From Agile Theater To Real Value with Michael Gerharz

Help me think through how this episode applies to my situation. Start by asking what I am trying to change. Separate the episode's claims from your suggestions, and say when the notes do not support a claim. Use the transcript to find passages, then check the audio before quoting. Transcript: https://yuvalyeret.com/podcast/episodes/from-agile-theater-to-real-value-with-michael-gerharz/transcript.md ## Published episode notes Ever feel like you’re the “agile person” in the room, brought in to run ceremonies, fix Jira boards, or play Scrum cop, but never actually invited to shape real strategy? You’re not alone. In this episode, Yuval sits down with Michael Gerharz, a computer scientist turned communication coach, to dig into why so many agilists get trapped in process theater, why it’s so tough to voice uncomfortable truths, and how to actually show up as a strategic partner instead of a tactical commodity. About the Guest Michael Gerharz helps leaders worldwide communicate with irresistible clarity, enabling their ideas to have the impact they deserve. His goal is to help you find words you truly believe in about the things you deeply care about. Chapters (00:00) – Welcome and why agile folks feel stuck in the “ceremony” rut (01:00) – Michael’s journey: from frustrated academic to communication coach (02:00) – Why more agilists are turning to communication experts (03:00) – Three big themes: Agile as theater, the struggle to voice hard truths, and the challenge of articulating value (05:00) – The commoditization of agile and the rise of checklist culture (08:00) – The vicious cycle: idealism meets organizational resistance (10:00) – Why preaching doesn’t work, and what to do instead (11:00) – Method wars, black-and-white thinking, and why nuance is so rare (14:00) – Human nature, echo chambers, and why LinkedIn rewards extremism (16:00) – What actually works: ditching jargon, speaking the language of the business (19:00) – The “curse of knowledge” and why agile compilers miss the mark (21:00) – Meeting people where they are: North Star vs. tactical signposts (25:00) – The PATH framework: Plain, Actionable, Transformative, Heartfelt (27:00) – Where to learn more about Michael’s work Notable Quotes “Agile has become more of a theater than actual progress… the process has become more important than the progress it’s meant to fuel.” , Michael Gerharz “Organizations don’t necessarily like to be shown themselves. The agile mirror doesn’t show your good side or your bad side, it just shows you, and that’s uncomfortable.” , Yuval Yeret “The more you know about something, the harder it gets to speak about it in simple terms. That’s the curse of knowledge.” , Michael Gerharz “If you’re not releasing something at the end of the sprint, you’re not doing it right… but most businesses live in the real world, not the Scrum Guide.” , Yuval Yeret Guest’s Links and Resources Michael’s book: The PATH to Strategic Impact, A practical guide to communicating strategy for real progress, built around the PATH principles: Plain and Simple, Actionable, Transformative, and Heartfelt. https://michaelgerharz.com/the-path/ Free “PATH in a Nutshell” guide: michaelgerharz.com/path-in-a-nutshell/, A concise summary of the core ideas from the book, plus a series of real-world case studies3. Creators and Guests Guest: Michael Gerharz – Communication coach, author, and advocate for plain language and strategic impact https://michaelgerharz.com/ Want to move beyond process theater and get traction on real outcomes? Subscribe, share your feedback, or reach out to Yuval for a conversation about scaling without the dogma. The Scaling w/ Agility Newsletter – https://yuvalyeret.com/insights Yuval's Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuvalyeret/ ## Transcript This transcript was edited from automatic speech recognition for readability. Speaker turns may be wrong or absent, and it may contain recognition errors. Check the audio before quoting or attributing a passage. Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/from-agile-theater-to-real-value-with-michael-gerharz/ ## The friction around leadership Hi there, welcome to the Scaling with Agility Podcast. The podcast for leaders who want their organization to work smarter, improve flow, and achieve better outcomes for real agility. I'm your host, Yuval Yeret. Ever feel like you're the agile person in the room, brought in to run ceremonies, fixed earboards, or playscrunked cup, but never actually invited to shape the real strategy? You're not alone. I've seen too many talented Agilis get stuck as tactical commodities. Sometimes I even feel that myself. Process mechanics instead of strategic partners. I invited today's guest Michael Gerhardz to dig into why that happens, what's genuinely hard about breaking out and communicating our worth, and hopefully give us a path out of this bite. Michael, welcome to the show. Welcome, you've all a great to be here. For folks who are just meaning you, Michael, can you share a little bit about who you are and what you do? Well, yeah, I'm Michael. I help leaders find the right words. I got frustrated at some point in the past after some of my PhDs actually in computer science have been to so many meetings and conferences where I got frustrated with all the great ideas that I've seen being thrown into a trash bin because people just didn't communicate them properly. They didn't even care to find better words. And I just didn't want that for my own ideas, for the ideas in my work group. And so started looking for better ways. And that's what let me hear. And today I'm helping teams, leaders, businesses find better words so that their ideas can make the impact they deserve. So we started talking about this. we were talking the other week about the fact that more and more agulists are turning to you