I’ve always seen Scrum as a container for doing your own practices. Just like in football (or soccer for some), you have some rules, and you have some delimitation of the playing surface. Within those rules and surface you can play football how you like.

Nobody tells you how to position your players on the field, or what strategy to use to defeat your opponent. But if you are not the goal keeper and you touch the ball with your hand, that’s breaking the rules. Playing by the rules outside the football field is again a no no (at least if you are not children playing in the park, which follows other rules :)).

But putting football in a container is simple. Putting software development in a container, not so much.

So Scrum is not a very well defined container. It tries to describe some things that have been observed to work, but it ignores the context in which those things unfold (like professional FIFA players vs. children in the park). They can’t have it otherwise or the guide will no longer be a guide, but a prescription. Even the words used in the guide are all encompassing, like leader. Well… there are hundreds of definitions of leadership, so how should we understand what a leader does according to Scrum? And more even, according to the context you apply Scrum in.

So I guess, until the Scrum Guide is defined such that there are no misunderstandings and interpretations (i.e. never), you can only look at it and ask “Are we still playing football? Or is this something else? (like running with the ball in your hands outside of the stadium or park)”