LESS Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Aimé Flemm: Renting The Change vs Owning It — Why LeSS Transformations Get Reversed

“They rented the change instead of owning it.” – Aimé Flemm

A year ago Aimé helped his Dutch employer adopt LeSS. The teams are happy. They’re performing well. And now, he’s watching it all get pulled apart. The company was acquired by a German parent that’s “actually really German” — traditional, command-and-control.

The parent wants to “align” all its companies and is pushing to revert the LeSS structure back to component teams. Why? Because higher management never went to the trainings. They never went through the change themselves. They signed off on it, but they didn’t internalize it.

And now the loud-but-few voices of the status quo are reaching upward, and management is panicking. That’s what Aimé means by “renting the change” — you got the lease, you never bought the building, and the moment pressure rises, you walk away.

His experiment for the next sprint, sharpened in this conversation: stop trying to defend the structure. Start a conversation with management to co-create success metrics for the merger itself. Decouple the structure from the definition of success. As long as the merger succeeds, the structure can stay fluid. Speak their language. And remember: coaching is the cherry on top — about 5% of the real gains. The big improvements live in the structural changes.

Self-reflection Question: When you sold your last change to upper management, did they buy it — or are they renting? And what’s your plan for the moment when they want to give back the keys?

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About Aimé Flemm

Aimé Flemm joins us from the Netherlands. Our guest is an organizational design coach who starts where most agile transformations stop. He works at the structural level: redesigning the incentives, reporting lines, and systems that either enable or quietly kill agility. His belief: you can’t coach your way out of a broken org design.

You can link with Aimé Flemm on LinkedIn.

Aimé Flemm: Culture Follows Structure — Why Some Teams Self-Destruct By Design

“Culture follows structure. The destructive tendencies of a team are the consequence of how the organization is actually structured.” – Aimé Flemm

Aimé doesn’t blame teams when they go toxic. He looks at the org chart. At his first gig, the UX-only team grew bitter — making screens nobody used, blocked from talking to customers, drowning in dependencies. The team’s behavior wasn’t a coaching problem. It was a structural one.

At his current company, building backend software for EV charging stations, he watched the opposite happen: leadership flipped seven component teams (backend, billing, etc.) into seven end-to-end feature teams with one Product Owner. Two-week sprints. Switching costs collapsed — they could decide on Wednesday to change direction, refine on Thursday, and have all seven teams pivot together by the next sprint.

The org became truly adaptive. Aimé’s question to every Scrum Master listening: is your organization fit for purpose? If the work is predictable and specialism-heavy, component teams can work. If you need adaptability, the structure has to match. Don’t coach behavior that the structure forces.

In this segment, we talk about Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior, the Star Model by Jay Galbraith, and Org Topologies.

Self-reflection Question: Look at the team you’re coaching. Which of their “destructive habits” might actually be a rational response to the structure you’ve put them in?

Featured Book of the Week: Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman

This week, Aimé recommends two books that complement each other. First — and his “holy bible” — is Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman. “I remember reading this for the first time. It took me two weeks, the whole book. And I was just constantly texting people — ‘this is it! It all makes sense now. I finally know what to do.'”

For the how of organizational change — workshop ideas, possible structures, change tactics, and the people side — LeSS is the book. The companion book Aimé pairs with it is 10x Organization by Alexey Krevitsky, Roland Flemm, and Craig Larman — strong on the what and the why, with a 2×2 visual map that helps you explain to management where you are today, where the market needs you to be, and what should change.

You can also listen to our episode with Bas Vodde and our BONUS episode with Roland Flemm for a deeper view.

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

About Aimé Flemm

You can link with Aimé Flemm on LinkedIn.

Viktor Glinka: From Component Teams to Cross-Functional Teams — How to Navigate the Hardest Agile Transformation

“Our customers do not buy our components. They use the product as a whole. And when it comes to integration, the real problem pops up.” – Viktor Glinka

Viktor brings a challenge many Scrum Masters face: transitioning from component teams to cross-component, cross-functional teams in a large-scale Scrum setup.

Picture 8 to 10 teams, each owning their own part of the system, never touching anything else — and the company stuck in delivery for months. The premise behind component teams sounds logical: specialization leads to speed. But as Viktor explains, that speed is local — optimized for the component, not the product. When integration time arrives, responsibility gaps appear, rework multiplies, and teams start identifying with their components rather than the product. “We’re the billing team — we don’t deal with anything else.”

