I often get asked — “what does good look like?”

It’s a tough one, because every team and context is different. But you can usually tell when things aren’t right.

When I’m brought in through Agile Second Opinion, I’m not there to audit or judge — I’m there to spot the patterns that hold delivery back. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it just feels off until I spend more time with the team. Once you see it, you can start to fix it. I call it positive negativity — finding what’s not working, so you can focus on what will.

Here are some of the early signs I look for:

Flow and Delivery
• Blocked column on the board. I use a blocked flag instead — with a column, work slips out of sight.
• Items not moving across the board in days.
• Work developed and tested but never released.
• Lots started, little finished.
• No discussion between starting and finishing work — especially when items take weeks.
• Work moving back from testing to dev with no way to track why.
• Constantly changing priorities.
• Fixed capacity, deadlines and scope, while BAU or support work continues (or worse, new ideas get added).

Team Behaviour and Collaboration
• Work allocated before it’s started. It’s not flow that’s broken, it’s autonomy and empowerment.
• People chasing “Ta-Da!” moments instead of asking for help.
• No real discussion or debate — just silence, side chats or dead channels.
• One or two loud voices dominating meetings, others tuned out. Not drawing out quieter voices is the quickest way to lose ideas.
• Cameras off on calls. (Mics off is an orange flag, cameras off is red.)
• People turning up very late to meetings.
• Nobody saying no to more work.

Ways of Working
• Stand-ups turning into presentations to the scrum master.
• Retros squeezed into 30 minutes — more about going through the motions than driving real improvement.
• Blindly following frameworks with no understanding of why they exist.
• Long BA monologues replacing collaboration.
• Requirements that read like dev specs.
• No clear demarcation between demand streams, making prioritisation impossible.

Culture and Environment
• Shying away from feedback — internal or external.
• Blind confidence that the experts are always right.
• Senior people dictating how to deliver each ticket.
• Other teams having no idea what you do.
• Work with no connection to a bigger vision.
• No positive celebration, only focus on what’s gone wrong.
• No social aspect in the team — no shared energy or camaraderie.

None of these alone mean a team’s broken, but when you start seeing a few together, flow’s gone, trust is slipping, and delivery becomes hard work.

If you spot something that doesn’t feel right, call it out in the moment. Those quick, honest conversations are often where the best coaching happens. Stand-ups and check-ins should be safe spaces to question, challenge, and fix things while they’re small.

So I’ll flip the question back:
What red flags do you notice when a team starts to lose its flow?