Exploring the Human edge in Agile
A philosophical piece about a lost package, a hotel front desk, and a film about dolls. The welcome is the first thing we cut and the last thing we can replace. Somewhere between a delivery van and a pick-up point in a corner shop, my package stopped existing. The tracking page said it had been … Read more
You’ve run the flawless session. Tight agenda, sound structure, good questions. And the room stayed shut anyway. That closed room is the half nobody trained you for. Not the technique (you have the technique). It is the layer underneath: the welcome as a designed act, the room before anyone speaks, your own state as the … Read more
I found the word “hostmanship” during a late-night reading rabbit hole. The kind that starts with a question about psychological safety and somehow ends at 1AM with you ordering a book from a Swedish publisher you’ve never heard of. The book was Gunnarsson & Blohm’s Hostmanship: The Art of Making People Feel Welcome, and the … Read more
Building on the first day’s look at silos, antipatterns, and the AI catalyst, the second day of the Online Scrum Master Summit 2026 carried the conversation further: from Scrum’s own rulebook getting an unofficial expansion, to the hardest skill in coaching turning out to be silence, to the idea that the org chart itself might … Read more
In 2024, I joined the Online Scrum Master Summit for the first time, an event filled to the brim with insights that inspired me as an agile coach and scrum master. The summit has a broad roster of speakers from across the world, each bringing their own view and practical guidance. This year marks its … Read more
Most days, you would have no trouble spotting me. A tattoo emblazons my chest and peeks out over my collar. Thick silver hoops in both ears. All black, leather suspenders, a bald head and a big beard. I have been told, affectionately, that I look like a queer villain, somewhere between a Star Wars bad … Read more
We have a ritual, my husband and I. After a meal out, on the walk home or in the subway, we debrief. And not just the food; we especially focus on the service. The way the host looked up when we walked in, or did not. Whether anyone noticed when a glass sat empty too … Read more
Resilience is in the smallest of things. I live next to a busy road. There’s a small crack in the concrete. It’s barely wide enough to notice, and yet a dandelion has pushed through it. No one planted it. No one watered it. The conditions are, by any reasonable measure, hostile. And still, life found … Read more
Death marks the final boundary between life and whatever comes next. While some find comfort in the idea of an afterlife, I personally take solace in the notion that it is absolute nothingness. In that nothingness, all life and all our thoughts are united in total oblivion: the inescapable fate that awaits everything. I once … Read more
Ever since I muttered “no friction, no sex” about a team conflict, it’s become a favourite catchphrase. It kind of stuck, as I love to provoke gasps and giggles. But the point lands: one cannot get to the exhilarating highs of teamwork without putting in the hard work of dealing with tension. Het mag knetteren, … Read more
This has been quite some time in the making. After reattempting the assessment in December 2025, I can finally, finally say it: I’m a certified Professional Scrum Master III (PSM III)! And I’m not exaggerating when I say this was one of the hardest exams I’ve ever taken. PSM III is a stress test of … Read more
Last year, I turned forty, and with that, I finally stopped flinching when someone called me “daddy.” In fact, I started encouraging it. It felt, strangely, like an arrival. I tell myself that this is a respectable age to claim the title. My partner agrees. He affectionately counts the grey hairs in my beard while … Read more
Speaking about nostalgia, my reel feeds of both YouTube and Instagram are tightly attuned to my preferences. It was no surprise I got a reel with a fragment of the 1999 Newsnight interview with David Bowie by Jeremy Paxman, about the rise of the internet and its impact on society. It urged me to look … Read more
More often now, my mind goes back to memories from decades ago. As I get older, I find myself daydreaming about the 80s and 90s when I was a kid. A time of CDs, video games, Saturday morning cartoons, and youth-defining songs. When I hear a familiar melody from 1999 (oh, what a year that … Read more
I once dabbled in project management. Then I found Agile, and I worked hard to say the world of project management goodbye. Structure-heavy schedules, Gantt charts, control disguised as communication, bickering over billable hours. I traded all that in for servant leadership, flow, and emergent design. Or so I thought. Because here I am again. … Read more