Month: January 2022

Rick Waters

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:51

What was it first encounter with Mike Beedle.

Speaker: Rick Waters 00:54

Meeting Mike was kind of funny. There’s a little bit of backstory here. I’ve been practicing scrum for, I don’t know five or six years before and really like to becoming a scrum master, becoming better at it. I was horrible at first and now I’m getting lots of different people’s points of view on how to be a great scrum master. And then starting to become familiar with big people’s names like, Ken shaver, Jeff Sutherland in of course, Mike Beedle. Then I figured out Mike lives here in Chicago, I’m a Chicago native. I’m like what if I had already taken my CSM class. And I was like, what if I just dropped in on him and said, hi, I just want to shake his hand and meet him. And if things go any further that’s cool, and if they don’t, that’s cool, too. But I just want to meet the guy.

So I send him a couple of emails, they all go unanswered, and what are we talking about? We’re talking about 2013, 2014, something like that. Everything goes on answered. And then I’m like, you know what? I’m working like three blocks from where he’s teaching. So on my lunch hour, I drive over to the hotel where he’s teaching a CSM class, I drop in I go, during their lunch break. I’m like, hi, Mike, you don’t know me. My name is Rick, a big fan. I bring the black book and I have him sign it and everything. And I’m like, hey, if there’s ever any time where you’d be okay with me sitting in on a class, I would love to just sit in the back and observe. I myself want to become a trainer eventually. But it’d be great to learn from somebody like you. He goes, yes. Come to Monday’s class. This is like Friday, right? He is like, come to Monday’s class, be there at 9am. And I’m like, oh, okay, we could do that. And so I came to Monday’s class. And about halfway through the first day of class, he says, okay, Rick, why don’t you walk them through this exercise, I’m going to go do something. I forgot what he said he was going to do. So he leaves the room for like an hour and a half. He’s gone for like an hour and a half in. We’re doing like the candy factory game, that people have to pass candy between them. Like, I don’t know, if I’m doing this, right. I’ve only seen it done like three times.

Mike and I never talked about this at all. Why would he trust me, someone he just met for like five minutes a couple of days ago. And I’ve been sitting quietly in the back of the room all day. Why would he trust me to do this and nobody in the room knew why I was there. I wasn’t participating in activities or anything I was just observing. So that was just so weird. And it was surprised things like that, that made me really love Mike because he would just do stuff and it just all sort of always magically worked out. It’s because of experiences like that, that Mike and I kind of bonded really well, over the coming years. I sat in on more of his classes, I co train with him a few times. And several years later, I ended up co training with him a lot so that I could become a trainer myself, but I think just because of that very first meeting with him, and that very first experience with him in class. That’s part of why I do what I do. And it’s a big reason why I’m a huge proponent of Scrum now, because things could have gone very differently way back in the early days. I could have fallen back into traditional project management type ways. I could have gone solely Kanban or so or a different way.

I think it was because of Mike’s influence in him. Always looking towards the future, there was always something big brewing on the horizon, and it ended up eventually becoming Enterprise Scrum, right? There’s always something big that he was talking about, I want to do this, I want to do this. And I’m like, Mike, you’re going in so many different directions. Is all of this one thing? Or is this just a lot of different side projects, and eventually ended up being Enterprise Scrum, which is one big thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:37

No, that’s great. And that’s really like, I mean, it speaks I love that story. Because it says, although this is about Mike but also told me a lot about you going the extra mile of like, he’s not answering trying to figure out how do I meet this guy? It’s really cool. And I think that’s something I didn’t expect. But I really appreciate you sharing that as well. In what other ways has Mike impacted you like, what did you learn from him? What are some of the biggest things through co training through talking to him, when you reflect back, what are some of the things that?

Speaker: Rick Waters 06:21

I’d say between 2016 and 2018. It was actually the public, let’s say it that way, the public development of Enterprise Scrum, they really kind of drew me to Mike, because Less was becoming a bigger and bigger thing. Less, has always been around, but it was becoming bigger and bigger. There was talks of Sutherland coming out with something some scaling framework. Nexus had been out for a while, and of course, scaled agile, was always lurking in the shadows becoming bigger. Mike, including everybody that was around him that he thought could actually make his idea better, was something that was truly refreshing to me. And it got me to start to really understand what collaboration was, you know? Yeah, of course, all throughout our agile careers, we talk about collaboration, cohesive teams, sharing of ideas, brainstorming, everybody’s vision counts. But this was like the first true application of it that I’d seen.

Mike was willing to take this thing that he had developed from the ground up, and open it up to his most trusted friends, and say, what do you think of this? Is the wording right here? What do you think of this concept? How can we develop this concept better? And while doing that, while almost literally wrapping his arms around the entire trusted community, he also wrapped his arms around and sort of embraced all of agility at the same time. I think the biggest problem with Enterprise Scrum and gaining acceptance was had the word scrum in it, it should have been like Enterprise Agility, or I don’t even know what the right name would be. But it was all of Agility, and including everything outside of Agility. It was, hey, let’s understand this world of work, because we talk about the world of work a lot. And most people have sort of blinders on, and they only want to look at one aspect of it. He was saying, let’s embrace all of it in when we want to move an organization towards one direction, we have to turn the entire organization and how do we do that? Do we do it in little tiny terms? Do we do it in one big, gentle giant type turn? And asking all 30 or 40 of us that were involved in helping him develop Enterprise Scrum, to help him develop Enterprise Scrum. That left a lasting impact on me because now, whenever I want to do something big, I very rarely start off alone.

Almost always get at least one or two friends of mine who I think have the same general sort of, I don’t know creative nature, and say, hey, here’s my next idea. You guys want in on this? You guys want to help me with this? And we’ll start together. Instead of me going off and sort of burning the midnight oil every single night trying to get something off the ground, and then saying, hey, what do you guys think about this? Do you want to do it with me? After I’ve done 90% of the work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:00

I mean, there’s something magical about that co creation, like you said, especially if you’re aligning yourself with people that you have trust and are willing to.., but there’s not a lot of groupthink, where you’re willing to discuss, there’s not the main knowledge, but you’re also pushing each other to probably think in different ways. Or maybe to stay on Enterprise Scrum. Do you know, first of all you talk about… should be called something else. Was there any discussion, Was the ship already sailed on what is it going to be called? Or did you guys have discussions on the name for the framework or..?

Speaker: Rick Waters 10:41

I can’t even begin to count how many times I talked to him about changing the name. I think at one point we’re meeting just about every other day for several months, I think for about a one-month span, every single time I talked to him, I said, okay, so what have you thought about…, what’s your idea around changing the name to something else, and he was getting really tired. I think you know we come up with a great idea for a name for something, and then we sort of go all in on it. We buy the domain, we trademark the name or whatever, we build a lot of foundation around this phrase, this term, whatever you want to call it. And then we realize, Wait, it’s taken on a new life, it needs to be called something else. Ah, it’s that sunk cost. I spent so much time and energy in that one thing, and that was going over here.

How do I change that? And I think that’s where Mike was going with that is, there’s so much invested, time, money, energy. All in one thing. If we call it something else, what do I lose? I mean, he had an entire company named Enterprise Scrum. So this thing that he created…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:08

And I can relate to that. I mean, as you were talking about, so like I have a book that I’ve been writing that’s based on wicked problems, and leading in wicked and complex environment, and the title of the book is wicked leadership. But it’s been, like you said, as the book evolves, and things like that. And it’s like kind of get input from people, like, probably wicked leadership, is not necessarily the best title for the mainstream, right? They probably for people out familiar with wicked problems. It might be, but I have that same type of feeling that sunk cost, like I’ve invested, I have the domain, I paid for the domain, all of that crap that at the end of the day, doesn’t really matter in a sense, or maybe it does, but I definitely relate to that.

Speaker: Rick Waters 12:59

You know not to go off on a tangent, I am likely to do that anyway. But wicked leadership, I like that, because it can go in so many different directions. If you’re in the northeast, that could be mean, great leadership, or if you’re anywhere else, it could be oh, that’s horrible leadership, you know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:16

Exactly. So that’s yeah, but it’s just like, same things are going through my head, which is like, sometimes I’m having doubts about that’s the latest, I’ve probably gone through five, six different working titles. But I can relate to that. When it comes to Enterprise Scrum, I mean, like, what attracted you to Enterprise Scrum and what Mike was doing with Enterprise Scrum. Compared to others, you know Less and other scaling frameworks that were out at that time.

Speaker: Rick Waters 13:51

Yeah, at the time, I didn’t have much exposure at all, to Less or Nexus, like, almost none, I’d heard that Ken Schwaber was coming up with his own thing. That’s the extent of my knowledge of Nexus. And I had read a little bit of Less the third book hadn’t come out yet. So I had read a little bit about it. I wasn’t too turned on but I wasn’t turned off. The thing that clicked with Enterprise Scrum was number one, I had its creator pretty much in front of me talking to me about it all the time. That’s going to influence you one way or another, right. The other big influence was I was working at Nokia at the time. And that’s when Leffingwell had come to Nokia and said, hey, I’ve got this idea on how to take lots of connected groups, and scale their agility in one way. And he definitely did not use those words. And over the course of time, he, at least at Nokia, I’m not going to say what happened at other companies but at least at Nokia, he pretty much destroyed the culture there. It was a huge agile culture there. And he pretty much just destroyed it. And that really turned me off to anything with Dean Leffingwell’s name on it. So I’m left with Mike Beedle, with Enterprise Scrum right here. we’re working miles apart, not 10s or hundreds or 1000s of miles apart. We’re working literally a couple of miles apart. I can meet him for lunch pretty much every day. And we did frequently.

And he’s talking about Enterprise Scrum the whole time. So the beauty that I found within our price scrum was that it actually didn’t matter if one area of the organization was using Scrum, and another area or even the same area and different teams was using something like Kanban or was waterfall or spiral or V model, it didn’t really matter. The beauty of Enterprise Scrum was that if you wanted an organization to go in one direction with how managers work, Enterprise Scrum accommodated that change. And I still think the beauty of Enterprise Scrum today, is the idea of constant change, understanding that there is constant change. And how do we deal with it as a company? Not how do we deal with it as a scrum team? How do we deal with it as a company? So, that’s really much my journey to ES,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:34

And is there a company or when we look at Enterprise Scrum today, and Mike’s legacy, what’s left of it?

Speaker: Rick Waters 16:50

Well, Enterprise Scrum as an idea, as a concept is still out there. It’s very cloudy, there’s a lot of mystery around what’s the legal ownership of it. Do his children own it? Does his ex-wife own it? Does his company that doesn’t exist anymore, does that own it? It’s really suspect where the legal ownership of Enterprise Scrum is right now. What I think the lasting legacy is that everything that I see coming out in not just since 2018, but also 2016, 2017, 2018 and beyond every new thing that I see coming out. I think Enterprise Scrum has impacted in one way or another, especially all of the focus of the last four years around business agility. I think Mike had a huge impact on this new trend towards focusing on business agility, mainly because he worked with the business agility Institute before it became a thing. He was working with them in trying to get them to adopt Enterprise Scrum. And once he passed, obviously, that sort of fell away, and but they still got his ideas ahead of time, and they’re still using them today. So I think that’s his lasting legacy with Enterprise Scrum is the business agility part, in that Business Agility Institute is still using it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:33

And maybe perhaps the foresight that he had, that that’s what’s coming. And like you said, everything probably was boiling up to that point, but now everything’s focused on that. Any other stories, anything that you would like to share about Mike or anything that maybe we missed?

Speaker: Rick Waters 18:58

I don’t know if we missed it, but there is one thing that I wanted to share, and that is just a few months before he passed. He had been traveling a lot trying to get Enterprise Scrum off the ground trying to solidify a relationship with the Business Agility Institute. He was in Chicago, and another CST was in Chicago. I hadn’t become a CST yet. I didn’t get my CST until after he passed. But also a really big friend of mine in the training industry, in the south of the United States. She was in town, and I just said, hey, Mike we’re supposed to have dinner tonight. Do you mind if… Mike Studerman joins us and Mike Studerman as you might know, he’s a CST up in Minneapolis, right. I’m like, do you mind he’s a friend of mine. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him before, but he’s in town training today. Do you mind if he joins us? Mike said sure yeah, bring him along.

And I said like a couple hours later I said, and you know what? Another friend of mine is in town and she would love to meet you and he goes yeah, bring her along and we had a big old dinner together and here’s the thing I don’t remember ever having, and I had a lot of meals with Mike. I don’t remember ever having a serious meal with him. It was always a lot of joking, a lot of smiling. Obviously a lot of drinking but just a lot of fun and it was me and him and a couple of other people who had never met before just all having a great time and I attribute that all to Mike’s personality. He was just you know what, he was just an all-around great guy.

Mike Dwyer

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:38

Who is Speaker: Mike Dwyer? Let’s start with that.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 00:42

Who is Mike Dywer? It’s a really good question, I’ve been asked a lot. My daughter wants to know, my new doctor wants to know, but let me tell you who I think, I have been doing the same thing for as long as I can remember. I’m an independent thinker, I believe looking at the left [unclear phrase 1:02] and choosing the path that I think I fiddle to best. What does that mean? Well, first of all, who is Speaker: Mike Dwyer is for, as technology. I’m not a technologist, my undergraduate degrees in psychology and geography, I have a business, an MBA, I used to dig graves, and I worked in a factory. And I will tell you something, you learn more about how people work when you work with people. The amazing thing I found out working in factories, is they chose the leader, I may have been the boss, they chose the leader. And the challenge that I learned was how to become that leader and still remain the boss. I then this, this is a funny true story, I am sitting in a, you know, I worked for two companies, Fisher Price I worked for Parker Brothers, you probably heard Fisher Price toys, and you’ve heard Parker Brothers. It’s a great place to do but I’ll tell you something as a killer market, you have between February 14 and April 1st, to ramp up production to make the money to pay for next year, okay? So talk about fast cycle, talk about iterative work. Now, when you’re on the production side of it, it was let’s all work out, that’s not the case. It’s living chaos, taking this paper plan and making machines run that way. How do you do that? Well, you don’t do that, the people doing the work, what I learned, most importantly, working in factories as an industrial engineer and manufacturing managers, like I do on the job for eight hours a day knows more about the job than you will ever know. So asking questions became a big part of my life. So here I am at Parker Brothers and somebody says, Oh, there’s this guy up at Wang laboratories. Oh, I know him and I call them up said Hey, what are you doing? He says, Hey, Mike, good to hear from you, I’m building a manufacturing management control system. I said, How can you do that you’ve never been on a manufacturing floor? Well, you’re such a smart blankety blank, blank, why don’t you come here and help us? Somebody just might do that. So, I mean, I had a well-planned career path, now, it was an opportunity to keep on working better. Just prior to that, I had also been in academia, and was also fascinated with how people work with each other inside new environments. I got out of that because, can you imagine spending your entire life work being valued by some sophomore desperately trying to get B in psychology? That wasn’t for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:05

What got you interested in psychology, though? Like maybe just to get that side of it

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 04:10

I was very interested in how people work together, what causes them to come together, you know, what gets into the formalization of group? How you move from a casual acquaintance or a pop up? How you move from that into some sort of informal working thing. What are the sticky points, the glues, the connection points, and how does that progress into a formal focused environment and then how does it mature into a bureaucracy? I was interested in it from the individuals perspective, not from the group’s perspective. I was very fortunate to go to a university that had some really great professors, and I had one professor, Dr. Wagner, who when I was graduating, he says, “I want you back here next year. Here’s your research grant”. And I understood, I said I wanted to be a professor, nobody want to realize that the collegial environment, that one thinks is in an academic situation is pure hokum. It is no rules, and I just said, you know, I want to do something. And then, you know, 45 years later, I’m sitting listening to my daughter, who said, getting her master’s in education from Harvard, telling the Dean of the Graduate School of Education, Sir, I don’t want to get the doctorate. I want to be the person somebody raised their doctorate about. And he said, you know, it’s really good to have children that are smarter than you. So, I got to Wang and I found myself at home. Wang R&D was probably the most exciting place to work. We had a reputation inside the of the [unclear word 6:20] community and inside the profession of being a place where we could do anything that struck our minds. And it was one of those senior officers of the company once said about R&D is, “ you know, you’re not going to get them to do what you want them to do. They’re going to do something and you figure out, can you use it in the product, or are you going to take patent and license to somebody else?” So I mean, imagine not having to grow up with Sure, for 10 years, but that that went away, and I had to go back and act like an adult. And what I found out is that if you focus on how to get people to work together towards a goal, you can attain anything. So your job as a manager, is to lead the people in that direction, while providing all the hokum, the paperwork, the PAP, policies and procedures, that gives them that buffer points. I delivered several projects, and was thoroughly eviscerated by the PMO. The only thing that saved me is that in one case, we saved the company from a $6 million lawsuit, we did in three weeks. And another case, another team goes under the thumb, really under the thumb, the PMO had a product rolled in massively, massively fail. It was supposed to be the new flagship, and it just turned turtle. So I came to them and said, “guys you have got to get a team, we can get a team”. So we can only have a conference room, one day a week”, I said, “okay, there’s six of us here. Everybody sign up one day for the same conference room. And you do that until you’re done”. And they turned around six weeks. So I was constantly in a battle with the PMO. And for the most part, I was successful, which of course, raises no ire with the establishment, so I learned from that. You can’t want to be loved, you got to want to be respected. And that brings us to Ken.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:50

Oh, yeah. How did you meet Ken? Ken Schwarber.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 08:54

All right. First time I met Ken Schwarber, he was in a conference room next to me explaining to a senior vice president of IT, “I can’t give you a delivery date, you keep on changing the requirements”. I said, “oh, I got to know this guy”. I also met him in a class, his company was running a project management scenario simulation. And there are about 40 side people, teams of five sounds familiar, and this was in the 90s. And we were given scenarios to deal with and that would produce a little PDP one. And there’s this little guy with short hair in the corner doing this. And we won because the last question you’re your senior hub developer has just given notice usually in two weeks, the project isn’t critical past what do you do? Well, the options were, bring somebody else new who could do that in two weeks, trust this guy, or ask for an extension and take the hit for that. So we went off and I said, “Look, guys, we’re dead in the water. We ask for extension, we’re dead. We bring a new guy, we’re dead. If we’re going to die, let’s go somebody else with the door, let’s trust them”. And we did and we were the only team could be successful. So that’s how far back Ken’s mindset was. Now, fast forward 2002-2003, and I’m not going into Softroll. Softroll was a very interesting company that doesn’t exist anymore. It was nerd heaven.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:37

What was it like in Burlington right or so?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 10:39

Right, Burlington, Burlington mall in Massachusetts, it was a strip mall, not a big mall, little strip mall behind there. And it was a bookstore, you walked in, and it had dozens of copies of every book you never want to ever read but you had to. In the corner, they had this little conversation pit, if you want to call it that, and I hear this voice. I know the voice of from somewhere. The man comes through and it is Ken Schwarber and he’s talking about something called Scrum. Scrum? And I sat down, I listened to him, and I said to him, I know you. And he looked and said yeah. I know you and I want to learn more. So I went over, I bought the coloring book, and that was the beginning of it. That was beginning but I think that was also the beginning of my involvement with the scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance because agile New England, which we both know…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:50

Yeah. Agile Bizarre.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 11:52

…was once called the Agile bizarre. And the scrum Alliance website was also called control chaos.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:00

I didn’t know that one.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 12:02

Oh, yeah. What control chaos was Ken’s website, and his motto at that time, “it’s all common sense”. Okay, and so we started saying, where’s that on periodic table, and the joke that was worse, the rarest element in the world. And we just had a wonderful time with it. But it was all about common sense.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:24

It still is today, right, about common sense? And a lot of times the over…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 12:28

It’s buried a lot inside the lingo, but it’s still there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:35

Where do you think maybe just to stick on Ken and Jeff, what do you think they got their ideas? I mean, I think a lot of us know, and, but I want to get your perspective on, what do you think Ken and Jeff got their ideas for Scrum?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 12:49

Well, there used to be Usenet group for small talk. And while I was working as a government contractor in the day and someone told me about this numbers. I was down in Cambridge in Kendall Square, straighten them right in the middle look, standing behind the guys from Lotus get lunch and the thing and listen to all this stuff. And slight can kind of worked inside the Usenet group and the small talk, and they were talking about, you know, “screw this stuff about all these project plans. We got to get this done and that done. And how do we smoke it? Blah blah”. And there’s talking about the small tight work and it was all about test first, test first.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:42

Yeah, these are probably the XP guys or…?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 13:45

Oh, no, this was yeah, it was the XP it was Ward, it was Jeff, it was…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:54

I mean, I spoke to Ken…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 13:58

It was Martin. Okay. And it was all about heavy duty hard, hard ball coding, to get the work done. And it all boil down to, they don’t know what the heck they want, they mean business. And that led to the whole test first model. Okay, and it led to some really great work and testing, the whole test first, exploratory testing. But that’s where the energy started. And the Agile Manifesto, most of the guys that came there can believe we’re on small talk. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:46

What do you think as far as like, you know, I want to get your thoughts on, you know, XP, was probably a one-time more popular than Scrum and had the bigger maybe movement and then probably Ken and Jeff, specifically with Ken, you know, with Scrum alliance, that kind of propelled and it was almost like a market I don’t know? Definitely scrum became what people associated with Agile. What are your thoughts on just how XP and Scrum evolved and how scrum became the, what people associated with Agile?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 15:30

