Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

Karim Harbott: Don't Scale Dysfunction—Fix the Team First Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "How do you define the success of a football manager? Football managers are successful when the team is successful. For Scrum Masters it is also like that. Is the team better than it was before?" - Karim Harbott   Karim uses a powerful analogy to define success for Scrum Masters: think of yourself as a football manager. A football manager isn't successful because they personally score goals—they're successful when the team wins. The same principle applies to Scrum Masters. Success isn't measured by how many problems you solve or how busy you are. It's measured by whether the team is better than they were before.  Are they more self-organizing? More effective? More aligned with organizational outcomes?  This requires a mindset shift. Unlike sprinters competing individually, Scrum Masters succeed by enabling others to be better.  Karim recommends involving the team when defining success—what does "better" mean to them? He also emphasizes linking the work of the team to organizational objectives. When teams understand how their efforts contribute to broader goals, they become more engaged and purposeful. But there's a critical warning: don't scale dysfunction! If a team isn't healthy, improving it is far more important than expanding your coaching to more teams.  A successful Scrum Master creates teams that don't need constant intervention—teams that can manage themselves, make decisions, and deliver value consistently. Just like a great football manager builds a team that plays brilliantly even when the manager isn't on the field.   Self-reflection Question: Is your team more capable and self-sufficient than they were six months ago, or have they become more dependent on you? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Systems Modeling with Causal Loop Diagrams "It shows how many aspects of the system there are and how things are interconnected. This helps us see something that we would not come up with in normal conversations." - Karim Harbott   Karim recommends using systems modeling—specifically causal loop diagrams—as a retrospective format. This approach helps teams visualize the complex interconnections between different aspects of their work. Instead of just listing what went wrong or right, causal loop diagrams reveal how various elements influence each other, often uncovering hidden feedback loops and unintended consequences.  The power of this format is that it surfaces insights the team wouldn't discover through normal conversation. Teams can then think of their retrospective actions as experiments—ways to interact with the system to test hypotheses about what will improve outcomes. This shifts retrospectives from complaint sessions to scientific inquiry, making them far more actionable and engaging. If your team is struggling with recurring issues or can't seem to break out of patterns, systems modeling might reveal the deeper dynamics at play.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Karim Harbott   Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.   You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.

Karim Harbott: You Can't Make a Flower Grow Faster—The Oblique Approach to Shaping Culture Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "How can I make a flower grow faster? Culture is a product of the behaviors of people in the system." - Karim Harbott   For Karim, one of the biggest challenges—and enablers—in his current work is creating a supporting culture. After years of learning what doesn't work, he's come to understand that culture isn't something you can force or mandate. Like trying to make a flower grow faster by pulling on it, direct approaches to culture change often backfire.  Instead, Karim uses what he calls the "oblique approach"—changing culture indirectly by adjusting the five levers: leadership behaviors, organizational structure, incentives, metrics, and systems. Leadership behaviors are particularly crucial.  When leaders step back and encourage ownership rather than micromanaging, teams transform. Incentives have a huge impact on how teams work—align them poorly, and you'll get exactly the wrong behaviors.  Karim references Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal, which demonstrates how changing organizational structure and leadership philosophy can unlock extraordinary performance. He also uses the Competing Values Framework to help leaders understand different cultural orientations and their tradeoffs. But the most important lesson? There are always unexpected consequences. Culture change requires patience, experimentation, and a willingness to observe how the system responds. You can't force a flower to grow, but you can create the conditions where it thrives.   Self-reflection Question: Are you trying to change your organization's culture directly, or are you adjusting the conditions that shape behavior?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Karim Harbott   Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.   You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.  

Karim Harbott: Why System Design Beats Individual Coaching Every Time Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "You can't change people, but you can change the system. Change the environment, not the people." - Karim Harbott   Karim was coaching a distributed team that was struggling with defects appearing constantly during sprints. The developers and testers were at different sites, and communication seemed fractured. But Karim knew from experience that when teams are underperforming, the problem usually isn't the people—it's the system they're working in. He stepped back to examine the broader context, implementing behavior-driven development(BDD) and specification by example to improve clarity through BDD scenarios.  But the defects persisted.  Then, almost by accident, Karim discovered the root cause: the developers and testers were employed by different companies. They had competing interests, different incentives, and fundamentally misaligned goals. No amount of coaching the individuals would fix a structural problem like that.  It took months, but eventually the system changed—developers and testers were reorganized into unified teams from the same organization. Suddenly, the defects dropped dramatically. As Jocko Willink writes in Extreme Ownership, when something isn't working, look at the system first. Karim's experience proves that sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is stop trying to fix people and start fixing the environment they work in.   Self-reflection Question: When your team struggles, do you look at the people or at the system they're embedded in? Featured Book of the Week: Scaling Lean and Agile Development by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde "This book was absolute gold. The way it is written, and the tools they talk about went beyond what I was talking about back then. They introduced many concepts that I now use." - Karim Harbott   Karim discovered Scaling Lean and Agile Development by accident, but it resonated with him immediately. The concepts Craig Larman and Bas Vodde introduced—particularly around LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum)—went far beyond the basics Karim had been working with. The book opened his eyes to system-level thinking at scale, showing how to maintain agility even as organizations grow.  It's packed with practical tools and frameworks that Karim still uses today. For anyone working beyond a single team, this book provides the depth and nuance that most scaling frameworks gloss over. Also worth reading: User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn, another foundational text that shaped Karim's approach to working with teams.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Karim Harbott   Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.   You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.

Karim Harbott: The Day I Discovered I Was a Scrum Project Manager, Not a Scrum Master Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "I was telling the team what to do, instead of helping the team to be better on their own. There's a lot more to being a Scrum Master than Agile—working with people is such a different skillset." - Karim Harbott   Karim thought he had mastered Scrum. He had read the books, understood the framework, and was getting things done. His team seemed to be moving forward smoothly—until he stepped away for a few weeks.  But, when he returned, everything had fallen apart. The team couldn't function without him constantly directing their work. That's when Karim realized he had fallen into one of the most common anti-patterns in Agile: the Scrum Project Manager.  Instead of enabling his team to be more effective, he had become their bottleneck. Every decision flowed through him, every task needed his approval, and the team had learned to wait for his direction rather than taking ownership themselves. The wake-up call was brutal but necessary.  Karim discovered that pushing project management responsibilities to the people doing the work—as David Marquet advocates—was far more powerful than being the hero who solves all problems. The real skill wasn't in telling people what to do; it was in creating an environment where they could figure it out themselves. Geoff Watts calls this servant leadership, and Karim learned it the hard way: a great Scrum Master makes themselves progressively less necessary, not more indispensable.   Self-reflection Question: Are you enabling your team to be more effective, or have you become the person they can't function without?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Karim Harbott   Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.   You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.  

