“If they don’t like the new direction, they know where the door is.”
How many times have you heard these phrases tossed around during a corporate restructuring, a messy pivot, or a sudden round of layoffs? We’ve been conditioned to believe that driving organizational change requires a kind of executive shock-and-awe. We issue top-down mandates, weaponize performance metrics, and use the unspoken anxiety of the next economic downturn to force compliance.
We call it “driving alignment.” Let’s call it what it actually is: corporate coercion.
We use these heavy-handed tactics because we assume force is the most efficient way to get results. But modern history, human psychology, and data tell a completely different story.
The Source: 100 Years of Uprisings
On a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, political scientist Erica Chenoweth dropped a data-backed bomb on our collective assumptions about power. Chenoweth studied over a century of global revolutions and insurrections to determine what actually forces a system to change.
Her research revealed two staggering facts:
Non-violent movements are twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.
The 3.5% Rule: No government or regime in her data set failed to change once 3.5% of the population became actively, visibly engaged in the movement.
Chenoweth also uncovered a dark tactical truth. Authoritarian regimes intentionally use violence and intimidation not just to hurt their active opponents, but to terrify the “neutral middle” of the population. The goal is to make joining the movement look so dangerous that the average citizen decides to stay home and stay quiet.
When we use coercive language, tight ultimatums, and fear-based pressure in business, we are running the exact same autocratic playbook. And it backfires beautifully.
The Reframe: The “Neutral Middle” is Your Bedrock
When a new initiative drops, leaders tend to divide the company into two camps: the enthusiastic early adopters and the “resisters.” Anyone who doesn’t immediately drink the Kool-Aid is viewed as passive, checked out, or a barrier to progress.
That is a short-sighted leadership blind spot.
Let’s reframe the emotional signal of the “neutral middle.” These employees aren’t lazy, and they don’t hate growth. They are corporate survivors.
They have deep institutional memory. They’ve watched three different “transformations” come and go under different leaders. Their neutrality isn’t a lack of commitment. It is a healthy mechanism of self-protection. They are trying to shield their energy, their focus, and their daily output from a chaotic management wave so they can actually do the work.
The neutral middle has good intentions. They are the essential bedrock holding the business together while executives play with new frameworks. If you treat their caution as a threat, you will push them directly into active resistance.
Leadership Application: How to Activate Your 3.5%
If you want real, sustainable evolution in your organization, you have to stop trying to force 100% compliance through fear. Instead, you need to attract a critical mass.
Ditch the Coercive Language: Eliminate phrases that imply people are disposable if they don’t instantly fall in line. Fear produces superficial compliance, but it utterly destroys the psychological safety required for actual innovation.
Build a Cross-Functional 3.5% Coalition: Your critical mass shouldn’t just be the executive team or a specialized squad of “change champions” who look like corporate cheerleaders. Your 3.5% must be a micro-coalition across all levels and roles. Find the informal culture carriers: the quiet senior engineers, the respected front-line managers, the operations experts. If they buy in, the system shifts organically.
Lower the Cost of Entry: Dictators hate humor and flexibility because it strips away their power. In organizations, instead of high-stakes mandates, use what Chenoweth calls “dilemma actions”—lightweight, low-friction experiments. Invite teams to try a new process for just two weeks as a trial. Keep it conversational, flexible, and iterative.
When you make the change safe, low-risk, and genuinely collaborative, the neutral middle will naturally lean in. You don’t need to drag them onto the bus. They will walk over to see why it’s worth riding.
A Practical Takeaway
Mantra for the week:
“Compliance can be forced; commitment must be attracted. Stop hunting for resisters, and start building your 3.5%.”
The Coaching Prompt
Ask yourself or your leadership team these questions this week:
Look at your current top-priority initiative. What coercive language or fear-based pressure (implicit or explicit) are you using to drive it forward?
Who are the informal, trusted influencers in your organization, outside of the executive team, who need to be part of your critical 3.5%?
How can you reframe the skepticism of your neutral team members? What valuable thing are they currently trying to protect?
It happens in almost every meeting. You are sitting there, minding your own business, when a colleague or executive throws a conversational hand grenade your way.
Suddenly, the spotlight is on you. Your heart rate spikes. Your brain frantically scrolls through every piece of data you’ve ever acquired, trying to find the “perfect” thing to say. And when you finally open your mouth, what comes out feels less like a strategic insight and more like a word salad.
We look at people who are effortlessly articulate in these moments and assume they possess a rare, genetic gift. We tell ourselves, “I’m just not good on my feet.” But that panic isn’t a sign of incompetence. It’s a structural failure.
The Source: Why Your Brain Freezes
In his book Think Faster, Talk Smarter, Stanford communication expert Matt Abrahams highlights the real culprit behind our impromptu speaking anxiety: Cognitive Load.
When you are put on the spot, your brain is suddenly forced to do two incredibly difficult things at the exact same time:
Listing: Generating the raw content (the facts, the ideas, the data).
Sequencing: Deciding the order in which to say them.
It’s the mental equivalent of trying to bake a cake while simultaneously writing the recipe from scratch. Your mental RAM maxes out, your internal system crashes, and you resort to “umms,” “ahhs,” and rambling.
The Reframe: Structure is Freedom
Here is the shift: Stop trying to think of what to say, and start choosing how to say it.
That sudden spike of adrenaline you feel when put on the spot isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It is raw energy looking for a container. If you don’t give that energy a boundary, it turns into anxiety. But if you give it a framework, it turns into focus.
As Abrahams notes, structure sets you free. When you choose a structural map before you start speaking, you automate the sequencing part of your brain. This frees up 50% of your cognitive capacity to focus entirely on your message. You don’t need a silver tongue; you just need a track to run on.
The Leadership Playbook: 3 Frameworks to Lean On
The next time you are caught off guard, do not just start talking. Take a breath, silently pick one of these three structural blueprints, and fill in the blanks:
1. The Everyday Anchor: What? So What? Now What?
This is the undisputed heavyweight champion of impromptu speaking. It works for project updates, giving feedback, or answering a sudden question from a client.
What: State the cold, hard facts or the current situation.
So What: Explain why this matters. What is the impact on the team, the budget, or the timeline?
Now What: Define the immediate next step or call to action.
2. The High-Stakes Pivot: Challenge – Opportunity – Resolution
When things go wrong and everyone looks to you for answers, use this to reframe a crisis into a strategic moment.
Challenge: Acknowledge the problem or obstacle directly without sugarcoating it.
Opportunity: Pivot to what can be learned, or what new door this challenge opens.
Resolution: Propose the definitive action step to move forward.
3. The Vision Builder: Past – Present – Future
Perfect for milestones, kicking off unexpected initiatives, or when you need to align a team that has lost its bearings.
Past: Where did we start? What is the context?
Present: Where are we standing right now? What is the immediate reality?
Future: Where are we going? What does success look like?
The Practical Takeaway
The One-Second Blueprint: The moment you are put on the spot, pause for one full second. In that silence, whisper a mantra to yourself: “I am doing a ‘What, So What, Now What’.” Deciding the structure before you open your mouth is the difference between wandering aimlessly and leading with authority.
The Coaching Prompt
Bring these questions to your next reflection session, or use them to coach a team member who struggles with visibility in meetings:
Where do I ramble most? In which specific scenarios (e.g., upward management, peer debates, client pushback) do I feel my cognitive load redlining?
What is my default defense mechanism when caught off guard? Do I over-explain with data, shut down and say too little, or pass the mic to someone else?
How can we build a “structure-first” culture on our team? How can we use frameworks like What? So What? Now What? in our async updates or daily standups to save everyone’s mental RAM?
Let’s talk about the lie we tell ourselves when we’re stressed:
“If I just think about this problem for another three hours, I’ll finally solve it.”
We replay past conversations like we’re a director trying to edit a bad movie, or we project into the future, convinced that worrying is just “proactive preparation.” We convince ourselves that this mental gymnastics is useful.
Spoiler alert: It’s not. It’s a maze. And the deeper you run into it, the harder it is to find the exit.
The Source: Thoughts are Weather, Not the Sky
In her book Just a Thought, Dr. Amy Johnson introduces a liberating paradigm shift about how our brains actually function.
As human beings, we are evolutionary marvels wired for survival. Your thinking mind isn’t trying to torture you when it loops on a mistake you made in a meeting last Tuesday; it’s simply trying to keep you safe.
The problem is that your brain doesn’t know the difference between a physical predator and a difficult client email. It treats both as existential threats, flooding your system with thoughts designed to “fix” the danger.
