Month: January 2022

Michael Vizdos

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:34

Who is Michael Vizdos?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 00:37

Ah, I’m just a regular guy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:42

That’s what everybody says, right?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 00:46

It really is, I’ve spent 30 years in the industry, working for big companies, small companies, done a couple of startups and I’ve been pretty much on my own since 2001. I’m working on a lot of companies and organizations and military teams. How do you get better using this agile stuff? And Agile is not the outcome. Really, it delivers outcome that are important to the organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:20

How did you get into this agile space? What was your… because everybody has their own kind of journey of how… they usually say it’s accidental, it’s not… what was your journey?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 01:32

Yeah, for me, I spent almost the first 10 or 12 years of my career, working for other companies, and being super frustrated about not being able to deliver good results. Not even good results consistently, just good results. And I joked around with a friend of mine way back in the day of… that if there was some kind of methodology or framework that we could just say, let’s iterate on this and get better. That was right around the time, Alastair was working with IBM and figuring out the Crystal Method. And I worked at the time for IBM well actually it was EDS, doing contract work on this thing called LS two, some operating system from IBM. And during that time, I really came to appreciate teamwork, and did a couple startups. And then right at about 2001 I got involved with some of the early Agile adopters and started following country labor [02:44]. He delivered this Scrum master class. I was one of the really early adopters in that class. And as I was doing that, I was writing this book on this thing called the Enterprise unified process with Scott Ambler.

And it was a big, heavy software development stuff. Soon as it got published, I was like, Wow, that’s good. But now what? So during that time, I’d gotten certified by Ken and really started working with him and Jeff Suther and others early on, to get classes started, trying to figure out what is this Scrum Alliance thing and here we are. 20 years later.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:37

That’s been an interesting journey. Maybe we can come back to that, you’ve contributed, a lot you’ve mentored a lot of people at Scrum Alliance. So that might be something that come back but I interviewed Scott and I think over the years his perspective is changed. What are your thoughts on the current DA?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 04:00

It’s good stuff. Scott’s always been good at pushing back against the organized stuff. It was good to see actually that, when the PMI bought him out for the disciplined Agile delivery. It’s fun now watching Scott there, Allen and Shaley, Shaley is…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:28

I’ve got an interview with him.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 04:30

Yeah, definitely. He’d be a good person to interview. And we’ve known each other for a long time and pushed back on a lot of ideas.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:41

It seems like everybody like you, so far, I almost feel like, I’ve interviewed close to 50 people like 47 I think this is my 47th interview, like four months. And there’s a common pattern where, I think people are realizing that these prescriptive approaches as lightweight as frameworks they could be, they’re still prescriptive and that there’s still more content, we need more contextualize things in our organization, especially when we start scaling, or descaling. So that’s one thing that’s really… when I spoke with Scott, when I spoke with David Anderson with all of these top leaders that represent different maybe paths or have a common message, which is, in a sense, we got to go back to the basics, we got to go back and understand these patterns and principles, before we start doing things. And even Dean, I spoke with Dean laughing, has his own perspective. But underneath all of that he understands the fundamentals and what needs to happen. It’s up to people to fall with it, to what is the saying that goes, its still a bull, right?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 06:02

Exactly. Yeah. I’ve really tried to stay focused on a lot of the basics. Because I find that going back to the basic a lot is a super helpful, and whether it’s Scrum, Kanban, whatever kind of framework or methodology you want to use, it’s important to focus on the people and then your actions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:27

Good. When you look at today and reflect back. what is important? What are you currently working on? What’s important to you right now? When you look at…?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 06:38

Yep, so today, it’s definitely staying with training. I really only do public training, maybe once a month. I find that that’s a good way to get people introduced to the topic, but, training a bunch of people, and then setting them back into the environment that they’re in, is not really super impactful. They need support after. So I’ve been mentoring, I’ve got the Agile mentoring group with Ron Jeffries, and I host that. And that’s just an experiment where Ron and I host the Slack community and talk to people. And with a lot of slack, people come in and out. And it’s great to see different perspectives from everyone around the world that’s in that group. And then I’m also spending a lot of time right now with schools, and education. And it’s important to me to help, really, this is generational change. And the stuff that we do is stuff basically that’s taught in kindergarten, play nice with others say Please, and Thank You, don’t be ‘mmm’ about everything.

And it’s been a really fun journey. Since about 2013. I got involved with schools, from elementary up through universities, and I’ve been spending a lot of time lately too, with the administration level. So at the district level of, how do you use Scrum, at the organization level, not even deep down into the schools, with the classrooms. And the Scrum Alliance is really starting to back a. thing called Cal K 12. Where it’s going to be certification for teachers to help give teachers tools to flip the classroom without really making huge major changes. Because teachers in the world, they’ve got tons and tons of stuff to do. Adding another thing on top of it is not going to help.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:04

So that too, so I’ve been teaching like in university here. And it’s interesting, even just like you said, it’s surprising that this is not, being pushed more in schools and I think, Scrum Alliance could definitely play even bigger role in this and not just Scrum Alliance, everybody because you have kids coming out of school, and now it’s a little bit different. I think there’s more and more, but don’t even know some of these approaches, or they’re looking for a job is like Scrum what or Agile what?

And maybe it’s not the point is not Agile or Scrum but this way of working and understanding and also from like you said, playing nice from people side, how do we better work together and how do we better understand each other needs? How do we empathize better with others, what other things… when it comes to schools like your work there? What are some of the things that are different maybe from what you see in the typical corporate environment?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 10:12

One of the things that I’m still adjusting to is in education, there is still an openness to share, and encouragement to share. It, it changes when you start bringing money into the conversation, and competition. There is no single place where there’s this aha, I invented it, and it’s mine. Everything that we’ve done, any kind of huge inventions that have been made has been really on innovation, not like some light bulb going off.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:58

It is interesting, some of the ways like that ego…, I think as soon as you throw in the money in your in corporate environment, and do you have organizational structure, especially that reinforces that it becomes very difficult to innovate, because it’s less of a collaborative effort. It’s more like, “I gotta protect my fifth”. And what I’m incentivized where I don’t know if in schools and level work that administrative level or, but it is interesting, and just how that plays out. So that’s couple of questions you want to ask me, so we thought for me we’ll play back and forth. For Michael

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 11:50

So for you, you’re almost 50 episodes in, what’s different today versus day one for you, the first podcast that you did?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:04

I don’t know if there’s much difference besides…, I just keep enjoying these conversations. My first one was with Daniel Mesic, I believe I reached out to him and Jean, and, I was like, “Guys, I have an idea for this podcast, would you be willing, I want to just pilot and see , I want to do three, four of these. If it works, I’ll continue doing it if it doesn’t.” And it was just right from the get go, I don’t know, because I was maybe comfortable with them. It was really just I enjoy we having conversation here. It’s like I miss these types of conversations. And the only way to get time with people seems now is this way. So it was also a nice way to say, “hey, do you have an hour to chit chat about topics we might be interested.”

So I don’t know if there is anything different, but I’m starting to see patterns. As I’m talking to people, people are saying things differently, but they’re saying the same things, in a sense of what they think, for instance, where we had the what are some of the challenges that we’re facing their own kind of journeys, and some of the biases to and some of the.., one of the things that I may be, so this is definitely something so I just the diversity, inclusion, that’s something that I didn’t think about, for instance, at the beginning, I was just, I had a bunch of white guys in my mind, because those are the people that I know, those are the people in our community that are considered leaders.

And I started thinking, look at my first 10 interviews, it’s all middle-aged white guys. And I’m like, that was something that just, presented itself to me, I’m like “how do I add more diversity,” but also, not just do it for sake of, hey, I want to diverse, I’m just going to interview anybody just to add to the mix. But what is some of the criteria? Or what are the topics that we’d like to discuss? So that’s definitely something now that you asked that I think about as far as, how do I add different voices? And maybe a couple other things that as I did this, like I started thinking about, well, if I’m interviewing top leaders, that’s great, right?

But how do I create a platform for people that are doing some great stuff, and get them a little bit more exposed to our community and highlight some of the stuff that did. So that’s the different part that, I want to do that I didn’t think of when I first started. And the third thing is Doing these, like Ask Me Anything session. So I did one with Roman Pilcher and then Mesic, I’m going ask Mike Cohen if he wants to do one. And just like these are where I’m not asking the questions that are asking the questions I’m just facilitating. So those are some of the things that come to mind.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 15:19

So for people that are listening or watching this, for the diversity part, what kind of requests would you have for maybe even the people watching or listening to help you get more diverse? Maybe people involved.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:39

So I think anything that would shed maybe different light, I feel another thing that I’m seeing is, which goes back to like those same patterns, like maybe diversity and topics, diversity in perspectives. There’s something to be said about having people disagree with some of the common. So I think, that held the differences in perspectives, which you just made me think about, another thing that I could do is hold the baits and facilitate those. But just in general, for instance, one thing that I just reached out to Nan then on Taiwan, he was a monk, the became Scrum trainer. And that’s a great example of the…, I don’t know anybody that was a monk. And that’s done. Scrum. He’s tried to do Scrum in cooking and different ways. And I love…, recently, what he’s been doing to entertain people in training. I don’t know if you seen but he’s doing some brilliant.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 16:55

Things growing up about John and Jane things. Yeah. DJing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:03

I love that. And I think another thing that I’ve been thinking about is, trainers that do fun stuff in class. So maybe compiling trainers, I’ve been doing like this piece and I wanted to this piece of remembering kind of like people. And one person that I got a chance to meet. In Dublin, I think you were there to Mike Beadle. And my first interaction with him was very positive in the sense that, he I didn’t know who it was, I was sitting next to him. And he was just the nicest guy trying to get into and then when I realized who it was, I’m like, oh, at least, you know, just so I know, people have done certain things to remember and keep his ideas. And so I’ve been interviewing people, just to kind of add a little bit more to that. So those types of kind of …, maybe deviating a little bit from typically what I’ve started and trying to add diversity in that way, I spoke with [name not clear] [18:20], and talk to her about what she’s doing in Africa and Nigeria. And those are ideas I didn’t think about when I first started, but…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 18:34

It’s awesome. So zoom forward to, Episode 99, or 100. What’s going to be different?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:46

I think, going back to what I just said that there is more diversity that there is, and I want to reflect low, but so I’m going to take mostly pause for the next couple of months is when I spent time in Croatia and Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia, that whole former Yugoslavia and maybe take that time to reflect a little bit, but I’m hoping that I can add little bit more to that diversity. And also, I haven’t gotten or asked for any feedback on these, or for an Agilist or somebody that considers them Agilist. I haven’t really gotten a lot of feedback besides just generic feedback that people tell me and but wasn’t one proactive. So we’ll see. I don’t know what the 100.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 19:37

Maybe, don’t some of that into the new flow of things will be interesting. So when you come back, you’ll be all recharged and ready to go. You’re working on a book, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:56

So yes, I’m working on a book and I tell people the reason that I started the podcast is not write. I have about 40,000 words written nine chapters. It’s really based on, it’s called wicked leadership based on wicked problems, how do we lead in a complex environment where we’re dealing a lot of times with wicked problems? So I’m writing a book, I was hoping to be done by now. But so, I…, you wrote a book, I don’t know, maybe you can give me advice. When you have a writer’s block, and you just can’t get back into rhythm, what do you do?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 20:36

Yeah, just keep writing, write every day, even if it’s garbage, write it, you can always delete it. The book that Scott and I wrote, with one more co-author, it was a long process. And one of the things I learned with writing that one, and this was back before, I mean, this was 2004 2005, when we were, writing it and creating it. It our copy editor, we had to send it out for copy, we got physical FedExed printed versions that we had to go back and do. And, I definitely came to love and respect copy editors, and the humility of just pay, this is, this is what’s needed. The, and the important thing is, you’re not going to ever get rich off of a book, maybe a couple of the early authors, you know, got some big bang for the buck on that. But really, what a book does allow you to do is get some more exposure into the into the world. And then you can lean back into that if you need to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:59

Yeah, for me, it was never, it’s just like, some of these ideas that have I’m also writing in a book is more like a novel or has stories so I tried to hide things from growing up in a war or maybe inexperience with the clients. So it has a lot of stories, intertwined in it, it’s pretty much that. And it’s also helped me to have writing coaches just to help me when I’m stuck in the…, one of the challenges last few years, it’s been California. And last year, we pretty much Airbnb during the COVID, so it was just like moving. And I keep making excuses, but I agree, one of the things that I know. And this is maybe for people listening to if they’re considering writing a book, I definitely resonated when you said write everyday, that’s the probably if I could give people one advice, I was waking up at 4:30, start writing a five to seven was my time uninterrupted. And it was, it was during that time that I made the most progress.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 23:12

Absolutely. And it’s very different than either doing a podcast or writing blogs too. And I’m seeing a lot of people recast blogs into books. And I’m like, they’re not sure

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:24

I’ve have been thinking about something like that, too. I don’t know, if it’s a blog, or what I’m going to do, but the fact is that people want different mediums. So for instance, the way that this podcast…, mostly video podcasts, I still haven’t put it like a regular podcast, which I have to in audio, just only. But there’s so much good stuff that people have said and tips. So I could figure out how to extract that and just make it available in a different format for people. Because not everybody is going to go through every single talk or discussion that I had. And I’m the only one that has listened to all of this or been part of all of this and I know there’s so much good stuff. So I got to figure out…, I’ve been thinking about possibly some type of book or paper, whatever, like my takeaways, but…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 24:21

And even just getting out and maybe helping to keep in that writing mode is just blog regularly about the topic like with implementing Scrum with the chicken and pig cartoons, I write for almost six or seven years, every single week. Right? A new comic strip came out and I wrote consistently and really over the past three or four years, what I’ve done is shifted from blogging to sending emails, and every Saturday morning at implementing Scrum you’ll get people that are subscribed there will get an email from me about implementing Scrum in the real world. And it’s really what I’m what I’m seeing in the real world working with teams today. And how do you get better implementing Scrum? Using things like the Scrum guide. I’ve recorded that that Scrum guide audio book for since like 2013 version. And…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:28

I always noted that, by the way,

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 25:31

That move sounds

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:34

Especially, it’s sometimes easier. And I’m trying to depict stuff. And even when I’m laying the bed, I feel like I have more focus and less distraction. Right? So I always [inaudible]. [25:50]

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 25:52

Yep. And in this latest version, I created an interactive Scrum guide too now. So if you go online, and instead of, if you’re like, “Oh, what is this event or activity,” you can click it, it will bring you to that next spot in the Scrum guide. I’m seeing a lot of people using that both in training and then back with their teams now, too, so it’s important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:14

Yeah, no, it is. I mean, it’s, it just gave me an idea, in a sense, what I haven’t thought about but , I can write my takeaways from each of the interviews and send out an email and people can watch it, but they also get, and then I can also put that, I mean, you said you’re writing a blog, I can put in an email, but there’s also no reason to put it like as a blog, too. So that’s something that I haven’t thought about. So thank you, Mike.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 26:43

Yeah, there’s an unending Idea Factory, I think, between both of us, we could just spin out ideas left and right, all day, every day. And one of the things that’s important, for writing the book is you writing it. When Iwas under contract to do the book back in 2005, one of the things I learned is, I think nine out of the 10 people that are under contract. Don’t finish the book.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:12

Even though you have that pressure, and it’s still Yeah…, I get stuck in this, it’s really the format, I know what I want to say. But it’s the structure, and it just the longer seems like the longer that I put it away, the longer I also…, and I feel like, things are marinating, and my ideas are getting better. So it’s also…, there’s no sense of urgency like, oh, if I write it this year, next year, like, I know that I have something, but…, so it’s just I keep making excuses at the end of the day, but even it doesn’t matter, I think it goes back to just write every day, you can throw it away, but even half an hour, like any muscle, if you train it more than you train it…, I want to get your thoughts on co-creation and pairing because you’ve done that, I’m assuming throughout your life, just looking at you having previous discussions with you, and looking at what you’re doing, you’re always, looking to help others and co-create what are… when you reflect on that, maybe who are some of the people that or maybe ways that you kind of think about co-creating or helping or I don’t know, what goes through your head when you want to do something because it seems like your tendency is a lot of times to collaborate. And even when I’ve done co-trainings or whatever, it just seems like it I work better when I work with somebody else, and it can feed off their thought process and they can feed off my thought process.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 28:58

Now, the important thing really is for you and whoever is co-creating with you are aligned. And it’s really like doing a dance together. And it’s important that you stay in alignment, and when you’re not be able to walk away from it, and be okay. Right? it does ebb and flow, we’re idea factories, we love coming up with new stuff. And we learn new things, right?

And when we learn new things, sometimes our perspective does change. So I’ve been I’ve been fortunate enough to really have awesome conversations with people like you and others in the industry over the years where we’ve been able to collaborate and sometimes that works. Sometimes they’re spectacular failures. And in my mind, the spectacular failures look like this mushroom cloud of a waste. Here’s what really is “Mm mmmm.” the world is still spinning. So it’s important to be able to also have fun while you’re doing it. Right. If it gets into a slog, it’s probably time to tap out and maybe do something else do something else.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:18

Right? Yeah, definitely, I think that were two things that really resonated like that things evolve. And I’ve had a couple of startups where I started with my friends or colleagues, and just things along and we don’t have, just we’ve learned or have changed perspectives. And in some instances has been not necessarily bad but just we see things differently, and they just walk away sometimes been just like, “hey, let me support you with this part that you’re doing” and, I think it’s maturing and getting older. There’s so much you have to go into any type of collaboration, co-creation with knowing that things will evolve.

But the most important thing is while, we have fun, something good probably, or there’s a really good chance that something good can come out of this. What have you, I mean, you’ve done also you’ve supported over the years Scrum Alliance in so many different ways. Maybe just to touch on Scrum Alliance, because a lot of times, we always tend to look at the negative side or it’s easy to bitch about this bitch about that. As you look at Scrum Alliance over the years, what are you proud of? What are you happy?

Because I remember, I think you Mike Blier, Jim York and I were in Boston for those face to face, it was a small, little room and small group of people. And you guys were not necessarily very happy with the current leadership. But still, I think we’re trying to empathize with what’s going on. So reflecting back not just in that time, but just since you’ve been part of Scrum Alliance. How have you seen Scrum Alliance grow? And what do you think of the current state where Scrum Alliance is?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 32:15

The current leadership is doing an awesome job over the past few years, and it’s really trying to maintain focus, to help really the community and people grow. When the Scrum Alliance first started, right, it was a for profit company. Right? And it was basically, Cain and maybe Mike and some others and Jeff, right. And when the trainer community was, less than 20 people, right, we were having the same kind of conversations that we’re having today with a community of hundreds. It’s good to see that people are bringing some new techniques and sharing the results with the Scrum Alliance. The Scrum Alliance right now, I think he’s still going through a “what are we going to be when we grow up?” Because they’ve got a ton of money sitting in the bank Right, as a nonprofit, and to serve a community and then what is it? Are they a certification machine? Are they really about coaching? Or what is it? So it’ll be it’ll be fun to watch how this starts to evolve.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:44

Yeah, I mean, if you look at it, and the what I would like to see for satellites, is that, you organization for impact, which they are what you said, you helping in schools, bring some of these ideas, helping teachers, nonprofits, what they’ve been doing also is, I just spoke with Kiera Harada, from Japan and going into some of these areas, and maybe, it’s not just Scrum. Obviously, I think it’s limited a little bit. And when we say Scrum Alliance, but just l helping people do better work and be happier, I think that’s something they have an opportunity to do that. And as a community, we have opportunity to be part of that and almost ride that wave. Because a lot of times, I feel like, I’ve hit a lottery with being part of this group, and we tend to get at each other.

