Scrum vs. Zen

When a thought comes up, do you translate that thought into action, or not? For this question, my friend Ed Blomquist recently presented this compelling juxtaposition: scrum vs. zen.

First, the framing. Ed and I both find our origins in the Greater Chicago area (the Pope, too; I will not tire of telling you). We both fit into a socioeconomic and cultural field that isn't all of the world. Ed has spent more years thinking about Zen than I have spent breathing. But I know that I am underqualified to talk about Zen. Scrum on the other hand, was the invention of my own corner of the culture-sphere.

Zen is a Mahayana Buddhist tradition that (in Wikipedia's own words): 

emphasizes meditation practice, direct insight into one's own Buddha nature (見性, Ch. jiànxìng, Jp. kenshō), and the personal expression of this insight in daily life for the benefit of others. Some Zen sources de-emphasize doctrinal study and traditional practices, favoring direct understanding through zazen and interaction with a master (Jp: rōshi, Ch: shīfu) who may be depicted as an iconoclastic and unconventional figure.

Whereas 

Scrum is an agile team collaboration framework commonly used in software development and other industries.

Scrum prescribes for teams to break work into goals to be completed within time-boxed iterations, called sprints. Each sprint is no longer than one month and commonly lasts two weeks. The scrum team assesses progress in time-boxed, stand-up meetings of up to 15 minutes, called daily scrums. At the end of the sprint, the team holds two further meetings: one sprint review to demonstrate the work for stakeholders and solicit feedback, and one internal sprint retrospective. A person in charge of a scrum team is typically called a scrum master.

(Weirdly, both concepts meet at the word "master." That's a deprecated term now, hmm?).

Sometimes, a thought comes up and I have to figure out what to do with that thought. Is that a thought to be translated into energetic action, or should that thought sit quietly? I’m not trying to create a plan for society, or manage a group of people: this is a personal-level essay. Actually, it’s about a scale smaller than the individual: what to do with a thought. Scrum and Zen can both be squished into a view on what to do with a thought. This squishing causes some distortion of the two concepts; both are truncated like how Procrustes cut or stretched his guests’ legs to fit the size of the bed he had.

I understand the Buddhist term yana to mean "vehicle". Scrum is a moving vehicle for thoughts. Scrum says "Let us transform this thought through action into an embodiment (in software), as rapidly as is humanly possible--actually a bit faster than is humanly possible if you please!" Zen probably says nothing -- gotcha! -- but the plan anyway is that you sit down and merely observe the thought (at certain stages of practice). The thought stays there as a thought, or maybe it blows on by like a cloud in the wind, and disappears into oblivion. In the Zen vehicle, ideally, one takes thought and ends with no-thought. Scrum sprints from here to there. Zen sits down and tries to disassemble the "here."

(When I was drafting this post in my head, I imagined Scrum and Zen as being participants in a cage fight. The referee would be Isaac Newton. Y'all have vivid imaginations and can expand that prompt if you want.)

I haven't read any books about scrum, but I've done it. I've held the weapon of scrum in my own hand, gone to battle and returned home victorious. Now, technically, "scrum" was a flash in the pan, a fad. People don't use that exact project management approach any more so much. The word "scrum" can now be sent back to rugby. But the attitude and posturing of hustle came before scrum and that attitude lives on after scrum. 

I use scrum here as a placeholder icon for the family of techniques that embody the energetic, constructive, problem-solving spirit. I've participated in all kinds of software engineering project management. Once, I even accidentally put on the hat of "deputy engineering program manager" (and we freakin' delivered on time).

On the other hand, I half-learned Zen through American authors, some of whom were only half serious. I thought I'd learn about Zen by reading the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" but it turns out that book was about western postmodernity and is explicitly not meant to explain Zen. But I also know about the kōan; maybe that book really is about Zen because it says it's not! (Send help!) Kōans appear in a few interesting places in my reading history, for example, in works by Hofstadter and Nachmanovitch. Now we have reached the entirely serious side. 

I studied Buddhism to some degree through the work of David Chapman and various podcasts -- although Chapman belongs to the Vajrayana branch of Mahayana rather than the Zen. I can't quite judge the importance of distinction, for lack of my knowledge of Zen. The two approaches have slightly different flavors to me: Zen seems more passive (in a way), more about clarity-within-paradox and more about emptiness specifically, while the Vajrayana in the general direction of David Chapman seems to emphasize action, vivid experience of life and the form-emptiness superposition. 

