moderator: 0:00

Welcome to the scrum.org community Podcast, the podcast from the home of Scrum. In this podcast, agile experts, including professional scrum trainers and other industry thought leaders, share their stories and experiences. We also explore hot topics in our space with thought provoking, challenging, energetic discussions. We hope you enjoy this episode.

Dave West: 0:21

Hello and welcome to the scrum.org community podcast. I'm your host. Dave West CEO, here@scrum.org in today's podcast, we're talking about an annual event give thanks for scrum that runs in the Boston area. This event, run by agile Boston, has been running for 17 years. That's 17 you know, that seems an inordinate amount of time. The reason why I wanted to talk about this event is that over those 17 years, as I've been part of it for the last sort of 10 it's really acted as an incredible mirror on the Agile and Scrum market, in a market that's been doing Scrum for probably 2530 years. So I thought it'd be really interesting to get the creator of give thanks for Scrum, Daniel Mezick, to come and join me today and talk about give thanks for Scrum and some of the learnings and some of those experiences for us, so that you our listeners, can really sort of use that as a mirror to see how Scrum and Agile has changed. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel,

Daniel Mezick: 1:38

thank you. Sir, glad to be here. Glad to be your honored guest.

Dave West: 1:42

Thank you. You always, you always my honored guest for whatever situation. So Daniel, you're the founder and one of the people on the leadership team of agile Boston, and you've been doing this event when you were a lot younger, 17, for the last 17 years. I think our listeners would love to hear a little bit about how it was incepted. What? What happened? Why? Why? Why it happened?

Daniel Mezick: 2:10

Well, around 2006 I got interested in in Scrum, and one thing led to another. We formed a user group in Boston, and I invited Jeff Sutherland to come and talk at the first meeting. We got over 200 people at that meeting. It was quite, you know, Jeff, Jeff drew a lot of people, and then when Jeff was when he did his thing, we got talk, and I got to know him, and I asked him if maybe, you know, he could invite Ken to come and do the same thing. And Ken did the same thing. Got a similar crowd a few months later. So that was the advent of agile Boston. And then it was striking to me that this thing that appeared to be growing quickly in making an impact in the world, a positive impact, was born in Boston. And these two gentlemen, you know, formulated this, this framework, and in here we are in Boston. What are we doing about it? You know? So I started to try to get both of them in the same room, you know, at a user group meeting or an event where they could both be present, and maybe we'd get 400 people. And I could, just could not accomplish that. Jeff, at that time, was spending his summers mostly in Scandinavia, doing Scrum stuff. Ken was all over the world, like Jeff, and you just could never get them in the same room. So I kept thinking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it, and one morning I realized these guys have families. They live in the Boston area. It's a family holiday that's on the calendar in November, the American Thanksgiving. I bet you we could do something in that week and get them both in the same room. And I called Jeff, and I asked him if he was interested in in doing it, and, you know, getting in front of the folks on Thanksgiving week. And he said, Okay. And then once that was established, I used the same pattern I used previously, and I asked him he might want to, you know, you think of a good idea to ask Ken if he might want to join us. You know? He's like, Oh, totally, yeah, I could tell him, tell him, you know, yeah, I want him to come. Go invite him, you know. So I did. I said, Hey Jeff. Jeff said, Yes, you know, you want to, you want to come do this thing. And Ken's like, absolutely. So that's how give thanks for scrum was born. It's because they're in the same place. At the same time during that week in November. That's, that's the reason for the name and everything else about it.

Dave West: 5:08

That's the the anchor of family is always, always a good one. And by the way, having knowing them very both very, very well and their wives very well, they weren't so happy. Their wives were not so happy with them being they avoided shopping and other things that week, but that might be another motivation for them as well. So tell me, tell me a little bit about this event. From that original 17 year old, 17 years ago to now. There's been a lot of themes, a lot of different themes, during those 17 years. Tell me a little bit about that.

