The Four Key Things

In my courses, I strive for four key things.

1. I want you to believe “I can do it.”
2. I want you to have some clue about the direction and what you want to do.
3. I want you to be scared. Yes, scared. At least some.
4. “If you wait for perfection, you might wait too long.” So, don’t wait. Start now.

Why scared? Well, I want Lean-Agile-Scrum to be so important, so good, so useful in your opinion, that you are anxious that you won’t do it well enough. You expect it to have a major impact on you, your team and your customers, so naturally you feel a pressure to do it well. You know you don’t know enough to do it very well yet (even simple things take a long time to learn to do well), and yet while it is simple, it is also complex. You know it is hard, and yet, you still do it.

So, you can see that balancing 1 and 3 is hard.

Of course, you know the definition of courage. It is: Doing something even though you are afraid. If you do something with no fear, then there is no courage. You might be overly-confident, or you might be foolhardy, but you are not courageous.

And I know you have courage.

Note also that I did not focus on explicit knowledge. That is the least useful thing to focus on, in my opinion. We need explicit knowledge about how to do Scrum, but dancing in the step-by-step way they show you in the books is ugly dancing, unless you also feel the music. The more important things are the desire and the tacit knowledge, so that over time they begin to dance well, and the connection to the underlying values and principles.

Let me end with two Yogi-isms. (Yogi Berra, that is.)

When asked, “What time is it?” he answered: “You mean now?”

He also said: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

I like to think he had become more optimistic. With every mistake we must surely be learning.

Go out and do it better. Now.

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