The Importance of Metaphor – Scrum

Scrum is a management framework that attempts to address complex issues by leveraging incremental development, cross-functional teams and the emergent qualities of self-organizing systems. It falls within the conceptual reach of agile practices and supports a structural paradox that I find attractive. 

It is idealistic about the capacity of people to solve complex problems yet it is brutally realistic in identifying impediments and adapting to change.

Agile and its related approaches are derived from concepts and ideas originating in Japanese manufacturing processes and software development. At their core, they are focused on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.

Lean is the approach that has the most current traction in North America. Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System. Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme of efficiency based on optimizing flow; it is a present-day instance of the recurring theme in human history toward increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas.

All agile approaches believe that embodied assumptions are threats to performance and different approaches have emerged to suit the given context.

Scrum attempts to deal with more complex challenges. Where lean attempts to remove deviation and waste, scrum assumes that deviation and ‘waste’ are inevitable and applies relentless reality checks to expose dysfunctional constraints and assumptions. Scrum is value-centered and explicitly believes that all members of an emergent, self-organizing have leadership accountability (much like lean). The unit of measure is built on a traditional (paleolithic) family units of 5 – 9. Scrum is intended for the kinds of work people have found unmanageable using defined processes – uncertain requirements combined with unpredictable technology implementation risks. It requires true commitment (at all levels) to self-organization and is not suited to repeatable activities.

I completed by Certified Scrummaster training in 2011 and have implemented Scrum for a couple of highly complex projects we are working through. I am enamored of Scrum, and was pleasantly surprised to hear that the metaphor of scrum was applied by Ikujiro Nonaka, another thought leader I admire greatly.

The metaphor derives from rugby, where the team will move the ball as a cohesive unit. I had the good fortune to work with interdisciplinary teams while working as a corporate trainer within Mitsubishi Motor Company in Aichi-ken, Japan. The more traditional approach to project management employed in Western Europe and North America was less firmly entrenched in Japanese business practices and different overarching metaphors could be supported.

I lack the research to support this, but I was often struck by the differences in collaborative action in Japanese rice cultivation versus the large-scale grain agriculture we are familiar with in the West. Rice plots are intensive and collaboratively harvested. Community members collectively work their way through each paddy, with very little task specialization employed. Western agriculture, due to questions of scale, followed a more milestoned approach to cultivation. Certain times of year required intensive activity and much of the work was done by paid staff. Timelines were well-known and resources allocated to meet the needs of the season. Rice cultivation is far more variable with small differences allowing for different requirements.

It should be no surprise then, that highly scheduled project management has been hard-wired into our social customs. It should also, then, come as no surprise that ‘scrum’ a metaphor from a Western game, found a more ready home in a nation where collective behaviours were patterned differently.

The growth of scrum in software also shouldn’t be a surprise. Software, unlike physical manufacturing , requires quality and fit to exist in a single source. The distributed product is identical to the piece from which it is cloned. Assembly manufacturing requires a stream of quality as duplication suffers from quality issues in physical equipment and human attention.

A simple shift in metaphor (from traditional or ‘waterfall’ approach to scrum) aligns behaviour far more easily than a detailed set of instructions of process notes. Ken Schwaber, a grandfather of scrum in North America, states that scrum is, “not a methodology – it is a pathway”. I believe it is telling that until the emergence of competing models of project management, no metaphor existed for the dominant. The introduction of new voices necessitated the qualification of traditional practices as ‘waterfall’. Widening the narrative space allowed new ideas and models to emerge. Sadly, an entirely new industry needed to evolve before the need could clearly be seen to North American audiences.

by Jerry McGrath

this article was cross-posted to www.upriver.ca

Why Metaphor Matters > Opening the Narrative Space

The header of this site states that,

The defining metaphors of our times are changing and new metaphors are necessary to pattern the complexity around us.

The obvious question then becomes, why do metaphors matter?

Nietzsche believed that, "Tropes are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature." He argues that there is "no real knowing apart from metaphor".

That was never really the intent of insisting on a need for new metaphors, however.

Thinking is a discontinuous string of discovery, emergence, closure and reopening. Each of us, over time, develops a set of perspectives and heuristics, or experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. These perspectives and heuristics are ways of encoding experience so that problems become easier. They are highly adaptive in that they allow us to provide simple 'rules of thumb' to complex events.

Our available solution set is defined by the patterns we apply to experience. Over the course of human development, the available range of new experiences has been fairly limited and some perspectives have been hard-wired in as instinct. It is not a heuristic to flinch when something large and hairy jumps out from our peripheral vision.

