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In this Mob Mentality Show episode, we sit down with Elizabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tossi for a fascinating deep dive into systems thinking, context, and variability. Drawing from the core ideas in their book, Signals and Levers, this conversation explores how mapping systems can transform organizational alignment, shift how leaders invest their resources, and expose the hidden dependencies across seemingly disconnected departments.
In this Mob Mentality Show episode, Chris Lucian sits down with Diana Larsen — co-author of Lead Without Blame, Five Rules for Accelerated Learning, and Agile Retrospectives — to explore what leadership looks like when your team is made of both humans and AI agents. Diana, who came into agile "through the XP door" in the late 90s, argues that a team of some number of humans plus some number of agents is still a complex adaptive system: it has a container, an identity, differences among its players, and exchanges that let it collaborate. The practices we built for human teams — retrospectives, chartering, liftoffs, checkpoints — still apply, if we're intentional about bringing them along.
Diana shares her "your agent is your mirror" idea (inspired by the book Your Dog Is Your Mirror): LLMs reflect the behavior they were trained on, and the way we talk to them shapes us too. She types please and thank you to her agents — not for them, but to retain her own humanity. Chris connects this to Theory X vs. Theory Y prompting, his agents.md files with single and double loop learning built in, and his experiments using a frontier model to build a deterministic TDD state-machine MCP server that keeps a less capable model honest — like a senior developer building a process for a junior.
The conversation then turns to mobbing with agents and the leadership challenges of this moment. Chris describes how his mobs use "weighing the ox" (wisdom of the crowd) prompting, collaborative prompting, and rotating across four machines, and why the 20-minute agent runtime is a key threshold for context switching. He argues mobbing is more valuable than ever because the typing was never the hard part. Together they discuss the diffusion of innovation, why "Agile is dead" gets declared at every chasm crossing, token maxing as Goodhart's Law taken to its extreme, the Red Queen hypothesis, why no one should have been laid off over AI, and a broken hiring pipeline where a "beautiful" new-grad resume from three years ago now gets 6 callbacks out of 700 applications.
We dig into:
Podcast Episode… Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mob-mentality-show/id1485950034 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/01npjdd1VRiNqw1RZ8aB5g?si=607de4da208a425c PodBean: https://mobmentalityshow.podbean.com/ Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7a695161-1857-466d-83ca-d9a75161823b/the-mob-mentality-show
References… Diana Larsen's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianalarsenagileswd/ Diana Larsen's website (Thrive in Turbulent Times program): https://dianalarsen.com/ Lead Without Blame by Diana Larsen and Tricia Broderick Five Rules for Accelerated Learning by Willem Larsen and Diana Larsen Clickchain.ai: https://clickchain.ai/ Your Dog Is Your Mirror by Kevin Behan Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference: https://www.pnsqc.org/ OOP Conference Munich: https://www.oop-konferenz.de/
Thanks to G-SLiK (https://soundcloud.com/g-slik) for the intro and outro music.
Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick discuss all things #agile and product development from a #MobProgramming perspective.
Chris Lucian is the Director of Software Development at Hunter Industries and a founder of mob programming. https://www.chrislucian.com/p/chris-lucian-biography.html
Austin Chadwick is a Mob Programmer at Hunter Industries and is a passionate agilist and craftsman with experience in several roles (e.g. coach, developer, tester, scrum master, business analyst). https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-chadwick-3a58151a4/
We would love your feedback and ideas for future episodes! Please add comments to the video or reach out to us on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/mob__mentality & https://twitter.com/ChristophLucian ).
All statements and opinions expressed by Chris, Diana, and Austin are solely their own and do not represent the views of any company. Chris and Austin are just sharing and not recommending ( https://justsharing.dev/ ).
Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick discuss all things #agile and product development from a #MobProgramming perspective. What if you could decompose every agile method down to its essential building blocks and recombine them for your own specific context? In this episode, Chris and Austin are joined by Aria Omidvar to explore the HEXI method — a framework-agnostic approach to understanding and applying agile, lean, and software craftsmanship practices through physical hexagon objects and collective sense-making.
Aria shares his journey from software craftsmanship and clean code, through Scrum and XP, to discovering Dave Snowden's HEXI method and building his own independent "Hexiverse" — a modular knowledge map that spans Software Teaming, Extreme Programming, Kanban, Modern Synthesis, the Agile Manifesto, and more. He unpacks how breaking methods into reusable hexagonal pieces allows teams (and individuals) to see the connections between ideas, surface what is missing, and navigate the overwhelming landscape of agile methods without falling into method wars.
