 Welcome to the first episode of Scrum Mastery Challenge. During this episode, we're going to get an insight into what our contestants think of when we ask them to represent agile in a non-verbal way under time pressure. First up, we'll see how Paul, Sam and Freya approach the challenge. Enjoy. Hello. Hello. Oh no. Create a picture that represents agile, most abstract yet understandable wins. You have 20 minutes at a time, it starts now. I have my last jigsaw. A mixture of interesting approaches there and some quite different outcomes. Perhaps you've already got your favourite, but don't decide yet because we haven't seen what Helen and Christina have done yet. Here's their attempt. And the award goes to... Create a picture that represents agile, most abstract yet understandable wins. You have 20 minutes, your time starts now. I'm a rubbish artist. Oh my days. I'm not even going to touch the paint. A picture, abstract picture. All right, what shall we draw? I think I failed, I'm not very good. So there we have the five pictures. As you'll remember from the wording of the challenge though, the winner would be the one who would be the most abstract and understandable. Now, I'm no art critic, so I didn't really think that I would be the best person to judge the results. Instead, I searched out somebody who knows a lot about art and interpreting it, but nothing about agile in order to judge the results. Let's see what that person makes about contestants' creations. Okay. Good to see you very well, sir. Thanks for your time. No problem. So I managed to convince a good friend of mine, Nick Nelson, here to judge one of our challenges. Nick is the head of art and the director of culture at one of the UK's top schools, Cheltenham College. And I'm really looking forward to this, getting his interpretation of our contestants' artwork. Obviously, I've been told nothing about these just so that we are all clear on this. This collective message or theme that's underlying and is recurrent is over the fact that this is to do with kind of brainstorming and working together and consultation processes and that kind of linking of ideas and collaboration, presumably, you know, well, I'm totally sure. But yes, this idea of germinating and the seed being sown, ideas taking form, roots growing, buds growing, and then you get this fecundity, as I said earlier. A growth mindset could be involved in this process. The other thing we've got up here is quite interesting is a monkey. And I'm not sure if this individual is quite cheeky as an individual. But in art history, it is a symbol of promiscuity or lasciviousness. So it's kind of seen as equally the devil at times personified. So I'm sure this individual is far from being a devil, but yeah, may have a cheeky side to them. I don't know. So to represent in agile, we want the growth of people. So we kind of need to harness their growth all the way through to maturity. Yes, that's a monkey. The monkey represents kind of like the flexibility, the agility, because in organizations, we come across lots of different challenges. And so we have to be flexible. We kind of have to try and move around the tree and try and change as much as possible. Equally in agile, you kind of need to provide nourishment. So my son here is kind of like the nourishment. And ultimately, agile really is about delivering value, making improvements to be able to help the bottom line to make customers happy. And so at some point in the time, my tree would have borne some fruit, which would have been the fruit of our labour. So with this one, clearly the word itself is fragmentary. So I can't determine what that word says or decipher what it's meant to be. And why they put these ones particularly over here, I'm not entirely sure. Obviously it's about breaking up that jigsaw initially in order to illustrate the point, which is that there are lots of individual pieces and it's a kind of piecemeal process that can grow organically in terms of putting together the jigsaw to arrive at the solution to a given situation, which is why the probably is in there. It reminds me a little bit of cubism in art, in art history, where you fragment an image and you take possible viewpoints from different angles and reinterpret them, which is what this individual seems to have done. This is agile in an image. If you were to put this jigsaw together, it would say value, but I've kind of let you put the caveat probably because I'm optimistic. That could say possibly. Point being is that you're pretty much constructing from a point of complete ambiguity when you start. And as you build a picture, the idea is you eventually arrive at value, but that is a one piece at a time endeavour. And so I think this actually represents kind of that journey. And I think I also quite like it, because I did it, but I quite like it because actually it also implies that sort of iterative process, right? One piece at a time. In a period called Surrealism, which was in 1924 onwards, we have a style of art which is called automatism, and it's really pioneered by people like Masson and Miro, and using very simple, quick, linear patterning to sum up a figure or a form incredibly quickly. It reminds me a little bit of that, as well as some more recent kind of graffiti style urban art of people like Keith Herring. So I'd say that they're quite adept at cartoon caricature, and they've encapsulated an idea really, really quite quickly, and it's very clear and proficiently done. It's quite pragmatic, it's clear, and you've also got a kind of mathematical bias or basis here in the sense that you've got a kind of equation if you like with the subdivision here. In our historical terms we call this a bipartite composition. It's often taken from the idea of a diptych, where you have two panels that are presented concurrently or simultaneously and they're often hinged. You've got this mass of people here showing the crowd idea of the people. So perhaps we're looking here at also something that's egalitarian, idea of the people and that democratic basis. They're obviously evidently happy or they're living particularly healthfully, perhaps an eating floor or butter, I don't know. But below that you've got the idea, I guess, of paperwork and paper shifting and pen pushing. And so ultimately in terms of the value, the importance that we're dealing with it as a kind of equation, one comes up with a sum and a value, and it must be that the people here are more important than the process of the paperwork. I summarise a lot of things on paper and a lot of symbols, but I thought I'd just narrow it down to people over process. And emphasis here on there's the element of the heart, people have to believe. It's about having people that believe in it. It's a very, very good bit of art, in my opinion, actually. I think this is the one that really does show some inherent talent artistically. It reminds me a little bit of a kind of surrealist painting, again, because if we think of the likes of René Magritte, he often uses the umbrella as a motif or possibly Salvador Dalí. So the umbrella in the centre is the idea that I guess you have this kind of umbrella collective. It may be more to do with the idea of delivering something and a package and arrival, but if we take the clockwise approach here, and we've got the protection in the centre, but we're riding through certain conditions, storms, maybe economic viability or not, and therefore arriving at the site of software packaging and producing the results, perhaps in data terms, in raw credentials there that will ultimately lead to the cash goal, but then of course the cycle continues this way round, and whether that kind of cash is converted into a viable product and a tangible result of the... Okay, so looking at this image here, we have the idea of the collective body at the base. So ultimately it's about teamwork, a group, an organisation, and therefore for me the process of collaboration, the idea of egalitarianism and people kind of collaborating with different backgrounds, walks of life, and cross-pollination of ideas. And for me the concept of this kind of myriad clouds and bubbles and so forth, there are so many of them, but it creates a kind of pollination idea of lots of things from the germination process stemming to ultimately at the top, the cloud, which is this goal, depicted in a rather kind of Roy Lichtenstein-esque pop art style, and it's well done in that sense because pop art was about commercial advertisement, graphic design, logos, text, image. So it has that immediate on a matter pig, pop or bang. So the way that this figure here, this I guess a woman, I may be wrong, has led to an ultimate goal that pings out of the canvas at us, is ultimately what we must arrive at as a collective body. There's something about this, that's sort of naive simplicity that I really, really like, and as I say, it looks rather like a kind of Keith Herring or it actually looks like a kind of professional artist who's doing what we call faux naivety or knife. So probably they're there, and I like this just because of the germinating, maybe it's unintentional, but the idea I really like is of the sky being filled almost with like pollen, and when you blow on a sort of teasel or a thistle and all those things sort of separate off and then they'll form something elsewhere. For me, probably fourth here, because actually although the end result isn't brilliantly depicted or painted, the idea is terribly clear, and the fact there's a monkey in there, it's just enigmatic, it's alluring, it's more cryptic. I like the idea of the words being fragmented and I'm not quite reading them, but I think that you should almost be able to read them and that's the point, that would be my number five there. So there are the scores. Personally, I found this challenge really interesting because it put our contestants on the spot to think of something that they think sums up an important aspect of agile. And I think that gives us an insight into their personal interpretation of agile. I think we all think of something slightly different when asked to think of agile and we all pick the aspect of agile that speaks to us, our history, our values, our experiences. So it's an interesting challenge but was there anything that we can learn from what we've seen? The first difficulty that many people face when encountering a challenge like this is the messages they tell themselves, something along the lines that I can't draw. We call these messages self-limiting beliefs because they're things that people believe about themselves and quite often they're the only people that believe those things about themselves and these beliefs often limit their participation or performance. Self-limiting beliefs typically stem