The Power of Psychological Safety in Agile Teams | Bernie Maloney

Summary

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Summary: The Power of Psychological Safety in Agile Teams | Bernie Maloney

Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Bernie Maloney, Agile Coach
Date: September 8, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the essential role of psychological safety in fostering high-performing Agile teams. Bernie Maloney, a seasoned Agile coach with experience across hardware and software industries, shares candid stories from his journey, emphasizing how environments that encourage making—and learning from—mistakes empower teams to thrive. The discussion touches on pivotal career moments, the creative responsibilities of Scrum Masters, and practical strategies for building trust and adaptability within organizations.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

Bernie's Unconventional Path to Agile (02:18-08:22)

• Engineering Roots and Early Agile Exposure:
  Bernie reveals his background as a mechanical engineer and how, before knowing the term "Agile," he was already practicing its principles at HP's consumer PC division in the late 1990s.

  • He describes working in a highly complex and fast-paced environment, managing deadlines influenced by hardware constraints (e.g., 14-month sheet metal timelines, 3-month product shelf-lives).
  • The team iteratively planned weekly, mirroring what would later become known as Scrum.
  • “I didn't know it, but I had been practicing Agile for about eight years before I heard the words Agile or Scrum.” (C, 02:20)

• Experimentation and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP):

  • Bernie discusses his interest in NLP, noting its influence on his communication and pattern-recognition skills.
  • He links the discovery of Agile's formal language and practices to his own experiences, affirming: “When I found Agile, I was like, this is the language for what we did in that consumer PC division.” (C, 05:23)

• Career Pivot and Language for Agile Roles:

  • After layoffs at HP and later TiVo, Bernie was guided toward Agile coaching roles. These shifts helped him crystallize the frameworks and vocabulary to describe the collaborative, iterative work he’d always embraced.

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Psychological Safety and "Making New Mistakes" (08:22-11:38)

• Embracing Mistakes as Learning Opportunities:
  Bernie recounts HP's ethic to “make new mistakes,” fostering a forgiving, high-trust environment where honest errors were tolerated so long as lessons were learned.

  • “I could tell you the story of the weekend I blew a million dollars of HP's money and I was forgiven. ... That really embodied for me what psychological safety is in an organization.” (C, 09:47)

• Personal Story: Protecting Team Safety During Retrospectives:

  • In a subsequent role, Bernie faced an organization with little psychological safety and significant distrust between management and teams.
  • Scrum Masters must “get creative,” he asserts—it's not just about following the book.
  • His solution: conduct retrospectives with the team first, then invite managers in only for an anonymized presentation of feedback.
  • “The team knew nobody was going to get thrown under the proverbial bus so that they had good psychological safety.” (C, 11:21)

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Learning Through Experimentation (11:38-13:54)

• Continuous Improvement via Experiments:
  Vasco and Bernie discuss the value of running workplace experiments rather than insisting on permanent change or unattainable certainty.
  • Vasco: “If it doesn't work, we'll change it.” (B, 12:49)
  • Bernie: “Let's run an experiment. Because people are going to be willing to deal with something so long as they know it’s going to end.” (C, 13:03)
  • Emphasizes the need to close the feedback loop with retrospectives after experiments, daisy-chaining adaptation across a team's practices.

The Role and Creative Responsibility of the Scrum Master (Throughout)

• Scrum Masters are responsible not merely for process enforcement, but for adapting practices creatively to context, particularly regarding psychological safety.
• Bernie notes, “You learn a set of tools, and then you got to learn how to apply the tools in the situations that you're in.” (C, 10:24)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Early Agile Practice:
  “I had been practicing Agile for about eight years before I heard the words Agile or Scrum.” (C, 02:20)

• On Psychological Safety:
  “Make new mistakes… If you make an honest mistake, you'll be forgiven. Just don’t make it again. Get the lesson.” (C, 08:56)

• On Experimentation:
  “Let's run an experiment. Because people are going to be willing to deal with something so long as they know it's going to end.” (C, 13:03)

• On Management and Trust:
  “You have to get management to recognize that they can criticize something, but they need to criticize the situation, not the people.” (C, 10:39)

• On Applying Agile Tools:
  “You learn a set of tools, and then you gotta learn how to apply the tools in the situations that you're in.” (C, 10:24)

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Timed Highlights

• 02:18 – Bernie’s corporate background and unwitting Agile practice at HP
• 05:23 – The lightbulb moment: discovering Agile’s language for his experience
• 09:47 – “Blew a million dollars,” lesson in psychological safety
• 10:24 – Creative adaptation of Agile tools in low-trust teams
• 11:21 – Retrospective anonymization to protect team members
• 13:03 – The value and structure of workplace experiments
• 13:37 – Retrospectives as continuous improvement drivers

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Tone and Takeaways

The conversation is candid, practical, and encouraging. Both Vasco and Bernie stress humility, experimentation, and empathy as central to Agile success. The recurring theme is that safety, creativity, and learning from failure are what enable teams to perform and enjoy their work. Scrum Masters, above all, are in the business of facilitating both.

