A common misconception
There’s a common misconception out there that Scrum Masters are simply runners. Runners of “ceremonies” (“events” in the language of the current Scrum Guide) and, in some implementations of Scrum, work.
Scrum Masters who only run events are easily replaceable in the age of AI, but that’s not what the Scrum Master was meant to be.
Scrum isn’t simply a routine for doing work. It encodes cultural, behavioural, and mindset shifts for the organisation which uses it.
If the true Scrum Master accountabilities are not being served in the organisation which uses Scrum, there’s a good chance the cultural shifts and provocative mandates that make Scrum work will not be developed or maintained.
What shifts are these?
Among others:
- The cultural shift towards cross-functional, self-managing teams — coupled with the relentless discovery and removal of dependencies.
- Everyone living the Scrum Values:
- Commitment — to achieving the goals and supporting each other.
- Focus — on the work to achieve those goals.
- Openness — about the work and its challenges.
- Respect — for each other as capable, independent people.
- Courage — to do the right thing and work on the difficult problems.
- The cultural shift towards radical empiricism and continuous adaptive planning over predictive planning and change resistance.
- The cultural shift of focusing on outcomes and impacts over activities and outputs in metrics and goals.
- The mandate to create at least one Done Increment every Sprint — and use the results of reaching for that to discover the impediments and remove them.
In other words, on that last point:
Create useable value every Sprint or find out why we can’t — and do something about it. Quickly.
That last item also points at Scrum as a problem-finding framework — using lived experience to discover the real impediments to agility and expedite their removal.
Scrum is not just for the Scrum Team
The cultural shifts encoded in Scrum are not just for the Scrum Team but its stakeholders and the organisation in which it operates too.
What can happen?
The kinds of things that can happen when there isn’t a Scrum Master in the room include:
- Passively accepting an inability to produce useable value every Sprint.
- Passively accepting rather than working to remove dependencies and impediments.
- Reverting to predictive planning over empiricism, perhaps coupled with sticking to the plan over responding to change.
- Work being managed across silos, with decisions about the work not being made where the expertise is.
- Reverting to a focus on activities and outputs over value and validation.
Causing and maintaining these shifts cannot be done passively. It requires a present, psychologically aware, tenacious, committed, visionary change agent in the room.
It requires someone who knows how Scrum should be effective. Someone who is committed to causing systemic ineffectiveness to be surfaced and motivate change.
That’s the ace Scrum Master.
In the age of AI, they also need to ensure the oversight over effective, ethical AI use is in place.
Do you want to be an ace Scrum Master?
To be this kind of Scrum Master, check out our PSM and PSM-AIE course dates:
https://leantree.co.uk/scrum-training
https://leantree.co.uk/scrum-ai