Just Who is this Guy (FlowChainSensei) Anyway? And Why is He Qualified to Comment on Agile Software Development?

Claude and I wrote me a new bio.

In the world of software development discourse, few voices are as provocative—or as polarising—as the one behind the handle FlowChainSensei. If you’ve spent any time in Agile circles online, you’ve likely encountered his scathing critiques of Agile software development practices. But who exactly is this mysterious figure who claims that ‘40 million brilliant minds‘ are now ‘spending their days in fruitless stand-ups and retrospectives’ and that ‘Agile has zero chance of delivering on its promises’?

Meet Bob Marshall: The Organisational AI Therapist

FlowChainSensei is the online persona of Bob Marshall, who currently describes himself as an ‘Organisational AI therapist’. This isn’t just a catchy title—Bob brings serious credentials that explain why his voice carries weight in discussions about the future of both software development and organisational effectiveness.

Backgrounder

Bob’s career trajectory reveals the depth of his software development expertise. His first 20 years were spent in the trenches as a developer, analyst, designer, architect and code troubleshooter—roles that gave him intimate knowledge of how software actually gets built and where things go wrong. This hands-on experience was followed by some 15 years helping a multitude of clients improve their software development approaches, before evolving into his current therapeutic practice.

This progression from practitioner to consultant to therapist reflects an increasingly sophisticated understanding of where the real problems lie in software development—not in the technical details, but in the human and organisational systems that create the context for technical work.

Five Decades in the Vanguard

Bob’s most compelling qualification is his longevity and verifiable involvement in the field. With 53 years in software development—including creating back in 1994 some practices that later became known as Agile—he has demonstrable evidence of being in the thick of it and the vanguard even before Agile happened.

During the period from 1994-2000, Bob was instrumental in creating what he calls ‘European Agile’ and created the Javelin software development method. This wasn’t someone learning about Agile from a certification course—Bob has documentation, project records, and verifiable traces of his involvement in developing the foundational practices years before the Agile Manifesto was even written.

From Agile Pioneer to Organisational Psychotherapist

What sets Bob apart from other Agile worthies is his evolution beyond traditional consulting approaches. He spent fours years as founder and CEO of Familiar, the first 100% Agile software house in Europe, but that was decades ago. He hasn’t been a consultant for over 20 years.

Instead, Bob developed what he calls ‘Organisational Psychotherapy’—bringing psychotherapy techniques out of the therapy room and into the organisation as a whole. He’s documented this approach extensively in his book Hearts over Diamonds: Serving Business and Society through Organisational Psychotherapy (Marshall, 2019).

The Therapeutic Alliance: Why Relationships Trump Solutions

Bob’s approach inverts everything most people expect from organisational change work. Where consultants diagnose problems and provide solutions, Bob creates space for organisations to surface their own unconscious assumptions. The key insight: it’s the therapeutic relationship itself that enables change, not any specific techniques or frameworks.

This relationship-centred approach explains why his work feels ‘alien’ to most business frameworks. People can’t categorise it as consulting, coaching, training, or change management because it operates from completely different assumptions about how transformation happens. As Bob notes in his therapeutic practice: voluntary participation is fundamental—nobody can be forced into genuine therapeutic engagement.

Organisational Cognitive Dissonance: The Hidden Driver of Readiness

One of Bob’s notable contributions is his analysis of organisational cognitive dissonance—what happens when organisations simultaneously hold incompatible belief systems. In his seminal 2012 post on OrgCogDiss, he explains how this internal tension creates the conditions for genuine change.

Unlike external pressure, which organisations can often rationalise away, cognitive dissonance is internal and harder to dismiss. Bob observed that this dissonance typically resolves itself within a nine-month half-life—but often not in the direction change agents hope for. Organisations either fully adopt new approaches or revert to old patterns, but they can’t sustain internal contradictions indefinitely.

This insight explains why so many transformation efforts create enormous organisational pain but ultimately fail. The dissonance gets resolved through exits and resistance rather than genuine adoption, leaving organisations depleted but not actually transformed.

The Memeplex Problem: Why Piecemeal Change Fails

Bob’s work on ‘memeplexes’—interlocking systems of organisational beliefs—reveals why most change initiatives fail. You can’t swap out individual beliefs when they’re part of an interlocking system. Trying to introduce ‘self-organisation’ into a command-and-control organisation without addressing the entire supporting structure of beliefs about authority, expertise, and planning just creates internal contradictions.

