Failure

Failure

"The only failure is the failure to learn from failure" -- Kevin Everett FitzMaurice

A friend of mine notice that in a big company, which recently decided to embrace agile and use Scrum, the Scrum practices are applied in a mechanical way. Actually he called it a 'theater', and he said that the 'agile principles' are important. A colleague had a similar observation, that Scrum is applied in an american-indian-ceremony kind-of way, expecting that the results will fall out of the sky.

Maybe this is related to the 'Shu Ha Ri' training cycle, which:

TheThreeExtremos lately seem to be recommending a ShuHaRi approach to XP: First, follow all the practices. Then, realize TheyreJustRules, and change them (i.e. break some of the original rules). Finally, you don't need to think about the rules anymore. -- GeorgePaci

But in day-to-day business, it is just sloppiness. People don't understand that they are on a learning journey, they don't understand why are they following the practices/rules. Some don't want to learn, they just one to get the job done and go home. Many people are just happy with Ship-It. We've done, it, we are happy, let's go home. No retrospection, no how-can-we-do-it-better-next-time, no 5-whys. There is no striving towards elegance, to do things better. No passion, no motivation. Probably that's why retrospective are the first to be dropped/disregarded.

Does this mean that Agile/(Scrum?) is a culture-thing? How can we change a 'not-my-problem' culture? How can we stop sinking in a pool of problems? How can we start carrying?

ps. via rangawald's delicious, I found Taming Perfectionism.