When the Gospel of Agile Becomes a Barrier to Change | Steve Martin

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches
Episode: When the Gospel of Agile Becomes a Barrier to Change | Steve Martin
Date: December 29, 2025
Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Steve Martin, Agile Coach & Founder, Agile Master Academy

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Overview: The Challenge of Agile Purism and Empathy in Transformation

In this episode, Vasco Duarte sits down with seasoned Agile coach Steve Martin to discuss a prevalent, but seldom-admitted, barrier to organizational change: when Agile zeal transforms into dogma, becoming a roadblock rather than an enabler. Steve shares his personal journey from project management into Agile, his initial missteps as a so-called "Agile purist," and the crucial lesson that true leadership in transformation means meeting people where they are—rather than browbeating them with the "Gospel of Agile." The conversation is rich with anecdotes about failure, self-awareness, and the evolution from enforcing frameworks to fostering real change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Steve's Entry into Agile and Initial Impressions

• Their Backgrounds and Early Careers

  • Steve started as a project manager in the charity sector, inspired by the energy of tech companies in the early 2000s.

    • "I started off as a project manager and I kind of fell into, into agile. I had never heard of it... I stumbled upon Agile and, and this thing called Scrum Master came up... It was like, I came home, I was like this, this is amazing." — Steve Martin [02:13]

  • Vasco resonates, reflecting on how project management felt like a constant battle against entropy, while Agile offered a more adaptive, system-oriented approach.

    • "Project management is unfortunately fighting against entropy, right?... In Agile we have this approach where entropy is just signals, it's information and that information is absorbed and handled by the system because the system is constantly adapting." — Vasco Duarte [04:43]

The Reality of Failure and the Trap of "Agile Preaching"

• Early Career Struggles & The 'Agile Bible' Trap

  • Steve shares candidly about the insecurity and failures of his early Agile days, especially as he became a coach.

    • "I failed an awful lot in the beginning... I was a real purist. When I started off as an Agile coach, I felt like there was this army behind me and like the bible of... the agile guide, the Scrum guide was the thing that, that I would be carrying around with me." — Steve Martin [07:51]

  • He describes feeling bolstered by the Scrum Guide, falling into the trap of weaponizing it:

    • "It's like, well, no, you, it's not me you're listening to. It's. It's this Bible, right? You've got to, you've got to follow this... and of course, the problem with that is you're pushing against the tide." — Steve Martin [08:19]

• Why the Gospel Approach Fails

  • Vasco highlights how Agile "preaching" often equates to invalidating people's past experiences, which provokes resistance:
    • "When we think we are spreading the gospel... we're actually telling people what you believed before is no longer true. And what we need to accept is that everybody needs to get to that realization on their own... we can't be doing it all the time." — Vasco Duarte [09:47]

The Turn: From Preacher to Empathizer

• Steve's Crucial Realization: Growth in Empathy

  • Steve admits it took self-awareness and years of missteps before realizing his role was not to enforce, but to enable.

    • "It took me a while to realize that that's what I was doing. I just felt like I was, I felt the reason wasn't working was it was them, it wasn't me... I need to meet them where they are. I need to be... in their shoes." — Steve Martin [10:48]

  • He connects this change in mindset to Agile's fundamental principles of empathy and customer-centricity:

    • "You need to get into the mind of the customer. And that's exactly what you need to do with... teams, with leaders that you're working with. You need to get into that, into their minds and understand the environment that they're in, have the empathy..." — Steve Martin [11:12]

  • Steve notes that real growth came as he began teaching Agile, allowing him to connect on a "deeper level" and recognize the importance of relationship-building over framework enforcement.

  • "It wasn't really until I started (teaching) that I could work with teams and leaders on... a more deeper level, and start really empathizing where, where they are dealing with... and comes with experience, meeting people where they are." — Steve Martin [12:07]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Project Management vs. Agile Adaptiveness:

  • "In Agile we have this approach where entropy is just signals... the system is constantly adapting... Agile was born in the context of accepting that changes are coming, chaos is natural, and we need to have a system that adapts and thrives in that kind of unpredictability." — Vasco Duarte [04:43]

• On the Problem with Agile Preaching:

  • "When we think we are spreading the gospel, so to speak... we're actually telling people what you believed before is no longer true. Everybody needs to get to that realization on their own." — Vasco Duarte [09:47]

• On the Shift Toward Empathy:

  • "I need to meet them where they are. I need to be... in their shoes. This is what we preach, right? We say think like the customer." — Steve Martin [10:48]

