In collaboration with InfoQ, we wrote the article “Liberating Structures — an Antidote to Zombie Scrum”. Scrum.org published the article as a whitepaper.
How does this help your team?
Scrum is a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. It helps organizations thrive on complexity. Scrum provides minimal boundaries for teams to self-organize and solve complex problems with an empirical approach.
However, we’ve noticed that although many organizations use Scrum, the majority struggle to grasp both the purpose of Scrum as well as its benefits. Instead of increasing their organizational agility and delivering value to customers sooner, they achieve the opposite. We’ve come to call this Zombie Scrum; something that looks like Scrum from a distance, but you quickly notice that things are amiss when you move closer. There is no beating heart of valuable and working software, customers are not involved, and there is no drive to improve nor room for self-organization.
One antidote we’ve found helpful is to rethink how teams interact, both within the team as well as with stakeholders and the broader organization. For this, we found help in Liberating Structures. Rooted in complexity science and based on simple recipes that allow everyone to be involved and unleashed, we’ve found them helpful to promote a fast-paced interaction, self-organization, high involvement, radical transparency, and creative destruction that we feel are vital to Scrum.
This paper describes what Zombie Scrum is about and gives you tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.
What do you receive?
- A 12-page PDF filled inspiration for how to use Liberating Structures to overcome Zombie Scrum.
- The whitepaper is richly illustrated by Thea Schukken.
More inspiration
- Try our Zombie Scrum Survival Guide if you need more help on how to overcome Zombie Scrum.
- We offer many more examples of how to use Liberating Structures (with Scrum) in this index of blog posts.
- Find many tried-and-tested, prepared strings for your Scrum Events here.