systems thinking Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Deborah Colombari: The Agile Team Destroyed by a Toxic Feedback Loop

“Whenever we almost started to achieve norming, we went back to storming.” – Deborah Colombari

Deborah shares the story of a team of about twelve developers and QA specialists that kept losing people one by one. The early signal was not a technical problem. It was turnover. A toxic direct leader created pressure, blame, and snarky responses whenever the team tried to explain what was happening. Because that leader’s own manager behaved the same way, Deborah saw a reinforced pattern rather than an isolated personality problem. The team could not stabilize.

Every time it moved toward norming, someone left or someone new arrived, sending the team back into storming. Knowledge walked out the door with the people who left, delivery dates slipped, morale dropped, and a fixed-date call center project was eventually canceled. Deborah’s story is a sharp systems thinking reminder for Scrum Masters: sometimes the problem is not inside the team. The team may be showing the symptoms of a system that punishes honesty, overloads people, and teaches them that leaving is safer than speaking.

In this segment, we talk about Russell Ackoff, his systems thinking interview with Haynes Media Works, and the Tuckman model.

Self-reflection Question: What turnover or morale signals are you treating as team problems when they may be system problems?

Featured Book of the Week: Russell Ackoff Interview by Haynes Media Works

Instead of a book, Deborah recommends an old Russell Ackoff interview from Haynes Media Works. She connects Ackoff’s thinking to Donella Meadows and to the practical work of Scrum Masters. Deborah highlights how Ackoff explains that the outcome a system is designed to produce affects how the whole system behaves.

Her example is health care: if the system rewards treating sickness, it becomes a disease-care system instead of a health system. For Scrum Masters, the lesson is direct. Teams are systems, companies are systems, and the incentives around them shape what they do. Deborah uses Ackoff’s work to remind us to look at feedback loops before assuming people are the problem.

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.

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

About Deborah Colombari

You can link with Deborah Colombari on LinkedIn.

BONUS: How AI Is Reshaping Software Teams From the Inside — Lessons From Google, Meta, and Snowflake

In this episode, Dwarak Rajagopal — VP of AI Engineering and Research at Snowflake — shares what he’s seeing firsthand as AI agents become part of the software development process. From compressed sprint cycles to automated standups across time zones, Dwarak draws on two decades of building AI infrastructure at Google, Meta, Uber, and Apple to show what’s actually changing inside engineering organizations today.

From Compiler Engineer to AI Leader — The Thread That Connects Two Decades

“In AI, the hardest part isn’t just the models itself, it’s making them work in real environments where data is messy, fragmented, and governed.”

Dwarak started his career as an open-source GCC compiler engineer over two decades ago, optimizing hardware performance. He moved into graphics at Apple, then pivoted to AI when AlexNet started running on GPUs around 2011-2012. From there, he built autonomous driving software at Uber, led Meta’s PyTorch core framework team bridging research and production, and at Google led AI Frameworks including getting Gemini training on TPUs. The common thread: always working at the intersection of research and production, making powerful technology work in the real world. That focus on real-world application is what drew him to Snowflake — where enterprise data meets AI at scale.

AI Is Changing What Engineers Actually Do All Day

“Engineers are spending more time on system design, validation, production reliability — and less time doing the implementation itself, because AI is helping that.” Continue reading BONUS: How AI Is Reshaping Software Teams From the Inside — Lessons From Google, Meta, and Snowflake

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

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.

BONUS: Why Your Agile Transformation Keeps Snapping Back — And What Systems Thinking Says About It, With Natalia Curusi

Natalia Curusi co-authored “From Resistance to Resilience: Practical Agile Lessons for Transformation”, a book that doesn’t tell you what agile should look like — it tells you what actually happens when you try to transform an organization. Friday-night deployments, zombie teams going through the motions, transformations that met a wall of silence.

In this episode, we unpack the real lessons from the front lines: how personal values drive the shift to agile, why some teams have all the ceremonies but none of the substance, and what systems thinking reveals about why transformations fail — or snap back.

When Your Values Don’t Match Your Ways of Working

“I felt like there is a mismatch in my values, my moral values and principles, and customer-centric orientation. So when I found out about Agile around 2010, I understood — okay, this is the answer. Now I have the answer how I can map my moral values and principles with software delivery.” Continue reading BONUS: Why Your Agile Transformation Keeps Snapping Back — And What Systems Thinking Says About It, With Natalia Curusi