Daniel Mezick: 5:49

Yeah. So what, what we try to do with each event is, is offer a glimpse, maybe not too far into the future, but a little bit into the future. With with Jeff and Ken present. You know, we've got the two subject matter experts in a in a place where we can, we can find that out. And we would always invite other related speakers to come and round out the card of speakers. Each year, Scrum had a different kind of a flavor. You know, way back in the day, it was one thing, and now it's, it's quite another as as people have used it, and it's matured. So like, back in as late as, like, first of all, the period from 2007 to 2017 about 10 years, I would say that that was primarily an education and experience report. Kind of event people would come, they would learn new things, they would meet new people, and they'd hear experiences of people who tried to do this in organizations and were successful, and we brought different thought leaders to the event. And people, these speakers, would fly in, and they would do it for nothing. So that's what happened. And we were at the Microsoft facility in Waltham for many years, and then they they moved to a different a different place. But for the first 10 years we were there, and we don't have a lot of the theme information. But around 2017 we started focusing on Scrum and agility and empiricism in general. You know, at scale, that was the 2017 theme. So some of the other themes over the years, 2018 business agility. You know, there was a conference in 2009 there was a local, regional scrum gathering that was in Arizona, in I think it was 2010 and it was called Scrum beyond software. And that was a very early event that was discussing what we now call business agility. So around 2720 18, that was our theme, business agility, how scrum can be used beyond engineering, right? And then 29 2019 success with Scrum, you know, emphasizing the spirit of Scrum and the best ideas and patterns for achieving real success following year the spirit of Scrum, which was literally focusing on the foundational culture and mindset of Scrum as especially as you know, that was the year that the event went global, right, because of covid, 2020 and I think we had 300 people attend online that year. And then in the 20s, value delivery, there was a 2021. Was a focus on value delivery. 2022 was a focus on discipline, the need for rigor and proper execution structure. 2023 was empiricism in the modern world, like scrum as an instance of an empirical framework, but empiricism being the actual goal and star of the show in terms of process. And then the last two years, 2024 it ended with a question mark, the future of Scrum, where we explored, you know, where is scrum going? Because there were some twists and turns in the marketplace for scrum in 2023 2024 and then finally, in 2025 scrum renewed what scrum was always meant to be, and the the subtext was about navigating an uncertain transition of what we might call legacy agility, incorporating AI into scrum practice and the necessary evolution of the scrum master role. So that's, that's where we went over the past, you know, 10 or so years.

Dave West: 9:41

So before we talk about 2025, because I really do want to spend quite a lot of time talking about that, I'd love to talk about how we got there, that it very much, actually, for 10 years you were very much focused on experience report, teaching. Existing Scrum. I'm always shocked by how long these things take, but, but that's not, not, shouldn't, shouldn't come as a surprise. You know, I still see a lot of people that are like, Oh, that's why you do a daily didn't realize I still see that. Then scaling, and then value, well, business agility, scaling those things. So how does it? How can we take these ideas, make them bigger, and then the value? How does scrum deliver more value? And the value of Scrum, those two interesting, interesting points, isn't it? It's kind of, I don't know when I looked at the list, because I obviously used AI to generate the list of what was the focus of give thanks for Scrum, and it was using what little information is out there. Because 20, you know, 17 years ago, it was a very different world, right? What was interesting was you could have literally taken any agile event and what was being talked about in the community. And it was, this was like a summary of it, it, which I thought was absolutely so interesting that these this, this event, was almost a sort of summary of what was happening in in the world at that moment.

Daniel Mezick: 11:18

Yes, each each year, around June, we get ready, you know, for structuring the event. And we have, we have discussions that are wide ranging about what the theme should be about, you know, what is the state of of practice? You know, what the quality of it, the volume of it, what, what changes are taking place? What are some of the cross currents in the in the community right now, and all this kind of stuff? And most importantly, how can we serve the public with an event that really focuses on something that they they care about and in and can benefit from, right? Like, how can we deliver the goods? You know, at the event, that's what the theme construction is about. So we're always trying to make a theme that's timely, urgent, valuable and interesting, right? So we spend a lot of time debating that, what are the, what are the candidate themes, and what are we going to what's the one we're going to settle on? You know,