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For Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches:
This episode provides relatable stories and actionable ideas—especially for those facing trust issues or hesitant management. Champion "making new mistakes," run experiments, and protect psychological safety as a bedrock for meaningful Agile transformation.

Transcript

[A]

Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

Hello everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And this week, joining us from the west coast in the US is Bernie Maloney. Hey Bernie, welcome to the show.

[C]

Thank you for inviting me.

[B]

Absolutely. So Bernie has helped teams grow businesses to beyond 4 billion in revenue, I imagine a year delivering products from consumer electronics to network infrastructure, services and payments. And I bet beyond, he helps clients achieve performance breakthroughs with their teams, organizations and themselves and believes that leading both, and believes that leads both to outrageous effectiveness. So that's really, really high effectiveness and a whole lot more fun. And that second part is actually a very important aspect of great, or as we call them sometimes high performing teams and organizations as well. So Bernie, that was a short intro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master?

[C]

A little bit more about myself. I'm actually a mechanical engineer by training, so I come at this very, very differently. I've got some other aspects of my background that play into how I approach this. And so the question of like how did I come about? This is a good lead in that allows me to rope it in. I didn't know it, but I had been practicing in Agile for about eight years before I heard the words Agile or Scrum. So I joined the consumer PC division at HP in the late 90s, the very late 90s, as consumer PCs were starting to really boom. And there's a very dynamic environment and it's a fun environment to talk about because it's got a lot of constraints that software don't. And so when people say oh, you can't use this stuff for hardware. I'm like, no, I've done it and I've done it. I get pretty big scale. So in the late 90s, early 2000s, PCs were desk side PCs. They had a lot of sheet metal in them. Sheet metal takes about 14 months from the time you start tooling until you can have product into retail. Motherboards take about nine months. But the shelf life of consumer PCs is only about three months because intel changes the roadmap every three months, which meant, okay, really inspect and adapt environment. The leaders in that division recognized that they needed to do something differently. And so they ran everything with weekly iterations of a plan. So everything we did there maps to Scrum. Now I could talk about it like we had distributed teams, volume manufacturing in Asia, engineering here in Silicon Valley. Go to market for Europe was in global France. Let's see, we had high volumes. Some of our products would have over a hundred thousand units in a single model. High complexity. When I started, we shipped six products a quarter. We grew to 20 in the US by the time I left after eight years, we were doing 200 products a quarter in Europe alone. Okay, tight timelines like, like I mentioned, now the timelines are even tighter because if you didn't get things in when you said you would, it wasn't like you missed one week of your addressable market. It was more like you miss 30% of your addressable market. So real high penalty for coming in late. And tight margins. So most technology products want to have a 20 to a 30% gross margin on a good day. We had an 8% gross margin for some of the products that we ship around Christmas time. 2% gross margins. We'd refer to it as we were shipping rotting bananas. That if we made the call wrong, we would need to put 20 to $100 discounts. We called it stapling 20 to $100 bills on every single unit to discount them, to move them out before the next models that were already on a ship coming across an ocean landed. And we did all that with weekly iterations of a plan with all that complexity. It was magical. Vasco. Okay, it was, it was the most fun I had, you know, to that point in my career. And as I was in that division, they, we, HP decided to build a TV division. Now. Yeah, HP actually shipped TVs. If you go look it up. The HP MediaSmart 3760 was the very first Internet connected TV. Even before Apple TV shipped. It was, it was a bomb. I could talk about why, but that's immaterial. And as that division was folding right as the 2008 recession hit, my boss there said, you really should take a look at this Agile and Scrum stuff. Now, at about that same point in time, I started studying something called Neuro Linguistic programming. There are people who love it, there's people who hate it. I'm somebody who loves it. And NLP is a way of really structuring language well and communicating very clearly. That's one of the ways you can look at it. One of the things it teaches is if you can find the words to describe a pattern, you can repeat the pattern. And so I knew I had so much fun there and I had these tools with nlp, it's like, oh my gosh, you know, I want to do more of this stuff. So when I found Agile, I was like, this is, this is the language for what we did in that consumer PC division. And that kind of started me on my path. I just got lucky. I got lucky at that point. So I had been a program manager at hp, not really program managers, like.

[B]

A project manager for large and complex endeavors.

