The 10 vicious circles at work: detecting and breaking them up
summary
Lists ten concrete downward spirals (abbreviations breeding confusion, Scrum Master as single point of failure, messy boards, 25‑person teams hiring weekly, 253 simultaneous backlog items, technical debt that makes refactors take months). Recommends specific remedies: 5 Whys or Ishikawa to find root causes, a simple skill matrix to reveal 2.5/1.5 expertise bottlenecks, dedicate X% of sprint to refactoring, add automation and coding conventions, use NPS-style team surveys, value‑stream and user‑story mapping, and enforce WIP limits with the mantra finish more, start less.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 4:44Psychological safety
- 6:45Scrum Master Superhero
- 9:00Find the root cause
- 13:03Dashboard and meetings
- 14:14Root cause
- 16:09Team turnover
- 17:22Team engagement survey
- 20:22Technical depth
- 22:23Frozen lake
- 26:13Conflict resolution depth
- 27:50Root causes
- 29:44No working progress limit
- 30:53The root cause
- 32:14No time for improvement
- 33:21Root cows
- 35:16Toxic behaviors
- 36:52Separate them
- 41:54Lets rewind
- 42:35Roll back finger pointing
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