The Never-Ending Search for Purple Cows

Thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday, and Program Increment (PI) Planning, it’s been a minute since my last post at Serious Scrum. The spot where I currently work rolls with SAFe, and if you’ve never participated in PI Planning (a.k.a. big room planning), it can be an impressive, chaotic scene. Thankfully, the talented editors, and community of writers here have been feeding your noggins with amazing content. Now that things have settled down a bit, and those events are behind me, it’s back to contributing to the community with more of my ramblings.

I often say that Scrum Masters (SM) aren’t s’pose to be cogs in a machine, but a pain in the ass; a force for disrupting business-as-usual. I’ve said it again, and again, and again, to the point of sometimes sounding like a broken record. But, with this post, I wanna lay down some fresh vinyl, and steer away from that mantra. From where I sit, there’s an aspect of the SM role that often gets lost in the mix at times. By trolling Hired, Indeed, or LinkedIn, you can see what companies seek in the Scrum Master role. Sjoerd Nijland even called out similar trends in his post, Scrum: beware of invisible cows!

From what I’ve seen, organizations place heavy emphasis on running Scrum events, maintaining/reporting metrics of some sort, and enforcing the “rules” of Scrum. It’s like they want a gatekeeper for process. Maybe this stems from the line in the Agile Manifesto about “…agile processes promote sustainable development… sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” Are folks focusing too much on the bits about process, and indefinite pace? I thought Scrum was s’pose to be about more than never-ending, mindless cycles of Daily Scrum, Sprint Retrospective, Sprint Review, and Sprint Planning. Scrum. Rinse. Repeat. Rarely do companies put priority on creative thinking, active learning, or cognitive thinking. Hell, I don’t see many calls for empiricism either. You know, that little notion that Scrum was founded upon.

So, what’s up with purple cows? Seth Godin talks about them in marketing, but my analogy comes from back in the day when I rolled as a freelance web designer. My first big opportunity as a freelancer came in the form of a sit down with a local chapter of the Boys and Girls Club. When I arrived for the appointment, the director got held up in a late-running meeting, so the staff asked if I wouldn’t mind hanging out in the activity room in the meantime.

To pass the time, my eyes wandered, surveying my surroundings. The activity room had plenty of things to keep kids busy: billiards, a ping pong table, drawing stations, board games, and bookcases lined with books. Then something caught my eye. Coloring book pages of cows had been posted along the walls, displayed like a miniature art show. I’m guessing as an after-school activity, some children had colored their cows black, and white with spots, while others had colored tan, or brown ones. A few cows stood out, especially the purple one. It’d been scribbled, and scrawled with a fat purple crayon, giving little care for completely filling it in, or staying within the lines. I imagined one of the adults insisted, “Cows aren’t s’pose to be that color. Why did you make it purple?,” and the child artist responded with, “Because I like purple.”

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that coloring books are s’pose to be about developing dexterity, but if presented with a picture of a cow today, would you color it with a purple crayon? If you did, would you be sure to stay within the lines? Cows aren’t yellow, or blue, and certainly not purple, but so what? It’s only a picture. As adults, we’re conditioned to value conformity, rewarded for adhering to a system of guidelines, and best practices. When did we lose our sense of wonder, experimentation, and creativity?

“Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.” — Alan Alda

As Scrum Masters, we often talk about the importance of changing mindsets, and surrendering to the inevitability of change. It’s the foundation of agility, while learning from experiences is a fundamental element of Scrum. Business-as-usual would have you believe that purple cows that stray from established rules are anomalies, but without folks who draw purple cows, you don’t get Miles Davis, Frida Kahlo, or Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Sure, know your shi*t. Understand the playbook, and the varied nuances of its implementation, but think beyond process. I contend that Scrum Masters should draw purple cows. We should constantly ask our teams, product owners, and organizations, “What can we learn? What can we do different? How can we break the rules?”

To be clear, I’m not advocating to break rules simply for the sake of breaking them, but for the sake of “…uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it, and helping others do it.” If a routine, or pattern has proven successful in the past, it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. So, when teams understand concepts like variation, and how it affects processes, maybe suggest dropping Story Points in favor of something else, like Cycle Time. Convince organizations that face-to-face conversation doesn’t necessarily mean co-located. I would say, “Think outside the box,” but I loathe that cliché.

My point is, don’t view things as they are, but for their potential. Crave change. Be a disruptive force against business-as-usual. Push the boundaries, and pursue the abstract. Never stop looking for purple cows.

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