Month: January 2022

Kiro Harada

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:48

Who is Kiro Harada?

Kiro Harada 00:52

I am Kiro Harada. So I’m an Agile coach, and doing Scrum training. But I have a background of chemical engineering. And after getting the job of a product development, and then doing some QA, I realized that the software is a key about improving my career, I switched my career to the software in 2000. The interesting thing is that, in chemical engineering department in 1990s, we had to do everything. So I did a little bit Computational Chemistry, but if you are in chemical engineering, you get a workstation. If you get the mechanical engineering, you have all the machines installed with that. In chemical engineering, okay, we have chemical reactors, both, we have to open a computer, build a network, and then apply patches for software, we have to do everything. So Chemical engineering is kind of good place to learn various kinds of things at the same time. Then I kind of continue that way until right now. So I’m doing Agile coaching as a main profession but as you can see the mess behind, I do a lot of things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:21

Great. And maybe can you elaborate a little bit on, you know, your experiences in hardware and your background in hardware, because I think it’s really interesting as far as your experience in applying scrum in hardware, and just how you got into this agile?

Kiro Harada 02:42

So since I was in chemical engineering, and then I was so much interested in mechanical engineering, I really like to create some things that work with a physical interaction with that. And then there’s a mechanical engineering way to create some working machines. But once it becomes complicated, it suddenly becomes exponentially difficult to implement it. And then we get to endure small machines that call to a microprocessor. Oh, it’s a good way. The more since we have small electronics that can be controlled by a computer, it’s much, much easier to implement some complex move just by hardware with software. So I’m pretty much interested with it. And then probably one of the reason I started working manufacturing, this was a product development, but that’s kind of in some movement happens with a working place. So yeah, I love working that way. Thanks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:58

So maybe, you know, I want to talk to you and see your perspective like Scrum and Agile methods have their roots in Japan, and in what ways has that impacted you, like what’s the perspective from somebody from Japan on Scrum and Agile, and do you see that Scrum and Agile have roots in Japan or is your perspective different on that?

Kiro Harada 04:24

Yeah, so, I do not think there is a specific origin of agile but I have to say that some of the manufacturer in Japan has their own way very similar, which is known as the agile right now. So what I understand is that, when the Japanese industry created a good industrial quality and standard, we didn’t have much money to implement the various kinds of instruments, machines, lines, whatever. Then, we didn’t have much resources so the only way we could do is, okay, collect all the people find the best way. So instead of dividing work for each person from the beginning point we get together, and then we think and work together, what is the best way to work out with minimum resources. And then that created the creativity that within our limited resources, what could be achieved. And then we have the better interaction with various people, with various background skills. And then that’s a secret, but why Agile and Scrum works.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:52

So essentially, get a bunch of smart people in a room that are willing to work with each other and just let them figure things out.

Kiro Harada 06:00

With my experience, actually, so good thing in working here is that I could have a direct interaction with the people actually who was in the development space. I do not call smart people, I do call crazy people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:17

So get a bunch of crazy people together, right? Smart and crazy, courageously maybe.

Kiro Harada 06:22

One other thing is that the since they do not have their own testing environment for them to test their idea, or they get together around the midnight at the factory, they change the factory, all the land experiment, and then in the morning, they get back the factory in the original space, so they can manufacture the ordinary manufacturing the next morning, and then they get back sleep. That’s the kind of crazy things I heard.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:51

What else I mean, last time, you and I spoke, you talked about the impact and the, you know, the pressure after the World War II, and Japan to deliver. Could you maybe elaborate and talk about some of that you share with me like, you know how this Kaizen way of working, goes back to Demin Tsi Ono [unclear word 7:21], and how the world war II or results of world war II kind of force Japanese to embrace that Kaizen.

Kiro Harada 07:29

And so after the World War Two, in the case of the after the war appeals, the older industry in Japan get into recession. So the old industry didn’t have much resources. Now we do have people work on it, but we didn’t have much machines with it. But the thing is that after the World War Two, the Deming came to Japan, they brought us the status, quality control and the way to improve the process on the quality and productivity. Since we didn’t have much resource, but we did have time, and then we have a good motivation to create the industry back. So to get the history back, there was the Korean War in place, and then we had a great need, a great industrial point to create trucks or other military vehicles, and then that creates a huge demand for vehicles, that train the industry a lot.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:40

So that created essentially platform for a lot of this stuff that was… [crosstalk 8:46]

Kiro Harada 08:46

Yeah, so it’s a really limited. Okay, we have time, but the deadline is near. So the first truck was designed in nine month.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:59

Wow. That is pretty cool. So maybe to expand on that, you know, I want to talk about your experience Scrum, in manufacturing. Could you speak maybe about Scrum in manufacturing? Like, what are some of the good, the bad, the ugly sides of Scrum and manufacturing?

Kiro Harada 09:22

Yeah, so actually just Scrum in manufacturing in Japan is, we are now getting back how we worked with Scrum. We need to talk a little bit about how the manufacturing practices blow to outside Japan in early 1980s. So since after the Japan industry came back to a very high productivity and high quality thing, that people are curious about it, and then they sent researchers and then the first famous book about Lean manufacturing is that machine that will change the world, so they thought it was the machine. So the little trick is that they didn’t disclose how actually overnight with it, just shows and adjusting, okay, the manufacturer repeatable process of manufacturing and then they call it the secret of high productivity, which is really not. And then people are really to track to the point, okay, it’s a pull system. Okay. Now pull system is for adjusting only, it is not for planning period. So the idea of putting a manufacturing practice in software is actually the initial idea was wrong, so we need to think more about how we design the manufacturing or how we design the product part of it in that sense, so there is no pure pull system. So it’s always a mixture of push system and pull system. So we need to have a similar batch processing, and then we do a continuous one piece roll that adjusts itself to liberalize the manufacturing. So we need a good mixture of it. So then Scrum is a good point. Scrum has a sprint and sprint running, so is the batch running. And then let the team decide how to deliver it, but they are so stronger in color is to minimize the lead time for each product backlog item. So it’s a good simulation in a designing way, or how we create a highly productive and high quality process. So I think Scrum is pretty much all about covering push and pull system.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:05

And could you maybe elaborate on that, because that’s really interesting, in a sense of thinking about it, sometimes we’re going to need a batch process, and that, you know, as far as the value stream that might be needed. And then sometimes, you know, when we look at things that might be more of a single flow. Could you give us maybe an example on, like, you know, in your experience manufacturing, like, you know, how do you leverage Scrum and other frameworks like Kanban? Or like, what does it look like? Because I’m assuming that it’s a custom framework in organizations that you’re not probably doing pure Scrum. Is that true or…?

Kiro Harada 12:47

Okay, so there’s no such thing like pure Scrum. Scrum is framework, so it’s just a framework, there’s nothing inside yet. So scrum part is that how we design very straightforward aspirin.[unclear phrase 13:04] So since manufacturing, so we keep creating the same product over for a certain period of time, so we have a same virus and stay in place. So then we measure it, we optimize that, so we create the flow with that. So the manufacturing, okay, I don’t call it a pretty easy, it still has a lot of adjustment and tweaks to make that flow, but as always creating a product or should I say designing the product, okay, we design the exact same product, this sprint again, you won’t never get paid so you have to make a new one. But even though you create a completely new one, every time in the sprint, your productivity or your result is not predictable. So we create a kind of various stream template every sprint, but we change a little bit every sprint and then also the work that fall on the various stream chances a little bit. So then, we allow to really automate everything. So if there’s a static vary string, we can update, okay, we can automate and then we can ask the machine to do it, but very stream or designing a scrum is that we’re updating various streams, we’re changing that work every time and also, we’re updating our people, “okay, we know better? Better still we like to have a metrics major inspect and adapt cycle. So itself is almost in a manufacturing is the same thing. So then Scrum is kind of say we are expanding our inspect, major and learn and update kind of process more on designing parts or the manufacturing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:12

That is interesting, because I mentioned earlier like I spoke with Joe Justice recently and he was working at Tesla, he was describing how, you know, he’s like this truly works. And it’s the, you know, almost like scrum on steroids in the sense of how they work and how they get stuff done and how they continuously iterate through things. What are some of the things that you’re seeing currently, that are applied in manufacturing? That are impressing you? And with the companies that you work, is there anything that impresses you like, wow, this is, you know, completely new way of working, or this is…?

Kiro Harada 16:06

So actually, there are several clients working on it, but in a manufacturing, so in the year is very strong, I cannot talk with these things, but they’re actually utilizing the way how to improve the whole process. The one example I can share is that I’m working with a small venture audio device company. They’re creating audio mixers for theatres. So multi-channel, high resolution, low latency one. But since, you know, the current audio has become the higher resolution audio, which has a much higher sampling rate, we used to implement with software but software fluctuation or latency make it very difficult for the multi-channel like 40 Channel mixer, to have the delays fix with it. So they wanted to create a hardware sound processing but the hardware is very hard. So what I did is as they actually implemented the older core logic with FPGA field programmable gate array, but they created a FPGA design by TDD, it’s more like Callaway TDD. So instead of creating the circuit or design gatally [unclear word 17:31], they create a logic analyzer or functional generator with FPGA cell, wow, and then create the input signal, audio signal, and then they start implementing target. So the interesting thing is that they also sit the analyzer in production. So they log a lot of information with it. Once in the LR in a field, they actually collect the log, and then they can replay the same thing. So, even though they’re creating hardware, they’re fully utilizing the software techniques to make the quality better. So I can say, okay, I will show you that link of the product after this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:21

Yeah, please and I’ll include it in the link. But that’s interesting, because it’s like, similar, like how a lot of these patterns, you know, we’re adopting software development, this is very standard pattern in the sense like, you know, test early and often move testing to the, you know, validate early, create some feedback loops, and you’re just applying it in that context. But it’s exact same thing that we do in the software development, you know, probably in some ways, it comes back from manufacturing. So it’s just interesting as Scrum is becoming more and more popular, how some of these patterns not in manufacturing, but just in other industries will be applied and contextualized.

Kiro Harada 19:06

Yeah, so I think, you know, the Apollo does, called jig in manufacturing. So Jig is a support to create the work of staying in the good position. So, when you create a wing or when you create something that keep a strict angle, we create some supporting device first and then create the work and make sure we do the uses in variation of the manufacturing process. So then, we call TDD but we are actually thinks it’s a JigDD, it is a jig, helping device that to create a product to be in correct angle, correct position, but the software helped us or we can create the Jig that is intelligent. So when we are designing it, we have to make sure our work is very well aligned with Jig. But our intelligent Jig is a little bit noisy, “hey hey”, [inaudible 20:11] you’re well aligned enough so, fix it. So, that helps a lot about work to designing. So, we are creating automated helper spreading, designing the process, designing the product, design hardware, to help us design better product by reducing the cognitive load to take care of the minor…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:36

Exactly, which is like concept in, I guess Agile too is out, automate whatever you can, whatever makes sense. So you can, like you said, minimize that cognitive Lobell. So just in general, like don’t worry about that, if it can be automated, it’s going to save you time, it’s going to help you go faster long term.

Kiro Harada 20:59

So, yeah, I think I find it very much fun.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:03

Yeah, it is. You talked about the next generation electric Kanban system manufacturing, could you maybe talk about what that is? The next generation electric Kanban system?

Kiro Harada 21:15

So, what I call a Kanban system in manufacturing not software version. So Kanban is about the messaging system. So we are actually telling, “Oh, we use that part, so please, supply us with that part”. And then the Kanban is sent back with the truck, and then few days or sometime few hours later, your part is delivered. But what the purpose of Kanban? So Kanban is actually not on order, it’s too slow. So we really wanted to synchronize all processes. So all the process in the same tack time, your tack time is at that how your conductor will control the whole length of manufacturing. But if the older processes, keeping the same tact, it is very effective, and then minimize working in progress, right. So what you want to do is synchronize processes. And then…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:42

Synchronize the value stream, I’m assuming because you’re looking at the old hours.

Kiro Harada 22:46

And then Kanban was necessary evil since all process cannot be synchronized, it is sometimes geographically away with it. And then geographical location difference was not really a problem since it takes time to deliver part, so it’s okay to deliver a Kanban back to the supplier. But we can have a better way to synchronize, we can have a better rhythm so that we can synchronize each other. So one of the key is that Kanban is the only signals from the user to supplier, so it only can accelerate. There’s no way to slow down. So that result in a huge loss in the car manufacturing in the Lehman shock period, since they can accelerate but they cannot slow down with the Kanban.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:51

So how do you slow it down? I mean, so if you can accelerate, and what you’re really saying is that you can like when your supplier sends you apart, you can’t really slow it down?

Kiro Harada 24:08

Yeah, so since Kanban is pull system so okay, the user using it and there’s a signal to the supplier, that is a signal to the supplier and then all the supply chains are connected. Okay when the situation like Lehman shock happened, okay, the cost of manufacturing, the Kanban is already there so all the parts…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:32

Start coming in.

Kiro Harada 24:34

That made a huge fluctuation. So pull system can pull into accelerate, but there’s the other part that is necessary too, how to slow down. With the next time on [unclear 24:49] system actually, I do not know what is happening in Kanban right now but they’re thinking about designing how to share the info “How to slow down, and still synchronize all the process to each other”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:05

Yeah, I mean, just thinking about it but I’m assuming this would go back to contracting and to the suppliers and communication and saying like, “hey, you know, what happens? If we have this type of an event, how do we communicate? And what type of policy do we need in place in order to, you know, stop sending us these parts because we no longer or we can’t, you’re sending out much faster rate than what we can actually take. And that might be creating the bottlenecks or costing more or whatever it is, right”?

Kiro Harada 25:38

So in, okay, in some huge company manufacturing case, the load fluctuation with adjustment with Kanban is only 5% per month. So if you cannot actually do more than 5%, if you cannot slow down more than 5% each month, so you have to at least one month before, situations a little more complicated. So okay, the Kanban system is for adjustments, so they cannot take care about 20%c, 30% changes. So it’s a responsibility of the push part of the system. So it’s a mixture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:21

Yeah, that is interesting. You know, I told you like, you know, my background is mostly in software development, and, you know, started working with more clients that are in manufacturing, or they have parts during manufacturing, it’s been very interesting. So maybe to shift gears a little bit, I wanted to talk to you about just the importance, I guess, or the why is it important for professionals in Japan to be introduced to Scrum? And is there like, you know, in the West, mostly, I guess it’s everywhere, it’s not just here in United States, but people are crazy about certifications, they’re crazy about Scrum is becoming, you know, so there are good and bad, of the certifications, but why do you think is important for professionals in Japan to be introduced to Scrum?

Kiro Harada 27:24

So, about 30, okay, or more than 30 years ago, so in 1980s, our way, the Japanese way of working shook the world. Actually, we changed the way of work 35 years ago. So then it was very different from what the other country sold is a normal way to there, and then we could do it. But as you know, after the so called bubble economy collapses, we are more about becoming small improvement, or should I say cost cutting, working, impressed for the last 20-30 years. So even though we create a very new crazy way of working 35 years ago, but we lost how we did it. And then after a long run, the new way, Okay, like scrum, the way of working all the way back to Japan again. So it’s a good thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:34

So it’s really about going back to the roots and understanding the essence of what the moment that was really started in Japan.

Kiro Harada 28:47

Yeah. I do not call its roots. But it’s older…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:54

Well, I think a lot of people and maybe it’s just the end, Jeff Sutherland, who has specifically, he talks about it, and, you know, the impact that you know, Tekyi Ono [unclear 29:10] and the two professors, you know, Harvard, Nonaka and I forget the gentleman’s name.

Kiro Harada 29:19

Yes, [inaudible 29:22]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:23

So, you know, they had a huge impact, and he’s and I think damning obviously, and, you know, probably without Toyota and without what, you know, DPS and a lot of this stuff, probably some of the stuff wouldn’t be where it is or maybe would have shaped it differently. But so that’s I think, why a lot of people consider that a lot of the roots or what was you know, big push came with lean and came from Japan.

Kiro Harada 29:57

Yeah, because it’s a good thing, I feel good. So, definitely that way. But the key part is that we keep learning, we keep studying other people, we keep studying what other people are doing. So the key here is that before the war, Toyota engineers visited the United States and visited all the factory for Ford, Chrysler, GM, and they learned a lot about the, they didn’t have much resource to create exactly same manufacturing line, and then suppose they stopped by a supermarket. And then they saw a supermarket putting glossaries other on it. Oh, that’s the idea. Wherever you deliver like, a car is like a shopping cart in a supermarket and party delivered on time to it. So it will become much very efficient with minimum and still have high production. So they learned a lot from the car manufacturer in the US but also from the supermarket.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:11

Yeah, it’s a good pull system and lean. What about why scrum Alliance, so we knew you’re associated with Scrum Alliance, and, you know, Scrum Alliance is the oldest, most recognized nonprofit organization. And I think you know, in the United States, Scrum Alliance dominates in the sense of certifications, all that but in other countries it doesn’t so like you know, people a lot of times associate themselves with other certification bodies. Why did you decide to, maybe you probably belong to others, I’m not sure but you’ve kind of decided to go down the CST path and trainer path and associate yourself with Scrum Alliance, so why scrum Alliance?

Kiro Harada 32:03

So I don’t know to feel bad about other certifications, but the reason I stayed in a CST path is that Scrum Alliance training is very diverse. So the training provided by the trainer are very different to each other as you try to capture Scrum, which is good thing. So in that sense, I’d like to have other certification body training so we like to capture the core part of Scrum to make it better. But at the same time, it’s a good thing that the certification body is not the training body, so training body made a various way of doing it, still the certification body a good certification, so we are known to either Yeah, traditional meeting on competing, but we are trying to better way of sharing Scrum idea and then we are learning from each other. So if there is no single, those scrum association, kind of saying, “okay, you have to teach this, this blah, blah, blah”, probably Scrum will lose their momentum.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:28

Exactly. And that’s kind of what attracted me too because I think that same thing of like, you know, there’s a certification body but there’s, you know, trainers, our community. So when I design my training, when you design your training, it’s different than we have seen learning objectives, but Kiro can design his own way. And, you know, I think there’s also my perspective around like, you know, nonprofit versus for profit, a lot of these organizations are for profit and not necessarily for impact organizations. So it’s interesting. You are one of the few first CSTR which CST Regional I believe, right. Well, what was your experience of becoming a CSTR? What was that process?

Kiro Harada 34:27

So it’s exactly the same as CST thing but since the way okay, providing training pretty much not really same or running with the waves of how CST is. Okay, so then, I believe they decided to give it a try. So since I think you have experiments, okay, introducing scrum to a large enterprise, and Scrum into small startup, do you do the same way? I do not think so. So then my experience is that if you bring a scrum to large enterprise, can you do develop a little software with that such loose process? That’s a response. And then when you bring your scrum to startup, do we need such a lot of meetings just to develop software? So it’s a completely different reaction to it. So we need to inspect and adapt, okay, inspect and adapt is a key part of it with the size of the company, or the history context of the company. But at the same time, it applies to culture, I don’t want to use a culture like term, but the context of each country, context of each group has different background. And then it may not be a good way to have a standardized way of introducing Scrum, won’t work there. So it’s the same thing, as I said, about a variety of Scrum trainers. So it’s better to have a different way of introducing scrum on how we see how Scrum is implemented. So if we work, having diversity is a good, risk mitigating way to growing Scrum. Oh, yeah, I think so. It’s a kind of experiments scrum alliance is doing right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:37

Yeah. And I think it’s great because I do like coming from a different country coming from a different culture, I like the challenge that I have, for instance, if I like I’ve done trainings in the in Serbia, Croatia, in that former Balkans area, and I’ve never delivered the training in Serbo-Croatian, like I’ve always delivered in English, even though I’m from that country, I wouldn’t be like for me, like in people, I can tell. Like, if I was delivering it in Serbo-Croatian, the experience would be different. So it’s same thing like here for trainers going to Japan, training in Japanese or in English, where if people had an option for a native language and native, like somebody that has more context about what’s going on, I think for those people that are looking for that type of experience would be like you said, option, diversity, like, you know, and I think a lot of times it’s a richer experience.

Kiro Harada 37:37

Yes. So interesting part is that, I think the when you introduce retrospectives for when introducing Scrum, it’s a new concept, right. But in Japan, we learn how to do retrospective in kindergarten. I mean, so yeah. Okay. Small kids are collected together so how old are they? So it’s a kind of the context, different from it. And then we actually forget how we do it. Why not? You did in Kindergarten, you can still do the same and the working process as well. So what went wrong today? What went well today? So it’s a kind of interaction to retrospectives here. But yeah, they are different countries, so there’s a different way of introducing it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:38

Yeah. I think it’s a I mean, we’ll see it’s a pilot and what are you seeing as benefits of the CSTR program? Like what have you gained from becoming a CSTR? What are the benefits of CSTR?

Kiro Harada 38:54

Yeah, not sure so I can start, okay. I can start providing a CSM classes here without having inviting CSTs on site. So yeah, I really love to invite CST on site and teaching together but because of the this COVID-19 situation, it is a little bit hard to invite people and then remote contexts, zoom context a little bit harder to share context. Lately like to resume working inviting CSTs including you, coming to Japan to teach together and then share the finding

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:36

I would love to. I don’t know about teach but I would love to visit maybe do one class but I’ve never been to Japan and I will…

Kiro Harada 39:44

But then meanwhile so we can continue providing certified trainings here in native longus. Actually capture some of the people who are not really keen on having English classes. So we are certainly expanding acknowledgement of the scrum in the market. And also there are some good scrum practitioners here, and then who are not really eager to apply for CST because of language barriers. So yeah, still the process involves some English, but we can start encouraging people. Okay. So there may be or otherwise, even though your English is not fluent enough to get through our English interviews in English, so there should be a way, of course…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:46

What was your experience? I mean, like my experience, I mean, like for those of you I think some of the listeners might be familiar with the Certified Scrum trainer process, some of you may not, but it’s a multiyear, very long process that requires a lot of things including persistence. And from your perspective, what message do you have for somebody that is thinking about going that path? Like reflecting back maybe doing a little retrospective here, what would you do differently? What would you do the same when it came to the CSTR program?

Kiro Harada 41:35

Okay, so one of the key retrospect that I have is that I could have started earlier. Always start early. So your career length is limited, so if you have something very interesting out something that will benefit for you, start early, that is the key. So it’s a kind of diverse experiments. So there’s a lot of people and then with diverse backgrounds, diverse ideas, diverse way of doing it, so appreciate it, it’s fun.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:17

And the application itself, I mean, like, I would say, you know, it took at least for both CST and CC, for me, the application is long and tedious, and I remember spending hours. So I tell usually, when people ask me, like, you know, how should I start preparing? What are the next steps? I usually tell them go review the application, understand start taking iterative and incremental approach to filling out your application.