from a fear of failure or judgment and you could see Helens quite clearly when the cover was removed and the challenge was revealed her first words were, I'm a rubbish artist. Christina's self-limiting belief was a little bit different and it revolved around how much time she had available rather than her ability. She didn't have enough time to use the paints, for example. Both of them overcame those self-limiting beliefs which is really important, so credit to them. I often reminded of the Henry Ford quote in situations like this. He said, whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're probably right. I see this a lot in agile teams. Individuals, even teams as a whole sometimes tell themselves things like I can't handle conflict or I'll never change this organisation. Noticing what we say to ourselves and then slightly tweaking those words to something more true and more enabling can make a huge difference. For example, I can't draw could become I can draw stickman. Or I can't handle conflict or I can't handle conflict or I can't handle conflict or I can't handle conflict or I can't handle conflict or I can't handle conflict or I can't handle conflict or I can't handle conflict could become I can handle disagreement when it's well facilitated or mediated. Interestingly, the person who had the least amount of self-limiting beliefs and the one who jumped straight in was the person with the least amount of baggage. Freya. Now, this might not be surprising when we consider what Picasso said that we're all born artists and the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. She hasn't had that artistic creativity taught out of her yet. Not only did our contestants have to think of an aspect of agile delivery but they also had to work out how to get that message across to an audience. So this makes it not just a creative challenge but also one that requires people to empathise because they need to think what would be easy for someone who doesn't know what I'm trying to say to understand. I think empathy is very important when it comes to agile because relationships are such a big part of making things work and empathy is a big part of making relationships work. In my experience, when trying to explain something verbally we often end up using too many words and that can lead to confusing or turning off whoever it is we're talking to. Our contestants just didn't have that as an option. They had to draw a picture and drawing a picture forces us to think from somebody else's point of view and also allows the person who's looking at that picture free reign to interpret what they're seeing through their lens of the world rather than having our world view forced upon them. Personally I think all of our contestants did really well because Nick, the judge, managed to pull an agile message out of every single one of them and he didn't know what they were intending to get across with their picture. I was also interested to see the difference of approaches. Christina immediately said she wasn't going to go near the paints because of the time box whereas Helen deliberately went for the paints. Her reason behind it was she considered painting to be her weakest medium and she wanted to test herself fully expanding her skillset through the experience and that's a pretty good characteristic of a great agile team. It's not always one that you find though and that's largely because it's very tempting to stick with what we know, especially when we're under pressure to find new things and teams operating in very short time boxes are less comfortable with experimenting and innovating than those you've got a longer time box within which to work. Paul stuck to what he knew, the marker pens, and he was probably the only person who didn't actually prototype quickly. Instead he thought a lot and then went straight onto the canvas probably remember him stroking his beard and wandering around. It was a risky approach for most people but because drawing this kind of thing is relatively normal for Paul it was less of an unknown and less of a risk for him. Sam might have won this challenge if it had simply said most abstract wins but his creative message wasn't quite as understandable and even the best messages can be lost in translation if we don't consider the audience's perspective well enough. I'm sure his creativity will work out for him in other challenges though. If you have some tips and tricks on fostering creativity and innovation check out my lightbulb talk on the topic. Who would have thought that just giving people some children's art equipment would lead to such interesting insights? Let's see how the leaderboard looks at the end of one challenge. Well as we can see it's an early lead for Christina closely followed by Paul with Helen and Sam bringing up the rear and our teenage contestant Freya sandwiched in the middle but there's a long long way to go yet before we'll be crowning our Scrum Mastery Challenge champion. Well that's the end of our time box for episode one of Scrum Mastery Challenge and we're almost done. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you found the episode useful make sure you'll subscribe to the YouTube channel so you'll be the first to be notified when the next episode is released. Until next time good luck with your own Scrum Mastery challenges and to get us to done done here are the credits.