[C]

That's a pretty decent, you know, my title was actually system manager because I had business responsibility for a billion dollar order product line and I was really helping the teams coordinate. So it was kind of a combination of Scrum Master, a combination of product owner and what I was doing. As the 2008 recession hit, HP let me go and I had to figure out how to reinvent myself. I eventually landed at TiVo, who liked my background in video and wanted to bring some of these new ways of working into TiVo. And when TiVo let me go, look, average tenure here in Silicon valley for the 30 plus years I've been here is 18 to 24 months. Okay? So it's unusual to have long tenures in Silicon Valley because people will change jobs either voluntarily or involuntarily after about that point in time. So it, it, it's still uncomfortable when it's involuntary, I'll let you know that.

[B]

Because that's always uncomfortable for sure.

[C]

And I was approached by a recruiter who said, do you know anybody who would fit this? And it was for an Agile coach. And I looked at him, I was like, oh my gosh, I could do that. And so I went and interviewed for it. Didn't get the position, but it gave me language for what is it that I really do, because people didn't have the language for running teams independently like that point, at that point in time, and so it gave me language and structure. I eventually landed a position as an agile coach with another organization, and that really started me on the path here.

[B]

So one of the things, like listening to this wonderful and varied story of how you came across the concept even before you had the language, as you just said, one of the things that I'm interesting. Interested in understanding better is that when you look at that career that is so diverse, what do you consider that is a kind of, I guess we could call it a pivotal mistake that you made that kind of informed how you took on these approaches, these practices from that moment on. So, Bernie, tell us the story of that moment.

[C]

I've got actually a couple, if I can work them in. So one of the stories I like to tell about, and it's about psychological safety, comes out of hp. The division had, they knew, like, tight margins, tight timelines like I described, that things would go sideways. So they actually had an ethic of make new mistakes. And that really established, if you make an honest mistake, you'll be forgiven. Just don't make it again. Get the lesson. And Vasco, I could tell you the story of the weekend. I blew a million dollars of HP's money and I was forgiven. Okay. It was not a comfortable situation, mind you, but I was actually forgiven. That. That really sat with me because it really embodied for me what psychological safety is in an organization. So that's been a big thing. One of the positions I took after hp, I was in an organization where there wasn't a lot of psychological safety. There was some distrust between management and the teams, and I was brought in to help the teams come up to speed on agile. So I was being a Scrum Master with them. There were product owners in the organization. The managers really wanted to come into the retrospectives. And I knew that was going to compromise psychological safety because there was already a pretty strong level of distrust. So I had to get creative. This is a big part of what Scrum Masters have to do. They have to get creative. It's not just follow the book. It's you learn a set of tools, and then you got to learn how to apply the tools in the situations that you're in. So the compromise that I struck was have the team hold the retrospective without management in the room, but save a little bit of time at the end, then with the team still in the room, invite management in, and then somebody in the team anonymize what the team found. So the stuff that was getting in their way, because honestly, that management team, their heart was in the right place. They wanted to help the teams. And that's what you have to get people to see, is you have to get management to recognize that they can criticize something, but they need to criticize the situation, not the people. And you gotta coach the people that it's about the situation, not your performance. And so by doing a debrief of the retrospective in front of the team, the team knew nobody was going to get thrown under the proverbial bus so that they had good psychological safety. So those are a couple of difficult situations that I've had to handle.

[B]

So one of the things that comes first of all, always make a new mistake. That's a great mantra, right? Like, don't make a mistake, make a new mistake. Because that also speaks to creativity, discovery, insights. You know, if we put the retros in, then also improvement and so on and so forth. And the way that looks, that kind of feeds into the next story, which is always make a new mistake. Now, when you did that strategy of having the retro with the team first and then the presentation for the managers, you are aiming for something positive, psychological safety. But we. You didn't know there was no way you could know how the managers would react to that. And, you know, would the anonymization of the input really be possible and practical and all of that. But this also speaks to, okay, I've made the mistake of letting the managers in. I know the consequence of that. So I can't make that mistake. I've done it already. Let's make a new mistake. Maybe this won't work, but at least it's not what I already know doesn't work. Right. And I think that also kind of being humble towards the future is a very important tool for us in that context. Right? Like, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know what's happened in the past. So let's try something else. And the way I often phrase it is like, let's do an experiment, right? If it doesn't work, we'll change it.

[C]

Yes, that's. That's one of my favorite techniques. Let's run an experiment. Because people are going to be willing to deal with something so long as they know it's going to end.

[B]

Now.

[C]

The other thing you have to do is at the, at the end of the experiment, you need to actually plan to do a retrospective. How did it go? What would we do differently the next time? And then I coach people now. Let's run another experiment. You know, it's just like, start Daisy chaining them. And there's times where I've heard people say it. I've done it a little bit myself. In some engagements where you can use retrospectives to inspect and adapt your way.

[B]

To everything else, absolutely use retrospectives and then you inspect and adapt to everything else that you will need. Some of it is in Scrum, some of it is something new that you need to develop in the context. Thank you for sharing those stories with us, Bernie. Welcome.

[C]

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

[A]

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