Scrum Master
How would you describe your job as a Scrum Master to a 4-year-old?
According to the Scrum Guide, one way a Scrum Master serves the Product Owner is to “Find techniques for effective Product Goal definition and Product Backlog management”.
Another way the Scrum Master serves the Organization is “By helping employees and stakeholders understand and instill an empirical approach for complex work”.
As I pondered how to answer my son’s question “What do you do at work dad?”, here’s a quick exercise I came up with using his favorite dry-erase handheld board.
I first instructed him “Draw me a triangle inside a circle”. He takes some time to draw it while keeping his drawing secret.
Me: “Can you show it to me?”
I can tell that he is proud of his work and shows a little bit of uneasiness revealing it at first. He eventually shows me this (keep in mind he has just learned his shapes):
In order to keep him interested in the activity, I show him gratitude and encourage him saying “Great Job!” and though that’s not quite what I had envisioned, I don’t scold him for it but rather show how pleased I was at his attempt.
Me: “Can we try drawing a triangle inside the circle?»
This time, he had no hesitation showing it to me as soon as he was done since it’s become another fun game with daddy. Here’s what this iteration looked like:
After seeing his second drawing which fit my exact ask, I realized that I failed to provide a key detail in what I had envisioned.
Me: “Oh I needed to tell you to Draw a triangle inside a circle where the corners of the triangle touch the circle.”
This turned out to be a very foreign concept for my 4-year-old who had just learned to draw his shapes. He was used to drawing each of the shapes separately. However, eventually, with some help, he delivered my vision.
For All I know, what my son learned about his dad is that he teaches people to draw triangles inside circles. How might this example be a lesson in communication, transparency, inspection and adaptation you may ask?
Communication
How might my son’s reaction have been if on his first attempt I had criticized him on his error? (his inside voice could be: “oh no, daddy’s not happy with what I did!”). What’s the likelihood of him attempting a 2nd drawing?
As adults, how often do we strive for perfection? How often do we want to please our managers, stakeholders or anyone in a position to critique our work due to how they’ve approached failure in the past? What does our inside voice say?
Transparency and Inspection
Do we fear making mistakes in the initial stages of our work? Are we reluctant to show our work early due to fear? Did we miss opportunities to learn from quick feedback that resulted in us losing a potential greater outcome beyond our wildest dreams?
As leaders, it is critical to cultivate a culture of learning via safe opportunities to inspect, nurturing communication with safeguards in place. How fast are we willing to show our work to our product owners and/or customers to get immediate feedback? Did we understand their requirements right? Did we miss a detail that was accidently omitted perhaps?
It is paramount to create an environment where failures are accepted since learnings from them are significantly valuable.
Adaptation
The only way to iterate towards perfection is by failing then adapting and iterating. This is not to say failure is acceptable in mission critical, production settings; rather finding ways to show your work early, allowing experiments where fault tolerance is higher; all for the purpose of obtaining true valuable feedback. Unfortunately, such feedback is almost impossible to get due to this very fear of showing imperfect work early or the fear of causing mission critical operational errors.
How do we establish safeguards in order to obtain true valuable feedback? In a software setting, in the early phase of “requirements” gathering, A/B user testing can be a useful technique. During the development phase, development, testing and/or staging environments that leverage cloud technologies to replicate production environments as close as possible. Using Canary rollouts to production to a limited number of trusted users. Practices like robust unit testing, automated testing leveraging AI, etc.
Once such safeguards are in place, communicate your new fault tolerance for the purposes of learning. Market it internally out the wazoo in your organization until everyone has this ingrained into a daily habit. This will lead to learnings that lead to innovation and perhaps a chance to become the next trillion-dollar company.
