Reframing Frameworks

Scrum was never meant to be hung on the wall and left untouched. Like any artwork, its value emerges through careful, ongoing curation.

After two decades teaching Scrum, I’ve made an important decision: I will not renew my Scrum.org trainer license at the end of 2025. For someone who has taught Scrum as a framework for so many years, the word framework is not just a technical label — it is a metaphor. A frame shapes how we view what sits inside it.

This is why I want to begin with an analogy from the world of art.

A museum curator never evaluates a painting on its own. They consider the frame, the placement, the lighting, the spacing, the height, and even what other works will surround it. A single painting can feel entirely different when it hangs a few feet to the left or next to a complementary piece. Context changes perception — sometimes dramatically.

Scrum works in much the same way. It is never just Scrum itself that determines its impact. It is Scrum in context: Scrum alongside culture, processes, incentives, leadership behaviors, and organizational design. And because of that, it’s worth stating explicitly:

Scrum Isn’t Wrong — But Agility Needs a New Posture

Scrum continues to work, and I am not stepping away because I believe Scrum has failed. I am stepping away because the world around Scrum has changed.

In the early days, we often described Scrum as a form of shock therapy. Teams stopped what they were doing, discarded legacy processes, and replaced everything with Scrum. This radical reset created a tight frame around an engineering team — a protected environment where cross-functionality, collaboration, and rapid feedback could flourish. For many years, this approach created impressive and immediate improvements.

But the shock is gone. What was once disruptive and refreshing has become familiar. The agile team “islands” created by Scrum — self-contained teams working in modern ways inside traditional organizations — now struggle to stay connected to a business environment that has evolved significantly.

The challenge today is not to create more islands, but to reconnect them to a broader organizational landscape that itself is changing. Ironically, agile teams must now learn to adapt their ways of working. What worked twenty years ago is not necessarily what today’s complex systems require. And from what I can tell, complexity is on a rise.

When the context around Scrum shifts and Scrum does not shift with it, the framework can easily slide into mechanical ritual, rule adherence, certification-oriented understanding, or process orthodoxy. The intent fades while the motions remain. In some organizations, Scrum begins to look like a polished routine performed without reflection.

Scrum hasn’t lost its essence. The context has simply overpowered it.

Today’s business challenges call for something more fluid: adaptability, scientific thinking, continuous sense-making, and deliberate learning across whole systems — not just within isolated teams.

When the Frame Remains Rigid but the Museum Changes

Frameworks provide structure, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But agility requires movement. When a framework becomes the center of attention, teams often devote their energy to preserving rituals, defending roles, and following guidance rather than exploring, learning, and adapting.

Meanwhile, the organization continues to evolve — sometimes rapidly. When the frame stays frozen, or teams aim to protect the boundary while the museum around it transforms, tension emerges. The friction we often attribute to “Scrum problems” is frequently a context problem instead.

This is where Agile Kata offers a different path.

Reframing Scrum With Agile Kata

Agile Kata is not a framework and it is not a new set of roles, events, or artifacts. Instead, it is a pattern — a simple, structured thinking routine that helps teams explore uncertainty, run small experiments, learn deliberately, and adapt their way of working over time.

What matters most is this: Agile Kata is a starting point, not an end state. It offers a sequence to begin with, but not one that teams should expect to practice in a rigid, unchanging form. As learning deepens and context evolves, the routine may change. That is ok. Steps might merge or loosen. The structure may become more fluid. The intention is to strengthen scientific thinking, not enforce another process.

And because Agile Kata encourages continuous reflection about the system, not the framework in isolation, it will inevitably influence the way Scrum looks inside an organization. For some teams the change will be subtle; for others it may be profound. Over time, your Scrum may no longer resemble the Scrum you know today — and that is not something to fear. That is agility doing what it was always meant to do: evolve responsibly with real-world complexity.

Agile Kata helps teams design their own ways of working intentionally, rather than inheriting a way of working by default. It enriches Scrum where Scrum fits, reshapes it where it doesn’t, and creates space for new patterns where none currently exist.

Examples of Reframing in Practice

Iterations as Exploration Rather Than Obligation

Two-week sprints have become a default rhythm in many organizations, but cadence is not the point; learning is. When iterations become habitual, their original purpose is often forgotten. With Agile Kata, teams may experiment with their cadence, shorten it, lengthen it, or — if the context favors a continuous flow — even remove iterations entirely. What matters is the intentional design of the learning rhythm, not the preservation of the ritual.

Planning, Refinement, and Review as Opportunities — Not Burdens

Scrum events tend to expand and harden over time. Planning can become an exercise in forecasting, a never-ending backlog refinement session (e.g. definition of ready), and sprint reviews are a scripted ritual. What once supported creativity can begin to limit it. Agile Kata encourages teams to question whether these routines still support learning and value creation, and if not, to adapt them thoughtfully rather than endure them automatically.

Ironically, Scrum has often become the very routine it once set out to disrupt.

What I Am Stepping Away From — And What I’m Continuing

I am not stepping away from Scrum. Far from it. I will continue to deliver my most effective, outcome-focused Scrum trainings — the ones refined over years — because they help people think differently, experiment thoughtfully, and approach their work with more clarity and creativity.

What I am stepping away from are certification-oriented classes that focus primarily on understanding the boundaries of the framework: the roles, the rules, the artifacts, and the precise mechanics of what is inside the frame. These courses serve a purpose, but they no longer reflect the direction agility needs to move. At least from my perspective. The future belongs to teams and organizations that learn how to evolve their way of working, not merely understand one specific way of working.

A Path Forward

Agile Kata does not replace Scrum; rather, it can reframe it. It situates Scrum within its broader organizational context and gives teams the means to examine and evolve that relationship over time. It supports organizations in designing ways of working that reflect their current challenges, constraints, and aspirations — not the assumptions of twenty years ago.

Scrum has provided us with a powerful beginning. Agile Kata extends that beginning into a journey. The question now is not whether Scrum still works. The question is how we choose to curate it.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to stay connected — join the conversation, explore what’s possible, and become part of the growing Agile Kata Pro community through classes, meetups, or this newsletter.

Reflection? In your organization, what might be influencing how Scrum is perceived, limited, or misunderstood today?