I was Scrum Master for a team that should've been Kanban. I turned the dysfunction into a space opera instead of handing my therapist a 400-page exhibit.
I was the Scrum Master when we first adopted Scrum — got the certification, then tried to actually get a team to follow it, in a context that should have been running Kanban from day one. I spent years watching ceremonies happen for the sake of ceremonies, forcing sprint cadence onto work that was actually flow-based and interrupt-driven, and wondering if I was the only one seeing how broken it all was.
So instead of just venting about it, I turned it into a structural argument. I took my actual team, exaggerated it into a space crew on a dying ship, and wrote out exactly how a textbook-bad Agile implementation actually breaks down — not as a rant, but as a real case study wearing a sci-fi costume. Somewhere in there I ended up naming the mechanism I kept watching play out in real life: a Team Lead role that doesn't exist in any Agile framework, inserting itself between the team and leadership anyway, filtering what gets through and taking credit for what makes it out clean. I'm calling it the Shielded Incompetence Layer — zero certification, zero accountability, full veto power, just by sitting in the right spot in the org chart.
And because apparently catastrophe isn't complete without something absurd in the background, there are also nine retired astronaut monkeys who keep drifting into frame mid-meeting, because every team needs a pet on camera, and these ones happen to glow.
It's called Agility Horizon (woohoo, I'm on Amazon). If you've ever watched someone with no certification and no accountability install themselves as the single point of failure between your team and the people who could actually fix things, you'll probably recognize a lot of this.
Genuinely curious if this resonates with anyone else here, or if I'm just describing my own personal nightmare.