Foundations

The spirit of the game

A team can hold every Scrum event on time and still miss what those events are meant to produce. The first pattern of A Scrum Book, The Spirit of the Game, starts from this observation. Two other patterns carry it further: Fertile Soil, which deals with values, and Norms of Conduct, which deals with the rules of conduct a team sets for itself.

An earpiece that no rule forbade

During the 1999 Cricket World Cup, the captain of the South African team wore an earpiece on the field that linked him to his coach. No law of cricket forbade it. According to the account given in A Scrum Book, the opposing captain nevertheless complained to the umpire, and the earpiece had to be removed because it went against the spirit of the game. The Laws of Cricket now open with a preamble stating that the sport is played within its laws and also within its spirit, and that this responsibility lies first with the captains.

The authors chose this story to open their collection, whose subtitle is The Spirit of the Game. They recognize in it a situation that many Scrum teams face: behavior that no written rule forbids, yet which everyone senses is damaging the game.

The Spirit of the Game: the first pattern

The pattern The Spirit of the Game is number 1 and carries two stars, which signals that the authors consider it indispensable (see Scrum's patterns for these conventions). Its context fits in one sentence: the Scrum framework does not have all the answers, so the team cannot turn to it every time it is unsure.

The problem, in the pattern's words: "Written rules might give concrete guidance for how to work together, but spirit is part of culture that guides interactions and may be discerned only when ignored or violated."

The pattern describes several forces, that is, several reasons why the problem does not sort itself out.

Scrum is simple to understand. So people fill the gaps with their own assumptions and treat it as a set of instructions.
Culture lives in habits, and habits resist change. The move from a command-and-control organization to autonomous teams makes developers uneasy, since they have to decide more for themselves, and makes managers uneasy, since they fear losing power.
The existing organization may contradict Scrum. The pattern cites a vice-president who imposes both the date and the scope, which leads to poor quality or burnout, and a project manager who demands daily reports, which signals suspicion.
The old hierarchy lives on under new names. A manager uses the team's tracking tool to assess each individual, and people start working for the measurement. A resource manager reshuffles the team every Sprint to fine-tune its skills, and the team no longer has the chance to organize itself.
Anyone can justify a questionable measure by saying it breaks no rule in the Guide. For the authors, "that the question of 'compliance' even arises is itself outside the spirit."

The solution is addressed to everyone involved with the product: "When using Scrum, the product community must focus on explicitly creating a culture in the organization where people know and follow the spirit of Scrum. Everyone working in or with a Scrum Team needs to help develop this culture by leading by example." To show where this spirit lies, the pattern points to the Agile Manifesto, and in particular to the principle that reads: "Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done."

The pattern does not hide the consequences. Working this way is uncomfortable at first, since it means breaking with habits people are not always aware of. The authors consider it essential to start with a good Scrum Master and a good Product Owner, and they ask team members to support one another during this period.

A Daily Scrum that follows the rules and has lost its meaning. In the IT department of a French county council, a team of seven is rebuilding the website for social welfare applications. The Daily Scrum takes place every morning at 9:15 and lasts fifteen minutes. The head of department attends with a notebook in hand, and each person turns to him to report what they did the day before. The task board is also used to prepare annual appraisals: the head counts the tasks each person has finished. After three months, the Developers split their work into tiny tasks, avoid difficult subjects and no longer report delays until the last day of the Sprint. On the face of it, no rule has been broken: the event exists, it happens every day and it stays within its time limit. Yet the Guide describes it as the moment when the Developers adjust their own plan, and here it has become a report to the boss. The day a developer suggests that the head of department attend only as a silent observer, he replies that no Scrum rule forbids him to ask questions.

Fertile Soil: five values in everyday actions

The pattern Fertile Soil (one star) concerns people who come together to build something and want to collaborate in the spirit of Scrum. Its problem: "It is the moment-by-moment interactions of people working together on a product that build and sustain product organizations. Interaction qualities both reflect and define organization qualities."

The forces are of three kinds. We readily picture an organization in terms of its legal documents, buildings, logo and procedures, whereas it is first of all a set of habits of interaction: a group that follows the rules of Scrum while keeping its old ways of talking to one another does not get the benefit. Next, the values an organization displays are often "just corporate wall decorations". If they are imposed from outside, they breed resentment, and if they are left alone, casual violations multiply. Finally, depending on someone else's work creates unease. When it grows, people protect themselves: they keep checking on others' progress and restrict their freedom, sometimes to the point of taking over their work.

The solution: "Demonstrate the values of Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect and Courage in your day-to-day behaviors and interactions." The pattern sees a virtuous circle here: these behaviors support transparency, transparency makes inspection and adaptation possible, and whoever acts this way encourages others to do the same.

