2.5 The Five Scrum Values
Key Takeaways
- The five Scrum values are Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage.
- Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living these five values.
- When the values are embodied by the Scrum Team, the pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life, building trust.
- The values give direction to the Scrum Team regarding their work, actions, and behavior.
- Decisions, steps taken, and the way Scrum is used should reinforce the values, not diminish or undermine them.
Why Values, Not Just Mechanics
A team can hold every Scrum event on schedule and still fail at Scrum if people hide problems, work on the wrong things, or fear speaking up. The 2020 Scrum Guide makes this explicit: "Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living five values: Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage." The mechanics — events, artifacts, accountabilities — are necessary but not sufficient; without the values they become empty ceremony.
" In other words, the values are what make empiricism real. Transparency only happens if people have the openness and courage to be honest about the true state of the work; inspection only matters if people commit to looking diligently; adaptation only happens if people have the courage to change and the respect to act on each other's input. This causal link — values build trust, trust brings the pillars to life — is itself a high-yield exam fact, because distractors sometimes claim the values are decorative or that they replace the pillars.
They do neither: the five values and the three pillars are distinct, and the values enable the pillars.
A concrete way to feel the dependency: a Sprint Review can only be transparent if the team is open about the true state of the Increment and has the courage to demo something genuinely Done rather than a polished illusion. A Retrospective only drives adaptation if members respect one another enough to give honest feedback without blame. The Daily Scrum only keeps the team focused on the Sprint Goal if everyone is committed to it. Strip out the values and the events still happen on the calendar, but they stop producing the empiricism they were designed to produce.
The Five Values In The Guide's Own Words
The 2020 Guide describes the values in a single tight paragraph. Learn these exact phrasings, because distractors frequently swap one value's description for another and the difference is a single sentence.
| Value | 2020 Scrum Guide description |
|---|---|
| Commitment | The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other. |
| Focus | Their primary focus is on the work of the Sprint to make the best possible progress toward these goals. |
| Openness | The Scrum Team and its stakeholders are open about the work and the challenges. |
| Respect | Scrum Team members respect each other to be capable, independent people, and are respected as such by the people with whom they work. |
| Courage | The Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing, to work on tough problems. |
" A subtle but tested point: Commitment in 2020 is about committing to goals (especially the Product Goal and Sprint Goal) and to supporting each other — it is deliberately not about a forecast becoming a fixed promise to deliver a specific scope. A 2017-era misreading where 'commitment' meant 'the team must deliver everything it forecast' is a classic trap; the Sprint Backlog is a forecast, and the values reframe commitment around goals and mutual support.
Exam Framing And Diagnosis
Many PSM I questions present a behavior and ask which value is most at risk or most demonstrated. Use these quick mappings:
- A Developer is afraid to raise a serious problem in the Retrospective or with stakeholders → Courage (and often Openness) is missing.
- The team keeps switching to unrelated work and abandoning the Sprint Goal → Focus is missing.
- Team members hide bad news, impediments, or true progress from stakeholders → Openness is missing.
- The Scrum Team will not support a struggling teammate or honor its commitment to its goals → Commitment is missing.
- Members dismiss each other's competence, micromanage, or override decisions disrespectfully → Respect is missing.
Two high-yield rules to lock in:
- The values are not the pillars. Do not confuse Commitment / Focus / Openness / Respect / Courage (the five values) with Transparency / Inspection / Adaptation (the three pillars). Questions deliberately mix these lists.
- The values are not optional culture decoration. The Guide says successful use of Scrum depends on living them, and that they build the trust that transparency and inspection require. When a value question feels ambiguous, trace it back to trust and the pillars and the correct answer usually resolves.
Finally, remember that the values apply to the whole Scrum Team and the people they work with — not only the Scrum Master. A distractor claiming the values 'only apply to the Scrum Master' or are 'enforced by management' contradicts the Guide, which frames them as a shared responsibility that gives direction to everyone's work, actions, and behavior.
Watch for two more recurring traps. First, do not over-attribute: a single behavior often touches more than one value (silence in a Retrospective implicates Courage and Openness), but the exam usually asks for the value most at risk — pick the most direct fit. Second, the Scrum Master models and coaches the values rather than policing them; an answer that has the Scrum Master 'enforce' the values with sanctions misreads the role. The Scrum Master helps the team and organization adopt an empirical, values-based way of working, which is how transparency, inspection, and adaptation — and the trust beneath them — actually take hold.
Name the missing Scrum value. The five Scrum values are Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and _______.
Type your answer below
During the Sprint Retrospective, team members privately admit a serious quality problem but stay silent because they fear blame, so nothing is raised. Which Scrum value is MOST at risk?
Match each Scrum value to the 2020 Scrum Guide description it corresponds to.
Match each item on the left with the correct item on the right
How does the 2020 Scrum Guide describe the relationship between the Scrum values and the three pillars?