I realized that I learned about Zen from the first generation of Western Buddhist thinkers (Baby boomers) while I learned about Vajrayana from 2nd gen American Buddhists (Gen X). Perhaps there's a more nuanced Zen that incorporates rationality like Chapman's kind of Vajrayana. But I am wallowing in ignorance here, trying to keep my head above the LLM-quality-level-waterline: just barely keeping myself from intellectual drowning. 

So we have two different vehicles onto which we can place thoughts:

• Scrum, the race car, designed for real-world optimal efficiency of teams with focused goals. Involves a Scrum master. The idea arose in my own lifetime and was a temporary fad. People still hustle, but under different banners.

• Zen, the car that's parked in the grass and doesn't have an ignition (by design). Aims at seeing the real world. Also involves masters. The idea arose like more than a thousand years ago and shows no signs of aging.

Now the meta-systematic approach says: choose wisely.

• Sometimes an energetic idea needs to go on the scrum-yana to rise from concept to implementation in a zealous fury. 

• Other times, the idea wants to come out, but actually needs to go sit down and get Zen-blanked out. 

• Or maybe the idea is quiet in your head, ashamed and wants to just disappear -- but actually should be given a bright red banner to charge the cannons on the angry stallion of scrum. 

• And in the fourth quadrant of the 2x2, we have the quiet idea that wants to vanish and should. But I don't know exactly what Zen will do to that idea that wants to vanish. The Zen path for a quiet idea could be surprising.

These vehicles are not quite about thoughts though; I forced that reduction onto them. And they're not on equal footing. Scrum is just about software development. Zen is vast and ineffable, with some properties of religion, and has the potential for broad impact on all aspects of life. Each path transforms the materials at hand; each path transforms the self.  

Where do you want to go today?

Progress as lines vs. progress as spirals

Physical exercising, say strength training, will see rapid gains at the start then less as time goes on. But also, you get sick one day and can't do as much, or you get very sick and stop working out for a couple weeks and you have to build up again.

Some progress is linear. Some progress is like a spiral, in that it cycles back around on itself.

The line and the cycle meet in the helix. Take two helixes, add cross-links and you've got the structure of DNA. But a DNA molecule could be all curled up in a bundly mess or it could be stretched out in an astronomically long line. 

(How does the fact go? If you stretched out all the DNA in your body, it would be longer than from the couch to the TV? Or longer than you'd want to walk on Sunday afternoon? Or maybe it's longer than the typical North American would be willing to drive in 24 hours? Or was it from Earth to the Moon? Or was it 160 lightyears?)

The higher-order spiral-linear helical progress could itself be more line-like or more spiral-like.

Ambition can be a distant point in space (160 lightyears, the Moon, a Sunday afternoon walk) which demands linear progress. What is the ambition of cyclic progress? Perhaps it's an attitude: Every day that I'm well enough, I do strength training. Or: the goal of the game is to keep playing.

In the socio-political world of progress, if you gain respect, that's nice -- or perhaps desperately necessary -- but a more lasting change for you would be for you to gain power. In utopia, no one would be subject to insults (say); we would all have respect. But a utopia would be fragile indeed if half the people had no power. (Isn't it convenient that women already have the right to vote in the USA and isn't it confusing that women aren't now equally represented in government.) Diffusion of power would represent linear progress to me, while shifting around who gets respect seems more like a cyclical process.

Part of the frustration that I find with progress of all sorts is when it's cyclical but I want it to be linear. Some part of me wishes that my muscles would gain a tiny bit of strength every day in some unending line. But what I'm wrestling with here is a fundamental part of the human condition and a fundamental aspect of this everchanging reality. 

Failing the linear progress possible with artificially straight paved roads and gasoline engines (pay no attention to the emissions behind the curtain), I suppose it's a blessing to have progress in any shape at all.

Hope 2.0

Here in 2025, there's no shortage of big problems floating around. Newspapers make sure that you're fully aware of any existing or new problems (they capitalize on outrage and despair). You also have a bundle of your own local & individual problems!

If one looks around and thinks about the future, it's somewhat natural to be hopeless.

But when I examine that hopelessness, both in myself and in others, I am starting to wonder if my concept of hope requires some re-shaping. 

I suggest a model of hope that is discipline-based. Here's more:

One. What is the shape of hope that I had before?

• Hope is an internal response to external circumstances.
• Hope is built on what I can see, mostly -- hope is based on the extrapolation from the current circumstances to future ones.
• In my specific case, hope is a virtue that was imported from my old Christianity without being revised for my new mostly-rationalist humanist meaningness outlook.
• Hope is a campfire on the hill that can be extinguished if the wind blows hard enough.

The above definition of hope needs to be upgraded! Because it's not delivering the goods.

Two. What new shape is desirable for hope going forward?

