Scrum: Failure by Design?

> Scrum is incredibly prescriptive on how you can best achieve that goal. Whether your organization supports the kind of team and conditions that make it possible to work in that way is not a consideration. You’re supposed to adapt your organization to make Scrum work.

> What if this is simply the wrong approach that leads to dogma and teams trying to follow rules that won’t work in their current context? What if we would take a different approach? Instead of being prescriptive on the team level and clinging to how the team should be working, why not be prescriptive on the organizational level instead?

> …Instead of making a team-level framework that focuses on how the team should work together, why not make an organization-level framework that focuses on the conditions necessary for empowered teams?

> Shouldn’t concepts like psychological safety, humble planning, and intent-based leadership be a prerequisite to be provided by the organization for empowered teams to succeed? The hard part is having the right conditions for empowered teams. Not having an empowered team knows how to follow Scrum.

I think this is actually exactly right, and applies to agile in general, and is the right way to think about it and the resolution of many tensions.

Agile requires a particular organizational context to work; but it doesn't describe how to get that context, or how to know if you have it, it just assumes it. This is why people arguing about agile often seem to be arguing about different things or have entirely different experiences -- it's about the organizational context that they aren't talking about.

Here’s a compilation of hundreds of social media comments explaining why agile/scrum is so problematic

https://github.com/rayfrankenstein/AITOW/blob/master/README....