Here I am, sitting in a hotel room again. Different city, different year, but somehow the same ritual: a half-empty glass of wine, the quiet hum of a city outside the window, and my thoughts drifting back over another year of PSM classes and the people who passed through them.

I wrote the original version of this post in 2017, on the eve of my last class of that year. I was reflecting on servant leadership and what it meant to be a Scrum Master who truly serves. Nine years later, but without having to wait until the end of the year unlike my original post, I find myself reflecting on the same question, but with a new and urgent dimension that 2017 I couldn't have fully imagined.

I have to be honest with you. As recently as 2025, I was still in denial about AI. I treated it as a productivity novelty, something for the early adopters and the keynote speakers to get excited about, nothing that would fundamentally change the work I do or the organisations I serve. I told myself it was hype. I kept my distance. I watched from the sidelines with the quiet scepticism of someone who has seen a lot of technology trends arrive with fanfare and quietly fade.

Then 2026 arrived. And something shifted. Not gradually. Fast. Organisations that were cautiously experimenting twelve months ago were restructuring around AI. People who were privately dismissive were publicly embracing it. AI companies are innovating at a pace that is hard to keep up with. You may be sceptical about their agenda, and honestly, some of that scepticism is healthy and warranted. But the impact on how organisations work, how people think about their roles, and how teams make decisions is undeniable. Whatever their motivations, the change they are driving is real. Regardless, this creates a more uncertain future than anything I have navigated in my years of agile practice. The conversations in my PSM classes changed. The questions got sharper, more personal, more urgent. It was no longer theoretical.

I could not stay on the sidelines anymore. Agile, at its heart, is about responding to change. About inspecting, adapting, and staying relevant to the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were. If I was going to keep teaching agility with integrity, I had to practise it myself. I had to embrace AI, not because I had figured it out, but because denying it was no longer honest.

AI is now in the room. And everything I believed about servant leadership then, I believe even more deeply now.

Robert Greenleaf first brought the concept of servant leadership into the business world, drawing on wisdom that is far older. The premise is both simple and quietly radical: the leader exists to serve the people around them, not the other way around. It is a principle that has outlasted every management trend I have witnessed in my career, and I have no doubt it will outlast this one too.

And yet, living it has never been easy. I said that in 2017 and I will say it again in 2026: servant leadership is hard. It was hard before AI. It is harder now, in a world that is moving faster, where the pressure to have answers is greater, and where the temptation to let technology do our leading for us has never been more seductive.

But here is what I have come to believe more strongly than ever: the age of AI does not make servant leadership less important. It makes it the most critical leadership practice a Scrum Master can have. And the rest of this post is about why.

I want to talk about something that has frustrated me for a long time, because it is directly connected to why servant leadership never became the default standard in most organisations, even though, by any honest measure, it should have.

Servant leadership has been misread. Badly. And not just by the authoritarian types who ignored it or rejected it. It has been misread by people who claimed to embrace it.

I have met Scrum Masters and leaders who wore the "servant leader" label with pride, and used it as a quiet excuse to avoid every hard thing leadership actually demands. They called it servant leadership when they refused to give direct feedback because they did not want to upset anyone. They called it servant leadership when they stayed silent in a room where someone needed to be challenged. They called it servant leadership when they smiled and nodded and let dysfunction continue for months because confronting it felt hierarchical.

That is not servant leadership. That is conflict avoidance wearing a noble costume.

I have felt this personally. There have been moments in my own career where I genuinely could not tell whether I was holding back out of genuine respect for someone's autonomy, or whether I was just afraid of the discomfort. That line is harder to find in yourself than you might think. And I will not pretend I have always found it cleanly.

And here is the paradox that I think sits at the heart of all of this. The very qualities that make servant leadership powerful, humility, patience, the willingness to put others first, are the same qualities that make it easy to fake badly. Humility looks a lot like avoidance if you are not paying close attention. Patience looks a lot like negligence if it goes on long enough. Putting others first looks a lot like having no convictions of your own if you never push back on anything. The distance between a genuine servant leader and a passive bystander with good intentions is not always obvious from the outside. And that ambiguity has cost servant leadership enormously in terms of how seriously organisations take it.

Then there is the other misreading. The one that makes me equal parts exhausted and amused every time I encounter it, which is more often than I would like.

