Dennis Mansell

Traditional management wisdom tells us that 'time is money'. However, during the years I have come to find that there is no conflict between learning and productivity, even that productivity increases as learning increases. To me this is such a no-brainer that I have had some difficulty in understanding why some managers might be against learning. In fact, on closer inspection, the managers I came across were not actually against learning, they are just against 'wasting time' and unaware that their push to save on wasteful activities such as study time was in fact destroying productivity.

Continuous Improvement, Autonomy, Validation - these terms are becoming so worn that they feel like business jargon. But if you have experienced the pain that Stagnation, Command & Control and Big Bang Deployment brings, you have ample reason not to look back.  The mild embarrassment that comes with joining the 'Agile cult' is greatly outweighed by the soul-numbing awfulness that is the alternative. Although the above is my experience too, this is not that story.  I have also had experiences with Chaos - the inferno that regularly erupts in Startupland and in many Open Source projects.  It, not Agile, is the real antithesis to the frozen hell that is Waterfall / Taylorism / TheoryX .  This is not that story either.  I actually started appreciating what I now call the Agile mindset, on a sailing boat. 

The coming week I will be sharing (but especially receiving!) pearls of wisdom on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast . Subscribe! Monday 15th February 2016: Failure Tuesday 16th February 2016: Teams Patrick Lencioni: The five dysfunctions of a team   Lyssa Adkins Wednesday 17th February 2016: Change CRR Global Deep Democracy Lewis Method Luis Goncalves and Ben Linders: Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives  Thursday 18th February 2016: Measuring Success Crisp.se Happiness Index   Leanpub: 96 Visualisation Examples -  Jimmy Janlen Friday 19th February: System Health and System Productivity System Causal Loop Diagrams Van Vliet, V. (2012). 5 times why (Toyoda) on ToolsHero Throwing Arrows technique ... not published yet :-( ...

cc image: JAM Project stencil: M MNMarz This is an easy to understand principle based on the well known children's 'pink elephant' conundrum. Child A: I know something you can't do. Child B: What? Child A: Don't think of a pink elephant. Child B: ...

I have made a mind map that makes the Scrum Guide a little more visual for those of us who's brains navigate space better than letters: Click here for a full screen version This is a derivative work by Dennis Mansell based on The Scrum Guide. No endorsement is made by either Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, or any of their related commercial entities. The original Scrum Guide is offered for license under the Attribution Share-Alike license of Creative Commons, accessible at  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode  and also described in summary form at  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ . By utilizing this you acknowledge and agree that you have read and agree to be bound by the terms of the Attribution ShareAlike license of Creative Commons.

About a year ago, I went to a training given by Sandra Bouckaert and Lydie van de Laar on the basics of Deep Democracy .  My wife was 35 weeks pregnant and I was working on a project with worryingly limited financing so I was not exactly in the perfect 'zen' mindset for a day of mind-battering brainstorming.  I expected to leave the day dazed and confused, yet found myself in the car buoyed up and even excited about what I had just experienced. Deep Democracy is a method developed in South Africa at the end of the apartheid regime and specializes in getting minority views heard.  It is concurrently a team-building tool and an ideation tool. 

Watching the development of yacht sailing teams during a campaign, I have always been struck by the similarities between an effective team on a boat and an effective Scrum team. If we take an X-35 team, it has 7 to 9 members.  Each member of the team has a very specific set of skills and a role. A team has a build-up to a race or a series of races in a campaign.  Usually there is a main goal - a certain race that stands out like a world cup - combined with a series of smaller events. Roles To get an idea of a typical modern sailing team, it is handy to understand what everyone does.  Beginning at the back of the boat: