 I'm Geoff Watts and welcome to episode three of Scrum Mastery Challenge, the ultimate agile coach game show. If you remember from episode two, Christina has a very slender lead with Helen Sam and Fred as a single point behind while Paul's disqualification leaves him in last place. So far, our contestants have had to engage their artistic and analytical sides. This week, we'll be testing their architectural capabilities. Let's see what this episode's challenge has in store for them. A freestanding structure out of the materials on the table. Toilet structure wins. You have 30 minutes. Time's up now. So, our contestants need to build a freestanding tower out of the materials provided. Let's see how Paul and Sam get on first. It's a nice goose. We've got a freestanding structure out of the materials on the table. Toilet structure wins. You have 30 minutes. Time starts now. Boxes. Platforms. Such as? These mob-like things. You look fairly attached to your early decisions. Yes. And there's a lot of extra infrastructure there. There's not actually doing a lot. If you look at it. There it goes. There he goes. You can't get much closer than that. Just half an inch separating the two of them. Quite different approaches. And both of them seemed relatively happy with their result. Both of them learned as they went along, but ultimately stuck with their original designs and ended up just tweaking along the way. But they ended up with two good solid scores to start us off. How good will they be when compared to the others though? Let's see Christina and Freya next. Lord, I'm gonna call this peanut butter. Maybe not peanut butter. But I'll make an exception for today. So I'm cool with that. I'm thinking how I can make it taller. Mm-hmm. Look what's on the top. Put it on top. Don't do these. 17 inches. I think I'm happy with this. I don't know if I'm already better. Really? With the attempt of destroying it. I think someone must have got 20. More tricky than that. Only one second. I don't think I'll be able to do anything better than that. Be careful with that place. I'm just gonna eat and put this mum out. I'll come back to that later. Interesting. Both Freya and Christina thought they'd reached their limit about what they could do quite early on. And they almost wanted to stop. But thankfully they taught themselves into carrying on. And both of them ended up with actually almost double what they thought was previously possible. I think there's a strong aspect of belief going on here. Belief in what they're capable of. Belief in what's possible. And what's needed to be successful. And a lot of agile teams have assumptions about what they're capable of. And what's necessary for them. And what's possible. But all the teams that I've worked with have found ways to improve that they actually wouldn't have thought possible just months or even weeks before that. What both Christina and Freya had at that time were solid bases that they could build on top of. And because their scores could be banked as it were and not lost if things went wrong, they were both a little bit more comfortable carrying on. And I think I compare this to agile teams who were able to ship at the end of a sprint and then iterate on that later. So if things go wrong, they can always roll back to the previous increment. And that gives them a little bit more room for experimentation, innovation, risk-taking. Like the boys before them, both Freya and Christina basically picked a design and stuck with it as they went through. Just tweaking it as they went. That's not particularly innovative, but it is a solid approach because it gives them a good chance to delivering something valuable into the time box. All four of them have so far. Let's see how Helen gets on. Simply testing your product. You moved that for me. Yeah, well, this is the risk and measuring, isn't it? You moved that. It's not safe enough. Not safe enough. Did you? Helen was the only one who threw away her initial design and went for something new. She'd initially gone for something really comprehensive, almost like a structural engineer in a way. She built it with real quality and very comprehensive, but she realized she didn't have enough material to complete the design as she imagined it. And rather than just settling for good enough, or sort of innovating around that, she decided to simplify. And simplifying is another important, but surprisingly difficult aspect of agile delivery. Human beings tend to overcomplicate things. We find it really difficult to start simple and keep things simple. But Gaulle's law tells us that any complex system that works invariably involves from a simple system that works. It's much harder to strip out complexity that you don't end up needing than it is to add it in when it's needed. I'm Paul mentioning this quite explicitly in his sort of retrospective at the end, because he pointed out quite a lot of unused infrastructure. Now in the real world, that stuff was expensive, not just to build, but also to maintain. And just it being there could end up causing problems later on down the line. Another thing Helen did was she broke the paradigm of the table. Although all the contestants said in their retrospective that they wished they'd started on the floor, none of them actually bit the bullet and moved from the table to the floor during the challenge. Except Helen. She challenged the assumptions about her workspace and she created a little bit more headspace, both literally and metaphorically, both for her and her construction. Having that ceiling there can not only set an explicit constraint, but it can also limit people's ambitions. I think a lot of agile teams make assumptions about their workspace without realizing it. I've seen many a great scrum master simply just ask the question, so that the team can at least consider whether they could make things more useful or more effective for themselves, rather than just accept things as they are and carry on blindly as normal. Another thing our contestants had to overcome, perhaps not quite explicitly though, was a fear of failure. And in this case, failure would have been their structure falling down. And when this happens, it's all too easy to judge ourselves and feel ourselves being judged by others for our failure and as a failure. And that fear can be paralyzing, which then leads to people and teams playing it safe and they limit their ambition, their creativity, their innovation. So creating an environment where teams can overcome that fear of failure is essential. And time boxing is one thing that can help here. If you've got really short time boxes, then there's a limit to how much time can be wasted if things come crashing down. Also, by having a longer time box, we can try a few things and still have space to deliver. A paradox, perhaps? Well, a lot of the more successful teams I work with tend to time box unofficially within the official time box. They set themselves smaller blocks of experimentation time within the sprint so they can experiment while also delivering. Well, as you can see, Helen's decision to break the paradigm of her environment and her courage to throw away her comprehensive design in favour of simplifying things give her a dramatic advantage over the other contestants and gives her her first win of the series. Paul and Sam were oh so close to one another, but that extra half an inch gives Paul the edge. So, looking at the leaderboard, we have a new leader. Helen has built herself a lead and jumps into first place, two points clear of Sam who has second place all to himself now. Paul has put the disappointment of his past of estimation disqualification behind him and joins Christina and Freya in equal third spot. Still very, very close and again, still a long way before we end up crowning our Scrum Mastery Challenge champion. But it's interesting how things are shaping up. Well, that's the end of our time box for episode three of Scrum Mastery Challenge and we're almost done. Another good challenge and I hope you enjoyed it as much as our contestants and I did. If you fancy running this challenge with your team or for yourself, let us know how you get on and what learning points you extract from it. Until next time though, good luck with your own Scrum Mastery Challenges and to get us to done done, here are the credits.