Dave West: 12:25

yeah, what struck me is it was almost a barometer to the state of agility and Scrum adoption. And, you know, each each year, just when I was reading it, it just made me smile, because I sort of remembering back to the to the heated, well LinkedIn, and prior to LinkedIn, the heated in person debates that you would have, or Twitter debates. And I thought that was, that was sort of that was interesting. So let's some now. Let's turn a little bit to 2025, because I know our listeners would be may they may not live in the Boston area, and unfortunately, you know, they couldn't get to the 2025, event. So tell me a little bit about the event. Obviously, I was there. I did some sort of presentation. I apologize, everybody. Next time, I'll try to do better. But the tell us a little bit about this year's event or last year's event. Yeah, so the

Daniel Mezick: 13:25

2025, event, you know, like all of the events over the 17 year period that we've done this, where we're trying to serve the public. So they say, Wow, right? So they come, and they really get a lot of value for their time and money that they spent to come to the event. So what we did this year, in prior years, from 2020 up to the present day, we were online. We're doing online events. And this year we decided, Okay, let's go back and do the live event. So what we did was we, in the morning, we had three stations in the conference space that addressed three separate topics, and the people rotated through those. And here's the three topics. The first one was a new focus on tangible results above everything else. In other words, you know, no more hand waving, no more theory and teaching. We need to deliver something here. So how do we deliver tangible results, right? And this speaks to the value question. The second topic was incorporating AI into scrum practice in practical terms, and this is both how the client's implementation of it in their business, and then the practitioners incorporation of AI into scrum practice, right? So that was what that was about. And then the third one was the necessary evolution of the scrum master role. That's a very broad topic, if we look at the. The scrum master role. I mean, ideally, great managers are exhibiting all the properties of a great scrum master, right? Those two separate things. The manager role is a formal, formally authorized role. The scrum master thing is something we lay on top of that is we have that conversation about, how do we, how do we, how do we demonstrate the value of the scrum master, basically.

Dave West: 15:28

So let's just start on that one, because these are three. It's funny that for the last 17 years, that value conversation, I'm sure, have been happening continuously. We'll come back to that in a second. But let's start with the scrum master. The scrum master role, because, you know that we can't be, we can't avoid, we can't be oblivious to the fact that SCRUM masters are being laid off. There's a lot of sort of, like anti scrum master in the industry as a whole Capital One is obviously famous. Got rid of all their Scrum Masters. We've got organizations that actually came to the event that have renamed them agile delivery leads. I think progress software has done that. You know that that that role, that that that section of the event is a really interesting one, because, you know, there's a lot of people that are very concerned as to their future because of the job title, Scrum Master, not necessarily because of the accountability. Because, let's be frank, Daniel the if you're running a team, if you've got multiple teams working, or a team working, you're going to have to have somebody, the best teams have somebody that's looking at the machine of delivery and helping that machine deliver. It might be a manager. It might be a project manager. It might be, I don't know who, but somebody is doing that. So, so the accountability if you're going to be successful has to happen. The thing that I noticed from the event was that lot about job titles, which was kind of both disappointing and also to be expected, right?

Daniel Mezick: 17:11

Yeah, you know, I want to make a comment here about one of the skills this, the scrum master has to have. The scrum master has to understand executive psychology and be able to function as a good communicator to these authority figures. Yeah, and this is something that we really kind of left Scrum Masters out, you know, kind of hang out to dry on this and figure it out for themselves. And it's not that simple, you know, there's some very subtle signaling that executives are very sensitive to, that Scrum Masters also need to be aware of if they're going to be effective in their job. So there's a lot of that. And over I've been doing coaching since, you know, basically 2006 and I can tell you that people informally authorized roles, like managers, some of them exhibit profoundly refined and well developed scrum master skills. So this underlap and this overlap about the scrum master role is something that's the worldwide community hasn't done a really good job of addressing

Dave West: 18:28

no and the whole Agile Coach thing sort of just added a level of confusion to the industry. You know, it's funny, when you talk to Jeff and Ken about this, they're very clear, you've got somebody that makes sure that the system's working, that the deliver, and somebody that's always trying to improve the system and challenge the system and protects the system. And when they say system, they mean the people, the practices, the technology, even that's being used to deliver valuable product, and you've got, and that's, that's what they think of themselves as, certainly Ken, who's probably more of a scrum master than than than Jeff, and I think he'd be fair to say, Jeff's more of a producty kind of owner type person, but Ken, who definitely exhibits that is like, well, you are you a manager in some situations, yeah, if that's how you get the authority to protect if that's how you get the authority to make changes, to fire people, to bring new people in, to do that, then that's necessary. In other situations, that is not the case. Yes.