whether it's Scramasters, Edgel coaches, agility leaders, they're coming into your solar system as we say to get some advice. Why do you think that is? What's going on? Yeah, well, I'm not an expert in your domain obviously, but so what I'm hearing here is that there might be three major themes here. First of all, there's frustration with the fact that, well, the agile domain feels to many of those people as turning into more of a theater than actual progress and actual useful tools. Like the process has become or seems to have become more important than the progress that it's meant to fuel. Part of that reason might be the second theme that it's become harder to or it feels harder for them to voice uncomfortable truths. That like the feel-good mentality has in certain parts of the domain taken over the process and so it's become harder to just plainly state the truth or just have conversations in a more focused manner that's geared towards the goal rather than how everyone feels. And a third theme that I'm hearing is that it feels like people increasingly feel that it's become harder to express and articulate their value. So the value that they bring to teams and businesses as agile coaches and to really articulate what the value is in their contribution. There's a lot to impact there. I want to maybe go to the second thing that you mentioned, which is Agilis find it harder to speak their truth. I think a lot of those things might be interconnected, so let's work through that. What I think might be happening, I'll connect it to how I think about this space. I think what's been happening is that as Edgel became mainstream, It crossed the cousin from the people that were willing to hear the truth about the organization, that were actually open to empiricism and transparency about what's working and not working. Those people were willing to hear the message, so were actually willing to do something about it. Over time, as those people got better through agility, agility got more popular, it became the thing you have to do. It got commoditized and what a lot of us actually started to face was organizations that were doing agile as a checklist item where it became much harder to show these organizations the mirror. Edge all is, you know, is a mirror and it's a mirror that doesn't, you know, show you your good side. It doesn't show you your bad side. It just, it just shows you you. And organizations don't necessarily like to be shown themselves. It's, you know, I think we've, I've struggled working with such organizations with how do you portray the message that there's this gap, there's this opportunity of if you go on this diet, it will actually be good for you. It's very different to convey that message to the organizations that are going on an an agile journey today, then when I was going on an agile journey or the original people I was talking to were going on an agile journey. So I think that's part of the struggle. We need a very different communication mechanism or communication strategy to talk to whoever is doing agile today. And maybe that's when I don't know, when I'm an agileist and I don't know how to communicate the mirror, I revert to an easy checklist. I revert to let's not worry about the tough improvements. ## What is really happening in the system Let's just do the minimum necessary to feel like we've gone on this diet. Let's get that gym membership rather than actually do the hard lifting. Yeah, and that only adds to the frustration, right? So if I understand the community correctly, there are a lot of idealistic people in there. People who are really passionate about the methodology and the value that they can bring. And just, well, defaulting to that checklist mode that you just outlined must feel so frustrating for them that you know the better path, but well, the team just doesn't seem to get it. And well, that leads to you like doing it not as passionately as you would like yourself to show up. And so it almost feels like a vicious circle. I think part of the problem here is that you can't force people to see things exactly the way that you do and see what's good for them if they aren't willing to look at it exactly that way that allows them to see it. And so like there's that gap that well a lot of coaches as I perceive them feel like they're on a mission like they know what's right and they feel like they need to preach or they've tried preaching that to them somehow it didn't land and so it feels like people just don't get it. And so basically at some point they just give up frustrated, perhaps look for other routes for themselves. Rather than perhaps try to understand why were they reaching out. I mean, as you described it, it feels like they were looking for the gain but without the pain of going through like looking in the mirror, right? So that's something that we can work with. They invited us in. They were willing to listen. And so now we got to work with that. What we cannot do apparently is just, well, preach to them and hope that they'll somehow magically get it. So we need to find like the common ground, the alignment, the path. So what about agility and the trend. Rangabel for them, struck a chord with them that we can attach to. And that might feel a little uncomfortable at the beginning because it's not like strictly to the rulebook, but it allows us a door in, a step in. It allows us to open the door to like change things one step at a time rather than all once. Yeah, this really resonates for me. I feel like in my conversations with Agilists, there's a lot of black and white. There's a lot of if you don't do this the whole thing, then you're not doing any of it. There's this whole let's call it method wars, the conversation about the scale-ledgeal framework is a common target of these statements. What people have to say about something like safe is that it's so safe to adopt it that