The Current Beneath the Sprint: Reading Your Team's Undertow

The team that should be thriving

Six months into the engagement, the coach has tried everything. The ceremonies are right. The team is engaged. The retrospectives produce action items. And every Monday morning, they drive to the office with the same quiet, indefinable sense of starting from zero.

The team is a platform engineering squad at a fintech — experienced, technically capable, and by most external measures, doing well. The PO is present and invested. Sprint goals are clear. The coach's facilitation is sharp. Action items from retrospectives get written and occasionally completed. But nothing accumulates. The same themes — ownership, slow decisions, the front-end team's latency — surface sprint after sprint in slightly different language. The team is polite about every intervention. Nothing changes.

The standard explanations don't fit. It is not leadership support — the engineering director attends sprint reviews. It is not team composition — the team has been stable for a year. It is not the framework — the ceremonies are running well. The coach has considered each of these and ruled them out. There is no obvious problem. There is only the Monday morning sense of starting from zero.

The problem was not in the team's ceremonies. It was in the water.

A coach who adjusts ceremonies, improves facilitation, and rewrites working agreements is snorkelling. They can see a great deal — the team's stated norms, its patterns of speech, its visible dynamics. But the currents that are actually moving the team operate below the visible waterline. This article is about those currents, what they are made of, how to recognise them, and how to work with them without converting them into a technique.

What the undertow is made of

The undertow is not a vague metaphor for culture. It is a specific layer of organizational life — the defended-against content that shapes team behaviour from below. Van Beekum (2012) identifies three distinct layers in any organizational system. Each layer is accessible by different means and requires a different kind of attention.

Most Agile coaching works at the observable level. Good facilitation, well-designed retrospectives, and careful contracting can reach the out-of-awareness level — the half-known truths that surface when the room feels safe enough. What coaching rarely reaches is the undertow proper: the content the team is actively organized against knowing.

Van Beekum (2006): "The answer to the way ahead is already available in the organization, but it is blocked by unconscious processes." The team is not missing the solution. The undertow is what prevents them from reaching it.

The undertow has specific content. It is not formless. Four types of content appear most consistently in the organizational unconscious of Agile teams.

Organisational shame

A past failure the team inherited or lived through: a botched launch, a transformation that ended with redundancies, a product that was killed mid-development. The team carries it as a starting condition they did not choose. It shapes their relationship to risk, to commitment, and to the question of whether things can be different this time. Nobody discusses it because discussing it would require naming the fear that it might happen again.

Unprocessed grief

A restructuring. A valued colleague who left under difficult circumstances. A decision made to the team rather than by it. Grief that is not named does not disappear; it becomes the emotional backdrop of every subsequent sprint. The team mourns something without knowing they are mourning. Their work carries a heaviness that does not correspond to any current problem on the board.

Loyalty conflicts

Team members who feel they are betraying something by fully committing to the current way of working: their expert identity, their professional history, their relationship to craft. This is not resistance to change in the ordinary sense. It is a genuine conflict between two legitimate commitments. The team member may want to do both. The undertow is the knowledge that they cannot.

Collective anxiety about ownership

The unspoken understanding that genuine ownership carries genuine consequences. The team may want autonomy in principle and defend against it in practice — because full ownership means that the next failure is theirs. The undertow here is not fear of the work but fear of the accountability that real agency requires. The team holds itself at the level of managed responsibility, just below the threshold where the consequences become personal.

These four types are illustrations, not a framework to memorize. The point is that the undertow has specific content — it is not vague organizational atmosphere. And the content predates the current sprint. The organizational history enters the room before anyone speaks. The team's collective script — what they have learned to expect, fear, and protect — shapes what is possible in any given iteration regardless of what the plan says.

Recognising undertow signals vs. surface problems

The diagnostic test for undertow is straightforward: does the problem respond to direct intervention? Surface problems do. Undertow problems don't — they reappear in new forms under new names.

