We say we want teams to own their decisions. But what happens the moment you actually hand people the pen, and they discover how uncomfortable that is?

Two weeks into a new role, Yves Hanoulle, who calls himself a “creative collaboration agent” rather than an agile coach, was working with a group of about forty people split into four colour-named sub-teams. Then an internal customer said any team could pick up a feature, except the yellow one. Yves stopped all work and ran a retro. The group quickly agreed on three teams instead of four, and spent a lot of energy blaming his boss and his absent predecessor for the original split. After lunch, Yves and his boss cleared every chair and table out of the biggest room in the building, and Yves explained the rules: “I would help you make decisions, but I would not make decisions for you.” Walk around in silence, form three circles, and stop moving when you’re happy.

Twenty minutes in, the loudest critic of the original decision pointed at Yves and said: “You should decide.” Yves said no, and reminded him of his own words that morning. What followed was a day of dynamics nobody had spoken about: a cluster of French-speaking colleagues who wouldn’t move, two people who physically blocked a third from joining their circle, a colleague in tears who was then welcomed with open arms, and the two most senior people choosing to split up. They finished at four o’clock with not a line of code written, and Yves believes they delivered more that sprint than if they had carried on.

This conversation explores what it means to decide how to decide without deciding the outcome. We dig into why people say “I hate this decision” when they really mean “I want someone to blame”, what removing speech makes visible, why a co-facilitator mattered, and the question Yves admits he never fully answered: what do you do with the truth a good exercise surfaces?

Key Discussion Points

• [00:01] Anything But the Yellow Team: An internal customer rules out one team, and Yves stops work to run a retro where the blame lands on his boss and predecessor
• [04:00] Chairs Out, Mouths Closed: Booking the biggest room, clearing the furniture, and the rules for walking in silence into three circles
• [06:00] “You Should Decide”: The loudest critic asks Yves to make the call, and Yves hands the morning’s complaint straight back
• [08:00] Language, Mentoring and a Blocked Circle: A French-speaking cluster in a Dutch-speaking group, and two people closing ranks on a third
• [12:00] Refusing the Checklist: Why Yves wouldn’t let forty people agree team criteria up front, even though they hated him for it
• [14:00] Deciding That We Decide: Andrew on the narrow but real authority of choosing how a decision gets made
• [24:00] Making Space: The colleague in tears, a five-minute chat with the boss, and a circle that opened up
• [29:00] The Signal Nobody Followed Up: Andrea asks what Yves did with the block, and why a day like this leaves a facilitator exhausted

Guest: Yves Hanoulle

Hosts: Andrew Harmel-Law, Andrea Magnorsky, Kenny Schwegler

We tend to assume that if the people who will live with an architecture standard help create it, adoption takes care of itself. Invite the teams, let them design the process, give everyone a voice, and the standards will be theirs.

Wouter Lagerweij tells the story of an organisation where that assumption did not hold. A large company grown through mergers and takeovers, where "no one can tell us what to do" had quietly turned into "no one is actually telling anyone what they're doing." The ask was sensible: standardisation and a common architecture, coming from the teams. Technical leads self-selected into the sessions, ADRs were written, debated and ratified, and everyone had an opinion. Half a year later, the standards were parked on a website and practically nobody was using them. Not even the teams whose own members had written them.

The moment it became undeniable was a sprint planning session. On the backlog: a technical improvement implementing one of those standards. There was a document, example code, a production service already using it, and the author, a former teammate, explicitly offering to help. The team's answer: "Yeah, we don't know. We're gonna postpone it to the next board."

This conversation, with Suzanne Lagerweij joining in, explores why doing all the right things still didn't produce the change. We dig into how a process built so that everyone has their say can end with nobody feeling they own the outcome, why consent is not consensus, why the technical lead is not always the person who moves a team, and why Wouter believes the missing ingredient was not more process but people whose only job is to keep the energy on one change until it lands.

