← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
BONUS From Individual AI Wins to Team-Wide Transformation With Monica Marquez
00:33:07
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A
Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question.
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B
What if, for the price of a
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fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame warfree and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's the Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.
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B
Hello, everybody. Welcome to this very special bonus episode on Transforming Workplaces in the Age of AI. We'll be talking leadership and agile with Monica Marquez. Hey, Monica, welcome to the show.
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C
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for inviting me. I'm ready and excited for this conversation.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
There's a lot we need to dig through. Let me tell you a little bit about Monica before we get started. She's a leadership and workplace AI advisor with over 25 years in people transformation. She coined the term returnship at Goldman Sachs and helped found Google's Product Inclusion Council and now guides leaders and teams to adopt AI, agile and inclusion practices that drive results. So, Monica, once again, thank you for being with us. You've spent over 25 years inside large, complex organizations involved in real change. Before we get into all of the AI and agile and leadership, I want to start with how you came to care so deeply about leadership and transformation. What's your origin story?
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C
So I guess that's a really great question. My origin story, I guess would say, is it wasn't a straight line. It never is.
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B
Right.
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C
But I can trace it back to a moment early in my career when I was really kind of technical and working on all these things and getting promoted into a leadership role. And within six months you start to realize, whoa, this takes a whole lot of other work. You're used to being an individual contributor. You do really, really good work. And because you're doing really good work, someone taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, I think you should lead this team. No one ever really teaches you what it really Takes to be a leader, right? What does leadership really actually require? And that really stuck with me in those moments of like, wait a minute, I know I was good at what I did, like very. You know, I was always told that I was a brilliant, technical person and I got things done. And so what better thing to do than to promote somebody to lead a team so that you can keep doing more of those things? But then it's like people get into the mix. And so that really stuck with me of that moment where I was a little lost, of like, I know what I do really well, I know what my zone of genius is, but how do I help other people do that too? And that's when I realized that, you know, it comes down to you becoming a really good leader. And so fast forward, you know, when I was working with incredible talent, with incredible individuals, you know, I started to realize that the systems weren't built for a lot of people. Like me, a Latina female, I was walking in the halls of organizations where it was a lot of white males. Started realizing that there were certain barriers and systemic things that regardless of how much you tried, sometimes you were running into these things. I started really starting to think about how do you help people navigate around, over, under, through these systemic barriers and things like that to really help people unlock their performance and really getting people to understand those things. And so started to learn that it's really about redesigning systems to unlock human potential. And that was the through line of my career and everything that I did. And you know, fast forward to some of the other companies like, you know, bank of America, Ernst and Young and Google, I was always really kind of at the intersection of people performance and really transformation. How do you help people transform? And so through all of that, you know, all of my work, through my former company and my current company, Flip Work, it really is about how do we create environments where people can do their best work. And in this world of AI, Flip Work is here to really help individuals become, what we like to say, agent to humans. How do you really leverage AI to help you get ahead? And you know, because if you don't, you're going to get left behind. So I've always kind of been in that space of people performance and transformation. And so, you know, it feels like right now with the world and the change, how change is happening faster than people can change, it's a really nice kind of sweet spot where I'm really enjoying helping people navigate that.
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B
So before we get into the impact of AI, and we will, because it does have an impact. I want to spend some time on the leadership aspect, which you just approached. And of course, even in the context of inclusion and equity diversity, which is our aspects that, hey, it's not even new that they bring value to teams when they need to go through problems and resolve those problems. But when you look at leadership development Today, this is 2026. As we recorded this podcast, what are we still getting wrong? Especially of course, for our audience in agile and tech focused environments.
