I’d taken the training, read the books, but no matter what I tried the teams weren’t getting the results I expected they would. I felt I was failing my teams, that I just didn’t know enough.
Then I made one change which unlocked the blockade. The teams started to improve, the work began to flow.
In the 15+ years since, I’ve noticed that most Scrum Masters never make this shift.
It’s not because they aren’t smart or don’t care. They get stuck in analysis paralysis. They need to find that key Scrum article, book, metric or training and then the teams will get better. They get stuck looking for the magic key.
The solution isn’t more training or learning. It’s mindset.
These lightbulb moments helped me and I bet they can help you.
1. Great Scrum is not the Destination
“You’re doing Scrum wrong.”
I heard that a lot when I asked more experienced Agile practitioners and coaches about the lack of progress. I see it all the time on LinkedIn and other forums when people ask for help.
This is the trap. And it gets in your head.
When we’re repeatedly told we’re doing something wrong it’s a natural response to want to “do it right”. So we go back to the books or search out additional expensive training. It’s a vicious cycle.
When you hear that, or something similar, step back for a moment and assess.
Ask a few questions:
- Does this person have incentive for me to believe this is true? Are they going to sell me some consulting or training?
- Is doing perfect Scrum the goal you should be working towards?
- What is the actual goal of using Scrum? What problems are you attempting to solve?
I’m not saying all consulting or training is bad. I’m just saying check motive first. And then continue here.
You should be using Scrum to reduce risk and improve value delivery. It’s a tool to improve, nothing more.
Executing the perfect Sprint Planning event or having a pristine burndown chart should not be the target. Sure, improve them if they not helping you attain the real goal, the real target – improved value delivery.
The mindset shift from being perfect at Scrum to using Scrum as a tool to improve value delivery is a key step for Scrum Masters to really help their teams.
Change the target. Scrum is a tool, not the target.
2. Listening to People Preaching from Atop Mount Stupid
If you come across guidance where the word “Agile” is used when someone is clearly talking about Scrum stop reading. They are even less informed and knowledgable than you are! What will follow will almost certainly be poor advice at best and perhaps even harmful.
One probable reason for people to present information as if they are experts is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (formulated by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999).
People who aren’t very good at something often think they’re much better than they actually are. Curiously, people who are very skilled often underestimate their own abilities.
Dunning & Kruger found that individuals with less competence often lack the self-awareness to recognize their own shortcomings.
They also found that highly competent individuals may assume that tasks easy for them are also easy for others. Or that if they know something others must know it as well. This leads them to undervalue their expertise.
This bias mostly comes from an inaccurate view of your own skill level.
For people with lower competence, the knowledge and skills needed to do well are often the same ones required to honestly assess their own performance.
Without these basic abilities, they can’t spot their mistakes or see how much better others are, which can lead to overconfidence. Or in this case, prove that a little knowledge can be dangerous.

Overcoming the Dunning-Kruger effect happens when we reflect on our abilities and get honest feedback while continuing to learn and improve.
I 100% admit to preaching from Mount Stupid myself. I proudly displayed my new CSM certification and pretended it made me the expert. I knew it all and forcing teams to follow Scrum to the letter was my mission.
If you remember the intro to this article you already know how things turned out. Not so good. I was on Mount Stupid chasing the wrong goal.
And worse, I was telling others “you don’t get it, you’re doing Scrum wrong”.
So when you hear such advice it’s likely you are interacting with someone who has not yet made the mindset shift to using Scrum as a tool rather than a target. Proceed with caution.
3. Understand the Intent
Ever heard the term “ScrumBut”? It’s what I, and others, used to throw at Scrum Masters and teams when we wanted to disparage their way of working.
“I/We do Scrum, but …” and then describe how you deviated from the Guide. And then get ridiculed for “not getting it”.
There are two distinct possibilities here.
First, the change might really be damaging, like dropping Retrospectives because the team is already good and there is nothing to change. Or they are too busy to stop once in a while to inspect and adapt.

In these cases more attention to understanding why Scrum has the artifacts and events it does would be the prudent approach.
For example, why Sprints? Some concepts you should understand include:
- Sprints teach teams to work in small batches to reduce risk.
- Sprints set up feedback loops such as the Review where you inspect progress and adapt based on feedback from Stakeholders which can include altering the product backlog.
The second possibility is that the team adapted away from Scrum because they understand the intent and found Scrum, or parts of it, getting in their way of additional improvement.
Once I made the mindset shift to improving value delivery by understanding the intent of Scrum, and applying that learning, rather than doing Scrum flawlessly, my teams took off.
And yes, if you deviate from the Scrum Guide you should no longer call what you are doing Scrum. But really, who cares? I won’t show up at your place of work and yell at you. At least not any more.
4. Adapt, Adapt, Adapt
It’s often been said that Agile, and Scrum in particular, is a mirror. It shows you flaws in your delivery methods. This is incredibly valuable information. How you decide to respond is likely predictive of your longer term success.
When the mirror is exposing problems within your methods and processes:
- Do you double down in performing flawless Scrum?
- Do you craft your change experiments, for issues found by looking in the mirror, to more closely follow the Scrum Guide? Or maybe even what you’ve heard are Scrum “Best Practices” such as Story Points and Velocity. (neither of which are part of Scrum)
- Or do you craft the change experiments with the goal of improving aspects of your delivery methods along with measures to evaluate the change?
What is your target and improvement measure at this point? Are you aiming to better follow the rules or increasing value to customers?
You might have the goal of being The Best Scrum Team Ever but if you are not delivering value to customers no one will notice or care.
I’m not saying the rules of Scrum don’t matter. They are helping you to learn things such as small batch thinking.
But once you understand that, the better approach is to apply that learning to improve value delivery over rule adherence. And that might mean adapting beyond Scrum. Or even instead of parts of Scrum.
Adapting to context will net you the big wins. And to do that you need to shift your mindset away from executing Flawless Scrum to favoring value delivery improvements.
5. Is Scrum Wrong for this Team?
Way back when I was standing atop Mount Stupid I felt that if all teams just followed the Scrum Guide they would blow the doors off their delivery expectations. I was told Scrum would work everywhere if applied correctly.
I’ve since learned otherwise from experience and opening my mind to different thinking.
Start by asking a few questions:
- Are we in an environment with many unknowns?
- Do we gather feedback on current progress to help inform future work?
- Are we in a highly volatile product space where the ability to pivot quickly is necessary?
If none of that describes the work your team is doing there are likely better options than Scrum. You probably don’t need the overhead it brings to achieve a high level of agility.
If that’s the case consider this quote from Peter Drucker.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Scrum can be a great teaching framework. Use it for that by understanding intent rather than making it the target as I did. Don’t get lost in the minutiae of Scrum.
Once you make that mindset shift I know your teams will break out and surprise you and others.
Until next time!
