You can follow every Scrum rule.
Run every ceremony.
Refine every ticket.
And still watch it all fall apart.
Because there’s one thing Scrum can’t work without.
And most teams skip it.
I was interviewing for a job where things were many things were a bit… broken.
They were honest about it. The team looked worn down. They admitted that they wanted to change things. I made an offhand joke—something about stories being just one vague sentence long. They winced. That’s when I knew: they were living it.
However as I spoke to them, I realised something very important:
They wanted it to be better.
They weren’t defending the mess. They weren’t pretending it was fine. They were frustrated — and they wanted things to be different.
That’s why I accepted the job.
On my first day, people were coming up to me, venting about everything that wasn’t working.
I listened. I took notes. I didn’t rush in with solutions. I just observed how things went off the rails. How the lack of detail in stories caused them to spiral out of control. How work derailed mid-sprint.
A few months later, after quietly collecting all those examples, I simply said:
“I’ve noticed a few patterns. Here’s where I think things go wrong. What if we try it this way instead?”
And because they wanted things to improve, they were open. They didn’t push back. They bought in.
And that’s the most important thing:
You can have the best plan in the world. The best process. The most beautiful, fully aligned Jira board. Every story refined. Every ceremony booked. Every best practice followed.
But if the people on the team don’t want it to work — it won’t.
They’ll resist. They’ll avoid. They’ll quietly sabotage. They’ll follow the rules technically, while making sure they don’t produce the intended result. And the project will fail.
Conversely: You can have a terrible plan. A bad process. Half-broken tools. Out-of-date stories. Missing acceptance criteria.
But if the people want it to work — if they care — it will work.
They patch the gaps. They fix the bad ideas. They rescue broken plans. They ask questions. They collaborate. They adjust. They will make it work.
As a Scrum Master, I’ve learned:
It’s not the process that matters most. It’s buy-in.
So many Scrum teams skip that step entirely, that’s why it goes wrong.
A Scrum Master joins, spots the chaos, and drops a process on the team like a piano from the sky.
“This is how we’re doing it now.”
No context. No collaboration. No buy-in.
And people push back—because now it’s not their process. It’s just another thing being done to them.
If it feels rigid, top-down, and oblivious to real problems? It’s not going to work and people either won’t or feel like they can’t make it work.
Even the best process in the world is useless if the team doesn’t want it.
After we got buy-in, everything started to shift.
I ran training to help the team understand what Scrum was really for—because you can’t care about a process you don’t understand.
We set up real sprints. A release plan. We restarted the meetings: retrospectives, wrap-ups, sprint kick-offs. We finally did backlog grooming—and tackled that tangle of poorly written tickets one by one.
And then I saw it: Developers creating well-written tickets with acceptance criteria—without being asked. Retrospectives full of honest, positive feedback.
Things still went wrong. They always do. But we had the framework. We had the mindset. And we kept iterating—not just on the work, but on the way we worked.
And it only worked because they made it work. They wanted it to work. So when something broke, they fixed it. When a new problem popped up, they tried something new. There was never any talk of giving up. Never any nostalgia for the chaos.
Starting a conversation with someone new can feel impossible.
You don’t know them. They don’t know you. Your brain freezes. You don’t know what to say. But the thing I’ve learned is:
If the person wants to talk to you — it doesn’t matter what you say.
You can walk up and spout complete nonsense. You can make a random comment about the weather or school holidays. If they want to talk to you, they’ll make it work. They’ll pick up the thread. They’ll build the conversation with you.
On the other hand, you can walk up with the most thoughtful, witty, carefully crafted opening line imaginable — and if they don’t want to talk to you, they’ll shut you down.
It’s not the line that matters. It’s whether both people want the conversation to happen.
Scrum is the same.
A perfect process without buy-in is just awkward small talk.
A broken one with buy-in? That’s how real connections start.
You can’t iterate your way out of apathy.
Davide la Locomotive 
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