ScrumOrg Marketing: 0:00

Music. Welcome to the scrum.org community podcast, a podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, we feature professional scrum trainers and other scrum practitioners sharing their stories and experiences to help learn from the experience of others. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Dave West: 0:20

Hello and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host. Dave West, CEO, here@scrum.org in today's podcast, we're lucky enough to talk to two authors of a new book on Scrum and agility. The book's title is solving for value, a journey of ambition and stupidity, by sandida and Ryan Brooke, welcome to the podcast. Sandra and Ryan. Thanks for having us to be here. It's great to have you in this sort of festive season, just for the for the listeners, you don't get the benefit of this, or maybe, maybe you've seen a picture of this, but Ryan is wearing his Christmas sweater or jumper, as I meant to say, so, so that that obviously provides you with some context as he answers these questions and and actually, I'd like to start with you, Ryan, if you don't mind, of course. So can you tell the listeners about this, this new book, you know, sort of give, give the overview, give the the thing you get on the back as it were,

Ryan Brook: 1:21

yeah, sure. So what we try to do with this book was try to create something a little bit different. So what we've got is, kind of, it's a book of two halves. We have, we have our story, our kind of, when we initially started, it was very Phoenix Project like it, we wanted a story about a fictitious organization called magnum opus that would allow us, as commentators looking at this to be able to well, offer advice, offer common pitfalls and anti patterns. So you kind of read it in two ways. It starts out with a story, and then Sanda and I will come in as the authors and comment on that story. Say good things, say bad things, but more importantly, offer practices and improvements to try and help you. Sanda has a wonderful word for it. He calls it a bar book. You know, it's a as if you were sat next to us at the bar, chatting along with us. That's kind of what the book is styled as, that sounds,

Dave West: 2:13

that sounds awesome and anti patterns. Because, from my experience, I spent a lot of time, as I said in the sort of intro to the book, or the forward, going around talking to organizations doing scrumm and agile, and trying these different ways of working. And there's a lot of examples of anti patterns that we see over and over again. So so Sanda, I don't mean to be a cynic here, but there's a lot of agile books around and, you know, even some of them written by myself. So gosh, yeah, that they're pretty awful, but there's a lot of really good ones as well. So why do we need another agile book?

Sander Dur: 2:59

Well, one of the main things to read this book is obviously because you wrote the forward to begin with.

Dave West: 3:05

There is that, yes, exactly. Now, the

Sander Dur: 3:08

thing that we saw in the market here is, like Ryan said, we started differently than we ended up with. We started from scrum master perspective. But we also know is that the scrum that the market at large is shifting more from a framework oriented mindset to more of a product oriented mindset. That's where we dive into as well. Like Scrum is still super important. Scrum is really important, but it's the means to the end, right? It's not necessarily the end state, and that's one of those dysfunctions that we started to see in one of the anti patterns, and also to combine that together with the bar book Scrum is super important, but it's also so misunderstood in many cases. And that's where we wanted to dive in these practices and what we can do with them, the anti patterns, and what we have done in our in our practice to to resolve these kind of anti patterns.

Dave West: 4:00

Yeah, I so I was fortunate for the listeners to read this book very early on, and it made me chuckle a lot, which is something I do want to come to in a second. There's a lot of lot of jokes throughout which made me smile. It definitely felt like I was at a pub with Ryan and Sander talking about my organization or the challenges that I have. But the the other thing that I really liked about this book, and the thing that I think makes it special, which you sort of mentioned, was the focus on value. I know it's in the title, and it's very easy to title the book and then completely forget it when you've when you've written, when you write it. But the ultimate that this isn't about Scrum. I mean, it is, or isn't about agile. It is, but it isn't. It's about why. It's about the outcomes that scrum provides. And when you don't do one of these things in Scrum, maybe it's a daily maybe it's, you know, you know, have a sprint goal. Maybe. It's whatever those things are. This is the impact in terms of the outcome, not that you haven't done it. This is, this is the impact to your organization. This is why you won't find value. So so easy. Does that really summarize sanda? You know, do you think that's summarizes your thoughts as you were writing this book,

