The document critiques the efficacy of Scrum certification and argues that it does not reliably predict future performance in project management. It highlights a cultural contrast between Japanese and North American attitudes towards failure and learning, emphasizing that true improvement comes from behavior change rather than certification tests. The text calls for a focus on ongoing, team-based learning and emphasizes the values of kaizen and continuous improvement in Agile practices.

1. 日本文化とアジャイル/スクラム
ジム・コプリエン氏

2. G&C
Certification...

3. ScrumMasterWorld
in Agile

4. mestreVerdens
i agility

5. mestreVerdens i agility

6. mestreVerdens i agility

7. Verdensmestre i agility

8. Verdensmestre i agility

9. Verdensmestre i agility

11. Agility Training Tools

20. The Arguments For
Certification
It makes money for those certified and for
those certifying
Certification supports good practice
Certification drives improvement

21. The arguments against
Testing is a poor indicator of future
performance
Who certifies the certifiers?
Testing itself does not elicit Kaizen mind
Test failure should lead to trainer Kaizen — not
trainee Kaizen

22. G&C
Project Management Certification
Does not Predict Performance
“A number of surveys over the years, including
Attributes of a High Performance PM - 2007, by
the Corporate Executive Board:
http://www.executiveboard.com have found
very little correlation between project
management certification and project
management effectiveness, or the number of
years a person has been in project
management roles and project management
effectiveness.”
— Patrick Weaver, http://network.projectmanagers.net/

23. Even proper tests tell us little
about aptitude or skill
“Test scores and grades are not indices of merit in their own right;
they are thought to provide a shorthand indication of a student’s
competencies in the world outside testing... Recent research on
the nature of talent indicates, however, that ... is false ... for the
upper part of the range... More reliable answers ... by assessing
what the subject does in a sample of the treatment situation itself...
[The test] will tell you about the person’s response tendencies in
situations that resemble the test rather than in situations that
resemble the criterion.”
— Tests Tell Us Little About Talent, Michael A. Wallach, American
Scientist 64(1), January-February 1976

24. Do CSTs know Scrum?
1.A Sprint is a fixed amount of time set aside for a team to run tests and
fix any outstanding bugs right before the product ships.
2.A team works as many hours as necessary to finish a Sprint.
3.Project Managers are defined in Scrum
4.The Product Owner assigns tasks to the team during the Sprint
5.The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to report to the Product Owner
6.Product Owners pre-assign PBIs to team specialists
7.ScrumMasters blame individuals responsible for PBIs not “Done”
8.The Retrospective finds who is responsible for the Sprint’s failure
9.Product Owners can add items to the Sprint Backlog during a Sprint.
10.The ScrumMaster is manager of the Scrum Team
It is reasonable to believe that you can believe all of the
following and still become a certified ScrumMaster:
Presented for comparison only. Answers are from a
reasonable CSM exam facsimile. The current exam allows 10
incorrect answers out of 35 before disallowing certification

25. Bloom Cognitive Taxonomy
Knowledge
Remembering previous material
Comprehension
What does the material mean?
Application
Use material in new, concrete settings
Analysis
Understand organizational structure
Synthesis
Create a new whole from the parts

26. Bloom Cognitive Taxonomy
Knowledge
Remembering previous material
Comprehension
What does the material mean?
Application
Use material in new, concrete settings
Analysis
Understand organizational structure
Synthesis
Create a new whole from the parts

27. Bloom Affective Taxonomy
Receiving Phenomena
Willingness to Listen and Listening
Responding
Engagement and active involvement
Valuing
Feeling a sense of worth
Organization
Creating a value system
Internalizing
Values drive behavior

28. Training
Receiving Phenomena
Willingness to Listen and Listening
Responding
Engagement and active involvement
Valuing
Feeling a sense of worth
Organization
Creating a value system
Internalizing
Values drive behavior
Knowledge
Remembering previous material
Comprehension
What does the material mean?
Application
Use material in new, concrete settings
Analysis
Understand organizational structure
Synthesis
Create a new whole from the parts

29. G&C
Is Scrum agile?
The answers to six of the questions have
changed since the sample exam (and there is
no recertification process)
The answers to three of the questions are
wrong in the first place

30. G&C
Does Certification drive
improvement? The Dunning-Kruger
Effect
Ignorance leads to
overconfidence, inability to
recognize skill, and inability to
assess one’s own level
Individuals may recognize and
acknowledge previous lack of
skill, if exposed to training
Certification doesn’t avoid
ScrumButt and may amplify it 0
25
50
75
100
125
Know Nothing Expert
Confidence
Experience

31. G&C
But there is a positive
outcome in Japan!
“Self-enhancing and self-improving motivations were investigated across
cultures. Replicating past research, North Americans who failed on a task
persisted less on a follow-up task than those who succeeded. In contrast,
Japanese who failed persisted more than those who succeeded. The
Japanese pattern is evidence for a self-improving orientation: Failures
highlight where corrective efforts are needed. Japanese who failed also
enhanced the importance and the diagnosticity of the task compared with
those who succeeded, whereas North Americans did the opposite.”
— Divergent consequences of success and failure in Japan and North
America: An investigation of self-improving motivations and malleable
selves. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(4), Heine et al.,
October 2001.

32. G&C
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
450
500
550
600
Success Failure
Persistence(sec.)
USA - Same Task
USA - Different
Which is Kaizen
mind?

