Funny Little Story About a Scrum “Implementation”

Funny little story about an “abstract” (if you will), implementation of Scrum that I told to Ken Schwaber at his CSM class in Boston a few years back.

My wife and I, like a lot of parents of young children, were trying desperately one night to get our three year old daughter to eat all her dinner. We tried everything from cutting up her food into smaller and smaller bites to introducing various incentives like ice-cream and TV after dinner .. no matter what the tactic, we just couldn’t get her to eat and were met with all sorts of resistance. At one point, I even made myself more food so that I could eat it along with her. Nothing was working. It was starting to get later in the evening and we knew we couldn’t put her to bed without dinner and I needed to get prepared for the next day for our team’s morning Scrum.

I think maybe because this was on my mind, I decided as a last resort to try some very basic agile approaches to get our daughter to eat. Instead of telling her that she needed to eat her dinner or - insert various parenting text-book consequences here -, I decided to ask her “…how many bites would you like to have?”. Immediately, I had her attention and she responded without much hesitation … “zero”. Well, zero obviously wasn’t going to be acceptable so we negotiated a higher number and finally arrived at two I believe it was. Hey, two was better than zero and meant at least some progress. She agreed and actually began and finished her two bites and then looked to me for feedback on her recent accomplishment. I thought, “Great! Well, how many would you like to have now”. “Three”, she said, and so we proceeded along just like this until her whole plate was finished. My wife, couldn’t believe her eyes, nor anyone else that we demonstrated our strategy too. Scrum Master or Parent Coach? … I thought … hmmm.

Ken Schwaber made a great point to me after I told him this story. A very fundamental part of this success was the fact that my daughter actually felt she owned the task of eating her dinner which differentiated it from all the other day-to-day requests we make to our children. She really felt good about doing it.

Scrum works, even for three year olds.