We dig into:
Scaling Complex Systems by Building on Agile Frameworks with Dave Snowden and Nigel Thurlow: https://youtu.be/AEf1BCffimA
In this Mob Mentality Show episode, we join James Herr and Woody Zuill for a one-of-a-kind session James calls the "Hot Sauce Ensemble" — mob programming a video game from scratch in the Godot engine using AI, while eating escalating hot sauces every three-minute rotation. Fair warning to podcast listeners: this episode has a strong YouTube component. If things start sounding chaotic and spicy, that's because they are — jump over to YouTube to see what's happening on screen.
James set up the session with Claude Code in VS Code (backed by Amazon Bedrock) and a blank Godot project containing only one asset: a hot sauce sprite generated by ChatGPT. From there, the mob navigated an AI coding agent through a real-time game build — adding player movement, landing explosions, and physics-based bell pepper enemies that scatter when stomped. The enemies were bell peppers specifically because Chris despises them. The hero is hot sauce. The logic is sound. Along the way, James introduced the "plate spinning" technique: opening multiple AI agents in parallel terminals so one prompt cooks while the mob drives another, keeping momentum even when AI responses run long.
We dig into:
If you've ever wondered what mob programming looks like when applied to game development, AI-assisted coding, and competitive spice tolerance all at once, this episode delivers all three simultaneously — with physics.
References… James Herr's LinkedIn: [PASTE LINK] Woody Zuill's LinkedIn: [PASTE LINK] Godot Engine: https://godotengine.org/ Claude Code: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code Mobster (mob timer): [PASTE LINK]
Hot Sauces Featured… James: Hot Ones Apricot Sauce (#7), Hot Ones The Last Dab (#10) Woody: Taco Bell Hot Sauce, ~3 lbs pickled jalapeños (stuffed in a burrito) Chris: Fishwife Albacore in Spicy Olive Oil, Oni Yuzu Lemon Hot Sauce (Japan), Marie Sharp's Carrot & Habanero (2-habanero, 4-habanero Blazing Hot, and 5-habanero BEWARE) on a PB&J
Thanks to G-SLiK (https://soundcloud.com/g-slik) for the intro and outro music.
Chris Lucian and Austin Chadwick discuss all things #agile and product development from a #MobProgramming perspective.
Chris Lucian is the Director of Software Development at Hunter Industries and a founder of mob programming. https://www.chrislucian.com/p/chris-lucian-biography.html
Austin Chadwick is a Mob Programmer at Hunter Industries and is a passionate agilist and craftsman with experience in several roles (e.g. coach, developer, tester, scrum master, business analyst). https://www.linkedin.com/in/austin-chadwick-3a58151a4/
We would love your feedback and ideas for future episodes! Please add comments to the video or reach out to us on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/mob__mentality & https://twitter.com/ChristophLucian ).
All statements and opinions expressed by Chris and Austin are solely their own and do not represent the views of any company. Chris and Austin are just sharing and not recommending ( https://justsharing.dev/ ).
Join the Mob Mentality Show for a stimulating conversation with Kenny (Baas) Schwegler, co-author of Collaborative Software Design, as we explore the intersection of software architecture, team collaboration, and organizational culture. In this episode, we uncover how collaborative software design and Domain-Driven Design (DDD) transform software delivery from a siloed, top-down process into a shared problem-solving experience that integrates business, engineering, and user perspectives to get all the data on the table.
What happens when Agile, Extreme Programming, and Test-Driven Development meet a world dominated by hardware, graphical programming, and binary artifacts?
What actually separates a fully engaged mob from one that feels flat, quiet, or stuck? And why does that difference matter far beyond team morale?
Escape Room Style Mobbing is a real collaboration pattern many teams run into, even if they do not have a name for it yet. In this episode of the Mob Mentality Show, we break down the spectrum between two very different mobbing modes: fast, noisy, interruption-heavy “escape room” mobbing and the quieter, deliberate, research-first approach some teams rely on instead.
In this Mob Mentality Show episode, we sit down with Abid Qureshi for a candid and eye-opening look at what Agile Software Development was meant to be versus what the industry turned it into. If you’ve ever wondered why “Agile” feels bloated today, why teams still struggle to adapt quickly, or why universities are still teaching outdated models like Waterfall, this conversation will hit home.
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