Oh, I’m going to give my personal opinion. I never did a project without XP. Even before I knew it was called XP, my technical proficiency is in testing at the enterprise level. Okay. Amazing, when it gets to unit testing, okay, I’m okay. But if you give me an enterprise level testing with layers and layers of stuff, I’m happy to do it. It’s got enough to keep me interested. But, at all levels, it becomes what’s the expected outcome? And then what are the parameters around that outcome? And I totally buy into and I totally support Jeff and Warden in XP, if you talk with Chad, he will tell you that the way he builds a product is first get the functionality to work. If the customer wants two plus two to add to three, figure out how to do that, get customers sign up that is what he wants, and then go back and refine it, you know, the other parameters. Okay, lines of code, and you’re hammered out and then you laminate, the layer, you stratify. And then you can slip back forth integrate that. That’s the essence of writing good code. I love my conversations to Ron. Okay, but we just disagree. We disagree on…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:04

Ron Jeffries, right?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 17:08

I think that he helped me explain to myself and to others where I was. And I think at times I helped him understand the difference. I mean, but Ron is adamant about the fact that this is about writing good code, it’s a software model. And I’m not sure that, I think we need to take extract the value of XP and the logic flow of XP, and make sure we implemented in other environments. Okay, so yeah, hats off to Ward and Ron, and Bob Martin. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:58

Yeah. Or Ken either. I mean, like…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 18:02

Well, not and, Ken made that happen. Because he, and in my opinion, he and Jeff at IDEX…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:13

No, I mean, Ken Bach. But Ken, and maybe to come back to Ken Schreiber, you took his first or one of the first classes that’s from the line

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 18:24

I think it was the first or second public class?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:27

Yeah. What was that like?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 18:30

I think anybody took one of his original classes and play the George Tabor game, still is traumatized. And still the problem you’re dealing with unreasonable illogical product owners or business that wants you to figure out how to make them happy. And you have to learn how to say yes, no, and I don’t understand. And he did it so well. I mean, of all the and I, you know, my trainings and coaching is all about simulations, but I learned a lot, just those two days and I had a lot of fun. And that led to a relationship with Ken and with Jeff that I still cherish today

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:35

It’s crazy, that small area outside of Boston and be like that, you know, used to drive through Lexington and that area from Rhode Island going up to Maine from college. And it’s interesting, you know, Burlington is by that way to, you know, by 95 and all that so it’s… But maybe to move from Massachusetts to Colorado, the first Scrum meeting in Boulderado. What was that like? Because I get stories from people, so what’s your memory of…?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 20:10

Okay, so I’m sitting at home. My company, three sided coin is floundering, which was the middle of the “.com bust”. I had had two small contracts, none of which to do with software. And I get this, this email says you’re invited to the scrum gathering in Boulder. Okay, so I check in, okay fine. Then I said, “I’m not comfortable with too many people”, and he said, “no it’s only going to be I think 50 or 60”, maybe it was 30. I get there, and there’s Ken and Mike and Esther. And they’ve got other people there too, and everybody’s doing their spiel. And there’s this energy about where we’re going with this thing. And Ken is pulling and pushing and why because you’re pulling and pushing. And to be honest with you, I was more aligned with Esther.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:21

What was her take on this?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 21:24

The importance of retrospectives. Okay, how do we plot where we are and data where we want to be? What’s the next small tack we take in our course. And I have always had a soft part for the pain, that’s you can flip that. But there was a lot of energy, there was a lot of enthusiasm. Oh, I don’t remember too many things other than sitting in front of Ron Jeffries and looking at him and saying, “you know something, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing [inaudible 22:16]. Well see, here’s part of Ken, he knows people that add value and he knew Ron added value, so did Allister.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:32

So he had that the neck for like understanding like, essentially, looking ahead, understanding who can help with his vision, because it is clear to me now, that in some ways Ken had an idea and vision because I don’t think, maybe this is something that I want to get your opinion on, do you think that Scrum and Agile would be where it is today without Ken? Like if you take Ken out of the…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 23:02

No, I don’t think so and I’ll tell you why. When the Agile Alliance began, Ken was a plank owner. The Agile alliances was pretty amorphous, pretty passive, I guess the term, they wanted to be very much let it generate itself and let it go out freely to the people. Ken, I think believed in all that but also Ken saw the need to have some sort of statement, some sort of mark about agility that you could measure? He also wanted to make money. I don’t blame him for that, right? I mean, if you can do this all on goodwill, then you’ll send me a donation. So in the end of the first agile Conference, which I forgot where that was, was this meeting, he contacted a bunch of ….

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:11

Wasn’t it like somewhere in Europe? I thought the first, no?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 24:19

I’m talking about the split between the scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. I remember walking…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:25

This is where Mike, Esther, and Ken kind of had some type of conversation or something like that, right?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 24:35

Well, they had a conversation and they called a bunch of people together and said we’re going to start the scrum Alliance as part of the Agile Alliance. And I was like…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:44

And Mike was saying, when I interviewed Mike Cohn, he was saying like, in a sense, it was really like somebody else from I can’t recall the guy from Canada that almost started as an incubator inside Agile Alliance, but then morphed into something you know, the Scrum Alliance.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 25:00

And I don’t remember that. Okay? Because I was more interested in listening to, again, how the Agile Alliance was talking about people working together. And what was missing was how individuals work with each other. Okay? They were going, I felt the Agile lunch is going a very soft direction, and from my experience, inside industry and business, I realized that there’s a lens of focus that has to be to that interaction pattern. And that’s why I chose more strongly involved in the scrum Alliance.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:45

That makes sense, that’s really interesting. And like, every time I speak to somebody that’s been involved in that, I get the, you know, better and better picture of what was going on. Maybe, to talk about a couple of funny things that I’ve heard you say before but like scrum master as a sheep dog, could you talk about that and share that?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 26:13

So we’re talking about how the scrum master was somebody was supposed to protect the team. So I’m going to lay this on Mr. Cohen. Mr. Cohen, came in and walked up to Mr. Schwarber, and went “woof, woof, (sniff sniff)” and that was a secret greeting between Scrum Masters. We were sheep dogs, and we all have to know who we were, “woof woof sniff sniff”. And it got to be funny. Yeah. Periodically, we’ll remind each other that there were “woof woof sniff sniff” in a comment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:00

What about the another one that I like, I’ve heard you say when we spoke in the past, in relation to scaling. Small scrum people and big scrum people.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 27:16

Yeah. And this is a bit of an axe of mine, I guess. And I’ll ask you this, how many small team situations have you gone into coach and they see your success and go, “oh, wow, we want more?” Did you ever not have that happen?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:35

Always, or more often than not.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 27:37

Okay, so here we are wildly successful. And even with Scrum initiative mapping, in my own experience, I was brought into contract with a small company that was doing incredibly valuable work with ill people. And the board was going to shut down because it couldn’t control the right team process, they couldn’t meet the customers’ needs. So I got brought in by a friend who just met vice president of development. He said, “Mike I just made, I was just promoted and offered the job of Vice President of Development is blah, blah”. I said, “ oh, congratulations”. He says, “I’m not going to take it unless you come”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:23

Let’s, yeah, yeah,

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 28:27

I went there. And president of the company couldn’t stand me. And the reason is, he was the biggest disrupter of all, every time a customer called up a big problem, he would take an old hand cranked siren, walk out in the middle of development. And every player said to my buddy, “we can’t stop this”. I said, “we are going to stop this, let me try”. I walked in and said, “I think you’re a genius”, to the president. You built this out of nothing, no funding, is what we’re calling like rock and roll. So I’m going to totally hear to your principal that when you bring up that air raid siren, we’re going to shut everything down. We’re going to rearrange, just do that and drop everything else”. And his eyes got about this big. He said “what?”. So well, I mean, “you’re the visionary. We can’t do all these things we’re going to do them all half as bad. So whenever you do that, I promise you, we will drop on that and that’s [inaudible 29:32]”. He looked at the buddy, “is he serious?” “Oh yeah”. He did that the last place we worked. I got control of the development teams and they grew sixfold in 18 months and when they were acquired, one of the reasons they were acquired is they couldn’t believe that they could keep this development staff the same size, and increase their market share, and their volume and have high customer satisfaction. So I went to the other company and they couldn’t do it. I was there five, I said I stay six weeks, I was here four and a half years and I left. So it’s all about management’s trust in you, and their agreement that if you screw up, you’re dead. Which is one of my axioms for coaching and Scrum and Agile is, we have great freedom, right? We are free of the one create anxiety help people who were careless, I’m going to get fired. Because we know something. We’re not going to be here forever. That’s, liberating. Think about it. I did do things that nobody else could do because you can’t fire me. Okay, I’m here because you need help, I’m going to give you the help. They don’t like it, I was looking for a job when I found this one.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:17

It is very interesting, because that feeling is liberating. And it’s also like as, especially as a change agent if you’re coming in or helping organization to have that mentality. And I think that same mentality can happen with people that are internal employees. Like we sometimes feel like, especially for Scrum Masters in like any type of chain, everybody should have that type of mentality where like, I don’t know who said it, but like, you know, the scrum master should always be at risk of getting fired because you’re pushing…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 31:56

I had senior managers that, “I would never let an employee do this. You’re successful, but…”, so what you’re saying is you would forego having success because you are wanting an employee to do this, why? And they would look at me and say, “what do you mean why?”. I said, “you met your goals, just kept on your budget, your employee numbers are good, your turnover rates down, you’re rocking it, product marketing is afraid of you, product development can’t wait to get a hold of you. They can’t feed you enough stuff that you’re doing. And you try to get rid of the guy that I’m trying to make that happen”, “get out of my office, you make making too much sense”. But you know, I don’t expect other coaches and trainers to be the same as I am. Why? Because I would rather be true to the goal than have an allegiance to somebody that doesn’t or can’t or won’t make that call.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:13

So you speak as you like, you’re still doing this, and I thought you’re retired. So…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 33:22

I am. I have actually planted my first turn my wife. And I got all those whales to stand up straight. I gave them all the support they need and they’re blooming.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:38

So how does it feel? I mean, like, and what are some of the thoughts when you look at, you know, kind of your past experiences and you know, what we’ve discussed here, and then when you look at our community, and just in general the movement, where it’s going, what comes through your mind?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 33:58

First of all, I don’t think the struggle for us to be here today, if Howard was not the chief product. He embodies in my mind what we need to help companies understand they have to have on board with them. Maybe not as CEO but as maybe master the ship. Secondly, the scrum alliance that I was part of has morphed, it’s no longer concerned with delivering an outcome in a specific time increment. We used to argue, almost had jihadist arguments about definition of duck. But not they’re not happening. Is that because we decided it’s too hard? Or that It’s not our purview anymore. So, we’re more into a soft statement about Scrum than we were in the past. And I think that’s probably due to a shift in the industry. We’re away from mostly hard coders, the Martins, the Henderson’s, the Becks, the Cunningham’s, and we’re into people that are using these development tools, okay, now, I am old school. Okay, given a choice of learning some new language, who are dicing up what’s going on the registers, I hope choose the registers. I definitely have no trust in anybody who writes the language. Okay, as a professional tester, my first job was understanding how the language was put together and how it makes itself to understand where to go poke holes. So I think the movement is moving in that direction, I am not sure that I could work in a distributed environment because I need to read people in a group. And here’s why, over the years, I’ve developed a couple of techniques, one of which is the simulation I use, which is basically a two phase; one is the Kobayashi Maru, no matter what you do, you will fail. And then it’s fun, I mean, at any level, I’ve done it with kindergarteners all the way up through executives, and PhDs. First, the first thing, the first round, everybody blows one way or another, and then the power, the retro. And I also reminded you…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:04

To learn, inspect and adapt.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 37:07

The more important thing is I say, No, you failed. Okay, so get rid of that axe, you failed, okay, you blew it, you spent too much time, you didn’t deliver enough, you deliver the wrong stuff, okay? Or you gain the situation, but you fail. But here’s why you failed, you didn’t listen to each other? How are you going to do this better? So I made those I said, “okay, so what do you do different?” So we put a box, so why don’t you ask these different teams, what they did and what they saw you doing? And sort of talk to him said okay, now I understand conversation. The question is, how do you get better? It is, you will not fail if you get better. That’s how you will…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:58

It is also making it okay. Make it okay to fail, and the failure is okay, that you are learning right and acknowledging that in that instance, or that simulation that you’re talking about, it’s almost giving them permission that, “hey, it’s okay”.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 38:12

More than giving them permission, telling them that failure, small failures lead to big successes fast. Okay? And then we put a second round, and I get to play more with the dynamics of the people. I was at a seminar once and I learned a really cool trick. You know, you’ve had Scrum masters for people and projects, and they’re just so excited and getting it done. And they start talking and talking and they suck up all the air. So I learned this technique I worked on Similan [unclear word 38:46], you’ve got to learn [unclear word 38:48] your doctor just called you can’t talk. Okay, the only thing you could do is nod your head like this, or like this with your team members. But you got to get this done team, figure it out. Guess what comes out of the ideas, the team is more than happy to sit back and wait for you to kind of do it. No, then it’s your fault for not making it right? Ah, but now the teams have got to step up and you have to listen. And all of a sudden better ideas coming. But then I explained to the Scrum Master, here’s the problem, when you do that, you lay yourself open to be criticized. It isn’t us it’s you. Don’t do that and embrace it, “wow, that makes total sense’. So those are a couple of things that I learned because remember my focus initially was on the individual interacting with a team and how to improve not just the individual but the team. And all this comes back to listening.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:07

Listening and probably empathizing too. Trying to understand and maybe to come to this back to, you know, like, where do you see like, for instance, maybe to come back to scaling, or to talk about scaling frameworks, to like these different frameworks and methods, do you see scrum still kind of being pro dominant? Do you see like, people just trying to adopt and contextualize things like, what is your thought like, you know, maybe for I’m sure, some of the people from our community will be listening to this as a reflection back on what you’ve done, maybe what are your thoughts as far as what should our community or community members be focused on? And where are we going from your perspective, given that you’re now outside, or maybe looking a little bit from the outside?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 41:04

No, I haven’t given up my license. I’m on sabbatical.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:09

But are you still monitoring some of the discussions?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 41:15

I’m not going to say yes or no. I will tell you this, I am taking time off. Will you just interject this, a lot of people listen to this conversation are going to be trainers and coaches. And they’re going to be fully involved like 25,000%. You can’t do it, I’m a proof of this. The last five years I work from 15 to 20, or actually 15 days, the last three years. I have lost my spark, my body was yelling at me. It took me two years to get my doctor to get off my back. You know, this is not a healthy lifestyle. Not when you’re traveling 48 weeks a year. This is not a healthy lifestyle, dealing with all the pressures we have. So make some moderation there. The other thing is, understand why you’re in it. If you’re in it for the money, you’re in a death spiral that we were at $1,400 a seat, you’re now down to 400 a seat, alright? We were highly interactive, face to face, and now you’re mostly distributed looking at a screen. There’s a chemistry part of the interaction. I’ll tell you one of the things I learned was I had a very interesting roommate when I was doing my research. He was a biochemist. And we’re talking about reactions, he went phenols. What are you talking about phenols? He said phenom is have a direct impact on how we interact with each other. You mean how I smell? Yeah. And I haven’t really delved into that, because I cannot memorize all these big long words. But that’s one thing I don’t think I want to do or could do. When you feel like you’re mailing at home, put away the postage stamps, take some time off, right? We have to find a way to get people to want to work towards goal. No, I think one of the things that I’m concerned about in the scrum Alliance, and in all coaching is that we are not coaching people to forge the tip of the spear to make progress, we’re not finding ways to get people to buy into this. And that’s because we focus too much on leadership. Let’s face it, a leader does not exist unless there’s somebody following them. And rank does not equate to respect. One of the things that I think we need to do as agile, as scrum and Pisco is put power back into the team member understand they are the ones that do the work, and as product owner is there to help them understand what the customers change their mind to, and the scrum master is there to protect them and to encourage them and listen to them, support them, in voicing their opinions towards that goal. I think that we’re going to a great extent we have lost that. We’re trying to make people feel good about themselves, it’s not something we do in business. How many days a week you feel really wonderful, whatever you’ve done, right? So you think you’re different than anybody else, so our job is to take goofy people and help them figure there’s going to be the up days, the down days, and then there’s going to be the daily work every day.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:08

I think there’s also that vision, right? Like that vision helps us motivates us understanding like, how do we create something or purpose, there’s something that people will be certainly motivating intrinsically, now, you know, to not, you know, in a sense, design a system where it reinforces people to try to solve problems, and they believe in solving those problems, rather than, you know, just talking about it, who should be doing what? So… so

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 45:41

What if we did this, supposing that we fed them, righteously fun, we can good problems, and then worked with them to understand how the failures help the customer, the business, understand what they can’t happen, and what the team can learn how to do better. A quick story, I had a client, and they wanted to have this really great thing for her healthy. And they built this matrix of this and this. And, they said, code that. And so I sat down with my technical guy and I said, “we can’t code that”. So now my job was to go to the customer for over a period of twice or three times a week meetings, going through their logic with them until they understand it was wrong. And explaining what we were trying to do this and it failed, and here’s how it failed. These are the conditions, and they come back and they finally said, we still think it can be done but we understand that the logic, not us, the logic isn’t there. Do we teach product owners to do that? No. Why? The advocacy is what I think we’re missing, and the leadership because we don’t get into team first.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:21

And that’s, it’s a really good point. Why because a lot of times, we still feel like we need to kind of drive and I’m just thinking about like not necessarily scrum Alliance, but in general like that theme first, and just giving people like you said, like that, I love how you throw in there, the wicked problems. The earlier, you know, give them the wicked problems or interesting problems to solve and let give them more than more autonomy to and trust them, something that you’ve said. So, that really resonates and it’s like, you know, to come back to the beginning, it’s that the simplicity going back to the fundamentals, you know, and what this whole movement…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 48:12

Really Miljan, if we started asking people, what’s the outcome you want? What’s the outcome you can deliver based on what we told you and we started refining the outcome, it will change. One last thing. Are we going to last things [inaudible 48:27] he also got me started on this book. 1976, if you read this book, you’ll find everything about Agile, Scrum, lean and team management. It’s all here. So if you want to know the source of…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:50

Further up the organization, yeah, and who’s the author?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 48:53

Robert Townsend.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:55

Great. So maybe yeah, I never actually heard about the book. The cover looks kind of familiar, but I don’t know. I’m going to get it and check it up.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 49:07

Well, you heard you [inaudible 49:09]. So Townsend was running ex, Amis Hana. Problem was number two. They really clever by Hertz.[not clear 49:14] So we came in so let’s make better model. We’re number two, we try her. It’s in the book. They had this thing about they were trying to figure out well, how to do things like where to put the new corporate headquarters. So we looked and said, “okay, so let’s pretend we’re the man from Mars. Coming down, we asked this man from Mars, where should we put it? What questions would he hit? What would we ask? Well, where are the two Bs concentrations and your people? Well, one was caddy and the other one was Manhattan. He said, Oh, well, maybe we should put her into two of them. But the other thing that I think most companies don’t do is they don’t take people in the office and make them go down and work in front of the customer. He talks about financial people drowning in terror when they had to actually address a customer, an irate customer. And when I worked for Fisher Price, every manager had to work on the floor, on the shift, but firmly third shift for a month to understand where their paycheck came from.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:39

And that was a more of a practice with lean earlier on and like you had to understand the work that people were doing and have at least a little bit more context rather than, you know. Maybe to finish with like, what are some of the other things that you would like to share? Or maybe that I didn’t ask you? What are some of the other things that we want to make sure that we record here? You and I have had a lot of discussions so there are some really good stuff I’m trying to think about if there’s anything else, but is there anything that comes to your mind that we didn’t discuss, or that we should bring up here, and some of this stuff shouldn’t be recorded, but songs that can be recorded?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 51:32

I have to think about that. I think that I would like to see a bigger us have a bigger understanding of the followers. You know, because followers literally choose their leaders. You can be the greatest word for the world, no one showed up, you just a guy stand on a soapbox in the middle of the street, right? So we have to help followers, ourselves included, understand how to discriminate good leadership based on the outcomes we personally want. And make sure that we’re doing it for us, not just for our individuals. And that’s where I think Scrum in a more dynamic sense, okay, plays a major role. We need guides, we need doers, we need an outcome, we need interface, but more importantly, who do we choose? And, you know, in mature teams, as you probably have happened, you can’t tell who the product owner and Scrum Masters sometimes, and that’s a level 14.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:50

And the true self organization where, you know, the lines start getting blurry as far as soon as well. But that’s true on the same like, you know, if you think about good sports teams, I tell people, you might have superstars, you might have really good teams, nobody’s saying he’s a defender, I’m a scorer, it’s just whatever it takes to win. And those lines are getting blurry as far as like, you know, what the expectations are? It’s like whoever can chip in and help.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 53:23

I couldn’t [unclear word 53:24] college, you know, rowing. And people say, what does that sport tell us? It’s not much I said, just find yourself a balance me. Find eight guys who are over 6feet tall, they can do calisthenics backwards for three and a half to four minutes, and casually increase the rate of the frequency of the calisthenics and then have a little guy at the end of it, or a little person at the end, yelling and screaming and calling you nasty things, and do that every day. It’s all about the goal, the outcome that you would subject yourself to that abuse, and I will tell you it is abuse. And if I were to say anything, and I dearly love Howard, because he’s doing this gently. What is it that we want to do? What is it we can do? And how we get there as things change? So yeah, I’m a fanboy of Howard’s but that’s because I know him very well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:30

No. It is great. I mean, especially if you know, like I think what Howard has done, what Melissa has done, and together it’s been amazing because if you look at previous leadership, and what has happened, I think we’re finally on the right track. And that we truly have the potential to, as a community, to be what scrum Alliance stands for, which is organization for impact and have an impact on the broader world. So I think, you know, time will tell, but my…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 55:04

Don’t forget this. Is that we would not be if someone didn’t have the focus, the commitment, the vision, and that was Ken and also someone like Jeff, who went out there and practice this to refine the abstract, and R&D study, Ken was working on IT settings, okay, and then driving up and down the layers. We wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for that, we wouldn’t be here without Ken, we wouldn’t have been here without Jim Canduct, or Mike Cohn. I mean, these are all important people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:53

And I think we all, at least I know I’m very thankful to you, to others that you just mentioned, and many other unnamed or I mentioned, who contributed to this movement because I think it is something special that was an accident. Like from Snowbird, to all of this, most of it was, you know, in a sense, unplanned and evolved into something that I think is great. And in many ways,

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 56:24

oh, you weren’t around in the days of the anvils project. Okay. If you look, there’s a video out there called the Bradley fighting machine. Watch that disaster, but many of us work on projects that never get anywhere. And what Agile…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:44

I’ve definitely worked on projects, and I’ve gotten my taste of what was happening, but probably on the tail end of a lot of that traditional what was happening in 80s, and 90s.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 56:56

Imagine the earth shaking statement that kind of rock, the project management role play, so all practice can be no longer than 18 months. And then it was a year, then six months, that was all precursors to where we are now. Also, the era of where project managers would say, “this is what I want, you can’t do that”. And people would always say, “it’s in there, you find it”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 57:33

It’s crazy. I mean, like so some people that, you know, some of the people that I’m mentoring and so the people that you see in classes, like never experienced any of that. They are younger, you know, maybe in early 20s, and it’s like they can, you know, a phantom working in that type of environment but it reaches far worse than that. And some, I think, you know, the current way of working is still doesn’t feel natural. So I think there’s still a lot to do but I agree, you know, at least with where we had it and leadership, I’m glad to be especially part of Scrum Alliance community and also part of this whole bigger moment. So, anything else?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer 58:24

Let me leave you with this last thing. This pandemic has revealed a lot of interesting data. We all expected the economy to tank, we all expected productivity to be awful, to be disharmony, and yet you look at the numbers, productivity is up, margins are up, revenues up. All these people worked at home. So maybe the next big question the scrum alliance and the Agile Alliance needs to answer is, why are they bringing people back into offices? What value does that add? That should take care of the next 15 years.

