Teach Scrum 6 Times!

We had a really nice Open Space session with Alistair Cockburn at the community day of XP Days 2009 in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the concept of Open Space was just too restricted for Alistair, he simply invited to "Whatever U want 2 talk about" what I'd like to define as Open-Open Space.

After several topics we started to talk about energizing teams and how to do this. The group mentioned good examples of situations when a team was able to show energetic motion.

We finally found the solution and the underlying method to trigger a team's energy and make it self-explode into a hyperproductive state! This is a quantum leap in agile team driving!

Take a look at the whiteboard Alistair is pointing at. The third line from the top shows the overwhelming truth:

Teach Scrum 6 times ("Repeat Yourself")

(Note: this post is pure nonsense. Do NOT teach Scrum 6 times to the same team or you will burn in hell.)

It's just that easy: if you're coaching or mentoring a Scrum team then simply teach Scrum 6 times to that team and it will suddenly jump into hyperproduction for sure!

The underlying principle and general method is "repeat yourself". "Repeat yourself" itself is an iterative process that should be timeboxed for maximum effectiveness. With the theory of dialectic constraints it can be proven that "repeat yourself" will lead to pure truth in the receiver's processing unit after infinite repetition.

Fortunately Scrum is such a reduced and simple framework that 6 iterations are enough for any team.

Try this and be surprised of its simplicity! Should you run into any problems with this approach, you should go on, try harder, and inspect and adapt as always.

Remember, if things do not work well it's always human failure due to the first tenet of the agile manifesto: humans and interactions over processes and tools. Humans err, processes and tools don't!

(Note: if you really didn't get it, this post is pure nonsense. Do NOT teach Scrum 6 times to the same team or you will burn in hell.)