Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"I thought my technical background was my biggest strength, but I understood that this was my biggest weakness—I was coming into stand-ups saying 'I know how we need to fix that issue,' and I was a Scrum Master." - Natalia Curusi

Natalia stepped into her first blended role as team leader and Scrum Master full of confidence. With years of programming experience behind her, she believed she could guide her team through any technical challenge. But during morning stand-ups, she found herself suggesting solutions, directing technical approaches, and sharing her expertise freely. The team listened—after all, she was their former leader. They implemented her suggestions, but when those solutions failed, the team didn't have the thinking process to adapt them to their context.

Natalia realized she was preventing the team's learning and ownership by taking control away from them. The turning point came when she made a deliberate choice: she selected the most technical person on the team to become the technical authority and committed to never stepping on his feet again. From that moment forward, she focused purely on the Scrum Master role—asking questions, fostering collaboration, and shutting up to listen actively.

Years later, that technical lead followed her to another job, and they remain friends to this day. Natalia learned that her contribution wasn't about giving solutions—it was about keeping the team from losing ownership of their work.

Self-reflection Question: When you attend your team's daily stand-up, are you contributing to collaboration, or is your contribution keeping the team from owning their work?

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Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.

🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.

Buy Now on Amazon

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About Natalia Curusi

With over 20 years in software delivery, Natalia Curusi is an expert in Agile Transformations, Delivery Optimisation, and Systems Thinking. As an Agile Coach at Endava, she leads Asia Pacific initiatives, driving business agility and continuous improvement while mentoring teams to build customer-centric, high-performing, and collaborative cultures.

You can link with Natalia Curusi on LinkedIn.

"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.

"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?"

Tom's framework makes the abstract concrete:

• Scale of measure: What dimension are you measuring? (e.g., time to complete task)

• Meter: How will you measure it? (e.g., user testing with stopwatch)

• Past/Status: Where are you now? (e.g., currently takes 47 seconds)

• Tolerable: What's the minimum acceptable? (e.g., must be under 30 seconds to survive)

• Target/Goal: What does success look like? (e.g., 15 seconds or less)

Many important concepts like "usability" decompose into 10+ different scales of measure—you're not looking for one magic number but a set of relevant metrics.

"Change moves at the speed of trust. Once there's trust, information flows. Once information flows, the system comes to life and can learn. Until there's trust, you have the Soviet problem."

Simon introduces trust as the "human growth hormone" of organizational change—it's fast, doesn't require a user's manual, and enables everything else. Low-trust environments hoard information, guaranteeing poor outcomes. The practical advice? Make your work visible to your manager, alignment-check first, do something, show results. Living the learning cycle yourself builds trust incrementally. And as Tom adds: if you deliver increased critical value every week, you will build trust.

About Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Tom Gilb, born in the US, lived in London, and then moved to Norway in 1958. An independent teacher, consultant, and writer, he has worked in software engineering, corporate top management, and large-scale systems engineering. As the saying goes, Tom was writing about Agile before Agile was named. In 1976, Tom introduced the term "evolutionary" in his book Software Metrics, advocating for development in small, measurable steps. Today, we talk about Evo, the name Tom uses to describe his approach. Tom has worked with Dr. Deming and holds a certificate personally signed by him.

You can listen to Tom Gilb's previous episodes here.

You can link with Tom Gilb on LinkedIn

Simon Holzapfel is an educator, coach, and learning innovator who helps teams work with greater clarity, speed, and purpose. He specializes in separating strategy from tactics, enabling short-cycle decision-making and higher-value workflows. Simon has spent his career coaching individuals and teams to achieve performance with deeper meaning and joy. Simon is also the author of the Equonomist newsletter on Substack.

And you can listen to Simon's previous episodes on the podcast here.

You can link with Simon Holzapfel on LinkedIn.

"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."

"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.

"Where are we going? Where are we now? Where should we have been at this point? And why is there a gap?"

Drawing from fighter pilot doctrine, these four questions should be asked at every micro-cycle—not just at quarterly reviews. Fighter pilots ask these questions every minute during critical missions, with clear abort criteria if answers are unacceptable. Most organizations have no abort criteria for their strategies at all, guaranteeing they'll discover failures far too late.

About Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Tom Gilb, born in the US, lived in London, and then moved to Norway in 1958. An independent teacher, consultant, and writer, he has worked in software engineering, corporate top management, and large-scale systems engineering. As the saying goes, Tom was writing about Agile before Agile was named. In 1976, Tom introduced the term "evolutionary" in his book Software Metrics, advocating for development in small, measurable steps. Today, we talk about Evo, the name Tom uses to describe his approach. Tom has worked with Dr. Deming and holds a certificate personally signed by him.

You can listen to Tom Gilb's previous episodes here.

You can link with Tom Gilb on LinkedIn

Simon Holzapfel is an educator, coach, and learning innovator who helps teams work with greater clarity, speed, and purpose. He specializes in separating strategy from tactics, enabling short-cycle decision-making and higher-value workflows. Simon has spent his career coaching individuals and teams to achieve performance with deeper meaning and joy. Simon is also the author of the Equonomist newsletter on Substack.

And you can listen to Simon's previous episodes on the podcast here.

You can link with Simon Holzapfel on LinkedIn.

"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.

"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.

"We have no mental model for most of leadership about how you actually align people around clear vision."

Simon introduces the concept of a Hoshin-Kanri "sprinkler" system—imagine strategic clarity flowing from the top and misting over everyone's desk as alignment. Most organizations lack anything resembling this. They have Moses descending from expensive consultant retreats with tablets, but no continuous two-way flow of strategic information. The result? Teams work hard on things that don't matter while critical values go unaddressed.

About Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Tom Gilb, born in the US, lived in London, and then moved to Norway in 1958. An independent teacher, consultant, and writer, he has worked in software engineering, corporate top management, and large-scale systems engineering. As the saying goes, Tom was writing about Agile before Agile was named. In 1976, Tom introduced the term "evolutionary" in his book Software Metrics, advocating for development in small, measurable steps. Today, we talk about Evo, the name Tom uses to describe his approach. Tom has worked with Dr. Deming and holds a certificate personally signed by him.

You can listen to Tom Gilb's previous episodes here.

You can link with Tom Gilb on LinkedIn

Simon Holzapfel is an educator, coach, and learning innovator who helps teams work with greater clarity, speed, and purpose. He specializes in separating strategy from tactics, enabling short-cycle decision-making and higher-value workflows. Simon has spent his career coaching individuals and teams to achieve performance with deeper meaning and joy. Simon is also the author of the Equonomist newsletter on Substack.

And you can listen to Simon's previous episodes on the podcast here.

You can link with Simon Holzapfel on LinkedIn.

"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.

"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.

"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."

The path forward starts with brutal honesty about what your organization actually cares about. Tom's approach involves:

• Identifying the top 10 critical stakeholder values

• Defining clear scales of measure for each

• Establishing where you are now (status)

• Setting where you need to be to survive (tolerable level)

• Defining what success looks like (target/goal level)

This isn't about adding bureaucracy—it's about creating shared clarity that enables everyone to row in the same direction.

About Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Tom Gilb, born in the US, lived in London, and then moved to Norway in 1958. An independent teacher, consultant, and writer, he has worked in software engineering, corporate top management, and large-scale systems engineering. As the saying goes, Tom was writing about Agile before Agile was named. In 1976, Tom introduced the term "evolutionary" in his book Software Metrics, advocating for development in small, measurable steps. Today, we talk about Evo, the name Tom uses to describe his approach. Tom has worked with Dr. Deming and holds a certificate personally signed by him.

You can listen to Tom Gilb's previous episodes here.

You can link with Tom Gilb on LinkedIn

Simon Holzapfel is an educator, coach, and learning innovator who helps teams work with greater clarity, speed, and purpose. He specializes in separating strategy from tactics, enabling short-cycle decision-making and higher-value workflows. Simon has spent his career coaching individuals and teams to achieve performance with deeper meaning and joy. Simon is also the author of the Equonomist newsletter on Substack.

And you can listen to Simon's previous episodes on the podcast here.

You can link with Simon Holzapfel on LinkedIn.