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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
The Big Agile Questions for 2025: A Community Reflection With Your Submitted Questions
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This is a special episode, where I introduce the "Big Agile Questions" survey and review some of the questions that you've already submitted! Thank you all who did! . Submit your questions, as we will be reviewing these in future episodes! The Power...
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Vasco Duarte
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. This is a special and I'm Vasco Duarte, your host. Today we're tackling the big agile questions for 2025. So we're going to talk about what are some important things to reflect on as a community, and we're going to review your questions, the ones that you've been sending into our Big Aggregate Agile Questions survey. So thank you all who have submitted already. For those of you who haven't, you still have a chance. Just go to the show notes of this episode and click the link and submit your Big agile question for 2025. Why do we want to do this? Why do we want to focus on the big Agile questions? Well, because Agile is at a crossroads. With the change in 2025 of the PMI, or project management Institute, buying out the Agile alliance, we need to face it, if we don't ask this, if we don't ask an answer that is these questions ourselves, someone else will define Agile's future for us. So in this episode, we'll explore some of your big questions for 2025 and talk about how you can be part of this global conversation. So let's get started. First, a little bit of reflection on why asking these big questions matters. Why is it so important? If you think about it, throughout history, the biggest leaps forward have come from people willing to ask difficult, sometimes even quite challenging questions. If you think about, for example, the Renaissance thinkers asked, what if knowledge wasn't confined to the church, right? Like, what if knowledge was free? And definitely, Gutenberg had a lot to do with that, with the printing press and the exponential distribution of knowledge. The Industrial Revolution also made big changes to our world when people started asking and answering the question of how can we scale human effort beyond our physical limits and of course, our own corner of history. The Agile Manifesto authors asked, what if we build these software processes around people and around aspects that highlight and emphasize the need for people to collaborate in every major shift? Whether it was the Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, or even the birth of Agile itself, progress has always started with this one thing, asking better questions. We have it right there in the Agile Manifesto. We are discovering and also sharing these better ways to build software. And it's now over two decades later, it's 2025, two and a half decades later. We need to keep Agile evolving. But of course, how do we do it? We need to ask better questions. So that's why we launched this Big Agile Questions campaign. We've been collecting this question through LinkedIn substack the newsletter and now also here on the podcast, we're using a survey for that. So just go to the Show Notes here on the podcast, click that link and ask your big questions. And now it's time to review some of those submissions. Many of you sent in questions, and we'll review some of them right now in this episode and also at a later stage. But the goal with this episode is to highlight that we are already asking important questions and to help us focus on what might be some of those answers. So before we dive in, let's take a moment to appreciate that questioning is not only about finding answers, it's also about discovering and challenging the assumptions that keep us firmly rooted in old paradigms. If I think about Galileo, for example, he didn't just ask does the earth revolve around the sun? He was actually asking questions that shattered the foundations of his time's thinking. That's exactly what Agile did, for example, to traditional project management and is still doing, judging from the conversations on LinkedIn and elsewhere. So let's embrace that same spirit of inquiry as we tackle the biggest questions that we have in the Agile community and that you have that you would like us to focus on as a community to answer. So first, one of our listeners Max what comes after the Agile era? Should we enter the Smart Org era where multiple toolboxes thrive? This is a particularly important question, and one that I bet many of you are already asking. What comes after Agile? It's a great thought, but when I think about this, what comes after Agile? I want to come back to this idea that Agile isn't like this defined set of processes and tools that you must adopt. It's something much wider now. Of course there will be something after Agile. I have no doubt. The world doesn't stop. Things are evolving all the time. AI, for example, is a trend, a technological trend that might change many of our long held assumptions. But maybe we need to evolve towards a world where Agile is more of a philosophy and that we locally adapt that philosophy to the different frameworks that we have at our disposal today and in the future. I also want to state that Agile frameworks that we have right now, like Scrum, Kanban, xp, are only the beginning of this transformation. I know, I know it's two and a half decades since the Agile Manifesto, but I don't think that we will stop evolving just because it's been so long since the Agile Manifesto. We will definitely find other ways to develop software. Just like Kanban and Scrum were novel ways to develop software There will be others because Kanban, Scrum, XP are what I call first gen, first generation agile frameworks. There's definitely a lot more to come and I'm definitely excited to be part of that discovery as we develop Agile principles and values further in our community. That is what it is all about. At the Global Agile Summit, for example, we will have some amazing examples of companies and individuals, developers, product people, CEOs that have already been exploring the next gen, I should call it maybe second or third generation agile frameworks. So I'm really looking forward to that summit and to