Michael K. Spayd

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:51

Who is Michael K. Spayd?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 00:55

Junior, actually.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:57

Junior..

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 01:00

Well, I’ve been in the Agile space for 21 years. The year the manifesto got signed is when I started unrelated and because I had training and psychotherapy, in change management and organization development, OD in Culture and leadership. And later integral in professional coaching, I brought all that stuff into the coaching world as much as I could, I mean that’s been a focus of what I’ve done, is systematically bringing in stuff about culture, about change, about how organizations develop, about how leaders grow, all things outside of the scope of agile as a methodology. Totally, but highly needed, right? Because it’s not just about practices, it’s about the environment that it’s practiced in. So that’s what I’ve done it at a coaching institute at transformation at collective edge, current company.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:10

What was your journey into this space?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 02:14

Well, so like specially to specifically integral and kin, I actually tagged along with a psychologist friend of mine, back in probably the mid 80s, to Ken Wilbers birthday party at his house. And it neither one of us knew him. But…, and that this was a long time ago. And that was my first interview, I had heard of him, because I was in a contemplative psychotherapy, master’s program. And he was in Boulder, I grew up in Boulder, and he used to live in Boulder. He lives in Denver now. But, and we, in the main impression that I had from him in that was his massive collection of books. He had the coolest damn collection of books I’ve ever seen. I mean…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:10

What did it look like?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 03:20

It was just like bookcases full of books.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:26

Little Library?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 03:28

Yes, like a library, like something you see in a movie or something.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:35

I was going say like, a James Bond movie or something like that.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 03:39

James Bond. And so anyway, I didn’t read it, at least one colleague of mine in this master’s program was reading his stuff, up for me back then. And I just wasn’t interested. I was aware of it. But I wasn’t interested at the time. And I think it took me, I don’t remember exactly when it was when I started reading some of the, well, I bought sex ecology and spirituality in, I think, when it came out in 96. So I was aware of something then but I wasn’t really paying attention to it. And then there must have been something in the early 2000s. And I’m pretty sure I went to the integral spiritual conference in 2007. And, met him in a pretty small conference, maybe 100 150 people and met a lot of the players in that world and then subsequently went to a number of conferences, they had some really good deep conferences, okay. I sort of dabbled with it, I guess, I would say before about 2013. So, I wrote the book proposal for…, what was this book? It was called coaching the Agile enterprise time. And somebody in the, it was in Mike Cones book group. And so all the all the authors in the book group get to look at people’s proposals to see whether they’re okay with them being in or what suggestions they have, because you’re applying to be in that series, as well as it appears in publisher book. And somebody I think was Kenny Rubin said something like, you need an organizing principle for this book, similar to Mike Cohn did in succeeding with Agile, I think, which is quite a ways back. I remember sort of being annoyed with it at first in my protective style, but it stuck in my craw, so to speak, it was a great suggestion. Thank you, Kenny. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that. And then it will hit me like a ton of bricks. Integral. Of course, because I did write original proposal for the book what integral had. And then it was so obvious in hindsight like the fuck of course, I got to do …,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:30

That the only way to look at it, if you want to approach the enterprise, that’s the only kind of framework to put it on.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 06:36

Yeah, that’s the only thing that doesn’t distort what’s going on, it has a place for everything. I mean, that’s the integral framework is about having a place for every perspective, it’s not about voting. This one’s better than that one, or this one’s the right one, because interviewers don’t believe that they believe that all perspectives are true.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:58

Truly.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 07:00

And so, the integral framework in general integral theory, ACO model, gives you a place to put everything and so it became so obvious that, I shaped it into this before I had a co-author, I shaped it into the AI quadrant in integral, I called specifically first leadership and engagement, and then later leadership and mindset, to focus, that was consistent with the AI quadrant, but it’s not the full scope of the AI quadrant, you could have all kinds of things there. But they’re not relevant to doing organizational change work particularly. So, then, I know that wand kind of in terms of my relation to Ken culminated for me in Michelle, and I did an interview with him in about July 2019, or something, as we were sort of trying to finish up the well, we finished it six months later, the first draft. And it was a really…, Ken was so generous with his time, he loves to talk about this stuff. Yeah. It was really sweet. then he wrote that praise piece, which was, because he has such a busy schedule, and so many…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:27

Well, that’s it. Yeah, I was surprised that he didn’t see that we got ahead, what about leadership circle? How did you…, because leadership circle is based on not necessarily the integral, but more of cognitive development and some of the work from, Craig graves and spiral dynamics and all of that. So how did you get to the, to Bob Anderson and leadership circle show?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 09:02

Well, it was almost certainly in 2012. Because that’s when I took my certification for the leadership circle. And I probably, I remember hearing about it from people I did worse. Organization relationship systems coaching. I did my certification back in like 2009 and 2010. And people in the Oz community talked about the leadership circle, as a really beautiful leadership 360. And superlatively, me, that isn’t best from whoever I was, it is multiple people said that. And that was one of those things where you’re starting to…, I wasn’t interested in it or whatever, but it was starting to come into my awareness. And I was…, I’m not interested in that, but I do Notice that it keeps showing up. And then it might have been Pete Behrens. That meant I don’t know, somebody I’d say triggered the thought to investigate it more fully. And I didn’t have Bob in my certification do I think he was in the I think he was in the same hotel or something teaching something else. I’m pretty sure he was. I didn’t meet him for another few years. But, and so just on the level of investigating, it was just clearly it’s such a beautiful design. It integrates the whole field of leadership. I mean, it really doesn’t it does what he says he did. And that’s what he did, universal model leadership is synthesizes most of the great leadership thinking and research. And, in getting to know him, more at like they have a leadership summit, either annually or every other year, and getting to spend more time with him. He’s just a beautiful, man. He’s like a programmer that…, some programmers go home from a day’s work coding, and they work to relax, they write more code, in their own projects, right? He wouldn’t do that. But he would go home and play with spreadsheets, because that was joy. I’m like, Dude, that is so not me. But…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:37

Well it’s interesting, especially when it comes to human behavior. And when start looking at this stuff, it’s very interesting. So, it must have been done in 2015, when LaLu came with reinventing organizations, and you referenced the Lalu in your book, what type of reaction did you have to that? Because when I read it, that was a trigger point. For me, one of the “Aha” moments or realizations, it resonated so well with me. And I remember talking to Michael De Lamass. I don’t know if you know, Michael De Lamass. Like, why are you so crazy? You know, how Michael is? He was curious why I was so crazy about the book. And he really had a profound impact on how I see things, how did it impact you?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 12:30

Well, I already knew all the spiral dynamics literature before he came out with his book, so I knew what it was based on. I had been reading the never-ending quest cleric graves book that was published posthumously. And is really hard to get right now, is that a print and, so I was, I was enamored with Graves’ research especially. But, what I really loved about what Lalu had done was to focus it specifically on organizations. I mean, spiral dynamics is written for…, the research was done on individual people, not on societies or anything like that, is done back and Chris Cowan, expanded it into more social kind of situations, and culture, and the history of people and whatever. But, I had that base, but what will Lalu did was two things, One was make it specific to organizations and say how it showed up, at Amber, orange, green and teal, and, obviously, specifically doing the big case studies on, the 12 Whatever it is, doesn’t, clients or organizations that are using peel practices in the end and his careful documentation and in the commonality between them was really

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:03

Did you know the correlation between the consciousness of a leader and houses, organization, that connection that LaLu made in the sense of…,

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 14:14

Right, yeah, the consciousness of the chief executive and the board, for instance, is the constraint on Yeah, I think, I don’t remember honestly, specifically, I think that that probably made some sense to me, but not as crisply as, Lalu stated it. And so, I quote that a lot. And, also it dovetails beautifully with the leadership circle, because it’s, I call, it I don’t even know what they call it anymore. Versailles that wants to change. You’re the first problem to solve. You’re the first mind to expand because you have the constraint, right. So, it’s always going to be bottlenecked by you. So, you’ve got to raise yourself in order to raise your organization around you. And that’s so embedded in the leadership circles, philosophy and approach it in a totally dovetails with what Lalu said. So that was like…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:19

So maybe before we dive into the contents of the book, Michelle, and how did you meet her, and how did that collaboration and co-creation emerge for the book?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 15:31

I met Michelle actually, in about 2005 or six, at a client. She wasn’t a coach at the time. And when I knew her back then in Richmond[15:51], and then I lost track of her for many years and then re met her at agile 2015. In Washington DC, at the, whatever they call it, aquarium or whatever it is, and caught up with her about how much…, she had subsequently become an Agile coach, and was with essentially leading a consulting practice in at a company she was working for, and I was like, she would be a good person to leave…, because I already had the vision of what I’m doing now. And back at ACI, to have training side, and then to have a coaching, consulting side that did the kinds of things that we talked about in the training. That was a vision. And I started out being the CEO of both organizations and Lisa was the president of ACI. And Michelle was president of transformation. So, that’s how we came together. And then sometime later, from that…, because I was having trouble finishing the book, I dropped it for more than a year a couple times, I think. I had released a draft of the first 100 pages of it in 2014. Before all of this, and…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:27

I can relate to that, because I’ve been doing the same thing. It’s so tough, and it’s been…, especially I keep making excuses. Even the reason I started the podcast, I tell people, it’s, not the right…

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 17:40

As a way of procrastinating from writing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:44

It’s so I can definitely relate.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 17:51

So, yeah, Michelle helped get it done. Yeah. I mean, just having another person there is really obviously useful. And, Michelle had a lot of experience with enterprise coaching work and a different take than I, we were teaching together, Agile transformational leader class at the time. So we were teaching people integral a lot. And, it’s always a different voice when you have a collaborator, there’s challenges and there’s benefits to having a collaborator and thank goodness she helped me get it done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:35

That’s awesome.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 18:37

It was such a relief to actually get it out. It was here raising at the end,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:43

I can only imagine because I know at least I was one of the people at least waiting and probably emailing saying where is going it to be, I have set alerts on Amazon. So, let’s dive into the book. So Agile transformation using the integral Agile transformation framework

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 19:06

To think and lead differently

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:08

To think and lead differently correct. So integral Agile transformation framework or IATF. How did you come up with a name? And I mean, I know how it makes sense. Related to integral and agile but did you think about any other different names or the natural…

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 19:28

Yeah, I know I had…, that came fairly early as I recall. It wasn’t anytime recently, I played with different names. Actually, one of the most interesting things that happened is, at the time that we…, that I released the first part of the book, the first 100 pages the integral foundation of it, and we even had some book clubs on it, for People, a couple of them. Back in 2014, come to find out. I think when we did this program for enterprise coaches way back, we were the first people out of the gate doing enterprise coach training back in 2014. And we did a thing called integral Agile wizardry, a five-day boot camp, and we had people do the leadership circle full, the full 360 profile. And we taught them a lot of integral stuff at an organizational level. And we taught them the integral Agile transformation framework, as such as it was the time. And come to find out that somebody else because he wrote me, [name not clear] [20:44] his last name, had just a coined the term integral Agile, as had in parallel without knowing about each other. And he, I don’t know what he saw, he saw some kind of post or something. I don’t know, I don’t remember what it was now. And, he wrote us in, was like, [holy shit]. And we invited him to be an assistant at this at our first boot camp, actually, which was cool to meet him. So, I couldn’t use integral Agile, just by itself, and transformation framework made sense. I’m actually in the middle of it with Michael Hammond of redoing that into a new version into a sort of an emerging version from our integral sense making it action work that we do and took the training, the coach training to do now. So, for me, it’s still emerging, it’s still…, there’s still other components, like putting a sensemaking component in really specifically into the framework is for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:59

Yeah. it is a sense making kind of framework. And a lot of times I tell people the way that we use Canadian to understand the context system, maybe this is like a much bigger… So, let’s dive into it. So, I don’t know if you noticed, but behind me here, four quadrants, Agile to Agility. Maybe we can start…

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 22:23

I’ve seen that thing, 100 times. I didn’t get a microphone in the middle of.. I didn’t realize it was quadrant.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:28

And you see what it says…

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 22:28

Green, black and teal. Are the three levels?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:34

Yeah, it’s green. Well, it’s teal, systems action culture. Yeah, so I thought, I don’t want to bring up anything in the sense because I don’t really like share a screen but we can use what’s behind me to kind of have a context and discussion. Okay. So maybe do you want to walk us through the framework and just, from an integral, maybe the quadrant. And then maybe we can allude to the…with green and teal to the outer things?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 23:09

Yeah. So, the full, it’s the other name for integral is AQAL, all quadrants, all levels, AQAL. And it really means all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types. So, it’s like a classification system of pretty much anything in the universe. And we’re the perspective that it makes sense in or that we’re that people… is a mapping system, right to shape how people are viewing something. So, for me, the most important line is the vertical line in the diagram behind you, and the logo behind you and in the requirements between the right side. Not sure this is coming out. Right. And….

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:01

It is yeah, I mean, people will be seeing so…, and this goes back to like doing Agile versus being Agile, in a sense, the right side.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 24:10

Yeah. I don’t like to reduce it to that. I don’t I wouldn’t argue with doing versus being. There’s some truth in that for sure. But it’s a little too narrow for me. Yeah, I mean, so, yes, more or less, but, it’s also the, the tangible things that people can see and verify. Like, behaviors, like structures, things, the org chart, like…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:41

Policies.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 24:43

Practice, like a policy Yeah. So they’re things that people can print or somehow touch in some way or view, its subjects the senses, whereas the left hand is intangible, and has to do with, how we think, what we think, how we feel, the ways that we feel, and the way that we make sense together, collectively. So, the right side has… excuse me, complexity. And the left side has depth. So, we talk about, you could talk about consciousness becomes more complex, but it’s probably more accurate to say consciousness becomes deeper.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:37

Deeper. So, culture and consciousness or mindset and culture become deeper, but behaviors and systems become more complex.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 25:48

Yes, driven by deeper consciousness, or constrained by, so people can do a stand up practice, right, and they can sort of “the rules,” but if they don’t have the consciousness to support it, they’re not going to do it properly, particularly, right. That’s why it turns into a status meeting to the to the scrum master or, where they check out and they don’t listen to each other. That’s not doing… I mean, that’s going through the motions of it. It’s enacting the behaviors on the right-hand side, but it’s not having the consciousness or the attitude or the intention on the left-hand side. So, especially because different kinds of cultural codes, at different levels, prioritize or marginalize right-hand versus left-hand, the thing that’s useful about integral is it brings that back to us that, structures sure as hell are important, the org structure is definitely important, the policies for performance management review and stuff are really important. And, practices that people do are really important and coding standards and whatever. But also, so are people’s attitude towards or people’s, emotional intelligence, people’s thinking patterns, and whether they can see through their thinking patterns, whether they can intentionally make sense together, do sensemaking together, or whether they group mind is…, we’re sensemaking in a sort of illegitimate way, we all we always come to the conclusion, rather than actually look at the data, for instance, that’s a left hand side thing in large part. So, upper left is the I quadrant, the internal of individual, you, everybody. And the lower left we quadrant is…, in the book, we call it, culture and relationship, organizational culture and relationship. It is about how we share.., we have a shared experience…, how you go into a team room, back in pre COVID days, you probably you remember, actually working with teams in person, perhaps, maybe you’re not that old. And, you feel a different thing, when you go into a given team room, it doesn’t feel the same as going into a different teams room does it different? And that’s the we space, that’s the we, perspective, is where we sense, we evolve to sense other people’s feelings and intentions and whatever. And on the right hand, we have practices and behavior, upper right “it” third person singular. And in the bottom right, we have its” third person plural, which there’s technically not a such a thing, can kind of made it up. But if it makes sense, I mean, it’s a collective versus an individual thing. And we call that organizational architecture, which includes structure and policies and governance and all those kind of things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:18

Yeah, so let’s explore these, I thought like we start with the I or the mindset, the top level, because you have three sections in the book and one section, the section two is pretty much all about the I and development. And one of the things that you…I’ve heard actually before, but and I actually like it, I’ve used it in some of the writing done during the referring to the mindset as an operating system and then also as a culture and operate. So maybe we could start with that, in a sense like that first acknowledging that we run different operating systems as individuals and as leaders. And yes. Could you maybe just touch upon that?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 30:03

Yeah, sure. Yeah. Great. Thanks. Good question. Useful question to me as the interviewee. So, that you asked about altitude. So that’s where we get into altitude. So, the quadrants are different perspectives that are all sort of at the same level. They’re not. They’re not more or less complex…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:23

But just for listeners, now we’re talking green versus steel here.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 30:34

Yes. Yeah, yes. So. consciousness, any given thing from any quadrants perspective, increases its complexity or its depth over time, often, or there’s a natural evolutionary impulse in the universe to evolve. And so, consciousness, individual consciousness, progresses the way we mapped it in the book, there’s not hundreds, but there are scores of ways that you could denote the progression from Amber to orange to green to teal, in consciousness itself in I. We, use the leadership circle, reactive creative integral, which is I prefer in some context to talk about Bob Keegan’s work, and socialized mind to self-authoring mind to self-transforming mind. So a leader who’s at socialized mind is going to or anybody not just a leader, but is going to make decisions and take action based on what they think other people will think, based on an internalized kind of cultural constraint or meal you that they’re and they internalize, basically, so is a stage of development that children go through. Maybe sometime in teenager hood, early or late, maybe depending on the person and the culture they’re in.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:10

But this is the shift from subject to object, right? So this, we’re talking about…, you talk about telling stories, and in this context of evolving from that socialized mind is where everything’s what others say, you only see things from one perspective, you’re not kind of transcending that. Yes. what’s the bigger picture here?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 32:35

Yes, yeah. And I would say it specifically technically, you internalize the views and beliefs and opinions of your…, you that you’re in could be a religious male, you could be a work male, you could be your family. In obviously, it changes at different points in your life in your surroundings. And so, you internalize that and so if somebody else criticizes you, you feel criticized. If somebody else praises you, you feel praised, and you end up sort of bias.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:14

I’ll give you a perfect example. And this is kind of like what I had an aha moment. So, growing up in Sarajevo, right, you have Muslims and Christians fighting? Yeah. So, if you’re Christian, your perspective and if…, Russians, or somebody support you, you’re like, Yeah, anything that has to do with Muslims you’re like, doesn’t matter because you’re part of that culture. And I think you talked about how our culture shapes so you’re brought up as it doesn’t matter, it goes both ways. But once I started taking myself outside of that situation, and not looking at myself as one but just stepping out and saying, look, there are two groups or three groups of people that are pointing fingers at each other and looking from a different perspective, but they…, when you look at it…, they’re saying, you suck you suck, but it’s really with the bigger picture is like we’re more alike.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 34:15

Yeah. And in socialized mind, you can only take the Christian perspective or the Muslim perspective. And you vilify…, that’s basically an amber kind of thing to do. Right? It’s, Amber, Claire, Claire graves found that Amber was the most vicious in attacking another system than any of the other levels was why you had the holy wars, the crusades, most genocide has been done in the name of the Church of whatever church or religion more than anything besides.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:58

So, we still see that type of stuff, just related back to organizations, those type of operating systems, even people in government and some of the organizations, and then, how do we transcend that into the orange or…?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 35:14

So that’s where the subject object thing that we mentioned comes in his development altogether is moving from what I’m subject to the what I look through my, the eyes that the lens that I looked through, and what I look at, right. And at different stages of development, there’s a different subject and a different object. So, when those change, when the former subject becomes the new object, then I develop, grow significantly. So for instance, when I moved to self-authoring mind, self-authoring mind is like the sense of “I am my own person.” I’m my own man, I’m my own woman. I don’t depend on other people to tell me what’s okay. I listen to what other people say. But I make my own judgments. And so I have seen what I used to look through, I’ve seen the social you that I’m in, and it’s values and stuff, and I start critiquing it, I say, I agree with this thing. And I don’t agree with this thing. So that’s, going, I’m rejecting that. And I’m importing this for myself. And I developed my own philosophy.

