Leadership as a Service — Why Scrum Masters Should Work Themselves Out of a Job and How Quality Circles Make Learning Flow | Peter Merel

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast — Episode Summary

Episode Title: Leadership as a Service — Why Scrum Masters Should Work Themselves Out of a Job and How Quality Circles Make Learning Flow
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Peter Merel
Date: May 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Vasco Duarte sits down with returning guest Peter Merel, Agile coach and creator of the xscale framework, to dive deep into two transformative organizational ideas: the use of quality circles to spread learning across teams, and the radical notion that the Scrum Master role should be “self-defeating”—empowering teams so thoroughly that the need for dedicated scrum masters disappears. The conversation is rich with practical advice and stories from the trenches, providing fresh takes on cross-team learning, distributed leadership, and how agile coaches measure their own success.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Camelot Model and Quality Circles as Agile Retrospectives

• Traditional Limitation: Retrospectives are usually confined within team boundaries, slowing learning diffusion.
• Peter’s Innovation: Drawing from manufacturing history, specifically quality circles from the Toyota Production System, to facilitate learning flow between teams.
• How It Works:
  • Teams are split into cross-team “quality circles” (e.g., three members, each from a different team).
  • Quality circles meet regularly for short discussions (10–30 min/week).
  • Topics include ongoing problems, new ideas, and support for overcoming constraints.
  • Output: Two types of proposals returned to each team:
    1. Proposed work items to improve the whole mosaic of teams.
    2. Working agreement treaties to align practices between teams.
• Results: Continuous, organization-wide learning via peer-to-peer conversations, cutting through slow, unwieldy “all hands” meetings.
  • Quote:

    “The neat thing about doing this regularly is that learnings flow across the organization. And that’s more valuable than anything you can come up with with a retrospective in your team by yourself.”
    (Peter Merel, 03:55)

2. The Unique Power of Three-Person Circles

• Why Three?
  • One explains, one listens, one anticipates next moves—creating a “hum” of healthy, self-organized energy.
• Scaling:
  • Multiple three-person circles can operate in parallel across a large organization, face to face, minimizing “middlemen.”
• Memorable Moment: Peter describes the sound of many circles in action as “the most beautiful symphony of that noise you ever hear in your life.”
  • Quote:

    “If you get your quality circles to meet in parallel standing next to whiteboards... you will hear the most beautiful symphony of that noise you ever hear in your life.”
    (Peter Merel, 04:57)

3. What Does “Success” Mean for Scrum Masters?

• Peter’s View: The role of Scrum Master should be “self-defeating.” The aim is not to embed a permanent authority figure but to inculcate “leadership as a service” throughout the team.
• Distributed Leadership:
  • Every team member provides leadership to others—no need for traditional roles like product owner or scrum master.
  • Inspiration drawn from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an indigenous model for direct democracy and peer-to-peer respect.
  • The goal: team members act as fully empowered adults, not subordinate “children” in need of oversight.
  • Quote:

    “Scrum Master is a self-defeating role. I don’t think that it should be a permanent thing. I don’t think it should be an organizational role at all. I love the idea of leadership as a service that every member of a team is providing their team, every member of a swarm is providing their swarm.”
    (Peter Merel, 06:23)

4. Measuring Progress Toward Obsolescence

• Key Question: If the goal is to no longer be needed, how does a Scrum Master honestly know if they’re achieving it?
• Peter’s Guidance:
  • Use the “leadership as a service” protocol to create autonomous alignment threads.
  • Begin with progressive team members; as capabilities mature, split and backfill new groups—scaling up peer leadership.
  • As these “steel threads” of alignment and leadership propagate, the coach/Scrum Master grows the organization’s capacity, always with a fresh challenge ahead.
  • The goal: accomplish real change in 8–12 week increments, leave a trail of tangible wins and recommendations, moving away from dependency on hierarchical bosses.
  • Quote:

    “What you’re doing as a coach or as a scrum master… is transforming change participants into change leaders.”
    (Peter Merel, 10:52)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Quality Circles:

