Oh We have advanced beyond Scrum

Sometimes i hear, "Oh, those Scrum practices of timeboxes, etc., are too basic or wasteful. We've advanced far beyond Scrum!"

First, if that's really true, i'm really happy to see a group that's done so much deep improvement. There are exceptions to what am about to describe, and for those exceptions, i say, "Good for you!"

But what I actually see when i go to gemba (not in a room with managers telling me their state) in almost every one of these cases of claimed advancement is not that they have advanced beyond Scrum, but that something else is going on. What's that?

It's that adopting real by-the-book standard Scrum exposed weaknesses that the group did not want to deal with. And as a variation, the group is demonstrating Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior and hiding the self-serving efforts by specialists and managers to maintain their privileged status-quo positions. How? By shifting attention away from their desire to cling to the status quo by claiming, "We are more advanced than Scrum", which really means "We don't want to change in any way that would challenge our positions."

So for example, a group of 5 teams working on one product together is actually unable to be disciplined and efficient and effective enough to work in a 2-week timebox and deliver a "done" product increment and ship it. Rather than fix the root cause problems, they shift the problem and say, "Scrum doesn't work here, let's try Kanban." Or, "We're more advanced than Scrum."

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