The Reframe: The Suggestion Box
Here is the twist: Rumination isn’t a sign that you are broken; it’s a sign that your survival brain is working perfectly. The loop of worry is just an emotional signal. It’s your brain saying, “Hey, I care about this outcome, and I feel unsafe right now.” But just because your mind hands you a thought doesn’t mean you have to buy into it. Your brain is a suggestion box, not a dictator. Thoughts are not solid objects; they are transient energy. They only become a maze when we grab onto them, unpack our bags, and decide to live there.
Nothing external can lift you out of that maze. No new strategy, no extra data, and no amount of reassurance. The exit is entirely internal: it’s realizing that a thought is just a thought, and you have the power to let it pass.
Leadership Application: Stop Time-Traveling
In leadership, staying stuck in the maze is a quiet productivity killer. When we ruminate, we aren’t leading; we are time-traveling.
We are either in the past, trying to manage a reality that has already occurred.
Or we are in the future, trying to control a reality that doesn’t exist yet.
When you are trapped in the past or the future, you are completely unavailable to the people you are leading in the present.
Letting go of the thought loop and returning to the room takes practice. It feels counter-intuitive because your brain tells you that dropping the worry means you’re being irresponsible. But true human-centric leadership requires the discipline to say, “Thank you, mind, for trying to protect me. But I am choosing to be right here, right now.”
A Practical Takeaway
The Leader’s Mantra: “It’s just a thought. It doesn’t need a meeting.”
The tl;dr: You cannot stop your brain from producing thoughts any more than you can stop the sky from producing clouds. But you can stop mistaking the clouds for the sky. Drop the debate with your own mind and anchor back into the present moment.
The Coaching Prompt
Ask yourself, or your team, during your next 1-on-1, these four questions to break the cycle of rumination:
What is the actual data here, and what is just the “survival story” my mind is spinning about it?
Am I actually preparing for the future right now, or am I just using worry to feel like I’m doing something?
If I chose not to believe this specific thought today, what action would I take right now?
What does my team need from me in this exact moment that I am currently missing?
Anxiety is creeping into leadership circles. A late-2025 study by The Conference Board suggests that AI can now handle up to 90% of routine career coaching tasks.
I’ll be honest: the knee-jerk fear of obsolescence was exactly my response recently. A client told me she was looking into AI to scale coaching across her organization. In her company, coaching has historically been locked behind a velvet rope, available only to those who reach a certain hierarchical level. She wanted to democratize it.
I was skeptical, but I investigated. And frankly, I was blown away. I found a platform that is incredibly effective if you want your people to practice soft skills, like navigating a difficult conversation with a colleague, or nailing a sales pitch, rather than practicing on actual prospects and customers.
My initial fear quickly gave way to a counterintuitive observation: AI isn’t here to kill human coaching or leadership; it’s here to save us from our own transactional mediocrity. The algorithm is forcing a brutal but necessary question: If a machine can do my job, was I operating like a machine?
The Framework
The Integral Institute offers a brilliant framework for navigating this shift. They divide our development needs into two distinct lanes:
Top-of-Funnel (How do I think about this problem?): The realm of performative, cognitive coaching.
Bottom-of-Funnel (Who am I becoming as a leader?): The realm of existential, transformational coaching.
Researcher Tatiana Bachkirova (HEC Paris) draws the absolute dividing line at “embodied empathy.” AI possesses flawless syntactic empathy: It knows exactly what words to string together to validate an emotion. But it has never lived through anything. It doesn’t know risk, loss, or mortality.
The Reframe: The Signal Behind the Threat
The fear of being replaced isn’t a bug; it’s a signal. It tells us we’ve spent way too much time in the “performative” zone: optimizing skills, running role-plays, and offering cognitive behavioral tweaks. AI excels here. It treats symptoms, optimizes metrics, and operates 24/7 without burning out.
The positive side of this “threat” is liberation. By offloading habit tracking and cognitive prep to an algorithm, human leaders and coaches are forced to step up and do their actual jobs: navigating the messy reality of human identity. An AI can give you ten perfectly structured frameworks for delegating tasks, but it cannot help you when your nervous system is terrified of losing control.
Leadership Application: The Hybrid Model
In organizational life, this demands a shift in how we build and support our teams. The future belongs to a tiered, hybrid model:
Phase 1: AI as the Pre-Coach (Performative). The tool is used for onboarding, baseline skill assessments, and goal-tracking. It handles the “presenting problem.”
Phase 2: The Human as the Alchemist (Transformational). This is where you step in. You use the AI’s data as a baseline, but focus entirely on the human. You read the shifting energy in a room, spot systemic power dynamics that an algorithm is blind to, and possess the courage to sit in the discomfort of silence to force a real breakthrough.
Phase 3: AI as the Accountability Partner (Continuous). Post-breakthrough, the AI steps back in to provide the daily nudges and micro-learning needed to turn a transformational epiphany into a sustained habit.
The Takeaway (TL;DR)
If coaching and leadership are just about giving advice and tracking KPIs, the algorithm wins. If they are interpretive, embodied, relational practices meant to reinvent how a human operates in the world, you are irreplaceable.
Leave the tasks to the bots; keep the identity for the humans.
The Coaching Prompt: The Impact Audit
Take five minutes before your next 1:1 or team meeting and ask yourself:
Looking at my meetings last week, which ones were just information transfer or checklist tracking (things an AI could easily do)?
When a team member struggles, do I rush to hand them a “solution framework” (bot mode), or am I capable of sitting in the discomfort and listening for the “unsaid”?
Am I trying to optimize this person’s symptoms, or am I trying to help them transform their professional identity?
P.S. If you are curious about the AI simulation tool I mentioned earlier—the one that blew me away for safe, scalable soft-skill practice—just reply to this email. I will gladly introduce you to the people behind the solution. Ironically enough, they are fantastic and very human.
P.P.S. Speaking of doing the deep, human work: if you haven’t yet taken the Emerging Leadership Navigator from last week’s newsletter for a spin, consider this your gentle nudge. It’s designed specifically to help you map out your own leadership bottlenecks and identity shifts: exactly the kind of “bottom-of-funnel” inner work an algorithm can’t do for you.
We all have a default setting. When the pressure dials up at work, we unconsciously retreat into the tasks that feel safe. The visionary strategist ignores the operational messy work; the relentless executor ignores team morale; the empathetic people-pleaser avoids hard business metrics.
We usually dress this up as “playing to our strengths.” But if we are being honest, it is often just a sophisticated way of neglecting the parts of our role that make us uncomfortable. The friction, exhaustion, or stagnation you might be feeling right now isn’t a sign that you are failing, it’s a signal that a critical dimension of your work is being starved of your attention.
The Source
More than a decade ago, I was working with a team that was hitting a wall. They were talented, but they were deeply misaligned on where their energy should be going. To help them map out their blind spots, I built a tool to force reflection on the neglected aspects of their roles.
Over the years, I’ve refined this framework through individual coaching and team sessions. It works just as well for Individual Contributors as it does for Managers. I call it the Emerging Leadership Navigator.
As you can see in the profile map below, it breaks your role down into four distinct compass points:
Business: The strategy, the market, and the value you are delivering.
People: The relationships, the culture, and the emotional intelligence required to lead.
Execution: The delivery, the grind, and getting things across the finish line.
System: The processes, the structures, and how things scale.
The Reframe
When you look at a radar chart like the one above, the instinct is to judge the gaps between where you are (Self-Perception) and what the role requires (Importance).
But let’s reframe that gap. That negative space isn’t a character flaw or a permanent weakness. It is pure signal. If you are feeling overwhelmed, the gap is showing you exactly where the bottleneck is. The anxiety of feeling “behind” is simply the emotional signal that you have outgrown your current default setting and it’s time to intentionally step into a new quadrant.
Leadership Application
Leadership does not emerge by being perfect at all four dimensions simultaneously. That’s a recipe for burnout. Leadership emerges when you create the conditions for awareness.
When you map your role using the Navigator, you suddenly make the invisible visible. You might realize that as an IC, you’ve been over-indexing on Execution while entirely neglecting the System that could make your life easier. Or as a manager, you might realize you are focusing so heavily on the Business that the People dimension is eroding. Recognizing this misalignment is the first step to correcting it.
I recently decided to make this tool accessible to everyone by creating a simplified online version. You can read more about the philosophy behind it here, and you can start your inquiry right here: The Emerging Leadership Navigator
Note: I would love to hear your feedback on the tool itself, or simply hear how it made you reflect on your role differently. Hit reply and let me know.
A Practical Takeaway
TL;DR: You can’t navigate out of a rut if you don’t know where you are on the map. Mantra: “The friction I feel is the exact dimension of leadership I am avoiding.”
