Member-only story
Scrum is an American-style methodology
Scrum framework is a set of rules. The concept, team dynamics and the psychology aren’t described for the team members. But it’s intentional.
This article is a part of my Scrum series, see with free links (including to this article):
I like Scrum. The good Scrum.
The story
I have been to the USA on a developer framework course with my colleagues from Europe a lot of years ago. Another half of the course participants were from the USA. The training material structure was simple: do something step-by-step as the material wrote and after having the result, let’s understand what you did.
On the 2nd day, when we already had asked the teacher again what the goal was before we started the step-by-step lesson, the teacher described the lesson goal in a very few sentences for us and asked patience from the American students, because European students would like to know the concepts before doing the exercise. After this affair, the teacher always told us the goal at the beginning of the step-by-step lesson.
The learning methodologies
On that course, I understand the difference between two different methodologies:
- American: let’s do something to have a result and understand what and why you did
- European: learn the concepts and do some exercises to memorize the concepts
The European methodology does not work with introducing Scrum, because the team members don’t have the needed competence in modern management (for example: learning organization) and psychology (team dynamics, cognitive psychology). Teaching it would take a long time (if they can sit through the course at all).
The American-style is more effective to introduce the Scrum: the team members have to follow the rules and after a while they understand the concept, for example the Agile, the Story Points, the Retro.
I know another learning methodology a little bit: the Japanese. But I never can understand it more deeply, because I didn’t grow up in Japanese culture. For example, when I read Taiichi Ohno’s book Toyota Production System, I realized, the bottom line is between the lines and I just felt something…