BONUS: Organizations as Ecosystems — Understanding Complexity, Innovation, and the Three-Body Problem at Work In this fascinating conversation about complex adaptive systems, Simon Holzapfel helps us understand why traditional planning and control methods fail in knowledge work — and what we can do instead. Understanding Ecosystems vs. Systems "Complex adaptive systems are complex in nature and adaptive in that they evolve over time. That's different from a static system." — Simon Holzapfel   Simon introduces the crucial distinction between mechanical systems and ecosystems. While mechanical systems are predictable and static, ecosystems — like teams and organizations — are complex, adaptive, and constantly evolving. The key difference lies in the interactions among team members, which create emergent properties that cannot be predicted by analyzing individuals separately. Managers often fall into the trap of focusing on individuals rather than the interactions between them, missing where the real magic happens. This is why understanding your organization as an ecosystem, not a machine, fundamentally changes how you lead. In this segment, we refer to the Stella systems modeling application. The Journey from Planning to Emergence "I used to come into class with a lesson plan — doop, doop, doop, minute by minute agenda. And then what I realized is that I would just completely squash those questions that would often emerge from the class." — Simon Holzapfel   Simon shares his transformation from rigid classroom planning to embracing emergence. As a history and economics teacher for 10 years, he learned that over-planning kills the spontaneous insights that make learning powerful. The same principle applies to leadership: planning is essential, but over-planning wastes time and prevents novelty from emerging. The key is separating strategic planning (the "where" and "why") from tactical execution (the "how"), letting teams make local decisions while leaders focus on alignment with the bigger picture. "Innovation Arrives Stochastically" "Simply by noticing the locations where you've had your best ideas, we notice the stochasticness of arrival. Might be the shower, might be on a bike ride, might be sitting in traffic, might be at your desk — but often not." — Simon Holzapfel   Simon unpacks the concept of stochastic emergence — the idea that innovation cannot be scheduled or predicted in advance. Stochastic means something is predictable over large datasets but not in any given moment. You know you'll have ideas if you give yourself time and space, but you can't predict when or where they'll arrive. This has profound implications for managers who try to control when and how innovation happens. Knowledge work is about creating things that haven't existed before, so emergence is what we rely on. Try to squash it with too much control, and it simply won't happen. In this segment, we refer to the Systems Innovation YouTube channel. The Three-Body Problem: A Metaphor for Teams "When you have three nonlinear functions working at the same time within a system, you have almost no ability to predict its future state beyond just some of the shortest time series data." — Simon Holzapfel   Simon uses the three-body problem from physics as a powerful metaphor for organizational complexity. In physics, when you have three bodies (like planets) influencing each other, prediction becomes nearly impossible. The same is true in business — think of R&D, manufacturing, and sales as three interacting forces. The lesson: don't think you can master this complexity. Work with it. Understand it's a system. Most variability comes from the system itself, not from any individual person. This allows us to depersonalize problems — people aren't good or bad, systems can be improved. When teams understand this, they can relax and stop treating every unpredictable moment as an emergency. Coaching Leaders to Embrace Uncertainty "I'll start by trying to read their comfort level. I'll ask about their favorite teachers, their most hated teachers, and I'll really try to bring them back to moments in time that were pivotal in their own development." — Simon Holzapfel   How do you help analytical, control-oriented leaders embrace complexity and emergence? Simon's approach is to build rapport first, then gently introduce concepts based on each leader's background. For technical people who prefer math, he'll discuss narrow tail distributions and fat tails. For humanities-oriented leaders, he uses narrative and storytelling. The goal is to get leaders to open up to possibilities without feeling diminished. He might suggest small experiments: "Hold your tongue once in a meeting" or "Ask questions instead of making statements." These incremental changes help managers realize they don't have to be superhuman problem-solvers who control everything. Giving the Board a Number: The Paradox of Prediction "Managers say we want scientific management, but they don't actually want that. They want predictive management." — Simon Holzapfel   Simon addresses one of the biggest tensions in agile adoption: leaders who say "I just need to give the board a number" while also wanting innovation and adaptability. The paradox is clear — you cannot simultaneously be open to innovation and emergent possibilities while executing a predetermined plan with perfect accuracy. This is an artifact of management literature that promoted the "philosopher king" manager who knows everything. But markets are too movable, consumer tastes vary too much, and knowledge work is too complex for any single person to control. The burnout we see in leaders often comes from trying to achieve an impossible standard. In this segment, we refer to the episodes with David Marquet.  Resources for Understanding Complexity "Eric Beinhocker's book called 'The Origin of Wealth' is wonderful. It's a very approachable and well-researched piece that shows where we've been and where we're going in this area." — Simon Holzapfel   Simon recommends two key resources for anyone wanting to understand complexity and ecosystems. First, Eric Beinhocker's "The Origin of Wealth" explains how we developed flawed economic assumptions based on 19th-century Newtonian physics, and why we need to evolve our understanding. Second, the Systems Innovation YouTube channel offers brilliant short videos perfect for curious, open-minded managers. Simon suggests a practical approach: have someone on your team watch a video and share what they learned. This creates shared language around complexity and makes the concepts less personal and less threatening. The Path Forward: Systems Over Individuals "As a manager, our goal is to constantly evaluate the performance of the system, not the people. We can always put better systems in place. We can always improve existing systems. But you can't tell people what to do — it's not possible." — Simon Holzapfel   The conversation concludes with a powerful insight from Deming's work: about 95% of a system's productivity is linked to the system itself, not individual performance. This reframes the manager's role entirely. Instead of trying to control people, focus on improving systems. Instead of treating burnout as individual failure, see it as information that something in the system isn't working. Organizations are ever-changing ecosystems with dynamic properties that can only be observed, never fully predicted. This requires a completely different way of thinking about management — one that embraces uncertainty, values emergence, and trusts teams to figure things out within clear strategic boundaries. Recommended Resources As recommended resources for further reading, Simon suggests:  The Origin of Wealth, by Eric Beinhocker The Systems Innovation YouTube channel   About Simon Holzapfel   Simon Holzapfel is an educator, coach, and learning innovator who helps teams work with greater clarity, speed, and purpose. He specializes in separating strategy from tactics, enabling short-cycle decision-making and higher-value workflows. Simon has spent his career coaching individuals and teams to achieve performance with deeper meaning and joy. Simon is also the author of the Equonomist newsletter on Substack, where he explores the intersection of economics, equality, and equanimity in the workplace.   You can link with Simon Holzapfel on LinkedIn.