The Coaching Prompt
Before you click into the tool, ask yourself (or your team) these three questions this week:
Of the four dimensions (Business, People, Execution, System), which one do I naturally retreat to when I am stressed?
Which dimension am I currently avoiding because it makes me feel incompetent or uncomfortable?
If I shifted just 10% of my energy this week into my most neglected dimension, what specific problem would it solve?
We’ve all got that one colleague. The one who sends our blood pressure spiking the second they open their mouth in a meeting. Our default response? We label them as difficult, passive, or overly rigid, and we vent about it to our work bestie later.
But what if your intense frustration with them isn’t about their incompetence, but a massive flashing signal pointing toward your untapped potential?
The Source: Daniel Ofman’s Core Quadrant
Dutch management expert Daniel Ofman developed a remarkably intuitive framework called the Core Quadrant. In studying human behavior, Ofman noticed that our greatest interpersonal clashes don’t happen because we are fundamentally broken, but because we misunderstand the nature of our own innate strengths.
As Ofman explains in this video, we are all born with effortless core qualities, things like determination, flexibility, or caring. But as he says, “There is no light without shadow.”
The Reframe: The “Too Much of Something Beautiful” Principle
When we look at our frustrations through Ofman’s lens, the emotional signal changes completely. Let’s break down the anatomy of a conflict using a common leadership trait: Determination.
The Core Quality: You are naturally driven. Pushing projects across the finish line is effortless for you.
The Pitfall (Too much of a good thing): Under stress, your determination tips over into your shadow side. You become Pushy or Demanding.
The Challenge (The Antidote): To balance your pitfall, you need to develop its positive opposite. The antidote to being pushy is developing Patience. If you can be “patiently determined,” you become unstoppable.
The Allergy (What you despise in others): Here is where the magic happens. What happens when someone takes Patience too far? They become Passive. This is your Allergy. Passive people drive you absolutely insane.
Here is the quote from Ofman that completely shifts this paradigm:
“If people would only realize that whenever you see something in another person that you don’t like, by definition it is always too much of something beautiful, it would change the world.”
That colleague who drives you crazy because they are “too passive”? They are just over-expressing the exact trait (patience) that you desperately need to develop.
The Leadership Application
In organizational life, we unconsciously look for our “Challenge” in others. The visionary founder partners with the methodical operator. The fiercely determined director hires the exceptionally patient manager.
This complementarity is incredibly powerful… until the pressure hits.
When stress enters the system, we retreat into our extremes. Suddenly, the determined leader views their patient partner as “lazy,” and the patient partner views the determined leader as a “bully.” You are allergic to their pitfall, and they are allergic to yours. It’s a predictable script that plays out in boardrooms every single day.
The goal of human-centric leadership isn’t to eradicate the people who annoy you. The goal is to stop judging your allergy and start mining it for the underlying “beautiful” trait. You don’t need to become passive, but you do need to learn the patience that lives underneath it.
A Practical Takeaway
Your intense emotional reactions to others are rarely about them; they are a diagnostic tool for your own imbalances.
Mantra: “My greatest frustrations are pointing to my greatest areas for growth.”
The Coaching Prompt
Grab a notebook and take 3 minutes to map this out before your next team interaction:
Identify the Trigger: Who is the one person at work who consistently triggers your “allergy” (frustration, anger, eye-rolls)?
Name the Label: What specific negative label have you placed on their behavior (e.g., passive, chaotic, overly rigid, wishy-washy)?
Find the Beauty: What is the positive, “beautiful” core quality hidden beneath that annoying behavior? (e.g., If they are “wishy-washy,” the core quality is “flexibility”).
The Integration: How can you integrate 10% more of that positive quality into your own leadership style this week?
If you’ve spent any time in modern corporate software or product development, you know the feeling. The endless sprint planning sessions. The two-week agile cycles that feel like a relentless treadmill. The daily stand-ups where a dozen people justify their existence to a Jira board.
We often view this bureaucratic friction as an annoying “bug” of scaling a company. But what if it’s an emotional signal? That feeling of drowning in meetings and coordination isn’t a sign that you need a better Scrum Master. It is a signal that your teams are too big, your boundaries are too weak, and you are trying to manage uncertainty through surveillance rather than trust.
Shape Up
What if the approach developed by the team at Basecamp, and detailed by Ryan Singer in the book Shape Up, is the exact answer we need? While traditional Agile often relies on large, multidisciplinary teams (Product Managers, Scrum Masters, UX, UI, Front-end, Back-end, QA) passing tickets back and forth, Shape Up advocates for a radically autonomous, micro-squad: one designer and one or two engineers.
Relevance in the Age of AI
Why is this incredibly relevant right now? Because we have entered the era of AI. With AI coding agents handling more and more software development tasks, a two-person squad today has the output capacity of a larger team from five years ago. Bloated multidisciplinary teams don’t make you faster anymore; they just multiply your communication tax.
The Reframe: Fixing the Time, Freeing the Humans
Traditional frameworks try to eliminate the anxiety of the unknown by breaking work into tiny pieces and asking: “How long will this take?”
Shape Up flips the script. You don’t ask for an estimate; you declare an appetite (e.g., “We are willing to spend six weeks on this problem, no more”).
By fixing the time constraint, you liberate the small team to creatively negotiate the scope. You give them a safe, strict container, and then you get out of their way.
The Shape Up Playbook: A Leadership Guide
This isn’t about blindly installing a new framework; it’s about drawing inspiration to fundamentally rethink how your organization delivers software. Here is the interconnected language of Shape Up, decoded for your context:
1. Preparing the Work (The Act of Shaping)
Shaped versus unshaped work: You cannot hand a micro-team a vague, unshaped idea (“fix onboarding”) and expect success. You must define the boundaries, the problem, and the guardrails before you delegate.
Designing at the right level of abstraction: When shaping, you don’t provide pixel-perfect wireframes—that stifles the team’s autonomy. You provide constraints.
Concepting with breadboards and fat marker sketches: You sketch the flow and the logic of the solution using thick markers (to prevent getting bogged down in UI details) or text-based “breadboards.”
Setting appetites instead of estimates: You declare what the problem is worth to the business in time (usually 2 or 6 weeks), rather than asking the team to predict the future.
2. The Commitment (The Contract)
Choosing the right cycle length: Basecamp uses a six-week cycle. It’s long enough to build something meaningful from start to finish, but short enough that the end is always looming, forcing tough decisions.
Making bets with a capped downside: You don’t “plan” a project; you make a bet on a 6-week appetite. The “capped downside” is the circuit breaker: if the project isn’t done in six weeks, it dies. No extensions. It forces the team to ship.
Honoring uninterrupted time: Once the bet is made, leadership steps back. No daily stand-ups. No checking in. You give the team total focus.
Uphill and Dowhill work (illustration from the book)
3. Executing the Work (The Team’s Ownership)
Breaking projects apart into scopes: Instead of organizing work by technical layers (e.g., “build the database”), the team organizes work by user flows or “scopes” that can be built, clicked through, and evaluated independently.
Downhill versus uphill work: This is brilliant emotional vocabulary. “Uphill” work is full of unknowns, it’s the anxiety of figuring out how to solve the problem. “Downhill” work is just execution. Teams use this language to communicate their confidence levels to leadership without needing a status meeting.
Scope hammering: To hit the immovable 6-week circuit breaker, the team must ruthlessly separate the “must-haves” from the “nice-to-haves.” They hammer the scope down to fit the time box.
4. The Reset
A cool-down period: After a 6-week cycle, you mandate a two-week cool-down. No scheduled projects. The team fixes bugs, explores new tech, and breathes. You cannot run human beings at 100% capacity indefinitely.
The Practical Takeaway
AI has given us the tools to keep teams incredibly lean, but lean teams require high trust and clear boundaries. Stop feeding people unshaped work and demanding estimates. Give a small team a shaped problem, a fixed time appetite, and the autonomy to hammer the scope.
(And remember, this is just a primer. There is a wealth of tactical depth to learn in the actual book, I highly recommend reading it in full to rethink how your team builds.)
The Coaching Prompt
Bring these questions to your next planning session or your own weekly review:
Am I tossing “unshaped” work over the fence?(Where am I causing team anxiety by delegating vague ideas instead of bounded problems?)
Where are we suffering from communication tax?(Could a specific initiative be handled faster by isolating 1 designer and 1 engineer and leaving them alone for 6 weeks?)
Are we managing risk through surveillance or boundaries?(Do we rely on daily stand-ups to feel safe, or do we rely on a strict “circuit breaker” that caps our downside risk?)
What is currently “uphill” work for my team?(Where are they carrying the emotional weight of unknowns, and how can I help them push it over the hill into execution?)