And I…, in leadership circle terms, I come to become outcome creating, focus on creating a vision of something not artistic creativity, but I focus on doing something making the world different in some way. And most people are in the transition between those two operating systems. They’re between socialized mind, the self-authoring mind. Now, plenty of people, especially people that succeed in business, have moved to self-authoring, that’s not really uncommon, but it’s not, it’s also not highly common. And then the next transition to self-transforming is quite uncommon. Self-transforming, then goes further than self-authoring. And now I critique my own philosophy of life. And I question my own assumptions. And I open up to things that I used to reject in myself, like Shadow Work, is bringing in things that I don’t like about myself that I project onto others, or I just repressed, or whatever, and there’s all kinds of energy tied up in that. And I is self-transforming is about opening those floodgates, and letting in all of who I am. And, and sort of being okay with that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:45

And that’s a huge thing, is our complexity. So, it’s almost like, I was trying to think about how to use the analogy, but it’s like, I was joking around with somebody that was talking. It’s like, running Windows ME in 2021. Windows ME was good at certain point, in certain context was trying to run it today. Things have evolved the complexity. So when it comes to leadership, you talked about, the cap or we talk, maybe I didn’t start recording, but the organization depending, so which operating system your leader is running, like how much essentially ego shows up and there’s a lot right, that goes, right, the current goes into this. How’s that related to the effectiveness of organization and agility? business agility?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 38:38

Yeah, good question. So, you can’t in the reacting, in the problem reacting mode, socialized mind mode, Keegan’s socialized mind, leadership circles are problem reacting, you can’t create change. It’s a negative feedback loop. That’s status quo enforcing, it shifts you back to the status quo. I mean, that’s what it’s…, it’s the very design of the systemic structure is a negative feedback loop. Outcome creating is a positive feedback loop. So, it allows the creation of change in the direction of your vision. It’s just the way people work. So, if you’re if you’re trying to have business agility, you can’t do that. It’s actually impossible to run that on a reactive or socialized mind operating system just doesn’t make sense. So, to get into the game, essentially of Agile leadership, you have to be at outcome creating the data because you just can’t run the app on that on that operating system. It’s a really get to servant leader and transformational leader you really pretty much need to be, in the range of self-transforming mind.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:02

And the way they transform, I think what you said and maybe just to, come back to this kind of how do you upgrade between operating systems? So, there’s something that you wrote in your book, when along the lines of awareness is the beginning of the pathway to in their development or this upgrade, right? Yeah. Right. So how…, can you maybe talk about the awareness because I think that’s something that’s a lot of times we talk about awareness, but we don’t really know what we’re talking about. When it comes to awareness.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 40:31

It’s a way of becoming first mindful. So first one becomes mindful, like in Buddhist tradition, I was trained in, meditation practice, creates mindfulness, or is a practice of mindfulness. And when we start paying attention to our thought stream, and how it actually works, and shows up, we start to become aware, in a bigger sense. So, mindfulness leads to awareness. And when we keep doing that, especially if we have an intention to grow, or to shift or something, you know, we do, I mean, we might take working with a coach or with some meditation practices, or some other kind of practices. It’s helpful to interact with somebody who’s functioning from a higher level, because they can ask you the questions from that mindset. Right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:34

But that awareness is also about shifting your beliefs and assumptions. You’re also right about that. And I think that’s a really important key part of that upgrade, is that you, you transcend the old beliefs and the old assumptions, right? For instance, just maybe give people an example what we’re talking about, because it’s like your choice, if you believe the world is predictable. And that runs like a machine, you transcend, you start believing that the world is more like, I think you also referenced this, in your book, write about this in your book, it’s more like a complex, adaptive system. And it’s more unpredictable than predictable. So those are the type of beliefs and assumptions that you make.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 42:30

Yes, that you start to use. So, the first step is starting to see that you do that. And the second step, so to speak, is to see what it costs you to do that, that’s a deeper part of the mindfulness awareness is first seen that it happens, and then second, seeing what the deficit of it is. Because there is there’s almost, there’s always a limitation, and a cost, both to you, personally, and to the people around you and to the work. I mean, at a lower level, our leadership effectiveness, for instance, is not as great if we’re reactive, it’s just not.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:10

Yeah, so I mean, what you just made me think about is another thing that may be sticking to the left side here and moving down to the culture because I agree, another thing that resonated with me in the book is that you said, there’s too much focus over the years on the right side, on behaviors, actions, and assistance, but not as much, especially in the West on the left side culture and mindset. So, one of the things that you mentioned that earlier, collective leadership development, but you said collective consciousness of most senior leadership teams is not complex enough to lead in the world we find ourselves in. Could you elaborate on that and talk about what you meant by that?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 43:54

Well, I mean, I’ve worked with a, quite a few leadership teams, and they, if you measure their collective effectiveness, like what the leadership circle, which has a scientific, measurement to it, basically, they’re not, they’re not very effective. And that’s because some of their socialized mind patterns with each other, their reactivity to each other, they’re being triggered by each other, blaming each other. And they’re deep conversations to uncover that people don’t go to normally. I mean, business teams don’t, talk about collective sensemaking very much or my projections or whatever, but they need to, because it traps them into a certain way of being with each other and a certain set of is where, it’s related to the idea of groupthink, right, is that we all believe certain things together, we’re pluralistic ignorance, which is…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:55

It also we talked about, you talked about calling on sensemaking by So it’s really about collective sense making down the culture and we write and being able to make sense as a leadership team, and then also being able to align our values and beliefs, because we could still have leadership team that’s made up of just in terms of, somebody’s thinking from that, you know, Amber, or orange and have couple of people, maybe they’re thinking, we’re operating from another operating system that’s green or teal. And How do you deal in that situation where, probably people with those newer, higher up or higher, it’s not the term, right term, but like, how do you get group of people that are running different operating systems? To make sense of things?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 45:53

Yes, that’s a real challenge.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:56

So I don’t know I last time we spoke and I think you said or somebody said, we’re screwed, in a sense, because it goes back to, what the Robert Keegan wrote about, in over our heads, meaning like, our environment is more complex than we can comprehend, or most people can comprehend.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 46:19

Yes, yes, it’s probably more complex than any of us can comprehend. But some of us are, I mean, if you’re, if you shifted to a center of gravity that’s higher on the developmental scale, you’re probably going to be more effective, you’re almost certainly going to be more effective than you were maybe not than somebody else, per se, but you’re going to be more effective than you were before, it’s going to increase my own leadership effectiveness. If I move up from reactive to creative, there’s no question.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:53

So, what’s interesting to me is you also call the operating system that’s running at the we are culture. So bottom left, so now we have operating system, leadership operating system that’s running in i or the left, so how, that is really like that depth that you talked about? Now, we’re talking about, culture is really, made up of these collective operating systems, which is really collective beliefs and assumptions.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 47:29

Yes. Yes. So, but the trick is that it’s not per se, your individual results and my individual results, and her individual results, and somebody else’s individual results all added together. It’s more mysterious than that, it comes out of like, in an organization, it comes out of the founding out of the founder, or founders, out of a culture that was developed way back, which might not at all fit to as leading now. Right. But it but it’s state, there’s a persistence to it, because systems have their own living quality. They’re not, it’s not one plus one is two, right? It’s…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:18

It’s that I mean, another thing that reminds me at least of back home, it’s the culture, for instance, for people that grew up anywhere by in the Balkans, it’s the vision of the people that started the country or the experiences. So, when you’re born into it, you’re kind of affected by the history. So, in that bottom, right, yes. It’s the history and all the rituals and everything that’s impacting that operating system.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 48:45

Yes. Yes, we are in both the right and left, I mean, it’s the cultural feeling about things. And it’s the specific structures like, we have certain holidays, to celebrate certain religious things, or cultural things that are important that the ceremony of that, the structure of it, the actual enactment of it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:10

Yeah, so, so these are in the book, he also talks about five integral disciplines. Consciousness change, evolving consciousness, conscious change, sorry, which is different than involving consciousness. We talked about involving consciousness or I, that will be the top left evolving systemic complexity, which is actually the we, which we just talked about. Then we have evolving adaptive architecture, which is the bottom right, the systems, right? Yes. And then we have evolving product innovation, which is the eye top right, so let’s maybe spend a little bit of time here just on it. And it’s evolving adapting architecture and product innovation. And then I would like to finish maybe, with the conscious change and leading change, as you kind of finish with a book. So Well, based on what we just discussed on evolving the mindset and culture. How does that relate to the right side of the quadrants of practices and structures?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 50:16

Oh, how does evolving consciousness relate to that? Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:21

So for instance, if I’m a leader, what I’m getting at is if I’m somebody that believes in a stable environment, and how does that going impact the right side? What type of policies do I do?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 50:37

Sure. So, so two kind of basic issues, there is obviously the consciousness of the person or person, him or something that define those adaptive structure, those non adaptive structure those organizational architecture structures? Well, obviously, a reactive mind is going to design a reactive structure. I mean, that’s just pretty obvious. But so that’s one issue is the level of evolution theater. But the other one is the culture itself. Right? It doesn’t matter, like you see it in government, a lot. Government is, especially in IT, I think, has drafted a lot of really visionary CIOs and CTO kind of people that have really progressive visions for what to do. But they’re unable to do that, because they’re working in government. I mean in a culture that’s much more powerful than they are as even if they’re the top leader. I mean, you can’t if you have 1000s, and 1000s of employees that every day, recreate the culture. Yeah, it’s hard to make a dent in that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:53

I agree. I was working one of the biggest public agencies in California, and that’s exactly it, doesn’t matter. They brought somebody that really does and reflects in practices. I mean, what else? I mean, how does the left side impact the right side? And what have you seen? What other examples? Can we do this?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 52:15

Well, actually, can we go the opposite way? So how does the right side impact the left side? So, because we haven’t talked too much about the right side? So, there’s an old saying, in, in business, that where you stand on an issue depends on where you sit, like what department you’re in? So, what you what you stand for, is dependent on what department you’re in. Where, what organizational perspective, you’re in, are you in marketing? that’s a different perspective than customer support very different well than engineering. I mean, there’s conflict, there’s tension, often in systems at those boundaries, because they don’t see the world in the same way. Right. So, you are, the structure that…, you’re in who you report to, makes a difference in your consciousness? I mean, you don’t, with some people you’ll develop as young people, you’ll have to shut yourself down. Right? So the structure molds, our consciousness, as well as, consciousness design, all of this, systems, but is it the quarters, there’s never a sense of, there’s one quadrant, that’s the best, they all have power, and they all influence each other.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:38

I mean, that comes liker, in the sense of, if we go to the top, right, imposing change versus co creating.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 53:46

Right, right. Right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:47

We’d a lot of times, see how, sometimes if we’re imposing change, it’s going to impact the mindset of people. And if we co create, it’s going to impact it. What else? I mean, from a perspective, what else would you like to share from the interplay between the four quadrants.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 54:12

Well, we do a cohort for people to become masterful in enterprise coaching an IC Agile IC EC program, and just had a one of the people in that report in the most glowing kind of a few sub terms. His conversation with camera was the CIO or SVP, but somebody in the leadership position in walk him through both halons, the level of, individual, Team department organization And so he walked me through halons and the quadrants, and they found all kinds of, this person responsible for the transformation, they found all kinds of insights from that. I mean, it blew up in a, in a good way. And it was just it was just another reminder about we tend to have a, we have a groupthink bias about, we’re probably biased toward the left hand quadrants. Most people are biased towards the right hand quadrant, but who are organizations, or at least, people in the Agile community actually are much more left hand quadrant oriented. I’ve found, but when we always miss, looking from a different quadrant perspective, and there’s always interesting stuff, useful stuff to uncover. If we shift perspectives from our natural one, for me, my mind is we. When I shift to looking from an its point of view, or from an “it” point of view, I see new stuff. And so, quadrants are all about the….

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:09

Holistic view, maybe,

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 56:11

Yes, in an holistic and comprehensive, it takes this the fundamental things that are in, can team up with, or realize, really, the four quadrants by looking at, hundreds of different systems of thought, throughout mankind’s history, and going, oh, there’s a commonality there, either a first person perspective, or a second person or third person, and that’s part of why they argue with each other so much. So, the advice that we take from that is, have a have a multi quadrant, change team. So that you have people with different expertise, some people are really good at it, some people are really good at we, some people are good at it. All those perspectives are valid and useful. And so how can you…, that’s part of how you do Conscious Change is you have a change team or whatever, steering committee or what have you, that has an orientation toward all the quadrants because they were, and all the altitudes, because it reveals.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 57:21

And we don’t see that. So maybe as a last thing here, let’s talk about this conscious change, training and coaching using the framework. So what are some of the things that when it comes to teaching, when it comes to coaching, when it comes to conscious choice, usually using the framework as a sense making framework to drive that change to teach people about, how they can make better sense of things that are going on? So how do you maybe let’s start with teaching, what are some of the things that you alluded earlier, but what else?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 58:02

So, Michael Hammond and I, teach a workshop called Master camp, which is for people that are transitioning from being team coaches to being enterprise coaches, or who are already doing enterprise organizational level work and want to up their game that way. And we use the integral framework and his evolve agility sensemaking framework, because they dovetail really nicely together, we take people through, exercises and whatnot, with that in case study of a really serious case study project that they have to do. And we use the integral, the basically the framework from the book with, I say, added stuff was in that sense making and also actually with human system dynamics work with adaptive action. And so we have them do exercises like design an integral assessment of your organization, look for have things that address all four quadrants, not just your favorite, right. So that I mean, which creates a stretch for people, I mean, whatever quadrant or two it is that, some providers is going to be a stretch for everything for anybody.

We do sensemaking conversations, we teach them a practice to do deliberate since making a very simple practice, but one that highlights how I make sense for me to see how I make sense of things, what I make up, what the story is behind it, and then adaptive action, something we didn’t cover in the book that I’ve come across subsequently and really fallen in love with his adaptive actions in, the HSD framework is containers different verses and exchanges, you have to make a change in a self-organizing system in either its containers, or its differences or exchanges. And you don’t just when you…, don’t believe that you can plan change, because you can, you can adapt to change, you can dance with change, you can create an intention, right, and you can do experiments, you can change a container, like, Agile is all about defining clear containers, like a team plus or minus seven people, right is a container. And it’s, Agile is about really good container differences, exchange practices, in a lot of ways. That’s part of a lot of why it works really well. And that’s the currency, you have to change stuff in an organization, you change how one of those parameters works. And you see what happens? You don’t think that you’re in control? Because you’re not?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:57

Yeah, and that, that makes me think about, just that now, maybe the just to bring in the coaching and consulting, making sense. A lot of times coaches have one size fits all, or maybe they even just coach you on the framework. And when I go in, when you start talking to a team or organization, you’re making sense, okay, who are these people? What is the organization? Is this orange type of organization? Is this leader or team made up? Yeah. And you’re constantly making sense of what’s going on? And your approaches are changing, right? Based on?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 1:01:29

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And, a way that that can go right in a way that that can go wrong, when I assess that an organization, center of gravity as an achievement, orange, for instance, is the way I can go wrong is for me to pigeonhole them into that and limit what they can do, and sort of have a prejudice against them really. And the way that that can be helpful on the on the other hand, is, if they do have an achievement, orange center of gravity, then I need to talk achievement, orange language, or I’m not going to reach that. If I don’t blend on some level with those values. I’m not going to be effective, right? So, knowing that is useful for just like, you know how to talk to people that are at a different age. I mean, you don’t talk to an adult, the way you talk to a six-year-old, and you don’t talk to most adults, the way you might talk to a 95-year-old person.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:02:27

So, do you think he talks about safe? He talked about safe in the book, do you think, Dean and safe is there’s a really good job of talking to people in their language and selling?,

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 1:02:39

Yeah, yes absolutely. That’s…, I mean, and they aim the framework in terms of the integral, safe, particularly, but to some extent, all scaling frameworks, but especially safe, I’m most familiar with safe rolling. They aimed it at the it’s quadrant at the organizational architecture quadrant in a lot of ways. The scrum framework, you know, is goes in the ID quadrant in it doesn’t need much. But it doesn’t have funding in it, doesn’t have governance in it doesn’t have all kinds of things in it that organization needs, and safe handled those things. And so, it took some of the role stuff, what do you call the people, that used to be directors of, IT or whatever? What do you call them in an agile framework? And, Dean gave them names, and that created comfort for people. And it’s a very orange, with shades of green kind of framework, that the altitude of it for in my experience. And I think I wouldn’t want to say that inherently true, per se, is the way it’s practiced, though, the way it’s practice is by achievement, orange organizations that adopted in a way to install the Agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:03:56

And that’s what I spoke with Dean couple of weeks ago now. And I think he gets it in a sense, but I think it’s also the side that people are one this and like, Hey, if you grab this, and it’s shiny object, and you want to do that, implement that from that orange perspective, then, go ahead and do it. But maybe to one of the things that I believe the book that you wrote here, and when I’m talking to people that I consider top leaders in Agile, we’re moving towards what you’re describing in this book, and I think the next 10 years, and what you’ve been talking for the last 10 years is about to get more traction.

I think we’ll start seeing and slowly people are starting to see and it’s, it’s interesting that and maybe my question is around how do we in your ways, how do we actually simplify the understanding or concepts from your book. So, they become more of a nation. So, more people are aware of this framework and how it’s similar to how people…, I remember like, going through or when I teach about Canadian people start making sense of the framework and how they can use it. Right? This is in a similar way, now we can have make a sense of the whole organization. And when I introduce people, they go,[Holy shit], now I know why my organization is so messed up.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 1:05:32

Right? Yeah, yeah, that’s the experience I have, especially giving talks that people go, Oh, that’s what’s going on. It’s using the integral framework is so different than implementing safe. Because it’s not something that you teach to everybody in the organization, there’s no need to do that. You teach it to the coaches, or the transformation leaders that are going to be using it in the background. It’s not something you foreground with the client, particularly, it’s something that the coach knows how to do. It’s like a skill set of how to assess what’s going on in organization, what quadrant does it align with? And what altitude, Amber, orange, green, teal, does it align with because that tells you how to work with it? It tells you, if it’s an IF thing, it says, you might want to look for what are the WE components that reinforce that it’s saying? Or what are the IT or I components that do, and what altitude it comes from tells you what’s possible, in an orange organization, you’re not going to adopt holarchy. That’s a horrible idea. So Horrible idea for agile coaches to suggest to their clients to get to implement holarchy, unless they’re pretty darn small organization or have a really strong commitment, and are already, operating from pluralistic green. It’s just not going to work. It’s not going to make sense to them. It’s like teaching a six-year-old integral calculus. No, that’s a bad idea. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Doesn’t need it, not going to brains not going to have the cognitive capacity for it right. Now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:07:19

Another thing that we didn’t talk about, and we don’t know, so by thing, just maybe to make a point, then in spiral dynamics that you can skip, so you can skip the upgrades from operating systems, you have to gradually upgrade, which is kind of tough. But maybe, as we kind of wrap up here, what message what would you like do inspiring coaches, change agents, leaders? What would you maybe invite them to do or…

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 1:07:49

Get exposure to the integral framework, from my book, from my classes, from other places around because it will change how you are able to see things and how effective you’re able to be? And the other thing that’s sort of related to it, or is the bigger subset of it is that the most impactful thing you can do, especially working at an organizational level, is to grow yourself? Because the coaches that is the greatest instrument of transformation that they have, more than any technique they know or anything else? So, if I’ve developed myself, I’m going to be more effective, I’m going to be less constrained and maybe less triggered by clients. I’m just going to be, and they can’t go further than I can go.

Peggy McAllister

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:49

Who is Speaker: Peggy McAllister?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 00:52

That’s a question we could go on for days. And you could ask 2000 people and they’d have 2000 different responses. My response today is, in my work, I work as an executive coach. And I do what I would call the deeper inner work with leaders versus consulting with them about how to be more strategic. I’m helping them look at the ways that some internal ways that they process things get in the way of being strategic. And with teams, I started my career as a university counselor, so I have a graduate degree in psychology. So the deeper work has always been of interest to me. And it took me a while to find my way into doing that with executives. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:54

What do you think is that deeper work, a lot of times we’re so bias or sometimes jumping into that strategic work. And it could be maybe because of how we’re incentivized, but what are you seeing when you’re coaching, when you’re working with leaders and that inner work and work on themselves? What are some of the things that were or maybe patterns that you’re seeing when you’re working with leadership?

