Hello Reader,

The executive team agrees: the Q4 strategy is solid. Everyone nods. The plan gets approved. Three months later, the market has shifted, and your assumptions were wrong. No one wants to admit they saw the warning signs but stayed quiet because the group had already made up its mind.

You didn't fail because of bad people. You failed because agreement felt safer than reality-testing.

Enter Scrum: a two-week work cycle with four mandatory checkpoints: Sprint Planning (commit to specific outcomes), Daily Standup (surface blockers in 15 minutes), Sprint Review (show working product to users), and Retrospective (examine what you got wrong). Most people reduce it to standups and sticky notes. It's actually a forcing function that makes teams test their assumptions against reality every 10 working days.

Teams are especially vulnerable to groupthink. Scrum builds deliberate skepticism into how you operate. You can't hide behind comfort when reality shows up twice a month.

This mental model is part of Re:Mind, a toolkit of thinking frameworks that help you cut through noise and manipulation.

Why Use It

Teams default to pretending they know more than they do. Someone proposes a plan, and everyone nods; suddenly, the plan becomes "the strategy." Scrum interrupts this by building four ceremonies into every work cycle that force assumptions into the light:

• Sprint Planning locks the team into a short cycle (1-4 weeks) where you commit to specific outcomes. You can't hide behind "eventually." You have to choose what matters most right now.
• Daily Standups surface blockers and misalignments before they compound. Problems that would have remained hidden for weeks are exposed in 15 minutes.
• Sprint Reviews put the working product in front of users. Reality gets a vote, not just your team's consensus.
• Sprint Retrospectives examine how the team thinks and works. You're not just building a product; you're building a better thinking system.

Without these structures, teams confuse activity with learning, consensus with correctness, and confidence with competence.

When to Use It

Use this model when your team is operating in genuine uncertainty:

• When building something new
• Where user needs aren't fully understood yet
• When everyone agrees on the plan, but no one can articulate what could go wrong
• When the team defends the roadmap more fiercely than questioning it
• When you keep being surprised by what you didn't see coming

This model is most powerful when your team needs to build conclusions on evidence, rather than assumptions inherited from whoever spoke most confidently.

How to Use It

In The Martian, Mark Watney survives Mars by working in short cycles. He doesn't plan his entire rescue; he can't. Instead, he solves the most critical problem in front of him, tests his solution against brutal reality, learns from what breaks, and adjusts. His survival depends on treating every assumption as temporary.

Scrum operates similarly, but for teams. Here's the ceremony stack:

• Sprint Planning (2 hours for a 2-week sprint): Gather the team. Review what you learned last sprint. Pick the highest-priority work you'll complete in the next two weeks. Make it specific: not "improve the dashboard" but "ship filterable date ranges and test with 10 users." Commit publicly. The constraint forces real prioritization.
• Daily Standup (15 minutes, every morning): Stand up. Each person answers three questions: What did I complete yesterday? What am I working on today? What's blocking me? No discussion—just information. If something needs deeper conversation, schedule it after. This surfaces misalignment and blockers before they metastasize.
• Sprint Review (1 hour): Demonstrate working product to users or stakeholders. Not slides. Not mockups. Actual functionality they can interact with. Watch what they do, not what they say. Gather evidence on whether your assumptions were correct. Adjust the backlog based on what you learned.
• Sprint Retrospective (45 minutes): Ask three questions as a team: What helped us think clearly this sprint? What created blind spots? What will we change next sprint? Write answers on a board. Pick one concrete change to implement. The team that improves its cognitive process compounds that advantage over time.

Repeat every two weeks. The cadence is the point.

Next Steps

In your next team meeting, commit to one two-week sprint. At the end, hold a 15-minute retrospective and ask: "What did reality teach us that contradicted our assumptions?" The discomfort you feel naming those gaps is the illusion of certainty breaking down.

Where It Came From

Jeff Sutherland developed Scrum in the early 1990s while working on software projects that kept failing under traditional "plan everything upfront" management. He drew from empirical process control (a manufacturing concept), research on high-performing teams, and his experience as a fighter pilot where survival depended on rapid adaptation to incomplete information. The framework was formalized in 1995 and has since been adopted by thousands of teams—anywhere groups need to navigate complex problems.

Thinking clearly as a team means building systems that reveal your wrong assumptions before they become catastrophic failures.

Until next time, keep questioning. Your mind is the last territory you truly control.

Think Independently, JC

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