Creating Conditions for Healthy Conflict and Continuous Improvement in Agile Teams | Bernard Agrest

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches Episode: Creating Conditions for Healthy Conflict and Continuous Improvement in Agile Teams
Host: Bernard Agreste
Release Date: July 3, 2025

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte welcomes Bernard Agreste, an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach. The conversation delves into fostering healthy conflict and continuous improvement within Agile teams, providing practical strategies and real-world examples to enhance Scrum practices.

Favorite Agile Retrospective Format: The Four Ls

Bernard begins by sharing his preferred Agile retrospective format—the Four Ls: Learned, Laughed, Lacked, and Longed For. He explains, “[...] it’s a simple but powerful framework. We’re not just asking the same questions you always expect” (01:38). This approach encourages team members to reflect deeply on their experiences, fostering a more engaging and productive retrospective.

Application in Leadership Meetings

Bernard recounts a specific instance where he applied the Four Ls in a leadership meeting for a Workday implementation at UW Madison. Initially, the meetings felt unproductive as they became mere information-sharing sessions. By introducing the Four Ls, Bernard facilitated a meaningful conversation about team sentiments and identified that the meetings needed to shift focus from big-picture strategies to aligning leadership with execution.

He notes, “[...] people were saying, we already have this time put aside, let's just change the format of what we use this time for” (05:12). This adjustment led to more cross-functional dialogues, ensuring that all departments were heard and aligned with upcoming deadlines and deliverables.

Defining Success as a Scrum Master

When asked about his definition of success, Bernard emphasizes the importance of creating conditions for honest conversations and healthy tensions. “[...] there’s no way a project is going to go without there being tension, disagreement, arguments” (05:47). He highlights the necessity of reducing a culture of fear within organizations, allowing team members to voice concerns without fear of reprisal.

Bernard shares an example from his work at Teach for America, where team members felt comfortable raising issues that could improve both their workflow and the overall business process. This environment fosters continuous improvement and ensures that potential problems are addressed proactively.

Utilizing Status Dashboards to Promote Transparency

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the effective use of status dashboards. Bernard criticizes the common practice of presenting dashboards with predominantly green indicators, referring to them humorously as “Watermelon Projects” where the exterior is green, but the interior is red. “[...] if you start them as green, people just say, oh yeah, looks good” (07:51).

Instead, Bernard advocates for initializing dashboard items as red, which inherently prompts discussions about their status. “If you start them as red, then you are triggering those conversations and that becomes important” (09:29). This strategy ensures that potential issues are addressed early, fostering a culture of transparency and accountability.

Additional Tips for Agile Success

Bernard offers additional practical advice, such as injecting humor into dashboards to maintain engagement. “[...] put a Spongebob picture on the dashboard just to make sure people are looking at it” (09:42). This playful tactic can increase interaction and ensure that team members remain attentive to project statuses.

Conclusion

Bernard Agreste’s insights provide Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches with actionable strategies to cultivate an environment conducive to healthy conflict and continuous improvement. By implementing the Four Ls retrospective format, redefining success to include honest communication, and utilizing status dashboards effectively, teams can enhance their Agile practices and achieve greater success.

As Bernard aptly summarizes, creating the right conditions within a team not only drives project success but also fosters a thriving, collaborative work environment.

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Notable Quotes:

• “It’s a simple but powerful framework. We’re not just asking the same questions you always expect.” — Bernard Agreste (01:38)

• “There’s no way a project is going to go without there being tension, disagreement, arguments.” — Bernard Agreste (05:47)

• “If you start them as green, people just say, oh yeah, looks good.” — Bernard Agreste (07:51)

• “Put a Spongebob picture on the dashboard just to make sure people are looking at it.” — Bernard Agreste (09:42)

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This episode is a valuable resource for Scrum Masters seeking to enhance team dynamics and drive continuous improvement. Bernard’s practical approaches and real-world examples offer a roadmap for creating more effective and harmonious Agile teams.

Transcript

[Vasco]

Hey there, Agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if, for the price of a 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 war free 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 this 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.

[Bernard Agreste]

Hello everybody. Welcome to our Success Thursday, the big question of the week this week with Bernard Agreste. Hey Bernard, welcome back.

[Bernard]

Hey Vasco, thanks so much.

[Bernard Agreste]

So Thursday is success day here on the podcast and we'll talk about what success means for us in a second. But let's start with another question, one that is very helpful, hopefully to get to that successful state. What's your favorite Agile retrospective format and why?

[Bernard]

Yeah, thanks Pasco. My favorite is the four Ls like learned, laughed and longed for. I think it's a simple but powerful framework. We're not just asking the same questions you always expect. And I think the long for in particular asks people to reflect and connect the dots between how they felt and how they actually performed. And so I actually used this format a few months ago at one of the standing leadership meetings for the workday implementation that I'm implementing right now. And I institute this over a year ago and I just had a hunch this meeting's really not productive anymore, but I couldn't really explain why. And so at the next meeting I rolled out the 4L's exercise, did a little bit of prompting and prep work before the actual meeting itself. So people came prepared and we had a really great conversation about like how people felt and what people were specifically longing for was actually a different type of meeting. We realized that this group still needed to meet, but given where we were in the implementation cycle, it was much less about like very big picture strategy and much more about like, all right, we need to make sure that leadership is aligned with execution for kind of like these bigger Deadlines that are now happening every couple of weeks. And so we changed this like cross functional sync that we were doing to be a more of a hey, in this meeting we're going to talk about one or two of the things that are happening next regardless of function. So like every function gets a chance to be talked and heard on like how that deadline that is coming up also impacts them. So making sure it wasn't a siloed conversation but a cross functional one still. And like since then, right. This has really helped us plan an open house share like really critical updates for faculty in the School of Medicine and Public Health at UW Madison for how like workday is going to change for them and what's going to mean for them. And then we also started testing a bunch of critical reports and prioritizing how we were going to communicate out with this massive school where these new reports are going to live, how you're going to access them. If a report's not live yet, what does that mean for you when you can expect it, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

[Bernard Agreste]

So it was also a way to surface the need to synchronize with other stakeholders, not just the people who were directly responsible for the delivery of the system, but also to listen to what others might need so that you could kind of fine tune each of the deliveries. Did I understand correctly?