We’ve all heard it. Maybe it was on the playground after a scraped knee, or at the dinner table after a frustrating day at school:
“Don’t cry.”
“Be a big girl/boy.”
“Don’t get angry. It’s not a big deal.”
From the time we can walk, we are taught that “strength” is synonymous with “silence.” We are coached to treat our emotions like unruly pets that need to be locked in the basement so the “productive” version of us can go to work.
But as Andy Puddicombe, the co-founder of Headspace, famously put it:
“Trying to outrun our emotions is as effective as trying to outrun our shadow in the sun.”
When the sun is high and things are easy, the shadow is small. But as the day goes on and the pressure mounts, that shadow stretches out behind you, looming over every decision you make. If you don’t learn to turn around and look at it, you’ll eventually trip over it.
The Source: Emotional Agility vs. The “Be Strong” Script
Psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, argues that modern culture often promotes a “tyranny of positivity.” We’ve been conditioned to treat difficult emotions as problems to fix rather than experiences to understand.
When we tell a child—or a direct report—not to feel what they are feeling, we aren’t teaching resilience. We are teaching suppression. And suppression is costly. Research shows that when people push emotions down, they don’t disappear. They tend to increase internal stress and often resurface later as disengagement, chronic stress, or emotional outbursts.
The Reframe: Emotions as Bio-Data
We need to stop viewing emotions as “weaknesses” and start viewing them as biological data points.
“Problemo resoluto” Madagascar
If you were driving a car and the “Low Oil” light came on, you wouldn’t put a piece of tape over it and say, “I’m a strong driver, I don’t need oil.” Yet, that’s exactly what we do when we tell ourselves to “power through” anxiety or “ignore” resentment.
The Old Way: “Stop crying/getting angry. Get back to work.” (Repression).
The New Way: “I feel tension in my chest. My body is noticing a threat. What is the signal?” (Literacy).
Leadership Application: The Stone-Faced Leader
The “Be Strong” narrative creates leaders who are emotionally stunted. If you can’t acknowledge your own fear, you will react with frustration when your team expresses theirs.
Unexamined emotions always “leak”:
An unacknowledged fear of failure manifests as micromanagement.
An unexpressed feeling of being undervalued manifests as passive-aggression.
The “Don’t Cry” kid grows up to be the “Don’t Complain” boss who wonders why their turnover is so high.
True human-centric leadership requires us to stop being “policemen” of our feelings and start being “detectives.”
A Practical Takeaway: The “Data Scan”
Next time you feel a “negative” emotion, don’t try to outrun it. Stand still and name it. Use the “Physical Anchor” tool:
Locate it: Where is it in your body? (Tight jaw, heavy chest, knotted stomach?)
Label it: Use the Emotion Wheel. Start at the center (e.g., “Sad”) and move outward until you find the specific word (e.g., “Abandoned” or “Empty”).
The Mantra:“I don’t have to like this feeling to listen to the data it’s giving me.”
The Coaching Prompt
Try these questions to break the “Be Strong” cycle with yourself or your team:
The Legacy: What was the “rule” about expressing emotions in my house growing up? How is that rule affecting my leadership today?
The Signal: If this physical tension in my body had a voice, what is the one sentence it would say right now?
The Shift: Instead of trying to “get over” this feeling, what would happen if I just sat with it for 90 seconds without judging it?
I watched a new TV show last weekend, and there it was again. The line that, once you notice it, ruins almost every script it touches.
“What do we do now?”
I want you to watch this short clip of Reese Witherspoon explaining exactly why this four-word sentence is so toxic. It is a masterclass in identifying the subtle ways we give away our power.
Before I heard Reese talk about this, I never truly “heard” the line. It was just background noise. I never considered it a problem, let alone a symptom of something deeper.
This is the definition of a blind spot.
We don’t know what we don’t know. Often, the things we are missing are the very things that would make the most difference in our growth. In movies, this line strips a character of their agency. In the workplace, it does something even worse. It turns high-performing professionals into passengers who are simply waiting for a driver.
Once you see this pattern, you cannot unsee it. You start to notice it in meetings, in emails, and in the way teams lean on their leaders. It is the sound of potential stalling out.
We usually think of blind spots as embarrassing or dangerous. We treat them like bugs in our software that need to be patched immediately.
But here is the reframe: The moment you identify a blind spot, you have found your next level of performance. The “What do we do now?” feeling is a signal. It isn’t a sign that you are failing: it is a sign that you have reached the edge of your current “map.” When you feel that urge to ask for directions, you aren’t actually lost. You are just standing at the frontier of your own agency.
The discomfort you feel when you realize you’ve been “scripted” is actually the birth of a new leadership capacity. It is the transition from a Fixed Mindset (waiting for the right answer) to a Growth Mindset (creating the answer).
Once you realize that “What do we do now?” is a signal of a blind spot, you have to decide how to respond to it in real-time. Whether the words are coming out of your mouth or someone else’s, the goal is the same: move from Passive Waiting to Active Intent.
When you hear yourself saying it
It usually happens when you’re tired, overwhelmed, or facing a problem you haven’t seen before. Your brain wants to offload the cognitive load to someone else.
The Pivot: Catch the question before it leaves your lips. If it does slip out, immediately follow it with: “Wait, let me rephrase that. Based on what I see, I think our best move is X. What am I missing?”
The “I Intend To” Rule: Practice the habit of never presenting a problem without a proposed next step. Even if you are 90% sure your idea is wrong, stating an intent forces your brain back into the driver’s seat. It changes your posture from a passenger to a navigator.
Intent is not “The Answer”: This isn’t about being a lone genius. Stating an intent can be as simple as saying, “I intend to pull the team together this afternoon to analyze our options.” By doing this, you aren’t waiting for a boss to tell you when to collaborate. You are designing the conditions for the solution to emerge. You are owning the process, even if you don’t own the final answer yet.
When you hear your team saying it
This is the “Answering Machine” trap. When a report or a coworker asks you what to do, your ego wants to provide the answer. It feels good to be the expert. But every time you provide the “fix,” you are accidentally training them to remain in the blind spot.
Create the Container: Instead of giving the answer, hold the space for theirs. Use what David Marquet calls “The Ladder of Leadership.”
The Reflection Technique: When they ask “What do we do now?”, respond with: “That’s a critical question. Before I share my perspective, I want to hear yours. If you were in total control here, what would your first move be and why?”
Adjust and Decide Together: This isn’t about leaving them stranded. It’s about collaborative adjustment. Once they share their intent, you can say: “I like that logic. Let’s tweak this one part to account for X, and then let’s run with it.” You are no longer giving orders: you are refining their leadership.
Banish the “Answering Machine” response. Next time you or your team feels stuck, remember that the goal isn’t to be right. The goal is to be active. Replace “What do we do now?” with “I intend to…” even if that intent is just to gather the right people to solve it together.
The Coaching Prompt
Grab a notebook or bring these to your next 1-on-1:
The Reaction Audit: The last time a team member suggested a “wrong” course of action, did you shut it down or did you explore their logic?
The Safety Check: Does my team know what “safe to fail” looks like in this project? Or do they feel they only have one shot to be right?
The “I Intend To” Challenge: How can I encourage my team to start their updates with the phrase “I intend to” this week?
Thank you for reading the Emerging Leadership Newsletter Each edition explores one idea that helps leaders create organizations where people take responsibility and deliver impact. If this resonates with you, feel free to share it with a colleague or start a conversation in your team.
You can also listen to new conversations on Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. You will find references and transcripts for each episode, along with past newsletters, on alexis.monville.com.
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We’ve all been sold the same dream: “Be Agile.” We start with a small, scrappy team where everyone finishes each other’s sentences, and the magic just happens.
But then, success hits. You grow. Ten people become fifty. Fifty become five hundred. Suddenly, those “individuals and interactions” you valued so much have turned into an endless calendar of “sync meetings” that leave everyone exhausted and nothing actually… synced.
The hard truth? At scale, the very things that made you Agile start to break you.
In the latest episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I sat down with Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder of Theodo and co-author of The Lean Tech Manifesto.
Fabrice has lived this. He helped scale an organization from 10 people to over 700. He realized that the four core values of the Agile Manifesto have a “scale issue.” It’s not that Agile is wrong; it’s that it wasn’t designed for the weight of a 100-million-dollar organization.
To survive growth, you don’t need more “Agile ceremonies.” You need Lean Tech.
In most corporate cultures, a “problem” is a bug—something to be hidden, fixed quietly, or blamed on someone else.
In a Lean Tech organization, a problem is a feature of growth. Fabrice argues that the goal of a leader isn’t to have all the answers, but to build a Learning Organization. This requires a radical psychological shift:
Hiding a problem is the only true failure.
