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The Scrum Fallacy
Scrum is just as bad as SAFe. Adopt it at your own risk.
Have you seen the classic Uninstall industrial mindset cartoon? In it, a worker tasked with “installing agile” is greeted to an office. An installation bar is displayed showing 20% completion and the worker says that he’s “now installed agile methodology,” but that “unfortunately it won’t work until you’ve uninstalled your 20th century industrial mindset.”
We laugh because it’s a funny-‘cause-it’s-true type of joke. We laugh because it’s so very relatable.
And yet right after you’re done laughing, you get busy “installing” Scrum, proclaiming you are now agile — without ever realizing Scrum won’t make you progress particularly far beyond those 20% shown in the comic.
Why?
Because Scrum has very little to do with agility. Scrum is but a vain attempt at transcribing values and principles, mashing them up real good, and brutally reshaping them as rules and elements with clear boundaries.
Scrum is a Frankenstein’s monster. By turning the values and principles of agile into the very thing agility set out to defeat — rigidity and inflexibility — it desecrates the concept itself.
