Out of the Mist

... in The Mist, "all the spirits of the earth were asleep — or almost all. The great Father of All Spirits was the only one awake. Gently he awoke the Sun Mother. As she opened her eyes a warm ray of light spread out towards the sleeping earth. The Father of All Spirits said to the Sun Mother, "Mother, I have work for you. Go down to the Earth and awake the sleeping spirits. Give them forms." [1]

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An organization may be able to survive in The Mist but it certainly cannot thrive there, and certainly cannot sustain the long-term health and joy of the broader ecosystem of itself and its beneficiaries. Innovation is the byproduct of eclectic engagement and diversity, which are the incubators in which new ideas and product increments emerge. And it takes discipline to manage the flow of work even in manual labor, let alone in the more technological endeavors that are the lion’s share of contemporary economic systems. Individual efforts most often wither and die.

Even in the mist, birds of a feather flock together. Organizations, groups, and corporations form wherever people gather together in numbers. Such groups historically started with subsistence economies: people worked together in farming and fishing communities to survive. One is that you have an existing structure, like some group with a, motivated by seeing the bright light, World System A. They have an arbitrary association based on deeply rooted insecurities fueled by a need to survive and a fear of death. Without the need to come together, they make assumption, adopt their current context. . . atrophy.

Many other groups form and founder. Some groups can’t turn their idea into something of value, and can’t create a constituency whose faith in the idea and desire to incorporate it into their own lives provides the means to sustain the idea. Or they come together but an inability to grow trust or to manage decisions well cause the team not to endure. (Product Organization). Some form and then grow out of hunger for power, and grow to the point of unmanageability. Scaling killed Rome, and the old IBM; the only time Toyota encountered serious business problems was the first time they borrowed outside money to grow rather than grow at a pace dictated by their incremental profits.

Rakuten syndrome.

The world would be better if this happened, so people come together to make it happen. World System B. Becoming. Coming together. SW is not a manageable resource like farm goods, because. Consumable resources require hierarchies. SW is not scarce.

The organization can’t share the same vision and same passion, that feeds and informs their day-to-day actions, so they end working as individuals or disembodied groups and return to the mist. “I don’t know why I’m doing this but I am.”

Therefore,

Bring a group of people with shared passion together around their shared consciousness not only at the level of the mother of invention, but at the more mysterious level of understanding the need for social contracts and the need ever to reflect and sharpen the value they provide, as well as the means by which that value is created.

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The team must gel with a balance of focus on the process and the product. Being focused only on the product without regard to fundamental natural processes that can facilitate the realization of these visions returns leads back to The Mist. Being focused only on the processes, or on governance, with little passion for the product, leaves one in even worse condition. A team can come together with a good balance of the two.

This book in your hands is a vision, richly supported by experience, of how such teams congeal out of the Mist, one step at a time, to do great things. It starts with a Product Owner who has a Vision and who expresses that Vision as a publicly visible Product Backlog. A Development Team rallies around this backlog and together they form a tribe to take the effort forward. The Development Team meets with the Product Owner in a ritual (Sprint Planning) to ensure a sharing of the vision and its realization. The Development Team limits their first attempt to a two-week increment, carried out according to their own work plan (Sprint Backlog), to produce a concrete result (Regular Product Increment) which is reviewed (in Sprint Planning) by the Product Owner to ponder its alignment with the Vision.

The tribe continuously adapts to an ever-changing world, re-planning tactics daily (at the Daily Standup) and revisiting their work habits and means of creating value (in the Sprint Retrospective) after each cycle of delivery. The ScrumMaster serves as an understated conscience, supporting the team to ever find better ways forward.

[1] —. “Australian Aborigine Creation Myth.‟ Cs.williams.edu, http://dept.cs.williams.edu/~lindsey/myths/myths_13.html (accessed 7 November 2017).