feedback loops Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Christian Thordal: When Applying Scrum By The Book Fails, Understanding Context Before Changing The System

“I treated Scrum like a military SOP — follow the book, execute the steps. But I failed to see that the context was really the tipping point. What looked like a problem was actually their solution.” – Christian Thordal

Christian shares a hard-won lesson from his time coaching three RPA teams at one of Denmark’s largest banks during the pandemic. He inherited teams running six-week sprints with half-hour planning sessions that amounted to little more than putting items on a calendar. As a former Danish Army officer, Christian’s instinct was to fix the obvious deviation from the Scrum Guide — the sprint length.

He advocated for shorter feedback loops and eventually convinced the Product Owner, who also served as the director, to try two-week sprints. The first planning session was a disaster.

There was yelling and scolding, and it became clear that the real problem had nothing to do with sprint length. The teams had no proper backlog. The six-week sprints actually worked because they gave teams enough time to go out to the business, discover work, and deliver it within a single cycle.

Christian realized he had been applying Scrum mechanically without understanding how work entered the system. He started attending business analyst and PO meetings, uncovered the backlog gap, and helped the teams build a proper one. His key insight: what looks like a symptom can actually be a pragmatic solution to real constraints. Understand the system before you change it.

In this episode, we refer to the book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you assumed a team’s practice was wrong, only to discover it was a reasonable adaptation to their context? How might you investigate the “why” behind existing processes before proposing changes?

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

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About Christian Thordal

Christian Thordal is a former Danish Army officer turned Agile Coach. He works with leaders and teams to create clarity, accountability, and momentum in complex organizations. His approach blends military leadership principles with modern product development, helping organizations move from discussion and strategy to real execution and measurable results.

You can link with Christian Thordal on LinkedIn.

Bhavin Shukla: The Hidden Cost of Always Saying Yes — How a Helpful Scrum Team Nearly Self-Destructed

“It was sort of making me feel as a Scrum Master, like it’s a slow self-destruction mode they are in. Good intentions, but it wasn’t helping them, and that’s something that they were not able to notice.” – Bhavin Shukla

Bhavin tells the story of a banking team that looked like every Scrum Master’s dream on day one — humming, cracking jokes, in the zone. But underneath the positive energy, the data told a different story. Sprint commitments kept overflowing, tech debt was rising, P1 and P2 production issues were climbing, and decision latency was immense. The root cause? This team of genuinely helpful people couldn’t say no. They wanted to help everyone who came to them, and that desire was slowly drowning them.

No one was giving them feedback about the consequences — missed sprint goals were met with “that’s okay, we’ll do it next sprint.” Bhavin introduced two simple tools: an anonymous happiness meter on the wall (rate 1-5, leave a note if below 3) and a gratitude wall. The data revealed the truth — the team was burning out, handling weekend incidents with no escalation path. Armed with this data, Bhavin coached the team on negotiation techniques: you don’t have to be rude to say no, you can negotiate the yes, you can negotiate the no.

In this segment, we talk about the importance of collecting regular data to surface hidden patterns, and the anti-pattern of teams operating without feedback on the consequences of their decisions.

Self-reflection Question: Is your team’s positive energy masking underlying problems? What data would help you discover whether good vibes are hiding unsustainable patterns?

Featured Book of the Week: Make Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis

Bhavin recommends Make Work Visible by Dominica DeGrandis because it goes beyond values and principles to put them into practice in a grounded, system-focused way. “One clear message I get from that book is it’s not the people who are the problem, it’s the system that we need to work on to improve ways of working,” Bhavin shares.

The book introduces concepts like the five thieves of time, visualizing work, dependencies, and bottlenecks — connecting lean thinking, Kanban principles, and behavioral patterns into a practical guide for any Scrum Master looking to understand the systems their teams operate in.

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

About Bhavin Shukla

Bhavin joins us from Australia. Bhavin is driven by unlocking potential and helping people thrive in ambiguity through clarity, honesty, and discipline. He believes growth comes from truthful conversations, thoughtful experimentation, and learning from failure. Guided by ownership, confidence, kindness, and purpose, he focuses on what matters most to build meaningful progress for himself and others.

You can link with Bhavin Shukla on LinkedIn.

BONUS: From Combat Pilot to Scrum Master – How Military Leadership Transforms Agile Teams

In this bonus episode, we explore a fascinating career transition with Nate Amidon, a former Air Force combat pilot who now helps software teams embed military-grade leadership principles into their Agile practices. Nate shares how the high-stakes discipline of aviation translates directly into building high-performing development teams, and why veterans make exceptional Scrum Masters.

The Brief-Execute-Debrief Cycle: Aviation Meets Agile

“We would mission brief in the morning and make sure everyone was on the same page. Then we problem-solved our way through the day, debriefed after, and did it again. When I learned about what Agile was, I realized it’s the exact same thing.”