In some cultures, particularly in organisations where hierarchy runs deep, "servant leader" got translated into something closer to "team personal assistant." The Scrum Master as the person who books the meeting rooms, sends the calendar invites, takes the minutes, chases the action items, orders the pizza for the retrospective, and makes sure everyone's Jira tickets are in the right column. The person the team goes to when the printer is jammed or the laptop needs a software update. The glorified administrator who serves the team by ensuring their administrative lives run smoothly, and nothing more.

I have seen job descriptions for Scrum Masters that were essentially office coordinator roles with an agile vocabulary layer applied on top. I have spoken to people who held the Scrum Master title and genuinely believed their job was to remove every logistical inconvenience from the team's path so the team could focus on the real work. Which is a lovely thought, except that it has nothing to do with servant leadership and everything to do with learned helplessness. When a Scrum Master spends their days arranging things instead of developing people, they are not serving the team. They are enabling the team to remain exactly as they are.

And the teams, to be fair, often loved it. Who would not want someone to handle all the annoying organisational friction? But being a servant leader is not about being loved for your usefulness. It is about making people better than they were before you were in the room. Those are not the same thing, and confusing them is one of the reasons the role gets dismissed as fungible.

Here is the painful tension in all of this. The concept of servant leadership was never wrong. The aspiration was never wrong. Greenleaf's original vision was genuinely radical and genuinely right. But somewhere between the idea and the implementation, it got diluted into either passivity or administration, and both dilutions gave critics exactly the ammunition they needed to dismiss it.

The result? Most organisations kept their hierarchies, kept their performance management frameworks, kept their quarterly review cycles with their ratings and rankings and reward mechanisms, and put "servant leadership" on a slide in the new leader induction programme somewhere between the company values and the expense reimbursement policy. A concept to aspire to. Not a culture to build.

But here is the truth that the passive interpretation of servant leadership gets completely wrong: serving people does not mean protecting them from difficulty. It means walking through difficulty with them. A surgeon who serves their patient does not avoid the operation because cutting hurts. A coach who serves an athlete does not skip the hard training sessions to keep the relationship comfortable. Serving someone, genuinely serving them, sometimes means saying the thing they do not want to hear, holding them to a standard they are not yet meeting, and refusing to let them stay smaller than they are capable of being.

Servant leadership without accountability is not kind. It is negligent.

And I think this misreading, this softened, conflict-avoiding, meeting-booking version of servant leadership, is a significant part of why it never became the de-facto standard in most organisations. It was too easy to dismiss. When leaders saw it modelled as passivity or personal assistance, they concluded it was not serious leadership. They were not entirely wrong to reach that conclusion, even if the model they were reacting to was a caricature of the real thing.

The other part is cultural. Organisations are built on structures of authority, and authority feels most legible when it is visible. When leaders make decisions, give directives, project confidence, and take charge. Servant leadership does the opposite of most of that, at least on the surface. It asks the leader to step back, to ask instead of tell, to make others visible instead of themselves. In a world that rewards the performance of confidence and equates loudness with competence, that posture looks weak to a lot of people. It does not photograph well.

And so it stayed on the fringes. A concept people nodded at in workshops and quietly set aside when the pressure was on.

This is the tension I have never fully resolved, and I am not sure it can be fully resolved. Servant leadership is genuinely counterintuitive in most of the environments where it is most needed. The people who need it most are often the ones least likely to recognise it when they see it, because it does not look like what they have been taught leadership is supposed to look like.

But here is what I have come to understand, especially in the hybrid and AI-augmented environments I am working in now. Servant leadership and decisive leadership are not opposites. They are not even in tension, when you understand what serving actually means.

In an environment where AI is generating recommendations, surfacing options, and producing outputs at a speed no human can match, the servant leader's job is not to defer to the technology and avoid the difficult human decisions. It is precisely the opposite. It is to exercise the kind of judgment that AI cannot: to look at a recommendation and say "this is not right for our people, regardless of what the data says." To make the call that protects human dignity when the algorithm is indifferent to it. To hold people accountable to standards that matter, while holding yourself to those same standards first.

That takes decisiveness. It takes courage. It takes a willingness to be unpopular in service of what is actually right.

Serving people does not mean making their lives comfortable. It means making their growth possible. And sometimes those are very different things.

