SCRUM MASTER
The Agile Training Seminar for Business Performance
Complete Training for Instructors, Professionals, Business Leaders, and the Professionally
Curious
Written by Joe Justice. Edited by Phil Klein.
2021 Agile Business Institute. All rights reserved. Quotations and use with attribution are
welcome. Book version 1.18

1Contents
SPRINT 1
1. INTRO (Introduction) agile team creation
2. GOAL the business justification for agile methods
3. BUILD experience great agile delivery
4. JETS real world examples
5. WHERE where and how are agile methods most useful
SPRINT 2
6. 3-5-3 Scrum completely explained
7. ROLE the 3 roles of Scrum
8. ESTIMATE the Maximum Likelihood Estimate
9. PLAN (Release Plan) accurate predictive business planning
10. XM (eXtreme Manufacturing) agile hardware technical practices
SPRINT 3
11. FOCUS The case against matrixed management, multitasking, and what to do about it
12. PLAN (Sprint Plan) conducting the Sprint Planning event step by step
13. SPRINT executing a plan, build, test, deploy cycle in a single sprint
14. DAILY conducting the Daily Meeting or Daily Scrum event for maximum effect
15. DEMO & RETRO conducting the final events of Scrum for maximum effect
SPRINT 4
16. SWITCH how to switch an entire business unit or company to agile methods
17. APPLY real world scenarios of challenges and how to overcome them
18. Q’s (Questions) famous or frequent questions and our best answers so far
19. ACTION transforming knowledge into results
20. CERTIFY (Certification) which certifications lead to which results

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FORWARD TO THE FORWARD
This book is primarily written by Joe Justice, and that means some quirks of speech are going tobe pervasive across the text. Joe loves the idea of Leading from an Emergent Future,
popularized by Otto Scharmer, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, where Joe has
guest lectured. The summary of the concept is to attempt to visualize the possible and probablefutures, and lead now within your scope of influence, no matter how broad or tiny it may feel at
the moment, to make better future options more likely, and to better prepare for future risks.
To go deeper on this concept, we recommend Otto’s book “Theory U”. Applied to this book,that means we use primarily gender-neutral pronouns, as the gender of the performer is notnearly as relevant to our business goals in this book, as what they are trying to achieve. For
example, someone like Joe, who holds the position of Chair of the Board, would be just that,and we’ll skip an older phrase of saying “Chairman”. Similarly, a generic reference to a Product
Owner would say “Product Owner” or maybe “they”. Next, this book will often request thereader consider a topic or suggest an activity. We intentionally avoid command and control
language or requests to act without consideration. This surrounds us with people who don’t
want to be told what to do but are interested in self-actualization, possibilities and inspiration,
which is part of the emerging future which we would like to enjoy. Boosting this, we attempt tophrase all actions as opportunities, all choices as options towards those opportunities, allplanning as intention, and all evidence as trends. This might help us create a more openminded state awash in opportunity which might give us the best avenue out even when thebusiness trend is tough, and the opportunities are risky. You see Joe Justice was born legally
blind, learning to read by having Joe’s nose touch the paper, and a life philosophy of viewing
challenges as opportunities has let Joe achieve some difficult and maybe even importantbusiness successes, despite an inauspicious start. You can read about the successes on Joe’s
LinkedIn page if you like.
For the purposes of this book, it is good to know that Joe has founded and grown his own
multinational company, set world records, been invited to consult by people who could afford

3

to talk to anyone, and achieved many of the traditional metrics of success as well as Joe’s own.
By the way, years of eye therapy, corrective lenses, and three eye surgeries later, Joe has agood amount of distance vision, too, and he did learn to read even before all that, with one of
his first written sentences being “I want to be an inventor, learn the secret to all knowledge,
and share it with everyone.” Let’s share the Scrum Master part of all knowledge, or at least as
much as Joe and the team of authors contributing to this book have unearthed so far. Related,
this book has frequent references to the work of others, and Joe wishes to stress the value ofmany of the concepts used in summary and application here. We write many recommendationsin this book to other’s works. We propose original concepts as well, namely Justice Estimation
using contemporary research to apply and refine estimation research published in 1969 by the
Rand Corporation, Justice’s Law inheriting from Conway’s Law from 1967, eXtreme
Manufacturing which is an adaptation of eXtreme Programing with powerful contributions by
Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Cynthia Andres, Ron Jeffries, Ann Anderson, Chet Hendrickson, andmany more, Group Scrum which was independently derived from practice at WIKISPEED Inc.
from 2006 onward, and has served as an inspiration and reference to many similar or lesssimple multiple group or large group Agile practices. We are building knowledge in a fieldundergoing many innovations, and we look to others, and to you as our readers to shareinnovations you know, so we can give credit to those as well, because that is fair and just, andfair and just is important. And building up others’ work is important, as the original creators arelikely to make more of those good works, and we will be more likely to benefit from theirvaluable works.
DEDICATIONTo Elon Musk. Elon is said to have never studied company performance, never hires consultantsfor company performance, never took a class on business performance. Elon is said to havehired a few people despite their MBA degrees but never because they had one. However, by
enthusiastically and relentlessly pursuing the best dreams, Elon has learned what we Scrum
professionals would have taught, and Elon achieves tremendous successes every week acrossfive companies, serving currently as CEO. In fact, these companies execute at a speed so fast4

that it is completely unknown by the incumbent competition and often misunderstood bymedia and investment professionals. We often think what we would teach if Elon Musk
attended one of our classes. This book is dedicated to giving a Scrum Master seminar somasterful that even if Elon Musk did take it, the mindset and framework and technical practices
would immediately be applied and double the speed, and double it again, across all fivecompanies. How awesome would that be, if you like fast electric cars, rockets and multiplanetary life, your artificial intelligent brain link partner, or zero traffic 1,000 kph transit? We
like all those things, so please enjoy this book on how to take or teach the best Scrum Masterseminar on the planet, or maybe beyond.
FOREWARD
What is a Scrum Master?
Scrum is a framework for work. It is a way to organize a group of people to get work done, andnow it is globally prevalent with thousands of companies hiring Scrum Masters. A significant
percentage of total posted open jobs worldwide has the word “Scrum” in the job description,
we suggest you give it a try.
A Scrum Master is a person highly knowledgeable in how Scrum works so they can help a teamof people get work done using the Scrum framework as their structure. We can think of them a
lot like a coach for a sport, first helping the players learn the rules of the game and then helping
the players practice to play the game with excellence.
A Certified ScrumMaster® is a Scrum Master with a credential, a certification, clarifying they
have met a level of training and immersion. The intention is that they likely are highly
knowledgeable in how Scrum works so they can help a team of people get work done using the
Scrum framework as their structure. The world’s most job-posting requested Agile or Scrum
credential is the Certified ScrumMaster®, maintained by the Scrum Alliance®, a non-profit entity
which provides these credentials to those that meet their selection criteria. Certified

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ScrumMaster® is a certification mark of Scrum Alliance, Inc. Opinions expressed in this book aresolely those of the authors and do not express the views or opinions of Scrum Alliance, Inc.
The most common method of earning a Certified ScrumMaster® credential is fully participating
in a 16 hour seminar instructed by a Certified Scrum Trainer. The Trainer is measured to meetthe requirements in terms of knowledge, work experience, teaching capability, and continuing
education, to maintain that credential. These 16-hour seminars have been conducted virtually,
all at once, in small chunks over days or weeks, and continuously during product delivery in realcompanies. The most common method is a 2-day seminar with a group of other professionals
interested in improving their employability or professional capability.
This book is a master class on the Scrum Master seminar. This book is for those who would liketo earn a Scrum Master credential and want the best in the world and most complete
understanding before they come into their class to be certified. This book is also for those whohave earned their Scrum Master credentials and want to go deep in areas of most interest andutility to them, as only a master class can provide. And this book is for Scrum Trainers, whowant to improve their depth, breadth, and mastery of their craft so that every Scrum Masterseminar they teach can truly be a master class.

