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Note: Sensitive souls, beware.

 🎭 Welcome to the Scrum Theater: Where Agility Is Just an Illusion.

"We’re agile—we do Scrum."

I hear this claim from organizations every week proudly checking all the Scrum boxes.

• Daily standups? every day...
• Sprint reviews? at the end of each sprint
• Jira dashboards? for sure, the scrum master is also administrator of JIRA...

And yet, their teams are stuck. Value delivery is stagnant. Customer satisfaction isn’t improving. The same problems resurface sprint after sprint.

They’re not doing Scrum. They’re performing it.

🎭 Welcome to the Scrum Theater, where every ceremony is flawlessly executed, yet real agility is nowhere to be found.

• For confidentiality reasons, I won’t name the real teams behind these stories and because I love Sherlock Holmes I will use his characters — but their struggles are very real.
• Let me tell you the story of three teams trapped in the grand illusion of agility…

🎬 Act I: The Perfect Ceremonies With Empty Outcomes

What’s the biggest sign of Scrum Theater? Flawless execution of rituals that produce no tangible results.

Take Sherlock Holmes’s team, often seen as the epitome of logic and reason. They were stumbling through Scrum, treating it like a performance, obsessed with following each ritual perfectly, yet missing the point entirely:

• Their standups lasted exactly 15 minutes.
• Their sprint reviews featured polished, rehearsed demos.
• Their retrospectives followed textbook formats, with colorful sticky notes.

And yet:

• Blockers were mentioned in standups, but they never actually got resolved.
• The same issues appeared in every retrospective, unchanged.
• Customer feedback was collected—but never acted upon.

Their velocity? Stagnant. Their team morale? Exhausted.😫

👉 The fix? We stopped measuring compliance with Scrum ceremonies and began measuring their actual impact.
By tracking whether blockers were resolved and how many improvement actions were implemented after each retrospective, the results were clear.

📈 The result?

They cut their ceremonies by 30%—and doubled the number of meaningful improvements delivered.

And you:  Have you ever found yourself playing a role in Scrum Theater?

🎬 Act II: The Data-Rich, Insight-Poor Information Radiators

Some teams confuse metrics with meaning.

Take Inspector Lestrade's team. They had the most impressive Jira dashboards I'd ever seen! Truly a sight to behold:

• Burndown charts
• Cumulative flow diagrams
• Velocity trends
• and so on...

They proudly displayed them on giant monitors! Managers were very impressed about that.

Yet when I asked:

Good job about your Graphs. Just a question: "What decisions have you made based on these charts in the past month?"

🫥 Silence. All the room went quiet... No one could answer me.

🎭 Welcome to the Scrum Theater, where dashboards look impressive but drive no real decisions.

👉 The fix? No chart without an action. Every displayed metric had to answer:
- What decision does this inform? 
- What behavior should it change?

Within two sprints, they removed 60% of their dashboards. 
Their predictability improved by 40%—and, more importantly, they started using data to make real decisions.

And guess what: managers ask about graphs, and the team knows how to answer

🎬 Act III: The Frozen Agile Mindset

The deadliest trap of Scrum Theater? Believing you’ve "achieved" agility.

Take Dr. Watson's team. They had been "doing Scrum" for three years. They had optimized their processes to perfection.

❌ And that was precisely the problem.

• They hadn’t adapted in over a year, convinced they had ‘mastered’ agility.
• They resisted experimentation because they believed they had "figured it out."

🚨 Agility dies the moment comfort settles in. The moment you stop evolving, you fossilize.

🎭 Welcome to the Scrum Theater, where teams believe they’ve reached the final act — but have actually stopped evolving.

👉 The fix?  We introduced "process innovation sprints" — dedicated time to experiment with alternatives

• We temporarily suspended some Scrum rules to test alternative ways of working.
• We experimented with mob programming—which drastically improved quality.
• We trialed continuous deployment—which reduced release overhead by 70%.
• We shadowed real users—which transformed their backlog with customer-driven insights.

📢 Agility isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. The moment you think you’ve "arrived," you’ve already fallen behind.

🎭 The Grand Finale: The Truth About Scrum Performance

💡 Authentic agility often looks messier than Scrum Theater.

✅ The teams with the best results?

• They don’t always follow Scrum by the book.
• They bend and adapt the framework to their team’s unique needs.
• They care more about delivering value than looking agile.

❌ The teams that struggle the most?

• They prioritize flawless execution over genuine progress.
• They follow the map instead of exploring the territory.
• They prioritize the recipe over the meal.

🎭 So, ask yourself: Are you truly agile, or are you simply playing a role in Scrum Theater?

Hi, I’m Salim — the professional & agile coach helping teams break free from Scrum Theater and unlock real agility.

👉 Have you experienced Scrum Theater in your organization? Share your worst example in the comments below.

🎭 Tired of Scrum Theater? Let’s talk about real solutions and how we can unlock true agility for your team.

#ScrumTheater #Scrum #Agility #AgileInnovation #ScrumMaster #RealAgility #AgileCoaching