 Welcome to the final episode of Scrum Mastery Challenge and just as a quick check no swimming pools around me this time to fall into. The bad news is this is the final episode but the good news is that we're going to find out who our 2018 Scrum Mastery Challenge champion is. Over the last couple of months we've seen Paul, Sam, Christina, Helen and Freya engage in numerous challenges in the name of entertainment and agile education. We've seen them build towers of food, memorise information about people, buy things, take photographs of things, paint pictures of things and with one challenge left remaining let's see what we've got in store for them this time. Hello. This is very exciting. Look at the seal. I've always wanted to come out here. Best day ever. Have your choice for as long as possible. You must be able to hold the biscuit for at least five seconds after dunking without the biscuit breaking. You may test as many times as you like. But you will not get any more biscuits. Oh, some of my favourites in there. So what's dunking biscuits in cups of tea got to do with agile? Well to be honest when I set the challenge I had absolutely no idea. As things stand after seven episodes only Sam, Christina and Freya are still in with a shout of winning but nobody knew this when this episode's challenge took place. So let's see how they got on. First up we're going to see Helen, Christina and Paul. Which one do I go for first? The testives are rich teas soaked quite quickly. So I probably won't use those. Right, let's test something out quickly first. Two gingers at once, right? Steady, go. And it's stable. I reckon that these ones, these are going to be the most stable. I'm going to try two party wings. Ready, savage, four biscuit approach. So that is two jammy dodgers and two cookies. It's going to go longer then. 14 and a half seconds. That's super strong. That's not even moving. Oh, no it has. No, it's gone everywhere. That held. That was alright. So you've got eight and a half seconds in the bag. Which one is that? That was custard cream. See, maybe my original assumption was wrong. Let's try the rich tea. No one likes the rich tea. Make sure one, two, three in the bag. I think that's it. Well, rich tea. Who'd have thought it? Who'd have thought that? Rich tea is obviously good for something. So the jammy dodgers and the cookies are the best so far. And again, Bourbons. I'm not going to count on Bourbons and digestives to the left. What I'll do in my last 30 seconds, I'll do a quick one. And I'll dump them in rich tea. I'm just going to go two double, two digestives. Three, two, one, go. We're up for it. Now what was that? 16. Is that my best one? That's your best. And then I think jammy dodgers because they've gone longer. You're in hand itself well. I'm going to try that one again. How much time have we got? Oh, Blimey, we've got two minutes. Sorry. I think it was about nine seconds ago. Eating these. Okay, this biscuit is proving to be the best one. So, does the whole thing have to go in? No. So it can be just the smallest amount. I reckon I've got about 15. I reckon that's 19. Is it? What's a 19? Okay. I made some judgments and I just proved myself wrong really, didn't I? Because I thought the ice ring would be no good, but that was like the second best. And I really slagged off rich tea biscuits. And actually, they were the winning biscuit. So it just proves that actually sometimes your first gut instincts are wrong. The first thing I noticed when I watched these three people was a lot of failure. But that's a good thing. They failed in order to succeed. They found out what worked very quickly by just dunking. And then they used that information to go on to the next thing. The other thing I noticed was Helen, especially, found out that her initial assumptions tended to be incorrect. And I really slagged off rich tea biscuits. And actually, they were the winning biscuit. She had her mind made up about what biscuits were going to be good for dunking and which biscuits were going to be bad for dunking. And by the end of it, she completely changed her mind based on actually doing something. And Paul got quite impressively creative by dunking combinations of biscuits. Never saw that one coming. Why did you do that? Well, it's like being in a planning session and having two different opinions about a solution and maybe suggesting as a team, is there any way that we can combine those two things together in parallel? Is there an element of both of those that we could combine to come up with a better plan than we thought of? So it's that kind of bespoke collaborative effort. Interesting analogy there. And they ended up all with very similar scores. Paul lasting 16 seconds. Christina 19 and Helen 21. That was eight seconds. It's gone all like a gel. It's going to go. You've got five seconds though, so that's 11. When you started, did you think 30 seconds was possible? No, I thought it was going to go for like six and then it would drop off under the water and I'd be like, oh, where did it go? So how did you get to 30 seconds then? I did it with rich tea. I put in the very, very, very edge and then with it staying in the tea, I just spun it round. Did you break the rules? I didn't think. I wondered if I could bend the rules. So I would say that one dunk is putting it in without taking it out but the same bit doesn't have to stay in as long as some part of it stays in. What was your strategy? Not to, like most things, just to do something and see what happens and then calculate my next step based on what happened. One of the mistakes that you've got to know what you're doing before you do something whereas actually the real learning only comes once you've done something. There's no point fighting the universal and inevitable truth that biscuits absorb tea. So really, it was about minimizing the amount of tea it could absorb. Step one of that was submerging less of the biscuit and then step two was submerging less of the biscuit and also for less long whilst keeping some of the biscuits submerged. And I think my mistake was using the ice biscuit first. So why did you use it first? I got excited. I got well excited about the ice biscuit. That's a winner right there. That guy's a champ. The other biscuits are losers. That's why I used it first. That