What are some of the things that they struggle, maybe with some of the things that they get easier, but maybe the environment doesn’t allow them to act in a way, that maybe they feel is a hole or more organic way of doing things? Because a lot of times I talk to people, and they’re like, no, I know, this is the right thing to do. But guess what, I also have a college student and I have to pay their tuition. So I have to do what I’m incentivized for.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 02:47

Yes. Yes. So many people these days are hitting up against that edge of, I’ve been doing what my company, what society has said I need to do and I don’t feel like I can do it for much longer or I can’t do it anymore. So there has been, I think, and we’re going in a direction, I don’t know, let’s see where this goes. But so many people right now are just done with living up to other people’s expectations, which is different from being in service to something that matters. And I want to make that distinction. But what I’m seeing with a lot of my own clients is, I’ve been doing this, I’m really good at this. And it’s feeling really empty, I’m exhausted, and I want to do something that has more meaning for me, not because I’m going to lose salary or lose the esteem of my colleagues.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:57

Or even identity. Sometimes it’s like I’m going to lose my identity. This is what people have known. And then letting go of that maybe identity. So could we explore, what is the identity? And why does it matter in Leadership?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 04:11

Yeah, yeah, that’s where I really like to play. So identity, as I would describe it today is a story that you have believed about who you need to be, not even exactly who you are, but who you need to be in order to be okay, in order to be successful. So for some of us, as little ones, if we were gifted with being an athlete, and we were always winning the awards, we grow up thinking that’s how I be the best me, I’ve got to just keep winning the awards, or if I’m the one who was always the responsible one in the family.

We often carry that into our work and we’re taking other people’s work on, no, it’s not a problem, no problem, give it to me. Other people learn to be the nice person. So always denying their own needs and taking care of everyone else. And all of these things lead to burnout if they are not managed at some point. So a lot of high achievers are burning out right now. They don’t give themselves permission to take a break. Because if my identity is, I’m always at the top, I’m always making those numbers, I’m always exceeding the numbers. If that is the case, then if I stop, I must be a failure. If I just pause and go do something that has nothing to do with succeeding, I’m failing and that’s not okay with who I am.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:06

It’s really interesting that you say that, because I’ve been in several situations like that, where you think that’s the case. And then the only thing that separates you from the identity and then different perspective is just actually letting go of that identity and just trying something for so short, where your perspective changes, and you’re like, how silly was I to think that? And I don’t know, do you see that? Sometimes is that what it takes? Just letting go even for a little second and saying, what’s the worst thing that could happen?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 06:43

That’s a great question. And what’s funny is with these identities, there is some sense of danger of stepping outside of it that we can’t even name like if I said, tell me what you think could happen? Your brain can’t come up with it but your nervous system, feel some sort of, danger, 911 alert. I can’t step beyond that edge. Can I tell a story?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:16

Yeah.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 07:18

And this is a story told by a wise one from 150 years ago or so, who grew up around many nomadic tribes would come through his town, so he began to get to know them. And he followed them. And he learned a lot, he was always curious about what made things happen and how people thought about things. And this one tribe had very specific, protocols that they followed, that were passed down through the centuries around how we do everything. So everybody had a role, when a storm came up, you get the 10 poles, you get the cooking stuff, you get the camels, blah, blah, blah.

And they had one very specific thing that they did. Every week, when the parents wanted to go off to gather the food, they would gather all the children in the oasis. And like the kids 10 and under, and one of the parents would take their finger and would start drawing a line, a circle in the sand around the outside of them. And so she go around. Drawing the circle around them. So imagine you’re sitting in the circle. And she says to them, and they hear this every week from one or the other parents.

If anyone crosses this line, you’re going to die. Now imagine you hear that every week as you’re growing up, if anyone crosses this line, you’re going to die, every time you stop at an oasis and parents have to go away. So now imagine that Miljan is seeing his 18-month-old cousin, Joanna, crawling around getting really close to that line. She’s just curious, she’s just want, she’s just wow, this is so cool where we are. Oh, my goodness. And Miljan sees her getting close to that line. What are you going to do if she gets close?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:43

Yeah, probably pull her back, right?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 09:45

You’re going to pull her back. Yeah. And what kind of energy is going to be in the pulling her back if you’ve been told every week of your 10 years of life, that you’re going to die if you crossed the line? How are you going to pull her back?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:01

Probably very reactively and very, yeah. I can’t, I don’t think I will be probably gentle, maybe.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 10:13

You probably be pretty forceful. No, stop. And so Joanna, and you through the years, through the month, got this in your nervous systems that line is a no. And so now imagine it’s 20 years later, and I meet you on the street, and I’m sitting alone, I hear you now have a family, tell me more. And we’re talking and as we’re talking, I’m getting down on the ground. I’m looking like I’m picking something up, but I’m really drawing a circle around your feet in the sand. And then I say, Miljan come here a minute, and I walk 50 yards away, I’m going to show you this rose. Now you’re standing there with a circle around your feet, what are you going to do?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:07

Yeah. I don’t know. And this is something that’s bringing up, it’s just like, it’s such a simple story. But if I really look at my life, and that metaphor of the line, and how we’ve been shaped, what’s coming to me is the cultural influence and the rituals, and the line like, there are things, it’s not that line in my life but there are certain things that represent that description and I might get really creative and say what’s there? Or I might just in the back of my head, maybe try to avoid for whatever reasons not to cross that line. And maybe, I was thinking about this recently how we do things and we believe things, but as we get older, we get a little bit more creative, and thoughtful about how we avoid things or maybe how we perceive and deal with whatever story we tell ourselves or wherever we make up.

And you and I have had this discussion about growing up in another country in a different culture, how you’re shaped into by your society. So, when I came to United States, that identity that we talked about earlier, started getting questioned, right? And as soon as I let go, what I thought I should be what my culture and what I was, as soon as I started suspending, do I really think I am what has been handed down to me from others? It changes that identity. So I don’t know if I answered your question. As far as what I would do, I would say I will get creative not to get out of that circle as a metaphor. If I’m still clinging to that identity, right? If I may be gone past it, I might say, yeah, no problem. Now I don’t claim to that identity or that ritual. So, I might have no problem crossing it.

But if I still cling to that identity, I would get very creative as far as not to, because there might be, still some fears. And that also, another thing that maybe reminds me of, is we don’t have to go down the culture wise, but I come from a region where, it’s very culture, we kill each other because of the culture and because of that identity. But that’s another thing that we cling to it in a way that, same way that we cling to religion. And, you might say, if I do this I’m going to go to hell, or I’m going to do this. And that line might represent 10 commandments, let’s just say. So I’m not going to do that. So anyway, I don’t know if that answers your question. But I want to explore that a little bit, and maybe we can bring it to a professional setting. How could somebody have that same feeling about decision that they’re making as executive?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 14:33

Yes, yes. Great. So I love how you’ve brought in all the nuances of identity to, because we have an identity that comes around our culture, our religion, our gender. I mean, there’s our race. There are so many things that I am an X. And as soon as we say I’m an X, we are looking through the lens of X. And we see everything in a way that supports that X until something cracks it open. So what the wise one who told this story said, is that circle in the desert is actually a hypnotic trance. Because the kids weren’t going to, we know the kids weren’t going to die if they crossed the line. And it was a way to keep them safe, which is what the start of our identity is about. It’s to keep us safe.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:37

So it’s a survival kind of mechanism.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 15:39

It’s a survival, and it’s an inculturation mech, yeah, it’s a way to help us to fit in to our society somehow or another. And we all find our own ways. So, three or four years ago, I was working with a guy who was a knockout superstar. Like from high school, he was always the award winner, the leader, everybody wanted him to take things over. So in this global multibillion dollar organization, he found he was barely in a role for six or eight months before they promoted and promoted and promoted him. And he got to a point where his old, the way he was used to getting things done was, he was the quarterback on the football team. He was calling the place, but he was also running most of the place. So now, his organization was so huge, he couldn’t do it all anymore.

And so he came to me and he said, I need to find a new way, so he thought it was going to give him some new strategy. And I said, so let’s call him Sam. Sam, what’s been your success formula? Because obviously, you’re being recognized everywhere for what you bring. And he said, well, it’s just, I just don’t fail. I said, you don’t? I was a little. And he said, no, very seriously, I don’t fail. And I said, what would happen if you did? The room got silent. And I could feel this anger starting to fill the room. And I said, what’s happening? He said, I am so ready to just walk out the door. And so we began just being curious. And this is what it takes to start unlocking some of these mechanisms that are driving us, that are not giving us any choice, we need to be curious. So somehow, he stuck in there in the process, and began getting curious.

And he remembered that when he was a kid, his father gave him explicit instructions that, you can’t fail, because if you fail, you’re a failure. And I won’t ever talk to you. I mean, that was the message, you must be the winner, not even number two, you always have to be number one, or else something really horrible is going to happen. And he took that in, but it went into his subconscious. So it’s not like he was always thinking, boy, dad’s going to do this. But it was the circle in the sand that kept being drawn for him. And then he didn’t even recognize he was in the circle. It was just who I am. I’m just the winner, I always. My success formula, I just don’t lose. When he saw that, and this doesn’t usually happen this quick.

But in that room, as he heard himself speak this, he said, that’s a bunch of BS. How did I? I’m smart. I know how to do. How did I buy into that? And then he began saying, so what would it look like if I weren’t the quarterback carrying all the plays? And he began being okay with experimenting with his team’s not going to get it right the first time. They’re going to have to run the place, they are going to be learning, discovering and within, I don’t know, a very short amount of time, his team, the revenue, all the markers way up very short amount of time.

And it took him being curious and sitting in that huge discomfort of, what do you mean I can always win? What do you mean? And so when we get to that edge of I’m supposed to be the winner, I’m supposed to be the one who has all the answers. When we’re pushed to the edge of, what if that’s not really so? If we can stay in that tension a bit and be curious, all sorts of new ways of bringing success to our teams, to our organizations are going to start moving, it opens up innovation, it opens up everything because we know what Agile curiosity is, a key factor there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:57

That [inaudible 20:59] experimentation experience. The empiricism that, Agile is specifically founded on is very interesting. So what I mean, why is that direct experience? And we were discussing about that in a work like what’s going on in our heads and a lot of times we can come across maybe too theoretical or too soft. How do you help leaders practice this? Because I tell people, you can’t just say you have to be more empathetic, or you have to look from somebody else’s perspective, I can say that, I can suggest by the person, let’s make a decision if they want to do that or not, right?

So what type of things do you do maybe to help people experience or come up with that? Oh, shoot now, now I see. I heard somebody recently say, they had that moment. And they’re like, I now realize what kind of asshole I was to my team and to the people that I work with. And it’s amazing because I’ve had those sometimes those kind of realizations that I didn’t see in retrospect, looking back, but that a lot of times is based through experience, you can see that not maybe in the moment. So maybe could you share, what are some of the things as a coach that you do with executives and people that you coach?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 22:38

Yeah, I would say one of the tools that I discovered 12,13 years ago, it’s called the leadership circle. And it’s a brilliant tool for unlocking all this. So it’s a 360. And if you can picture a circle with an equator, through the middle of it, the bottom of the circle will show all of the ways that your leadership is being sourced from fear. The top of the circle shows all of the ways that you source your leadership from a desire to make a difference, from a desire to be in service to something that’s bigger than you. So the bottom are all the ways that we learned how to stay safe as a kid.

And these ways are ways that we see everything as a problem and try and make sure that the problem gets solved, versus looking at what do we want to create is what we’re asking at the top. And so leaders that I give this to it’s a 360. So they’re asking 15 to 20 people in their organization to answer these questions that will then show them how others are experiencing them compared to how they experienced themselves. And so the first step to unlocking these more reactive patterns that keep ourselves, our own gifts locked up, keep our organizations locked up, is to begin becoming aware of them. So if for instance, you’re shown that your biggest reactive tendency is to want to control everything, it’s called autocratic. So you take the steering wheel no matter what.

And that is keeping your team, your organization from really developing their capacity to deliver and you’re keeping everything in a small little box. So what I first do with somebody doing this is I send them out to do some discovery work and to just begin writing down all the instances when they have found that they are grabbing the steering wheel. And nine times out of 10 they’ll say, oh my god, I knew I do it, did it some, I’m doing it all the bloody time. Like five times in one meeting, I’m taking the steering wheel. And what I asked them to do is write down, what was the story in your head when you took the reins? What were you telling yourself about the situation?

Why I need to take charge the other person or people? What are you telling yourself about you? And as they begin, I’m taking the curtains away, the blinders and really paying attention to how they’re processing their experience. That begins to, it’s almost like the reactive is a mechanism that stored back in their primitive brain, their lizard brain. And the way it keeps taking charge is that it hasn’t come into consciousness, the drivers haven’t. So as you begin tracking, what am I telling myself when I’m taking charge, about all those things, the people, situation? You begin seeing patterns and then like Sam, you go.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:34

Well, it’s almost like, I think the way that I describe it, and it’s either an operating system. So that reactive is one type of operating system and then when you move to creative, it’s a separate operating systems. And within that operating system, you have a lens that you’re looking through. So as soon as you, and I tell people, it’s not necessarily an upgrade, it’s a different operating system. And you’re looking through different lens through and everything looks different. Once you start looking to that from reactive in a creative way, right?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 27:09

Yes, yes, that’s beautifully said. And I would also say, it’s like moving from Dos to Windows. Dos isn’t bad. It’s just not as sophisticated. It’s doesn’t have the capacity that Windows does.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:29

So maybe to expand this and some of the readers are familiar with this concept. It’s based on cognitive development, right? So even creative is not necessarily that integral, which is the operating system after this one, or the after the creative one. And a lot of people believe that in order to operate in today’s environment and complex environment, we really need to upgrade to that integral view, a more holistic view. What are your thoughts on that? Most people are operating from creative and reactive operating like 80 or so generally speaking over the years people have. What are your thoughts in a sense of how do we progress? Because you can’t also skip, you can’t just upgrade. How do we work with leaders that are maybe more reactive, that want to cling to that and maybe coming back to that experience? Is it maybe just helping them be self-more awareness and creating more and more awareness around what they’re doing?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 28:34

That’s a huge piece of it. And they have to be ready. If you’re not ready, you’re not going to notice it. But I have to tell you that. Most of the time, when I’m working with pretty reactive people, they’re in pain, they’re stressed, they don’t want to be holding their whole life that tightly but they are. So, self-awareness is a key through all of it through the reactive and the creative to begin opening up your capacity. There’s a theory by a guy named Michael Washburn called the identity project. And he describes this movement that we have into identity and then as the identity begins dissolving.

And if you picture a bell-shaped curve when we’re born, what he says is at the bottom, the foundation of our whole life wherever we are is what he calls the ground of being, now that may sound woo woo, you can but, it is a when a baby is born for instance, they don’t know when a hands hanging down. They don’t know that’s a me. That’s just one more curiosity. Oh, that’s something floating in the air. They feel and experience and interconnectedness with everything, that’s the ground of being this interconnected, like the ecosystem.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:08

Is that what Robert Keegan and others have called the shift from subject to object? And what I mean by that, you start looking at your, I’ve experienced in a way, where it’s tied to the identity, but you start looking at yourself from other perspectives, and you’re almost looking at yourself and trying to observe what am I doing here? And that’s really about awareness. I think if you can see how am I coming across to others? What am I seeing that they’re not seeing? Or what they’re seeing that I’m not seeing? Is that what we’re talking about when it comes to awareness being…?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 30:50

Yes, this mechanism that’s driving the reactive when it comes out and we begin noticing, it begins on blocking, it begins.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:07

I don’t know if you’ve read the Sapiens, from Harare, it’s a really good book about essentially, history of humankind. And for instance, that with my son being born and listening and reading to that, was like that little shift, at least in my perspective, just like, around my identity, because it talks about those beliefs and identity that as humans, what we did in order to survive, and that was really tied to my identity growing up in the Balkans. And then when I realized, I mean, it’s funny as it sounds, but it’s like there’s more to history than last 5000 years ago, or 3000 years ago, right? And there’s just certain things that start clicking in my head where, it’s almost like, that was part of at least my development. And when I started taking things in looking from a more objective perspective, it was an interesting how my identity shifted, or just how I process things, how I see things unnecessarily identity, which it did change. But it’s also interesting and I want to hear your thoughts on this.

And so being part of the Balkans where I’m from, being an Orthodox Christian, now if my friends are, all hardcore, Orthodox Christians, let’s just say, or Serbs, or whatever, and we don’t fight against Muslims, other Christians or Catholics, so now, if I’m saying, I don’t hate Muslims, I see them as even though my father was in three different concentration camps, Muslim concentration camps, he himself said, there are only good and bad people.

But your society still expects you to act in certain ways. So, if we go back to that person that was achiever in a sense, and that ingrained that you don’t have to be number one, his parents or his dad maybe still expects him to be number one, let’s just say. So now you’re dealing with this, now I don’t see things the way that my father does and that sometimes can be conflicting in our heads. So I’m interested to hear your thoughts on that piece where you’ve transcended your old ways of thinking, but you’re still not necessarily, to some extent influenced by those close to you that may not have.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 34:05

Yes, this happens a lot in marriage. One partner has some big [inaudible 34:15] and changes, and the other is still living in the old container. And how do you manage that? That is, again, there’s no rules, it’s a journey of discovery. It is sometimes by living in a bigger way, just your presence can invite other people to step beyond the line of a circle. But nothing is going to convince somebody to cross that line until they’re ready, until they’ve had the aha, until they had this mechanism, begin becoming more clear, as you said, what has seemed like who I am to be like, oh, this is a story about who I am. Like in the story with the desert, the kids had the whole desert. And we have this whole desert of who we are to express but we live in a small slice of it. So I don’t know if I’ve answered your question.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:24

I’m curious. This is more of like as I said, a discussion that doesn’t has some structure to it, but doesn’t. But I’m curious because, a lot of times, I’m asking myself these questions. And I love to hear other people’s thoughts on it, because I don’t have the answers. And it’s good to hear other people’s perspectives. How do we lead effectively in today’s environment? How besides self-awareness, what are some of the practice even, a lot of times, and I still struggle with this, but meditation is one of the good practices to be self, to kind of with all the craziness around ourselves, but how do we leave or as leaders, how can we lead more effectively?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 36:19

Yeah, I think when you say meditation, slowing down, and taking pauses is essential now. Just going for the sake of going is again, being run by a part of your identity that told you if you stop something horrible is going to happen. And for all of those questions that keep us at an edge, that keeps us living out of old stories. Is that really true? Is a great question. Is that really true that something horrible is going to happen if you just stop for a minute? If your organization is on a trajectory and you can tell, we need to stop here, we need to pause, we need to reassess. So pausing is critical right now, making room for other perspectives is critical right now.

So if we just go, shuum, we tend to go with just our perspective, so we’re missing all the perspectives. And we know in complexity, the more perspectives we bring in, I know like in scrums and things, you’ve got to have a lot of perspectives coming into what’s the best solution, you can’t just, okay, I know what we’re doing, let’s gear up and go. So this pause, this making room, this space, also, if we’re spinning in our heads in stories, if we’re just oh my god, going from one thing to another to another, we fail to notice what’s actually here that could be informing our next step? So slowing down, making room, listening, looking.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:19

You think like, COVID, I agree, and I can relate to this story too, because I feel lately, or at least over the last year or so, I’ve done the same thing, it’s like, I got to do this, I got to do that. And I’ve been like, and it’s funny though, because coming from a different country and having something especially my parents and not having anything, so we’ve gone from having to not having so, we’ve gone through that, so I know how it is. I tell people, it’s not that bad, especially United States, not to have anything, there’s so many opportunities even back home, but this fear of, oh, what happens if I don’t have enough work? What happens? So I overcompensate by overworking.

And then I’m like okay, at what point do I slow down and enjoy life, right? And for instance, now, I’m going to back home for two months, and I’m trying to slow down and exactly like you’re saying, take that breeder. And almost, I should be doing that more frequently, and basing it out. But I can relate to that. I think to some extent, it’s that identity, but it’s also maybe a little bit of fear to or what’s going to happen if I don’t make enough where I can pay the bills and things like that, but deep down I know, as humans, we figure things out. What’s the worst thing that can happen, right? And it’s interesting that you say that because I can really relate to that too.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 40:03

So you’ve got this frontal lobes that are saying, what’s the worst that can happen? But you’ve got this old mechanism that’s wired for safety saying, I can’t Oh my gosh, that’s wired to look for threat, threat, threat. Where’s the treat right? So this telling this, we’ve got this, we’re fine. If you don’t notice that your fear is getting quieter, then that might not be the mechanism that’s going to help. And right now we’re all being faced with our fears.

The world has put a lot of pretty dangerous situations in our face. So how do we walk in this? And I would say, so there is self-awareness, giving ourselves pause. But also for those of us who are very self-sufficient recognizing that we can’t go alone anymore, that we’ve got to be all in this together. So collaboration is important. The old paradigm of even things like IP, all the things that might be limiting to I own it, it’s mine. That’s not going to work anymore.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:39

But that’s going to be tough, because what you’re saying is that letting go of ego.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 41:45

It’s going to be. It’s asking a lot of all of us. Yes. And the part that have been the warriors protecting that line in the sand? Yeah, that line is everywhere.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:02

You’ve run a retreat, I think a couple of times a year and what is it called again?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 42:09

It’s called Return to Wholeness.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:11

Return to wholeness, and I was seriously considering it. And I think that’s maybe how I found out or got introduced to some of your work. What does that mean to return to wholeness in the context of what we’ve been talking about?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 42:29

I was beginning to tell you about Washburn, so I’ll return to that. We entered life not knowing there was a me that started and ended here. We experienced this interconnectedness of everything. But as we entered the identity, we went into a sense of separation. And so that’s the moving into the reactive, where we’re always looking around for how can I stay safe? How can I stay loved? How can I stay belonging, connected? Oh, if I do this, something bad going to happen.

That’s the reactive that begins developing as teenagers, we watch them, oh, my gosh, my hair is the part wrong side that sort of, and then we move into what the leadership circle calls the creative, which is the full flowering of the identity, which is, I can do this, I can help make this happen. And we work with others. But there’s still a lot of I and me. We’re very clear on our gifts, and we use them well.

