Many Scrum Masters seem to limit themselves to team-level work, avoiding the broader organizational challenges where real change often happens. This narrow focus raises questions about the role’s value and whether it's living up to its potential. Maybe it's time to rethink expectations—or redefine the role entirely.

Can you do 100% Scrum and SAFe at the same time? In this post, I explore that question through a real-life training story, highlighting the tradeoffs and tensions that surface when frameworks collide. The key takeaway: it’s less about purity and more about mindful, context-driven choices.

Over the years, I've noticed recurring challenges and red flags that can seriously limit Scrum's effectiveness. Spotting these symptoms early can mean the difference between Scrum thriving or turning into "mission impossible." In this blog post, I'll highlight the key pitfalls to watch out for.

How "Strategy Knotworking" turns ideas and ambitions into reality, and why it's an excellent structure for your Sprint Retrospective.

A Scrum Master's pitfall is getting too attached to their role. They no longer address impediments because they fear losing their freelance assignment or permanent role and negatively impacting their career. In this blog post, I share why they should be willing to get fired.

This blog post describes a 1-hour Retrospective format to help teams reflect on the empirical pillars of Scrum.

A glue role connects different parts of an organization, ensuring smooth team communication, collaboration, and integration. These roles are essential for implementing change and solving systemic issues that impact multiple departments. It’s easy to see the connection to the purpose of a Scrum Master, right?

You can't force a team to improve; instead, create the conditions where they want to. Improvement must come from within, and your role as a Scrum Master, leader, or manager is to make that journey possible. In this article, I'll share questions to reflect on and offer tangible recommendations to get started.

The Scrum framework offers clear rules, guidelines, and constraints. Teams can use these as boundaries to self-manage and self-organize their work, minimize risk, and deliver value to their stakeholders. When teams are relatively new to Scrum, strictly following the rules and constraints makes sense. But what if a team wants to change the rules of Scrum? In this blog post, I share my thoughts.

Making the state of Agile transparent by shining light on problems, obstacles, and successes touches on the essence of what coaches and Scrum Masters should do. Yet many don't use a 'flashlight.' They wander through organizations in the dark, trying to figure out what’s happening. In this post, I explain why using a flashlight matters and how you can get started.

Create a shared understanding of the benefits of Agile for your organization and make gaining them a shared responsibility. In addition, it creates a climate of continuous improvement in which progress is measured. How else would you know you're gaining the benefits of Agile?

Be mindful of your Scrum bubble. Stay in touch with the 'real world,' don't get stuck in a theoretical bubble disconnected from real users, and keep adding fresh oxygen (other people with new insights) to your bubble!

Showing the value you offer to the organization is more critical than ever for Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters. It’s not easy, though. The three recommendations I provide in this blog post might help. If you’re interested, dig deeper into Evidence-Based Management, Kanban, and the scientific research behind Columinity.

In large organizations, a Scrum Master’s focus is often a team; the Agile Coach works with multiple teams and their environments, and the Enterprise Agile Coach works with the broader organization. Be mindful of the consequences. It can limit the ability to remove impediments and improve team- and organizational effectiveness.

Gut feelings and intuition might be spot on, but they can be fraught with biases, personal preferences, and wrong heuristics. Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters would be wise to use a more data-informed, evidence-based, and scientifically validated approach to improve team and organizational effectiveness.

Be mindful of your coaching distance. Too much distance from a team can lead to disconnection and false assumptions, while too close might block the team's growth and autonomy.

Breaking down items is often complex, requiring significant creativity and time to think things through. We've experienced teams benefiting from a Diverge-Converge Pattern. In this blog post, we describe how it works.

If Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, and all other Agile practitioners want to survive, make more impact, and offer more value, they should use data, evidence-based feedback, and insights from scientific research to improve team and organizational effectiveness.

As a Scrum Master, solving problems for the team is acceptable for the right reasons. Don’t do it out of routine. Before solving a problem, consider if you’re helping the team grow in their ability to resolve similar problems independently.

The Scrum Master is primarily responsible for the Scrum framework and the empirical process underlying it. Sometimes, this may require making tough decisions. To what extent does this include removing people from the team? We share our thoughts in this article.

Don't spend months writing detailed proposals only to discover that things always worked out differently. Instead, sell Sprints and deliver more value to your customers sooner!

In this article, we address a myth that seems to be about words. “Products” or “projects,” who cares? But words have meaning and exist within a broader context. The purpose of the Scrum framework is much broader and deeper than merely changing the words we use to talk about work. And if you find yourself charging at everything that sounds like “projects,” you may be missing that bigger picture.

Teams are more effective when they have clear and singular goals to guide their work. Goals are present in most Agile frameworks, like Sprint Goals and Product Goals in Scrum. Yet, most teams don’t use them. Learn why this happens and how to start improving.

I recently joined a conversation with Agile Coaches from various organizations. What started with lightweight chitchat ended with a depressing conclusion: many felt close to burning out. Learn more about the reasons, and how Agile Coaching Ethics and Liberating Structures can help.

A myth re-visited. Seven years ago, Christiaan Verwijs and I wrote the article "The Scrum Master is a Junior Agile Coach" and explained why this is a myth according to the Scrum Guide. What's the state of this myth today?

The impact of a powerless Product Owner and the strength of a Product Owner with a full mandate.

My thoughts on the recent ‘Agile is Death’ claims

My thoughts on the recent ‘Agile is Death’ claims

Decorate your team space with this poster. It tells you exactly what you need to do when you are confronted with Zombie Scrum!

Scrum is a framework to reduce risk, increase predictability, and deliver value to your stakeholders sooner. But what when is something actually valuable?

An experiment that encourages teams to select their own metrics

Why I don’t care that much about the Scrum roles, events, and artifacts, and what I do care about instead.

Thoughts and ideas on how to prevent, resolve, or simply accept it

Test which rules really matter and trigger a wave of change in your organization

A personal experience and a tangible exercise to show why complexity requires ‘doing’ instead of ‘thinking’

Use the Liberating Structure “Purpose-to-Practice” to create a plan for the Sprint, and revisit & update the P2P canvas during each Scrum event

How validating the value of the Scrum team’s work during the Sprint limits risk and increases predictability

Find a better balance between solving problems and enabling growth and autonomy

How lead- and cycle time are incredibly helpful metrics to drive change where it matters

Stuck in a boring, neverending, meaningless Scrum rhythm? Give Scrum a break, and rethink what approach suits your team the best!

A personal experience of identifying the ideal Product Owner

10 Liberating Structures To Help Your Organization Lose Weight And Increase Agility

How poor facilitation of the Scrum events can cause Zombie Scrum, and how to create more engaging, impactful, and meaningful Scrum events with Liberating Structures.

How a simple experiment can have a huge impact!

A workshop that enables teams and management to clearly express essential needs to use Scrum more effectively

Bring Scrum Masters together and see where they can help and support each other

A simple format for the Sprint Retrospective to create a shared understanding with one of the foundational Liberating Structures

Help Scrum Teams, stakeholders, and supporters understand how their system works, find leverage points, and trigger (big) change.

How Liberating Structures and servant leadership create an environment for Scrum Masters to find support, offer help, and draw inspiration

A do-it-yourself workshop to have Scrum teams clearly express what they need from management, stakeholders, and the supporting organization with “What I Need From You”