Respect: The Missing Ingredient in Your Agile Transformation

Why respect isn’t just a soft value — but your system’s only real chance at speed.

If you’ve ever stood in Shinjuku Station in Tokyo — the busiest transport hub in the world, with over 4 million people passing through it every day — you’ve probably felt something strange: peace.

There’s no shoving, no shouting, no chaos. The signage is thoughtful. The flow is constant. If you stop, people flow around you. No one elbows. No one snaps. And somehow, despite the density, it all works.

Now imagine trying that in New York. Or London. Or Frankfurt. You’d get friction, noise, inefficiency, and frustration. Why? Not because people are less intelligent. But because the system runs on mutual respect, and some cultures simply don’t have that coded into their operating system.

Let’s bring this back to your or your client's company.

You want agility? You want speed? You want cross-functional teams to collaborate like a jazz band? Then here’s the inconvenient truth:

Respect isn’t optional. It’s infrastructure.

I’ve worked with many tech teams. And a big silent killer of performance are turf wars.

People fighting not for the best solution, but to be right. People who won’t listen, who talk over others, who shoot down ideas not because they’re bad, but because they’re not theirs.

This burns energy. Slows everything down.

And worse — even when the “right” solution wins, the team has lost psychological safety. No one wants to speak up next time. Respect is gone.

Contrast that with teams where respect is present. People disagree — of course. But they inquire. They ask:

And more often than not, they land on a third, better solution that neither had seen alone.

That’s real agility:
​Synthesis, not compromise.
​Progress, not ego.

Respect scales. Disrespect explodes.

At the organizational level, the same pattern repeats.

One department accuses another of blocking progress. The other feels overwhelmed, unappreciated, unseen. They start blaming each other, assuming ill intent. A culture of suspicion replaces a culture of trust.

But when we assume positive intent (API) — when we start from respect — we unlock something remarkable.

I saw this in a manufacturing company: two departments at war finally sat down and asked each other,

It turned out: the problem wasn’t them. It was the system.

That conversation only happened because someone dared to take a step back. Respect isn’t weakness. It’s strategic insight.

“We don’t have time for that.”

This is the classic manager excuse.

• We’re too busy to build respect.
• We don't have time to take a step back.
• Too busy to listen.
• Too busy to pause.

But we all know what this 100% utilization thinking really leads to. As a reminder, here's a picture of a 100% utilized road:

Every lane full.
No room get out of the way.
No movement.
No flow.

Taking a step back, helping others, understanding root causes — these might seem like inefficiencies. But they’re the round wheels you refused while dragging your square cart.

The irony is:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. But respect makes culture edible.

You can’t retrofit Lean, Agile, or any modern system onto a culture that rewards elbows and punishes empathy.

Tokyo works because its people respect space, time, and each other. Lean production was born in that cultural soil.

Don’t ask why the Toyota Production System didn’t scale easily outside Japan. Ask:

“Are we creating a culture where people naturally take a step back to help each other?”​
Or: “Are we just building a faster feature factory with square wheels?”

The truth is simple: