Podcast Episode Details

Impact Engineering, Finding Agile's Lost North Star |Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel

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BONUS: Impact Engineering—Finding Agile's Lost North Star With Tom Gilb and Simon Holzapfel The Clarity Problem: Why Organizations Start with "Fuzzy B*S*!"

"Everybody seems to start from a position of fuzzy b*s*. Nice-sounding words. Management does it, professors do it, politicians do it. And they don't even feel very guilty about it."

Tom Gilb doesn't mince words when describing how most organizations define their objectives. The fundamental problem isn't a lack of ambition—it's a lack of clarity. When leaders are asked about their critical values like "extremely high security" or "employee happiness," they typically respond with circular definitions that provide no actionable direction. Tom's approach starts by exposing this gap and then demonstrating that any value—no matter how "soft" or intangible it seems—can be quantified. Using AI tools, he's shown clients over 1,400 different ways to measure human happiness alone.

Why Agile Lost Its North Star

"Agile's lost its North Star because the economic problems it was trying to solve within the organization are now mismatched with the digital world."

Simon Holzapfel offers a structural analysis: Agile developed primarily to allay the concerns of pre-digital capital—investors who needed reassurance that their money wouldn't disappear into failed projects. But today's digital economy operates differently. Capital now moves like a service (SaaS model), and innovation is fundamentally stochastic—you can't predict when breakthroughs will happen. Organizations using flow-focused tools when the real problem is value creation are applying yesterday's solutions to today's challenges.

The First Step: Quantify Your Critical Values

"If you ask AI to quantify employee happiness a hundred different ways, it will do it in one minute for free. So you can no longer be in denial."

The path forward starts with brutal honesty about what your organization actually cares about. Tom's approach involves:

• Identifying the top 10 critical stakeholder values

• Defining clear scales of measure for each

• Establishing where you are now (status)

• Published on 4 days, 18 hours ago