What Happened to the Scrum Master Role?

Welcome And The Big Question

Peter [0:04]: Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale.

Dave [0:13]: Hello, Peter. Good to catch up again. So I had a question for you.

Cutting Roles And Replacing With AI

Dave [0:33]: ...important in many organizations that we work with.

Peter [0:36]: Yeah, I'm seeing the same thing, but I think that's something that's been happening for quite a while too. A lot of organizations have this attitude of "if you're not directly involved in the delivery of value, I want you out of here." And we're going to replace those types of roles with AI, or whatever the underlying delivery managers or whatever they're going to call them.

Dave [1:02]: Some sort of role in there.

Peter [1:03]: Yeah. So the role dedicated purely to continuous improvement, helping the team work on their ways of working, that role hasn't really survived.

How The Scrum Master Role Diluted

Dave [1:19]: It's an interesting one, because you and I, over my roughly 20 years working in this space, have spent a lot of time helping create, guide, and mentor people into that role: scrum master, team coach, agile coach. That role is much greater than simple continuous improvement, or even complicated continuous improvement. There's a facilitation element, a delivery element, lots of different things that fit into it. But I think two things happened. One is that the standalone role didn't really stand up to scrutiny as it became more prevalent in the industry. There were many brilliant organizations we worked with, both of us, where these individuals had tremendous impact on the value the organization created and its ability to deliver. But as more of these roles came out into the industry, the impact of the role got diluted.

Peter [2:30]: Yeah, well, I can take a two-day course and now I'm a scrum master. That's the whole problem of the agile industrial complex, churning out another scrum master.

Dave [2:47]: Yeah, there's that side of it. It's easy to reflect on that, but there's also: were they set up for success? One of the things I remember spending a lot of time pushing back on is, what is the value created by an agile coach?

The Missing Answer On Coach Value

Dave [2:49]: That was never properly answered. It was answered with arm-waving, not with clear-cut guidance. And I think that brings us to the second thing, which is: the real value was creating a culture of continuous improvement. And when you have a culture of continuous improvement, the idea of a "role" stops making sense, because it shifts from being a role to being a responsibility shared across many people.

From Role To Shared Responsibility

Dave [3:33]: That mindset of continuous improvement becomes something I bring to the table, or you bring to the table, when we're problem-solving or looking at performance, rather than being an individual we dial up and bring into the conversation to say, "I can see what's going on, this is what we need to work on." That's one of the big shifts we're seeing: it becoming a responsibility across many roles rather than a single role tasked with it as their primary job.

Peter [4:05]: Exactly. And I think there's another piece to it. I see this in different organizations where they don't feel like they have the time.

No Time To Improve And Why

Peter [4:25]: It's not a priority. It's not on the agenda, not something they feel they can carve out time for, let alone pay enough attention to actually do things differently as a result.

Episodic Improvement Versus Baked In

Dave [4:47]: I think of that as episodic engagement with continuous improvement. Sharpening the axe, whatever analogy you want to use. There are organizations, we've all been there, where we're working so hard we don't have time to sharpen the axe that would let us work better. And there are organizations that have that mindset baked in for whatever reason, and I think of the others as episodic, in the sense that eventually the axe gets so blunt you need to sharpen it. So on an episodic basis, you bring in experts who come in and say, "I can show you how to sharpen the axe." But they sharpen it once and leave. Then the axe goes blunt again over time, and eventually you need to bring in the expert again. Whereas what we're actually looking for, and what the companies that treat it as a shared responsibility do, is sharpen the axe repeatedly, on a regular basis, so it stays close to sharp.

Toyota Andon Cord As Learning System

Peter [6:00]: Yeah, it's baked into the system. It's part of how they operate. We were talking about Toyota, a great example of this. You pull the andon cord and it slows the production line down. Not necessarily stops it immediately, but slows it down, and people come over and have a real conversation right then about what needs to happen to improve the system of work. So there's a built-in mechanism for that, and the support is part of a lot of different people's roles.

Dave [6:42]: I wanted to add something there, because there are a lot of articles about the mindset difference in organizations. At Toyota, the andon cord gets pulled constantly, and it leads to a rapid response: experienced people coming together to understand the root cause and make changes. Other organizations also use an andon cord, but when it's pulled, the response is "how do we get the line moving again, we're losing money."