Sander Dur: 5:22

absolutely that, and it's that, combined with the fact that a lot of practitioners struggle to be in these kind of situations, it takes a lot of perseverance, and that's why we wanted to provide the empathy to the practitioners, right? And also to get back to what scrum tries to do is to bring the transparency, inspection, adaptation, having a good, hard, critical look and the courage to be transparent about those kind of things. And we felt that that is missing in a lot of organizations, so we want to bring that back, but also let the reader know that you're not alone in these kind of these kind of challenges. Yeah, I

Ryan Brook: 6:00

think that that thing that Sanders just hit on there, that empathy, that feeling alone, we often see Scrum Masters in organizations, almost, well, sadly, sometimes quite piecemeal. You know, you're in a large area with only maybe one or two people, and the ability to kind of have that conversation with with a book, in this case, to say you're not alone. We've been there. Sometimes it's just really crappy. But however experienced you are, whatever organization you're working within, it's just about taking one foot in front of another and seeing if you can get better tomorrow, exactly.

Sander Dur: 6:33

And ultimately, we want to read there to become better, in getting that value and delivering that value that we all strive for. Yeah,

Dave West: 6:41

it kind of reminded me why I'm in this role, actually, which is, which is bizarre that it would but, you know, I was as I was reading the book, and, you know, laughing at some of the jokes, it reminded me there's a heavy emphasis on self management, a heavy emphasis on taking ownership in the context of business value, etc. And you know, part of the reason why I love Scrum is that it's about empowering teams to deliver value. And the role of a scrum master, Agile coach, Delivery Manager, whatever that title is, doesn't really matter. That's your job. It's to get the best out of everybody in pursuit of the goal that you're at. And that means contribution. That means self management, self organization, empowerment, those things and that that's heavily talked about in the in the book, which I was I It wasn't what I was expecting and it but it really did remind me why, why scrum so, so important. I

Ryan Brook: 7:43

think one of the things Sandra and I have tried to do throughout the book is we keep coming back to that word of anti patterns that we've actually gone out on the circuit a little bit and tried to deliver a talk about the 10 common dysfunctions, 10 lies. We're calling them, that almost organizations are telling themselves. And you kind of see people in the comments, and afterwards, they'll message us on LinkedIn, and they'll, they'll chuckled, but also have gone, do you know what? Sometimes, unless you, unless you slap yourself in the face with it, you almost don't acknowledge these issues, these anti patterns. So this book is almost like your guide. Yes, it's about value, yes, it's about self management, but it's, it's a self reflection tool, really, to say, Do you know what? That's not okay. How do we take a step forward?

Dave West: 8:23

So give me an example of one of the anti patterns. Oh,

Ryan Brook: 8:26

Santa, take a pick. You can. You can pick first Sure.

Sander Dur: 8:29

Let's start with one of the main ones where it actually starts to go wrong in many organizations, is that Scrum, or any you can replace this with any kind of framework or methodology, whatever you want, but it's picked mindlessly, right? It's, we're going to do Scrum because we so see so many linked influencers do this kind of thing. There's so much going on. It sounded cool at this party. No one talks about Scrum at parties, but, you know, it sounded cool where I heard it. And they mindlessly start running this. And they don't think about, what kind of problem do we really have, what kind of solutions do we have to that might fit that problem, that we can actually, you know, move to mitigate that. And why might scrum be one of those things? And if we're going to do Scrum, what kind of organizational changes do we need to make in order to make that work? And these steps are usually skipped immediately. Scrum is treated like Harry Potter's magic wand, the magic salvation of everything, expecting that all the the problems and dysfunctions are magically going to be resolved. And that's just not the case. Yet this that's how it's being treated. That's where we want to shine a little light on these kind of dysfunctions. It

Dave West: 9:39

that definitely is an empty pattern I see all the time, and by the way, I don't totally hate it, because obviously they then go on scrum training, and that's great, and that helps pay my mortgage, so I appreciate it. However, the reality is that if you adopt something without understanding. The why, which is very different from traditional engineering processes the Industrial Revolution, which was just do this worry. Don't worry about the system. Don't worry about the why. Just do that widget, really, really, really well and that. But scrum isn't that. Scrum is you have to understand the context. You have to appreciate the why, you have to understand the impact, the organizational capability to support it, and and if those things aren't necessarily right or aligned, or the motivation isn't correct, you know, if it isn't, Scrum isn't about delivering things faster. You do deliver things faster, but it's about delivering value better. Blah, blah, blah, then you ultimately are in trouble. So that's a really, really great dysfunction. Ryan hit me up with another one. Man, oh,