of course, once the summit is done, to share all of that with you guys. But yeah, we need to be there to be part of that conversation. So thank you for the question Max. That was a wonderful question and a very important one. The next question comes from Bob Marshall, previous guest here on the podcast and amazing friend and thinker, and he asks why is there so much willful blindness to psychology in business and software development? Wow, Bob, that is a big one. It's almost like how early economists ignored human behavior, assuming people acted rationally. Of course, spoiler alert, they don't. Agile is about people, but sometimes we treat them, teams, organizations and even people like machines. We expect that people behave predictably, that they behave within a certain structure, and that our job is to set up that structure. And of course I'm talking about here, Frederick Taylor's scientific management ideas. Now Taylor's ideas weren't totally wrong, but of course we've evolved a long, long way since then. For example, we now know about things like psychological safety. So that's something, a set of tools, ideas, concepts that came into our world that give us a much better understanding of how teams work. We also understand that today managers, leaders are working with teams of specialists, people who know more about the work that they're doing than their leaders do. And that's okay, because the leaders shouldn't be doing that work. They should be focusing on other aspects, the systemic approaches that allow us to create motivating workplaces that lead to productive collaboration. So it all goes back to this principle of individuals and interaction over or this value, pardon me, of the Agile manifesto, the value of individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I think that Agile is starting and must continue to embrace what we know now about human behavior, motivation, collaboration. But there's more to come. Psychological safety being one example, NVC or nonviolent communication being another example. Definitely a lot of things, pardon me. So definitely a lot of things that we can explore in that regard and make it better for everyone. So psychology is definitely a huge set of tools or has a huge set of tools for us that will help us in our work. So great question, Bob, and I'm sure we will be talking about that in the podcast in the future. And of course, as usual, you're always welcome, Bob. So welcome to the podcast to talk about this. I'm sure our listeners would love to hear your thoughts as well. Right. And the next question comes from Tsvonimir. We just recorded a podcast with Svone a few days ago. It's going to come out in a few weeks, so stay tuned for that. His question is how can we challenge leaders to step up their involvement while remaining trusted and respected? This is a very important question and I think it is about what leadership means at its core, this being involved because leaders are the ones responsible for the change, whatever that change is, as Deming used to say. But how do we balance this? Being involved with trust is influencing, with allowing teams to grow and express their potential. Some time ago here on the podcast, we interviewed David Marquet. He's the author of Turn the Ship around, an awesome book that I think everyone should read. We interviewed David on the role of leaders and what role they need to take when the work is being done by specialists, experts. We also talked with Ari Pekaskarp about a new kind of leadership. He describes a more humanistic leadership and so on. There's a lot of detail in that episode. It's a great episode. A long one, 40 minutes I think, so check it out. But this links also very much to the question that Bob asked, understanding psychology of our workplaces, teams and individuals. But we also need to translate these insights, psychology, systems, language, in the case of David Marquez, work in, turn the ship around into practical approaches. And here is what I think the agile community can come in and help us find much better approaches. Now, there's a lot of people out there already working on this. Joanna Rothman, Diana Larson and many others are talking about leadership. But I think we need to take this challenge as a community and find those frameworks that leaders can adapt. I mean, we have Scrum for development teams, right? Scrum or XP or Kanban. We have things like product discovery for product owners. These are all things that help people be better in their roles. But we don't have the same kind of coherent set of frameworks and tools for leaders. And I think here is where the agile community can bring their ingenuity, their innovation capability to help leaders in their role. Svane, thank you for asking that question, a very important question of how we help leaders as an agile community and of course, how we grow to become the leaders that we want to see in our organization. More on that in the upcoming weeks because there's a lot to discuss in the domain of leadership for engineering and product organizations. The next question comes from Andrew Mitchell, also long term friend. Hi Andrew, how are you doing in Canada? He asks how can we deliver sooner and meet product deadlines with better forecasting tools? While this one is very close to my heart. No estimates, anyone? The key of course, in my perspective is to shift from this rigid prediction expectations to using simple yet effective forecasting tools that use, for example, historical data, but also include people's insights to help decision making. If there's one thing we've learned from old school project management, the fading framework that is still the 600 pound gorilla in the room. Don't forget that if there's one thing we've learned from project management is that estimates don't prevent delays. In fact, in my own research I've found projects are on average 60% late. I've done a lot of talks about that. But we also know that the larger the projects are, the later they get. And this is a very simple strategy we can use as agilists, right? Like we need to build around shorter, smaller projects that deliver to production. And we've been doing this quite effectively with tools and approaches like continuous integration, continuous delivery. But there's more we need to do, so. I hear you, Andrew. I've suggested an approach in the no estimates