I’ve written several blog posts about the role of a Scrum Master. Most recently, I wrote about why we shouldn’t refer to Scrum Masters as leaders. But the new revision of the Scrum Guide that just came out throws another wrinkle in the role definition, by saying this (emphasis added):

The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. They do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory and practice, both within the Scrum Team and the organization.

The Scrum Master is accountable for the Scrum Team’s effectiveness. They do this by enabling the Scrum Team to improve its practices, within the Scrum framework.

Scrum Masters are true leaders who serve the Scrum Team and the larger organization

https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-master

At first glance this looks like it directly contradicts what I’ve written. It is as if Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland read my blog and said, “No, no, we meant that they should really be leaders”. Actually, it looks like the guide goes even further, assigning to the Scrum Master the accountability for the team’s effectiveness. As Allen Holub put it

“I hold you accountable” means “I’ll punish you if you fu***k up. & the speaker gets to define what f’d up means.

That’s the _only_ way I’ve heard the word used in actual practice. Trying to convince yourself the word is kinder and gentler is delusional wishful thinking, IMO.

https://twitter.com/allenholub/status/1331702088355651585?s=20

While I do not necessarily share Holub’s colorful turn of phrase,he has a point. In English, “accountability” rarely has positive connotations. I have never heard anyone use the phrase “the project went great and I hold you accountable!” I’m not sure if a sentence like that would even make sense to the listener. What’s more, this idea of accountability seems to fly in the face of another central idea of the Scrum Guide: Self-Management. For how can you say “The entire Scrum Team is accountable” when you’re holding one particular person’s feet to the fire?

So what’s going on here?

A part of the answer might be gleaned from the list of ways that the Scrum Master serves the people around them. As I pointed out last week, the term “leads” only appears in this list once, in the context of leading training. The rest of their duties are “coach,” “help,” “ensure,” etc. In other words, the Scrum Master is “accountable” for the team’s effectiveness in the same way that the Product Owner is accountable for maximizing value:

The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team. How this is done may vary widely across organizations, Scrum Teams, and individuals.

[..]

The Product Owner may do the above work or may delegate the responsibility to others. Regardless, the Product Owner remains accountable.

https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#product-owner

IE, they have the final say on what would be the most effective way for the team to maximize its outcomes, but not necessarily for creating those outcomes.

Another part of the answer might be that this is also a way to acknowledge that we do not live in an ideal world. At the end of 2020, Agile is enjoying unprecedented popularity, and rare is the software company that doesn’t employ Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or some other agile framework to conduct its development.

Yet, for all this, it is also very rare to find a truly agile company that operates entirely on trust and self-management. The very nature of the market requires long-term planning, prediction, and accountability from companies, and they in turn require these from their management and employees. For all the self management in the world, a department head is unlikely to sit down with the entire scrum team to try and get answers about what they are doing and when they will be done. (This is even more rare in remote situations, where the team may be spread across the country or the globe.)

Traditional management requires accountability, and this may be Scrum’s way of giving it to them, while defining the spheres of that accountability. You think that the team is not building the right thing? Talk to the PO. You think that the team is not performing well enough? Talk to the Scrum Master. But in both of those cases, you (the manager) must listen to the people who own that part of the effort, and engage with them to try to solve the problems together.

Will it work? I am not convinced. I think that the choice of words in the new guide will be a topic of hot debate for the upcoming years, and that the guide will eventually be revised or expanded to clarify this issue. But for all my skepticism, and that of my fellow agilists like Mr. Holub, I have to look at it and say, “Scrum is founded in empiricism, and empiricism teaches us to judge an action by its results.” So I’m going to wait with my own colorful comments until I see the results of this and the other revisions of the guide. Until then, Scrum on.