  “The neat thing about doing this regularly is that learnings flow across the organization. And that’s more valuable than anything you can come up with with a retrospective in your team by yourself.”
  (Peter Merel, 03:55)

• On Distributed Leadership:

  “Scrum Master is a self-defeating role… I love the idea of leadership as a service that every member of a team is providing their team.”
  (Peter Merel, 06:23)

• On Team Self-Sufficiency:

  “If this is going to be a self organizing team, then they have to be able to self organize whether you are there or not. And once they can do it without you, well then you need to go to the next thing because they don’t need you now.”
  (Peter Merel, 07:34)

• On Growing Change:

  “…the neat thing about doing these little engagements, these little change actions, is that you can make people happy in, let’s say, an 8 to 12 week period and get a really good reference internal to the organization.”
  (Peter Merel, 09:37)

• On the Coach’s True Job:

  “What you’re doing as a coach or as a scrum master…is transforming change participants into change leaders.”
  (Peter Merel, 10:52)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:46 — Peter introduces the Camelot model and quality circles
• 04:34 — The rationale and magical effectiveness of three-person circles
• 06:22 — Definition of success for scrum masters: working yourself out of a job
• 08:26 — How to measure progress towards team self-sufficiency
• 10:52 — The coach’s core function: turning participants into leaders

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Takeaways for Scrum Masters & Agile Coaches

• Facilitate, then get out of the way: True success is designing teams and organizations that don’t depend on central authority figures.
• Enable flow across boundaries: Regular, cross-team quality circles are a lightweight, face-to-face mechanism for spreading learning and solving constraints at scale.
• Empower peers, avoid dependency: Target your efforts at developing distributed leadership; move on when teams can flourish without you.
• Change is a chain reaction: Seed progress with your most progressive people, create tangible wins, and let success stories fuel the next wave.

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Further Resources

• xscale Camelot Model — [link to be provided in episode show notes]
• Leadership as a Service Protocol — [link to be provided in episode show notes]
• Quality Circles Info — [link to be provided in episode show notes]

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Host’s Closing Remark:
“Distributed leadership model, leadership as a service… sounds like another great bonus episode. Peter, I hope you have enough time for us to book those.”
(Vasco Duarte, 11:12)

Transcript

[Pasco]

Hello everyone.

[Podcast Host]

Quick heads up before we start today's episode. The Global Agile Summit is happening on May 4th. Yes, May 4th. And even with a big blowout Star wars party, you have to join. It will be online and it's like always free to attend. We have four tracks this year that I'm really excited about and I think you will too. Stick around to the end of the episode to know what they are. If you want to check it out already now you can check it out at bit ly globalagile 26. That's the numerals 2 and 6 at the end. So one more time, that's bit ly globalagile 2, 6, all one word, all lowercase. And 2 and 6 are the numerals 2 and 6. So stick around till the end of the episode and I'll tell you what's in store. But for now, on to today's episode.

[Pasco]

Hello, everybody. It is Thursday Here on the podcast this week we have with us Peter Merrell. Hey, Peter, welcome back.

[Peter Merrell]

Hey, Pasco. It's a pleasure to be here again.

[Pasco]

Likewise. And we had a great conversation yesterday about throughput accounting and being scientific about our work. So the next question is definitely in that line. We'll talk about success in a minute and there will be some science involved, I'm sure. But first, the core role, or, sorry, the core cycle loop of being scientific is learning from experience. And that's what we try to do in Agile retrospective. So I want to know what's your favorite Agile retrospective and why?