We tend to, but we have opportunity to make an impact. Some people would wish to have an opportunity that we do as trainers and coaches. And I feel sometimes they will probably do a better job. Maybe not because we’re all humans, but it’s just it’s I feel privileged to be part of this community and I think we all have responsibility and opportunity to make much bigger impact. And like you said, maybe when we grow up, or we’re slowly growing up, that will happen. So I don’t know if you should share the same views. But that’s kind of like what I’m thinking about what I think about Scrum Alliance and how and what the future may hold.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 35:24

And really, I’m now working with people who want to do this right. It’s the people who are just you know, up against and fighting or raging against the machine, or don’t want to change you know what, have fun, right? Continue doing whatever you’re doing. Let me know how that goes. And the people that are saying, Wow, this thing can make a change. And this is possible. I’m loving working with those groups of people all around the world.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:56

Yeah, and something that I want to come back maybe to but which is related to Scrum Alliance students, some of these programs, in a sense, Scrum Alliance is known, and a lot of times people see it as 02 Day certification, but not many people know about the other training opportunities, coaching opportunities, other certifications that require a lot more time, and I really enjoy, like you said, following up and helping people develop because after that two day training, which is most of the classes are CSM, CSPO for most people. But that follow up and helping people grow, because those two days are obviously not enough. And a lot of times people don’t have the support in their organizations that they need. Do you think we’ll focus more and more on that type of service where it’s not just transactional, hey, you know, come take the class, but more of a follow up, and truly trying to help people because we all know, what it takes to succeed and to learn and two days is by far just enough to get you interested in familiar but it’s nowhere close to what people need.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 37:11

And, and it’s important to also realize the Scrum Alliance is not going to make that change, it’s us as a community to have to make the change. Right, for me, it’s very non transactional for me. And I’ve been training since right at about early 2006. And over those 15 years, I’m still in contact with people that I trained over 15 years ago, now, some of them now are like, I’m capping out, I’m retiring, which I’m getting a lot, I’m seeing a lot more of that. And most of the business that I do in training, and consulting is almost all word of mouth. I’m not the cheapest person out there, I’m not out there competing on, do my $295, CSM, I’ve kept my pricing pretty consistent. And I’m probably getting smaller classes. But again, it’s people that want to be there. I really, I actually try to tell people who are there just for the certification or check the box go somewhere else. Because it’s the experience that I again, try to create is not the one off transaction. But we’re in it, you’ve bought access to not only me, but a community of people that I’ve trained, and worked with and consulted with over the years around the world.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:48

And I’ve been messing around with that. Because I’ve explored both, in a sense, and I can tell you that, for me when it feels more or less transactional, if I’m working with a partner, and it’s all about just sell, run the class, right? I also feel I’m less motivated, especially if there’s a lot of people in there and I feel like I could do much better job in helping them if it was like, you know, 12, 15, 20 people at max rather than 30. And it kind of has a impact on me how I train, how I feel, I contributed to their growth. And it’s making me think, like he’s just said, what am I really trying to do here? Is it make more money, is it have a bigger impact? Because I think, deep down what I want is that impact and know that the hate, you’re paying, but you’re getting, what I think is right, I’m not trying to maximize just a just on my end and it’s a constant battle for me because for whatever reason, I guess, as a human and also being, I’m still fairly new to this whole training business because I come from a more of a coaching and consulting. And it’s a different model than being a CST.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 40:19

Absolutely, and recognizing that a lot of the people that come to the initial trainings come for very different reasons. So again, it’s, a lot of times, does the date work, does the pricing work, used to be the location work? That’s gone now Right. So a lot of people I would say, that are searching don’t really care who it is that’s delivering. So my focus on that is, really get people who want to do this. Again, it’s not doesn’t always happen, right? I’ll get people in the class that are like, “my boss is forcing me to be here.” And that’s a rough slog for two days. And well it’s pretty much two days of guided discussions, whether it’s in person or online, people use different technique learn and train.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:29

Yeah, it’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about is mix of…, from typical CSM. Two day class where I’ve done like advanced Scrum master classes, I spread them over, one month, and those I love because there’s more interaction, both, what we’re used to be, did couple of physical, which were great. But even zoom, this was before COVID. But now on Zoom, it’s really nice just to be able to continue that connection and people to be able to go back, apply stuff, talk to them throughout the week, and then come back and, and there’s different, a feeling to it. And you can tell the…, what people get out of those. Same thing with like CSP, and now Cal classes, I’m finding, I don’t know, if you teach those, but I’m finding that having that mix to as a trainer is really helpful, rather than just doing one type of classes. So that’s another thing that is a trainer I’m considering, what is that mix? How do I motivate myself and feel I’m contributing? Not to my bottom line, but to everybody else’s bottom line as well.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 42:55

And we are running businesses, and it’s important to understand that right? And it’s a different mindset. It doesn’t mean we have to chase every shiny object that’s out there. Right. The Scrum Alliance offers a lot of different badges and certifications. Intentionally, I am not chasing a lot of them. I’m staying super focused on what is it that I’m trying to do? Okay, so for me, it’s, again, really important to go deep somewhere and really understand a domain or industry or sector really well,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:33

Well, questions? What else you want to ask me? Because I’ve been…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 43:46

So what can what can I do to help you get the book out? Haha.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:50

You can read it. I have…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 43:52

So I read like the first day you dropped it, right? Yeah. hey, I want some feedback. I was Okay, I could see this is definitely the Point. 001. Yeah, I would love to take a look at all this look like and, and give you some feedback if that’s what you’d like. And because I read a lot, I read at least one or two books a week.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:23

I used to do that. Not currently as but yeah, maybe like it’s I don’t know, I think you were one of the first ones I asked. It’s been at least a year and I’ve added a lot more to it. But maybe even just nudged me a little bit. Just you know, maybe coach me through it, when you think of me Have you said no, how’s that book or what could you have anything to send me whatever it is to get me back into I don’t know if it’s going to help or not, but I definitely need the little nudging I guess.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 44:59

And Well, while you’re out and about on maybe hitting the reset button, one of the great books that I recommend to writers is Stephen King on writing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:13

I had read that and yeah, that’s it. I do know that I live about an hour away from so it’s, it’s a great,

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 45:24

A great reminder right again, and when I say write every day, if you get a chance to get Mike Cohn on here that he’s just a rock star in that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:37

Well, I was asking, I got Mike and he was saying the same thing, write everyday. He’s like he was even playing with Pomodoro. And just fry for half an hour. And then…, so and I’ve asked, a lot of people have written books and same message. And again, I just got a refocus, and hopefully this reset. Oh, but I’m just taking a little longer break will help with that. But I think I know, in my head is just, the actual knowing or getting back into rhythm, there’s something to be said about getting back into the habit of writing. So…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 46:17

I mean, even at conferences with Mike Cohn over the years, or things that I’ve worked with him on, it’s, he does his keynotes. He does his talks, and then he goes back to the room. And early on, and I want to talk to him about that. I’m like, why aren’t you out there, you networking with people and I’m writing. I have a job. And he’s super focused on that. And he’s built an incredible organization of some Rockstar trainers and in products that have been super useful to people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:55

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think he should be inspiration to all of us, in a sense, even, starting the Scrum Alliance. And one of the things that he said, that was really funny and resonated, was, you have to be just about right amount of lazy, where you’re not trying to do everything and yeah, and there’s so much to be said about that, where, think about what you’re where you focus, what you just said he could have done a network, done all that, but he knows what were his focuses? So, that’s a good advice. And yeah, anything they can do to help me.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 47:47

Yeah. So here we are at like, episode, but almost 50, so 47 48, whatever it is. Here’s my offer. If this podcast slash, videos, make it to 100 Bring you back. And let’s like, Will rewatch this episode, almost like we could we could almost do a watch party, you go. Are we thinking back?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:14

That will be fun, actually, that’s a great idea. And just reflect on it. And I agree, let’s…, I don’t know when that 100 is going be. But yeah, let’s do that. I think that will be fun. Or even if you just give me an idea, like even inviting everybody who wants to show up that I’ve interviewed, and I don’t know, maybe just opening it up. It might be too many people, but maybe it’ll only show up. But that’s a great idea.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 48:46

Maybe did I for 50? Yeah, maybe yeah, let’s do that. Again, ideas we got we got so many ideas,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:54

Putting them into actions, right and deciding which ideas, you want to explore. What is maybe something that I haven’t asked you or maybe something that you want to highlight? As we’re kind of nearing here? Is there anything that you want to share anything that you want to ask me?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 49:14

I’m really for the listeners, and people watching this. You’ve watched this conversation, it’s kind of has gone in and out. It’s almost we’re sitting in a bar talking. That’s what take conversations like this. Pick out one thing and then apply it on a daily basis. If you’ve got ideas, put them in action, or if you need help, like if you’re stuck or you need an introduction, contact me.

Johanna Rothman

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:59

Who is Johanna Rothman?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 01:03

You might, actually if I’m being kind of a ‘why’ is asked, I hope that I can say that on this, I guess. You might have to edit that out. I have a big mouth and I have a lot of experience in various contexts, not everybody’s contexts but a lot of experience and I applied that hard earned experience to the issues of management and product development and everything that comes along with that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:42

Does that come from, before I started recording, we talked about how we’re actually not too far from each other right now. I’m in Portland, Maine, you’re in Arlington, is that in the New England edge or is it something that New Englanders, is that part of the big mouth or innocence?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 02:06

No, I don’t think so. I think it’s me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:11

That’s awesome.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 02:13

I don’t think it’s, no, I think that there are a lot more. I know a lot of other people here who are much calmer and everything like that. So, I actually put in my bio, I offer frank advice and that helps get my clients, it helps my potential clients decide whether or not I’m the right person for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:46

That is great. When it comes to, I guess, you know books, you’ve written close to 20 books, 18 I believe right now and counting. Do you have a favorite one?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 03:03

No, that’s like, asking if you have a favorite child. No.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:09

I only have one child right now. So, you know, it’s for me, it’s easy, so maybe I can’t really relate.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 03:17

Yeah, I know I have two children. Well, they’re grown so it’s hard to call them children but they are. So, every book is unique. I don’t write the same book again and again and I really don’t like doing second editions. I do have some second editions but I prefer not. I prefer to write a book and make it so it’s, not universal but long lived, right? I’m not tied to a technology and tied to a time. So, I’ve done a pretty good job with that. So, for me right now since we are recording this and the Modern Management Made Easy books are out, the Modern Management Made Easy books are my ‘favorite’ and assumes consulting book, that will be my favorite.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:20

Great, what is your process? I think I was listening to one of the podcasts. I don’t know exactly which one and you talked about, like, you know, the discipline of writing every day. And you know, how do you get into the habit because like, I can relate a little bit to that because I started writing a book and that discipline of writing every day really made the difference. As soon as I stopped, I stopped writing, it’s been a while since I saw it. What would you recommend to those that hopefully want to write but also like, how do you get back out of that writer’s block, is it just start writing again? Or like, what’s your space, how do you kind of, not necessary, force yourself but help yourself focus on writing?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 05:11

So, well I really like what you said, help yourself focus, right? Because I actually write in, often in 15-minute blocks because I am busy just the same way everybody else is, right? So, I did a little bit of writing before we got on this morning, I actually only did five minutes of writing, that’s what I had. And I have, I put aside time on my calendar because it’s been a crazy week. So today, I actually have several one-hour blocks that I put inside those blocks to write in 15-minute increments. So, I write for 15 minutes and then I tend to walk around because I mean, I need to get my blood moving, I need a change of venue so that I have more ideas. And so, for me, it’s all about if you get out of the habit of writing, do the smallest thing you can to get back into the habit and you don’t need a lot of time, 15 minutes every single day is much more sustainable than an hour, right, at least in my experience.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:30

Yeah, that’s a very good advice and again, like I can relate though, it’s just because it is so tough and like if you think it’s too big, it’s almost like you know, when we talk about an agile you know, those be buys those smaller chunks of work and get those done. To come back to New England and summer, where would you like to spend, is there a place because for me, like between Croatia and Montenegro and New England, I always debate like, where would I rather spend the summer because I love summers in New England. Is there another place for you besides New England or maybe you’re more of a fall person because fall in New England is also nice?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 07:19

I really like it here and I was just whining this morning to my husband, that we do not have enough money to buy a mansion on the cape. We just don’t and wait, there’s something about the cape that really calls to me, Cape Cod, for our listeners who were not in the New England area. Maybe because I went to camp on Cape Cod, back when I was a kid, I loved it. It was a wonderful thing and if I could be anywhere inside of water, that would be really good. Yeah, but not, so yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:04

The reason that I ask, I’ve read one of your posts recently about reset and you said like, you know, summer is a good time for you to reset and kind of you know, rethink what you’re doing? Could you maybe elaborate on that like, why you think resets and readjustments are important because I think in our, you know, today’s life, everything, I feel like I’m busier since COVID. And it’s harder to reset because it’s just a continuous kind of flow, both personal as well as work related stuff. So, let’s talk a little bit about reset.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 08:44

So, in that post, I believe it was around July 1, somewhere around there and I find it, so I always have goals for the year and in order to achieve those goals, I break them down into monthly goals. And I use rolling wave planning for every single week because I have opportunities as a consultant to speak or consult or coach or something, then I did not know about it at the beginning of the week or the month of the year but I want to be able to take advantage of some of those opportunities. So, I’m always replanting in the small. However, if I don’t track what I’m doing for a yearly basis, then I don’t actually make the progress on what to make in a year. So, for example, I trust the number of published words or publishable words I have because I’m a writer, right? And that’s what writers do, we track the words and I find that if I don’t track the words, I don’t always get my 15 minutes of writing every day. So, that’s a reinforcing measure right, it reinforcing good stuff. And then if I look back at the first half of the year and I see where I am in relationship to where I wanted to be, then I can say, well, what do I need to change? Now, some people do this quarterly, I find that still quarterly is, I’m still working on those small rolling waves inside the larger months, inside the larger year already. If I’m not where I want to be at the halfway mark, I still have a chance to fix the year.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:41

So, you’re on a different fiscal year, kind of like government, you know, when it starts in July versus like, most of us, you know, think about like, what am I going to do at the end of the year? You know, what are my goals for this year but I really like the idea of reset, rethinking things in the summer. So, that’s something I’m going to try and apply myself but it’s also that rolling, kind of like, I really like, I’ve done that in the past but I think we all can do a better job of, you know, kind of, like what we preach about, talk about actually apply in our own work.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 11:19

So, I’ve been writing about Rolling Wave Deliverable Based Planning, since I think 96, or seven or eight or nine, very, a long time and I find that I mean, I use this for my own work, right? That’s how I get, if people ask me all the time, how do you write so much and you talk so much and I have the same number of hours as anybody else but I use, that’s why I find Rolling Wave Deliverable Based Planning so helpful. And that’s one of the things we have as Agilers, right? We might have a big goal for a product, for me, that’s a book or a workshop and I cannot get it all done in one day or one week or even one month, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:15

But it’s also easy to get all around that. Like, when I think about anything big, it’s like, it’s easier to say no, than yes. So like, you know, when we think big, you know, when we chunk it down to smaller, like you said, I really liked what you said earlier about, like, even if I can write for five minutes, it’s keeping me in that mindset of just keep going. Because that’s how I always thought like, I need at least an hour, you know, and you don’t.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 12:44

I really increased my throughput when I started to write in less time. I used to always block in an hour and I need to do it in an hour. Yeah, no, now I need 15 minutes so I write a whole lot more.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:02

And that’s what we talked about in software development too in this sense, like it’s the same principle. So, applying it to writing is also, you recently talked about or wrote about work life balance and what it means to you. It’s related to this topic because you know that’s important, too and could you talk about that a little bit and bring some light to that post?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 13:27

Sure. So, I’m pretty open about the fact that I have vertigo, I have permanent vertigo. I am always a dizzy bright, right? I moved my head in the world most of it all. I walked with a rollator, there. Yeah. And I, yeah, it’s right behind me. I walk all the time with a rollator because if I walk with my rollator, I can actually get exercise. I get nice and warm. I read hard, I get my heart rate up. It’s everything I need and the people in my neighborhood think I’m nuts. I don’t care, I am nuts, this is totally fine. However, if I don’t balance my physical health with my emotional health with my intellectual and mental health, right, all of this is really necessary for us. So, I put my health first, as if I don’t put my health first, I cannot be a good wife and a good mother. Although I’m sure that my kids were like, a little less mothering now, I cannot be a good consultant, I can definitely not be a good writer. So, for me, it starts with, how do I keep myself healthy in all ways and then how do I extend my ability to keep myself healthy, to my family, to my work, to my clients, to my community, all that stuff. And, you know, I wrote in manage your job search that I don’t believe in work life balance, you only have life and everybody needs to find what works for them in any given time of their lives but we all need to make our choices so that we optimize for what we need at the time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:27

Do you think it’s easier as a consultant versus, work both as a consultant outside and inside companies and like, I’m sure you have as well? And like, it’s a little bit different when you’re in a system that’s not also helping you make that decision, right? So, what do you think our companies are doing today to help people because ultimately, it is our decision, right? But companies can make it easier than employees to make that decision and to prioritize, you know, what’s important to them at any given moment.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 15:59

I’m going to take a little issue with that, I’m going to say, well, while companies might make that easier for employees, my experience is that very few managers actually think about that for their staff, right, for the people that they live and serve. Back when I was a manager inside organizations, I was, if I had to give myself a rate, I was a kind of 50/50 on extending enough empathy to the people I lived and served. I think I am better with that now, I certainly practiced a lot more but I think it’s really incumbent on people to say, I will work nine to five, return to six or eight to twelve and then I need a few hours with the kids and then I can come back to work. I had a job once as a manager, right, I was there from nine to five on the dot and sometimes only 4:30, depending on what my kids needed that day, right? So, and I went back to work after supper, I did a whole bunch of report generation, I call, I did phone screens for hiring people. I worked after supper but I had a very hard stop probably earlier than they wanted any manager to actually finish for the day but I had small children, I needed to do something like that. So, I did.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:43

That’s about discipline, though. Like, you have to really be disciplined about what you do, when you do it. Like, it goes back to writing too because in a sense, you know, you have to prioritize for yourself. So, it’s a two-way thing and what I’m getting, you know, from this is, sometimes, I’ve done this myself and I’ve seen others where like, we kind of put it on others and half of the work, we have to make sure that it’s on us in a sense, like I have to make that decision. I’m going to leave by 4:30 and I’m not going to make excuses but I also know that I have to finish stuff. So, I’m going to be disciplined about my time boxing and what I’m doing, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 18:26

Yeah, so I mean, I told all the people I lead, right? I was the manager for 17 people, that I explained to them, here’s my day, if you want me after, in this time, where I’m with my kids, you don’t get me. And this is back before we had ubiquitous cell phones. So, I gave my home phone number to the people in my team and I said me if you’re really need me, you can call me after 7:30 because husband is dealing with small children. I am back at work and if you really need me, if it cannot wait until the next day and I gave my boss my home phone number and my team and I think we all need to have boundaries about where we work, when we work, what we do. I’m not sure if this is discipline, maybe it is, back before I had the vertigo I worked out every single morning, starting at about 6:30 in the morning. My husband and I got up at six, I was in the gym by 6:30, I was done by nine-ish, 8:30 whatever. I had long workouts. So, especially when I was working from home as a consultant and I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed having the discipline of going to the gym every single morning, Monday through Friday, I had different workouts for different days because you know, that’s what you do. Yeah, but I happen to like my routines and I’m not sure if it’s discipline or routines but whatever it is, it works for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:21

You wrote with, I’m thinking about like remote and it is a lot of times, I guess, maybe harder. And I’m going back to the book that you wrote with Mark on remote and distributed teams, what are some of the tips that you can maybe give people, is it again just routines when it comes to working from home and it’s a little bit hard sometimes because you know, kids are at home, everybody’s at home, more probably distractions, I’m assuming? You don’t have, I know I struggle sometime of finding time for myself because as soon as I’m done here, I walk out. You were right there, where like, you know, you sometimes you had that ride or whatever it is in between, what are some of the tips they will give people to deal and be more maybe discipline or organized now that we’re mostly distributed and remote?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 21:12

So, the hours of overlap are so important and when Mark and I offered an hours of overlap chart and there’s Google Docs that people can also use for themselves. We only had it in ours and now what I think, I’m pretty sure that Mark and I both agree, I would not do hours, I would do either 20-minute segments or 30-minute segments because we are not, this is not normal, remote work. We are all at home and our kids are with us and I bet there are some parents out there who cannot wait for the start of the school, they are just done being home with their kids. I actually said to Mark; my husband as opposed to Mark Kilbv, my co-writer. I said to my husband and it’s a good thing our children are old and grown and out of the house as I’m not sure I would have made it. Yeah, I mean, I would have, we all would have gone nuts, this house is not big enough for four people all doing their own work. So, I think that anybody who’s home with children is just astonishing but to go back to how I would do it is, in 20- or 30-minute segments, you have the option of we will work together here, we will take a break here and we all need to do something else, we will be back at work together. So, the more you can create those little time boxes of when we will all be together and know in advance, then you can all commit to that. Which means that anybody with a really small child, that’s really hard but anybody with children who are able to manage themselves for 20 minutes at a time, this is still doable.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:16

It’s also easier to find maybe those smaller chunks and a lot of times you just reconnect, realign, you know or just, you know, from a communication standpoint, it’s probably a lot easier to do something that we’re doing here; video and probably screenshare rather than just you know, emails. To come back to your kids, you recently wrote about how you judge or how you judge if something is good or how good something is, you used the analogy with buying a dress for your second daughter, could you maybe talk about that I enjoyed reading that as well.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 23:55

Thank you, I’m so glad you’re enjoying the creative and adaptable life flow, thank you. I’m never sure how many people actually read that. So, a lot of mothers of the bride, mothers of the groom have these flowing long dresses and they look really lovely and chiffon flows directly into the brakes of my rollator. And I discovered that the hard way at my older daughter’s wedding. So, I have very different criteria for this dress than I had for the first dress. And I find that especially, if we think about that as an analogy to the products that we create, until we start to put something in front of our users, they don’t know what they really want and their criteria change. And so, we always hear at least I used to always hear this a lot in the old days of software development, you gave me what I asked for but it’s not when I need. And when we can change that and that’s all about changing the criteria. How do we get to the point where we can see what we really need?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:15

It’s all about learning that criteria evolves as you learn, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 25:19

Yeah. So, I learned at my older daughter’s wedding, I’m going to take that learning and change what I do for this next wedding. And I think a lot of us, we realize how differently we use technology now and how we could use it in the future? And can we be perfect at this, absolutely not? But we can be better at it and that means we need more deliverables, more assessment as we go and to be willing and open to changing that criteria.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:04

And that’s the O.P.I, I mean like, in a sense, it goes back to those outcomes, what are you trying to do and you know, in your instance, you’re trying to be comfortable and enjoy your daughter’s wedding as well as look good. So, whatever is going to get to that outcome. Maybe, to switch gears a little bit, another thing that I found interesting is you wrote about policies and procedures and how they increase friction and that’s really like, you know, a systemic. For me like, you talked about how over the years, we add policies, we add and maybe at some point, they made sense but a lot of times, you know, they’re outdated or you know, the context has changed. And as managers, as leaders, importance of understanding the system and understanding the policies within that system and evolving those policies or maybe loosen up those policies so they’re not, as you know, loosen up the guardrails, I guess. So, could you talk about that? Like, why did you write that? Like, what triggered that thought to write that article because I’m assuming you always have something that triggers an idea or thought?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 27:21