book that I think would help prevent a lot of these problems and delays, but it's not over yet. There's a lot more to be developed in this area of delivering on time. So yeah, stay tuned. More is coming, I'm sure. So Andrew, thank you for the question and the last question we will review in this special episode. And we need to keep it short, as it usually goes. Here on the podcast, Liet Feren asks, how can we engage executives in agile transformation? This is a really important question and really apropos because we have at the Global Agile Summit, we have these executives talking. They will be on stage sharing how they have done it. So it's an excellent opportunity for us to learn from them and of course to take stories with us and use them when we're back at work. Here's a thought though. Executives love outcomes, they don't really care for frameworks. In fact, one of the most common phrases I hear from executives is I don't really care how you do it. Just get it done. Now. This isn't necessarily a very productive statement, but it does point to this idea that we need to talk there. We need to speak their language, I think is what I mean to say. And how do we do that? Well, there's a podcast episode coming in the next few days, so stay tuned Here on the RSS feed or wherever you get the podcast, there's an interview with Josh Anderson where we tackle this question directly. One big tip that I can already give you from that episode is the idea that we need to talk the language of leadership. We need to understand their goals, their needs, their approaches so that we can add value to their work. Here on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast, we've done a whole week of episodes where I interview CTOs, check out the link in the show notes. But in that week of episodes, so five episodes, we interview CTOs and also CTPOs and discuss what are their focuses, what they use in their work, what kind of strategies, approaches, frameworks they use, and we need to hear what they have to say. We need to be there with them if we are to help them. At the Global Agile Summit, we're also inviting CEOs to share their perspective. Sven Ditz, for example, will share how he runs a software consultancy without estimates and without contracts. I mean, think about it. Svend's teams are already delivering value before their competitors have even negotiated the contract. I mean, how can you beat that? It's a great story and I'm really looking forward to hear Sven's talk. We also have another great story from an Agile Transformation in a Public Sector organization that went all the way from full old school governmental project management driven organization to Agile and product driven organization. So be sure to check that out as well. Don't miss it. All the details will be@globalagilesummit.com but this means there will be a lot of CEOs on stage sharing their story. And this is your opportunity to hear how they talk, what matters to them, how they think, because that's incredibly important information for us if we are to talk with them in their own language. So thank you Liet, for the question that you sent as well. And there were so many more questions submitted by all of you. So thank you very much to all of you who submitted questions. We could not review all of them here today in this special shortish episode, but I do want to add a few more shout outs to Al Shalloway, a podcaster that I followed from the beginning of my Agile journey for his thoughts and questions on LinkedIn. Thank you, Al. And also to Fred Daikler. He's an organizer at the Global Agile Summit, but he also offered a great question for us to consider and always bring it with us. And also useful when talking to leaders. The question was, what would success look like for you? Why not? Let's start with that conversation with that question. Let's start the conversation with that question. What would success look like for you? And this is critical for us to be asking to understand what teams, leaders, other people need so that we can help them. Just like any great scientific revolution, the enlightenment, the birth of physics, the development of Agile, nothing happens with people in isolation. These are all movements. Just as Agile is a movement that is driven by community, you are the community. So we want to bring all of you together at the Global Agile Summit to talk about these questions, share what we've learned, and of course set up new experiments, things to try when we go back to work right after the conference. Thank you for submitting the questions. We'll definitely tackle a lot more of those questions in the coming weeks. The survey is still open, so check out the show notes and add your question to the list. And in order to answer these questions, we're bringing together at the Global Agile Summit 2025 some of the best Agile speakers in the world. So Jurgen Apello is going to talk about AI in leadership and management. Goiko Adzic is going to talk about product management. Great ideas that he has to share that really aren't being shared anywhere else. So be sure to check that keynote out. And an exclusive reveal. Nobody knows about that. You're the first one to listen. Clinton Keith, who wrote the book on Scrum for game development, will be at the summit. I'm really looking forward to meet Clinton. I interviewed him for the no Estimates book many years ago and I'm really looking forward to have a great dinner and a drink with him. Right, so now it's your turn. What's your biggest Agile question? The one that you want to get the community to help you answer? Go to the link in the show notes, add your question so that we can tackle that in future episodes. And a huge, huge thank you to everyone who submitted their question. There were so many amazing ones and we'll continue to explore them in future episodes. Now, if you enjoy this episode, share this episode with your team, your network, and anyone who's passionate about the future of Agile. And don't forget, subscribe to our newsletter. A lot of these things are being discussed in the newsletter as well. We publish about one newsletter researched in depth reflective article every week. So check out the newsletter subscription, link in the show notes and join the community. Until next time, keep asking big questions and keep challenging the status quo. I'll see you online.