Before I talk about where we are headed, I need to say something that has been sitting with me for years. Something I did not write about explicitly in 2017 but probably should have.

Scrum has been misunderstood. And I do not mean misunderstood in the small ways, like confusing velocity with value or mistaking a Daily Scrum for a status meeting. I mean misunderstood at the level of intent.

Long before AI arrived, Scrum was appealing to a certain kind of leader for the wrong reasons. The Sprint gave certain managers a clock to count down. The backlog gave them a list to police. The Daily Scrum gave them a daily moment to ask, in front of everyone, "why isn't this done yet?" Velocity gave them a number to demand be higher next Sprint. Burndown charts gave them a visual to point at when they wanted to express disappointment.

For an authoritarian leader, Scrum looked like a sophisticated micromanagement system dressed in agile clothing. And many of them adopted it enthusiastically, not because they believed in self-managing teams or empirical thinking, but because it gave them more structured visibility into what people were and were not doing.

I have observed from afar Daily Scrums that felt like daily status updates, designed less for the team and more for the manager who needed to know exactly who was behind and why. The team just don't want to be there and try to make it legitimate to run asynchronous update with team chat. I have seen Sprint Reviews that were just another name for user acceptance testing and a blame game event, where the question was never "what did we learn?" but "who is responsible for this not being done?" I have watched the Retrospective, that one ceremony designed entirely for the team to own their own improvement, reduced to a fun ice-breaking activity that carefully avoided any mention of the actual misery of the Sprint. Keep the vibes good. Don't talk about the real problems. See everyone next fortnight. None of that is Scrum. But all of it was done in Scrum's name.

And the people on those teams? They knew. They always know. They showed up to the ceremonies because they had to. They kept their real conversations for the hallway and the Slack channel the manager wasn't in. They learned to game the velocity numbers. They stopped bringing their full thinking to the room because the room wasn't safe.

Those Scrum Masters, the ones who used the framework to surveil rather than serve, who reported upward rather than protected downward, who optimised for management comfort rather than team effectiveness, they were never servant leaders. They were authoritarian leaders wearing a Scrum Master badge.

Now AI is here. And for that same kind of leader, AI is even more appealing than Scrum ever was. They can push down the team's throat, this is the solution, because AI said so. No discussion needed. No dissent tolerated. The algorithm has spoken, and questioning it is apparently the same as being resistant to change. It is the perfect authoritarian tool, wrapped in the language of intelligence.

But here is what I believe with everything I have: that approach is not going to work. It never really worked with Scrum, and it will not work with AI.

The organisations that treated Scrum as a micromanagement tool did not become more agile. They became better at performing agility while the actual human conditions required for agility, trust, safety, genuine collaboration, and the freedom to think, quietly deteriorated. They got faster at the ceremonies and slower at the things that actually matter.

The same will happen with AI. You can instrument everything and understand nothing. You can measure all the outputs and miss all the signals. You can optimise every process and hollow out the very human judgment that makes the organisation worth anything at all.

The framework was never the problem. The heart of the person using it was.

And in the age of AI, the heart of the leader matters more than ever.

The servant leaders who were genuinely serving their people before AI arrived? They are going to shine even more brightly now. Because they have already built the thing that AI cannot build: trust. Their people come to them honestly. Their organisations know how to learn. The psychological safety they cultivated over years is exactly the environment in which genuine AI fluency actually develops.

They do not need to change who they are. They need to bring who they already are into this new context.

And what does that look like? It starts with humility. Not performative humility, but the genuine kind, where you understand clearly that your job is not about your own visibility, your own career, or your own mastery of the latest tools. The growth of a servant leader is not measured by their position on an org chart or their fluency with AI. It is measured by the growth of the people they serve.

AI gives leaders a new kind of temptation here. You can generate insights, summarise meetings, produce strategies, and present polished outputs faster than ever before. And it is very easy, almost without noticing, to start positioning yourself as the one who "knows how to use AI" while the people around you feel increasingly uncertain about their own relevance. Servant leadership in the age of AI means resisting that. It means using AI to make the people around you more capable, more visible, more confident. Not to make yourself look smarter.

Here is the deeper tension that I think about constantly, and that I want to name directly.

