Podcast | Scrumming Through School with Nigel Thurlow

Intro

Hi everyone, and welcome to our podcast! Today, we have a super exciting guest—Nigel Thurlow! He’s an expert in helping teams work better together, and he’s even worked with the famous car company Toyota. Nigel knows a lot about teamwork, solving big problems, and how to get things done in smart and fun ways. We’re going to ask him questions about his cool job, what kids can learn from it, and how we can use his ideas in school and beyond. So get ready to learn, laugh, and maybe even become a teamwork pro yourself!

1. It's great to meet you, Nigel. May I ask, what is “The Flow System,” and why did you create it?

2. Hi Nigel, I understand that you worked at Toyota. They have some interesting takes on how business and life work. How did your time at Toyota influence your approach to Agile and Lean methods?

3. Hi Nigel, Can you share a fun story about teaching Agile to a big company?

4. Why do you think some companies and schools struggle with Agile Transformations, and what are agile transformations?

5. Nigel, I am super interested. What does “Scrum the Toyota Way” mean?

6. Hi Nigel, I have 59 other classmates. We are a team. How do you think teamwork helps in solving complex problems? 

7. If you could teach Agile to any group of people, anywhere in the world, who would it be and why - and do you think Agile will still be necessary if and when we live on the moon or in space?

8. What advice would you give to kids who want to be good team players, and should they listen to their teachers as much as our parents did when they were in school - or has the world changed now and teachers are everywhere - not just at Mayflower?

9. Can you explain what “Lean Thinking” is in a fun way?

10. What’s the most exciting project you’ve worked on, and what made it special?

11. Do you think schools should teach teamwork and Agile thinking? How could that look in a classroom? Do you think that we could create a Toyota child group of creative thinkers? What problems could we look to solve in the world or the school system?

12. When you were in school, did you ever do a group project that went really well—or really wrong? What happened?

13. Hi Nigel, we have a great idea. If we created a ‘kid Scrum team’ at school, what roles would we have, and what would we build together?

Outro:

That’s it for today’s episode—thank you so much to Nigel Thurlow for joining us and sharing such awesome ideas! We learned how working as a team can help solve big problems, how thinking in new ways can make school projects more fun, and that even grown-ups sometimes need a plan to stay on track. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to tell your friends, teachers, or parents about it. And remember—no matter how old you are, you can always be a leader, a listener, and a learner. See you next time! Together we can...

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About Nigel | https://nigelthurlow.com/

Nigel Thurlow is an expert in organizational design, author, and renowned speaker who serves as a consultant to industry in business agility — and as an expert in the application of cross-disciplinary methods and approaches to accelerate business change.

Nigel Thurlow previously served as the first-ever Chief of Agile at Toyota, where he created the World Agility Forum award-winning “Scrum the Toyota Way” and co-created The Flow System™, a holistic FLOW-based approach to delivering customer-first value built on a foundation of The Toyota Production System.

Throughout his career, Thurlow has gained an enviable recognition as a leading expert in Lean and Agile methods, tools, techniques, and approaches. He specializes in developing effective organizational designs and operating models for organizations to embrace both Lean and Agile concepts. By leveraging knowledge from various sources, Thurlow helps optimize organizations to enact successful, long-lasting transformational strategies in applying Lean thinking, Agile techniques, and Scrum – while combining complexity thinking, distributive leadership, and team science, represented by a triple helix structure known as the DNA of Organizations™.

As of 2024, he has trained over 8,500 people worldwide in Scrum, Agile, Lean, Flow, Complexity, and organizational design. Thurlow is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST).

An instinctive problem solver, Nigel Thurlow takes a method-agnostic, cross-industry approach in helping organisations find the right tools, methods, and approaches to overcome challenges within their contextual situation. He advocates for the fact that there is not a one-size-fits-all prescriptive approach to agility; all tools have utility, but they also have contextual limitations. From this vantage point, Thurlow equips an organisation’s people to become an army of problem solvers, expanding their perception of what they do so they can better understand and prepare for potential challenges along the way.

Thurlow is currently the Chief Executive Officer at The Flow Consortium, a collection of highly regarded companies in the Lean and Agile world — as well as the scientific and academic communities at large. The Flow Consortium strives to expand the boundaries of current Lean and Agile thinking through the understanding of complexity thinking, distributed leadership, and team science by tapping into the minds of top thought leaders from these concentrations.

While at Toyota, Thurlow worked to frame Scrum as more than just a standardised behavioural process by applying and advancing fundamental methodologies to spur innovative, forward-thinking solutions to Toyota’s most complex challenges. He also founded the Toyota Agile Academy in 2018. These efforts signalled a transformative phase for Toyota, leading the company towards organisational agility and helping its team members better understand this concept in an automotive production context.

Additionally, Thurlow has been a board presence at the University of North Texas since 2019, serving as an advisor to the Department of Information Science Board and a member of the College of Information Leadership Board. He has also served as the President of CDQ LLC since 2012. Prior to that, Thurlow held executive coaching and training roles for companies including Vodafone, Lumen Technologies, Scrum, Inc., GE Power & Water, 3M Healthcare Information Systems, Bose Corporation, The TJX Companies, Inc. – as well as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has also taught Scrum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

As an author, Thurlow was named a Forbes top 10 author for co-authoring the book “The Flow System™” in 2020. He has recently co-authored “The Flow System Playbook” published in 2023 which presents a practical study guide and reference book to all the concepts covered in the first book.

His other notable publications include “Introducing the Flow System (2019)” and “TPS and the Age of Destruction (2019).” He is also the co-author of The Flow Guide and The Flow System Principles and Key Attributes Guidebook. Recently, Thurlow co-authored “The Substrate Independence Theory,” a peer-reviewed scientific article exploring sensemaking techniques as a means to provide cognitively based scaffolds that guide and structure learning. His latest research is around Assemblages Theory and the interactions and novel emergence when combining diverse tools, techniques, methods, and approaches in contextual situations.

Thurlow also serves as a member on the Forbes Coaches Council writing and advising on business and leadership topics. He is the co-author of the upcoming book on Decision Making in Complexity.

As of 2024, Nigel Thurlow has been nominated and will appear in Marquis Who’s Who (both print and online) as a notable American public figure, recognizing his work on methods and The Flow System. Established in 1898, Marquis Who’s Who presents unmatched coverage of the lives of today’s leaders and achievers from the United States and around the world, and from every significant field of endeavor. More information will be released soon once press releases have been issued.

Today, Nigel Thurlow remains at the forefront of innovation across the Lean, Agile, and Complexity Thinking disciplines, striving to push existing ideologies to new horizons while eliminating critical misconceptions surrounding modern applications.