was pretty much word for word. What I should have done is used one of the worst biscuits. Rich tea. That bad boy's not going to last five seconds in or out of the coffee, right? Both Freya and Sam effectively questioned the definition of done tea by challenging me on what the term dunk actually meant. They both found creative ways of solving the problem and tackling the challenge to make him to a really good agile team. Delivering the goal rather than just asking for a specific requirement and following it to the latter. The only difference between the two was how quickly Sam came up with the idea. That gave him more time to iterate and enhance the solution compared to Freya. So is there anything relevant to being agile in dunking biscuits in cups of tea? The first thing I think is to just get on with it. The people that did the best in this challenge were the ones who went for it straight away. They started dunking and started finding out what was going on, what was going to work and what wasn't going to work as quickly as possible. There's a lot of unknowns and when there are a lot of unknowns the best thing to do is just to try something and then use that information to make your next decision better. Very akin to those operating in an uncertain environment where agile is the best way of finding things out. The second thing is around challenging our assumptions. It's very easy to be blind to the things we think we know or the things we think we don't know. In this situation all of our contestants ended up challenging something about what they believed. Whether that was about the dunking quality of a rich tea biscuit or the combination of biscuits or what the term dunk actually meant. Agile requires us to challenge our assumptions most notably about what we consider to be normal and quite often a lot of the aspects of agile delivery can seem counter-intuitive. So we have to trust ourselves, trust the process and give things a go. It's easier for us to do this when we're operating in short time boxes because it's a lot less risky to experiment and find things out when the risk is only a short amount of time being wasted. Another thing that makes it a little bit easier for us to challenge our assumptions is by working in a cross-functional team because we haven't just got our own ideas to listen to. We've got a diverse range of perspectives. And the third analogy I think we've found here is around being courageous. Agile requires us to be brave. We're going to change the way that we do things personally, individually, as a team and as an organisation. We're going to be changing cultures. We're going to be making decisions with incomplete information. We're going to be running experiments where we might get things wrong. We're going to be delivering something without all the information necessary and getting feedback on that, iterating, letting go of our ideas and changing our mind as we get new information. And in this challenge, we required courage in terms of leaving the biscuit in the tea for as long as possible and using up our scarce resources. So here's a reminder of the standings before this challenge. And with the points from this challenge taking into account, we have a winner. Helen and Paul ended up on 19 points and joined fourth. Despite Frey as an innovative approach here, it wasn't quite enough to bring her the title, but she does get a podium finish. Christina's fought a good fight throughout the whole series and must feel a little unlucky to be pipped right at the end. But second place is certainly no disgrace. Which means our winner and the Scrum Mastery champion of 2018 is Sam the Firestarter Whitehead. Is it time? Understood. Sam's done brilliantly throughout this series. He's probably been our most creative and innovative out-of-the-box thinker and has approached each challenge with enthusiasm and a sense of humor. He's a well-deserved winner, I think. How does he feel about being the first Scrum Mastery Challenge champion? One, that's awesome. To be honest, when you asked, I was just happy to compete. And then when I saw the pedigree of the other people involved and their creativity, their experience, in fact just the sheer intelligence of all of the people involved, immediately I was like, yeah, easy. Which turned out to be the case. I didn't even go full out, to be honest with you. Seriously, though, when I started I thought actually, considering the crowd at anything fifth place is a bad thing based on who else was competing. It turned out that I came first, which is a little bit remarkable. It's probably going to add to the perception that I know I'm doing. That's really useful. And obviously, the check's in the post, right? You're going to say, Jeff, are you just going to deliver the check? Bant transfer? Anyway, winning, but it was, you know, that was important take. I mentioned courage earlier on. And I think we need to just take a quick look at the actual series as a whole. All of our contestants threw themselves into this without knowing what they were getting themselves into. That required courage, and I really appreciate them getting involved. Hopefully you've taken something useful from this series that you can use with your team or your organisation or personally. But if nothing else, I hope you're inspired by their give it a go attitude. What can you take away from this and use tomorrow? We're nearly done and the credits are about to roll. So all that's left for me to do is to thank our contestants and our judges and you for watching. And one final request for you to take part in our charity causes. Like my mushroom eating video and buy a raffle ticket for the artworks that they created in episode one. All proceeds going to charity. If you like videos, then check out my series of lightbulb talks. It doesn't take long to subscribe and you'll get notified when a new one comes out. And now we really are done done. Roll the credits. You can eat it. But I can't because I dip it in the tea and it's going to mush. So remember, the state of play right now after seven episodes are that Sam, Christina and Freya are still in with a chance of being this week's... Eventually, Helen challenged her initial assumptions about which... So what are the analogies between dunking tea? Eventually, Helen... Helen? Helen?