Blog

The first rule of scaling agile? Don't scale — get your best people in a room and figure out what actually needs doing. But when scaling is unavoidable, not all frameworks deserve equal respect. This opinionated walk through LeSS, Disciplined Agile, Scrum at Scale, SAFe, Nexus, Spotify/ING, and Flight Levels cuts through the noise to expose a common pathology: organizations growing product owners like flowers, each tending their own backlog while the highest-value work sits untouched. Three patterns earn praise, three get dismissed, and one framework is labeled a "piss in your pants" solution — find out which.

Isn't Kanban just about outputs? Doesn't it miss a trick on value and organizational capability? This piece pushes back on both assumptions, using Scrum.org's Evidence Based Management framework — with its four key value areas of current value, unrealized value, time to market, and ability to innovate (or, more honestly, "inability to innovate") — as the lens. The argument: Kanban is a strategy for optimizing the flow of value, not just stuff out the door, and when used with discipline it improves all four areas. Along the way: why classes of service often make things worse (with a thought experiment about queues at the Ukrainian border), why intangible work earns its keep, why prioritizing already-started work is a classic trap, and why the dance of finishing, watching for aging, and avoiding starvation is the heart of doing Kanban well. Take the time it takes, so it takes less time.

"How do we balance UX with shipping fast in Scrum?" is the wrong question. The real goal isn't to ship faster — it's to discover faster, because a large chunk of the ideas in your backlog probably shouldn't be built at all. Here's how Scrum and UX actually fit together, from striped vs. blended backlogs to the Lean UX Canvas, and why the combination closes the fundamental gap that Lean Startup left open.

Kanban is a strategy for optimizing the flow of value — and that makes it especially well-suited to complex work, where uncertainty is the rule, not the exception. This piece walks through the Kanban practices through a complexity lens: defining and visualizing the workflow so signals (and signals of trouble) become visible, actively managing items so nothing ages or stagnates, and continuously improving the workflow to strike a better balance between effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability. There's always a bottleneck in complex work — if there weren't, capacity would be unlimited — and finding it isn't about blame. Plus a real example from a fast-moving consumer goods marketing team that solved a hidden bottleneck simply by adding a swimlane per dependency partner. A reminder that the board should serve the people doing the work first, with executives getting clarity as a bonus.

What is organizational agility in 2022? After a year of learning, this updated definition starts where it often helps to start — with what agility is not. It's not the agile industrial complex. It's not a single vendor transforming the organization. It's not re-labeling what you already do, choosing predictability over uncertainty, or old-fashioned micro-management dressed up in new clothes. As Klaus Leopold puts it, "agility is not a team sport; it is a company sport." Pithy one-liners like "harnessing change for competitive advantage" leave too much room for interpretation, so this piece offers something more substantive: a working definition that captures what organizational agility looks like (constructive collaboration between people with diverse perspectives), what it feels like (more humanity, authenticity, leadership, engagement, and care for current and future revenues), and how each of those breaks down into concrete behaviors. Treat it as a template — modify, delete, resequence, and clarify what agility means for your context.

Scrum already helps teams deal with complexity — so what does adding Kanban bring to the mix? This piece looks at how Scrum with Kanban tightens the empirical loop, sharpens focus, and helps teams navigate complexity more easily through one definition of workflow, four practices, and four measures. From visualizing aged work, blockers, and unacknowledged dependencies, to using throughput and Monte Carlo probabilistic forecasting in Sprint Planning and Sprint Review, to managing expectations early enough to course correct — this is about more than visual boards. It's about avoiding execution bias, dodging groupthink, and not falling into the "build it and they will come" trap. Because in complex environments, simply talking to the customer beats a fantasy of what we think they want. Plus a reminder that value today isn't just about customers and the organization — it's also about sustainability, risk reduction, and learning.

What is organizational agility, really? It's a question people throw around constantly without aligning on what the words actually mean. This piece pushes past pithy one-liners ("an organization's ability to harness change for competitive advantage") to offer something more substantive: a working definition that captures what real organizational agility looks like, feels like, and what it's not (in a word — bs). It's about creating an adaptable organization that drives disruption through more effectiveness, more frequency-of-impact, more flow, less drag, and sustainability of work. It feels like more humanity, authenticity, leadership, engagement, and current-and-future-revenues — each of those broken down into concrete behaviors. Plus an honest reflection on the gap between executives understanding delivery problems (70% of people convinced) and actually fixing them (20% convinced), and why "we're already agile" is the death knell for real change.