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