Real-life user stories
Practical insights, valuable practices and ready-to-use tools to improve your personal agility
How I learned to stop playing it safe
At my first physiotherapy session on Friday, the therapist started with an oil massage of the scar tissue. Now healed, my wrist shows a thin, five-centimeter line of swollen, hardened skin. I had only dared to touch it gently, but he was working the scarred area firmly while we talked....
Gratitude does not speak for itself
The day after the accident, a package landed on our doorstep. Mrs. Scrumpy, always one step ahead, had already ordered me a pair of Skechers slip-ons: no laces, just slide in and go. With one arm in a cast, there was no way I’d be tying my own shoes for...
The simplest leadership lesson I keep relearning
April 12th, 1976. A plane landed in the Netherlands. It carried around 20 children from India, along with some guides. Each child had a band-aid on their wrist with their name written on it. They were traveling toward new families they had never met. My sister was one of them....
When you finally see beneath the surface
Last Friday, I had a follow-up appointment with the surgeon who operated on my wrist. He took a good look at the wound, confirmed the infection was on its way out, and gave me the usual instructions for caring for it at home. Just as we were wrapping up, I...
What becoming a patient taught me about leadership
Last Saturday, while changing my bandages, I noticed the wound on my wrist was not healing as it should. I called the ER, thinking I’d be in and out with a fancy new bandage or maybe a couple of stitches. Instead, they found a nasty infection and told me I...
One story at a time: a Scrum Master’s guide to healing
The surgery on Monday had gone well, they told me. A plate, some screws, and a pressure bandage for one day. The stitches should dissolve on their own. But on Monday at 2 o’clock in the morning, I was sitting on the sofa watching a movie. Not by choice. The...
This morning, I had to think about how to hold a knife
Last Thursday, I left home on my bicycle. I was heading to a training I had been looking forward to for weeks. Two hundred meters from my front door, it hit me. A car that is. I had seen him approaching from the opposite side of the roundabout, scanning the...
No transparency, no progress
When people meet me online for the first time, they often assume I’m working from the office because of the board behind me. It always surprises them when I explain that I’m actually at home in my study, and that the board is a real Kanban board with real sticky...
How to improve yourself
One of the great strengths of Scrum is its inspect & adapt mechanism for continuous improvement. During the sprint review, we evaluate the outcome of the sprint together with stakeholders to determine where to go next. In the sprint retrospective, we look for ways to improve our quality and effectiveness...
No gain without pain? A more enjoyable alternative
As a Scrum Master, I enjoy facilitating retrospectives with my teams. These are great opportunities to exchange insights, learn together, and set the next step in continuous improvement. I love trying out new formats and observing how they work in practice. My main reason is to avoid routine or boredom...
Motivation missing? 5 tips to kickstart yourself!
You might think I am always happy because I wrote “A Scrum Master’s Guide to Happiness”. Or that my plans and actions always go as planned, thanks to my Scrum Master skills. Maybe you assume I’m relentlessly cheerful and always full of energy. Well, I wish that were true. I...
The hidden forces that shape your life: finding your core values
As a Scrum Master, I work with teams and support them in their journey to continuously improve themselves and deliver value to their customers. At a minimum, a team is a group of individuals collaborating towards a shared goal. Over the years, I learned that identifying shared values is powerful...
This simple chart helps you see what you should focus on next
Do you ever feel frustrated about all the things you want to do, knowing there won’t be enough time to get them all done? Or, while you are dedicating your precious time to one aspect of your life, you get that nagging feeling that you are neglecting another, more critical...
Creating Your Own Personal Retrospective
As a Scrum Master, my job is to help teams within companies improve their performance over time. One way I do this is through something called a sprint retrospective. At the end of every sprint — a period of time during which specified work must be completed — a team...
A Scrum Master’s Strategy for Focusing a Scattered Mind
A while back, I noticed that my teenage daughter was overwhelmed by everything she had on her plate: moving out on her own for the first time, applying to internships, searching for a part-time job, staying on top of her health, and maintaining her social life. While she has always...
How Scrum inspired me to improve our family life
Did you ever hear or read those stories about Agile/Scrum enthusiasts who not only used Scrum at work, but went as far as to adopt this way of working at home? They make a family backlog, plan their weekly sprint together, and have a daily scrum at breakfast. And did...