The Liberators Podcast

This episode is about how unreliable, nonobjective, and biased your and my thinking is. As sociologists and psychologists have long pointed out, we should develop a more skeptical and nuanced view of our own opinions. In this episode, we explore eight biases and explore how they influence our beliefs in the workplace. A bias called "regression to the mean" can easily lead management to c...

This year has been challenging for all of us. It wasn't any different for our company, The Liberators. At the same time, seemingly insurmountable challenges are also drivers of innovation. In this personal episode, we share how we are turning the ship around. Our purpose is to liberate teams from dehumanizing and ineffective ways of organizing work by putting them in control of shaping their...

"Teams make people more than people make teams." It may be a bold statement, but there is a surprising amount of scientific evidence that shows the overwhelming effect of our social environment on our behavior and performance. By understanding why it is easier to understand what makes change so difficult. In this episode of our podcast, we explore a different way to understand organizati...

Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn, easy-to-facilitate techniques that build real engagement and involvement in groups of any size. We’ve been using them for a while now. One thing we’ve learned is that coming up with good ‘invitations’ is 90% of the work. In this episode we share some of the lessons we’ve learned and are still learning. This episode is based on this blogpost . In the episode...

There is a problem with traditional learning models where experts tell people what they need to know: it doesn't work. Scientific research tells us that people don't learn from being told what they need to learn. In this episode, we explore an alternative approach called Visual Thinking Strategies. Although only one piece of the puzzle, it creates engaging learning environments by guidin...

What creates Zombie Scrum? One clear theme we — and many others — have found is that people use the Scrum Framework for the wrong reasons. When you ask people in a Zombie Scrum organization what they are hoping to get out of Scrum, you’ll hear things like “more speed”, “more brains”, “more output” and “more efficiency”. That’s very different from the actual meaning of the word “agile”. It’s also v...

"That doesn't work in the real world", "Our product is too complex" and "That works only for hip startups" are some of the reasons that people offer when we ask them why they don't ship faster. In environments with Zombie Scrum, people don't understand why it's important to ship fast. When you ask them, they respond with a shrug. Or with a dismissi...

In this episode, we take a birds-eye view of what is happening in and around us. Technological innovations are emerging rapidly and our work is increasingly globalized, inter-connected and dependent on technology. And it seems to be accelerating: welcome to the technological Supernova! In this episode we capture two complementary perspectives on this supernova and how to survive it. We also connec...

“Self-organization is the process by which spontaneous order arises from something that is initially disorganized.” That sounds very deep, but what does it mean in practice? For such a popular topic as "self-organization", its often remarkably unclear what it means or how to make it happen. In this episode, we explore how Liberating Structures are effectively instruments for self-organiz...

“Stakeholders are less satisfied, less value is delivered and team morale is markedly lower when management hardly interacts with the teams” This is one finding from the 2.000+ teams that have participated to date in our Zombie Scrum Survey. In this episode, we explore the improvements we made to the survey based on the data we collected to data. We also shared other preliminary findings. This epi...

Does your Scrum Team use Sprint Goals? If not, why? Perhaps your team finds it hard to identify a goal for the Sprint out of the patchwork of items on the Sprint Backlog? Or perhaps your Product Owner doesn’t know how to balance the requests from many different groups of stakeholders? In this episode, we bust one of the most persistent myths in Scrum; the notion that Sprint Goals are optional in S...

A simple way to understand Scrum would be to emphasize that its all about releasing faster and sooner. But what if everything that is released isn't valuable or useful? How beneficial is Scrum then? In this episode, we explore the curious case of the missing customer in Scrum. It's a case we often see in the Scrum Teams we work with. Even the Scrum Guide itself makes no direct mention of...

A good start for a new Scrum Team is really half the work. This is where you can start building the psychological safety and self-organizing skills that are so vital to the further success. In this episode we share our approach to starting new Scrum Teams. And we offer 10 practical things you can do with a new team. Or even with teams that have been going on for a while, but can use a refresher. T...

"By indulging in their own desire to 'try new structures' or dazzle the group with amazing riffs and mashups of Liberating Structures, facilitators may actually be preventing users from becoming skilled at them themselves. This episode is a reflection on Liberating Structures, and in particular, an insight that we developed during the Liberating Structures Learning Gathering in 2019...

Almost everybody sees the value of Sprint Goals. But most teams struggle with them nonetheless. In this short episode, we offer 10 Powerful Questions that we've found to be very helpful. Where some of the questions focus on identifying the general direction for the Sprint Goal, others are more about selecting the work that is needed for that. Or narrowing down to the Sprint to what is possibl...

When you work in a team or with others, you'll recognize that conflict is a natural part of our work with others. Where some conflicts are visible, most remain below the surface and manifest only as tension and frustration. They happen, regardless of our intentions and experience. There are different ways to deal with conflict. The Dual Concern Model for Conflict is a helpful way to look at t...

Conflicts are fascinating. They are a natural part of working with other people and can drain significant amounts of energy way from our work together. Yet, for something that is so natural, we're often pretty bad at recognizing conflicts when they happen. For most us, 'conflicts' are those moments when people throw with doors, raise their voices or openly express their disagreement...

What is the Scrum Framework? How does it work? What is its purpose? And how do all these roles, events and artifacts work together? This episode of our podcast is for everyone who wants to learn what Scrum is, or wants to refresh their understanding. Recently, we noticed that we don't have an episode dedicated to explaining the Scrum Framework itself. We often touch on elements or bust '...

Technical debt, or the accumulation of low-quality code, seems to be inevitable when you create software. It is one of the biggest frustrations and demotivators of Development Teams. They are often acutely aware of technical debt, but feel powerless and unable to explain why technical debt should be a priority. Instead, they feel that ‘business keeps adding more features over stabilizing the found...

One of our patrons, Chris Davies, shares with us a challenge that he and his team are facing. What should you do when your team is unable to deliver done and working software within a Sprint? When is it okay to lengthen a Sprint? And what considerations come into play. In this episode we use the Liberating Structure "Troika Consulting" to offer help. In true Troika-fashion, Chris first s...

Recently, we had the huge pleasure of participating in an hour-long episode of The Agile Wire by Jeff Bubolz and Jeff Maleski. Its basically just one hour of us talking about what we care about the most, what we've learned through our work with Scrum Teams and what can is made possible when teams work empirically. We also share a lot of our mistakes (and had a good laugh). But we also share s...

The Scrum Framework urges teams to involve stakeholders. But many Scrum Teams struggle to do so. For some, involving one or two internal stakeholders seems plenty. For others, stakeholders can only be involved when the entire product is done. In a previous episode , we described one of the symptoms that let you know that your stakeholders are not adequately involved. This article explores the main...

In this episode we make a bold argument: stop using separate environments for development, testing, acceptance, and production - commonly called DTAP. Why? Because DTAP-pipelines create queues and accumulate all sorts of waste. Not only does this cost you a lot in terms of money and effort, they also make it harder to respond quickly to changing needs and emerging issues. In this episode, we explo...

In the past, we often corrected how people spoke about work. Whenever someone mentioned “project”, we would correct it to “product”. With a pedantic tone, we would explain that “we’re building a product here, not doing a project” (with an implicit “you silly”). People who are passionate about Scrum usually don't love projects. They are believed to be the opposite to what we're trying to...

Our brains have not evolved for complex work. Our memory is limited. We make decisions based on heuristics instead of a full rational analysis of all the facts. And that is exactly why the Scrum Framework works so well: it helps us think by Sprinting. In this longer-than-usual episode of our podcast, we explore how scientific insights from cybernetics, cognitive psychology and human factors help u...