Yeah, several things, almost all of these, a lot of the policies I see are because somebody made a mistake and we want to, in effect, punish everybody else or we’re trying to manage risks of some sort. And the risks I see are often about money but the policies and the mistakes are often a banner of product development. So, I gave the example in there, a management sign up for deployment and this one, this was a client of mine, they had wrapped themselves so far around the axle with asking for signups that the managers no longer understood anything in the code. Right? So, the managers had to sign off on deployment but they didn’t know anything in the code. I mean, I asked these people, do you know about the internals? No, my people tell me what’s going on? Okay, fine. Yeah and because they had all these signups they needed a separate deployment team. So, the deployment team did not know what was in the code and if they did not deploy in the right order, which was the example I gave, then they did an upgrade to the database before they did all of the preparation for the upgrade to the database. They had no way to rollback. Well, no easy way to rollback and so all of this risk management with signups and a separate deployment team actually created the exact problem that they wanted to avoid. So, I said to them, what would it take for you to be comfortable with having a team, just choose any team at all? Deploy on Monday and then another team to deploy on Tuesday and another team to deploy on Wednesday, what would it take for you to be comfortable with that? They said well, a whole lot more testing. Okay? Maybe go to a staging server and tested there first, I said, okay, right, how can you get comfortable with going to production right away? What would it take? So, we talked about their continuous integration and then their pipeline to get to continuous delivery. And they’re not continuous in the sense of what a lot of other people think is continuous now, where any team can deploy at any time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:02

But it’s a step probably in the right direction. Yeah.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 30:05

Yeah, they do have automated deployment from 2am to 4am and then a whole bunch of testing as they go. And they always have somebody on call, I’m not so excited about that but nobody has to respond until 6am. So, they have a system that’s working better, that does allow for more trust and at some point, maybe they will just deploy during the day, I even hope that that happens. But I think it’s so hard for managers to trust when something goes wrong, everybody feels badly and instead of saying, how do we recover faster from that, that’s when they put all these policies and procedures in place.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:57

So, there’s that connection between policies and procedure, risk or recently, I saw somewhere written here, every agile approach manages certain risk, right? And then there’s trust, so policies and procedures, risks and trust. So, when it comes to managers, we just said, like, my people and my peeps got it, I don’t have to worry about, you know, this risk management in traditional sense. And from traditional project management was something that project manager was responsible for or maybe you would have a risk management team but it wasn’t really you know, what we talked about in agile words, like, the distributing and everybody’s responsible for risk, you know and everybody should be having their eyes open and, you know, when it comes to risk and we should have trust to make sure that we’re not putting policies in place. How have you seen this distribution of or taken like a lot of times, developers or I mean any developers, anybody on the scrum team, anybody that is doing the work has a difficult time accepting that they need to manage their own work or that they actually need to manage risk? So, how do you help people understand, I’m assuming that you agree that they should be thinking about risk, they should be thinking about manage their own work? How do we help people like that maybe see the value in managing risk and managing their own work?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 32:25

So, this is where thinking about outcomes versus outputs is so important. I am a huge fan of having a product goal, right, we are doing this product for these people, for these kinds of outcomes and if we always think about that as we create smaller stories and if we always think about that as we integrate performance and security into everything that we do, then we are much more likely to reach the outcomes that we want and manage risk as we proceed. So, this is a function of the project owner, that possibly the project managers and where management cannot take that away from the people on the team, right? If you delegate a problem and its outcomes to a team, right, it may be in the form of a product, maybe in the form of a service, then you cannot take it back. Right? That’s really important. You cannot be wishy washy about, yeah, you have the responsibility and you have the authority to do this and then on Friday afternoon, no, I’m not happy, I’m going to take it back. You’ve cannot do that as a manager in any management form, right? I don’t care if you’re called a scrum master or project manager or a people manager, you have to, once you offer the team, the problem and the outcomes, that’s the role of delegation, you cannot take it back at any time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:10

And that’s I think really important point which is hard, it also like it’s a mindset like, for we’ve been so like, conditioned over the years, right, to think certain way, to work certain way. One of those is that, hey, you know, I have a manager and they’re responsible for everything, I’m just going to go in, code or test or do my job and that’s obviously changing but like, I was teaching a class here at University of Maine and kids today and in general, like are not thinking the way or they’re not being conditioned in a way to think about it. They’re like, I’m a full stack developer, I’m a problem solver, I need to think about the customer, I should be talking to the customer and a lot of times, like, when I work with clients, especially like larger companies or government agencies, it’s like you know, I’m a back-end developer on this application, don’t ask me to do anything else. Right? So, little bit of that is I think conditioning and I know like, I’ve read that, you know, your earlier days or late 1970s, late 1980s, you worked on cross functional teams. So, what got me thinking is like, you know, like, what has changed when you reflect back? Like, what are the things look like then because a lot of times when I talk to people, they say, like, we’re agile back then and we’re doing some of this stuff. So, maybe could you take us down memory lane and talk about, like, you know, how some of this stuff back in 70s, 80s was, you know, kind of all about, had the same principles that we talk about. And at least to me, it’ll be interesting, because I’ve talked to people and they tell me stories about, like, you know, agile wasn’t, you know, born in 2001. This way of working was so, when you reflect what are some of the thoughts that come to mind?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 36:04

So, up until 1985, when the personal computer came out, we all had to share computers, right? We had either mainframes or mini computers. So, on my first job as well, we had a mainframe and there was the guy who did the JCL and we had key punch ladies, which was kind of crazy because in college I’d actually worked on a time-sharing operating system. So, we all had our own monitors. We had time slices on the computer itself but it was used to a keyboard not a key punch. Yeah, fine but there were no formal testers on our very large program in 1977. We had developers and we all looked at each other’s design, we all looked at each other’s code, we had religious design reviews, religious code reviews and religious testing as a team. Right? So, the team would go into the lab and say, is this working now? So, we did not have supposedly independent verification and validation, that worked out fairly well, I have a funny story of when I went to implement conference calling for a telephone system. I made it so that the general could only listen, everybody else talked as I flipped the bid, fine. He had a really good attitude about this because I said to him, I have not tested, this is the first time I’ve tested it. He said to me, go flip that bid the other way, fine but then, when I worked on a mini computer on analytical chemical instrumentation, there were seven or eight of us as in the software department, right, we had a department. We, again, revision of this code and design, we tested with each other and for each other because when I’m in development mode, I don’t see the same things is when I’m in testing mode and then I worked on machine vision systems on specific, on I guess, proprietary hardware. So, we all had access to the operating system, we all had access to all the libraries and we changed what we needed to do. I mean, we had to get, if we wanted to change the operating system, we really need to get permission from everybody else. Did we really wanted to change the OS? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. So, well we all work together as cross functional teams and I think for those first couple of machine vision companies on mini computers, I found that we worked in small chunks, where the chunks as small as they are now, no, except for me because I had learned about the 90% done schedule game in my first job at a school. I was 90% done for five weeks and well, I went to 91%, 92%,92 and a half percent but my boss finally took pity on me. He said would you like to know a secret advice? I said yes because I have no idea when this is going to be done and he told me that inch pebbles, right? When it’s your date task, either done or not done, does this sound like small stories to you? So, I started to use inch pebbles in 1977 because that’s when I knew I was totally broken on this particular project. When you use inch pebbles and rolling wave planning, it looks a lot like what we do as Agilers now, not exactly the same, I did not use test driven development, I was not that smart. In fact, I stared at it, for cleanroom just stare at it. So, I did not do everything back then but a lot of what we use now, I’ve been using since the 70s and the big change came in 1985 and 86 when the personal computer came up and that’s when managers thought for only four grand or five grands, I can buy each developer, his or her own computer and really focus down on what that developer needs to do. So, we had this interesting confluence of problems, project management software that was focused on resource efficiency, what is each person doing separately and a personal computer that allowed each person to focus down on their work?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:08

And that’s when they started measuring lines of code and all of that, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 41:13

Yeah, so that really changed, well it reinforced how managers thought about managing and how project managers thought about managing. I am convinced that that’s why the Agile Manifesto was born.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:32

To bring us back and to go back there. Yeah, that’s probably interesting.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 41:38

Yeah, 15 years of resource efficiency thinking was horrible.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:45

Assuming that we can get the you know, people confused with being busy developers, writing code and getting stuff done and if you look at it from that side, you can get easily confused. I wanted to maybe to switch a little bit here. I was interested in, I wanted to get your thoughts on your recently collaborative business agility Institute and their job number four title, reclaiming management. So, I wanted to get your thoughts first on, has management become a dirty word? Like, a lot of times people now use management and it’s like, you know, it’s a dirty word like, you know, management is bad or so I wanted to ask you first that and then maybe you could elaborate on what did you learn from being the editor and being involved in that project?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 42:37

So, I think that for too many Agilers, management is a dirty word because they use control; command and control as equivalency for management. A management’s job is not about command and control, a management’s job is to create the environment where everybody can succeed for a greater purpose, for that overarching goal, to answer the why, to answer the value that each person, each team, each products brings to the organization. So, management is all about the culture, creating and refining the culture that will create great products, right? If we have a culture and that people can really succeed in, they will create great products. So, management is all about the guardrails and constraints that allow people to do great work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:30

[not sure 43.31] in the system, in a sense, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 43:33

Yes. If managers are not meta about the work, about the system, the environment, the culture, then managers are probably commanding and controlling, not all that useful. So, and what I learned from this issue, so I’ve been the technical editor for Agileconnection.com for six years, several years ago and I really enjoyed it. I really love helping writers find their voice, show their gems, their thoughts that are really useful. So, I really enjoyed that but I don’t want to be a book doctor or any of that, that’s, no, that’s not for me. That’s why I offer writing workshops because I want people to be able to do that for themselves. Now, when I learned, I had such a good time with this issue, first of all, there were several other people I’ve wanted to invite for this issue that they’ve been doing really great work about agile management and I could not invite them. Evan Laybourn, the B.A.I leader, director, whatever he’s called said Johanna, you have to keep to a word count, fine. I will keep to my word count well, right if you have to, you really have to worry about the word count for the paper cut, yeah, fine. So, I had a strict word count, well, not strict but a boundary.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:09

Probably a range, yeah.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 45:12

A boundary. So, I had to really manage my desire for all the people I really wanted, that was a challenge. And I got some wonderful essays from amazing people who you might or might not know. So, let me see if I can find my, I’m going to find my…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:39

Yeah, I had that list. I actually took a look at I don’t know if I have it handy but I definitely looked at the articles and people on that list and I agree.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 45:51

Well, it’s a combination of consultants and practitioners, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:57

Which is always a good mix.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 45:59

Yeah, Kath, Doug Norton. Boris Gloger, Jeffrey Frederick, Barry O’Reilly, Gunter, Esther Derby and Douglas Squirrels are all consultants and well known, really smart people. And then there’s Shawn Flaherty and a case study by Barry O’Reilly and Steve Leist. So, we have a nice mixture of real practitioners, people who might speak about this but only in their kind of a context and a whole bunch of other people who have seen many instances of interesting management and Agility in Agile Management and so, I’m really happy about this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:52

It’s great and it’s coming out soon, right? It’s not out yet.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 46:57

It’s not out yet and all I know is when I was supposed to be done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:05

I think I’m assuming the next couple of months but yeah. You talked about? Yeah. We’ll let people know, yeah. I think so because the other report is coming. Yeah. So, one of the things that made me to come back to you said, you know, managers are responsible for creating a culture. How do they do that? What’s culture? I mean, like, we talked about culture and mindset and these there but nobody really, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly. So maybe, what is your definition of culture and how do managers and leaders help create a culture or maybe some of the ways?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 47:41

Yeah, I’ve adapted my mind definition from Shine because I find that shine has artifacts, values, assumptions, they all get me confused and they’re not concrete. So, the concrete thing is, there are three pieces of the concrete pieces of culture, there’s working people discuss, how do we treat each other and what do we reward? And of the of all three of those, what do we reward is the most important piece. If we say, we don’t want firefighting but we reward individual work, that looks like firefighting, then that’s what we reward. Right? And if we say, if we reward managers on their deliverables, managers are not going to extend trust to the people who need to do the work, they’re not going to delegate work to people in terms of outcomes, right, not problems and outcomes. So, the rewards drive so much of the culture and the rewards are so hard to change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:55

And that’s the interplay between the rewards and the system and behavior and then you know, what cap of culture we create, which is a lot of times, you know, especially in the organizations that most of us deal with, work with, where we have a lot of layers in hierarchy where, you know, people that can change the policies and those rewards, is small percentage of people in the organization. So, for those managers and leaders to be able to do that and to enable the type of culture that’s maybe healthier for today’s environment is key. And I think, you know, I’ve been looking in interviewing people from HR and I think HR and finance is finally catching up to understand what role they play in this movement and how they need to help organization change those policies and maybe loosen up the guardrails. So, people can have a little bit more flexibility in defining those policies. So, managers can do their job in a sense and leaders can do their job.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 50:07

Well, if we can get finance to move away from managing with cost accounting to managing by throughput, that will be a huge thing. They saw after we’ve worked in cost accounting terms. Yeah and that’s a problem, when you would change the whole dynamic for the project portfolio instead of asking people to predict when they would be done or how much it’s going to cost, they could change the conversation. That’s how much do we want to invest for now? What’s the cost of delay of not having this thing? Are there any other pieces that would help the entire organization if we did them to reduce the friction all through the organization? Right? And it would change the conversation and if we can get HR to drive moving away from personal, individual rewards, we still need some of that. And the teams are much more likely to know who is actually done a good job and who has not, right? In an actual team, there’s not a lot of room for hiding.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:19

Self-regulating?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 51:21

Yeah, it’s much more self-regulating and if we can move away from just individual rewards to a combination of rewards and based on outcomes, based on the team’s value, I think that we are much more likely to succeed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:42

Right. Maybe, you know, for our last topic here, the podcast is called Agile to Agility and I talked about, you know, how you know, last 20 years were a lot about just agile doing agile, I hope the next 20 years will be about agile and agility because those two go together. And I want to tie back another thing that you wrote, which I really like about finite and infinite games. When we look at our agile community and what has happened and what where we’re kind of going, what do you think, you know, are we playing the finite or infinite games? Where do you think agile is going? What are next maybe five years, ten years? I don’t know. You’ve seen it all. So, do you have any insights into where we might be going?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 52:35

So, I’ve got to tell you, I’m an eternal optimist. Right? So, I need to preface it with that. I really hope that we stop fighting about the frameworks. I find frameworks, well, some frameworks are sort of useful, some are not comprehensible to me. I will just stop there. And I find that, the more we think about how do we use all the information we have for better business outcomes and if we start to focus on business outcomes, we are much more likely to get agility. I actually am working with a client right now, it’s a small client so I’m not sure if this is generally kind of transferable to anybody else, where I said to them, don’t worry about the teams, the teams are smart, they will figure out, they want to use scrum, they want to use flow, doesn’t matter. Whenever they want to use, it’s totally going to be fine but what really matters is that the managers have this same overarching goal and that their job is to create business outcomes, not outputs. And so, if you get the managers to collaborate, that will enable you to get to business agility. They said, I know Johanna, right? This is six months ago, I don’t know, you kind of looking crazy over there. I said, what have you got to lose, right? Try for three months and see what happens, so I’ve been coaching them all this time. They had this enormous breakthrough, where and of course, I’m under NDA, I cannot talk about who the client is or where they are but they had this enormous breakthrough and the teams are collaborating in ways that they had never collaborated before because the managers all had the same overarching goal. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:48

All in alignments, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 54:50

Yeah, some teams use scrum, some teams use flow, there’s a couple of programs that are using safe that’s fine. As long as they deliver on a regular keenness for those overarching business outcomes, that’s what really matters and this company is having their best quarter ever.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:15

And that points to it, you know, I’ve talked to several top leaders and it’s the same message essentially, we got to start thinking for ourselves and start contextualizing. You won’t see any more like where, you know, you’ve probably been part of, you know, I have like, where, you know, a publicly traded company of you know, 1000s of people everybody gets trained in Scrum or Kanban but it’s one or the other. And, you know, everybody has to do it this way or safe or whatever it is and I think what we’re heading into is more of contextualizing things, not written so like you just explained. It’s like, you know, give things freedom to understand what their context is and design whatever works for them rather than limiting them to a specific framework or you know, way of working. So, very interesting maybe as a last thing, what message, what do you want to leave us with for the end?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 56:15

So, I would like you to think for agility, I would really like you to think about what business outcomes can I contribute to? And who do I need to work with to contribute to them, right? How can we work as a team of a cross functional product team, a team of managers at all levels to really focus on business outcomes, so that we deliver what we want so our customers are happy for agility? And I will try doing my marketing thing, I’m not very good at this. So, I’ll try anyway, I offer a quarterly writing workshop that really helps people get out of their heads and get words on paper. So, if people are interested in that, they should email me or contact me in some way.

Patricia Kong

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:48

Who is Patricia Kong?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 00:51

Oh, my goodness. Patricia Kong is her mother’s daughter, I would say it like that. I am a very curious person that is always looking and finding myself at different intersections in the road. I’ve been at scrum.org for almost 10 years. And I’m really interested in people’s and organization’s behavior and misbehavior and why things work the way they do. So naturally, what I’ve been focused on is thinking about how at scrum.org, agility can work or does not work at the organization level. And so, you and I have talked about things like leadership and culture and all those things. So we’re trying to mesh those together.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:40

And maybe just to go back even a little bit. Before the scrum.org journey, you didn’t know agile, you were in a different industry, finance, if I remember correctly.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 01:56

Yeah, I started. So I started out in the financial industry in investment services, and it’s usually, gosh, I don’t know, it’s kind of like when you’re Asian American first generation, it’s like, you’re supposed to go into medicine, you’re supposed to go into maybe be a lawyer but my family isn’t straight up, you come here, you go to school, you are going to study business. And I went that way. And so my culture and even the beginning professionally, was very much of a certain, a culture and understanding that was based off of authority.

And then I actually moved out into, it’s just this curiosity thing where it was, is this how it is? And when we talk to young people about the future of work and how these things, it’s really interesting, because I had a lot of knowledge in the financial industry, but I will look to develop skills. And so I was recruited into research firm. And then I really started to do marketing strategy and tech and started to work with really big one be blessed companies. And I found myself in France, in Paris for love. And had some different stuff there, but really started to work with startup firms. And then I think like everybody, we’re working on technology, building stuff that didn’t work back against the wall. Let’s do that agile stuff. And so now, I think people are going to know that I’m really old.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:30

We’re all getting older.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 03:33

I’m trying to get over it. It’s fine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:36

You took Ken’s class, right? How did you get introduced to Scrum and Agile?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 03:44

Well, when I was in France, and we were building this technology. And I was in the ad space, we started to say, we had teams in France, we had teams in US, we had teams in Eastern Europe, and nothing was working. So we started to say, and the CTO was like, hey let’s look at this. Let’s look at this agile stuff, there’s a better way of working for us to collaborate. And so that was my exposure really to Agile and Scrum, we start to think about those things and that was really the exposure to this notion of product ownership. But of course, I was doing it quite bad thing, right?

Everything is like we must do this, we’re going to do it this way and you guys are the developers and here it is. We had a team in the UK. And because of love, I came back again to the US. And what I found was myself starting to work at smaller and smaller, smaller organizations. And at that point from that org was still quite small and I met Ken and he was working on something called the continuous improvement framework. So I started to get masterclasses from him. And also as an employee, joined the organization, thinking about how to streamline business and starting to develop new stuff. And that’s really been, and he and I are very friendly, and his wife and he’s always challenging me to think. So it’s always, every conversation is a masterclass with him.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:21

And you must I mean, like also staying with one organization for a decade is also indicative of just, you have to enjoy it, you have to be challenged otherwise, it’s probably not intrinsically motivating. So what are maybe the things that you’ve learned from Ken and what are the things that keep you at scrum.org?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 05:47

Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. And there’s Ken, there’s also the community and people like yourself, when I talk about community, I’ll extend it, right? We’re not just talking about professional scrum trainers of Scrum at org. But I never specially with the way my personality, other than my marriage would think that I would have such a long relationship that I would be sitting at a company for 10 years, I even still think about it now. And I wouldn’t say that I’m locked in a golden cage, right? I think that that’s something, have you heard that term?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:26

No. I can only imagine.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 06:31

There you think about the golden cage. As I talk to you, there’s a rock wall behind me, but the golden cage is this notion like, if I were to think about, right? You’re working in an organization and you don’t really have a clear view of the goals of the organization and the vision. And you don’t really have a great environment with trust and safety and those things, what might keep you there. And it must be, and I’m thinking it’s like a golden cage, you must be getting paid really well, there’s something else that just motivates you. So I just think of when I think of that, I’m thinking of a two by two, thinking of a golden age. So I think it’s just there’s still a lot of interesting problems to solve that are worthwhile, and I have the autonomy to do it.

And even some of the things that I get to talk about in conversations with people like yourself, and people who are very experienced and different thought leaders. There’s things that are provoked and provocative of how we can help people address problems. Because the flip side of that is that, we are having conversations, trying to help teams, help organizations, help people become more professional. And yet, what we find is that there, I don’t know, if you see this, I feel so sad when I can have a conversation, it’s like, that’s the same conversation I had 10 years ago, right? And there’s still a lot of people to help. And so it’s that full spectrum that I’m trying to serve. And Scrum.org gives me a platform to do that, right? And scrum gives me a platform to do that agility.

