Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

Peter Merel: When a Hub-and-Spoke Executive Hijacks Your Agile Transformation — And What to Do About It
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.
 
"Either you're going to do what you know works, or you're going to step away. Either way, you're not going to do damage to your client." - Peter Merel
 
After a successful transformation at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Peter Merel moved to Westpac, another major Australian bank, expecting to replicate the same approach. He found an executive who appeared eager to support an agile transformation — but this executive saw agile as the ideal form of micromanagement. Everything and everyone revolved around this one individual, and as Peter began facilitating conversations that didn't hub on the executive, the executive felt disempowered. Peter was blind to this dynamic — he had never encountered it before. The situation deteriorated because Peter had been hired to run a push-based transformation, when he knew from experience that only pull-based transformation works. At Commonwealth Bank, he had built a thin steel thread from business through to DevOps with a small group, proved it worked, and then grown it organically. At Westpac, he let himself be persuaded to push change into the organization, and it compromised everything. The lesson Peter shares is stark: if you can't do what you know works, and you can't step away, then you are the problem. He also warns that when coaches fail this way, they make life harder for whoever comes next — a responsibility that's easy to overlook in the moment.
 
In this segment, we talk about pull-based transformation and why push-based change programs consistently fail in large organizations.
 
Self-reflection Question: Are you currently in a situation where you've compromised on your approach to change — and if so, are you doing more damage by staying than you would by stepping away?
Featured Book of the Week: The Agile Way by Peter Merel
Peter's own book, The Agile Way, is his modern translation of the Tao Te Ching — a 3,000-year-old text he argues was originally about how to achieve agile development in organizations large and small. Peter first started translating this text in 1989, and after decades of iteration, the book draws connections between ancient wisdom and modern agile practices — XP, Lean, Theory of Constraints, throughput accounting, and permaculture. As Peter explains, "The sage in Lao Tzu is Shang Ren — agile people. This is a book about agile people, agility, and it always was." The book is available at agile.way.pm, and Kent Beck, who wrote the foreword, calls it "a dangerous little book" — dangerous in the same sense as the word extreme.
 
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🔥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
 
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About Peter Merel
 
Credited in the first agile book (XP Embraced), keynoted the first agile conference, invented the first agile training game, founded the xscale alliance, authored the agile way, Peter developed software by hand for forty years, coached agile in person for twenty years, and is working now to revolutionize the AI alignment landscape.
 
You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.

Peter Merel: When Telling a Manager "You Don't Have a Role" Backfires — A Lesson in Agile Coaching Humility
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.
 
"A failure is not a failure. A failure is just the first step." - Peter Merel
 
Peter Merel became a Scrum Master by stealth — long before the title existed. Credited in Kent Beck's first XP book and present at the first agile conference, Peter was practicing lightweight processes at Hewlett Packard in the late 1990s. When he took a role at GMAC, the residential finance arm of General Motors, he brought XP practices with him and found early success. After six months of strong results, the project manager, Mike Alakom, sat Peter down and asked the most dangerous management question: "What do I do?" Peter gave what he now calls the stupidest answer possible — "You don't really have a role in this process." The next day, Mike called an all-hands meeting and calmly maneuvered Peter into crediting the entire way of working as Mike's idea. Peter stayed on for another six months, but at arm's length. In hindsight, Peter recognizes Mike did exactly what he should have done. The second failure came at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where Peter was brought in to coach agile but was actually being set up to fail — a ripcord the organization could pull when it wasn't ready for change. The delivery manager, Des Webster, told Peter directly: "You were set up to fail." Peter walked away, thinking he'd never return. But six years later, every person he had coached had moved up in the organization, and Peter came back as principal coach for 50,000 people. The CIO declared Agile one of the bank's five pillars. Just because you hit the wall doesn't mean it's the end — it might be the beginning.
 
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you failed at introducing change, and have you considered that the seeds you planted might still be growing in ways you can't yet see?
 
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🔥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 Peter Merel
 
Credited in the first agile book (XP Embraced), keynoted the first agile conference, invented the first agile training game, founded the xscale alliance, authored the agile way, Peter developed software by hand for forty years, coached agile in person for twenty years, and is working now to revolutionize the AI alignment landscape.
 
