“This was neither Scrum, nor a team. It was more like the anti-pattern bingo team.” – Gunnar Fischer
When Gunnar took his first job abroad, he walked straight into what he calls the “anti-pattern bingo team”—a supposed Scrum team that was neither Scrum nor a team. The company was in trouble, the team had a bad reputation and was used as a punching bag, the manager-of-manager treated them like a stepchild, and the new manager didn’t seem to know what he had signed up for. The team members themselves didn’t really want to work together.
The goals slipped. Decisions were made in back rooms, outside the official meetings. And underneath it all sat the most corrosive belief Gunnar names: that success is a zero-sum game—if you win, I lose. With that mindset, there is no team, just individuals defending turf.
One pattern stuck with him so clearly he gave it a name: sandcastle planning. The team would finish a Sprint planning, agree on a goal, and the manager would walk in right after the meeting and overturn the whole thing with his own priorities.
Over time, the team stopped putting effort into planning. Why build the castle if someone will trample it? Even worse, when an escalation finally surfaced, Gunnar—an immigrant—was told that as a German, he must be “very authoritarian.” A label, served up as analysis. That was the moment he knew the team would never have safe disagreements, never reach the right level of challenge, never recover.
In this segment, we talk about the corrosive effect of treating people as labels, and how the absence of an explicit reason for the team’s existence makes everything else collapse.
Self-reflection Question: Does your team have a clear, explicit reason for existing—or are you just a group that shares a technology, a building, or a reporting line?
Featured Book of the Week: Scrum Mastery (2nd Edition) by Geoff Watts
For Gunnar, the book that shaped him most as a Scrum Master is Scrum Mastery (2nd Edition) by Geoff Watts—what he calls “the noble knight of Scrum books.” He first read it just after a Scrum course and thought, “What should I even do with this kind of wisdom?”
Years later he came back to it and understood. A few years after that, he became modest about it: these are truths, but it’s about making them true—and watching for when they aren’t. The book is full of phrases like “a good Scrum Master is indispensable; a great Scrum Master is dispensable and wanted.” That last line captured it perfectly for him: success isn’t being unneeded, it’s being chosen.
As Gunnar puts it: “In times when everybody is challenged and people are making fun of agile practitioners, this brings back all of the ideals of what a Scrum Master is really about.” You can also listen to our previous episode with Geoff Watts on the podcast.
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Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Gunnar Fischer
Gunnar is the leader of the Chocolate Guild. Agile practitioner with a software developer background and a strong interest in people, intercultural contacts and the bigger picture. Gunnar’s purpose is to teach and to learn, to grow as a person and to support others who want the same.
You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.
You can also read Gunnar’s writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.
Junaid Shaikh is an energetic Agile Coach with a natural flair for Agile and Scrum, shaped by recent experiences at software giants like Ericsson and hardware leaders ABB. In his work, he champions collaboration, curiosity, and continuous improvement. Beyond coaching, he brings the same passion to cricket, table tennis, carrom, and his newest sporting obsession — padel.
Lai-Ling fixes the gap between operating model design and real-world delivery through her interim executive, consulting, capability building, and executive coaching work. She also equips product and transformation leaders with the capability everyone expects but no one teaches – how to navigate the people, politics, and performance expectations that come with their jobs.
Harri is an experienced leader, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach who was introduced to the world of agile software development in 2010. Since then, Harri has had the pleasure of leading great agile teams in various forms.