CHAPTER 1: INTRO (Introduction)
This book is our launchpad to reach the rapidly growing new world of Modern Business Agility.
Here we will present the Scrum Master program fully and completely, sharing how to achieve
the business values included in it. The intention is to give you the principles that make it work
broadly and to offer specific applications that solve recurring problems in specific domains. On
completion of this book, you, as a dedicated reader, will be able to obtain the business valuesof the Scrum Master program in your studies, your personal goals, your personal work, andyour business. In addition, a dedicated reader should be able to teach a top-tier Scrum Masterseminar, provided they earn and maintain the appropriate credential, anywhere they choose in6the world. Combined, the authors of this book have trained more than 10,000 Scrum Masters in
Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and North and South America. The authors of this book haveachieved many of their own academic and personal goals, working goals, financial goals andmore broadly, business goals.
Why should you consider trusting this book and its authors?
This book is created by the Agile Business Institute, with the primary contributor being Joe
Justice, Chair of the Board at the Agile Business Institute. The Agile Business Institute has
amassed more than 100 years combined experience in Executive Led Agile Transformations of
Global Fortune 50 companies.
Joe Justice has been featured on CNN Money, Forbes, the Harvard Business Review, TED.com,
the Discovery Channel, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today show, Fox News, the Asahi
Shimbun, and the Nikkei, among other global publications. Joe Justice’s experience includes
Agile Transformation work, training, consulting, and presenting in Lockheed Martin, Google,
Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, the US Air force, HP, Tesla, Toyota, Nissan, MIT, Siemens, Pictet
Bank, and more than 100 others.
The Agile Business Institute has full time operations in all the most densely populated timezones, truly covering the world of work. The ultimate goal of the Agile Business Institute is to
produce a globally powerful Master of Business Agility Degree, a modern MBA. Having guest
lectured at MIT Sloan Business School, Harvard Business School, UC Berkley, Carnegie Melon,
Oxford University in England, L’Ecole in Paris, University of Barcelona and Parsons School of
Design in NYC, and others, we have observed contemporary business degrees offer courses on
business agility but still teach outmoded models of dehumanizing and frankly ineffective
management. It must be so tempting to believe that business students can learn a rote set of
spreadsheet formulas, that arm them to sweep out the old management teams and create
dramatically superior sustained shareholder performance. Rote formulas would do nothing to7repeatably create products that improve what is possible with a high morale employee base.
For that we will need an entire new framework.
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
Immersive learning is a superpower we can all access, and one way this is done is in a seminar.
In this book, we want to give you a feel for the seminar experience as you go along, gaining a
sense of inclusion during our time together. Findings about the physiology and neuroscience oflearning suggest that active focus for set blocks of time, with breaks between them, enhances
the learning experience. When reading this book, please treat it the same as you would
attendance in one of our classes. Get up and get moving at least every 90 minutes if you can.
Take a 15-minute break every 45 minutes to walk, stretch, get a coffee or water, and mostimportantly, get fresh air. Research by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SUNY
Upstate Medical University show the air in a conference room, or single room, becomes sooxygen poor after just one short meeting, that our brain function is as impacted more thansome drugs, with performance dropping from 44-94% when CO2 levels crossed 2,500 ppm. A
Harvard and SUNY study later backed up those findings.
If practical, please attempt to read this book in two days. A recommended and aggressive goal
would be Chapter 1 through 10, the first half of the book, across a full day. Treat this day as animmersive class, with 4 to 8 hours dedicated to this first approximately 100 pages. Then,
perform the brief homework just before going to sleep on night one, at the end of chapter 10,
the first half the book. The morning on day 2 your brain will have had the opportunity togenerate new synapses and new synaptic connections, which allow us to develop new patternsof thinking and new habits. This is in fact required to accomplish a change in mindset, should
you decide for that to be something you are interested in exploring. Day two please read thesecond half of the book, chapter 11 through 20, concluding with your certification. We are notable to grant a certification from the Scrum Alliance without working directly with you and yourgroup in a specific classroom format, however you will have earned the equivalent knowledge8and we look forward to certifying you in person, should that be of interest to you, when you
come to our seminars armed with your best questions.
Now you know all about us, and our dreams, and the structure of this book. We want to know
more about you. 1) What company do you work in or are you seeking new opportunities? 2)
How do you measure your own business success? 3) Does your organization measure businesssuccess as currency in dollars or another global exchange, or in impact the way a non-profit
might? 4) What do you think might be the strongest business value of good Scrum in an
organization? 5) What is your role in the organization? 6) What two or three skills, or more, do
you do well professionally at work? It turns out we are all cross-functional, multi-skilled people,
but some of us have not explained our breadth of skills to most of our colleagues or business
partners. 7) How long have you been using Scrum, if at all? Please post this to any of theauthors or the Agile Business Institute via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, email, or your preferred
method. The email for Joe Justice is Joe@Justice.fit. The email for the Agile Business Institute is
Team@AgileBusinessInstitute.org. In a classroom setting, we would ask you to get up andintroduce yourself to 3 to 4 other people across the room by asking each of them thesequestions in turn, and then sharing your own answers. When you are beginning selforganization of teams, we recommend you do the same. You are invited to attend an upcoming
course yourself and become certified as a Scrum Master. Please see the available andrecommended courses at www.agilebusinessinstitute.org.
Next, we would wish to take a class photo, for all of us to remember the start of our 2-day
Scrum Master journey together. Please consider taking a selfie now, or using your work profile
picture, and sending it to us. This might help us create some of the network, and comradery,
and mutual support that comes from a classroom session together, even delivered through thisbook. If you don’t mind, please give it a try! In the classroom, we ask participants to form asingle file line in order of experience with Scrum. This might feel a bit intimidating, but there
are some very useful teaching reasons for doing it. First, we are physically standing up for
Scrum, which in some way shows an interest as a pledge of sorts to be interested in it earnestly,9

at least for the two days of the training. Second, this physical act reduces the likelihood of a
student slouching in their seat and acting as a know-it-all and making sniping comments that
could slow or derail the course. That effect is partly due to the straight spine most of us adopt
when standing up in a single file line to have our picture taken. Through this technique, theslouching posture of a snide commenter is disrupted early in the course.
In addition, seeing where we all are in a continuum of learning more experience with Scrum,
creates a public value for Scrum experience that overrides a frustrated or tired students
possible urge to devalue Scrum publicly. In any event, after the students have formed a single
file line, in relative order of Scrum experience, our instructors will ask students to raise theirhands if they have less than one year of experience with Scrum, and re-order the line. This
repeats by increasing the increment of time and asking attendees re-order themselves, until we
all know how long the most experienced person in the room has been attempting effective
Scrum, and we all know about the range of experience in the room. This allows the class, fromthis point on, to be tailored to beginners, intermediate, or advanced Scrum application to best
match the class. It lets the instructors learn a lot more, sometimes a student is far moreexperienced than some of the instructors, and making this visible early on allows the instructors
to teach effectively what they do know while building in time for them to learn as much as theycan, too.
SELF ORGANIZATIONThe next step is to practice a team launch, as similar as practical to a real company during Agile
restructuring. We ask attendees to self-organize into a group of 4 to 6 people, and we request
they join a group of all people they do not know, with an equal distribution of experience with
Scrum across all the teams that form. We also ask that each team have a gender split
representative of the gender split of the attendees in the seminar. Being on a team with all
people we don’t know gives us the option to reinvent ourselves; no one on the team knows ourstrengths and weaknesses yet. This frees us from routine, pre-conception, and habit, allowing
ourselves to play a new role, as an even more capable person and professional. Since we are