You can link with Peter Merel on LinkedIn. You can also find his work at agile.way.pm.

BONUS: Why Your Agile Transformation Keeps Snapping Back — And What Systems Thinking Says About It
Natalia Curusi co-authored a book that doesn't tell you what agile should look like — it tells you what actually happens when you try to transform an organization. Friday-night deployments, zombie teams going through the motions, transformations that met a wall of silence. In this episode, we unpack the real lessons from the front lines: how personal values drive the shift to agile, why some teams have all the ceremonies but none of the substance, and what systems thinking reveals about why transformations fail — or snap back.
When Your Values Don't Match Your Ways of Working
"I felt like there is a mismatch in my values, my moral values and principles, and customer-centric orientation. So when I found out about Agile around 2010, I understood — okay, this is the answer. Now I have the answer how I can map my moral values and principles with software delivery."
 
Natalia's journey to agile didn't start with a methodology — it started with a gut feeling that something was wrong. Working in large corporations in the early 2000s with fixed-scope contracts, late deployments, and scripts running directly in production, she sensed a disconnect between how work was done and how it should be done. When she moved to a smaller company around 2010 and experienced transparency, collaboration, and the freedom to ask any question without fear, she realized this was the agile mindset — even before she knew the term. The key insight: agile isn't something you adopt, it's something that aligns with values you may already hold. That alignment between personal principles and ways of working is what makes the difference between going through the motions and genuinely transforming how a team operates.
Don't Be an Agile Zombie
"The first thing I observe — if I go to some of the ceremonies and I see that stand-up becomes like a status meeting, and everybody is reporting to somebody. People are afraid to say some of the things, afraid to escalate risks or assumptions."
 
One of the strongest chapters in the book is titled "Don't Be an Agile Zombie." Natalia describes teams that have all the boards, all the roles, all the right meeting cadences — but nothing is actually changing. The Scrum Master becomes a secretary. The Product Owner is a proxy afraid to make decisions. The tell-tale signs? Fear and formality. When people report upward instead of collaborating sideways, when risks go unspoken because the environment punishes transparency, that's a watermelon project — green on the outside, red on the inside. Natalia's approach starts with observing the tone and dynamics in ceremonies. If the stand-up feels like a status report and not a coordination meeting, something deeper is broken. And her advice is direct: if an organization is delivering waterfall and happy with the predictability and value, that's fine — just call it what it is. Don't put lipstick on a pig. As Rebecca Homkes discussed on this podcast, the key is to communicate the truth with care, but communicate it nonetheless.
Task-Driven vs. Value-Driven: The Real Spectrum
"It's not right to say that you are agile if you are not. Just name the things how they are — name the things using the right word."
 
Rather than the old waterfall-vs-agile binary, a more useful lens is the spectrum between task-driven and value-driven product development. On the task-driven side, somebody creates the list of tasks — requirements, architecture document, design document — and a project manager distributes them. Teams execute but aren't asked to be creative or adaptable. On the value-driven side, what matters is the impact of what teams build. Value is discovered through the dynamic interaction of functionality with customers — it can't be predetermined. Most organizations sit somewhere on this spectrum, and many are slowly moving toward the value-driven end even if they don't call it agile. The practical takeaway: transformation should be tailored to where an organization actually is, not where a framework says it should be. The book argues for a pragmatic, hybrid approach rather than evangelical purity.
Systems Thinking: Why Transformations Snap Back
"We did a big agile transformation — five years of real transformation. Then the company was bought, merged with a bigger payment provider. And now they are working with SAFe. And that's the end of the story."
 
