KUMAR: Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with The Meridian Point. Today's guest is an Agile coach and transformation practitioner who has spent years working inside some of Canada's largest organizations, including Canada Life, helping leadership teams navigate complexity without losing their people in the process. Nawaz Butt is based in Toronto and brings a perspective on organizational change that is anything but textbook. He doesn't see people as Agile or non-Agile. He doesn't chase frameworks for their own sake. What he does chase is authentic presence, honest conversations, and the kind of change that actually sticks. He's here today to talk about what it really takes to catalyze change from the inside, why de-scaling organizations may matter more than scaling them, and what happens when you bring your whole self to work in a culture that rewards multitasking. This should be a fantastic conversation because it's right up my alley. Hi, Nawaz, nice to have you on the show.
NAWAZ: Hi. Thank you for having me.
KUMAR: Of course. So, as per the intro, you've been a coach for a long time inside some large companies. Most people, myself included, are brought in to scale the approach, to scale it from one team to multiple teams to hundreds of teams, perhaps. But you've said publicly that the goal should be to de-scale organizations. That's something I also believe in through my work with XSCALE, and the idea of de-scaling organizations really appeals to me. What do you mean by that, and where did that thinking originate?
NAWAZ: Thanks, I'm glad you asked. I go back to this old cliche, Conway's Law. Organizations design systems that are just a reflection of their communication structures. Organizations tend to get bigger, and once they get bigger, they tend to add layers. Those layers could be hierarchies, chain of command, approvals, hand-offs. So I'm not surprised that when I go in, especially in the tech space, I see teams running into a number of dependencies. Because it's a large organization, the capabilities have spread across the enterprise. As organizations scale those capabilities within those structures, what they are doing is adding more load on the system. They're adding committees, steering committees, gates. That whole coordination effort becomes a huge undertaking. My take on this is: yes, you can celebrate your growth. Some people chase numbers, like the number of people reporting to them, the size of portfolios, the reporting lines they have. But for me, organizational maturity is about how we make decision-making simple. I was in an organization where they did engagement surveys, and year on year, one of the top five issues was that decision-making is slow. So this is where I tend to talk about the de-scaling concept. De-scaling means we need to create localized decision-making bodies in the organization where people and teams are able to make decisions. That may help them overcome some of the dependencies they're running into. The aim has to be not to have more teams, but to have fewer teams in the organization.
KUMAR: Is it fewer teams, or fewer people on teams, or both?
NAWAZ: The definition of team can be very subjective, depending on how people define it. People say two people are a team. Scrum has its own cross-functional team definition. I don't get too hooked up on the definition, as long as people have a common goal and are driving toward it. I go back to Formula One. I ask people, how many people are on a Formula One team? People give different answers because they're thinking about how many people are on the racetrack at a given time. But when you look at Ferrari or Red Bull, they have 1,200 to 1,500 people, or even more, on a Formula One team. How can those people work together toward a common goal? Because the common goal is to win races. If leadership has done a good enough job defining what the goals are, it becomes easier to rally people around them. I remember a conversation with a leader in an organization with a lot of layers. This leader was a business sponsor, and what he was effectively asking was, do these people even understand what we are trying to achieve? He was referring to component teams, middleware API teams, back-end teams. The messaging gets lost in the complexity of the architecture, and everything becomes a binary decision.
KUMAR: I'm totally tracking with you. I'm just curious, when you go into a large company and say you need fewer teams, I don't know if that message lands easily. Maybe it's more about alignment that allows for autonomy, the decisions to be made autonomously by the teams themselves, which may lead to fewer teams being needed to do the same amount of work. I think what you're getting at is that we have people focused on conveying information that maybe wouldn't be needed if they were aligned to a common mission and understood their role in achieving it. Is that where you're going?
NAWAZ: Right. And I also wonder about the definition of team. People throw the word out, and for me it has a very specific meaning. The people on a team, whatever the number, and there have been a lot of studies showing that smaller numbers are more effective, those people understand each other's skills and abilities, they pull toward the same goal, they back each other up and help each other without being asked. I don't see that much of that. What I see more often are groups of people working on a project but functioning as individuals inside that group. That may be a symptom of the hierarchy and bureaucracy created by scaling.
KUMAR: What's your thought on that?
NAWAZ: The concept of team is misunderstood. People who report to the same manager are mostly classified as a team. There is a book called Collaborative Intelligence, I believe the author is Hackman, and I think he worked with CIA teams. He put together six conditions for a team. I don't remember all of them, but the first condition is that the team needs to have a purpose. You need the right people for the right job. He put coaching at number five, which means coaching can help, but it's not the prerequisite to make a great team. Making a real team, even using a tick-box approach, means having the right purpose, the right people, and the right skill set. That means the right attitude and all the competencies needed to deliver the product, which is difficult to find.