We can use AI for just about anything now. We can get answers in seconds. We can generate solutions, action plans, coaching questions, even feedback for our people. The capability is right there. And when someone comes to us with a problem, it is very easy to reach for it.

But the moment we do that, we have stopped serving. We have started substituting.

AI can generate output that looks like performance. Reports, analyses, code, plans. In organisations that are not thoughtful about this, leaders can mistake AI-assisted output for human growth. And people who are quietly struggling, who have not yet developed the judgment and confidence to work with AI well, can become invisible.

A servant leader pays attention to what is happening underneath the output. Not "did this person produce the report?" but "does this person understand what they produced? Do they have the confidence to challenge it if it's wrong? Are they growing?"

I still believe, as I did in 2017, that human beings are creatures of growth. Nobody wakes up wanting to be at their worst. In the age of AI, where people are quietly asking "am I still valuable?", a servant leader's response to that question is everything.

What makes a servant leader different is not whether they use AI. It is whether they have the discipline to hold the line on something most people are quietly abandoning: the principle that the solutions should still come from the humans we serve, not from the machine. Our role is to help people think, not to think for them with a better tool. If AI produces the answer and we hand it over, we have not grown the person in front of us. We have just made them dependent on a different source of dependency.

Controlling that temptation has to come from within us. From a clear, non-negotiable principle that human growth, not efficient output, is the measure of our service. That is what separates a servant leader from a well-meaning leader with a very fast AI subscription.

There is something that moves me deeply about this moment, and I want to be honest about how complicated it actually is.

We spent years fighting the idea that the workplace is only for work and human beings should leave their humanity at the door. We made some progress on that. And now, in the same organisations that are slowly learning to honour whole people, we are introducing AI that has no feelings, no doubts, no bad days, and no need for dignity.

But this is not just a philosophical tension anymore. There is real fear in the room.

Workforce reductions are visible. Roles are being restructured. People are watching colleagues disappear and wondering if they are next. And nobody, not the executives, not the consultants, not even the AI companies themselves, can tell you with any confidence whether this is a temporary disruption or a permanent reshaping of what work looks like. That uncertainty does not dissolve fear. It compounds it.

When people are surrounded by AI tools that are always available, always efficient, never tired, and never uncertain, they can start to feel that their own humanness is a liability. Their uncertainty, their need for rest, their emotional responses to hard situations. All of it starts to feel like a flaw compared to the machine next to them. And underneath that feeling, often unspoken, is a simpler and more frightening thought: am I still needed here at all?

This is where the dilemma for the servant leader becomes genuinely painful.

The instinct of a leader who serves is to be present, open, and honest. To hold space for the fear. To say "I see you, I hear you, we will navigate this together." But here is the tension that I sit with and that I suspect many servant leaders are sitting with right now: what if you do not have the answers? What if the organisation you are serving is already planning changes you are not authorised to share? What if your own role is also at stake?

Being vulnerable as a leader is powerful when you are on solid ground. But what does vulnerability look like when the ground is shifting under your feet too?

I do not have a clean answer to that. And I think pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

What I do believe is this: a servant leader who is also uncertain, also a little afraid, also navigating the same ambiguity as the people they serve, is not a failed servant leader. They are a human one. And paradoxically, that shared humanity, admitted honestly rather than hidden behind a confident facade, may be the most reassuring thing they can offer. Not "I have this figured out" but "I am in this with you, and I am not going to pretend otherwise."

That is harder than it sounds. Because the pressure on leaders right now is to project certainty. To have a plan. To communicate confidence. The organisation wants you to calm the room, not add to the noise.

But I remember an old boss who used to say, "don't come to me with a problem, come to me with a solution." I was uncomfortable with it then. I find it even more troubling now. Because the problems people are carrying into the room today, questions about identity, purpose, relevance, and survival, do not have ready solutions. And a leader who only opens their door to people who have already solved their own problems is not a servant leader. They are a gatekeeper.

The servant leader invites people with an open hand, even when they cannot fix what they are being handed. Especially then.

Being a leader who serves has never been easy. In 2026, it is harder than it has ever been. But the difficulty does not make it less important. If anything, the fact that it is this hard right now is precisely why it matters this much.

None of this works without honesty. And honesty in the age of AI requires a specific kind of courage.

Here are truths that servant leaders need to have the courage to say out loud in 2026:

AI makes mistakes. Confidently, fluently, at scale.

