I want you to imagine it’s December 2019.

You are part of a Scrum Team. Not just any scrum team, but a great one. Super-high performing, on target in everything, delivering so much value that your customers toast your every email. You hit every timebox, ace every sprint review, your stakeholders are convinced that you can read their minds, external agile coaches come to facilitate your meetings and then retire in tears knowing that they’ll never be part of anything so great ever again. You are, in a word, perfect.

And then Covid hits and you are scrambling blindly like everyone else.

When I was first studying the role of a Scrum Master I kept coming across phrases like “The Scrum Master’s job is to make themself redundant.” The idea is that if the role of the Scrum Master is to teach the team and the organization about Scrum and how to apply it, then surely there comes a time when there is nothing more to teach. The current iteration of the Scrum guide is all of 13 pages. Surely you can train a team of highly capable people to memorize the thing and execute it to perfection?

It’s possible that you can. Like the team I described above, it is possible that you can achieve such a high degree of mastery that you would be tempted to say “I know everything that there is to know about this,” and you might be right for a while. But the world changes constantly, and what is perfect today may be “not good enough” tomorrow.

I had a meeting recently with a fellow Agile coaching student where we were doing some mock coaching sessions. My partner was rather frustrated by the session, saying that she needs more practice in how to apply the techniques we learned. To which I pulled out a book of Judo throws that I had on my shelf and told her that learning and practice are important, since they let you build “muscle memory”, but no matter how much you practice you will always have to adjust and improvise.

I was thinking about this topic a lot after reading the new Scrum guide. I must admit that my first reaction when I read the new guide was less than positive. It felt like the ground was moving beneath my feet and that things I once knew as fact were no longer true. Further, it seems that ideas that I have argued for for years, based on my understanding of scrum, were now less relevant if not downright obsolete. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way “they” just changed everything.

Yes, even those of us who are supposed to champion change and flexibility can find ourselves in the position of having this kind of gut reaction. No one likes having their assumptions challenged, especially when those assumptions are core beliefs they have about what they do. What does all this have to do with practice? Everything.

One of the ways you often see scrum defined is as a way to “practice agility.” And when I was done railing about the new guide, my agile “muscle memory” kicked in and I asked myself, “Now that this is the new reality, how do I adapt to it?” The use of the word adapt, one of the pillars of Scrum, is of course not coincidental.

We are taught to believe that “practice makes perfect,” and indeed it is possible that if you do something enough times, you will distil your actions and motions to perfect economy and efficiency. But that perfection is brittle, and could shatter as soon as conditions shift. Instead of striving for perfection, we do ourselves and our teams a better service by striving for improvement.

I am not an agile expert, and never will be. I know a lot about agility, agile practices, scrum, and many other things, but I will never know it all. There will always be new things to learn, new ways to experiment, new practices to try, and new problems to figure out. I am not a perfect agilist, and I take comfort in the knowledge that I, and this whole movement, will always have room to grow. Just look at Jeff and Ken: they’re still figuring it out, and they just put out a new version of the guide. After 25 years it’s still not perfect, and it never will be. They’re not trying to make it perfect, they’re just trying to make it better.