The Agile Organization as a Learning System With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Episode: The Agile Organization as a Learning System With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guests: Tom Gilb (Agile pioneer, author of the EVO approach) & Simon Holzapfel (Agile thought leader)
Date: December 12, 2025

---

Episode Overview

In this culminating episode of a special week-long series, host Vasco Duarte brings together Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel for a deep dive into what makes organizations truly agile, adaptable, and rooted in ongoing learning. The discussion weaves together themes from Gilb’s engineering value methodology (EVO), Holzapfel’s organizational “ecosystem” perspective, and pragmatic advice for leaders who want to transform organizations into learning systems. The trio covers the balance between structure and adaptability, the importance of value delivery over process adherence, and how social and technological “glue” sustains lasting change.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The “Farmer Mentality” and Learning Organizations

Simon’s approach to creating adaptable, learning-focused organizations

• Simon likens the most effective organizations to ecosystems managed thoughtfully—like farmers, not industrialists.
  • “Take a farmer's mentality, go slow to go fast. If you want to go somewhere, go together as a team.” (Simon, 02:22)
  • The farmer approach emphasizes stability, connection, play, and evolving together, rejecting the linear “industrial mind.”
  • Key to learning: Slow down, nurture team bonds, institutional memory, and a sense of play and clear values.

2. Building Stability as Foundation for Adaptation

• Simon suggests a practical way to “prepare the soil”:
  • Stabilize core roles (e.g., Scrum Masters) for a decade to build deep, tacit knowledge and institutional memory.
    • “Set aside what you think is a staggeringly stupid, large amount of money to say we're going to blow out the constraint of stable scrum masters for 10 years.” (Simon, 04:36)
• This foundation buffers teams—and enables more freedom and experimentation at the Scrum team level (Run Scrum, LeSS, DAD, etc.).

3. Why Aren’t Organizations Adopting Proven Value Engineering?

• Tom shares a candid critique:
  • “Agile is not the most important idea... there's a higher level, more important idea if you're talking to a top manager: value.” (Tom Gilb, 06:03)
  • Value delivery trumps Agile—he calls for “Value Masters, not Scrum Masters.”
    • Value here is defined by critical stakeholder outcomes: “Value is not money or profit... It is the critical stakeholder values like security, which is not a money value, but boy, is it important.” (Tom, 07:12)

4. Balancing Structure and Adaptability

• Agile transformation requires both:
  • Adapt organically as information emerges (learning cycles, feedback)
  • Apply rigorous structure when defining, measuring, and acting on value (strategy engineering)
• Tom’s advice to clients:
  • “Keep the focus on the value flow... Anything that helps you, try them out. If they work, keep them. If they don't work, change. Everything else is secondary. Value flow is primary.” (Tom, 09:03)

5. Doctrine vs. Process: Adaptive Patterns for Complex Systems

• Vasco introduces the concept of doctrine: A body of context-driven patterns (“OODA loops,” mission processes) rather than rigid processes.
  • “A doctrine meaning a history advised collection of patterns that have been proven to work.” (Vasco, 10:44)
• Tom references his paper “DOVE: Deliver Optimum Values Efficiently,” which serves as a value-centric manifesto.
  • “It is quite simply a set of principles that Focus on delivering value. Delivering value. Delivering value.” (Tom, 11:38)
• Simon highlights seeing both “social technology” and “physical technology”—with culture and interactions forming the “air we breathe” in organizations. (Simon, 12:53)

6. Social & Technological Glue in Organizations

• Vasco synthesizes: Value is created in interactions; learning organizations need ongoing, live conversation—not just annual meetings or process adherence.
  • “Any learning organization [is] a continuous process that creates value in interactions.” (Vasco, 15:22)
• Tom identifies clarity of joint purpose as the “essential ingredient of the social glue.”
  • “Scrum and Agile have done zero, zilch, nothing to help us ever. They've not even had a serious conversation about it.” (Tom, 16:22)
• Short-term visible value delivery builds trust—and is thus vital for creating “glue.”

