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Home > Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast > When a Hub-and-Spoke Executive Hijacks Your Agile Transformation — And What to Do About It | Peter Merel
Podcast: Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast
Episode:

When a Hub-and-Spoke Executive Hijacks Your Agile Transformation — And What to Do About It | Peter Merel
Category: News & Politics
Duration: 00:16:31
Publish Date: 2026-05-05 10:05:00
Description: Peter Merel: When a Hub-and-Spoke Executive Hijacks Your Agile Transformation — And What to Do About It

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.

"Either you're going to do what you know works, or you're going to step away. Either way, you're not going to do damage to your client." - Peter Merel

After a successful transformation at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Peter Merel moved to Westpac, another major Australian bank, expecting to replicate the same approach. He found an executive who appeared eager to support an agile transformation — but this executive saw agile as the ideal form of micromanagement. Everything and everyone revolved around this one individual, and as Peter began facilitating conversations that didn't hub on the executive, the executive felt disempowered. Peter was blind to this dynamic — he had never encountered it before. The situation deteriorated because Peter had been hired to run a push-based transformation, when he knew from experience that only pull-based transformation works. At Commonwealth Bank, he had built a thin steel thread from business through to DevOps with a small group, proved it worked, and then grown it organically. At Westpac, he let himself be persuaded to push change into the organization, and it compromised everything. The lesson Peter shares is stark: if you can't do what you know works, and you can't step away, then you are the problem. He also warns that when coaches fail this way, they make life harder for whoever comes next — a responsibility that's easy to overlook in the moment.

In this segment, we talk about pull-based transformation and why push-based change programs consistently fail in large organizations.

Self-reflection Question: Are you currently in a situation where you've compromised on your approach to change — and if so, are you doing more damage by staying than you would by stepping away?

Featured Book of the Week: The Agile Way by Peter Merel

Peter's own book, The Agile Way, is his modern translation of the Tao Te Ching — a 3,000-year-old text he argues was originally about how to achieve agile development in organizations large and small. Peter first started translating this text in 1989, and after decades of iteration, the book draws connections between ancient wisdom and modern agile practices — XP, Lean, Theory of Constraints, throughput accounting, and permaculture. As Peter explains, "The sage in Lao Tzu is Shang Ren — agile people. This is a book about agile people, agility, and it always was." The book is available at agile.way.pm, and Kent Beck, who wrote the foreword, calls it "a dangerous little book" — dangerous in the same sense as the word extreme.

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