you don't really change anything. That's what I hear from a lot of hardcore Agilists. It's so accommodating of how you're doing things as an organization that it's too easy. It doesn't really show you a a mirror at all. And in a way, these people are right. It is possible to go on a safe diet and not lose weight at all, not improve your agility at all. The other extreme is if you take other approaches that require very, very hard diet, it's like 75-odd for people. that's not what some organizations want. And people are struggling. What I see in the community is a lot of agilists are struggling to find nuance. They're struggling to find the way to drive value through evolution, through small nudges, thinking about concrete interventions. And what I'm trying to figure out is, why is that? What's going on? What's so hard about us as a community, as an industry even, people inside organizations, people that are providing services? Why is it so uncommon to find new ones in this world? I guess that's a deeply human property characteristic, right? It's not, to me, it doesn't feel unique to the agile community. It feels like a deeply human thing and something that only seems to get more pronounced in recent years, that tendency to argue why you are right and the others are wrong, to find arguments, be right rather than figure out a way to get it right together. And the way that most people choose to do that is by persuading harder, by finding ever more arguments for why their take is right and your take is wrong. Why I am smart and you got to get smart eventually through my bit wisdom. So they persuade harder rather than resonating stronger rather than understanding. So what about the agile approach is it that will help them get where they want to go in a way that feels comfortable enough for them to take the first step yet engaging and ambitious enough to want to embark on the journey in the first place and also get over the hurdles and roadblocks that eventually will show up. Yeah, you know, as you're talking through that, I'm reflecting on the fact that so many of our communication channels, the places where we get information, there are places that thrive on extremism other than nuance. ## The practical shift Like if you're, I've personally been struggling with, you know, nuance doesn't come across as easy on LinkedIn when you're trying to get rich and engagement. People are looking for the controversial point of view, the contrast, they're looking to contrast things, they're not looking to bridge things together. You can see it in politics, You can see it everywhere. And you know, it makes sense that, I mean, it's sad, but it's also the reality that we're facing human nature until the AI overlords take over, organizational transformation will have to deal with human nature. There's, what have you found that works? like what are some of the patterns that you've seen in communication strategy that that work in an environment where people don't see the new ones or some of these other patterns we're talking through. A couple of things come to mind but I think one of the most obvious things when you look from the outside, like I basically do, is a fixation on the language, an obsession with the jargon, which has a very defined meaning in the domain, which some people are super passionate about using it the correct way, and they tend into lecture people, teams, leaders about, no, that's not what we do, we do it then, and that's called this and that's called that. And that doesn't feel good to be lectured that way, right? Because people who aren't familiar, who aren't as passionate, at least yet about those things, they don't even get that news. They don't even get why you are making such a big deal out of that. It's just a word to them. And so I guess that one way to open the door for the teams and the managers is to use more of their language, to find a translation from the from the agile jargon to the words that they use that make sense to them what it means for them using the metaphors that they are familiar with and that they can make sense of. I think that, I mean, again, that's not totally unique. That actually has a name, the curse of knowledge. I mean, what's the more you know about something, the harder it gets to speak about it in simple terms, so terms that make sense for layman's. But it feels like a certain part of the community is so passionate about that that it even might alienate at certain times. Do you have a specific, maybe let's try to unpack one of these to an example. So do you have a specific term that you feel is considered? These are at least wheeled more often. I can come up with ideas, but let's the commission of done. Does that work? I'm trying to find terms that might trigger this behavior. A lot of time you see, I call us compilers, right? We're both computer scientists. A lot of agileists come from this space. We compile this scrum guide or the safe guidance and you know anything that's not exactly as it's within there we we correct people on it so that definitely happens I'm trying to think of what's one good example where this is driving an unhealthy behavior so like one thing that I see a lot of Agilis do recently is they talk about working software done increments they they are saying listen if you're not releasing something at the end of the sprint it's not considered done yeah right and what do you think might be happening if I let's say as a scrum train I'm telling a team or a leader, as long as you're not releasing at the end of the sprint, you know, you're not doing it right, you're not doing Scrum, the whole point of Scrum is to get things really down at the end of the sprint, and that only includes releasing. Yeah, I think one thing that can happen is that people will think that, well, this guy might not even know might not even know how things work in the real world. I mean, this