Why I became a Professional Scrum Master

Rachel Elizabeth Dickstein
3 min readMar 3, 2021

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I love Agile work environments because they thrive on the democratic input of ideas from everyone.

Note: All viewpoints expressed in this article are my own and unrelated to any of my current or previous workplaces and volunteer positions.

Why did I become a Professional Scrum Master and now work as an Agile project manager within the Scrum framework? The answer is simple: I want and need work in which I feel I am leaving my mark on Earth and helping shape society to correspond more to my ideal image. Working with Scrum helps me change the world, one team and one company/institution at a time. My ideal image of society is people being more reflective and self-aware of their actions and taking responsibility for the consequences — positive or negative — of those actions. In other words, I want to see humans become more responsive to their surroundings. This correlates perfectly to the Agile philosophy and working within the Scrum framework.

Something that gets under my skin is when people turn on their autopilot, saying things like, “Well, this is the way things have always been done.” And “I will just follow these orders given to me by my leader/manager/etc. without regarding the stakeholders.” As a trained historian living in Europe and a descendant of Jewish victims of the European Holocaust, I must emphasize how dangerous the consequences of this mindless way of working can become. (You can now see that I have an intense personal interest in people turning on their brains instead of going through the motions and following top-down orders.)

We as a society need to operate in an empirical manner. Thinking for ourselves and testing our ideas and then basing our business and personal decisions on evidence, not on mere beliefs, will help us be active and efficient employees as well as help us turn off autopilot and avoid buying into illogical beliefs or guesswork in general.

Furthermore, we need to operate with more empathy. Humans are very emotional creatures, and it will only help us in our teamwork and professional decision-making to be more tuned in with one another. More empathy leads to more communication and, in turn, more trust and thus more safe spaces for trying out new and creative ideas; this all ultimately leads to a higher return on investments.

Therefore, we need to be more logical and evidence-based as well as more empathetic. Empathy and empiricism are not diametrically opposed. In fact, I find that being empathetic is one of the most logical and results-driven methods we can follow. As stated by the Business Agility Meetup (BAM) Berlin: “Customers are more informed, responsible for their future and their expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. Employees demand more clarity, empowerment, and meaning in their work.” The key here is #adaptability and #agility in this unpredictable market — in other words, demonstrating Sustainable Business Agility.

This was just a brief insight into my main reasons for wanting to work as a Scrum Master and then eventually as an Agile Coach. If you are more curious about me and/or my projects, feel free to reach out! I’m always open for a chat in English, German, and French (still working on conversational Hebrew, but I’m getting there!).

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Rachel Elizabeth Dickstein
Rachel Elizabeth Dickstein

Written by Rachel Elizabeth Dickstein

I am a Berlin-based Agile coach with a background in history and the political science of Western European-Middle Eastern foreign relations.

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