Topic: Reflect on the empirical pillars of Scrum 🎯
Type: Retrospective format 🤔
Duration: 60 minutes ⏰
In complex work, more is unknown than known. The unknown is discovered by releasing done increments early and often. With these increments, you validate assumptions, learn what is needed, and avoid the risk of spending time and money on the wrong things. As a result, you can deliver value to your stakeholders sooner.
When a team uses Scrum to navigate complexity, it's helpful to frequently reflect on the quality of the underlying empirical pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
With the Scrum artifacts, you create transparency as follows:
🎯 Product Goals & Product Backlog = Future
🎯 Sprint Goals & Sprint Backlog = Present
💰 Product Increment & DoD = Past
Product Goals and the Product Backlog make visible what the road ahead looks like and—given the knowledge you have today—what work is needed. Sprint Goals and the Sprint Backlog make the current focus and work visible. The Product Increment makes the work visible that has been completed so far and according to what quality standards (DoD).
Each Scrum event is an opportunity to inspect and adapt. The Scrum events can only be effective if you have high-quality artifacts that reflect full transparency.
As the Scrum Guide nicely describes:
- Transparency enables inspection. Inspection without transparency is misleading and wasteful. 🤷♀️
- Inspection enables adaptation. Inspection without adaptation is considered pointless. Scrum events are designed to provoke change. 🌀
- Adaptation requires autonomy, motivation, and skills to identify and implement small improvements. ✅
So, interesting questions to reflect on are:
🤔 How can you improve the artifacts so they'll make the future, present, and past even more clear?
🤔 How can you trigger deeper inspection to uncover the root cause of problems your team faces?
🤔 How can you identify small AND meaningful improvements to ignite a cycle of 'transparency, inspection, and adaptation' instead of transparency, inspection, and ignore'?
Why don't you use the next Sprint Retrospective to reflect on these empirical pillars of Scrum? It's time well spent.
When using Liberating Structures, consider using Conversation Cafe. It invites people to listen to one another’s thoughts and reflect on a shared challenge, such as what your team could improve when considering the pillars of Scrum. Or try Impromptu Networking. In each round, invite the team to discuss one of the questions in pairs. Share insights with the entire group. Do three rounds in total to cover all the questions.
Feel free to share any other thoughts or ideas. Let’s learn and grow together!