Lunch & Learn series on From Code to Team (Second Edition), Chapter 3. 20 minutes: a story before the first slide (under 4), 12 talk, 4 discussion. Verbatim script; timing marks are the running clock. Slide numbers match the deck.
Room: mixed — leads, aspiring leads, and engineers who never intend to lead. Everyone in the room has sat in a ceremony they could not explain and been told it was Agile.
0:00Told with the title slide up and nothing else. Under 4 minutes. Not on any slide. Presenter's voice; swap in your own, keep the shape.
Ninety-five. Pause. Ninety-five revolutions a minute. That is the cadence the professionals pedal at, and so that is what we pedaled at, and we were slow.
Six in the morning, a Saturday bunch ride, 12 of us on a road that climbs for 8 kilometers out of the valley. Our group had a self-appointed coach — a good rider, a generous man, who had read everything and had a small computer on his handlebars that showed cadence to the nearest revolution. And every few hundred meters, the same call from the front: "Cadence! Keep it up! Ninety-five!" So we kept it up. Twelve people spinning in tiny gears, legs going round like egg-beaters, breathing hard, hearts pounding. We sounded like a fast group. We felt like a fast group — busy, working, everything moving.
And a rider from another club, an older woman on an old steel bike, went past us on the climb at what looked like 70 revolutions a minute, in a big gear, barely breathing, and disappeared round the bend.
For 3 Saturdays this happened. The call from the front, the egg-beaters, the same woman going past. Our coach had ridden with a serious club once, and that club had spun at 95, and 95 had been fast, and so 95 was the answer. He never once asked what 95 was for.
On the fourth Saturday he had a cold. And the woman on the steel bike — it turned out she had raced, decades ago — dropped back into our group at the bottom of the climb, watched us for a minute, and said one sentence I can still hear over the wind: "You're riding the number. Ride the bike." She made us go up 3 gears. Slow the legs right down — 70, embarrassingly slow; you could feel every pedal stroke. And then she made us push. Long, connected, the whole bike driving forward on every stroke, the chain quiet.
At 70 we were faster up that climb than we had been at 95.
Then she brought it up — 75, 80, 85 — one step at a time, and at every step she asked the same question: "Is the bike still moving?" If the egg-beaters came back, down a gear. Most of us ended that summer somewhere around 85, and we ended it faster, and the number was never again a thing somebody shouted from the front. It was the fastest cadence at which we could still drive the bike honestly — and it was different for every rider in the group.
Our coach was not a fool. He had inherited a number from a club he no longer rode with, and he defended it because it was the only thing about coaching he was certain of. I have done exactly that, with a different number, on a different team, and I will show you the day I found out.
That is what today is about: the rhythm your team runs at is a choice — and the question is never what do the professionals do? It is: is the bike still moving?
3:30MYOB, Melbourne, 2018. Eleven engineers, a Scrum board on one wall, a Kanban board on the other, a burndown that went red if the line drifted 8 points off ideal. We ran 7 ceremonies a week. Daily stand-up, sprint planning, mid-sprint check-in, backlog refinement, review, retro — and a process retro of the sprint retro itself. I had spent the previous weekend rewriting the mid-sprint check-in template to make it "tighter," and I walked in on Wednesday proud of it. I could have told you exactly how each of the 7 was run. I could not have told you what any of them was for.
Hamish — 4 years in, one of the strongest engineers in the room — sat through the 45-minute check-in with the specific tired expression of an engineer whose actual work was on a laptop he was not being allowed to open. The third week, he caught me in the corridor: "We spend more time inspecting the sprint than we do running it, and I do not, at the moment, know how to tell you that in the room."
He was being kind. What I heard underneath was: process theater is what a lead reaches for when the job is unfamiliar and busyness feels like proof of competence. He had watched me do exactly that for 3 weeks. If you have a Hamish sentence in your head right now — hold onto it. The discussion is in 12 minutes.
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