What can I say… I love both Scrum and Chess … I can draw parallelism between these two in terms of my state of consciousness when I am scrimmaging with teams or playing tournament chess.
For both, I always achieve a state of ‘flow’ … which has the following characteristics:
- I am working to accomplish clear tactical and strategic goals
- I get immediate feedback
- I must use significant skills to achieve my goals
- I am in control of my work and game and I have in my power to accomplish my goals
- I can concentrate on my goals
- I become deeply involved in my work and game
- I focus on work and game and lose concern for myself
- I experience altered sense of time
- I consistently produce at high levels of accomplishment
Scrum and Chess demand total concentrated effort on the work and game on hand hence the resulting state of flow on the developers and players respectively.