Social activity has also generated a fair quantity of shared perspectives that proved beneficial in advancing our common purpose. The phenomenon of inequity of attention in organizations is an example of how perspectives can influence behaviour in a way that was once adaptive. Essentially, in traditional organizations, people develop or innately possess the perspective that the ideas and opinions of those above you in the hierarchy are more worthy of attention than those more junior. To ensure the smooth operation of communities concerned with predictability and the efficient deployment of resources, this heuristic makes perfect sense. Those at the top needed a sense that their wishes would be reflected in the activities of the whole. Being right or wrong was less critical than being sure.

Metaphors then become ways of capturing perspectives and heuristics in ways that facilitate transmission.

As an example, the story of Little Red Riding Hood speaks volumes to societal changes in perspective of natural spaces over time. The first stories ended tragically with a wolf devouring our heroine with little fanfare. The meaning was clear based on the times. The woods were a menacing place.

During the Industrial Revolution the story shifted as Little Red Riding Hood suffered sexual assault at the hands of the wolf. Nature had been disrupted to support industry in the countryside and with industrialization came young men from the city. Nature became a place of social and physical danger.

During the 1950s, Little Red Riding Hood found her savior in the woodsman. A woman's honor and security was guaranteed in the form of nuclear family. Nature had been subdued by men with axes.

The modern story sees our heroine fend for herself. Nature is a spectator to the events as a strong female presence emerges.

Organizations are similarly defined by the stories we tell. Reframing a problem through a different perspective offers a broader solution set to draw upon. Encoding problems in new ways can generate incredible innovation. The batch processing system that supported quality improvements in Japan evolved from an ability to move away from an assembly-line approach to production. This advance would have been much more difficult in Western business where assembly-line thinking dominated perspectives and narratives.

Opening up the narrative space allows for new solutions to emerge. I tell my daughter the story of Little Red Riding Hood in my own way. The woods are a dark and mysterious place full of danger. However, being prepared and aware can allow her to enjoy what it has to offer while appreciating the risks involved.

‘Stepping up’ and ‘stepping aside’ – the challenges of succession

This article was initially published in the Banff Centre's Leadership Compass and a PDF version can be found here. As a part of our work, we have been exploring the challenges of executing succession in our Alberta partners. Across industries, sectors and geographies we have seen patterns of challenges that make developing succession pools a difficult task.

Leadership Compass - 2011

One of the most complicated issues facing leaders and organizations today is how to identify, develop, and retain the next generation of leaders. In order to examine how the leadership of organizations is changing and how organizations need to adapt, we hosted a workshop, Leadership Fitness: Succession and Readiness to Lead, at The Banff Centre. The intent of the workshop was to hear directly from those responsible for supporting succession, and to see where The Banff Centre can play a role in advancing readiness in our partners.

In conversations with partners and in our applied research, succession consistently emerges as a critical concern. Organizations are seeing a profound demographic shift with mass retirements of middle- and senior-managing baby boomers, and as intense poaching of talent and richer incentives lure leaders to healthy sectors and organizations. According to Statistics Canada, by 2015 one in five workers will be aged 55 to 64, which brings succession to the forefront of organizational challenges.

According to research, “growing talent within organizations yields leaders who, through their historical knowledge and experience in the organization, have earned the trust of the organization and are more likely to be accepted as knowledgeable, capable leaders”.

Although definitions of succession differ broadly, participants in the workshop agreed on the need to carefully consider succession for roles, recruitment, leadership capacity, and organizational integrity. But how? We assume that organizational members will deliberately volunteer their strengths to the team. What we found in exploring stories of succession during the workshop, however, was that empathy, respect, and trust play critical roles in the willingness of leaders to ‘step up’ and existing leaders to ‘step to the side’.

We often focus on the ‘planning’ of succession, and there is a thriving industry in consulting and advising on succession strategies. However, people responsible for implementing succession realize that implementing the plan requires different tools and a different mindset. Throughout the 2-day workshop, participants surfaced two dimensions to successional issues within organizations, regardless of industry or type.

• The ‘planning’ components of succession were defined in terms of processes, activities, and culture. 
• The ‘doing’ components of succession asked participants to explore respect, trust, and empathy as critical components of building organizational futures. 

The reality is that succession can only succeed when the ‘planning’ components are supported by a deep connection to those we want to lead and be led by. Our workshop dialogue revealed that leaders are concerned with employees who don’t leave but refuse to ‘step up’, so they lose interest in the changes happening around them. Additionally, current senior leaders are unable to appreciate the ideas and energy of a new working generation, so they never find the courage to ‘step to the side’.