So if you picture the creative at the top of the bell-shaped curve, when we begin relaxing our grip on the identity, when we begin letting all of these stories of who I thought I needed to be, we hold them lightly. And we open more to being an instrument for some purpose that’s bigger than us. How can I be in service? It’s not about me anymore, it’s about this larger thing. That is the return to that’s the beginning the dissolving of this. I’m only this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:21

And that’s almost like letting the returning to wholeness is letting go of that ego because probably as a kid, or as a newborn, you don’t have much of an ego. It starts like you said, growing probably. So as you become more interesting. I haven’t thought about it from that perspective, but that makes a lot of sense. And I think another thing that maybe we haven’t talked about which is that, reactive side is still within us. So as you go to wholeness like you said, they’ll have that, it’s just that or perhaps the current needs require us to operate or to upgrade, or whatever you want to call it. But that reactive, we still can pull on it right? When we need to. So I think a lot of people misunderstand that, but that goes away, doesn’t really go away, Is there, right?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 45:22

And we’d like it to go away. Yeah. The reactive is when fears in the driver’s seat. And the more conscious we get, we can go ah, you know what? Right now fear is in the driver’s seat. But my team needs me to operate from a different place. But I’m self-aware enough that I know, this fear is running in me. So I asked, what is the purpose that I can best serve in this next meeting with my team? What do they need? What does the organization need? And we begin asking purposeful questions that place this young one in the child seat in the backseat, put them in the seat belt, and we take over driving the car, they may still be screaming. No, but we’re driving.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:13

That’s really another thing that I’ve been thinking about is we becoming like, COVID has forced this even more to work across countries and cultural lines. So if you think of somebody working with somebody, let’s just say right now in Afghanistan, where there’s a lot of fear, right? So from their perspective, it’s different from somebody maybe in the Western world, they’re going to be thinking about something else. So as a leader, trying to empathize and trying to at least acknowledge that somebody else may have not, may not be at the same, what is it called? Like a hierarchy of needs or because in a sense, I’m trying to satisfy my basic safety needs, where you’ve already got that met, and you’re thinking about, so is it also about awareness when it comes to leadership in organizations being aware of that cultural context, right?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 47:12

The cultural context? Yes. And if you think about Afghanistan, trauma, is we’ve got a whole country in trauma right now. Wherever, whether they’re holding the guns, or whether the guns are being held on them, the whole country…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:30

I’m just using that as an example. There are so many other places. I mean, I tell people even going back to the Balkans, it’s same thing, people have gone through wars and they have certain beliefs. There’s even a cultural stuff where this is you’re supposed to be told what the elder tells you or do what the elder tells you. So it’s just, as we continue to collaborate and work across the globe, I think one of the key things will leaders will be to understand a little bit more than empathize with the people that are not part of their culture.

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 48:05

Absolutely. Yes, some cultures are much more cerebral, much more just here. And other cultures are more this, like when we’re coaching a lot of Asian cultures, there is very much a complying part of how they grow up. That can have more of a reactive piece to it, but it can also have in its full blossoming in the creative, it can be a looking out for all my team and being respectful of elders and those who have more, but not saying, not holding back when something needs to be said. So there’s a, yeah, respecting getting to know. And again, that’s where Curiosity with these times and our work. It’s a real key curiosity. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:11

So maybe as we’re finishing here, what is something that you would like us to leave the audience with? What is maybe a message or something to think about when it comes to leadership, when it comes to wholeness and being a better leader?

Speaker: Peggy McAllister 49:29

Yeah, two things that I would ask you all to just be thinking about, and the first would have to do with the circle in the desert. What is the circle that is still keeping you more contained than you need to? That it’s still keeping you operating from some level of fear and shield versus a more natural flowing of your gifts out into the world?

And two, as you let yourself, you might even as you’re walking one day, imagine there’s a line in the sand in front of you. What is keeping you from crossing that line and what is inviting you to step over? What would call you to enter the larger desert? What is a purpose that inspires you right now in this day and time? Because purpose will pull you further and further into your wholeness. It’s fear and safety that keeps us acting in these labels, roles, containers that are too small for what the world needs right now.

Crom Burgos

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:45

So let’s start with who is Crom Burgos or Cromwell Burgos?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 00:53

Yeah, it depends on who you ask that. So I am very curious, I love to experiment and at the same time, I love doing, so it’s a good combination, but it would actually overwhelm me sometimes. So, you test something like a process, and then whatever it is, and then you start improving, you start creating mistakes and failures, and you start over again, and I think that’s just my life story. From a graduate, as an engineer, did really get the hang of it. Civil engineering in like, this is not for me. And so when the construction management, started as a project engineer , every time I learned something like that, you start thinking systems and expanding. And then next thing I know, I’m in pre-construction, and then now I’m in manufacturing, at the same time construction. So I think if you look back, it’s sometimes you’re lucky and then you see the relationships between what you do. So I think if I have to describe myself, I’m a doer and very curious.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:24

So then continuously inspecting, and adapting, it looks like.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 02:29

Right, it’s a game that never ends. So you start, just like our conversation about “hey the video”, and there’s one person that is like, “oh, dislike”. That really is like I want to understand, what is that we can improve based on that simple dislike”?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:54

And just to maybe add some context to the listeners, we’re talking about Crom did maybe a year ago, or a couple years ago, I did a talk for one of the communities that I support, on agility in construction. And we’re talking about how people are watching, there’s a lot of views, and webinars or whatever you want to call it, and there’s one dislike, or one person that doesn’t like what we are talking about, you know, it’d be nice to know what that is? Can there be agility in construction? Maybe we can start with that. Maybe give us some background on how is agility and lean and some of these agile approaches adopted in construction. You work for one of the biggest construction companies in California. And you’ve been applying this stuff for years, so how do you apply, or in what ways do you apply these methods, as well as the cultural mindset side in construction?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 04:07

Right, the movement started way back. My time, I was probably still in school, late 90s, mid 90s. And it really started based on the Toyota Production System. So I think Berkeley was involved and now there’s lean construction Institute, right? So I’m trying to give you a little background. Now, it started to really take traction, when I say now, like after COVID, before COVID, a year like 2018-2019, it really started to just in that it exploded, because it works. So is there room for agility in construction? So agility is a mindset; and it’s almost like you need, if Lean is the umbrella, and agility is in that umbrella, that is something that I think you have to take that medicine and know that construction, its nature is not agile, meaning we’re bound by code. We have a lot of constraints in, especially when you’re building, once you’re building, you start putting things together, you start losing agility. So now you’re thinking of where is agility? Agility is now in the front end, right? How can you have agility during design? So that as you’re managing your budget, you’re managing schedule, you can switch and make sound decisions. And in trying to focus on planning, replanning, looking at what is the right design as you’re designing?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:13

So it is about learning, right? The whole idea of prototyping and validating things early on, is to learn, right?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 06:23

That is correct. Yeah. And then so it’s funny, you mentioned that because one of the things that we do in design, we actually prototype; there’s two ways to prototype, you either prototype physical rooms, right, or any, what we call markups, or you can prototype before you draw as a piece of paper, you use as prototype. So if you’re familiar with A3 thinking, I always look at A3 thinking as a prototype. So you get everybody together, cross functional team, hey, here’s a problem to solve. Right? How do we distribute air, right, across the building, and then you work with the people that are involved in disciplines; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, your architect, everybody as a cross functional team, you use A3s as a mock up before you draw. The problem is we draw right away. And so what is it we are drawing? You draw the rooms, you draw like you’re making decisions that are still uninformed, right, it’s based on your experience, rather than open it up, and then do prototypes. So either you prototype using A3s, or if you really want to prototype the rooms and how it feels you can use Styrofoam, right. So one project that I was part with, it was in Canada, we work with the Ministry of Health, and the nurses have the doctors actually build the rooms using Styrofoam. And there’s carpenter helping them with how to make the Styrofoam stand, and all that. But they push in real beds. And I remember one point where the initial design was about an 800 or 900 square feet operating room, and once they put that in, they put the walls in, the doctor actually said ‘this is a little too big”. So they start pulling the walls in. I think it ended up to be 600. But that right there, it goes back to agility, right? Involve the customer. So when you’re making a decision involve the customer. And it got to a point where there were five families and patients, patient families actually invited to get in the room, the patient room, and it’s all Styrofoam. And then hey, here’s the window, here’s where you sleep when you’re with your kid, right, nurses looking at outlets with light because there’s an argument between old outlets need to be right-hand, like the orientation of the room. And so they have to test it. So I guess, prototype first before drawing, rather than draw and then prototype.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:30

How do you introduce Lean and Agile concepts to teams and organizations? In construction, in context of construction?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 09:39

Good question. So really, if you’re passionate about it, if there’s no program, right in your company, start with yourself, start where you can influence right. So it’s always about starting where you are. So if you’re a project engineer, start where you are as a project engineer, and who you can influence. It may be your trade partners, it may be your superintendent. And then if you’re a project executive, start where you’re at. Now, what that means is now the responsibility is on you. So the current company I’m working with, we’re a manufacturer at the same time in construction, and our president would always tell me, “Crom, you’re introducing something that is new to some people, it is your burden, that wis what he tells me, it is your burden to actually explain it better, and then give examples, right”. So the point is, if you want to try it, if you’re curious, that’s good, but it is really your burden. So don’t make it too big, make it just for the people around. I’ll tell you a story here, so I started this company two years ago, and you’re always looking for an opportunity, right? And so okay, you start with yourself, you’re new, you’re new to the company, so they have different experiences than you, they see things differently, mindset’s different, so you’re always looking for opportunity. And it’s always about, again, if there’s a problem. So a problem is a very good time to start lean and agility because it’s very, I am going to use the word easy, right, because all you need to do is expose the problem. And before COVID, we use post it notes, so when would you talk to somebody and they start saying, “hey, this and that”, you start writing it down, you just throw it on the wall, right. And now, the person is not looking at the poster. And then suddenly, they start drawing , I think my point is, the next thing is, expose the problem or expose the work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:19

And one of the ways to do that is through visualizing work, then you have something that you know, people can focus on.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 12:27

That is where I’m going, right? So you expose the work. And what does that mean? Then you start thinking about works, and you start thinking about who’s responsible for it, then suddenly you’re, I know your audience are very advanced, so suddenly, you’re using a Kanban system. And then from there, you can see the relationship and then the amazing part is when it clicks, right? When you start with, “hey, who’s going on vacation?” Because now you’re starting to manage your capacity. And people don’t notice, is that write it on the poster, vacation, put it on the day or days. And then suddenly, people say, “hey, there’s no capacity there”. Right? Because if a person is a swim lane, and the days are capacity, you just block out your capacity. And then people started to, and I always see this, how can I help you? Once that starts like “how can I help you?” because you’re on vacation, then suddenly the team dynamics is starting to slide.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:33

And that is self-management, self-organization seems like a naturally emerges because nobody’s going to tell us we were figuring this out by ourselves.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 13:43

Yeah, because you can see it, you can see the work. Right. So yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:50

You talked about, last time we spoke, you talked about three C’s; clarification, correction, confusion, and trying to eliminate. Could you elaborate on those, if you remember?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 14:01

So, in Lean, even in Agile, we start to talk about quality. And in quality, you’re not talking about levels of quality, I’m talking about quality in terms of defective work, and rework, right? So in, I think the context was don’t accept defect, or don’t accept defective work. So let’s say you’re estimating or you’re designing, or you’re working in the line, right? You’re always waiting for somebody to give you something. And if that work, and we call it percent, complete and accurate, so if that work is 90% complete, then if I accept it, then I have to finish the work. So now, it’s either it’s confusion, you need to clarify, and also the other thing to clarify, correct, or being confused, right? That’s my determination that waste has been created, if those three things will happen, right? If somebody is confused with the work you’re giving them, somebody has to make the correction, somebody has to make a clarification, you’re creating waste. And so now you’re working on that, don’t pass rework, don’t pass defect. So don’t accept defect, don’t create defect, and then don’t pass defect. I think that’s the, if you see those three C’s happening, that means rework, defect, waste has been created.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:53

And how do you get people to understand that because like that comes, you know, more from lean than anything else that you know, eliminating that unnecessary waste? And one of the challenges is like, how do you get others to understand these things? So in construction, how do you help people understand the need for, you know, if we need to clarify things, if we need to correct things, if there’s confusion, that these are wastes, how do you get these teams and individuals to think about these? So what happens in real life, when people run against these, like, what have you seen? Like, how do people respond to minimizing clarification, correction, and confusion?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 16:39

So it’s every day. So you deal with this every day. In fact, I just deal with this before this meeting, right? Quality of documents. So it’s over communication, and really understanding if you focus on, so these are all tied, right. This is an answer that is a systems. When you ask that question, I start thinking about back to your first question, How do you start to expose the work? And when you expose the work, once you see the work, you now see where people are overburdened. Because all these starts with people being overburdened, and so shortcuts are made. Right? So it’s almost like you have to go to the source of the error, and the source of the error is when people are overburdened, when people are disrespected, right? When you don’t ask like, “are you busy? Like, can you do this? Will you please do this for me?” So, the source of the error if it’s overburdening, you expose the work, you can see that people are overburdened, and you start leveling that work. So meaning, let’s not overproduce, because it’s not needed right now. So where the conversation of defect, it’ll slowly just go away. That is because once you don’t over produce, and then you talk to your customer, hey, and the customer is always defined as in our case, in this conversation, the next step, right. You can have external customer, but in working together as a team, let’s say you have teams of five, and then there’s like 25 teams, you always want to be explicit in asking the customer. And that’s why when you expose the work through, again, Kanban system, then the work is defined to the amount that the customer needs it, naturally eliminates overburden, it eliminates the clarification, it eliminates the confusion, because it’s the conversation rather than the process of the tools. Right. And so, I don’t know if that answered your question, but…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:02

It does, and yeah, it’s brought up another question as far as the customer what you just said, which is that if I understood you correctly, that the customer since you still have in construction, handoffs and those gates like that, your customer is whoever is handling the next phase of the work. Is that correct?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 19:25

That is correct. So whoever is waiting for you, that’s your customer. Yeah, in the chain, right? Well, you have an overall customer, which is let’s say your client, and you have to engage the client, especially when you start getting overburden, you have to show it to the client, like “hey, can you help us here?” Because if you don’t engage your customer, you’re making assumptions and assumptions are, if you’re really good, it’s probably 70/30 or 80/20, right, so you still have that, again, as leaders, if you make two errors out of 10 instruction, and you say, hey 80%, that’s a good batting average, think of the people in your downstream waiting for that instruction, right? That’s why you have to engage your customer, eliminate assumptions, and then again, expose the work and then focus on quality of work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:27

So how would like just to give maybe an example, how would architects and designers when they’re designing, who is their customer and how do they engage with them?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 20:39

So we always look at the architect as the, depending on the phase, as the Pace Setter, right? So the customer, let’s say, are the stakeholders, the client, right? So they have a program, and they talk about the program, and from the program, they create the drawings, the rooms, and all that, and then they need something from, let’s say, as a general contractor, they probably need something from us as far as “hey how is this going to work?”, as far as maintenance, as far as all those things, and then we have our trade partners, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, drywall, all that. So I guess to answer your question is, you have to look at the drawings differently, you have to look at the drawings as products. And then as product, you have to organize around the product as a cross functional team, with a clear owner of the product. And so it depends on the phase of the design. Again, the architect sets the vision for, “hey this is the client’s vision, and this is how we’re going to execute it”. And so you align to that. And so the architect is our lead, we call them lead horse, right, they set the pace, because if they’re slow, we can’t really go as fast. And so you have to do things together in the beginning, all the time. If they want to say something, you have to create it right away, like, I’m give you a specific example, in our case, if they want to see how this looks, you have to bend a rebar right away, that’s how it looks. And they can draw, right. But that is really hard to do in construction, because there’s a lot of, again, there’s a lot of traditional superstitious things that people would do. So that, again, like some people would say, “collaboration, that takes time, that’s a waste”, like, what’s waste in when you go down a path and it’s wrong, and we’re all going to do rework. And so I don’t know if that helps you out with understanding that role of the architect, because there…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:03

It does, I’m just trying to better understand the customer and the handoffs, and how, for instance, you know, in software development, it’s almost like, let’s just say if you are an analyst, your customers would be maybe testers and developers in traditional sense, is that correct?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 23:24

Yeah, very close.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:27

So in a sense, you’re working with them, you’re working on your chunk of work, or the piece of the work and the bigger puzzle, and then you’re collaborating with them and making sure that they’re involved in your process, or at least there’s transparency, and you’re looking and visualizing work across the whole system. So in this instance, you would see developers, you would see testers, and they will be able to look at your work and you guys are discussing and getting each other involved. Even though you’re working in your own silo.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 24:01

And if I may add to that, right, so the other thing as you’re working together, so architects are very creative, right, they just like it’s fun to work with architects. They just have a different way of solving a problem. So once they understand what you’re offering, so meaning you have to really let them understand what your products can do. You have to unlock value, right? So we have a product and this product can do this and that and this is how you work around the product.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:44

Could you maybe give an example even like with you know, you guys have worked with Apple and then you spaceship, your product or was the product like one of the modules or like, could you maybe… [crosstalk 24:56]

Speaker: Crom Burgos 24:56

… floor and the ceiling as one right and then heating is in there. But a really good example is, let’s say you have, we have an exterior product. So an exterior facade product, so we do a complete exterior system. And our guys really spent time in trying to work with the architect from the very beginning, you have to pull it from the very beginning, pre-manufacturing is a strategy from the very beginning, you cannot conceive, once you’re in the middle of design, and you go back, everybody’s going to get frustrated. Once they know how to work around your product, so it’s like a car, right, you have a chassis, and our product has a chassis where you can put anything on top of the chassis, once they understand that, architects are very creative in organizing five different types of, let’s say, five different types of panels and it would look like 30 different types of panels. You know what I’m saying, once they understand the connections, because it’s really just the connections between the product. So I think where I’m going with this is, again, to your point, work with the architect, but give them knowledge and then educate everybody what you’re offering, because sometimes they don’t know what we can do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:27

I think something that you’ve said, and maybe this is to just focus on that too, like focusing on the outcome that the customer wants, even some of your contracts are based on, “hey, what are you trying to do? What problem are you trying to solve? How much money do you have?”, and then you kind of brainstorm and figure out how to achieve that goal or outcome based on what the problem is or what the customer is trying to do. And to me, that was very interesting, because that includes everything that they need. It’s like, we’re going to help you solve your problem within the constraints that you have.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 27:06

Right. So, that’s always very dependent on the culture of the client, right? Because there are clients that would say, “I have 100 million, I’m going to draw this, I’m going to send it out, everybody bids on it is going to come back 80 million”, right? Because you’re capitalizing on mistakes, right? And so if you have 30-40 different trades, and each of the trade, you will send it out to bid eight, nine, whatever, different trades, somehow somewhere, there’s always a low bid. And that total of the low bid like 70-80 million, they will say, I still have 20 million, right? But the problem there is now you’re going to disco, you’re going instead of what we call Value Engineering, it’s now devalued engineering, and you’re spending your money on things that doesn’t add value, because now the project schedule stretch, you’re now paying for escalation, which doesn’t add value, right? Other owners, like I’m going to give an example. I’m going to give a prop here for Sutter Health. So that’s where I learned, I started my Lean journey. So those type of clients would say, “hey, I have a problem and this is the purpose of the project. And based on my benchmarking, I have 100 million dollars for this”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:45

So, how do you set priorities, you have a concept of product ownership in the work that you do, so could you maybe elaborate on the concept of product ownership, product management, and prioritization?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 29:05

Right, so we’re starting to unofficially call our people names. So we started with, especially on this project I’m working with it, we started with, okay, Product Owner scrum master role, right, and then working together. So trying to split the what and the how, because it’s too much to manage. So how does priorities work? Everything is priority, right? So, what you’re doing is really just looking at the order of the priorities. So you’re synchronizing the priorities, and again, we go back to our first conversation, expose the work. So once you expose the work, and that work is always based on a vision, right? So it’s a cascading vision. So let’s say the project has a vision and the vision is to provide, again, back to this project I’m working on, one of the vision is to provide affordable housing, like to solve that problem with student housing. And so from there, you can now see the cascading vision because the architect based on that would have the vision as well, right? So based on that vision, these are the programs that we’re going to target, and then based on that program, these are that design that how we’re going to attack that, right. And so suddenly, you can see the priority, right, and then you synchronize on a weekly basis. And it’s always the rule, right? There’s one person that’s going to set the priority for that certain, what we call product, so we always product guys, we’re trying to stay out of projects, as a company, so we’re looking at a market. And so since we are looking at the market, you’re dealing with products.