Showing a problem is an act of service.
Analyzing a problem is the core work of a leader.
When we reframe our technical hurdles (like a monolithic codebase) as communication hurdles, we stop fighting the technology and start re-architecting the human system.
One of the examples Fabrice shares is the “API Mandate.” When Amazon faced scaling gridlock, Jeff Bezos didn’t ask for more meetings. He asked for fewer.
By forcing teams to interact only through tech-enabled interfaces (APIs), they created a Tech-Enabled Network of Teams.
To scale successfully, you need to align your leadership with the five structural elements of the Lean Tech House:
Value for the Customer (The Guiding Star): Move beyond simple “collaboration”. Leaders must work tirelessly to clarify what “value” actually looks like for the whole organization so that every team can align their autonomy with a shared goal.
Right-First-Time (The Quality Pillar): This is the ideal of perfect quality. Instead of rushing to “move fast and break things,” aim to detect and analyze defects as early as possible—such as through unit testing or precise specifications—to build long-term intuition and speed.
Just-In-Time (The Flow Pillar): Fight the urge to work on multiple features in parallel to “feel” productive. Focus on single-piece flow, delivering small increments of value quickly to get real feedback and reduce the waste of half-finished work.
Building a Learning Organization (The Cultural Foundation): Create a culture where raising a problem is a positive act and hiding one is discouraged. This is grounded in a culture of problem-solving, where leaders teach skills rather than just providing solutions.
Tech-Enabled Network of Teams (The Technical Foundation): You cannot achieve agility on top of a messy architecture. Use technology—like APIs or modular design—to enable teams to work autonomously without needing constant, bureaucratic synchronization meetings.
The Kanban Mantra:“Stop starting, start finishing.”
If your team is struggling with “Agile fatigue,” look at your Work In Progress (WIP). Parallel work is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the difficult conversations that collaboration requires.
The Gold: Scaling isn’t about adding more layers of management; it’s about removing the “waste” that prevents value from flowing.
The Coaching Prompt
Ask yourself (or your team) these three questions this week:
“What is the most uncomfortable problem we are currently pretending doesn’t exist?”
“If we could only work on one thing this week to deliver value to the customer, what would it be—and why aren’t we doing that?”
“When was the last time I ‘went to the Gemba’ (the actual code, the actual customer call, the actual workshop) instead of just reading a report about it?”
Want to hear the full deep dive? You can listen to the full conversation with Fabrice Bernhard on Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership right here.
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In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I welcome Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CTO of Theodo, and co-author of The Lean Tech Manifesto.
Over the past decade, Theodo has grown from 10 people to more than 700, while maintaining speed, quality, and responsibility. In our conversation, Fabrice makes a provocative but thoughtful claim: all four values of the Agile Manifesto have a scale issue. Not because Agile is wrong, but because what works beautifully for small teams does not automatically work for large organizations.
Together, we explore how Lean thinking helps preserve the intention of Agile while making it work at scale.
In this episode, we discuss:
Why Agile principles struggle when organizations grow
The difference between “customer collaboration” and “value for the customer”
How Amazon’s API mandate enabled autonomy at scale
Why architecture matters as much as culture when scaling
What a tech-enabled network of teams really means
How to start evolving a monolith without rewriting everything
What it takes to build a true learning organization
Why Lean is not only good for people, but also good for business
Alexis: I’m very happy to welcome Fabrice Bernhard. Fabrice is the CTO and co-founder of Theodo, the technology company co-founded with Benoît Charles-Lavauzelles. Over the past decade, they scaled Theodo from 10 people and 1 million dollars in 2012 to more than 700 people and 100 million in 2022. They are the authors of The Lean Tech Manifesto, a book that captures their experience of scaling an organization without sacrificing quality, engagement, or responsibility.
Fabrice, welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. How do you usually introduce yourself to someone you just met?
Fabrice: I would say that my name is Fabrice Bernhard and I’m the co-founder of Theodo. And if it’s in a working environment, which I guess this is the case here, I would say that Theodo is an international tech consultancy based in London, Paris, Casablanca, and Cape Town.
Alexis: When I read the book, I was very surprised by one of the comments just at the beginning of the book that clearly encourages people to skip a chapter, not to read about that story. And I was very curious. Of course, I read the story, and I found that very interesting. So why that comment?
Fabrice: Yeah, it’s a very interesting question. I think we wanted the book to be about Lean Tech, about our learnings and experience around adapting lean wisdom to the tech industry and tech organizations. We found that our story was a good introduction to that, to better understand the context and where we had arrived there. But we didn’t think it was a necessary part. So that’s what we wanted to convey, to really explain that you don’t need to read our story to learn about Lean Tech.
That being said, I completely understand your point. The story is a very good introduction and I think it provides valuable context to the book.
Alexis: When you look back, you were already a small company and you scaled quite a lot. What are the main points of the story you want to tell?
Fabrice: Yeah. I think in the scaling story, if you look at our bottlenecks to scaling, the first one was finding product-market fit. And finding product-market fit happened when we really deeply understood agility, agile methodologies, and we were able to bring them to larger corporates who were definitely struggling to adopt them on their own.
So that’s been the first step. And once we had product-market fit, that’s when the scaling really started. And then the key bottleneck was, how can we scale our organization and maintain this agile culture that we love and that makes our difference to our clients while becoming much bigger, and therefore facing all the challenges that typical large organizations face, which lead them to becoming big, bureaucratic organizations.
And that’s when we met a lean coach who had been through a similar journey, who had loved Agile, had tried to apply it in a large organization and realized the limitations, the problems that Agile doesn’t address when you’re a large organization.
He found Lean afterwards, found answers to all his questions in Lean thinking, and told us, you know what, I can also bring them to you and you’ll see, it will be amazing. And so that’s why we’ve been on a Lean journey ever since. That was back in 2012, and we’re now, what, in 2026. So that’s already 14 years now.
Alexis: Yeah, it’s very impressive because you mentioned something that a lot of people faced in the agile community. They were able to use the agile principles and the agile values as a team, as a small team, they were able to really improve the way they were working. But in the larger organization, it was not necessarily working. And you explained that very well, going back to the Agile Manifesto and looking at the pieces that are able to scale and the pieces that need a little bit of something else. Can you tell us a little bit about that first part?
Fabrice: What is very interesting is the first question is, what is agility? And what the pioneers who wrote the Agile Manifesto did very well is give an answer. They wrote the Agile Manifesto, which was the shared understanding of what made an agile software development team agile.
So you can always go back to this manifesto to understand what they meant by agility, which is very good. And so when you look at the principles, I think they make a lot of sense and they capture very well the essence of what it means to be agile.
And then the analysis for us was to think, okay, why can’t these principles work in a large organization? And when you take each value, each of the four values of the Agile Manifesto, and you try to imagine yourself as a leader of a large organization trying to lead with these principles, you realize all four of them have a scale issue.
They all really capture what makes a small team very effective. And the idea is good, but these four ideas just don’t scale.
Two very simple examples. One is customer collaboration over contract negotiation. It makes a lot of sense, but in large organizations you start having two issues. One is you can’t have the customer in every team, as Extreme Programming encourages to do, and which we did at Theodo. It was amazing. We had the customer in the team, and that created magic. But you can’t have the customer in every team when the project starts requiring 10 or 20 teams.
That’s one side of the coin. And the other side of the coin is when you are working for large organizations, there’s not one customer who really knows what they need. You start having multiple stakeholders with contradictory requirements, contradictory needs. And building a great product is really taking all of these into account, understanding the trade-offs, and then making hard decisions.
And customer collaboration just doesn’t tell you how to address both of these issues at scale. And what we thought is, does Lean thinking actually bring a principle that conveys the same kind of intention, but actually works at scale? And we found it.
The first principle of Lean thinking is called “Value for the customer.” And for us, it addresses exactly that thing. It addresses the fact that as a leader of a large organization, you need to work very hard on clarifying and communicating all the time what value for the customer means for the whole organization and for each individual team in the organization.
And that is very helpful. That is very powerful. That is in line with the intention of the Agile Manifesto. And it works at any scale because typically Toyota is very good at this and they have 300,000 employees. Amazon is very good at this and they’ve got a million employees.
So being obsessed with the customer is a very good principle that you will find in most organizations that feel agile and are very large. So that was one example. And then, depending on how long you want me to speak, I can give a second example.
Alexis: Good.
Fabrice: Yeah. I could give you all four examples, but I’ll just give two. And the second one, and I’ll be shorter, is the core principle of the Agile Manifesto, which is individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
And again, this idea that as a team you can rely on direct interactions to make things work is very important and very useful, but only possible at small scales.
