Scrum promotes lean thinking
Focus on what matters, discard the rest
Scrum is founded on empiricism and lean thinking. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is observed. Lean thinking reduces waste and focuses on the essentials.
— Scrum Guide 2020
This short, 32-word paragraph seems simple. In reality, this paragraph includes the concepts that make Scrum such a powerful framework.
Empiricism means working in a fact-based, experience-based, and evidence-based manner. Scrum implements an empirical process where progress is based on observations of reality, not fictitious plans.
Lean thinking is less clear. The Scrum Guide is not as explicit about its lean roots.
Let’s explore what lean thinking means in Scrum. To do that, we first need to understand what lean is.
This is Lean: a short story of Toyota
The book “This is Lean — Resolving the efficiency paradox”, by Niklas Modig and Pär Åhlström, offers concise, easy-to-grasp ideas around what lean thinking means. In one of the final chapters, there is a story about three researchers that meet with one of the senior managers at Toyota, Nishida-san.
The story goes as anyone familiar with “The Goal” and “The Phoenix Project” would expect. The researchers have the wrong preconceptions of what Lean is really about and Nishida-san gracefully turns their world upside-down.
To him, Lean is a philosophy. To explain what Lean is, Nishida-san compares his organisation to a tree. The way people in the organisation behave towards the tree define the values of the organisation.
“When we established Toyota Motor Corporation, we saw our company as a newly planted tree. At that time we had no knowledge of how to take care of and look after a tree. Our lack of knowledge led us to be very careful. We never made a hasty decision. We asked ourselves questions as:
- What do we consider a beautiful tree?
- What do we not consider to be a beautiful tree?
When we had consensus around those questions, we summarised our thoughts into our values. Those values defined how we should always be towards our tree.”
— Nishida-san
He goes on to explain that their most important value is to focus on customers. To Toyota, satisfying their customers’ needs was the equivalent of the beautiful tree. Thus, everyone on the organisation should make decisions based on how to satisfy their customers’ needs.
Values are supported by principles. Principles emerge as the organisation makes decisions according to its values.
“As our tree continued to grow, we continued to look after it according to our values. To ensure that we really did look after it, we asked ourselves questions such as:
- What decisions have we made today that made the tree more beautiful?
- What decisions have we made today that did not make the tree more beautiful?
- What can we learn from this to ensure that the tree will be even more beautiful tomorrow?
By asking ourselves these questions every day, principles gradually started to develop regarding how we made decisions. We started to see a pattern around how we looked after our tree so that its beauty was always growing. The principles guided us in terms of how and what to prioritise in our business. The principles developed due to our attention always being on our values. You could say that our principles realised our values as they guided us in looking after our tree, but also in how not to look after our tree.”
— Nishida-san
Nishida-san explains that everything they did to support their value, customer focus, could be summarised into two principles: just-in-time and jidoka.
- Just-in-time is about flow. It has to do with delivering “exactly what the customer wants, when the customer wants it, and in the quantity that the customer wants”.
- Jidoka is about transparency of relevant information in the process. “Jidoka is about creating a visible and clear picture so that anything that happens to, hinders or disturbs the flow can be identified immediately”.
Nishida-san explains these two principles using the analogy of a soccer team:
“The first principle is just-in-time and it is about creating flow. Imagine a soccer match. Flow is when the team passes the ball from one end of the field to the other and finally kicks the ball into the opponent’s goal. The ball is moving all the time. All the players help to find the perfect path for the ball. The ball flows across the field and into the goal. In principle, scoring a goal in soccer is the same as delivering exactly what the customer wants, when the customer wants it, and in the quantity that the customer wants. Customer service is about scoring a goal.
Jidoka is the other side of the same coin. It complements just-in-time.
[…]
What underlying conditions must exist in order for a soccer team to score a lot of goals?
[…]
In addition to all the players being able to understand the rules and their own team’s strategy, all the players, from all positions on the field, must always be able to:
- See the field, the ball, and the goal
- See all players on the field
- See the score
- See how much playing time is left
- Hear the whistle
- Hear their team members and the crowd
Every player can see and hear and is aware of everything that is happening all the time. Based on this clear picture, they can make decisions about how, together, they can score a goal. If any player makes a mistake, or if one of the teams scores a goal, the referee blows his whistle. All players hear this whistle, and the game stops. These conditions are the same in most team sports. Everyone can see everything all the time and the referee can stop the game within a second.”