Daniel Mezick: 19:42

So the scrum master role is a very interesting role. You've used the the a word a couple times, or you're talking about authority and authorization. And we could go off on a whole other one hour podcast just about that. But that's that was one of the three things. In the 2025 give thanks for Scrum, the necessary evolution of the scrum master role.

Dave West: 20:06

And from what I remember from the sessions and the sort of present back, it was very much one. This is a key role, a key a key set of skills that every organization is going to need to this. They need to manage their executives in a way that shows value so it sort of fits in with the first thing that we talked about. And they can, they are going to be a key catalyst for the adoption of AI in their teams. As the product owner is thinking about AI as it applies to the product that they're doing. I think they were the three big things that jumped out. Did I miss anything on that?

Daniel Mezick: 20:51

No, but I really, you know, when I when I was just listening to you there, I realized that, you know, and I agree and join with you in this idea, someone in the organization close to the teams, needs to be demonstrating those behaviors. Otherwise, things do break down. The communication breaks down, the flow of process and value breaks down without someone who's stewarding, I guess, would be a good term, and making sure when there's a hiccup or something, that it's addressed and dealt with. And you know, the flow continues Exactly.

Dave West: 21:26

And the job title thing was interesting, because in the room we had people who thought very strongly that it needed to be a separate job title with management authority. We had other people in the room that were very passionate that it wasn't a job title and it was just a set of behaviors, accountabilities, whatever you want to call it, that anybody could do, you know. And there was much debate as to which was the most successful. And unfortunately, I think it's it depends on the environment in which you're putting this person in. It does so. Then that brings me to the second area, which is the AI stuff. And this was obviously a massive theme of what Jeff was talking about and and a bit of the theme that I was talking about as well in my talks, which is the the role of a genic AI, or, I think a better way of describing it is really this idea that you've got an A member of the team, or members of the team, the scrum team, that aren't human, that are actually AI tools that have a nice user interface, by common language, by, you know, standard English language, yeah,

Daniel Mezick: 22:46

let's discuss that for a minute. Okay, so the group relations people, Eric trist and some of these other people from, from, you know, earlier history of organizational development, coined the phrase socio technical system, socio technical design to describe the man machine interface, right? So when, when you when a when a person is operating, it's one thing. When a machine is operating, it's another thing, but when the machine and the human interact, it's a third thing. Yeah. And the social the socio, called socio technical design is really critical. So if you think of like, for example, email, email has really bad socio technical design, any Yahoo can push any kind of junk into your inbox if they have your email address, yes. So this bad technical design at the other end, you've got this, like a generative AI that has an interface, that's a natural language interface. It has profoundly great socio technical design, okay? And we're led to believe, you know, because we jump to conclusions as humans, that, you know, it's like a team member, right? No, no, no, it's not a team member. It's, it's still a machine, it's still a tool, and the people are over here and the the tools are over here. It just so happens, the tools are acting more and more like, you know, language terms, more human, right? So I think it's a little bit of a category, or to what I when I went to at the event this year, I was thinking, they're not, they're not team members. You know, Jeff was saying the AI is a team member. Think so. I mean,

