex and uncertain environments, more is unknown than is known. And what we know is subject to change. Only what we have achieved is known (unless we prefer to cover up). Progress is in what we have done, more than in what we plan to do. What we plan to do are assumptions that need validation by emerging actions and decisions. We make and incrementally change decisions based on what is known.

In Scrum, it is considered a good idea for teams to know about the progress they have been making. It is one parameter (of several) to take into account when considering the inherently uncertain future.

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The Illusion of Agility (What Most Agile Transformations End up Delivering)

Agility is a unique and continuously evolving state that is typical to a specific organization with its people and its history. A traditional (industrial) approach to becoming more Agile commonly creates no more than an illusion of agility.

Agility is a specific state as it reflects the unique lessons and learnings that an organization and its inhabitants went and go through, the way in which specific annoyances and hindrances were and are overcome, the many inspections and adaptations that occur along the journey. Agility is a unique signature with imprints of the people involved, their relationships and interactions, used and abandoned tools, processes, practices, constructs, within and across the many eco-systems that make out an organization, and potentially stretching across the organization’s boundaries.