KatAnu Connect Podcast

Kate Megaw
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  • Management
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Kate Megaw, Ryan Smith & Anu Smalley host a variety of discussions on Leadership & Agility!

  1. 1d ago

    Back to Basics: What the Agile Manifesto Still Gets Right in the Age of AI

    Many Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches have been cut loose, organizations are changing how they deliver products and services, and AI has landed on top of both. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith open a new Back to Basics series with the document that started all of it, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. They start with the obvious question. If it was written for software, what word belongs there now? Ryan says iterative development. Anu says iterative fill in the blank, because coaching a leader is iterative too. Then they go to the four values and pick favorites, and pretty much land on the same pair. Individuals and interactions, and responding to change, come out as the bookends that give the middle two somewhere to stand. Meanwhile AI is quietly pulling attention back toward the tools on the right and working software and customer collaboration are where teams are slipping.  The close is the useful part. This is not a rulebook to recite at people. It is a short piece of text that gives a team permission to work better.

  2. Aug 24

    Stop Doing More With Less. Start Doing Less, Better.

    Every month when we teach the Certified Agile Leader class it opens with the same question: what is your biggest challenge right now? In 2025 the answer was “leading multi generational teams”. This year it is “doing more with less”, and Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith take it apart. They cover what the phrase really means, from layoffs and canceled tool licenses to the quiet blurring of the Scrum Master and Product Owner roles, and they name the 2026 version of the argument: four humans plus a handful of agents, surely that equals a team of ten! It does not. If output goes up and outcomes stay flat, waste has gone up, and adding weight to a car whose wheels are already spinning only sinks it deeper. The conversation goes to the real costs, including burnout, quiet quitting, quality shortcuts, and a junior pipeline nobody is filling, then lands somewhere useful. Make the trade offs visible, go back to the basics, and stop trying to do more with less. Do less, better.

  3. Aug 17

    Why Transformations Stall: The Change Readiness Gap

    Earlier this year the PMI and Agile Alliance introduced the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility.  Then came the harder question: why do organizations with great strategies still struggle to execute them?  Their answer is a report called Closing the Change Readiness Gap, and in this episode Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith dig into what it found.  Executives are confident their purpose is clear, yet the single biggest problem they named was the disconnect between planning and execution.  The report points to four obstacles: signal loss, where the why gets stripped out on the way down; decision rights that sit too far from the work; a structural trap where friction hardens into process; and a lack of psychological safety to name any of it.  The trio unpack why these are not four separate problems but one connected system, why the frozen middle is really a shock absorber, and why you cannot bolt AI or a framework onto a broken structure and expect flow.

  4. Aug 10

    The Age of Perpetual Transformation: Takeaways from Agile 2026

    This year's Agile 2026 theme was “shaping the future with agility,” and that is exactly where Kate Megaw and Anu Smalley found the industry: mid-shift, still deciding what comes next. Back from the conference, they sit down with Ryan Smith for an honest field report. The partnership between PMI and the Agile Alliance has solidified, so the room was no longer split into project managers on one side and Scrum Masters on the other.  AI, meanwhile, has stopped being the shiny new thing bolted onto every session title and settled into the operating system of how we work, though “don't forget the human” is still treated as a footnote.  Kate and Anu wrestle with an industry in flux where no one has put a finger on what is broken yet, the Scrum Master role morphing into a dozen job titles, and Anu's growing conviction that the psychology of AI is the work that matters.  The phrase that stuck with Kate from one of the sessions says it all: we are in the age of perpetual transformation.

  5. Aug 3

    The Sound of Silence: Why Your Meetings Go Quiet and What to Do About It

    You schedule the meeting, you ask for input, and the room goes quiet. Then the real conversation happens in the hallway afterward. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith dig into why people stay silent, and what facilitators can actually do about it. Silence is rarely about a disengaged team. It is fear of looking foolish, internal processors who need time to think, a leader who anchors the room before anyone speaks, and big talkers who cannot sit with a pause. Remote meetings can quietly make all of it worse. The cost is real. Silence erodes trust, hides risks that surface mid sprint when it is too late, shrinks innovation, and hands the decision to the loudest voice in the room. Kate and Ryan share the practical moves they use to turn it around, from waiting out the silence and asking sharper questions, to silent writing, round robins, breakout pairs, stacking, and priming the pump before the meeting even starts. The throughline is simple. Facilitation is not just a soft skill, it is a design tool. Good meetings are designed, not winged, because as our friend Anu likes to say, “winging it is not a plan”!

  6. Jul 27

    Scrum Master or Change Agent? Has the Role Outgrown Its Name?

    The Scrum Master role has quietly evolved, and the industry has not caught up. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith unpack how the role calcified into a person who runs the events and works through a checklist, when the real job was always to be a change agent and an organizational catalyst. Look at the job market and you see the shift already happening. Scrum Master, Project Manager, Technical Project Manager, Delivery Manager, and Program Manager are being used interchangeably, because the title never fit cleanly on an org chart and the Scrum Guide 2020 move from roles to accountabilities went largely unnoticed. Kate and Ryan wrestle with a hard question. If the title confuses more than it clarifies, is it time to let it go? The word master implies telling rather than facilitating, and the name says nothing about what the person actually delivers. They also push back on the idea that agility is dying, making the case that it is becoming the DNA of healthy organizations instead. The takeaway is simple and a little uncomfortable. Stop defending the label and start demonstrating the impact a person in this role can have.

  7. Jul 20

    Velocity Is Vanity, Outcomes Are Reality

    Velocity feels like proof.  Fifty story points done, a bigger number than last sprint, a box checked.  But velocity measures how busy a team is, not whether anything valuable reached the customer.  Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith take apart the metric everyone loves to report and rebuild the case for measuring what matters.  Velocity, they argue, was never a metric at all. It is an internal planning tool, Mike Cohn's “yesterday's weather”, useful for forecasting and useless for judging.  From there the conversation turns to the measures that actually signal agility: outcome over output, flow metrics like lead time, work in progress limits, emergent work per sprint, flow efficiency, and the strategic questions executives really care about, such as whether the business moved forward.  Along the way Ryan shares the MVP that 300 people found on their own, and Kate lands the question that cuts through it all: if your velocity doubled tomorrow, would your customers even notice? Velocity is vanity.  Outcomes are reality.  Agility lives in the flow.

  8. Jul 13

    Big A, Little a: Making agility Part of Your Company's DNA

    There is “Big A” Agility, the frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe, and there is “little a” agility, the plain human ability to change direction when the world shifts under your feet. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith make the case that the second one matters most, and that it belongs in every company's core values, not just its delivery teams. Recorded ahead of Agile 2026 in Washington DC, whose theme is “Shaping the Future with Agility”, the conversation moves from VUCA to Bill George's VUCA 2.0, which answers volatility with vision, uncertainty with understanding, complexity with courage, and ambiguity with adaptability, to the most expensive words in business: “we have always done it this way”. Kate and Ryan dig into experimentation and the experiment log, why psychological safety is the ground everything grows from, the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and why the five year plan and the pretty Gantt chart no longer survive contact with reality. The takeaway is simple. Shaping the future with agility is not about predicting what comes next. It is about building leaders, teams, and organizations that can thrive no matter what does.

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About

Kate Megaw, Ryan Smith & Anu Smalley host a variety of discussions on Leadership & Agility!

Information

  • Creator
    Kate Megaw
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    191
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 KatAnu Connect Podcast
  • Show Website
    KatAnu Connect Podcast

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