Every IT project today uses Scrum or something like it. Every manager is happy that their teams use Scrum, because when you use Scrum, you produce better code in less time. Or so they think. I have worked in quite a few projects — I lost count how many since I started working in IT in 1980 — and what I see is the following: Scrum does a lot of harm to projects, to software, to teams and to people. I’ll explain.
I’ll tell you the story of an imaginary consultant in the late 19th century who came up with the brilliant plan to write a book about how expert painters paint. The idea was that the book would enable all painters to paint like a master painter.
Our consultant starts his journey when he accidentally meets Jules Breton, a French painter who has just finished his book “La vie d’un Artiste” (the life of an artist). Breton tells our consultant everything about painting. He explains how he went to Antwerp to take classes from Gustave Wappers and copied the works of Flemish masters. He went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux Arts where he worked with realist painters. Then he went to Belgium again to study with Félix de Vigne. He spent a lot of time with the De Vigne family, he met De Vigne’s daughter Elodie whom he married years later. The consultant makes notes, writing down “Antwerp” and “realist painters” and “Félix de Vigne” and many more important words he has picked up.
Breton has just returned from a trip to Amsterdam, to meet his friend Thérèse Schwartze, who is emerging as a brilliant portrait painter. They had met in Antwerp and in Paris at the Salon, where Breton had insisted on being the one to award Schwartze her Gold Medal. Our brave consultant immediately travels to Amsterdam to meet with Schwartze and ask her what she did to make such beautiful portraits.
Schwartze receives our friend in her home at Prinsengracht 1091, she takes him to her studio in the attick and offers him a wooden chair. On the easel is a half finished painting of the young queen Wilhelmina. Then she tells him how her father, portrait painter Johan George Schwartze, started teaching her portrait painting when she was a child. When she was in her twenties, she went to Germany to take classes from Gabriel Max, Franz von Lenbach, Piloty and others. However, Schwartze’s future husband Anton van Duyl told her that German painters were the past, the future of painting was in Paris. So the took the train to Paris, where Henri Havard brought her in contact with Henner, Bonnat and many others. She stayed in a cheap guest house and she was invited for supper by many famous painters. She became friends with the etcher Maxime Lalanne.
Schwartze also tells our brave friend that she has a brother, George, who at a young age was a promising painter — the Rijksmuseum has a number of his watercolors — but is now living in a mental health institution in Rosmalen.
Our fine consultant then travels to Scheveningen, for a brief visit to Jozef Israëls, he was referred to Israëls by Schwartze who admired Israëls and called him “the little big man”. Israëls was not very tall.
Next stop is Vincent van Gogh, who lives in Arles. He isn’t that famous at the time, his fame will later be brought to him by his sister-in-law Jo Bonger who spent her life promoting Vincent’s work all over Europe. Van Gogh doesn’t talk much, so the visit is more or less pointless. Our consultant does get a peak at Van Gogh’s easel, made of pine wood, covered with paint in all colors. He observes Van Gogh’s brown leather shoes, left lace untied, and his trousers with a small hole in the right leg.
From all painters he meets, our consultant does not get a lot of information about technical issues, like what paint to use, what brushes, and how to go about setting up the painting. So he decides to include everything his granddad told him when he was a kid. His granddad had been a painter, not a famous one, our friend used to enjoy seeing his grandpa paint in his studio in the attick, explaining his technique to his grandson. Grandpa created his own canvases, for which he put together a pine frame, put gray-brown canvas on it and prepared it with lead-based white paint before putting it on his beautiful oak easel. Grandpa then used ocre to set up the contours of the autumn landscape he was about to paint with his long brushes, getting paint from his rectangular plywood palette. He explained that the lower you paint the horizon, the better the perspective gets. “You see landscap paintings where the horizon is high, higher than the center of the painting. You notice that in such a painting the painter struggles with perspective. You can’t get the perspective right”. The child had observed that in grandpa’s paintings, the horizon was always low, creating space in the landscape.
After a year of traveling, visiting exhibitions, talking to painters, reading books, even taking painting classes, our consultant starts to write. This is not hard. He has gathered so much information, before he knows he has a 300 page book titled “Painting in 30 days”. The key advice it contains can be summarized like
- go take classes in Munich
- go study in Antwerp and Paris
- when in Paris, go to suppers and concerts
- befriend an etcher
- put a family member in a psychiatric clinic
- have your subject sit on an uncomfortable wooden chair
- marry the daughter of your teacher
- have your studio in the attick
- use a pinewood easel
- use 50cm brushes
- use a rectangular plywood palette
- wear brown shoes, left lace untied
- always have an unfinished painting on your easel, preferably of a queen
- paint the first outline in ocre
- use lead-based white paint to prepare the canvas
The book is a major success. It sells by the millions, and within three years, all paintings are created with 50cm length brushes, on lead-white paint, outline created in ocre. Daughters of mentors and painters are now in short supply. Brothers are in mental hospitals. Attick studios go for absurd prices. And two painters have died of infections after cutting off one of their ears.