Not surprisingly, we discovered that succession is hard. The structural challenges are known, and planning can ensure that new challenges are met. However, effective planning requires the commitment and energy of those who currently lead, as well as future leaders. This is where individual acts of trust, respect, and empathy can support the succession vision.

Another imposing issue that surfaced during the workshop was the changing reality of organizational life, shifting demographics, and the need to understand succession in the context of larger systems of value creation. Some lament the loss of loyalty as employees move from role to role, although others believe that loyalty is adopting a new face. Participants believed that the needs of future leaders are complex and tied to larger conversations than organizations alone can support.

According to author William J. Rothwell, succession “rules, procedures, and techniques used in the past appear to be growing increasingly outmoded and inappropriate”. According to our workshop group, the skills and resiliency required to support succession are of a different character than the skills necessary to plan the succession. Ultimately, trust, respect, and a shared sense of purpose will allow leaders the comfort to ‘step up’ when required and ‘step to the side’ when a new response is needed.

[1]American Society for Training and Development, Oct 2006


[2]Rothwell, William J. Effective Succession Planning: Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent From Within: 4th Revised edition. Amacon. Toronto. April 29, 2010.

by Jerrold McGrath

Welcome to The Banff Centre

A new year brings many new changes, and The Banff Centre is no exception. We are saying hello to our newest President and CEO in Jeff Melanson. trained singer and leading arts manager, Jeff Melanson has served as executive director and co-CEO of Canada’s National Ballet School since 2006. He has emerged as a significant international arts leader, having also served as dean of The Royal Conservatory of Music School between 2000 and 2006. He was appointed special advisor on Arts and Culture to Toronto mayor Rob Ford in 2010.

Although he has been here at the Centre for a few months getting to know the space and faces, today was his first day in the new position and one of his first acts was to send out a greeting to all of us working here.

Dear colleagues, Welcome to the Banff Centre 2012.
As I have now officially stepped into the role as President, I thought I would write this short note of welcome and appreciation.

I would like start by acknowledging the incredible contributions of Mary Hofstetter. Mary has made a lasting impact on the Banff Centre and she has made this transition as smooth and seamless as possible. She has left the Banff Centre in good shape, well poised for our future adventures together.

This fall, I had the opportunity to meet most of you at various functions, on campus or in the town. Over the course of six weeks through October and November, I believe I likely met close to 3,000 Banff Centre friends and stakeholders here in the Bow Valley, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto. As such, I must admit to exceeding my capacity to put the right names to faces. Each of you is important to the Banff Centre and I am looking forward to getting to know you all better. Please continue to be patient with me as I re-introduce myself to the Banff Centre community over these next few months.

As you are all aware, our world is experiencing a challenging period of economic, social and cultural change. Fundamental economic assumptions are being challenged, technology is changing the ways we connect with each other and our world, and cultural/creative industries are in a period of considerable flux.

I believe the Banff Centre, through its focus on enabling access to and excellence in creativity and innovation, is uniquely well positioned to address these challenges and to help foster a national and international dialogue that will see our world champion the best of what we as human beings are capable of. Whether through our exceptional arts programming, our leadership development, our hospitality and conferences, or other programming we will develop together, the Banff Centre will continue to be a leader in inspiring creativity, encouraging our participants and ourselves to dream big.

I am excited to serve as your President for this next period of growth, innovation and experimentation.
Our success will be shared. We are all collaborators in this process and we all have a role to play in ensuring we are building on the Banff Centre's incredible legacy while also stepping boldly forward. As such each and every voice counts.Our future success depends on our capacity to listen to each other, to push boundaries and to create an environment where the impossible might be worth a try.

I look forward to seeing you all around campus.

Warmest regards, Jeff

So there you have it. My favourite quote about the Banff Centre dates back 30 or so years. In an article talking about the release of year-round programming a journalist remarked that The Banff Centre has never been accused of thinking small. I believe that a leader's role is to articulate a better future. It is our responsibility to live into it. I feel like we're off to a good start.

Educational Technology and 'Aesthetic' Approaches to Learning

from Aichi Triennale - 2010

In our work at Leadership Development at The Banff Centre, we make use of natural spaces and the expressive arts to help people and organizations access tacit understanding that would otherwise struggle to surface. ‘Surfacing’ involves talking about the things that we know deeply yet struggle to make explicit. The disconnect between what we know and what we make explicit can create a friction that is both disconcerting and generative.