So, a bathroom modular part is a product. And so there is a person, a product owner that has the vision, and understands the customer so that somebody is always, remember our first conversation on engage the customer, but that’s not always possible, right? So you get to have somebody, speak for the customer within your group. So that that person becomes what we call the voice of the customer and always reminds everybody, “hey”, you always start with, “Hey, this is the vision for this product, modular parts”. The customer’s here, and this, this, and that. And like, it’s a big thing for us, right now in this modular pod, there’s three bedrooms, and there’s a bathroom and a shower. And when people are working, they’re always going back to when they’re students, and saying, “Oh, that’s not going to work because when I was a student, when I got home, and I just have like, spent all night out with the guys drinking, that drain would get stuck” right. And then we start playing around with the simple things like playing around with the drains like, this cover’s not going to work, because you’re always thinking about the customer and the stakeholders. So, the priority is set by the product owner, and there’s a lot of product owners, and they synchronize. And there’s always like a Chief Product Owner, the person that is part of that vertical, as we call it, because we have to split the work, I wish I can show you pictures, but we split the project into a side, central plant, ground floor, residential, and then upper floor amenities. And each one has a product owner, and all the priorities go to that product owner. So there’s five product owners that are synchronizing based on one Chief Product Owner, right? So it’s the cascading priority.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:20

In also like the whole modular kind of aspect of construction, there’s couple of different aspects of it. One is cost, right, it’s probably a lot more cost effective if you build it somewhere else, and then you deliver the module rather than, so there’s the economic side of that, but it’s also like, you know, in what ways is construction becoming more and more modular? And even with the apples, you know, spaceship building, most of that was modular, right?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 33:55

Right. Yeah, especially that project, and I wasn’t really part of the project, but from in depth sense, right, you cannot build that on site, because you won’t get the, because Apple is very specific to the level of quality and how that’s finished, even the curves, the curvature of the stair is based on the Apple corner of the phone, right? Because that’s not really a radius, right? It’s what they call a VCA, where it’s a moving radius. So you can’t really build that on site. And so, in that part, pre-manufacturing really is superior in that sense, because we can control the tolerances, we can control the finish. Now modularization on the other hand, where you have a platform and then in the platform you put as much as you can as much system as you can, the goal is, again, to eliminate labor on site because it’s safer, right? You have lesser people on site, it’s safer, and it’s a better product. Now, if you look at modularization as a project, cost might not be effective, right? So that’s why you have to look at these kind of things as a market, and then you look at the needs of the market, in our case, student housing, and how we solve that student housing. Because modularization is not always the answer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:40

So context, like if it’s…

Speaker: Crom Burgos 35:43

Yeah, sometimes panelization, sometimes it’s just stick building is the answer. So it really depends on the politics [unclear word 35:54] but as you’re getting better at modularization, you’re going to return that savings, you’re going to get that savings. Again, plan, do study adjust on the product, product becomes lighter, the product becomes, right, you’re looking at why are we still using nail studs framing drywall? That thing has been like, what, 100 years? We’ve been using that for 100 years. Is there another type of wall we can use? It’s lighter.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:22

So it’s almost like continuous improvement side of things, from lean and edge. What are the things I mean, like that people would find interesting, like, what have you in construction, or maybe not just your company, but what’s been adopted in construction industry that really comes from Lean and Agile? Like, could you give some examples maybe?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 36:43

Yeah, so the biggest thing is the limiting work in progress as far as how things get done, right. So that is what we have, again, Berkeley started his whole movement, lean construction Institute, and it’s called the last planner system. So that really started the concept of, “hey, you don’t have to be busy all the time. Limit your work in progress by instituting a pool system”. Right? So you go to a supermarket, people are throwing things in your cart, right? You have to pull it from and then you put it in your cart as you need it. And so that’s, I think that’s a big revolution in the thinking of, “hey, Amazon, I’m going to bring 20 guy, I’m going to go and blow for one week”, and you just ruined it for everybody. Right? Instead of, “hey just bring five guys and do it for four weeks. And then we can all work together in small chunks”. Now that’s the key to agility. Right? Smaller chunks

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:55

Yeah, exactly. What else? What else do you…?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 38:00

That’s one, and then technology starting to get there, but I think the biggest shift in construction is really the focus on the well-being of the people. And I think that’s a bigger shift that lean actually brought, right. So we always say respect for people. And I think that’s the biggest, if you have to really look back at the end here, like if 10 years from now you look back, it’s really focusing on people’s well-being, rather than focusing on tools. Because construction, we love to be busy all the time. You won’t believe it, we just go in there, it’s like we work right away. Like, plan-do, plan-do, plan-do, right? So fires are burning everywhere. It’s like plan-do, but there’s no going back and learning. So people actually drive that learning. So if you start with people, and you start with that concept of “hey, how do we make sure everything’s easy and better?” And easier and better is safer. Right? I think that’s the biggest thing that Lean brought.

And the next thing is, I think process, right? That’s pool system. And then now we’re into creating flow, right? Creating a, instead of a pool planning schedule, or a pool planning strategy, it’s now a flow strategy, right? We’re now talking about leveling work. That’s a big shift the last five years, we’re talking about what is the need, and then dividing your time with the need, and then you create flow, right? So, you create the heartbeat pack. So I think that’s one biggest thing and then, again, technology is there, but as far as lean, I think it’s respect for people is probably what.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:04

Yeah. What about Scrum and Agile? Like, you know, if you kind of look at the roots of lean, and then maybe, you know, you mentioned roles, but is there anything else from Scrum or agile specifically? Some of the stuff that you mentioned, you know,…

Speaker: Crom Burgos 40:20

Right. So if you look at scrums, scrum is, you know, everything goes back to Theodore, right? It’s always like, “Hey, I got this thing. You chase it. And boom, Prius”, right? And so, just like Scrum, In 1986, they found out, okay it’s a different way of working. And so, you develop a system, you give it a name, and with Scrum, here is what you appreciate with Scrum, right? It’s the role definition and there’s a specific theory behind it. Right. So you adapt, you inspect, and then you adaptation, transparency, adaptation, inspection, those three things, right. Which to me, in the beginning, right, so I keep talking about a how do you start, start with yourself, start where you are, expose thinking, but really expose thinking, that’s transparency.

So that’s really it goes back to the scrum guide, right? It’s like, okay, fine. And then check in daily. So this is where the, again, I appreciate agility, agile in the scrum framework, because it really is focused on that daily check in where you know what people are doing and where they’re struggling. And if you really put all that together, right, you’re transparent with the work every day, you’re inspecting, “Hey, are you done? Are you not done? We’re going to help you”, instead of sticking with the plan, in construction, we love to stick with the plan. We love to stick with a plan, like “create the plan, work the plan”. No, plans are good, but the check on the plan every week, every day, and then suddenly, you’re agile. Right? So by doing daily, it’s almost like “hey, what’s the silver bullet of agility?” Like daily check it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:36

Transparency and quick feedback loops, right?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 42:39

It’s just talking every day. So I don’t even have to help you but I think the movement starting to, there are now people consultants, right. And they did try to bring the lessons from software into construction. I think it was in 2014/2015, I got it. So as you’re doing Lean, you just naturally get into Scrum, right. And the first thing I remember I did was just for myself to be doing them. And then the only reason I did that was to just show everybody what I’m working on so they don’t overburden me, but that was very selfish. And so if they say, “Hey, I did this, with the boards, like where do you want me to put it?”. That is very selfish. And then it became a suddenly turns into more understanding. And then again, you go back as okay. Oh, lean at the beginning, you say, “Oh, that’s all lean, agility”. But you can’t really make that quick conclusion, right? Because agility is really focused on the mindset and the change, right? How you do that, which is if you really dig down to lean, yes, the Yoda is that way. Right

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:03

It talks about, I mean to Yoda, yeah, I think, but the way the lean was kind of introduced in the West, kind of forgot about the mindset and culture and there was more of the. In what ways do you think, I mean, like as we kind of close, or close up here, what are some of the things that you see, in what ways will construction industry apply more and more of these Lean and Agile approaches? Like how do you think like COVID has maybe pushed construction industry to change the old ways of working because there’s definitely need to innovate, there’s definitely need to inspect and adapt, what do you think we’re going to see in construction In the next maybe 5-10 years, that will be different than what we are used to?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 45:00

There is now a lot of talk about industry 4.0. And industry 4.0. is about automation. But then with COVID hit, it accelerated a lot of things. Because now you’re forced to use drones to look at your job site, right, and then you start appreciating it. I never believed in working from home before, when COVID hit, I spent a year, almost a year and a half working from home. The problem is you end up working more than because everybody has to schedule a meeting with you. So a five minute conversation is always a 30 minute block in your calendar. And you end up talking about golf. Right? In the first five minutes or so. It’s, there’s a plus and minus, but it did accelerate. So it accelerated the need to be transparent. It accelerated the need, because the collaboration, we always think of collaboration, there is always value in in-person and we’re starting to learn that, hey, you can pick and choose right? There are times when you are together, there are times when it’s a Teams or Zoom call, but it did accelerate in that sense, because you’re forced to do it. So the companies that were already transparent, so we started doing that and we’re just lucky and we expose a lot of work, we have Teams exposing work. When COVID hit, it took us a day to just adjust, like what we did, we went to the office, take all the pictures, go back home, and then distribute the pictures, plan based on the pictures, and then started talking about how can we transfer it. So it’s very organic transition from paper to electronic. So I think that’s what COVID brought is that. But then now the question is the learning, right? Because the coaching and interaction and because we learn better if it’s real time. So yeah, so I don’t have not answered your question. But it did accelerate, because it’s a disrupter. There’s always that one disrupter. And it was, the disruption is you can keep producing work without going to where the work is.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:39

Which is, especially in construction, it’s an interesting concept. Because when you think about construction, you always think about people being on site, from everybody. And…

Speaker: Crom Burgos 47:52

And that’s where productizing makes sense when you start pre-manufacturing. Because you can control your manufacturing, right, there’s always a person for us during COVID. Because now we have to ask for exemption for essential work. And so, we assign people to clean areas all the time, right, during, so what I’m saying is, it’s easier to control your manufacturing, because you can always control the environment. And then so you take as much as, there are jobs that we take probably 70,000, Mondays, right? For one job, imagine that. Right. So that’s a safer job site. That is a job site that you can do social distancing. The funny part is I’m talking to one of the hospital clients, and one of the directors actually say, “wow, COVID actually, some of our work was faster, because we’re not putting trades on top of each other”. Because of social distancing, they’re forced to like, “hey, work in that room, and then jump to that room”. And the flow is like, amazing. Isn’t that mazing that COVID made that happen?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:09

It is. I mean, it is definitely interesting. And you know, just being a little bit more in tuned into what’s going on in construction and how the construction industry is applying some of this stuff is really interesting, especially when I saw like some of the big names in Agile community are working with construction companies. There you see that there is some serious interest. But one of the things that I think you call it, you know, essentially thing that’s killing in the construction industry is that inspection at the end. And it’s like that definition of done and if we could get those permits and if we could, you know actually find a way to get stuff done, done, right, rather than waiting for that last thing to be inspected, so what do you think, you know, when it comes to public policy and some like inspection, like, you know, getting permits, do you think that requires change in policies and laws? As far as, you know, maybe giving you even more agility in construction of when can you call something done? And like, if you’ve finished that dorm for students, like, you can’t finish just first floor and then whatever, and then move people in, you have to get that permit, right, so do you think there are going to be changes? And is it really, you know, that last inspection that’s killing agility and lean in construction?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 50:44

So, you always have to go back, right? It’s your burden, right? Let’s say inspections are there for a reason, it’s always about life safety. And so the inspectors are doing their job, right. But they’re, I think what needs to change is the number of inspections. So there has to be clients or third party needs to be willing to have continuous inspections, rather than one big batch at the end. So it’s still on us, as general contractors to find a process that they can get involved so that we can just, I’m going to borrow the concept in manufacturing what we have, right, so in manufacturing, we have a code required third party inspections. And we also have our own quality inspections. And you have to build that inspection within that step. So meaning, even if there’s just one inspection, but you don’t accept defect, you don’t create defect, and you don’t pass a defect, you’re always going to pass inspections. Right? Now, that leads to the question of okay, you have to understand what the inspector is looking for. So I would change that first, I would say, “Hey, mister inspector, show us everything you’re looking for”. If we can change that, right, if the inspectors have a list, because if you’re an inspector, and I’m an inspector, we have two different interpretation of something.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:30

So it’s almost like coming up with definition of done or some type of acceptance criteria, like what does it mean for this to be done, including inspection, to pass the inspection?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 52:43

Inspectors are your customer, right? Inspectors are your customers. So again, the burden is on us, involve the customer, involve the inspector, what are you looking for? Educate the people doing the work, meaning now we’re going into a different, it’s no longer QA, QC. It’s now, everybody is responsible for quality. And so with that in mind, you’re no longer “do it right the first time”, right? Because that is blaming somebody like, “Hey, do it right the first time”. It’s now right the first time, right? So your everything is right the first time. There’s a difference there, right. So this focus on quality will just lead to that, passing the inspection. Now, the thing about agility that we it’s hard to do in construction is getting occupancy. Because now you don’t really occupy your building until it’s done, and you can even bring in your furniture, right? There’s a certain approval before you bring in your furniture. And so you’re first, second, third floor, if you have 10 floors of building, sitting there just waiting. But you can now, there’s a workaround, right. You can do paint and improvement, meaning build your shell, do tenant improvement and then release a floor in time. So maybe that’s a strategy, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:26

Yeah. And just thinking in those ways in pushing some of the policies and the ways they’ve been designed for previous context or what worked in the past or what needed to be done given would be interesting.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 54:40

That is always like, it’s always life safety. So in California, there’s earthquake, and then when there’s earthquake, it usually cause fire. So now your fire marshal and your IORs that’s a burden, right? If somebody dies because they didn’t do their work, then it’s. So if you understand that, then then you don’t shortcut your work. I guess, again, know what the inspector wants, and then definition of Done inspection is part of definition of Done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:20

Great. So maybe as a last thing, what would you like to leave us with the, you know, both for the people from the construction industry that are listening to this, but also from other industries, including software development that are listening? What message do you want to maybe share with them when it comes to agility?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 55:43

So, your background, agile to agility? That is really the point. So the point is not the process, the document, I’m saying like the point is agility. The point is adaptation. The point is, find a way so that your teams are comfortable to change up. And when your teams learn to plan, replan every week, then you start accelerating to produce work, right, to produce product, and it always goes back to our first conversation. How do people change and adapt and replan and plan? Always expose the work, right, always be transparent. And that transparency is like dancing. If you put your steps in the floor, and you number it, and you just follow it, right, 123 all the way to 30. And then somebody is calling “hey it’s 5678” and then you just jump 5678, right, because it’s transparent, you can see it. So I guess transparency is probably key to agility, other than inspection and adaptation but, make work visible, and then can people can self-manage, people can now adjust

Geoff Watts

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:51

Let’s start with who is Geoff Watts.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 00:59

You want me to introduce myself? I hate that kind of thing. That’s fine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:03

Do it in your own way. You don’t have to…

Speaker: Geoff Watts 01:07

Yeah, I mean, most people know me for my books, I suppose. I’ve written a few on agile and coaching, and a joke book. But most of my time I spend coaching, usually people one to one, sometimes teams, whether they be agile teams or leadership teams. And in the past, I’ve done some training and things. But largely I’m a coach. I was a coach before I was a scrum master. And so those two worlds of professional coaching and agile have been my professional life for the last 20 years. I often describe it as a bit of a Venn diagram with my agile world is one circle and my professional coaching world is another and then there’s this nice little sweet spot where they overlap and you can bring some of the professional coaching practices and disciplines into the Agile world.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:06

How did you get into the Agile space?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 02:10

Largely through being rebellious, I suppose. But I mean, some people view it as rebellious, I viewed it as practical. I mean, but I do admit that I have a rebellious side. I like alternative, I like change. But I was a project manager at a telecoms company. And it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me that we would run our projects kind of knowing that they were doomed to fail. And I just thought there was a better way of doing things. And so instead of following the waterfall approach that I was trained in, I decided to speak to my developers, so I speak to my customers and actually thought, actually, you know what, they probably need to speak to each other without me being in the middle. And yeah, it started there and then it was just a case of right place at the right time or wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it. We got a new CIO who came in from the States, who done some agile stuff at a company over there and said, you know, if this company is going to survive, it needs to change. And I was probably one of the only people in the company and in many ways the country who had done anything, so he sort of picked me out. Jeff, you need to go and start coaching all these teams to do something like what you’ve been doing there. That’s it, the rest is history.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:45

That is great. Over the years, you’ve collaborated with a lot of people, including Mike Cohn, in your recent, though maybe not recent, you’ve been collaborating with the probably Dave Snowden and Andrea Tomassini for some time but you guys developed a framework called organic agility framework. Could you maybe talk about that? Because I’m completely new to it, I’ve done a little bit of my kind of looking around, but it seems very interesting. Maybe could you talk about what it is and then we can dive a little bit deeper into it?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 04:20

Sure. But again, I suppose that came from a little bit of combination of frustration, and just sort of trusting our instincts if you like. So as agile coaches, Andrea and I, we never got involved in any of the scaling frameworks. And we never really asked ourselves why until we sort of sat down and had a talk about it and said well, they just feel contradictory. And the best way that we could describe it was they feel like they’re trying to do agile in a waterfall way and it didn’t seem to sit well with us. So we said, well, when we’re speaking to leaders of organizations who were saying, well, we can get agile working at a team level, but we can’t get it working at the organizational level, and we want to, and you’re saying that these frameworks don’t work, but you’re not giving us anything instead, so what are our answers? Yeah, sort of ad hoc could we formalize the middle bit? Andrea was already doing quite a bit of work with Dave Snowden anyway, on the sense to make a framework and the Kanban framework. And so could we actually give these leaders a way of actually visualizing what their current culture is, and see, based on the changes that they make to their leadership style, the decision making process, their structures, the way they the resource their teams, whatever changes they make, can they see real time changes to that culture and the results and then make decisions based on the changes that they’re seeing? So an iterative incremental, inspect and adapt approach to cultural change within their organization. And so that’s what we put a lot of time into doing is to creating that visualization because visualization is powerful and transparency is the bedrock of inspection and empiricism. So we managed to do that. And we detached ourselves from the idea of actually you need to become an agile organization. That was the first thing we did. Which is why, when you see organic agility, it’s written with a small “a”, that’s quite deliberate. Because actually, we say to leaders, you may not want to be an agile organization, that might not be right for you. Just because we have experienced as agile coaches doesn’t mean we’re here to tell you to become agile. We want you to make decisions based on your understanding of what’s right for you in your context, and enable your people within your organization to make those decisions consistently, even though they’re facing different circumstances to other people and other teams in your organization. So you may well have, and it may well be right for you, as a company to have different pockets of agility and waterfall and different levels of agility and different types of agility because this organization is big and it has different challenges. So that’s kind of where that came from.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:34

So it’s all about contextualizing things, you know, we’ve been living in a world where it’s all like, you know, one size fits all, do this, do that recipe type of stuff. And what you’re saying and what resonated with you guys is that context is king and not everything needs to be the big a or even little a. Like you know, within my podcast called agile agility and has several meanings. And there was a reason why that, you know, agilities, lower a. But it is about agility and like you said, it’s different levels. Not everything necessarily needs to be, you know, I’m assuming talking to Dave and talking to Andrea, and probably from your understanding, it’s about understanding the complexity, right and contextualizing things to that.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 08:25

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, all of these organizations that we work with, they’re genuinely facing, I mean, the facing a number of different challenges. But one of the big tensions that they’re facing is that they know on the one hand, they need to increase autonomy, because to be responsive, people on the ground need to be able to make decisions rather than have them escalated up. But equally, if you enable autonomy for everyone, then there’s a good chance that you get chaos because everyone’s going to do things differently. So it’s about trying to get that balance of autonomy and standardization if you like. So this element of coherence across the organization so that you can have organizational resilience. So that’s where the organic comes from, its organizational resilience by growing autonomy and an interdependent culture. And it’s, you know, it’s not something we’ve got a massive marketing machine behind, it’s not something we’re hoping is going to take over the world, but it’s something that helps us just, you know, formalize something that we’re talking about to organisations, rather than just trust us, we’ll help you work something out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:32

Well, it’s interesting because like there’s a certain pattern that I’ve noticed within some of these interviews are people that I, you know, including Dave, which is that we’re moving away from these prescriptive frameworks. And it comes down to you know, when I was looking at organic agility, and again, organic stands for organizational resilience by growing autonomy and nurturing and the independent culture, I highlighted organizational resilience, autonomy and culture in that sense. And really agility is about that organizational resilience. And that’s a spectrum depends how on the content how resilient organization needs to be. Autonomy you just touched upon, but maybe you could we focus a little bit on the cultural side, like how do you define culture and how do you influence and change culture?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 10:37

So culture is one of those things that’s been notoriously difficult to define for lots of people for a long period of time. I typically view it and this is a lot, you can imagine a lot of conversations that we had between myself, Andrea and David were around what is culture. And what we typically gravitated towards was it’s the stories that people tell about how things get done. So one of the first things we’ll do when speaking to a team, a leadership team or anyone within the organization is, tell me a story of when something worked really well here, tell me a story of when something doesn’t work well. And tell me a story that’s pretty typical of your work, your organization. Now when I used to work at this telecoms company, it was pretty easy to tell, just by overhearing a conversation in a bar, who else worked for that company because of the stories that they told. And we were said to have, the phrase that I heard back then was we have a very thick culture. Now unfortunately the English language has many different definitions of the word thick and unfortunately, one of them means to be unintelligent, but that wasn’t the intention of that definition, it was generally saying you can tell somebody from this organization pretty quickly. Yeah. And so what we’re trying to do and your second question was, how do you go about changing it, is about creating the opportunity for us to write different stories. And if you think about culture outside of the organization, it’s again stories that we tell about our culture, stories that get handed down from one generation to another. When we meet another organization, we tell stories that tell tell them about us. And so we built the organic framework around the ability to tell stories, to cluster stories and to be able to create opportunities to write new ones.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:39

And like, when you said that, something that, I don’t know how much you’re familiar with it, but from a, you know, in relation to the stories, it’s relevant to our values and beliefs. You know, the stories that we tell ourselves and the reality that we, you know, perceive or make in our heads. So really, when you said that, what resonated with me is it’s really about changing our collective values and beliefs as a company and we do that through stories perhaps, is that what you’re alluding to?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 13:12

Yeah, so when we talk about organic agility to people, to leaders, and teams, we reference the pyramid of results and basically, that’s saying, at the top of the pyramid, the first thing that you see is results. Okay, they’re visible, something’s happened. These could be financial results or they could be the result of the consequences of a decision. And results happen because of the actions that we take. And logic would say, Einstein would say, the first sign of madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results. If you want different results, you should take different actions. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case in complex environments. You can do the same thing and get different results, you could do different things and get the same results. There’s no guarantee about cause and effect there. We can’t standardize our actions in a complex environment. So what determines our actions? Well, our beliefs and our values determine our actions, what we think is right, what we think is the right thing to do, what we think other people will judge us favorably for, what we believe the consequences of these decisions to be. So we might be able to standardize beliefs so that even though we may have different actions, they’re based on the same belief system. But how do we form our beliefs? We form our beliefs through experiences. Okay, now that’s often we do something and something happens and that says, okay, well, I won’t do that again or I will do that again. It could be something very Pavlovian like that. But so what we are saying to organizations is don’t try and standardize actions, try and standardize beliefs through creating more and more experiences and recognizing and appreciating experiences. Does that make sense?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:06

It makes perfect sense to me. I’m trying to maybe, you know, because a lot of times we focus agile, the big A has been about those actions and focusing on those actions, not focusing, aligning the beliefs. But if you go back to the Agile Manifesto for instance, it’s all about aligning those beliefs and values. Within the organic agility framework, you guys have five principles. Maybe we can explore those because that’s aligning more of a beliefs and perceptions in those principles. And maybe, I don’t know, I’m interested in hearing your take on differences between values, beliefs, and principles. Where do the principles fit?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 15:56

Well, if I can just go back slightly because you did mention something that I think is really quite interesting. So as well as stories being an enabler of change, another valuable enabler of change is rituals. And where things like Scrum have come in, is to apply or to put in place rituals. So things like a daily Scrum for example that you mentioned, that is a ritual. And it’s intended to create an experience and embed an experience. And one of the powers of rituals is that it provides a level of certainty in an area of uncertainty. So it provides sort of the anchor in a storm if you like. And the more you do something, the more, you know, just becomes normal. And then most of this agile coaches that I come across and I say it’s not about the daily Scrum itself, it’s about the purpose behind the daily Scrum but the daily Scrum is just a ritual to get you there. That’s sort of Xu Hari side of things. And whether you think, looking at something like Kanban, whether you think visualizing your workflow is a principle or it’s a ritual, whether you think putting limits on your working progress is a ritual or a principle is kind of a semantic. It could be either, it could be both. But principles are to me a way of linking values and rituals, they are the explanation of why certain rituals might be useful to us and might not be based on the values that we have. That’s the way that I look at it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:29

It’s very interesting. So based on what you’re saying and it’s like connection between, you know, our mindset, or you can call it the, you know, values, principles and the culture, right, the principal sit between, you know, what we value individually and then the culture and those share. Another thing that’s related to the culture and maybe to go back is the relationships, right? Big part is that. So maybe how do you intertwine? So part of those stories, part of those rituals is also the relationships that emerge. And those shaped culture, how do we go about enriching those relationships? Do agile practices support that, like how do we? Is it the environment? One thing that we then discuss, which is organizational design and architecture and how does that impact these. And I don’t know, to me, and maybe we’re going a little bit off topic, so you can steer us. But there is an interplay between the actions, mindset and values and principles, the culture and the fourth one would be the organizational structures, policies and all of that. And I’m interested, you know, if you want to explore that, what is the…

Speaker: Geoff Watts 18:57

Yeah, you’ve given me a, you basically opened a can there and saying which one do you want to talk about? And yeah, that’s cool. I mean, I’m a big fan of relationships. I believe that pretty much, most dysfunctions, if not all dysfunctions that you see within organizations are based on mismatched expectations. Because everybody wants to do a good job. There are very few people out there that enjoy sabotaging things just for fun. It’s usually an unmet need that that is a result of that. So I spend a lot of time with people, with teams working on visualizing the expectations for one another. And once they’ve visualized, negotiating them. And there’s a point behind this because the leadership framework that we put in place within the organic scaffolding talks about different leadership archetypes and how none of them are right or wrong, none of them are good or bad. It’s about whether it’s appropriate for first of all, the context that you’re in and secondly, what the other party is looking for. Because I could come along as a leader and say, right, self-organization autonomy, that is where we’re going so I’m just going to step back, and it’s all up to you. And sometimes, that’ll be brilliant. Sometimes people would absolutely love that, the teams would just run off and do brilliant things. Sometimes they would say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?! And be absolutely freaked out by it, because they don’t have the competence or the confidence or the conditions to be successful as an autonomous team. Equally, I could come along as a leader and say, right, there’s no argument here, I need you to do this and I need you to do it this way. No debate, no discussion, no democracy, no consensus, do it, do it this way. And sometimes that will be met with massive amounts of motivational debt, sometimes it would be met with oh thank hell for that. Oh, thank you. Brilliant. I’m just glad you’ve said that. And it’s not about right or wrong. It’s the context again, it’s coming back to that. So having that conversation about what in certain circumstances, this is the kind of leadership behavior that people are probably going to respond well to and in certain circumstances, they would respond badly so they would incur what we call motivational debt. So these relationships are absolutely key. And it’s not about the traditional leaders adopting those leadership archetypes, because we view leadership as something that is a capability to be encouraged throughout the organization, not held in the hands of those at the top of a pyramid. But in order to encourage mindful autonomy, we need to spread that leadership throughout. So understanding the context for certain leadership archetypes is something that everybody should be aware of, and empowered to adopt. And so that would be my view on the relationship side of things. And when it comes to the organizational structures, again, I think, for me, it’s got to be an agile approach. So an inspect and adapt approach to it but value driven. So for me, agility is not just about doing any old thing and then changing your mind, it’s about being pretty disciplined about, you know, focusing on what’s important, working with what you do and what you don’t know, doing the best you can and then reflecting once you’ve got through the full feedback loop as soon as possible. And I think the same for me goes with organizational structure, with architecture, with everything is use what you do know, analyze what can be analyzed, and then experiment mindfully, cheaply, carefully, and learn and inspect and adapt. So we do a lot of value streaming and then asking our organizations to be very ruthless in staffing their teams to be able to deliver value. And almost without exception, I say almost without exception, because I can’t trust my memory as much as I used to these days. It’s resulted in every organization that we’ve been with having to do less stuff in order to get more stuff done because they’re almost always doing too much stuff and spreading people too thin, and jeopardizing everything that they’re doing because that aren’t willing to be ruthless in what they are focusing on in terms of value.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:37

And it goes back to something you said earlier transparency and visualization. I think it I’ve been in so many situations where people actually just visualize what they don’t. And that goes back to also what you said about experience, that’s going to change somebody’s mind or could change potentially somebody’s mind when you just see how much stuff you have in progress and what’s actually getting done. So let’s look at the five principles because then we can tie some of this stuff. So the first one increased cultural awareness and coherence. Second one is situational decision making, focus on value creation, validating changes in small increments and optimizing for flow. Are these in any particular order and how did you guys, what was the experience working and coming up with these with Dave and Andrea?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 24:34

Like I said, I can’t really rely on my memory as much as I used to. But I know it was an iterative process, and it was one of those, it’s not necessarily a linear thing because we’ve started with different teams, different organizations, with different principles. But I think if you took a large enough sample size, you’d say this is probably the most likely sequential order and flow have them. And so this is how we teach them. This is how we, the order that we talked to people about with them, because the first principle around increasing cultural awareness and coherence, if you are not aware of what your culture is, how do you know whether you’re making progress towards where you want to be? So it’s about getting a baseline and trying to share that baseline without judgment across the organization. Because if we’ve got different perceptions, if you and I have a different awareness of what our culture is, then we could quite easily be pulling in very different directions with the same intent. But if we’re aware, collectively, we have a common coherence about what our culture is, then we can agree to make movements together in the same direction. The danger there is that we’re judging things because we tend to do that as human beings; this is good, this is bad, this is my fault, this is your fault. And that’s not helpful. We are where we are because we made the best decisions we could in the past. Every process, every story was created with good intent and every process and procedure that we had in place was valid for a reason at that point in time. There’s no point judging it, it’s just we are where we are. So getting that awareness and coherence allows us to make more coherent decisions, consistent value based decisions which is something that we move on to in principle too, which is situation of decision making, which is where we bring in the idea of the Kanarian framework and the domains and complicated in the conversation about efficiency and effectiveness. And again, neither is good, neither is bad, it’s about what’s appropriate for the context. And then once we understand there are different ways of creating value. So I can be efficient in creating value, or it can be effective in creating value, both are good, both are bad in the right circumstances. But once I’m aware of that, then we can actually focus a lot more ruthlessly and a lot more mindfully on that value. We’re not just being busy for busy sake, we can actually say, you know what, let’s channel our energies towards this value stream, this value stream, this value stream. And what it takes both structurally and mindset wise and skill base wise to create value in an effective way is very different to what’s required to create value in an efficient way. So we might as asked the guy to talk about exploit squads and explore squads and things like that. So we can focus on value creation. But we’re not going to get it right straightaway. So one of the important things that we need to put in place is this concept of experimentation about trial and error, but not just any kind of trial and error, kind of I was guilty of using the phrase fail fast for a long time and I now try and use the phrase fail mindfully instead, because it’s not just about failing fast, it’s about creating opportunities to learn richly. And it’s something that I’ve had a bit of a, as we say in England, a bee in my bonnet about for a bit.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:22

Well, it’s easy to say fail fast but what you’re saying is, you know, you could fail fast and not learn much, or you could fail fast and learn a lot from it. And also, it’s about that experience that you talked about. And that’s gonna get us to maybe even understand things better and make sense of things a little bit better. What about optimized flow? That’s the last one and you said these are in sequential order.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 28:53

Yeah, and it’s not quite as simple as that but I think it’s well enough to look at that. Yeah. So this is once we’ve got this idea of where our values coming from, we’ve you know, we’ve tried a few things we’ve got into a bit of a habit of running safety value experiments, then we can start looking at well, how can we get that value better? And so coming back to your conversation about structure, whether it be how we structure our people, how we structure our departments, the policies and processes that support all that, we can start asking the questions of well, which of these processes, policies, structures, organizational setups, hierarchies, matrixes, whatever are helping us deliver value, and which of them aren’t helping us to deliver value, not just in the short term, but the long term as well because it’s very tempting to optimize for the short term. So for example, if you’ve got an expert in one particular skill to give all that work to the expert, which is very short term effective, but it’s a long term bottleneck that we’re creating. So thinking about how we do this as an organization and then slowly, tweaking, inspecting and adapting the way that we’re set up to get closer and closer to where we think we want to be and then re-evaluating.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:10

Yeah, and something that you just said about specifically that, you know, something like a policy or something like, you know, short term, I think it goes in relates to structure. It’s been maybe a couple of years now, I was working with an executive and we’re talking about this stuff, and you know, he’s like, Miljan, I know what the right thing to do is, but I also have a kid in college. And policy or incentive was annual. Like if they can do this and delivered this, then they were gonna get their bonus. So this was contradicting what this person knew was the right thing to do but for them to get the bonus, they had to focus on short term, which actually cost the company a lot more long time. And this is hard work. So even if we look at these five principles, this is difficult. Companies want safe, they want, you know, something that they can be comfortable with. So when we look at the future of agility and business agility, and when you look at the organic agility framework, I feel like this is the future. But this is really hard work, because it puts pressure on organizations to understand these principles and what’s behind these principles. And it’s not just few people understanding the organization, this is creating a culture, an army of people that understand this stuff. So what are your thoughts on you know, the next 5, 10 years as I believe that these type of framework, these type of approaches are principle based, a pattern based approaches are not specific, but you have to contextualize, how much chance do you know the framework that we currently know have at succeeding and how much are they exposing just how, the last 10 years maybe of adopting and popularizing all of these scaling frameworks has not worked?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 32:16

And I think that’s key for me. And so there’s, for me, there’s the market side of things and then there’s the personal side of things for me. So from a market perspective, as with everything else, I think the market will sort out. There will be enough failures of silver bullets, shall we say? And the smart organizations, the okay, brave leaders, because it does take a certain amount of courage to say, I’m going to pass on that off the shelf one size fits all thing that this well paid consultancy is offering me and actually get involved and take the less clear path but the one that instinctively I know is probably right. It does require courage. But there will be more and more of those that survive. And to be honest, I think this is where I’ve changed as a person over the years is that I used to sort of lie awake, it’s slightly literal, slightly metaphorical, lie awake at night, worrying that actually there are a lot of organizations out there that were doing the wrong thing. I think now, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s the actually the ones that want to go down that route are going to go down that route; the ones that aren’t, the ones that are smarter are the ones that are more born to survive, if you like.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:48

I was gonna say survival is optional, right?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 33:51

Yeah, exactly. That’s a really, really, really good point. And they will be more and more, and I think we are, I don’t have the stats to hand, Snowden would but the number of failures of organizations now and the rate of failure, you know, the amount of time it takes for a company to fail these days is a lot smaller than it was before. But the ones that succeed, really succeed. And the, this isn’t a new statement to make, it’s something that I’ve been saying for quite a long time because it’s become part of the Agile lexicon if you like, is that an agile transformation is a misnomer because you’re never going to be transformed. But the organization of today and certainly the organization at tomorrow is one that is continually transitioning.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:39

And that comes through and I’m interested given your background, the transformation is a leftover from a waterfall world where as you probably know, we’re not quite as old as some of the other people in our community and joking obviously, but what used to happen is he would bring consulting company like, you know, big consulting company, every five years, they would do some type of transformation, they would leave and then he will probably call them back. So I think that was a leftover from, you know, 80s 90s of these transformations and then we just put it agile label on it and we call it transformation, agile transformation. But exactly same things that they did with waterfall and adapting and all of the other approaches. And I think if we look at it from a different lens, and if we suspend that idea of transformation as being a project, rather than ongoing thing that you embed in everything that you do, it’s a different lens that we’re now looking at everything. It’s not once and done but it’s something that goes back to that organizational resilience, it’s about creating organizational resilience, not transforming organization from one state or another.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 35:55

Yeah, you’re spot on. And it goes back to my point of being brave. And I’m just going to amplify that even more, because transformation is a really appealing idea, because it has a sense of closure to it, it has a sense of completeness to it. And as human beings, we’re drawn to that. We don’t like the idea of being in flux of uncertainty. And what we’re saying, when I say we, Andrea, Dave and other people, are saying essentially, you know, you need to get used to the fact that you are going to be constantly in a state of flux, organizationally. And while that might take a little bit of bravery to come to terms with. What you’ve just said is exactly right. And when you play it back to them, think back to the last year, 20 years of your organization, even if you weren’t here for that 20 years, look back to the stories, how many times have you had a transformation? What’s the cycle time of a transformation? And actually, has it ever finished before you started the next one? So it’s actually reality anyway but coming to terms with it and explicitly accepting it are two different things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:06

It’s back to the stories that we tell ourselves, right? What about, you know, what’s your perspective on how do we measure agility or organizational resilience?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 37:21

So I’m not too worried about measuring agility because like I said, there may be times when actually that’s not the right thing for us. But I think resilience is an interesting one. I think, so there’s a term that sort of generated in football in the UK called bounce back ability. And it was termed by a manager of a football team over here in the UK. So your ability to bounce back, it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you recover that kind of thing you know. And I think that’s effectively what we’re looking for from resilience. Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world, if you took that model, if you took talibs model, you’d be looking for anti-fragility, that might be too expensive, it might be too extreme. So resilience is good enough. So how do you, what’s your sort of proxy metric for resilience? Well, for me, the question I asked leaders is, how quickly and how effectively can you re-channel your resources, your money, your assets, your people, into a new opportunity or to stave off a new threat? How quickly can you do that? Because you can’t necessarily predict them. Alright? It’s not about trying to predict these threats. It’s how quickly can you respond to them and effectively. And that’s, I don’t think that’s necessarily got a label yet but that question, how quickly can you do that? And can you do that quick enough to survive, first of all? And can you do it quicker than everybody else so that actually you can take advantage of these changes? And I think that’s the measure, that’s the metric that I tend to get people to look for even if I’m not necessarily encouraging them to look for numbers, for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:09

That’s a really good way and remind me of, you know, one of the ways that will give you that it’s options, right? Once you’re, you know, options in creating those options to respond or to redirect. And you’re focused a lot on self-mastery and you’ve developed course communities and that self-mastery is also developing people. I don’t know if we’re familiar with fidelity here United States, but and they’re not the first one but like, for instance, they give their people one day a week or most programs or product lines give their people one day a week, Tuesday, usually to focus on you know self-development. You can watch YouTube videos or you can, you know, do some productive, you don’t have to report what you’ve done but it’s really encouraging people to develop that self-mastery. So I believe that I can give the company that resilience and options if they need to change and will. So, coming to self-mastery, how do you define self-mastery? What’s the importance of your obviously design courses, you’ve talked a lot about it, could you maybe shed some light on self-mastery and how you see it play the role in that organizational resilience?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 40:29

Yeah, so for me, self-mastery is becoming much more aware of my triggers, my strengths, and whether my strengths are actually working for me, or not, which might sound like a strange thing to say. But I think that we’ve every strength that we’ve got has the potential to become a weakness for us. And every weakness that we’ve got has the potential to provide some strength. So self-mastery is becoming much more aware of where those traits, if you like, are; whether we’re overdoing them, whether we’re underdoing them, whether we got them in balance. And these traits could be anything from perfectionism, to performance anxiety, or people pleasing. These aren’t necessarily hard skills, like Java development or anything like that. These are actual mind skills, if you like. And I think for us, a lot of our decisions are based on our beliefs, not just about what’s going on in our environment, or our society but also what’s going on in our heads. And a lot of that stuff happens unconsciously. So self-mastery for me is about bringing that into the conscious mind so that we can be more mindful about it in a non-judgmental way so that we can actually leverage them for us. Now, if I’m more aware and in control of my thought patterns, my scripts, then I can respond more mindfully to the situations rather than responding instinctively or emotionally. And at an individual level that is important for resilience, because it makes me much more able to cope with change, cope with what might be perceived as threats. And ultimately, our organizations are a collection of individuals, the stories that we create. So looking at that, at an organizational level, we have a bunch of self-aware people who’ve mastered them, although it’s a journey, it’s not a destination, and if we have certain higher level of self-mastery within our people, then we can expect to be more resilient as an organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:40

And that just made me think of like the first two principles in the organic agility framework, cultural awareness and coherence as well as situational decision making. So we have awareness and then when we haven’t talked about is sensemaking. Collective individual sense making. There’s a relationship with I’m assuming the more aware we are of our own thought processes, the inner kind of operating model and the better that we make sense of things and the higher collective self-awareness is, the better collective sense making is. Do you see it that way? Is there a connection maybe or some type of connection between the awareness and sense making both at the individual level and collective?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 43:36

Yeah, I think you’ve made a really good connection there. So what I can do here is in my head, is I can visualize some of the things that we do, which I can’t necessarily replicate here, certainly not on an audio podcast. But imagine a heatmap of data points and these data points all have, you can drill down into them. And so you can find out from this data point you know, who made that decision? How quickly that decision was made? How do we feel about that decision? What factors went into making that decision? And all these different sort of components to the decision. And also look at what kind of leadership style was in play at the time, what kind of team composition was in play at the time and did that turn out to be a positive result for us or a negative result for us? And we can start to look at this data. But that visualization of big data within the organization allows us to make sense of the situation across the organization. And that works at a personal level as well. So if I could become more aware of what’s going on for me and when I was thinking this way, when I was making these assumptions, this led to this kind of result and it was favorable for me or not, then I can make more, I can use that empirical approach both at a personal and an organizational levels. It’s absolutely linked, you’re absolutely right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:55

We have a few minutes left here. What would you like to share with the community? Any tips, any takeaways, any invitations? I know you’re doing a lot of stuff on your own, you’re building a community, how would you like to finish up?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 45:14

It is interesting you use the word community, that’s certainly since the pandemic started, that’s something that, I’ve always been involved in things like meetup groups, in conferences and things, but I found the disconnect and the feeling of isolation increased quite a lot across the people. So I’m lucky in that I have no connections to lots of different organizations, lots of different communities, lots of different groups. But quite a lot of people in organizations feel quite on their own when they’re trying to be a change agent, when they’re trying to make change happen. And the inability to travel and the inability to meet up in person really hit these people. So I put a lot of effort in trying to create a safer community, one that wasn’t like other potential social media channels which had a lot of ego and trolling and things, where people could share their experiences, where they could ask questions. And we’ve had special guests come on, we do little private workshops and things, sharing articles, we have themes of the month. And we’ve got over 500 people now who, from different countries, from different organizations and it’s completely free. We’ve got a code of conduct that we expect people to sign up to but that’s pretty much it. And it’s helping people just explore different ideas, but in a safe, respectful way. So I would encourage, I would invite people to come along, it’s called Geoff Sajha mastery community

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:46

And I would include it in the link below so it’s easier for people to click on. Anything else, any other tips for coaches, for leaders, for anybody or anything else that maybe we didn’t touch upon that you want to share with people?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 47:05

Because my work is so varied, it’s difficult to pinpoint on something, but what I will say is, we’re all doing a really tough job, everybody’s doing a tough job. And I think certainly recently, I’ve noticed a trend of people, people’s self-confidence and self-doubt dropping quite a lot and it’s quite easy to not see the good in what we’re doing. And first of all, do that for yourself. Take a little bit of time out, pat yourself on the back for things that you’ve been doing. But also make sure that when somebody that you see, that somebody that you know has done something good, just go a little bit out your way and let them know that they’ve been seen because people are a lot less visible than they used to be. That would be my message.