Some time ago, I published an article explaining how the original concept of Scrum Master is changing and going into a direction that me and others are not comfortable with. A direction towards processes, efficiency, rules, etc. We believed and still believe that a focus on people and nature is slowly being forgotten. We don’t want that to happen, at least for us, so we decided to rename our role internally and call it Scrum Master for the People.
We have been reflecting and focusing on people and we have seen amazing results in the last years. Today, we decided to start sharing some of our learnings hoping that others can benefit from it and perhaps, create a new way of working.
Maybe the best way to start is by describing the SM for the People’s responsibilities.
- To make it easier we created the following diagram showing the main areas involved (you can call if a framework if you wish but we won’t, there are too many already ;) )
At the top you can find the goal of a SM for the People:
- To help create high performance teams.
Defining what a high performance team is, is a nice activity and took us some time. Let’s not spend so much time in this and move to the next part which is the core of everything: “Acknowledge Humanity”. This is the part that reminds everyone:
“Hey, we are humans, we have virtues and flaws, we can’t be perfect. We are humans and yet, there is a risk of losing part of our humanity if we don’t take care of it”
This is for us the hardest part: to realise that it is possible to lose our humanity. That it is possible to live with a feeling of incompleteness, to have a life in which something is missing and we can’t fill that hole. That we can have a life without harmony, a life in constant conflict with who or what we are.
How can we create a great team if each individual feels incomplete? It seems really hard. But just think the other way, imagine how amazing your team will be if each one of us feels complete; in harmony. Imagine the things we could achieve, the innovation we could create.
In our experience we saw that just by helping a little bit a person to be a little bit more complete, it creates a huge difference.
But what things can remove or add “humanity” on each of us? We had to start asking ourselves: What makes a human a human? is it freedom? is it the ability to reflect based on our past? is it the ability to transform your reality? This is another nice activity to do with your group.
If your definition becomes for example the ability to transform your reality, then you can find those things preventing you from doing that. Maybe too many meetings are not letting you think? maybe a manager that doesn’t take into consideration your opinion? Once we find them we work on them.
In parallel, we work on creating activities that help people regain humanity based on your definition. In our example since the definition is the ability to transform reality we could create opportunities for people to talk, think and decide together or support someone’s idea until it becomes “real".
The next three components
Acknowledging Humanity is the core element of a SM for the People, it is vital to consider it in everything we do. But what are other things that the SM for the People do? To make it easier for us, we divided it in 3 areas.
The first area is about transparency in the process and time for reflection or in short: inspecting and adapting. For doing this, we need to be aware of what is happening around us and second, we should have time to reflect and decide on what to change. We found out that the Scrum Framework is great for this. It even provides the values needed to create this transparency. You could, of course, find another framework or other ways for achieving the same.
The second area that we have is the Team Basic Needs, there are also many frameworks that provide you with ideas of what can go inside. The ones I’ve heard the most are Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Pink’s motivation theory In our case we decided to focus on five categories: Purpose, Trust, Alignment, Growth and Work Enablement. We could explain them in a different post but at the end you could define your own categories. The important part is that the SM for the People is also responsible for supporting these areas at the individual level as well as the team level. Is this a lot of work? yes it is. And this bring me to an important point of a SM for the People: know your limits. A SM for the People should be careful on the amount of people and the number of teams you work with or you won’t be able to really do your job. Just imagine that you will need to think on how to build trust inside your team, alignment, purpose, growth. It gets really difficult.
The third and final area is in my opinion the most exciting one: Organic Mindset. It is exciting because it is new but at the same time it is old. We have been researching for centuries about Nature, about human beings, there are plenty of books about how humans behave and tons of information about complexity. Even if we have never read a book about those topics we can just go out and see all the living things around us.
Is in this area in which we research about humans and Nature and every time we discover something we try to apply it to our work. We try to understand how humans and nature are and we embrace it, we create processes to support people and NOT to change them. Let me give you an example: Imagine that your colleague always forgets certain information, instead of blaming her, arranging meetings to tell her that she should learn those things and expect her to be “professional”, we accept that people forget things. What we do is simply writing that information at the wall so that every time we meet we can see that information. It is a simple and maybe funny example but it represents the idea.
Another part of the Organic Mindset is that in order to deal with a difficult problem we try first to see how Nature deals with it. For example a typical problem in each company is Scaling. Our answer for this is to look at Nature. How does a forrest scale? How does an ecosystem evolve? And how does Nature organically grow? We research and from our findings we start experimenting. But this is not efficient! you might say. Yes, exactly we are not searching for efficiency, Nature is not designed to be efficient and neither do we. But Nature is still there and it is still a beautiful place to be.
One last point in our area of Organic Mindset: In order for us to remember what we discovered we created internal principles and values. We are constantly defining them and improving them. We have for example “Connection before collaboration”. We have more but we hope that you can create your own based on your needs and who you are.
Final words
As you could read, all these areas are areas in which a SM for the People works. The job is not only about knowing a framework, it is about being curious about people, it is about the desire to learn about People and Nature and the will to support others and everyone as possible. It is not only a job, it is more than that. Is the commitment to search for answers, to be curious, to challenge the status quo and search for helping each person regain their humanity. It is about identifying oppression and liberating it via reflection and action. It is hard but also extremely rewarding. And this is why we want to share with others and hope that you can enjoy it as much as we are doing. And if you feel that your current role as SM is not exactly what you were looking for, instead of changing the role why not trying to become a SM for the people?
Have a great day. Thanks for reading.