He explores this concept further in his book Memeology: Surfacing and Reflecting on the Organisation’s Collective Assumptions and Beliefs (Marshall, 2021). Most failed transformations are attempts to graft elements from one memeplex onto another incompatible one, creating the very cognitive dissonance that eventually leads to rejection of the new elements.

Beyond Agile: The Quintessence Alternative

Bob isn’t just a critic—he’s developed alternatives. His framework ‘Quintessence’, detailed in his book Quintessence: An Acme for Highly Effective Software Development Organisations (Marshall, 2021), represents what he calls ‘the radical departure from Agile norms, based as it is on people-oriented technologies such as sociology, group dynamics, psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, anthropology, cognitive science and modern neuroscience’.

But true to his therapeutic approach, Bob doesn’t push Quintessence as a solution to be implemented. Instead, he creates conditions where organisations might naturally evolve toward more effective ways of working based on their own insights and readiness.

The Evidence Question: Why Facts Don’t Change Minds

Bob makes a provocative observation about the role of evidence in organisational change: assertions often carry more weight than verifiable facts because ‘nobody’s opinion is swayed by evidence’. This isn’t cynicism—it’s recognition that evidence gets interpreted within existing paradigms until something else creates readiness for change.

Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigm shifts, Bob notes that evidence alone never creates fundamental change—it gets reinterpreted within existing frameworks until organisations become ready to see things differently. This readiness comes from organisational stress and cognitive dissonance, not from logical argument.

The Readiness Challenge: Why Most People Don’t Engage

Bob sees the general lack of engagement with his writing as corroboration for Gallup’s data on employee engagement—few are yet ready to own improvement efforts and their own motivation. Most people remain trapped in patterns where they expect solutions to be provided rather than taking responsibility for their own transformation.

This explains why his therapeutic approach focuses on creating conditions for readiness rather than trying to convince people with evidence or argument. Until someone genuinely wants to change, all the insights in the world won’t help them.

Why His Critique Resonates

Bob’s perspective resonates with many practitioners experiencing Agile fatigue because he articulates what they feel but struggle to express. His recent post ‘How We Broke 40 Million Developers‘ struck a chord by describing how modern practices often feel performative rather than productive.

The Bottom Line: Qualified by Experience and Understanding

Is Bob qualified to comment on Agile (and the alternatives)? Absolutely. His five+ decades in software development, his demonstrable involvement in creating pre-Agile practices, his experience sucessfully founding and running the first 100% Agile software house in Europe, and his deep work in organisational psychology and change give him a unique vantage point.

His perspective is clearly informed by his therapeutic practice and his promotion of alternative approaches. And his core challenge remains valid: after more than 20 years of Agile domination, are we better at attending to people’s needs? Are users getting products and services that genuinely serve them better?

The Therapeutic Difference

What makes Bob’s voice distinctive isn’t just his comments on Agile—it’s his deep insights and understanding of how organisational change actually works. His therapeutic approach recognises that transformation happens through relationships and readiness, not through evidence and argument. Organisations change when they’re ready to see themselves differently, not when they’re presented with compelling data about their dysfunction.

This insight challenges the entire ‘evidence-based’ approach to organisational improvement. Bob suggests that meaningful change happens through shifts in readiness and perspective, with evidence becoming compelling only after those shifts occur, not before.

Whether you see Bob as a wise elder statesman or a contrarian voice, his decades of experience and unique therapeutic perspective offer valuable insights into why so many development efforts and ‘Agile transformation’ efforts fail—and what might work better.

Of course, you have to have the motivation to do better for any of Bob’s insights to be of any help to you.

Further Reading

Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Allyn & Bacon.

Bridges, W. (2004). Managing transitions: Making the most of change (2nd ed.). Da Capo Press.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

Marshall, R. W. (2019). Hearts over diamonds: Serving business and society through organisational psychotherapy. Leanpub.

Marshall, R. W. (2021a). Memeology: Surfacing and reflecting on the organisation’s collective assumptions and beliefs. Leanpub.

Marshall, R. W. (2021b). Quintessence: An acme for highly effective software development organisations. Leanpub.

Marshall, R. W. (2012, November 16). OrgCogDiss. Think Different. Retrieved from https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/orgcogdiss/

Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy: Its current practice, implications, and theory. Houghton Mifflin.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press.

Bob Marshall blogs at Think Different and his books on Organisational Psychotherapy, Memeology, and Quintessence are available through Leanpub.