Darryl Wright: The PONO—Product Owners in Name Only and How They Destroy Teams Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: Collaborative, Present, and Clear in Vision   "She was collaborative, and that meant that she was present—the opposite of the MIA product owner. She came, and she sat with the team, and she worked with them side by side. Even when she was working on something different, she'd be there, she'd be available." - Darryl Wright   Darryl shares an unusual story about one of the best Product Owners he's ever encountered—someone who had never even heard of Agile before taking the role. Working for a large consulting company with 170,000 staff worldwide, they faced a difficult project that nobody wanted to do. Darryl suggested running it as an Agile project, but the entire team had zero Agile experience. The only person who'd heard of Agile was a new graduate who'd studied it for one week at university—he became the Scrum Master. The executive sponsor, with her business acumen and stakeholder management skills, became the Product Owner despite having no idea what that meant.  The results were extraordinary: an 18-month project completed in just over 7 months, and when asked about the experience, the team's highest feedback was how much fun they had working on what was supposed to be an awful, difficult project. Darryl attributes this success to mindset—the team was open and willing to try something new.  The Product Owner brought critical skills to the role even without technical Agile knowledge: She was collaborative and present, sitting with the team and remaining available. She was decisive, making prioritization calls clearly so nobody was ever confused about priorities. She had excellent communication skills, articulating the vision with clarity that inspired the team. Her stakeholder management capabilities kept external pressures managed appropriately. And her business acumen meant she instantly understood conversations about value, time to market, and customer impact.  Without formal training, she became an amazing Product Owner simply by being open, willing, and committed. As Darryl reflects, going from never having heard of the role to being an inspiring Product Owner in 7 months was incredible—one of the most successful projects and teams he's ever worked with.   Self-reflection Question: If you had to choose between a Product Owner with deep Agile certification and no business skills, or one with strong business acumen and willingness to learn—which would serve your team better? The Bad Product Owner: The PONO—Product Owner in Name Only   "The team never saw the PO until the showcase. And so, the team would come along with work that they deemed was finished, and the product owner had not seen it before because he wasn't around. So he would be seeing it for the first time in the showcase, and he would then accept or reject the work in the showcase, in front of other stakeholders." - Darryl Wright   The most destructive anti-pattern Darryl has witnessed was the MIA—Missing in Action—Product Owner, someone who was a Product Owner in Name Only (PONO). This senior business person was too busy to spend time with the team, only appearing at the sprint showcase. The damage this created was systematic and crushing. The team would build work without Product Owner engagement, then present it in the showcase looking to be proud of their accomplishment.  The PO, seeing it for the first time, would accept or reject the work in front of stakeholders. When he rejected it, the team was crushed, deflated, demoralized, and made to look like fools in front of senior leaders—essentially thrown under the bus. This pattern violates multiple principles of Agile teamwork. First, there's no feedback loop during the sprint, so the team works blind, hoping they're building the right thing. Second, the showcase becomes a validation ceremony rather than a collaborative feedback session, creating a dynamic of subservience rather than curiosity. The team seeks approval instead of engaging as explorers discovering what delivers customer value together. Third, the PO positions themselves as judge rather than coach—extracting themselves from responsibility for what's delivered while placing all blame on the team.  As Deming's quote reminds us, "A leader is a coach, not a judge." When the PO takes the judge role, they're betraying fundamental Agile values.  The responsibility for what the team delivers belongs strictly to the Product Owner; the team owns how it's delivered.  When Darryl encounters this situation as a Scrum Master, he lobbies intensely with the PO: "Even if you can't spare any other time for the entire sprint, give us just one hour the night before the showcase." That single hour lets the team preview what they'll present, getting early yes/no decisions so they never face public rejection. The basic building block of any Agile or Scrum way of working is an empowered team—and this anti-pattern strips all empowerment away.   Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner show up as a coach who's building something together with the team, or as a judge who pronounces verdicts? How does that dynamic shape what your team is willing to try?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Darryl Wright   Darryl is an Agile Coach and Instructor dedicated to helping organisations and leaders be both successful and humane. He has over two decades in IT delivery and business leadership, he champions Agile ways of working to create thriving workplaces where people are happy, productive, and deliver products customers truly love.   You can link with Darryl Wright on LinkedIn, and visit Darryl's website at www.organa.com.au.

Darryl Wright: The Retrospective Formats That Actually Generate Change Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "My success is, how much have I helped the team achieve what they want? If what they want is to uplift quality, or to reduce their time to market, well then, my success is helping them achieve that." - Darryl Wright   When Darryl enters a new organization, he's often told his success will be measured by percentage of Agile adoption or team maturity assessment scores. His response is direct: those are vanity metrics that show something for its own sake, not real success. True success requires multiple measures, carefully balanced to prevent gaming and to capture both the human and business dimensions of work.  Darryl advocates balancing quantitative metrics like lead time and flow efficiency with qualitative measures like employee happiness and team self-assessment of productivity. He balances business outcomes like customer satisfaction and revenue with humanity metrics that track the team's journey toward high performance. Most importantly, Darryl believes his success metrics should be co-created with the team. If he's there to help the team, then success must be defined by how much he's helped them achieve what they want—not what he wants.  When stakeholders fixate on output metrics like "more story points," Darryl uses a coaching approach to shift the conversation toward outcomes and value. "Would you be happy if your team checked off more boxes, but your customers were less happy?" he asks. This opens space for exploring what they really want to achieve and why it matters. The key is translating outputs into impacts, helping people articulate the business value or customer experience improvement they're actually seeking.  As detailed in Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathan Smart, comprehensive dashboards can track value across multiple domains simultaneously—balancing speed with quality, business success with humanity, quantitative data with qualitative experience. When done well, Agile teams can be highly productive, highly successful, and have high morale at the same time. We don't have to sacrifice one for the other—we can have both.   Self-reflection Question: If your team could only track two metrics for the next sprint, what would they choose? What would you choose? And more importantly, whose choice should drive the selection? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 4 L's and Three Little Pigs Darryl offers two favorites, tailored to different contexts. For learning environments, he loves the 4 L's retrospective: Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For. This format creates space for teams to reflect on their learning journey, surfacing insights about what worked, what was missing, and what they aspire to moving forward.  For operational environments, he recommends the Three Little Pigs retrospective, which brilliantly surfaces team strengths and weaknesses through a playful metaphor. The House of Straw represents things the team is weak at—nothing stands up, everything falls over. The House of Sticks is things they've put structure around, but it doesn't really work. The House of Bricks represents what they're solid on, what they can count on every time. Then comes the most important part: identifying the Big Bad Wolf—the scary thing, the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about but everyone knows is there. This format creates psychological safety to discuss the undiscussable.  Darryl emphasizes two critical success factors for retrospectives: First, vary your formats. Teams that hear the same questions sprint after sprint will disengage, asking "why are you asking me again?" Different questions provide different lenses, generating fresh insights. Second, ensure actions come out of every retro. Nothing kills engagement faster than suggestions disappearing into the void. When people see their ideas lead to real changes, they'll eagerly return to the next retrospective.  And don't forget to know your team—if they're sports fans, use sports retros; if they're scientists, use space exploration themes. Just don't make the mistake of running a "sailboat retro" with retiring mainframe engineers who'll ask if you think they're kindergarten children. For more retrospective formats, check out Retromat.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Darryl Wright   Darryl is an Agile Coach and Instructor dedicated to helping organisations and leaders be both successful and humane. He has over two decades in IT delivery and business leadership, he champions Agile ways of working to create thriving workplaces where people are happy, productive, and deliver products customers truly love.   You can link with Darryl Wright on LinkedIn, and visit Darryl's website at www.organa.com.au.

