Stepping out of Fear and into Possibility

Hi. Howard here.

I heard the best motto last week at Global Scrum Gathering Austin 2019: Fear is frozen fun. Turns out this saying has been around for a long time, but it was the first time I had heard it. So I had to stop and think about it for a moment or two, turning it over in my mind a bit. Fear. Frozen fun.

I know fear. Stepping out into a new vision for Scrum Alliance is scary—so scary that I feel at times as though I might just stop breathing. What if I can’t do this? What if this direction is wrong? What if … the questions wake me from sleep in the middle of the night and leave me tossing and turning. 

Yet this fear is oddly motivating. The great surfer Laird Hamilton was quoted as saying
“I tell people that they should get scared. It’s good for our systems. Our systems were designed to be under threat. Want to see an antelope run fast? Have it get chased by a cheetah."

Fear makes you see better, it makes you hear better, it makes you think better— once you’re used to harnessing it.”

So to combat the fear, I step into the fun—into the unknown and the possibilities. 

And we’re asking Scrum Alliance staff to step into the fun with us. We’re reorganizing the whole company as I write this, forming cross-functional teams that each serve a specific customer segment. This brilliant idea, proposed by my partner-in-fun Melissa Boggs, is designed in part to help us all focus more fully on delighting the customer. 

We’re also pushing the concept of team to new limits. When I say cross-functional, I mean it. We no longer have a marketing department, an events department, an IT department. Instead, every team has a mixture of people from every department. And we didn’t assign these teams, people self-selected a team. Talk about some fun!

The new teams are meeting to form charters, working agreements, and to just get to know one another. In another week or so, they’ll start sprinting. I can’t wait to see what kind of fun they get up to.

What about you? What kind of fun is waiting on the other side of your fear? There’s only one way to find out, my friends. Take a big step out of your comfort zone and try something you never imagined you could do. I’m having the ride of my life.

P.S. Special thanks to Kert Peterson (Chief Learning Officer, Applied Frameworks) for the breakfast chat and the links to these articles!

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