Kiro Harada 42:48

So but at the same time, so I need a little proposal about how to improve it. So since it’s a clear symptom that there are multiple peels here. So there must be peels here is that the symptom is keep adding things, not removing. Since it’s a structure of adding new criteria, saying and then it is not really straightforward, and then a vary stream optimized way of it. It is perfectly okay to go awry, find newline. But we can make it a little bit easier to get into the gate. Okay, the key or some of the, okay, martial arts training, whatever is it’s pretty much made it easier to get in the gate and then you pass it out. And then, so if it becomes a part of the applicants professional development, it’d be good.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:03

Yeah, that’s a really interesting concept. Because I think if you could get people even to start filling out or getting somebody to help them with the application or something, that’s something for scrum alliance to think about, in a sense of how do we get people to start filling out application, start kind of getting in the process, maybe even getting another CST or somebody to help them with that initial startup, might get more people to kind of engage in this process because yeah.

Kiro Harada 44:37

So since Scrum is very diverse. So I have never seen the exact same scrum implementation in two different teams. So I really like to encourage people how people implemented Scrum, what kind of tricks, tips they have tried, so that the other people can try it, and then actually describing how they did it, it’s really helped to develop their career too. So, I actually mentioned that I was working in scrum patterns working group. So we are collecting, good working way doing it, and then to write document about it so that the other people can try with it. So working software is better, but document can survive history. The people with no contact, try new equipment, new air walking, so I think it will help change our way of work as well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:52

Great, so maybe the last question here, a little fun question. If you could have dinner with two people that are alive, who would you choose? And why?

Kiro Harada 46:07

So okay, so if the people are alive, I just go for it. Okay, let’s go for dinner. And then the contrary, I’m thinking of, do you know robot Heinlein, science fiction writer?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:23

No.

Kiro Harada 46:27

It’s the door to the summer, or the other stranger in a strange run. It’s a science fiction writer. He wrote about the society in the future. So even though he died when I was at high school, so I really wanted to meet him. But I literally talk with him that after he observed the College Station, how he imagined the future. So they have a good foundation. Yeah, all the same reason I like to see Isaac Asimov who was a science fiction writer as well. So who are good imaginary, that actually somewhat accurately predict the future right now? What kind of thing happening?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:22

What’s going on in their heads as they… [crosstalk 47:28]

Kiro Harada 47:29

So unfortunately, we cannot go to the moon right now. We have imagined when I was a kid, but okay, this smartphone changed the way so we can talk everywhere, we can see everywhere, we can send pictures, Oh, is that change a lot. So but we will see the change a lot and I’m looking forward to it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:57

Yeah, no, I think yeah, it is cool. And it’s interesting, you know, that some people have that foresight, or maybe, you know, just guessing, but just knowing I agree, knowing like their thought process and how they come up with those ideas would be really interesting. Is there anything else that I didn’t know to ask you? But if you were me, you’re like, “oh, yeah, I would have asked him this question”. What was something like that you worked on? Or maybe something that I should ask you but I just didn’t ask.

Kiro Harada 48:47

I will talk about my okay, April fool project I did a few years ago, which is a lazy manifesto. Yeah, it’s a joke site for the April thing, but I’m seriously joking. So I really like to have all the team to become creative, innovative and crazy how to new things. And key part is how they can become lazy. And then how to finish the ordinary drudgery work in a controlled manner. And then some people okay, especially some teams in here, probably, they work so hard. They try to finish all the tasks by hand with perfect quality, and then they’re too tired to do something crazy. So be lazy or try to okay not to do the task, probably it won’t hurt anything. So then you have some slack time, you have some free time, you have some free resources, and then there are some crazy thoughts around where something new happens. So I really like to, all the team have the such kind of slack or flee time to do something crazy.

Jurgen Appelo

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:49

Who is Jurgen Appelo?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 00:53

That’s me. I usually describe myself as a speaker, writer and entrepreneur, those three words seem to describe most of what I’m doing. And I’m from the Netherlands, I’m 51 years old and leading a pretty happy life, I suppose.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:18

Nice, so what’s important to you, I want to dive a little bit into like you know, your current motivations and what’s important to you. So, you’ve done a lot in the sense of, for I think this whole movement and I want to come back to complexity, to why study science but like, right now when you look at your life, when you look at the just the work environment as well because I think it’s hard to distinguish between you know, our work lives and what we do and what’s important to you, what motivates you currently?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 01:59

What motivates me is, coming up with things that people find useful and then help them be happier in their jobs. That’s why I call my company, Happy Melly because it is after a famous billboard you know, Rotterdam where I live that says Melly Shum hates her job. It’s a work of art that has been there in that street for 25 years and some people wonder why is Melly Shum hating her job? It doesn’t explain, it’s just Melly Shum hates her job with a picture of Melly smiling in the camera hating her job and that for me was the inspiration of calling my company, Happy Melly because I want Melly to be happy. Why are people hating their job, they’re in the wrong job or they should change their job? So, for me that’s an explanation of what I like doing and it helps when I discover stuff or invent stuff and describe it in such a way that people say well now I finally understand it or now it is finally useful. I get these compliments every now and then like, I do the digging around and reading dozens of books and then people say wow, thank you for summarizing all of that. Now, it has finally become applicable and useful for me at this, it saves me reading all that other stuff. So yeah, being helpful, helping people be happy in their jobs that’s more or less what I love doing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:37

Why is happiness so important? You’ve written a book on it too. I mean, it’s a pretty basic question but from your perspective, you know, because most people are not happy at work.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 03:51

Yeah, well, that’s a simple and at the same time a deep question, I suppose. I just noticed that I have never done things, at least not for long that I hated. Right? When I finished my studies at the University in Delft, I study software engineering, all my peers basically disappeared into regular jobs for high paying consultancy companies or IT companies, whatever. And I thought, doesn’t seem interesting to me, that doesn’t make me happy to be as what some people say a ‘slave wage slave’, basically. So no, I you started my own company and I became a freelancer and I started writing courseware and I did very different things compared to my peers because that seemed more exciting and was riskier, more uncertain but I loved it more. And that has always been the case, every choice I made, I make the choices that make sense to me because they help me be happier in the work that I do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:08

How much does that have to do with autonomy because I have like, similar experience where I started a software development company in colleges, started you know, writing code or designing too in high school. So, I’ve worked like you know, my you know, since I was in high school for myself but I’ve also taken pauses where I worked inside the companies and autonomy is a big part for me. Is it the autonomy that makes you happy or is it other things like, what is it for you?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 05:40

It is definitely part of it. I mean, one of the management 3.0 games or exercises that I created is a movie motivators and freedom is one of the 10 motivators in that exercise. And I have always said that for me, it’s at the top, I want my freedom, I want my autonomy because I am unhappy if others make the decisions for me like, what project I am supposed to work on and things like that, that never interested me. Even when I was CIO for a good number of years, then I was not at all interested in working on projects for customers. I was very interested in working on improving our own processes as a company and then helping the developers have more enjoyable jobs and basically inward looking in the company because then I could choose my own work basically. I could choose what I want to improve next and I was not interested in something that somebody else handed me as I want this e-commerce website and okay, whatever it’s your problem not mine. So, yeah autonomy is a big one for me definitely. It is part of why I like them but also, I’m very curious person. I am now preparing for a new workshop that I will start giving in the autumn and I love the research, I just love digging into articles and books and drawing connections between things and then coming up with new insights and then they go this is something that I need to add to the workshop because I think this is new and then turning that into new exercises. So, the curiosity part, the finding things out is important and also the creative aspect of it. So, how do I now bring this to people in a way that they like it, that they enjoy having a game with each other, doing an exercise etc. So yeah, freedom is one part but also curiosity and creativity, those combined basically make my job.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:03

And I’m assuming that result of understanding that what you’re doing and creating is actually helping others is very motivating as a satisfaction too.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 08:14

For sure yeah, last example, I was in Iran two, three weeks ago which was an amazing trip in itself by the way and I had coffee with someone who showed me around the city a bit and said well, I just wanted to thank you for the workshop I did with you. Seven years ago, he was in my workshop in Turkey back then. I said and thanks to you I quit my job because I hated it and then I started my own company and now he was CEO of a company of 70 people and he said that would never have happened if I had not met you and just decided okay, apparently I need to quit my job because this is not making me happy and that makes me so feel so good. I mean, I didn’t know I was completely unaware of this person somewhere on the other side of the planet, apparently being influenced by my workshop and I have similar stories from people reading my books and so that’s super cool, that makes my day when someone shares an example like that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:19

I heard coffee makes your day too and given that you were in Turkey and in Iran, I’m assuming you tried the Turkish coffee and you know, what’s your favorite coffee? Just more on the personal side because I heard that you do take your coffee seriously, like it’s.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 09:38

Yeah, well, to be honest, I like the kind of coffee that other people may not refer to really as coffee because I want it with a lot of milk. So, I like my lattes and cappuccinos and things like that, I don’t drink straight coffee that’s not my thing. And so, for some coffee, connoisseurs that would be spoiling the coffee, my god you throw milk in there, are you insane? Yeah, sorry that’s how I like it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:09

Yeah, I used to be like that and I don’t know, it’s been like 10 plus years I switched and I only drink black coffee up here in New England, like Dunkin Donuts again you probably, some people wouldn’t consider it coffee either so I used to like that but now it’s all large stuff and I joke around like, Turkish coffee is still my, I was born in Sarajevo so like that whole Balkans area is impacted by that.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 10:34

Makes sense.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:40

Were you surprised by the reaction, I mean you talked about like you know, the gratification of you know putting something out there that you research, that you know, you put your own thoughts on it like, with the management 3.0 and like just how much receptive the community and everybody was, were you surprised by that? Like, what was your initial, I know it’s been years but what was your initial reaction to that?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 11:05

Yes, I am still surprised that it took off that well. I can rationally explain it because as I said I love the research a lot, I love the digging around and seeing connections between things actually, this is interesting at the personal level when I was 11 years old I got this advice from the teacher back then like, all kids at that age got before they went to high school. What the teachers at the time thought, the area where I was supposed to find my job and apparently my teacher at that time noticed that I loved analyzing stuff, so he said maybe you should become an analyst or whatever. I had no idea what an analyst was, I didn’t know what analysts did but apparently, I like solving problems and checking things out to see how they worked. And yeah, that has been with me ever since so I still do that and that is something that people appreciate and I have this creative streak I like training that into visuals and good storytelling and so I often say, I just steal stuff, I just borrow stuff from many sources but I present it in a way that’s more better consumable I suppose. Because I read a lot of books and to be honest my god, they’re so boring very often. I go through them but I can imagine people giving up very soon, I like writing in a different way that is more entertaining and that still has a high information density. So yeah, that I think explains why Management 3.0 took off at the time. It’s well researched, a lot of references there but also presented with a lot of visual stories [unsure 13:04] etc.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:08

Yeah, in a sense, it’s really especially the main that you’re writing about which has to do a lot with you know, complexity science, complexity management. There are a lot of like, you said books they you know, have a lot of good content but the way that concepts and things are described is not necessarily easy to understand. I want to start maybe where, on a fun part by asking you this question, what lies between order and chaos?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 13:40

One that, complexity lies between order and chaos, that’s the whole point of systems at the edge of chaos, you can also have the edge of order because they are right there in between. I mean, that’s what scientists have been working on ever since the 90s, basically. I am so old that I remember chaos theory emerging, that was I think in 87, that it became a big thing in the mathematical department. So, I studied software engineering in Delft and we share the same faculty with mathematics. So, we and the mathematicians were in the same building, we conduct the same study society actually and one year the theme was chaos. Actually, I was the one, I remember I came up with that term chaos not because I noticed this was something big among the math people. So, I said well, let’s make that the theme of the yearbook, I still have that behind me, yeah over here. Yeah. So, this is the book, you can’t see it on the podcast but this is the year book, then I, another said the segment, chaos, you see, chaos here, the chaos, you see that? Yeah, that’s 88, 89 wow and my drawings as well. So yeah, that’s when it started and that turned into complexity science in the 90s, basically and I thought it was so inspiring, super fascinating. They explain how the universe works because everything is a complex system. So, it was wow moments all the time when I read those books and then Agile software development emerged early 2000s. And I saw all the parallels, they even use the same words, emergence, self-organization, that was the same thing. It’s just applied complexity science, basically.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:47

Is complexity science the one of your favorite topics?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 15:51

It is, I don’t do much reading in that area to be honest at the time because I have read so much already and there are so many other interesting topics out there as well and the science doesn’t change that much. I mean, that’s just the way the world works, I now get the basic concepts. I’m not an expert by far but I know what fitness landscapes are and reflectivity and emergence and all that. So, don’t need to read more about it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:21

When it comes to management, when it comes to agile movement, you know, a lot of like, people that started, people that are more experienced understand, like you said, you know, we’ve taken these complexity sciences, complexity management ideas for the agile, we tend to put agile in everything, right? Like, what is your take on how much is a common knowledge around complexity management and complexity science in the agile and management circles?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 16:58

Not much.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:00

Do you think it’s improving or do you think the awarenesses?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 17:05

Maybe it is not really advanced to be honest, I’m not an advanced thinker by any stretch of the imagination, don’t get me wrong but in the land of the blind, the one with one eye sees most? So, but I am sometimes yeah, I’m a little bit skeptical and critical of how other people approach things because I find that there is no complexity mindset behind it. I’ll give you a concrete example, I just discussed that a couple of days ago again, there’s often this suggestion that you should not reward individuals in the Agile community that instead you should reward teams because if you reward individuals, then the problem is that people will go on to compete on teams, there’s plenty of evidence for that. I totally understand that suggestion but what people apparently don’t seem to understand is when you reward teams, you get exactly the same thing, only one on a level higher. Then the teams are going to compete with each other, I mean, it’s not that difficult to understand this, right? You didn’t solve the problem, you move that one level up, it’s not cleaning your house but just swiping the dirt under the carpet, the dirt is still there. It’s just in a different place. So, now the teams are going to compete with each other, how do you solve that? Well, maybe we should not reward teams, we should reward the departments. Alright, congratulations, you removed the problem, yet another level up. You’re not solving the problem. This is to me an example of someone who was not thinking as a systems thinker, is not a complexity mindset, to be honest.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:58

Well, even systems thing, I was talking to Dave Snowden and he was shedding all over systems thinking and I think, you know, for several reasons but I think, you know, one of them is that even systems thinking is misunderstood. And everybody talks about systems thinking but it’s not just physical systems, right? It’s social systems, there’s many different ways of looking at systems. And I think, you know, the people, a lot of times people look at systems, it’s just the physical ones. To come back to this topic of complexity and maybe even systems thinking, in what ways are the teams and organizations like living systems because living systems are complex, adaptive systems, right?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 19:44

Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:44

So, how are organizations because we have metaphors, we compare organizations to machines, to this and that, that is not necessarily a complex, adaptive system. In what ways are organizations more like adaptive, complex systems?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 20:05

Well, because like all those other complex systems, they consist of parts, they are the people whose performance depends on the interactions with all the other parts around them. So, I very much agree with the idea that you cannot really measure an individual person’s performance, the performance of the person depends on their relationships with the parts around them, the interactions with the others and Google has proven this already with their research a number of years ago, that also the performance is in the relationships between people and the dynamics of the group and not so much in the individual person. That’s totally in line with complexity science and I also explain that you don’t simply solve the problem of rewarding people by more than one level up because yeah, teams also communicate with each other and our relationship with each other in the organization. There is a reward system in complex systems, the parts are rewarded, they are rewarded for contributing to the other parts around them. So, excuse me, I need a glass of water, so the performance of an individual part needs to be measured in terms of how well has it contributed to the others. So, basically, that’s what 360-degree evaluations do in a way, right? Where everyone that the person has been working with decide with each other on how much value that person has contributed to those relationships. So, there still needs to be an individual reward but that reward needs to be decided by all the pipes around that individual and that is how complex systems work. They’re all always reward systems in any complex adaptive system, there are reward systems, yes, the parts are rewarded but the reward depends on the relationships between the others and not by some manager, who is handling everything. And then you have solved the problem because this is fractal, this also applies to teams and departments basically.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:41

Well, that’s the thing and like, I want to explore this a little bit more because it also when it comes to like, you know, organization setting goals, or like, you know, purpose, you know, a lot of times one size fits all but if we go back to, you know, just understanding people, understanding complexity, there’s multiple levels of how we look at the purpose, how we look at the goals, how we look at rewards and how we incentivize. And if we look at the bigger organization, it’s not really set up or architected to be coming back to this is organizations in the world of systems, like our organizations are not set up to deal with complexity. And I think people like yourselves and others are trying to really describe that and that’s what underneath all of your approaches, description, that’s really, you know, a lot of times what you’re saying and yet, we still see many organizations, not fully understanding the design, architecture, policies, including, you know, some of these goals. So, how do you go about helping organizations deal with this?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 24:01

Well, good question and I noticed that organizations need patterns to be copied examples, from others. That’s why solutions quote, unquote, like safe and Spotify model and others are so popular because they give organizations something to copy and try out and adapt to their own context. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you understand that what works for others doesn’t necessarily work for you but at least you have a starting point for experimentation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:41

But maybe let’s pause there, I think there’s a big, there’s something there that you said I want to explore a little bit more, as long as you understand that it’s a point for experimentation. And I think that’s not how it’s understood, that’s not how it’s sold, right? It’s sold as the solution and you know?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 25:02

Yeah, it will literally, the same website has these implementation roadmaps like, literally the word implementation as if you’re rolling out some software product that needs to be installed in the organization. So, the terminology is somewhat worrying. Fortunately, there are smart people out there and good coaches and consultants that know how to go about using these frameworks and toolboxes in a smart way, disregarding the implementation approach but just more on with an approach where you treat the framework as a toolbox of good ideas that you could apply individually perhaps. So yeah, that’s the starting point, you need to see it as an experiment but that is also how complex systems work. It is, I described that in the, I think in the last chapter of Measurement 3.0, there are different ways that organisms evolve. And the horizontal gene transfer is one of the most successful ways in the biosphere, there’s basically organisms flinging DNA around and picking it up from others, that’s what bacteria do. By the way, they just copy parts and from each other, this seems like a cool piece of DNA, give me that? See what it does for me, oops, that didn’t work out well. I’ll try something else. So, horizontal gene transfer is a big thing in the bias actually, what humans do, we call that sex, it’s a rather special case in the biosphere There’s a very complicated way of mixing two strands of DNA. So, just sharing, basically.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:55

So, is it more like Lean and Agile and now how agile is emerging like in other, would you call that linear where like it was adopted in you know, manufacturing mass production now that was applied to knowledge work that has more complexity to it perhaps, would that be a linear?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 27:19

Well, I think the principles of Lean have applied very well to manufacturing of course but there was the context of knowing what the end result had to be because it was all about optimization at the Toyota manufacturing plants. Then, they knew what car had to be creative, they just want it to be flexible, so that they could change things fast because yes, customer requirements change then demand change all the time. But the way they manufactured the cars is not the same as the way they designed the cars so discovery is something different compared to delivery.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:05

Alright, what I meant more is like, this is almost like what you described earlier, as is borrowing these ideas from Lean applying them to the context of agile and more software development, would that be more without horizontal gene sharing or maybe I misunderstood?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 28:28

Yeah, so indeed, that is horizontal copying from one domain to the other but as I said, the context is different because in manufacturing, you know what the end result is and in software development, you don’t get the whole point of software that you make each piece only once. Because a lot of it is discovery and that means that the principles apply with the practices are very different. And I’m also somewhat against certain metaphors such as inventory, there’s been this emphasis on inventory being waste in Lean. Why that makes sense if you make a car but it makes no sense if you do software development because when you do creative work, then the work that is in progress is not necessarily waste. It is stuff that is working in your subconscious, that may need time sometimes to form into something beautiful or useful or whatever. I’m a writer, I know how these things, these creative processes work, you cannot just, I cannot just push things out by the minute and then deliver chapters one by one. Some things, you have to simmer for a while in your head and actually Jerry Weinberg call that the fieldstone method. Well, he wrote many pieces of text and they were just lying about doing nothing and then at some point, what I wrote here is actually, it connects to that other unfinished thing that I wrote back then last year and then they start cross pollinating and that’s how the new stuff emerges. So, inventory in lean in manufacturing is not the same as inventory in a creative job. So, the metaphor does not translate well because it’s taken out of context so you’d have to adapt.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:33

Well, it’s also I think, one is about efficiency, the other one is more about innovation and emergence. So, like, you know, I joke around but it’s, you know, I let things marinate in my head and I’ve been writing actually a book for last couple of years. And a lot of times I let things marinate and it’s like, you know, one morning just hits me or like, I’m taking a shower, gone for a walk or run and it hits me, I’m like, all of that inventory was there for a reason in order to make a breakthrough in this idea or concept.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 31:10

Or if it is because of a conversation you have with someone that, well, that solves the thing that I have been thinking about for the last couple of months. Now, I can write that blog post or something like that. So yeah, innovation is very different.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:25

So, context matters, right? And then a lot of times, we’re looking for easy solution, there’s something about humans to preserve energy to do whatever, which I don’t fully understand but we’re eager to jump to the quick solutions. And our environment and our context is not necessarily conducive right now to that. What are your thoughts on context and why, you know, is it important to you? Or why should it be if it is or why is it?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 32:05

Well, obviously, context is important but a context has changed definitely last year because of the whole COVID crisis of course, people have been working from home instead of at the office, a discussion is going on where a company said some company has to get back to the office because we’re not innovative enough anymore when everyone is at their home. Workplaces being quite productive that the research says that people are more productive when they are working by themselves that has apparently worked out for the better but when they’re not collaborating in the same room, the story goes that they’re less innovative and less creative because they don’t share as much ideas with each other. Interestingly enough, I just read a counterpoint to that last week that I never thought of before but it said, this has not been proven actually, that people are less innovative when they join through zoom calls or whatever. And actually, when people get into a room with each other, there is a much higher chance that people conform to the norm of the local culture in the organization, you adapt, like you switch to a different identity and that has an impact on how people think. It has been said by many that, people feel more themselves when they join through zoom calls from their own home because I am now in my own house being me, I joined a call so I have somewhat different identity when I joined the call. And you can say well, this is actually good for brainstorming discussions because you make it easier for people to bring their different perspectives, to bring their different personalities to problem solving because if you take them out of their own context, out of their own homes, you put them into an office, they’re going to switch identity and suddenly groupthink emerges that you may not have wanted. So, and I thought I just read that last week and I thought, wow, that’s brilliant. So indeed, it has not been proven that people are more innovative when they’re in the same room, maybe you should put them like, in seven different locations in the world. One is in Turkey, coffee block and the other is in Iran and the other is in whatever and then you have them make a zoom call discussing a difficult problem to solve. Maybe those people are more innovative then because of the different contexts that they bring to the table.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:58

Well, that’s what I’m like, you know, it’s been interesting for me too because like, you know, I switch between California, East Coast here and then you know, Montenegro and Croatia mostly. And it’s just, it goes back to that autonomy, it goes back to that freedom. Like, in a sense, I feel more motivated, where I can work from anywhere, it’s my decision to choose if I want to work 4pm to midnight or work, you know, from 5am to noon or whatever it is. And, you know, where even organizations going back now are saying, okay, you know, they’re defining companywide policies versus allowing teams to the side work context to really well, just their approaches to their context. Do you think or what are you seeing maybe like, as far as how organizations maybe learned anything from COVID around the context and around that self-organization that exists in living systems?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 36:07