And these chocolate, Scrum and Scrum values and all the things that we’re thinking about. And then when people are thinking about just the journey that I’ve had and the stuff that I’ve worked on scaling, agility, does that make sense? What are you doing? How do we make sure that we’re doing this for the reason? Can you get into that as an organization? So right now, what we’re looking at is, what are the principles that we might think about for enterprise agility? And how can we start to use something simple like that, where we might help Scrum Masters or Agile coaches and leaders, people who are leading agility in the organization to take those and start to think about what they’re doing, what they’re not doing, where they can improve?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:01

Yeah, and maybe just to stick on that, the principles based, I was talking to Jeff Watts yesterday, and he was talking about how he’s working with Dave Snowden and [inaudible 9:14] on this order, they’ve developed this organic agility framework. And they have five principles there to. Why do you think, I mean, what’s the connection between values, personal values, principles, and then the specific behaviors and actions? Because I think the reason I ask is I believe we’re moving towards almost going back to the basics, understanding the principles and how they influence our actions. So what is the maybe my question is why principles based in how are things emerging for you when you talk about scaling in principles-based frameworks?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 09:59

Yeah, and for us, it might be some principles that we’re using, like you said, to get back to something foundational to anchor to see if what we’re trying to help people with is making sense. And if they don’t, we throw them away, if there’s more we improver or don’t improve. And it’s not like we’re trying to rewrite the Agile Manifesto, it’s really trying to dilute it, but it’s to focus on it not dilute it. But there was something that I was, I’ve done a lot of work, obviously around evidence-based management. And that’s really an attempt to help people use evidence as suggestions for how they make decisions, right? And it’s really about empiricism. And when I think about that model, there were three aspects that really struck me and struck the team. When we thought about, why measurement matters? Why this notion of evidence matters?

And the three things that we were using that we asked people to think about, was when you’re thinking about agile, when you’re thinking about how you run business, how you work together, we found that there’s this really interesting relationship for people to think about between their goals, their measurements, and their behaviors, and the relationship between those three things, start to bring out the values that you’re talking about in a few different ways. So if you think about the relationships, okay, now we know we have measures, but what are those measures tied to? Are they tied to the goals? Are they not? Is that goal transparent? How will that act? How will the people behave as a reaction to that? And then this notion of. what does that actually represent from the values of an organization? So we’re trying to say of course you could have a really big consulting company that’s helped this company write out their vision and their values and stuff.

But for me, when I think about, we just look at these three things, what are the goals, measures and behaviors? Maybe you’re not capturing any measures. Maybe you’re not thinking about the behaviors. But the interesting thing is because the human part or the behavior part of it is certainly what drives a lot of the complexity, right? So you start to think about all those things and how it works together. And that’s driving us to think about are there other principles in terms of how that affects the organization start to get into to do more detailed things, right? So goals, how do we think about outcomes? What about the portfolio? How do we reward teams, not individuals? What is it in terms of activity? What’s is the reward system? What does it mean to be crossing dependencies? What does that drive into a system? So those are a lot of things just from…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:55

Yeah. There’s the interplay between goals, measurements and behaviors and the actions. One of the things that I always find companies and people struggling is defining business value. And even in classes that I do, I ask people, raise your hand if you know how your product owner or how your company defines business value. And it’s like 90% of the class doesn’t even know how value is defined. In the ABM, you kind of look at four key values areas. So could we maybe spend a little bit of time just looking at how do you define value? And do you see the same thing? Where we talk about delivering value yet nobody has any freaking clue what value is.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 13:45

Yeah. That’s one of the reasons that we created the four key value areas, or we’re trying to have this conversation and we’re still having it, right? This notion, somebody just referred it to as, what is that value gap? But it’s still, do you know what value means to understand what that gap means, right? Like, is that just the little space when you’re taking the T, like, the little gap there or the tube, the metro. So was years ago is just, oh, we got to do Agile, we’re going to scale, we’re going to use Scrum. And we’re going to do this and we’re doing this in pursuit of value. And it’s like, well, what does value mean for you guys? Or the other side of it was, hey our organization leaders say we need to do Agile, but we’re not actually sure they know what that means.

So we need to measure stuff and show them and that comes back into the value. So we start to think about value in different ways. We start to say, hey, at that point, there were three current value, where are you in the organization? What do you have, right? If you think about how venture capitalists invest or if you think about how you run your portfolio or business, right, what do you have now? And then we say, well, that’s interesting but all companies usually do that. What do we have? Who are we? And we said there must be something about the market or outside unrealized value. So what is it that the customers actually want? What are those outcomes that we’re trying to fulfill? What is the opportunity there? What is the satisfaction gap for the customer, right? And so if we think about that as market, then the other key value areas that we talk about are your time to market, right?

So the time to get feedback, everybody’s usually focusing there, people sometimes confuse that with just how fast we are. But this is really about time to learn all those things. And then there’s ability to innovate. So can you actually innovate or you being held back and when you take those four things, and start to look at them in two ways, one holistically, so when you make a decision, what else does it affect if you’re trying to increase your speed? If you run really fast, is that great or are you running in the wrong direction? That’s how I think about time driving current value. And then the other one is that, you must know if you have a pain point somewhere. So it could be like a lens, let’s look at your, you can’t release, takes you to 14 months. Let’s look at your time to [inaudible 16:15] and build to innovate and see what we can do and see if we can start to affect some change in the other area using experimentation hopefully.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:24

Yeah, and maybe those another thing that kind of interests me in ABM, as far as when it comes to experimentation. So how do you measure an effect of an experiment? I think it’s more and more becoming evident that we need to innovate and try things. So from your perspective of the end perspective, how do we measure the effect of an experiment? Or do we just run?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 16:55

No, I think we should just keep doing stuff. That’s the easiest part, right? Well, for us, it’s really thinking about just the goal, right? So it’s like, if I think the notion of an experiment is that you’ll know if it’s true or not, what would you look at? And so if you’re trying to test things, so for instance, let’s say, I’m trying to have a small goal of releasing a new class, I need to one because of the company where we’re talking about how we scale our training, I need to know of this material, what is good? But let’s say I’m going to focus on is a transferable, is a knowledge transferable, it’s very different to create something that I will teach, versus 300 people are going to teach, right? So I need to test that and they need to say, what will I know to see if this is the sexually transferable knowledge?

And so it’s really getting into the, why are you doing something? Or what are you trying to learn? And I think ultimately, what’s good about that is that if we can think about these different goals that we have, we’ll just use that language, then we can say you know what? That thing that we’re trying to pursue out there, and that North Star, it’s not valid anymore. And if we think about COVID, right? The things that we’re trying to do, it’s not the same anymore, we have to do things differently, might not be relevant anymore. And then of course, COVID was trying to go down, open up, change again, right? So there are so many things in terms of just understanding why we’re doing stuff is just a little bit more streamlined.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:30

Yeah. And I don’t know, I mean, this is something again, I find in many organizations, many clients that like going back to those goals, that everybody understands the goals or you talked about focusing on activities, outputs and outcomes and even impacts, right? What are those longer-term impacts that we’re looking for? What do you think when it comes to leadership, why is there maybe a gap or lack of knowledge around like just goal setting and understanding how to get people organized, or not organized but motivate young girls, because people that I’ve talked to a lot of times are so disengaged, because they don’t really understand what the goals are, and what those goals are just delivered this, which would be some type of output. And what are you doing, how does ABM help with that? Because I think that’s one of the key when it comes to leadership, product ownership, whatever you want to classify it as we struggled to help people understand the goals?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 19:40

Yeah, there’s so many layers in there and your question was long enough. My first sarcastic answer will be softened now whereas I think is it might just be sometimes because I’ve been in a golden cage. You just got to protect your territory and your little golden egg kind of thing. But I think there’s a few things, which is, when we use, like I said before, when you’re just talking about evidence, it’s kind of as a product owner, I should be paying attention to some of the things that work or don’t work and be able to say that just because even something for instance, it’s like, we have, we’re really successful, we’re setting up future teams, future set teams, that assumes that the future should live forever what I mean? Like, you start to think things that are the behavior that starts to get in there.

The other notion is, is that there’s this whole notion of complexity in there. And when you’re talking, I was talking to a consultant, and he was saying you know what? I hated it when I was a project owner. And I had to try to predict these things, because we could put in [inaudible 20:53] future A, point in future B, nobody uses them put in feature C. Now everybody’s using it, right? There’s just what experiments are you going to try to run, why? And I think leadership when you’re talking about activities, outputs and outcomes, when we start to think about outcomes, and why somebody else is using or is buying our product. It will drive us to think and act in different ways.

And then you can use that for good or bad, right? And that brings up for me when I think about societal impact. So think about Amazon, how they’ve been driving their business during COVID and all these things. Yes because people want to buy things easily, they want it to come to their house, they don’t want to have to go to the store and all these things. And then you see like bass was going to the moon and a cowboy hat and he’s like, Thank you. You paid for all this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:45

But somebody benefited from this whole situation.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 21:47

Yeah. And I think that that’s where we’re starting to see. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Colada Perez, and how she talks about the different pivots in time. But there’s two things and we’re starting to see it line up right now and I think COVID in the economy kind of drove it out is that, when we start to look at companies and leadership, employees and people are starting to say I have beliefs and I have a value system. Do you support that? And what is your organization trying to do to support the things that I believe in? and if you don’t, then I have another option. And there’s all these other different things that have started to come up where leader start need to start to think about things because people have more options where they work.

How do they work? Should they work for themselves? And we’ve started to see fun things now where people can still do good work from anywhere. And they will make those choices or at least they’ll feel dirty about it if they buy from a company or work with somebody they don’t want to. And eventually somebody is going to hear about that. So it’s really interesting, this dynamic, they’re looking at how can organizations and leaders start to think about the societal impact that they’re having on and what that means for us as a whole society. So there’s this whole mindset shift from not just the fixed mindset to the growth mindset, which is about the individual. But this beneficial mindset of what I do, hopefully helps somebody else.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:23

Well, it’s also like, I think shifting in almost influencing the organization, it used to be where stockholders were the major group that was influencing the direction of the organization, and employees just had to suck it up and just do whatever the company did. Now, the shift is, like you said, more and more people have opportunity to pick and choose. And since we acknowledge work, people or companies work the smartest people in their organization.

So those strategic goals, maybe to go back to the key elements of ABM and maybe explore the goal section, like those strategic goals are now impacted or influenced by employees as well. Could you think of a strategic so you have strategic goals, intermediate goals, intermediate tactics, tactical goals? In what ways, for instance, maybe we can take some that work or some, in what ways are strategic goals influenced by the employees or partners or people that have?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 24:36

Yeah, well, this is too easy because, for us, we’re a mission-based organization. So we’re always trying to figure out what is it outside of the White Tower that we’re trying to work on. And for us, let’s just talk about enterprise and agility and it’s just there’s been an interesting thing, transparently of seeing sometimes coaches and consultants. So we have, we work with a network companies or work with professional scrum trainers, our courseware is really collaborated on the feedback that we get from trainers who are teaching in the field to provide a very defined and updated and consistent experience. And so at least from the enterprise level, there’s two things that are interesting, because there’s people actually work with organizations. This is the wall that I keep hitting, same wall and I engage in, my colleagues engaged with organizations, and we work with other companies, is the same wall. So we’re trying to solve that.

And then what we see at the same time is that we’re doing, that we might have trainers and consultants who really only were at that point, comfortable working or only wanted to work at the team level, they’re starting to naturally work and it becomes your great coach, somebody wants to talk to you, you’re working with larger organizations. But the strategic goal that at least I’ve been thinking about for enterprise stuff that we work on is how do you stop zombie transformations? That’s a thing. You know what I mean? Like the lipstick on a [inaudible 26:18]? Or what is it that you can actually use? How do we actually make that valuable for organizations so that it’s not just lip service? So that whole term of zombies scrum or zombie transformations, that’s the thing that we’re looking to do.

And it’s the course that’s around evidence-based management is one attempt, evidence-based management in itself is just one attempt. We tested that and when you talk about breaking that into smaller goals, we released an assessment certification, didn’t mark it, it just wanted to see what would happen and start to see what do people struggle with. So we have a lot of that firsthand data about what people struggle with. And interesting thing around product ownership is the area when I would just see, because we have different areas in our assessments of where people perform really well, and they don’t. And product owner, for the people that take that test, the last time I checked, it was around this notion of value, and value management. And that not was interesting, because I think in the PSM one that we have, the worst performing session was on just the scrum framework. There’s a lot of interesting things there that start to drive those conversations.

But if you want to bring it back even to the goal, sometimes what we find is for a larger organization, it’s hard to have that conversation and find out about the goals. That’s been easier in smaller companies as you would probably know, you know, can we have that goal conversation and see what experiments we need to run? That becomes a lot easier in a larger organization where there’s a lot of different factors, it might just say, where do you hurt the most, and then start to evolve from the goals because now especially where we’re just saying, we need to be smarter about what we do with our time, where we invest our money, where invest our energy as people and as organizations, the conversation makes more sense around ABM. And we can say, well, your goals are this. So what are you going to do when we think about weapon capacity? What do we want to invest in? And so that’s been interesting, especially, what are the ideas that the teams can come up with to try reach those goals?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:34

Yeah, and another thing that I see that’s tied to this is like when you have organization that’s all-in silos and you have a specific goals like an enterprise level, then at some point, the interests start conflicting, if you have multiple goals, and if you don’t have that, Northstar. So that alignment around tactical goals and how they align to intermediate goals to how they align to bigger goals, a lot of times can be messed up just by how we are structured. Do you see that? And maybe you know some of the Agile frameworks help with that, or don’t help with that.

Because I mean, last five years or 10 years has been all about scaling frameworks. And the more people that I talk to, the more people are saying, we’re moving away, not necessarily quickly, but we’re going to move away from frameworks. And it’s going to go back to understanding those fundamental principles, and then contextualize and creating frameworks that are specific to our need, current needs. Do you see Nexus, Safe and all these other frameworks living on and getting more and more popular? Or do you think what you alluded to earlier, like, we’re going to see a little bit more flexibility in the framework stem cells or back to the principles? Any thoughts on that?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 30:05

Gosh, you’re going to share your thoughts.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:08

Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, if you think about it and we want to be honest, most people that are doing scrum are not doing Scrum. Most people trying to do any of the scaling frameworks, don’t know what the heck they’re doing. So it’s almost I use the analogy of a recipe. It’s great, recipe and I don’t know, if I told you like my New England clam chowder recipe, in a sense, it can look really nice and you can be very excited about that chowder. But if you don’t have all the ingredients, and you’ve never cooked anything or improvised then what are the chances that you’ll mess up? And I think that’s what we do, we take people through classes or through assessments, and we assume that they understand the recipe.

But when the ingredients change, they don’t know what to do. So imagine that if it’s with Scrum, which is pretty lightweight framework, when you start talking about scaling frameworks and my own experience, as a coach and consultant is name a company that has successfully implemented these frameworks by the book if they didn’t have chefs, and some really experienced cooks in their organization to contextualize those frameworks. So my thought is that we’re going to need to build that capability inside organizations to come up with frameworks and maintain frameworks or context specific, rather than what we’ve seen over the last years is…

Speaker: Patricia Kong 31:52

You see that something like here’s what works for us and Scrum and we’ll take the pieces that or do you think that there’s always just, this is the basic part that you need to keep.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:04

I think you’re always going to go, this is the basic part. So like understanding parasitism understanding like the, but if you don’t even have the basic parts, and a lot of times even when for instance, if you talk about government agencies, they don’t even have the basic stuff. So how do we even help them move from very rigid structure, even if you ask them have cross functional teams, they’re going to say, well, we can restructure to have cross functional teams. So I think it’s harder but I don’t know, if we want to put a mirror to ourselves as a community.

Look at what we’ve created, we’ve created something, a movement that’s very popular but not very successful in my opinion. It’s successful if we want to rate it against them, compare it to what was before, yes, but boring promises versus what it actually does, in my opinion, including going back to evidence based management or just like understanding, how do we know that we’re improving? Most organizations don’t, they focus, like you said, on those activities and outputs, they don’t even… Yeah, so that’s my thought. I don’t know if you agree or disagree.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 33:25

No, there’s so many in there. So I don’t know, if I mentioned this to you. But EBM came the crux of this whole notion of EBM. Because I remember I said I was thinking about continuous improvement, right? It came out of, we have to scale, we’re going to scale agility, we’re going to $2 million, roll up that chain training, and we’re saying, hey, hold up. Do you know that if that works for you, why don’t you find some evidence that it’s actually working how to use it. And that’s actually how that came up. And this very people talk about its super, it can get very theoretical about how we’re working on things in EBM, and you just talk about empiricism, the KBAs. But when you think about when I’ve seen different implementations of EBM, I don’t care what you’re using, it just show me that you’re trying and that you’re getting better.

And that you have a goal and you understand why you’re working on it. Is to me what is relevant, and you’ll identify opportunities, and then you make a decision whether you should pursue that opportunity and or not, right? So when you talk about just in a product equality gap, or if you talk about, there’s this whole new market we want to pursue or there’s something that there’s this opportunity for people in virtual training, why would they do that? But to get back what you’re talking about this getting back, I think the words will change but hopefully, the things that the spirit of the things that we’re trying to help organizations really accelerate and sustain will stay. So even if you think about that goals, measurements, behaviors, when people think about that relationship there, right?

So these are just words, they are concepts, they are manmade concepts, people-made concepts, the whole notion and how that works at your organization, and what would we have to do to try to cultivate the culture that we want, maybe it’s just that. What I love about the scrum framework is that it is simple, is complex, and that it lives on values. But then we start to say things like values, all the commitment, and it becomes crap, because people are saying, what does that really mean? And how are you demonstrating it? And how can we make that real? And for my experience, it’s just working together as a team, right? If we’re saying that the teams are actually the people who are responsible, I don’t want to get into words, but who create value, that we can start to look at things maybe a little bit differently.

And it’s not about you know, there’s types of different behaviors and personalities that I’ve noticed where it’s just like, I don’t really like this leadership stuff, it’s just too theoretical, and I don’t understand it. Whereas I prefer this book in this way of thinking, because it tells me exactly what I need to do. And there’s those different types of mindsets, even of leaders that are coming up into the management world, I see that people around me and it seems that they get these different pointers, and then they start to say, okay, now I understand where that’s starting to express itself and how I have to start thinking about the behaviors that I’m causing to happen or not happen. And then or in a team, let’s just say.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:04

It’s interesting, I think the COVID, I don’t know who said it, I was talking to somebody and they said the COVID created the uncertainty impression in organization just at the same time, there always has been the I was [inaudible 37:23] leadership, business agility, and they said that COVID has created essentially single disruption across all industries in a short period. And COVID if you think about it has impacted what we’ve done and has forced people to look at agile, the community that we’re part of, and said, what have we done? How are we really helping people with the agility? And I don’t know when you think about resilient organizations, how do you think maybe COVID or we talk about developing capabilities, what are your thoughts on the connection between COVID, how it’s impacted how we work?

We talked before we started this [inaudible 38:23] and burnout, developing capabilities, is one of the key things, how do we develop the capability for organizations to deal with complexity? So as far as COVID, in what ways has a force us to rethink our society? What are our I guess blind spots? Because I think, at least forced me to think about mine. It opened my eyes to certain things that I wasn’t aware of, because I was an outer pilot. And one of those things is that, we have to do a better job as a community, helping organizations not just going and get the money. Look at the diversity part. Look at the burnout part. Look at the everything like where before, I wasn’t really thinking about as much and now I’m more conscious, I guess about it. So maybe what are the things that COVID forced you to rethink? And what do you think have forced us as a society and community?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 39:37

Yeah, good for you too. I think there’s I don’t know what stage I’m at, like, just from a personal level because it’s like COVID then it’s like party. Then it’s like freedom, then it’s like Just kidding. But the notion…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:55

I feel that’s going to be [inaudible 39:56] for next couple of years, just messing with us.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 40:01

Yeah, this is an interesting one. And I don’t say this lightheartedly, but it’s certainly a little bit of this notion of war, something that affects something globally. I think that COVID, we talked about this previously, it’s this notion, like you said, you brought up a lot of points actually, that I want to make sure your listeners are going to start to pull apart too, is this notion that there was around leadership and management. So one of the things that came up is people were saying you know what? We need to be more careful about how we’re doing stuff, and who want to be more agile and want to make this better, the same questions still came up? How do we measure the performance? How do we know we’re actually being successful? What are we trying to pursue?

Can we change faster, what’s holding us back? So that and really having an outcome conversation has been something that’s really resonated and been helpful, and I’m not talking about any specific process that you have to follow. It’s just having that so that when you are thinking about and we’re working in remote environment, and by the way we’re seeing that people can do great work remotely, is that we’re seeing things like, okay, well, if we’re working on these outcomes, and we’re not just trying to produce widgets anymore, we now have an opportunity to work together on something. We understand from the team level what success looks like, and I can understand what progress toward that success looks like. And now when you’re in a middle manager role, what we’re seeing in companies is that they have the ability to say, well, if they’re not being managed on budgets, and we’re trying to reach for this outcome, I don’t need to manage the same way that I used to, right? There’s a relief that we saw. And so..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:59

I think there’s also trust. It feel like letting go a lot of times helps develop that trust or indicates the trust, because if I was unsure, and I was more involved as a manager, now, I’m seeing almost evidence base, that things can operate by themselves. Then I’m indicating that I trust you. I don’t have to be so hands on as a manager.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 42:23

Yeah, I think it’s kind of, because it becomes out of your control maybe, but there’s this thing, and maybe it happens internally, but to build trust you needs to go through some conflict. So there’s been maybe some internal conflict, or there’s kind of a fight against if it’s something that happens, and then you pivot and that conflict might be COVID here, but there’s some sort of you know that the conflict we can get through that and still be okay, that’s what builds trust. And so it’s acquired, and then what we would see, especially when you talk about the trust or just the I’m in it, I’m along for the ride, is that we see from an executive leadership standpoint, is that they said, we’re now able to look at information and it’s not just lines and graphs and colors.

