Scrum Values are Not Unique to Scrum
Scrum values are not unique to Scrum. The five values, i.e. courage, focus, commitment, respect, and openness, is not something that Scrum brought into our world. Those values are already there, albeit implicity, in the Principles of the Agile Manifesto created in 2001; more than 10 years before they were introduced in the Scrum Guide.
Looking at the fact that the Agile Manifesto was created by practitioners with years of experience, that also means that those values are already there even before the creation of the Manifesto itself. That’s because the Manifesto is simply an attempt to explicitly state what’s really important in software development. They were not novel, they just needed to be highlighted; big time.
That being said, every single method that claims to be Agile should have those values as the foundation of their practice, whether explicitly or implicitly. As with Scrum, Extreme Programming is on the explicit side. It has them in its statement of The Values of Extreme Programming. The wordings and definition might be different than those in Scrum Values, but I believe the intention remains the same. Kanban is on the implicit side. You can’t “see” those values, but it’s there. I also believe the same thing applies to the other 38 Agile methods (or more).
Courage, commitment, focus, openness, and respect (in short: CC4) has an even broader use than just Agile. They are required to make anything work, even in Waterfall. We need CC4 to optimize our work. We need CC4 to maximize the result of our work. We also need CC4 to create a healthy working environment. It is simply unfortunate that Waterfall is inherently unable to provide those values in its practice.
Those values are only unique to a method, any method, that actually works and creates a healthy working environment in the process.
The founder of Scrum Framework, seeing how important those values are, did a good job in making it explicit in the Scrum Guide. It is unique because of the Scrum context added in the definition of those values. Other than that, it should be safe to say that CC4, i.e. courage, commitment, focus, openness, and respect are relevant a lot more that just Scrum, or even Agile. Those values are only unique to a method, any method, that actually works and creates a healthy working environment in the process.