I think they have at least, there’s this joke that has gone around last year, who has impacted the organization the most, was that the manager or the employee or the cultural COVID-19, will always be, it was COVID that pushed organizations forward because they have resisted remote working many of them for a long time. And now they had to and they know this well, it’s actually not that bad as we always been fearful of. So, that’s a good thing and fortunately, most people resist going back to the office full time, of course, most organizations want at least some kind of hybrid form, that is what they will, most of them will end up with. Then the question is, how do you decide who is at the office, when? And you said, yeah, some organizations will determine that for everyone. Actually, that’s a minority of the companies I have noticed. I believe Apple was in that category where they said at certain dates, everyone needs to be at the office but that isn’t even smart because then, on those days, the offices will be crapped. On those three days and the other two days, it will be virtually up to you, that’s not a smart way of dividing resources across all your workers. So, it’s better to leave the decision to teams and I think organizations, many of them will have found out that people can solve, organize pretty well. They did that when they were at home, still stuff got done, everyone was contributing. So, they can probably also make a decision with that team, when should we be at the office and when can we work from home. You just probably need a little bit of coordination because if you let everyone decide for themselves and most of them are going to decide that Friday and Monday are the days to work at home because that’s so convenient to have a long weekend. So, you probably want to guide that a little bit but I do believe and I see that also in the articles because I have an alert on hybrid working and things like that on Google News because I keep up to date on what’s happening there. And most organizations default to letting the teams decide when to be at the office and when to be at home.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:43

But the core like, it’s really like, you know, I think we need things like COVID because as humans, we get comfortable, you know? We will, you know, we have to get out of our comfort seats to say like, yeah, we can do this, right? So, there is that in order, there needs to be some kind of push a lot of times to get us you know, out of our current perspectives or even paradigms but there’s also so much desire for that linear kind of approach’s thinking. And again, if we just go back to kind of where we started with complexity sciences, if we look at it, like for most of living systems, you have some type of boundaries or guardrails, right and people self-organize so I think a lot of times when I work with executives, it’s about creating that ecosystem where emergence can happen and you still need alignment in order to some extent in that order in the sense of complexity but moreover, like alignment and guardrails and then in creating, you know, create that environment for people to emerge in. I’m not necessarily worried but I do think like, you know, speaking to you, speaking to like, you know, I’ve had several other people on the podcast, I don’t see this happening like, for a majority in the next 10 years where organizations fully understand the underlying principles of complexity and contextualizing things to their environment. Do you see that? Am I maybe just not as optimistic? Or do you see, are there signs that organizations are maturing in their understanding of how to deal with complexity?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 40:46

Some are, others are not, is that a problem, I don’t think so. Survival is not mandatory and as they say, I don’t care if some organizations don’t make it and die in the next decade, whatever. People will survive, they will find other jobs that better run companies and everyone will be happier. Yes, it will be slightly stressful for some having to find another job, so what? That’s just another tiny crisis to overcome. So, I’m not worried about that, we see great examples of very inspiring things happening with fast, growing companies that by the way, are always organized in a Lean and Agile sense with Lean Startup, design thinking kinds of practices. All the fast-growing company, they know how to do it, I just finished the book about Netflix by Reed Hastings and no rules are all super interesting. How they set it all up, as you see it agile all the way amazing and how they do that and they have disrupted their industry and they forced their competitors to adopt similar kinds of approaches, otherwise they would go out of business. You see the same in every industry now. Tesla has disrupted the car industry so leaving Volkswagen and others scrambling to catch up and modernize their software development departments, that’s a good thing because it means that people like me get invites and that to do workshops and presentations and everything that keeps me in business as well. So, and some of them make it and others don’t and yeah, as I said I don’t care if some don’t make it, let the bad ones perish and be replaced with better ones.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:46

Yeah, it’s interesting and it goes back again to, it’s how the nature is it, it’s how complex systems are but like yet as humans, by stores ourselves, we think we’re the center of world, we think we’re the only ones that are the most important than this planet. Right? There’s that whole bias, I want to get your thoughts on this because related to all of this and I think it’s a part that not many times is brought up but like, self-determination, theory or cognitive development when it comes to motivation, when it comes to complex systems, what is your thought in a sense on what’s important to us, how we see the world and having many different I guess perspectives, how does that contribute to complexity? I don’t know how familiar with the UI, with the self-determination theory I saw you talk about a little bit, how desires differ and house structure but I don’t know if you want to maybe just expand on that a little bit because I think that’s really important from my perspective to this whole.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 44:09

Well, sure, well there are a number of theory indeed; self-determination, research theory is one of many them are referred to exact in my work. And for me, those human desires, self-actualization and freedom and social connectedness and whatever you have a number of categories, they all emerged through biological processes of survival of the fittest, that’s the foundation of how the biosphere around us works. And at some point, this has resulted in humans as a byproduct of whatever else happened in the biosphere, we’re just an accident; a fortunate accident for us.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:04

Yeah, from my perspective not fortunate from, if you look at some of the other species.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 45:09

Yeah, well I sometimes say humans for Planet Earth are just like a bad rash, it’s like, this annoying itch and at some point, you will probably get rid of because we don’t mean much on a geological scale to be honest. And also, okay, we starting to mean a little bit in that in terms of the footprint and the bio mass but still, I think Atlantic krill still outcompete us in terms of bio mass on this planet, there’s more Atlantic krill than human beings.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:49

Than human, yeah.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 45:49

And ends also, outpace us 10 to 1. So, we’re unimportant in that sense and we human beings we have, because of our biological needs, etc., we have this on the one hand, we have this need for freedom but on the other and also there’s need for social relatedness and sometimes those are compete with each other, etc. And all of that is really fascinating when you stick to the human perspective and of course, I do that as well, with my work, my presentations, I want to help humans be happy because that fascinates me and it also gets me paid, which is important to get to a point because I have a life to live as well. But when I go to that higher level, I sometimes think it’s all irrelevant because you get to that philosophical level of what are human beings doing here in the world? Yeah, we’re making a little bit of a mess of it, causing a sixth extinction. Well, Planet Earth has survived the previous five so it will probably survive this one as well. One of my favorite fragments, I think I’ve included in one of my books that I got from a science article was many billions of years ago. No, that was just 2 to 3 billion years ago, there was this new gas that emerged that was highly toxic and it wiped out like 95% of all species, it was amazing and we call that oxygen. That’s an interesting perspective, isn’t it, it was an accidental byproduct of plants or emitted oxygen as a waste, as a product into the atmosphere and it killed 95% that we never punished plants for that, wiping out so many other species where they’re waste. I love that kind of thinking. So, we’re not as bad as plants yet, in what we have done to the world. Let’s hope it doesn’t always get that, also doesn’t get that bad. So, but it’s nice to have a relativistic perspective on things every now and then

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:21

If we bring this back to the organization, to teams, right? And if we will look at, you know, from that theory of even cognitive development, self-determination or whatever you want to call it but essentially, there is, like you said, there are many different thoughts, frameworks around this concept but there are common patterns around this, which is that our environment influences what we want, what we consider important, what we believe it, right? So, growing up in Sarajevo, during the war, where my dad was in, you know, three different concentration camps shaped me as a person differently than, you know, maybe my peers, when I moved here as a 13-year-old to United States. I had different beliefs, growing up in that culture, going through that experience versus people or kids my age. So, fast forward to where Miljan is now professional working, it’s going to be different to motivate me as a person versus somebody else that grew up in New England or in California or whatever it is. So, a lot of times, there is one size fits all when it comes to motivating, leading people and we don’t take into consideration that context of their beliefs, their values, how do you go because that’s like, you know, when we talk about systems and when we talk about, you know, physical systems is one thing, when we talk about social systems and how we interact relationships and what’s driving that, that’s more of a softer side, human systems? How do you see that human side, human systems and how it ties to the living systems in the context of organizations and culture, maybe?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 50:14

Well, one of the things that struck me when I read one of the complexity science books that really was an eye opener to me was that, I don’t know who it was or wrote it. It was like, there is no such thing as freedom. He said it because you only exist thanks to the environment that has produced you and that sustains you and that nurtures you until the environment decides that it’s time for you to go. That is not freedom, right? I depend on oxygen, I depend on parents having birth me. I depend on so many things that my freedom is a figment of my imagination and that was an eye opener to me because I’ve always said my freedom is so important to me. And that was for me, like, obvious that it would also be important to everyone else around me but apparently, it’s not. And it made me understand other cultures a little bit better, where they have less emphasis on freedom and more on relatedness and social cohesion, for example, I was not able to criticize that as much anymore because of reading that complexity perspective. Is that your sense of freedom? Yeah, that’s just your personal illusion. Be happy with it but actually, there is no such thing because everything depends on everything else. And in a way I thought it was beautiful but also explain to me that my feeling of freedom, yes, that has also been fed to me by my environment, just the concept of freedom is something that I received from the environment on which I depend. So, that is ridiculous to think that I invented it or something, right? So, all these memes as Richard Dawkins famously came up with many years ago, they yeah, the influencers and your background is obviously very different from mine. I’m Dutch so that also means that I behave in a way that is similar to other Dutch people, I might think I am autonomous but I am almost ‘copy-pastable’ across the country because there are many people like me here in this part of the world who are thinking the same way and behave in a similar way, that makes me not really autonomous, does it? Because I am just a result of my environment and I need to accept that as a human being and the same in organizations. The people form the organization but the organization also forms the people, it goes in two directions that’s called reflexivity. In a complexity science, they depend on each other. So, the mindset of the people, hopefully an agile mindset, growth mindset will inform the organization’s culture but it’s the same the other way around, the culture in organization will shape the people working there and hopefully, that is a positive, virtuous circle but in some environments, it’s a bad, vicious circle that you get. And then maybe it’s time to get out of there, we go back to where we started. Some people are happier when they just quit their jobs and some systems you can only get rid of by letting them die because you cannot break that vicious circle, you just have to let it die.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:07

Move on.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 54:10

Yeah, move on, get the part out of that environment, put them somewhere else so that they can grow something new.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:19

Yeah, I was going to say so something else can emerge. So, maybe as a last question, which ties to all of this is, you know, we put term agile on you know, dealing with complexity, you’ve called it, you know, management 3.0 but really, we’re talking about same thing, which is, how do we deal with complexity that we’re increasing complexity that we’re in. So, what do you think is going to emerge from this, I see a new paradigm emerging. I don’t know if you see that but something’s going to emerge from this sooner or later. You know, over the last twenty years, do you think it’s, what is it? Do you think, you know, what would management 4.0 look like? Or what would the new paradigm look like if we look at the environment currently and what we do?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 55:17

Well, a number of things are happening. First of all, the obvious one is hybrid workplaces that is a very practical thing that we need to solve in the next year or so that’s going to change how we work. But at another level, I have noticed, we made this really good switch or transition in many organizations from projects to products, which is good, you need to be responsible for the entire lifecycle of a product and not just from one hand over to the other. That’s done, we have many organizations have accepted that but I think we’re not there yet. There’s still a handover happening in organizations between those who make a product and those who provide all the other communication around it, which is finance, marketing, customer support, etc. And it has happened quite often that I was either very happy with the product but totally disappointed with the rest of the organization because customer service sucked or marketing screwed me or finance was just the pain to handle or the other way around, it has happened that products were mediocre but workable but the company was so enjoyable with such great people. And finance was fast and their response and customer support was really good then, I’m okay with the acceptable product because the whole package is positive. So, I think we need to switch from product to experience because and this is what they have already done in service design and design thinking with journey mapping, for example, understanding, what is the old journey of a customer, of a client with all that touchpoints, with our company. They sometimes call us, sometimes they chat with us on Facebook or WhatsApp, whatever. Sometimes they use our product, sometimes they come into the store and that’s an entire experience, we need the response for the entire experience and the product is only one part of it. And I think such organizations as Apple and Tesla said that they understand this because I have some friends who ordered a Tesla from the moment they ordered it is already an enjoyable experience, just ordering it. They don’t even have the product yet but already the relationship with the company, they found that enjoyable; the way they were treated. And then I think that’s a company that understands that is not only about the car and that is at some point being delivered, there’s a whole phase before and whole phase after that you need to be feel responsible for. So, we need to switch from product to experience and maybe rename the product backlog to the experience backlog. They need to be experienced owners instead of product owners etc. And that makes us more inclusive of the others in the organization such as finance, marketing support, who also impact the net promoter score and whatever you have of the customer. So, I think that’s the next step.

Jutta Eckstein

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:42

Who is Jutta Eckstein?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 00:45

Oh, my God, where should I start here? Well, really I don’t know where to start. So I started off actually as a teacher. So having an education as being a teacher, but I never really like completed everything, but then never really worked in that. However, I benefit from this a lot. Because teaching, training is also part of what I’m doing. So I’m protective about that. And then I’m an engineer. And as an engineer, I kind of lost my heart in programming. So I then started off as a software developer, which I really loved. I think my first real language was actually C++. And then I encountered small talk, which really became my love. And you can tell by that it’s quite some time ago. And then there was a time in a project I was working on where the project managers said will I know, but something has changed for the better since you are here on the team. And this made me think that maybe I can also offer something else than developing, it’s not that I was fed up, but just it opened a door or so it should just some possibilities. And then I first went into more like design, and then more architecture.

And then more into well, what is needed to ensure that teams pull together, and not apart from each other. And all of that actually happened, which is kind of my encounter with agile, with me being active mainly in two communities. So the one was the small talk community and the other one was patterns. And in both of those actual kinds of originated in I don’t know, not everyone who is listening might know that, but it’s really kind of two of the main roots of agile, are like small talk and design patterns. So like the, I don’t know, it’s a kind of that the first really important agile approaches like extreme programming and Scrum, they both discovered in small talk projects. And also they have been published at first as designed, as pattern languages actually, before, it has been publishing out of ways. So that’s why it was kind of a natural. So now we’re speaking at the moment, like back in 97. I learned about XPS. Again, you can see how old I am.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:43

No, it’s very important. I want to come back to this stuff. But it’s very important, I think, to acknowledge that. And not many people know that. So

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 03:51

That’s true. Yeah, and maybe I try to make the rest a little bit faster. So then I discovered agile stuff. And I used to work at the time also more in large projects. And so in naturally by the end of 2001, I was in a large project, and just thought well, which was a failure. And therefore they kind of free started and I got in and I don’t want to say like it’s of course I saved it. There were more people and more changes that were happening at that time, right. But one of the changes I brought in was well let’s do that actual stuff. And because the pain was so high, people were really open for everything. And for me this was also cool because well again, it was by the end of 2001 beginning 2002 Well whole 2002 Definitely. Nobody spoke about scaling agile, right? So we just learned about the manifesto that has been created. Both Scrum and XP were around a bit, scrum not knowing so much at the time. So this is kind of exciting. And it all worked out and well, there were other projects following however, the trigger for me to write my first book, actually so which was on scaling agile and publish it in 2014. And of course, nobody was interested because people had other problems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:30

Well, that’s the case, I think a lot of your books and I wanted to come back to that, too, is like that they’re a little bit ahead of their time, and a little bit you know, not necessarily what people are currently looking for. But what they will be looking for. But what they will be looking for in the near future.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 05:45

That so my hope was the bossa nova book, which I think yeah, the first publication was in 18, but this was much more timely than my other books. I absolutely agree. Because like the second book on distributed agile that was published in 2010. And at that time, people started looking into scaling, but not into global stuff, right? What do we do? How do we organize distributed and dispersed teams and all of that? So.. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:20

So it’s interesting from a perspective that, agile, I mean, it was born, but really like the practitioners that started this movement, I think, understood complexity. So they just probably understood people and complexity. That’s why even if we go to Agile Manifesto, I think we have described and others, it’s a value system more than it is practices and frameworks, right? Yeah.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 06:51

I thought more like value system, and maybe guidelines or so.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:57

Yes. So when you reflect back, what is important today, to you, from a perspective of agile, from perspective of where it is, what do you consider important? What motivates you currently around the work that we do?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 07:15

Okay, so these are for me two different questions. The one is, do think about reflecting back, which it sounds to me more looking at, okay, what kind of changed, did we really bring, or so and the other thing is, yeah, what motivates me today or what do I think, where is it now. So, which one is more important? Which one do you want to go first?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:38

It’s almost like what I wanted you to do is almost like retrospect, right? Like, if you’re looking back in a context of what has happened over the last 20 years, right? And then if you kind of look at the next 5 to 10 years, what do you want to focus on? What’s important to you, based on the experience, I guess? So, it’s more forward looking. But don’t forget where coming from.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 08:02

Yeah. I think I really have actually a clear answer. So for me, the Agile Manifesto has always been super important. But I started off with XP but still, once the manifesto was out, it was really more the manifesto that guided what I’ve done, which was also the reason because a lot of the stuff that I did, there wasn’t really anything out there. And so there was no scaling something or distributed, agile, whatever. And so what I always did was I looked at the manifesto, at the values and the principles and thought, okay, what do they mean, in the context I’m in right now, like in this large context, or something we haven’t talked about yet is like, remember the first hardware project I did. So well, the manifesto was created for software. So what do I do now? And so I always I kept coming back to the manifesto, and it’s kind of wearing different classes, looking at the principles through those classes. So like the hopper, large to global whatever and thought okay, but can they provide some guidance there? And I still felt they could. And in starting with the in the distributed one, if you think of this one principles, that says they like the face to face conversation is the best way to convey information right. That people often said, at least way back when that well, that’s a reason why you cannot do Agile in a global setting, right in a distributed setting. And for me well we still want to aim for that. So let’s look how we can aim for that. And of course, we cannot do this like all the time we don’t have a common ballroom, of course not. But what can we do to still see this as our guidelines and seeing that this is really important for us to build the trust and to connect and to ship really also right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:31

And to communicate I think a lot of times, it’s becoming even more now like, and I think that’s specific principle of, you know, face to face is like, people don’t fully understand that it was never about face to face, it was always about communication, collaboration, trust, right, relationships, but the most effective and the richest way to communicate, especially when it was written back in 2001, was face to face.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 11:00

Yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:01

So I think, you know, and this goes back to the patterns, right? You have to understand the why behind the pattern, and be able depict the pattern, rather than just assume the practice or principle for what it is.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 11:17

That’s true. Yeah. So we haven’t answered yet. The forward looking. So and the thing is, really, I keep coming back to that. And that’s what I do right now. So what’s my big passion is at the moment is sustainability in the sense of like, social, economic, and environmental. So also fighting the climate change. And I think, well, even here, the manifesto can provide some guidance. And I know well, more and more people start talking about that. So my take is not so much on saying, okay, well…, we sorry, I think I have to say it this way. Agile is the hammer, and therefore also sustainability is a nail. That’s not what I mean. What I mean, is, well, there are forecasts that say by 2030, IT will consume about 21% of the overall energy consumption, which means it’s not that software, IT whatever is the resolution, as a lot of people think, to the climate change, but it really can be, and is in some areas, but it also has a bad impact. And so actually, it’s more like coming back to the thing that we do with agile, which is developing software, delivering it making the customer happy, and all of that, but now looking at the principles, what does this actually mean? If we take sustainability serious. So what is the carbon footprint of the software that we are writing? How ethical is the software that we are creating and well, there’s a lot of discussion about like, algorithm bias and stuff like that, which plays into this. And even in will once we are back in the offices, even in the offices like is the carpet glued with a toxic glue to the floor, right? Do we have natural light there, natural plant this all piece into the same thing. And interesting this about like the competent staff. So this is what I see in that principle where it says, like, trust motivated individuals and give them the environment to get the job done. So looking at environment, all of a sudden, it has a different meaning. And this is again, what I mean with I keep coming back to the principles and look at them. What do they mean through this glasses that I’m wearing right now, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:09

So what you’re saying like, I want to use the metaphor of glasses and back to the values and value systems is that when we look at the different glasses, we’re also looking through different set of values and principles and beliefs, right. So that requires us to believe what we’re seeing through those glasses and buy into what we’re seeing through those glasses. Right? So when we talk about like sustainability when we talk about exactly what you just described, I can just say, I have to believe that putting that toxic glue on the carpet is something that is wrong. And I’m not going to tolerate right, it’s not just saying Oh, yeah, but screw it, you know, it’s making my company more or saving my company more money.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 15:02

Yeah, right, which is kind of the same as what we saying in agile in general. And I’m not sure I guess more people have heard discussions about that even things like, well, creating all those tests that takes time away from shipping to the client or whatever. And, well, we just say like, they’re the value, these are important for us. And that’s why we have those principles guiding those values.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:36

It’s individual decision to embrace those principles of values, I guess.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 15:42

That’s true. Yeah. And, to me, this was just always a really big help. So and, yeah, I think it can just be a great guidance, if you think Agile is for you important, because you want to be or have to be flexible, adaptive, responsive, fast, nimble, whatever else, right. So really agile more in the literal sense. And then what do you need to do to behave like that or to show that or become that? And this is what I think the principals do, at least. That’s what they offered to me. And it might be perhaps even boring for other people, because, well, it’s not the Bible. And no, it’s not. But it gives some great ideas. And it can really trigger deep thoughts. Again, wearing different glasses.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:46

Yeah. And like we’ve gone, maybe just to kind of summarize this, and to kind of come back to what’s coming, or maybe what in addition to what you describe about sustainability, but last 20 years, of Agile Manifesto, and from small talk, the pattern language, the pattern communities that you discuss, all of that was, at least that community understood the importance of patterns, complexity, right. And a lot of what we’ve seen over the last 10-20 years, is shift towards more of processes and practices back to what those people were running away from. Because if you see all the frameworks now, all the you know, focus on practices, do you see that as well? And do you see the shift back to understanding or is it more balanced approach?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 17:41

So, yes, and no, and the no comes more from it than I think this has always been the case.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:51

The pendulum always swinging.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 17:54

That’s, that’s one of the things that also, people always have asked for recipes. And the frameworks are giving you that they give you a recipe and therefore you feel much safer, than without one, so you just follow that, and then it’s the recipes fault if it’s not working out. And that is easier than saying, well, you actually have to think for yourself, what is appropriate, what would help you here, which also, then, especially in cultures, where you think, like, okay, who’s accountable? Right. And then the ones who are not following some predefined path, they have a problem then right? If it’s not working out, and the reason probably is more that it’s seems to be difficult to really embrace this kind of experimental approach, or what we call with person over the probing thing where you always reflect what we see, while we add what’s difficult right now, what’s our hypothesis that’s actually happening, and will happen if we do this and that change? And then thinking of the change you do thinking about how you measure it also, in order to be able to tell, well, that hypothesis was true or not, and then start reflecting again, but it’s actually the probing is actually more a scientific approach to running experiments. It’s nothing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:32

Yeah, it’s like dealing with complexity. Like what I really liked about Bossa Nova is like, it’s collections. So you have like with Beyond Budgeting with open space with sociocracy with agile, these are all combination of patterns to deal with complexity, right. And it’s just still collection of patterns. And how would you describe the patterns in the context of that recipe and cooking analogy is almost like, Oh, here’s a barbecue sauce. If you need barbecue sauce, here’s how you.. but you’re still putting things together based on your context like, how do you define patterns in that context?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 20:20

Well, I’m not sure if I have a good answer. The thing that we discovered when we worked on bossa nova, so John Beck and myself, we found that most of those people have those different patterns or streams, how we often call them as well, that most of them said, Actually, we have the answer. And from their perspective, that is true, it’s, again, a kind of a recipe. So if I talk to people who are really deep into sociocracy, they were saying, well, you don’t need anything else, because you are just ensuring that the power is distributed and not centralized, that equivalence is there or was scattered, and then it will all resolve itself. And it is kind of true. In the same way as it is true that you could also say, from an agile perspective, well, all you need is a retrospective, and you keep retrospect thing and changing into it better. And which is also true in a sense. And in the same way as beyond budgeting. They say, well, we all know money rules the world and as long as we use money to control all the work, there’s no way of being more agile. So the budget has to really deal with that complexity and address it and otherwise you will not getting anywhere. And again, so they are all true from their perspective.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:57

So let me ask you this then is the idea… I get it, I get it. So I want to get your answer on this. So do you see Bossa Nova is more integrative holistic, like where it considers multiple truths or is that the idea behind bossa nova.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 22:15

So I would say so. So it is this holistic view, it’s a synthesis without being a close synthesis. So if you think about the, well, I have the book back there, right? If you think about the kind of the logo that we are using, the thing is where I have the arrow, there’s the Nova, which has an arrow going further. And what we meant with that is although we see all those four streams are really providing each a different view on a company. They are also not the sole true. So the buzzer is not a soul truth, we need also to know that because we know new stuff will be developed and new stuff is also out there, use it and apply it but always kind of yeah, don’t forget to have that holistic view on the organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:15

But Nova also apply. I really liked that that’s what resonated with me. And like I think what Nova, and exactly what you indicated there is symbolizing emergence and complexity, right? So it’s that like, hey, embrace the emergence in what’s coming through these patterns or wherever you’re seeing. That’s why I say like, a lot of this stuff, it’s beyond, it’s done, because I think this is probably for the last five years, that people have thought and I don’t think a lot of this stuff will be understood. Or mainstream in the next 10 years, at least that’s my like, looking at things, you know, because..