In the later part of the book, Natalia and her co-author move into systems thinking — Cynefin, the Iceberg Model, causal loop diagrams. Many agile practitioners stop before they get here because it feels academic. But Natalia argues it's essential, and she illustrates why with a real example: a payment company that went through five years of successful agile transformation using LeSS, only to be acquired by a larger organization that pushed SAFe — and the transformation snapped back. This is the basin of attraction concept: a system has to pass through a point of genuine disruption before it can settle into a new stable state. Without that, it returns to where it was. For practitioners looking to get started with systems thinking, Natalia recommends The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge and learning to build causal loop diagrams — a practical tool that creates productive conversations about how organizational dynamics actually work.
The Post-Agile Era: Beyond Labels
"It's like comparing apples and orchestras. You cannot compare agile and AI — they are completely different things. Agile is not enough, but it's also not dead."
 
Natalia addresses the "Agile is dead" debate head-on. Her argument: comparing agile to AI is a category error. An apple cannot play an orchestra, and an orchestra cannot replace an apple — they serve entirely different purposes. AI can handle a significant portion of day-to-day tasks, but it lacks common sense, empathy, and the ability to read a room. Rather than declaring agile dead, Natalia sees a post-agile era — not one where agile disappears, but where we move beyond the label wars. The trends that matter aren't about whether agile is popular; they're about collaboration, adaptability, and understanding how teams and organizations actually work. We can finally talk about what matters in our industry without being pressured to label it.
About Natalia Curusi
Natalia Curusi is an Agile Coach at Endava with over 20 years in software delivery, specializing in agile transformations, delivery optimization, and systems thinking. She leads Asia Pacific initiatives driving business agility. She is co-author of From Resistance to Resilience: Practical Agile Lessons for Transformation.
 
You can link with Natalia Curusi on LinkedIn and visit her website at nataliacurusi.com. You can also join the Agile Continuum community on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Hard Hats and Standups — Why the Construction Industry Is Going Agile at GAS26
Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is one of the co-hosts of the Agile in Construction track at the Global Agile Summit 2026. In this preview episode, he and Vasco talk about why Agile belongs on the construction site, what the track's speakers discovered when they stopped following the plan, and why software people should pay close attention to an industry that builds hospitals, not apps.
Construction Is 20 Years Behind — And That's the Opportunity
"People don't realize that those ideas absolutely work in other industries. Agile's been successfully applied everywhere, and I think where it gets the least amount of publicity is in the construction sector."
 
When most people hear "Agile," they think standups in a tech office, not concrete and rebar. Felipe wants to change that. Construction, he says, is always about 20 years behind whatever process or technology the rest of the world adopts — a "very safe stock of keeping tradition." That gap is exactly what makes this track valuable. Agile is alive and growing in construction, and the translation turns out to be simpler than you'd expect. Most of what needs to change isn't the framework — it's the vocabulary. The sessions in this track show how practitioners made that jump with surprisingly small tweaks.
The Speakers Don't Know How Good They Are
"Half the speakers that I asked were like, 'what, me? Do I have a story to share?' I was like, yeah, you have this really amazing... people just don't realize how awesome they are."
 
One of the things that struck Felipe while assembling the track was how humble the speakers are. People who have transformed how their companies deliver work — including the keynote speaker, Brian, whose organization celebrated 10 years and saw dramatic before-and-after results — genuinely didn't think their stories were remarkable. They grew up in an industry with 100 years of project management tradition, where PMI-style thinking is the water they swim in. They don't see how different things look from the outside. Some of these practitioners couldn't even work across projects before adopting Agile — and now they're doing it routinely. That capacity shift alone is a data point worth paying attention to.
Stop Following the Plan — Start Responding to Change
"It's just ground into you, that thou shalt follow a plan. But in reality... they have to do heroic things to make those plans happen. Because the plans are just wrong."
 
Felipe zeroed in on the Agile value of responding to change over following a plan as the single biggest shift his speakers experienced. In construction, plan adherence is gospel — you follow the schedule, period. But in practice, teams were performing heroics just to make flawed plans appear to work. As speakers adopted Agile, they stopped forcing broken plans and started adapting. Felipe gives a nod to #NoEstimates — calling Vasco "the granddaddy of #NoEstimates" — as part of the same insight: the plans are wrong, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can respond to what's actually happening. The second pattern was equally powerful: for the first time, construction workers started thinking about who actually uses what they build. You'd think building a school or hospital makes the end user obvious, but Felipe says people in the industry can work for years and never once consider who receives their work. Agile forced that question, and the answers changed how they prioritize.
What Software People Should Steal From Construction
"Inside of every process are people. Everyone faces resistance to change... when I stopped trying to teach people, and I started inviting people, things changed."
 