We adhere to the belief that organizations, institutions and most of the networks we perceive as real are made up of powerful conversations. It is not always easy to start a new conversation when our points of access are already set out for us. Powerful aesthetic experiences can trigger new dialogue as they circumvent the pre-formed language that defines a lot of what we do day in and day out. Art has always served this purpose, allowing creator and audience to access the essence of issues. Natural spaces can also inspire that friction and the energy to start a new conversation. The Banff Centre integrates these elements into our leadership programming.

With so much of our lives spent in a digital world, what role can digital expression serve to encourage powerful conversations? If anything, digital media has been accused of limiting the space available for dialogue as our processes and our task become increasingly mechanized. Others, however, see the potential for digital media to support a different kind of conversation; a conversation that is supported by the strengths of its carrier -- collaborative, scalable, not limited by geography and supportive of rich experiences.

My learning objectives are tied to the need to understand the role of new media in creating powerful aesthetic experiences for our participants.

Integrating Educational Technology into Programming

The distinctive nature of our programming and the complex challenges of our partners make the task of integrating supportive technologies more difficult. We continue to critically examine the feasibility and fit of technology-supported program elements across our partner organizations.

Develop Craft Skills in Various Environments

We view the curatorial power of mobile applications as a rich space for growing new transformative tools for our programming. Developing the craft skills necessary to support learning in this space will be essential to my long-term success.

Develop Capacity as a Change Manager for Educational Technology

When educational technologies are implemented in organizations, the change management process can be difficult. This is particularly true when the decision makers already "know" how the technology needs to be used. We believe that any change initiative centered on new technology that requires human beings to serve only as spectators will fail. Change initiatives require a level of permission from those being changed.

Our work affords organizations and their members the tools to imagine new frameworks for approaching today's complex challenges. We believe that any division between how we learn and how we work will create unnecessary disconnects that make application more difficult. The reality of work for many of us is digital and interdisciplinary and therefore our approach to building capacity must be supported by digital and interdisciplinary approaches.

What do street art, Lean production and fractals have to do with leadership?

Banff, Alberta - where I live and work

My name is Jerry McGrath and I am a Program Manager with Leadership Development at The Banff Centre. I am currently tasked with ensuring that Leadership Development’s client partners receive a leading edge, innovative, exceptional program experience, that meets or exceeds the client’s and the participant’s expectations and ties into long-term leader and leadership needs. Primarily, this involves performing ongoing needs assessments with partner organizations in order to recommend, design and deliver learning solutions for their members. I am not generally a facilitator, but leverage our relationships with over 75 faculty and Advisory Council members across Canada and the internal resources of The Banff Centre to provide training and leadership development.

I also perform a research function, integrating and sharing our internal content expertise and some of the more exploratory work that we do.  Although ensuring measurement and tracking of program impact and evaluation is a component of my role, the ad hoc nature of many of our engagements makes assessing the true impacts of organizational interventions difficult.

In my time at The Banff Centre I have managed over 90 program offerings for over 1500 participants. We provide recurring learning programs for several client organizations and consult on HR planning and employee engagement with several others. I am perhaps most proud of the work that led into our Leading through Change program, a new open enrolment offering from Leadership Development that develops leaders’ capacity to engage with complexity and creation.

We conduct regular forums for conversations around challenges facing senior HR leaders in Calgary and take a truly co-creative approach to program design. As the demands made of HR departments have shifted, we have filled a need within the community by offering facilitated dialogue around pressing HR issues.  I believe that I bring innovative and creative approaches to organizational and professional development and leading research on best practices for learning, organizational development; HR planning; employee engagement and future learning requirements.

Personally, I am passionate about new media art (including street art), Japanese business customs (I worked as a relocation trainer in Nagoya, Japan for 5 years) and leadership in the digital age. 'Leadership in the digital age' is a bit misleading as any leadership that occurs in the developed world is by definition leading in a digital age. Sadly, few leader or leadership development providers face this reality directly. It`s much easier to learn from the past than try to craft a response to a chaotic present and an unknowable future.

My attraction to new media artists, graffiti, and Japanese methods are not incidental to my work. The defining metaphors of our times are changing and new metaphors are necessary to understand the complexity around us. Old assumptions become dangerous when not critically considered and by looking at the arts and the lessons learned from other cultures we gain insight into our own assumptions about how the world works.

Toyota`s well-documented Lean advances only make sense when considering the cultural norms and activities that existed to support them. The idea of kouhai and senpai are embedded in Japanese culture from the elementary school level. The kouhai - senpai relationship then becomes a natural carrier for Lean and vice versa. The fractal nature of these pairs allow for practices and improvements to rapidly disseminate and again, the concept of fractals are central to Japanese artistic traditions, particularly as seen in the work of Hokusai.

