Fix Zombie Scrum in 3 Steps

What is Zombie Scrum?

Zombie Scrum describes teams that have retained the Scrum structure (rituals, roles, etc.) but have lost the actual core – customer benefits, values and continuous improvement –. Scrum thus turns into an empty shell without real agility.

Typical symptoms of Zombie Scrum are:

• Mechanically performed ritual processes without added value
• No functioning increments, rare or useless stakeholder reviews
• No real retrospective or improvement plans
• Little autonomy, lack of responsibility

The impact of Zombie Scrum: demotivation, declining quality, lack of adaptation – Scrum as an empty ritual. See also: Fake Agile

There are many reasons for Zombie Scrum. You can probably answer this best for your team and your organization individually.

Or if not, maybe just ask your team? Here’s a retro format you can use to investigate the causes of zombie scrum in your team:

• What prevents us or makes it difficult for us to obtain direct feedback from our customers?
• What prevents us from independently defining our priorities, working methods and solutions?
• What would have to happen for us as a team to be maximally motivated to achieve our team goal and create value for our customers?

How to solve Zombie Scrum: The 3 steps

Many instructions for Scrum are super technical. I am not a fan of such detailed instructions. How exactly you conduct a sprint review is ultimately irrelevant. In my experience, the key points needed to cure Zombie Scrum are the following 3 steps:

Step 1: Team goal and customer feedback

You can’t work in an agile way without real customer contact. After all, the team must be able to obtain feedback from customers after each sprint in order to incorporate it into the prioritization of the next sprint.

Management and other stakeholders must not serve as a “proxy” for the customer. Agile teams do not develop what management thinks the customer wants, but what the customer wants. And for this, the agile teams speak not with management, but with the customer themselves.

Sure: Management also has an influence on the team and that’s OK. Management is welcome to help formulate the team’s goals. But then the team must be given enough freedom by management to work together with the customers in a self-organized way.

Step 2: Create psychological safety & self-efficacy

Does the team speak up directly when something isn’t working? Or do they only whisper about problems behind closed doors, but don’t really address them constructively in order to achieve an improvement?

If so, this could be due to 2 things:

• There is a lack of psychological safety in the team: people don’t dare to address problems openly.
• Learned helplessness: the team no longer believes that anything can be improved.

It is often a mixture of both. An open error culture is needed so that it is normalized to address problems and, in the best case, even receive recognition for them.

In order to get rid of the learned helplessness (i.e. low self-efficacy), the next step is needed:

Step 3: Continuous Improvement

The team must realize that problems that are addressed are also solved. So take every opportunity to actively tackle problems and solve them.

As soon as the team realizes that things are changing, they will also address problems more openly again in retrospectives.

It doesn’t happen overnight. The learned helplessness has, in case of doubt, grown over the years. But that should not be an excuse! Every retrospective is an opportunity to set the positive spiral of self-efficacy in motion.

Tip: If your retrospectives are lacking momentum, Echometer could help: With its playful and structured approach, you can breathe new life into your retrospectives with Echometer. Just give it a try here: Try out the retro tool Echometer

Conclusion: Zombie Scrum can be cured

The good news first: yes, zombie scrum can be cured. And it is even relatively clear what ingredients are needed.

The bad news is that each of these ingredients is not easy to obtain. Depending on the context, it can admittedly take a lot of energy to create the conditions. Worse still, it may turn out that your organization is not yet ready for true agile ways of working.

But let’s not assume the worst case scenario. If you now at least know the cause of your zombie scrum, you can work on it in a targeted manner. Very agile, step by step.

So, let’s go!