Why Teams Go Through The Motions of Agile Without Being Agile, And What To Do About It

Junaid Shaikh: Why Teams Go Through The Motions of Agile Without Being Agile, And What To Do About It

Junaid's book recommendation is The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. As a Scrum Master working at companies like Ericsson and ABB — organizations that are a "United Nations" of cultures — understanding cultural tendencies has been essential. But Junaid goes further: you can customize the Culture Map framework even within a team of people from the same country, using the parameters to map different personalities. It's about how you use the tool, not just where people come from.

He also recommends Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great Servant Leadership by Geoff Watts for practical advice on the servant leadership role, and regularly visits Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org for real-world insights from the community.

On the topic of teams that self-destruct, Junaid paints a picture that many listeners will recognize. He picked up a team's retrospective history and cumulative flow diagrams and found problems at every level: managers who declared "from tomorrow we're going agile" without understanding what that meant, then started comparing velocity across teams. Product owners who took PO training but reverted to command-and-control project management. A previous Scrum Master doing what Junaid calls "zombie Scrum" — implementing the framework mechanically without understanding its purpose.

The pattern underneath it all: people enveloping their traditional mindset under an agile umbrella. The ceremonies happen, the daily standups run, but nobody is questioning why they're doing any of it. As Vasco observes, this zombie pattern isn't limited to Scrum — it happens with code reviews, architecture reviews, any process that gets adopted without critical thinking about its purpose.

Junaid's insight: if you don't understand the basics with the right mindset, every event feels like overhead. Teams complain about "too many meetings" because they're running agile ceremonies on top of their old informal processes. "If you don't get out of your previous shell, you cannot get into a new shell."

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About Junaid Shaikh

Junaid Shaikh is an energetic Agile Coach with a natural flair for Agile and Scrum, shaped by recent experiences at software giants like Ericsson and hardware leaders ABB. In his work, he champions collaboration, curiosity, and continuous improvement. Beyond coaching, he brings the same passion to cricket, table tennis, carrom, and his newest sporting obsession — padel. You can link with Junaid Shaikh on LinkedIn.