My new whitepaper “Scrum. Not Scrum. (Redefining the Future Through the Roots)” is now available. I derived the content from the new book I am writing. That new book will hold my vision on how to deeply and systemically redesign organizations towards a more humane system based on a new development paradigm in which ‘productivity’ is about value and is aligned with ‘humanity’. Revisiting the roots of what is called “Scrum” showed me the path to shaping the future of development as part of a better world to live and work in.
In December (2025) I started working on a new book. Again. And at the same time…finally. Over the years I have gone through several attempts to write a new book, but they all ended up in the bin. This time was different. Maybe it was some inner drive that made it feel different?
In 2019 I shared my observations about what I called The Illusion of Agility in a short movie and in a whitepaper. They hold my observations on what I had seen happening with most—if not all—so-called ‘Agile Transformations’ or similar attempts of organizations to become Agile by adopting Scrum or otherwise. Because pointing out the problem (“inspection”) without offering a way out (“adaptation”) is hardly helpful, at the same time I also shared my advice to “Re-imagine your Scrum” in a short movie. However, I never got to writing the full whitepaper until the fall of 2025. Finally publishing this whitepaper really was the spark I needed to get going on a new book.
The plan was to elaborate on the ideas of “Re-imagining (your) Scrum”, expand and enrich it with ideas of “Moving (your) Scrum Downfield” and add a chapter on why and how to “Humanize the Workplace”. These are the topics of most of my speaking engagements since 2020.
As I was writing however, a nagging feeling started creeping in. That feeling told me that my writing was not ambitious enough (not worthwhile) and that I was even driven by the wrong ambition. Yet, it was difficult to really wrap my head around it. But the writing process helped me to deeply reconsider many of the ideas and concepts that I ever experienced and described—in my books, blog notes, whitepapers and elsewhere. I (re)discovered many ideas that had been lingering in my head for a long time, with several of them even going back to my earliest years of Scrum (2003-2005). I had shared them in whole or in part in my work with clients, in my classes and workshop and at various events, meet-ups and gatherings, but I gained a new light on them. The feeling grew that I was on to something…
I started extending and rephrasing many concepts and ideas which made them feel like novel and innovative. It also sparked the emergence of new insights in my mind. Finally, I was uncovering many concepts and ideas that I felt are worthwhile capturing in a book. That in turn made me really go all the way… I was able to piece together a lot of the ideas gathered during my professional life so far. In the end, it has taken me a considerable time to distill and fine-tune them, and numerous times of re-writing and restructuring the complete manuscript that I had created so far, but I ended up describing a cohesive vision for the organizational design of more humane and future-proof organizations.
Then a friend checking out my draft manuscript made me feel uneasy again. Luckily. I realized that the work I had done up to that point was (a) still too much about the past and (b) too full of justification of myself. That was not useful in offering innovative ideas and concepts to redefine the future. It actually covered the novelty message in dust. Some painful introspection taught me that the reason was that (a) the book originally started out as described before and (b) I am a very uncertain person with a very low level of self-esteem anyhow.
Long story short: I was once again facing the effort of substantially redoing a lot of what I had already written. On the other hand, such back and forth movements are not really unusual in my creative efforts. As I was getting ready to re-start and remove the many observations and references to the past, I still felt that there is value in them, next to the fact that I had the incredible urge to get some things off my chest also. Then it dawned upon me that what I had written actually would make a pretty good whitepaper, one that fits my collection of whitepapers pretty decently actually. It was quite an effort but I have now published that whitepaper that I gave the title “Scrum. Not Scrum. (Redefining the Future Through the Roots)”. You will find that it is also a sort of rationale of my new book. Revisiting the roots of what is called “Scrum” showed me the path to shaping the future of development. Both aspects are highlighted in my whitepaper. My book will focus on the latter.
In short: it is time to redefine how to organize development. In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka shared their research on successful development organization in the field of new product development. They called it “the rugby approach” because it revolved around self-organizing, multidisciplinary teams. In 1995, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber used “Scrum” as the name for their new software development process. The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. More than ever before, technology and cognitive, creative work have become critical drivers of organizations and of society at large. At the same time, the playfield of development is going through fundamental changes—not in the least through the advent of AI. It is time to move on and emerge a new development paradigm.
In the book as I currently envision it, I present how to deeply and systemically redesign organizations towards a more humane organization based on a new development paradigm. So, it will not just be for those that have adopted Agile and Scrum. This book also helps those that haven’t done so and have no plans to do so. This book takes the reader beyond what most people understand as Agile and Scrum anyhow. 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. This book is about deep, systemic changes that as a whole represent a new beginning.
“Organizational constructs are not to be added but are to be replaced or eliminated, as is the case for ‘Big Bold Bureaucracy’. Instead of worsening the feelings of alienation, the machinery of alienation itself needs to be dismantled. Instead of adding corporate management techniques, it is ‘managerialism’ in itself that needs to be halted.”