33. Instruction, nature, or
nurture?
“In the nature vs. nurture debate, researchers have
declared nurture the winner. People who excel are the
ones who work the hardest; it takes ten+ years of
deliberate practice to become an expert. Deliberate
practice is not about putting in hours, it’s about working
to improve performance. It does not mean doing what
you are good at; it means challenging yourself under the
guidance of a teacher.” — Mary Poppendieck
Nature is not an impediment

34. G&C
Autonomy, Mastery, and
Purpose
Dan Pink, author of Drive: what motivates us?
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
Great motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic, to
teams and individuals

35. Who certifies the
certifiers & trainers?
Certification tests a body of knowledge, but there is hardly an agile
body of knowledge
There is no process of recognizing the authority of the authors of
certification, and much evidence that this authority was weak
The current certification is largely from the “new crowd”
No ethics guards on conflict of interest
No evidence of strong background in curriculum development and
a lot of evidence against it
None of these criteria are backed with certifiable credentials!

36. G&C
Certifying Trainers
“My pursuit of the CST designation has simultaneously been one of the best experiences of
my professional live and also the most insulting, degrading ones.
“The co-training experiences have been wonderful, and the professional colleagues I have
developed will continue to enrich me, but the TAC experience is disgraceful.
“The issue is that the TAC sees as its mandate to make sure a candidate can handle a hostile
classroom. So they act like a bunch of hostile children trying to upset their teacher. My
reaction to this situation would be the same as Mike Cohn’s or Ken’s – remove those students
from the class! But that was not an option in the TAC exam process and the TAC would
not/did not consider the ample evidence in my portfolio that I have handled many very difficult
professional environments, so they failed me on the basis that I did not handle the artificially
TAC-simulated difficult classroom to their satisfaction.
“The applicant before me came out of the `simulated CSM course´ literally shaking so hard I
thought he might collapse.”
— A CST Applicant (who is currently working as one of the world’s best CSTs)

37. G&C
A deeper issue
Scrum Certification and, to some degree,
Scrum itself, are American-centric
The Scrum Alliance recognizes this to the
extent it is rooted in language
We have to get beyond “changing the America
of work”
There is no culturally insensitive core worth
certifying

38. G&C
The Central Thesis
Learning is a change in behavior — not just knowledge
Certification tests mainly knowledge and comprehension,
and not application, analysis, or synthesis
The core of Scrum is Kaizen mind
Therefore, we need ongoing, continuous, re-certification
It must be done at the team level
It must be done in the team context, with team autonomy,
for the team’s sense of purpose

39. What do these companies
have in common?
Toyota
3M
General Electric
Proctor & Gamble

40. It’s about Kaizen mind,
not certification
Kaizen at the group level
No Kaizen without hansei — in the sense of
Japanese focusing on improving failure
This is the heart of Scrum: People, and Kaizen
Worrisome trends in Japanese management
towards valuing certification

41. Scrum...
Is about opennness, honesty and
transparency
... except anything related to certification

42. G&C
Part II: Scrum Knowsy®
A partnership between ScrumTide,
Ltd., and Innovation Games
One of the current top 2 initiatives of
Scrum Foundation
Available at:
http://playknowsy.com/a/scrumtide
See http://www.scrumknowsy.com

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47. G&C
We didn’t
know we
agree
We know we
agree
This is a mess
We know we
disagree
High internal alignment
Low external
alignment
High external
alignment
Low internal alignment

48. G&C
Ongoing self-
assessment...
Honors Autonomy
Causes Mastery ever to grow
Leads to a Transcendent Sense of Purpose
Recognizes Nurture over Nature or instruction
Challenging yourself under a Sensei

49. G&C
Conclusion
Certification does not predict future performance, so is
not part of an empirical Scrum framework
Certification provides no evidence that what Scrum
trainers are training is Scrum, or even that it is good
Certification does not implement approaches that
incent learning, especially in North American culture
What one learns for certification is a small fraction of
what underlies a successful Scrum

50. G&C
Conclusion
Intentional practice, group introspection, hansei and Kaizen
are the Scrum way
Good agile belongs more in the hands of the team than of the
trainer
Learning from failure, rather than one-time testing, is the
Japanese way
We can certify Kata; Scrum is fundamentally about kata
yaburi. To certify it is to destroy it
Japanese managers who insist on Scrum certification betray
Japanese culture

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53. G&C
Following slides are backup slides. They do
not need to be translated (but you can if you
think people would enjoy having the citations).

54. G&C
The American Occupational Therapy Association's certification
instruments, the Certification Examination for Occupational
Therapists Registered and the Field Work Performance Report,
were examined in terms of their ability to predict future job
performance and satisfaction of occupational therapists. A job
satisfaction questionnaire was administered to 208 occupational
therapists, and their supervisors rated them on a job
performance instrument. The resulting correlations between
these work adjustment variables and the previously administered
certification instruments failed to reveal any predictive ability.
Some plausible reasons for these negative results and possible
directions for further research into this professional screening
process were explored.

55. Does certification predict
performance?
“As has been demonstrated time and time again, there
is no evidence that teacher credentialing increases
student achievement. What the evidence suggests is
that teacher-certification requirements actually drive
potentially good teachers, especially individuals with
advanced subject-matter knowledge, out of the
teaching market.”
— Tim Keller, Institute for Justice, Tempe, AZ, The
Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2012, p A16

56. G&C
Other Nationalities
0 22.5 45 67.5 90 112.5
Yugoslavia
California
Australia
Estonia
Germany
Finland
Sweden
UK
Redmond