organizational design 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.

Aimé Flemm: Why Solo Scrum Masters Get Fired — The Coalition Of The Willing

“It doesn’t make sense to try and change a system of 2,000 people on your own.” – Aimé Flemm

Three months into his first gig out of consultancy, Aimé got the call: you’re fired. He was at a Dutch pension fund — 2,000 people, deeply ingrained legacy structure — serving as Scrum Master to three component teams, including a UX-only team that couldn’t ship anything end-to-end.

Full of ambition and fresh ideas from a meetup, he pushed to restructure the teams to be cross-functional. His manager said “yeah, go for it.” But Aimé was the only one pushing. He was, in his words, “poking and fighting the system way too much that they had built.” So they didn’t extend the contract.

The lesson he carries from that firing reshaped how he approaches every change initiative since: do not try to do it alone. Find the coalition of the willing first — other Scrum Masters, other change agents, the volunteers — and build a network before you start pushing structural change. Use Scrum Master Syncs, communities of practice, even pizza budgets. Let the change spread like an oil spill. It takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. But you’ll still have a job at the end of it.

Self-reflection Question: Where in your current organization are you trying to change the system alone — and who could become your first ally if you stopped pushing and started recruiting?

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

About Aimé Flemm

You can link with Aimé Flemm 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

BONUS: Leadership Is Contextual — How a CTO Adapts From 7-Person Startups to 2,000-Person Organizations

In this CTO Series episode, Daniel Harcek shares how leading engineering teams across radically different scales — from a 7-person fintech startup to a 2,000-person cybersecurity company — taught him that leadership isn’t one-size-fits-all. We explore how he builds AI-first organizations, drives agile transformations, and why he believes every person in a company should think like a tech person.

What Works at 10 People Breaks at 100

“Leadership is contextual, not absolute. What works with 10 people breaks at 50, at 100.”

Daniel’s career spans from building a 30-person team for a German startup out of Žilina, Slovakia, to leading 70 engineers at Avast’s mobile division within a 2,000-person organization, and now running a 7-person team at WageNow. Each scale demanded a fundamentally different approach. At smaller scales, you strip away operational overhead and push ownership directly to the people. At larger scales, you need guardrails, dedicated roles, and structured processes that the smaller team would find suffocating. The lesson: don’t carry your playbook from one context to another — rebuild it for the reality you’re in.

End-to-End Ownership Replaces Specialized Roles

“Each engineer owns quality for the task he delivers. And he owns the fact that it comes to production.” Continue reading BONUS: Leadership Is Contextual — How a CTO Adapts From 7-Person Startups to 2,000-Person Organizations