Replacing human judgment with AI outputs because it is faster is not progress. It is a risk.

Not every person who is struggling with AI adoption is resistant or incompetent. Some of them are asking the right questions that no one else is brave enough to ask.

The organisations that are rushing their AI transformation without investing in human judgment and ethical oversight are building on sand.

These truths are not comfortable. Some of them will make stakeholders defensive. Some of them will cost you goodwill in rooms that are excited about the technology. A servant leader speaks them anyway, because their commitment is to the greatness and long-term wellbeing of the people and organisation they serve, not to being popular in the short term.

And then there is the truth about yourself. I wrote in 2017 that being open about your vulnerability is a service to others. That it creates safety. That it builds the trust without which no real service is possible. I believe that more strongly than ever.

So I will say it plainly: I do not have all the answers about AI. And I will go one step further than that.

I was in denial about AI until very recently. I genuinely believed it was not that serious. I watched the hype cycles, kept my distance, and assumed things would settle back to something resembling normal. They did not. Organisations moved. People adapted. The world I was serving changed around me while I was standing still.

What finally shifted me was not a new capability or a better demo. It was the people in my PSM classes. They were no longer asking theoretical questions about AI. They were asking urgent, personal questions. "How do I stay relevant?" "How do I help my organisation through this?" "How do I know what to trust?" Those questions were real. And I could not serve them honestly while still treating AI as something I had not fully engaged with.

Agile teaches us to respond to change over following a plan. I had to apply that to myself. Inspect. Adapt. Stay relevant to the world as it actually is.

When I tell my students and the organisations I serve this honestly, something shifts. The posture in the room changes. People who were pretending to be confident about AI relax. People who were ashamed of their uncertainty look up.

In a world that rewards the performance of confidence over genuine understanding, a leader who says "I don't have this figured out either, and here is what I am learning" gives others permission to be honest too. That honesty is what makes real learning possible.

Being open about your own uncertainty with AI is not weakness. Right now, it is the most powerful thing you can model.

The Work Is the Same. The Stakes Are Higher.

I am still working on being a servant leader. I said that in 2017 and it is still true. If anything, 2026 has shown me how much further I have to go.

But I believe this more strongly now than I ever have: servant leadership is not just a nice leadership style to aspire to. In the age of AI, it is the leadership practice that will determine whether organisations come through this transformation with their people intact, empowered, and genuinely more capable, or whether they arrive at an AI-enabled future with efficient outputs and hollowed-out human beings.

The Scrum Master who leads by serving does not compete with AI. They do what AI cannot: they see the person in front of them, hold space for their uncertainty, tell the truth with compassion, and believe, even when it is not yet visible, in the greatness of the people they serve.

One more thing I want to say before I close, because it comes up in almost every PSM and PSM AI Essentials class I run.

People ask me: what is the future for Scrum Masters as AI gets better and better? Are they still needed? Many organisations already see the Scrum Master role as passive. As AI becomes more capable of facilitating, summarising, analysing, and even coaching, the question feels more urgent with every passing month.

Here is my honest answer.

Job titles come and go. They always have. The role of the Scrum Master as it exists today may look very different in five years. Some organisations will rename it. Some will absorb it into other roles. Some, frankly, will make the mistake of replacing it with an AI dashboard and call that progress.

But the principle of leading by serving others does not age. It does not become obsolete. It does not get automated. Because what it produces, trust, safety, human growth, genuine judgment, the willingness of people to bring their full selves to hard problems, is exactly what AI cannot manufacture and organisations will always need more of, not less.

So my advice is this: do not worry about the job title. Keep leading by serving others. If you do that with integrity, you will always be needed, whatever the role is called.

That is what I am still reaching for. I hope it is what you are reaching for too.

Because here is the bigger picture. The job of the servant leader, to make the workplace more human, to ensure people are exercising genuine judgment rather than overly trusting AI, is not becoming less relevant as AI advances. It is becoming more important with every passing month. Organisations are moving fast. Tools are getting smarter. And in all of that acceleration, the workplaces that hold onto their humanity will be the ones where a servant leader was quietly, persistently doing their work. We need more of those leaders. Not fewer. The world cannot afford to lose the humanity of the workplace to efficiency.

Take care, everyone.