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 23:57

Yeah that could well be true. So maybe kind of, I don’t know if it’s really a closure, but to add to this point. So when we created that holistic view and that synthesis, we really struggled to move on because we knew the reader will sit there and say, John, Jutta tell me, now what? So what is it that I can do now, I understand that this is a holistic thing, and I have to have a different perspective on things and change the perspective and look for the patterns and all of that. But now tell me what to do because it was obvious for us that people still ask for a recipe.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:49

And coming back to that maybe just to explore this because I’ve written on this and the talks about it but like it’s an issue where what ingredients in organization keeps changing daily or all the time, right? And you always have to that emergence that Nova is coming up with a recipe that currently works for you in your context, right? And if we rely on Jutta and Miljan to come in and say like, Hey, you know, here’s your recipe, here’s your recipe, right? Then you’re really not embracing developing your own chefs and getting people to figure things out on their own, and maybe just to come to a different question, then. Is that why agility is so hard? I mean, why do you think, what are some of the things that you’re seeing where, and from your perspective, you’ve worked on big projects. What are some of the things that you see when it comes to companywide agility and why companies struggle?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 25:53

So the one thing first, this that I think with the probing be found a kind of breach to a recipe, and with all the sample probes that we are having here, and we still collect them, also having them on our website. So it gives examples. And this, I think, makes it easier also for companywide agility to kind of learn through examples. And what we see is that people are asking for that. But then they look at an example probe and say, well, but actually, my situation is different. So I need something else. And we said, yes, exactly. You need something else. And that’s, perfect. So this is not to your question. So this is more like, okay, it is still a kind of recipe by those example probes in the idea of probing, reflecting and coming up with a hypothesis, and then an experiment. Yet still, it is also difficult. And I believe the main reason is that you need this holistic perspective, to really think of companywide agility. And most of people just think of one area and even in that so what I’ve seen, maybe this is a good example, although it’s bad. So a company so well I was only be there for a day or something.

So very short, they just want to hear like, what do I think about this or so and they were using Scrum for quite some time in their IT department. And pretty well. So it’s not that you could say, well, this was whatever. Yeah, Doc scramble, however you want to call it, yeah, Scrum pact or anything. So this was all fine. And the company decided to really go more agile more towards companywide agility. And which meant to have what I call real cross functional teams. So not only that we say, testers together with developers and back end with front end and stuff like that. But real cross functional through over the across the silos of the company, meaning the business, the sales, marketing, whoever is part of that team. Guess who had the biggest problems with that? The scrum teams. They said, well, we really want to have that product owner who tells us and we don’t want to know maybe this goes volunteer to fluency. We don’t want to be in that position that be explore new markets together as a team, right? We want to have somebody who tells us, and I thought this quite interesting. And with that Derrick was more the other side, not IT side. They were more ready for that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:02

Well, exactly. And I think I see same thing. And I think there’s two forms. There’s the people side, the value system that’s going on with the lenses that people are looking through, right. So if I’m not open to that. The other thing is, I think the limitations of Scrum. I don’t see scrum as a true high complexity framework. Right. So when we have a lot of high levels of complexity, I don’t think Scrum is a good recipe. And a lot of times that backfires on people. So, do you see it that way? Or I mean, what do you think about those two, between the people and operating systems that are running in our heads or the things that we’re seeing through our lenses.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 29:47

No I think you are right. And it’s also I guess, now staying with this example when this request was made to go to what real cross functional teams. The scrum teams, they felt like oh, but this is not how Scrum is described. And they are right. That’s true, right. And from that perspective, again referring maybe more to actual fluency. If you’re like using Scrum, then you are kind of at the beginning. So now flowing into agile, but only if you really go into companywide agility then scrum doesn’t help you that much anymore.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:31

It’s the patterns, right? It’s understanding what’s underneath what’s good about Scrum, what’s your context and then contextualizing. But it’s tough for organizations to do that. But yet, we see a lot of scaling frameworks. And I’m not picking in a lot of people pick and save, I think, you know, there are contexts and there’s, you know, less than that, all of these different frameworks, they have a lot of good patterns. But if your context, or your environment is not set up for that, you know, it’s tough.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 31:05

Yeah. I think this is not the only thing. So the main thing is the people more or less try to implement it, as they learned it, got educated in it, read about it. And it’s exactly what you’re saying they are not contextualizing. And then those frameworks are not working anymore. Yeah, so it’s probably not necessarily the framework’s fault. But on the other hand, they often also don’t motivate too much to contextualize, which I also understand now say, okay, here it is, this is what we offer. And if you just follow that, then it’s all fine. Yet, you still have to reflect and adapt.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:01

Yeah. So just to keep stay on this topic of companywide agility, I wanted to get your thoughts on the importance, and how do you get trust in alignment? When you’re scaling, right, because those are two really important things, if you want to scale up or scale down, scaling doesn’t necessarily mean Right, like just scaling up, you could be scaling down. So from your perspective, what is the relationship between trust and alignment?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 32:28

Hmm, yeah, well, one of the key thing is that trust can only be given. And also what I think I learned, this one’s from Tom DeMarco, who had shared story where he was saying, like, well, trust always has to go ahead, which is sometimes discussed in a different way that people think, well, you have to earn the trust or so, is what people say. But actually, you can only show the trust if somebody trusts in you. Otherwise, you cannot, because then there will be always control and therefore you just don’t have the leeway to show that you are trustworthy. And so this is, I think, one of the difficulties and there, again, from a personal perspective, or companywide perspective, I would say, all of those four streams are really paying into that starting with sociocracy thing. Well, we really ensure every voice gets heard, is getting heard, and also how we make decisions that we really want to ensure everyone is with us here without being completely slowed down, like with a consensus decision, right? So that helps already because it shows the trust, I show the trust, I know you can be part of that decision. And we believe in you there. And definitely same with open space. So open space as a strategy meaning well we trust you that you understand what the next features or the next product we should work on or what kind of even if you start small like with self-selecting teams, we trust you that you select the teams in a way or come up with a team emergent structure in a way so that we can be successful it’s not somebody else deciding we trust you all, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:43

That takes a different type of leader to actually let go of that right.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 34:48

Being courageous probably. Yeah, well NPM budgeting, same thing. It’s often you control most of what’s going on in a company through the numbers, but to you say, well, we trust you. And actually I have a great example. That was way before I knew about [inaudible] [35:11], I think it’s kind of the second biggest software company at least way back when into money. So not comparable to like IBM or whatever. But still. And I was there, maybe 15 years ago or so. So it’s really long, though. And so my client took me to the canteen for lunch. And I was completely surprised to see what was going on there. So people kind of yeah, went up and look for the lunch, which they then got handed over from the kitchen staff. And then there was an open cashier. That people put in their money and collected there exchanged, there was nobody sitting there no camera, watching it. It was completely trusting everyone who’s roping in that company, that they will just pay what’s requested and being Yeah, trustworthy on that. And that really was sticking with me and I said well, what a strong signal to the people. And on the other hand, you could also say, well in companies, we all trust the people to run those million dollar projects, but we don’t trust them to pay for their lunch? What is this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:37

Well it goes back also to what you just said, what was it? Like trust is leading or trust is always ahead. Yeah. So it’s like you get to show trust especially from a company perspective. That goes into and I know that this is also close to you, architecture and design and policies. So when we talk about companywide agility, what are some of the things when it comes to design and architecture and policies, that we need to also look through different set of eye glasses?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 37:15

So now, probably, we are also shifting more towards alignment, what I haven’t really talked about much. And there for me is really, I would say more provided by the structure you’re setting up with and again, I think [inaudible] [37:33] is just offering a great deal here so that you elect those people who you as a team, for example, trust that they make the right decisions on your architecture, if you need something like an enterprise wide or company wide, which is not always required, which is also a thing that definitely needs to be professional. Because sometimes these things are rule although they’re not really necessary. And they’re more in the way then them being helpful. But they’re also good reasons why you really want to have that and you need it. And if you have like product line development or something like that. And so it is really for me more, how do we structure ourselves? How do we organize ourselves so that we have this structure where we know there are people who can make that decision together. And it’s not a decision made on the ivory tower, but more like a bottom-up election of representatives coming together and making those decisions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:37

Yeah, and really what I want, again, coming back to the alignment, coming back to the complexity, and where we started here, we talk about emerging architecture and software development, but we don’t really have emerging architecture and organizational design. Right?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 38:55

Yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:56

Do you think we’re going to get there because, you know, most of the companies are so used to kind of what we’ve seen with IT systems like, you know, big, don’t change it, and sociocracy is just one of the… I like really s3 and s3 specifies is similar to, you know, I’m referring to sociocracy 3.0. Like they are different patterns for scaling or different patterns for architecture and structure. And this is, in my opinion, something that’s ahead of its time. But do you also do maybe see it differently from a perspective, what’s coming? What’s going to work in complexity when it comes to alignment design architecture? Well, how design and architecture can help alignment I guess,

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 39:47

Yes, it can. I really assume that we will have more network structures and the network structures in the way that they help us in sense to scale down, and not up. So a bit of what we hear from some companies like WL Gore that they say will not bigger than 120 people. And then we start a new branch and where we organized ourselves. And so then the different branches are connected, which is, yeah, one way of having such a more network structure. So it’s more autonomous areas, maybe and then those autonomous areas being connected them again.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:38

Exactly. I was talking to Dave Snowden, maybe a couple months ago on my podcast, and he was saying, like, why this is important. I really liked how he described and in a sense, if you want innovation, if you’re dealing with complexity, you’re going to have emergence, right. So the best way to have an emergence is to decentralize, and lead those agents, whatever you want to call it, self-organize. And, again, this goes back to alignment and trust, if we don’t trust our people, and help them or help structure alignment, then we’re back to where we were, which is not a very good way to deal, with increasing complexity, right?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 41:24

Well, actually, you can also think this way about like a big open space. So thinking of companies really like big open spaces, you have that common theme that what is the company’s purpose, what is the thing that holds us together? What do we want? What kind of difference do we want to make in the world, and then you have people who want to work on different areas that constitute or pay into that purpose. And they come together make that happen, and once they are done then they look for other stuff they want to work on. So which is, open space is an emergent structure, right? Which has that alignment with that theme. And I can’t imagine that something like this is really more happening in the future, just because it’s needed. And I also know, well, the bigger the companies are getting that the more they feel like, oh, we have to have this carved in stone almost. And there are sometimes also people asking for that kind of, okay, where’s my role description or something? Well, maybe you define it, and maybe you define it today different than you would do tomorrow. And, of course, which comes with a lot of uncertainty again, so we are back to sometimes it feels just safer to have that kind of recipe.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:01

Exactly. And it goes back also to I guess talking about, some of us are more comfortable with uncertainty. Some of us aren’t, and there is no one size fits all right. And then also cultures, I mean, like, I grew up in Boston and Sarajevo, in that whole Balkans areas, you probably know, the environment there is a lot different than it is here, United States, so your environment shapes what you see through your glasses. So I think, you know, having that context is really important too. As we become more in global society, we start collaborating and having themes, or why certain people see things different way. And understanding that. So…

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 43:51

Which is a different topic and interesting one by itself.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:57

Oh, yeah, so that’s why I said, so most of this is like, just trying to like, if we’re sitting in the coffee shop and just talking, we could deep dive into a lot of these and you know, their topic by themselves, but it’s interesting to hear your perspective on some of this stuff. And what’s even more interesting to me is, as I’m talking to each of my guests, there are patterns emerging in a sense of what people are saying. And it’s really helping me understand, like here are different people with different backgrounds and perspectives. But in a nutshell, they’re saying the same thing. And I don’t know how much it has to do with other biases, or you know what, we’ve been conditioned, but it is interesting. Having a background in teaching and learning, what do you think, how can companies become learning organizations? I know you’ve talked about this in the past, but what have you learned and what would you like to share around becoming a learning organization?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 45:03

Yeah, well, actually, it’s thing we have talked already about, which is having this approach to probes or to experiments being open and courageous to do that, because that’s the only way you will be innovative, actually trying that, trying things out, but maybe even a controlled way, by having that hypothesis first. So you know, what you’re actually trying and what you can learn from it, right. And I sometimes struggle. And you might have seen me struggling with that before, with the thing that we say in agile very often that it’s so important to fail fast. But I just think this is so wrong. It’s such a wrong message. Because the goal is not to fail fast. The goal is to learn fast. And you do what you need to do in order to learn fast, and sometimes it implies failure. And sometimes it implies not failure, or whatever it is, yeah. But the failure is not your goal. It’s a means and that’s struck with it always. However, having said that, it means for learning organization, it must be well, more than okay, it must be understood that in order to learn, we have to run experiments and look at them, but they teach us back. And then with what they taught us back, we do the next step where and the next experiment and try to learn from that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:48

So empiricism in a nutshell, in a sense, learn through experience, right? I really like you know, to stay a little bit on the probing piece, because you described it as a ha moment, and also something that you think is necessary in order to deal with the current environment. So, this probing is all about experience, it’s all about learning what you just described. And it gives, unlike recipe, I think probing, I wouldn’t call it a recipe, I think it gives people permission and encourages them to create experiences. Because you’re not saying like, here’s a recipe or saying like, here’s an idea, if you want to make barbecue sauce, here’s an idea of how you make barbecue sauce. But don’t assume that, what you do here is going to work. Like here’s just an idea. So you can get started, is that how you see probing in the sense of, like, encouraging experience?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 47:52

So what you described was, I would more refer to, that’s a prob. Now, probing for me is the whole approach. And the whole approach is well, and that is the kind of a recipe really start with reflecting on your situation, then come up with a hypothesis that you have based on that reflection, then with that hypothesis, develop an experiment that can validate or invalidate your hypothesis. And when you run the experiment, measure before and after, so you know, what you really learn. And then the kind of last or additional step, which I think is really also super important, is please talk about it, publish about it. And that goes back to what you said earlier. So we don’t know much about emergent organizational architectures. Well, we don’t because not much is talked about that it’s not much talked about what have people tried, and how did it work out, in which context? And maybe my context is similar and therefore I might try that, or maybe I change it completely, or whatever. So it’s that yeah, learning from your peers and your peers can be the club.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:15

Well, is it the peers, but it’s also I’m assuming the customer because there’s customers at the center there as well. So how do we get closer to the customer to right because… So maybe, I don’t know as a last question or just the statement like, what would you share? I really love your forward looking and that motivates me in the sense of just seeing other people that kind of have expressed what’s in my head better than what I have been able to and see things what’s going. So what would be your message to somebody that’s, learning about agile or wants to learn more about these patterns driven. What message would you give to those not necessarily that are familiar with the patterns, but the ones that are not, which is the vast majority of people?

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 50:27

It seems to me that, yeah iterated around that already yet. So the key thing for me is probably really taking time for reflection. And too often, we feel, or we are push to go into action. And just going into action is the same way as delivering stuff. So which is delivering output but not outcome, right, and, therefore not making much difference. So action doesn’t really help us. So take time to reflect and then go into action based on your reflection. So again, that’s why I say I kind of iterated about that already, which is, again, the probing thing. Or if you stay in the actual perspective, just think of using retrospectives in various ways. So with your team, but also maybe on different organizational levels, so that you can also reflect on what’s helping you in the structure that you’re having in that organization. Or maybe also, it’s an individual kind of retrospective. Where are you with your ideas and stuff like where do you want to go next. So yeah, I think the intentional stillness is what too often missing. And this is me saying that, who is talking all the time [inaudible] [52:12]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:14

No, but I think that’s something that we need to come back. And then like, the whole I think reflection, contemplation, in a sense, it’s what you’re saying is working on ourselves. Like, you know, we talked about understanding organizations understanding, but we really don’t know much about ourselves, it goes back to emotional intelligence, it goes back to self awareness, it goes back to a lot of these things that were very reactive. And I think what you’re saying, and what I understood is more like, take a time this, I used to play soccer. And my dad was always telling me, and my coach, you got to stop and lift your head up and look at the field, understand the field, you can’t just be, you know, dribbling and looking down.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 53:02

Yes. Exactly.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:03

It’s kind of like that.

Speaker: Jutta Eckstein 53:04

Yeah. And actually, this reminds me of what we talked about earlier, which was maybe a bit short how we talked about it, the learning organization, which connects really to that because the key is a learning organization will only emerge by the individuals starting to learn. An organization is not a thing. It’s the individuals who make that thing really and so it starts with individuals learning.

Benson

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:31

Who is Jim Benson? This one gets people but…

Speaker: Jim Benson 00:41

Well, yeah, Jim Benson has been many different people throughout the course of his life. I was a angry punk rocker for a while, I was an urban planner. I was an AIDS activist, I ran the AIDS Memorial quilt, the names projects Memorial quilt for the Northwest region of the US for like 12 years. I’ve owned a software company. I’m part of the team, I guess, that invented Kanban and then took that on to personal Kanban and Lean coffee. And in a nutshell, all of those things is that Jim Benson is a person who believes that people do their best work when working with others, that collaboration is the shortest path to success and they we need to build built environments, systems, visual controls, things like that agreements that make collaboration more natural and less an avenue for blaming other people when things don’t happen.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:54

That’s awesome. And I was trying to, like, do a little bit of background research and I saw that you were transportation engineer, and you quit your job and started a software company. I was like what was he thinking, you know? How did that come about?

Speaker: Jim Benson 02:10

Well so what happened was years ago, when I was an engineer, I worked with a guy named William Routan and he was the person I started my software company with. And we worked for a company called David Evans and Associates. And that was probably one of the best companies anyone could work for at all. And they were great because they had a motto that they kind of stuck to, which is we find outstanding professionals, and we give them the tools they need to do an outstanding job. So this was like the late 80s, early 90s and we had unlimited vacation days, you know, all those great things that tech invented, we had that before there was tech. And William and I, we worked in a field, it was called IPS or intelligent transportation systems and it was right at the birth of where information technology met transportation. And so we did the very first real time traffic website for the Washington Department of Transportation here. And then later with our software company, we did the very first GIS based real time traffic website for the San Francisco or for the Bay Area Council of Governments. And that was called 511.org and it was the first GIS based system. So when you go use Google Maps now, that’s based on tech that we kind of pioneered. And no, they didn’t pay us for it. But we started, we moved from one to the other because we ended up but it kind of as a fluke getting a couple of coding projects and we were trying to figure out how are we going to fit these coding projects into what we’re already doing. And we were introduced to this guy who had just written this book and his name was Kent Beck. And so we started off, you know, in XP, doing agile stuff in XP before agile I think even had a name yet. I think that it was just XP. Yeah, so it was a really fortuitous moment because we were used to building things like subways, that took 30 years to build and all of a sudden, we built this like software in two weeks and we’re like drunk with power at that point. We were like oh my God, we can have like immediate impact. That’s crazy! And so we liked it so much that we went off and started Cranial solutions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:51

What role did you play in David Anderson’s blue book because he told me that that happened through just link coffees at the cocoa place in Seattle.

Speaker: Jim Benson 05:03

Now no lean coffee came well after we started Kanban.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:08

What ways did you influence or did you influence David’s book?

Speaker: Jim Benson 05:12

So Dave and I used to spend a lot of time together. And we spent a lot of time in various pubs, drinking scotch, and talking about our relationships, and agile. And one of the things we talked about most was, you know, he had written agile management, which has a lot of great stuff in it, but it’s very, very difficult to implement. And so we kept talking about ways to implement that. And just over here in the ladies pub, in front of the fireplace, was where we first kind of drew the first Kanbany idea. And my background is psychology and engineering and kind of collaborative systems and Dave is in you know, big business, you know, making big projects happen. And so we both went off into our respective offices and implemented the thing on that piece of paper. So David and Drag Ocean and others and Corry Lattice started building on XIT project, kind of that version of Kanban, and in my office, we were building more of the personal Kanbans, small teams, high degree of variation approach. So it’s very much a symbiotic creation. Dave then went off to do the work that he did at Corbis. And then after Corbis, he came over and we started modus cooperating together. In fact, we developed this logo together. And we did that for a little while, but it kind of became clear that what our individual visions of Kanban, they were aligned but they weren’t the same and so we went off and, you know, did our own separate things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:11

Nice. And maybe just to come back to systems and psychology a little bit, you know, people define systems differently, you know, and there are a lot of different systems. But, you know, I think what a lot of times forget is the human side of the systems or human systems. I spoke with David actually, maybe a month ago now, and, you know, the way that he was emphasizing how much we need to know understand social systems and how we interact as humans within those systems was really refreshing because they never heard David talk about that before. And I think you know, that’s something as an agile-lean community, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about at all, you know, psychology. And I think I heard you somewhere say, it’s not the psychology where you’re, you know, treating patients, but more like a just understanding humans and how we think, what motivates us, you know, what’s important to us, and then also how we interact in a social environment. What are your thoughts I mean, when it comes to you have background in this; what do most professionals and companies get wrong about the human systems side?