Because as soon as you grow the number of people that need to interact, the number of possible interactions grows to the square of the number of people. And you start having thousands or millions of possible interactions, which makes no sense.
What we found in organizations that had managed to scale and keep some kind of agility is that they had been able to reorganize as a network of teams. So they had basically kept this team spirit by organizing themselves as autonomous teams.
And then the question becomes, how do you manage to create an organization that works as a network of teams in a seamless way, where teams are able to have a strong form of autonomy despite being part of a very large organization?
And we realized that all of the examples we looked at had technology as a key enabler of distributing the work and then reassembling it in a seamless way.
So that’s why we called the principle a tech-enabled network of teams. And as examples, we give Linux and we give Amazon, which we could talk a lot more about if you want, or you can read the book if you want to know more about it.
Alexis: Yeah. We have value for the customer, that’s basically our guiding star. Tech-enabled network of teams, that’s the foundation to make all those things work.
If we go back to value for the customer for a second, what does that mean for a leader in an organization, whatever the size? What are the questions they should ask themselves?
Fabrice: Lean Tech is basically our own secret sauce. So what do we do internally? It means taking the time as a leadership team, on a regular basis, to actually think about that. What is value at the whole level of the organization?
So that’s one thing. Another thing is to confront that idea of value that you have with the reality of it. Because as soon as the organization grows, what you start having is a disconnect between what you think customers want and what customers actually want on the ground, and what teams on the ground are faced with.
And so there’s a key practice in Lean thinking called “go and see,” or going to the gemba. Gemba being a Japanese word for where work really happens.
And so that’s a key practice of a leadership team in a Lean Tech organization, to often go and visit teams and be very curious, not judgmental, not reactive to issues, just really to observe how things work and confront your vision of what value is with the reality on the ground.
So that’s the second very important thing. And then there’s a lot about communicating and empowering teams on value.
A great way to communicate value is to build an Obeya. Obeya is another Japanese word that means a big room. And the key idea is that you display in your office, and it’s much better if it’s physical, you display your understanding of the value, your understanding of the key challenges to provide that value, the key learnings, the key recent learnings around that, the key next steps that need to be tackled.
And that creates a lot of clarity and instant widespread sharing of what value means to the whole organization.
And then there’s a whole aspect, and that’s a very popular aspect in the tech world, which is called team topology. So creating or redesigning the organization so that teams are aligned on the value. So identifying the value streams and making sure that the organization is organized around these value streams, so that teams know to which customer they’re contributing and what kind of value they’re contributing to that customer.
So that everyone can be empowered on what is the value that they actually need to build and to deliver. And if they have the autonomy to do that, then they engineer themselves the solution to creating that value.
Alexis: Do you have an example when you felt you articulated properly the value for the customer at a very high level, but when teams were maybe a little bit struggling with understanding the value, and you’ve seen that moving from not understanding to already understanding?
Fabrice: Ah, it’s a very interesting one. The first example that comes to my mind is not us, but somebody else.
A very interesting organization asked us to come in and evaluate them using the Lean Tech framework.
And one thing we realized is that for leadership, there was a very clear technical requirement around the latency of the product. The latency had to be below 50 milliseconds to be sellable as a home cinema product.
All the studies had shown that if it was above 50 milliseconds, customers would notice it and would not be happy with it.
When we went on the ground and we asked the teams if they knew about it, they said, “Not really. We’re aiming for 80 milliseconds. Fifty is impossible anyway, that’s why we’re aiming for 80.”
So we went back to the leadership team and we said, by the way, one thing we’ve realized by going around is that the teams didn’t know that it was a key part of the value for you to deliver under 50 milliseconds.
The leadership team got a bit frustrated because for them they had made it very clear. And they hadn’t made it very clear.
What we said is: definitely not clear enough. Not obvious enough. Not unavoidable enough that the teams would have needed to raise the issue and say, “Guys, we’re not achieving these 50 milliseconds. What can we do?”
Instead, the disconnect between leadership and teams on the ground made it possible for teams who found achieving 50 milliseconds super hard to deprioritize that challenge.
And that, I think, is a very interesting example that we see in every large organization. Some challenges are very hard. If they’re not made super clear and obvious, quite naturally the organization will deprioritize them for easier things that they can do.
And that, I think, is a harsh example of value for the customer. It’s not just communicating, but it’s also clarifying the priorities and making sure that when things get hard, people know they need to raise their hands and say, okay, we need help, rather than just reprioritize and work on something else.
Alexis: Yeah, it’s an excellent example of communication not being a one-way street. You need to enable the other way, so people can raise their hand.
I’ve heard that a lot of times. When people are actually doing the work, it’s very different. And you can be frustrated on both sides.
Fabrice: And I think it was a very good example of frustrations on both sides. Leadership said, “We had made it clear.” Teams on the ground said, “Yes, we heard it once, we raised the issue that it was hard, and nobody came to us.”
And therefore this conversation that should have happened on a regular basis happened maybe once and then never happened again.
Alexis: Yeah. Yeah. I’m curious: did they succeed in either changing the goal or succeeding in the goal?
Fabrice: I don’t have the exact answer, so I have some guesses, but I prefer not to share them.
Alexis: Okay. That’s good.
We discussed a little bit high-level value for the customer. That’s great.
You mentioned the tech-enabled network of teams. Can you unpack that for a second to define that? I know that you discussed team topologies and the idea of stream-aligned teams, and aligning teams on the value. A lot of people are trying to do that, and you can see how difficult it is when you’re really trying.
What is that tech-enabled network of teams you mentioned?
Fabrice: Yes. So it all started with trying to find how do you keep the magic of the agile principle, individuals and interactions, at scale.
And clearly when we look at Amazon, what they did back in about 2000, they had the same issue that every large organization has. They had one big monolithic code base. Everyone that was contributing to it was treading on each other teams’ feet.
And therefore there was a huge challenge on how do we synchronize when one team needs to change something that impacts another team. How do we synchronize these changes?
So they had these big synchronization meetings every quarter. And it was a big mess. And very good developers were starting to leave because they couldn’t be bothered with so much bureaucracy.
We’ve seen that in large organizations, we’ve seen that everywhere.
What they did at Amazon at that moment is that there was this debate around maybe we need more communication or better communication.
And Jeff Bezos had a very good intuition and said, no, we need less communication. The problem is that the teams are not autonomous enough. So we need to find a way for them to find that autonomy again.
And so they started this very large program of creating APIs so that each team would not need to meet with another team. They would be able to interact with them through self-explanatory APIs. So very intuitive APIs, very reliable APIs.
So that’s often called the API mandate. It required a year and a half of investment for the first teams, and then probably became faster and faster for all the teams afterwards.
And the end result was that the Amazon code base was completely broken down into modules. Each team had their own module. And every module, when it needed to interact with other modules, did it through very well-defined, very stable, reliable, intuitive APIs.
And that completely transformed Amazon. It gave them this agility back and was definitely a foundation to their super fast growth for the following years and the following 20 years.
And it was also the foundation for the invention of the cloud. Because once they realized that every dependency could be transformed into an API, the obvious idea was to say, okay, can we transform our dependency to getting a new server into an API, where you just need to say, “Please, I want a new server,” and get it.
So this is basically the story behind the principle of tech-enabled network of teams.
And in this principle, we really mix two ideas. One is that the team needs to be autonomous.
And from a people perspective, this means having a competent team leader able to help them when they have problems. And a key way to help is not to solve the problem, but to actually teach problem-solving skills.
And so that’s a key lean idea: a great team leader is a team leader that is competent and great at coaching problem-solving skills.
So that was one aspect, the people aspect. And then there was a technical aspect.
Because what we realized, and that’s also what we see in traditional organizations, is that it’s not just a people problem. It’s also a technical challenge.
You can try to reorganize as much as you want. If the underlying architecture is not modular enough, then you will still be stuck, whatever your organization.
And that’s why we added the tech-enabled part. Because we think without a big rework of your underlying technology, you will never get the agility that you are aiming for.
Alexis: Okay. This is the part I believe a lot of people listening will be a little bit annoyed with. Because they will not know where to start.
Let’s say I have a big monolith. I need to grow the team. Now the team is too big. The monolith is too big. What can I do? I don’t have the time to re-architect everything. Where do I start?
Fabrice: I don’t have a simple answer to that question, but we do have a lot of experience around that question.
I think I’m simplifying slightly when I say making the monolith modular, because we have a few examples where one of the key transformations was actually the deployment pipeline.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Fabrice: So moving to a deployment process that is much closer to trunk-based development. Investing heavily in automated testing. Investing in feature flagging.
