Be prescriptive first to become Agile later?

Jose M. Ramirez
2 min readNov 13, 2022

There is a fairly general tendency in the Agile community to confuse the ideal state with the strategy; this confusion is inherited from applying “modern” methods of participatory management and innovative leadership.

Many Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches, when faced with opportunities for improvement in a team, opt for the “Agile” strategy of motivating the team to adopt the desired behavior or avoid the “anti-pattern” without being strong enough to make the change produced. This often leads to frustration and, in many cases, abandonment.

The Scrum Masters and Coaches must be leaders, authentic leaders. A leader is not an authoritarian boss but analyzes situations, identifies opportunities, and provides direction. A leader works according to his team so that each member, and therefore the team, is in the ideal situation for success.

This leadership must be exercised with passion and energy, without imposition, but with conviction. We can start by suggesting, but sometimes it is necessary to suggest or even indicate what can be better firmly. Sometimes it is necessary to be prescriptive, even closely follow-up, to demonstrate the benefits of a behavior.

The difference between this strategy and traditional bureaucratic management is that these techniques, which could be described as…

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