Collaborative planning with scrum
Effective planning requires humility and a willingness to collaborate.
The effectiveness of planning reflects the collaboration put into it. As a scrum master, the scrum guide does not teach you or a team how to collaborate — you’ve got to figure out how to do that with your colleagues, and your colleagues must be willing to collaborate with you. However, scrum can give you a framework for organisation, out of which collaboration and planning practices can emerge. This post explains why effective planning requires commitment from the whole team to learn how to do it together. And whaddya know, commitment is something that scrum really values.
Reality is slippery. An certain orange-coloured president has probably made many of us question it over the last eighteen months or so. But, like any difficult situation, we can use him as an opportunity to learn.
Philosophers love to grapple with the idea of an objective reality. What do we really consider ‘true’ anyway? Aren’t there lies, damn lies and statistics? Isn’t history written by those that win the war? If I believe something to be true, is that more important than the evidence presented to me? These are all troubling questions.
Hubris, power and control are all close relations. Also, paradoxically, power and control have been proven time and again throughout history to be totally irresponsible. They can actively help us to lose track of reality if we give them the reins.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Lord Acton, 1887)
We all like to believe that we have a handle on the universe and how it operates. This makes it jarring to remember that people in general tend to overstate our own abilities, especially when we have a lack of knowledge on a particular topic. And this is happening at scale, every day!
Perversely, this illusion of control and capability is a coping mechanism, shielding us from the cripplingly frightening alternative: we are not in control, and most of the events of our lives will probably happen despite our best attempts to influence them.
With tongue firmly in cheek, Douglas Adams once wrote of a terrible machine that could punish someone in the worst way imaginable: they were pushed into the ‘Total Perspective Vortex’, and their actual position and importance in the universe was revealed to them in an instant.
“The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife” (Douglas Adams)
Naturally, this sudden onslaught of perspective would crush those guilty of hubris and self-importance, and reduce those poor people to gibbering and tears, a shadow of their former selves. Humility overload.
The lesson is clear: without humility, we can lose perspective. Ed Schein and Peter Schein wrote recently on the topic of humble leadership, and I believe this mindset is an essential ingredient into good planning.
Planning in and of itself is not a virtuous act. It must be done well to be meaningful. And just like anything else, it can be done badly. An illusion of control and an absence of humility are perfect attitudes to create an ineffective planning session.
Bad planning also includes tacit assumptions of simplicity, and fails to adequately take complexity into account. Dave Snowden warns us of the perils of this with the Cynefin sense-making framework. In complex situations, rather than assuming simplicity, overestimating our own capabilities, or planning too far ahead, the best strategy available is to move forward one small step at a time, and validate as we go. Sense and respond, and reality will emerge. An assumption of control over complexity is actively dangerous, and risks creating chaos situations downstream.

For example, on a complex project, if we assume that a spreadsheet or GANTT chart contains every task that must be completed in order to achieve a goal, aren’t we already deluded, and one step removed from reality? Wouldn’t it be foolish to slavishly follow that plan, ignoring any new information that might emerge while we do? If we ask, one week later, why our reality has diverged from the plan, do we expose our lack of control? Are we expecting reality to bend to match our plan, despite evidence of change? If we deliver the plan, will it still be required or correct?
In addition, if hubris dominates individuals’ actions, and there is a persisting belief that we alone can resolve a particular situation, we will fail to scale our plan, fail to collaborate, feed our own illusion of control, and therefore risk creating disorder. Myopic, individualistic planning can also feed this situation. Humility can make it better, and fuel a more collaborative mindset.
Planning is different from a plan, in that it is a collaborative activity. Planning involves conversations with the right people in the room, assessments of where we are right now, a determination of where we need to be, and agreement on the next logical steps to take to help us get there.
Planning is an active pursuit, where we collectively interpret a shared version of reality, and assess the most appropriate next steps to take in a complex environment… we learn together.

The Scrum framework attempts to add routine planning into a team’s activities. Scrum is a framework designed specifically to help learning and planning emerge in a collaborative way, and it is designed to work better in complex environments. Every two or three weeks we set ourselves a goal, and plan a sprint’s worth of work to achieve that goal. These are the expected outcomes of sprint planning. Every day we meet to asses how we’re doing and plan the day’s activities to best help achieve the sprint goal. These are the expected outcomes of a daily scrum.
There is value in following a plan, but we value responding to change more. (adapted from The Agile Manifesto)
At the end of a sprint, we check in with all of our customers to discuss how we are doing, and demonstrate the product increment we put together in the last iteration. These are the outcomes of a sprint review. We also discuss privately as a team what went well during the last sprint, and the improvement actions to prioritise in the next sprint. These are the outcomes of a sprint retrospective.
All of these conversations — sprint planning, the daily standup and the review and the retrospective- are essentially collaborative planning in the active sense.
At sprint planning we may produce a Big Visible artefact that shows what we want to achieve, and this could be a whiteboard… or even a GANTT chart. If that works for your team, then use it!
However, it’s critical to remember that we are in a complex environment, and this is just a forecast, based on the best information we had available at the time. We do not assume we are in total control. The plan requires flexibility. It will definitely change.
Like any forecast, your sprint plan won’t ever be perfectly accurate, but if we get the right people into the room to make that plan together, then we should have a better chance of coping with changes when they happen. Keeping perspective should help us to cope if difficult decisions crop up mid-sprint.
If we collaborate well together during all of these planning sessions, then the effectiveness of our forecasting should improve. However, humility is necessary, and so is an awareness of our tacit assumptions of simplicity, and the possibility that we are over-estimating our own abilities.
If a scrum team is routinely poor at planning, they might blame scrum for the problem. However, in my own opinion, that is misguided. Scrum only provides a framework for teams to meet, collaborate and figure out how they plan. If a team have the commitment to collaborate, with humility and courage required to continuously improve together, then they will significantly improve the effectiveness of their planning with scrum.
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