RingTFM

I've been in this industry a long time, & back in the dark old days of Unix running on DEC boxes locked away in rooms where the acolytes tended their gods lovingly, when the bitch operator from hell was a serial as funny as it was relevant, one of the first & most important acronyms I learned was RTFM - that is, kindly refer back to the manual. Yes, I know it stands for much more than that, but there is no need to go on about the importance of the F, otherwise we're probably going to get distracted with references to the Kama Sutra, being the only FM I've ever read.
Anyway, my point is that it was the right way to do things then, & even in today's world of instant gratification, RingTFM can be edifying. It settles arguments, gives inspiration & guidance, & gets you unstuck. It is the oracle (to get back to that religious experience) (not to be confused with the software company).
But why am I talking about the FM in a blog ostensibly about Scrum? Simply put, there is an FM, & it should be Red. Scrum is a thinking methodology - it requires you to be aware of the process & constantly review what you are doing, what you are achieving, & how you can do more or better. You can't just "be" Scrum by following a set of procedures. It's in the development of the procedures that the power of Scrum comes to the fore. It is in the ownership, the review, the practice, the understanding, the doing, that counts for success.
Failure is more likely linked to not being Scrum. That's a big call. Scrum cannot, of itself, fail, because it is a methodology. There will always be a way to make Scrum-like practices. There will be better practices. There will be places where more practices can be applied, or the same practices will be more effective, but it will be very hard to find an environment where Scrum just will not work. That statement is actually wrong - because Scrum will never work unless the people involved want it to.
The only way that Scrum can be made to work is if people understand what Scrum is (& isn't), & how they contribute to its success (rather than expecting a silver bullet - proven since the sixties to not exist, much to the delight of vampyres everywhere). By people, I mean everyone, as Scrum is all-inclusive. Senior management down to build-boy (the recent graduate or part-timer) must RTFM. This is not just the responsibility of the Scrum Master - they are simply the person most likely to notice when there's a deviation from Scrum, but it's not their job to be the repository of all methodology knowledge to save anyone else from RingTFM.