Scrum is losing its edge
Many now admit what’s long been apparent: Scrum has peaked. Organizations that once positioned themselves as agile are slowly drifting back to pre-agile habits: more hierarchy, more control, and more efficiency thinking. The latest trend suggests that sprinkling AI across the enterprise will deliver the speed and adaptability required to survive today’s accelerating change. But tech alone isn't enough.
It is tempting to conclude that Scrum or Agile simply do not work at scale. A more honest conclusion is this: we never fully addressed what it really means to embed Scrum in an organization in a way that drives sustained performance. We focused on practices and frameworks, but left the underlying organizational design largely untouched.
And someone predicted this...
At the team level, Scrum still works well. Many organizations have teams that deliver small increments regularly, inspect and adapt, and improve their ways of working. To move beyond single teams, scaling frameworks such as SAFe, Scrum@Scale, and Nexus were introduced. They solve important coordination problems and can create improvements.
Yet over time, many large-scale implementations disappoint. Organizations “implement” frameworks via transformation programs, often led by external consultants. Attention shifts to rollout plans, structures, and compliance. Ownership of change never happens. Root causes never get solved.
When change is rented rather than owned, it rarely lasts. The framework becomes the destination, instead of a means to serve business ambitions. The deeper question—whether the organization is actually designed to learn, adapt, and deliver value at scale—remains unanswered.
Let's fix the org
There’s good news: most organizations already have seeds of agility. The opportunity isn’t to replace what works, but to remove what blocks it. They have Scrum teams. They regularily produce working increments. And they have people experimenting with AI. The opportunity is not to replace this with yet another framework, but to address the real constraint: organizational design.
This is the perspective behind 10X ORG, built on Org Topologies . This is not a scaling framework. It is an organizational design system that helps leaders and teams reason about how the organization should be shaped to support its ambitions. A different organizational design produces different organizational capabilities: adaptability, efficiency, or speed.
Org Topologies offers a shared map to see how an organization currently works, to assess where it is mismatched with its goals, to deliberately design improvements and evolve over time. It is grounded in systems thinking, yet intentionally simple enough to be understood not just by executives or consultants, but by everybody working in the organization. It combines a clear map, a method for organizational development, and a small set of design principles that keep decisions coherent.
Deliberate org design starts with a simple but uncomfortable question: is our current organization actually capable of delivering what we now expect from it? An organization is a vehicle. Different vehicles serve different purposes. When ambitions change, the vehicle must change as well.
This becomes even more critical with the rise of AI. AI has the potential to significantly expand what Scrum teams can take responsibility for. Tasks that used to require specialized roles, heavy handovers, or centralized expert groups can increasingly be supported or amplified by AI. This allows teams to broaden their mandates—from delivering features to solving real customer problems end to end.
But AI only compounds value when organizational design allows it. If teams are narrowly scoped, constrained by rigid interfaces, or discouraged from collaborating across boundaries, AI applications remain local optimizations. When Scrum teams are deliberately mandated to collaborate and coordinate around shared customer problems, AI becomes a force multiplier. It supports faster learning, better decision-making, and deeper problem solving across teams rather than within silos.
Teams rely less on strict role separation and more on complementary capabilities. Human skills such as sensemaking, judgment, and collaboration are amplified by AI, not replaced. AI is an input to human intelligence, not an outcome. But this only works when teams are positioned and trusted to take on broader accountability.
Elevating Scrum in an AI-enabled world is therefore not primarily a tooling challenge. It is a systemic design challenge. It impacts how teams are mandated, how they are rewarded, how HR policies support learning, the structure they work in, and how leadership steers. These are not changes that can be imposed top-down through a transformation plan. They must be designed, explained, and co-owned.
Organizational design isn’t a luxury, it’s a leadership imperative. In an AI-enabled world, it’s the difference between teams that deliver and teams that transform.
And remember, there is no instant pudding.
For those who want to explore this in depth, the book 10X ORG will be published on February 24 on Amazon. It is written as a business novel, alternating a realistic storyline with focused theoretical sections. Its goal is to make organizational design—and the elevation of Scrum in an AI-enabled organization—understandable, discussable, and actionable.