7. Notable Exchange: Jack Welch and Social Technology

• Simon references Jack Welch as someone who understood “social technology,” though often misunderstood or villainized now.
  • “He wrote about social technology in the 80s and 90s... Jack Welch, way, way back, got it. If only Tom and Jack had gotten together, global poverty would have been erased decades ago.” (Simon, 17:50)

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• Simon Holzapfel on Farmer's Mentality:
  “Go slow to go fast. If you want to go somewhere, go together as a team.” (02:22)
• Tom Gilb on Value over Process:
  “Agile is not the most important idea... There's a higher level, more important idea... Value.” (06:03)
• Tom Gilb on what organizations really need:
  “We need value Masters, not Scrum Masters.” (06:37)
• Simon Holzapfel on building institutional memory:
  “Build tacit institutional memory in a staggering way.” (04:53)
• Tom Gilb on priorities:
  “Keep the focus on the value flow... Anything else is secondary.” (09:03)
• Vasco Duarte synthesizing the duality:
  “Learning organization as a continuous process that creates value in interactions.” (15:22)
• Tom Gilb on the missing Agile conversation:
  “Scrum and Agile have done zero, zilch, nothing to help us ever. They've not even had a serious conversation about it.” (16:22)
• Simon Holzapfel on Jack Welch and social technology:
  “He wrote about social technology in the 80s and 90s... Jack Welch, way, way back, got it...” (17:50)
• Closing encouragement:
  “Go Scrum Masters everywhere. Know that you're needed, loved and appreciated. Even if there's no one in the team right now who looks like that's true for them.” (Simon, 19:04)

---

Key Timestamps

• 01:27 – Episode topic setup: Synthesizing the week, ecosystem, “farmer mindset”
• 02:22 – Simon introduces the farmer metaphor for agile organizations
• 04:36 – The case for long-term investment in Scrum Master stability
• 06:03 – Tom’s fundamental argument: Value over Agile as the key idea
• 09:03 – How Tom guides clients to balance structure and adaptation
• 11:38 – Tom introduces his “DOVE” doctrine
• 12:53 – Simon discusses “social technology” versus “physical technology”
• 16:22 – Tom critiques Agile/Scrum for failing to create clarity of joint purpose
• 17:50 – Simon references Jack Welch on social technology
• 19:04 – Simon’s closing encouragement to Scrum Masters

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a nuanced, practical, and sometimes provocative look at what it really takes to foster a learning, resilient, and truly agile organization. Central themes include:

• Prioritizing value delivery over “being Agile”
• Building institutional memory and stability in supportive roles
• Recognizing and bridging both the social and technological aspects of change
• The need for ongoing, value-focused, and context-aware practices—grounded in doctrine, not dogma

The speakers’ advice is clear: Go beyond process, invest in people and clarity, and treat the organization as a living, evolving ecosystem.

---

Transcript

[A]

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.

[B]

Hello everybody. Welcome to our fifth, our last but definitely not least episode of this special week with Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel. Hey Simon and Tom, welcome back.

[C]

Thanks Katya. Great to be here.

[B]

So in this mini series we've explored Tom Gilp's work and the EVO approach to engineering value in organizations or impact engineering. Today we're going to bring it all together because as Simon likes to call it, it's always a system and he even talks about an ecosystem. He'll explain a little bit more about that. But we've talked about different aspects of this whole chain, let's call it the stack, the knowledge stack from Tom Gilb. And we need to bring it all together into this concept of a learning adaptable or adapting as it is, because it's a process organization. So Simon, through the work that you've done and of course the experience you have, what is your perspective on how we manage an organization? As if we really wanted it to be agile, adaptable and learning organization?

