Why we do things in Scrum

We do daily scrums by answering the three questions.
We give a only a demo in the review.
We skip retrospective.
Planning is distributing tasks
But we do Scrum.

That is not Scrum, that is doing what we do in another form. For me the basis are the three pillars: transparency, inspection and adaption. Every event in Scrum is based on these pillars. 

Take the standup for instance, it is transparent because everybody is welcome to attend and the work progress is made visible. It is a moment to inspect the work for that day and come up with a plan to deliver stuff. It is a moment to adapt the way we are organized to get things done. 
I can't withstand those annoying questions: what did you do, what are you going to to and do you have impediments. The result is somewhat in the area of: "I did x yesterday, didn't finish so I continue on x today and I need to visit the dentist". We are not interested in your status or your agenda. At a standup we are inspecting if we get work done. Nothing about the individual, all about the team. So stop with those questions! One approach you can use is to talk about the work items on the board. Go from almost done in the top right corner, to stuff that can be started in the bottom left. Ask yourselves: what do we need today to get the top story in the done state. Don't make it individual work, but group up to finish the work. Find a way to finish it, then move to the next item on the list until you run out of team members. The work on the top is the most important, so it is also very important to finish it first.

Next on the agenda is the review. A review is a key moment to talk to the stakeholders, inspect the work that has been done, agree on the next goals. You can do a demo if it adds to the experience of the stakeholder. But most important is that you talk about what needs to be done and what you need from each other. Offer insights in work, show metrics, ask what the stakeholder needs and measure. Become predictable. Stakeholders don't need status updates or reports, they want to be involved and this is the moment to do that.

Then comes the retrospective. Most teams draw a boat or a racing car and talk about what is slowing them down and what can speed them up. It's a nice exercise, but it doesn't get to the point of the retrospective. Where the review is about what we do, the retrospective is about how we do it. What is our way of working, are we a team, can we trust each other, what can we do to improve flow and focus. In the retrospective you inspect and adapt on the way you work as a team.

And the last event in Scrum is planning. In this event we don't distribute tasks, we inspect our parameters. What capacity do we have, how does that relate to our speed of delivery and how much work can we take on. Is there any unplanned work we need to take in account? What stuff are we not going to do. Can we finish all the work and be predictable? So we inspect the work load, we adapt our forecast and we publish our sprint log to make it transparent.

We've talked about four Scrum events and how they relate to the pillars. Transparency is needed to build trust, inspection is needed to learn and adaption is needed to improve.