• Hope is a chosen attitude to orient oneself toward positive action and lucky opportunity.
• Hope is an act of the will regardless of the external, present circumstances.
• Hope is entirely a human concept, without reference to heaven / God / whatever.
• Hope is a mechanically powered flashlight that only goes out if the user stops exerting effort.

Ok what does this new approach to hope mean?

At first, hope is gonna seem a lot harder suddenly. If there's not too much wind, a campfire on the hill will sustain itself and even grow without much effort on your part. But that shake-powered flashlight will be dim until you charge up the battery.

This upgraded hope is like running: it's gonna be difficult and painful and requires extreme discipline. A hope married to courage. Each day, I gotta decide: am I hopin' today? And I gotta say yes, even if it's difficult. (Just do it? Maybe you need to buy a new pair of training shoes? Whatever helps!!) With practice, hope 2.0 will become more natural.

The potential payoff is great: hope in the darkest, scariest circumstances is redeemed.

Whether this is encouraging or discouraging -- well that's up to you!

Comments on Color

Recently, I read this piece "Why Is the World Losing Color?" The thesis is that people who use color are using more shades of gray and fewer vibrant reds, yellows, greens and purples. What the body of the essay doesn't say, but the graphs maybe do say, is that blue is on the rise again after a recent pinch.

Pink drama

My first thought when I read the article was, “Yes, good!" This is the true aesthetic: grays, a blue hint, and generally desaturated. But then I realized that my own aesthetic conception was, in fact, me following the crowd.

The Gray Chapter

After receiving a swag shirt from work that is a wonderful, vibrant purple, I had determined that the astral color of 2025 was to be purple. And so, in fact, it has been.*

2025 astral purple, disguised as a flower

* This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.

After quite a bit of focus on hearing, sound and music (say, 2000-2023) I feel like my attention has shifted -- no, not shifted -- broadened to include more of the visual. After getting an APS-C digital camera, the latent became actual and I have been teaching myself to be a photographer. And a videographer. And in the Wizard Peter act, a generative artist.

Oh, give me green

Color has become much more important to me. And the digital visual art has fed back into my perception. I think of photography and my camera as teaching me to see. To see in different ways, to shift my perspective (geometrically) and alter my sense of color qualia. To really open my brain to know what my eyes are seeing, which I actually find quite difficult.

I have consciously been chasing a “taste” in my photography. And it's born in a similar place to my writing on izzzzi, which has expanded to a series of recent posts here -- the germ of a thesis that I am different and that I have a distinct and valuable perspective. (In the trivial case, my perspective is valuable to me. (And, darn it to the (red (and yellow)) fiery hell that Dante wrote of, that's enough!))

Red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me

So I chase some elusive and developing aesthetic in my photography, videomaking and generative art. Photography is really the parent of the other two, the more basic art form, upstream in the evolutionary family tree. Not really, but that's a helpful simplification for my purposes here. The still photograph has elements of composition and perspective; it is the raw geometry of a three-dimensional world projected into a finite, two-dimensional rectangle.

Composition and perspective are decoupled from color enough that one might accidentally slide into some Platonic declamation that the monochrome photograph is sufficient to capture form. But that's not quite it. The same photograph may be well-balanced in its color form, while being a chaotic mess in black-and-white, or vice versa.

Beauty in form

I have no illusion that the taste that I'm chasing is somehow novel in the scheme of humanity. And I'm not really trying to push any artistic boundaries per se. But having chased novelty and global-to-humanity boundaries in other domains, I come to these newer-to-me art forms with a quiet confidence that my distinct perspective (and a righteous soul*) is enough. 

* This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.

Color has the thrilling property of simultaneously seeming to be entirely objective, while in fact being irreducibly subjective in some sense. No one has been able to fly a thought-spaceship out of the event horizon of the thought-blackhole of whether or not you and I experience the same thing when we both look up at the blue sky: is my "blue" the same qualia as your "blue"? 

True blue

Probably there's a strong argument to be made for the case that most people all perceive the same colors in the same way based on our brains all being similar and black-box observations of our color perceptions are usually close. But other species have photoreceptors for infrared and ultraviolet and surely their inner experience of light with a dominant wavelength of 625-750nm is not isomorphic to what we call “red.” The experience of redness is intrinsically limited to beings with certain kinds of eyes and certain kinds of brains.

And there’s a wide range of variation in eyes and brains, even among humans. So the joys of color perception and color harmony are mine. Not mine alone, but perhaps little aspects are special to me, or at least unusual.