• The Value of Relationship-Building:

  • "Build a real strong relationship so that they can then you can bring them along rather than force them into it, you know." — Steve Martin [11:33]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:11] Guest intro & Steve’s Agile origin story
• [02:13] Steve’s first exposure to Agile and why it resonated
• [04:43] Project management vs. Agile’s approach to change/entropy
• [07:16] Introduction to "Fail Monday" and the spectrum of Agile failure
• [07:51] Steve’s story: Failures as a purist Agile coach, weaponizing the Scrum Guide
• [09:47] Vasco explains why “spreading the gospel” triggers resistance
• [10:48] Steve’s realization: Empathy is the essential shift
• [12:07] The impact of teaching on Steve’s growth as a coach

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Key Takeaways

• Dogmatic enforcement of Agile frameworks creates resistance; real transformation requires empathy and context-awareness.
• It's critical for Agile practitioners to “meet people where they are” and understand organizational and individual contexts before advocating for change.
• Failures in early coaching often spring from insecurity, lack of mentorship, and over-reliance on "the Agile Bible." Growth comes from self-awareness, experience, and focus on relationships over rules.
• Agile is not about perfect predictability but about building adaptive systems that thrive on change and unpredictability.

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For Scrum Masters and Agile coaches, this episode is a valuable reminder: Leading change is not about enforcement—it's about understanding, empathy, and enabling others to discover better ways of working for themselves.

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.

[B]

Do it now. But if you're not doing it now.

[A]

Let'S listen to the podcast.

[B]

Hello everybody. Welcome to one more week of the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. And this week, joining us from beautiful Brighton in the UK is Steve Martin. Hey Steve, welcome to the show.

[C]

Vasco, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here.

[B]

Absolutely. It's a pleasure to have you. So for all of you who don't know yet, Steve, Steve is an agile coach, mentor and the founder of the Agile Master Academy. After over 14 years leading Agile transformation programs, he's on a mission to elevate Scrum Masters, building high performance teams, measurable impact and influence, and of course raising industry standards of agile mastery through practical, pardon me, and evidence led coaching. And this is very important, of course, and I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about this evidence led coaching during this week. But to start us off, Steve, tell us a little bit more about yourself and how did you end up becoming a Scrum Master in the first place?

[C]

Well, Vasco, we're going back a number of years now. I actually had hair when I first started.

[B]

I did too. Look at that.

[C]

Not as gray as where I am now as well. I started off as a project manager and I kind of fell into, into agile. I had never heard of it. I was really buzzed and inspired by the kind of tech companies of the early 2000s, like the real kind of big, you know, the dot com era. I sort of probably hit the back end of that and I really wanted to get involved. How do I use my skills to get involved in this? I wasn't an engineer in any capacity, a software engineer or anything, so I, I was a project manager working for a charity and I just basically stumbled upon Agile and, and this thing called Scrum Master came up and I, I went into the Scrum Master course with Joel Bear where basically two days, and I learned. It was like, I came home, I was like this, this is amazing. Like I'd been working, I've been in a career, in different careers for about 15 years by this point and I had never seen anything like this. It was like a real.

[B]

It felt natural to you, right?

[C]

It felt natural, but it, it was also, I think the fact that it was just so fluid. It didn't seem like there was any real angst, right? Where, where there was just, you know, like if, if you're working in a really bureaucracy, bureaucratic organization, which is where I spent a lot of my early career, you would, all you would see would, would be barriers and, and, and everything just felt like such an effort, whereas working with, with a Scrum team, and that's how I, how I got into it. I joined a very small software company and I just looked around. Everybody just seems to have such energy and such a will to want to do it right, you know, and to, and to. Actually there was just, there was just a real buzz and so it was so different to anything I'd experienced before, you know?

[B]

Absolutely. I, it feels familiar to me, that aspect of being a project manager and understanding, you call it the angst and the obstacles like that, that's very, very much like project management felt back then and it still feels today. Because of course project management is unfortunately fighting against entropy, right? Like, like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the universe tends to entropy. If you do nothing, it reverts to chaos. And that's how. And imagine having to fight that all the time, right? Well, I don't need to imagine because I was there for many years as a project manager. And in Agile we have this approach where entropy is just signals, it's information and that information is absorbed and handled by the system because the system is constantly adapting. And here by the system we mean the whole management approach, the engineering practices, all of that. Right? Because Agile was born in the context of accepting that changes are coming, chaos is natural, and we need to have a system that adapts and thrives in that kind of unpredictability. I don't know if that's how you felt it, but that's how I translate it in my head because I felt the same. I was famously a. Skeptical and I've talked about that a lot Here on the podcast, I was a skeptical of Scrum, I was skeptical of Agile, but the first time I did a project, I said, God damn it, how could we even work in any other way?