Here's the cross-industry lesson Felipe wants software practitioners to hear: resistance to change is universal, and the breakthrough is the same everywhere. Every speaker in the track had a moment where they learned something new and didn't want to go back to the old way. That's the same moment every Scrum Master, product owner, and developer has lived through. The universal tactic that worked? Showing rather than telling. Case study after case study revealed that the real breakthroughs came not from training sessions or slide decks, but from demonstrating results and inviting people in. Stop teaching, start inviting — that's a principle that works whether you're pouring concrete or shipping code.
Come Monday, You'll Ask Better Questions
"The best thing you're gonna do on Monday after the summit is you're gonna start to ask really intelligent questions. That is gonna be priceless. That's something that AI doesn't even do for people."
 
Felipe's take on what attendees will walk away with isn't a new framework or a certification. It's a shift in the questions they ask. Twenty years into practicing Lean Construction, Agile, and Scrum, Felipe says asking better questions is the one thing that has stuck with him the entire time. Better questions melt away resistance, open up new perspectives, and make new ways of working accessible. The ideas in the track are, in his words, "not terribly complicated — they're actually quite simple, and I would even say elegant." And the speakers are approachable — Felipe personally vouches that every speaker in his track answers emails. There will also be live Q&A sessions during the summit for direct interaction.
When Your AI Agent Tells You to Build a Website, You Listen
"My chief orchestrator said, you should have your own website. So felipe.engineer was built."
 
In a delightful closing moment, Felipe shared that his personal website at felipe.engineer was built by his AI agent. Not suggested and then hand-coded — fully built, complete with a style guide the agent had strategically created two weeks earlier. Felipe jokes that the AI was setting him up: first planting the seed that he needed a style guide, then recommending it be applied to a brand-new personal site. Felipe also has a session in the track about building an AI bot for construction sites — another reason to check out the full lineup at globalagilesummit.com.
About Felipe Engineer-Manriquez
Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide — and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.
 
You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.
 
You can also find Felipe at thefelipe.bio.link, check out The EBFC Show podcast, and join the EBFC Scrum Community of Practice.

BONUS: The Game Industry Is Ending — And Why That Might Be the Best Thing for Agile Teams
In this BONUS episode, we preview the Agile in Gaming track at the Global Agile Summit 2026 with track host Eagan Rackley. Eagan shares how he curated a lineup of speakers that spans indie studios, AI-driven game platforms, and multi-studio leadership — all focused on the human side of game development during one of the industry's most turbulent periods. If you've ever wondered what Agile looks like when artists, designers, sound engineers, and programmers all need to ship together under pressure, this is the episode.
From Agile Coach Client to Track Host
"You helped me recognize strengths I'd been dismissing in myself as a leader that I could turn the volume up on, and helped turn me on to some of my more people-first instincts into actual leadership accents."
 
Eagan's path to hosting the Agile in Gaming track started when he worked with Vasco at Malwarebytes in the early 2020s. That coaching relationship shifted how he thought about leadership — moving from dismissing his people-first instincts to leaning into them. When the Global Agile Summit opened up volunteer spots in 2025, he jumped in and co-hosted the development track. Game dev speakers drew strong audience engagement, and when the team suggested a dedicated gaming track for 2026, it was an easy yes. For Eagan, hosting is not just about giving — it is about learning from peers in an industry he transitioned into and loves deeply.
Why Agile in Gaming Deserves Its Own Track
"A lot of the problems we solve in gaming are the same problems people are solving in Agile everywhere, just with a different space. But also, Agile is very specific in gaming — even something like storyboarding is functionally different because you're describing a car in a city that makes these sounds, that drives with physics in this way."
 
