Every End Has a Start (from the (last) Scrum Caretaker Courier 16)

As you are reading this, a complete calendar month has already (almost) gone by in 2026, this not so ‘new’ year anymore. We are 29 January 2026 as I am writing this. I hope your year has started off brilliantly and I wish you all the best. That wish, by the way, is not just for 2026 but for many, many years to come.

Our daughter made the paintings for the above greeting cards at our request. We feel it makes it so much more personal. I hope you like them too. My creativity is so much less, which shows in the cross-stitching work that I have picked up on again (after many years):

As much as every end has a start, every end also is a start–as we know from transitioning into a new year. Would you agree that transitioning into a new year does not really belong in the “big, disruptive” category? My online presentation “Re-imagine your Scrum” for the Scrum Caretakers of the Universe (SMOTU) on 15 January 2026 will have been my last public session. This Scrum Caretaker Courier (nr. 16) will also be my last. I have other ambitions and aspirations on how to connect with people. Allow me to still share how I look at 2025 and at 2026.

Warm regards
Gunther
independent Scrum Caretaker and Workplace Humanitarian

ps. No matter how big a disruption is or feels, time will take us to the future–despite its intimate relationship with space. Let’s abide by the scientific fact that:

“This directionality, this arrow of time, is one of the most powerful and universal organizational principles behind the workings of the physical world”

–Thomas Hertog, “On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory” (2023)

Rocks Moved in 2025

In 2025, much to my joy, I have been able to move some ‘Big Rocks’:

• Already in January 2025 the third edition of my Dutch translation of my pocket guide to Scrum, “Scrum Wegwijzer (Derde druk)“, was published. As you may have guessed, the work had started much sooner: after the publication of the 4th edition of the English version of “Scrum – A Pocket Guide” in September 2024. But, hey, a ‘Big Rock’ can’t be considered as “moved” unless the work is available for the consumer.  
• In September 2025 I finally wrote and published the follow-up paper to “The illusion of agility” (2019) called “Re-imagine your Scrum“. I am unable to articulate why it took me so long, but I strongly feel that I couldn’t have expressed my follow-up views and advice in writing any sooner.
• In October 2025 I finalised and released my new Scrum Focus Class called “Engaging the Brain“. It was originally designed to be a follow-up workshop to my Scrum Focus Class about “The Scrum Values” but I decided to decouple them anyhow, so people can attend both classes independently. I like that more than locking-in people.

In the mean time I had revamped my series of proprietary workshops. I renamed the series from “Scrum Pocket Classes” to “Scrum Focus Classes” (July 2025),  called the overarching series to the two mentioned classes “Psychological Safety” and rebranded the first class from “The Scrum Values” to “Values Drive Behavior” (October 2025). Those achievements I call ‘Small Rocks that were moved.

Unfortunately, not one of the planned sessions for Scrum Focus Class 2 on Psychological Safety (“Engaging the Brain”) happened because nobody registered, despite my public campaigns and personal mails.

I actively solicited feedback about this highly disappointing result to you and others. The major reason why people weren’t signing up seems to be that their company wasn’t funding them to attend (and they either didn’t want to fund it privately or they had done that already too much).

As several people had indicated “maybe in 2026”, I recently gave it another try. To no avail. The same result as before (near total silence). Even more disappointments and important food for thought.

Professional Scrum Classes in Athens, Greece

I am excited to share that I will be facilitating some Professional Scrum classes in beautiful Athens (Greece) in person.

Last year, at the request of Learning Actors, I facilitated an in-person, private PSPO class for (non-software) people of a large Greek company. Upon the great receipt and feedback, Learning Actors invited me to come back to facilitate some public classes on site:

• A PSM class on 20/21 April 2026 (“Professional Scrum Master”).
• A PSPO class on 22/23 April 2026 (“Professional Scrum Product Owner”).

Both classes are planned to take place in the office of Learning Actors: 280 Mesogeion, 15562 Cholargos, Athens.

Interested people can obviously get in touch with Learning Actors or yours truly.

