“A successful Scrum Master is healthy flow of value in a healthy work environment.” – Gunnar Fischer
Gunnar’s definition of success comes in one phrase that hides a lot of work: healthy flow of value in a healthy work environment.
The work environment, he says, is an ecosystem—it doesn’t have tigers, but it has plenty of layers and forces that can throw the balance off. You start at the team: are we reaching our goals most of the time? (If always, you might be playing too safe.) Then you move outward to the customer: who are we doing this work for, and are they succeeding?
Then to the company: what’s good for the customer might still be bad for the financials. And finally back to the individual: a team can be hitting its goals, the customer can be happy, the company can be making money, and a person on the team can still be quietly under-challenged and ready to leave.
Gunnar measures the flow side with the four Kanban guide metrics—cycle time, throughput, work item age, and work in progress—but he keeps reminding himself that finishing isn’t the same as getting feedback.
Did the customer use what we built? He’s been demotivated more than once by seeing a “very important” piece of work go untouched after delivery. And then there’s the social side: the level of healthy, constructive disagreement, and reading the room when colleagues from a culture that doesn’t say “no” go silent.
In this episode, we refer to Kanban flow metrics (cycle time, throughput, work item age, WIP) and the importance of treating the backlog as options, not promises.
Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you measured not whether the team finished something, but whether the customer actually used it?
Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: What, So What, Now What?
Gunnar’s favorite retrospective format is What, So What, Now What?, one of the Liberating Structures (and free to read up on online). He used it after a tense production deployment that succeeded but left the team rattled. Instead of jumping to “we need to do exactly this,” he forced the team to split their thinking: what are the facts we can describe, so what is our interpretation of those facts, and now what are the possible options going forward.
Sounds simple. But the brain hates incomplete pictures—it auto-completes them with speculation. That instinct kept our ancestors alive when they couldn’t see the full tiger behind the bushes; it ruins our reasoning at work.
By making the team distinguish hard between fact and interpretation, the format produced three concrete ideas. Within three months, the team had implemented all three, and things improved.
Gunnar’s broader takeaway about retrospectives: don’t run them right after the event (“get a coffee, step away from your desk for fifteen minutes”), don’t wait two months either, and—above all—“people need to look like winners when they’re going into a difficult retrospective.” Then honor their time by following up. If nobody else does the follow-up, the Scrum Master has to be the reminder.
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About Gunnar Fischer
Gunnar is the leader of the Chocolate Guild. Agile practitioner with a software developer background and a strong interest in people, intercultural contacts and the bigger picture. Gunnar’s purpose is to teach and to learn, to grow as a person and to support others who want the same.
You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.
You can also read Gunnar’s writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.