10

aiming to actually build new synapses tonight and myelinate them, like we do every time welearn something new, or better yet, create a better-serving habit, we are best served bysurrounding ourselves with people who do not yet have any perceptions of us.
This step, like all parts of an Agile Transformation, and an Agile project, and this Scrum Masterseminar, is conducted using Test Driven Development. The test is given to all attendees in asclear and brief a way as possible, and the next part of the work begins once the test is observed
to have been passed. The test is, all students are sitting down at a new table, with theirbelongings, in a group of 4 to 6 people they don’t know, with a gender split similar to thegender split of the attending students, and the relative Scrum experience in the room
distributed approximately equally across all teams. One fast way to accomplish some of this is
to have the students, while still standing in order of experience with Scrum from the classphoto, count off by the number of class attendees divided by 4, placing them each in a team of
4 people. While this works fine, commanding this early on creates a mood where students are
simply waiting for direction, which is not the alive and vivacious spirit of fast teams capable andinterested in autonomously solving their own problems. As an instructor, we recommend trying
to “read the room”. The goal is to determine if letting the students fumble a bit, but ultimately
self-organize into teams, will be seen by students, long term, as their own accomplishment, orjust frustration. By the way, this also will reveal the culture in which the people in the room areused to working. For example, in some seminars, a manager type will simply start pointing at
people and telling them which team to go in, and even worse some attendees will immediately
follow these commands without even being surprised. This early reveal of an entrenchedcommand and control culture will let you know your course will need to be adapted, to provide
even more hands-on exercises, on the benefits of autonomous teams that make their own
decisions, likely in financial success terms. This is because command and control organizations
are often driven by commercial metrics above all else, likely as a result of a leadership culture
selected over time from metrics-based MBA programs, which preach Sloan Silos and treating
people as resources to be commanded. Interestingly, those same organizations, typically, havethe lowest process efficiency when faced with quick change, and therefore stand to gain the11

greatest business advantage if they can foster self-organization and empowered teams in theircompany. You really are doing the good work here and will help these companies a tremendous
amount.
Now the test has passed, everyone is sitting in a group of 4 to 6 people. They are then asked tocreate a Scrum Board, or Kanban Board (Japanese for a sign board) as shown:

Note the steps 1 through 4, to guide the attendees through filling in this sheet, including
choosing an aspirational team name, choosing someone to begin playing the Product Ownerrole, and someone else to begin playing the Scrum Master role, and the balance of the team tobegin playing the Developer roles, and then writing 5 column headers, and finally filling in sticky
notes of specific pain points or questions that attendees wish to accomplish during the seminar.
Possibly without knowing it, your class has just conducted team launches at scale. They havejust self-organized into teams, created an information radiator of what they want to get done,in a standard format all attendees can understand (or will be comfortable with by the end of12

our Scrum Master seminar), and made visible who is currently playing which role, so that teams
can interact with each other as scaling patterns, to coordinate across multiple teams, areintroduced to the class. You have done it. With this structure, the class can already self-organize
up to hundreds of students. The largest class Joe Justice has taught, as of this writing, was 250
students, with only Joe as the instructor. Establishing this team launch first allows the course to
self-regulate, as we will see in the sections on Group Scrum. It is Joe’s belief this system canallow for a single simultaneous class of any size, provided all attendees can clearly see and hear
the instructor, and their immediate team members, which is accomplishable with large screensand clear powered audio, or online tools such as zoom. The principle here is, if we get thestructure right the scaling is painless, up or down, at any time. It may be useful to mention acontingency here. Joe likes to ask the class, “what happens if someone comes into class late?”
Joe then fishes for the answer, that the Scrum Masters will welcome that person, help themfind a team of people they don’t know, and then the Scrum Master of that team will do theirbest, along with all the team members, to catch up that new person, and make them feel athome and welcomed. This is the same pattern used any time a new resource is made available
in the organization. And with this ground rule established, the course begins to regulate itself,even in this not-unlikely scenario. As all three roles of Scrum are better and better understood,
the class is soon able to self-regulate across many types of interruptions, aberrations, and evensome catastrophes.
METASCRUM
Next, our first scaling pattern, MetaScrum. Here we will use the MetaScrum pattern as written
by Jim Coplien et al, with additions by Joe Justice.
In the book “A Scrum Book”, Jim Coplien et al write: “Create a MetaScrum as a forum where theentire enterprise can align behind the Product Owners’ (PO’s) Backlogs at every level of Scrumin the organization.”
Here is how we will facilitate it, including the additions Joe Justice applies in the field: The
instructor will place sticky notes on a wall where everyone can see. A virtual wall works fine for13

a virtual class. If there are 11 teams in the seminar, there should be 11 or more sticky notes, sothat each team may select their own sticky note. Each sticky note will have a business goal, thatis achievable with effective Scrum, written across it in large font, readable from the back of theroom. For example:

The teams are asked to send the person currently playing the Product Owner role up to thesticky notes, and the Product Owners are asked to discuss with each other, which ONE goal
they will choose as their team’s Release Goal, to be placed on their team’s Scrum Board. Team
members are asked to quietly lobby their Product Owner for the Release Goal they are mostinterested in or most excited about. Anyone, through their Product Owner, may propose newgoals provided they can convince a majority of Product Owner’s, that their newly proposed goalis even higher business value than the already posted goals. In the event that a team does notreach consensus quickly, the Product Owner is empowered to ultimately decide the goal for
their team. Deciding a Release Goal for your team is a delicate act, as it can damage a team’s
belief that they can make their own decisions. Teams that believe they cannot make their own
decision are slower, as seen at the beginning of day two, in Chapter 11: FOCUS. However, a14

team that does not quickly have a shared goal fails the definition of a Complex Adaptive
System, which will also prevent a team from quickly making decisions inside the team andcause the same slowness. The Product Owner’s role here, is to allow the team to discuss as longas is fruitful, but not allow the team members to get frustrated or lose momentum.
The Release Goal chosen during MetaScrum must be explained to the teams. In our seminar,each Release Goal is a business goal. Teams are instructed that they will teach others, through aposter each team will collaboratively create, how to achieve their chosen written business goal,by the end of the 2-day seminar. In this way, teams have now learned how to receive new
business goals from management, and see how to coordinate with other teams to get the goals
to the teams that are best equipped to solve the problem. As teams are allowed to trade
players anytime, to best match skill and enthusiasm to the current goal, we now have a selforganizing system that iterates to self-maximize effectiveness of delivery and morale. We really
could stop the class right here, in the first 60 minutes, but practicing the rest of Scrum will help
us head-off many edge cases that can and do arise in the real world of work.
After MetaScrum, teams are shown the overall Backlog for the course. The Scrum Master of
each team follows the instructor in creating a Sprint 1 burn down chart, which is absolutely
necessary for creating future customer commitments, or working with investors, as seen after
lunch time in Chapter 8: ESTIMATE.
The entire course Backlog:

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The Sprint 1 burn down chart:

16

Finally, the Group Scrum Board is drawn for the class. This board is maintained by the
instructor, just as it would be maintained by the business owner, ultimately responsible for
viability and impact of the business. This is similar to an “obeya” room in the Toyota Production
System, a one-stop view of the best information currently available, to make business decisions
on the spot. For this practice to be effective, the best information must be present here, andthe information must be current. Luckily, now that we have the Scrum Framework in placeacross our teams. Scrum Masters are trained and responsible to provide management metrics
that are incredibly brief, simple, and straightforward, making our Group Scrum board fit on astandard white board or virtual white board:Specific column headers will be introduced in the chapters titled Build, Estimate, and finally
Focus. In the live working environment in real business, the Group Scrum Board columns will be
Sprint numbers, with each team having their own row, and the cells filled in by the teams
themselves. Usually, the Scrum Master fills in most cells for their team’s row on the Group
Scrum Board, but the team may choose any scribe. The Group Scrum Board is updated at least
once per product release, as part of each Sprint Review, and demonstration of team progress.
17

What is actually filled in, is that team’s Sprint Goal and a Y/N as to whether the team showed
the Sprint Goal met the Definition of Done before the set time for Sprint Review, at the end of
the Sprint. This will be explained with examples in the chapter titled Demo & Retro near theend of our book. As a brief and timely example, Sprint Goals may be a directionally correct
improvement of a KPI or OKR, or a product release, or an agreement signed, or a moneytransfer completed, or a marketing campaign now live, or a customer mission accomplished, ora new customer signed, etc.

