How to Get Reliable Forecasts from Reluctant Agile Teams
There are many reasons people are reluctant to make a commitment. One of the biggest lies at the heart of psychological safety is the ability to say no, to disagree constructively and professionally, or to share an idea that cuts across groupthink. This tension shows up clearly in Agile teams. Team members are often reluctant to commit, and one of the trickiest commitments we ask for is estimation.
Whether or not your team adopts estimation formally as part of its practice, at some point someone will ask:
How much work is involved in getting this delivered?
How long will it take?
When can we give a commitment back to the people who asked for it?
That’s the basic premise. And it throws up a fascinating tension: the need to provide certainty about when something will be ready and shippable versus the comfort and confidence of the people who actually have to do the work.
From my years of Agile coaching — and hundreds of one-on-one conversations with people in delivery teams — one theme is clear. Almost everyone has a story about the negative consequences of making an estimate. Sometimes they were punished for being “wrong,” other times they were locked into an unrealistic commitment. The result? A long-lasting reluctance to estimate at all.
Which leaves us with the central question this blog is trying to answer: How do we help teams adopt estimation practices in a way that enables reliable forecasting and high-confidence plans — without undermining psychological safety — so we can keep the commitments we make to stakeholders?
If you’re in a team, managing one, or sitting in a leadership role, there are some realities worth facing. First, not everyone comes to work with a growth mindset. Not everyone wants to “lean in,” give discretionary effort, or fully buy into the organisation’s vision or even the team’s goal. Some people simply come to work to do their job. They want a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s effort, and that’s it. And that’s okay.
Managers — the pragmatic ones I coach and work with — need to own this truth. A diverse team will always have a mix:
A portion of people who are energised, leaning in, and giving extra effort.
And a portion who will reliably “do their job,” without needing to go above and beyond.
Good managers accept this balance instead of fighting it. They know that building a sustainable team doesn’t mean trying to turn everyone into high performers in the stereotypical sense. It means creating an environment where different mindsets can still work together, safely and effectively.
Side note: I still see some organisations “crowd sourcing” teams and expecting them to norm and perform. Don’t expect a group of people to behave like a team.
Giving Teams Time to Settle
The second thing is giving the team time to settle, form, and establish normal behaviours. In other words, letting them get through the storming and forming stage of team development so they can reach a stable baseline.
That baseline is crucial. It tells us how much work the team typically gets through in a given period — their velocity. Without it, we’re chasing performance without knowing where we’re starting from.
But establishing that baseline isn’t as easy as it sounds. Teams face churn, holidays, sick leave, and shifting priorities. It’s rare to get a clean, uninterrupted two-week stretch to observe stable delivery. It often takes a few sprints, iterations, or timeboxes before a team’s “normal” really shows up.
Once that norm is established, then — and only then — can managers and coaches start looking at ways to improve estimation, commitment, and planning.
Building Rigour into Estimation
There also needs to be rigour around how estimation is approached at different points in the lifecycle of work. Different stages require different people, different levels of detail, and different methods.
Take a product roadmap, for example. Imagine a dozen features spanning the next 12 months. To create a useful forecast, we don’t need pinpoint accuracy — but we do need a structured process. That means:
Having the right conversations with the right people.
Roughly shaping the features enough to understand them.
Quickly sizing them at a high level (within ±50%) to get an order-of-magnitude view.
This kind of roadmap-level estimation is often underestimated in terms of the facilitation skill it requires. Someone has to guide the group through shaping and sizing work in a way that gets quick, relative inputs, without bogging everyone down.
Once a team has formed and settled into a stable velocity, that higher-level view can be tied to reality. We start to see how much work is actually delivered each sprint or iteration and how it aligns with the scope of work on the roadmap.
At the sprint level, estimation becomes more granular. Here, the challenge is creating a safe environment where people feel comfortable making commitments, while also encouraging them to stretch. Managers and coaches need to recognise and embrace what I’d call performance diversity — the reality that not everyone in a team contributes equally.
In practice, some people may consistently deliver 30% of what the highest performers do. Sometimes that’s about capability. Sometimes it’s about mindset. Often it’s a mix of both. And that’s okay.
When scaling agile delivery across large programs, expecting every team to be a superstar team is unrealistic. What matters is understanding the blend of people you have, supporting them with the right facilitation, and applying estimation methods that balance fairness, performance, and predictability.
The Manager’s Balancing Act
The manager’s job is an interesting one. How do you create estimation rigour and set the expectation that numbers will be put against the work — both at the roadmap level and at the team level — while also ensuring the environment is psychologically safe? People need to feel they can voice disagreement, dissent, or alternate views. This diversity of opinion should be welcomed. But at the same time, if you contribute to the estimation and planning process, there’s an expectation that you take responsibility for your input. In other words, you need to own your estimates.
It’s not about getting estimates exactly right every sprint. It’s about the mindset of trying your best to understand, contribute, and play your part when asked. What frustrates managers most is when a plan is agreed in a safe, well-facilitated way, but the team still balks when asked mid-sprint or midway through a project whether they’re confident of meeting the objectives. These moments are opportunities for managers to reaffirm psychological safety — but the team must also meet them halfway and participate fully.
When I coach managers, I stress the importance of holding the line and exhausting every supportive measure before resorting to anything punitive. I’m not talking days or weeks, I’m talking months. This is where skilled facilitation and coaching support help ensure the team has what they need. Ultimately, though, there will always be underperformers or people who are not in the right role, team, or organisation.
The point is this: once you’ve done everything possible to create a well-structured, psychologically safe estimation process and given the team every chance to succeed, then you can identify true underperformance or capability gaps. At that stage, a manager can make an informed, data-driven decision, knowing they’ve set the right conditions. And sometimes the reality is that the right person might simply be in the wrong role, the wrong team, or the wrong organisation at that time. That’s okay too. Life isn’t perfect, and no team is ever perfect either.
Wrapping It Up
To adopt effective estimation and improve planning confidence, we need to:
Acknowledge psychological safety — people are reluctant to commit if there’s fear of negative consequences.
Accept performance diversity — not everyone will lean in fully, and that’s okay.
Give teams time to settle — let them form, storm, and norm before expecting stable delivery.
Apply estimation rigour — use the right methods at the roadmap level and sprint level, with skilled facilitation to guide the process.
Balance safety and accountability — managers must create safe conditions while still expecting ownership of estimates.
Do this, and you build the conditions for reliable forecasting and high-confidence plans — without burning out teams or creating unrealistic expectations.
Because in the end, estimation isn’t about perfect numbers. It’s about creating a shared understanding, making commitments we can actually keep, and helping stakeholders trust that when we say “we’re on track”, it really means something.
