A few years ago, I received a call from a very frustrated vice president of development in the Midwest. He sent his staff to get trained in Scrum. He thought he was sending his team off to learn how to develop software. Instead, they came back scrumbroken.

The team spun in circles arguing about their stand-up meetings, trying to wrap their heads around the arcane notion of Fibonacci-based pseudo-planning, how best to set fire to their documentation, and so on.

None of them came back ready to jump into work. They had to deploy all the processes and tools, there was no time for individuals or how they might interact.

“They are all arguing about what agile is,” said the vice president. “It’s like they all went to different classes.” His pain was evident over the phone. “Is it possible for you to come in and kind of teach them how to actually work? Or maybe what agile is?”

In this video, I discuss the 16 points I sent him in the memo below. These, for me, are 16 Elements of the Soul of Agile. Yes, you can come up with others. If you do, that’s good! Keep doing that. This list is not the end of the conversation.

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