As a human being, you have different sides to your personality and sometimes,
those sides don’t always see eye to eye and you are faced with internal struggles, deciding what to do.

Nothing in life is ever black and white, and for a scrum master, that is no different.
A scrum master is faced with paradoxes, the role itself is a huge paradox, servant-leader (or at least, at first glance it seems to be so)
I feel that, managing those paradoxes shows how skilled you really are, more than that, it is part of the attraction of being a scrum master.

One of the paradoxes that I would like to take a closer look at is the Agile fundamental of ‘delivering business value’ and the ‘protector of the team’.

Business value is a very wide term, and does not just apply to the product you are delivering. You need to be sensitive to all elements at play.
What stakeholders are involved and what are their ‘other’ agenda’s?
I have encountered several companies where some stakeholders had as part of their agenda to see agile fail,
because it wasn’t the ‘right’ manager, team or project that was introducing Agile.

For me, part of being a scrum master is picking up on those things and seeing how you can be true to the agile values in the best way, always with the bigger picture in mind.
Is there a one size fits all solution? No there isn’t. I always try to find out why those agenda’s are there, what is the underlying need?
Can you find a different solution to meet that need and create a win-win? Sometimes the anwser to that is no, but at least it gives you information to find solutions.

Another challenge is the work load of a team, or even how self-empowered a team can be at what stage. Again, I believe there is no ‘one’ right solution, different scrum masters will have different approaches.
Some teams are very new and might need some guidance in the beginning, especially if you have external forces at place.

Let’s say you let them fly and they crash and burn, great lesson and they will be so much stronger for the next iteration, but combine that with an environment like I described above and there might not be a next time.

And what if your team has internal struggles themselves?
Not every one can cope yet with crash/burn/learn. Again, you need to be sensitive to these dynamics.

That’s what makes it fascinating, and the more you are faced with these challenges, the more you learn as a scrum master, the more value you can add and the more valuable you become.

What do you think?

Yours truly,

Brigitte.