That’s the status of a project, I’m able to look and understand the status of my product of what I’m trying to do, we need to do this quickly and we need to do this effectively. And if it doesn’t work, we need to try something out again. So this is already natural when there’s heat on you. The other thing, I think that COVID, not just COVID, think about all the other things that came up because we were in COVID, we’re staring at our phones, a lot of stuff happening in the US and around the world. We’re now very much engaged in different issues. So when we look at social and civil issues, the thing that you brought around diversity inclusion is really interesting, because now we’re talking about the capabilities. And is there…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:51

An innovation because I think with diversity and inclusion, I think, at least based on what I’ve seen, personally, you get more innovative because you’re getting more perspectives, you’re getting more…

Speaker: Patricia Kong 44:07

Exactly. Yeah on a basic level, you could just say, these people are really different, and they’re going to fight. However, if they understand that they’re trying to creatively come up with something, what you do is you’ve gotten different perspectives, hopefully they create something that’s better. And by the way, now, a person that I never would have befriended before or worked with before I have the opportunity. I’ve have seen to be honest there’s like, oh, this whole diversity and inclusion thing, it’s harder for me to get a job or we have to recruit more people, but there’s just been, there’s really the success of your own teams where we see when there’s diversity there and diversity of thought.

And that kind of ties back into now this notion of, what is our social and civil obligation? I now have a choice because COVID has made, you can literally there’s some industries where you can go out there, get a job and ask for 20% more, because there’s just not a lot of people wanting to work in certain jobs, or they just have a lot of choice. And so what a company stands for is really interesting. And the question that I think HR leaders and senior leadership is thinking about is, what is that boundary? How do we at least make sure that people understand what we stand for and employees can engage, opt in or out? And I think the other thing is around mental health.

I was probably in a different place six, eight months ago, where I just felt really down. I didn’t know what was going on. It’s just the notion of our work or talking to a wall all day or talking to a screen, doing conferences, where it’s just like, I don’t have that interaction. That was draining on me because of my personality but the thing around mental health, and what do we do as teams to support because we have a goal that we’re trying to achieve? And I want to support you so that we can work together toward those things?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:59

Yeah, and some something that maybe just as we’re getting closer here, I do want to highlight in a sense, and this is kind of how, before in the focus, we started the conversation, how there’s more focus on what the employees want. And they have more influence. It used to be where company would say we’re all about employees and still kind of cadence to the stockholders. I feel like this is not the same thing where it’s mostly talk, like, oh, we need to talk about diversity, we’re getting pressure on diversity, we were getting pressure about thinking a little bit more about mental health and other things when it comes to employees, but it’s mostly just to comply with the pressures that are creating, I think, probably what we’ll see more and more out hoping that companies do really mean it.

They’re not just doing to comply with the pressures, but they actually become innovative, about how do we and understand that the essence of complexity that inclusion and diversity is key to complexity, right? Same thing is understanding that if we don’t take care of our employees, not just mental health, well as a whole being that we’re not going to have healthy organization. So I hope that’s the case that, again, I’m seeing more of a talk rather than true belief around. But I don’t know what your thoughts are on that. And maybe with the last couple of minutes that we have, what would you maybe your thoughts on my comment there? And what would you like to leave us with? What is a message that you would like to leave the audience with?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 47:43

Yes. I think that it’s kind of like the talk is cheap thing. And people talk about it a lot. And they talk about how they’re trying to be socially aware and their understanding. And we have this now fancy mission statement around our diversity, inclusion beliefs, but it’s kind of not only what are you doing, but why are you doing it and what are you hoping to learn? And do you bring in expertise? In the same way we might have agile experts, there are people out there who’ve done a lot of studies and work and what are you trying to do to give back if that’s what your company believes in. But when people think about their employees, and I’ll close it in this way, is that I used to think a lot about employees as the asset into the organization, there’s a lot of knowledge there. And when I think about that from a key value here in EBM, it’s about the current value for you. And I think that organizations are probably already facing this or thinking about that. But if you were to flip the model on its head and say, when we think about the future of work, and the future of knowledge work, and all these different things, what might that look like? What experiences do we have to provide?

Are our children going to be going to university or is there something else that they’re learning on the field? Those are interesting things to think about to see if people are actually able to practice what they’re preaching, not only through a fancy certification in a class, but actually through the work they’re doing and how they express themselves. And the way that I think that that calls out on why it’s really important to an organization because I think that and some of my colleagues, you choose that we’ve had this conversation about employees in the relationship to innovation. So employees are not only the acid in the organization, there’s value that great people talk about that old time, value value, value. But it is so because of the ability to innovate and how employees can be great at that or not, because of what’s driven around artificially around them. They’re multitasking, they’re unhappy, mental health, the environment that’s around them. So I would think about employees in relation to innovation and What are the pros, the cons? What inhibits that? What motivates that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:06

Yeah. I think we have to like I was recently talking to people at Scrum Alliance, and I don’t know what it is at Scrum.org and other but we need to use our own back rule too from practicing what we preach well, so to look at what we talk about, including but when you look, at least when I look at Scrum Alliance and diversity and all of that, it’s not what we most of us talk about and also, Scrum Alliance recently started focusing on education in schools, if we want to change the world of work, how are we actually helping people die or go into the workforce understand this stuff. So I see some promising stuff that as a community doing, and it’ll be interesting to reflect maybe in a few years to see how has COVID really forced us to reinvent maybe or innovate, is we’re telling other people, you should innovate in these other things. Let’s see how we’re doing as a community.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 51:10

We have to really start to I think, challenge yourself.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:15

Do you feel though maybe, just as last thing, I’m interested, do you feel like we’re just reaching a lot and not implementing ourselves? So do you think it’s maybe a mix? Because a lot of times, I feel like anything else you do in life, you feel like even when I tell certain things to my son, I’m telling him, but I’m not doing that?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 51:37

Well, I think you’re thinking about something you might have answered your own question. I don’t know it’s a week. But can we always do better? I think we can always start to do it. Because there is some people who are trying to help and whatever path you might have to take to get that foot in the door to help, whatever. And if it’s more of a get rich scheme, and you’ve told yourself a story now, believe it, challenge yourself to think about why sometimes at least from some of the companies and people I talked to, Agile has become a dirty word. What’s going on there and how we contributed to that. And also I think about, what is the work that we need to do on ourselves? We talk about coaching, coaching, coaching, do we get that coaching for ourselves? Do we experience what it’s like to be given feedback? That kind of stuff. Nobody generally wants to be like, oh, you’re totally messed up you spent, I don’t know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:43

Or do we want to be like, yeah, that’s really good way to I think end this. I’d be willing to get the feedback and get the coaching and help the word down other people’s…

Speaker: Patricia Kong 52:57

Yeah. That’s the skin, the thick skin and then maybe if we know that then we can be more understanding when we work with others.

Evan Leybourn

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 00:55

What is your definition of business agility and how is it different than maybe how it’s been described in the past?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 01:04

Yeah, so our definition is fairly straightforward. Business agility is the set of organizational capabilities, behaviors and ways of working that affords your business, the freedom, the flexibility and the resilience to achieve its purpose no matter what the future brings. There’s a couple of elements in that definition. It’s a set of organizational capabilities and behaviors. It’s not a framework, it’s not something necessarily that you do. The behaviors are how you act and the capabilities is what you is… by acting in a certain way, you create capabilities, new capabilities for your organization. When we talk about affording your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, you don’t have to be a proprietary company, you can be a not for profit, you can be a government organization, you have a reason to exist. Now, I’ll call upon another author, Frederic Laloux. Frederick wrote about teal organizations for fairly the top end of business agility. Let’s think of it that way. But in it, he says, profits is like the air, you do not live to breathe, but you do need to breathe in order to live. Now, this is quite important. Your organization has a purpose. And that purpose is not to make money. Money, certainly for a commercial organization, is an indicator that you are achieving your purpose, but it is not the purpose in and of itself. So organizations that understand what their purpose is are able to pivot and adapt, they’re able to respond to global crises like a global pandemic, in order to achieve that purpose, even when everything they’ve done in the past is no longer true. Which is then those last six words, no matter what the future brings. And this is where, this is the agility part here. Because I don’t know what the future is going to hold. I can’t plan for it. And I don’t. Right now, the business agility Institute, we’re organizing a physical conference in New York City in March. And…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 03:52

Hopefully, it’s going to be a little bit different than the last time you guys…

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 03:57

Absolutely. In 2020, we held this conference in March and I literally had to stand on stage on that Wednesday, I think it was the 11th and say the World Health Organization has just declared a pandemic. But we’re planning a physical conference in March. All right. But all right, we consider ourselves to be an agile organization. We know that but, I don’t know when people are going to be listening to this, but it’s currently July, right? So we have about nine months. Anything could happen. Right now we’ve got the Delta variants, maybe we get a gamma variant and Iota variant, something that’s going to impact us. Maybe people just refuse to go back to work. It’s like, nope, no one’s gonna go face to face. Or maybe everyone’s just so sick and tired of being locked down that is like, a chance to meet all my friends face to face again? I haven’t done that in two years! And maybe we’ll sell out within a week. We don’t know. But the truth is, we don’t need to know because as an agile organization, we have the, we know how to adapt our strategy plans based on an uncertain future. So we have multiple real options open to us and there’s certain thresholds and milestones are met, we trigger one set of options versus another. So there’s always that agility is how you survive uncertainty. And COVID is a bad example. Because it’s so easy to point to COVID and go COVID makes an uncertain future. And yeah, that’s true. But it’s too easy. The truth is, we’ve always been or had uncertain futures. The truth is that while COVID is at a scale that most organizations and basically most industries have never seen or certainly haven’t seen since like the last 40, 50 years, this kind of… before that, we’ve had the global financial crisis, we’ve had wars and civil unrest, we’ve had currency crashes and major industrial disruptions. So uncertainty is just a fact of business.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 06:33

Way of life, yea.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 06:35

It’s a way of life. So COVID, I don’t like using COVID because it’s too easy. And it makes people think that, oh, once COVID is over, we’ll just go back to normal. No! There is no normal, there’s never been a normal. Your company is going to be disrupted, right? COVID just disrupted everyone at the same time. That’s the only difference. All right? But your company is going to be disrupted again in the next 10 years, I don’t know where, I don’t know how, you don’t know where and you don’t know how. All you know is that you have or need to have the ability to respond, not react, to respond to whatever the future brings. And that’s business agility.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 07:15

And that like maybe to just stick on that a little bit because I think it’s a really good example. And it starts with you, right, as a leader, to embrace the uncertainty rather than, like, what we a lot of times do is lie to ourselves that, you know, there is certainty. So what you just described is, I think, is a good example of a leader or somebody saying, things are uncertain and I have to look at the world as uncertain and be able to understand what my options are and deal with those options rather than run from those options. You know, so I think there’s a lot of data, there’s a lot of especially over the last five years that indicates towards including Laloux, depending on leader and their perspective and cognitive capacity, there is high correlation to how you know the organization is agile or tolerant towards you know, that uncertainty. So what are your thoughts on that relationship between the individual leader and their mindset and organizational agility or business agility?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 08:30

So, I may give you two answers and they might seem a little contradictory, but they’re not. So the first is, for those who don’t know about the business agility Institute, we are a research and advocacy organization. We’re not consultancy, we don’t do training, we’re funded by our members. We’re a membership organization. But as a research organization, we have currently 14 research teams, exploring everything from the relationship between diversity, equity and inclusion and agility, the relationship between company performance and agility, looking at different, we have one paper coming out called deliberation of leadership, that is talking about the necessity and it’s looking at literature around the link between power and leadership and the need to disconnect that in many cases. But our main publication, the one that everyone knows about is the business agility report. We publish that once a year, we’re actually doing the data analysis for 2021 right now. And in the business agility report, leadership and various aspects of leadership is identified as the top challenge and has been identified as the top challenge to adopting business agility really much since the beginning of every year. Now, this comes in many flavors, sometimes it’s leadership buy in, getting them to actually recognize the need and the importance of this. Sometimes it’s around change management, communicating the need for agility, communicate the need for change. And sometimes it can come down to the generic culture and mindset, which is very much expressed by some of those leaders. Now, in my own personal experience, as I said at the beginning, I was a consultant for a long time, I would say that the top executives get it, people who run companies are exposed to that uncertainty every single day and it’s you can’t become a top executive without having an agile mindset. Even if you don’t have an agile organization and let’s face it, most don’t, those executives have a natural agility, it’s why they’re successful at that level. What we’re talking about those, is sometimes called the frozen middle, those layers, C minus three, down to like, division heads or team or like section heads. These folks are, they exist in a world of process, they exist in a world that is certain or at least the systems pretend that things are certain. So when ambiguity and uncertainty is exposed to them, it’s actually a problem because they’re not ready for it. And so when a transformation comes through, because you want an organization that can adapt, that can respond, you’re hitting against the training, and sometimes decades of experience that says, hey…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 12:31

Conditioning, that gives the conditioning.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 12:35

It’s like Pavlovian training. The truth is the uncertainty has always been there, the organizational momentum and inertia has just kind of hidden it but that’s not good enough anymore because the markets are moving so fast. We’re in a point now where in economics is a concept called information asymmetry. And it boils, and any economists who are listening, I’m very sorry, but very simply, too simply there is a disconnect in the information available or known to two parties. And that disconnect, right, the person with the most information controls the price. Sales has operated for centuries, I’ll just say decades, but forever on information asymmetry; the seller knows more than the buyer. For one of the first times in history, that is no longer true. As a consumer, as a buyer, you have so much information at your fingertips. There is no excuse for you as a buyer not to know more than the person that you’re buying from. And so information asymmetry is at best now equalized, at worst flipped. So your consumers and your customers know more about your business and how and what you’re selling, than often your own sales people. And this is a problem. No, it’s not a problem; this is an opportunity. This is a challenge. And because of this, this is part of the reason why disruption is so rife, it’s why industries are so ripe for disruption because a new company who can address a customer need better and faster than an established company can completely cannibalize the market base of an existing company. And that’s information asymmetry in action and that’s agility, oh, sorry and that’s disruption in action and that’s why we need agility. And it’s the leaders who if they do not have the skill, and it is a skill, it can be learned; if they do not have the skill to create an agile organization and to lead an agile organization, then the company will fail, maybe not today, but definitely within the next five or ten years.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 15:00

Yeah, so maybe just to expand on that the third in last years and I’m assuming there was similar silos, and I’m assuming silos are tightly tied to the organizational architecture, business architecture and you know, as you were talking and referencing like how things evolve, like, I was recently re-watching in a class, Gary Hamel talking about like, you know, at the beginning of the last century, there was, you know, an average size of a company was four people. Right? And, you know, like, over the last 100 years, especially last probably, you know, 40, 50 years, we’ve tried to scale things up and structure things. And you could say sometimes it worked, but like it’s definitely not working in the context of dealing with that uncertainty and Volker world that I guess, not a guess but we’re in. So organizational structure, governance, architecture, the other part of the of the coin I’m assuming, what are you seeing in that space and what needs to change?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 16:20

Yeah, let me go back to an earlier question. What is business agility? And let me add something to that before I answer the question you just asked because I’m gonna answer what business agility is not. Business agility is not agile business, is not agile outside IT. This was actually the mistake I first made when I got into this space. So in 2008, as I mentioned, I was a director in the Australian public service. I wasn’t a great director. I was a good team leader, I was a good project manager but I’d never run whole of government program. I was never responsible for a section. So it was an entirely new skill set and one I’d never learnt. So it’s an entire another story as to how [cross-talking 17:15]

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 17:16

Peter principle right?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 17:18

Yeah, no. It definitely was the Peter Principle; I got promoted to my level and competence. And it took a very good leader above me to point out my arrogance and the assumptions and get me to look at how to be better. And so one of the things I did was I looked at agile because remember, I’ve been using agile as a developer and as a team leader, as project manager since 2003. So I looked at that and it’s like the problems I’m facing as a director are the same class of problems I face as developer right? Coordination, cooperation, uncertainty, getting groups of people to actually develop a product quickly and of quality, could the same principles that I used in an agile space work in a business setting? Now the answer was yes. And so. But this wasn’t business agility, this was agile business. Capital A agile business. And so I took concepts like iterations into running the section, I took concepts like pair programming, I just called it pair work, into the organization. And it worked. Like writing a memo, a ministerial brief with two people, creates a much better, much faster documents than one person writing. Now, the problem is, there was no agility in the system. We were constrained and going back to Theory of Constraints, we had constraints to agility, those constraints were organizational governance and bureaucracy. We could do agile, right? But it was very difficult for us to be agile at a business context. So we could do pair programming or pair writing, we could write this brief, but we still had to send it through the 4 layers of hierarchy. So I was the executive director, then there was the assistant secretary, the first Assistant Secretary, the deputy secretary, and then the secretary. So even as an executive director, there were four layers above me.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 19:31

Typical government structure with public.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 19:35

So that minutes had to go through four layers of executives who were not agile in the slightest. Anyway, there’s an entire conversation around delegation and different types of delegation; are you delegating heads or delegating hands? And in the government setting, those executives treat delegation like I just need an extra pair of hands. I’m the head, if it matches my own mental model, it will pass. So all I need is another pair of hands to do what I’m thinking as opposed to delegating heads which is here’s the outcome, you do it as best as you see, my job is quality control and just as validation, making sure things are within tolerance, not exactly as I want them to be. Anyway, that’s an entirely different conversation, I’m getting sidetracked. But sending this minute up, we weren’t agile in the system. So do you actual question, governance, structure, processes, when we talk about business agility, it’s not the same as saying agile business because what we need is agility in the system, we need different capabilities to emerge that enable an organization and organization to respond to whatever happens. And these capabilities are things like the ability to lead through empowerment and influence. Think about that. We don’t need leaders to lead through, well definitely not fear but through direction. It’s about, it’s that delegation through heads. It’s I need this minute to go to the secretary or go to the Minister to explain something that’s critically important. If I’m going to lead through direction, it’s gonna take three months, if I’m going to lead through empowerment, it’s gonna take three days, right? We need the ability to continuously improve. Those feedback loops, inspect and adapt. Like that’s agility 101. And we need a company to inspect and adapt. Not just a team, not just a product; we need the ability to seize emergent opportunities, right? If something happens out there in the marketplace, if you take longer than your competitor to seize that opportunity, your competitor are gonna own that space, they’re going to own the market, not you. So and again, we’re a research organization, we actually have a research model, a behavioral and capability model built on 82 behaviors and 13 capabilities. That’s just three of the capabilities that I’m talking about. We’ll run out of time I talk too long. But the point is that we need an adaptive governance structure that promotes agility. I want to add one last thing, because there’s like a principle that underlies all of this. And that principle is trust. So think about trust in; when I was a consultant, I used to work for IBM. And like every single large consultancy, their travel processes were bureaucratic and slow. I had to get approval to travel. I never once got declined approval but I always had to ask for approval. And if it was q4, I had to go to the country manager to get approval. Now the reason being IBM is trying to save money, they want to stop unnecessary travel, all that kind of thing. But the problem is, sometimes I wouldn’t get approval to travel till the day before. So I can guarantee you that governance, which was designed to save money, cost the money back because…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 24:08

You’re paying three times the price of the tickets.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 24:12

Now, remember what I said, I never once got declined. So I was trust worthy. But the system was designed not to trust. It was designed to assume that I don’t know when is the right time to travel. I don’t know when it’s appropriate. And so the system wasted money because it didn’t trust. Now, agile governance is built on trust. It’s not blind and that’s why we talk about audit, governance versus approval governance. Approval governance is stop until I tell you to continue. And that stop is a delay. It increases costs, it increases both real cost and opportunity cost. Whereas audit governance is continue unless I tell you to stop. Because if I make a mistake, I buy a flight, I don’t need to, that audit will pick it up. And then if I’ve made a mistake, I guarantee I’m not going to make that mistake again. Right? Because and learning from your mistakes, I’ve got a nine year old child, it’s how she learns. It’s how we all learn.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 25:30

As you’re saying that like it reminds me of just going back to understanding the systems, understanding the both human systems and why trust is important to us as humans, but also, just from a systems perspective and complexity or looking at organizations and we’re saying it’s almost like looking organization is a complex adaptive system, adding human spice to it or side to it and saying like how do we decentralize? How do we create those guardrails rather than having go through a stupid process that doesn’t make sense, it’s costing us more, because we don’t understand how to design systems and we don’t really understand people, we’re assuming that people are not trustworthy or that they’ve dumb so? Or not necessarily maybe, you know, dumb maybe too strong a word but that’s what it indicates when you look at how the system was designed or the process was designed. We can switch gears a little bit. Another thing that caught my attention and I wanted to get your thoughts on it, is when respondents described communication and collaboration as the single biggest benefit that business agility has brought to their organization. And this was a huge jump from, I believe, the year before. And in every organization that I go to, you know, usually collaboration and communication is the biggest issue. So, you know, just figure out how to better collaborate and communicate and you know, you’ll be much better off, don’t worry about any of the Agile stuff, right? And I wanted to just maybe get your thoughts on, were you surprised by that or what do you think about that jump from the year before?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 27:20