[C]

Yeah, we would decide first would we want to eat food grown by Joel Saletan or some sort of monoculture somewhere? If you want the monoculture root, that's fine. And in the short term it's good. And in a pre digital world, it's good. How you do it in the Joel Salatin way as a leader is to be a farmer. Take a farmer's mentality, go slow to go fast. If you want to go somewhere, go together as a team. The way to do it is just really, really simple principles about how do you create a good learning environment that any Educator, parents who's, you know, like, we all know this. This is common knowledge. However, what people have given up on is you can have fun and clear values, you can have play and, you know, these. And just like the linear industrial mind, the zero sum mind, just can't hold that. So if you can just go beyond that and we all feel this like we want to be connected to our work, we want to be connected to our families. You get to a learning organization by just being farmer, speed together, slow down, that's how you start to learn. No nervous system that's like wa. Really builds much over time.

[B]

Right.

[C]

It's think of the body, trust the body, let the body be a body.

[B]

So of the concepts that we've discussed during this week, Simon, what do you think would be the ones that. That would be critical for us to be able to adopt that farmer's mentality?

[A]

Right.

[B]

Growing the organization, as it were.

[D]

Sure.

[C]

So a policy could be from the organization's top. We're going to just stabilize our team of Scrum Masters across the whole org and we're going to say team age matters and we're going to say we're going to empower the Scrum Masters in just that cohort. That would be one policy, easy, simple.

[B]

Thing that could be prepare the soil. In other words, like establish a structure that is stable enough for the other aspects to kind of develop.

[C]

Sure. So if I was to advise a board of a large tech company, what I would say is set aside what you think is a staggeringly stupid, large amount of money to say we're going to blow out the constraint of stable scrum masters for 10 years.

[B]

Whoa.

[C]

That means you'll build tacit institutional memory in a staggering way. And, you know, as long as the board doesn't change its mind, that's going to happen. That accumulation of knowledge, all those measurements that Tom talked about, you'll then have a repository and the humans, that's not going to cost a lot of money. You can put a buffer around that layer and then let all those Scrum teams run. Teams run whatever they're running. Run leaf, run, run dad, run less or run whatever they want.

[B]

One of the things that you were mentioning, which is about this stability that allows the rest of the organization to adapt and grow. I'm thinking that a lot of the ideas that Tom, you mentioned in your books and papers are ideas that it would be easy, in a, let's say, coffee conversation, would be easy to agree. Oh, they sound reasonable. They sound like good approaches. Anyone with an engineering Background will probably recognize many of the aspects that you talk about. So in your perspective, Tom, why is it that more organizations aren't applying these ideas that you've been talking about for decades?

[D]

Okay, now I hate to disappoint some people by saying Agile is not the most important idea.

[C]

Yay.

[D]

If it's an important idea.

[C]

Critical.

[D]

Right. But there's a higher level, more important idea if you're talking to a top manager. Hey, would you like me to be agile? Would you like me to deliver value? What do you think they're going to say? Oh, I want an Agile person if I get no value and it goes negative. You're kidding. Okay, we've got to shift our mindset from Agile, a useful tool for delivering value, and the value itself. And there are many tactics for delivering value. Agile being one amongst many and not even a necessary one. Okay, so we need value Masters, not Scrum Masters. Value is not money or profit, as many misunderstand. It is the critical stakeholder values like security, which is not a money value, but boy, is it important.

[B]

Okay, today, even more.

[C]

But Tom, if for a Scrum team working from a backlog, their ability to do those things is contingent on the quality of what's in the backlog. If you can't control your backlog, you're then in chaos. Is that, I mean, I think that's part of it.

[D]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I hope the backlog is well designed. Strategies towards your value goals that will really give you the value when you do them. Okay, but we got to shift focus to a values plural values stream, a critical values stream. And we need to have people who are value delivery masters, not Scrum masters.

