Under this somewhat provocative title, I’m not seeking confrontation. On the contrary, it’s neutrality that I wish to highlight. Don’t be sentimental: be totally neutral.

For example, you’re deploying Scrum within a well-established organization (let’s say a large enterprise), with habits, methods, and people who didn’t wait for you to deliver a product. But here you come with your “agility”.

Support, documentation, QA come looking for information.

What will happen to the specifications (on which the documentation is based), what will happen to the tests? what will happen to the documentation? etc. etc. My position is simple (which doesn’t mean it’s easy to maintain): here’s the current state, here are our objectives dictated by value creation, here’s our schedule, here’s the current scope, here’s the method, etc. You believe we need to integrate this level of documentation to be able to sell the product? Very well, I’ll inform the team and the product owner (or better: go talk to them about it!). The latter will decide (probably not alone, by the way—they are the empowered representative of a broader working group) what priority to give to this value creation. The team may suggest integrating this point into their definition of “done”. We’ll probably need to ask ourselves whether the documentation you’re requesting really carries value. Why and how.

I don’t have the answer, you have the answer, they have the answer. (The consultant in their most obscene pose, some will cry).

We clearly display our objectives, our priorities, the context, the schedule, the definition of “done”, etc. We can try things if we’re not sure of the right solution. We’ll quickly analyze whether it worked or not.

Transparency, Inspection, Adaptation.

I often end up answering: “I don’t know, what do you think?”. My role is to support, protect, guarantee, explain, facilitate, remove ambiguities, highlight, etc. (in my current mission, which serves as the backdrop for this post, I have an ambivalent role between agile coach and scrummaster—some will cry heresy, perseverare diabolicum). That the trade-offs and priorities be clear, based on the right indicators, communicated. That the right to make mistakes and to experiment be allowed.

I have no bias, no sentiment, I am neutral.

I also sometimes say: by such date we’ll have substantial enough feedback to assess whether this is working or whether it’s a failure (implying: is the Scrum deployment working or is it a failure?). We’ll make a decision based on clear and transparent indicators.

Transparency, Inspection, Adaptation.

This can irritate. And here everything depends on the psychology (oh my, how overused that term is) of the Scrummaster or agile coach. Is this why Ken Schwaber in a famous video renames the scrummaster, the prick… (the prick, but in slang: the dick, the cock…)? Yes most certainly, we can irritate.

Careful, one last point: remaining neutral doesn’t mean not encouraging or congratulating the team, or conversely telling them that we’re surprised or disappointed in certain cases.