Ryan Brook: 10:48

what do we want to go for? Well, the absolute need to scale in a lot of organizations, and I'm purposely being vague with the word scale. I know it's like a red rag to a lot of bull balls in the Agile community, but what we see in a lot of organizations is, you know, well, scaling, or de scaling, we talk about in the book, but scaling particularly as a problem, because it's their inability to rationalize a product backlog and inability to pick and so what they try and do is try and put loads of teams on loads of products. And actually, they haven't even got the base building blocks right. First, it's, do you know what? It's not even just taking a problem. It's taking a problem and timing it by 10. And that's something we see consistently in organizations, because they believe that it's like buying one simple solution off the shelf, one thing to manage a scaled implementation versus 10 smaller ones. Whereas we all know that those 10 smaller ones are probably easier to manage than one large one, and that's something we see all the time.

Dave West: 11:52

Yeah, and do you think that organizations scale? Because you know that, because that historically, that's the way in which success has created, you know, with that sort of factory mentality that you know soon as let's, let's, let's, let's, add 100 people to this, when in doubt, add somebody else. Do you think it's because of that, or do you think it's because scale means power, authority, status? Well,

Sander Dur: 12:21

and they already have so many people in the organization that they need to keep busy, right? So we're just going to slap a slight framework, a scaling framework, on it, without even starting with the basis, with a proper foundation. Now here's a here's a nice scaling framework that we just took off Brian shelf, and now we're going to apply that across a multi 100 people. And good luck. Now, we expect you to do the right thing right right away, as soon as possible. Yeah?

Dave West: 12:44

And I Yeah. I mean, the Twitter example is an example of an organ, yeah, when Elon Musk came to Twitter, and I know that's, you know, there's lots of negative stuff about Elon at the moment, but, but one thing that's really interesting in terms of the impact that he had at Twitter in material of the fact that you know your experience of Twitter, but ultimately they're delivering more features now with significantly less people, they're doing more because, you know, he instantly reduced their headcount significantly. And rumor has it, he's going to try to do that with the US government next, but we'll see how that goes. But so don't scale too soon. Get the basics in place. Scale value, not, not, not processes, you know, those sort of, yeah, that makes, makes a lot, lot of sense. How about another one? This is awesome. I'm I, even though I read many of these things, it's sort of bringing it all back. Now. Sanda, have you got one that you would like?

Sander Dur: 13:48

This one is right up Ryan's alley as well. Road maps are just fixed to follow like if what are you going to what are you going to eat for dinner? June, 26 2025 I was

Dave West: 14:01

thinking I was going to have a maybe an Indian, yeah, I think, you know, ashwari Naan. Oh, are you not meant to plan that far in advance? Sandra, is that what you're saying? How

Sander Dur: 14:15

high is the probability that that line is going to change? It's something exactly with something arbitrary, exactly, we always call roadmaps, the plan to deviate from and setting something in stone just does not make sense at all, especially if you go beyond the even the closed realm. Brian, what do you think? Yeah, roadmaps

Ryan Brook: 14:39

are like. It's something that really frustrates me, because typically we see road maps on a confluence page or on a PowerPoint slide. They go from left to right. They've got milestones on them, and everyone views them as this gospel, but we all know the minute that that document gets emailed out, it's out of date, and it's just incredibly frustrating that it's then treated as some. You know, it's put in p6 or it's put in some sort of planning tool, and then it's almost ticked off against style. You know, hey, why don't we just try and do a road map in concentric circles? Now, is in the middle. Next is a little bit out there with four or five things in something. One of these things might be able to come into the now, but we just don't know. I can't plan two weeks ahead. My teams can't plan two weeks ahead. So why the hell are they trying to plan a year five years ahead, with putting dates on it at the same time? It's just frustrating.