Dave West: 24:28

it depends on how you're thinking about your team. I certainly wouldn't like to go out for a drink with AI because they don't, they don't have a wallet, and they can't buy a round. So, you know, and that's obviously how I define a good team member, but that's just because I'm British. It's kind of what we do. But the in terms of, and I think Jeff was really categorizing it on they can do, they can take tasks from the backlog, sprint backlog, and do them, and it's as simple as that. In fact, I was on a call this small. Morning with a guy, ex McKinsey, guy who now runs the development of this, this Swedish company, has got about 120 150 engineers working, and he's basically ripping out massive chunks of their system and replacing it regenerative AI capabilities. And it's and he's increasing the capability. He's reducing size of teams and because it can do some amazing, amazing things. And he's like, Well, it can build code faster than most developers. It can do testing, definitely better than most developers it can do. It can help me make decisions about architecture, about, you know, etc, but it obviously can't it. What it doesn't replace is the decisions and the choices and the empathy with their users and things like that. But what it can do is make you it can augment your team, right? Such a way that you can either deliver more stuff or there can be less of you to deliver it, which most organizations, unfortunately, are doing. The latter, which is a bit of a shame.

Daniel Mezick: 26:12

Yes, let's discuss this agentic AI just for a minute, right? So I think Jeff is quite correct in what he said during the 2025 event, which is companies that reorganize their workflows to acknowledge the advent of the agents. AI agents are the ones that are going to massively benefit at the expense of their competitors, who, for whatever reason, cannot or will not re architect their workflow.

Dave West: 26:48

Yes, I think that was the crux of his presentation. And the call to action was, and you as scrum practitioners, need to be at the front of working out what these workflows look like and these workflows are going to change, that was the other interesting theme from from his presentation, and in general, was these, these workflows will change on a, on a on a at least a monthly basis, probably quicker than that, as these models change, obviously, potentially with the advent of the use of quantum computing, and assuming that energy is free and available ever if we can that potentially these llms, the models that they're running, will be dynamic. Thus they will change continuously. Thus your workflows can potentially change frequently,

Daniel Mezick: 27:43

and people are allergic to that. So, you know, we haven't discussed empiricism yet, but I want to bookmark it, because you might want to, might want to go to the first of the three things, which is a new focus on tangible results. You might want to, we might want to talk about that for a minute before we get to empiricism, but most people are allergic to not knowing, and they will literally make up a story that might or may or may not be true to comfort themselves about what's going on. Right? So we're all making up stories to make sense of reality and to not make sense of reality. That is to have uncertainty is very stressful to people, yeah, which explains a lot of, you know, resistance to frameworks like scrum right?

Dave West: 28:34

Yeah, I think that, you know, the scrumming encourages three really important changes in an organization, maybe four, but three for sure. One is around ownership. What do you mean is somebody's actually in charge, makes a decision about what's being done, etc, because people hate, hate that. It approaches problems with a we're not totally sure. Let's do the smallest we can do to get the most value. You're like, hang on a minute. Of course, we're sure if we deliver this feature, we know that this will do x. And the third thing is, it says the only people that actually know how to solve these problems are the people that are working in these problems. Hang on a minute. What do you mean? No, no, no, no, no. I know what needs to be done. I just haven't got time to do it so that I've employed these people. So those, those three things ultimately, are counter to most organizations.

Daniel Mezick: 29:40

Yes, because organizations are happiest and have the most sense of well being when there's certainty. So we see this in the stock market, right? Like you know, this is why we have earnings calls, right, to manage the expectations of people so they know what to expect, right? And this is what they corporations. Run on meanwhile, like the entire world, I could strongly argue that the world has become more uncertain and more empirical than

Dave West: 30:11

ever. Well, that needs to be more empirical. Yeah.

Daniel Mezick: 30:14

We need more important than ever because of the the pace of uncertainty and change,

Dave West: 30:22

yeah, and ultimately, you could argue it's almost chaotic now the world because just because something worked a minute ago doesn't mean it's going to work. Obviously, empiricism gives us, and I'm no expert on complexity theory and Snowden and the like, but it gives us at least some level of control and some level of feeling like we're making progress towards a goal, etc.

Daniel Mezick: 30:49

Yes, yes. And, you know, in Ken's 1996 book, I think it was called Agile software development with Scrum,

Dave West: 30:56

yeah, Scrum with the colors on the front, yeah, yeah.