— Nishida-san
Principles are supported by methods. Methods emerge by allowing principles to direct decisions and actions. When decisions and actions need to be aligned with the principles, people develop new ways of performing different tasks. According to Nishida-san, methods are the best way of “looking after the tree every day so that it could be as beautiful as possible”.
In the case of Lean, some of the most important methods are standardisation and visual planning. Standardisation ensures a common understanding of how some task should be carried out. Visual planning ensures transparency of the relevant information across the whole process.
“We want to see the whole picture all the time. If all employees visualise the progress they are making, two particular things are made possible:
- First, if the progress is going according to plan, we know that we are on track. The visualised information allows us to see that the situation is normal. We are doing what we are supposed to be doing.
- Secondly, if the progress is not going according to plan, the visualised information allows us to react instantly. We can see the situation as abnormal. We see deviations from the normal state.[…] It is impossible to control a whole organisation. But it is possible to standardise and visualise everything we do. Through visualisation, we can control the whole organisation by just controlling the deviations from the standards. It is the deviations that trigger improvement of the normal state.”
— Nishida-san
Finally, Nishida-san adds another layer to the pyramid and summarises everything he explained before:
“Our values define how we should be, regardless of the situation or context. Values are the basis for our very existence and the state towards which we continually strive.
Our principles define how we should make decisions and what we should prioritise. Just-in-time and jidoka define the direction in which our operations should develop. Towards the customer! Towards that beautiful tree!
The methods define how we should perform different tasks. Methods are the motors that propel us in the right direction.
Tools are what we need to have and activities are what we need to do to realise a specific method.
Everything is connected in a system that, continuously and in small steps, develops our business into a very beautiful tree.”
— Nishida-san
Lean thinking and Scrum
If we take each short paragraph from the summary individually we can immediately see how Scrum is founded on lean thinking:
Scrum values are at the top of the pyramid
“Our values define how we should be, regardless of the situation or context. Values are the basis for our very existence and the state towards which we continually strive.”
“Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living five values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. […] These values give direction to the Scrum Team with regard to their work, actions, and behavior. The decisions that are made, the steps taken, and the way Scrum is used should reinforce these values, not diminish or undermine them.” — SG 2020
Scrum pillars, Roles, Events, and Artifacts are designed to pursue ‘just-in-time’ and ‘jidoka’
“Our principles define how we should make decisions and what we should prioritise. Just-in-time and jidoka define the direction in which our operations should develop. Towards the customer! Towards that beautiful tree!”
The principle of jidoka is demonstrated in Scrum in a couple of ways:
- The empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
- Scrum Artifacts, which are designed to maximise transparency of key information.
- Scrum Events, which are formal opportunities to inspect and adapt Scrum Artifacts.
- The Scrum Master is accountable for promoting empiricism and Scrum.
- Developers are accountable for creating the plan for the Sprint and for raising impediments to their work.
Just-in-time has to do with the delivery of value. Regardless of your delivery frequency, the goal of Scrum is to deliver the maximum amount of business value at the right time:
- Scrum Events are designed to help achieve flow. This is specially true when combining Scrum with Kanban.
- The entire Scrum Team is accountable for creating a valuable, useful Increment every Sprint.
- Scrum Artifacts are customer-centric. They are designed to highlight:
— What is most valuable to stakeholders and customers (Product Backlog).
— The expected outcome of the work of the Scrum Team, as well as the progress of the team’s plan towards achieving the Sprint Goal (Sprint Backlog).
— The resulting product of the team’s work, which can be delivered when it’s most appropriate (Increment).
Scrum events are designed so the relevant activities happen at the right time
“The methods define how we should perform different tasks. Methods are the motors that propel us in the right direction. Tools are what we need to have and activities are what we need to do to realise a specific method.”
Scrum defines the purpose of Scrum Events and provides some structure to guide their respective agendas. However, Scrum does not prescribe how to carry out any of the Events.
“Various processes, techniques and methods can be employed within the framework. Scrum wraps around existing practices or renders them unnecessary. Scrum makes visible the relative efficacy of current management, environment, and work techniques, so that improvements can be made” — SG 2020
Still, Scrum Events are designed to “propel us in the right direction”.
The framework brings everything together
“Everything is connected in a system that, continuously and in small steps, develops our business into a very beautiful tree.”
The Scrum framework connects the points so teams and organisations can, continuously and in small steps, deliver business value to stakeholders and customers.
Endnote
Scrum is founded on empiricism and lean thinking. Still, the Scrum Guide is not as clear in defining lean as it is in defining empiricism.
I hope this article has provided some clarity in this regard.
Scrum on!
