Team size in Scrum, actually

“Empiricism” and “Self-organization” are essential management principles embedded in Scrum. They form Scrum’s DNA, the core beliefs for a Scrum eco-system to take shape.

Empiricism is the methodical approach of inspection and adaptation. The technical process feel to this aspect of Scrum partially explains why it typically meets less resistance. Additionally, there are the immediate and tangible benefits resulting from the closed-loop feedback control offered by Scrum. It helps at organizations facing the urgent need to quickly increase, at least minimally, their ability to adapt. The increasing business awareness that this ability (to act with agility) is needed more than ever is helpful in accepting the shift from predictive to empirical management.

Unfortunately, the importance and the immense potential benefits of self-organization are seeping through much slower. Despite the wide adoption of Scrum. Self-organization obviously resides more in the people part of Scrum. The foundational view that people are not, and should not be treated as, ‘resources’ (robots, cogs or replaceable pieces of machinery) goes against one of the hardest relics of the industrial paradigm. It explains why self-organization meets such strong organizational counter-forces, and is often even actively and openly fought and rejected. The longing for the old days of command-and-control (and the status derived from being ‘in control’). Add to that that the impact of self-organization is less obvious, with less immediate or visible impact.

Scrum practitioners across the globe need to realize that the ambition to re-humanize the workplace continues to require a lot of attention and energy.

Look around in your organization. Look at the effectiveness of the traditional manager-led ways of working in today’s creative and cognitive work environments. Consider the arrogance of a single person believing to know better how to organize than the collective of highly skilled people accountable for that work. Do your work plans and instructions still come from one person only (or some other external instance)? How can one person claim to know more than the collective intelligence of a full team’s collected brains when having to address…