I have already mentioned the concept in a previous post: In Agile coaching, people often speak about the Shu Ha Ri – a theory coming from martial arts about how people learn new skills. First, a set of rules is introduced (Shu), then people learn to apply these rules properly to their given situation and possibly to “bend” them, where necessary (Ha) and finally, they understand how to grow beyond the rules, how to live the “spirit” of the rules without even thinking about them.
It seems that in introducing Scrum, there is often a focus on the Shu part. The rules are introduced as strict laws. Fairly little reasoning is given for them. The goal is to establish the rules and to achieve improvement e.g. in performance or quality through whatever benefits Scrum provides. And obviously, Scrum does provide benefits, even if the Scrum team does not understand anything about the agile principles behind Scrum and the greater framework of thoughts and ideas that Scrum is embedded into. Early testing will increase quality. Frequent retrospectives will lead to constant improvement. Iterative work will allow the team to fail fast.
However, I believe that this “Shu-focussed” approach can lead to Scrum implementations that go down a completely wrong path – abominations such as Scrumerfall or tailored Scrum versions that omit the parts which are good for the team and focus on the parts that look good to management. Also, a Shu-focussed team would end up going through the motions of implementing Scrum as a process (which it isn’t) instead of working towards a goal that goes beyond being able to say “We are doing Scrum”.
So in my opinion, just understanding the Scrum rules is not sufficient. The rules are simple. The Scrum guide explains the rules in quite a bit of detail on twelve pages, though I am sure it would be possible to squeeze them onto one page and to learn them in less than ten minutes. So the complexity of the Shu part is quite low.
Consider examples like the games chess or go. The rules for both games are extremely simple and would also easily fit onto a single page. But if you study the rules for chess, you still will not be able to play a very meaningful game of chess. You need at least a basic introduction to the many other considerations that transcend the rules – a few simple openings, general strategic considerations and end game strategies. You need to get an idea of what the Ha and Ri look like before you really get what the game is all about. And I believe it is the same with Scrum.
So it is not enough to just teach people the rules of Scrum or to give people a rough idea of agile principles. I strongly believe it is necessary to motivate Scrum and other agile approaches beyond the pure rules and to at least give people are rough idea of what can be achieved with Scrum beyond just a higher performance.
AgileEvangelist 