Speaker: Jim Benson 08:28

Wow. We’ve been taught for over 100 years that we need to pay attention to policy, procedure and that if we do those things, then the humans will just do what we tell them to. And one of the things that you know, when everybody was talking about Scrum bot, I was saying all Scrum teams are Scrum bot and they would get upset about that. And I’d be like, if you take any scrum team, and you remove two people from it, and you move two people on, does the team change? And they’re like, well of course it does. Scrum bot. Something different is happening because the individuals that are gathered to work together, form their own culture. So I want to make sure that people actually understand that yes, we’re trying to get like flow of tickets through a Kanban but we’re also trying to get psychological flow; which is I’m comfortable with the work that I’m getting, I feel protected by the system that I’m in, I feel like the system is exciting enough that I can change it in helpful ways, when somebody else has a problem, I know when I can help and when I can’t. Those things give you professional comfort and we don’t design for those. In fact, we usually designed for the opposite; we design for stopping people from exercising their professional judgment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:03

You think there’s a tight correlation between I think I’ve heard you say before clarity and flow. Could you maybe elaborate on that, what you mean by clarity and flow?

Speaker: Jim Benson 10:14

Yeah. And clarity doesn’t mean that everything is defined, it means that we just understand how everything is. So in Agile or in software development in general, there are a lot of things that are very standard, that we can say every day, these things are going to happen, or each time I touch this, this is going to happen or, you know, this is part of our, you know, our racks, and in our racks, we’re always going to have things very standardized. And then we’re going to have things that are very complex, because that’s what we do for a living. We solve weird problems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:50

Wicked problems.

Speaker: Jim Benson 10:51

Yes, wicked problem. Wicked weird problems. And the problem is that we spend a lot of time inventing wicked problems because we don’t take any time to say, this is what our standard work is, this is the stuff we know, let’s just set that up so that it’ll be stable, then when something weird happens, we will have the cognitive bandwidth to be able to deal with it. And when it comes up, and it says, you know, hey, I’m just presenting myself, I’m a new weird thing, do we have a set of procedures to effectively deal with the weird thing? Like, if you come up against a complex problem, do you always have more than three people who are going to work on solving it? Because individuals can’t solve complex problems. You know, when those come up and they reach a certain level of danger, who else needs to be involved?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:51

And what you’re saying is like, we just got to start thinking, right?

Speaker: Jim Benson 11:55

We have to start valuing each other. We have to recognize that like these walking flawed globs of water and goo in our heads, those are the things that actually write the code. You know, it’s not JIRA, and it’s not, you know, GitHub, writing the code, we’re writing the code and if we set up a system, like you know, who found out this better than Electronic Arts? If you treat your people like crap, they will produce crap. And if you teach your people well, they will reciprocate. So how do we intentionally wake up in the morning and say, we’re going to set up a system that maybe has a Kanban in it, we tend to have like five or six visual controls probably for any given project that we’re working on. So Kanban is like the entry level to an effective team, it’s not the marker of an effective team. And those other visual controls are based on what information the professionals on that team need in order to do a good job you know, right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:11

So that’s, you know, in a sense, like, a lot of that is… the reason they said, we gotta start thinking because like, there’s a lot of, you know, focus on Scrum, focus on and, you know, just name a framework. And what I’ve seen, at least in reality is that, we got to start using our heads, we got to start, we can’t rely just saw a framework, and I think, you know, when you say we get a, minimize the variance or understand what the standard work is, and that doesn’t imply necessarily, you know, apply, you know, a famous or a framework but it’s more like, we get to understand our work, and we have to understand what type of work it is, based on the type of work treated differently. If you have a lot of certainty, don’t know work complicated, you know, create processes. Is that what you’re saying?

Speaker: Jim Benson 14:05

Yeah, yeah. And that when I’m working like in construction or healthcare or something outside of software and they say that they want to be agile, and then I say, well, you know, do you want to do Scrum or do you want to do XP or do you want to do less, or do you want to do data, do you want to do safe? And just sit there and list like 12 frameworks and they’re like, and I was like, yeah. So that’s what agile means to me; utter chaos. So can we take a step back and find out like what is bothering the professionals on your team and in the ecosystem that your team interacts with? And then can we start to remove the impediments that they’re facing on a daily basis to get work done? And it would be easy to dump that into the of lean, but lean also doesn’t go far enough in dealing with those relationships. And it’s a shame because lean always really, you know, tries to relate itself back to Toyota. But Toyota’s big thing wasn’t, you know, an add on cord or stopping the line or having your Kanban even. Toyota’s big thing was building better relationships with their supply chain. That’s the thing!

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:31

But it was also I think people. Like I think the way that lean and it was interpreted in a West is different than how to Toyota in the East. You know, there was a lot more focus on people and relationships. And I think that speaks to the culture, which I’m interested. Like, how do you define culture? I haven’t heard you… what is culture to you?

Speaker: Jim Benson 15:53

Well, what we say is the individuals in teams create value. And so that’s kind of the operational system. And that culture is the needs of the people on those teams to that where satisfying those needs allow them to behave as responsible professionals. So they can make decisions when they need to, again, they can help when they need to. So it’s one of the biggest things that kills any company is they put barriers up for people helping other people, then someone needed help, they didn’t get it, they blame the other people. So what we tend to define as culture is often kind of the failure state of culture. You know, like we have an accountability culture here, or we have, you know, big carrot and stick culture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:52

Can we talk about that because I think that’s another important point that I’ve heard you have made recently and you may have said that like, high performing teams move from accountability to responsibility. When you said that, that was like that makes a lot of sense. So could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jim Benson 17:11

I get a lot of flack for it. I feel like a bomber in World War II. You know. flyers like… you know, all these things,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:21

I think one of the things that I think you know, that I want to bring up that [inaudible 17:27]. It resonated with me, it resonated with me.

Speaker: Jim Benson 17:31

So accountability is generally a failure state; it’s generally a failure demand model, where you’re setting up expectations of people and then you are preparing to hold them accountable when it doesn’t go right. Rather than setting up a system from the beginning that says, as a group, here are our goals. You know, these different people might be taking the lead on this thing or this other thing, but all of us are responsible for making sure that we get to that end state safely. So that when you’re, you know, if you’re on a Kanban your swim lanes, and you’re swimming along and someone down here starts drowning, you can go save them. You have to like I’m sorry, I got a deadline, you know…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:22

Yeah, so how do then… I mean, I get a couple of questions I guess, but to elaborate on this, so I agree accountability is like cover my ass, responsibility is like do the right thing maybe.

Speaker: Jim Benson 18:38

Yep. That’s it. That’s exactly it. The one thing that I learned at David Evans and Associates was that that professionalism didn’t mean I do my work. Professionalism was I make the world better for my customers, for my colleagues and for myself. But if you skip any of those, you’re in trouble. And so when we build systems that say things like the scrum master protects the team from management or demands by the client, instant fail. 100% is instant fail.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:16

So the latest Scrum guide 2020 has moved to accountabilities.

Speaker: Jim Benson 19:21

Yep. Okay, they’re always catching up. But I mean, they got a crap even from Ron Jeffries about that last week.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:39

What do you think about the commercialization of agile? And you know, I’m a CSP, I train and you know, it’s a usually two day course, people are coming for certifications. And I don’t know, I was listening to one of your podcasts and the way they you set up your trainings and one of the things that you said that resonated with me and that I tend to, like those longer spread out classes is that you can’t just jam things into two days so you purposely have designed some of your courses that are months long.

Speaker: Jim Benson 20:13

Yeah, four months.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:15

What is it four months? It’s like marinating, right? You want the ideas and these concepts to marinate in your head. And the whole agile has moved over is that…

Speaker: Jim Benson 20:28

Instant gratification.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:30

Yeah. So is that gonna stick around probably?

Speaker: Jim Benson 20:34

Oh, you mean the instant gratification? Yeah, it’s human nature. So right now, universities are having a problem, because people are like, you mean, I have to go to school for months? Oh, my God! And they’re like, yeah, cuz you gotta think, seriously. And we’re so used to, you know, oh, my God, this is bothering me, in five minutes I want it to no longer bother me. And then we wonder how we get things like, you know, current issues that we have with social media platforms. Is it we don’t take the time to really think about the ramifications of what we’re building.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:25

So where are we headed? I mean, in a sense, like, I know, we can foretell future but like, all the signs are saying in the sense like there’s more demand for quick wins, there’s more demand for these, you know, two days certification classes. I’m not getting even though I’ve run, you know, month long, for instance, CSM. You know, [inaudible 21:48] just that wants to take that approach that you’ve described as well where it’s like four month process in a cohort type of style, where you’re actually learning with others, you’re putting things into practice. And as humans, that’s how we lot of times learn. And it seems like the whole human side of things is still getting shoved to the side.

Speaker: Jim Benson 22:13

Yeah, and so that’s a big thing in our visual management certification and it catches students off guard. So you’ll go through the first section which kind of just uses personal Kanban just kind of say, this is what a system might look like. But immediately upon getting into the second section, that’s about interactions, the things that we claim to do in Agile. Oh we’re really good at the individuals, we kind of suck at the interactions. And so one of the homework assignments in that, and this is like, it’s a serious, like gut punch to tech people is, and this is an assignment that I had, it was literally something from my past, which we take the town of Albion Michigan, which is a town that has a little University, a little College in it, but it’s been dwindling in population since the 1950s. And people have been very good at, you know, complaining about it. And so we say, okay, you’re going to have a public meeting, you’re going to have the city and you’re going to have a college, they don’t get along. And you need to figure out a way to bring helpful industry or helpful business into the city. And we tell them about some different types of endogenous and exogenous growth, you know, some economic theories that are quite outside of agile and lean. And we say your job is to bring these people together and design a meeting that will achieve consensus. And a lot of people have a lot of problem with that because it’s something they’re not familiar with. But I was talking to one of my agile coach friends the other day, and he was like, the other day you know, we thought our company was super awesome and then all of a sudden we had all of these complaints lined up against us about microaggressions. And I’m like really? Did they teach you about that in your CSM? So what I want people to get out of our classes is yes, you know, here’s how you can visualize work, here’s how you can visualize conversations, here’s how you can visualize outcomes. But it’s so that you can deal with situations like that. Like real life stuff. Coding is not real life. The stuff that goes around the coding is! My bosses are being jerks, we got three quarters of the way through this process and we were derailed, the guy on the board of directors whose pet project this was had a heart attack last night and all the other people in the board of directors hate him. You know, weird stuff like that happens, that’s what we need to be ready to deal with. And if we are, the coding stuff is easy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:22

So that’s my concern, right? There are not that many people if you look at the interest and then if you look at like, you know, the classes out there, not much is being discussed in the agile, lean circles about exactly what you said. It’s more like oh go learn about, you know, safe and running trains, go learn about Scrum Master role and how to become Scrum Master. But nobody’s really the peeking and understanding what’s underneath all of that. The human side.

Speaker: Jim Benson 25:51

And even when they try, they do the same thing. So it’s like, I’m going to go off, and I’m going to take a two day course and get a certification in psychological safety. And it’s like, psychological safety is really, really deep. And if you get a two day course in it, you just paid for a two day course in making yourself feel better about psychological safety. But what you’re not doing is sitting around saying, wow, like, I’m going to take a whole day and think about times where I’ve totally messed up someone else’s psychological safety. And I’m gonna own that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:35

But that requires, you know, that requires self-awareness, that requires, you know, and I just, you know, my point around this is that we know that that’s important, but we don’t put as an industry, you know, a lot of leader I talked to, but the money is in the [inaudible 26:59].

Speaker: Jim Benson 26:58

So there’s a reason why Motus Institute and modus co-operandi do not have 700 employees. So we designed the lean, agile visual management program to attract people who would want to be in the program. And I was really worried that if we set up a two day certification in anything, I would become incredibly wealthy and no one would get any value for it but they would think they did and that would not make me feel good.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:36

That’s the thing. You know, so what are you finding out? Like, because I agree, it’s like, it feels it makes you feel good, you know, that maybe, like you said, you’re making more money, you get it, you’re certifying more people, but it probably feels a lot more better to understand that you’re equipping people to actually deal with real problems and it’s probably coming back so like, what are some of the things that you’re seeing that when people come back to you, and I’m sure you have some stories and that made you feel good in the sense that…

Speaker: Jim Benson 28:14

So there’s two things. There’s two things about that. First, is that there’s a lot of really good people in the Agile world. So I don’t want to make it… because I often state things too bluntly and then I am taken as like guy that hates all the people but talks about how nice people should be. But the system that we’ve set up is not allowing the Agile community to have the right conversations because they’re chasing, you know, their necks, they’re you know, they’re safe, you know, level 72 you know, certification. Safe is pretty much up with the Masons now. There’s enough levels in there, I think. But you’ve got good people at the scrum Alliance who are trying really hard, like really, really hard to fix some of these systemic issues. And I want to acknowledge that because like I said, I always end up painting myself into that corner. So what I found is also is that whether it’s people coming to us for new work or people returning after years, or people that we didn’t ever know were using our stuff who then show up and like say we’re doing these things, is that it’s been incredibly gratifying that from new hires, actually, we’ll just say like from university to new hires to people who have been in for a while to upper management, there is a strong realization that the problems that we’re seeing across the board in business are due to an inability to effectively work with other people. They’re not due to how fast you fail, they’re not due to how you know how many 1000s of experiments you run, or even how many times you pull the and on cord, it’s do I understand how the individuals in my group are working with the other people to provide value. And when I get a call from like, you know, say somebody my age, somebody like in their mid 50s, who has worked in like, there’s a company that we’re working with or worked with that makes tents. So like, they literally have a big, huge, gigantic tents. And when the leadership called up and said, you know, we understand that in order to make better tents, we have to treat each other better. And we have 75 years or whatever it was of experience of not treating people better. We know we’re not horrible but we’re not making the extra effort. When people lead with that,. I get hopeful, I get really super hopeful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:17

I mean, it is definitely like, if you don’t have that, like, you know the numbers, you know people are disengaged, they’re disconnected from the work and there’s no way that you can innovate or that you can do good work when you’re disengaged. When I’ve been disengaged, I’m thinking about other stuff that I want to do that I feel like is more gratifying than what I might be working on right then. I think a lot of people feel that way too. And it’s interesting that human side of things that like you said, is the trickiest, you can do all this other stuff but maybe too, like something that you said that I want to come back to is the human side and like, you know, a lot of times we have a hard time saying like, you know, developers should talk to the customers. You know, a lot of times they go to the leaders and say, developers should be talking to the customers and get closer to the customer. And they’re like hell no! Are you crazy Miljan? You want to have weird developers to talk to customers? And then you talk to developers, and they’re like, No, leave me alone.

Speaker: Jim Benson 32:30

I’ll give you the best example that I ever saw was, we did work for a part of the Washington State government that handles most of the social services in the state. And we worked with two teams; one team was working on maintaining an old crappy piece of software that manage all of the at risk elderly people in the state. So people who might be in home situation where they were being abused or beaten up or locked in a room and their savings were just being spent by their kids or whatever. And then the other was for kids. So all of the kids that were in the CPS system. And I said do you ever go watch what your customers are doing? And they said, yeah sometimes we’ll go and we’ll sit with the caseworkers and we’ll watch them use the system. And I was like, why do you care about that? And they said, Well, you know, we want to see like where they’re stumbling and where they have problems with drop down menus and things like that. And I was like, all right, I want you to listen to me very carefully. The people that you are meeting, when you do that are not your customers. And they’re like, but they’re the caseworkers, they’re the people who use it. I was like, no, no, you see, you seem to think that the people that you’re meeting are the caseworkers. And by then they’re just like, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. So I said here’s what I want you to do. I want you to wake up at six o’clock in the morning, already dicey with a software developer. I want you to go with your caseworker, meet them for breakfast and then I want you and then by then they’re already saying no. I want you to get in a car with them and I want you to drive around with them for the day, just one day and then watch them use your software. And so of course they’d meet with the caseworker in the morning, caseworker is like hi, isn’t it a great day and then they go get coffee and stuff and then they start meeting with people and by the end of the day, the caseworker is just a wreck. Because you’re literally seeing the worst, every hour of how human beings treat other human beings and then you’re expected come in and use a piece of software that looks like it was designed for Windows XP? You know, it was it was like a hostile program. So yeah, they could navigate it. But they were dealing with so much crap by that point that all they really wanted to do is sleep or find something at the bottom of a bottle. And I about killed those poor people. They weren’t prepared to know what being a caseworker smells like. So it’s not just meeting with your customer, it’s understanding the reality of the people who are using the stuff. And they were really mad at me. But almost instantly, they started making some pretty major UX changes that they never would have done otherwise, because logically the software worked okay. After that, they were like, what gift can I give to those people? Sorry, that was a really long answer but it was awesome.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:58

That was a really good example in the sense of like, you know, we talk a lot about getting closer to the customer, we spend so much time building the wrong things or you know, we confuse being busy with you know, something that surely solving the problem when we can just…

Speaker: Jim Benson 36:14

We confuse instrumentation with relationships. Ouch. Yes, Jim@ modusoperandi.com if you want send your hate mail there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:30

So maybe let’s continue with this because I want to bring up something else that I agree with then. So you said the basic structure of Agile Manifesto is fundamentally flawed. [inaudible 36:41] over create a toxic environment. Could you, this is another one of those things that you might get some hate mail but could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jim Benson 36:52

So what’s been funny is I’ve been on the stalwart stage at agile insert year several times. And this one comes up all the time, like every year, I think. And it’s because people are struggling with it. So it’s not because they hate it, it’s because they’re struggling with it. And I don’t blame the Agile community for this at all. But I think it’s snowboard, snowboard, at sunburn too, when they went and said, oh it’s fine. and then they went home, I was like, you tell people that they need to continuously improve things and then you went and said all the Agile Manifesto is fine and then you just went home? Wow, that’s some lazy stuff there guys! So congratulations on that. So yeah, so you have couplets and like individuals and interactions over processes and tools. And the problem is individuals cannot interact without processes and tools. So what that actually reads out as, like honest to God, and this is full on Jim Benson agile heretic here; individuals and interactions over processes and tools means people talking without knowing how to talk. Okay? So individuals and actions or interactions through processes and tools, that’s great. Working code through proper documentation, that’s great. But what’s happened is and I know that they say the stuff on the left, we believe in the stuff on the right, we just believe the stuff on the left more, total cop out and a total lack of understanding of the syntax of English.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:40

But I think it’s also the way that I see that it’s flawed, it’s not even English, it goes back to the humans, human side of things. And the reason I think it’s flawed is because you taking that statement of over, right. Nothing in a sense like, over is a too strong of a word where there you know, there are multiple truths. Right?

Speaker: Jim Benson 39:10

I would say so, yes and that it creates a set of false dichotomies, that people have had major anti-pattern reactions to. Like you go to places and they say, we’re agile, therefore, we don’t document our code. And I know that people will say, that’s not how it’s supposed to happen. Too bad! You created the system that is encouraging that behavior so we need to come up with a way to encourage the behavior that we wish to see which is appropriate professional, you know, professional code with professional documentation. Just that simple.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:52

But that’s also common sense. And, you know, sometimes that common sense is not the common practice as the saying goes but it’s like, you know, we tend to lean on Agile Manifesto, lean on these frameworks. And it really goes back to just I call it just going back to thinking, like you know, going back to using your head and figuring out what works for you. And maybe to shift gears a little bit, I want to come back, I worked with this company in California called Clark Pacific. And they use Lean and Agile for construction, their construction company. And given you a background, I wanted to maybe spend a little bit of time exploring, just what are you seeing in that construction space? The clients that you’re working with, what are the challenges that they’re facing with, and what common pitfalls are they falling in.

Speaker: Jim Benson 40:52

So the beautiful thing about construction is that it is hundreds of years old and it has new so like, you know, you have like old money and new money. If you have like old process and new process, software is all new process, so people are just trying to spend it as quickly as they possibly can. And you know, by working with Clark, that you’ll meet people there who have worked there 35 or 40 years, you know. There aren’t any tech companies that have been around that long except like, except Microsoft and Apple, you know, so. So you know, the beauty there is that the misbehaviors of various actors are incredibly known and almost taken for granted. So let’s say you’ve got a general contractor on a project, you’ve got an architect, you have two structural engineers, you have one environmental engineer, you have 15 trades and those are all coming together to spend millions of dollars of somebody’s money or in case you know, with me in probably with your projects as well, billions of dollars of somebody’s money. So the size of these projects makes startups look like a joke. And every project is kind of given, you know, carte blanche. Is like you can be what you want to be. And the so what I loved with working with Turner is that they took that seriously. And so when I said you know on like this project, I would like to develop a better relationship with the designers and the architects so that when we’re processing paperwork, that paperwork just flows through, and it’s not a big fight to get stuff done all the time. And I’ll save everybody money, it’ll save everybody time. But the only thing that we’re going to do really is get together and agree not to be jerks. And everybody of course, said well, I’m totally willing to do that but those other jerks aren’t. And then we got all the jerks in the room and they’re like, I thought you were the jerk. Awww and then there was a big hug. And I love that stuff. I absolutely love that stuff. Because in that field, you can’t hide from who your customer is, and you can’t hide from the trades. Because if you do, they’re gonna fall off a ladder and hurt themselves literally. So software is like so safe. You know, the only hurt you ever get is your feelings or because you’re treated like crap, you know, those are the only two things but you very rarely, you know, have a rivet go through your skull or something. Almost never happens in software. But what was your experience?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:53

Well, it’s just like understanding you know, challenges of dependencies right, challenges so like you said relationship and communication and visualizing work and what’s, you know, it’s always amazing when people start talking to each other and they start understanding and you know, develop that relationship. Like you said, it seems like the human side of things kind of fixes everything else. If we have that trust if we have those relationships. And I thought it was interesting how Clark Pacific combined like they didn’t necessarily care about Scrum more or agile or lean, that they were looking at you know, just what works for us and how can we help others understand what we’re trying to do here, how we’re visualizing work, how the work is flowing?

Speaker: Jim Benson 44:48

That was it. That was what made every day at Turner construction feel like I was going to like a business spa. Is that people might do things that you wish they didn’t do, they might not do things as quickly as you want, but people were just ridiculously practical. And in the end, even though, you know, I like to avoid unnecessary deadlines, when you’re building a multi-billion dollar building that already has tenants who are slated to move in, and their rent in their current building is two and a half million dollars a month, there is real penalties for missing the real deadline and so you need to make sure upfront that that deadline is acceptable, that there are allowances for different complexities, and that you have the ability to deal with those complexities as they come up, and that you, you know, the one of the guys that I work with a Turner he just did a series of events with some of their suppliers and initially, the suppliers were like, all right, you give me millions of dollars for the business every year, so I’ll come to your stupid thing. And then a couple of days into it, they’re like, wait, if we do this, can we really do this? And they’re like, yeah, we can really do this and we want, we want to make sure that you have a safer environment that you know, when other people are going to be on the floor when, but you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they’re like, and one of the guys said, you know, if we go through a couple projects, and you know, the all these projects do this and we get into a rhythm, you can bet that our estimates for you are going to come in 20% lower, because they instantly could see where the savings were going to come from. And the savings were all relationships. So it wasn’t like we’re going to make the cost of wood lower. It was we’re just gonna stop treating you like dirt.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:54

And that’s what I’m seeing too like that relationship side, that culture side, they they’re talking about changing that because again, another thing that I’m seeing and I didn’t know this till I got into the space a little bit. But lean construction Institute is big, and you know, they’re looking at agile and then like I saw Jeff Sutherland and scrumming diving into this construction business

Speaker: Jim Benson 47:24

God help us all.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:28

So I’m like, I wanted to get your thoughts on like do you think it you know, as agile is going outside of software development, and there is an interest in construction to learn about these because they see them as management approaches.

