Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

by Jeff Sutherland

Years later it occurred to me that organizations, teams, and people are all complex adaptive systems. The same things that move cells from one state to another are also what move people from one state to another. To change a cell, you first inject energy into the system. At first there’s chaos, there seem to be no rules, everything is in flux. When you do this to organizations trying to change, people often freak out. They can’t understand what’s happening. They don’t know what to do. But remarkably quickly, just like a cell, an organization settles into a new steady state. The only question is whether the new state is better than the old one. Is the cell cancerous or healthy? How, I wondered, can we figure out some simple rules that will guide teams to settle into a more productive, happier, supportive, fun, and ecstatic state? I spent the next fifteen years trying to figure that out.