The Price of Distraction

Dear Agile passionate

Progress is slow, let’s say, it takes a few months for anything to be completed. Everybody complains about this, and frustrations are at an all-time high. But fear not! I know a person who knows a person who still needs to repay a favor, and if we just email it to him, we’ll get it faster. Just don’t let anybody know it’s being worked on! On the other side of the business, this is also being debated. The solution? We’ll hire a project manager to lead that high-profile project to success. It has to succeed, because it’s for our highest-paying customer and we need to keep them satisfied. As for those other projects that have been in the works for over a year and are falling behind… well, that’s just doing business, right?

Meanwhile, everyone is becoming dissatisfied. On a personal level, progress is painstakingly slow. A task that requires only 8 hours of actual work (from start to finish) takes 6 months to complete in the entire system. It seems everyone is creating policy on their own turf without considering the bigger picture. It looks like all the work was decided upon and refined two years ago, only for us to realize now that we need to refine it again because it’s unclear. The people who did the original work have already left, and everything has changed. Some units of work have undergone this cycle multiple times.

Sound familiar? 

In the workshop The Price of Distraction, we’ll explain the mechanics of what is happening here and what you can do to stop it and restore the flow of the company. We’ll help you understand the pitfalls of “common sense” and “doing it the same way for 30 years.” You will gain insights into the levers you can pull to return work to a normal state and create a better bottom line.

Join us at this Agile Café on 21 April 2026 in Edegem!

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• The pitfall of high utilisation
• The magnifying effect of slack in the system
• Effectiveness over efficiency
• Why Kanban is not always the way to go
• How to use a token system to reach flow on an organizational level
• Why resource efficiency is hampering your delivery

FOR WHOM?

Everybody who works in a team (or in a constellation of teams) and wants to learn: managers, product owners, Scrum masters, delivery leads, etc.

Bonus: there will be pizza ;-)

DETAILS

• The facilitator of The Price of Distraction workshop is Dimitri Bauwens
• Language is Dutch
• This workshop is free of charge