Speaker: Jim Benson 47:44

What no, what they have bought is the bullshit arguments that agile actually works for people. And the reason that those arguments persist is because nobody ever actually measures what’s really going on. So we cherry pick routinely, you know, good stories, and then we tell those good stories a lot. And what we’re not doing is saying, what does agile actually mean? Like for the love of God, what does this thing mean? Because it doesn’t mean two week iterations, it doesn’t mean small teams, it doesn’t… you know, everything that we ever try and give it as a definition, it immediately wiggles out of that definition. So right now literally, the definition for me for agile is good shit. And I love the drive to do better things and continuous improvement but the malpractice that has been perpetuated in the name of agile, you know, that’s how we have 737s falling out of the sky.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:00

Yeah. Which is crazy. And I mean, and like then all the big consulting companies are into this. And, you know, this is not just what you’re saying. It’s not just that false perception outside of software, it’s in software too.

Speaker: Jim Benson 49:16

Yes, yeah. We don’t know what it means.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:19

Yeah. And companies are falling for it, they think, you know, like you said, they don’t really know what it means but everybody’s doing it so my company must do it as well.

Speaker: Jim Benson 49:28

Yep. And so that brings us back to the beginning. You’re bringing a coach, the coach has gone through a couple of these certification programs, they’ve got enough of a resume to say I’ve done things for people, no one really checks your history. But, you know, questions that I would ask a new agile coach were what’s the weirdest problem that you came up, that confronted you and how did you solve it? How did you deal with it when you got a team working in a comfortable way and somebody else came along and derailed it? And to see if the responses to those things are humane, or if they’re complain.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:11

Yeah, exactly. And that tells you a lot about that person and there’s, you know, their state of mind and what they’re thinking.

Speaker: Jim Benson 50:20

So I’ll tell you like, there’re a lot of people that I would trust immediately in the Agile world with one of my clients. You know, Ron Jeffries and I spar all the time, I would totally trust him with one of my clients. And I guarantee you that if you go back and look through all the clients that Ron Jeffries has ever had, he’s never done the same thing twice. He’s done what the client has needed and I respect the hell out of him for it. You know, I would trust Alister Coburn with any of my clients. You know, there’s a long list of people that I would trust. I’m not going to say who I would not trust but what makes me untrusting is the number of people running around claiming to be experts who have never managed anything, have never dealt with a serious interpersonal issue, who don’t understand the relationships between serious interpersonal relationships, or issues and agile or lean or making a better culture. And, you know, we’ve had to deal with horrible things since we started Modus. Not in our company, with our with our customers. And there have been like sexual assaults, people posting on Facebook, I’m going to drive to the office and blow everybody away and everybody knows that person has a truckload of guns. You know, upper management specifically laying traps for people so that they can make them look bad to not just fire them, but to ruin their career in the future. Crazy things! And or even just simple power dynamics where a company’s set up to have like incredible positional power centered in two or three senior vice presidents, and everybody else just lives in fear and you’re brought in as the coach, how do you create positive change in an organization that is scared to death? How do you create positive change in an organization that has just been brought up on charges by the federal government for mishandling the information of the people that subscribe to it service? You know, your Scrum Master training isn’t going to help you with that. And I’m being all ranty about this, because that’s why people hire us.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:02

But it goes back to like where we started and maybe this is a good way to conclude it; it goes back to the systems, understand the systems and not just in I… think I spoke with Dave Snowden and he was shedding all over systems thinking, just because they think, same way that you know, with they get certain things too extreme, we’ve taken systems thinking too extreme, just to mean, you know, one type of system, like physical systems or but like it’s really understanding different types of systems including, as I said, human systems are humans side. And I agree, you know, most of the coaches, most of the trainers don’t have that experience, can go in and understand that. The question is, if I had to guess it’s very small of people that can do that. And yet, our world is dealing with challenges that require more than that small percentage of people that can do it, and what I respect about what you’re doing and what some of the other people are doing in the industry is creating and helping develop people to understand that broader spectrum of skills and understanding that you need to have to do that. So maybe as a last kind of thought here is what would be your message to people that are aspiring to be those culture that you describe that you would like to work with?

Speaker: Jim Benson 54:35

Can I share my screen? So here we go, I’ll quickly share my screen. So this is a LinkedIn post that I put up the other day and I use the LinkedIn post just to make sure that I got the fully redacted version of this. So Tony and I just did a week-long event with one of our larger clients and we have kind of a half format. And so I’m showing this to kind of show, the half format. It’s kind of like a ramp if you will. So we got this group together and they’re are a hyper distributed team, no two people on this team are actually in the same city, really. And so they’re spread all over the world. But they have a very pivotal role in in this large company. And they also kind of work on that dividing line between research and development and release. So they have to be able to speak super creative and super buttoned down. They’re really amazing special group of people. So what we did initially was he got together with them, and we did a value stream mapping exercise and that’s what this part is. And in that we go through and we say, okay, basically, what is the problem that you’re currently having? You know, and then we say, okay, what is the process behind that? And we get together, and we know, you know, what happens in the process, what problems are in there, what possible solutions are in there, who you can collaborate with, etc, and so forth. And we always start with this because it’s kind of like calisthenics. It’s just like a warm up exercise but it’s super valuable. So in this, you get everybody in this mode, where they’re thinking about things that happen both procedurally and culturally because no work is handed off without either helping or harming the person that comes after you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:34

It’s almost like exposing the system or visualizing the physical system of the value delivering, you just try and try to reflect it back to them. Right?

Speaker: Jim Benson 56:43

100%, but also to get them to see it, because no team ever agrees on what it is. Ever!

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:49

And you will probably say the most valuable part of this is the conversation that goes into this right?

Speaker: Jim Benson 56:54

Totally, totally. It’s that and it’s getting them ramped up. And then we go into this thing and this thing is what we call the charter. And we do for affinity mapping exercises around vision, which is kind of like, you know, what does the team do? Who do they do it for? What value do they get out of it? How are their lives better? And then the next one is expectations. What do we expect from each other of people giving us work, of people that we give work to? The next one is boundaries or collaboration; when do we need to talk to each other? And then the last one is victory, which is like if we were 100% successful right now, what would that look like? And we go through each of these, in this case, this was Monday, this was Tuesday, this was Wednesday. So we’re already halfway into the week, and we’re supposed to do all these things. So then we get into Thursday, and I’m like, alright guys, you know, we’ve really got to turn up the heat. So we go into the communications agreement, which is what do we need as professionals to know? How do we know it? Where’s the information stored? Why do we always have to ask each other? Where do we lose stuff? And we start to build out what the communications agreement for this is, so that we can give people this stuff so that we can do this thing. And then we didn’t get all the way through it. Then we got to here, it became clear that the team already had what they needed to know out of this exercise. And rather than going and doing this next thing, and it doesn’t even matter what that thing was, we went and did a second value stream mapping exercise around what their future state was. So alright smart people. If everything worked fine, what would that generic thing look like? Because this was a particular thing they did and they did, like 20 or 30 particular things. So we said all right, what’s your particular you know, what’s the genericized version of that, that looks perfect? And then after that we did this is called the low hanging fruit orchard where we create, we basically have them move all of the solutions that were in these previous things down into here, we did a little effort and impact thing and then we created a roadmap for them to actually do that. And while we were doing that, they were like putting silly pictures in here and doing all of this stuff and it was filled with their personality. But the key here is that our goal originally was to do these nine boxes and in the end, we did these two and two thirds, or two and three quarters and then after that all this other stuff is just made up on the fly based on the needs of that team. Why is that important? Well, that’s important because if you go into your client, to your customers, and you do the same thing every time, we’re going to do stand-up meetings and we’re going to ask what you do yesterday, what’re you gonna do today and you know, do you have any blockers? We’re gonna do retrospectives every two weeks and they’re going to look like the this format and we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that. If you have that script, you helped no one because they have problems that are independent of software development.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:00

Yeah, and like what I mean, like what I saw there, just as you quickly describe that is like, let me help you understand the current state, let me clear the platform for you to discuss it better understand that. Let’s talk about, you know, how we’re going to work, what is the future look like, right, in the sense of policies and you know, what we need to do as a team and then let’s visualize the future state. And with that you’re giving the I’m sure that’s not the end, now the hard work starts, which is how do we evolve the system, right?

Speaker: Jim Benson 1:00:32

How do we take the momentum of this really emotional week and make sure that your culture that you’ve defined here is operationalized, it’s part of your overall obeya. So I know we’re probably going long so I’m going to try and make this super short. But I want to share just really quickly our, you know, the one of the guys that invented Kanban, this is their current Kanban. And the reason for this is, this is our podcast, these are our newsletters, these are our blog posts, this is marketing, this is all the crap that goes into actually building a company. This down here is one of the courses that needed to be shored up. So at any given point in time, you need to know more stuff than is just going to be on a Kanban. So I say this because I don’t want the Agile people to think that I’m just ragging on agile. I’m ragging on our current state in software development.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:01:41

I think most people, at least I agree and why I want to speak with you because I respect that. Like, as much as we teach as much as we’d… like any person that can, that has been and done any of this stuff, understands what it takes. And what you’re describing is the same type of patterns that I’ve seen that work. And I know what also doesn’t work. What doesn’t work is saying, go do Scrum when people don’t have no clue or they don’t have the environment to do scrum. And maybe the last word that you know, to leave us with is integrity. I think I hold myself a little bit more to integrity and doing the right thing. Sometimes even though it’s you know, taking less money. And but it goes back to like, really people and I think a lot of times we do what customers want, we do what we want and we know that’s probably not serving anybody want better so

Speaker: Jim Benson 1:02:47

And just to close on an to agree with that and to close on that as at right now, as software people, we have the fate of the world in our hands. We can build reliable pieces of equipment and code that flies planes, drives cars, restarts hearts, or we can focus on dividing things into two week iterations or on tickets moving from left to right. We need to make sure at any given point in time that we understand there are a lot of unintended consequences of our faulty work and that we can’t accept that malpractice or that laissez faire attitude anymore. We have to grow up and build some real software.

Gil Broza

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:32

What are your thoughts on the current state of, you know, prescriptive approaches? Is that going to stick around?

Speaker: Gil Broza 00:40

Well, I’m pretty sure it’s gonna stick around. I mean, history has shown that approaches get standardized and there is a lot of value to standardization, depending on context, and depending how far you take it. Okay? You know, I’ll give you an example. You know, if you take a plane, when we go back to flying, right, I want my pilots to follow procedures, I want them following their checklists, no matter how awesome they are. I want them to be good. They are particularly good when they’re able to handle situations that the protocols never gave them answers for. Okay? But before regular operations, it’s okay to follow procedure. Now, we are in knowledge work. Knowledge work has lots more parameters, there’s vocab, there’s so much. Yeah, right. So there is variability, you deal with human beings, work gets created in the brain, you know, through keyboards, but still in the brain. And we’re not also looking for similarity and homogeneity, right? We want the more creative, we want the special, we want the thing that will distinguish us in the marketplace. And so when that is the case, you can only standardize so much. Now we have frameworks all over the place and they all focus on somewhat different things. And they also go to different lengths in terms of how much they tell you and what they tell you to put in place. But even the frameworks evolve, right? If you look, you know, 5, 10 years ago, Scrum says more and Safe said less. So who’s right? Were they wrong back then? Are they more right now? I don’t know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:36

That’s a really good point.

Speaker: Gil Broza 02:37

Yeah, and you know, the scrum guide always said don’t mess with Scrum. But the scrum guide actually changes every two, three years. And if you look at the version now, it is rather different from 10 and 15 years ago. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:51

And then what do you say about the Agile Manifesto where some people have said, you know, change it, update it, and they left it as it is? And you know…

Speaker: Gil Broza 03:01

So if you look at my books for instance, you will see that I have actually taken it further. Basically, what I described like in my mindset book is what I believe the consensus in the Agile community is. It is congruent with the manifesto. So the manifesto said very little, it said very little or not at all about safety. Right? There were additional matters that it never spoke about. It was software specific, but we can carry the spirit. Right? Now, should we carry the spirit? I think the results show that it’s a good idea. Okay? Now, do we have to stay absolutely true to the words? That would probably make it religion. Now, that’s not, you know, that’s neither here nor there but if we are in the business of adaptation, then maybe it’s also okay to adapt our value systems and our belief systems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:05

So maybe let’s explore those. You talk in your book a lot about, you know, values, beliefs, principles. And a lot of times, like, you know, when I talked to people, and I covered these, and I tried to, especially in the leadership classes, advanced classes, most people don’t fully understand that. So could you maybe just, from your perspective, describe, well, maybe you can start with a purpose and like, the way they you kind of structure in your book in the diagram that you share with me and I’ve looked at where you have purpose and objectives, mindset, and then tactics specifically?

Speaker: Gil Broza 04:41

Yes. So the idea is that there is a straight line of thinking between the purpose of the work we do which we might capture as objectives and the tactics by which we carry out the work. Tactics being processes, tools, practices, methods, roles, artifacts, and so on. And that straight line of thinking, the intermediate step is that of mindset. Mindset is fundamentally how we approach the work. It’s what gives, you know, color to those tactics. For instance, one of the principles in Agile is collaboration, this idea that, you know, two minds are better than one, that’s actually a belief. But the principle of collaboration is you have something to do? Get more than one person to own the result. Okay? Not to just be, you know, friendly and helpful and sharing information, but to actually take ownership for the result however they divide up to work. So that’s an abstract notion. It helps us make choices. I have work to do, should I collaborate, should I not? That’s a principle. But the higher level, higher conceptual level, the higher abstraction in mindset are values and beliefs, and those are the squishier bits, the even less visible, the more subjective, the more abstract. So beliefs are basically our narrative, they are how we see the world, how we see our customers, how we see ourselves, how we see people, how we engage with humans, and so on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:12

What we believe is true, right? It’s what we describe it but a lot of people have described it too. Which is pretty interesting. So we have beliefs and then what about values? Because I want to ask you about this too.

Speaker: Gil Broza 06:24

Right. So both of them are voluntary, we actually choose our beliefs, and we choose our values, but their significance is different. So beliefs give context and validity to our values. And value is what’s important to me. I can think of it as what I optimize for, what’s my North Star, what’s non-negotiable. For instance, when we’re being agile, one of our values is to be adaptive. Right? It is so important, it is at the highest level of significance, just below purpose. And what’s the idea? The idea is that if we are being adaptive, we’re more likely to achieve our objective. Now, do we know this for a fact? Actually, we don’t. And that’s where the beliefs come in. So if you look at the manifesto for instance, and you don’t even need to go that far, I mean, every agiler says that, change is good for you. But that’s a belief, you cannot prove that. Now, you can say well change will happen. Well, okay, that’s pretty close to fact, but is it good for you? Should you adapt to it? Is it good for business to adapt to it? And when that’s the case, how should we go about it? So I might say adapting to change is good for business, therefore, I value adaptation. And to act on it, how we will make decisions, I will choose such principles as frequent planning, collaboration, continuous learning, continuous improvement, feedback, right? All those. And so my beliefs and values kind of hold together, they’re really a mental view of what’s happening around me and how I engage with that. And from that, I derive and choose principles that make it so. Okay, for instance, you know, we value you know, the freedom of the individual in our country, one of the principles is we reelect who governs us every so often. Okay? The tactics, how you set up elections, how you count, that’s tactical, right? Is it paper? Is it electronic? That’s not the question. The question is that you have elections because you value self-representation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:39

And so do you think, you know, and I have a certain perspective, and I want to get your thoughts on this. But so like, for instance, would you consider respect of value?

Speaker: Gil Broza 08:53

I’m going to guess you took this from one of scrums values, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:56

No, no, no, no, no, it’s just like, the reason that I say, this is where I’m going with this. So if we consider which I think, you know, you could put respect as a value, right? But our belief around respect could be differ, right? Like for instance, I might say, you know, you get respect by earning it, right. And you might say, Hey, you know, you get respect this way, right? So we bought my value respect but our belief around respect could be different.

Speaker: Gil Broza 09:31

Right. And that will translate to which principles we choose. So for instance, if you believe that you get respect by earning it, as opposed to, you know, it’s just given to you out of the blue or credentials, then one of your principles could be, be respectful in every communication. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:52

Exactly. So I want to ask you this then, do you think when we look at organizations and we all might have similar values, do you think when we have conflict in organizations, is it at the belief level, mostly principal level or value?

Speaker: Gil Broza 10:14

Usually beliefs and values. Usually. Now here’s something else; all of those things that we said we valued, we just use nouns. We need to define them. So when you say respect, what does that mean? We have to define it. Right? Can I respect people and still refer to them as resources? Right? I mean, that’s a legitimate question. So if I hear, let’s say, a senior leader, that’s mostly who I work with, and if they say, I respect our people, I want to empower them. So what does it mean? So what do you mean, when you use the word resource in reference to those people? What does that mean to you? And sometimes people catch themselves and they realize that their values and beliefs are misaligned with how they act, misaligned with their principles. So we always have some set of values, some set of beliefs and some principles.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:13

But we also say that those are not really values, you’re just sugarcoating your behavior, because your values and beliefs are really the reflection of your behaviors, right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 11:23

They are, Yes. So there’s a way [cross talking 11:26]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:27

Same way I could say, I’m not racist, right? And then you know, my values based on what, you know, could be totally different. And there’s that usually an organization that misalignment of what’s accepted in society, what I need to say, and maybe possibly do versus what my underlying core values and beliefs might be. Right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 11:53

Right. So what you’re describing is that there is a misalignment between those conceptual levels, that misalignment is the very definition of dysfunction. Now, we might sugarcoat it, we might say that’s the politically right thing to do, we might say that is self-preserving behavior. We can explain it many different ways but the result is that when we are misaligned, a few things happen. First off, we act according to our real values and our real beliefs, we confuse people who thought one thing would happen and another day. And the third is, we actually lose a foundation of trust. Right? We lose a foundation of trust and that is, by the way a key matter when it comes to agile implementations and agile transformations where you have management bringing in some type of Agile framework or not and they start acting on it and following the rules and going through the motions and so on. But then people say, but they don’t really mean it. Now, how do people know that? They know that because of what actually is valued such as be ready on the deadline, on time and on budget, make your predictions and stick to your predictions, standardize everything you do, right, predictability gets right the first time. So even if those leaders don’t expressly use those words, it comes across in communications, in conversations, in follow ups, in accountability, and so on. And then people say, okay, so we kind of seem to be doing the Agile thing but we’re not really being agile. So what people are noticing instinctively is the value is mismatch.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:43

So what do you do in that instance?

Speaker: Gil Broza 13:45

Yeah. And that’s why most of my work with clients is not, you know, here’s how you do Scrum right or anything like that. It is helping the leaders make the mental shifts so that their behaviors are different, but the behaviors are not make believe, the behaviors are real. And that takes lots of forms, usually not found under the umbrella of Agile coaching. Right, yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:16

It’s more like professional coaching and that’s also like more like cognitive growth, because in order for you to shift your values, you have to change your perspectives and believes right, you kind of have to transcend what your current way of the world is. Right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 14:31

Yes, yes. Everybody has this model of the world and we need to make it explicit. And you know, a lot of coaching starts with that. Right? Okay, you want to go there? What do you think now? Right? What’s the gap? So yeah, a fair bit of it does come across in coaching, but it comes across in just plain old conversations, it comes across in teachable moments, it comes across in talks, in Oh, I just picked something up from a book, whatever it is, but it’s not about showing people, here’s what the process is like, you know, take it and ye shall become agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:06

Exactly. And that’s the whole side, you know, and I think that’s why I really love how you explain the mindset, because that’s really what it is and most of the work, this is the hard part. Like if you’re going to organization, right, and you have somebody with very strong values and beliefs around, like, I need certainty, I need to be able to control stuff, and they have a lot of authority, then there’s so much that you can do there, right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 15:37

So what I like to do is see where their need for certainty comes from. Now, some of it is in their personality, right, because we all have, you know, it deep seated value system that does change with time as we mature and collect life experiences, and so on, but it changes slowly. But the other perspective, and this is something that, you know, I have really brought to my, you know, practice in the last, I’m gonna say for 10 years, it’s this perspective that people’s behaviors are also modulated by pressures from the system. Right? So I’ll give you an example. I’m working with a marketing team right now. One of the directors, I love working with her. She’s curious, she studies everything. Between our conversations, she just went ahead and read my book, stuff like that. I mean, she really invests herself into this. Her boss who was the VP of Marketing thinks of her as a control freak. Now, is she really a control freak? Well, she likes to be in control, yes. But from my conversations with her, what’s really going on there is we just don’t have the capacity, not enough people enough knowledge, skill, and such, to turn out really good work because we’ve grown fast and there’s million other reasons and if I don’t do this, nobody else would. Now to some people, that would put them in a victim mentality. To her, it’s a responsibility mentality. So you see, it’s different mentality. I mean, mindset and mentality very similar. You know, same superficial behavior but what’s going on in the back of their minds is different.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:27

And that’s really like, you know, when I talked to other agile coaches, or coaches like, understanding just exactly what you said, and being able to contextualize your approach, like if it’s one on one coaching or if you’re working with a leader, and not having like one size fits all, but really trying to in a way understand, you know, this is where kind of empathy comes in, right? Where you truly try to suspend your beliefs and your values and try to look through somebody else’s head and try to truly hear what they hear and see what they’re saying, then you can start really seeing what you can do to help that person.

Speaker: Gil Broza 18:07

Exactly. Now, I came into this. And here’s another thing about our beliefs, right? If you believe that people mean well, that they, you know, work from positive intent, that they genuinely want to help, then you will act differently. So for instance, in this case, I first met that Director of Marketing a month ago, or something like that. Now, I already work with the rest of the company but I hadn’t known them. I did a little bit of a, you know, assessment, and I talked to everybody. So I came in with an understanding of the company, but very little knowledge of the people in marketing and I wanted to assume the best and that’s what I saw there. And so now, I look forward to working with that director. And not only that, I recommended to the VP, you know, you do need somebody to kind of help lead the journey, right? Because agile is totally new for marketing, although uses boards and they don’t even use the right. And I offered that director would be a good choice. And the VP looked at me on zoom, right, and she looked at me and said really? I said yes, because her heart’s in the right place and she spends the time, she you know, she takes those steps forward. And if there is a little bit of control, we’ll work with it. But I can tell you that the VP would have never considered her for that role because she had already in her mind kind of painted her… Yes, right, right. And it’s not even a matter of you know, stereotyping; it’s just you know, I’ve worked with you long enough, I kind of think I know you. But it’s all mind reading. And it’s all mind reading. And not only that, it doesn’t take into account again, the context.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:00

Well, it’s also the human side. So I was talking the last week with James Priests and we had similar characters because like this really interests me, this human side of things, because I think the tactic side is a lot easier than the human side. And he was, you know, saying, like, in the sense and I actually didn’t think about it, you know, before, but like, you know, how we tend to judge, right? And either positive or negative, and like, you know, just being a little bit more aware of how we’re judging other people and not making those conclusions in judging too early is so important when it comes to that awareness and being aware of just what’s going on in your head.