CHAPTER 2: GOAL
Scrum is touted in business journals, and in the business media, as a framework to increase thespeed of delivery. Case studies across global companies support that companies can increase
speed of response time and delivery by replacing wait states with a rapid decision-making
structure such as Scrum. In addition, the inspect and adapt cycle provides a regular cadence ofcontinuous improvement to amplify the effect. But when is speed not desirable? It is important
to apply a tool where it will generate the most value.
Let’s think of two scenarios, a convenience store in a high traffic area, and a Japanese onsen, or
soaking tub, in a landscaped private sanctuary.
In the convenience store, speed of the overall experience is important to the customer and thebusiness. As mentioned, this is a high traffic area, and the faster a customer moves through thestore, the faster the next customer may move through the store. The faster the customer finds
what they are hoping to find, is exposed to additional opportunities that may be valuable tothem, and the faster the purchase is completed, is net positive for the customer and thebusiness.
Let’s think then about the soaking bath, the onsen. Losing track of time, turning inward and to
the private garden surroundings, feeling the ripples on the water from the slightest wiggle of18

your toes, these are some of the reasons that customers choose this experience. Here,prolonging a sense of time (a Kairos or expansive sense of time over a Chronos or linear senseof time), is highly valuable. But what about cleaning the onsen after a spill, how long does thecustomer and the business want that to take? What about repairs or corrections of a problem
or disruption? What about response time to a rowdy, loud, or even dangerous customer? Inthese cases, speed is still the advantage to the customer and the business, but with the goal of
speed to restore the almost timeless sense of tranquility. We will propose that speed is the
positive asset for all companies to achieve what they wish, and is always an advantage, even if
speed is used to more rapidly create slowness.
In fact, if we look at companies in the same industry, we can compare the financial
performance of companies that focus on speed of innovation versus companies that focus oncontinuous improvement.
Here is a stock price climb of a company that focuses on speed of innovation. Their CEO haspublicly communicated “Pace of Innovation is all that matters in the long run.” In the transcript
excerpts from an investor earnings call, you can see the management team does not use any
internal financial modelling or financial metrics. They manage by measuring team performanceand challenging the teams themselves to increase the efficiency and remove bottlenecks, which
in turn allow volume to increase. Their margin is entirely driven by automation.

19

We will now add a yellow line to compare this to a stock performance of a company focused oncontinuous improvement, in this case Toyota Motor Corporation, and a quotation from Ford
Motor Company leadership:20

We see that when growth is the target, there is some industry evidence that speed isimportant. Speed of understanding what the customer wants, speed of executing that, speed ofbuilding quality in, speed of driving cost out, and speed of improving the customer perceived
value. The Scrum framework matches this very well. Our part, as Scrum Masters, is to remove
the impediments that increase the flow of customer visible value through the organization. The
Product Owners are responsible for identifying the highest customer perceived value that theorganization can build, and the Developers are responsible for practicing engineering practices
that let them increase quality while expanding the scope of what the team is capable ofbuilding quickly. As Scrum Masters we also own the framework, the communication structure
throughout the organization. Without this, decisions cannot be responsibly made within theteams, which increases pressure on management to make snap decisions with poor data, which
decreases managerial effectiveness, which ultimately creates slow companies. And, as we’ve
just seen, slow may be a poor match if we want growth. Joe Justice has set up a Certified
ScrumMaster® class inside Tesla, and Riccardo Mariti has earned Scrum credentials inside Tesla.
Tesla does not use the word Scrum often, only sometimes, however the Tesla CEO Elon Musk isfond of saying “Agile” and even now is finally implementing some of the sustainable pace21

practices of Scrum to reduce employee burnout. What about Toyota, which produces
enormously successful products but at a much slower pace? A fast-tracked project in Toyota
would take 2 years, with minor model changes occurring every 2.5 to 3.5 years, versus Teslamaking 27 changes, to the Tesla Model S sedan alone, in a single week.
Is Toyota doomed in the long run by not having enough speed for the new world order? Joe has
also worked with management teams at Toyota North America in applying agility to develop
the stamp and dye operations of the 2019 Toyota Camry. The 2019 Camry is a first for Toyota,
with an all-aluminum roof in a production vehicle, which required many inspect and adapt
Sprints to create and increase quality and reliability. Joe also worked with the Scrum team, allteam members and their management support earning Certified ScrumMaster® credentials,
creating the financial approvals system for Toyota North America, which is used for all
significant funding decisions in the entire company. Joe then was brought to Toyota
headquarters in Japan, and then to train every employee of the Toyota Autonomous Driving
teams at TRIAD, including the next CEO of Toyota, Diasuke Toyota, who is a trained Scrum
Master. The stated reasons for Toyota to train Scrum Masters is to improve happiness andquality of life at work, and to increase speed by establishing a rhythm of visible work. While
Toyota is only now re-orienting the company to high speed delivery, as of this writing, products
are still internally managed at Toyota City global headquarters as multiple year initiatives. Timewill tell.
A caveat, however. Both companies referenced above are enormously successful. Both havehigh customer satisfaction ratings, and both are at the top or near the top, now, of productquality indexes. Saying speed is the only way to create and maintain an excellent, financiallysuccessful company is a stance that has counter evidence. However, if growth is the goal, we
can make a much clearer case. And if speed is important to drive growth, or for any otherpurpose, there is currently thousands of companies worth of evidence that Scrum is compatible
with speed. It is much more difficult to prove causality. Is Amazon so huge and so fast because
they have small team sizes and push decision making rights and process improvements into the22teams, or are they so huge and so fast because they entered their markets at the right timewith genius executive vision? Likely there is some of both, and we can’t prove the full-stackteams owning most of their own decisions and improvements is the majority reason, or evenrequired for their success. We can observe that all 5 of the highest market capitalizationcompanies on the planet have small team sizes as the primary working unit. These companies
also stress and reinforce cross-functional or “full stack” skills in designing, producing, testing,and soliciting customer feedback directly by the same team. All these successful companies also
have teams owning pieces with technical implementation and user facing, profit generating
functions within the same team. As of this writing those companies are Apple, Microsoft,
Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Facebook. There is a case that Saudi Aramco is more valuable
than Apple, without relying on small, cross functional, mission focused, customer facing
technical teams, and if this is true then geography and politics can certainly create massive
financial success as well. But while some of us cannot choose where resources are distributedin the world and what “ownership” and “extraction rights” are currently legal and which are notlegal, we can choose our company structure, and with Scrum Masters we have good evidence
we can transform an entire business for speed.
What about company size? Is speed less important for established, older companies that
employee hundreds of thousands of people globally? Robert Bosch GmbH is a global company
employing more than 398,150 people in 2019. Here is a quote from the chair of the board ofRobert Bosch GmbH, Volkmar Denner, also performing as CEO of that company.
BOSCH“For Bosch agility is crucial, it allows us to adjust to the increasing speed of change around us.
Agility allows us to remain in a position as an innovation leader.” Volkmar Denner, Chair of theBoard and CEO, Robert Bosch GmbH.
Joe Justice worked directly with Volkmar Denner, at Bosch world headquarters in Stuttgart. It
started with Volkmar calling Joe Justice directly on his personal mobile phone. “I was very23

surprised, evidently Volkmar’s administration team had researched me and presented Volkmar
with my mobile number and work history. Volkmar was very friendly and very familiar with mywork, and very clear. He said that an idea like Uber would never survive in the current Bosch.
Their project approval process was too laborious and too risk averse. He needed an Agile
company to create a faster pace of innovation. He said they were working with Tesla, and theparts of Bosch delivering to Tesla had seen agility, and very fast hardware design, develop, andtest cycles. Volkmar said the rest of Bosch was not yet performing this way. The CEO’s decision
was to eliminate personal performance incentives for all 500 of the company’s top executives.
This would be replaced with a % of total company profit, meaning top executives were nolonger incented to grow and reduce risk in just their little piece, but were incented to findwhatever grew all of Bosch the most quickly, with an acceptable level of risk. He then asked me
to present to these 500 top executives, including all the board of Bosch, and the board above
the board of Bosch. Volkmar wanted me to share about WIKISPEED, my small, but global car
company. The CEO requested I surprise them, that this Agile way of working may very quickly
produce a competitor, from a sector that they had not been tracking, or not been even aware
existed. He also asked me to work in small groups with every single executive, to explain in
more detail how this actual Agile way of working is managed. Following this, sections of Bosch,
up to 4,000 employees at a time, switched to Agile. Some sections of the company release
newly designed and tested hardware and software every single week. Some of these groups ofup to 4,000 people had no managers, only Product Owners to prioritize, and Scrum Masters toremove impediments to speed of flow.” For details of what happens inside a Sprint at Bosch,see Chapter 13: SPRINT.
Finally, it is useful to see speed is a top driver of virtually all the competitors and partners ofthese companies.
TOYOTA“We must destroy the Toyota Way” “What I strongly felt … was the difficulty of innovatingwhen times are normal.” “We can identify things that we will further accelerate to promote

