Why System Design Beats Individual Coaching Every Time | Karim Harbott

Karim Harbott: Why System Design Beats Individual Coaching Every Time

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.

"You can't change people, but you can change the system. Change the environment, not the people." - Karim Harbott

Karim was coaching a distributed team that was struggling with defects appearing constantly during sprints. The developers and testers were at different sites, and communication seemed fractured. But Karim knew from experience that when teams are underperforming, the problem usually isn't the people—it's the system they're working in. He stepped back to examine the broader context, implementing behavior-driven development(BDD) and specification by example to improve clarity through BDD scenarios.

But the defects persisted.

Then, almost by accident, Karim discovered the root cause: the developers and testers were employed by different companies. They had competing interests, different incentives, and fundamentally misaligned goals. No amount of coaching the individuals would fix a structural problem like that.

It took months, but eventually the system changed—developers and testers were reorganized into unified teams from the same organization. Suddenly, the defects dropped dramatically. As Jocko Willink writes in Extreme Ownership, when something isn't working, look at the system first. Karim's experience proves that sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is stop trying to fix people and start fixing the environment they work in.

Self-reflection Question: When your team struggles, do you look at the people or at the system they're embedded in?

Featured Book of the Week: Scaling Lean and Agile Development by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde

"This book was absolute gold. The way it is written, and the tools they talk about went beyond what I was talking about back then. They introduced many concepts that I now use." - Karim Harbott

Karim discovered Scaling Lean and Agile Development by accident, but it resonated with him immediately. The concepts Craig Larman and Bas Vodde introduced—particularly around LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum)—went far beyond the basics Karim had been working with. The book opened his eyes to system-level thinking at scale, showing how to maintain agility even as organizations grow.

It's packed with practical tools and frameworks that Karim still uses today. For anyone working beyond a single team, this book provides the depth and nuance that most scaling frameworks gloss over. Also worth reading: User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn, another foundational text that shaped Karim's approach to working with teams.

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About Karim Harbott

Karim is a consultant, trainer, and non-executive director. He bridges the gap between strategy, business agility, digital transformation, innovation, AI, and board governance. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer, and is the author of The 6 Enablers of Business Agility.

You can link with Karim Harbott on LinkedIn.