[Bernard]

Yeah, exactly right. We had earlier a, you know, this cross functional group of leadership people meeting and just kind of saying like, here's what's happening in my world. Right. Almost like a scrum of scrums. Almost right, here's what's happening. And like at a certain point it no longer mattered that we like we're learning about updates from their world because we were like, well that's great, but we are going live in three months, right. And now it's one month. And so the meetings were, you know, like almost. Here's a bunch of information. None of it's actionable. You can't really do anything with it. It's just inform and like you can inform through email. And so I had a hunch that maybe we need to cancel this meeting. Maybe we can change it to something else. But what I really liked about the four Ls is that there's specifically you are asking people reflect on what you want. Right. And pretty unanimously people were saying, we already have this time put aside, let's just change the format of what we use this time for.

[Vasco]

Yeah.

[Bernard Agreste]

So realizing what we want and then being able to take action. And I really like how you link this longed for as kind of a bridge between what happened and what we wish we would do differently because that enables then the solution focused conversation. And we do all of this because of course we want to be successful ourselves as Scrum Masters, as well as helping the delivery and the team succeed. So let's dive into that. First thing though, Bernard, for you, what does success mean for you as a Scrum Master?

[Bernard]

Yeah, I think for me it is the conditions are in place for creating honest conversation and healthy tension to surface. There's just no way a project is going to go without there being tension, disagreement, arguments. And too many organizations have a culture of fear, worried about reprisal. And so that's something that I work as best as I can to reduce. And I know that in my position, like there's always going to be a little bit of that in an organization anyway. And so in my position it's not that I can eliminate it, but if I can, at least on my team and with the senior stakeholders that I'm engaging with, start to kind of nudge people away from that, that's how I view success. And like kind of, you know, going back to the example from the implementation I did at Teach for America, right, People weren't raising issues to be bothers, right? They weren't trying to be pains. They were saying, hey, I'm seeing an issue in this product that if fixed, would both make my life better, but in making my life better would make the business run smoother, right? And I think that like, once we can get to a point where it's not saying that every single person, you know, like has to, like, not every single person's voicing has to be like accounted for a ton. But you can create the conditions for people to feel comfortable saying, hey, I have an issue here. And then one of the counter examples that I actually talking about is the success metrics by dashboard. A clean dashboard that's full of green check marks means the project is delivering on time and above budget and all of that. But is it actually driving the change that we want? Right? I've seen too many organizations use the green dashboard as an excuse to not engage with the staff and say like, hey, like, do you even know what is happening? Right? Do you even know that this implementation is happening and what's going to do for you? Or is it just like we've got all these greens because somebody thinks it's green but nobody's actually engaging with people?

[Bernard Agreste]

Well, one of the tools that I've used in the Past, especially in my past as a project manager, is to start all the dashboard items as read. And you wouldn't believe the amount of conversation that comes up because then we really have to talk about the topics, right? Like, like when you start it as green, we called it Watermelon projects, where you have it green on the outside, but completely red on the inside, right? But if you start with the red, then people go, hey, why is this red? And you might say something as simple as, well, we haven't started yet, so we don't really know. So it has to stay red because we have no indication it's working, right? Or we expect we will be ready by then, but we don't yet know. So we need to keep it red because we need to keep looking at it, need to understand what's going on. Or it's still red because we don't have the dependency ready yet and the dependency might be late. Who knows, right? Like if we start the items in the dashboard as red, then we are triggering those conversations and that becomes important. And if we start them as green, then people just say, oh yeah, looks good, right? And then when it finally goes red, it's too late because we're not ready to have those conversations yet. There's no understanding, there's no shared view of what needs to happen. So it's a way to kind of foster the need to talk about it. And if it starts as red, immediately you didn't give time to this silent conflict to emerge. You already start talking about what needs to be talked about.

[Bernard]

That's awesome. I don't think I've ever heard of that before. Also, really like, what did you call it? The Watermelon Project. That's really funny. I'm going to start thinking about where I could apply that. That's great. Thank you for sharing with that.

[Bernard Agreste]

Yeah, and just another tip, every now and then, put a spongebob picture on the dashboard just to make sure people are looking at it. Because if nobody comments, nobody's looking at it.

[Bernard]

What's spongebob doing here? That's very funny.

[Bernard Agreste]

Thank you for sharing that, Bernard.

[Vasco]

All right, I hope you liked this episode, but before you hit next episode, here's the deal. This podcast is powered by people like you, the members who wanted more than just inspiration. They wanted real tools and real connection to people who are practicing agile. Every day we're talking access to over 700 hours of agile gold, CTO level strategy talks, Summit keynotes, live workshops, E courses, deep dive interviews, books, and if you're into no Estimates. We got the pioneers of no estimates in those deep dive interviews as well. Agile Business intelligence, creating product visions, coaching.

[Bernard Agreste]

Your product owner courses.

[Vasco]

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[Bernard Agreste]

It's important.

[Vasco]

But doing it together, that's next level.

[Bernard Agreste]

I'll see you in the community.

[Bernard]

Slack.

[Bernard Agreste]

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