Tune and Adjust Nov/Dec 2025

Crookes Valley Park, 5th November 2025

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
— principles 11 & 12 from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, 2001

I wrote last month that I'm working on withholding opinion. This is all very well, but I now find I have very litle to say, and this newsletter, due by the end of November and now four days late, still has no fuel to make it go. Better write something, anything, really, so I'll tell you what I've been up to this past week, in terms of work, just a few facts—you can form your own opinions.

On Friday I hosted another Scrum Exchange event in London.1 Since I moved back to the UK in 2016 this has been a six-monthly recurring get-together of change agents, consultants, coaches, scrum masters, and others interested in improving the (corporate) world of work. The name dates back to 2006 when I and a few friends organised an event in Palo Alto focused on engaging attendees as involved participants, not passive listeners.2 We wanted to see an end to the tedious sage-on-a-stage conferences that still dominated everywhere. Although this first Exchange was still trapped in structure, tracks and invited speakers, it was characterised by a spirit of interactivity, which set it apart from the traditional conferences of the time. It is this spirit that has morphed and simplified into the open, agendaless, non-hierarchical nature we see at our Exchanges today.

Sadly though, despite its reliance on big, upfront planning, command and control of attendees—led, like sheep, from one room to another according to a pre-selected track—and an almost complete absence of spontaneity and emergence, the superstars-on-a-stage-with-powerpoint-slides model still predominates our industry. It seems to be the water we swim in, so much so in fact that over the past year I was barely aware I was swimming there too, or that I had, after guarding it so preciously, somehow lost my integrity. I organised two online events, The Feast of Facilitators (Spring nd Autumn editions) each with four invited "sage" speakers. Yes, the events were successful, by some measure of 'success': they happened, people came, they listened, they gave (mostly) good feedback, I made some money, but that Jiminy Cricket3 on my shoulder kept poking me and saying Hey you, stop it! This is wrong, and you know it. And it was wrong. I was. It took attending the last Scrum Exchange, talking heart-to-heart with my friends Mandy and Charles-Louis, and reading Mandy's generous, heart-warming and touching tribute to my work that opened my eyes again.

I was prompted to make this topic my newsletter (and yes, okay, opinion is creeping in; difficult to hold it at bay!) after reading a post on LinkedIn about what an honour it was for the writer to be "sharing a stage" with [list of famous Agile people]. The same sense of This is Wrong! kicked in. This is hero-worship; it is idolatry. I began to write a reply, but didn't have the heart to send it. I like the person, and their conference invitation was certainly warranted. No judgement there. But when did personalities become more important than principles? Perhaps they always were, and I just tried not to notice. I won't share a link to the original post, as that doesn't seem fair or kind, but this was my (unposted) response:

I know I should be offering you smiley faces and applause emoticons, but firstly, I hope you know you are equal to any of these people, and secondly why does it matter? Over the past 20+ years I've "shared the stage" with many big name people, but the stage is the absolute least important, least interesting part of any conference (the second least being the speakers). If it is awe you need, be in awe of the attendees instead. These people pay money and give up their time to come and learn. They are the invisible ones, the receptors who hold the greatest of our treasures: our unknown, unknowable future. The speakers, if you think about it, are mostly of the past, some possibly the present, but few offer much in the way of revelation, only repeating what we've already read in their books or heard on their podcasts. I usually learn more, and certainly feel more inspired when attending agenda-free, open space events: those that have zero invited speakers, those events full of nobodies...

I was thinking, naturally enough, of the Scrum Exchange while I wrote my response. And over the past few days I've been wondering how I might find, or create more things like that: open, agendaless events, brimming with wisdom, and spontaneity, structured and paced according to those present,4 not by a faceless (often absent) organiser. And the thought (along with the inevitable termination of the Feast of Facilitators series) led me towards a new creation, namely this.

The Edge of Reason: Online Facilitation Skills for Managers, Coaches and Team Leads

I invite you to read the full description, and consider i) socialising this to your work colleagues, and ii) joining yourself. Being online this is open to anyone, anywhere, including early-risers in the far west and night-owls in the far east. The Edge of Reason has an Alice/Wonder­land/Looking-Glass feel to it, where you suddenly feel as if you have lost your balance, where everything looks the same, feels the same, but then, not quite, where familiar words and phrases take on new meaning, and paradox makes perfect sense. Because that is what facilitation needs to be like. The facilitator cannot be in control, only the one embracing the moment and with the skills to help participants craft whatever happens into something meaningful, and possibly useful. Imagine this as a conversation between a scrum team and their stakeholders.

Alice went on, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where-" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"-so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

And in case you're wondering why you are spending your time reading this nonsense, the Cheshire Cat has some advice for you too.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

1 You can see photographs and read participant responses to this event here.
2 The Scrum Exchange: USA West, 2006. Agility in Motion
3 In case you are not familiar with Jiminy Cricket, he is a character in Walt Disney's 1940 film, Pinocchio, where he is cast as the puppet's moral guide (his conscience). He looks like this.
4 Agile Coach camps, such as ALE use a similar, open, agendaless model. I hope to attend the next on in 2026.

—

November News

Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot." It was that day again, and we participated as we did last year, from a distance, sitting in a park in the centre of Sheffield watching other people setting off fireworks, clapping and saying "oooh!" at all the appropriate places. Tradition!

Our other important date in November is the 14th, which is the day Rayna and I met in 2011, making this 14th our 14th anniversary. We have survived two seven-year-itches. Interestingly, we don't really celebrate our wedding day. It is our first meeting that takes priority. Neither of us could have imagined that, sitting in a Denny's in Wilmington, California that we'd still be together 14 years later,living in the UK, with two daughters. There were many things stacked against us. I'll let you guess :)

Otherwise, life just bounces merrily along, with its highs and lows. I've found something like a sustainable, Goldilocked pace of work: not too busy, not too free, not too rich, not too poor, not too interesting, not too dull. And now, already well into December, it is time to post this missive. As a final thought, here's some wintery imagery from Dylan Thomas.

The crisp path through the field in this December snow, in the deep dark, where we trod the buried grass like ghosts on dry toast.

My next newsletter will be on New Year's Day, with my word of the year.
Tobias

Postscript: I'd like to invite you to upgrade to a paid subscription for my substack. There is no paywall for my monthly newsletters (so you'll continue to receive them whether or not you upgrade) but in July I begun a paid series entitled Simplicity where I critique the world of work, and offer new (and indeed, ancient) approaches that may just save us from the corporate sins of egocentricity, pride, hubris, entitlement, narcissism, monologue and compliance, to name just a few. There are better ways, but to get there requires a breakdown of assumption and habit, not a facade of "Agile". We need to go through an autumn and a winter, to shed what we think we know, all that we cling onto, before we can burst forth into a new kind of spring. Please join me on this journey. Your support, both financially and morally, will be greatly appreciated.

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