When Scrum began transforming software development in the early 2000s, it was often presented as a revolutionary invention. Iterative planning, short feedback cycles, self-organising teams, unpredictability treated as a core condition rather than a disruption. It sounded new.
To me, it sounded familiar. I had already lived all of it. On film sets.
Complexity as the operating condition
Film productions are complex adaptive systems in their purest form. Dozens of departments work interdependently. Camera needs lighting. Lighting needs power. Power needs production. Production needs the location. The location depends on a permit. The permit depends on the weather. The weather has no interest in the shooting schedule.
And then someone parks a car in front of the entrance.
That is not the exception. It is the normal state of affairs. Anyone who works on set learns very quickly that the plan is not reality. It is an opening hypothesis, tested afresh every morning.
What Scrum and film production have in common
A Scrum sprint corresponds to a shooting day. A fixed time frame, a clear objective, a variable outcome. What is in the can by the end of the day is in the can. What is not gets reassessed.
The Daily Scrum corresponds to the morning meeting on set, the crew call. All the relevant departments, one short alignment: What is the plan? What has changed? Who needs what from whom? It takes no more than fifteen minutes because it cannot. The clock is running.
The Product Owner corresponds to the director. They hold the vision. Everyone else optimises within that vision, proposes alternatives and makes it real. The creative direction still sits with one person. This is not hierarchy for power’s sake. It is hierarchy in service of clarity.
The retrospective corresponds to the conversation at wrap and the review after the edit. What worked? What would we do differently next time? On set, this usually happens informally, while striking equipment in the evening or over a beer afterwards. But it happens.
Dependencies as a design problem
SAFe, the Scaled Agile Framework, and concepts such as Agile Release Trains were developed to address one of the hardest problems in large organisations: dependencies between teams.
A film set has no formal method for this. It has a culture. Name dependencies early. Escalate problems early. Never wait until it is too late. Above all, never pretend that everything is going to plan when it is not.
The gaffer is, in this sense, a dependency manager. They coordinate power, lighting, rigging, safety and the camera department’s creative requirements, often in real time, often without enough information, always under time pressure.
Directly beside the gaffer is the best boy, the first assistant within the lighting department. This role is the film set’s equivalent of a Scrum Master. They carry responsibility for process within the lighting team, protect the crew from overflowing external requests, communicate with other departments, coordinate deliveries and keep the gaffer’s back free. No Scrum certificate. No retrospective facilitated with sticky notes. The same function.
The unpredictable as a resource
There is one dimension in which film production fundamentally challenges organisational theory: the unpredictable is not only a risk. Sometimes it is the best thing that can happen.
The light just before sunset, the so-called golden hour, cannot be planned or reproduced. You can prepare for it. You can be fast enough to use it. You cannot order it. Agile frameworks speak about adaptability. They rarely speak about the possibility that the unpredictable may hold a quality that exceeds anything we could have planned.
What organisations could learn from a film set
A film set is not a perfect organisation. There is abuse of power, exhaustion and poor leadership. But film crews have developed something many organisations are still looking for: a deeply embedded culture for working with complexity under time pressure.
In practice, problems are named immediately because waiting them out is not an option. Hierarchy is respected where it creates clarity and bypassed where it costs speed. Improvisation is not a sign of poor planning. It is what good preparation makes possible.
What has always fascinated me about film crews is not their efficiency. It is their organic quality. A good film crew does not work like a machine. It works like a living system: responding, adapting and learning in real time. That is the starting point of my Living Systems Framework.