So the year before, I think customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction. But last year’s report was… so we published it in September 2020. We’ve been collecting data since September 2019. So we had completely coincidentally, 6 months of data pre COVID and 6 months of data post COVID. In fact, I think the numbers were like 45% pre, 55% post in terms of number of respondents. So we could actually see some real impact variation that COVID-19 brought because companies had to respond. And we saw some real substantive changes. For example, manufacturing jumped to the number three industry. Manufacturing had, in fact, I think in year one, I don’t think it was in the top 10. It was so consulting and technology has always been one and two. I think they’ve swapped a couple of times, but they’ve always been one and two. And that makes sense. Consultants, especially the midsize consulting firms, it’s there for people who you become a consultant because like you want to push boundaries, you want to try different things and so they often try it to themselves. Maybe not so much like the big four, but certainly the midsize consultancies. Tech firms, they’ve been doing agile since the beginning. So it makes sense that tech firms have greater agility. But manufacturing jumped and a large part that’s because a lot of these organizations, they saw what happens when you lean too far. Right? And so their supply chains, they’ve been applying lean since the 80s. And their supply chains was so lean, that they were fragile. So they wanted to keep the lean benefits but bring agility into the system, not fragility into the system. And so that’s where business agility, that’s why the spike in business agility. We also saw that regions shifted. And if you’re American listeners, I’m very sorry, but agility dropped in North America quite substantially. Agility in Asia jumped 25%. Agility worldwide grew 15%. But agility in North America dropped 10%. And this hasn’t been published yet, because we’re still doing the data analysis but right now, America is dropping again. The 2021 report, which will be coming out in about six weeks is showing that America has gone from being number one in the world to I think second last after Middle East and Africa. So we have some, I have theories as to why that is, no evidence as to why those theories are holding true but definitely have some theories as to why this is the case. But that’s not sort of what you asked. When we’re looking at communication, COVID was a communication challenge but because it was such a challenge, it forced organizations to really, really focus on it. So we definitely saw that over like, pre March 2020 and post March 2020, the improvement to communication and collaboration increased, not because you can communicate and collaborate better when you’re working from home but because it forced people to be deliberate about it, it forced people to actually invest in new, both technological tools as well as just like processes and approaches to improve collaboration. So because of COVID-19, because of that focus on improving collaboration, especially in an agile setting, that’s like business agility, enabled greater collaboration and communication in a time when communication collaboration was most needed.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 32:06

Do you think, in what ways is it going to continue to challenge that? Because like, as we look at, you know, going back or the going back, or going back to work, in a sense, in what ways do you think the taking of blood that we got from COVID, as far as like, you know, just how we work, how we collaborate and communicate, is it going to continue to kind of push the organizations towards that greater collaboration and communication?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 32:37

So I think we’ll see greater agility just in general. So people often ask me is top down or bottom up, what’s better? And the answer I used to give and I think the answer that most people give is both. But it’s a cop out. It’s also the wrong question. Because it’s a false dichotomy. It’s not top down or bottom up. I think of organizational transformation like brewing a cup of tea. So there’s no point, at some point, you have a cup of water and another point, you definitely have a cup of tea, right? There’s no point where suddenly, water becomes tea. It’s about strength and infusion. You put the tea leaves in, heat, motion, stir around, you let it brew, and then over time, it gets stronger and stronger, you get more tea. And the same is true of agility. I don’t like to use the word transformation, I prefer the word journey, right? You have change agents throughout the organization, you have motivation. A global pandemic is a good motivation towards agility. That’s the heat. You got motion, people moving around, working in different projects, engaging in different things. And so these change agents are infusing agility throughout the organization as it moves, as the pressure and the heat is made. And so this organization, there’s no point at which it’s suddenly an agile organization like that tea. There’s a point where it’s definitely not agile. There’s a point where it definitely is agile.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 34:35

Or if you add some more water or something else to it.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 34:40

And there’s all sorts of things that happen. At a certain point, water becomes tea through infusion. An organization has agility, builds greater agility through infusion. And so COVID-19 has created the heat, right? It’s created one of the environments for agility to flourish. And so the need for better communication and collaboration will continue. And agility will continue to be an approach, a very good approach to actually creating that. And so this kind of, if you think about the, if we think about organizations, we think about how they grow and they progress, I think 2021 through to 2022, we will see more and more organizations become deliberately agile and we will also see more and more organizations become organically agile, and they may not even call it business agility. They may not call it anything. Those behaviors will naturally emerge because it is what is necessary and because the organization values those behaviors

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 36:17

And that’s yeah. That remind me of just like I had a discussion with Mike Cohn and he exactly said that. He’s like I live for a day where we don’t call these things, you know. Do you think in that sense, the frameworks and the whole business around certifications, frameworks, and all of this is also at its peak?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 36:40

That’s a good question. Yes and no. So I believe very strongly in education. I think education is important. Now, education is different from certification. I think we will see, business agility education expands. So we’re running one of our research projects right now that we’ve just started is an evaluation of 100 MBA schools and their MBA programs, looking at the level of agility. So think of it like an MBA agility index, right? Which MBAs naturally promote agility and which ones do not? That we’re very, very early on, I can’t, there’s nothing I can share on that piece of research. We’ve only just literally only just started in the last three weeks. But I think we’ll see education and learning around the concepts of agility, not necessarily agile, but the concepts of agility instilled through all professional leadership, education, like MBAs. You already see things like the PMI when they bought disciplined agile and they bought flex. They’re doing it because they’re trying to build agility into the project management profession.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 38:24

Well, that’s good and like what, I’ve been talking to several people that I respect and I feel like I have, it’s almost like going back to the basics, going back to like decoupling or taking apart these frameworks and looking at the patterns within these frameworks and then almost constructing something that works in your context a lot rather than saying, hey, you know, use Scrum, go to Miljan two day class or go to somebody else’s class. And, you know, but rather like, you know, you got to start thinking like, why do you have daily stand up? What is the purpose of it? How would I contextualize that in my environment rather than that Scrum says, you have to have a daily stand up.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 39:05

Yeah. And so that’s critically important. Because as I said early on, business agility is not agile business. And there are things that we can learn from agile frameworks and there are practices that we can adopt. But it’s contextual and every organization needs to look at, they want agility, they want all those capabilities, those 13 capabilities I was talking about.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 39:31

That’s why I put this agile to agility.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 39:35

Yeah, that’s exactly it. So we can learn from agile, we can take a lot from it, we can respect the heritage, but we don’t have to do it. And even the Agile community says this. Don’t do agile, be agile, right? Being agile is agility. That’s the goal. That’s what’s important. So more and more organizations are going to be… So more education is going to be integrating these concepts; they may not call it agile, they may not teach stand ups, but they’ll be teaching agility, natural native agility. In terms of the… right now, organizations are in pain and they need help. So I’m not a consultant anymore. And as I said, I don’t think transformations are necessarily like… A journey to agility is not a project, it doesn’t have a start and an end. It is an ongoing journey; it’s that agile to agility journey. But I do think that organizations are going to be looking to experts, those who have done it to guide them and help them on the journey. And there are good experts and there are bad experts. And I’m not going to get pulled into the…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 41:06

Cooks and Chefs

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 41:08

Yeah, yeah, all that kind of stuff. But organizations need that support. Many organizations need that support. Where they need that support, they’re going to be calling on education to teach and to learn. And where there is education, there is validated learning and that’s what a certification is. The certification is not saying that you are an expert in something, is not saying that you can do something. A certification is saying we validate that you have learnt something. Right? Now there are professional level certifications which are different. So IC agile expert certification, Scrum alliances, CEC, CTC, CSPs for example, which are not education based but they’re valid is like, it’s not validated learning, it’s validated practice. Yes, I’ve done this, here’s evidence that I’ve done it. That’s a different level of certification. I think those will become more valuable over time. Our community has a habit of very short term thinking, which is ironic given what we’re talking about. But quite often, someone sees oh, there’s money in certification so that they build up their own and they actually devalue the thing for the entire industry. And they have a problem. But right now, those professional level certifications actually do, for the most part, show that someone can do something. I think that will become more important in the mid-term. And the validated learning will be important for as long as organizations see the struggle and they need help on the struggle and thus the education. At a certain point, we’re not there yet. I believe agility will become…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 43:11

Something you don’t talk; it’s just what you do, right?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 43:14

It’s just, it is how we do business. Right? In the same way that no one goes to a class to learn traditional management, most MBA programs do I suppose. But when I got promoted and the reason I had the Peter Principle when I first became a director is I never got taught how to be a director. It’s just how leaders operators and what was assumed and expected. At a certain point, we’re just going to assume and expect leaders to be or to have agility or to be agile. And that days is probably 10 years off.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 44:03

Yeah, no, I mean, that aligns with mine. So maybe just, I had another question which we don’t have time around like how business agility, perception of business agility varies drastically based on who you ask? Well, we’ll leave that as a something that people can go and read the report. But when it comes to the 2021 report or anything else, leave us with some insights that you have or may have that most people may not based on what you do. If you have like a nugget or two.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 44:42

So first of all, I call you back to Theory of Constraints. There’s a constraint to agility in your organization and it’s probably not the software team anymore. 20 years ago, or 18 years ago for me, 2003 I was doing Scrum and we were deploying every two weeks. But we weren’t applying to production, we were deploying to staging because we had an operations team. And our operations team had a release window. And that release window was once every six months. So whilst my team’s agility was measured in weeks, the system’s agility was measured still in months. Now, I left the technical world by about 2008. But around that time, DevOps starts to emerge as this thing. And DevOps was the system, finding ways of improving agility. And so now Amazon can deploy into production every 11 something seconds. Fantastic. What does that mean? It means the constraint to agility was software, we invent agile, then it was operations, we invent DevOps. So but where’s the constraint today? In your organization, your natural agility is not measured in days, weeks or seconds, it’s measured at the speed that you can recruit, it’s measured at the speed you can get a budget change or a budget approved, it’s measured at the speed that your steering committee or project control board or change advisory board meets because they are the ones who approved the next phase gate.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 46:28

Or maybe there you can change your policy.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 46:31

That’s it! These are the constraints to agility. So find the constraint, figure out which part of your organization is the limiting constraining factor to agility and that’s where your coaches should be. I guarantee that for most of the listeners, the investments in the Agile or business agility transformation is not at the point of constraint. They’re probably already reaching diminishing returns of their transformation investment because they’re the point at which their transformation is being focused has reached a local maximum, right? And we need to get to move that transformation focus to the area of constraint so that the entire system can improve. And that’s probably the biggest insight I can share. And I’ll say, look to HR, look to finance and look to your governance and compliance processes. Those are right now for most organizations, the biggest constraints.

Jesse Fewell

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:43

Who’s Jesse Fewell?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 00:44

Oh wow, it’s kind of an existential question.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:50

It’s what everybody says and sometimes I even tell people, this is what I’m going to ask you. It throws people little bit because it’s like hopefully, you know yourself better than I do.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 01:06

I got a couple of checklist items. Professionally speaking, I help change makers find the reward of driving results in impacting lives at the office. That’s what I do professionally as I mentor transformation leaders and then wrapped around that are the people that influenced me to be the me that does that. And so, I am a husband, I am a father of growing children. What do you call the children that are now like legal adults? I mean they’re not really children anymore but they’re my children and they deeply impact me.

Last night, my son got his first professional offer for a software engineering job after university and we’re all celebrating the fact that that’s happening. And I took a look at it and what it showed me was, I am no longer the software engineering professional I was almost a decade ago that he is now aspiring to become. And so, it’s exciting for me to see him moving into a place that I have gradually evolved out of. And then the third checklist item that I think is somewhat relevant to what you and I have been talking about previously is I am a failed follower of Christ. And so, I’ve regained an interest and a passion for a deeper spiritual journey and that comes through spiral dynamics, integral theory, it comes through a fascinating bit of work by the Bible project and just rediscovering a non-dual, non-sectarian approach to a spiritual side of things which absolutely relates to work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:29

When you said that, it’s almost like we spend a lot of time focusing on things outside of ourselves and not focus on ourselves and I think it’s just like anything else. It’s more like in a work, understanding who I am, what do I believe and how do I make sense of things. And for me, that was in a previous discussion that you and I had. We talked about how our environment shapes us and how we see the world by environment that we’re part of and it’s interesting. So sorry to interrupt but maybe we can explore that in a sense, how do we work on ourselves? Because most of the Agile community is working on others but how can you help others if you don’t help yourself or if you don’t understand yourself better?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 04:29

Yeah, it’s super critical because if we are change makers, if we’re the ones that are leading our colleagues to better ways of working, more competitive, more collaborative, more creative ways of working then you’re right. The distraction tends to be on the external about fixing them and they don’t get it and they’re not on board and maybe because I’m the problem.

In fact, this week, I’m doing a talk for the Loud and Agile meetup. “we are the reasons transformations fail and we are also their greatest hope.” And so, it’s that kind of embracing the contradiction that I find to be fascinating right now, confronting your own ego so that you can get out of your own way and bring your best holistic self to the work that you do instead of always second guessing yourself, instead of chasing after somebody else’s dream or somebody else’s success like you know what? If I lower my standard of living by living abroad in a different economy, I may not need a bazillion dollars to retire and be successful.

So yeah, I don’t know how much you’ve talked with Maria inaudible(06:00) but I look up to her as a role model of redefining your lifestyle to fit the work that you want to do. And so for those of you who are listening who don’t know, Marina inaudible(06:17) is a global agile thought leader who is founder of the Agile Marketing Academy, is the creator of the Agile Hero Summit and several years ago, sold off her belongings, her home, her apartment and began living as a digital nomad across the world and across the US and filming it on Instagram as a way to illustrate about how you can take control over your own professional environment. You don’t need to be a slave to the paycheck and you have inside of you, each of us have inside of us an inherent creativity to re-architect our lives and our jobs to be more fulfilling, more rewarding and more sustainable so that you don’t burn out or bore out. So yeah, shout out to you, Maria, you’ve always been a role model.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:18

I want to try to get her on the podcast too because yeah, at least I’ve thought about bringing her and also talking about she’s been pushing agile marketing and just how agile marketing along with other kind of industries or marketing along with other industries have tried to and ways adopted some of these agile ways of working. But maybe to come back to Jesse, you recently posted a question in our community like what inspires you, what keeps you fire lit these days? So, I’m going to turn this question back and even though you shared it, I’m going to give you an opportunity maybe here to share what you shared or maybe expand on it but what inspires Jesse?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 08:08

What inspires me, what gets me fired up and actually where I’m wanting to move more and more of my life’s work into this direction is when regular everyday professionals break through their own limitations to greater impact. We’re piloting right now a mentoring program, a cohort of everyday professionals. There’s an operations manager, we have a PMO manager, there is an individual contributor who used to be a supervisor for a quality group at a chemical manufacturing company. But then she was asked hey, could you just go like explore what it would take for us to build a services business because we’re all product and we’ve never done that before. You have no budget, you have no headcount, can you just go explore building a completely new business unit that’s going to be the foundation of our future growth? And that operations manager she was thrown into a new role with no guidance on what her role was and that PMO manager was marginalized for two years because her boss left and so her boss’ boss was like yeah, I’m just going to ignore your team for the next two years and don’t you dare propose that maybe you could step up into your former boss’ shoes, you’re totally not ready and that’s presumptuous.

And so, these are just three examples of the kinds of everyday people who in a matter of weeks with just a little bit of community support, a little bit of seeing through the eyes of possibility, they’re totally like generating amazing results and that’s what gets me fired up is when average everyday people are overcoming the perceived constraints of their environment. I don’t have a fancy title, I don’t have a big budget, I only have two certifications. I don’t have all of Jesse’s certifications and so I couldn’t possibly start coaching my boss to be a more effective leader which is what that operations manager is and then a facilitated dialogue across multiple departments about what a non-burnout culture might look like or actually piloting a new service pilot with one of the existing clients which is what that other woman is doing.

So that’s what gets me fired up is seeing people breaking the rules of the conventional and so those are my examples. I gave a few examples that are out in the industry but I’ll let you kind of pick the ones that you find exciting and inspiring because I wanted to share mine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:59

Yeah, that’s awesome and maybe to tie it back to what we talked about earlier about like spiral dynamics, what motivates us and things like that. It’s like it feels so good like to see other people succeed right. And like hearing those stories like they describe like I’ve had similar situations where people either have been conditioned like we’re all conditioned by a culture and how we work and it’s like people have certain beliefs around things that are so entrenched that it’s like how you said, how can I coach, I don’t have all those skills, I can’t do that and actually see them break through those barriers is motivating to me as a coach and consultant. And maybe to come back to Maria’s example I’m sure you’ve been there like where money is a factor up to the point where you want to live the lifestyle whatever they want to but after that point, the return on happiness is diminishing, right?

So, in spiral dynamics or general in cognitive development theory, the idea is that as you satisfy your needs, you’re going to look more to self-actualization to probably fulfill other needs that are more internal than external. And to me, that’s kind of when you talk about what inspires you. what motivates you, I can relate to that because helping others is what inspires me and what keeps me going or what you said is always keeps your fire lit.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 13:01

And so, one thing that’s coming to my mind right now as you’re talking about helping people achieve a higher order of awesomeness, a higher order of impact, what comes to my mind right now is cooks and chefs and I wanted to just dwell on this a little bit. For those of you who haven’t read the blog post, look it up.

Now Leon talks about that there’s a difference between cooks and chefs and there’s a spectrum between the follow the recipe cook which is like the grill dad. So, I’m dad on the grill and I’m following this recipe because that’s what the right way to do it, don’t screw it up as opposed to on the other end of the extreme where you’ve probably got a one star, two-star Michelin chef who’s innovating completely new things that nobody’s ever done before. And the metaphor really resonates with me because in order to build a better work environment, in order to build a better organization, we have to empower, enable, equip all of those people, the people who are innovating and creating completely new techniques and new practices. They get a lot of the press and they get a lot of the conference speaking gigs and there’s a place for that. So, people who are for example like innovating new organizational design models, awesome. But then there’s the a few practitioners who are just like just tell me what scrum rules are because I need to follow the scrum rules. I’ve never done this before. I need a baseline. I need an anchor. I need some kind of a guideline and then there’s a lot of us who are just casting all the love towards the innovators and chefs and all the judgment and all the cooks and the beginners.

And so, I find that if we’re going to be helpful, we need to be helpful to everyone where they are rather than being agitated and frustrated about where they should be and so that’s my take on chefs and cooks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:20

Yeah, and you just made me think of which I haven’t written that we’re discussing the article but it’s almost like there’s this shift and let’s just say the COVID has pushed the environment towards like hey, we’re going to cook more at home, right? So now you have a lot of people trying to figure out how to cook at home that they haven’t and then disappointing and judging would be like people that like that have cooked before that are more experience, shutting all over people that don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and saying like look at these suckers. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 15:59

You’ll have to bleep that out later.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:05

But like that’s really I think, as our environment has moved into more and more complexity or is more and more complex, more and more people can’t rely on frameworks, methodologies. They have to figure things out on their own. But at the same time, I think that empathy that patience with people that never done anything in that space is like and this same thing happens. Earlier this week, I spoke with Dean Leffingwell and people shadow over safe do and I tell people yeah, I mean like in a sense but there’s a lot of good stuff. But if you have people that put in like don’t understand the patterns and what safe kind of compasses, a bunch of different good and bad patterns and practices. If you’re just taking it blindly, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s almost like taking a recipe and just saying, we’re going to apply it. We’re going to have a wedding and we’re just going to try to do it ourselves. Just understand that you’re not going to be probably as successful as somebody that’s done it before and be okay with that and set the expectations to improve rather than use that.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 17:26

So, I’ve got my own observation about the Scaled Agile Community in the state of where safe is at in the industry and then I’ve also got my own conflicts with judgment and my own issues around holier than thou or agile or than thou kind of perspectives. But I view the state of the Scaled Agile community and movement to be relatively exactly the same as where the scrum alliance and the scrum community and scrum.org where roughly about 10 to 15 years ago. Just 10 to 15 years ago, there was the guru in Kench Waiver and Jeff Sutherland, there was the official statement which was one of their books, the scrum guide probably hadn’t even roughly it came out in the middle of this phase of and there were the grand disciples and everyone wanted to become one of their trainers. That’s what the ultimate aspiration of being an agile champion was to become one of the Illuminati in one of the high priests in this particular community. And everyone was casting judgment, all the scrum people because they were successful at capturing the mind share of the agile conversation. And the people that were usually upset about that were a lot of the extreme programming people because rewind 10 years before that, in the late 90s, right about when the agile movement was starting to coalesce, they had all of the mindshare and their gurus were the ones getting all the and everyone wanted to be the disciple and the heir apparent to Ron and Kent and all of those.

And so, there’s this cascading wave of envy and there’s a cascading pattern of the guru who sets a template that people follow and received criticism from all of the others who are not involved in that. And if you actually just go talk to these gurus, they’re just normal people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:45

Yeah

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 19:49

And the fundamental contribution I think that Scaled Agile has done is it has created an agile option for the cultures that need an answer to every question before I do anything. And so, for those of us who want to foster a kind of a growth mindset and agile mindset, that’s fingernails on a chalkboard because we’re trying to encourage leaning into the unknown and leading into the not having an answer. But that’s too big a leap for statistically a quarter of all professionals in all cultures in all environments at least

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:29

Yeah and maybe to bring it back to spiral dynamics and just that aspect too and maybe lose work which is based on spiral dynamics by stuff for like amber or orange to jump two levels up to like green or teal right? So, a lot of times, I tell people like look at government agencies and I don’t know how much you worked I think you mentioned.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 20:56

Hi, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Jessie, I’m based in Washington DC.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:01

I would say like we’re screwed when it comes to government because the way that they’re structured, the culture and everything. So, safe is a stepping stone for instance and even with safe, they’re having a hard time. So, like trying to remote some of these.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 21:23

Here’s an idea, how about we introduce sociocracy over at the Department of Defense? How about we do that? Let’s see how far that goes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:33

Not in our lifetime I think but exactly that so context matters. I don’t know if you’ve like also maybe to go a little bit off topic. But when I coach in Europe or in different cultures like as a coach, as a consultant, my approach completely changes based on the context based on the beliefs of people based on their values and I have to understand where they are, what they value, what they believe in and change my approach based on that.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 22:12

I just did a talk to the scrum summit 2021, this past weekend which was a virtual event that was targeted to the South Asian market and the South Asian community. And in that talk, I went off on a little bit of a sidebar. It was about culture and how do you measure and quantify culture. I’m a practitioner of the competing values framework and with that framework, you can actually measure and visualize where your cultural biases and I took a little bit of a detour about that about saying well, you don’t understand the Indian context Jesse or you don’t understand the German culture and the German environment because you’re just an American with your American beer, you’re very orange bias, right? And so, I went to the harsh data insights and I did a couple of screenshots and I said okay, let’s just compare the three places that Jesse’s lived as an ex expat in Germany, expat in Bangalore, India and then as an American in all kinds of different American subcultures and what’s interesting is that, yes, indeed, there are these country specific patterns.

