 Hi, I'm Jeff Watts and welcome to another light bulb talk. This one is about situations where the Scrum Master shouldn't facilitate the Scrum Team. In general, the Scrum Master should be facilitating the Scrum Team. They're there to help a team develop, grow, get better at using Scrum, get better at managing themselves, get more comfortable and confident at delivering value on a frequent regular basis. But there are some times when it might not be appropriate for a Scrum Master to facilitate the team. If you bear in mind that the term facilitate means to make easy or make easier, then there are very few situations when the Scrum Team couldn't benefit from someone coming along and making things easy or easier for them. But there are some rare situations when it might not work out that way. And these situations usually revolve around either team growth or a conflict of interest. The first situation is when the team is mature enough and they want to take more ownership of themselves and their process. So they might want to start facilitating their own retrospectives for example. As the Scrum Team gets used to working with each other and gets used to working with Scrum, the rituals and ceremonies and things become a little bit easier. In those situations, great Scrum Masters realise that actually it's probably better for them to consciously take a step back and allow teams more space and more opportunity to take ownership of their actions, their ceremonies and facilitate things like retrospectives, daily scrums, planning sessions. Because if the Scrum Master stepped in at that point in time it would undermine their development, their growth. The other main situation where a Scrum Master probably shouldn't facilitate a Scrum Team is when there's some kind of conflict or potential conflict and interest. And this can be quite mild. So for example, sometimes the Scrum Master might also want to play an active role in the meeting. Now they could do that as a Scrum Master as a facilitator, but the facilitator is most effective when they're able to be neutral and they don't have an ulterior motive. The Scrum Master has been part of the sprint. Perhaps they've got some quite strong feelings about what happened and they'd like to just talk about them as anybody else would without fear of undermining the facilitation of the meeting. In that case it's probably better to find someone from outside the team or perhaps even from someone outside the organisation completely who can come in and be a more objective neutral facilitator. To give that Scrum Master a chance to really play an active part sometimes it's a little bit more complicated than that and perhaps there's a conflict between the Scrum Master and a member of the team. Now in those situations the facilitator can't be neutral if they're one of the parties involved so probably best to find somebody else who can mediate that a little bit more objectively. Perhaps the Scrum Master's perceived to be more friendly with one team member than another and if there's some kind of conflict between those two then again that Scrum Master's neutrality or objectivity could be compromised. So in general Scrum Masters probably should be facilitating the team and doing anything to make things easy or easier for them there are some times when actually remaining as facilitator could make it harder for the team generally revolving around those two areas one around team growth and the other around the ability to facilitate objectively and neutrally. So if there is an ulterior motive or perceived to be or the Scrum Master wants to play an active team member role then they should probably step out of the facilitator's hat and invite somebody else in. I hope you enjoyed this light bulb talk if you did please like and subscribe and we'll see you next time.