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Home > Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast > Over-Commitment and Silence—The Deadly Duo Destroying Your Teams | Felipe Engineer-Manriquez
Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
Episode:

Over-Commitment and Silence—The Deadly Duo Destroying Your Teams | Felipe Engineer-Manriquez
Category: News & Politics
Duration: 00:13:56
Publish Date: 2026-01-27 11:05:00
Description: Agile in Construction: Over-Commitment and Silence—The Deadly Duo Destroying Your Teams With Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"I don't think people are bad. They don't self-destruct because they're bad. What I do see is people getting crushed in terribly bad systems." - Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe shares a powerful insight about team dysfunction: teams don't self-destruct because of bad people—they get crushed by broken systems. On a hospital construction project, he witnessed a dangerous pattern: over-commitment coupled with silence. People would commit to pouring concrete on Thursday when there wasn't even rebar in place—a physical impossibility. But psychological safety was so low that no one could say the emperor had no clothes. Felipe's approach? Ask obvious questions that break the pattern. "Don't you need this so you can do that?" This simple question, framed with verb-noun phrases, surfaces what cannot be spoken. He positions himself as "just a simple, dumb general contractor" who doesn't understand—creating safety for others to speak truth. The turning point comes when you slow down, make work visible, and allow people to say no. As Felipe puts it: "For real accountability, if people are not allowed to say no, then they actually can't make a real promise." Silence is not alignment, and saying yes in low-trust environments is actually hiding from accountability.

In this segment, we talk about psychological safety and systems thinking in team dynamics.

Self-reflection Question: When you see a team over-committing to impossible deadlines, what question could you ask that surfaces the truth without putting individuals at risk?

Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt

Felipe chose The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt as the most transformative book of his early lean career. He describes it as "the number one game changer"—a fictional story that teaches the Theory of Constraints in a way you can internalize. The famous "Herbie story" within the book illustrates how helping the slowest part of a process speeds up the entire system. Felipe emphasizes that Theory of Constraints is often skipped in Scrum training when classes run out of time, leaving many credentialed Scrum Masters without this essential knowledge. He uses these principles daily with the Last Planner System in construction—creating visual boards that look like Gantt charts (because construction loves schedules) but function like Scrum boards with days of the week instead of "to do, doing, done."

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