Building on the first day’s look at silos, antipatterns, and the AI catalyst, the second day of the Online Scrum Master Summit 2026 carried the conversation further: from Scrum’s own rulebook getting an unofficial expansion, to the hardest skill in coaching turning out to be silence, to the idea that the org chart itself might be the thing standing in a Scrum Master’s way. Here are my highlights.
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Ralph Jocham – Scrum Guide Expansion Pack: The Director’s Cut
Ralph Jocham’s session introduced the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack, a companion text he co-authored with Jeff Sutherland and John Coleman to address what the 13-page Scrum Guide leaves unsaid. The Expansion adds acceptance criteria, reframes Stakeholders and Supporters, renames Developers to Product Developers, and repositions the Product Owner and Scrum Master roles around outcomes rather than output. Its sharpest addition is a second Definition of Done: Output Done for the quality of what a team builds, and Outcome Done for whether it actually changed anything for the people it was built for.
Jocham also walked through the Expansion’s treatment of AI in Scrum, which frames AI as a teammate that makes output cheap without making outcome any cheaper — and requires that the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and at least one Product Developer remain human. The full Expansion Pack includes nine further standalone modules, covering everything from multi-team Scrum to engineering practices, each contributed by a different author from the wider Scrum community.
Anemari Fiser – From Technical Strength to People Skills
Anemari Fiser’s session addressed a transition many Scrum Masters, tech leads, and product people go through without anyone naming it: realising that success in the role depends far more on people skills than on technical ones, and that nobody taught those skills explicitly. She opened with an example of a senior developer who delegated a task but left an edge case unstated, and the work came back wrong — not from a skills gap, but a communication gap that technical training never addresses.
Fiser’s strongest illustration was a moment from her own coaching practice where she asked three tech leads, independently, who owned a particular piece of work, and got three different answers. Her point: ownership has to be made explicit, not assumed, and soft skills are something to practice deliberately rather than something people are simply expected to “have.”
Sara Davidsson – From Scrum Master to Enterprise Coach
Very happy to see Sara Davidsson again, as she was my ICAgile instructor for ICP-ENT! Sara’s session traced her own path from team-level Scrum Master to Enterprise Coach, and the identity overload that tends to come with the territory along the way; she described accumulating unofficial titles like “the Scrum Police” and “the Fika Fixer” before learning to let go of them. Her core argument was that the jump to enterprise-level work means navigating organisational politics and multiple teams at once, and that doing this well requires staying resilient without losing yourself in the process.
She illustrated this with a story about coaching a leader who hadn’t asked to be coached, and a separate moment in a systems-coaching session where she said nothing at all for the entire meeting, and the team made more progress than in sessions where she’d actively facilitated. Both stories underlined her central point: the more senior the coaching work gets, the more restraint becomes the actual skill.
Sudheendra Rayabhagi – Fixing the CORE of Agile Teams
Sudheendra Rayabhagi introduced CORE, a diagnostic framework built from years of cross-cultural coaching conversations, covering Clarity, Operating System, Responsibility, and Environment. His argument was that roughly 80% of recurring agile frustration (regardless of country, culture, or framework in use) traces back to one of these four root causes rather than to surface-level ceremony problems.
His most memorable illustration was “watermelon reporting”: a multi-country program where status stayed green for eight weeks straight, until he privately asked the regional lead whether delivery was actually on track and got an answer that revealed the green status was about looking safe, not being accurate. He paired this with a sharp operational point (that teams move at the speed of their slowest dependency, and full utilisation is rarely a sign of health) before closing on a simple piece of advice: pick one assumption, one dependency, one safer conversation, and start there.
Tadej Accetto – Top 5 Lessons from 1,000 Agile Coaches
Another ICAgile instructor (ICP-ATF and ICP-ACC) I am happy to see again! Tadej Accetto, returning to OSMS for the first time since 2022, took the written feedback from three of his coaching classes (over a thousand comments in total) and ran it through AI to surface the patterns nobody had aggregated before. The five lessons that came back: people already know more than they think; staying quiet is the hardest skill in coaching; peer groups teach as much as the trainer does; tools only open doors to growth, they don’t guarantee it; and the gap between what someone expected and what they got is usually where the real learning happens.
He illustrated the “staying quiet” lesson with a story from his own early coaching training, where 45 minutes of near-total silence let a colleague talk himself to his own answer, and closed the session by opening the floor to questions; which were met, fittingly, with a long stretch of silence he chose to sit with rather than fill.
Ricardo Fernandes – Your Organization Is the Problem, Here’s How to unFIX It
Ricardo Fernandes, also returning since 2022, built his session around a fictional case study: Sara, a Scrum Master at a company called NexaCore going through an AI transformation that produces three well-funded, fully-staffed teams that never collaborate. After trying every standard fix (better ceremonies, dashboards, escalation) Sara reaches the same conclusion Fernandes wanted the room to reach: when everything’s been done right and it still fails, the problem isn’t execution, it’s the system underneath it.
He introduced unFIX, a model created by Jurgen Appelo, as a language rather than a rigid framework for diagnosing that kind of structural problem, built around Crews (Value, Capability, Platform, Experience, Governance) and Investment Horizons (Maintenance, Improvement, Extension, Disruption). Applied back to NexaCore, the diagnosis was that the company’s AI transformation (genuinely disruptive, unknown-territory work) was being run through a maintenance-level structure of status reports and approval gates, which is why nothing moved despite everyone being busy.
The thread running under the second and final day is less about any one framework and more about where a Scrum Master’s leverage actually sits: sometimes in the rulebook itself, sometimes in restraint, sometimes in the structure of the organisation no ceremony can fix from inside the team.