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C
I think what we're still getting wrong is that there is no one way or one framework or one leadership theory that's going to work for everybody. Really what people forget is that being a good leader is you also becoming a little bit more well versed in the psychology or behavioral psychology of people so that you can understand how do you work with various different people in order to get out of them what they need. And so leaders really need to ask, what do these people, what do my team members need to succeed? Instead of why isn't this done yet? Or any of those things. Really understanding that most leadership development still rewards the command and control kind of archetype. And in the olden days, kind of still like the person who has all the answers is kind of this decisive hero. But in this day and age, in 2026, now with AI, it's even more critical that leaders really start to become more agile and really starting to think about what do we need to succeed. Right? It's even more critical because AI moves so fast that when you think you've fixed something, it changes the next day. Right. And so leaders are starting to become bottlenecks. And if they, you know, if they need to approve every single decision, you're never going to become an agentic leader or an agentic human or even an agentic enterprise. You're just going to become slow because the bureaucracy in the organization is, is going to really slow things down. And so, you know, it's really about how do you leverage AI to mitigate some of those friction points? What are the $10 tasks that AI can solve for so that leaders and even the individuals or the experts themselves can really use their judgment and discernment to make the $10,000 decisions. And so the issue and the thing that we're getting wrong specifically answering your question is we're still training leaders like it's 1995, right? We're teaching strategy execution and maybe some emotional intelligence if the company is progressive. But we're not teaching leaders how to lead in uncertainty. And when you deal with Uncertainty, Our brains are wired for certainty. So then you start getting into the behavioral and neural science. And so the idea of what is agile, it's really to be a system designed for uncertainty. And we aren't built, we aren't wired for uncertainty. We're wired for certainty. So that's where the whole behavioral and psychology of, like, how do you help people move forward despite the uncertainty?
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B
And talking about that. Certainty and uncertainty are topics we talk about here on the podcast all the time because we are focusing on agile product development, which means that actually uncertainty is the fuel for how we work, right?
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C
Yeah, the curiosity.
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B
Exactly. And it becomes a contributor. It becomes something that gives us what is unexpected, which usually means value for the customer in the end. But a lot of organizations, even though they might say they're agile, they still preach and teach, just like you said, this command and control behavior. The obvious question is, how do you help leaders unlearn that? Also because. And we'll talk about AI next. Also because command and control doesn't work with AI.
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C
Yeah, no, it doesn't work with AI. What we try to teach leaders is really getting them to understand that that what got you here isn't going to get you there. Right. And, you know, when you start to think about the idea of, you know, agility and getting, you know, pivoting, I mean, we, we as humans are used to change, right? Well, like most people say, no, oh, no, I love change. I change all the time. The difference of change today is that change is moving faster than people know how to change. Right. We're humans who by, you know, just, we evolve, but we evolve over time. And we eventually, like, yes, some people may evolve a little faster, we're a little more innovative, but the change that is happening today is at a much faster clip than we're used to. And so that is where we really have to start thinking about how do you. The only thing that's certain now is that you're going to have to change faster and quicker. And so that, at the end of the day, is where we have to get comfortable, like you said, with that uncertainty and have that uncertainty really fuel us into the. In the curiosity. But also creating that psychologically safe space for people to be okay with the failing. And, you know, because the AI is a little bit of testing and learning, constantly testing and learning. And so the control piece, like if you are very much, like you said, a command and control, you're going to feel a little disoriented or you're going to feel, you know, you're going to, you're, you're going to resist that because you don't have the control.
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B
In fact, you're going to go back to the control techniques you had before. I mean, exactly.
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C
You're going to, you're exactly.
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B
I face this all the time when we try to work through plans about the future and, and the whole conversation revolves around how can we get more certainty, how can we get more assurance that we are going to do exactly everything that we. When in fact, especially in agile environments, what we're trying to do is to enable the discovery because whatever we plan, we can find better, Right? No matter how much we spend planning, we can always find better. And we need to be open to that opportunity. And the command and control removes that openness to the opportunities that are about to emerge.
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C
Yes. And what you mentioned is the research is showing a lot of the leaders that I'm speaking to at different organizations and some of our partner organizations that we're working with in terms of, they're sharing with us that the bottleneck right now is this middle management layer, right? It's these middle managers that are not, not willing to relinquish the command and control. And they also have this unspoken fear of managing agents, right, because they don't want to be liable for the output of these agents. But what they don't realize is that they can control the output of these agents by training the agents the way that we need to. But it's a little bit of a. I try to help some of these leaders understand and say you've got to treat your AI tools like instead of AI artificial intelligence, they are an artificial intern. Just like when you get a brand new intern, they're brilliant. They're these young, curious, like very smart individuals. But you don't give them a task and then take the output and take it for face value and give it to leadership or give it to your client. You basically take this, this output and you tell the intern, this is good, this is not. We need to tweak this here. Here's some contextual wisdom that I'm going to share with you so that you can get the right output. You've got to treat your LLMs in the same way where you are training them and you're taking that output and finessing it just like you would with an intern to get the right output outcome that you want. And so what people miss is that you always have to have human in the loop and the human brings that creativity as well as that. You know what we like to say is more of the contextual wisdom, the context that you have to give so that you can then start to, in some ways, control the output. But sometimes there's a little bit of this fear that we're seeing a lot with leaders, that it's this unspoken fear of, well, if I train the LLM to do all of these things, then I'm basically training myself out of a job. Right?
