Olivia: A massive study of corporate projects found that 64% of features—things people spent months, even years, building—are rarely or never used. Think about that. Most of the work happening in offices right now is functionally useless. What if you could stop doing it? Jackson: That is… profoundly depressing. So you’re telling me that statistically, two-thirds of my hypothetical career could be a complete and utter waste of time? That’s my takeaway from a Tuesday morning? Olivia: That’s the grim reality for a lot of organizations. And that’s the exact problem J.J. Sutherland tackles head-on in The Scrum Fieldbook: Faster performance. Better results. Starting now. Jackson: I’ve heard the name Sutherland in this context before. Is there a connection? Olivia: A big one. He’s the son of Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of the Scrum framework. But what makes this book so compelling is that J.J. isn't just a theorist riding on his father's coattails. He’s a former war correspondent who has spent years in the trenches, applying these ideas everywhere from 3M and Toyota to U.S. Navy Special Forces. He’s seen it work in the most high-stakes environments imaginable. Jackson: Okay, that background gets my attention. A war correspondent’s guide to project management. So how does one even begin to figure out which 64% of their work is useless? In most companies, everything is labeled 'top priority.' Olivia: Ah, you've just hit on the first great illusion of modern work. The difference between being busy and being done.

Jackson: Right. Everyone I know is 'busy.' Their calendars are a nightmare, they’re in back-to-back meetings, they’re juggling a dozen projects. But if I ask them what they actually finished last week, I get a lot of blank stares. Olivia: Exactly. Sutherland calls this the trap of focusing on outputs instead of outcomes. Outputs are the meetings, the reports, the emails—the flurry of activity. Outcomes are the finished, valuable things that actually move the needle. He tells this incredible story about a global materials company he consulted for. They were a major player, but they were getting crushed by smaller, faster competitors. Jackson: Let me guess, their solution was to work harder and have more meetings? Olivia: You’re not wrong. Their R&D lab was a perfect example of the problem. The leadership was panicking, so they had their brilliant scientists working on over a hundred different projects simultaneously. Jackson: A hundred? How is that even possible? Olivia: It wasn’t. The scientists were stretched so thin, pulled from one 'urgent' task to another, that nothing was ever getting finished. They were perpetually busy, but they weren't delivering any new products. Meanwhile, the 'fast followers' were reverse-engineering their old products and eating their lunch. Jackson: That sounds like my personal nightmare. So what did Sutherland’s team do? Come in with some complex new software? Olivia: Something much simpler, and much more painful. The consultant, Steve Daukas, had the lab leadership write every single project on a Post-it note and stick it on a giant wall. Then he asked them to put the names of the scientists working on each one. The visual was horrifying. They saw immediately that they had enough people to maybe, maybe do ten or twelve of those projects well. Jackson: Oh, I can feel the tension in that room. I bet you could hear a pin drop. So they had to choose. Olivia: They had to choose. They had to make the brutal, agonizing decision to kill nearly 90% of their active projects. They had to say 'no.' And that’s a word that most corporate cultures are allergic to. Jackson: That’s an understatement. Saying 'no' to a project someone higher up loves feels like career suicide. How did they even get the leadership to agree? Olivia: Because the alternative was to continue failing. Scrum, at its heart, is a framework that forces these brutally honest conversations. It makes the cost of 'busyness' visible. Once they narrowed their focus to just twelve projects, they created a clear, prioritized list—a Product Backlog. The scientists self-organized into teams, and for the first time, they had a single, clear goal for each work cycle, or 'Sprint.' Jackson: So it’s like corporate Marie Kondo. 'Does this project spark revenue?' No? Thank you, next. Olivia: That's a perfect way to put it! And the results were staggering. The lab doubled its productivity. Their average development time for a new product went from two and a half years down to six weeks. They were launching products with customers already lined up to buy them. They stopped being busy and started getting things done. Jackson: Six weeks from two and a half years. That’s not just an improvement; that’s a different reality. It feels like the problem wasn't the scientists' talent, but the entire system they were trapped in. Olivia: Precisely. And that process of choosing what not to do reveals the deeper truth of the book: the system you work in determines your results. Which brings us to this radical idea that structure is culture.

