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Scrum in quotes

William van den Ende was trying to find a good balance for quotes included in blog posts, and his effort inspired me to try and assemble a blog post entirely out of other people’s quotes.

It’s a bad idea. Set your expectations accordingly. Here goes.

“Scrum”

Transparency enables inspection. Inspection without transparency is misleading and wasteful.1 Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.2 If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.3 The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.7

Inspection enables adaptation. Inspection without adaptation is considered pointless.1 What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it.4 Scrum events are designed to provoke change.1 Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.5

If any aspects of a process deviate outside acceptable limits or if the resulting product is unacceptable, the process being applied or the materials being produced must be adjusted. The adjustment must be made as soon as possible to minimize further deviation.1 The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.9

Don’t just change, transform. It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform.6 The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.8 The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.10

We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.12 They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.13 Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.11

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.14

The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other.1 To truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality.15 Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick.16

  • [1] Scrum Guide
  • [2] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • [3] Mark Twain
  • [4] Maya Angelou
  • [5] Margaret Mead
  • [6] Roy T. Bennett
  • [7] Flannery O’Connor
  • [8] Albert Einstein
  • [9] William Arthur Ward
  • [10] Friedrich Nietzsche
  • [11] Barack Obama
  • [12] Santosh Kalwar
  • [13] Andy Warhol
  • [14] Neil Gaiman
  • [15] John Bradshaw
  • [16] Terence McKenna