Independent organisational consultant
I help organisations work out what’s actually wrong before they spend money fixing the wrong thing.
Episode 1
Scrum Masters Should Be Unemployed
A mentor's throwaway line about making yourself jobless, and what happens to the people who take it seriously enough to become invisible.
Mathias
The role of the Scrum Master is to make ourselves jobless.
AI
Which creates a perverse incentive.
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Recent problems
Episode 1 · 14 min
Scrum Masters Should Be Unemployed
A mentor's throwaway line about making yourself jobless, and what happens to the people who take it seriously enough to become invisible.
Mathias
The role of the Scrum Master is to make ourselves jobless.
AI
Which creates a perverse incentive.
Read this episode
Episode 2 · 16 min
Jira Is Waiting to Become Conscious
A planning tool that can be configured into a small internal government, and what happens when the dashboard becomes easier to govern than the work it represents.
Mathias
Jira is the best worst planning tool I have available to me.
AI
You have added a captcha before failure.
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Episode 3 · 16 min
We Built You a Better Community. Attendance Is Mandatory.
A city, a workplace guild, and the difference between systems people use and systems people inhabit.
Mathias
What you can’t do is force people into communities. “Mandatory community service” sounds, funnily enough, like a prison sentence.
AI
So there’s a difference between offering community and expecting identification.
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All episodes
Selected work
Unifying customer service after forty-four mergers
Customer service needed technical support for cross-selling and cross-product service across a fragmented application stack.
The sharpest friction appeared when products were being created, changed, terminated, or migrated — precisely when customers called and staff had the least reliable visibility.
Staff gained one place to see a customer's relationship with the company across product areas.
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Choosing honesty over false confidence in customer data
Applications needed an easy way to find related customer accounts and products across several ERP systems.
Legacy records lacked a consistently reliable identifier, while fallback matching could expose one customer's information to another.
The customer-service platform remained usable throughout the matching engine's six-month withdrawal.
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Building a voluntary community after an organisational transfer
Four transferred Scrum Masters had lost their coach and their forum for developing agile practice.
They needed to establish agile as a people-centred discipline in a company that treated it mainly as a project-management tool.
The guild grew from five founding members to twelve active members, including after membership became fully voluntary.
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Mentoring four people without one standard programme
Four people were developing as Scrum Masters or Product Owners, with little clarity about what mentoring should address.
Their role titles concealed different starting points, so useful support could not be standardised around the role alone.
All four people developed within their respective roles, without one standard mentoring programme.
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Working together
Diagnostic work, facilitation, coaching and mentoring, and short product or delivery interventions.
Remote. Short and defined by default, at low weekly hours, expandable when the engagement justifies it. Contracted through Roaming Minds House.
You do not need to know whether the situation calls for a diagnostic, facilitation, coaching, or something else. Working out what it actually is can be the first conversation.