[C]

Yeah, I agree. It's something I found, you know, pretty much straight away. Was that real? It was almost like you're looking around and you're just seeing that where people would feel safe amongst this kind of structure and standards. And you mentioned about chaos and unpredictability. I think that's where we've been battling over the last few years. I think organizations tend to want to have that predictability, and so that's probably where we've been battling so much, because it still hasn't properly landed right.

[B]

And there's nothing wrong with wanting predictability. What's wrong is building processes that depend.

[C]

On it existing and it being perfect.

[B]

I imagine that through that realization, I'm sure you have some amazing stories to tell us. But of course, today's Monday here on the podcast, so we have the Fail Monday. And in Fail Monday, we focus on the things that didn't really go as we expected, because even though agile is adaptable and it thrives with unpredictability and uncertainty, the fact is that not everything works out the first time we try it. So we want to explore one of those stories. Steve, tell us that story. We'll dive into the takeaways later, but tell us the story first.

[C]

Yeah, well, I failed an awful lot in the beginning. And I tell you, the first couple of years I spent really hiding the fact that I didn't have any experience and it was, it was really difficult for me. I had no mentor, I had no one really sort of helping me embed what, what good. I didn't really know what good looked like at all. I was kind of trying to sort of fudge my way through it. And so I had plenty of failures of just basically trial and error and working through it. Luckily, I had a. Some really good product teams, engineering teams that, that were very supportive of me. And there was, there was a good culture and good atmosphere and environment there. The, probably the failure that really stood out for me. It was really my early Agile coach career. So I moved into contracting and I started up as a, as an Agile coach, as just one of the first teams that I worked with. I was a real purist. When I started off as an Agile coach, I, I felt like there was a familiar. It sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah. I felt like there was this army behind me and like the bible of, of the agile guy, the Scrum guide was the thing that, that I would be carrying around with me. And it's like, well, no, you, it's not me you're listening to. It's. It's this Bible, right? You've got to, you've got to follow this. Don't, you know, basically, don't, don't challenge me on this because this is how it's supposed to be. And of course, the problem with that is you're pushing against the tide. People are going to be resistant. And if you're just shoving it down their throats and giving them a real purist view, of course they're going to get, you're going to get their backs up.

[B]

And that's very important because actually, when we think we are spreading the gospel, so to speak, taking the metaphor a bit further, we're actually telling people what you believed before is no longer true. And what we need to accept is that everybody needs to get to that realization on their own. They can't be pushed to that realization. Yes, of course it's okay to preach every now and then. Everybody does it. Everybody, literally 100% of the people do it every now and then. But we can't be doing it all the time. Right? Like, we need to understand the context and where it makes sense to go back to why this works, why that doesn't work, and instead try to help people solve the problems they're facing with. And actually, I don't know, that's how I solved it. How did you solve it, Steve, when you understood that, okay, this isn't going to work, this preaching and spreading the gospel isn't going to work? How did you change your attitude?

[C]

Right. It took me a while to realize that that's what I was doing. I just felt like I was, I felt the reason wasn't working was it was them, it wasn't me. And so it took me a long time to really have that big self awareness that actually I, I need to meet them where they are. I need to be. Yeah, I need to think in their shoes. This is what we preach, right? We say think like the customer. Right? You need to get into the mind of the customer. And that's exactly what you need to do with, with product owners, with, with teams, with leaders that you're working with. You need to get into that, into their minds and understand the environment that they're in, have the empathy, almost build Personas from them so that you can then start to work with them better, really, and, and build a real strong relationship so that they can then you can bring them along gone rather than force them into it, you know. So it took me a while to realize that. It took me a, you know, a good couple of years. Wasn't I tell you. I tell you. It wasn't until I really started teaching about Agile and and various different courses that I teach. It wasn't really until I started doing that that I could work with teams and leaders on a, on a slightly different level, a more deeper level, and start really empathizing where, where they are dealing with and comes with experience, meeting.

[B]

People where they are indeed a very important realization. Thank you for sharing that, Steve.

[C]

Well, as I say, I have many failures. We have probably haven't got time to go through all of.

[A]

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[B]

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[D]

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