[B]

So when, when we think about this, so we talked about this idea that, okay, organizations need to grow and they grow aspects that we can't control, like people's connections, trust, we've already talked about and so on, and we also talked about this idea of engineering. But what is really interesting for me in this week's discussion is that we are both talking about the need to adapt organically as information becomes available, but also the need to have a very structured process as to how we define what information is important, how we measure it, and then of course, how we track how we are getting into that. So this contrast is very interesting and I want to hear your thoughts on the need to have both ideas in mind at all times. So Tom, let's start with you. How do you help your customers, your clients and the people you advise to hold These two thoughts in mind, that it's adaptability with a structured process around defining, measuring and acting on what value is.

[D]

Okay. Keep the focus on the value flow and anything that helps you, which will be a wide variety of different things for different organizations there, you know, try them out. If they work, keep them. If they don't work, change. Okay. In other words, everything else is secondary. Value flow is primary. That's how I keep the focus.

[B]

How about you, Simon?

[C]

Yeah, because when you focus on the work, you're not focusing on the feelings of people who are doing the work. Those feelings super matter. But if you're letting those feelings get in front of the mission of the team, you're guaranteed to be troubled and slow.

[B]

So one of the things that I've been arguing for is this idea. And now I'm thinking about software, only the software industry, because it's where I am and it's where my focus is at the moment. So I'm not excluding the others. I'm just choosing to focus on, on the software industry. Now for a moment, I've been arguing that we need a doctrine. A doctrine meaning a history advised collection of patterns that have been proven to work. So it's not a process, it's actually a set of many different processes that you can apply in a specific context because doctrine has context in built into it. And an example we mentioned on, I believe it was on Wednesday, is this concept of a mission process, like the OODA loop in some cases or other organizations use different names for it. But it's where are we going? Where are we now? Where should we be? Why is there a gap? And then we act on it, just constantly surfacing this information. I want to hear your thoughts on this, on the idea of having a.

[A]

Set of a doctrine.

[B]

So a set of patterns that are applied in context versus a process, a single approach that should always work. So let's start with you, Simon.

[C]

Oh my gosh. You know, I was so. Can I go second? Because I started to think, oh my God, what is Tom going to say? And then I completely forgot what I was thinking about.

[B]

I don't know, Tom, do we allow him to go second or do we put him on the spot?

[D]

Make him happy, make him happy.

[C]

Okay. And now I've had enough time. Okay, sorry, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.

[D]

I wrote a paper on this called Dove recently, Deliver Optimum Values Efficiently. And it's the manifesto you may be looking for, Vasco. And we can share it with everybody. But it is quite simply a set of principles that Focus on delivering value. Delivering value. Delivering value.

[B]

So basically what you're arguing for, Tom, if I get you right, is using this focus on value and of course everything around it as the catalyst, the enabler for us to discover all of the other things that we may need to support that.

[D]

Good, you got it.

[B]

All right.

[D]

Everything else is secondary, as they say, Agile included.

[B]

How about you, Simon? Like, how do you see this difference between doctrine and process?

[C]

Yeah. So to me again it comes down to what are we actually doing? We're doing knowledge work that is a post industrial process. You know, I see the world if, like, if I, you know those glasses, 3D glasses, like one is kind of blue and one is red, but they come.

[B]

Welcome to the 90s. Yes.

[C]

So for me the red lens is physical technology. You can see it. The blue lens is social technology. It's the air we breathe, it's culture, it's all these things but we don't have. Eric Beinhocker talks about this. Once you can see the world as just a place where our social and physical technologies meet that joyous boundary where stuff gets done, it gets really much, much easier because people can again think like farmers, slow down, go to that team level, look at the values, do all the sort of gilbey and learning loops.

