Psychologists did not invent Agile or Scrum, but psychology can help explain why it works.
[See also this text on Medium.]
The Team: Belonging Increase Motivation
The cross-functional Team is critical in scrum. It’s the Team estimates all work (instead being told from above). It’s the Team that commits (in the sprint planning) to deliver at the end of the sprint. The Team rules. The Team is a pure group: 7-10 people, the optimal size for a group. The Team has no hierarchy or roles, except for the Scrum Master but he is a servant-leader, not a traditional manager. The Team plans its own work.
My experience is that the strong sense of being part of an efficient team that controls it’s own destiny is a key reason people like Scrum.
To psychologists, this is no surprise. Maslow has Belonging already at level 3 in the Hierarchy of Needs. In experiments at Stanford, Walden showed that mere belonging to a group increase motivation. The smallest thing, such as sharing birthdays, could increase motivation to work on a task.
Scrum’s strong focus on teams, as a connected group, in the same building, in the same room, not more than 7-10, is a key reason it works. Scrum fails with large teams or teams that lack social connectedness.
The Sprint: The Habit of Delivering Working Software
The continuous deliverables at every Sprint Demo creates a habit.
The habit of delivery working software.
In traditional software projects, schedules constantly change, ”deadlines” get shifted on a daily basis. No one knows when things are supposed to be Done. There is no way, delivering high-quality software on time can become the norm. Project members are pushed towards ever-changing deadlines, sometimes throwing quality out of the window, and in the worst case, both.
Not so in Scrum! There is always one and only one deadline. The end of the sprint. And the sprint is always the same size. As a Scrum developer, deadlines never change and there is only one that matters: the end of this sprint.
The fact that a Stimulus-Response-loop, repeated over and over again, such as Sprint Planning –> 2 weeks sprint –> Sprint Demo, creates a habit is well known among psychologists. Ivan Pavlov showed this more than hundred years ago with his famous dogs. It’s called ”classical conditioning” and leads to automatic behavior. It’s the same thing that is used when, for example, you get every 10th coffee for free, or a annual salary raise. The Sprint Planning/Demo, repeated again and again, is continuous reinforcement, that creates the great habit of delivering working software.
In fact, psychologists have learned that in the long run, it’s more effective to alter the interval and/or ratio of the reward. For Scrum this means to sometime change the length of the sprint, or make sure the goals/rewards are not always the same. The Product Owner has a critical task to ensure the rewards are not always the same: a new customer, an inspiring demo, a more efficient infrastructure.
A not so uncommon critique against Scrum is that it turns developers into ”slaves”, or perhaps dogs, like Pavlov’s dog. It’s true that it creates a habit that is hard to break, using the same mechanism a Casino may use to get people to play more games. But the habit of delivering working software on a timely manner is a great one, no matter how it was reinforced.
Sources
There are lots of great, easy-to-read, psychology books about human behavior in general. Here are two I like:
Thinking, Fast and SlowImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
by Daniel Kanheman (already a classic!)
How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the art and science of persuasion and motivationImage may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
by Susan Weinschenk
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