Working Systems and Scrum

2023-10-31

Have you ever heard of Gall’s Law? It’s a quote from John Gall’s book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail :

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

I touched on the atomicity of Scrum previously. But this Law bring up a worthy question for agile practitioners. Often during an Agile Transformation, we start with a full Scrum implementation. But is starting that way trying to start with a complex system? Or is it introducing a new simple working system?