Address "lack of ownership" directly — run a workshop, rewrite the team agreement, clarify accountabilities — and watch what happens. If the team nods and three sprints later the same problem surfaces in different language, the problem is not in the ownership structure. It is in what ownership would require the team to face.

One distinction matters here before going further. If a team lacks decision authority, their failure to own outcomes is structural, not undertow. The undertow concept applies where the structure permits autonomy but the team does not use it. Applying depth concepts to structurally constrained teams produces confusion and occasionally harm. The question to ask first is always whether the conditions for autonomy are actually in place.

Five patterns consistently signal undertow rather than surface dysfunction.

How a coach works with undertow

Undertow work requires a different discipline than facilitation. It begins not with a technique but with a stance — deliberate not-knowing — and proceeds through the coach's own experience as a primary instrument, through hypothesis rather than interpretation, and through working with the team's history directly.

The first discipline: not knowing

Van Beekum, drawing on Bion, describes the relational practitioner as someone who enters the relationship deliberately withholding premature understanding. The coach who arrives with a diagnosis has already decided what is happening. What they observe will confirm what they already believe. The discipline is to arrive without the diagnosis — to meet the team as it actually is rather than as the pattern-recognition from previous engagements expects it to be.

Not knowing is not passivity or confusion. It is a rigorous discipline of attention. It requires the coach to tolerate the discomfort of not yet having a formulation — the particular anxiety of being in the room without a framework to organise what they are seeing. Most coaching training moves coaches quickly away from this discomfort. Working with undertow requires learning to stay in it.

Using the coach's own experience as instrument

Van Beekum's distillation process — adapted here for Agile coaching work — is a sequence of four moves the coach makes with their own experience in the room.

First: slow down. What is the physical sensation in the room right now — not in the declared content, but in the quality of attention, in the weight or lightness of the air? Second: what is the emotional tone beneath the stated topic? The team may be discussing velocity while something else is present underneath. Third: what theme keeps reappearing across sessions in different language? The persistence of a theme — even when its specific form changes — is undertow data. Fourth: what does the team seem to be working very hard not to say? The effort of avoidance has its own texture.

This is not the coach making inferences about the team. It is the coach using their own perceptual experience — what they notice in their body, what they feel in the room — as primary data. The coach who has done their own work is a more sensitive instrument. The coach who has not risks confusing their own history with the team's.

The hypothesis, not the interpretation

Van Beekum: "the making of meaning is through analysis, which is the curious exploring of hypotheses about potential meaning." The coach does not name the undertow as established fact. They offer it as a question: I keep noticing that when we talk about this topic, the energy in the room changes. I'm curious what's underneath that.

This is the difference between diagnosis and hypothesis. Diagnosis closes meaning — it says what the thing is, and the team either accepts or rejects it. Hypothesis opens meaning — it says here is something I'm noticing, and invites the team into the inquiry. The team's interpretation of their own experience is more durable than the coach's. The coach's job is to make the inquiry possible, not to complete it.

Working with organisational history

Three questions are consistently underused in Agile coaching contexts:

"What's the story of how this team was formed?"

"What's the most important thing that happened to this team before I arrived?"

"What did you try before that didn't work — and what did that cost?"

These are not therapeutic questions. They are history questions. The team carries its history whether or not anyone asks about it. Asking makes the history available to work with rather than merely available to act from.

The pattern that predates the team: a composite

A delivery team at a logistics company. The team was assembled after a previous team was disbanded following a public product failure. Nobody mentions it. The current team's members were not on the previous one. But they inherited the codebase, the stakeholders' wariness, and the organizational memory of what went wrong. In their retrospectives they keep circling the question of whether the product architecture can be trusted. They write action items about it. They never execute them.

The coach asks, in the seventh session: What's the story of this team? How did it start?The answer takes forty minutes. By the end of the conversation the team has named, for the first time, that they have been doing a previous team's work while carrying a previous team's failure as their starting condition. The circling stops at the next session.

