How I discovered Agile is about Ownership
By helping a Management Team embrace Scrum.
I often notice how Scrum Teams get caught up in endless discussions about how Scrum should be done. These are often not about solving the problem at hand, but about fitting some theoretical interpretation of Scrum. Discussions can become quite dogmatic and polarising. The passion is encouraging but the resulting confusion is not.
Thinking about this strange contradiction, I often wonder whether theory actually makes implementing Agile more difficult. Recently, I had a perfect opportunity to test this idea.
I was invited to help a management team better understand what Agile is. They were having trouble achieving their business goals and were curious about whether Agile would help them. They had a 2-day retreat planned and gave me a full day to tell them about Agile.
I decided to organise 3 activities for them, deliberately avoiding theory as much as possible and just focusing on the practice.
We started the day with a short discussion about Agile being more about a way of thinking and being open-minded than it is about frameworks and difficult words. From there we jumped right into the first activity, the Ball Point Game.
