In 1986 two experts in management science, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published a paper in the Harvard Business Review titled “The New New Product Development Game”(Takeuchi & Ikujiro, 1986). The authors described how companies that develop new products successfully are doing so using methods that are considerably faster than traditional ones, comparing them to rugby teams – the entire team working together, passing the ball back and forth. They compared traditional approaches to relay races, where individual contributors do their part, then hand off the product to the next team.

Check out the original “The New New
Product Development Game” article from 1986

https://links.klose-coaching.com/newPDGame

The article noted that the following conditions were present in companies that operated in this way and that contributed to the development of highly successful products:

• Built in instability - an atmosphere of thinking outside the box
• Self organizing project teams - autonomy and self-accountability
• Overlapping development phases - collaboration between departments
• Multilearning - multiple, rich ways to learn from and about customer needs
• Subtle Control - keeping things on track without infringing on the team’s autonomy
• Organizational transfer of learning - intentional transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge 

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, both active in the software development industry, built on the concepts the article introduced and developed a framework that teams can use to deliver software. They called the framework Scrum and presented it at the 1995 Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) conference. At its core is a cross functional team that - just like a rugby team - passes the ball back and forth in a self-organized, non predictable way to ‘get the job done’.

Since then Scrum has gained global adoption and has both been integrated into several larger frameworks that allow for software delivery across an entire enterprise (scaling frameworks) and has been adopted for delivery of value other than software in various industries, including education, oil & gas, marketing, and many others.