97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 84. Networks and Respect

Paul Oldfield

It may not be immediately obvious, but Scrum is designed for networks rather than for hierarchies. Scrum is designed on the premise of self-organization. Trying to fit Scrum into a hierarchical organization creates many problems. Allow me to highlight one major aspect here.

Hierarchical organizations have a presumption of authority. Even within a team, levels of seniority matter. People further up the hierarchy are taken to be authoritative, no matter their level of expertise. A far better mindset to have, if self-organization is to work well and, in turn, for the network to work well, is that relationships are peer to peer; all people, if not actually equal, are at least treated as such. They do, of course, have different skills and knowledge and different levels of experience. It is these differences that are suppressed in a hierarchy but that make a network so valuable. What we don’t know, someone else in our network might. Similarly, at some other time, we might have the skills or information that others are looking for. Although the flow of information is bidirectional, there might be more going one way than the other. Don’t focus on this seeming inequality; focus on the value that both sides get out of the link.

This can be a particularly difficult change in mindset for people when they are long accustomed to hierarchical ...