A home-robot company's bonus structure rewards managers for hitting the retail launch date regardless of the state of the Increment, and the firmware team starts feeling pressure to report progress more favorably than it actually is to avoid conflict with leadership. What should the Scrum Master do about this?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
An incentive that rewards hitting a date over telling the truth about the work is quietly training people to lie with a straight face. That's not a team-level habit to coach away — it's the organization's own reward system pointed in the wrong direction. The Scrum Master's job is to say that out loud to whoever built the incentive, not to help the team get better at hiding things.
Full Explanation
Transparency is one of the three pillars empiricism depends on, and it only works if people have a reason to report what's actually true rather than what's comfortable to hear. An incentive structure that rewards hitting a date irrespective of the Increment's real state creates exactly the wrong pressure, and because the incentive lives at the organizational level, it can't be fixed by asking the team to try harder to be honest — the reward system itself has to change. The Scrum Master's service to the organization includes helping leadership see where its own policies work against Scrum, which is what surfacing this incentive conflict does. Ignoring it treats compensation as untouchable when it's directly producing a transparency problem the Scrum Master is accountable for addressing. Instructing the team to keep reporting favorably makes the Scrum Master complicit in the exact dishonesty that's undermining inspection and adaptation. Filing a grievance and withdrawing from Sprint Reviews abandons the team's actual events over a policy dispute and removes the Scrum Master from the place where the problem is most visible, rather than using that visibility to push for change. A caveat: changing a compensation structure is slow and usually outside the Scrum Master's own authority — the job is to make the conflict undeniable, not to guarantee an immediate fix. Concrete check: notice whether Sprint Review conversations about the Increment's true state get more guarded as a launch date approaches — that shift is a symptom of exactly this incentive problem.