I remember a place where I brought this framework up in a conversation with a leader. What had happened was that a team had lost its purpose. It wasn't a bad team, it was a great team, but it lost its purpose because the organization had shifted priorities. So my conversation with the leader was that this team ticks all the boxes. The only thing it doesn't have is a vision, a purpose. Give this team a purpose and they will do great things. Another way of looking at it: we usually get hooked on the top-down need to have an objective to make a great team. But the teams could already be there. You just need to bring the right work to them and take advantage of the camaraderie that exists.
KUMAR: Yeah, I like the way you put it. Give a team potential, bring the right work or the right purpose to them, and they can really blossom. And the key there is bringing the work to the team, because too often in large companies, people are brought to the work rather than the work being brought to the team. Going back to de-scaling: you mentioned earlier that fewer teams are often enough, as long as they have the power to make decisions autonomously for the things they're responsible for. What does that look like in practice?
NAWAZ: There's a nice tool from the management space called delegation poker. It maps out the extremes from a telling stance all the way to full delegation. That's a negotiation between the team and leadership. You may not start at one of those extremes, maybe you start somewhere in the middle, but wherever you start, the aim is to always work toward full delegation. Not everything can be autonomous. Some management decisions, like hiring in some cases, or budgeting, may still require collaboration. But the decision ultimately sits with the leader. Moving the organization or the team toward more autonomy is where we want to go.
I remember one situation where, in the very early days of standing up a team, a leader sent an email with 25-plus points about what they wanted from the team. That started the conversation. Why do you think the team needs all of these things? What do those things mean for the team? The idea was to bring that leader to a space where we could discuss the shift from a telling stance to a facilitating stance, to a collaboration stance, to an owning stance. It's a shift in how they think and approach things. But you can start from anywhere. The aim is to make the team the nucleus of what delivery looks like.
As we stand up more long-lived teams with fixed capacity, the team needs to own some of the decisions about their commitments and how they deliver against them.
KUMAR: I'm with you. I'm just still wondering how fewer teams translates to faster decision-making for the organization as a whole.
NAWAZ: It's like peeling an onion in the organization. I have seen it everywhere. When we look at delivery models, I usually see traditional models, some bits of Agile, and then a hybrid. That's one of the challenges. Organizations are not decisive about which direction they want to go. There was an article in the Harvard Business Review where a CEO was chasing a target percentage of Agile teams in the organization. But if that's the right way to work, why do you want other teams? Organizations are still not decisive because of the legacy management footprint in many of their practices.
As organizations force traditional approaches alongside Agile, teams end up with a local Agile footprint but aligned to traditional delivery. We still want the big Gantt charts and the schedules, and then the teams are supposed to deliver against that. Organizations are not looking at what their value stream would look like when we talk about end-to-end customer experience. We're still stuck in business versus tech discussions. As alignment around the customer is missing, we get a lot of vertical silos standing up on both the business and tech sides, which creates a multiplier effect. We scale those localized capabilities more and more. A bank ends up wanting 25 API teams because this API team needs to serve the entire organization.
We also tend to have a lot of virtual teams because as more projects happen, the underlying Agile teams doing most of the production support and BAU work end up having people borrowed from them to put a portion of their capacity toward a new mandate. Something suffers in the system, but we don't know exactly where or at what cost. Because everyone is running in their own lane, we're trying to maximize existing capabilities by setting up virtual teams across multiple mandates. Those mandates can run into each other. I have seen firsthand where teams are struggling to integrate their work because their initiatives are clashing. They can't merge their branch, they can't push to production. Organization complexity cascades everywhere.
KUMAR: Yeah, I see that all the time in the companies I'm supporting as well. Because there's so much work in progress, with things clashing and conflicting, it obviously affects the teams, especially when the organization hasn't been structured to make value delivery easier. All right, let's shift topics a bit. You've said you don't see people as Agile or non-Agile. How does that mindset actually show up for you as a coach?
NAWAZ: I borrow from Kanban here: meet the team where they are. That is my position on people. I don't think people resist Agile. I think they resist uncertainty, or maybe changes to their identity or status, or gaps that exist in the organization. For me, it's a people-first approach. That's what the Agile Manifesto also says: people over process, interactions over tools. I try to come as transparent and open as I can be and have honest conversations with people, without using Agile jargon. It's a people connection, a people conversation, trying to understand where I can help and what gaps they want me to look at.
