Once upon a time… there was a time when a career looked predictable (I do not miss those times, even when I miss stability… almost never).
You got an education, chose a profession, gained experience, and slowly moved forward. Identity was stable. You could say, “I am a doctor” or “I am an engineer,” and it was meaningful and permanent. Employers asked, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” — and this question did not feel strange (it probably did, but for another reason).
Then the idea of VUCA appeared, the world was defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (I wrote about it here).
Career stopped being something stable. It became something like a flexible flow. Identity also changed. It became flexible: not “I am a Product Owner,” but “I am a Product Owner now.” Adaptability became more important than stability, and continuous studying and learning became the norm. You could not rely on the future being predictable, but you could try to stay flexible enough to move with it.
But today we live not only in VUCA. We live in BANI — a brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible world. This is not only about the external world. It is about how people experience it internally.
I started noticing this inside teams as well. From the outside, everything can look correct. Scrum is in place. Velocity is counted and tracked. Retrospectives happen. The board is clean. But somewhere deep inside, people feel tired, or even irritated, for no clear reason… silently burning out.
Scrum is a good framework. I use it myself. It helps organize work. I learned it from the best practitioners, Sally Beety and Paul Gregory, when I worked at Juriba LTD (I have not seen better examples after them). Scrum is a useful framework. But in most cases, it is not a psychological safety system.
It cannot create trust where there is none. It cannot remove anxiety about the future of the product, or the company, or your own place inside it. It helps organize work, but it does not automatically create internal stability (quite often it can create an illusion of it).
Scrum works best when certain conditions already exist: trust, professional maturity, intellectual honesty, and willingness to take responsibility. Without these, Scrum becomes just a structure people move inside, without believing in it. It is like trying to play chess with someone who knows how the pieces move, but does not care about the game.
I once worked with a developer who was capable and internally disengaged in the same time. He wanted recognition and growth, but avoided the effort required to reach the next level. He treated Scrum with quiet cynicism (he found ways to do less and not be caught or questioned for a long time) — the same way emotionally immature people sometimes treat empathy: as weakness. So the framework was in the place, but the internal foundation was missing.
This is where BANI becomes visible.
- Brittle — systems that look stable, but break suddenly. I have seen companies where people quietly disappeared. They went on vacation and never returned. Only later the team learned they had left.
- Anxious — not just complexity, but emotional pressure. We have effort estimates and planned release dates, but it feels more like a way to keep stakeholders calm
- Nonlinear — actions do not produce predictable results. Again effort estimates just a way to “marry” reality and expectations.
- Incomprehensible — even with data, clarity does not always emerge.
In this environment, structure alone is not enough. Scrum alone cannot remove anxiety. Velocity cannot create meaning. Retrospectives cannot replace trust.
What can help? Obviosly,
- clarity – not as control,
- structure — not as bureaucracy,
- empathy — not as weakness,
- and less heroism…
But this is an idealistic view. In reality, the answer is probably somewhere in a healthy distance between extremes. This feels more realistic.
Scrum is still useful. I continue to use it. At least it feels softer and more careful with teams. I think, initially it tries to carefully unite talented individuals into one real team. But I no longer expect it to solve problems it was never designed to solve.
Frameworks organize work. People carry uncertainty. World requires flexibility and the human psyche requires stability.
We move between these poles constantly. And maybe understanding this tension is already a form of stability…
Leave a Reply