What the scrum core values and stoicism have in common
While I only received a minor in philosophy, stoicism has been one of my favorite philosophies to follow and use in my daily life. It has not only helped me shape my career in I.T. (Information Technology), but also how I manage personal and outside relationships.
I got my Bachelors of Science degree in Information Technology, and knew that even though I was a tech nerd, I had a passion for helping people (hence me studying philosophy for my minor). I knew as a young adult that in my future careers, I wanted to bring a way to bridge philosophy and tech into one.
I went down the road of project management, and discovered agile project and product management later on in my career path. Once I learned about the agile and scrum frameworks several years ago, I knew this would be everything I wanted for in a career wise. The values of scrum and agile lined up so well with my personal and philosophical beliefs.
The Agile Framework was based on empiricism, which is the philosophy that emphasizes that life and actions are based on experience. Experience, facts, and evidence are the key concepts that are introduced in scrum where you learn by transparency in inspecting and adapting to improve software (three pillars)! However, as great as empiricism is, I’m not here to discuss the philosophy that shaped scrum as we know it.
My passion is the scrum values and how they are similar to stoic beliefs.
The scrum values are as follows:
A lot of people gloss over these values, and usually don’t look back at them of having any major importance. I can’t imagine a developer spending hours learning and focusing on these values in comparison to getting the work done in a sprint, although when organizations first go to scrum, these values should always be emphasized in meetings like sprint planning, daily scrum and the retrospective.
As a scrum master, the most important values that I personally highlight on a daily basis is respect and openness. I encourage the team to be open about how they feel, especially if they are struggling on something, so we can move past roadblocks in a timely fashion. I also believe in respecting everyone's space to get the work done, while also respecting everyone’s varying beliefs and diversity.
From a development team perspective, I would feel their values of commitment, focus and courage are extremely important in making sure we are meeting our sprint goals, and speaking up when things become challenging.
It’s important for the team to feel like they can be open with each other.
It’s important for a team to be able to ask questions (courage) to make sure they are doing the right work.
It’s important for the team to know the sprint goals and commit to them and be open about how much work they can take.
It’s important to respect each other on the team, even if we have different viewpoints.
It’s important to be open to learning about diversity on a team, and how we can all reach the same goals.
When a team is built on respect, openness, commitment to the scrum goals, a focus on the future sprints, and the courage to move past roadblocks and get things done, the scrum team will thrive.
Now, I spent a while talking about the scrum values, but where does the stoic values come into play?
From reading the stoic legends of Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca, I’ve learned and lived their values through their writing and experiences.
Stoics preach four main virtues which they discuss in their writing:
Wisdom (prudence)
Morality (justice)
Courage (fortitude)
Moderation (temperance)
The shared virtue that scrum and stoicism have in common off the bat is courage. One could argue that the scrum value of respect and stoic value of morality (justice) go hand in hand. Without a basic level of respect and understanding of each other, would we be capable of justice?
Wisdom, while not an official scrum value should be noted that it can apply in any type of workplace setting, especially in agile. We need our scrum teams to develop the wisdom to do the right thing, and the wisdom to make the right choices, etc. We can achieve this wisdom through courage, and openness in a scrum team.
We might not always know what to do in a situation — you could learn empirically, or through the actions of others. It’s okay to learn as you go, but it’s also more than okay to hear about other people’s experiences on how to make things better, so you can gain some wisdom on how to prevent any past mistakes from happening in the future. Utilizing retrospectives in the sprint will provide the team wisdom to keep inspecting and adapting — and ultimately, there is wisdom to be found after these types of discussions.
Moderation and temperance is a very important value that should be applied to scrum teams as well. Temperance is one’s ability to maintain self control and utilize emotions without haste.
Here is a fictional scenario that I wrote on why temperance is important in a scrum setting:
Imagine you have a developer on a team that is very reactive to constructive feedback. Let’s say their attitude is poor, and aren’t very open to having a dialogue about the issues they are having. Anytime you try to tell them about how they could fix a problem, they might dismiss it like it is not a problem, or actually get mad at you for bringing up that a problem has been found. If this is in a software setting, and the developer missed a bug right before a release, this could be a big issue. They could argue that this bug is not their problem, because the other developer worked on it but that is not the case. The responsibility is shared for the developers for a product being successful and there must be some level of understanding to happen to make the team realize this. This is not healthy for a scrum team’s collaboration and hinders the sprint goal. If a person does not feel safe in expressing their opinions openly, or even being open to change without feeling attacked, this type of behavior will hinder the scrum team’s progress.
This is where the value of temperance would come into play. Temperance is the ability to process your emotions without reaction. While it is not a scrum core value, it should be a value that every member on the scrum team possesses to be able to prevent conflict and work towards healthy resolutions of issues that might escalate.
The stoics weren’t very big on fancy displays of emotions, however, they were keen on ensuring that they could control certain emotional states, i.e. anger, frustration, jealousy, sadness, etc.
The Stoics believed that anything that could happen to us, we would have the courage and fortitude to accept the cards we were dealt and not react harshly. Even if life dealt us an unfair card — we can accept that while it may not be fair, we do not have to sit and dwell in the feeling of unfairness. We must accept that this feeling happened, and then move past it to stay content with oneself.
Acting like a rational human being was key in stoic philosophy, and key in any professional setting.
The last stoic value is justice. Marcus Aurelius believed justice was the most important value because it is “the source of all the other virtues.”
With ensuring a team is focused on justice — they ensure that they will do no harm to each other. This can even be written as one of the “scrum ground rules” for a new team, to ensure that the team is being met openly and respected. Again, respect and justice really do go hand in hand with the shared values.
In stoicism, justice is even ensuring that we are all working towards the common good. This can be defined in agile as ensuring we are all working towards the sprint goal.
So really, through all that, it seems that as agile teams we have a lot more in common with stoicism that one might have thought.
As a techie with a passion in philosophy, I strive to ensure that the lessons from the great stoics are never forgotten.
As Marcus Aurelius once said:
“It is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given, and not waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.” -Marcus Aurelius
