Agile in Construction: Stop Teaching and Start Doing—The Secret to Agile Adoption in Construction With Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

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"I forgot a couple key things. Number one, they don't have the enthusiasm and love for these new ways of working like I do because they didn't understand the problem that they were in." - Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe shares a powerful failure story from his early days adopting Lean and Agile in construction. After discovering Jeff Sutherland's "Red Book" and experiencing incredible results using Scrum with his 4-year-old son on a weekend project, he was eager to bring these methods to his construction team. The problem? He immediately went into teaching mode. His boss Nate and the rest of the team wanted nothing to do with Scrum—they Googled it, saw it was "a software thing," and shut down completely. This is what Felipe now calls the "Not Invented Here Syndrome"—people resist ideas that don't originate from their domain. The breakthrough came when Felipe stopped teaching and started doing. He calls it the "ninja Scrum approach"—embodying the processes and tools without labeling them, making work visible, and delivering results.

When he managed $25 million worth of scopes using these methods silently, one project manager named Tom stopped him and said, "We've never come to a project where people held their promises." Within a year, even his resistant boss Nate acknowledged the transformation in a post-mortem review. The lesson: don't teach until people pull for the teaching.

In this episode, we refer to NoEstimates and Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland.

Self-reflection Question: When you introduce new practices to a team, do you wait until they pull for the teaching, or do you default to explaining before they've seen the value?

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About Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide—and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.

You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.

You can also find Felipe at thefelipe.bio.link, check out The EBFC Show podcast, and join the EBFC Scrum Community of Practice.

Construction Scrum

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