OPENNESS VS TRANSPARENCY

Openness and Transparency are mentioned in the official Scrum Guide. The first one is a core value, the other one is a pillar. Many times, they are misunderstood one for another and both for other things that are neither openness nor transparency.

When I ask in my workshop what do those words mean, I often get a wide variety of responses and some of the top ones are related to the human relationships and are interpreted as letting other know whatever of our business (just an evil short summary).

That’s neither the case for openness nor for transparency. Literally speaking (and quoting the usual Oxford dictionary), those are the official definitions:

Transparency: “the quality of something, such as a situation or an argument, that makes it easy to understand” but also “the quality of something, such as glass, that allows you to see through it”.

Openness: “ the quality of being honest and not hiding information or feelings” but also “the quality of being able to think about, accept or listen to different ideas or people”.

So, the Scrum framework considers those “qualities” to be as important as a foundational pillar and a core value. Why is that?

First, let’s debunk the most common idea that is, letting other know everything about you. That’s simply wrong and useless, at least in the context of what is Scrum. Well, unless it’s a value to let everyone else know everything about your work (e.g. in Open Source), transparency and openness have a totally different meaning.

Transparency is a pillar of Scrum because if you want to implement the framework in an effective way, having the possibility to continuously inspect and adapt the processes, the products and whatever is part of the system.

Transparency means to agree on each definition, to create structures that reduce and remove “political” decisions based on biased personal objectives. Transparency is a foundation to being able to implement the framework at the system level for optimizing the whole.

Example of transparency are:

·        Using inner source, which is the open source within the enterprise

·        Using open portfolio management, where the management organizes the work and let people self-organize around it with the only objective of maximizing what’s in the definition of value

·        Using a minimal and useful set of meaningful leading and lagging indicators, available to everyone, so that progress can be measured

·        Fostering feedback and constructive positive conflict

I could do more, but I think you got the idea.

Openness, on the other hand, is something totally different and it’s a value, not a pillar, because it’s not something to build on, but a quality to reach new value streams, new ideas and to foster collaboration.

Being open, for an organization, means to avoid “bureaucracy by design”, “we always did so” and “it works that way” thinking. Being open means being open to experimentation and learning from failures. Openness is considered a value because it’s a vector for gaining value, whatever the organization decides to define it.

Example of openness are:

·        Sponsoring hackatons, where people, even from outside the company, try to exploit and leverage existent assets and value streams to find new ways.

·        Implementing the blameless post-mortem culture, where there is never a blame or shame event, even when an employee puts down by mistake the entire infrastructure of a region (it actually happened in AWS).

·        Asking for feedback and learning to accept and use it.

·        Promoting cross functional teams, as they will bring different ideas to everyone else. Indeed, in a team where people belong to different domains, they may have different culture, know-how, know-what and skills that will require to increase and learn openness to let the whole team grow.

Examples of events that in Scrum make extended use of transparency are sprint review and daily scrum, even if all of them are founded on transparency. Openness, instead, is very well perceived in retrospectives but also in reviews.