So, for example, in the United States, the score is off the charts on individualism which means that the stereotype, right. Americans generally have no appreciation for the impact they have on each other or they have on others. They’re very ethnocentric and very much focused on my department and my office and I kind of forget about the other offices. And then in the Indian context, there’s a big power distance measure and that feeds the stereotype that says well, Indians don’t want to upset the hierarchy. And yet, when I was in Bangalore, I dealt with a ton of startups where they specifically recruited people that had a very creative culture and a mindset where they were yelling at their boss all day long and it totally defied the stereotype. Likewise, here in DC, if you want to talk about individualism and competitiveness and the American innovation and then I go into some offices where there are people that are just tell me what to do. I’ve been here for 20 years, I gave up 15 years ago and I have been here 20 years so just tell me what to do.

And so, yes and so the way I summarized it is your country culture informs your company culture, it does not define it. It is not your destiny and so I don’t know, do you see a similar pattern?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:06

I do exactly and like so there are a couple of things maybe that we can explore. So now is the workforce is becoming more global, what about if you have team members from different type of cultures that are impacting your team culture because it definitely influences that. So, there’s that aspect of how does outside culture, the company influence my company or my team. But then the other thing is that I look at is you could have a team of let’s just say five to seven people and each of those individuals is running what I call operating system in their head or value system or whatever it is that might be different to each individual. So, for Jesse, it might be like screw it like you said, I gave up 15 years ago. I’m just riding this agile way because before agile was something else and before that, it was something else so I’m just going to ride this way.

So, you might have somebody like that that’s disengage, you might have somebody that’s looking to retire, you might have somebody that’s actually just wants to exceed and succeed and that might be somebody that’s more of the orange type of person more of an achiever and then you might have somebody that just wants to help others and sees like what we started this conversation with. They really get fulfilled and satisfied by seeing others succeed. So how do you get a group of people that are influenced by the outside cultures that are all around the world where their company culture is shaping and then their individual thought systems are different.

So as a coach, when you go in or a consultant, if you’re ignorant to that systemic view of things influencing each other then I think at least when I started adjusting things as a coach based on the those things or those are some of the things, I find that like everybody gets more out of the relationship and the goals that we’re trying to do by helping, first of all, understanding myself and helping understand from their perspectives and empathizing with everybody’s perspectives and needs and understanding the cultures and how they impact. So, I don’t know, if you look at it that way or what is your approach when dealing with a situation like that?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 27:42

Yesterday, I held two back-to-back workshops with two very different corporate cultures. One of them is a hardware company that has a Latin American CEO, an American leadership team and German engineers. And so, I held a workshop explaining about how these are some role definitions and they’re a little bit different than your understanding of this and so after 10-minute presentation thoughts, questions? Yeah, I don’t think that’s clear. I don’t see it. Pin drop, crickets. Yeah, I’m not following. Would anybody else like to comment? And so, we just had to move forward into the awkwardness. That was kind of an awkward matzoh ball right there like oh, what are you going do so. And so, I just move forward with the agenda and kind of continued and listened a little bit and then reinforced. We have this is awkward, this is different. It’s going to take repetition and acclamation. The very next hour, I did another workshop for a creative agency where people were joking with each other, they had zoom backgrounds that were just hilarious. And they were like oh, looks like Jesse’s going to be preaching at us again today, “hahaha” and so it is completely different culture.

So I could shift my energy from being one of a patient encouragement to be one like well, if you can’t take it, don’t dish it because here it comes. And so, then I had to just being a little bit more playful and energetic and so it’s kind of what leadership is. It’s being authentic to who you are but also being sensitive to the people around you. And so, like if you have a diverse culture of different kinds of personalities and different countries represented, there’s an assertive accommodative yin yang kind of dynamic where as the leader or coach, I assert a few things but then I include what some of the unique elements that other people are bringing in. So as a coach, I defer to the dominant culture but then I assert new information into that conversation. As a leader, I might assert this is the singular core value that that I believe in and I want to emphasize and I’m going leave space for everybody else to put their stuff in.

So, coaching is leadership and effective leadership involves coaching but I think the nuance is where do you begin, where’s your starting point? So, I like hearing your take on bringing different people together.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:07

Well, that inaudible(31:08) like another thing that I’ve been trying to mess around and figure out is like when does Miljan become like that guy that pushes people right. I don’t know if you played sports but I’ve had coaches where they like piss you off in a sense in order to get the most out of you or they just blindly, from a consulting standpoint, they say in your face like what you’re doing wrong and that might get some type of reaction. So, I was talking inaudible(31:47) to Mike Cohn and both of them kind of said we tell organizations that if you don’t have this, you’ll fail at the beginning, right. So, it’s almost like that shock like and there is some value in that. I don’t know what your thoughts are.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 32:09

You had a chat with Pete Barron’s about that and he also believes in when he invites people into his leadership workshops, the first lesson is here’s why we’re all here. This is all of the things is going on in the industry and the second lesson is oh and by the way, you’re not up for it and he has a way where he can do that. So, you know what, this is an area where I think I need to grow. I need to grow with a little bit more forceful truth telling. I tend to want so much to empathize and encourage that my assertive energy is probably 90%, inspirational rather than a little bit more challenging.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:03

That’s the thing and this is exactly same thing like where our culture influences us, right? Like in the United States or generally, in western, it’s like being nice like you don’t want to offend people and just say nice things even though you don’t think them. And I was talking, I had a student from Southern Italy that was saying like here, like if you’re my friend and you don’t tell me that this is messed up, like these sucks, we’re going to lose trust, right? And that same thing, like in a part of the Europe that I grew up, people will say like if you’re presenting something or if they don’t, they’re like this is shit. And like saying that in this is where the culture like it’s expected and normal in certain cultures and in some cultures, it’s kind of unacceptable or rude.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 34:04

I guess that represents a growth area for all of us. If you have an assertive bias, how can you grow a skill set to be accommodated at the right times but still be yourself. You don’t want to be contrived or fake. I love what Brene Brown talked about in Dare to Lead about that authenticity where you got to be yourself within boundaries. People don’t need to know your deepest darkest childhood secrets and yet, you do need to kind of share your opinions and you do need to step outside of your comfort zone in Jesse’s case to be a little bit more forceful with truth. But then be able to shift gears if somebody needs a little bit of encouragement So it’s a work in progress.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:02

Yeah. It’s an art too because you really have to read the context like maybe it comes with experience but maybe let’s switch gears a little bit and maybe we can come back and tie it. Something that I thought we could talk about is in your book, Untapped Agility, the seven leadership moves to take your transformation to the next level, you talk about attack culture and structure together.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 35:36

Yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:37

Could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 35:39

So, we are in the 20th anniversary of the agile movement and if you zoom out over the last 20 years or 25 years, if you want to count the pre manifesto activities, one of the patterns that shows up over and over is what I call agile sectarianism. We bunch up into these clusters and we throw judgment bombs at each other from like your scaling model is evil, your scaling model is judgmental and one of the ways that we sectarianize into groups is around whether a transformation should be about the mindset or about the methods. You got to start with mindset first, you got to get people to a growth mindset, agile mindset because no matter what practices you install, if you don’t get that mindset locked down, it’s not going to stick or you know what all those touchy feely, fufu ninnies, they want to go talk about mindset over there, we’re going to go do stuff. We’re going to install best practices, we’re going to start measuring, we’re going to get very good results and ROI and we never talked about why. We never talked about what is important and so it turns into a bunch of noise. I saw one very large telecom spend a million dollars on training of mindset, lots of workshops, posters, surprise, a year later, nothing’s changed and that just agitated me. So, I actually created a blog post almost 10 years ago called culture comes last because at the time, I was so frustrated by that. I was like you need to start doing stuff, you can’t be anything unless you’re doing something. And then what I came to realize over the recent years is that that that can turn into an imbalance and now you forgot to create the context, a narrative and that’s what leadership is, right?

Leadership is about creating directing attention and so that’s the point in the book. The point of the book is that if you want to have a successful transformation, you’ve got to address the contextual with what you’re doing. You have to contextualize all these methods and all of these practices and you need to operationalize your mindset. I can’t tell you how many times again, Brene Brown covers this as well. How do we operationalize our core values? You put five-values up on a poster and put it around the office and just expect magic to happen. So that’s where the point of the book is going. What caught your attention about that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:42

Well, the reason I bring it up it’s in the book that I am writing. The Agile part is the structure part and the agility is the culture, right? So is the full spectrum and like if you look at the logo behind me, the four quadrants of the integral, the left side mindset and culture is being agile, the right side is about doing Agile. So, what you just described is one group focusing on doing Agile mostly when we talk about softer stuff that’s less measurable like culture and mindset.

So, to me, what that means is that attacking the whole like integral, holistic way of looking at things rather than one versus another which has been like you said, for most, it’s been between the right and left. I think last time we showed but like Michael’s book, Agile transformation is about in my opinion, new paradigm of looking at things holistically and combining so is this full spectrum, agile to agility or more of a holistic way of doing things.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 40:01

Yeah and it builds on so you mentioned Lou earlier with the book Reinventing Organizations. When that book first came out, everything is a journey, everything’s a work in progress. When that book first came out, I thought it was utterly judgmental. Like you’re going to categorize oh absolutely. You’re going to categorize people into less evolved red and kind of neanderthal orange and then there’s us who are super enlightened and we’re all the way up here. And it’s just a matter of evolving your consciousness to a higher level and then maybe someday, you’ll be as awesome as we are. And I was like and so that’s why the competing values framework resonated with me so much at the time because it just put all of that on a flat grid and said run a survey. Ask good people where they are and then you have a very democratic, non-judgmental saying oh yeah, we absolutely believe in doing things right at the expense of anything else. So even if it means going slower, even if it means we clobber people’s opinions, we do things right. And that is very much in Amber’s traditionalistic kind of follow the rules environment but I wasn’t ready to see it that way. And I think that there are a lot of people that latched on to that spiral dynamics concept and wanted everyone to jump four or five levels of consciousness right away and if you weren’t there then you’re not agile and you don’t get it.

And so but now, the breakthrough which was even before Michael’s book I think was what Shawn and Larson are doing with the Agile Fluency Project which is which of these five cultures best describes yours and for that culture, here’s the next level of agility you should pursue and I think it’s genius because there’s a non-judgmental element there to say oh and it might be over the course of 5 years, 10 years, you might find yourself at another kind of culture after you’ve been investing a lot of this. Capital One is an example that has been working on their Agile transformation for 10 years.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:23

It’s probably more than that.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 42:27

And so, they might have found themselves kind of shifting what their aspirations are once they go through certain things. So, you’re right. I think that integral model is incredibly powerful but I had to grow into not just cognitively understanding it but emotionally tolerating the idea that there is a predictable sequential journey. And I think for a lot of transformation champions, it’s super agitating because I want to go get to Ben and Jerry’s culture right away. I don’t want to have to go through all this other stuff.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:04

Well, that’s the thing and like it used to be easier because like the pace of change was slower. I think now there’s misalignment between pace of change and how we can keep up. And I think one example just in the world is like if you look at capitalism or just individualism like if we keep going at this pace, we’ll probably mess things up but that’s a separate topic. Maybe another thing that we thought we could explore is the myth of the Agile Coach. What do you have to say about that?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 43:50

The myth of the Agile coach? Here’s the myth. The myth is that the effectiveness of a transformation is contingent upon the effectiveness of an Agile coach. And I have found that to be completely untrue, unrelated not even an issue. So, the state of agile coaching report came out earlier this year that put numbers to some common understandings around the fact that if you’re an Agile coach and you’re working as a consultant, you’re probably earning a little bit more than if you’re working as an internal employee. If you’re an Agile Coach, you probably have a certification and there’s a minority of those, a small number that have what are called a masters certification like your CEC or like the ICF, PCC these are high order coaching certs and only a small number of them but only a third of all agile coaches that responded even have a certification of any kind.

And so that we kind of knew but one of the things that I think is an emerging observation is that as an Agile Coach, you can help but you’re not the thing. And so, I think there’s a little bit of ego and a little bit of guilt that floats around that they’re going to screw it up unless I’m involved in everything. Actually, they’re going to screw it up even if you are involved. And then there’s all this guilt which is oh man, I wasn’t there and they screwed it up. Well, they would probably still screw it up if you were there. And I can’t tell you I’ve seen coaches that are just amazing transformational personalities and the team or the leadership, they’re just not ready. And so, it doesn’t matter if you bring in Tony Robbins and making all the C level executives cry in the middle of a boardroom like oh my gosh you talking right, I’m a jerk and I need to get it. As soon as the meeting is over, the next day they come back and they’re going to go back to old habits. It’s just the nature of the journey.

So that’s the myth, the Agile coach is you’re not the critical linchpin that you may have led yourself to believe you are so lay off the guilt and swallow your ego.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:30

And I think that’s kind of coming back to cooks and chefs. For chefs, I talk about like the goal is to create more cooks and chefs. As a coach internal or external, your job in an organization is to work yourself out of the job. So, if I think like hey, I’m coming into Jesse’s organization and I’m going to teach them how am I going to get them to understand this recipe or to follow the recipe, I’ll be screwed. What I need to do is help Jesse’s organization understand how they can come up with something that’s delicious with whatever ingredients they have. And I think as coaches, a lot of times, we’re struggling with that because we’re not necessarily developing people in a way we think like they rely on us which is I think part of that myth.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 47:33

Yeah, there was one of our colleagues, I forget who it was but it was at a scrum Alliance event and they brought to my mind the English children’s story of Nanny McPhee who said to the children. She’s a nanny and so she was taking care of these children and she says when you want me to leave, that is when I will stay and then when you want me to stay, that’s when it’s time for me to leave and so, there’s that tension there that I thought was very intriguing.

So there comes a time where hopefully, you outgrow your mentor. I’ve outgrown a few of my mentors in my career. It’s weird, where you could see yourself well man, I really looked up to this person and now I’m having to think about why aren’t they taking this step and that step and this step and that step and I think that’s a good thing. If you were able to be a catalyst for somebody else to where they’re not even more effective. I mentioned my son, he just got an offer for his first job out of university that earns just as almost pretty much as earning the same salary that I had after 18 years of experience and that just brings me joy. So, working yourself out of a job is a nice beginning but then there’s layers to that, that can get a little bit exciting.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:18

Well yeah and so that growth and it kind of like what can we do to help others keep those fires lit I guess? So, maybe it’s crazy how time flies and I know you have a meeting after this. So maybe like what are some of the things from your book in general that you would like to share with listeners? Takeaway, anything that you think will be helpful?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 49:52

Well, if you want to if you want to learn more then you can go to untappedagility.com and check out the book. There’s a free excerpt, there’s free templates and downloads, untappedagility.com and it’s available at all your favorite retailers. And so that might be interesting to you to help you kind of dig in and learn more but if you want to take some steps forward in this mentoring relationship if you want to break through your own barriers of self-limiting beliefs, go to agilevictory.com and book a chat with me and we can talk more about what it looks like and what it takes. So untappedagility.com for more knowledge and agilevictory.com for more results.

Aanu Gopald

Transcript:

Speaker: Miljan Baji 00:46

Who is Aanu Gopald?

Aanu Gopald 00:53

Wow. That’s actually a very good question. Who is Aanu Gopald? I’m a woman of many parts, that’s what I call it myself. I’m a Family woman, I’ve got three lovely, beautiful kids and I’m also a wife with a very supportive husband that keeps the home front when I’m in Africa. Aanu Gopald is also a dreamer. I’m so passionate about human capacity developments and I also believe that anyone can achieve whatever they set their mind to do to become who they want to be and do whatever they want to do, especially even in an uncomfortable conditions or situations especially, if you know a lot of Africa. Aanu Gopald is also a torch bearer, I move to the world in search of other people to light up especially women. I am so passionate about women maybe because I’m also a woman and my soul also draws strength from serving others and lifting them up. As a dreamer, I just want to touch lives and that’s actually the theme of Africa Agility Foundation, “touching life, one breath at a time”.

I’m also a chain catalyst and I truly believe in people, I’m very altruistic so the happiness of others actually influences my happiness. What gives me joy and fulfillment is when I see others, especially those that are my mentors, those that I have touched, achieving their goals, their dreams in life. Another part to Aanu Gopald is I’m a philanthropies, I continuously seek to impact lives in the world around me. My family and I do a lot for orphanage homes in Africa, especially in Nigeria in rural areas. Africa Agility Foundation, myself and my team, we run free programs for kids and youth in Africa, Nigeria, in partnership with Sudan NextGen led by Sally Elatta, we are moving to Sudan, also Kenya and Ghana to do so many amazing things to improve quality of lives and also reduce poverty and also employment for youth in Africa. Yeah, thank you. Other side of Aanu that most people know is I’m a business agility coach, a trainer, facilitator, a speaker and everything about agile agility, that’s another side of Aanu.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 03:54

That’s awesome. That’s inspirational too. I feel a little bit of guilt. Like, I came from another country that’s formerly Yugoslavia, Bosnian specifically and I’ve tried to help and justify in my own ways that help but I think you’re inspiring me in the sense of what you’re doing. It tells me that I should be doing more to help people where I’m from, and contribute more. Thank you for doing that. At least that has sparked a little bit more fire, doing a little bit and giving more back where I’m from. And you were just recently in Nigeria for the Lagos girls tech bootcamp that you organized. How did that go?

Aanu Gopald 04:47

It’s was revelational for me, it was mind blowing, insightful. It was a new experience for me because the first one we did last year COVID happened so I joined them virtually via zoom and although we don’t really have much COVID cases in Nigeria, I don’t know the magic that happened, they were able to contain it. They had it in person but being there physically was a new experience for me, with the two weeks plus I was in Nigeria. What made it revelational was, I’ve come to understand that the young people, not just in Africa, but every parts of the world have the power to bring about the much needed change, especially when they have the right vision, the mastery and also a sense of purpose. I saw 100 determined, audacious, courageous and resilient female youths despite all odds against them, some of them are undergraduates, majority of them are graduates with no job, the unemployment rate is very high in that parts of the world. They believed in their dreams, they have passion for tech although they didn’t study tech in school and they worked so hard during those three weeks to bring that dream to reality. So it was mind blowing and during that three weeks bootcamp, they were trained in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, web development, data science UI/UX, and also two days certified master class, thanks to Scrum Alliance for that, and Joseph Farewell for facilitating it, it was free for the girls.

The highlights of the Bootcamp and this is where the magic happened, or miracle, whatever metaphor that we want to call it. For those two days, they use scrum, doing daily scrum to develop d2 solutions to solve the top three complex challenge that we have in Lagos, Nigeria. Lagos State is the most populous and the most tribal state in Africa. So imagine, they walked into the bootcamp with no prior experience in those seats filled and they did magic in two days, daily scrum that was like, wow, miracle happening in Lagos. Where the moments of humility comes for me, and also stepped in for me, and also deep appreciation for the girls and their talents was, the state governor was at the grand finale with his cabinet members and some of the MDs of corporations, he applauded the girls of their dedication, their creativity. When they were doing the live demo of the three d2 solutions across (inaudible 8:41), waste management and traffic management, he said, he’s been thinking about this with his team, his cabinet members in the last two and half years, this is a problem, we need to fix it, we need to do something about it and what they’ve been doing is talking about it but in two days, you girls, were not like us. He actually used the word you ladies are smarter than us, you solved our problem in two days. What we’ve not been able to do in two and half years in his position. It was revolutionary, I was humbled.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 09:28

What’s going through my head now is more like just how we can enable as a community of trainers and coaches, so those girls now have some experience or they’ve been introduced similar like, maybe we can go back to how you were introduced to Agile and Scrum, but now they can become change agents in the most populous part of the Africa and be those change agents that you are and they can inspire others in a complex world, especially in areas like Africa, not just Africa, different parts of the world where we need more people to embrace empiricism, embrace what we talked about with technology and just solve these problems. What did the girls say? Do you have any stories from them sharing their takeaways with you how they were touched and influenced?

Aanu Gopald 10:46

Well, all the stories are on Africa Agility social media platforms, the girls were very appreciative of the opportunity, because it’s so expensive to run programs like this and not having the financial support makes it difficult sometimes. The fact that there is an organization that cares so much about them, that cares so much about their development, their growth, and also a path that can create opportunities, especially job and entrepreneurship opportunities for them was what they were looking for and Africa agility Foundation gave them that opportunity, opened that door for them. A good example was one of the girls that came for the bootcamp last year she spoke to her boss, she was earning less than $100 per month, the currency has changed, is really poor and the boss said, sorry, whatever you want to go and learn has nothing to do with what we do in our organization and she resigned. I love dreamers, I love go-getters, she resigned, she left the job.

And it’s not really easy to get jobs in Africa, if you have one hold on tight to it, it doesn’t matter even if the pay is not that good because you need to take care for yourself, take care of your family and two weeks into the bootcamp, she actually shared what she has learnt, what she has built on social media and before the end of the bootcamp she made times five of what she used to make when she was working in that company. And there are so many testimonials like that, even at the grand finale, five of the girls got employment with an aviation company in Nigeria (inaudible 12:58), the MD was there and he saw the innovation the girls created and like, Oh, come on some of you ladies. And right now I was told on Saturday, every Saturday, there’s a program that happens like a form of mentorship for the girls. And the MD of a company came to speak to the ladies. I had 10 of them on the spot. Tthat’s the impacts.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 13:31

But you’re also creating platform. I think it’s impact but also having Scrum Alliance and having what you’re doing with the Agile Africa and Agile Africa Alliance, and helping bring people together, create platforms where people, could you maybe talk about that a little bit and bring some light to that because I think a lot of times, and for a lot of us, it’s where you create relationships, where you meet, others where you learn your thing. How’s Agile Africa and Agile Africa Alliance bringing people together and how is that helping with this broader movement of bringing or in the sense of exposing people to these agile methods of thinking and ways of working in Africa?