Darryl Wright: Why AI Adoption Will Fail Just Like Agile Did—Unless We Change Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "People are looking to AI to solve their problems, and they're doing it in the same way that they previously looked to Agile to solve their problems for them. The problem with that is, of course, that Agile doesn't solve problems for you. What it does is it shines a light on where your problems are." - Darryl Wright   The world has gone AI crazy, and Darryl sees history repeating itself in troubling ways. Organizations are rushing to adopt AI with the same magical thinking they once applied to Agile—believing that simply implementing the tool will solve their fundamental problems. But just as Agile reveals problems rather than solving them, AI will do the same. Worse, AI threatens to accelerate existing problems: if you have too many things moving at once, AI won't fix that, it will amplify the chaos. If you automate a bad process, you've simply locked in badness at higher speed.  As Darryl points out, when organizations don't understand that AI requires them to still do the hard work of problem-solving, they're setting themselves up for disillusionment, and in five or twenty years, we'll hear "AI is dead" just like we now hear "Agile is dead." The challenge for Scrum Masters and Agile coaches is profound: how do you help people with something they don't know they need? The answer lies in returning to first principles. Before adopting any tool—whether Agile or AI—organizations must clearly define the problem they're trying to solve.  As Einstein reportedly said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." Value stream mapping becomes essential, allowing teams to visualize where humans and AI agents should operate, with clear handovers and explicit policies. The cognitive load on software teams will increase dramatically as AI generates more code, more options, and more complexity. Without clear thinking about problems and deliberate design of systems, AI adoption will follow the same disappointing trajectory as many Agile adoptions—lots of activity, little improvement, and eventually, blame directed at the tool rather than the system.   Self-reflection Question: Are you adopting AI to solve a clearly defined problem, or because everyone else is doing it? If you automated your current process with AI, would you be locking in excellence or just accelerating dysfunction?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Darryl Wright   Darryl is an Agile Coach and Instructor dedicated to helping organisations and leaders be both successful and humane. He has over two decades in IT delivery and business leadership, he champions Agile ways of working to create thriving workplaces where people are happy, productive, and deliver products customers truly love.   You can link with Darryl Wright on LinkedIn, and visit Darryl's website at www.organa.com.au.

Darryl Wright: The Agile Team That Committed to Failure for 18 Sprints Straight Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "As Deming said, a bad system will beat a good person every time." - Darryl Wright   Darryl was called in to help a struggling team at a large energy retailer. The symptoms seemed straightforward—low morale, poor relationships, and chronic underdelivery. But as he asked questions, a heartbreaking pattern emerged. The team had been "committing" to 110 story points per sprint while consistently delivering only 30. For 18 sprints.  When Darryl asked why the team would commit to numbers they couldn't possibly achieve, the answer was devastating: "The business needs that much." This wasn't a problem of skill or capability—it was learned helplessness in action. Sprint after sprint, the team experienced failure, which made them more despondent and less effective, creating a vicious downward spiral. The business lost trust, the team lost confidence, and everyone was trapped in a system that guaranteed continued failure.  When Darryl proposed the solution—committing to a realistic 30 points—he was told it was impossible because "the business needs 110 points." But the business wasn't getting 110 points anyway. They were getting broken promises, a demoralized team, stress leave, high churn, and a relationship built on distrust. Darryl couldn't change the system in that case, but the lesson was clear: adult people who manage their lives perfectly well outside work can become completely helpless inside work when the system repeatedly tells them their judgment doesn't matter. As Ricardo Semler observes in Maverick!, people leave their initiative at the door when organizations create systems that punish honest assessment and reward false promises.   Self-reflection Question: Is your team committing to what they believe they can achieve, or to what they think someone else wants to hear? What would happen if they told the truth? Featured Book of the Week: Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathan Smart Darryl describes Better Value, Sooner, Safer, Happier by Jonathan Smart as a treasure trove of real-life experience from people who have "had their sleeves rolled up in the trenches" for decades. What he loves most is the authenticity—the authors openly share not just their successes, but all the things that didn't work and why.  One story that crystallizes the book's brilliance involves Barclays Bank and their ingenious approach to change adoption. Facing resistance from laggards who refused to adopt Agile improvements despite overwhelming social proof, they started publishing lists of "most improved teams." When resisters saw themselves at the bottom of these public lists, they called to complain—and were asked, "Did you have improvements we didn't know about?" The awkward pause would follow, then the inevitable question: "How do I get these improvements?" Demand creation at its finest.  Darryl particularly appreciates that the authors present at conferences saying, "Let me tell you about all the things we've stuffed up in major agile transformations all around the world," bringing genuine humility and practical wisdom to every page.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Darryl Wright   Darryl is an Agile Coach and Instructor dedicated to helping organisations and leaders be both successful and humane. He has over two decades in IT delivery and business leadership, he champions Agile ways of working to create thriving workplaces where people are happy, productive, and deliver products customers truly love.   You can link with Darryl Wright on LinkedIn, and visit Darryl's website at www.organa.com.au.

Darryl Wright: When Enthusiasm Became Interference—Learning to Listen as a Scrum Master Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "Wait stands for Why Am I Talking? Just ask yourself, wait, why am I talking? Is this the right moment for you to give an idea, or is this the right moment to just listen and let them have space to come up with ideas?" - Darryl Wright   Early in his Agile journey, Darryl was evangelically enthusiastic about the principles and practices that had transformed his approach to leadership. He believed he had discovered the answers people were seeking, and his excitement manifested in a problematic pattern—he talked too much. Constantly jumping in with solutions, ideas, and suggestions, Darryl dominated conversations without realizing the impact. Then someone pulled him aside with a generous gift: "You're not really giving other people time to come up with ideas or take ownership of a problem."  They introduced him to WAIT—Why Am I Talking?—an acronym that would fundamentally shift his coaching approach. This simple tool forced Darryl to pause before speaking and examine his motivations. Was he trying to prove himself? Did he think he knew better? Or was this genuinely the right moment to contribute? As he practiced this technique, Darryl discovered something profound: when he held space and waited, others would eventually step forward with insights and solutions.  The concept of "small enough to try, safe enough to fail" became his framework for deciding when to intervene. Not every moment requires a Scrum Master to step in—sometimes the most powerful coaching happens in silence. By developing better skills in active listening and learning to hold space for others, Darryl transformed from someone who provided all the answers into someone who created the conditions for shared leadership to emerge.   In this episode, we refer to David Marquet's episodes on the podcast for practical techniques on holding space and enabling leadership in others.   Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you caught yourself jumping in with a solution before giving your team space to discover it themselves? What would happen if you waited just five more minutes?   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.   🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.   Buy Now on Amazon   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]   About Darryl Wright   Darryl is an Agile Coach and Instructor dedicated to helping organisations and leaders be both successful and humane. He has over two decades in IT delivery and business leadership, he champions Agile ways of working to create thriving workplaces where people are happy, productive, and deliver products customers truly love.   You can link with Darryl Wright on LinkedIn, and visit Darryl's website at www.organa.com.au.