24changes.” “When you look at a product, going to the actual sites, going to genba, what is
important is to fuel the change point.” Akio Toyoda, CEO Toyota Motor Corporation.
Joe Justice was brought in to train all staff at Toyota Research Institute Advanced Development,or TRIAD, the Agile center for the new Toyota. Every single person at this site, and in many of
the suppliers, was trained as a Scrum Master. Akio Toyoda visited to celebrate, and theostensible next CEO, Daisuke Toyoda, was installed as an employee at TRIAD and trained by Joe
Justice as a Scrum Master. A former Google employee was hired in to operate as TRIAD’s CEO.
In this way, Toyota trains its next CEO in Agile working, to be able to lead all of Toyota withagility. The homepage for TRIAD currently reads “Silicon Valley Agility. Japanese Master
Craftsmanship.”
VOLKSWAGEN“The Volkswagen group is becoming more transparent, more Agile, more efficient, moreinnovative, and more profitable, that is what counts moving forward.” Then “The big questions
are: Are we fast enough? If we continue at our current speed, it is going to be very tough. “Volkswagen CEO Herbert DiesPaul Takken spent years on assignment at a global company in Wolfsburg, Germany, and has
many anecdotes about traditional German and global manufacturing operations. Paul talks
about leadership hiring Scrum Masters into their companies, to establish a culture of fastaction, self-decision making, gentle and respectful pushback when being asked to wait orsubmit documents for approval from outside the team producing the product or service, and tocoach executives on the most effective leadership methods when now funding thousands ofAgile teams.
Joe Justice was invited as the keynote speaker for the first Agile Automotive conference, andthere collaborated with passionate agilists from Brose, the second largest automotive supplierin Europe, Ford Europe, Volkswagen group and their sub companies such as Porsche and25Bugatti, BMW, and Daimler. Joe later was invited back to meet with the CEO of MAN truck andbus, a Volkswagen company, and have breakfast with regional executives from the BMW group,
where they discussed their company-wide Agile Transformation ambitions. The goals for allthese Agile Transformations were increased speed, increased innovation, rapid change, and risk
reduction through quality and transparency, while they deployed speed at scale. All thesecompanies hired Scrum Masters.
TESLA“Pace of innovation is all that matters in the long run.” -Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Inc., and CEO,Space Exploration Technologies Corp, better known as SpaceX, and CEO, Neuralink Corporation,
and CEO, The Boring Company.
As we mentioned previously, Joe Justice set up a Certified ScrumMaster® seminar inside Tesla.
Joe later joined Tesla as a direct employee, after this book manuscript was completed. Joe
operated Agile@Tesla, from the company global headquarters, in Fremont, CA, USA. During
publishing of this book, there was just enough time to add this excerpt. Tesla, inside, likeSpaceX, is incredibly fast and without much hierarchy. Anyone can talk directly to Elon Musk,
the CEO. And if anyone tries to prevent talking to Elon, that is grounds for them to be fired
immediately. That keeps the company very flat, very accessible, and very nimble. There is no
Chief role, of anything, in Tesla, as that would not be flat enough for the speed they achieve.
Elon often sleeps in a sleeping bag in the paint buildings, when the CEO was not sleeping in the
new factories under construction. Elon also frequently joined the assembly line, wrenching andbolting, wearing production gloves, and helping configure robots. Elon claims 80% of the CEO’s
workday is spent on engineering, and Joe Justice believes this to be true.
Speed is the reason for Scrum. It is important to say a successful Scrum Master does not
advocate rushing. Degrading quality damages many types of businesses, and the morale ofworkers who care about quality. A Scrum Master’s job is to make it possible, even likely, for26

Scrum teams to increase speed while maintaining or increasing quality. But is that possible?
Let’s build something together to explore the idea.
But first to summarize. The goal of being a Scrum Master is to increase the speed of your work,and the team of people you need to work with the get your work all the way to done. We do
this by removing impediments to the flow of work towards done. The flow referred to here is all
the steps, from concept and launch, through design and build, to done, of high-quality, tested
work. That means we will need to be an expert in business flow, team psychology,
organizational change for continuous improvement, continuous improvement, and we’ll seethat this will require a good grasp of complex adaptive systems, organizational structures,liberating structures, theory of constraints, human communication, motivation, and eventraditional management. Welcome to Scrum Master class, we’re going to cover a lot, and it’sgoing to be awesome.

CHAPTER 3: BUILD
27

We want Scrum Masters to be relaxed and confident in their ability to help increase speed
while quality maintains or climbs. To do that, we have Scrum seminar attendees actually build
things themselves using Scrum in Scrum teams. We have them apply the Scrum framework, asthey learn it, for them to see speed increase and quality increase. We often ask seminar
attendees how they felt, using rankings of happiness on a scale of 1 to 5, so that attendees cansee which practices also were correlated with the most self-reported happiness. What we build
depends on the class. The effect we want is a build exercise that increases the confidence of thesoon-to-be Scrum Masters. During a seminar, the effect of the build exercise is dependent on
how refreshed and supported the instructor is at that moment. Joe Justice has created a studyof 71 Scrum seminars taught in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
These seminars represent more than 3,500 attendees. All attendees self-organized their own
Scrum teams with Scrum boards and the 3 Scrum Roles, exactly as you have done in chapter 1:
INTRO (Introduction). The teams then built things in 3 or more Sprints. Some teams chose tobuild Lego cities, some teams wrote software, some teams folded paper airplanes, some teams
designed and built entire cars with Joe Justice and raced those cars to celebrate. In every case,teams were forced to stop work at the end of each Sprint, and their Scrum Master was asked tofacilitate a Retrospective. How to facilitate an excellent Retrospective will be covered in moredetail in Chapter 15: DEMO & RETRO. Here, we will summarize. A Retrospective is done, orcomplete, when the team has chosen what they will do differently next Sprint to be faster andhappier.
The purpose of a Retrospective is to choose a process improvement. A process improvement isalso referred to by the Japanese world “kaizen”. The word Kaizen has become popular amongprocess improvement professionals, many of whom study the Toyota Production System. After
this process improvement, or kaizen, is chosen, the teams start the next Sprint. Every Sprint theProduct owner writes, on the Group Scrum Board, a measure of how much work met thequality bar, and is therefore done, during that Sprint. Quality is also measured and labeled.
What we have found is that in all 71 seminars velocity increased across the Sprints. And in 70 of
71 seminars quality also increased across the Sprints. It did not matter if the seminar was in28

Tokyo, taught in Japanese with executives and engineering leads from NEC. It did not matter if
the course was in Australia with a mix of military special forces and Regular Army, and civilian
specialists. It did not matter if the seminar was held in Tesla, in Silicon Valley, in the USA. It did
not matter if the seminar was in Germany with older, arguably stodgy engineers with decadesof entrenched opinions. It did not matter if all attendees were C-level, or new hires, or even if
the attendees were students and kids. And it did not matter if we were folding paper airplanes,
writing software, drawing CAD, cutting aluminum, laying up carbon fiber, programming
electronics, laying out circuit boards, or playing with Lego. Every team sped up, and 99% ofthem increased quality while they sped up.
This experience might be the most valuable for building confidence. The quotations fromrespected industry leaders help a Scrum Master know they are in good company. If anyone says
this Agile stuff is silly, they would also be saying the CEOs of most global companies are also
silly, along with the most exciting startups globally, and that helps insulate a Scrum Master fromcriticism. The business case studies showing successful company restructuring, using Scrum
Teams, give a roadmap to replicate. We will have more on Justice’s Law, to complete company
restructuring, in Chapter 13: SPRINT. The repeated positive business outcomes assure us thatthat Scrum teams as a company structure can work across many types of work, maybe even all
types of work. Actually doing it, actually building something ourselves in a Scrum team, using
Scrum, creates a deeper confidence. Part of this is seeing the Group Scrum Board metrics, fromour own team and all the other teams attending our seminar. During the build exercise, themetrics ramp up to an organizational performance level we likely have never been a part ofbefore. That creates the confidence. Now, our trained Scrum Master can walk into a company
full of Agile teams, and our Scrum Master can see if the teams are simply using Agile words, or,if they are using Scrum to get performance. Our trained Scrum Master now knows how to lookat a Scrum Board and see speed and quality, or if the Scrum Board not-used, stale, or worse yethiding a team that doesn’t yet know how to do Scrum.