Aanu Gopald 14:24

So Agile Africa and Agile Africa Alliance started back in 2000 and towards the end of 2017, then kicked off the first quarter of 2018. We saw a gap and we saw a need and that is what actually birth the platform and that was before COVID, now that everything has gone virtual. The platform was for growing a community of diverse African professionals. One thing about Africans is we love education. Our parents will do anything even sell their houses, their cars, whatever they have to send us to school. The parts of the world that I came from first degrees is not good enough. The state I came from in Nigeria, it’s PhD but I had to tell my dad, sorry, the best you can get from me is master degree. I’m not going towards the route, education is very important, so we have a lot of educated professionals in Africa.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 15:52

Is it just education, it seems expectations are high in general.

Aanu Gopald 15:58

The expectations are very high, there’s nothing like college fund, there’s no college debt. Expectations are very, very, very, very high. And the dream was like, agile is not that popular in Africa, what can you do to introduce this new way of working, this new way of thinking, everything around agility to Africa and that’s what birthed that platform and with this initiative, we are able to connect Africans with the global Agile community. The resources are mastering, bringing top leaders in the space to come and share their experiences, their wisdom, everything around agile innovation, professional coaching, personal development and branding. The goal, actually, is human capacity development and also to facilitate the needed transformation that will sustain Africa economic growth. That was the dream.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 17:12

So it’s much bigger. I mean, it’s bigger, it’s how do we,

Aanu Gopald 17:16

Yep, so what’s your question?

Speaker: Miljan Baji 17:19

No. So it’s much bigger than just software. It’s much bigger. It has to do with the problems, real problems that people are facing. You mentioned Sally Elatta, who else in the community is contributing and to helping bring agile agility to end the mindset to people in Africa?

Aanu Gopald 17:50

Oh, there’re so many, there are a list of them.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 17:53

That’s great to hear. Maybe just to name the few, who are some of the ones that you’re closely working with and you feel deserve to be mentioned.

Aanu Gopald 18:06

Well, everyone deserves to be mentioned. If I stay within the Scrum Alliance community, we have Joseph Farewell, we have Bob Galen, we have Sherry Silas, we have Michael de la Maza and I’m blanking on right now. Oh, MJ, I remember MJ talking about different types of teams. And we have also a lot of people outside, we have Luke Omar who is not really a Scrum Alliance person, he was actually our second speaker. We have my former boss at Toyota Nyjah Tolo, he actually graced the platform as our first speaker, so we have different people from different parts of the world that has supported this movement. And there are some other people that have supported us financially as well, especially bringing agility to Africa. The youth in Africa are agile, to be honest with you, we’ve gone through a lot of resilience and adaptation. In Africa, you have to quickly adapt, we are born agile in Africa, and we’ve received a lot of financial support, moral support from a lot of people from the Western world. So a great thanks to many, many, many of them.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 19:41

That is awesome. I think something resonated, saying we’re agile. When you grow up in a country or in a part of the world where there’s a lot of competition, I can only imagine in Lagos in Nigeria where it’s highly concentrated, especially in Lagos, probably similar to any big city, but it’s like you get to figure things out, nothing’s given to you, there’s so much competition and having experienced that, it’s demanding. There’s pressure, it’s not easy to grow up in a smaller town and I’ve experienced that too. As far as also motivationally, you can succeed so it motivates you, where you have a lot of people embracing that agility and empiricism and just trying to figure out and you’ll fail a lot, but you also learn a lot. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about, I still don’t know best way to express it, but it’s that environment, almost like a boiler pot type of environment where things are constantly blowing, it’s interesting. And there’s something to innovation, there’s something to learn in that type of environment where it forces you, you don’t have an option not to figure things out, nothing’s given.

Aanu Gopald 21:21

Nothing is given. There’s no privileges. You need to be agile to survive.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 21:30

Maybe we’ll come back to this topic, but there’s something there, it’s been kind of marinating in my head as far as what’s going on. You were the first black female African to achieve both certified team coach and certified enterprise coach through Scrum Alliance. Why was that important for you and for Scrum Alliance?

Aanu Gopald 21:55

Wow. Well, the importance of that for me wasn’t about the certification, but about making a difference in my community and the CTC, the CEC was just a confirmation of my accomplishments in the Agile coaching world. Throughout my career, and I’m sure you would have observed this as well, I’ve been to classes, trainings, workshops, local meetups conferences, and there were only a few people that looks like me. Few years ago, when I embarked on this journey of both certifications, we only have a few handful of black people on the Scrum Alliance guide level, we only have the Morrissey’s at the (inaudible 22:49) level. And I can’t even remember if there was any black person, at the CEC or CTC level at that point, to be honest, I can’t remember. But that was the motivation for me, I see a gap and this become a mission for me, a mission to help others that looks like me, other Africans to start this journey, to inspire them that it’s possible, it is doable. Of course, it’s a long journey with a lot of learning, with a lot of growth and the growth and the opportunity to improve myself personally, to be a better me and to be a better coach in order to serve my community and the organizations that I consult for was the motivation for me.

And right now with the other five black level guide, we are motivated, I mean CAC certified agile coaches level guides at scrum Alliance, the six of those, we are motivated, we are starting a program in September and October to bring the African Americans and the African community together and support them on this journey, that we did it and we believe that you can do it and we are here to guide, to mentor, to support you in achieving your dream because this is a dream to many, many, many people. And also, the accomplishment was a huge opportunity for me to be a role model, not just to Africans but also to women, minority women, that you know what, this is a path for you, not just an opportunity, this is something that you deserve and you can start this journey especially going through the process, the experience and I understood what it takes to become a CTC or a CAC level, supporting the women, the African male and female in this part of the town that I am and also in diaspora, you can achieve these two destinations, it belongs to you, it’s your right. That’s the word I’m looking for. It’s your rights.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 25:40

I agree. I was talking to both Bob Galen and Sherry Silas, diversity wise, from all perspective, but it’s also being able to bring different experiences of diversity to the guide level, and sometimes, I was joking around first then, I didn’t think about diversity like in my podcast in a sense. They started as, hey, I want to have these, it was mostly in my head, it was mostly these guys that I’ll have beers with and as I started enjoying the podcast more and more, I’m like, who else would I want to talk to, who else have I spoken before and for instance, you and I have interacted a couple of different times where I brought you in to speak and I also don’t want to force it, I don’t want to just bring people on just to add to diversity, I want to be able to talk to people that I feel are doing great stuff but at the same time, I can see my biases come out. And like, hey, I want to talk to guys, I want to talk to these people and it requires us to be a little bit more self-aware, I guess that’s where I’m going with this, or what we’re doing, and what we can do to help others because, as you know, especially in the scrum Alliance community, having people mentors and people that can help you is night and day as far as how you can succeed and how you can join the community and all of that. If people don’t have that platform, for instance, what you’re creating or just seeing, hey, can I make it, is it even possible for me to make it.

So the more that people see, and the more that we create equal opportunities for people to get mentors to do these supplements, I think the richer our community and not necessarily just scrum Alliance, but in general outside of Agile. Reflecting back, it requires all of us to be a little bit more conscious about what we’re doing and being more proactive and I’m trying. I’m saying, I’m reaching out, working with Bob but he was sharing some of the things that he was doing. I don’t know if you know the story where he was talking about how his daughter was pushing him, yes, you can say you’re supportive, but what are you doing about it? What steps are you actually taking to make a difference, and that resonated with me, too, same way that at the beginning of this conversation, you said, these are the things that I’m actually doing to help people in Nigeria in Africa, not just saying, I support you, but I’m also doing it through these actions. I think that’s a good example of not just talking, but actually following through with some action, so that’s inspirational to me.

Aanu Gopald 28:44

Thank you so much. My experience with the work I’m doing in Africa consciously made me to be self-aware of the role I am playing in the evolution of the human systems. I’ve always believed that, Africans are the only ones that can solve their own problems and the Girls in Tech initiative, really confirm that for me because I see transformational change happen for these girls, what they need is connecting them to the opportunities, they are ready. Africans are ready for change, we easily embrace change. We have very limited opportunities compared to the Western world and we are readily available for different types of opportunities and different types of change.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 29:50

You think technology will change things because now it’s leveled and it’s easier to connect with people, it’s easier to work remotely. I’m assuming that’ll create more opportunities. I actually just hired somebody from Nigeria to translate, not translate but I’m creating a transcript and it’s easy. I’ve hired people from back home as well. It’s a global market and it’s interesting. Another thing that’s interesting, I don’t know. When I work from people back home, I prefer to speak in English, then in Serbo Croatian because it’s easier for me, especially in business terms, express. But the point that I’m trying to make, communication wise, now, everybody speaks English. So it doesn’t matter where you are, the person working from Nigeria is fluent in English and so the competition, I think, is increasing, but it’s also creating platform for people across the world. And it’s been like that for some time now. But what do you think from your perspective. How is COVID and technology creating more leveled field when it comes to the work?

Aanu Gopald 31:23

So technology has changed the way we work and COVID actually enforced that for everybody, every organizations in every parts of the world and like you said, most parts of Africa, especially in Nigeria, we speak English, and we speak fluent English, because we’re colonized by British and with technology, people can work anywhere and work for any organization in any part of the world. And when you do more research about what people are saying about Africa right now, Africa is now poised to be one of the fastest growing regions in the world and what this means for Africa is maybe we are going to be the new China, we are going to be the new India and we are going to be the hope for human capital. So, with the news and what we are seeing and the way technology is changing, the way organizations are working right now and the way people are working right now, Sally Elatta who is the founder of Sudan NextGen, and also Africa agility, my NGO, we’ve partnered together to start a new initiative called Africa NextGen and our aim is to make Africa the next destination for digital job outsourcing. If you go to africanextgen.com, we are developing youth in Africa with the right skills for them to be able to compete with their counterparts in the Western world.

Organizations, employers can hire talent from Africa actually the youth for digital jobs, and also invest in growing intrapreneurs within Africa. In the year of COVID about 200 startups were birthed in Africa, in the year of COVID when most organizations were shutting down. The African youth, like I said, they are agile, they moved away from white collar jobs that doesn’t exist and they saw opportunities, innovation, using their creativity and they came up with companies that can help to solve the complex problems that we have in Africa. And right now on African NextGen, organizations can hire talent, African youth for digital jobs in customer experience, agile roles, (inaudible 34:10), they are certified, they’ve got the professional certification, they’ve gone through mentorship and the opportunities for them to grow. They can hire in mobile and web development, digital marketing, robotic data science, all our graduates from girls in tech, and also QA and automation testing. So we have those skills available and we have those talents available. So we are looking for organizations in the Western world. Come on, hire this amazing… Another thing about Africans, that we are very, very hard working. I don’t know if you have ever worked with an African. Normally when a job is nine to five, if we are not done with our work, we just want to deliver value and results, very, very hard working. It’s in our DNA.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 35:03

I grew up with immigrant in the United States as an immigrant, I went to ESL classes here and went to high school and even college and I had more in common with people from Africa and Asia than when we moved. Something that you said, I think it’s Africa is a great example, but I think applies for those that are listening, it’s not just for Africa. There are parts of the world that have similar situations where people are eager, and they see the potential how they can contribute to the problems and to the economy, globally. There’s so many parts of the world that are eager to be part of this bigger movement, around solving all kinds of bigger, I mean, biggest problems in the world. And I think it’s an exciting time too because I think in the next 10 years, it’s only just going to get bigger and bigger and we’re going to see the potential of what we can do when we have more people and more diversity across the globe engaged in solving problems and getting rather than just one parts and I don’t know, if you feel the same way, but I feel that the buildup, and it’s not just now, but I think COVID has really triggered it. Maybe, to come back to the question from earlier, what can we all do to improve social and professional equality? What are some of the things for those that are listening and including myself, that want to know in what ways we can help with social and professional equality?

Aanu Gopald 37:06

To be to be honest with you, privileges on ramps would only show up consciously or unconsciously, especially if you are in this part of the world, the Western world and few things that came to mind for me is, number one, we have to be consciously aware of the way we show up at work, and also in the community, it’s not about color at all. It’s about showing up the way we want people to show up for us. Secondly, we should learn how to give the gift of love, the gift of care, the gift of support to the community, regardless of the color, the shape, even the field. We go out to meet people, what do we do, we put smiles on people’s face, especially those of us that we came from Asia or Africa, and maybe we live in this world, there are so many things happening in our parts of the of our world with our family that bothers us a lot, that we so much care for. And also, living and working here with the way some people behave, I don’t want to mention some few things. But we should show up with love, with care, with supports, everyday think about what gifts do you want to give to others, how do you want to put smiles on the faces or in the face of one person.

How do I want to touch one life today. Another thing that came to mind is yes, we know that we have a lot of challenges, we have lots of issues in developing countries or continents and most of the time you hear bad reporting about oh, this country is this, every country have its own vices, we have our own problems, our challenges, we should start promoting the good things that is happening in developing countries, in some other parts of the world. And also with COVID happening last year and of course COVID is still in the space right now, people should show interest in by many more about the needs of other people, the people we work with, even when you go online, you can find out about how we can improve social and professional equality in Asia, in Africa, what can we do to support?

Speaker: Miljan Baji 40:13

It’s really about, as you’re saying, what I’m hearing is empathy and experience but I also tell people, it’s very difficult to empathize if you’re not willing also to, in some ways put yourself in that experience, right? It’s a fine line between, well, it’s not a fine line, but for many people it is, without truly understanding what people are going through or what they’ve gone through. And for many people, we only and including myself, if I really want to understand what Aanu is thinking, and to truly be able to empathize with Aanu, I have to see through your eyes and experience all and try to understand what you grew up with, what has shaped your worldviews, your perspectives, in order to truly be able to support and see things from somebody else’s perspective. I think a lot of times we don’t have that experience, we don’t have that platform, I can say, I support the diversity, I support this and that. This goes back to what I was saying, I have to do something about it, I have to try to do something about diversity, only then will I start getting a small sense. Oh, what that is about, it’s not just talk, talk but put yourself in a position where you can learn more about really what we’re talking about and what other people might be going through.

Aanu Gopald 42:06

Yeah, exactly. I’ve heard a lot of people saying, Oh, we are supporting diversity and inclusion and equality. It’s all about talk, talk and there are different ways that we can support. People are hungry, people are, oh, God. Financial sponsors, $10 is a big amounts of money for some people, just that gift of $10. There are different NGOs or individuals making big impact. Share your knowledge, you don’t have money, but you’ve got something here. Share your knowledge, that’s a gift that we can give to people. I’m going to be a bit personal here. For the Africa NextGen, we need mentors, we need trainers in all those skills that I have mentioned communication, emotional intelligence, leadership, just name it, digital marketing, customer experience, empathy mapping and lead product development. Agile, you’re a CST. You can offer free certifications, you can give the gift of coaching, leadership development, because this youth are leaders not just of tomorrow, they are leaders of today. There are so many things that we can give, we are looking for sponsors, we are looking for companies to provide paid and unpaid internships for the youth that graduate from Africa next gen initiatives. And also in September, we are having another Girls in Tech.

Right now, I’m desperately in need of financial sponsor, it cost a lot of money to run the bootcamp because it’s a passion for me. My husband and I and with a lot of Africans, individual Africans, they are supporting this movement. We are going to launch a donation, help fund, any one of those out there $50 means a lot to us, support this movement. We’ve trained over 200 Girls, we’ve trained sorry, about 200 Girls, of which 50% of them are in employment right now. That’s the impacts. 15% of them are either freelancing or they are Techpreneur. One of them is actually consulting for a company in the US and she lives in Nigeria. This is the smile that we want to put on the faces of these girls. We want to close the gender gap in technology. Right now we have 25% of female 75% of male of which only 3% are African Americans and Africa and the ratio of African women in technology is 0.0 something percent

Speaker: Miljan Baji 45:10

Which is crazy. That’s the world that we live in and when you look at the numbers, and not just there, everywhere, it is insane. In a way, how can that be good for innovation if it’s so homogeneous. Getting us, our community that you and I are part of, getting scrum Alliance getting everybody just to understand a little bit, even that 50 bucks, all of the trainers, we all can chip in little bit, whatever it is.

Aanu Gopald 45:52

I’m coming to you, I’m just waiting to create it and posts it on the TCC group on LinkedIn, for my guide level families, and families and people that cares about impacting lives in Africa to support us. I spoke with, when I was in Nigeria, and I’m going to say, one of the top lawyers in Africa, there’s a state in Nigeria that, there’s a city, what the Girls does at the age of 15-17 is for the parents to send them for prostitution in Italy, that’s the business when you get to the age of that. That’s how the parents live, in a small city in that part of the country. and the dream of the man is, let’s bring Girls in tech to the city and he said, you know what, I’m going to do everything possible to sponsor you that if we can touch the life of just two girls, stop them from going to Italy for prostitution, that’s the biggest achievement for him. And I was like, wow, whatever it takes, I’m ready to do this. Those are the testimonials. Life is tough, very tough.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 47:31

It also tells you about the environment, if somebody is forced to do that, it tells you about the environment that they live in, and what type of options they have. So if we can just give people and girls options not to consider that or even be motivated or that something’s going to say, there is a potential here for me, or this is how I see myself and it is, and I think it just comes to all of us being more conscious and be more actionable about what we’re doing, it’s easier to say, it goes back to what I said at the beginning, I donate back home in both financially as well as, I support the communities where I’m from, but I still know that I can do more. And a lot I do, it can make huge difference. And I can give others like what you’re doing, getting others to evolve. This conversation, at least for me, is opening up again, it’s going to come back to me and doing something about it. But it is helping me get a little bit more motivated and put some more things into action. I wanted to ask you this earlier, just on the fun side, you’ve been doing and helping organizations outside of it adopt Agile and Scrum. Could you maybe share some of the stories or areas where you’ve helped companies outside of IT?

Aanu Gopald 49:15

Oh, I have so many examples and I’m thinking in my head, which example should I actually give? And the one that came to mind for me was Capital One. I was an Agile Coach within the IT departments in the small business and international car departments. The leader of the business team, and when I mean the business team, this is where the bankers,, the credit analyst, underwriters, booking and funding, the people you talk to when you’re looking for Loan, Mortgage and stuff like that, said, I love this agile thing that you guys are doing, I could see improvements, I could see sustainable change, I could see equality improving, morality and all those benefits productivity that comes with agility. And he said, Oh, I want to do the same thing for my business team. And I said, Okay, what problem are you trying to solve? The usual questions that we asked and he said, you know what, the turnaround time for business customers to ask for loan, and for the loan to be deposited into the account is like, Oh, I don’t want to give number because we want to reduce the lead time, the language, I will call it.

So started with training, just a bit of orientation of what Agile is, and blah, blah, blah, and they decided to call a cross-functional team, a cross-functional team of bankers, credit analyst, booking and funding and an underwriter part of a team. They do daily scrum, daily standup where they meet every morning, oh, yesterday, i decisioned XYZ loans. Today, I’m going to decision this loan, oh, yesterday, I spoke to a customer, some documentation we’re missing and today I will follow up, I have impediments, I do have impediment, so they form small pods so they call it pods. And they became more collaborative, they work together as a team. For an example, a documenters has a lot of documents to review and an underwriter is less busy, okay, oh, I can support you, I can help you. That team work, the real team work, the real scrum team work, started happening. To cut the long story short, they were able to become 40% faster and that was an amazing result.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 52:07

That’s what happens when you just put people together and let them figure things out.

Aanu Gopald 52:13

They just figured things out. It’s collaboration, the power of team collaboration, mutual accountability, it’s not my job, you are the one reviewing documents. No, we are a team and we are in it together and we succeed together as a team.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 52:34

That, yeah, and it goes back to even some type of conditioning, what we’re used to, like, in organizations, the way that organizations have been set up, it’s like, we’ve been untrained to just collaborate and figure things. A lot of times, we’ve been trained to take orders, especially in some countries, coming back to some of the cultural aspect, that’s how you’ve been conditioned, that’s what’s expected of you to just get together and figure things out. It’s like, it’s a normal thing, but it’s not a normal thing in a business setting.

Aanu Gopald 53:18

That’s really true you know, because in Africa, if I’m older than you, you don’t call me by my name, you call me by my initial, you’d say AG, because of that culture respect. It’s disrespectful for me to call someone that I’m older than, it’s very disrespectful for me to call you Aanu, we call by initials. So that’s a sign of respect, that culture (inaudible 53:51)

Speaker: Miljan Baji 53:52

I would definitely love to get your thoughts about how the cultural aspect is a global workforce. Now we have company culture, but we also have global culture, like you might have teams from all over the world that have come from different backgrounds, different cultures, and how’s that impacting the team culture or company culture, but we’ll save that. We’re almost out of time and it’s crazy how time flies by. What would you leave the listeners with? What is the message that you would like to leave everybody with?

Aanu Gopald 54:29

The message I would like to leave everybody is find something that you can give back to the community. There are different things that we can do to support the community. There are different gifts that we have within our capacity and power to give. It doesn’t have to be in Asia, it doesn’t have to be in Africa. Touch A Life every day. And another thing I want to leave is everyone has a dream. Don’t be one of those people that will take their dream to the grave without achieving it. Believe in your dream and make it happen. Just step into your superpower and bring your dream to life. Find people that can support you. I have the best team in the world in Africa. They do most of the stuff. What I do is look for money. I have the best team in Africa that makes things happen. Find the best people that will share and believe in your dream, they will support you to achieve it. I always tell people when I’m talking to the youth, when you go to the graveyard and if your eyes could be open you will see amazing dreamers that died with their dream. Do not die with your dream, make it happen in this one lifetime that you have. Make that big impact in the world. We are all created to bring a change to the world. Be that change agents.