Alberto Terol

A few years ago I worked in a team that wore its “agile transformation” like a badge of honor. We had our impeccable Kanban board, our sprints, our rituals. Everything by the book. Until one day I asked something uncomfortable: “Why are we explaining what we did in the retrospective, and what we plan to do in the daily… rather than spending time actually executing?”. Silence. Turns out we had adopted the liturgy without understanding the sermon. And I pushed my luck and said something that didn’t land particularly well: “Agility comes from being agile, not from following a playbook.”

That experience taught me something I see repeated in almost every organization: when something doesn’t work, the instinctive reflex isn’t to understand what’s broken but adding something on top: a new process, committee or approval layer. I call it Organizational Scaffolding: the framework that hides the building instead of repairing it.

And the worst part is that each new layer triggers a perverse effect. It’s called Diffusion of Responsibility (Darley and Latané studied it in 1968 and called it the “Bystander Effect”): the more people participate in an approval chain, the less responsible each one feels. Those at the bottom think “the people above will review it properly.” Those at the top approve without looking because they assume “the people below already validated it.” Result: nobody truly reviews anything, but everyone signs off. We’ve created the illusion of control by multiplying the points of control.

It’s the scaffolding paradox: more structure, less order. More procedure, less rigor. More signatories, less responsibility.

So what actually works? Subtract: kill the meeting nobody prepares for, eliminate the report nobody reads and collapse the approval chain. As Richard Thaler would put it, the problem is rarely lack of incentives, it’s the sludge, the invisible friction that makes the desired behavior heroic instead of natural.

Dysfunctional organizations don’t improve by adding layers. They improve when someone has the courage to remove the scaffolding and look at what’s underneath.

Because a broken team with a new process is still a broken team. Now it simply has a process nobody follows. Or worse: one everyone follows religiously while the actual work rots beneath it.

Before adding anything, ask yourself one question: “Are we solving the problem or hiding from it?”

If the answer needs a 40-slide deck to explain itself, you already have it.

#ChangeManagement #OrganizationalChange #Agile #Transformation #ChangePills