When they reorganized into cross-functional teams, the complaints were immediate: “I was really productive before, and now I can’t finish anything.” Viktor and his fellow Scrum Masters took a two-pronged approach. First, they secured time credit from leadership — a couple of months where learning was prioritized over deadlines.

They ran mob programming sessions, coached teams, and removed impediments. Second, they shifted focus from outputs to outcomes, organizing customer interviews that helped developers understand what users actually needed.

The development director reinforced this by joining refinement sessions, telling teams: “You might not need to develop anything if it still satisfies the customer need.” The result was a shift from transactional stakeholder relationships to genuine cooperation, and teams that began to see beyond their component boundaries.

Self-reflection Question: If your teams are organized around components, what would it take to run one experiment — just one sprint — where a team picks up work outside their usual component? What would you need to make that safe?

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

About Viktor Glinka

Viktor is an organisational consultant and Professional Scrum Master who helps teams and leaders find simpler ways to deliver value while keeping the human side of work at the center. He’s practical, curious, and focused on real outcomes rather than buzzwords. His true passion is adaptability – both in business and in personal life.

You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.

Viktor Glinka: When Passion Becomes the Problem — How Pushing for Agile Change Too Fast Creates Resistance

“I wanted to change the organization overnight with my eagerness and passion. Instead of helping the system to evolve, I created resistance. I became the problem myself.” – Viktor Glinka

Viktor shares one of the most honest failure stories we’ve heard on the show. Early in his Scrum Master career, he joined a finance organization as a Scrum Master for a newly created department — his first experience in a scaled setup. Each team owned a particular part of the user journey, organized around components.

After getting exposed to Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) through a colleague, Viktor became overexcited. He started pushing for structural changes daily, telling the head of department that the current team composition was wrong and they needed cross-functional feature teams. But he was disconnected from reality.

For this particular organization, even having partially cross-functional teams was already a big stretch. Worse, the head of department wasn’t even authorized to make the changes Viktor was pushing for. Instead of helping the system evolve, he created resistance.

What proved his approach wrong? That same department later received a European Award for being the best mortgage department. It took Viktor a few more years and similar cases to fully absorb the lesson: read the room, develop sensitivity to the system’s pace, and stimulate reflection in decision makers rather than pushing your own agenda.

In this episode, we refer to organizational development, LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), and systems analysis. Viktor also mentions the interview with Bas Vodde on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.

Self-reflection Question: When was the last time you pushed for a change because you believed it was right, without checking whether the system was ready for it? What would happen if you started by asking decision makers what they think would be a good next step?

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

About Viktor Glinka

You can link with Viktor Glinka on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Why Every Organization Reinvents Silos—And What to Do About It, With Roland Flemm

Today we speak with Roland Flemm, co-creator of Org Topologies and co-author of 10X Org — Powered by Org Topologies. Roland has spent decades in the trenches—first as a developer, then in infrastructure, and finally as a Scrum Master, trainer, and organizational design consultant. In this episode, he explains why even teenagers with zero corporate experience instinctively create departmental silos, why making every team faster doesn’t make the whole organization faster, and how leaders can use the Org Topologies map to see their organization as it actually is—not as the org chart says it should be.

From Developer to Org Designer: Four Decades of Hitting the Same Wall

“I felt many, many times the limitations of organizational structures stopping me from using my common sense to make people work together in a proper way.”

Roland’s career spans over 40 years, starting as a developer in 1984. After a decade writing code and another decade in infrastructure, he moved into Scrum and agile coaching. But even as a highly effective Scrum Master, he kept hitting the same ceiling: local team improvements couldn’t break through organizational boundaries. You could have wins with your team, but the moment you needed multiple teams to work together, someone higher up would shut it down. That frustration led him to Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, which offered a more educated approach to multi-team collaboration—and eventually to co-creating Org Topologies as a way to help leaders see and change the structures that block real collaboration.

Bas has been on the podcast to share his view on scaling Scrum with LeSS, listen to his episode here.

The Hydrogen Car That Built Its Own Silos

“If you don’t think about your org design—the way that you want to collaborate—then something like this happens.” Continue reading BONUS: Why Every Organization Reinvents Silos—And What to Do About It, With Roland Flemm