Jackson: Okay, 'structure is culture.' That sounds like something you’d see on a motivational poster, but what does it actually mean in practice? Olivia: It means your org chart, your approval processes, your meeting rules—all that boring stuff—isn't just bureaucracy. It's the source code for your company's behavior. To make it real, Sutherland tells a story that has nothing to do with tech. It’s about a Tuscan restaurant in London called Riccardo's. Jackson: A restaurant? I love this. Finally, an agile example I can sink my teeth into. Olivia: The owner, Riccardo, was fed up with the traditional, high-stress, hierarchical kitchen model. He felt it stifled creativity and burned people out. So, after learning about Scrum, he did something wild. He eliminated all the manager roles. The head chef, the maître d'—gone. Everyone, from the cooks to the waiters, became a single team. Jackson: Hold on. No managers? Who makes decisions? Who does the scheduling? That sounds like chaos. Olivia: That’s what you’d think! But they used the Scrum framework to create a new structure. For scheduling, instead of a manager spending hours on the phone, they put a giant chart on the wall showing all the shifts for the week. They gave each employee Post-it notes representing their available shifts and said, "You're all part-owners now. Figure it out." Jackson: And what happened? Olivia: The team filled out the entire schedule in an hour. But more importantly, they discovered they had a bunch of leftover Post-its. They realized the old managers had been over-staffing shifts to keep people happy, which was costing the business a fortune. Because the team was now empowered and had a stake in the profits, they self-corrected the problem in two weeks. The time it took to resolve customer issues dropped by 70%. Jackson: Wow. So by changing the structure of how scheduling was done—from a top-down decision to a transparent team activity—they changed the culture from one of just showing up to one of shared ownership. Olivia: Exactly! And this scales up. There's a concept from the 1960s called Conway's Law, which basically states that any system a company designs will be a copy of its own communication structure. Jackson: Wait, so the messy, bug-filled software my old company made was a direct reflection of our chaotic, siloed departments? That's... disturbingly accurate. Olivia: It's almost always true. And Sutherland gives the ultimate example: the Swedish company Saab, which builds the Gripen fighter jet. In the 1980s, planes were built as one tightly-coupled machine. Upgrading one part, like the radar, meant redesigning half the plane. It was slow and incredibly expensive. Jackson: A classic waterfall approach, just with jet fuel. Olivia: Right. So when they designed the new Gripen E, they used Scrum principles. They broke their organization into modular, cross-functional teams—avionics, weapons, fuselage. And because the teams were modular, the plane they built was modular. They call it a 'smart fighter,' built like Lego. They can now plug-and-play new technologies—a new sensor, a new missile system—without rebuilding the whole jet. They built a structure that embraces change. Jackson: A restaurant and a fighter jet, governed by the same principle. That’s incredible. You’re changing the rules of the game, not just trying to make the players run faster. Olivia: That’s the core insight. You can’t just tell people to be more innovative or collaborative. You have to build a system where that's the natural way to behave.

Jackson: So, if I'm boiling this down, it feels like it’s not about working harder or having more meetings. It's about two things. First, ruthlessly defining what 'done' actually means and having the courage to kill everything else. And second, architecting your teams and rules so that doing the right thing becomes the path of least resistance. Olivia: That's a perfect synthesis. The book is widely acclaimed for these practical, field-tested insights, but some critics do point out that it can feel like a 'Scrum-is-the-answer-to-everything' narrative. And of course, no framework is a silver bullet. Jackson: Right, you can't just put up a board with Post-it notes and expect magic to happen if the underlying culture is toxic or leadership isn't on board. Olivia: Absolutely. The framework doesn't solve your problems; it just makes them painfully, undeniably visible. It holds up a mirror. But the book's ultimate message is that the system isn't fixed. You can redesign it. Sutherland quotes his father's critical insight after seeing massive government projects fail: 'It wasn’t the people who failed, it was the system.' Jackson: That’s such a powerful reframe. It shifts the focus from blame to problem-solving. Olivia: It does. So the one thing to take away from our talk today is to look at a frustrating process at work this week—a slow approval, a pointless recurring meeting, a project that never ends—and ask not 'who is to blame for this?' but 'what broken rule in our system creates this outcome?' Jackson: That’s a question that could spark a revolution. Or at least a much better Monday. We'd love to hear about the 'broken rules' you see every day. Find us on our socials and share one. You'll probably find you're not alone. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.