Daniel Mezick: 30:59

That book has a lot of complexity science in it that's obviously, you know, influenced by Ken. So Ken was always thinking in this way. He co wrote that with Mike Beadle, but when I reread that book, I was shocked at the quality of the content in that book around scrums, addressing addressing complexity and uncertainty.

Dave West: 31:23

And that was actually all motivated because his brother in law actually, but we'll ignore the Hugh, who was working at DuPont, was working in materials, and where there was a large amount of science that highlighted the lack of certainty, and they were building processes with uncertain outcomes. So they Oh, well, the outcomes weren't necessarily on the same but how you got there was relatively uncertain. And they look and when they were talking about how software was developed, they were like he said, What the heck? Why are you applying this? What this structured? It wasn't he didn't call it waterfall, sequential control process you need to apply a different one. And obviously, Ken's wife, Chris is a PhD in chemistry as well. So I think that that all came to a head. And hence the reason my empiricism was very explicitly added, added to Scrum,

Daniel Mezick: 32:19

yes, yes, yes, it's, that's a it's super interesting. The whole, the whole thing about Scrum, in its role in a world that needs more empiricism, is, like, just incredible. So, like, if you, if you go around and you look at, like, online people talking about, well, that's not Scrum. This isn't Scrum. Or or Scrum is nothing, but a collection of, you know, empirical practices that existed before, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah, all those things are true. But if you don't do them, you know, if you don't do the behaviors that scrum suggesting, like having a single owner, like having a daily, you know, replan these kinds of things, you're going to get into huge trouble. And I would argue that this ABC waterfall approach is actually just a comforting story that's completely an illusion. Because if we were to acknowledge that, we'd have to face the fact we don't know anything.

Dave West: 33:16

Yes, well actually, Winston Royce, who was the guy I used to work with his son, Walker Winston Royce, who coined in the IBM Systems journal, coined the term waterfall, described it as a way that people like to manage software projects. But that isn't the reality and but that word, that phrase, was like, Oh, that's a nice phrase. We'll we'll call them all call it waterfall so and I think that what's interesting, and let's talk briefly about that first subject value, because I think it does have a clear connection with all the other things that we've just talked about, the role of Scrum Master and the use of AI in Scrum teams, that and the connection with empiricism, because ultimately, the value of Scrum is the ability to effectively manage a complex situation and deliver some value, the most value that you can out of it, Whilst not killing your team or destroying your team. The that that is ultimately the value of Scrum, but it's, it seems that many organizations have a really hard time with that, because it is counter to their existing organizational structure, processes, truisms, and you've got this like, well, what is the value where? What is it? I mean, business outcomes. Okay, what happens if I do experiments that demonstrate that actually, this isn't the business so it's learning. How do you measure learning? And now you throw AI into it, where you've got a continuous process of of discovery around how to work. Work utilizing AI, right?

Daniel Mezick: 35:02

So ultimately, you know, I've thought a little bit about this. First of all, value is a very deep and wide subject. Like, what is value? There's cash and non cash value. If the company stock goes up, you know, 300% can we attribute that directly to Scrum? Probably not. Okay, so what is the ultimate measure of value? What is a proxy for all of the nuance of the value components? I think it is delighted stakeholders. They fund everything. They are voting with the budget that they have, you know, stewardship authority over and they're looking to get something for that budget. And when they, you know, when they fund a scrum team, they that's what they expect. So to me, if the stakeholders are delighted, with a few exceptions, it's a pretty good proxy for what value actually is.

Dave West: 36:00

Yeah, I'd probably agree. Actually, ultimately, and a good product owner, working with the scrum master, will determine the relative importance not all stakeholders are the same, right? Instance, I have stakeholders. I have PSTs, 300 and something. PSTs, I have my team, and I have Ken and Chris owners, you know, when it comes to who thinks I'm doing a good job, I there's definitely a hierarchy there and as the should be. But ultimately, I think, but yes, I agree. But the thing that's really interesting about that is, with you, particularly if you bring empiricism into it. You the only way you can they can know stuff is if you do stuff right. But that's actually a jump. Most people's perception of the value of a team that's working for them, with them, delivering stuff to them is not necessarily other than users. There's very few people that actually that how they appreciate the value of the team is by them doing stuff. Do you know what I mean? Daniel, it's really, you know, whispers and, Oh, you heard about that team over there? Or, you know that they're not really doing well, or, oh, did you see their dashboard? Or all this stuff. So the most important thing a scrum master can do is make what they're doing and the value that it's delivering transparent to all stakeholders in the context necessary for that stakeholder to appreciate it. I think,