All-natural color wheel

But at this point, do I fly at this article with guns blazing, either in favor of vibrant hues, or perhaps in alliance with the Almighty Grayscale army? I don't know. This question is a bit too generic anyway; different situations call for different palettes. But at least, I can have the cultural-situational awareness that I'm playing tag with the zeitgeist when I dial back the saturation slider.

Perception, Anxiety and Noise, for me

When I was younger and more ignorant, I had the impression that Platonically-ideal perception was possible. For example, I had the impression that I heard what was exact reality. But also, from my teens on, I was deeply disturbed by tinnitus and a condition they called “hyperacusis,” that is, pain caused by sounds. Paradoxically, I was also deeply into music and music making. I have much more peace about this bizarre dilemma now, having learned much in the past decades about my perception, the noise therein and the anxious feelings that certain sensations seem to cause.

Once I read someone describe hyperacusis as a not-real condition. Noise in perception seems to me like a confused, torrential mixture of real and non-real, to the point that a clear distinction may not be entirely possible. But for the feelings of pain that sound could provoke, perhaps hyperacusis was a placeholder term to tide me over the quarter-century before I would learn a more subtle, accurate description of my perceptual experiences. Somewhere in between pain caused by loud sounds (hyperacusis) and emotionally-neutral hearing lies misophonia, a concept that I recently learned from Scott Alexander. Scott describes misophonia as belonging to the world of mental health rather than a medical issue with the sense of hearing. Perhaps if misophonia had been an idea within reach in my teens, I would have taken on that label instead of "hyperacusis." But neither hyperacusis nor misophonia exactly describe my relationship with sound, although both are helpful categories.

For a long while, my tinnitus was bothersome to the point of provoking anxiety. The noise in my ears was a near-constant suggestion that my hearing was broken somehow. When I was in my 20s, I got a hearing test which revealed a dip in my right ear’s frequency response around 6 kHz. This dip served as “objective confirmation” for my fears. As the years unfolded, my relationship with anxiety broadened and deepened, in the sense of facing more distress, but I also began reaching better states of peace with a variety of causes of distress. Later hearing tests continued to show no significant hearing impairment, but still the right-side 6 kHz dip. Now I see the dip as a benign non-standard feature of Peter the human, like the congenital funny bumps on my skin on the inside of my right wrist.

Comment from Hacker News:

there is a weird 'information hazard' component to tinnitus. It's like losing 'the game'.

“The game” in this context refers to a juvenile social game where one loses the game if one thinks about the game. The more I thought about tinnitus, the more I gave in to sound-aversion / hyperacusis and hid in a quiet room with foam earplugs in, the more distressed I felt. If I relax and ignore the constant sound in my ears, then the anxiety loses its power. Perception, meaning and emotion dance together; they have no fixed, definite or unchangeable relationship.

I think my hyperacusis was disassembled in part by me detangling the many various sensations of pain in and near my ears. Having foam earplugs in my ears for long enough causes my ear canals to ache (this is so so so bitterly ironic!). Earplug-ache is not the same as pain caused by my unprotected ears hearing too loud a sound (whatever exactly that smorgasbord of sensation is for me). Having over-ear headphones or earmuffs on can eventually cause the area around my ears to ache, or, depending on the design and fit of the headphones / earmuffs, the outer ears (the pinnae) can also be sore. Different designs of earplug / headphone are possible and each design has a different comfort profile over time. And none of this has anything to do with sound per se, it’s all to do with my touch-sensations in and around my ears. 

Defense against sound does have a practical aspect. Damage to the hearing system is a real possibility. I maxed out the practical defense side. I have earplugs that are custom molded to fit my ear canals and acoustically designed for flat frequency response (“musician’s earplugs”). I have three different sets of noise cancelling headphones that I use on trains / planes / wherever. I have earmuffs for use with power tools. My smartwatch has a sound level meter. I avoid loud concerts — this one has come at a high cost to me, though. My sound aversion also stopped me from participating in playing loud music. Perhaps I could have joined a rock band as a teen instead of hiding in my bedroom with earplugs in! This is one of my great regrets in life, but when I’m a bit more gentle with myself, I see a self that is simply cut from different cloth. I was not meant to be a guitarist in a touring rock band, for some non-theistic value of the word “meant.” 

The COVID pandemic lockdowns was also an interesting natural experiment for me + loud sounds. I stopped being around PA systems, airplane noise, crowd noise, etc. for a long period of time, giving me an opportunity to “reset” my relationship with loud sound. This actually granted a new positive emotional valence to the social event with loud music. Many things rapidly changed at once, but one happy change that has lasted is that I am less reactive to loud sounds now than I was before the pandemic.

