Tom Gilb Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

BONUS: The Agile Organization as a Learning System

Think Like a Farmer, Not a Factory Manager

“Go slow to go fast. If you want to go somewhere, go together as a team. Take a farmer’s mentality.”

Simon contrasts monoculture industrial thinking with the permaculture approach of Joel Salatin. Industrial approaches optimize for short-term efficiency but create fragile systems. Farmer thinking recognizes that healthy ecosystems require patience, diversity, and nurturing conditions for growth. The nervous system that’s constantly stressed never builds much over time—think of the body, trust the body, let the body be a body.

Value Masters, Not Scrum Masters

“We need value masters, not Scrum Masters. Agile is a useful tool for delivering value, but value itself is primary. Everything else is secondary—Agile included.”

Tom makes his most provocative point: if you asked a top manager whether they’d prefer an agile person or value delivery, the answer is obvious. Agile is one tactic among many for delivering value—not even a necessary one. The shift required is from process mastery to value mastery, from Scrum Masters to people who understand and can deliver on critical stakeholder values.

The DOVE Manifesto

“I wrote a paper called DOVE—Deliver Optimum Values Efficiently. It’s the manifesto focusing on delivering value, delivering value, delivering value.” Continue reading BONUS: The Agile Organization as a Learning System

BONUS: Quality 5.0—Quantifying the “Unmeasurable” With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Clarification Before Quantification

“Quantification is not the main idea. The key idea is clarification—so that the executive team understands each other.”

Tom emphasizes that measurement is a means to an end. The real goal is shared understanding. But quantification is a powerful clarification tactic because it forces precision. When someone says they want a “very fast car,” asking “can we define a scale of measure?” immediately surfaces the vagueness. Miles per hour? Acceleration time? Top speed? Each choice defines what you’re actually optimizing for.

The Scale-Meter-Target Framework

“First, define a scale of measure. Second, define the meter—the device for measuring. Third, set numbers: where are we now, what’s the minimum to survive, and what does success look like?” Continue reading BONUS: Quality 5.0—Quantifying the “Unmeasurable” With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

BONUS: Testing as Measurement—Why Bug-Hunting Misses the Point With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

The Revelation That Almost Caused a Car Crash

“Tom said like 10 sentences in a row, kind of like a geometric proof, that just so blew my mind I almost drove off the road. I realized I had wasted hundreds of hours in boardrooms arguing about errors of which we were aware of perhaps 10%.”

Simon shares the moment Tom’s framework clicked for him. The insight? Traditional testing—finding bugs and defects—is the wrong focus entirely. It’s a programmer’s view of the world. Managers don’t care about bugs; they care about results, about improvements in their business. Tom calls this shift moving from “testing” to “measurement of enhanced or increased value at every cycle.”

The American Toast Problem

“How do we make toast in America? We burn the toast, and then we pay someone to scrape off the black bits off the bread.”

Vasco invokes Deming’s classic analogy to describe traditional software testing. The entire testing-at-the-end approach is fundamentally wasteful. Instead, Tom advocates for continuous measurement against quantified values. If you expected 3% progress toward your goals this week and didn’t get it, you’ve learned something critical: your strategy needs to change. If you did get it, keep going with confidence.

Four Questions at Every Checkpoint

“Where are we going? Where are we now? Where should we have been at this point? And why is there a gap?” Continue reading BONUS: Testing as Measurement—Why Bug-Hunting Misses the Point With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

BONUS: Continuous Strategy Engineering—Beyond Waterfall Planning With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Strategy Professors Are Decades Behind

“The professors of strategy have no clue as to what Evo is. They are locked in decades ago, waterfall mode.”

Tom’s analysis is stark: the people teaching strategy in business schools haven’t undergone the same agile transformation that software development experienced. They still think in terms of 5-year plans that get tested at the end—a guaranteed recipe for discovering failure too late. The alternative? Decompose any large strategy into weekly value delivery steps. And if you think that’s impossible, ask any AI to do it for you—it will produce 52 reasonable weekly increments in about a minute.

Why OKRs Aren’t Enough for Complex Systems

“If you’re doing small-scale stuff that OKRs were designed for, like planning your personal work 14 days hence, OKRs are wonderful. If you’re designing the air traffic control system for Europe, they’re just too simple.”

Tom distinguishes between tools appropriate for personal productivity and those needed for complex organizational strategy. OKRs force some thinking, which is good, but they weren’t designed for—and have never been adapted to—large-scale systems engineering. His paper “What is Wrong with OKRs?” documents roughly 100 gaps between simple OKRs and what robust value requirements actually require.

Check out Tom Gilb’s paper on what’s wrong with OKR’s and how to fix it.

The Missing Alignment Layer

“We have no mental model for most of leadership about how you actually align people around clear vision.” Continue reading BONUS: Continuous Strategy Engineering—Beyond Waterfall Planning With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

BONUS: Impact Engineering—Finding Agile’s Lost North Star With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

The Clarity Problem: Why Organizations Start with “Fuzzy BS!”

“Everybody seems to start from a position of fuzzy b*s*. Nice-sounding words. Management does it, professors do it, politicians do it. And they don’t even feel very guilty about it.”

Tom Gilb doesn’t mince words when describing how most organizations define their objectives. The fundamental problem isn’t a lack of ambition—it’s a lack of clarity. When leaders are asked about their critical values like “extremely high security” or “employee happiness,” they typically respond with circular definitions that provide no actionable direction. Tom’s approach starts by exposing this gap and then demonstrating that any value—no matter how “soft” or intangible it seems—can be quantified. Using AI tools, he’s shown clients over 1,400 different ways to measure human happiness alone.

Why Agile Lost Its North Star

“Agile’s lost its North Star because the economic problems it was trying to solve within the organization are now mismatched with the digital world.”

Simon Holzapfel offers a structural analysis: Agile developed primarily to allay the concerns of pre-digital capital—investors who needed reassurance that their money wouldn’t disappear into failed projects. But today’s digital economy operates differently. Capital now moves like a service (SaaS model), and innovation is fundamentally stochastic—you can’t predict when breakthroughs will happen. Organizations using flow-focused tools when the real problem is value creation are applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s challenges.

The First Step: Quantify Your Critical Values

“If you ask AI to quantify employee happiness a hundred different ways, it will do it in one minute for free. So you can no longer be in denial.” Continue reading BONUS: Impact Engineering—Finding Agile’s Lost North Star With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel