A further important point: working in a maximally productive way—the Scrum way—doesn’t have to be confined to business. What if people used this method to address the big problems our species struggles with—such as dependence on oil, or poor education, or lack of clean water in impoverished parts of the globe, or rampant crime? What if there really

Everyone Knows Everything. Communication saturation accelerates work.

Demo or Die. At the end of each Sprint, have something that’s done—something that can be used (to fly, drive, whatever).

It’s the system that surrounds us, rather than any intrinsic quality, that accounts for the vast majority of our behavior. What Scrum is designed to do is change that system. Instead of looking for blame and fault, it rewards positive behavior by focusing people on working together and getting things done.

If you’ve ever watched great dancers or gymnasts, you know that their motion can almost seem effortless, as if they’re doing nothing but simply being. They seem as if they couldn’t be anything else but what they are in that moment. I experienced that one day when a diminutive aikido master threw me effortlessly through the air, and yet did so in a

One, the Product Owner needs to be knowledgeable about the domain. By this I mean two things: the Product Owner should understand the process the team is executing well enough to know what can be done and, just as important, what can’t. But the Product Owner also has to understand the what well enough to know how to translate what can be done into

the danger almost settled me. I credit this to the training I got from the Air Force on how to control risk. That training taught me to do four things: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Specifically, I would observe the target area, figure out the best path into the hot zone and the best path out, orient myself in the face of unexpected events, and

Four, the Product Owner needs to be accountable for value. In a business context what matters is revenue. I measure a Product Owner by how much revenue they deliver per “point” of effort. If the team is producing forty points of work every week, I want to measure how much revenue is created for each and every point. But the measurement of value

In their original paper that described what became Scrum, “The New New Product Development Game,” Professors Takeuchi and Nonaka described the characteristics of the teams they saw at the best companies in the world: 1. Transcendent: They have a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary. This self-realized goal allows them to move beyond the ordinary