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B
Wow.
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C
And that's the furthest thing from the truth, you know, but, but, but people fear that, right?
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B
Yeah. And, and that's, that's, that's actually one of the things that we talk a lot about here. Like in, in, in our podcast, we interview people who are leaders, Scrum masters, product owners, team leads, CTOs, architects. And, and one of the things that we very often face is exactly this idea that, okay, our job is to work ourselves out of a job. And, and when you say it like that, there's a natural and totally understandable fear, right? Like, no one wants to get out of their job because, you know, we, we still need to pay our bills. But what gets missed, I think, and I would like to hear your thoughts on that, is this idea that the more we focus on predictability and control, the more likely it is we will not be needed because predictability and control, which is impossible, but should it be possible, then of course, then you can just automate it. Right? Like, and for me, what is paradoxical is that these leaders aren't seeing that their creativity, their curiosity is what makes them valuable for their teams and within their organizations. Do you see that too, with the leaders that you work with?
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C
We do, and we do. And it's kind of like this really deep groove, like you said, where there is this underlying fear of, like, well, you know, things will be completely automated. But I think what people don't realize is that you can't just take a workflow today the way that you do it manually and overlay AI on it, because there's always whatever friction point, pain point, risk, human error that happens. You're just going to exacerbate that with AI. And so what we tell leaders is that it's that contextual knowledge of you always know where to check for the error, where to check for the friction or the pain point. Tools aren't going to know that, you know, like, just innately, you have to be able to tell them that. And so exactly what you say. We're trying to get people to understand that, you know, their, their own creativity and like you said, their own contextual knowledge and what I like to say is, you know, there's the artificial intelligence and then there's your authentic intelligence. Your authentic intelligence is what is going to equal success and what it's really going to equal. You know, that is where the value or the worth is.
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Is.
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C
And so getting people to rewrite these really deeply woven kind of conditioned beliefs that effort equals success is the old equation, right? And so that's where we're starting to see some pushback, too. Vasco is where leaders feel like, well, in any given day, it takes me four hours to do this analytical report, but when I use AI, I get it done in 30 minutes. And so in my old kind of equation that has been groomed in my head is telling me that time equal success, effort equals success. Well, if I'm using less time to do it, am I going to be successful? You start to question your worth, right? And so we're starting to try to tell people that equation is outdated. It's pre AI. And so the new equation is impact equals success, right? And so getting people to understand that output equals success and impact equals worth, right? And so getting people to rewrite those equations so they don't push back on this idea that, well, if I'm not, you know, like, me as a young Latina was always taught that I have to work twice as hard to get half as far. Well, I was first in, last out. Now you kind of sit there and you're like, oh, my gosh, like what used to take me 10 hours, you know, in a. In a day to do, I can get it done in four hours. Like, you know, then I'm not. I'm not worthy anymore of being a high performer.
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B
That's the real danger, right? Because in the end, the customer cares about the impact on their lives. They don't care about how many hours you work, right? Like, I would even say that the idea that effort equals success or worth is even pre industrial, because the industrial revolution changed that equation already once. And of course, we're going to change it more than once in the future as well. But then I'm thinking, but how about teams, right? Because of course, you work with these leaders, but these leaders have teams. And of course, if AI has an impact in how work gets done, it also changes how teams get shaped. So how do you think AI will change the way teams are structured?