Fix Fast Or Learn Deeply

Dave [7:22]: So the response is a lot less about root cause, less about the total quality management thinking we associate with lean and agile, and much more about "we've got to get things moving," with an eye on a ticking clock that's costing money. That's a cultural difference, not a tooling one.

Peter [7:39]: Right, and the problem in that latter case is it creates a reluctance to pull the cord at all.

Dave [7:46]: Absolutely.

Peter [7:47]: Whereas Toyota famously investigates if the number of times it's pulled falls below a minimum. They expect it to be pulled a lot, something like 10,000 times an hour, though I don't remember the exact number. If it drops below that, it means the plant has stopped learning, at least in how they look at it.

Dave [8:13]: Right, it's a signal about learning.

Peter [8:16]: It's a signal for learning.

Dave [8:17]: And there are other manufacturers, I'm thinking of the "Big Three" US auto makers, but not just them, where the andon cord is about the clock ticking and getting things moving again. That brings a different mindset. Less about learning, more about fixing an immediate problem, sometimes with a lot of false positives, where you think there's a problem but maybe it's not permanent and just needs a temporary fix rather than real change.

Peter [8:56]: Right, we don't need a permanent fix to how we work, just something to get us moving again. It's interesting how that plays out.

AI As Experimentation And Learning Engine

Peter [9:06]: I think the evolution of the Scrum Master role in the world of AI is interesting too, because it doesn't have an obvious parallel in the future roles we talk about. I do wonder if, when AI is used well in organizations, it accelerates experimentation, and by doing so accelerates continuous improvement. Maybe you don't need a role whose job is to ensure that culture exists, because AI ends up creating a culture of its own.

Dave [9:51]: You could say the same thing about Agile: it also accelerates experimentation and learning. I think this is part of it. Whether it's AI or Agile or the Scrum Master, it's not meant to be a permanent feature. It's a step on the journey of understanding something and then absorbing it into how the organization solves problems and learns. It's really about how we use AI to learn, not how we use AI to tell us what to do right now.

Peter [10:37]: Yeah.

Teams Shift Toward Systems Thinking

Peter [10:38]: Our development teams are also going to evolve into a very different set of structures and roles, which will transform the interactions between them, because the natural evolution is toward looking at the system much more broadly, much more systems-focused. And that itself creates a need, because once you're looking at the system more broadly, you have to start asking what the ways of working are within that system and how the different parts interact.

So Where Did Scrum Masters Go

Dave [11:16]: This is where it gets really interesting, because the difficulty of looking into the system has always been that the system is complex and complicated, not straightforward. We've been looking for straight-line effects: if I push here, I get a response over there. AI now lets us look at much more complicated system dynamics and start understanding how they work, beyond what we could do without decades of experience and a lot of analysis. So there's a real opportunity now to look at systems at a level we haven't been able to before.

Peter [11:57]: So whatever happened to the Scrum Master?

Dave [12:00]: Here are my two findings, if you like. One, Scrum Masters moved outside the organization. There's now an episodic pattern: when something gets painful enough to become top of mind, organizations go find help from continuous improvement experts who come in, nod sagely, and guide some form of improvement. But it's episodic, not part of the culture. Ideally, and hopefully many of our listeners are working in organizations like this, that continuous improvement mindset has been absorbed into the culture. Now it's a responsibility shared across management and leadership roles and the teams themselves, rather than a role. It's part of the conversation whenever problems arise: how do we do root cause analysis, how do people work together to continuously improve how things are working?

Peter [13:03]: I'd add to that the piece about the andon cord. The signal that there's a need to improve generates different responses in different organizations. In a lot of them, the response is "you're on the clock, get it back online now," versus "there's something wrong in the system, what can we do to make it better?" Those two responses differ a lot. And I think the healthier organizations are very much focused on the latter: looking at the system and understanding what it needs.

Wrap Up And Subscribe Reminder

Peter [13:46]: With that, we'll wrap it up there. Interesting conversation as always. Hope our listeners enjoyed it. Don't forget to tell your friends and family to hit subscribe, and we'll look forward to next time.

Dave [13:56]: Till next time. Thanks again, Peter.

Peter [13:58]: You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and David Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.