Dave West: 15:29

But surely you have to balance the desire by, you know, executives like that, you know, like, like me, I'm pretending to be one at the moment the because we want to be able to forecast, because there's a lot of other moving parts inside, you know, whether it's commitments to partners, whether it's commitments to the street, whether it's how do we, how do we balance that? And I know you talked a little bit about that in the book, so how do you, how did you How would you recommend we balance the need for flexibility with the need for for for be able to predict the future a little bit?

Ryan Brook: 16:11

I think you kind of addressed it in your answer. There you we talk about roadmaps being fixed as the anti pattern. Some of it's a culture and a knowledge issue when we publish this and we don't say this is what we will do. Yes, we need to forecast. We need to give people a vision, a level of transparency over what the future looks like. But also, there needs to almost be that caveat. I wish roadmaps just came with a little TLDR at the bottom that says this is probably already wrong, but it, but it's, it's like a product owner being transparent with their decisions in a product backlog. It's a way of showing positive intent and purpose. So I think that is great. Road maps are a wonderful tool, but they have a massive drawback when they're considered as commitments rather than forecasts.

Dave West: 16:55

And obviously there's something about there's some things we can predict and there's some things that we can't. And it's knowing, like we can predict that we're going to release the product on that date. We just can't predict exactly what's going to be in it. Or maybe you know, and it's balancing that kind of giving that level of knowledge. It's funny whether you know, whether reports are increasingly wrong at the moment in the US anyway. But wouldn't it be nice sometimes they're right, and that's because they have a high amount, like not much is changing the jet streams in the same position, etc. I would love that that that fidelity to be reported in the Reva report. This is a high likelihood of success. This is a low likelihood of success, as I'm planning my barbecue or my, you know, or my kids birthday party outside. And I think that road maps would benefit from some of that, you know, the stuff that we and as soon as we don't know something, then we highlight the fact and and the like I don't know, Sanda, you, you got some strong opinions on road maps?

Sander Dur: 18:04

Yeah, I'm, I'm also curious, from your perspective as one of those executives, how did you deal? How did your road map change just prior to COVID?

Dave West: 18:14

Oh, fundamentally. So, it's so funny. So I we used to draw it. And I know Ryan, you. I know I know we should be smarter. I apologize to the audience here, however, you know, Cobblers, children and all that. Anyway, so, so we had on my whiteboard in my office. I had a plan for the next year, broadly and yes, it was more goal oriented. It was less out, you know, it was very outcome, very same. So it was good, you know, we had some some plans, and of which, supporting, you know, sort of like instructor led online training was not on that plan. I tried to implement some ideas around that earlier. Got massive pushback, given up. Would be a good way of describing my behaviors. And so we wasn't there. So March 13, it was a Friday, I was sitting in the office with this huge plan, and that was the last day I was in the office. And fundamentally, we radically changed how what we were doing, in terms of the goals that we were trying to achieve, and how frequently we reviewed our plan and our progress against it. So it fundamentally changed, and we were doing well. Every other week we were replanning the order of the classes were going to be available, the you know, what, how we were supporting, the how face to faces were going to happen, you know, weren't virtual, you know, and, and it was very dynamic, incredibly stressful, but wasn't the actual work wasn't actually stressful. It's funny, it was more the environment, because there were just so many unknowns outside of work as well. You know, the safety. My family and all of those sort of things that was actually more stressful than the actual work. The work was actually kind of fun, and we delivered classes very quickly, and then after three months of, you know, not being able to deliver it particularly successfully, or having challenges and learning, we then it just was, went Gangbuster. So I guess, yeah,

Sander Dur: 20:21

that's the thing, right? That's one of those coming back to road maps, but applies to pretty much all of the dysfunctions and anti patterns we hear so often. Now, we can do that here. When I asked my manager the week before, just prior to the first lockdown, like, can I work from home? Nah, we don't have the infrastructure. We can't do that. We don't have those options. You know, it's going to take at least half year of investment, so we're not going to do that. But all of a sudden, these circumstances change. Now you have the burning platform to change, and all of a sudden, fam people can do it within a week. Everyone's working from home in a week. So it's creating that, that necessity for people to find the creativity to solve these kind of problems. And I think that's that's one of the things that many organizations should come back to provide the sandbox for people to to operate within, right? I think that's one of the things that we've lost over time, is playing around in that sandbox. I'm not saying like a physical sandbox, but there was a parallel to the physical sandbox when we were a kid, because those sandboxes world were the realm of opportunities. The imagination was limitless. And then after we started moving more and more into the corporate world, how, the why and the creativity got, you know, dragged out. And I think we need to put that more back into into practice. I