Digital media artists and street artists offer us similar insights into the `reality`of modern life. They serve as a critical indicator of where our culture sits and trying to pretend that shifts in artistic expression are separate from larger trends is a dangerous pattern that we`ve often seen repeated.

Our work at The Banff Centre affords organizations and their members the tools to imagine new frameworks for approaching today's complex challenges. The reality of work for many of us is digital and interdisciplinary and therefore my curiosity is around approaches to building capacity that are supported by digital and interdisciplinary approaches.

We're beginning to see that digital leadership requires a strong(er) bias toward action. The world moves too quickly to wait for the `right`answer when the `right` answer is unknowable. I also believe that leading in the digital age requires building capacity at the periphery, where the organization interacts with its larger ecology. This doesn`t mean that my work isn`t appropriate for senior leaders (where much of it occurs now), just that we ask them to shift their focus from the conceptual centre of the organization to the fringes where innovation occurs.

This space is intended to be a journal of work being done in the field of 'digital leadership' and a place that integrates my work at The Banff Centre and my independent work done through upriver Innovations. Leadership Development at The Banff Centre, besides being the coolest place to work on earth, affords me opportunities to work at the cutting edge of leadership and leader development practice. My work with upriver Innovations lets me explore 'what's next?' and my own curiosity about supporting interdisciplinary, innovative and highly collaborative teams.

Alberta Innovates Technology Futures - Strategy and Execution

This will be our next to final effort at unpacking the sessions I attended at the AITF Tech Futures Summit. This set of talks I attended spoke of some of the on-the-ground planning and action that is supporting the larger dialogue around the role of government in supporting, catalyzing and delivering on innovation in the province of Alberta.

Ray Bassett is the Assistant Deputy Minister with the Premier's Council for Economic Strategy. Over his career, he has had extensive experience in policy development, program development and delivery, preparing legislation, federal/provincial relations, and project management.

His talk was entitled, "Challenges in Creating Policy to Improve Alberta's Competitiveness" and although the focus ostensibly on 'challenges', we were left with the sense of possibility that great challenges engineer. Alberta is highly dependent on commodity markets and on the US consumer. Some are frustrated that this dependency has persisted for so long and there are very few examples of resource-based jurisdictions that have been able to make their economies less dependent on natural resources.Rather than suffering a sense of helplessness, however, Mr. Bassett's presentation spoke of possibility and the role that the public sector must play to generate broader economic options.

Mr. Bassett defined public policy quite succintly:

Public policy is a course of action adopted and pursued by government to guide and determine present and future decisions (that is) administered through legislation, regulations and administrative practices

The Province of Alberta currently works with around 25 major strategy documents. One central theme to the Premier's Council for Economic Strategy (PCES) final report is the need to invest in people development.

Alberta needs all its citizens to develop the mindset and skills to thrive in today’s world and drive economic growth – to be resilient, lifelong learners, healthy and productive, eager to achieve and perform, globally connected and informed. 

This was summarized well as a need to shift from an economy of circumstance to an economy of intent. In hearing this, we wondered at what capacities are required to be resilient. The industrial model has traditionally relied on predictability to drive economic growth. The return on assets could be closely monitored to ensure the productivity gains necessary to improve our collective standard of living. Unfortunately, it seems that the returns on fixed assets are diminishing and new sources of productivity must be found to improve the lot of our children and our children's children.

Resiliency in this context seems to be the ability to be creative in the face of very real constraints. The requirement to shift mental models is no longer a gradual luxury. Adaptive capacity is the agility to look beyond the tools already in our belt.

One approach to building this innovative capacity was presented by Axel Meisen, who holds the Chair of Foresight at AITF, working on long-term, strategic issues where AITF and Alberta can excel in building globally competitive commerce. Specifically, he leads the annual Jasper Innovation Forum where important opportunities for Alberta are explored. He spoke of the need to build innovation capacity through international experience and spoke compellingly of how China looked ahead and supported many graduates in advancing their educations through overseas assignments.

We have seen that the most impactful way to move past behaviours that are no longer adaptive is by experiencing first-hand other approaches that work. Support can be offered to reflect on these placements as unexamined experiences remain simply experiences, while critical examination can lead to a process of integration and application that would benefit the larger community. The concept wasn't presented as a comprehensive response but clearly illustrated how our shared understanding of the challenges ahead might be addressed.