29

So how to do Scrum in class? Let’s use two examples, the airplane game, and the WIKISPEED car
build. The airplane game is great because it is so portable. The airplane game was first definedfor grade school students by a team of brilliant educators in 2009(https://web.archive.org/web/20120609084634/http://www.teachengineering.org/vie

w_activity.php?url=collection/wst_/activities/wst_kanban/wst_kanban_activity1.xml
Teresa Abney, Adam Nathan, Don Knobbe, Lisa Picker, 2009, documented June 9 2012).
The game can be run anywhere we can get a full stack of paper from the nearest office printer.
We can step into any venue anywhere and reasonably expect the physical requirement to bemeetable. The car build is the entire opposite. This activity requires at a minimum all the raw
materials and tools to create a car. In exchange, the exercise is entirely more memorable. Joe
Justice still has past students stop him in the airport to take a picture together and sign a book,saying the car build they did together however many years ago is still the highlight of theirprofessional life. That type of business performance imprint is priceless, but again the logistics
are, literally, heavy.
The good news is a build exercise can be run with any type of work, provided it meets thefollowing criteria. The work must be able to be completed and judged for quality within the
Sprint length. For a car, at least in Sprint one, the entire product is unlikely to be completed
within a single Sprint. In that case the product must be modular, where each module is able tobe completed and tested within the Sprint length. By the way, you have just grasped why
modularity is necessary for Scrum companies. Modularity is used to fit the entire
design/analyze/build/test/deploy cycle into a single Sprint. For a massive project, it must be
modularized, and the modules must be able to be built in parallel. In that way, if we have a big
project, like a WIKISPEED car, which is composed of 8 modules, and if we have 8 teams, we cancomplete the car and test it within one Sprint. Now that you know the secret, we will return tothe build exercise.
First, let us conduct a masterclass on the airplane game.

30

Each Scrum team is instructed in the goal. The goal is that we are now acting as one company
with many Scrum teams. One of the teams is a management team responsible for choosing the
project that will bring the most value to the company, given what the company can build, andwhat resources the company can access currently. That project would have been chosen in a
MetaScrum, where any employee at any level can propose a more valuable goal. MetaScrum,
used this way, is explicitly to solve for Volkmar Denner’s problem at Bosch, where an idea like
Uber would not have survived the many approvals, and presentations, and reports, of theprevious Bosch project selection process. At the start of the airplane game, that goal has
already been chosen for brevity. The goal is to build as many paper airplanes across all teams as
we possibly can with quality. The “All Teams” part is stressed several times, and teams are
asked to help each other to maximize total output. We will come back to this point at the endof Sprint 2 of this exercise. The airplanes must be tested within the Sprint. Anyone can test but
only the Product Owner’s test counts. The team can rotate who is playing the Product Owner or
any of the Scrum Roles or even trade with other teams at any time. The test is to throw the
airplane 3 meters, or about 10 feet, or farther. Any plane that fails to fly 3 meters must be putin the recycling bin; it has crashed. Any plane that flies 3 meters, has met our quality bar. The
Product Owner updates the Group Scrum Board, showing how many paper planes successfully
pass the test by meeting our shared quality bar. Product Owners track how many planes they
threw each Sprint, of those did any meet the quality bar of flying 3 or more meters, and how
many partially folded airplanes were left at the end of the Sprint, which is our WIP or Work In
Process. Work In Process is a type of waste, where products are not completed yet, but thepartial products are taking up space and already took up time and other resources. That is tosay we have made investment but do not yet have any return on that investment. At the end ofeach Sprint all WIP is put in the recycling bin. This ensures every Sprint starts from 0 planes.
Starting from 0 planes ensures that if a team has more planes pass the test next Sprint, it isbecause they increased speed, not because they had a bunch of partially folded airplanes left
over from the previous Sprint. And, finally, all planes must fly with aerodynamic lift. We’ve seen
a lot, from crumpling up a balled wad of paper and throwing it, which we call the “space pod”,
to nesting 4 or even more sheets of paper on top of each other and folding them all at once and31calling it 4 or even more planes. In all these cases however, the craft are not flying withaerodynamic lift. The space pod isn’t using aerodynamic lift at all. And in the nested airplanecase, only one plane is flying with aerodynamic lift, the rest are cargo and do not count.
It is important to not hand out the paper to the teams, but instead to set the stack of paper
somewhere where all teams can see it and can get to it. This way the teams build the
expectation of going to get their own supplies. When building cars or other products with
Scrum, it does not scale to have a facilitator running supplies and tools to teams. Instead, teams
need to know where their supplies and tools are likely to be found and be patterned to get
supplies and tools themselves as needed.
Teams are further constrained, that all planes must be folded from ¼ of a full sheet of paper.
This results in smaller planes, less waste, and less material consumed. Previously, all planes
were required to have a blunted tip for safety, however many Scrum seminars have skipped
this step and we have yet not recorded an injury. Please judge the risk yourself and make thebest decision for you and your seminar when you are teaching or participating in this or asimilar exercise.

32

Teams are free to fold any type of airplane they want, use any design they want, organize thework anyway they want, have anyone perform any step they want. We will simulate complex
work, that any one engineer can not yet complete alone. To enforce that constraint, we add therule “one person, one fold.” This means that any person may fold any part of the plane, butthen must pass the plane to someone else to conduct the next fold. There are so many usefulreasons for this in our game. One reason is now the team is much better off if they can agree on
one plane design at a time, which means they are figuring out how to make design decisions as
a team. This also means now the team can swarm, where each team member understands thehigh-level design, to the point that they can work simultaneously, without losing the overalldesign goal. This allows many team dynamics to be tested that are not present in individual
work. And it means no one person can finish the product by themselves, again allowing for ateam dynamic to emerge, which is the key enabler for speed inside a given Scrum team.
And we are off. Sprint one starts. There is energetic and rhythmic music. There are teams thatchoose to sit and teams that choose to stand. There are teams that have moved their work area
to be more near a 3 meter straight path where they can throw their planes, and teams who
33

have their Product Owner get up and walk to the other side of the room, before they throw
each plane. There are teams where the Product Owner throws planes and then sits back down
to help fold, or wait for folded planes, and there are teams where the Product Owner shouts
back as each plane is thrown, giving their team feedback on which design is flying and which
design is crashing, and what they want from the next plane. And then Sprint one ends, abruptly
and with immediate finality. The immediate finality is important, or some teams will throw justa few more planes, but that would ruin the accuracy of the scores that are about to berecorded. The Product Owners update the Group Scrum Board, writing how many planes flew 3
or more meters that Sprint, how many planes were tested, in this case tested means thrown,
and how much WIP is left partially folded or untested on the table. Some Sprints, a teamforgets to throw any planes during the Sprint and has 100% WIP. Some Sprints none of theplanes fly 3 meters or more. Some of the Sprints, a tremendous improvement is found and thenumber of planes that flies the distance doubles or even more.

