Scrum and Agile should be for everyone
In your search for solutions, involve everyone benefiting from them
So, here’s the situation.
You and your Tech Lead are going through the effort of explaining the importance of technical debt and refactoring to your Manager and your CEO.
To that effect, you invite a few devs to talk about their impediments, and how they felt about it so that you can work together on a solution.
You don’t invite the Product Owners, because hey, it’s about handiwork and not really about them, right? Plus you can be relatively certain they will side with your Manager, delay the entire thing, and backstab you in front of your CEO, and that would delay the solution, which ultimately benefits them because you think you know better about how they should work than they do.
In short: you played the toxic organization game because that’s just the fastest way to get things done.
But that doesn’t really adhere to the Scrum Values, does it? It wasn’t courageous, nor was it very trusting, and it definitely wasn’t transparent. It’s very hard to embody these values in the face of office politics. But nevertheless, it would have been better to grab your POs, sit down with them and go “Look, X is happening, and that makes me feel like this, and I think we should instead do Y. I’m going to propose a solution Z to management, what do you think?”
Would they have held firm to the limiting belief that change needs to happen very, very slowly, and if possible, not right now? Maybe. But on the other hand, they could have come up with great ideas and could have helped the effort. It would have been a hard conversation regardless, but that doesn’t mean you can skip it.
Ultimately, as a Scrum Master, you’re being paid to have hard conversations, to strengthen teams through mutual understanding of common goals, and to ensure that the benefits of Scrum/Agile are felt throughout the entire organization.
And what kind of Scrum master would you be if, in your desire to make the entire organization a better place to work, you left out a member of your own team?
