Counting how many teams run the Agile ceremonies tells you people are doing things. It doesn’t tell you anything got better. Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi call that “change theater,” and it’s one of the illusions their new book is built to take apart.
My guests for Episode 550 are the co-authors of Signals & Levers: Systems Thinking Tools to Unblock Software Delivery (IT Revolution, September 2026). Elisabeth is the founder of Curious Duck Digital Laboratory, former VP of R&D at Pivotal, and author of Explore It! Joel is co-founder and CTO of Dojo & Co. and co-author of Creating Your Dojo and Coaching for Learning.
The book is written for software organizations, but the ideas come from Deming, Shewhart, Argyris, and Donella Meadows, and most of this conversation applies to any leader trying to improve a system. We talk about the three illusions of predictability, progress, and control, and why they tend to show up together. We get into what it means to run “open loop,” changing things without ever checking whether the change worked, and how organizations accidentally create latency by separating strategy from execution. Joel explains why he brought process behavior charts to software teams, and Elisabeth makes the case that story points are an opinion, cycle time is a fact, and doing math on an opinion still leaves you with an opinion.
We close on psychological safety: why a defensive organization can score itself high on safety surveys while behaving otherwise, and why you can’t fix fear by telling people to be brave.
Full show notes, links, and transcript: https://www.leanblog.org/550
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