Now that every team can see how they and all the teams together are performing, the magic
happens. The person currently playing the Scrum Master Role on each team is asked to34

facilitate a Retrospective. Typically, they have not yet been trained in any of the dozens offormal methods to facilitate an excellent Retrospective. Typically, the Scrum Master, and thepeople folding airplanes with them, have just met an hour or two prior, at the start of the
Scrum seminar. The teams are asked to support their Scrum Master in discussion, and choose
one thing they will do differently next Sprint, to build more airplanes that fly 3 meters or more,
and to have more fun doing it. The teams discuss, and they choose. This is called the Inspect
and Adapt loop in Scrum, and it always happens right after Sprint Review, or the moment when
we know how much work met our Definition of Done, and is accepted as done with quality. The
Sprint Review, in miniature, is the Product Owners writing the scores on the Group Scrum
Board. The Inspect and Adapt loop is simply scientific method, an empirical process. As we areusing an empirical process here, to control the way we work, through a regular rhythm ofSprints, we call this in process engineering terms an Empirical Process Control. Scrum is a 2 level
Empirical Process Control, but we’ll get to that in Chapter 6: 3-5-3.
And now Sprint 2 starts. The teams typically have even more vigor, they have ideas of how to
perform, and already have some experience relying on each other. Planes start to fly thickthrough the air, continuously, during the 3-minute Sprint. And, TIME! All teams stop
simultaneously, and the Sprint is already becoming a rhythm. Teams do not act interrupted, or
a little annoyed, at the end of Sprint two as many of them did at the end of Sprint 1. Instead,
there is more body language revealing relaxation and accomplishment, and many people aresmiling. Product Owners write their scores on the Group Scrum Board but hardly anyone islooking, except for the occasional side-ways glance to see if their team is the best. Somethingunhealthy begins to emerge here. It happens in every case except when we run the exercise
with pre-school kids. Pre-school kids have not yet entered traditional academia, or sports. For
nearly all post-preschool teams, conversation moves to how their team can win.
Teams start to say how their team is the best, or how their team needs to overtake others, or
how their team needs to fight to become the best at the expense of other teams. This is when
the instructor calls for everyone’s attention. Maybe they use chimes, maybe they raise their35

hand, in any case, they request full silence from the room. The instructor then reminds
everyone, that the stated goal of this paper airplane manufacturing company, is to maximize
the output across all teams, and assist each other. The instructor asks the person playing the
Product Owner of the highest performing team, what they did last Sprint to help the lowest
performing team. The answer so far has always been “nothing”. The teams are reassured that
this answer is completely normal across all companies, all countries, and all cultures.
It is important to keep everyone feeling valued and accepted and not “injured”, so immediate
forgiveness here will pay dividends in the rest of the classm in terms of engagement andknowledge retention. The instructor then asks the Scrum Master of the lowest performing
team, what they did to solicit help from the highest performing team, or any other team, andthe answer so far has always been “we did not ask”. Again, immediate forgiveness by the
instructor here is important. Then, the instructor makes the business point clear. In business,even when the executives say, the goal of the company is collaboration to achieve maximum
performance, even when teams are specifically asked to help each other, it is not enough. As
leaders of Agile organizations, we have to do something more to actually get the collaboration
for which Agile teams are famous, and which amplifies performance. We need to command andcontrol something. In Scrum we command and control the interfaces, and everything else isleft up to the teams. This creates the stable framework of Scrum across the organization, while
maximizing the innovation and self-management aspects, through the Scrum Roles, on eachteam. We will try it now. We will command and control the interface between teams. We will
have Group Scrum. For more information on coordinating large initiatives with many teams,
and entire enterprises, including supply chains, regulatory organizations, and suppliers, pleasesee our book “Group Scrum”, (www.agilebusinessinstiture.org/books).

36

The product Owners from all teams are called, to meet in front of the Group Scrum Board, andasked to discuss how to improve the product, the paper airplane, for three minutes. Their one
goal is to bring an improvement back to their team. They are instructed that the fastest teamshould share, but all teams should then share, as it has been observed that the best performing
product is often someone else’s reaction to the previous best performing product, andtherefore the even better performing product is equally likely to be shared by the lowest
performing team, after they have seen the previous best performer. This is called MetaScrum,
where the goal and product are discussed. Anyone is welcome, but only the Product Owners
talk. Restricting the number of people talking is only to reduce the number of communication
pathways (see Chapter 14: DAILY). Other team members talk to their Product Owner, quietly,
and ask their Product Owner to bring the good ideas from their team to the MetaScrum
conversation. For more information on MetaScrum, see A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game,by James O. Coplien et all.
The Scrum Masters are asked to stand in a circle in another area of the room, where they arestill in eyesight and hearing range of the Product Owners and all the Developers. They host an37

almost identical meeting but focused on speed improvements, by removing impediments toflow. This is often called Scrum of Scrums. Again, for more information on Scrum of Scrums, as arepeatable pattern, see the book A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game.
Simultaneously, the Developers at their own tables are asked to host a Daily Scrum meeting,where they discuss what technical practices and work methods they might try, to increase
quality. In the airplane game, quality is the % of planes that fly 3 meters out of the total numberof planes flown. So how can they more reliably produce planes that will fly 3 meters or more?
Note the Developers are not asked to discuss speed improvements, that comes from the Scrum
Master’s flow improvements. And the Developers are not asked to improve the product, theProduct Owners are attempting to do that. The Developers are asked to relax, destress, andthink about how to fold paper airplanes with low defects. How to fold creases well? How topass the paper smoothly, and orient it clearly and understandably to the next team member?
We absolutely want everyone in the room to give improvements to flow which drives speed,
product and goal which drives value, and engineering practices which drive quality. Everyone isinvited to quietly lobby ideas through their Developers, Scrum Masters, or Product Owners, toget their innovative idea considered by that group.
This continues for 3 minutes, and then the Developers are asked to re-unite with the Product
Owners and Scrum Masters, and invest another 1 minute together, and re-plan Sprint 3.
And then Sprint 3 starts. The air is a steady stream of paper airplanes. Planes stick into ceilingtiles, wall molding, and white board frames. People laugh. Most teams are standing now in awhat looks like a relaxed, high energy posture, as they lean forward and slide paper plane bits
around. Many teams have a Product Owner folding the last fold, and then throwing the planefrom where they stand, and calmly but loudly and clearly giving feedback to the team, saying
what they need differently on the next plane, or confirming that the design is still performingwith quality. When “TIME!” is called, and all teams stop folding, there is laugher, cheers,sometimes high-fives or hugs, but that really depends on the culture of the attendees, and38

where in the world the class is being held. The Sprint three scores are posted on the Group
Scrum Board.
We will now host a closing Retrospective. The Scrum Masters are asked to ask their teams“What could be changed in your real companies, based on what worked in this game?”
Depending on class timing, a Developer from each team may be asked to share the possible realcompany change, that they believe would have the largest business impact in a real company.
Frequently shared ideas are:“Continually re-planning during the work, not just up-front, lets us build a better product withhigher quality and build it faster.”“Having the Product Owners and Scrum Masters meet in Group Scrum, sped all of us up. We
could do that in our real company tomorrow.”“Finishing the product in our team, not just planning it, or just testing it, or just building it, let us
improve the entire flow.”
And so on. Some instructors write these possible process improvements down, and email theseminar attendees as a reminder, of what to try, when they are back in their real companies.
For the Airplane Game, we usually end here, and move to the teachable moment, the enduring
lesson we wish the soon-to-be-Scrum Masters take back to their companies, and their passion
projects, and their own studies, and their families, and their own lives.
1. Work can speed up. Many professionals actually believe that there is only one speed forwork, only on or off. This has been reinforced by a number of non-evidence-based MBA,or Masters of Business Administration, programs where hot-shot graduate students aretaught, that the method to increase the speed of work is to add people. This has been
known untrue since the publishing of the Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
in the 1980’s. Brooks published “Brooks Law: Adding people to a late project makes itlater”. This has been proven in every industry measured under audit. We will explain

39

this phenomenon, and the communication pathways that currently explain our
understanding of the cause of it, in Chapter 14: DAILY. Graduate Students have been
misinformed for years by the “Iron Triangle” of management: resources, scope andtime. The idea, that the same scope of work could be completed more quickly, with thesame people, but in less time, breaks the idea of the iron triangle, and all the spreadsheet company modelling made from it, including most of the “expert organizational
consulting” brought by established and well paid mega-consultancies around the world.
Many of those same consulting companies have since been trained by us, and areworking to re-vamp their offerings, to match what has been learned by becoming Scrum
Masters. All of the major consulting companies now offer Agile services.
2. Work can speed up and quality can go up the same time. Many professionals actually
believe that if work could speed up, the only way to speed up would be to sacrificequality. The reality, that applying a forced stop of work and Retrospective after making
performance visible, through the Sprint Review, could actually increase speed andquality, is completely outside the prior belief system for many professionals.
Because a principle redefining moment has just occurred for some percentage of the attendeesof the class, it Is important as an instructor to immediately follow through into examples of theprinciples of this game performing in real work. Here are some projects Joe Justice has workedon:40This is such a mental stretch for many attendees, compared to business as usual, that it must be
justified, or it just an outlandish claim, and the entire class thereafter is suspect of fraud. We
immediately share how the examples are actually achieved, which is our next chapter, Chapter
4: JETS. Note that the airplane game often takes 45 minutes. It is important to have a break justbefore the airplane game, and then present JETS quickly and clearly, then make room for the
next break.
What about building a car in Sprints?
Joe Justice became well known globally, after presenting a 9-minute presentation at
TEDxRainier, in Seattle, Washington, USA. In this Ted.com talk Joe explained how he worked, asa member of a volunteer team, creating ultra-efficient cars in 1-week Sprints. This shocked
hardware organizations globally, where 3 or 7 or even 14-year long development cycles are
accepted.

