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Great Scrum teams know that Scrum\u2019s essence is learning and ongoing improvement. Scrum and agile have propelled the Japanese term <\/span>kaizen<\/span><\/i> into the limelight to be much more broadly recognized today than it was 20 years ago. While literally meaning just \u201cgetting better,\u201d the Toyota culture uses the term as a slogan, and the international use of the term has taken on the sense of <\/span>continuous<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>incremental<\/span><\/i> improvement.<\/span><\/p>\n Both <\/span>continuous<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>incremental<\/span><\/i> resonate well with the agile \u00a0software milieux. But first, it\u2019s important that even Toyota views \u00a0improvement as progressing in discrete quanta interspersed by periods of practice, learning, and normalization. Takeuchi\u2019s <\/span>Extreme Toyota<\/span><\/i> portrays the improvement process as a staircase with discrete steps: \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Change \u2014 both good and bad \u2014 causes disruption, and the \u201cinstitutionalize and practice\u201d plateaus tend back towards normalcy. We change one thing at a time to seek both better results and a return to statistical control as we absorb the disruption.<\/span><\/p>\n Agile folks also emphasize that changes unfold through incremental, piecemeal improvements. Yet powerful change is not always incremental. We speak of \u201cre-making the organization.\u201d Hurricanes and fires wipe life from the land but plants again take root and a fresh ecosystem quickly bounces back. We\u2019re looking for optima, but incremental approaches alone easily settle into local optima rather than finding a path to the greatest good.<\/span><\/p>\n And that brings us to another Japanese word and philosophy of change: <\/span>kaikaku<\/span><\/i> \u2014 radical change. Such change might mean disrupting the lives of distributed team members to instead create collocated teams, or abolishing development management, or discarding job titles. It may remove the boundaries between development, testing, and delivery so that every developer does all three.<\/span><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve been paying attention, such properties are fundamental to a true Scrum transformation. Scrum prefers collocated teams; it has no development management; it recognizes no job titles within the Development\/Delivery Team; and there are no testing teams or DevOps teams \u2014 the Development\/Delivery Team does it all. In most organizations, these provisions in themselves spell out changes beyond incremental kaizen. It\u2019s <\/span>kaikaku<\/span><\/i>. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Every organization has eggs that must be broken \u2014 and you don\u2019t break eggs incrementally.<\/span><\/p>\n Organizational change follows one of three paths: reject, rationalize, or replace. Organizations that reject the opportunity to become agile risk being put out of business by more savvy competition. The largest groups are rationalizers, who implement suboptimal mixtures of old and new because, for example, it\u2019s just too large of a discontinuity to fire development managers or to give total product control to the Product Owner. And then there are those who are willing to throw it all away: to replace the status quo with something better.<\/span><\/p>\n The key to reducing risk is in the \u201cto be willing\u201d part. You may discard everything you are doing, but not all at once. And maybe you are already doing some things right. But attend to continuous discontinuity \u2014 alternating radical change and incremental refinement.<\/span><\/p>\n The fly in the ointment is that several old practices may be intertwined and must be retired together. The more old practices you retain at the beginning, the greater the entanglement of practices, and the lower the chance that you\u2019ll ever completely escape the old ways. Just as manufacturing work cells displaced assembly lines, so a Scrum organization displaces development management. It does not evolve from it.<\/span><\/p>\n So as you embrace agility, soberly consider whether an incremental approach alone might leave you at a local Scrum-butt maximum. As Thomas Jefferson quipped, a little revolution now and then is a good thing.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"2017-11-30_15-23-14\"](\"http:\/\/leanmagazine.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017-11-30_15-23-14.png\")
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