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C
So I think that teams definitely are probably going to be leaner, but I think that teams also have to reskill. Like, you have to work as a team. So at flip work, we do what we call flip Labs. And it's really where we get a leader and a handful of their team members to say, over the next 90 days, we're going to do what we'd like to say, quote unquote, like a capstone project where you're going to take one workflow that is critical to your team's success and we're going to help you reinvent that workflow. Leveraging AI and really kind of like dissecting this workflow to say, where can AI handle or automate some of this work? That was maybe the work that drained your team, right? Like, it was almost kind of like, oh, man, my team, they're so brilliant and so smart, but we waste so much time doing the $10 tasks, right? Because we have to do this manual kind of stuff where can AI do that? So that it basically unlocks the capability of taking the extra time that you have now to really use their zone of genius to add in higher value work. And so sometimes it's saying, okay, well, we used to have these team members on the front of the assembly line. Now we're taking them and moving them to the middle of the assembly line or to the end of the assembly line so that we have more quality work. And so many teams aren't. That's not what's happening right now. What's happening is that they all have these AI tools. And as individuals, yes, I'm using AI to help me be more efficient. I'm getting what used to take me. I'm saving maybe an hour or two a day. I feel more efficient. I feel good. I feel like I'm using AI. Their teams might be using AI as individual contributors, but they aren't using AI in their actual workflows and the handoffs and all of those things. And so that's why leaders and managers are scratching their head. Like, why aren't we seeing the roi, like bubble up into kind of the team, you know, roi? And it's because they haven't stepped back to really think about where are the handoffs? How do we handoff? Is the handoff automated? Is it still human in the loop with the handoffs and in checks and balances? And so that's what we're seeing is that they aren't doing the work of like, everybody's kind of like using the AI for their individual, kind of personal, individual workflows and efficiencies, but it's not bubbling up as a team that they're coming together. And that's the biggest thing is the team has to come together to really understand where are the, where are, where's the friction? Where are the handoffs? How can the handoffs be augmented by AI? How can some of the handoffs even be replaced by AI? And then where is the human in the loop? Right. And then how do you take, really in one of these things where we're not a big proponent of now you had a team of 12, now you just need a team of four. And it's just like, no, how do you reskill some of these other people into other roles? Right. And so there are some interesting case studies out there. I was at a conference not too long ago and we had a leader sharing the IKEA case study, which I'm going to kind of paraphrase what they shared, but IKEA brought in AI into their customer service kind of, you know, how do we, customer relations, how do we leverage AI? And instead of displacing or letting go of their front, you know, front, you know, front facing customer service, they retrain those people in kind of some design capacity and kind of more like helping design rooms and, and all of that kind of like, you know, furniture and kind of more, you know, design type of creative roles. And what turned out what happened was they just took that talent, put it, repotted it somewhere else instead of letting it go. They didn't have to hire more people, they just trained these people. And Ikea, you know, the following year saw a huge increase in revenues because they were, you know, they leveraged these people and they didn't have to hire more people, they just kind of reskilled who they had. So what I tell teams is that you could have a year where maybe your headcount stays flat, but you're going to get more done because you're leveraging AI and reskilling people in more high value roles.
- [23:31]
B
And I think that's the challenge for leaders to creatively think about where value can be augmented, amplified or even created from scratch. Because there are always so many opportunities that we are not taking advantage of one thing out of curiosity. One of the things that we work with all the time, of course, in software and Agile specifically, is this idea of experimentation. Right. Like trying out many different things. Have you worked with leaders to facilitate that thinking of helping to use AI to create experiment ideas, to run experiments instead of trying to do everything top down, command and control, detailed plan, create more opportunities, explore more opportunities and therefore also discover more value?
- [24:19]
C
Yes. And so, and that's part of the reason that's what we like to Call our flip labs where these, you know, it's giving permission to these teams and leaders like for the next 90 days, which are these like 90 day sprints of being able to take a workflow and you know, test it, learn it, you know, get feedback, tweak it, all of those types of things, but also start measuring the outcomes. You know, we have some leaders who still push back and it's just like, well, they want. Because ironically, they never really measured the output of their current workflows. They don't know whether or not the AI would be better or not. So then we do kind of a B testing. We're like, okay, take half your team and do your kind of regular workflow as you do it and take team B and leverage AI and let's do it in a one week sprint or a two week sprint. And then see the outputs. Team A, who did it the old way and team B who did it a new way with AI. Where, where were the outputs better? And sometimes you'll see where team B had, you know, multiple outputs, but maybe the quality wasn't as high as the one output from team A. And then it's like, okay, well how do you start to get the take what the quality or the output that you like in A and get team B to get similar outcomes. And so that's when they start to see the value of like, oh, wait a minute, like, you know, so we're able to, instead of spinning out one or two analyst reports the old way, we're able to spit out four high quality reports after we've tweaked it. So sometimes it does take, like you said, a little bit of testing and learning, but you have to be intentional on creating that safe space and allowing them to do the testing and learning and kind of taking the liability away from the team that it's like, if you fail, you're not going to get in trouble. This is the point we want to, we want to learn from the failures because sometimes we learn more from the failures than we do the success.