[B]

So I think this is an important point and also something that might even lead to a bonus episode later on, which is this idea that organizations are these multidimensional entities. There's the social aspect, you called it the social technology. There's a lot of technology involved, but it's more than technology. I know that, you know that it's more than technology. I'm just making it obvious. And then there's the actual technology that we use, right? Like you know, email and the physical space and even processes, those are like actual technology that we use. And when we think about this as this double sided, we need to find how do these two things work. And I don't know if Tom agrees with me, but I think that one of the things that is preventing us from looking at value engineering or impact engineering is that we keep on thinking that if we just execute the process, we don't need to care about anything else. If we just have a strategy, whatever the strategy is, if we just have weekly meetings, like talking about scrum, if we just have an annual, whatever, strategy definition workshop with the key leaders of the organization, we just keep on thinking that if that works, then everything goes. And I'm reminded of the work by Eskokilpia, Finnish business business philosopher, who unfortunately passed away a few years ago. But he used to talk about that value is created in interactions. So he was totally defining the organization as a social entity. Now, I admit, I think that he was also ignoring the technological part, which I think Tom brings to the conversation in a very explicit way with his focus on engineering. But I also understand that there's a need for us to consider any learning organization as a continuous process that creates value in interactions. If I think about Tom, your process for strategy engineering, that only works if we can keep that conversation alive throughout the year, throughout the weeks, if we have even just one week cycles. That's where I am. I am missing that glue that brings the social engineering aspects. And we can talk about maybe Tom, about writing a paper on that, how to engineer the social aspect of the organization to get to apply evo, the value engineering practice that you talk about. But what do you guys think about it? Let's start with Tom.

[D]

Okay. I believe that an essential ingredient of the social glue is clarity, clarity of joint purpose. And. And that's the big breakdown. And. And Scrum and Agile have done zero, zilch, nothing to help us ever. They've not even had a serious conversation about it. Now the. Then the engineering process is a way of bringing credible change that gives value and it does it in the short term. And that builds trust. The fact that you really, in the short term deliver something that people find meaningful that will help you keep your jobs. Guys.

[B]

How about you, Simon? What do you think about this bringing the social aspects with the technological aspects and actually being able to make them work together?

[C]

I think that's the $64 trillion question. Start to build good glue factories, and then the problem we'll have is that we'll have, you know, Jack Welch, your listeners. Spit out anything in your mouth. I'm about to shout out Jack Welch.

[B]

All right, you have to explain that because there's a lot of young people listening to us. They might not know who he is.

[C]

Okay, so go to your Wikipedia or information source and look at Jack Welch and look at what he's famous for, the thing he's least famous for, but really, I think his signal genius, he wrote about social technology in the 80s and 90s. He and Deming, like people just villainize him mindlessly because he said some stupid things that have been proven false over time. He got social technology. Jack Welch, way, way back. Got it. If only Tom and Jack had gotten together, global poverty would have been erased decades ago. Unfortunately, such thing did not happen.

[B]

Yeah, that is true. They didn't cross for some reason. Okay, We've opened so many threads that we could develop maybe for future bonus episodes. So if you're listening to us and you have a great idea for a bonus episode, something you would like to explore, just hit us up on LinkedIn. Let us know. What are you most interested in? What is the topic you want us to explore in more detail? For now, I want to thank Simon and Tom. Thank you very much for being here and for being so generous with your time and your knowledge.

[D]

Our pleasure, my great pleasure.

[C]

Go Scrum Masters everywhere. Know that you're needed, loved and appreciated. Even if there's no one in the team right now who looks like that's true for them.

[A]

Alright, 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 Talk, 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 your product owner courses, you name it. You'll get invites to monthly live Q&As with agile pioneers and practitioners, plus a private Slack community which is free of all of that AI slop you see everywhere. And of course without the flame wars. It's a community of practitioners that want to learn and thrive together. It's the best place to connect with community and learn together. So if this podcast has helped you before, imagine what you will get from this podcast membership. So head on over to scrummastertoolbox.org membership and join the community that's shaping the future of Agile. We have so much for you, so check out all the [e-mail] membership because listening is great, it's important. But doing it together, that's next level. I'll see you in the community.

[B]

Slack we really hope you liked our show. And if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes? Share this podcast and let other Scrum Masters know about this valuable resource for their work. Remember that sharing is caring.