Alex Sloley: How to Coach POs Who Treat Developers Like Mindless Robots In this episode, we refer to the previous episodes with David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around! The Great Product Owner: Trust and the Sprint Review That Changes Everything Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "She was like, oh my gosh, I've never seen this before, I didn't think it was possible. I just saw you deliver stuff in 2 weeks that I can actually use." - Alex Sloley In 2011, Alex worked with a client organization creating software for external companies. They needed a Product Owner for a new Agile team, and a representative from the client—who had never experienced Scrum—volunteered for the role. She was initially skeptical, having never witnessed or heard of this approach. Alex gently coached her through the process, asking her to trust the team and be patient. Then came the first Sprint Review, and everything changed. For the first time in her career, she saw working product delivered in just two weeks that she could actually touch, see, and use. Her head exploded with possibility. Even though it didn't have everything and wasn't perfect, it was remarkably good. That moment flipped a switch—she became fully engaged and transformed into a champion for Agile adoption, not just for the team but for the entire company. Alex reflects that she embodied all five Scrum values: focus (trusting the team's capacity), commitment (attending and engaging in all events), openness (giving the new approach a chance), respect (giving the team space to succeed), and courage (championing an unfamiliar process). The breakthrough wasn't about product ownership techniques—it was about creating an experience that reinforced Scrum values, allowing her to see the potential of a bright new future. Self-reflection Question: What practices, techniques, or processes can you implement that will naturally and automatically build the five Scrum values in your Product Owner? The Bad Product Owner: When Control Becomes Domination Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "They basically just owned the team. The developers on the team might as well have been mindless robots, because they were being assigned all the work, told how much work they could do in a sprint, what the work was." - Alex Sloley In 2018, while working with five interconnected Product Owners, Alex observed a Sprint Planning session that revealed a severe anti-pattern. One Product Owner completely controlled everything, telling the team exactly what work they would take into the Sprint, assigning specific work to specific people by name, and dictating precisely how they would implement solutions down to technical details like which functions and APIs to use. The developers were reduced to helpless executors with no autonomy, while the Scrum Master sat powerless in the corner. Alex wondered what caused this dynamic—was the PO a former project manager? Had the team broken trust in the past? What emotional baggage or trauma led to this situation? His approach started with building trust through coffee meetings and informal conversations, crucially viewing the PO not as the problem but as someone facing their own impediment. He reframed the challenge as solving the Product Owner's problem rather than fixing the Product Owner. When he asked, "Why do you have to do all this? Can't you trust the team?" and suggested the PO could relax if they delegated, the response was surprisingly positive. The PO was willing to step back once given permission and assurance. Alex's key lesson: think strategically about how to build trust and who needs to build trust with whom. Sometimes the person who appears to be creating problems is actually struggling under their own burden. Self-reflection Question: When you encounter a controlling Product Owner, do you approach the situation as "fixing" the PO or as "solving the PO's problem"? How might this reframe change your coaching strategy? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Alex Sloley Alex believes that a great Scrum Master can have a long and lasting impact on people and teams. He is a global agile and product management evangelist, author of The Agile Community, and frequent international speaker. A former Microsoft leader with 15 years' experience, he now trains, coaches, and drives transformations worldwide. Certified across Scrum, ICAgile, and Kanban, Alex energizes communities, guides leaders, and—yes—enjoys good beer. You can link with Alex Sloley on LinkedIn. Website: alexsloley.com Book: The Agile Community (available on Amazon)

Alex Sloley: Why Sticky Notes Are Your Visualization Superpower in Retrospectives Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Like the smell, the vibe is something you feel. If you're having a successful impact on the organization or on teams as a Scrum Master, you can feel it, you can smell it. It's intangible." - Alex Sloley Alex introduces a compelling concept from Sumantra Ghoshal about "the smell of the workplace"—you can walk into an environment and immediately sense whether it smells like fresh strawberries and cream or a dumpster fire. In Australia, there's a cultural reference from the movie "The Castle" about "the vibe of the thing," and Alex emphasizes that as a successful Scrum Master, you can feel and smell when you're having an impact. While telling executives you're measuring "vibe" might be challenging, Alex shares three concrete ways he's measured success. The key insight is that success isn't always measurable in traditional ways, but successful Scrum Masters develop an intuition for sensing when their work is making a meaningful difference. Self-reflection Question: Can you articulate the "vibe" or "smell" of your current team or organization? What specific indicators tell you whether your Scrum Master work is truly making an impact beyond the metrics? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Sticky Notes for Everything Alex champions any retrospective format that includes sticky notes, calling them a "visualization superpower." With sticky notes, teams can visualize anything—the good, the bad, improvements, options, possibilities, and even metrics. They make information transparent, which is critical for the inspect-and-adapt cycle that forms the heart of Scrum. Alex emphasizes being strategic about visualization: identify a challenge, figure out how to make it visual, and then create experiments around that visualization. Once something becomes visible, magic happens because the team can see patterns they've never noticed before. You can use different sizes, colors, and positions to visualize constraints in the system, including interruptions, unplanned work, blocker clustering, impediments, and flow. This approach works not just in retrospectives but in planning, reviews, and daily scrums. The key principle is that you must have transparency in order to inspect, and you must inspect to adapt. Alex's practical advice: be strategic about what you choose to visualize, involve the team in determining how to make challenges visible, and watch as the transparency naturally leads to insights and improvement ideas. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Alex Sloley Alex believes that a great Scrum Master can have a long and lasting impact on people and teams. He is a global agile and product management evangelist, author of The Agile Community, and frequent international speaker. A former Microsoft leader with 15 years' experience, he now trains, coaches, and drives transformations worldwide. Certified across Scrum, ICAgile, and Kanban, Alex energizes communities, guides leaders, and—yes—enjoys good beer. You can link with Alex Sloley on LinkedIn.

Alex Sloley: Coaching Teams Trapped Between Agile Aspirations and Organizational Control Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "The team says, oh, we want to try to do things this way, and the org keeps coming back and saying stuff like, no, no, no, you can't do that, because in this org, we don't allow that." - Alex Sloley Alex shares his current challenge working with a 10-person pilot Scrum team within a 1,500-person organization that has never done Agile before. While the team appears open-minded and eager to embrace agile ways of working, the organization continuously creates impediments by dictating how the team must estimate, break down work, and operate. Management tells them "the right way" to do everything, from estimation techniques to role-based work assignments, even implementing RACI matrices that restrict who can do what type of work. Half the team has been with the organization for six months or less, making it comfortable to simply defer to authority and follow organizational rules. Through coaching conversation, Alex explores whether the team might be falling into learned helplessness or simply finding comfort in being told what to do—both positions that avoid accountability. His experimental approach includes designing retrospective questions to help the team reflect on what they believe they're empowered to do versus what management dictates, and potentially using delegation cards to facilitate conversations about decision-making authority. Alex's key insight is recognizing that teams may step back from empowerment either out of fear or comfort, and identifying which dynamic is at play requires careful, small experiments that create safe spaces for honest dialogue. Self-reflection Question: When your team defers to organizational authority, are they operating from learned helplessness, comfort in avoiding accountability, or genuine respect for hierarchy? How can you design experiments to uncover the real dynamic at play? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Alex Sloley Alex believes that a great Scrum Master can have a long and lasting impact on people and teams. He is a global agile and product management evangelist, author of The Agile Community, and frequent international speaker. A former Microsoft leader with 15 years' experience, he now trains, coaches, and drives transformations worldwide. Certified across Scrum, ICAgile, and Kanban, Alex energizes communities, guides leaders, and—yes—enjoys good beer. You can link with Alex Sloley on LinkedIn.