[Peter Merrell]

So in xscale, we have a structure we call the Camelot model, and it's not that different from a lot of other models, but it takes advantage of a technique that was kind of forgotten or lost after some of the early Toyota production system manufacturing breakthroughs. And it's a technique called a quality circle. So the idea is very simple. Let's say that we have teams of six people. I'm going to pick that relatively arbitrarily. It's a whole bunch of stuff from Dunbar that explains why that's not. Give your number and I'm not going to go there. Let's say it's six people. We've got a number of these teams. Why do we only have retrospectives inside a single team? How is learning going to flow from one team to another? Well, we can have big all hands meetings, we do workshops, we can do all kinds of. We can do open spaces and it's all slow. It'll be really good if learning could flow continuously across the fabric of Teams throughout our swarm or throughout our organization. How can we do that? Well, let's say that we're going to break three teams of six into six quality circles of three people each one from each team and they're going to meet for 10 minutes, half an hour once a week and they're going to talk about the problems they're facing and the ideas that have come up and how they can help each other and how they can enable things for each other and how they can solve constraints for each other and. And they're going to take two kinds of idea back to their team. First kind of idea is a proposal for a piece of work, something that would make life better for the teams as a whole. Second kind of idea is a way of aligning their ways of working, a treaty, a working agreement between the teams. And then the teams are still autonomous. They can decide whether they're going to take these ideas on or prioritize how they're going to respond to them and so on. But the neat thing with quality circles is if you hold them regularly and you hold them before your team gets together and makes decisions about what it wants to do to plan its next bit of work, if it's going to do continuous planning. And maybe it's more a matter of just sticking these things on a board. If you're swarming or if you're mobbing, going, okay, what's the next thing we're going to do above everything else? And we're not going to do any queuing theory at all. There's lots of ways of doing that. But the neat thing about doing this regularly is that learnings flow across the organization. And that's more valuable than anything you can come up with with a retrospective in your team by yourself.

[Pasco]

Yeah, absolutely. Cross team retrospectives and quality circles. Quality circles, which is a very old practice from the industrial world that we can still benefit from.

[Peter Merrell]

I will say three people is magic for sharing learnings because while one person is explaining something, another person's listening to them. Third person is thinking about where's the conversation going to go next? So you get this beautiful hum. If you get your quality circles to meet in parallel standing next to whiteboards as a coach, you listen for a certain noise that a healthy self organizing team makes as a hum. And you know that noise as well as I do. When you have six of these three person quality circles, you will hear the most beautiful symphony of that noise you ever hear in your life. And the beautiful thing about this quality circle idea is it's not Limited to just three teams. You can do this at multiple levels and you can actually have people go and take part in representing a group of teams. So in terms of a swarm or larger structures, and you can keep doing this face to face. Doing it face to face minimizes the middlemen and that means it's in the manifesto. Face to face communication is always the best way to go about doing this. So this gives us a mechanism for doing that across organizations. You can make a fabric of it.

[Pasco]

We'll put the link in the show, notes for people to go in and check out quality circles. And of course we do this retros because we want to succeed as Scrum Masters. And obviously before we can do that, we need to define what that is. So when you talk to Agile coaches and Scrum Masters all over the world these days, Peter, what do you define success for Scrum Masters?

[Peter Merrell]

I think that Scrum Master is a self defeating role. I don't think that it should be a permanent thing. I don't think it should be an organizational role at all. I love the idea of leadership as a service that every member of a team is providing their team, every member of a swarm is providing their swarm. So the question then is what is the protocol of leadership as a service without middlemen, without product owners, Scrum Masters without these roles, how do we do this? And there is a very simple protocol you can apply that we get from the Haudenosaunee. If no one heard of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy before they were the successful direct democratic version of a republic that existed in North America before the usa, a lot of the founding fathers of the USA borrowed their stuff. There were limiting factors in what the Haudenosaunee did as well. The neat thing with leadership as a service is it's such a simple protocol that you can apply this generally no matter what structure your organization takes and get huge benefits from it. And the neat thing from the point of view of a Scrum Master or a coach is you can get this to be something that people are using peer to peer, treating each other as adults, not looking at you as the parent and themselves as disempowered children. This is going to be a self organizing team. Then they have to be able to self organize whether you are there or not. And once they can do it without you, well then you need to go to the next thing because they don't need you now.

