In the summer of 2019 I got in touch with O’Reilly Media about their ambition to add a book about Scrum to their “97 Things” series. Drained as I was after a mission as Scrum Enterprise Coach at a large organization it was a great way to re-energize and practice some writing again (as I had sacrificed that to fully focus on my customer). Having no other plans for that time being, I could completely focus on my work as curator: contacting people, collecting ideas for essays, reviewing potential essays, suggesting potential edits, ordering and categorizing them, reviewing the manuscript and the cover.
As the title of the series suggests, the idea was to collect 97 essays in the book, to be provided by people from around the world. O’Reilly and I compiled and merged our lists of potential authors and in August 2019 I started contacting them as potential contributors. We did not invite people to contribute because of their titles, ranks, or positions. We invited them because we believed they had valuable insights to share with fellow practitioners.
I ended up contacting 129 people, of which:
- 22 People never responded (although being contacted at least 2 and sometimes even 3 times)
- 38 People eventually said ‘no’ (often after having been contacted a few times).
- 69 People ultimately delivered one or more essays that made it into the book, where:
- 2 People contributed 4 Things.
- 8 People contributed 3 Things.
- 7 People contributed 2 Things.
- 52 People contributed 1 Thing or co-authored a Thing.
I thank every single contributing author and am glad they all ended up with their picture on the cover:
I thoroughly enjoyed the work on the book. As contributions came in gradually and I had no other plans, I was able to keep up and respond swiftly to the authors. Some proposals were incredibly well crafted (needing almost no work from me). Others were more like raw brain-dumps (requiring a lot of work). Others were somewhere in between. One of the most insightful experiences was working with O’Reilly’s editors on the final manuscript, specifically about the use of English and formatting of titles, text, references, etc. As I had no other plans and my focus was nearly completely on the book, I broke some O’Reilly world records of cycle time (if I remember well we finished the book 1.5 years before the deadline they had in mind). Ultimately, in May 2020 I could already proudly announce the availability of “97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know”.
I would have preferred the book’s title to be more in line with my own focus, i.e. (holistically) on Scrum as a framework. For that reason I did not want any specific Scrum accountability in the title. As the publisher (for understandable reasons of consistency) wanted something of a role in the title, we settled on my suggestion to call the book “97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know“. Soon after that first release in English, the book was also translated in Polish, Japanese and traditional Chinese.
During the Corona times I already shared different ‘Things’ from the book in online sessions with their respective authors. I made sure all recordings were made available through my website.
I hereby want to share Thing 90: “The Origins of Scrum Might Not Be What You Think They Are” by Rafael Sabbagh, which was published in Part X of the book: “Scrum Off Script”. Rafael’s essay brought an insight that was new to me, a subtlety on how the framework we all know got its name, “Scrum”. I used that insight when creating my chronology of Scrum, “Scrum: A Brief History of a Long-Lived Hype” and I am adding it to the 4th edition of my book, “Scrum – A Pocket Guide“.
I want to share it because I believe it will be new to many other Scrum practitioners too (that have not read “the book”97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know”).
The Origins of Scrum Might Not Be What You Think They Are
“If Scrum was applied to software development, it would go something like this: …you form a team by carefully selecting one person from each [traditional development phase]…You then give them a description of the problem to be solved and…unsettle the team by saying that their job is to produce the system in, say, half the time and money and it must have twice the performance of other systems. Next, you say that how they do it is their business.
—Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions, by Peter DeGrace and Leslie Hulet Stahl (Prentice Hall, 1990)
Scrum, the framework as we know it today, was officially presented to the public in 1995. It captured the way of working that Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber had developed starting in 1992. Sutherland and Schwaber frequently mention the article, “The New New Product Development Game,” published in 1986 by Takeuchi and Nonaka in Harvard Business Review (1). They refer to it as the main source of inspiration for the Scrum framework. These Japanese business professors had done extensive research in the field of companies developing new products (such as cars, printers, photocopiers, and personal computers). In the article, the authors used the analogy of a rugby game to describe how the development teams for new products in the more successful companies were working. At the heart of it was self-organization and the boundaries that help turn it into a success.
The word scrum, a rugby formation for putting the ball back into play, is used in the article as the metaphor. This is what inspired the creators of Scrum when naming the framework in 1995.
Or, so they say…
There are indications that Sutherland and Schwaber didn’t tell the whole story. The book Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions was published in 1990. As the earlier excerpt shows, it was this book that introduced the idea of applying the practices described by Takeuchi and Nonaka to software development. And it was in this same book that this new way of working was baptized as Scrum.
To be fair, it’s important to point out that the book doesn’t provide a detailed or usable method to put these ideas into practice. The authors explain why the waterfall model doesn’t work for software development, and they offer possible alternatives, among them (what they call) Scrum.
Sutherland and Schwaber drove forward the creation of the actual Scrum framework in the first half of the 1990s. They defined the rules, roles, events, and artifacts based on their work in practice. They’ve evolved and kept sustaining them since then and deserve all the credit for that.
Jeff Sutherland refers to Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions in at least two articles he wrote in the early days of Scrum (2). He highlights this work as a major influence on the introduction of Scrum at Easel Corporation. Unfortunately, the authors of the book were never given the real credit they deserve, and their initial importance got lost over time. But they were the ones who first voiced the idea to apply the approach described by Takeuchi and Nonaka to software development, and they were the ones who actually baptized this approach as Scrum.
(1) Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, “The New New Product Development Game,” Harvard Business Review, Jan. 1986, https://oreil.ly/kBq_y.
(2) Jeff Sutherland, “Agile Can Scale: Inventing and Reinventing SCRUM in Five Companies,” Cutter Business Technology Journal Vol. 14, 2001: pp. 5–11; and “Agile Development: Lessons Learned from the First Scrum,” Cutter Agile Project Management Advisory Service: Executive Update Vol. 5, No. 20, 2004: pp. 1–4.
About Rafael Sabbagh
Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT).
Rafa Sabbagh is a co-founder of K21, where he’s been working with agile and digital transformations of companies ranging from startups to multinationals since the mid 2000’s. As a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT), and former member of the Scrum Alliance Board of Directors from 2015 to 2017, Rafa has personally trained over 10,000 Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Agile Coaches in more than 500 classes. Rafa has done training and coaching in more than 20 countries and has spoken at several Agile events worldwide.
Besides his contribution “The Origins of Scrum Might Not Be What You Think They Are” (Thing 90), Rafael also contributed “Scrum: Giving the Steering Wheel Back to Business” (Thing 14) and “The Purpose of Sprint Review Is to Gather Feedback—Period” (Thing 51) to the book “97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know”.
