Definitely, Maybe Agile

Organizational change resistance isn't dysfunction, it's a system doing exactly what it was built to do. Peter and Dave break down why structures, incentives, and leadership behavior create that resistance, and how AI is now exposing it faster than ever. Dave and Peter dig into what they call the organizational immune system: the structures, incentives, and habits that keep a company sta...

Organizational honesty starts with information: can your team actually see what's happening, and can they say it without fear of pushback? Dave and Peter dig into why teams shade the truth when a deadline is on the line, and what actually creates room for honesty instead. They talk about the difference between activity data and real information, why cheap, near real-time visual management bea...

AI is making it faster and cheaper to ship features. That doesn't mean you should ship more of them at once. Peter and Dave dig into a pattern they're both starting to see: organizations using AI-assisted development as a reason to bring back big upfront planning and large project releases. The logic makes a certain kind of sense. If AI can build faster, why not design bigger? But that r...

Tommy Cotter is Director of Data Products at Benzinga, a financial media company building the data infrastructure that sits behind trading platforms and investment apps used by millions of people daily. He's been navigating the shift to AI-assisted workflows in a space where speed and accuracy aren't just nice to have - getting it wrong has real consequences. In this episode, Peter and D...

Royce Sin spent a decade at HSBC automating things nobody asked him to automate. He didn't ask for permission. He just did it, showed people the results, and let the time savings speak for itself. That instinct, to question why things are done a certain way and then actually do something about it, is what eventually led him into the AI space. In this episode, Peter and Dave sit down with Royc...

As AI handles more of the foundational work, entry-level engineering roles are disappearing. Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock examine why that trend is short-sighted, what junior developers actually contribute to team growth and AI adoption, and how organizations that skip early-career hiring may be trading long-term capability for short-term convenience. This week's takeaways: Labeling the n...

Conference season is back, and so are the real conversations. In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock catch up after a busy stretch of travel and dig into something Dave has been road-testing at conferences: why most people given access to AI tools freeze up, and what actually helps them move past that. Dave ran a workshop at the Global Scrum Gathering in Vancouver for non-technical role...

Most organizations think they're doing AI. They've bought the licenses, rolled out the tools, and told the team to start using Copilot. But adding AI on top of a 40-year-old process isn't transformation. It's decoration.  Andre Kaminski, Director of Advanced Technology Solutions at WorkSafeBC and author of "The AI-Native Software Development Lifecycle," joins Peter an...

Agreeing on an idea doesn't mean you both understood the same thing. Dave Sharrock and Peter Maddison dig into why shared context breaks down in practice, and how AI makes that problem harder to ignore. This week's takeaways: Intent is always imperfect. Define how you'll validate it, not just what it is. Ambiguity in context isn't a bug. It's necessary. Validation is how y...

It doesn't happen all at once. A great idea comes out of a strategy session. Someone turns it into a PowerPoint. Another person summarizes that PowerPoint with AI. By the time it reaches the team building it, the sharp edges are gone and nobody quite remembers what made the idea worth pursuing in the first place. Peter and Dave dig into a problem that's older than AI but getting harder t...

Most organizations think they have a capacity problem. They usually don't. What they have is a work-in-progress problem. And those two things call for very different solutions. In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock dig into one of the most persistent headaches in organizational management: capacity tracking. Why does the instinct to measure utilization backfire? Why does loading p...

AI is changing how products get built. That part isn't news. But it's also changing who needs to do what - and that's a conversation most organizations haven't had yet. In this episode, Peter and Dave dig into one of the more interesting tensions emerging in 2026: as coding agents take on more of the actual development work, the thing that drives quality output isn't just...

A lot of organizations are betting that AI will make their teams faster. Some of them are right. Most are solving the wrong problem. AJ Bubb, founder of MxP Studio and host of Facing Disruption, joins Peter and Dave to talk about what actually happens when AI lands in a development team without fixing the system around it. If engineers can't get approvals, can't get access, and spend hal...

Most organizations are running some version of a project operating model or a product operating model - or, more honestly, an uncomfortable mix of both. In this episode, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock get into what actually separates these two approaches, where the tensions show up, and why copying what works somewhere else rarely lands the way you expect. They dig into how the nature of your wo...

Product manager. Product owner. Project manager. Three roles that often exist in the same organization, sometimes in the same meeting, and frequently stepping on each other's toes. In this episode, Dave and Peter break down what actually separates these roles, why the confusion happens, and what it costs when the lines blur in the wrong ways. They dig into the difference between a project-cen...

Most organizations are somewhere between experimenting with AI agents and quietly hoping nothing breaks in production. Logan Kelly, CEO of Waxle AI, has spent a lot of time in that gap, and he thinks governance is the piece most teams are walking past too quickly. In this episode, Logan joins Peter and Dave to talk about what agentic governance actually looks like in practice, why a single consist...

Most conversations about AI focus on what it can do in a controlled setting. This one doesn't. Callum Sharrock spends his days deploying AI systems in real environments, watching them succeed and fail in ways no simulation predicted, and reporting what he finds. His conclusion? The trend line is steeper than most people realize, and snapshot thinking is getting a lot of organizations into tro...

Something is shifting inside organizations right now, and it's creating a split that's hard to ignore. AI is compressing the time it takes to generate, validate, and prototype ideas. Some people inside your org are moving at a completely different speed than the systems built to support them. Peter and Dave are calling it the great decoupling, and it's already happening whether you&...

A few times in tech, two streams collide, and everything changes. David Kilzer has spent 50 years putting automation to work in manufacturing and distribution around the world, and he thinks we're at one of those moments right now. The convergence of AI and humanoid robotics, in his view, is the biggest shift humankind has faced since fire. In this episode, David joins Peter and Dave to unpac...

Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock sit down with Steve Pereira, founder of Visible Flow Consulting, to talk about something most organizations get backwards: the obsession with efficiency at the expense of actual flow. Steve works with large companies to improve operational performance through value stream mapping and continuous delivery. But the conversations he keeps having aren't about cutti...

The marketplace is full of AI noise, but what does it actually mean for how organizations innovate and learn? Dave and Peter revisit the classic pioneers-settlers-town planners model and discover something unexpected: AI has reversed the flow. Where organizations once looked up the chain for scaling lessons, now large enterprises are watching small explorers to understand disruption, while entrepr...

You know that expensive software system your company bought that everyone... stopped using? Deborah Kaminetzky sees this pattern constantly. Projects delivered on time and on budget that still fail because nobody wants to touch them. Deb brings a unique lens to technology implementation. She's a former attorney turned project management consultant who specializes in what she calls the "m...

What happens when you need to ship software in environments where failure isn't just expensive, it's catastrophic? Ivan Gekht, CEO of Gehtsoft, joins Peter and Dave to challenge how we think about agile delivery in high-stakes, regulated systems. Forget the innovation lab. Ivan argues that real innovation happens 10 minutes at a time, every day, at your desk. He shares why learning witho...

As we close out 2025, Peter and Dave are making predictions about what's coming in 2026, especially around AI, organizational change, and how teams actually work. They cover five key predictions: AI moves from tools to organizational capability : Organizations that invest in literacy, governance, and data foundations will pull ahead of those just sprinkling AI on top and hoping for the best....

What happens when your greatest strength becomes your biggest blind spot? In this episode, Peter and Dave sit down with Jill Macauley, COO of Behavioral Essentials, to explore how self-awareness shapes better leadership. They dig into why even talented leaders struggle with identity shifts, how generational expectations are changing the workplace, and why the best coaches focus on small tweaks rat...