Dave West: 21:44

100% well that, as I say, that's the reason why I'm so excited about Scrum. Over the last 10 years, as I've been CEO of scrum.org that was reason why I joined scrum.org because I ultimately believe in empowering people to have ownership of their sandbox and encouraging them to do creative work instead of just work and, and I think we can change the world if we do that and and at the very least, get happier people, which would be nice, right? That would be a great step in the right direction. So I'm curious, you know, as we've been talking about the anti patterns we've been talking about this, this pro I'm curious about your the process, you know, your writing process and journey on this book. I hate to say this, but I don't strike Sander in particular. Doesn't strike me as a book writer. You know, you strike me very much as a let's get stuff done. Let's get a bunch of people together. Let's cause some chaos in a nice, positive, structured way, and then make some changes. And magic happens. Ryan, you're a little bit more student, you know, organized and systematic and the like they were about.

Ryan Brook: 22:55

You're about to eat your hat. Dave, when you fit, when you finish your question,

Dave West: 22:58

oh, I was gonna say the process. How did this journey happen? And, yeah, I always love a good hat eating. I'm

Sander Dur: 23:04

gonna let my evil twin sister answer this question

Ryan Brook: 23:08

that's not helpful on a on an audio only podcast, the fact that we look very similar.

Dave West: 23:14

You do look a little bit similar, I guess so. To answer your

Ryan Brook: 23:17

question, how did we go about it? We kind of decided that we wanted to try and break down some of the stereotypes of books. Particularly, they just feel quite dry, you know, you you buy one same content produced in a different way. And we just thought, what could we do? So we knocked up a few ideas, good old sticky notes and some online collaboration. And we tried to come up with a title, but we couldn't. So we just started writing. We started putting out an increment. Sander, very luckily, has a very helpful discord community where we were releasing chapters incrementally getting feedback. What did we think? And once we felt like we kind of had that, I guess we call it a track, the track of value that we were aiming for, we then kind of went heads down. It took us a long time to get going. I You, I mean, so I'm very grateful you called me studious. But actually, Sanda was the one driving this whole thing. He was the one whipping me to get going. And it was challenging. Writing a book is, I mean, you know, Dave, but 50% of it is actually writing the words, and then it's the marketing, the IP ends, the barcodes, the editing, the proofreading, the the front cover, the name, oh my god, coming up with a name, I said to Sander in the dedication, we are never doing this again, and yet, we already are, aren't we? Sander, yeah,

Sander Dur: 24:34

the next book is already in the works. Luckily, we just spoke to Dan Pink, and we have, we're authorized to use his work as well to to get some traction in there. So that's awesome. Oh,

Dave West: 24:45

autonomy, mastery, purpose is always, always fun, right? The So, yeah, the the process of writing a book is, is always very interesting. And it's, it's great that you highlighted a couple of things that I think that that traditional publishing. Houses to have a real challenge with which is this incremental, you know, sort of like experimentation approach. And obviously, Sanda has a great discord community that you can leverage and get that feedback as you inspect and adapt the journey that that you're that you're on. That was, that was interesting, Sanda, what was your experience of writing this

Sander Dur: 25:23

book? Well, one of the first things, so I started writing this book, I asked Ryan to be my co author, because I'm terrible at really wrapping things up. And he's like, South bar calls at the account to build a buddy, and he was my account to build a buddy. So, you know, there's always someone to fall back on. And I start with with the idea of of calling the company, Mack mope is approach. Ryan said, This is what I want to do. Mac mope is the best ever work. That that's what it means in Latin. And then I found out that he studied Latin, and then immediately I got that back into my face. Now it means greatest work. You know, it's that kind of stuff that I would have never found out if I didn't work with with Ryan. But also we try to eat our own dog food. We try to do this in a scrum way, you know, do this iteratively, incrementally, in sprints. Turns out, sprints are not the Scrum is not the right way to write a book, which is interesting because it's not. It doesn't have that level of complexity that you would need to make scrum actually work, right? It's we, we needlessly over complicated that in that sense. But we learned so much because we self published for a variety of reasons. So then, indeed, it's writing the words. But then you also dive into, how does the publication work? What do you need to pay attention to? How do you style the book, making sure that there's sufficient spacing in between, switching the page numbers from left and right. It's all these small details that you would never notice if you're just chugging out the words,

