A talk delivered at Agile in the City: London in 2017 illustrating the operationalization of complexity thinking in building successful football teams. The argument is that Scrum patterns can do the same for Agile teams

1. José Mourinho,
Complexity Thinking
and Team Building
Alan O’Callaghan
ajocallaghan@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/alanjocallaghan/
Principal Product Owner, CSP,CSM,CSPO
June 15-16 2017

2. Football and Scrum have some similarities
• Few rules: easily understood
• “Played” by teams
• That have to be coached
• An almost infinite variety of approaches to “winning”

3. 26major trophies since 2002
2 European Championships
1 Europa League trophies
Major League titles in 4 different
countries
This guy
knows
something
about team-
building
28
2

4. Mourinho graduated in Sports Science at ISEF*
and was forced to study Matveyev’s classic book
• Rejected its central tenets because it was
focused on training individual sportsmen
• Began developing his own methodology
• Driven by his own early experiences
• Paid to observe teams since he was 15
• Influenced by Manuel Sérgio – an ISEF
teacher and a philosopher
*Instituto Superior de Eduçáo Física
“We have to understand that
eleven men chasing an objective
is completely different from one
man doing it.” José Mourinho

5. “Mourinho didn’t teach me how to play
football. I know how to play football. He
taught me how to play in a team, which
is something different. And that’s why he
is successful wherever he is.” Didier
Drogba

6. What is most striking about Mourinho, according to his friend
and biographer Luis Lourenço, is that he is the first football
manager to operationalize complexity in his methods
“I argue that, at the level of training
and football teams, Jose Mourinho is
the first to create a new paradigm of
knowledge, the complexity of Edgar
Morin, and ‘carry it’ from the field of
Philosophy, from the world of ideas, to
concrete human activity”. Luis
Lourenço

7. “We need a kind of thinking that reconnects that which is
disjoined and compartmentalized, that respects diversity
as it recognizes unity, and that tries to discern
interdependencies. We need a radical thinking (which gets
to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and
an organisation or systems thinking” Edgar Morin,
Philosopher

8. Whole
Part
Part
Part
Cartesian thinking: ‘The whole is the sum of its parts.
Fix all the parts and the whole is taken care of’
Systems thinking: ‘The parts cannot be understood
without understanding the whole’
Complexity thinking: ‘The parts are also wholes. We
need to understand the relationships between
them’

9. “A team brings together people focused
on a common goal working in a perfectly
established way. It’s defined as a group
of organized individuals led by a leader
and working within a context, towards
the same objective”. Olivier Devillard,
Coaching Expert
• A group of individuals only
becomes a team when
seduced by a common
goal
• Autonomy cannot be
‘granted’
• It must be ‘taken’

10. “It must always be our objective to ‘be
champions’. It must be a daily objective, a
consistent and permanent motivation, and a
light that guides our journey from now. Every
workout, every match, every minute of our
professional and social life must focus on this
objective, which, I repeat is OURS”. José
Mourinho
From Mourinho’s
letter to the Chelsea
players, before he
met them for the
first time in 2004

11. “I cannot think of another manager
who would have got away with
that… It was a piece of body
language I’ve never seen in football
before. It means he’s one of the
players” Desmond Morris,
Anthropologist

13. “The weakening of the global perspective leads to the
weakening of the sense of responsibility (one tends to
be responsible only for his specialized task), as well as a
weakening of solidarity (each fails to understand its
organic connection) [with the group in which he or she
in inserted]. Edgar Morin
To me the whole is everything, the part is an important
means for the whole to achieve its objectives. So I think
that from the time that group culture exists, there’s the
culture of the whole. The overall objective is perfectly
articulated by the group. I think the notion of sacrificing
the part for the whole stops making any sense. It’s through
the parts that you reach the whole.” José Mourinho

15. “The team structure is important, but so are all the
surrounding structures. And when I say other structures, I
mean different departments – the medical department, the
football department, the kitmen, the scouts…These are all
interacting structures and can’t be seen as something
isolated.” Rui Faria, Mourinho’s Assistant

16. Team
Coach
Squad
Backroom staffMedical
Department…
Club
“The whole that is in the part that is in the whole” José Mourinho
The world is a complex
system of centres or
“wholes” within
“wholes”. We need to
base actions on an
understanding of their
interrelationships

17. There is another approach to
complexity more familiar to
software engineering : patterns
Christopher Alexander critiques
Cartesian thinking in Nature of
Order. He says patterns are rules
for making “centers” whole
In his earlier work he says you
apply patterns from the largest
first, then successively choose
the smaller ones to create
sequences
The Scrum Patterns
Group is currently
mining the “deeper
patterns of Scrum”…
...and putting together
sequences of patterns
that address complexity

18. PO SM
Development
Team
Is this a good picture of a Scrum
Team?
No. It’s a bit “Mickey Mouse”

19. • The Product Owner is a peer member of the Scrum Team
– Not external to it
PO
Dev
Dev
Dev
Dev
SM
Scrum Team
stakeholders
Dev
Dev
Dev
Dev
SM
PO
Scrum Team
stakeholders
PO sits on boundary
Developers ‘encapsulated’
PO decides “what” to build
Developers decide “How” to build it
This is
NOT
Scrum
PO “is the manifestation of the business” in the
Scrum Team
PO explains “What” AND “Why”
Scrum Team agrees goals
Developers decide “How” to build it
This is
Scrum

20. Dev
Dev
Dev
Dev
SM
PO
Scrum Team
Stable Team
Product Owner Team
Vision
Team Pride
Domain Expertise in Roles
Product Pride
Unity of Purpose
Developer Controls Process
Just some of
the Scrum
patterns that
contribute to
this idea of a
Scrum Team
Sprint Goal
Spirit of the Game

21. CONCLUSIONS
• Complexity thinking is key to the building of
cohesive teams
• Groups of individuals need to be seduced by
common goals to become teams
• Individuals can only become team players by
learning how to contextualize their role in
relation to others
• Scrum patterns may help us take the next
steps to operationalizing complexity

22. Some References
• Mourinho: Further Anatomy of a Winner. P.
Barclay. Orion 2015
• José Mourinho- Special leadership: Creating
and Managing Successful Teams. L. Lourenço.
Prime Books.2014
• José Mourinho – Made in Portugal: The
Authorised Biography L. Lourenço and J.
Mourinho. Dewi Lewis Media. 2004
• On Complexity. E.Morin.Hampton Press. 2008

23. More References
• Nature of Order (vols 1-4). C. Alexander.
Routledge 2004
• A Pattern Language. C. Alexander. Oxford
University Press. 1978
• Scrum Patterns Community
www.scrumplop.org
• Published Scrum Patterns
https://sites.google.com/a/scrumplop.org/pu
blished-patterns/home

24. Contact Details
Email: ajocallaghan@gmail.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/alanjocallaghan
Website: www.emerald-hill.co.uk