Your help in sharing this news in your company and your network would be much appreciated 🙏.

The Biggest Rock for 2026: A New Book

In December 2025, I finally started writing a new book. As I know from my previous writing endeavours: writing is re-writing. But, so much time spent on creating this book so far went not just into the regular process of re-writing what I had written before. I probably spent even more time re-writing all I had written before with what I was uncovering during the writing. During the process I saw the final figure becoming present in the massive block asking for the excess material to be removed, carefully.

This book marks the beginning of an incredibly important next stage of my journey of humanizing the workplace:

Regardless the unfortunate reality of the attempts of organizations to increase their agility, a more fundamental question is: is ‘agility’ even the right goal of such transformation? Is ‘agility’ not merely the means to an end? The answer to the question of what should have been the goal is: generating value. Generating value and increasing the ability to do so is and should have been the purpose.

There actually is thus a bigger problem underlying the problem of “the illusion of agility”. And it is “the illusion of striving for agility”. We can only move forward by putting (the ability of) generating value front and center. We need to look beyond our past achievements and increase our efforts to shape a better future, a future in which we stop building on ideas and principles from manufacturing—directly or indirectly. It is high time to go to the next level of work organization, beyond Type B or Type C development as described in ‘The New New Product Development Game’ (1986), beyond Scrum (1995-1998) and beyond Agile (2001).

We need to (re)design our organizations to thrive in the Anthropocene, redefine ‘productivity’ and align it with ‘humanity’, beyond the obsession with (what traditionally is called) ‘productivity’ and about what yields the highest ‘productivity’ gains. It is time to shift from volume to value. It is time to optimize our work organization, the processes we follow as well as our organizations themselves for value.

In this book I present how to deeply and systemically redesign organizations towards a more humane organization, and not just those that have adopted Scrum. This book also helps those that haven’t adopted Scrum and have no plans to do so. This book takes the reader beyond what most people understand as Agile and Scrum anyhow, albeit remaining true to their spirit. This book is about Scrum beyond Agile, about Scrum beyond its terminology, about Scrum beyond Agile teams, about being agile beyond frameworks. It goes beyond anything we know today all together.

For this book I have deeply reconsidered, extended and rephrased the principles, practices and concepts I have experienced, observed, described and promoted throughout my life of Scrum, since 2003. I was able to finally piece together a lot of the ideas that I gathered during my professional life so far into a cohesive vision for systemic organizational change towards more humane, and therefore more viable and future-proof, organizations.

Another Big Rock for 2026: Patreon

As you may know, business wise I have been and still am in a very difficult position. The effort for the care for our adult sons (given their disabilities) has gradually increased so much over the years that I can’t take up traditional consulting work any more. At the same time, I am the only source of income for our family. Gradually, I became completely dependent on classes and workshops, mostly on Professional Scrum classes. I operate independently in the sense that I have no business partners, training organizations or other forms of enterprise support.

That worked reasonably well until the training market started degrading before it totally collapsed. Bottom line, I’ve had no worthwhile revenues over the past years and my company Ullizee-Inc is running out of its financial buffers. Yet, despite my difficult business position I don’t want to give in to despair and I will stick to delivering value and quality, and not go the easy money. It is why I created my proprietary Scrum Focus Classes, but also why it was such a slow process. Unfortunately, to no avail.

Quite some people shared that they would be willing to (financially) support me without having to ‘buy’ something, just to make sure I can keep conceiving and sharing (as I am currently doing with my new book). inspired by them I am planning to give Patreon a try. I envision using it to set up a community space for (Scrum) Caretakers and (Workplace) Humanitarians. I envision a few different membership levels and different types of discounts, content offerings and discussions depending on the membership levels:

• Open hangouts.
• Collaborative Interactivents.
• Scrum Pocketcasts (reading my book ‘Scrum – A Pocket Guide’).
• Sneak previews and presentations of my new book.
• Dry-runs of new workshops and class exercises.

Ideally it would become the Foundation for Humane Workplace Organization (FHWO).