Dave West: 26:51

yeah, it is, yeah. It's interesting. You said that Scrum is not necessarily right for writing books. I think there's definitely some elements of Scrum, particularly when you're trying to discover the journey, the sort of crux of the book, that experimentation and rapid delivery and feedback. I think it works perfectly. I think towards the, you know, as as a book becomes a formed thing, then it becomes more of it's a complicated, maybe even a simple, problem that. And then it is really sort of like just getting tasks done, learning what they, you know, learning what that tasks are like buying an ISBN, because you have to buy them, which I never really understood until, you know, being involved a little bit in book publishing. So the last thing I just want to touch on before, we leave, and this has been a really thank you for taking the time. Today is the humor, the scrum dad jokes. I know both of you are funny but but being funny in real life and being funny on the page aren't necessarily the same thing. It was a bit of a risk. Wasn't it being humorous in a book because of the way in which, you know, it's like being humorous on on Twitter or on Slack, it can flat very quickly, right? Why did you decide to I mean, I it has worked. So for our listeners, you know, get if you get the opportunity to read this book, and I recommend you do it actually does work. Some of them you're just like, you're groaning, but some of them actually make you giggle a little bit. So

Unknown: 28:31

yeah, it has worked, but it's a bit of a risk. Why did you decide to do it?

Ryan Brook: 28:37

Because no one wants to write a book. That is really, really hard to do. We wanted to write a book for us to read. This was never about revenue. This was never about marketing or branding. The cynics can disagree, but this was something that we went you know what? I would want to read this book, and when I read things, I want to be chuckling along. You can't do boring, bland empathy. You need to be like, Do you know what we've been there. And also, humor is our way of coping with things and kind of accepting that things aren't perfect. And so, yeah, you know, it was a bit of a risk, but to be honest, if it had sold five copies, Sandra and I would have been very happy with what we achieved. So we're just grateful that it's landed really nicely, exactly,

Sander Dur: 29:23

and it did. And indeed, we wanted this book to be a reflection of us as well, like it's sometimes we see these authors that write in a very different style than they are themselves. And you know, it doesn't really mix well, but it to us. It shouldn't make a difference whether you read the book or you talk to us. It should be the same tone, it should be the same approach, and you should have the same level of engagement in that sense,

Dave West: 29:51

I apologize. Yes, my book writing is definitely less, less me than it should be, and maybe that's something I need to take on board. So thank you. You forever.

Unknown: 30:01

I didn't say

Dave West: 30:03

that. I know I feel that, and I do appreciate that I was, I was a little cynical when I started reading the book about how value, the value of the humor, but I think the it definitely created a connection with me and that that the the word empathy, you've used it a few times and and I think that books that create connections are pretty rare and actually pretty, pretty awesome. So I really do appreciate you writing the book, taking the time navigating the complexities of the process, and sharing your wisdom with the with the with the community, and thank you for taking the time today. I could talk to you both for hours, as we have in the past, so unfortunately, we don't have that much time, but so thank you for taking the time on this podcast. Thank you again for having us welcome so thank you. Listeners. Today we were talking to sander and Ryan Brooke about their book, basically as solving for value, a journey of ambition and stupidity. I think I was the last bit sometimes, but it's an awesome book. It has some great, great, great anti patterns, patterns, great stories. It's a it's a really interesting read. It's also kind of humorous and and really talks about real Scrum, professional Scrum, whatever you want to call it, the the essence of why you were doing the things to deliver value for your customers, for your your stakeholders. So I recommend reading it, enjoy it and and thank you for listening today to scrum.org, community podcast. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, share with friends, and of course, come back and listen some more. I'm lucky enough to have a variety of guests talking about everything in the area of professional Scrum, product thinking, and, of course, agile. Thank you, everybody and Scrum on you.