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Over the past ten years I think I have seen maybe a dozen organizations really embrace the Agile mindset. Most people think Scrum is something that you do rather than a new way of thinking about how to improve your team, organization and business. I find this to be true regardless of my perspective as a team member, internal change agent, independent consultant or Certified Scrum Trainer®. Oddly enough, the co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, have emphasized the mindset is more important than going through the motions over-and-over again for as long as I can remember.
“Scrum is not a process or a technique for building products; rather, it is a framework within which you can employ various processes and techniques. Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and development practices so that you can improve [emphasis added].”
If you are not improving each Sprint, not dismantling the sacred cows of your organization, not going after the obvious waste the inhibits flow, then you are not doing Scrum right. When I see this lack of improvement in an organization, it is pretty clear that middle management have missed the Agile mindset which, in part, questions everything about the status quo. Without the Agile mindset, practices and techniques that are intended to be liberating rapidly become micromanagement Hell.
In the last decade, I have seen middle managers repurpose this powerful framework for change to preserve and justify the mediocre results of the status quo. All one needs to do is to take the basic steps of Scrum, apply an industrial, efficiency-driven mindset to the framework and one can pretty quickly suck the life out of the organization. Soon enough, Scrum becomes this empty, meaningless shell. Meanwhile, the really good and talented people head for the doors and the rest move into oblivion. The first step to fixing this situation is helping middle management and business leaders to adopt and use the Agile mindset.
Here are three ways I think the Scrum world is going to change in the next ten years.
Just Be Honest: My First Ten Years of Scrum
Top Ten Articles You Didn’t Read: Best of the Best
That Happened in 2005? Retrospective of the Big Moments of 2005