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B
And it's not only sometimes, of course.
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C
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
So, Monica, we're getting close to the end, but this is definitely a very interesting area, an area that is still developing at the time of recording. Is there a book? Could be a book, an article, a tool, a video, a course that you'd recommend for our leaders listening to us trying to navigate how AI and agile can help their teams perform.
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C
Yeah, I mean, the irony is, like you were saying, you know, as soon as a book is published, it's almost dated in this, in this day and age, right? And so for, for me, you know, what I have done is I've started really following a lot of these various different newsletters that are, you know, that are put out by even some of the big conglomerates like the OpenAI. You know, I've been following really closely recently the World Economic Forum, you know, the McKinsey's, the EY's of the world where they're releasing, you know, reports that are coming out now in hindsight where, you know, it's just like everybody kind of ran to jump on the bandwagon and they spent millions on all of these AI tools and deployed all of these kind of like AI tech pilots. And then they're starting to realize we're not seeing the roi. And it's because they started to realize like, oh, we didn't really think about the, how the human would adopt this or like what are some of the, the more behavioral psychology, like pieces to change management and all of that. And so the, the best thing that I would say is like, you know, find a couple of newsletters. Like I like to, to listen, I like to get the Superhuman newsletter. You know, I like to get the various different newsletters even from who's one of the founders of HubSpot. I'm drawing a blank on his newsletter. But I follow these newsletters that come out weekly, that have come out more periodic than a quarterly, kind of like, you know, paper or any of those things because the tools and the AIs are changing almost as rapidly. I mean, you and I both see all the time the rollouts of like, oh, now there's GPT 5.1, 5.1 thinking all of these types of things because they're changing so fast. And so, you know, in the past I used to say, oh, here's my go to, you know, Bible or book or whatever. And, and I'm finding more and more that like there isn't, you know, as soon as it's out there, it's dated. And so I'm just a big, I like to be kind of in the moment with a lot of the research. So I'm usually following, you know, significant kind of papers as they come out and doing all of that research. But one of the things that I learned is that I like to use a tool called Chat Hub. And Chat Hub is a tool where you can prompt once, like even if you're getting your like latest news or whatever, but you can pick the LLM. So I, it's like Four windows that are opened up, you prompt once and you see the answers come from like, you know, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini or whatever. And you can kind of compare, you know, and get more information and get the different perspectives and then kind of see which tools don't work really well for, you know, various different prompts. So I'm, I'm a little bit more of like the more being more agile in my learning. So I think that's my point is that there's no one book anymore. It's like be agile in the way that you're learning.
- [29:41]
B
Absolutely. And I'm sure people can learn a lot by following you on social media and checking out your company flip work. The links will be in the show notes, but that's my perspective. Monica, where would you advise our listeners to go to to find out more about you and your work?
- [29:57]
C
Sure. So I'm always posting on LinkedIn. So you know, my handle is just theMonica Marquez on LinkedIn. I have my website, which is themonicamarcas.com you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. So I put out a newsletter too that really tries to. It's a five minute read on how do you humanize AI. And so always sharing new tools that I'm experimenting with, you know, new papers or things that I've kind of read and found important, but really kind of sharing with people like various different prompts and tools that they can start using in their day to day as well.
- [30:32]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And we'll put the link to all of those in the show notes, make sure that people will find them easily for now. Monica, thank you very much for sharing all of that with us and for your time and your generosity with your knowledge.
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C
No, thank you so much for sharing your platform.
- [30:51]
A
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