Religion at work, Scrum, and the power of stories with Tobias Mayer

Tobias Mayer is an iconoclast. I’ve long seen him as a kind of prophetic figure in the fray of conversation about how to be human at work, how to build high performing teams, and how to create effective human centred organisations. Tobias is a Scrum trainer with thousands of students having passed through his classes.

Tobias is also a practicing Christian, and we have connected in the past about ways to bring conversation about religion and faith into the workplace. Whilst this week’s episode isn’t technically a conversation about cognitive science, it is a conversation about human meaning making, and what the world of work has to learn from the world of religion.

We covered topics such as:

* What organisations can learn from religion about how to be more human

* The power of story and metaphor

* How to help your team members show up with their whole selves

* Haiku writing for software developers

* Why Product Owners should write bad user stories

* whether Jesus was a zombie or a vampire

* Change versus coercion in organisational transformation

* Iterative revolutions

* Spreading ideas within organisations in a hybrid world

You can find Tobias’ work on scrum.academy and tobiasmayer.uk.

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