The team was not paralysed by technical complexity. They were paralysed by a failure that was not theirs and had never been named.

This is not therapy. It is history work. The coach's job is to make the pattern nameable, not to process the grief. For most teams, making the history conscious is sufficient. The circling does not require resolution. It requires recognition.

Containment without rescue

The coach's job when touching the undertow is to hold the experience — not to fix it, explain it away, or convert it into an action item. Not every theme that surfaces in a session needs a retro action. Some things need to be present in the room before they can be changed. The pull toward premature closure — a new working agreement, a stakeholder session, a retrospective format redesign — is itself often an enactment: the coach converting the team's distress into activity because the distress is difficult to hold.

Van Beekum: the relational practitioner is "challenged to implement the open and unpredictable nature of unconscious dynamics, without pretending that the process can be controlled." For Agile coaches: resist the pull toward premature closure. Not every undertow signal is a problem to be solved in this session.

What you can't access without going under

Surface-only coaching produces surface-only change. This is not a criticism of surface coaching — it does real and necessary work. But there is a class of team problem that surface coaching cannot reach, because the problem is not on the surface.

The team agrees to a new retrospective format. The new format runs for two sprints. Then it runs the same as the old one. The format was never the problem. The team changed the form and kept the content. The content is the undertow.

The depth paradox is worth naming directly: the teams that present as most resistant on the surface are often the ones that would benefit most from depth work. Their surface resistance is proportional to what is defended against. A team that "doesn't do feelings" is frequently carrying the most. The defended surface is a measure of the undertow's pressure.

The coach's own undertow

Every coach brings their organizational history into the room. Their previous engagements, their own relationship to authority and to failure, their script about what competent coaching looks like. This is not a problem to be solved before the coach can work — all coaches have organizational history. The question is whether that history is named and workable.

In supervision, a coach describes feeling mysteriously ineffective with a high-performing team. Their facilitation is technically sound. Their questions are well-formed. Nothing lands. The supervisor asks about the coach's previous engagement. The coach had spent eighteen months at a technology company where a major transformation was cancelled after the programme director left. They had left without processing it as a professional loss. They are now treating this new team as if they are the previous one — preparing more, pushing harder, working to prevent a collapse that already happened elsewhere.

The coach's undertow was interacting with the team's. They were not ineffective. They were responding to a different system.

This is where the supervision argument extends beyond what Article 1 established. Article 1 argued that supervision is necessary for working with enactment. Article 2 adds: supervision is also necessary for working with the coach's own organizational history — the accumulated experience that the coach brings into each new system and that will interact with that system whether or not the coach knows it is there.

Working with undertow is not mystical. It is a set of disciplined practices that can be applied in live sessions. These three moves shift a session from surface-level facilitation to depth-aware work. None of them requires a new ceremony or a new format. Each requires a different quality of attention.

The choice available to practitioners

Van Beekum's scuba diving metaphor is not an argument for depth as an end in itself. It is an argument for access. Surface coaching is valuable. It reaches the observable level reliably and, with care, reaches the out-of-awareness level too. But there are teams and moments where surface work will not hold — not because it is done badly, but because the force acting against it is below the waterline.

The coach cannot decide to work at depth in the abstract. They can only decide, session by session, whether to follow the energy or manage the agenda. Whether to ask about the team's history or focus on the sprint plan. Whether to sit with what just surfaced or convert it into an action item. These are not grand methodological commitments. They are small decisions, made in the moment, that accumulate into a different kind of coaching.

When the undertow contains a sharp division between what feels safe and what feels dangerous — between "us" and "them," between the Agile team and the organisation it works inside — the phenomenon shifts from undertow into something more specific: organizational splitting. That is the subject of the next article in this series.

The undertow is always there. The question is whether the coach learns to sense it before it pulls them under.