What readers of the book didn’t know whas that granddad used ocre because he was poor, and ocre was by far the cheapest color. He used 50cm brushes because he was a big man, with enormous hands. He had a rectangular palette because he could not afford to buy a palette, he made his palette himself from a piece of plywood. They didn’t know Van Gogh used a pinewood easel just because that’s what they gave him in Arles. Grandpa had a proper oak easel. They didn’t know that although Schwartze made our friend sit on a simple wooden kitchen chair, she generally did her best to make her subjects feel as comfortable as possible, she was actually known for that. The book may not have mentioned that Havard fled Paris in 1848 after being sentenced to death for participating in the Paris Commune, he went to Amsterdam which is why Van Duyl knew him. Had our consultant written this in his book, many young painters would have gotten themselves a death sentence “because that is what proper painters do”.
Knowledge is a funny thing. When we built “knowledge based systems” in the 90’s — we then called these systems “AI” — we found that you can interview people for their knowledge, but they generally don’t tell you what you need. What they tell you is what they think they do, which is not what they actually do. What you see them do is what they do, but it is not what they think. In an insurance company, Zwolsche Algemeene, a person accepting applications for car insurances told me that they look at certain fields on the form, make comparisons and calculations, then accept the application or not. Then I talked to an elderly man, he was the super senior person in the department, he turned out to have the wisdom to verbalize what they actually did. He said “I just imagine the person and the car as I understand them from the application form, I imagine seeing them on the freeway next to me and I ask myself if this makes sense. If it doesn’t, I don’t accept”. He could not explain how or what he’d imagine, or what the essential factors were, but I did understand what he meant. And I couldn’t program it in our software. This type of knowledge, the knowledge that you know but can’t explain in words, was coined “tacit knowledge” by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. The other type of knowledge, the knowledge that you can write down and put in your software, is “explicit knowledge”.
What our imaginary friendly consultant did was write down the explicit knowledge he gathered from the master painters (can you call a woman painter a master painter?). It’s the stuff like where do you go to study and what brushes do you use. The tacit knowledge is what you derive from Jules Breton’s autobiographical book “La Vie d‘un Artiste” . It doesn’t tell you anything practical. It does tell you how he lived his life, and you can imagine how that got him to becoming a master painter. It does not tell you the size of his brushes or the type of paint he used. It does tell you that he found the mentors and teachers he needed to develop his style of painting, in much the same way that Schwartze found her mentors, when after first going to Germany, she then took the advice from Van Duyl and went to Paris. Listen to people you trust, learn from people who you admire, then do what you need to do.
Writing a book about “how to paint” creates painters Bob Ross style. Teaching people to listen and observe, and to work with masters and experts, creates painters Jules Breton style, and maybe the occasional Van Gogh.
A book on “how to do software projects” should not say “have a 15 minute stand up meeting at 9am” because this will lead to Bob Ross type programmers. Instead, tell people to learn by working in stellar teams and listen and observe. And when you can’t join a stellar team, work in teams that have one or two people you think you can learn from. Work in a team that you know creates good software. Work in a team that you know its members are happy. That will make you a Jules Breton style programmer. And if you’re lucky, maybe even a Van Gogh style programmer.
The brave consultant never lived. The granddad did. My granddad was a painter, he taught me about horizons and perspective, about outlines and ocre. He did not work with Van Gogh, he worked with Bart van der Leck from whom he learned a lot, as he said. He did have a beautiful, paint stained oak easel that my sister now uses.
Jules Breton wrote an autobiography that is worth reading. He was a poet too, his letters are fun to read.
Henri Havard was actually sentenced to death in 1848, he fled to the Netherlands, he wrote a seminal book about Delft porcelain and he was instrumental in bringing Schwartze to Paris (Havard had been pardoned shortly after 1848). Becoming a brilliant painter depends on knowing the right people.
Vincent van Gogh in his lifetime was not the famous painter he now is. After he died, his sister-in-law Jo Bonger, the wife of Theo van Gogh, put her life in the service of making Vincent famous. Hans Luijten has written a brilliant book about that.
Nonaka and Takeuchi wrote a book about innovation, in which they coined the term “tacit knowledge”. This book is supposed to be one of the roots of Scrum. If you have read this book, you’ll have realized that you can’t write a book about “how to be a brilliant painter” or “how to do software projects like a boss”. You cannot express tacit knowledge as explicit knowledge in a book.
I am not a painter. I learned from my granddad, but I lack any type of visual memory, I think it’s called aphantasia. I do have a vivid imagination, that’s why I’m good at innovation. I have a special interest in painter Bart van der Leck, because my granddad worked with him. I have an interest in Thérèse Schwartze and her family, which I have explained here.
The life of an artist, Jules Breton, 1890
Letter from Jules Breton to Thérèse Schwartze, 1894
Letter from Henry Havard to Anton van Duyl
All about Vincent, Hans Luijten
Thérèse Schwartze and her family
The Knowledge Creating Company, 1995, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi
Software Craftsmanship, 2001, Pete McBreen
