Origin of Scrum

⏱ 4 min  ·  📅 2026

The term scrum and the working model it designates were identified and named by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi in 1986, while analyzing how the leading technology manufacturing companies of the time developed new products. The authors compared the way of moving forward as a team that they observed—overlapping, self-managing, and oriented toward a shared goal—with the forward movement of a scrum formation in rugby, and the term was coined.

Although the model emerged in companies making technology hardware products, it is suitable for any project with unstable requirements that demands speed and flexibility, situations that are especially common in software development.

From observation to formal framework

Nonaka and Takeuchi's work described behavior patterns in high-performing teams, but did not prescribe a specific method. The formalization of Scrum as a framework of rules for software development came later, through two professionals who applied those principles in their own projects:

• Ken Schwaber used Scrum principles in the development of Delphi and presented them publicly in 1995 at the OOPSLA conference ("Object-Oriented Programming Systems & Applications"), under the name "Scrum Development Process".
• Jeff Sutherland applied the same approach in parallel at Easel Corporation, a company that would later become part of VMARK, Informix, and finally Ascential Software Corporation.

Together, they formalized the framework we know today as Scrum, which the Scrum Guide documents and continuously updates.

Characteristics That Defined the Original Model

Nonaka and Takeuchi's study identified three distinctive traits in the best-performing teams:

• Incremental strategy: the product is not planned and executed all at once; instead, it is built and delivered in successive increments.
• Tacit knowledge over processes: the quality of the result depends more on the knowledge and collaboration of people in self-organizing teams than on the rigor of the processes used.
• Overlapping phases: instead of sequential cycles in which each phase waits for the previous one to finish, analysis, design, development, and testing activities are carried out concurrently.

These three traits remain the structural principles of Scrum today.

Scrum and AI

The model that Nonaka and Takeuchi described in 1986—self-managing teams, rapid learning, continuous adaptation—is especially well suited to the current context of development with generative AI, where uncertainty about the product's behavior is inherent and requirements evolve as the team learns how the model behaves. The principles behind the origin of Scrum have not aged: they still describe the conditions that enable good work in highly uncertain environments.

Resources

📚 Wicked Problems, Righteous SolutionsNotes · Scrum Manager

References

• Takeuchi, Hirotaka; Nonaka, Ikujiro. (1986). "The New New Product Development Game". Harvard Business Review, January-February 1986.

See also

New New Product Development Game Scrum Field Standard Scrum: Components and Framework Introduction to Scrum Scrum Adoptions: Technical and Advanced The Agile Manifesto

Want to advance in agility? You can search for course and exam calls, or go at your own pace by becoming a member of the Agile Club. This membership includes exclusive resources, e-learning classrooms, and access to Skill Arena: a space to practice and measure your agile skills at your own pace.

Search calls

Agile Club