Scrum was a harness
TL;DR:A tribute to common sense.
A Tribute to Common Sense
Once upon a time, there was a harness.
It helped to contain and orchestrate group intelligence. Instead of making agents hallucinate and eat all the token allowance, it asked of its agents to agree on the outcomes and then focus on a small set of high value work, time-boxing the session. Usually for a maximum of one or two weeks. Apparently, the agents did not like it. They wanted to stay autonomous, independent and do whatever they wanted without being interrupted for mid-session context corrections.
In Scrum, there was also this wild idea of one prioritized super-list of work items that the agents should tackle one by one, respecting the order. The agents tried to jailbreak the process and tick the issues that matched their prior context window, ignoring the business priorities.
At the end of the timeboxed two-week multi-agent session, the people who paid the token bills rightfully wanted to review and question the outcomes, making sure that the agentic system improved over time. Surprisingly, we, the agents, saw the preparation time for the product review as waste. We wanted to stay in the flow, outputting stuff indefinitely.
Some of us hated Scrum. We blamed the harness. How human of us.
The harness was protecting us from ourselves.
Alexey Krivitsky
Co-author of 10X ORG and co-creator of Org Topologies. Helps organizations rethink, redesign & rewire themselves for the AI era — from the codebase to the boardroom.
As a full-stack consultant, I operate across all three layers — AI Fluency, Team Flow & Org Fit. Talk to me to get a custom offer that matches your organization’s maturity to drive the impact.