Value	What it asks of you every day
Commitment	Committing to a goal, from today's task to the whole product, and supporting your teammates in reaching it
Focus	Devoting your efforts to the work of the Sprint instead of scattering them
Openness	Showing your work as it is, with its successes, its failures and its impediments
Respect	Regarding your colleagues as capable, independent people
Courage	Doing the right thing and tackling difficult problems, which means daring to say what is wrong

These five values come from Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle's book, Agile Software Development with Scrum (2001), which the pattern cites. The pattern's name comes from an image it develops: "The quality of the plant depends on the quality of the soil it grows in." It links this to an analogy that Jeffrey Liker and David Meier report from Toyota in The Toyota Way Fieldbook (2005), that of the garden whose soil is prepared, watered and weeded until the harvest.

Norms of Conduct: setting rules of behavior

The third pattern, Norms of Conduct (no star), concerns a Scrum Team that has just come together. Its problem: "A Scrum Team benefits from a common agreement among its members about what they aspire to become, how they will make decisions, how they will provide feedback to each other, and what they collectively value."

The forces have to do with what goes unsaid. Each person arrives with ideas about the right way to behave, drawn from past experience. These ideas are rarely voiced, either because people assume the others share them or because they are not even aware of them. When they clash, misunderstanding and distrust follow. The pattern cites a study by Connie Gersick (1989) in support of the idea that a group develops norms within minutes, whether it means to or not. If those norms are not chosen, it is only by luck that they will support teamwork.

The solution is that the Scrum Team agrees to norms of conduct, that is, expectations about acceptable behavior.

A team where nobody dared contradict the professors. The pattern reports the case of a team that brought together people from several hierarchical levels, including university professors. Nobody felt safe enough to challenge them when they broke a promise, or even to disagree with them in discussions. The team devoted a session to its norms of conduct and grouped them under three values. Under openness, it wrote: "We see it as professionalism to hold each other accountable when we do not follow up on our promises" and "We believe that proactively informing the team of possible delays is our duty." Under courage: "We see asking for help as a sign of strength and professional behavior." Under respect: "We expect that every team member is accountable to all others" and "We value and are thankful for remarks and criticism from all team members." According to the authors, the team then knew how to engage in productive conflict.

The pattern adds three points. The best moment to write these norms is when the team forms. It is better to phrase them positively, saying what people do rather than what they must avoid. Finally, they serve as a reference: people can turn to them in the Sprint Retrospective when tension rises. The authors distinguish them from the working agreements many teams draw up about how they organize their work, and they note that the two can exist side by side.

What the 2020 Scrum Guide says

The five values have appeared in the Scrum Guide since 2016, and the 2020 edition keeps them. It adds that the decisions made and the way Scrum is used "should reinforce these values, not diminish or undermine them", and that when the values "are embodied by the Scrum Team and the people they work with, the empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life".

The 2020 Guide also goes in the direction of the first pattern when it writes: "Rather than provide people with detailed instructions, the rules of Scrum guide their relationships and interactions." It nonetheless maintains that the framework is "immutable" and that leaving out elements covers up problems. The book's authors do not say otherwise: they regard the Guide as a rulebook that is useful to follow most of the time, and they ask that the spirit be added to it.

Three differences are worth knowing. The pattern quotes the phrase that Scrum is "simple to understand but difficult to master", which appeared in earlier editions of the Guide and which the 2020 edition does not repeat. It speaks of the "Development Team" and of a self-organizing team, where the 2020 Guide speaks of "Developers" and of a self-managing team. Finally, norms of conduct do not appear in the Guide, which leaves them to complementary practices.

Limits and pitfalls

Spirit is a vague notion, and the pattern admits as much: it is easier to see that it has been broken than to define it. So anyone can invoke the spirit to set aside a rule they find inconvenient, for example to drop the Sprint Retrospective on the grounds that what matters is to get on with the work.

Values wear out quickly when they are displayed without being practiced, and they become harmful when they are used to demand conformity. Accusing someone of "lacking commitment" because they refuse to work overtime twists the word. Fertile Soil itself distinguishes values that come from people from those that are imposed on them to control them.

Setting an example is not always enough. A team cannot on its own make up for a management that assesses individuals from the task board or reshuffles teams every Sprint. The pattern asks everyone who works with the Scrum Team to lead by example, managers included, without saying how to bring them to it. Other patterns take this on, among them Involve the Managers, presented in the article Protecting the Sprint from interruptions.

As for the evidence, the studies these patterns cite on how norms form in small groups do exist, and Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety (1999) points the same way: in the teams of a manufacturing company she studied, those where people could speak up without fear learned more. The effect of a norms-of-conduct session on a Scrum team's results has not been measured, however, and the case of the professors is a testimony. These three patterns are reasonable hypotheses (see Criticism and the state of the evidence).