Alex Sloley: When Toxic Leadership Creates Teams That Self-Destruct Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "They would take notes at every team meeting, so that later on they could argue with team members about what they committed to, and what they said in meetings." - Alex Sloley Alex recounts working with a small team where a project manager created such a toxic environment that one new hire quit after just eight hours on the job. This PM would belittle team members publicly, take detailed notes to use as weapons in contract negotiations, and dominate the team through intimidation. The situation became so severe that one team member sent an email that sounded like a suicide note. When the PM criticized Alex's "slide deck velocity," comparing four slides per 15 minutes to Alex's one, he realized the environment was beyond salvaging. Despite coaching the team and attempting to introduce Scrum values, Alex ultimately concluded that management was encouraging this behavior as a control mechanism. The organization lacked trust in the team, creating learned helplessness where team members became submissive and unable to resist. Sometimes, the most important lesson for a Scrum Master is recognizing when a system is too toxic to change and having the courage to walk away. Alex emphasizes that respect—one of the core Scrum values—was completely absent, making any meaningful transformation impossible. In this segment, we talk about "learned helplessness".  Self-reflection Question: How do you recognize when a toxic environment is being actively encouraged by the system rather than caused by individual behavior? What are the signs that it's time to exit rather than continue fighting? Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Alex describes his complex relationship with The Goal by Goldratt—it both inspires and worries him. He struggles with the text because the concepts are so deep and meaningful that he's never quite sure he's fully understood everything Goldratt was trying to convey. The book was difficult to read, taking him four times longer than other agile-related books, and he had to reread entire sections multiple times. Despite the challenge, the concepts around Theory of Constraints and systems thinking have stayed with him for years. Alex worries late at night that he might have missed something important in the book.  He also mentions reading The Scrum Guide at least once a week, finding new tidbits each time and reflecting on why specific segments say what they say. Both books share a common thread—the text that isn't in the text—requiring readers to dig deeper into the underlying principles and meanings rather than just the surface content. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Alex Sloley Alex believes that a great Scrum Master can have a long and lasting impact on people and teams. He is a global agile and product management evangelist, author of The Agile Community, and frequent international speaker. A former Microsoft leader with 15 years' experience, he now trains, coaches, and drives transformations worldwide. Certified across Scrum, ICAgile, and Kanban, Alex energizes communities, guides leaders, and—yes—enjoys good beer. You can link with Alex Sloley on LinkedIn.

Alex Sloley: The Sprint Planning That Wouldn't End - A Timeboxing Failure Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Although I knew about the steps of sprint planning, what I didn't really understand was the box of time versus the box of scope." - Alex Sloley Alex shares a critical learning moment from his first team as a Scrum Master. After six months in the role, during an eight-hour sprint planning session for a four-week sprint, he successfully completed the "what" portion but ran out of time before addressing "how." Rather than respecting the timebox, Alex forced the team to continue planning for another four hours the next day—blowing the timebox by 50%. This experience taught him a fundamental lesson: the difference between scope-boxing and timeboxing. In waterfall, we try to control scope while time slips away. In Scrum, we fix time and let scope adjust. Alex emphasizes that timeboxing isn't just about keeping meetings short—it's about limiting work in process and maintaining focus. His practical tip: use visible timers to train yourself and your teams to respect timeboxes. This mindset shift from controlling scope to respecting time remains one of the most important lessons for Scrum Masters. Self-reflection Question: How often do you prioritize completing a planned agenda over respecting the timebox? What message does this send to your team about the values you're reinforcing? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Alex Sloley Alex believes that a great Scrum Master can have a long and lasting impact on people and teams. He is a global agile and product management evangelist, author of The Agile Community, and frequent international speaker. A former Microsoft leader with 15 years' experience, he now trains, coaches, and drives transformations worldwide. Certified across Scrum, ICAgile, and Kanban, Alex energizes communities, guides leaders, and—yes—enjoys good beer. You can link with Alex Sloley on LinkedIn.