Daniel Mezick: 37:35

yes, that's that's super important. And in fact, you know, broadcasting information in a way that does not require a reply is actually a really good way to create a coordinated system. So for example, if you look in nature, social insects have colonies in the millions and they, they, they are through through signaling mechanisms, they stay coordinated. So what you just spoke to there is super important, okay, if a team's delivering value, it needs to get broadcasted and so that the other teams can pick up on the same patterns, and so forth and so on. But the reality is that uncertainty is something that highly authorized business leaders are allergic to, and the assumption of using an empirical framework like Scrum is that we don't know everything, which is quite frightening to people in control. So, you know, we do have a little bit of a dilemma there. We haven't really done a great job of educating about empirical process control,

Dave West: 38:53

no particularly at scale. Everybody can appreciate it when they're working in their situation, at their moment. For instance, the best examples of Scrum being executed Ken talks about 20 years ago were disaster projects, whether it's, you know, patient keeper, dare I say it, or or whether it's FBI Sentinel, and then even the use at companies like fidelity. The reason why scrum was being used wasn't because things were going well. It's because they were going really badly. And, yeah, it's because they were desperate, yes, and they were willing to accept that they didn't know stuff. And they're willing to accept because there was no alternative, yes.

Daniel Mezick: 39:41

So they came kicking and screaming to new understandings about, you know, empiricism, right? Do a little learn a little inspect that, deliver, go again, right? This is something that's, you know, there's an allergy developed for that. And I want to say one more thing before we. Um, probably move on to some other topics. Is, I think, the number one impediment to good empirical process control in organizations, profit seeking, goal seeking companies, the number one impediment, in my opinion, is, drum roll, please. It is obscene levels of profit when you're printing money. Why do I have to improve? Okay, so if you look at, for example, insurance companies, they are the poster child of this, this pattern, yes, they print money. There's huge bureaucracy and internal, you know, waste that's generated by that bureaucracy, and they don't care at all. Why? Yes, because they're just printing,

Dave West: 40:52

and it's hard to change that in terms of organization. I mean, you know, insurance companies, by the way, I'm not dissing insurance companies. It's a very, very important business, and there's some amazing people working in insurance companies that are booking that trend. They're delivering value in spite of the environment that they're in. But you know that insurance companies actually have structures around protecting risk and protect and slowing things down, and so, by the very nature of their business. So, yeah, it is, it is, is hard to see, to see them changing. Maybe AI will be the, the catalyst for certain levels of change when your competitor is, is seven people, and your 3000 people, right? If you look at what Mark and Drayson is doing in terms of him funding startups, he's now funding startups that with the you cannot grow your team more than seven or something. Think he lets them grow their sales organization, but their product delivery can has to be less than and well. And you know, when you're competing against those kind of organizations where the ability to rapidly change, then these organizations will have to change. But that's always been my assumption. It's not been proven right yet. So yes, but so we will see anyway we've been talking, and we could talk for hours, Dan as you as we have and our listeners obviously have probably more important things to do, including delivering value and actually doing real work. So I guess as we wrap this up, you know, you're thinking about 2026, and I encourage all the listeners in the Boston area in particular to please come to this event. I am committed to come, as is Jeff for next for this year, 2026 Much to my wife's annoyance. Who was, who was trying to give me a shopping list the day before? But you know what? What are you thinking 2026 is going to be about? Is it going to be more of the same? Is it? Is it going to be just all about AI? What do you think?