Meditation on sound has been helpful for my decoupling perceptions of sound with emotion. The meditation instruction to listen without judging or creating meaning has been helpful for me to be less reactive to unpleasant sound, both from the external environment and the tinnitus that I perceive as being from within me. The therapy work that I have done starting with meanings and emotional triggers has made me realize that some sounds are bothersome because of what they mean rather than what they sound like. For example, if I hear a child yelling, that’s not necessarily bothersome, but if I hear the same yell from my own child, then that same sound has much more power. In some ways, this is a trivial conclusion: the gunshot sounds in a movie are fun, but a gunshot sound from the street in front of your house is literally an emergency. But many sounds are both bothersome to me in the realm of perception and in the realm of meaning. The yelling child sound is pretty annoying, even if it came from a speaker during a movie (I would turn the volume down).

Detangling perception, meaning and emotion for sounds has been helpful to me. Meditation has been one avenue and emotion-meaning work has been another. Now, I have started to notice the subtleties of my perception of sound in a more finely grained way. Another strange perceptual quirk has entered my awareness. Certain sounds, especially the loud, transient sounds with sudden onsets seem to provoke touch / proprioceptive-like sensations. Some sounds hit me, but not like being punched with a fist, more like crashing my torso into a gym mat. What is this? Am I reflexively tensing collections of muscles when I hear certain sounds? Do I actually have sound-to-touch synesthesia? Am I actually noticing something that is common to many people’s experience, but they usually ignore (as is the case, I think, for tinnitus and noise in the visual system)? Perhaps this bodily sensation is connected to my experiences earlier in life that I called “hyperacusis”, which is pain caused by sound. 

Back to noise: I hear stuff in silent rooms. I also see dynamic textures in perfectly flat colors. I see colors and textures when my eyes are shut in a dark room. Some of the noise that I see is actually myself: for example, the white blood cells wandering through the capillaries in eyeballs. I’ve heard that some kinds of tinnitus are actually the ear hearing the body, perhaps even the sounds caused by neural activity. 

The noise in my visual system never bothered me as much as my tinnitus. I wonder why the hearing-modality noise bothered me so much while the sight-modality noise didn’t. I care a lot about both senses, although hearing has always been my favorite. I think it’s because I developed a cycle of fixation and anxiety about tinnitus (and I noticed the tinnitus first). But my default-state equanimity about my visual perception noise actually gives me courageous motivation to chill out about tinnitus. 

For a while, I had recurring “referred pain” sensations in my wrists and hands. (Fortunately a skilled physiotherapist managed to fix this.) The referred pain caused a lot of anxiety, while it was there, 2012-2019, but for a long time I hovered between catastrophizing that it would end my career and delaying doing anything about it. The referred pain was really in my body and not only my mind, at least I think so, because it got better with treatment focused primarily on the body. The referred pain was so full of noise that it couldn’t quite be pinpointed exactly where it hurt. At one point, I was trying to communicate my pain to a doctor, so I put a dot on each point that hurt with a marker. The dots were all over my hands, never in exactly the same place twice.

I don’t get phantom smells, and I often have the experience of “not smelling anything right now.” Side note: I did lose my sense of smell, twice, during the same episode of having COVID. And, my mother is anosmic: she cannot smell. She can taste just fine -- a difficulty for uneducated theorists of the senses. I am glad to be able to smell. Maybe if I worked harder at smelling, I would start noticing the noise of smell perception; I assume noise is like certain views of God in that it is omnipresent.

I find the philosophical need to reject the Platonic ideals in their more conventional forms. When I was in college, I tried to shock people by saying that I didn’t believe in numbers. Now, I try not to wallow in that thought-blackhole: whether or not numbers are “real” is not a question that I can help answer and the result makes no difference to me. But whether or not I am constantly and vividly hallucinating a haze of unreal perceptions seems a lot more important! “Hallucination” carries a strong negative valence. But it’s also the wrong description, in my case. Even the most vivid of migraine auras and the loudest ear-ringing are clearly distinguishable as not-real for me. Instead, what I think I’m perceiving is a signal from reality plus sensory self-noise.

Reality doesn’t come as a convenient mixture of signal plus noise. (No Platonic ideals!) Even the current through a conductor has some intrinsic noise due to the thermal motion of the electrons. Noise is part of reality. I’m part of reality. And noise is part of me. I’m part of the noise. I am noise (partially). And there’s no reason to be concerned about that. 

Why am I writing this essay? Surely, my perception, my experience of the world is actually different to the bulk of humanity. The so-called-real and the so-called-not-real tango in my perception, hopefully guiding me to wise action and happiness, but there are no guarantees.