BONUS: The Evolution of Agile - From Project Management to Adaptive Intelligence, With Mario Aiello In this BONUS episode, we explore the remarkable journey of Mario Aiello, a veteran agility thinker who has witnessed and shaped the evolution of Agile from its earliest days. Now freshly retired, Mario shares decades of hard-won insights about what works, what doesn't, and where Agile is headed next. This conversation challenges conventional thinking about methodologies, certifications, and what it truly means to be an Agile coach in complex environments. The Early Days: Agilizing Before Agile Had a Name "I came from project management and project management was, for me, was not working. I used to be a wishful liar, basically, because I used to manipulate reports in such a way that would please the listener. I knew it was bullshit." Mario's journey into Agile began around 2001 at Sun Microsystems, where he was already experimenting with iterative approaches while the rest of the world was still firmly planted in traditional project management. Working in Palo Alto, he encountered early adopters discussing Extreme Programming and had an "aha moment" - realizing that concepts like short iterations, feedback loops, and learning could rescue him from the unsustainable madness of traditional project management. He began incorporating these ideas into his work with PRINCE2, calling stages "iterations" and making them as short as possible. His simple agile approach focused on: work on the most important thing first, finish it, then move to the next one, cooperate with each other, and continuously improve. The Trajectory of Agile: From Values to Mechanisms "When the craze of methodologies came about, I started questioning the commercialization and monetization of methodologies. That's where things started to get a little bit complicated because the general focus drifted from values and principles to mechanisms and metrics." Mario describes witnessing three distinct phases in Agile's evolution. The early days were authentic - software developers speaking from the heart about genuine needs for new ways of working. The Agile Manifesto put important truths in front of everyone. However, as methodologies became commercialized, the focus shifted dangerously away from the core values and principles toward prescriptive mechanisms, metrics, and ceremonies. Mario emphasizes that when you focus on values and principles, you discover the purpose behind changing your ways of working. When you focus only on mechanics, you end up just doing things without real purpose - and that's when Agile became a noun, with people trying to "be agile" instead of achieving agility. He's clear that he's not against methodologies like Scrum, XP, SAFe, or LeSS - but rather against their mindless application without understanding the essence behind them. Making Sense Before Methodology: The Four-Fit Framework "Agile for me has to be fit for purpose, fit for context, fit for practice, and I even include a fourth dimension - fit for improvement." Rather than jumping straight to methodology selection, Mario advocates for a sense-making approach. First, understand your purpose - why do you want Agile? Then examine your context - where do you live, how does your company work? Only after making sense of the gap between your current state and where the values and principles suggest you should be, should you choose a methodology. This might mean Scrum for complex environments, or perhaps a flow-based approach for more predictable work, or creating your own hybrid. The key insight is that anyone who understands Agile's principles and values is free to create their own approach - it's fundamentally about plan, do, inspect, and adapt. Learning Through Failure: Context is Paramount "I failed more often than I won. That teaches you - being brave enough to say I failed, I learned, I move on because I'm going to use it better next time." Mario shares pivotal learning moments from his career, including an early attempt to "agilize PRINCE2" in a command-and-control startup environment. While not an ultimate success, this battle taught him that context is paramount and cannot be ignored. You must start by understanding how things are done today - identifying what's good (keep doing it), what's bad (try to improve it), and what's ugly (eradicate it to the extent possible). This lesson shaped his next engagement at a 300-person organization, where he spent nearly five months preparing the organizational context before even introducing Scrum. He started with "simple agile" practices, then took a systems approach to the entire delivery system. A Systems Approach: From Idea to Cash "From the moment sales and marketing people get brilliant ideas they want built, until the team delivers them into production and supports them - all that is a system. You cannot have different parts finger-pointing." Mario challenges the common narrow view of software development systems. Rather than focusing only on prioritization, development, and testing, he advocates for considering everything that influences delivery - from conception through to cash. His approach involved reorganizing an entire office floor, moving away from functional silos (sales here, marketing there, development over there) to value stream-based organization around products. Everyone involved in making work happen, including security, sales, product design, and client understanding, is part of the system. In one transformation, he shifted security from being gatekeepers at the end of the line to strategic partners from day one, embedding security throughout the entire value stream. This comprehensive systems thinking happened before formal Scrum training began. Beyond the Job Description: What Can an Agile Coach Really Do? "I said to some people, I'm not a coach. I'm just somebody that happens to have experience. How can I give something that can help and maybe influence the system?" Mario admits he doesn't qualify as a coach by traditional standards - he has no formal coaching qualifications. His coaching approach comes from decades of Rugby experience and focuses on establishing relationships with teams, understanding where they're going, and helping them make sense of their path forward. He emphasizes adaptive intelligence - the probe, sense, respond cycle. Rather than trying to change everything at once and capsizing the boat, he advocates for challenging one behavior at a time, starting with the most important, encouraging adaptation, and probing quickly to check for impact of specific changes. His role became inviting people to think outside the box, beyond the rigidity of their training and certifications, helping individuals and teams who could then influence the broader system even when organizational change seemed impossible. The Future: Adaptive Intelligence and Making Room for Agile "I'm using a lot of adaptive intelligence these days - probe, sense, respond, learn and adapt. That sequence will take people places." Looking ahead, Mario believes the valuable core of Agile - its values and principles - will remain, but the way we apply them must evolve. He advocates for adaptive intelligence approaches that emphasize sense-making and continuous learning rather than rigid adherence to frameworks. As he enters retirement, Mario is determined to make room for Agile in his new life, seeking ways to give back to the community through his blog, his new Substack "Adaptive Ways," and by inviting others to think differently. He's exploring a "pay as you wish" approach to sharing his experience, recognizing that while he may not be a traditional coach or social media expert, his decades of real-world experience - with its failures and successes - holds value for those still navigating the complexity of organizational change. About Mario Aiello Retired from full-time work, Mario is an agility thinker shaped by real-world complexity, not dogma. With decades in VUCA environments, he blends strategic clarity, emotional intelligence, and creative resilience. He designs context-driven agility, guiding teams and leaders beyond frameworks toward genuine value, adaptive systems, and meaningful transformation. You can link with Mario Aiello on LinkedIn, visit his website at Agile Ways.

Renee Troughton: Analytics From Day One and Four Other Principles of Great POs Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Product owners who think about their products as just a backlog that I prioritize, and I get some detailed requirements from stakeholders, and I give that to the team... that's not empowering the team. And it's probably leading you to building the wrong thing, just faster." The Bad Product Owner: The Backlog Manager Without Vision Renee describes a pattern of Product Owners who don't understand product management—they lack roadmaps, strategy, and never speak to customers. These POs focus solely on backlogs, prioritizing detailed requirements from stakeholders without testing hypotheses or learning about their market. Taking an empathetic view, Renee notes these individuals may have fallen into the role without passion, never seeing what excellence looks like, and struggling with extreme time poverty. Product ownership is one of the hardest roles from a time perspective—dealing with legislative requirements, compliance, risk, fail-and-fix work, and constant incoming demands. Drowning in day-to-day urgency, they lack breathing space for strategic thinking.  These POs also struggle with vulnerability, feeling they should have all answers as leaders, making it difficult to admit knowledge gaps. Without organizational safety to fail, they can't demonstrate the confidence balanced with humility needed to test hypotheses and potentially be wrong. The result is building the wrong thing faster, without empowering teams or creating real value. Self-reflection Question: Are you managing your Product Owners' workload and supporting their strategic thinking time, or are you allowing them to drown in tactical work that prevents them from truly leading their products? The Great Product Owner: Analytics from Day One and Market Awareness "They really iterated, I think, 5 key principles quite consistently... the one thing that did really shape my thinking at that time was... Analytics from day one." Renee celebrates a Chief Product Owner who led 13 teams with extraordinary effectiveness. This PO consistently communicated five key principles, with "analytics from day one" being paramount—emphasizing the critical need to know immediately if new features work and understanding customer behavior from launch. This PO demonstrated deep market awareness, regularly spending time in Silicon Valley, understanding innovation trends and where the industry was heading. They maintained a clear product vision and could powerfully sell the dream to stakeholders.  Perhaps most impressively, they brought urgency during a competitive "space race" situation when a former leader left with intellectual property to build a competing product. Despite this pressure, they never allowed compromise on quality—rallying teams with mission and purpose while maintaining standards. This combination of strategic vision, market knowledge, data-driven decision-making, and balanced urgency created an environment where teams delivered excellence under competitive pressure. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Renee Troughton Renee is one of the most experienced Agile coaches in the Southern Hemisphere with over two decades of transformation experience across banking, insurance, pharma, and real estate. Since 2002, she's helped organizations go digital, tackle systemic issues, and deliver value faster. Passionate about cutting bureaucracy, Renee champions a return to humanity at work. Follow Renee's work at AgileForest.com, her website as well as her work on the Agile Revolution podcast.  You can link with Renee Troughton on LinkedIn.

