is an excellent book by Jeff Sutherland, subtitled A revolutionary approach to building teams, beating deadlines, and boosting productivity (isbn 978-847-94108-4).
As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
The most powerful part of Scrum from his [Jeff Johnson] point of view? Demos.
Scrum is not about the developers. It's about the customers and stakeholders.
I learned a lot about systems theory and how a system only has certain stable states. As a cell evolves, it moves from one stable state to another. Figuring out the rules to move a complex adaptive system from one state to another, and how to make the next state a positive one rather than a negative one, was something I spent nearly a decade on.
To change a cell, you first inject energy into the system. At first there's chaos, there seem to be no rules, everything is in flux...
"How many gantt charts have you seen in your career?" I asked.
"Hundreds," he replied.
"How many of them were right?"
He paused. "None."
In business we all too often focus solely on individuals, even if production is a team effort.
It's the system that surrounds us, rather than any intrinsic quality, that accounts for the vast majority of our behaviour.
Every three weeks each team had to demonstrate to their colleagues what it was working on. This was an open demonstration; anyone could come. And if that demo wasn't both working and cool, [MediaLab] directors killed the project.
"Sprints." We called them that because the name evokes a quality of intensity.
Nothing gets moved to Done unless it can be used by the customer.
After engaging for a while in Sprints and Stand-ups, you stop seeing time as a linear arrow into the future but, rather, as something that is fundamentally cyclical.
People think in narratives, in stories.
The Product Owner has to be available to the team, to explain what needs to be done and why. While the Product Owner is ultimately accountable for the Backlog, there needs to be a constant dialogue with the team.
Orientation isn't just a state you're in; it's a process. You're always orienting... [OODA]