KUMAR: That's a good approach. Even if someone hasn't had any experience with Agile, it's been around for 25 or 26 years and people have an opinion of it. The approach you use, not talking jargon but really understanding what people are struggling with and where their constraints are, is really the only approach to use as a coach. That's kind of my approach as well.
NAWAZ: When we talk about people, I was proven wrong at times, but there was that study Google did, Project Aristotle, where they were trying to find the secret sauce of high-performing teams. What they found was that it's not the smartest people or the most knowledgeable people that make the difference. It's psychological safety on the team that is the biggest contributor. There were five factors in total, but psychological safety was the biggest one.
So I go back to that. How much safety is there when I'm having conversations with people? Are they feeling safe? Are they open? I really like it when somebody says they hate something. I'm looking for the skeleton to come out of the closet. But that openness comes when people trust you and have confidence in you, which takes effort. Once you build that, you can have very honest and true conversations with people outside the Agile versus non-Agile realm. This is a real people connection. This is where we challenge our thoughts, our beliefs, our blind spots. That's where we can become a partner and an ally without wearing any titles.
I have successes with this, but I won't claim it works everywhere. One of my fellow coaches was given the title of Gentle Coach by a client. And one of the things that was said was, Nawaz, if somebody goes to person one in the morning and calls them an a-hole, and says the same to person two in the afternoon, and to person three in the evening, you know who the a-hole is. It's your reflection you see. If you bring your true self to the conversation, most times people respond, and you have a more empathetic, real conversation. That's how I try to show up in my practice.
KUMAR: That's a great approach. I know from our last conversation that you hold a standard for yourself of being fully present at work, keeping your camera on, not multitasking, in a culture where many people are doing the opposite. I love the Gentle Coach moniker. And if I remember right, you've gotten feedback that you're too transparent for some organizations. How do you hold that standard without becoming a disruption to your own ability to operate inside the organization?
NAWAZ: I walk away from a team when it's the right call. One time, leadership brought me in and asked me to look at a team that had been without a manager for over a year. They wanted me to go in and spin this team up and make them an awesome team. I went and looked at the team. I'm not going to get into all the details, but I went back to leadership a week or two weeks later. I know it was a risky move because as a consultant I was supposed to find or create complexity rather than recommend less. But I told them this team doesn't need me. I explained why. The team was very self-organized, small and nimble. They were all for one and one for all. They were looking after each other. It was an in-person team, which helps. Nobody needed to tell them to do their stand-up. Even if only two people were there, they were doing it. The thing happening for that team was that they were without a leader, and that is what I try to educate leadership on: please get out of the way of the teams. This team survived without a manager.
I go back to Shark Tank. When entrepreneurs come in with a pitch, the sharks often ask, are you doing this full time? If not, if you are spending time somewhere else, you are not spending that time growing this business. I see coaching the same way. I have limited coaching hours. My job as a coach is not to preserve my role. It's to create conditions where people can become more self-organized and self-sufficient. I would rather go and help other teams that would benefit from my attention.
KUMAR: I love it. You're essentially working yourself out of a job by creating the conditions for teams to be more self-sufficient. If you can do that, you've done your job, and you can apply your talent to teams that may need that work. Where do you see the coaching profession going in the future?
NAWAZ: This is a difficult one. I can't see the future. I'm an accidental coach myself. I happened to land on this title because it's close to my true DNA as a person. The industry gave me this title. I was never chasing it. I had many other titles in my career. As everything does, this thing is going to evolve. We've seen fast-tracking of that evolution recently with the rise of AI. I think coaching as a discipline is going to stay in some form and shape. I was talking to a Scrum Master recently who kept referring to me as an Agile coach and not seeing themselves as a coach. I had to tell them: don't get fixated on the title. You are also a coach. Everyone in the leadership domain does some form of coaching and mentoring.
I would be happier if organizations made coaching and mentoring part of the leadership traits they want to see in their leaders. Right now, the patterns of the past are coming back. The version of leadership we see in places that are struggling is just the same patterns repeating because those leaders create more leaders like themselves, and it becomes a vicious cycle. My hope is that as modern management thinking and practitioners like myself bring these conversations into our interactions with leadership, we can make a small dent in how organizations recruit and develop people. I believe the next generation is going to be different and more modern in their thinking.
KUMAR: That's what I'm trying to do as well. There are a lot of leaders who are natural coaches in most companies. You find them, you see them, and they recognize you. But coaching and mentoring and facilitating aren't necessarily things that people get promoted for. People get promoted for what they can do or what they did, for tangible evidence of successes, not so much for the people they developed. And the engagement rates in most companies are pretty low, around 35 to 40 percent, which means 60 to 65 percent of people are not engaged in their work. That supports your argument that you don't need as many teams. If you can get teams that are engaged and productive, they can do amazing things, and you won't need as many teams to do the work that currently requires all of them.
