agile leadership Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

BONUS: Why AI Needs More Than Silicon Valley Moonshots With Salima Bhimani

AI is changing the work of software teams, but Salima Bhimani argues that the bigger question is not only what AI can automate. In this BONUS episode, Salima shares what she learned inside Alphabet’s moonshot ecosystem, why breakthrough ideas may be hiding in plain sight, and how more people can become moonshot makers when technology meets lived intelligence.

To know more about her work, check out her latest book, Invent Now: The Next Leap in Moonshots and her website.

Invention Starts in Real-World Constraints

“Invention is something that is always happening in relationship to something that’s in the world.”

Salima traces her view of invention back to a family history of migration, adaptation, and rebuilding under constraints. Her roots go from India to East Africa, where her family had to learn new languages, new land, and new ways to survive. That experience shaped a practical view of innovation: invention is not only the work of a lone genius in a lab. It often starts in friction, necessity, and the daily encounter between people and the systems around them.

We May Be Thinking Too Small About Innovation

“We’ve actually shrunk our ability to see what’s out there in the world by limiting who’s in the room.” Continue reading BONUS: Why AI Needs More Than Silicon Valley Moonshots With Salima Bhimani

Deborah Colombari: When Agile Principles Became a Fight With the System

“I was trying to go against the system, but you cannot go against the system.” – Deborah Colombari

Deborah Colombari’s Scrum Master journey started with a sense that Agile gave her permission to work differently. After early project management work, a year in Canada exposed her to Agile, and the Scrum Master role soon “felt like a glove.” But her failure story starts when a supportive leader left and a more command-driven manager arrived. Deborah pushed back hard, trying to protect the Agile practices she believed were right: dailies, burn-down and burn-up charts, transparency, and team focus.

The problem was that she was fighting the manager instead of first understanding the system around him. That conflict spilled into the team and damaged morale. Looking back, Deborah says she would now sit down with the manager first, understand the goals and pressures behind the change, and look for compromise before escalating into resistance. Her key learning was pragmatic: Scrum Masters need principles, but they also need diplomacy. The work is not only helping the team inside the Agile bubble, but also translating between that bubble and the wider organization.

In this episode, we refer to ITIL, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows.

Self-reflection Question: Where are you fighting the system before you have understood the pressure it is trying to respond to?

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Deborah Colombari

Deborah is an Enterprise Agile Coach with a decade of experience championing Agile principles across organizations. Passionate about collaboration and continuous improvement, Deborah genuinely loves what she does—empowering others to work smarter, deliver value, and thrive in dynamic environments.

You can link with Deborah Colombari on LinkedIn.

BONUS: When Burnout Looks Like Productivity—The Hidden Risk to Your Team’s Innovation Capacity

In this BONUS episode, Alison Campbell, CEO of unBurnt, and researcher at Bentley University shares the research that reframes burnout as a measurable threat to a team’s ability to innovate. We learn why your most productive people may be your biggest innovation risk, how to spot capacity draining out of a team before the output drops, and where Scrum Masters have the leverage to protect the one thing that keeps teams building: the space to think.

From the ER to the Research

“I kept normalizing the stress, the exhaustion, eventually the stomach aches as, well, this is just the price of entry. This is part of being a busy, full-time executive and working mom.”

Alison spent nearly twenty years in corporate roles—moving from finance to e-commerce to HR tech, with analytics as the through line and a love for the building phase inside companies. The pandemic was the turning point. With two young kids at home and a global team to hold together, she pushed through eighteen months of warning signs she had normalized, until severe stomach pain landed her in the emergency room needing surgery.

That was the stop moment.

What started as private shame—the feeling that she alone had failed while everyone else “had it all figured out”—became a research question the moment she started talking about it and heard the same story mirrored back from colleague after colleague. This wasn’t one exhausted mom at a hard moment. It was a design and systems problem worth studying.

When Burnout Looks Like Productivity

“Even when that innovative work behavior was high, when burnout was high, that segment of our sample had the lowest innovation capacity of the entire group we surveyed.” Continue reading BONUS: When Burnout Looks Like Productivity—The Hidden Risk to Your Team’s Innovation Capacity

BONUS: Why Your Organization Is Still a Factory — And What an Octopus Can Teach You About Transformation

Phil Le-Brun and Dr. Jana Werner both work inside Amazon, advising Fortune 500 leaders on transformation. But before Amazon, they spent decades in the trenches — Phil as International CIO of McDonald’s, Jana leading change in banking and logistics. Together they wrote The Octopus Organization (HBR Press) to explain why most companies are still running on a hundred-year-old factory model, and what the alternative looks like.

“We Want to Help You Make Your Own New Interesting Mistakes”

“We keep saying, as Phil likes to say, can we help you make your own new interesting mistakes and avoid the mistakes that we see again and again.”

Jana and Phil are both practitioners who have led large-scale changes — and made mistakes they’re now happy to share. Jana describes working with incredible, smart, thoughtful people inside large organizations who weren’t trusted, weren’t allowed to do the work they could do, and couldn’t be their best selves. She managed to turn teams considered underperforming into rock stars simply by listening and giving them space. Phil saw the same pattern at McDonald’s — incredible people who knew the answers but weren’t allowed to act on them. A disastrous standardization push from 2002 to 2004 taught him that top-down efficiency mandates don’t work. The CEO left, and Phil got the opportunity to tap into people lower in the organization, define a common mission, and start building from there.

The Factory Model Nobody Questions

“There was no upside for her people taking ownership because you could have career-limiting effects if you made a mistake, if you were seen to be making a mistake or overstepping.” Continue reading BONUS: Why Your Organization Is Still a Factory — And What an Octopus Can Teach You About Transformation

BONUS: Why Leaders Who Chase Certainty Will Become AI’s Biggest Bottleneck

What happens when the leaders we trust to guide transformation become the bottleneck slowing it down? In this episode, Monica Marquez—with 25+ years in people transformation at Goldman Sachs, Google, and beyond—reveals why the old equation of effort equals success is breaking down, and what leaders must unlearn to thrive in the age of AI.

The Leadership Crisis Nobody Trained You For

“No one ever really teaches you what it really takes to be a leader. You know what you do really well, but how do you help other people do that too? That’s when I realized it comes down to becoming a really good leader.”

Monica’s origin story captures a universal struggle: being promoted for technical excellence, then discovering that leading people requires completely different skills. She spent her career at organizations like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Ernst & Young, and Google realizing that systems weren’t built for everyone—and that the real work of leadership is redesigning those systems to unlock human potential. Today, through her company Flipwork, she helps leaders and teams become what she calls “agentic humans”—people who leverage AI to get ahead rather than getting left behind.

The Command and Control Trap

“Most leadership development still rewards the command and control archetype. The person who has all the answers, the decisive hero. But AI moves so fast that when you think you’ve fixed something, it changes the next day. Leaders are starting to become bottlenecks.” Continue reading BONUS: Why Leaders Who Chase Certainty Will Become AI’s Biggest Bottleneck