Attack of the Scrumzilla!

As a child, I was a big fan of monster movies, from the classic Universal horror films, the campy gore of Hammer horror films, and the unbridled fun of Japanese kaiju films. My favorite was Godzilla because my ten-year-old self identified with the lumbering lizard, and I spent my Saturday afternoons watching UHF television and enjoying these edited television treats. A pre-teen boy has all the properties of a Japanize movie monster. The limbs are unresponsive, the impulse control is lacking, and in moments of stress, you roar for attention. Godzilla was both an inspiration and friend on those lonely Saturday afternoons.  

Plenty of time has passed since those Saturday creature features, but I still see the tropes of those films in my consulting work. The most disturbing is the appearance of a monster that terrorized the cubicles of every business – the scrumzilla! A scrumzilla is a recently minted scrum master or SCP who, with the discipline of a guard at a POW camp, attempts to enforce the rules of scrum or SAFe with an iron hand. These people are the avatars of a dark scrum. These individuals understand the letter of the scrum guide but not the spirit or intent.  

A scrumzilla will stomp over the empowerment of the team because they are experimenting with a new way of working which does not align perfectly with the Scrum Guide or the SAFe specification. These individuals ignore the agile manifest because they follow processes and tools more than they trust individuals and interactions. Without early interventions from management or a coach, these monsters will destroy your digital transformation efforts faster than Rhodan.  

For agile to work, the most important thing you can do is to lead by example instead of by authority. I speak from experience because I was a scrumzilla. It would take me a year with the direction of a patient manager and agile coach to get me to the point where I could get a team to self-organize without being prescriptive. Let people make mistakes and then use those errors as learning opportunities. The approach is not the spit and polish of a military drill team but rather the technique used by bomb disposal units. If you have met anyone involved in Explosive Ordnance Disposal, you know they have a light approach to discipline and a deadly serious focus on learning. It is because a lack of knowledge can get someone killed when working with explosives. 

Just because someone takes a test and passes a training course, they do not become an expert. It takes practice and time before they have the correct temperament to serve others and guide people through the agile process. I have seen plenty of damage done by lousy scrum masters and product owners. Terrible agile coaches are more destructive. If we are going to lead change in organizations successfully, we need to be on the lookout for these scrumzillas before they crush us underfoot. 

Until next time.