The Best Framework Is No Framework.

Scrum is in decline (thankfully). It's interesting, however, that many people, when told that, immediately go to "What framework is replacing Scrum?" How about no framework? Process frameworks have never done anybody any good because they don't transfer. Frameworks come and go precisely because none of them "work."

Consider NUMMI, a joint effort between GM and Toyota. When run by GM, the plant was one of the worst-performing in the country. Toyota turned it into one of the best in a matter of months. Central to that change was the notion that the best people to figure out the best way to work are the people doing the work. Each autonomous team was responsible for improving in whatever way they deemed fit, and they had the active help and support of management in making any changes. The approach was a huge success.

GM then decided to document the processes and take them to Detroit, where the teams were ordered to adopt them. The transfer was a spectacular failure. GM simply didn't realize that the key driver of success was the teams' ability to figure out how to do their own work. It was not the process; it was the autonomy. A process that works well for the team that originated it may not work at all for anybody else. I should also point out that by the time those processes were installed in Detroit, the processes had changed back at NUMMI. The processes changed constantly as the teams learned. Ways of working are not static. Frameworks are.

Frameworks are all the equivalent of taking a process that worked well for one team and forcing it down the throats of everybody else, and the results are the same ones that GM witnessed. Every team is unique. Every team needs to develop their own way of working. That has to be done from a position of knowledge, of course. Random flailing around is like 1,000 monkeys typing Shakespeare. Learning, then, has to be a normal work activity actively supported by the organization.

I’ll add that, no, it’s not a good idea to start with a framework as a kind of “training wheels.” You don’t learn to ride a bike until the training wheels come off. Frameworks are not useful learning aids. Instead, they mold the team into specific ways of thinking—rather like brainwashing. More importantly, I’ve never seen a team evolve away from that initial framework in any meaningful way. Teams don’t slowly evolve beyond Scrum. They dump the entire thing and start over from scratch.

So, when it comes to frameworks, “just say no.”