Key Discussion Points

* [00:02] Standardisation From the Teams: A merged organisation where autonomy has become "nobody tells anyone anything" asks for a common architecture built by the teams themselves

* [00:05] Parked on a Website: After half a year of ratifying ADRs, the standards sit unused, even by their authors, and the process gets seen as a "distributed ivory tower"

* [00:07] "Postpone It to the Next Board": Documentation, example code, a production service and a willing author, and the team still defers the work

* [00:08] Pulling Every Lever: Easier adoption, wider representation and explicit leadership permission fall flat, while defect-only sprints actually deliver

* [00:13] Nobody Owned It: Not even the people in the room felt the standards were theirs, and Suzanne asks whether technical leads were the teams' informal leaders

* [00:16] Too Much Room to Object: A process designed so everyone has their say, design by committee, and the difference between consent and consensus

* [00:22] One Change, Real Slack: What Wouter would do differently, from landing a single standard to sending in people whose only job is to raise the energy

* [00:24] More Emotional Than Cognitive: Connecting the "because" to what teams care about, and why a dashboard is not the change

**Guests:** Wouter Lagerweij, Suzanne Lagerweij

**Hosts:** Kenny Schwegler

Most organisations have a community of practice that nobody actually wants to attend. It sits in the calendar every two weeks, a handful of people talk, and the rest stay silent. Suzanne Lagerweij has a simple explanation for why: people don't feel like they matter there. Why would anyone go the extra mile if they go unnoticed?

Suzanne brings a background in psychology and social work, including working with troubled teenagers in group homes. She sees clear parallels with software teams: stubborn people you can't order around, where nothing moves until you understand what they need.

At her current client, AI adoption consisted of exactly one thing: an Excel sheet where a few early adopters logged their experiments. There was no direction and no support, and nobody was listening. So Suzanne, brought in to coach a very difficult team, organised an internal AI conference that nobody had asked for. Management said yes, but mostly worried about the hours lost from the roadmap. About 100 people came to the first edition and 150 to the second.

Alongside the conference she started a biweekly AI café: a demo, a conversation and a freshly baked cake. She refused to make it hybrid, because "if you want to have an actual community that works, people have to be together."

Her own team went from being the problem team to being the department's AI frontrunners. Not everything moved, though. Management loved the energy, right up to the point where they realised they were part of the problem. Suzanne proposed a questionnaire to understand where developers were on the learning curve. It came back longer and mandatory, with everyone summoned to a meeting to fill it in. "Well, that's not how it works."

This conversation explores what it takes to build a community people actually want to be part of. That means making invisible work visible to the people who can support it, and recognising people as individuals. It also means finding successors before you leave, and being honest about why you're doing it when it isn't your job. Wouter Lagerweij joins in to connect the mandatory survey to Goodhart's law, with token spend as the new lines of code. As Suzanne puts it: if you don't, then who does?

Key Discussion Points

• [00:01] From Group Homes to Lifeless Chapters: Suzanne's background in social work, and why communities of practice become just another meeting when people feel unnoticed
• [03:45] The Spreadsheet Was the Strategy: AI adoption amounts to an Excel sheet of experiments, so Suzanne organises an internal conference nobody budgeted for
• [05:00] A Stage, Not a Finished Product: Convincing reluctant speakers that a session is a story, and bringing management in to see what's really happening
• [07:00] Cake, Demos, and No Hybrid: The biweekly AI café that turned a problem team into frontrunners, and why Suzanne insisted people be in the room
• [10:00] Management as Part of the Problem: Managers who liked the movement, but not what it revealed about them
• [13:30] If You Don't, Who Does?: Why communities collapse when the organiser leaves, and the effort of finding people to carry it forward
• [15:00] Making People Change Makers: Small steps, visible value, and Wouter on appreciation and recognition as the basics that make people feel important
• [19:00] The Mandatory Questionnaire: Measuring productivity versus understanding the learning curve, and why enforced participation breaks the instrument

Guest: Suzanne Lagerweij (with Wouter Lagerweij)

Host: Kenny Schwegler