teams that self-destruct Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Joshua McDonald: The Distributed Agile Team That Hid Problems Behind Follow-Up Stories

“They started to separate and call each other out, which is definitely not Agile.” – Joshua McDonald

Joshua shares the story of a 17-person distributed team spread across time zones, cultures, and communication styles. Some team members were direct and ready to challenge problems in public. Others preferred quieter, one-on-one conversations.

Over time, those differences created a blame environment where people stopped asking for help and started hiding problems. Long-running work was closed and replaced with follow-up stories, then part two, then part three, until the real issue disappeared under Jira housekeeping.

The result was not better flow, but delayed learning, missed upskilling opportunities, and a stressful team environment where quieter people stopped speaking in standups and retrospectives. Joshua explains what he would do differently now: split the team by communication patterns, listen to what each group needs, act as a mediator, and only bring the whole group together once people feel heard.

In this segment, we talk about different communication styles.

Self-reflection Question: What signals tell you that people are hiding problems because the team environment does not feel safe enough?

Featured Book of the Week: Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

Joshua recommends Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi because it reframed networking as a relationship practice, not a transaction. The book helped him see that staying connected with people creates learning, support, and a safety net over time.

He also mentions the Bible as a daily source for reflecting on respect, peace, and conflict resolution, especially because Scrum Masters often need more than process knowledge to help teams work well together. For Joshua, both recommendations point to the same deeper idea: our work improves when we treat relationships as something to maintain before we urgently need them.

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About Joshua McDonald

Joshua is endlessly curious about better ways of working. He helps teams grow by blending experimentation, creativity, and AI with practical coaching. When a meeting feels routine, he’s already testing a new approach to make it more valuable. Energetic and inventive, he turns everyday collaboration into opportunities for team growth.

You can link with Joshua McDonald on LinkedIn.

Wasim Osman: When a Scrum Team’s Silence Becomes a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

“No team is interested in deliberately destroying their outcome or their team. Nobody does that on purpose.” – Wasim Osman

Wasim’s team was building a SaaS product with real potential. They followed Scrum, shipped features fast—and quietly let the bugs pile up. When customers finally pushed back (“you built five features, four of them have bugs”), the team made a confident bet: one quarter for new features, then one month to fix everything. It didn’t work.

The bug-bashing month revealed deeper, structural problems that demanded refactoring, and the roadmap was already packed. Then the fixes got handed to a single team, who felt demoted from the “prestigious” work of building features. Resentment grew between the teams.

At the height of that tension, the company was acquired by a waterfall-driven parent company. The head of engineering left, the chief architect and two senior engineers followed, and it became chaos. Wasim’s hardest lesson wasn’t about the acquisition—it was about voice.

The engineers assumed waterfall was being forced on them and stopped pushing back; leadership assumed the engineers were fine with it. Nobody said what they actually thought, and the fear became reality. As Wasim puts it, there was “no captain on the ship.”

In this segment, we talk about how even conversations need to be iterative, and how a Scrum Master has to balance speaking up (so the team isn’t rudderless) without speaking so much that the team stops voicing their own opinions.

Self-reflection Question: Where on your team is an unspoken assumption quietly hardening into reality, and what would it take for you to name it out loud first?

Featured Book of the Week: Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen

Wasim’s most-recommended book is Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. What stuck with him is a deceptively simple model: every hard conversation is really made of three conversations—the “what happened” conversation (the content), the feelings conversation, and the identity conversation (what the situation says about whether you’re competent, good, or lovable). “When I first read it, I thought there can’t be only three types of conversations,” Wasim admits.

“But once you’ve gone through the book, you can put any conversation into one of those funnels.” He found it especially powerful in retrospectives: when the same issue keeps resurfacing, the real conversation is often about feelings, not action items—someone was never okay with an earlier decision, and that’s why the follow-ups never happened.

Self-reflection Question: In your last tense retrospective, which of the three conversations—content, feelings, or identity—was really driving the room?

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

About Wasim Osman

Wasim Osman is a seasoned Agile Coach and a Product Owner at Orkestra SCS. He launched his agile career at a Silicon Valley startup based in New York, then spent years coaching teams across Canada, helping organizations transform how they deliver value. Wasim brings a rare blend of agile discipline and product thinking. He’s passionate about building technology that drives real business impact.

You can link with Wasim Osman on LinkedIn.

Havva Sevay: The Car Configuration Team That Spiraled Into Silence—and the Workshop That Saved It

“First they tell you their opinion. Then they start shouting, getting emotional. And the third one is silence—and resignation. That’s the worst part.” – Havva Sevay

Havva remembers a highly motivated development team working on a car configuration system so complex it began to wear them down. They asked for training.

The Product Owner waved it off—they’ve had enough training, they should understand it. What followed was a three-stage spiral Havva now recognizes anywhere: first the team shares opinions and solutions, then frustration turns to emotion and shouting, and finally comes silence and resignation. The team even kicked the Product Owner out of their daily—a low point Havva calls the worst she has seen in her career.

The turning point was a LEGO Serious Play workshop. By getting both sides to build how they wanted to work together, the Product Owner did active listening for the first time, recognized the team needed an experienced developer to guide them, and the relationship transformed. The lesson: Scrum Masters are the facilitators of those moments of coming together—and there need to be many, at every level.

Self-reflection Question: Is a team you support moving through opinion → emotion → silence right now? What moment of coming-together could you facilitate before they reach resignation?