Speaker: Gil Broza 20:48

Which is why I really like this mantra of how do I know? So maybe I have an opinion about something or, I don’t know, I heard that somebody is doing something and already I, you know, jump to some sort of conclusion or judgment. And the thing is not just the judgment of, you know, this is good or bad. It’s like, the person is stupid, the person didn’t think it through, they didn’t ask enough people, they’re only looking out for themselves. And then the question I like to remind myself to ask is, well, how do I know that really? Is truly just conjecture? Maybe it’s right but is it just conjecture or is there actually facts here? I might be aware of or not.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:36

So what got you… just maybe and then we can shift gears but I’m interested just like what got you into this? You’ve written books on, you know, the human side, the mindset, like what was the thing that triggered you to kind of explore this human side of things? I’m curious, like, do you remember when it happened or it was always…?

Speaker: Gil Broza 21:57

You know, all of these things are a lifetime in the making, right? So when I wrote the human side of agile, so 2011 I wrote it, that was looking back on how I was helping people with agile, and I noticed that most of what I was doing was actually on the soft side. Yes, there was process, and I was teaching developers how to, you know, do test driven development and how to write clean code. And, like, all the technical stuff too. But I noticed that, you know, my biggest successes came from talking with people about how they embrace this new set of ideas. And I noticed that I was pretty consistently successful with that, you know, to the extent an outsider can change a company culture. And I figured, okay, there is something here. And that was around the time when process became a big deal, and everybody was getting certified and how you do x. And to me, this was like you know, you can’t just talk about the process. Right? You just can’t. And I remember when I came up with the title, some people told me, you know, that’s the Forgotten side. And other people were actually kind of surprised. You know, what do you mean human side? It’s a process right? So no, I mean, if you treat it as a process, you won’t get far okay.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:50

But it’s also that side is hard to measure in a sense, you know, than the process sides. So a lot of times we focus on what we can measure but how do you measure you know, the mindset? How do you measure behavior? Maybe in some ways you can, behavior specifically, you can but mind may be a little bit.

Speaker: Gil Broza 24:11

No, no, no, look, I do measure it. It’s something I do for my clients. I do give them a snapshot of really how agile they’re being, you know, how much and how well but the thing is, for most of my interactions with clients, whether again, it’s leaders or team members or anyone, the measurements are actually not the issue so much. The issue is what do we need to improve, what do we need to fix? Where’s stuff stuck? And again, I think this is also part of my question or slash rebel background and that, you know, look, I’ve been in this for 20 plus years, people have always talked about measuring. And I kept asking myself, what the hell for? Why do you need to measure everything? Clearly there’s stuff you want to measure. Yes. Okay. If bugs escaped to production? Yeah, we want to know our trends. Okay? If our turnover is high, we want to know how high and is that even normal? Okay, maybe high is normal. But you don’t have to measure everything just for the sake of measuring. I mean, you want to improve it, you have to have an idea of where things are at and a set of numbers is not necessarily how you will get that information.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:40

It gets us nice looking charts, you know, with a lot of data, and then we show.

Speaker: Gil Broza 25:47

Look, what one good benefit of measuring is seeing improvement over time, right, as opposed to a point measure, you see trends, good. Okay? And so for instance, you know, measuring your lead time, yes, it makes sense. But it is so squishy, right. And if you change your definitions, you change your states a little bit, you change how you split your stories, already your measures are gone. So my belief and it’s been like this for, you know, well over 10 years is if you are interested in getting better business outcomes through agile, then the very first thing you have to do is put people before process. Which by the way goes to the earlier question of you know, is respect a value? So respect is a value and trust has value and so on but we normally lump them under a single one which is people before process, which in the Agile sense, also goes with safety and servant leadership. So, if you see people before process that gives you the starting point, you cannot work without it. Okay, then you want to work on, you know, value and creating products that matter, and delivering services that matter, and the whole product development around them. Okay? And that will also give you some of the adaptation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:20

But that’s a huge leap though. Like, you know, and I know different people have different opinions, but like, you know, in Lalou’s work, he talks about, you know, where people value and the orange, where the values and beliefs around put the system like, you know, the company has stockholders and others before you put your employees and technically people. So in order to transcend that collective belief that it’s, you know, the company comes before people, it’s gonna take some time. And I think you know, what agile stands for is that next cognitive leap or whatever you want to call it, where we value each other and people more than processes and the company itself.

Speaker: Gil Broza 28:15

So look, there’s always going to be tension between valuing the company or valuing the people who are in it. Right? And if the company is incorporated, like pretty much everybody in our industry, then is the company the same as its people? People change over time, right? I mean, this is a philosophical question. Legally, it is different. Because right, you can have 100% turnover and it’s still the same company. Now okay, so does it have the same culture? Does it still have the same mission? And all of those questions, which we’re not going to answer today. I don’t think anybody can answer them. But then the question is, who is your duty to? And what do you think will work? So agile says or believes, it’s a belief; that if we treat people well, they will create better products and therefore that will be better for the business. So the way we help the business succeed is by making it so people can succeed; ourselves, our teams, our leaders, our stakeholders, our business units, our customers of course. And so if we create an ecosystem where they can work well together and want to work there and put their best foot forward and bring their best selves to work and all of that stuff, then we believe that our results, our deliverables, our products, and so therefore our outcomes will be better. Now, can we prove that? No. Is there a lot of evidence that shows that it works? Yes. Is it conclusive? No. So that’s where we need leadership. We need leaders who can get behind that belief and say, that’s how I want to lead around here. That’s the type of company I want to lead. And there are lots of examples in the industry nowadays. Okay? So that’s the mental leap.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:19

And that’s it. That’s what I’m curious. I don’t know. Are you familiar with the Kuhn cycle? Thomas Kuhns cycle, like the guy that came up with the… anyway, like, the guy that came up with the term paradigm. Thomas Kuhn. And essentially, I want to get your thoughts, but I wasn’t sure if you’re familiar, like, you know, the paradigm, you know that we’re in, where it is in that cycle. But maybe let’s switch gears. You’ve written a book on agile outside of software development. If I had to guess, not much changes, it’s still the same thing that we talked about here, right? What is different?

Speaker: Gil Broza 30:59

What is different? Look, fundamentally, it is in fact the same. Okay? What I find is different is, how do you make it work? And where do you make this work? So here’s an example; for the longest time, you know, well-meaning agile coaches would agree with you that agile is not the best solution for everything. I mean, if you look in software development, it’s pretty useful in many parts of it, but even then, not always. Sometimes you have better approaches. Not a ton of them, but you do. Okay. When you look outside of software, work is different. Okay? We cannot lump that all work under the same umbrella as if its needs and parameters and context are all the same. Okay? So marketing a brand has a different set of parameters than running finance for a company. And it is way different than designing your new office space. And it is way different than finding the next vaccine. Okay? So you cannot expect to give them the same solutions. So not only is there no best practice, there is no single framework that will apply to everything. The problem is that people still try to apply those frameworks and they kind of go at it backwards. Here’s the framework, it should work, I need to make some changes here but I got to keep the framework. And so they run into trouble. And that’s why I think that outside of software, you have to be extra deliberate and extra intentional about designing your methods and your structures, your tactics basically, based on, again, what you value in this situation and what you believe is true in the situation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:06

And that’s really also, that reminds me of in a sense, a lot of times we force transformations on people, we tell them what to do and what you just said is really getting people to put in people in the driver’s seat, right, rather than us trying to impose or drive.

Speaker: Gil Broza 33:30

Right. Now, most people I know, could care less about designing their process, they just want to do the work. So it does make sense to rely on people who specialize somewhat in process. Now, that does not mean that you have to take the same process every time. Right? It’s just like, you know, when we think about agile in software development, and you know, statistically, most of your listeners would still be in that space. How you build a, you know an app would be quite different than how you would build, you know, movie editing software and how you will do you know, airplane scheduling software, right? And how you will do computer assisted surgery. Why should you use the same process for all of them? There will be some slight overlap, okay. But you think about everything differently, about your user, about product evolution, about quality, who it is that you’re collaborating with on the way to determining the best solution. How do you handle disasters, right? The level of skill that your team has, that’s of course more situational, that technology is available to you. Why would you give them the same frame work? So when you go outside of software, it’s the exact same questions. Okay? So the marketing team I’m working with, they’re in an insurance company. They’re very different from the marketing team I worked with in the media company. Okay? And it’s not all about, you know, yeah, you put campaigns out there, you get some paid media. Okay fine. But it’s not. It’s about moving the needle. And how you move the needle in the insurance space is rather different than how you move it when you know, people watch your stuff on TV.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:31

Exactly. And there is a commitment difference. Usually insurance says once you get somebody you have him for a while.

Speaker: Gil Broza 35:45

So loyalty, right, not only that, right, the stakes are higher. Right? If you get a bunch of bad clients and insurance, that can be seriously bad, right? If a million people watch your show instead of a million point 1, yeah, okay, that will somehow affect the bottom line, but not as much. So, you know, the cost of being wrong, the cost of change, they have their different scales.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:14

But that requires, you know, in organization, building this internal capacity and capability to be able, you know, I use analogy of cooks and chefs in the sense, like, ingredients keeps changing, we need more people in organization to understand at a chemical level, what can I throw in? And what goes well together, right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 36:40

Yes, and that’s why I was saying that it does make sense to rely on people who do have some process specialization, some cultures specialization, right? Some team dynamics specialization. Now, more and more companies have them. You have coaches on staff, you have people who lead to change from other perspectives, in the bigger organizations, you have some facilities, some guild, whatever to you know, help make this change. And these are people who don’t just, you know, build product, right? They learn from us and others what the state of the art is, when it comes to organ culture, and managing flow, and so on and so forth. So yes, we do need to build this capacity more and more, it is, in fact happening. More and more people are joining the industry who are able to provide that capacity. You know, when I started, I’m like the first generation after the manifesto authors and I think we’re now in like the third generation in terms of, you know, new coaches, new Scrum masters, new Kanban, this and that, who really help organizations with, you know, so what’s current. So it’s happening slowly.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:08

Well in the end, there’s more interest. You know, if you think about just the and this topic of Agile outside of software development, I’m working with a company in California called Park Pacific, and they’re using lean agile, these ways of working, including, you know, what we’re discussing around mindset in construction. So it’s really interesting and I’m actually interviewing, I think, Jim Benson next week and I want to talk to him. He’s doing, you know, he has a civil engineering background and he’s said he’s doing a lot of this stuff in construction. So I think, you know, like you said, marketing, you know, HR just this morning, spoke to Rena about, you know, HR. So I think there is a momentum, where people are realizing as our work is, you know, increasing in complexity, the needs to start figuring things out, and there’s just more people trying to figure this thing out. So it’s a good thing, I think.

Speaker: Gil Broza 39:11

Yes and you know, it used to be that when companies downsize, the first to go were the coaches. I just spoke with somebody who works for a large bank today and apparently they had a pretty significant reduction, something like 20% few months ago and he actually lost 25% but that’s all he lost. They could have taken more people from his group, he has like 60 agile coaches, now he has 45. Yeah, actually, the other problem in that case is yes, he kept 45 but then he lost eight of them who said, Oh, agile is clearly not gonna work out here so we’re leaving. So yeah, which is another thing that companies do, right. When senior leadership makes all sorts of, you know, big material decisions, they don’t always consider the cultural impacts, the effect on change initiatives and so on, because they’re used to measuring. And that stuff is squishy. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:19

Well, this also goes back to like how you incentivized you know. Hey, if I know that my bonus depends on current TAs, then I’m going to look where I’m going to jump. What are some of the ways that you’ve seen companies becoming agile go wrong? You know, so that’s one. What are some of the other things that you’re seeing?

Speaker: Gil Broza 40:39

So what I normally see, and that’s the typical client that comes to me is they’ve started it, usually it’s like a year or two, three ago, they kind of have something going, usually Scrum, hardly ever Kanban. And it’s just mediocre. It’s mediocre. People are not loving it, it seems to be better than before, they’re tired of the meetings. Not just because of the zoom, right? But they’re just tired of all the ceremonies. But they’re intent on keeping doing them because their hey ceremonies and stuff like we got to do. And it’s just nothing is great. And their problem is that they don’t actually know how to fix it because they think they’re doing everything right. Right? They have the roles, all the tactics, right? They have the roles, the artifacts, the JIRA of course, and so on. But that’s it. And it’s not, the results are not quite there. And like, really, when you think you do everything right and the results are not there, well, what do you do?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:48

Get more consultants.

Speaker: Gil Broza 41:50

Yeah, but then the question is, which consultants? Right? One of my best clients came to me with a total misunderstanding of the ask. They were doing Scrum like really badly and they wanted the developers to do even more practices from Scrum and tell us how to do them, like really right. And I explained all my approach like I’ve been doing with you in the past hour, and they said, Oh, interesting, never occurred to us. And this clients turned into an opportunity to help at the mindset level going all the way up to CEO, not just how to do the stand ups better. Don’t waste my time was doing stand ups better. Okay? I will gladly help you become more agile however that takes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:44

So maybe exactly what you just remind me of like the importance of alignment and the importance of looking at you know, essentially the hard stuff of the systems, which will be your policies, your organizational architecture. So, what are, you know, when it comes to organizational architecture, and alignment, how do you help clients, especially those in C suite understand like, the importance of them understanding how their systems or in this instance policies, architectures, both IT and business impact the people’s behaviors, as well as their, you know, journey when it comes to dealing with this complexity that they’re faced?

Speaker: Gil Broza 43:42

Well, look, it comes up in conversations all the time. When I have FaceTime with like, executives, those are some of the things I will bring to the conversation and sometimes they asked me all sorts of questions; Well you know, this or that happened, what do you think and so on, and I will sometimes take this to really a teaching moment, right? Because in most cases, the problem is just awareness. That’s it. That’s it. It’s not that, you know, they are intent on doing the opposite thing from agility. No, but they just don’t realize the effect the whole system’s thinking, right? System thinking has been around for quite some time. How many people actually understand it? Really? Okay. So it comes up with that. One thing I like to do with as many clients as I can, and it’s like, I’m gonna say more than half is to actually have training sessions with executives, where I teach them, you know, like an executives guide to the agile mindset. So at least I have dedicated time with them, where I can really paint a complete picture for them of you know, what does it mean to steer a system composed of human beings, not resources. And so when we have that starting point, that helps build some of the trust, and then I can have the later conversations with them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:10

But I think you said, you know, that kind of resonated for my last week’s conversations like, you know, James Priest said like you know, because I’ve made this similar point and he’s like Miljan, I could be completely aware that I’m an asshole or an idiot or be acting that way and still do it. So it’s not necessarily just awareness, but it goes back to the values and beliefs. Once I have that awareness, how am I acting based on what I’m aware of?

Speaker: Gil Broza 45:42

Okay, so I was being generous. And because again, I like to assume before knowing otherwise that you do in fact mean well. Now, these people are hiring me, right, they’re paying my bills. So they’re trying to get something. Now, I would not sign the contract with them if I can see that what they’re trying to get to, is just not at all what I agree with. Right? If the contract is fundamentally about how do I make my people work harder, I don’t want you for clients. If the contract is about, how do we come more productive here, and I can hear that you’re really a slave driver, you only care about productivity, you don’t care about the people on the other side of productivity, I won’t take you on. But I do give quite the benefit of the doubt. I’ve recently worked with a CEO who is very much about productivity. I had like two hour long conversations with him, the VP of engineering was in attendance and I helped him think differently. Has it changed overnight? No. But he is a smart cookie. A CEO at age 27 and a unicorn. He is working differently now. Has he changed everything? No, it will take more time. Right? But the conversation started earlier around how do we actually have a better culture around here?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:14

Nice. So maybe and we don’t have time to talk about culture, and I don’t want to dive into it, you know, but maybe, you know, you’ve written three books. I don’t know if you planning to write a next book. But if you were, what would it be?

Speaker: Gil Broza 47:35

I really don’t know. Seriously, I don’t.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:43

No, I was wondering, because a lot of times, you know, you might be thinking and I wanted to see if that’s gonna, you know, shed any light on what’s currently on your mind but in the sense of like, what’s going on and I think this whole space of Agile also software is on my mind by want to see you know, if there was something else. So maybe as a last question, then and I sometimes ask this is, you know, you and I’ve only spoken once before, and I don’t know you that well so you know, I know I missed some questions and what is the question maybe that I missed or I didn’t know to ask that you would say, Miljan, I wish you asked this?

Speaker: Gil Broza 48:33

Well, you already asked lots of questions I wanted be asked so it’s harder to answer. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:47

So maybe Okay, that’s good. At least I tried to do a little bit of my homework and understand kinda like, you know, your perspective. What is the message maybe that you would leave the listeners with when it comes to agile, and specifically, maybe agile leadership? What’s important about agile leadership and maybe something on that note?

Speaker: Gil Broza 49:16

I think the most important thing around agile leadership is to see people for people, warts and all, our imperfect humanity. In fact, just this morning, I posted on LinkedIn about the amazing parallels between modern leadership and modern parenting. My twins just finished high school. And you know, they were born around the time I started coaching, consulting. And knowing agile helped me become a better parent. Not that we have product owners and stand ups and boards. No, it’s the thinking behind agile. It’s the leadership thinking here. It’s the serving the outcome, responsibility, taking all of the things. You might have listeners who have kids all the way from zero to 20 years old. Anything you learn in agile and you apply at home will probably make you a better parent. And a lot of the stuff that you realize about parenting that works carries over to leading adults. And something that is common to both is you have so much in your blind spots. We all have blind spots. We think we know, we mind raids, we believe that we’ve communicated clearly, we believe that we’ve expressed the need clearly, we believe that we are being supportive, we believe that we’re being fair and No, we’re not. Most of the time, we’re not. We’re totally self-deceived, that’s a throwback to the book leadership and self-deception which everybody should read. But the thing is, there is a blind spot, work on reducing it. Can I actually plug something here?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:10

Please, yeah.

Speaker: Gil Broza 51:11

Okay. So if you go to my website @3pvantage.com/blindspots, there is just a little mini program done by over email, calling attention to common blind spots that leaders have. There’s like, there’s a top seven there that somehow seem to be trouble for almost everybody. And you know, just noticing those blind spots and doing something about them, this program comes with, you know, advice, that alone will move you forward a lot more than you know, insisting on more structure and best practices.

Riina Hellström

“I think companies are making a huge mistake by creating a one size fits all policy, would say you have to be in the office X amount per week.” – Riina Hellström

TRANSCRIPT:

Miljan Bajic: 00:34

So, who is Riina Hellström?

Riina Hellström: 00:40

You know what, asking that question over and over again by myself as well, who am I, and almost always getting to new answers, but let me just kind of give you a little overview of who I think I am. So, my name is Riina Hellström. I am a Finnish agile enterprise coach, and an organization developer. And I’ve been working with organizations or people systems, if you may, for 20 plus years. So, I’ve been working with so many different ways, and so many different things with org change, with organizational design, with management structures, with strategies, and strategy adoption, with everything you can imagine in HR apart from a couple of things, which I haven’t done, and then worked with agile quite a lot as well. So, the last 11 years, I have been focusing on what agile brings to the management side, the work development side, the org design side, and to HR. And then I work quite a lot with non-IT professionals. So, trying to help people understand what this means in their own domain. So that’s me. Privately, I live in Finland, I work globally, especially now with what happened with the COVID, our businesses all over the world starting in the morning with Australia ending with US in the evening. So, it’s a lot of work currently, which I love. And then privately I’ve got two kids and a summer home and, on an island, where we are aiming to be today or this summer as well for a while. So that’s what I do in the spare time. And I love traveling but right now one and a half years, I haven’t been able to do that privately. So, I’m hoping that the world will be opening up soon.

Miljan Bajic: 02:27

Where do you want to go once things open up?

Riina Hellström: 02:32

I would like to go to Japan, I haven’t, I love getting touched by new cultures and new ways of thinking, new world languages. And I haven’t experienced Japan yet. So that’s something that I would like to experience. And then I have a couple of things on my bucket list like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and then again, South America. I just loved South America and the vibe there. It’s very different from our organized Pakistan to Finland to go to South America. Like, you know, money on maybe, maybe does, let’s take it easy and have a mango and a beer.

Miljan Bajic: 03:10

Yeah, I know, I was talking to my wife too and like we usually it’s like travel between the United States and Europe. And you know, it’s just some of those places, especially in Australia, we have a lot of relatives there and it’s interesting. So, I think it’s everybody I talked to these days, everybody’s eager to go back to travelling so. But to bring us back to HR and agile, there’s a lot of, we hear a lot about agile in HR, agile HR. What does it actually mean? And why is it becoming increasingly important? You’ve wrote a book on it, or you co-authored the book on agile HR. So, what is it then why is it important?

Riina Hellström: 03:53

So let me take you back to 11 years ago, when I was working in organizations within HR and Management Development, I was continuously challenging how we were treating people, how we were setting up people practices and trying to support them to do a good job. But they were basically just, I mean, the way how organizations are set up are very machine like, it’s like the taken from the engineering practices and processes, practices, standardization, this is how things work. And I was challenging that might be because of my background and team sports. I’ve been playing handball for 18 years in my life. And then might be in my background, also in organic chemistry and organic, you know, pharmaceuticals and how the body works, etc. So, there’s a lot of different kind of thinking from that organic side and I was looking at organizations said; You know what? This doesn’t make sense. We’ve got brilliant people here. They are…. so, they’ve got so much potential, but they’re just bringing a fraction of it to work because our system doesn’t allow them to work together very well, so I was always challenging this. And I was looking for something that would, I was kind of trying to make up a system in my head, like, how can we bring the biggest potential? How can teams start really working together? I was thinking that we don’t need that much managers, we might need coaches to bring the best out of people, etc. And then I came across the scrum Guide, which practically changed my life. Because when I read that I was like, yes, somebody has described a system of work, which I believe in, which sounds like organic, it sounds like people can bring their potential, it sounds like we’re continuously learning and adapting to the ongoing environmental changes, needing to adapt to requirement changes, etc. And I saw that you know what? This is not just happening in software or IT; this is happening everywhere. And that kind of picked my kind of, I just blew my mind that you know what? This is going to spread from software to every about everywhere else as well, then I started learning about this. And I started connecting with people like you, who are kind of long-term gurus in Agile from the software and IT side. And that people said to me; you know what? What are you doing here, we don’t want HR even close to what we’re doing, because you’re ruining everything for us. And I went like, you know what? You just wait, because when you start scaling this across your organization, when you start scaling agile teams, and then you just start working together, and you might have 100 people working this way, that’s when you start to start to knock on my door in HR because we’re caring for the people system, we’re caring for org design, we might be caring for how we develop managers long term or leadership, we are caring for performance management structures, for rewarding, for the policies of how to work, how to recruit, how to hire and fire people, what kind of learning, you know, processes and practices you’ve got in this organization. So, all of that people back end, that’s what HR is working with. And that’s why agile HR is important. So, some people say, this is just a fad and you’ve got just taking agile from software and using it in HR. You know what? Yeah, I am, because we’ve got a lot to learn from you people, we need to start adopting the ways of working here as well to be able to create people, practices that work for agile organizations, we have to be agile ourselves, and start co-creating with people, start understanding what works, only delivering out people practices that work with the teams. So, there’s a lot in Agile HR, we talk about two things, agile, HR, or agile in HR. So how can we in HR, or people operations start using the Agile practices to deliver value out to our employees, to the managers, to the businesses? And on the other hand, HR for agile, which means that what kind of people practices, people policies, people solutions, and products, do we need to build to enable modern organizations, perhaps network flexible, agile organizations. So, these are two sides of Agile HR, which I tend to bring up.