is a business and we have stuff happening all the time. And it's not like we don't try. It's not like we don't want to get this done. But while stuff happens, and we need to deal with it. And so get realistic about that. And like appreciating that stance that, well, and there's their troubles and struggles and, and while finding a more empathetic way to speak about this, that well, acknowledges that might help in that situation. Yeah, I like that. In the Kahneman Wall, we talk about meeting people where they are, starting with what they have, encouraging acts of leadership, of courage, to challenge the comfort zone. And I think that's like the gray between the black or white. There's a nuance going back to that term in what we're trying to get at with this requirement to be or desire the North Star. It's a lot of requirements. It's a North Star to be delivering, working stuff every couple of weeks, the desire to close feedback loops and adjust course and rather than navigating blind, that's a good desire. Organizations that cannot really do that, okay, nor star, what do we do to get there? That's the conversation and they should be doing it because they realize that feedback is useful for them, that they're actually, it's painful not to have that feedback and to get it in your face at the end. And in some other organizations, maybe release is not needed. Maybe you can get that feedback some other way. Yeah, and I think the North Star is actually a pretty good explanation for what's going on here. Because the thing about the North Star is, Yeah, it gives us direction. But the trouble with it is that while we're in the works, we hardly ever look up to look at it. ## What leaders should pay attention to And even worse, during daytime, like when our inboxes is filling up by the minute, when we're heading from meeting to meeting and while getting that angry customer call, during daytime, we don't even see the North Star. So we need like signposts that help us orient during the day, during the times when we don't have to have the time, or even the environment that provides us with the North Star. And like meeting them there is what might help here. Not just while sticking to the idealistic vision of, this is our North Star, but being open and flexible enough to adapt it to what happens during the daytime. I mean, I think if I look at, I'll add that I, what I see from a lot of Agilis out there, and a lot of the frustrations that both experts like me are seeing, as well as leaders in the trenches are seeing, is that it certainly seems like the Scramasters, The age of coaches, the agilists, the people that are working on agility in the trenches, are not even aware of the North Star. They're driving people towards mechanics and the theater. They are either not aware of the North Star or they don't know how to connect people to that North Star. And I agree with you. There's something that's missing in the middle. this chain of leading behaviors that would get you eventually to what you want and those are the things you should be focused on. But you should be focused on those leading behaviors and outcomes rather than the mechanics. The mechanics are too tactical. The North Star might be too strategic and too far away, we need people to see the path. Yeah, yeah, you're right. And path happens to be a great acronym, right? So I use that in my book as well. Path as like almost a checklist to help you find words that might provide that bridge. So, and the way that I broke it down in the book is that P stands for plain and simple. So, rather than like use the jargon, use the plain and simple words that everyone can understand, that everyone knows what it means. But make sure that it's A, actionable. That, well, it's not just a North Star that says, well, it's the direction, but that helps us figure out the steps that we actually need to take. does the way that we speak about our goals really inform the choices that we need to make and then is it T transformative so does it really motivate us to to go there are we willing to go there is it changing the game or just playing the old game a little better and then is it HR heartfelt so is it something that we deeply care about something that aligns the business goals with the personal goals of the team, right? And so if we check those boxes, we might have a better chance to actually get in the direction that the North Star provides. No, this is great. I think this might actually be a good place to pause. I don't know that we've fixed the challenges of the agilists that wants to make themselves more relevant and strategic, strategic, but maybe the path that you're describing is a good place to start. Where can people find out more about the path to being more strategic? You're interested to dive deeper. Well first of all, there's the book, the Path to Strategic Impact, which is available in where I break it down and give many real-life examples of how company have made use of that checklist and also discuss everyday challenges that you can face in companies and when you scale or in more complex situations. But there's actually a good starting point. There's a free nutshell version on my website, which you can find perhaps you might want to put the link in the show notes. It's michaelguards.com slash path minus in a nutshell. So where you can find where you can download a free in a nutshell version. And just well, have a short glimpse at it. Thanks for joining me today, Michael. All right, folks, that's it for today. I'm Yvall Yerit and I hope you join me again next time for scaling with agility. ## Source boundary These are the published show notes from the podcast feed. They are a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim record of the conversation. The transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors or unlabeled speakers. Check the audio before quoting anyone.