&gt;&gt; we&#x27;re already drones. If i wanted to be an ant, i&#x27;d join the military.<p>&gt;Author is talking about ants as they are (which are really awesome!) rather than ants as a poor metaphor for mindlessness.<p>it is exactly the same. Just painted with different sentiments. Self-organization by the way of deciding what to do just based on the current state of the local context is exactly the military way - you carry your order without taking in and analyzing the global context of that order. I.e. mindlessly. It is a _good_ thing there.<p>&gt;When I see SCRUM &quot;fail&quot; in that productivity goes down, it&#x27;s not that teams produce less, it&#x27;s that they fail to produce what&#x27;s actually valuable.<p>yes, that is one of the ways SCRUM kills productivity by design - many valuable things in software can&#x27;t be (or much harder to) produced while adhering to the strict latency requirements of SCRUM and thus people&#x2F;teams produce what they can instead while staying inside those latency limits. Again, it is basic system analysis - decomposing system and introducing interfaces in unnatural places just to meet the artificial requirements of the process weakens the system and leads to degradation of it. As i said - it is funny how supposedly professional system designer&#x2F;developers, ie. software engineering teams and orgs, fail to see it in many cases.