[Pasco]

So one of the things that I always ask, because this is the we should work ourselves out of a job answer is something that recurringly comes up. And one of the things that I want to ask is, all right, but let's assume that is the definition of success. How do I know if I'm getting closer? Because, I mean, let's be honest, nobody wants to see themselves as not necessary anymore. So how do we keep ourselves honest to that premise of what success means?

[Peter Merrell]

So I mentioned that this leadership as a service, as a protocol, and we'll include that protocol in the show notes. But if I can do these things quickly, if I can make that steel thread of alignment happen, then my next job is to grow it. How do I grow it? Well, I'll split it in two and I'll backfill with the next most progressive people in the organization. Because I always want to start with the most progressive people. I can find them with an open space. So the neat thing about leveraging this idea of growing capability is that now I always have a next thing to do. I always have more challenges until I have transformed the organization as a whole, or at that point, obviously the organization doesn't need me. That's great. That's a wonderful thing to have on your resume. But the neat thing about doing these little engagements, these little change actions, is that you can make people happy in, let's say, an 8 to 12 week period and get a really good reference internal to the organization. People will recommend you to the people they trust. Hey, this guy solved a problem for me. He can solve your problem. That's the kind of stuff that you want. You don't want to be constantly relying on the mercurial boss of bosses for your daily bread. You want to make that person happy, but you want to be able to show them a whole bunch of wins that you were able to get without depending on them. And the neat thing about this idea of growing the capability, growing the new organization outside of the bottom that is the old organization, is that there's no friction out there. It's like a superconductor for change. And everybody who's involved wants this to work. So when you bring new people in, all you have to tell them is if you don't like the way you're working with these people you already know and trust. It doesn't depend on me. It depends on your relationships with them. If you don't like that, you can go back to the old organization. It's fine as long as they're not in a place where they're risking something, they're keen to make it work as well. They want to see this work. It's much better than what used to happen so you can grow it fast. I did this with a group of 300 in nine months prior to going into the Commonwealth bank gig. That was what actually got me that job the second time and and proved that this works. And I was the only change agent there and I began to think that change agent was itself the wrong way to look at this. What we really want is change participants and change leaders. And what you're doing as a coach or as a scrum master, I'm just going to call it the same thing. For now, what you're doing is transforming change participants into change leaders.

[Pasco]

I really like the Distributed leadership model Leadership Business Service sounds like another great bonus episode. So you got two in the backlog now, Peter. I hope you have enough time for us to book those. It's going to be a lovely conversation, I'm sure. Thank you for sharing that with us, Peter.

[Peter Merrell]

No worries. My pleasure.

[Podcast Host]

Hi there friends. Thanks for sticking around till the end of the episode. So let me tell you what's coming on May 4th. We're running the Global Agile Summit. It will be online and I want you there this year. We have four tracks and each one is built around real conversations with practitioners. No slides, no keynote theater, just honest interviews with people doing the work, just like you. The first track is AI in organizations where practitioners show what actually works. No hype, just AI that makes your Monday better. Happy Monday everybody. And then we have the People track honest conversations about putting humans at the center of how we work and keeping them there. And third is Agile in Construction. And yes, I really mean brick and mortar construction. Lean and Agile, Actual job sites Field leaders Removing waste Teams transforming how buildings get built. Stay tuned for what I think will be a super track on Agile in Construction. And the fourth track is Agile in Gaming. How Game studios Ship without Burning out Agile Inside the Creative Pressure Cooker over the years We've had more than 12,000 participants since 2017, the time of the first summit organized with the podcast, and this year we're making it easier than ever to join. You can register for free and get access to the Summit sessions live during the event week. That's May 4th to May 6th. Or you can grab the Practitioner Pass and get immediate access to last year's keynotes from Jurgen Apollo, Gojko Adi and Mirete Kangas right now, even before the Summit starts. So grab your Practitioner Pass and start learning today. Head on over to bit ly globalagile 26. That's 2 6, the numerals 2 and 6 sign up and I'll see you on May 4th. And one more time, here we go. Bit ly. Globalagile 26. All lowercase, all one word and 26. That's the numeral 2 and the numeral 6. I'll see you on the conference floor.