What Your Delivery Charts Are Actually Telling You

ISSUE 05: This Week: Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions, mapped to CFD, Lead Time Distribution, and Burn-Down Chart.

Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is built as a pyramid.

Absence of Trust sits at the bottom: team members do not admit mistakes. They do not ask for help, so problems stay hidden.

That produces Fear of Conflict: nobody wants to argue about the real issue, so meetings stay polite and nothing gets resolved.

Unresolved disagreement produces Lack of Commitment, because a team that didn't discuss doesn't commit either way.

Weak commitment produces Avoidance of Accountability. No committment and hence no accountability.

And at the top sits Inattention to Results, where people protect their own standing instead of the group's outcome.

Each layer causes the one above it.

Lencioni's own model has nothing to do with software delivery. What follows is my own applied reading of it, built from running these retros repeatedly, not something Lencioni argued himself.

Lead Time Distributions:

This chart has the strongest public evidence, so it's worth leading with.

Daniel Vacanti and Bennet Vallet documented a Siemens Health Services team's Kanban adoption in an Agile Alliance experience report. Before Kanban, their 85th-percentile cycle time sat at 71 days. In the first release after adopting Kanban, it dropped to 43 days. By the second release, it had stabilized around 40–41 days, and the team specifically noted the variability had also come down. Low variability means that you can promise a date and actually hit it.

The unhealthy version of this chart has a real dataset behind it too. Alexei Zheglov analyzed lead times at an IT solutions organization and compared two categories of work side by side.

Same organization, two categories of work. “Red Reports” (average 35 days, 85th percentile 61 days, 98th percentile 96 days) versus “Purple Integrations” (shape parameter 3.22, more symmetrical — exact day figures for this category weren't published in the source). Source: Alexei Zheglov, Connected Knowledge, 2014.

One category, internally called “Red Reports,” averaged 35 days but had an 85th percentile of 61 days and a 98th percentile of 96 days: a cluster of fast items with a long tail stretching far past the average. Another category, “Purple Integrations,” had a much more symmetrical shape: most items landing close together with no long straggle.

Let’s look at this through the lens of Lencioni’s model. A long tail like Red Reports' usually happens when a team never agrees on what to pick up first. Without a real, committed-to priority rule, whoever argues loudest in the moment gets fast-tracked, and everything else sits in the queue behind them. That's Lack of Commitment, and the histogram shape is what it looks like from the outside.

Cumulative Flow Diagrams

The chart most teams treat as their go-to bottleneck detector was never designed to prove one exists.

That nuance actually strengthens the Lencioni connection rather than weakening it. A widening band tells you something is backed up somewhere. It doesn't tell you who avoided the conversation that would have prevented it, and no chart can. To make that concrete, here's a worked example.

The width of the testing band rises at Day 7. Is there anyone talking about it in the Standups? Check the standup; no one is raising it. If anyone tries to raise it, it would mean telling a teammate their work wasn't ready. That's Avoidance of Accountability.

Burndown Charts:

The classic “hockey stick” burndown: flat for most of the sprint, then a steep drop at the end. It’s called “Late Acceptance”. The product owner accepts or rejects work only near the end of the sprint, so the chart can't move until that backlog of undecided work finally clears. Nobody, as far as the research turned up, has published the day-by-day numbers behind a specific instance.

As per Lencioni’s Model, this is “Inattention to Results,,” wearing the veil of a burn-down chart in disguise. A team under pressure to show a good burndown has an easy way out: quietly renegotiate scope downward instead of raising the harder issue of why the real work isn't converging. The chart looks identical either way, which is exactly the problem. It rewards whichever team is better at managing the appearance of the line, not the one actually finishing work.

What this means for retro

These charts will tell you when to ask the harder question, and the research above changes what that question should be for each one.

For a lead time distribution with a long tail, the useful question is whether the team ever actually agreed on a priority rule, or whether priority just gets decided by whoever's most persistent that week.

For a CFD, the useful question is what happened a day or two before the band widened, and who noticed it building.

For a burndown, the useful question is whether the scope on day one is the same scope being measured on the last day — and if it shifted quietly, why nobody said so out loud when it happened.

If your team's flow metrics have a shape like the ones above, and the certification or technique to fix it is the actual gap, EasyLearningTre (www.easylearningtre.com) runs structured, practical training built for exactly this.

If the problem is the team dynamics, the trust and accountability layer that no amount of chart-reading training fixes on its own, that's what I coach and consult on at ProvCraft (www.provcraft.com).