97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 4. Scrum Is Simple. Just Use It As Is.

Ken Schwaber

Scrum is a mindset: an approach to turning complex, chaotic problems into something that can be used. Jeff Sutherland and I based it on these pillars:

1. Small, self-organizing, self-managing teams

2. Lean principles

3. Empiricism, using frequent inspection and adaptation to guide the work of the teams to the most successful outcome possible

The Scrum Guide is a body of knowledge that explicitly defines what Scrum is (and, by default, what it isn’t). The Scrum Guide doesn’t tell you how to use Scrum, how to implement Scrum, or how to build products with Scrum.

People learned what Scrum was and how to use it by taking courses, going to conferences, reading books and blogs, etc., but primarily by trying to create useful things from visions, concepts, and desires using their understanding of Scrum. As they went at it, Scrum started to make sense. Scrum helped them manage outcomes. But, when people tried to use Scrum, they learned that the difficulty of Scrum was getting a shared understanding of what was desired, what was possible, and what their skills would allow them to create and to work together to do their best.

In 2009, I recognized that we had broken the waterfall mold. People understood (largely) that our “agile, lightweight” approach worked and was appropriate for the emerging complexity in the world. ...