Nate’s transition from flying C-17 cargo planes to working with Agile teams wasn’t as jarring as you might expect. Flying missions that lasted 2-3 weeks with a crew of 5-7 people taught him the fundamentals of iterative work: daily alignment, continuous problem-solving, and regular reflection. The brief-execute-debrief cycle that every military pilot learns mirrors the sprint cadence that Agile teams follow. Time-boxing wasn’t new to him either—when you’re flying, you only have so much fuel, so deadlines aren’t arbitrary constraints but physical realities that demand disciplined execution.

In this episode with Christian Boucousis, we also discuss the brief-execute-debrief cycle in detail.

In this segment, we also refer to Cynefin, and the classification of complexity.

Alignment: The Real Purpose Behind Ceremonies

“It’s really important to make sure everyone understands why you’re doing what you’re doing. We don’t brief, execute, debrief just because—we do it because we know that getting everybody on the same page is really important.” Continue reading BONUS: From Combat Pilot to Scrum Master – How Military Leadership Transforms Agile Teams

Carmela Then: From Requirements Chaos to Story Mapping Success—How Planning Transforms Agile Teams

“We can’t continue to do this. Something has to change.” – Carmela Then

Carmela shares a story of organizational chaos that will resonate with many Agile practitioners. She joined a company where teams would jump straight into writing requirements without pausing to understand what they were trying to achieve. Vendor deliverables were thrown “over the fence” to internal technology teams with the assumption that everyone would magically know what to do. For almost a year, this pattern continued: teams writing stories on the fly while building, creating massive rework, confusion, and burnout.

The Product Owner faced constant stakeholder disappointment, having to explain what wasn’t delivered and why. Then came the breakthrough moment—the PO reached out and said, “We can’t continue to do this.” Carmela introduced a structured approach: workshops that brought business stakeholders and subject matter experts together to walk through end-to-end business processes. She implemented story mapping—visualizing the journey from beginning to end, with each major step broken into smaller, actionable stories.

Critically, she built in feedback loops: playback sessions where the team validated their understanding with stakeholders before committing to development. The result? Teams could now distinguish between well-understood work they could start immediately and the “hairy” items that needed more investigation. The Product Owner could make informed prioritization decisions, and the entire team gained visibility into the bigger picture.

Self-reflection Question: How often does your team pause to map the full end-to-end journey before diving into requirements, and what might you be missing by skipping this step?

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

About Carmela Then

Carmela is a Senior Business Analyst with 15+ years in financial and mining sectors. A Certified and Advanced ScrumMaster, she excels in leading agile initiatives, delivering business value, and aligning technical outcomes with strategic goals.

You can link with Carmela Then on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Consulting is Different—How Consulting Contracts Work Against Agile Development, With Jakob Wolman and Wilko Nienhaus

In this BONUS episode, we explore the critical differences between building software as a consultant versus inside a product company. Jakob Wolman contributed an insightful article to the Global Agile Summit book examining how third-party software development operates under entirely different constraints than in-house product development. Joined by Wilko Nienhaus, CTO of Vaimo, a global consulting company, we dive into ownership dynamics, misaligned incentives, contracting challenges, and the business pressures that shape consulting—along with practical stories from the field about what really works.

The Cobbler’s Shoes Problem

“I come back to the office from this workshop, and suddenly, with these eyes on looking for improvements in process, I just suddenly am hit by this revelation of why things are so slow here? Why are we working so inefficiently?”

Jakob describes the striking paradox many consultancies face: they excel at helping clients improve their processes while their own internal operations remain inefficient. This “shoemaker’s children” phenomenon reflects a fundamental challenge in consulting—the difficulty of investing in your own improvements when all energy flows toward billable client work. Digital agencies often have outdated or poorly implemented websites despite building sophisticated solutions for others, illustrating how consultancies struggle to apply their own expertise internally.

Misaligned Incentives Create Antagonistic Dynamics

“It’s almost as if the clients are actually paying us to be slow, because our incentive is to spend more time on achieving what the client wants, because we get paid by the hour.”

The incentive structures in consulting create inherent conflicts that don’t exist in product companies. Consultants typically bill by the hour, creating a perverse incentive to spend more time rather than deliver efficiently. Meanwhile, clients pursue business outcomes and want results as quickly and cheaply as possible. This fundamental misalignment leads to:

- Clients adopting a procurement mindset, treating software development like ordering from a catalog
- A “wall” between stakeholders and development teams that’s even stronger than in product companies
- Antagonistic relationships where scope changes feel like financial traps rather than necessary learning
- Contracting processes that reinforce waterfall thinking even when both parties claim to want agility

Wilko emphasizes that contracting has a huge impact on these dynamics, and companies must deliberately change their engagement models to break free from these patterns.

The Budgeting Trap and Specification Overload

“Because of this budgeting process where you now need to motivate what this budget does, or you need to spend that budget, you essentially create this necessity to define everything.” Continue reading BONUS: Consulting is Different—How Consulting Contracts Work Against Agile Development, With Jakob Wolman and Wilko Nienhaus