A team member has made a mistake on a project. How should the scrum master address the mistake?

The Scrum Master's role is to be a servant-leader and facilitator. When a mistake occurs, the goal is not to assign blame but to learn and improve as a team. Facilitating a retrospective provides a safe, structured event for the entire team to inspect what happened, identify the root cause, and collaboratively create an action plan to prevent the mistake's recurrence. This approach fosters a culture of continuous improvement, psychological safety, and collective ownership, which are core to Agile and Scrum principles.

A. This is prescriptive and doesn't address the root cause or encourage the team to own and improve its process.
B. This imposes a specific solution; the team should decide on process changes, possibly during a retrospective.
D. This creates a culture of fear, discouraging transparency and learning from the inevitable mistakes that lead to innovation.

1. Schwaber

K.

& Sutherland

J. (2020). The 2020 Scrum Guide. Scrum.org. (p. 10

"The Sprint Retrospective" section describes its purpose to "plan ways to increase quality and effectiveness").

2. Project Management Institute. (2017). Agile Practice Guide. Newtown Square

PA: Project Management Institute. (p. 50

Section 5.2.4 Retrospectives

describes the event as a way to "fine-tune the process").