Daniel Mezick: 43:08

A couple things. First of all, AI is going to be a predominant thing next year for this event. And the reason why is because we'll have a whole year of learning in applying it, and there'll be a progression, just like there was with Scrum itself, over time, over these past 17 years, we're going to see that same kind of thing happen with AI. And AI is transformative. And, of course, you know, Scrum is all about, you know, transformational products and transformational change. So those two things are linked at the hip. So I think we're going to see the AI thing come be even clearer, maybe a little more narrowly defined we'll address it. It won't be as wide, it'll be a little more narrow and a little more focused on particular things that are working that we'll know as the year unfolds. And then the second thing that's that's big that we're talking about now is the kind of, what's the word I'm looking for the demise of the large agile framework, where it's beginning to be seen as, like, you know, we really wanted to believe this, this stuff works, and that's why we bought it, you know. And we actually bought, you know, maybe something that didn't work the way we expected, or maybe, in some cases, didn't work at all. I think that this is something that's going to accelerate and continue into 2026 you're, you're seeing the agile and empirical stuff being rolled into product roles. And, you know the idea of, like, release train engineer and all these other roles, they're sort of being subsumed into the formally authorized roles that are on the org chart.

Dave West: 44:56

Yeah, I mean, I always shocked and little I mean, scaling is an. Interesting topic. I'm not sure I've got any more answers than anybody else around it. Though I've seen hundreds, if not 1000s, of organizations wrestling with it, what was always a shock was things like scaled agile and the like, I'm not dissing them, but you didn't really see those. Don't see if it was a dedicated software company, they wouldn't be using something like a scout agile, which is, which is really interesting, as all of these companies that were adopting it were saying, we're going to be increasingly our value and our innovation is increasingly from software. And you know, there was always this sort of disconnect. And yeah, we, I had a podcast the other day where an organization had adopted it actually a software organization had adopt safe, and they were like saying, we're moving away from that to something slightly different. So I think, I think those two themes will continue. I think I agree with you. I think the the application of AI, a lot more practical stuff. And I think that the sort of real life. What does the future have for enterprises? Is it just product centric? Is it, you know, particularly, if AI changes the way in which it is consumed in organizations? What does that mean? Yeah, I think there's going to be an interesting conversation about the place that agile happens. Maybe. I think that's going to change over the next three to five years, which is which, of course, because give thanks for Scrum is always a little bit of a mirror of what's happening in the world. We will see that in the in the titles of give thanks for Scrum, the themes of give thanks for scrum in the next few years.

Daniel Mezick: 46:46

Yes, and going forward, we are holding the tension between the online event and the live face to face thing that we did in 2025 so in 2020 we did, we did online. It was purely online. Got over 300 people. 2025, where we're in Boston, we had about 110 people. We had no online aspect. So what we're doing is we're thinking about how we can blend these two things. And I've got, I've received some good ideas from other people about how we might be able to do this, where we do a blended event that has both the face to face community, Boston community aspect, but also the wider online piece that you know, because the world is actually interested in what we have to say.

Dave West: 47:37

It does appear so well. Daniel, thank you for attending the spending the time today talking about give thanks for Scrum. I really appreciated it.

Daniel Mezick: 47:47

Thank you, Dave. It's my pleasure. And you know, I look forward to seeing what unfolds in 2026 for Scrum, and scrum.org as well. Well.

Dave West: 47:57

Thank you. I appreciate that, and thank you for listening. Today, we were talking about give thanks for Scrum, which has been running for 17 Can you believe it years? And I was fortunate to have Daniel Messick, founder of give thanks for Scrum, and founder of agile Boston, and part of the leadership team of agile Boston, Daniel definitely shared with me and hopefully with you, the story of give thanks to Scrum and how it's evolved over these 17 years. And left us with 2025 you know, the role of AI, the role the value, where does value live, and the future of the scrum master accountability. And talked a little bit about that, and, you know, and how those three sort of intertwined in terms of the future of Scrum, which I thought was really, really interesting, and hopefully you did as well. Thanks for listening to today's scrum.org community podcast. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, share with your friends, and of course, come back and listen some more. I'm lucky enough to have a variety of guests talking about everything in the area of professional Scrum, product thinking, and, of course, agile. Thanks everybody. ScrumOrg.