Zombie Scrum: The Night of the Living Teams

How to Bring Scrum Back to Life (Before It Bites You Too)

Once upon a time there was a Scrum Team. It ran Sprints, Dailies, Reviews, and Retros. It used Jira with religious zeal. The board was a perfect mosaic of colored tickets. Every event started on time. Every Sprint ended on schedule.

And yet… something was off. No one talked about value. No one laughed during the Retro. No one knew why they were building that feature. Eyes were dull. Hands moved out of habit.

Scrum was standing, but it was dead inside.

Welcome to the world of Zombie Scrum.

The Contagion

The disease always starts the same way: in neat, harmless, perfectly managed environments.
Where no one dares to question the checklist, where process matters more than learning, where “we follow the framework to the letter” is the daily prayer.

At first, it’s barely noticeable: Retros get shorter, Dailies turn into mic checks, Reviews become sterile demos.

Then comes the output fever. Speed is mistaken for value, quantity for quality, efficiency for effectiveness.

When experimentation dies and curiosity evaporates, the team changes form. It walks, talks, fills in tickets, but it no longer learns.

The first symptom is silence.

zombiescrum.org

 

The Roots of Evil

Every zombie is born from fear.

In the Scrum world, fears are silent but deadly:

• fear of looking incompetent,
• fear of contradicting others,
• fear of slowing down,
• fear of breaking the mold.

Transparency fades. Inspection turns into theater. Adaptation becomes cosmetic.

Teams stop talking to stakeholders. No one delivers a truly Done Increment. Retros turn into a ritual circle of good intentions.

This is where the virus thrives: the team “does Scrum”, but it isn’t Scrum.

What’s missing are its vital organs: autonomy, goals, real-world contact, and continuous learning.

The Secret Cure

Every good horror story has an antidote.
This one doesn’t come from a spellbook, but from Amy Edmondson:

“Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

It’s the first line of defense against zombification.

When no one fears saying “I don’t know”, the team becomes human again.

Building it takes concrete gestures.
In teams that come back to life, people learn to share their successes (as in Appreciative Interviews), to ask for and offer help without fear (Helping Heuristics), and to notice what works before fixing what doesn’t (Compliment Postcards).

There’s no magic formula, only real spaces where voices can flow again, and with them, courage.

The Autopsies

Look closely and you’ll find four necrotic organs in Zombie Scrum teams:

1. Build what stakeholders need. No contact with users, no validation.
2. Ship fast. No releasable Increment, no continuous integration.
3. Improve continuously. No real inspection, only hollow rituals.
4. Self-organize. No autonomy, only permissions and approvals.

These are Scrum’s vital functions. If even one shuts down, the body survives, but the empirical instinct dies.

zombiescrum.org

 

The Rituals of Resurrection

You don’t need an exorcism. You need method, patience, and brutal self-reflection.

1. Goals as Talismans
Every Scrum Team needs visible Product and Sprint Goals.
They’re the compass separating purpose from chaos.
Without them, the Daily becomes routine and the Review a catwalk.

2. Autonomy as Antidote
A living team decides how, in what order, and by whom the work gets done.
To regain that freedom:

• use Purpose-to-Practice to redefine shared purpose and principles;
• build a Skill Matrix to become cross-functional;
• make constraints visible with Permission Tokens;
• map dependencies as if freeing blocked veins.

3. Management: The Hidden Factor
No resurrection happens without support.
Managers don’t control the zombies, they care for the environment where teams can rise again.

Some workshops can help, not to apply methods, but to spark dialogue.
Mapping networks of support (like Social Network Mapping), making mutual needs explicit (What I Need From You), or setting recurring moments to face impediments together (Recurring Cadence).

When management listens and removes obstacles, the ground becomes fertile again.

4. The Cycle of Life (Ecocycle Planning)
Every Sprint is a small evolutionary experiment.
Use the Ecocycle to see what to start, sustain, let die, or renew.
That’s how the team keeps its improvement metabolism alive.

5. Brutal Self-Reflection
The hardest step: looking in the mirror.
Asking: “How am I contributing to the zombification?”

Barry Overeem calls it “the eleventh success factor.”
It only works when it’s brutally honest.

Try these practices:

• a daily journal with a personal zombification score (1–5);
• Troika Consulting for immediate peer feedback;
• Agile Conversations sessions to analyze language and uncover where trust dies.

Sometimes, healing requires a radical act: changing team or even organization.

The Survivors

How to recognize them?

• Their Dailies focus on goals, not tickets.
• Every Retro ends with a measurable decision.
• The Scrum Master doesn’t animate rituals — they protect empiricism.
• The Product Owner doesn’t dictate roadmaps — they cultivate purpose and value.
• Developers don’t just “execute” — they build and improve the system.
• Managers don’t give orders — they remove obstacles and defend autonomy.
• They’re not perfect — but they’re alive.

The Dawn of Human Teams

Scrum isn’t a religion. It’s an empirical organism.
And like any organism, it breathes, changes, makes mistakes.
When it stops doing so, it becomes an empty shell.

So if in your next Sprint you hear dragging footsteps, if your Retro feels like a séance, remember: you don’t need a new framework. You need courage, and a torch of honesty, to look at what has truly gone dark.

There’s nothing scarier than a team that’s stopped learning. And nothing more powerful than one that learns again.

If your team looks like something out of a Romero movie, we can help you rebuild a culture where empiricism breathes, psychological safety pulses, and every Sprint becomes an evolutionary step.

Let’s talk — before the infection spreads.