the goal Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Agile in Construction: Over-Commitment and Silence—The Deadly Duo Destroying Your Teams With Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

“I don’t think people are bad. They don’t self-destruct because they’re bad. What I do see is people getting crushed in terribly bad systems.” – Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe shares a powerful insight about team dysfunction: teams don’t self-destruct because of bad people—they get crushed by broken systems. On a hospital construction project, he witnessed a dangerous pattern: over-commitment coupled with silence. People would commit to pouring concrete on Thursday when there wasn’t even rebar in place—a physical impossibility. But psychological safety was so low that no one could say the emperor had no clothes. Felipe’s approach? Ask obvious questions that break the pattern. “Don’t you need this so you can do that?” This simple question, framed with verb-noun phrases, surfaces what cannot be spoken. He positions himself as “just a simple, dumb general contractor” who doesn’t understand—creating safety for others to speak truth. The turning point comes when you slow down, make work visible, and allow people to say no. As Felipe puts it: “For real accountability, if people are not allowed to say no, then they actually can’t make a real promise.” Silence is not alignment, and saying yes in low-trust environments is actually hiding from accountability.

In this segment, we talk about psychological safety and systems thinking in team dynamics.

Self-reflection Question: When you see a team over-committing to impossible deadlines, what question could you ask that surfaces the truth without putting individuals at risk?

Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

Felipe chose The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt as the most transformative book of his early lean career. He describes it as “the number one game changer”—a fictional story that teaches the Theory of Constraints in a way you can internalize. The famous “Herbie story” within the book illustrates how helping the slowest part of a process speeds up the entire system. Felipe emphasizes that Theory of Constraints is often skipped in Scrum training when classes run out of time, leaving many credentialed Scrum Masters without this essential knowledge. He uses these principles daily with the Last Planner System in construction—creating visual boards that look like Gantt charts (because construction loves schedules) but function like Scrum boards with days of the week instead of “to do, doing, done.”

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 Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide—and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.

You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.

You can also find Felipe at thefelipe.bio.link, check out The EBFC Show podcast, and join the EBFC Scrum Community of Practice.

Stacey Taurah: Counterintuitive! When an Agile team of A-players started acting like a team of C-players!

This team had people with an excellent technical background, and they were all driven and focused on delivering. It was therefore a surprise to see how the team started to act disengaged, and to see how the team was unable to deliver. When looking into it, Stacey found out that the team – even if it was filled with great people – was not working as a team. Listen in to learn about what drove this team apart!

In this segment, we refer to the Impostor Syndrome, a phenomenon that Scrum Masters often need to deal with.

Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Godratt

In The Goal by Godratt (already mentioned in previous episodes), Stacey found important tips and lessons on how to have conversations about planning and resourcing with the whole business, and to understand that sometimes, what seems like a blocker can be solved by using the Five Focusing Steps of Theory Of Constraints.

About Stacey Taurah

A seasoned agile coach with a squiggly line into tech and delivery. From forensics to frameworks and all that’s in between.

You can link with Stacey Taurah on LinkedIn.

Shahin Sheidaei: A dark pattern in Agile teams that Scrum Masters must be aware of, and prepared for!

Shahin was working with a group of Scrum Masters. As he started to observe the work of the Scrum Masters, he observed a pattern that he could not understand. The team lacked energy. In an effort to help the team, and the Scrum Master, Shahin and the Scrum Master started to do some small changes to the meetings and Scrum ceremonies, but the needle didn’t move. Eventually the Scrum Master left the organization. Later on, Shahin met some of the team members and learned the real pattern that had been going on in that team, a dark pattern that we must be aware of! Listen in to learn what the pattern was, and how you can be ready for it!

Featured Book of the Week: Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen

The book Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen is a book that Shahin still goes back to even after having read it many years ago. It’s a book that can help starting Scrum Masters to be ready to host great Retrospectives for their teams, especially when they don’t yet have a large number of tools to use in those ceremonies.

In this segment, we also refer to The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. A book that Shahin describes as a story telling book that brings a perspective of the whole organization performance, a perspective that we don’t often have as a Scrum Master

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Shahin Sheidaei

Shahin Sheidaei is an Agile, Lean and Success Coach,International Speaker, Transformation Expert, and Entrepreneur.

Shahin is a passionate organizational designer focusing on organizational performance, and is also founder and principal coach at Elevate Change Inc.

You can link with Shahin Sheidaei on LinkedIn and connect with Shahin Sheidaei on Twitter.

Salvatore Rinaldo: When helping a Scrum team is unable to stick to a Sprint plan, look outside the team

Salvatore was working in a startup with a team that, on paper, was a star team. However, when he started to observe how they worked, he noticed that the team was rarely sticking to what they had planned for the Sprint, and even the PO was at a loss on how to help the team stay on track and focus on what they had planned. In this segment, we refer to Cost of Delay, one of the topics discussed in The Principles of Product Development Flow, and share some tips on how to help a team that is stuck in this situation.

Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Elyahu Goldratt

In The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt, Salvatore found the principles behind lean thinking as well as a model that helped him in his work as a Scrum Master. The Goal is a book where Theory Of Constraints is introduced to a business focused audience concerned with improving the performance of their businesses. In this segment, we also refer to The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Don Reinertsen, which helped Salvatore understand how the flow of work can be investigated and improved in organizations.

About Salvatore Rinaldo

Salvatore is an Agile Coach and Scrum Master based in London. His background is in telecommunications and software engineering. For the past 7 years, Salvatore has been helping organizations leverage Lean, agile, Flow principles and system thinking to achieve better business agility.

You can link with Salvatore Rinaldo on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Simon Severino on Strategy Sprints, Agile turned all the way up to 11!

Does Agile apply when managing a company? In this episode, Simon Severino shares his story and his business of taking Agile to the C-Suite of fast-growing companies!

If you follow this podcast, the success of Agile methods is not a news item. It’s clear that Agile has improved greatly our ability to deliver software products to the market. In this episode, however, we look at a different application of Agile ideas. What if we could apply Agile to the methods we use to manage our businesses? That’s where this interview focuses: how Agile changes our approaches to running a business.

Simon is a growth consulting, he works with business leaders to help them improve the performance of their business. He does that using methods that will sound familiar to all Agile product development team members.

Tag: the goal