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To host a build event, we will need a modular product, a ready Backlog of kits to design andbuild and test each module of that product, printed signs of the 7 eXtreme Manufacturing
Practices, as listed in Chapter 10: XM (eXtreme Manufacturing), Self-organizing module teams,
and as much fun stuff as we can, to boost morale, because building cars is difficult andstrenuous. More detail, edge cases, principles, and options are presented in our book
WIKISPEED, Ultra-Fast, Ultra-Efficient, Ultra-Fun: (www.agilebusinessinstiture.org/book).
All participants do need to sign a safety and liability waiver, here is the one Joe Justice uses:“By signing here, I agree that I release Joe Justice, WIKISPEED Inc., and everyone else, for any
injury I may sustain. I also agree to release any photos or video taken here into the publicdomain.”Then, Joe recommends the following:

Now we are ready! We have all the materials and tools piled up, and a ready Backlog on thewall. A Group Scrum Board has been posted, for teams to write down how much of the Backlog
they complete each Sprint. The Sprint cadence is called by the instructor, or timed with music
and a large screen, or both. Each Sprint starts with MetaScrum, where the Product Owners
meet in front of the Backlog, and teams lobby them for what to do next. The facilitator moves

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available Backlog, on cards, from a “Not Ready” column to “Ready” column. Work is held backin the “Not Ready” column, if it is dependent on something else not yet done, or otherwise notimmediately actionable. This helps prevent teams from becoming frustrated, by selecting work,that is not yet able to be completed to the definition of done. For example, the only Backlog in
the Ready column in Sprint 1, are to post the 7 XM practices signs, visibly around the work area,
fan out and group all materials and tools, so the materials and tools are all visible, fromstanding in one space, and materials and tools are grouped with similar materials and tools, andthe work area is swept clean. As soon as the XM practices are posted, the facilitator moves
Backlog to the ready column, to complete setting up the work area. For example, once the XM
Practice sign saying, “Safety Gear”, is posted, the instructor will move into the ready column the
Backlog saying, “All safety gear under the Safety Gear sign”. Following these steps, typically inless than 5 minutes, a pile of materials and tools has been transformed into a functional factory
space.
Next the teams pull Backlog. Teams do this by hosting their own MetaScrums whenever theyneed them now. The teams are given specific instructions that their Scrum Masters will help
remove impediments, like organizing tool sharing across teams, however anyone can help the
Scrum Masters accomplish this. A recurring risk is the teams working through the Sprint
boundaries and skipping Sprint Review and Retrospective. If teams work through the Scrum
Events, the teams’ velocity do not increase Sprint to Sprint. We recommend the instructor
politely, but firmly, enforce the Sprint boundary. We also recommend showing the velocity
growth, as a result, after the fact.
The reader is invited to watch a time lapse of several car build events all over the world, hosted
on WIKISPEED’s YouTube channel, www.YouTube.com/WIKISPEED. Most of these time lapse
videos are tagged with “Build Party” and “Time Lapse”.

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The morale boost when the car comes together, and the people who built it can sit in it, andagain when the attendees can take pictures of it, and the vehicle starts to really looks like a car,and again when they can drive it, is almost unreal.

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Some additional words of encouragement and experience. Hosting a build party takes at least afull day before, to prepare the materials and tools, sometimes 3 days. It also takes about a day
after, to store the vehicle that was built, or sell it, or deliver it, or break it back down intomodules or materials for a future build event. Logistically, it is massive. The memories areworth it, the morale and confidence imparted are impossible to replace, the professional
network earned from these activities has a depth and loyalty as if you have truly accomplishedsomething transformative together, because you have. But be ready for the time commitment
and physicality, eat well and sleep well, as best you can, the week before and after. And doing abuild event every week, or one every day, is a real test of your healthy lifestyle. You have beenencouraged, and warned, and we are wishing you luck and success.
We also invite you to consider joining Team WIKISPEED, at www.WIKISPEED.org. WIKISPEED is a
global non-profit organization, pulling work that contributors are excited about from the
Backlog of projects, hosted on the website. Interested people, all over the world, areencouraged to work alone, or better yet in Scrum teams, and even better yet in teams of teams
as a Group Scrum, to accomplish one of the projects and post their Sprint Review on
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WIKISPEED’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/WIKISPEED. This is an entirely selfmanaging, honor-system, open and transparent method, and yet has produced 4 world records
in life-critical, highly regulated industries. This encompasses much more than only Scrum;
however, Scrum Masters are the necessary ingredient, on each team, to provide themechanism to coordinate across large groups, with Group Scrum. For more reading on thecrowdsourcing, morale building practices, momentum building practices, frugal practices,
social-good practices, and growth mindset in a post-growth market, we recommend you enjoy
our book, WIKISPEED, Ultra-Fast, Ultra-Efficient, Ultra-Fun.
At this point in the Scrum Master seminar, our Sprint 1 Burn Down Chart may look a lot like thisone. This burn down chart is from a seminar in Japan, where the seminar starts at 10am andends at 6pm with a Happy Hour:That means it is time to take a 15-minute break. Please get up, stretch, walk outside, let fresh
air into your room, use the bathroom if you need to, and ideally exercise a little bit.

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CHAPTER 4: JETSThe F-35 is advertised as the most complex, most competent, most advanced multi-role joint
strike fighter ever produced. At a purchase price of $180 million dollars per airplane, plus
maintenance, the total program cost is calculated to be $1.5 trillion dollars, making it more
expensive than constructing all the Egyptian pyramids in adjusted currency. In fact, that makes
it the single most expensive project ever undertaken by humans on earth. The world healthorganization says $1.5 trillion United States dollars is enough money to feed every person on
the planet for 50 years continuously and end world hunger.
What happens when businesses and organizations and governments develop an attack or adefense that prevents the F-35 from completing its missions? All that $1.5 trillion dollars sits
idle until the F-35 program can deploy a countermeasure. In the world of global defense thesemoves are attempted all the time, every week, continuously. How fast do the world’s militaries
want to design, develop, test, and deploy new countermeasures? Really, really fast. $1.5 trillion
dollars’ worth of fast.
We don’t get to talk about most of our work with the F-22 and F-35 programs, but we can show
pictures with signed releases taken in Joe Justice’s house.

49Here we see the head engineers from Boeing and Lockheed Martin for the F-22, the retired 3
star Air Force general who headed the F-22 project at the time and now heads the F-35, a
leadership team member for the F-35, the US Government procurement officials responsible
for purchasing the F-22, and the government organization responsible for auditing the purchaseprocess to verify it is in the tax payers best interests. When we talk about “Full Stack Teams”
that can responsibly make decisions inside the team without waiting on external approvals, thisis what we mean. This, by the way, is why an Agile Transformation is a leadership activity, it
involves the policy makers of the company to sign a new policy and fund it.
When these professionals run the “build” exercise, they don’t need to fold paper airplanes.
They are so good they can use metal and carbon fiber. In the pictures below, you can see theseteams with a car they built, in a similar amount of time to what most companies use conducting
the paper airplane game.
THANK YOU FOR READING OUR FIRST 50 PAGES AS A PREVIEW! FOR THE COMPLETE BOOK,
PLEASE VISIT www.AgileBusinessInstitute.org/books

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This book is available on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Master-Training-Performance-Institute/dp/B08VYR25BZ
This book is available on LeanPub:
https://leanpub.com/bookstore?type=all&search=joe%20justiceThank you Paolo Sammicheli. Paul Takken. Riccardo Mariti.
Your lives are masterworks of self-development and execution.
You gave to me from your highly developed skills and charged me nothing.
I cannot wait to do the same for you.
-Joe Justice January 29 2021

Made on Earth by Humans

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