That is typically, I would say, the first thing I would start with. And I’m not the only one to think that. Continuous deployment is clearly one great way to get there.
And then the re-architecting would happen, but you can’t do it all at once. I believe, and we’ve done it quite a few times, you re-architect in a progressive way.
Alexis: Yeah.
Fabrice: And that’s why it’s hard. Because it requires very good architecting skills, tech design skills.
And usually the leaders who are complaining about the lack of agility are often non-technical. So they don’t understand that they have to put energy on that.
And yeah, I guess if there’s one key message here, it’s that you cannot achieve agility just by addressing the people challenge. You also need to address the technical challenge.
And that does require getting your hands dirty and trying to understand why the current tech landscape is not working.
Alexis: I like that because it gives a sense that it’s possible. It will be step by step. There’s a real investment. And you need real engineering skills. You cannot fake it on that part.
Fabrice: Yeah, no, of course. And to be honest, the outcome can be much better than what most people believe.
We’ve just delivered the new professional bank of LCL, which is a very large French bank. We did it in 10 months, and we had about 150 dependencies to the existing IT system.
So it was a difficult project, with 150 dependencies. But once you know how to design the thing, once you have the delivery discipline, you can actually achieve the kind of speeds that you see in startups.
And one good reason for that is that startups are not new anymore. Most of them also have legacy code they have to deal with. So they’re not that much faster.
With the right technical expertise and the right delivery discipline, you can deliver a whole new digital experience for a bank in 10 months.
Alexis: You spoke a little bit about learning. That’s one of the foundations you talk about in the book, about building a learning organization. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Fabrice: Yes. The way I restructured the Agile Manifesto, and this is a quick introduction, is that there’s a leadership aspect, and this is value for the customer, lead with value for the customer.
Then there’s a management and working organization aspect. How do you make teams able to contribute? So that’s tech-enabled network of teams.
And then there’s a whole body of knowledge around delivery and quality at scale. And this is what we call right first time and just in time, really leveraging the decades of experience of Toyota in producing much higher quality cars, super fast.
But once you’ve said all that, the key missing aspect is: how did Toyota get there, for example?
There’s an anecdote I love, and it’s probably a bit imagined, but let’s imagine Americans arriving in Japan in the eighties and asking Toyota, “Can we visit your factories? Apparently you are so much more productive than us and we want to know why.”
And the Japanese would be like, “Yeah, sure, whatever.” And the guys would come and they would try to understand everything. And then they would come back to the US, copy-paste it, and they would get some benefits, but they would also have issues.
And they would go back to Japan and say, “We tried to do the same as you. We had issues here and here. Can you show us how you do it?”
And then they would look, and everything had changed.
And that’s the key aspect of Toyota. They didn’t invent a great way of doing things. They invented the culture of continuous improvement. So whenever you come, the better way of doing things is changing.
And that’s the building a learning organization aspect. And that’s, of course, the most exciting aspect of all. It’s the one that has to do with innovation.
If we want to dig a bit into what building a learning organization means, it means one key thing. If there’s one thing to remember, it’s creating a culture of problem solving.
A culture where raising problems, identifying problems, is welcomed positively, and people are then supported and trained into problem solving them.
And that’s a very cultural aspect. And it starts at the top, with leaders showing that they will not react negatively to being told about problems.
They might react negatively to people hiding problems.
You are turning around the usual reaction to a problem. Showing a problem is positive. Hiding a problem is negative. And not analyzing a problem is potentially discouraged.
What is encouraged is analyzing the problem. And if you don’t have the skills, that’s actually a skill. You can learn it. You can teach it.
And that’s really a key aspect. And that’s something we do at Theodo ever since, I would say, 2012, when this lean coach started coaching us.
We started having dojos on problem solving. And every week, the whole organization would meet on Monday at 12. One team would present a recent problem solving, and we would challenge them and give hints and advice on how to improve it.
So the skill of problem solving became really at the heart of our culture. And I think that’s probably the key foundation of a learning culture.
Alexis: Excellent. I really encourage people to think about what happens when we ask that kind of question: “What is the problem you are working on?”
And my first reaction to that was, “I don’t have any problem.” The first reaction we have is to try to put aside all those things and say we are very successful and everything is going well.
Except that means we are not improving and we are not learning. And going to that culture is really something.
Fabrice: It is. It’s very interesting because “problem” has two definitions. And one of them is a scientific definition. And clearly what Theodo has done is adopt this scientific definition of problem, which is completely neutral, or rather positive.
And that’s important.
There’s also a very interesting reframe of what business means. It’s as if you can look at business as trying to transform the world and bring a new solution to the world, etcetera. Or you can see it as things that were meant to happen but are not happening in the best way, because there’s still a lot of waste.
And it’s a very different way of looking at business.
And I think both are interesting and valid. And of course, the other way makes you start thinking, okay, customers have needs. Whether I’m here or not, they would probably need that.
And the question is, how can I provide it, and how can I provide it in a better way? And it’s probably in the way I provide a solution to their need that there’s a lot of waste along the way.
How can I identify this waste, and how can I remove it?
And of course, that’s the most beautiful way of generating profit. Because if you respond to the need and seamlessly start reducing all the waste in responding to that need, you are generating profit while not changing anything for the customer.
And what is even more interesting is that if reducing those wastes means you have done a lot of problem solving, which means you have actually found issues in the way you provide your work, then you probably improve the value for the customer at the same time.
So you generate profit and improve value for the customer, all that in a seamless way for the customer.
So this vision of business is very beautiful.
Alexis: Yeah. And I believe that core idea of already changing the mindset we have about how we already do the work, you alluded to that before.
There are two big pillars that you are looking at: right first time and just in time. Could you give us examples of what it means?
Fabrice: There’s a really good example at the moment in AI coding. Actually, I posted about it on LinkedIn this morning.
Typically now, if you do a bit of AI coding, the easy approach is to start chatting to code and say, “Can you do this?” “No, not exactly this.” “No, not exactly this.” “More like that.”
And there’s another way, which is to actually work hard on the plan, on the specifications, and then give it all at once to Claude. And Claude then delivers the perfect result.
And right first time would, of course, be the second option.
And why is it so interesting? The second approach means you will have to learn a lot more. Because of course it will not be right the first times.
So you’ll start analyzing, okay, what did I miss in my instructions that made the AI not understand what I meant?
Alexis: Yeah.
Fabrice: And so you’re building intuitions on what works, what doesn’t work, what AI needs, what are maybe the assumptions that you believe the AI would have but doesn’t have, etcetera.
So right first time is the idea that you aim for perfect quality. So it’s an ideal.
And to do that, you look for problems as early as possible. And then you analyze them in a systematic way to think, okay, how could I have avoided that defect? How could I have detected it earlier? How could I have avoided it?
And this means you become much, much stronger. And of course, you deliver much better quality in the process.
What we’ve observed is that the more we detect and analyze defects super early on, and that is typically a very good promotion of unit testing and test-driven development, the less defects you have in production down the line.
So that’s one leg.
And then of course, you mentioned the other leg, which is just in time.
The reality is the better your quality, the less rework, and the more the value flows to the customer. So aiming for great quality means you will go faster.
But then of course there’s a whole aspect in a large organization. How do you deal with the complexity of multiple teams contributing to the same work?
And this is where Toyota brings decades of experience in an approach called just in time, with a few key ideas. Some of them are single-piece flow and takt time and pull systems and kanban.
But yeah, maybe I’m going a bit further than your initial question.
Alexis: That’s good. Let’s go there.
That idea of the one-piece flow, for example, is a very simple one, but often I see teams who are not really working as a team. Everybody works on his own thing, to the point where they develop very specific skills for those particular things.
So it’s the description of the opposite of the one-piece flow, and right?
Fabrice: Yeah, no, you’re right. It’s completely the opposite.
An easy solution to single-piece flow, and they’re not that easy, but typically Agile helps by having cross-disciplinary teams. And if the team is good and they’re able to help each other, then in a way you have single-piece flow in the sense that the request arrives in the team and then it gets delivered by the team.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Fabrice: But that’s important because it means that people within the team are able to help each other.
And if, I don’t know, there’s someone who’s much better at UX but there’s no UX work at the moment, they might come and pair program with a software engineer to help the software engineer go faster.
The other idea, which I think is simple to understand and very powerful, and actually not often implemented, is the idea to make sure that you deliver increments of value.
So typically, imagine you’re doing Scrum. You’re working in sprints, and you have one epic, one full feature that could deliver value to the customer.
But the team decides to work on two or three epics at the same time because they don’t want to tread on each other’s feet.