Renee Troughton: From Lower-Order to Higher-Order Values in Scrum Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "If you, as a senior leader, demonstrate vulnerability, it creates real magic in an organization where others can open up and be their authentic self." Renee defines success for Scrum Masters through deeply human values: integrity, holding her truth, being compassionately authentic, caring, open, honest, listening, and vulnerable. She emphasizes that vulnerability as a senior leader creates transformative magic in organizations, allowing others to bring their authentic selves to work. Drawing on Byron Katie's "Loving What Is" and Frederick Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations," Renee explains that many corporate organizations focus on lower-order values like results and performance, while more autonomous organizations prioritize higher-order values rooted in the heart. When having conversations with people, Renee connects with them as human beings first—not rushing to business if someone is struggling personally. Success means seeing people completely for who they are, not as resources to be changed or leveraged. The foundation for collaboration, empowerment, and autonomy is trust, respect, and safety. Renee emphasizes that without these fundamental values in place, everything else implodes. She demonstrates how vulnerability, active listening, and accepting people where they are creates the fertile ground for successful teams and organizations. Self-reflection Question: Do you demonstrate vulnerability as a leader, creating space for others to bring their authentic selves to work, or do you hide behind a professional facade that prevents genuine human connection? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Themed Retrospectives (Monopoly, Sports, Current Events) "It gave a freshness to it. And it gave almost like a livelihood or a joyfulness to it as an activity as well." Renee recommends themed retrospectives like the Monopoly Retro or sports-themed formats that use current events or cultural references (aka metaphor retrospectives). While working at a consultancy, they would theme retrospectives every week around different topics—football, news events, or various scenarios—using collages of pictures showing different emotions (upset, angry, happy). Team members would identify with feelings and reframe their week within the theme's context, such as "it was a rough game" or "we didn't score enough goals." The brilliance of this approach is covering the same retrospective questions while bringing freshness, creativity, and joyfulness to the activity. These metaphorical formats allow teams to verbalize things that aren't easily expressible in structured formats, triggering different perspectives and creative thinking. The format stays consistent while feeling completely new, maintaining engagement while avoiding retrospective fatigue. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Renee Troughton Renee is one of the most experienced Agile coaches in the Southern Hemisphere with over two decades of transformation experience across banking, insurance, pharma, and real estate. Since 2002, she's helped organizations go digital, tackle systemic issues, and deliver value faster. Passionate about cutting bureaucracy, Renee champions a return to humanity at work. Follow Renee's work at AgileForest.com, her website as well as her work on the Agile Revolution podcast.  You can link with Renee Troughton on LinkedIn.

Renee Troughton: Managing Dependencies and Downstream Bottlenecks in Scrum Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "For the actual product teams, it's not a problem for them... It's more the downstream teams that aren't the product teams, that are still dependencies... They just don't see that work until, hey, we urgently need this." Renee brings a dual-edged challenge from her current work with dozens of teams across multiple business lines. While quarterly planning happens at a high level, small downstream teams—middleware, AI, data, and even non-technical teams like legal—are not considered in the planning process. These teams experience unexpected work floods with dramatic peaks and troughs throughout the quarter. The product teams are comfortable with ambiguity and incremental delivery, but downstream service teams don't see work coming until it arrives urgently. Through a coaching conversation, Renee and Vasco explore multiple experimental approaches: top-to-bottom stack ranking of initiatives, holding excess capacity based on historical patterns, shared code ownership where downstream teams advise rather than execute changes, and using Theory of Constraints to manage flow into bottleneck teams. They discuss how lack of discovery work compounds the problem, as teams "just start working" without identifying all players who need involvement. The solution requires balancing multiple strategies while maintaining an experimentation mindset, recognizing that complex systems require sensing our way toward solutions rather than predicting them. Self-reflection Question: Are you actively managing the flow of work to prevent downstream bottlenecks, or are you allowing your "downstream teams" to be repeatedly overwhelmed by last-minute urgent requests? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Renee Troughton Renee is one of the most experienced Agile coaches in the Southern Hemisphere with over two decades of transformation experience across banking, insurance, pharma, and real estate. Since 2002, she's helped organizations go digital, tackle systemic issues, and deliver value faster. Passionate about cutting bureaucracy, Renee champions a return to humanity at work. Follow Renee's work at AgileForest.com, her website as well as her work on the Agile Revolution podcast.  You can link with Renee Troughton on LinkedIn.

Renee Troughton: The Hidden Cost of Constant Restructuring in Agile Organizations Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. "Trust and safety are the most fundamental foundations of a team to perform. And so you are just breaking the core of teams when you're doing this." Renee challenges us to look beyond team dysfunction and examine the "dirty little secrets" in organizations—leadership-driven anti-patterns that destroy team performance. She reveals a cyclical pattern of constant restructuring that occurs every six months in many organizations, driven by leaders who avoid difficult performance management conversations and instead force people through redundancy rounds. This creates a cascade of fear, panic, and victim mindset throughout the organization. Beyond restructuring, Renee identifies other destructive patterns including the C-suite shuffle (where new CEOs bring in their own teams, cascading change throughout the organization) and the insourcing/outsourcing swings that create chaos over 5-8 year cycles. These high-level decisions drain productivity for months as teams storm and reform, losing critical knowledge and breaking the trust and safety that are fundamental for high performance. Renee emphasizes that as Agile coaches and Scrum Masters, we often don't feel empowered to challenge these decisions, yet they represent the biggest drain on organizational productivity. Self-reflection Question: Have you identified the cyclical organizational anti-patterns in your workplace, and do you have the courage to raise these systemic issues with senior leadership? Featured Book of the Week: Loving What Is by Byron Katie "It teaches you around how to reframe your thoughts in the day-to-day life, to assess them in a different light than you would normally perceive them to be." Renee recommends "Loving What Is" by Byron Katie as an essential tool for Scrum Master introspection. This book teaches practical techniques for reframing thoughts and recognizing that problems we perceive "out there" are often internal framing issues. Katie's method, called "The Work," provides a worksheet-based approach to introspection that helps identify when our perceptions create unnecessary suffering. Renee also highlights Marshall Rosenberg's "Nonviolent Communication" as a companion book, which uses language to tap into underlying emotions and needs. Both books offer practical, actionable techniques for self-knowledge—a critical skill for anyone in the Scrum Master role. The journey these books provide leads to inner peace through understanding that many challenges stem from how we internally frame situations rather than external reality. We have many episodes on NVC, Nonviolent Communication, which you can dive into and learn from experienced practitioners.  [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] 🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥 Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people. 🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue. Buy Now on Amazon [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends] About Renee Troughton Renee is one of the most experienced Agile coaches in the Southern Hemisphere with over two decades of transformation experience across banking, insurance, pharma, and real estate. Since 2002, she's helped organizations go digital, tackle systemic issues, and deliver value faster. Passionate about cutting bureaucracy, Renee champions a return to humanity at work. Follow Renee's work at AgileForest.com, her website as well as her work on the Agile Revolution podcast.  You can link with Renee Troughton on LinkedIn.