Batching and Empowering Team Flow in Scrum

Imagine a team diligently adhering to Scrum, meticulously creating a Product Backlog of stories, and refining them into detailed requirements with acceptance criteria. In Sprint Planning, they pull the items from their Product Backlog into their Sprint Backlog based on their capacity. They may even task out the selected items into tangible pieces of work. They wrap Sprint Planning up by attempting to formulate a Sprint Goal. 

Do you think this sounds familiar to you? If so, you're likely caught up in mechanical Scrum.

Enter the flow experts who specialise in the Theory of Constraints or Kanban. Their first criticism will be on the batching in Scrum, and they are 100% right, but for the wrong reasons. I’d like to help you see what is going on here and why this is bad Scrum.