Featured Book of the Week: The Unfair Advantage by Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba

Havva discovered The Unfair Advantage and it reshaped how she thinks about her own style as a Scrum Master. The book argues that every person has advantages others don’t—and the skill is recognizing and using them. Havva took that idea literally: she had trained in LEGO Serious Play, a method many dismiss as “for kids,” and decided to make it her unfair advantage, promoting it inside her company until even upper management asked to use it. “I got the knowledge, so I used it internally,” she says. The lesson for Scrum Masters: own your style, embrace what makes you different, and don’t be discouraged when not every team responds to it.

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

About Havva Sevay

Havva is a people-focused organizational development expert with a Master’s in Business Administration and certification as a Scrum Master. She empowers teams and leaders through agile methodologies, modern leadership, and a strong feedback culture, fostering psychological safety and collaboration. Passionate about HR initiatives, Havva shapes people strategies, enhances employee experience, and drives inclusive, high-performing workplaces built on trust and engagement.

You can link with Havva Sevay on LinkedIn.

Danil Chernyshev: Why Teams Always Adapt—And How Bad Rules Push Them Into Zombie Scrum

“Teams always adapt. You only get to decide what they adapt to.” – Danil Chernyshev

Most dysfunction doesn’t start with the team—it starts with the structure around them. Danil shares the story of a classic metrics-driven organization where Scrum Masters reported to a dedicated manager who measured their success by team velocity.

That manager tracked retrospectives in a separate log, and would show up at the daily Scrum to confirm everyone answered the three questions. The result was predictable: the retrospective became a clock to survive, the daily became a checkbox with no real conversation, and velocity turned into theater—stories closed as “done,” then reopened as “part two” in the next sprint. There was never a real done increment.

Danil refuses to blame the team. They were doing exactly what teams always do—adapting to survive the rules and boundaries handed to them. As he and Vasco explore, the only real choice a leader has is not whether a team adapts, but what they adapt to. Dictate bureaucracy, and they’ll adapt to surviving it. That’s how productive, enjoyable work quietly turns into zombie Scrum. Servant leadership exists precisely so someone helps the team adapt toward value—not toward compliance.

Self-reflection Question: Look at a behavior on your team you find frustrating—what rule or structure might that team be adapting to in order to survive?

Featured Book of the Week: Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability by Daniel Vacanti

Danil calls this book eye-opening. It changed how he thinks about metrics—not as a reporting tool for executives, but as something teams can use for themselves to understand what to do next and how to improve.

As he puts it, “after that book, you will probably know that a lot of cumulative flow diagrams that you saw in your past, they doesn’t work well, and need to be rebuilt.” The book makes flow metrics serve the team first, while still giving leadership the transparency they need. You can also hear Daniel Vacanti on the podcast, and get the book here: Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability by Daniel Vacanti.

In this segment, we talk about User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton, and you can hear Jeff Patton on the podcast.

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

About Danil Chernyshev

Danil is a results-driven Scrum Master and Delivery Manager passionate about optimizing SDLC processes and unlocking development teams’ potential. With a keen interest in AI, he empowers organizations to innovate and excel, bridging agile practices with cutting-edge technology for impactful results.

You can link with Danil Chernyshev on LinkedIn.

Alf Dobbert-Baums: The Team That Decided Sprint Goals Were Optional

“Everything was a golden route. It was kind of like a little feature factory.” – Alf Dobbert-Baums

Alf coached three teams. None of them cared about THE sprint goal. Most sprints had five or six “goals” — which is to say, none. The Product Owner was a proxy PO, no authority to say no, so anything that landed in the inbox got pulled into the sprint. The team had several applications to support on top of feature work. Missing a sprint goal had no consequences, so the question stopped being asked. When Alf pushed for a single, focused goal — concrete or abstract, didn’t matter — the team would shrug and add three more stories to the cluster.

Asked which item mattered most, they answered: “all of them.” Alf names the dynamic precisely: short-term personal urgency replaced the team goal, and “all of them” became the death of focus. The cost wasn’t just the missed goals — it was the missed collaboration. With a sprint goal, the team works together on one thing. Without one, they cooperate on parallel tracks and call it a sprint. There’s a difference. Sprint goals create focus, predictability, and the rare feeling of finishing something together.

In this segment, we talk about the difference between cooperation and collaboration and why sprint goals are the lever that turns one into the other.

Self-reflection Question: If you asked your team this sprint “what’s the most important thing we’ll finish?” — and they answered “all of them” — what would you do next?

Featured Book of the Week: Humble Consulting by Edgar Schein and Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There by Marvin R. Weisbord

Alf gives two recommendations. The first is Humble Consulting by Edgar Schein — “It teaches you that you don’t know anything, and even if you ask, you still will not fully understand what the other person is in… But the good thing is that when you ask questions, it might help the other person to get on a different track.” The second is Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There by Marvin R. Weisbord. Alf tells a story to explain why it matters: he prepared a polished 90-minute workshop. Within 5 minutes of starting, the team’s real topic surfaced — and it had nothing to do with his agenda. His head screamed “no, my workshop!” but the book gave him permission to ditch the plan, name what he was seeing, and let the team choose. They chose the new topic. He moderated. It became one of the most important sessions he ever ran. The lesson: don’t just do something — stand there, and let what’s really happening become visible.

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

About Alf Dobbert-Baums

Alf lives in Berlin. He studied Theater/Religion at the Freie University Berlin. He is a Systemic Organizational Consultant, a Scrum Master and Agile Coach. He has also been a freelancer for Usability and Requirements Engineering for car manufacturers. At “Verti” he led the agile transformation.

You can link with Alf Dobbert-Baums on LinkedIn.