I got to sit in on the autopsy later, as we uncovered the gruesome history of the Scrum. Not that it was particularly awful, up to this point. So, an investment bank has a bunch of in-house proprietary trading teams who specialize in taking positions on the basis of quantitative analysis of which way the markets are trending? There’s nothing illegal, immoral, or fattening about that. Investment Bank has a group who work on minimizing the latency in their trades, to reduce the market spread? Ditto. Algorithmic trading teams shoveling out and revoking put offers every few milliseconds to see what falls out of the high-frequency trading tree? We’re getting into dubious territory here, but everyone else has been doing it, ever since the Yanks deep-sixed the important bits of the Glass-Steagall Act and their commercial banks all sprouted high-stakes gambling arms—but that’s ancient history. The point is, the Bank wasn’t doing anything they shouldn’t have been doing, at least within the context of the crisis of early twenty-first-century capitalism.

Until we get to the Scrum.

A scrum—generic—is, depending on which dictionary you look it up in, either an elaborate way of restarting play in a rugby match (rugby: sort of like American football only with less body armor and more biting and gouging—I was forced to play it at school: did wonders for my character), or one of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone. The rugby version involves getting head-down and having a shoving match with the other side, sometimes involving ear-chewing, scrotum-grabbing, and neck-breaking (although the latter is frowned upon); the software variant is not dissimilar. It has its origins in Agile methodology, although it’s Agile hopped up on crystal meth and spoiling for a fight: exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a bunch of city high-flyers to find appealing (at least in principle, and as long as it didn’t look likely to detonate a large landmine under their bonuses).

The Scrum, singular, was the brainchild of Oscar Menendez, the vast unsympathetic brain at the heart of The Bank’s Data Analytics Support Division, and sometime Algorithmics star. Back in the prehistory of the early noughties they headhunted him from Google to show them how to apply map/reduce to the very large data sets they were processing in real time—

(You’re not listening, are you? Damn it, I suffered through the briefing. I don’t see why you shouldn’t have to suffer, too!)