At the end of the sprint, you have three features that are half done. So you have no value for the customer. You have no learning. You can’t deploy anything in production. So your week has been, from a value point of view, completely wasted.
If instead of three people working on three features and doing half of each, the three had worked on only one feature, you could say, if you sum three times half, they will do less.
But the reality, in terms of value for the customer and for the organization, is that they’re doing much more.
Because at least at the end of the week, yes, it’s hard, yes, they’ve had to tread on each other’s feet a bit, but they’ve delivered one thing in production.
They can get feedback. They can say, “By the way, for the next feature, you know what? I completely changed my mind.”
And that’s a key idea of single-piece flow.
But how many teams are working on three, four, five features in parallel? I would say most of the teams I’ve ever met.
And therefore single-piece flow is really a principle to fight against that urge of doing things in parallel to feel more productive, which actually destroys global productivity.
Alexis: Yeah. What I really like with those two principles you highlighted is that basically it forces those conversations. It forces people to learn. It forces people to collaborate. It forces people to know how to work on the code all at the same time.
It forces a lot of those conversations we can avoid. But when we avoid them, we create a lot of waste. So it’s very interesting to look at it in that way.
Fabrice: I guess you’ve summarized a key idea of Lean thinking, which is showing the problems that are uncomfortable, but that are key to being a better company.
And then not seeing them as threats or depressing ideas, but seeing them as opportunities to problem solve and learn.
And do a bit better, and then a bit more better, and a bit more.
Not try to solve everything at once, except that things are the way they are. And the business is not dead yet.
But it could definitely be improved, and it would definitely be better for the customer and the organization.
Alexis: I really enjoyed the book, and I encourage people to read it.
We brushed a few things about the book, but there’s a lot more to say and a lot more value in it.
I love the way you explain the principles and provide examples from the tech industry, for those high-level principles that are not so obvious.
What are the things you want to close with? You’ve worked with Theodo for quite a long time now. Is it still exciting? Do you see things continue to evolve? Are you still a learning organization?
Fabrice: To be completely transparent, one challenge we’ve had has been COVID.
COVID destroyed visual management because all of a sudden we were all working from home.
And of course we had to find ways to work remotely. But our culture of really having all the indicators on the walls and giving a lot of visibility on what really mattered on every project was replaced by Notion and Miro.
And we lost some of the impact of visual management.
So that’s been one of the learnings from the last few years. And that’s not captured in the book because the book was finished in 2021–2022.
But I think we really realized the impact in the last one or two years. And we’ve been working hard on bringing visual management back.
Alexis: Yeah.
Fabrice: So that’s a current, very specific but quite strategic challenge.
And of course, the learnings now are how do you maintain this culture at even a larger scale.
A lot of what I write happens when we were scaling from 100 to about 500, and now we’re 700 and growing more. So that’s going to be a very interesting challenge.
It’s very exciting.
And the good thing about a learning culture and a lean culture where you find problems everywhere is that there’s enough problems to learn from for centuries. So I’m not worried about that.
And AI, of course, adds another layer. Not only do you have all these promises, but you also have the market throwing innovations at you that change the game.
Having a learning culture means you can adapt much faster than your competitors.
Clearly, I can see how our Lean Tech culture has given us a huge advantage with the arrival of AI.
We were better equipped as a large organization to frame that as an interesting problem, find places where AI could bring value right away, and experiment.
And a good thing about using AI where it brings value is that you can measure the impact of your experiments.
So now we already go three times faster than before, and we’re aiming for ten times faster.
So no, exciting times. I’m not bored.
Alexis: Yeah, that’s very cool.
I’ll put a link to my attempt to explain what Quentin Pleplé explained at Tech.Rocks about the factory you built using AI agents to modernize applications, because it’s fascinating, and the learning loop that’s built in to really improve the way it works.
It’s exciting times indeed.
What is one question I should have asked you that I did not, that you would like to answer?
Fabrice: You didn’t ask too much about AI, and I answered about AI nonetheless.
That’s fine.
I guess one interesting question when you talk about agility and Lean and things like that is to talk about business.
I think that’s one thing that has weakened the agile community, not talking enough about business.
At the end of the day, for a company, the key thing is: does that actually help us be a better business?
So that’s one question you could have asked.
And the answer would be: we were doing 1 million in revenue back in 2012. We’re doing over 100 million this year.
The industry has been suffering the last few years, but we’ve had a good year last year, and we’re on track to have another good year this year.
So yes, Lean Tech is great in terms of learning and people development, but it’s also great for business.
That’s what makes it a very sustainable approach to adopt.
Alexis: And that’s probably where people can really focus. If you can do it, maybe they can learn how to do it.
That’s very interesting.
Fabrice: We are happy to share.
Alexis: Glad to hear that.
Thank you very much for making the time to join me for this episode, and I’ll talk to you soon.
Fabrice: Thank you very much. Talk to you soon too.
Alexis (outro): If this conversation resonated with you, I’d really encourage you to share this episode with one or two people in your life. Someone you work with, someone you lead, or someone you are learning alongside.
Your recommendations truly matter. They help this podcast reach people who could learn from these conversations and apply them in their own context.
You can also find the full transcript of this episode in the companion blog post linked in the description. It’s available on alexis.monville.com if you’d like to revisit a specific moment or share it in written form.
Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership is supported by Pearlside. At Pearlside, we work with leaders and teams to create the conditions for responsibility, clarity, and impact to emerge.
You can learn more at pearlside.fr. Thank you for listening.
We’ve all been there: A “simple” legacy migration is estimated at 6 months. Two months in, the team discovers a web of hidden dependencies and implicit logic. The timeline balloons from 26 weeks to 70. The business loses faith.
At the latest Tech Rocks Summit (Dec 2025), Quentin Pleplé (CTO at Theodo) shared a framework to break this cycle. By merging Lean manufacturing principles with Agentic AI, his team is now modernizing legacy systems 3x faster while actually increasing code quality.
The Strategy: The “Modernization Factory”
Instead of treating migration as a manual craft, Theodo treats it as a structured assembly line. The unit of work is the “Touchpoint”—any testable element like an API endpoint, a frontend page, or a cron job.
By moving from simple workflows to autonomous agents in 2025, they’ve defined a Migration Flow that ensures every piece of code is scrutinized by both AI and humans.
The 6-Step Industrial Flow Based on the process Quentin detailed, every touchpoint follows a rigorous path to ensure nothing is missed:
Discovery (Agent-Led): An agent maps dependencies using recursive analysis to find “implicit” logic—hidden framework hooks or naming conventions—that traditional tools miss.
Reverse Engineering: This agent extracts business rules and technical logic, converting “spaghetti” into structured Markdown documentation so the “why” is never lost.
The Plan (Architect Agent): Using Spec-Driven Development, the agent writes the specs. Crucially, it must ask the developer 3–10 clarifying questions before it is allowed to proceed.
Code & Test: Developers work in Pair Programming with the AI. A QE agent runs unit and integration tests in a loop until everything passes—but humans must validate every step.
Kaizen (Continuous Improvement): Every human comment on a Pull Request (PR) is treated as a “defect”. A Kaizen Agent analyzes these via the GitHub API to find root causes and update the project’s global guidelines.
Validation: The final human review ensures the architecture meets the target standards.
Engineering Rigor: Solving the “Reviewer’s Nightmare”
One of the biggest risks with AI is the “PR dump”—6,000 lines of code that are impossible to review. Theodo solves this with the Storyteller Agent.
The Storyteller Agent rewrites the Git history into a logical narrative. It breaks a massive PR into small, atomic commits (Documentation → Pure Logic → Services → UI), making it digestible for a human Tech Lead.
The Result: 21 Weeks Instead of 70
By applying this Lean mindset, HealthHero saw their “runaway” 70-week migration completed in just 21 weeks. The speed didn’t come from cutting corners, but from automating “no-value” tasks like boilerplate and test writing, allowing humans to focus on high-level architecture and refactoring.
If this “Industrialized Agile” approach sparked your curiosity, you won’t want to miss our upcoming episode of Le Podcast.
We are sitting down with a renowned book author who will dive even deeper into how to effectively combine Agile and Lean methodologies within large-scale tech organizations. We’ll explore how to move beyond individual team “hacks” to create a true culture of continuous improvement across thousands of engineers.
Don’t miss out: Subscribe to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership on your favorite platform to be notified the moment this deep-dive episode drops.
A Final Thought to Carry With You As we move from “handcrafted” code to the “AI Factory,” the most critical question for leadership isn’t how fast we can code, but:
In an era where agents can handle the implementation, is your team currently organized to be the architects of the process, or are they still just the builders in the trenches?
