Ah - you’ve been subjected to management-by-scrum. I am sorry.
Scrum is a collaboration hack for creative problem solving teams, not a managerial accountability tool. The version of scrum where stand ups are for checking on the team’s progress and velocity is reported on up the org is using the tools of scrum to solve a very different problem than the one that it was designed for.
I’m sorry you don’t believe it’s possible but I can tell you from experience that it is possible to use the processes of scrum and the principles of agile to help a team collaborate on open ended creative problem solving tasks.
Maybe it's finally time to give up on Scrum. Whatever good intentions the original inventors had, whatever idealized situations it may work with perfect unicorn teams, the general experience in the wild of this benighted framework is a tool in the hands of mediocre, inexperienced managers to micromanage, infantilize and monitor developers. It's essentially warmed up command-and-control Taylorism with some feelgood buzzwords and neologisms thrown in. I would even prefer the old horrible Waterfall approach, at least we didn't have all the endless, pointless groomings, standups and retros to attend along with the "we so agile" gaslighting.
Scrum is a collaboration hack for creative problem solving teams, not a managerial accountability tool. The version of scrum where stand ups are for checking on the team’s progress and velocity is reported on up the org is using the tools of scrum to solve a very different problem than the one that it was designed for.
I’m sorry you don’t believe it’s possible but I can tell you from experience that it is possible to use the processes of scrum and the principles of agile to help a team collaborate on open ended creative problem solving tasks.