Gaming sits at a unique intersection of disciplines — art, sound, design, engineering, narrative — all collaborating under tight constraints. Agile shows up differently here. The frameworks are similar, but the mechanics of how multidisciplinary teams coordinate are distinct. At gaming conferences, you rarely hear people talk about agility the way the Agile community does, and at Agile conferences, gaming is almost never represented. Eagan saw that gap and built a track to bridge it. The problems — building trust under pressure, introducing change to skeptical teams, managing cross-discipline dependencies — are universal. The context just makes them more vivid.
The Producer Who Hates Agile but Runs an Agile Shop
"He doesn't like Agile at all. He runs a really humanist-centered version of waterfall that can pivot quickly, which my argument is it's fairly agile, but it's not something he believes in — but it's also one of the most agile places I've ever worked."
 
One of Eagan's most striking observations comes from his current studio, led by an executive producer named Chris Whiteside. Chris explicitly rejects Agile as a label — likely burned by past implementations where someone tried to install a framework rather than nurture a mindset. Yet the way he runs teams is deeply human-centered, responsive, and adaptive. It is a useful reminder that the label matters far less than the behavior, and that some of the most agile organizations don't call themselves agile at all. The pattern Eagan has seen across studios mirrors what happens everywhere: framework-only installations that generate resistance, versus environments where the mindset develops organically.
Accessible Excellence: The Skateboard Video Philosophy
"I wanted to create a track that felt like accessible excellence. Just pushing beyond right where we were, but you could watch these talks and say, I could do that, that could be me. On Monday morning, I want to go in and try to be that person a little more."
 
When selecting speakers, Eagan drew on an unlikely reference point: a 1990s skateboard video called Zero Hero by a company called Zoroac. The skaters were not doing impossible three-story drops — they were doing moves that felt just one or two steps beyond what you could already do. That is the energy Eagan wanted for the track. Not aspirational keynotes from unreachable experts, but stories from people whose work makes you think: I could try that on Monday. He deliberately chose speakers across a range of experience levels and industry positions to hit that sweet spot.
The Speakers and What to Expect
"I want this track to be the answer to the question of whether it's worth it to stay in the industry and keep going — with some evidence that there are people out there doing this work thoughtfully, doing it well, and finding ways to remain human."
 
The track features a deliberately diverse lineup. Clinton Keith delivers the keynote, titled "The Game Industry As We Know It Is Ending — And the Future Could Be Much Better," which examines why the old AAA model is failing and where the industry is heading. Umar Ajaz focuses on building Agile into indie studios from the ground up — a timely topic as the industry shifts toward smaller, more agile teams. Kat Antonovich brings a social work background to team dynamics and change management, and Eagan intentionally sought an associate-level speaker because junior professionals have been disproportionately hit by industry layoffs. Marcos Jordt presents on Bitmagic, a fully AI-driven game development platform, along with his experience setting up Agile in Finland. And Kari Koivistoinen addresses the macro level: how to run multiple studios while preventing crunch and keeping team environments healthy.
Who Should Register
"These are the same problems everyone is solving in Agile. How do you build trust on teams under pressure? Introducing change when people are resistant or skeptical. Those show up everywhere."
 
This track is for curious people — whether they work in gaming or not. If you are interested in how teams solve problems with creativity and constraints, how multidisciplinary collaboration actually works (or breaks down), and what happens when an industry goes through a genuine transformation, there is something here for you. The goal is not prescriptive solutions. It is about getting down to fundamentals: what makes people do their best work and what makes teams function well. For people already in the gaming industry, Eagan designed this track to be the answer to the question many are asking after years of layoffs, studio closures, and canceled projects — is it still worth it? The track says yes, and backs it up with evidence.
About Eagan Rackley
Eagan Rackley is the track host for the Agile in Gaming track at the Global Agile Summit and a seasoned software engineer and Agile leader with 24+ years of experience spanning game development, enterprise architecture, graphics, and highly parallel programming. A passionate problem-solver, he excels in building collaborative teams, driving innovation, and turning conflict into opportunity. He thrives on creating software that empowers people and transforms ideas into impact.
 
You can link with Eagan Rackley on LinkedIn.