NAWAZ: Right. I go back to who was probably the first official coach. I believe Taiichi Ohno was the first coach. He introduced the Toyota Team Leader role. He came up with a discipline around how to create more leaders at Toyota. He was the first coach, but he never called himself that. He created something to scale the practice in the organization because he thought he couldn't be everywhere. He started small, put a discipline in place, and the organization grew from there.
I'm not a big fan of titles. I think the functions matter more. The Scrum Master title became a job title, which is strange, because the Scrum Master role was supposed to have project management and people management functions baked into it. Now it has become Scrum theater in many places. I want the disciplines and capabilities to exist regardless of the titles. I would actually be happier if the title went away. It has sometimes put me on a pedestal, where people take two steps back and say, okay, the coach is in the room, give the coach some space. I never liked that. I like to be rooted on the ground and have real conversations with people. But this is where the industry has landed with this function, so no complaints. I believe coaching is here to stay. What form it takes, I don't know. My hope is that the human stays in the loop with all this emergence of AI.
KUMAR: I'll tell you a little story about that. One of my business coaching clients asked me to package up an AI with my knowledge, my frameworks and my approach, and I fed it into an agent and gave it to him for the time between our sessions. We meet every couple of weeks, and in between, when he has a question, he can use the agent because it has enough to simulate a conversation he might have with me. He named the agent E. Kumar.
NAWAZ: Yeah. I know there was someone in Canada who came up with an Agile coaching agent they call Max. They were training it on some of the things you just described. I do see that happening, but I would hope the human element doesn't go away or disappear. I'm seeing a lot of things where people record their meetings, take transcripts, and let AI generate action items. There's a lot of data being thrown around. But one of the questions I asked people was: okay, this AI bot does all these things, but can you tell me what it didn't do? The answers I got back were surface-level. It couldn't get an abbreviation right, or a name was incorrectly spelled. Those kinds of things happen because of organizational culture. But that's not the answer I'm looking for.
I believe there are things that humans see that AI can't. This thing has no feeling. It doesn't have emotional intelligence. It won't feel the tension in the room. It won't see the visual cues, like someone rolling their eyes or staring at the ceiling. At least not yet. And even if it gets there, I'm not sure how much I would trust it. We still need humans to exchange feelings, discuss opinions and disagreements, and sit with concerns or frustration. Those are human connections. That's the part I feel AI will struggle to replicate.
KUMAR: Maybe I'll share this agent with you so you can test it. It's quite sophisticated. The answers it gives are sophisticated, and it intuits what you're thinking in some cases. The models are getting better at simulating responses. Some people would argue we're close to artificial general intelligence. Some of these models are being curtailed, like the latest from Anthropic, because they're so powerful. The industry is changing rapidly. What was state-of-the-art a year ago is completely outdated now. It's hard to predict where coaching is going to go. I know BetterUp is deploying agents to some of their clients where people can choose to get help from the bot or a human. In some cases, clients are more open with the bots than with the humans, and I think that reflects the quality of some coaching relationships. Humans have biases and the machine doesn't. At least not in the same way.
NAWAZ: Right. I think that's where we need to keep our minds open. Responding to change is one of the Agile values, right? We need to be open in the practice and the industry, and look for avenues to get better at what we do. I'm not an AI hater. I've given a talk at my workplace on AI and human intelligence. This is an area of interest for me because AI already helps me in some ways. I don't have a pair coaching model in my practice anymore, but I use AI as my pair coach at times. I interact with it, I consult it, I try to get more perspective and sometimes go deeper. I just don't want it making all my coaching decisions.
KUMAR: That makes sense. We're about 45 minutes in, so we're going to wrap up here soon. Is there anything I didn't ask that you'd like to share with the audience?
NAWAZ: I would say, do what you like to do. That's my message. What makes you happier is the most important thing. You only live once. So do what you like to do, or at least do more of it if you can't do only that. I happened to accidentally land in a space where I think I found my true ikigai. I really like doing what you and I are doing right now. There are no strings attached, nobody's getting paid. But this is what we do. Helping people, talking to people, reaching out to people: that is my ultimate happiness spot. It could be different for other people, but that would be my message.
KUMAR: I love it. That's a great message to leave the show with. For whoever is watching, figure out what you love to do and find your ikigai, your sacred space. That way you can leave your mark on this world in some way. Leave it a better place than the way you found it. Thank you so much for joining, Nawaz. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. You should come back.
NAWAZ: This has been really enjoyable for me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
KUMAR: Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.