Miljan Bajic: 08:17

Yeah, so maybe let’s explore one of those. So, like when it comes to helping in, you know, HR driving and helping with org transformation and design, in what ways could HR help with org design and transformations and these initiatives that are companywide, encompass the entire organization and impact every piece of the organization?

Riina Hellström: 08:44

So, it depends a bit in my opinion on the context, when we talk about [inaudible 08:47]

Miljan Bajic: 08:48

It always does right? Context is the most…

Riina Hellström: 08:52

Exactly. When we talk about transformations, first of all, what kind of a company is transforming? If it’s the traditional classic management structure, where we got the line organization, where you got the annual budget, you’ve got the project management, you’ve got that kind of structure, and you start gradually bringing people on board to an agile structure is setting up agile teams, maybe finding an end-to-end value stream where you start a scaled model. When you start a little bit of Kanban here, start using Scrum in certain teams, in those kinds of situations, HR can work with so many different things, first of all, capability to build. So, who is sitting on their learning and development is usually HR and then you just start building the capabilities at least half a year, if not a year ahead so that you’ve got product owners coming in and scrum masters coming in. Then you’ve got people understand agile on the business side. So that’s one part. Another part is the org design because quite, I would say how would I say this without being too cynical? Well big consultancies coming in and selling big transformations, usually come in with a model. Here is a perfect model for you. And here is, this is how you should implement agile. And I don’t believe that because I’ve been working with so many organizational changes that you just can’t implement or change, especially with agile, you have to invite people in, you have to do create with them, and bring them along to a journey, which is an evolution, not an implementation. So, when you start working with this, we in HR have seen quite many changes. And we might be able to help with that. Staging, and creating a roadmap of what to do next, and what to remember to do rewarding people practices, enablers, such as rewarding and performance, structures, leadership, so where I see quite a lot of transformations go wrong or have trouble is when we have this, we keep the same line management structure in the Agile structure, right? And we don’t need the same kind of line managers there. What we need is different kinds of enablers and people who will lie in the teams who work with impediments, work with improvement of the system. We don’t need that, how would I say, maybe, delegating, micromanaging, reporting, accountable line manager there. And to start changing the structure of management, that’s also something that HR works with? Where do we find…?

Miljan Bajic: 11:31

So that’s a lot about like decentralizing. What you’re describing is like how the context matters but assuming that we’re working, where you know, that type of like, you know, command and control, or maybe not necessarily command and control, but more of, you know, one person accountable for everything versus sharing their responsibility. Is that what you’re talking about?

Riina Hellström: 11:56

Correct. I mean, it is a lot about decentralizing what makes sense. But then understanding where it makes sense to have central services available. For example, if we’re talking about people services, I don’t think that each team should be professionals in talent acquisition and recruiting. I think that there should be a service where we’ve got, you know, shortlisted people, two teams and saying, Hey, we know that you’re looking for an arm, you know, software developer, back end software developer, here are the talents that we’ve scanned from our you know, databases from our network, they who have applied, look at these candidates and come back to us to see what you want to do with them, rather than have them do the kind of dirty work of recruitment, or the kind of operational work. So, there’s a lot of thinking here and there is not one way of doing this, there is not one model, but we have to continue to think about what’s best for the organization, how much work we can put on the teams as well and how much decision making they’re ready take on. I’ll give an example just to be clear, because it’s much easier to actually talk by examples. I was working with a transformation, business transformation, where we transformed a unit with 550 people towards kind of a team of teams’ model. So wasn’t any of these agile scalable that we are used to but the team of teams’ model, self-organized teams, who were there to sync together on how to work. Consultancy, and IT consultancy, they’re competing with the best agile, very innovative companies. And we started onboarding people onto this model. And then we onboard about 200 people onto self-organized model. And the team started realizing that they’ve got different maturity levels of making these decisions themselves. Some teams, were not quite there yet to make pricing decisions, or to make decisions about which leads were kind of okay to start working with, because if you started working with lead, it was a lot of work that went into getting all the way to a suggestion or, you know. So we instead of having a manager there to make these decisions. What we came up with, and what the managers themselves came up with is that they created a team of leaders who offered services to these teams. So, leadership as a service, and they say, here we can help with pricing, we can help you with, you know, agreeing on if a lead is qualified or not, we can help you with problems in the team, we can help you with, you know, retrospectives, we can help you with impediments around the organization. So, these are services for you as teams to be able to do a good job. Now I think, it was just brilliant, again, rethinking on how we can support the system and help that evolved, rather than creating some kind of an additional process or additional role to take in each role in each.

Miljan Bajic: 14:57

Yeah, and that’s what it sounds like. It’s almost as the and I’ve seen this and I agree in the sense of like trying to go prescriptive with like this is more organic, you create some guardrails, and you say self-organize around this. In this instance of policy, right? Would you call that a policy?

Riina Hellström: 15:14

I would call it an ongoing service that needs to kind of be it’s kind of an in-house consultancy, basically. But then if I talk about process or policy, I had, this is not our example, when we are in HR, we have two things that we need to take care of, at least. First of all, supporting the organization to do its best possible job and be healthy you know, that’s one thing. Second of all, every country has legal compliance, regarding employment laws, regarding corporate laws, what we need to take care of with employees’ health, well-being, all of these things. And you’re not a professional in corporate employment legislation, even if you’re a master of Agile enterprise, whatever, you don’t know what the law is in France, or Russia or US or whatever. But we’ve got the network to understand what we can do there and we can’t do there and how we need to support the organization within those constraints. So that’s something that we’ll need to, you know, we still need to have policies there. And I had a transformation where this executive agile, I was CHRO there, one of the Agile coaches came to say, hey, we’ve got a great idea. We are now so self-organized so we’re not going to report or record any work time anymore. Because everybody can take care of themselves. I was like, that’s a great idea. But let’s just kind of take a step back, a couple steps back here, because that is a massive risk. And that risk is at risk that the company can’t take because there’s legislation in place, if we can’t show the authorities how much you work, we are going to be in court and shut down very quickly so that you don’t work overtime, without pay or overtime so we’re killing you at work, you know, so, or that you were overburdening yourself with too much work. So, we can’t do that. And sometimes we have to be the bad police, bad cop, still and say, Hey, fantastic idea, but let’s look at the constraints. In a similar way, as you in software are looking at, for example, privacy, or security discussions, you’ve got certain guardrails, which you just need to keep and that’s the same thing with the people practices, every country additionally has different kind of legislation. So, it’s not that easy to create fair systems that work in each country. And that’s the back end that we know quite a lot about. Does that make sense?

Miljan Bajic: 17:49

It does. No, I’m just thinking, you know, in the sense of like, you know, changing those, you know, policies that are related to design, and one of them that comes up a lot is obviously the whole compensation and that’s related to that is performance reviews, right? So, from your perspective, and understanding of the traditional way of performance reviews, what does it look like in an agile context or in a complex context? How do we reward people? How do we do you know, some type of assessments or you know, what replaces annual reviews?

Riina Hellström: 18:34

What do you do even for that once-a-year discussion with your manager about how you did the whole, you know, it’s as absurd as I would be your spouse, and I would have one conversation with you a year telling you that, you know, Miljan, last year, you did your three from last year, your three out of five from the whole year for all situations, you know, it’s as ridiculous. So, let’s start looking into this.

Miljan Bajic: 18:59

To make this comparison even a little bit more crazy or funnier, if you had five husbands, if they all performed great, you couldn’t also rate them as fives, right? There’s something fundamentally wrong with that, with that approach. So, what are we doing in Agile, like…?

Riina Hellström: 19:18

So, first of all, let’s understand. I think that we need to go back to some principles. Why do we have performance management structure in place all together? What value are they there to drive, okay? And if we look at the value, it’s not actually, the value shouldn’t be about looking in the review mirror and evaluating what you did. The value should be helping you succeed as you move forward, because that’s the thing that we can still impact, right. So, I would like us to start thinking about performance management as in growth conversations, as in looking forward as an improving and again, as in target setting and knowing where we’re going even if the target would, even if we would need to pivot a little bit, the target’s there, we are aligned on where we’re going so that we can self-organize around that. Now, easier said than done. The large corporations have performance management structures that are agreed all the way up in the board. So, changing them takes at least one year, if not two years, just really start redesigning a performance management structure takes a long time, not done in, you know, a blink of an eye. Second of all, if we can’t change that big thing, immediately, what I usually have recommended is okay, let’s tweak it a little bit, let’s at least get rid of individual target setting. Because if you’ve got an individual target for a person working in a scrum team or agile team, and they are set for a year, and even if that agile team needs to pivot or even leave the value delivery, because it doesn’t make sense, these persons might be conflicted with their target versus what’s the best thing to do. So, let’s give people at least a team target if not the value delivery targets towards the customer, where we’ve got several teams connected to the same value delivery. Let’s try, remembering where we build performance management structures. We have a saying in Finland, if you bow to one side, you show your back end to another side. I’m not sure if you have that saying you know. So rewarding practices are the same, you always sub -optimize something. If you got a team level practice, you might sub optimize the unit profitability. If you’ve got a high-level target setting, say that everybody’s rewarding is connected to a high-level target, you feel that okay, but I don’t have that much to say, I can’t influence that much, it is not motivating me. So now we come to the motivating point. Do we need these targets and rewarding connected? Quite a lot of companies are decoupling the target setting from the rewarding. So rewarding is maybe connected to profitability or growth or new customer, you know, recognition. So, the KPIs or the value deliveries there for. And the targets are set, maybe quarterly, where we quarterly are looking into how can we get towards this big ambitious goal? What do we do there? And the targets are then discussed how did we get towards them? How did we do? How do we you know; how can we improve? And I hearing me use the word we continuously, it is about we, it’s about how do we go there. And now I think we could have different kind of levels of performance management as well, almost kind of influence.

The third thing I want to say about this is that which many people haven’t really maybe kind of broken down into bits and pieces but the Agile system is a performance management system. I’m going to say that, again, this is so important. The agile structure includes everything that a performance management, the traditional performance management structure included. It includes setting a big vision, it includes a goal, the KPIs of what we’re building, what the value deliveries, it includes breaking that goal down into attainable epics, or features or bits and pieces that we’re building. It includes continuous evaluation of those pieces and setting targets on a micro level, right? We’re setting targets for each quarter, or sprint or whatever you’re using. We’ve got the what we know what we’re aiming for in teams. It includes evaluation of those targets together as a team. How are we doing? Are we delivering what we should? So, it’s the evolution there as well and it includes improvement. So how can we improve as a team or as a unit or as a whatever the bigger size is? So includes all of those elements. What it doesn’t include, specifically is what we tend to have in the performance management structure as well, is the learning and development. So how do we add to growing our capabilities and skills? But that can be added as well. So why do we need an extra layer of performance management on top of agile which includes or this is a good question as well. Can we just pay people enough to bring their best to work, to do their best with the potential they have in you know, in comparison to maybe the field overall and then skip that circus of performance management? That’s one question I have.

Miljan Bajic: 24:31

Yeah, it’s I think that’s what we know we’re going see, you know, over the last 5 years, 10 years agile HR has slowly been brewing, but I think over the next 5 to 10 years, we’re going to see more organizations trying to figure this out. And like you said, I don’t think there is a specific way of doing it. You have to figure it out based on your context. What are some of the companies out there that you admire? Maybe that you worked with, or you’ve you heard of. Like, what are they doing that are kind of the forefront of this kind of change?

Riina Hellström: 25:07

Of Agile HR? I have to say I do like Spotify’s HR and analysts but if I sharing on their agile practices and how they are working with hacking their selves forward and growing the understanding and co-creating with the organization, I do like that very much. I also appreciate, we’ve got some fantastic case studies in the agile HR community that are also shared in our network where people will learn this are starting to, for example, use design thinking in delivering people products in-house. So, if we take an example, they want to develop an awesome remote onboarding practice, instead of us going with HR people into a bunker, designing the onboarding practice, and then, you know, releasing that to you and say Okay, here is we implement this. We would take you in and say, hey, you know, a couple of people who’s been recently onboarding, a couple of managers, maybe some candidates and say, let’s now innovate on how to create awesome remote onboarding practices. They would use design thinking in validating, testing small scale, what works and what doesn’t. And then when they find something that works in their contexts, in their company with the candidates and with the people who their onboarding, they would maybe then adopt a couple of different ones, couple of different remote onboarding practices. So, this is what we’re seeing across the scale with people in HR who learn this way of thinking. They don’t think there’s a one size fits all, they don’t think that they can come up with the solution themselves. They start developing with the organization. There’s some amazing stuff coming up such as I know that I can’t mention them some of the customers names because we’ve got a very strict NDA. So let me say this. A very prominent tech company, delivering technology and entertainment to many of the people in the world are right now building an inclusion in everything they do. And that’s also done through testing, evaluating, discussion with the company all over so that it’s part of what we do. It’s not something additional added on to, you know, everything we do. But there’s great things going on and it’s not about who does what? It’s about how we think of delivering these things, to the employees, to the managers, to the leaders. We don’t, we stop with this, you know, going into product development stage for a year and then coming up with something which is old, not liked, not validated. We’re talking about having a pilot test group, but all the assumptions have been built into the product anyway, you know, and that’s.

Miljan Bajic: 27:47

So, you’re anchoring? Yeah. So that’s very interesting, because its kind of like that’s what we’re dealing with the you know, agile, and I know, in your book, you talk about mindset, but could you maybe just elaborate, like, it’s a mindset shift.

Riina Hellström: 28:04

Massive.

Miljan Bajic: 28:06

And that’s easier said than done.

Riina Hellström: 28:10

May I kind of ask you another question back? What’s your typical viewpoint of HR people? What is how would you describe; this is a HR person?

Miljan Bajic: 28:24

It’s somebody that’s responsible for the, you know, HR stuff. Performance, jobs, hiring, you know, somebody that works with senior leaders on defining maybe culture, you know, in a sense, they’re responsible, like you said earlier, like, maybe health of the organization, in general. But, you know, one thing that probably stands, they’re like far away, right, they’re not engaged, and they tell us what to do. And I think that’s what a lot of people feel like, because I’ve worked in as a consultant but I also worked inside organizations as an employee, and that’s how it feels like, and for the ones that are moving more to this inclusion that you’re talking about, and co-creation, it feels more engaging you know, as an employee, you feel more engaged.

Riina Hellström: 29:16

Great to hear that you’ve got, still you have quite a modern view of who HR is and what we do, because quite many people say HR, they’re doing something with admin and just sending us a lot of forms, and taking care of payroll and some legal stuff, right. So, they don’t know that we’re working with all that what you just said, but quite many people think that HR are… and yes, there are different ranges of HR people. There’re the more operational, more kind of legal background people who take care of what we need to take care of, but they’re kind of I would say, if I dare to, what’s the word in English when you kind of give a character, characterize. Characterize them quite high probability is that they are risk averse, because they need to take care of a lot of stuff regarding law, they are prone to want the right solutions, the right answers, prepare everything to perfection and have all the answers prepared for managers and leaders because they are putting quite difficult situations quite often so they want to be prepared and have everything done and polished, and, you know, show a perfect solution or product. So to start to teach these people who think this way and who have been, you know, they’ve been trained this way, that’s their dominant way of thinking. Hey, you know what? What if we would show something which is a draft? Or what if we would show something, three mock ups and prototypes to managers and ask for feedback? Oh, my God, that’s such a big mindset shift even that. How can we show something which isn’t ready? How can we even say that we don’t know where we’re going to end up? Well, how can you know something? If you’re working with, say, culture change, how on earth could you write an end state of culture change? You can’t my friends. We have to just start going in this direction, you know, as an evolution stepwise. But when we then help them understand how to do that, that’s what I think is the beauty with agile is that, the certainty doesn’t come from what you do. The certainty doesn’t come from a plan as it did previously. The certainty comes from the process. The certainty comes from I know that we will have planning time coming up every month, the certainty comes from I know that we will review together what we’ve done. And if it’s not perfect, it’s okay, because somebody, there’s a high probability that somebody who will pick up on the on the foot flaws, you know, we can fix it as we go forward. That’s where the certainty comes from, from the process. And when people start learning this, they are much more comfortable with starting to work in new ways, starting to show kind of half-done prototypes to employees, starting to bringing employees to hacking. You know, let’s have the recruitment practice together. Starting to be opening up to ideas, and even letting people very keen to get feedback. I mean, get people to shoot down the ideas, if they’re not good. Why build something in a scale matter for the whole organization if five people can tell you in the beginning that this won’t fly? You know, so.

Miljan Bajic: 32:32

And that’s more like, you know, so who’s responsible for engagement? Because most people in less than countries, at least based on the research are disengaged at work. So, is it HR that responsible? Because, well, who is it? Maybe we’re all responsible for it, but…

Riina Hellström: 32:46

Just what I’m laughing about. I mean, that’s like, who’s responsible for you breathing? Who’s responsible for having good communication? Everyone are! You know, we might have tools, practices, and supporting mechanisms or services to help you in team start engaging more, or start evaluating your engagement or bringing some kind of budgets to do something with your growth or health or whatever. Well, I think there’s two sides, by the way, engagement, but enablement as well. You can be as engaged as you want. But if you don’t have the tools and the means to deliver value, that engagement won’t take you far.

Miljan Bajic: 33:31

Well, what about this? I recently worked with a client, and one of the managers says Miljan, the only way that you get promoted here, and you climb up the ladder is by staying, you know, unnoticed, and, you know, just not raising any red flags, keeping it down and not essentially messing things up. Because eventually whoever messes up there, they’ll filter those out. So that’s not policy. That’s not, you know, that’s I would assume it has been culture, right?

Riina Hellström: 34:09

Yeah, that’s more culture. And I mean, I think that my answer is, choose your battles. There are amazing companies that you can work for, if you are innovative, if you’re ready to, you know, bring in ideas, work with others, be engaged and there are companies where there isn’t time or space or room for that. And I think choose your battles is as well as sometimes you can actually make quite a big difference as being the innovator, as being the one who is engaging others, as being the one who is always in these new initiatives. But carrying the full load old time will become quite burdening. So, yeah, it’s more of a cultural thing. And quite a lot of companies are now talking about going agile and let’s be innovative. You know, everybody has a voice, and will have a lot. But even the most innovative companies still have some structures, especially if they’ve been around for longer than 20 years, 15-20 years, they still have some structures there, which are top down. And we won’t get rid of those structures. Some top-down structures are actually quite good as well. So, I’m not fully in for or… there are organizations where full self-organizing principles can work but when we start work, working with larger structures, top-down structures and organizing principles might be as well welcomed for people to bring some clarity and alignment, etc. That said, I think that we can go so much faster in organizations that are larger when we unleash the engagement and potential. And I think that I’m not sure if you agree, but when you tell people is that, you can go and work with these people towards that goal, that’s the goal we’re aiming for. We can’t tell you exactly how to go there. But you need to figure that out together. Here is, you know, means for you to do this enablement, budgets, you know, decisions, this is how we can work with problems as we go along. And here are some clear, red lines that you can’t step over. These are the constraints, you can’t do this, or this or this or this, that’s a no go. And I think to bring this clarity to people, what can I do? What can’t I do? And then just say, tell them, run, go find out, and let me know how I can support you. That’s what we’re trying to build. And those kinds of organizations, I think will thrive in the in the going forward.

Miljan Bajic: 36:48

Yeah, I mean, I think so too. And so, what is it about like our desire to have specific framework because like everybody that I talked to, everybody is saying, you know, this kind of templatized, the way of like, the way the frameworks have been sold, the big consulting companies are doing and, you know, for, if you’ve been in the trenches, and you’ve been doing this, you know, that there’s no framework that you have to contextualize, and adjust things. So why do you think organizations buy into the scaling? And how do you work if you work with organizations, for instance, that have adopted save for one of the other frameworks? And what kind of challenges do you run into when companies’ kind of going all in on a specific framework that might not align with,

Riina Hellström: 37:37

I would say, I’m not for against any kind of frameworks. I understand most of them understand what’s good about them, and I understand their pitfalls. And I also am not naïve. If you want to start changing an organization with 50,000 people, you can’t just do that organically, you know, let agile bloom and you know, start doing something in teams and start with standing how this works. It will take too long, that’s a business risk. So, I’ve seen some companies do an implementation of one of the models which are scaling agile. So scrum at scale, Spotify model, safe, less, these types of models are used. And it’s kind of a next iteration. It’s kind of getting everybody to just work in a new way and a quite a quick way. But there might be missing on what I think is the most important thing. And I think it’s the most important thing is to reach every individual who start working in a new way in three different ways. First of all, heart to understand what the values and the principles are behind this. Why is this a new way of working? What does it mean for me as a behavioral change when I start working in my domain, or with my new team, or with the people that are around me? What does that change in how I do my everyday life, but also how I make decisions, how I react on things? And being able to recognize that, for example, just a couple of examples. How do we deal with mistakes? How do we deal with conflicts? How do we deal with impediments in this organization? Just very important questions that reveal what value level you’re on. The second part, the second was hands. How to quickly move from concept, you know, concepts and conceptualizing the models to let’s just start trying here. This is how we do it. You know, let’s meet let’s plan our stuff. Let’s visualize it up on the wall. Let’s start working on that. It will not be easy the first couple of Sprint’s or couple of rounds, and that’s integrate and improve. And that’s whole idea.

Miljan Bajic: 39:55

So that’s the whole kind of idea of empiricism and just respect and adapt, keep it transparent.

Riina Hellström: 40:02

Exactly. And if there’s something with the model that doesn’t, if we talk about kind of transforming with through models, if there’s something with the model that doesn’t work, raise that. We need to have a, some kind of a team or a unit that takes up these red flags and checks, okay, this skills model is breaking down here, doesn’t work there, let’s fix this somehow, let’s give them the freedom to do it in a different way, or let’s coordinate or let’s get these teams to work together. Because right now, I see quite a lot of this thing that organizations are adopting agile, some kind of, you know, say for or another model, and they kind of haven’t on additionally to their line or organization, they just add a scale model on top of that, and say, you know, you’re not working in your usual job, 100%. But additionally, you’re in this one trade, safe trade, and you’re there 20%. And then you’re another safe trade for 10%. And that’s not even safe, my friends. I mean, that isn’t the scaled agile model. That’s just combining two models and just making a mess.

Miljan Bajic 41:06

Exactly like that. I use the analogy of cooks and chefs, it’s like bunch of cooks, throwing stuff in without knowing what they’re doing. And this comes back to the idea of learning and development. And what I run into a lot organizations, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Peter Principle, where like, people are promoted to a position where they’re not really competent for. But like, how is learning and development changing and like, what types of things HR can support? I don’t know if you’re familiar with fidelity, but they for instance, give one day a week to the developers. Tuesdays to focus on learning and developing themselves. And they don’t ask them to report anything. Just said one day a week is dedicated for you to growing yourself. That’s a pretty big commitment from a company to say one day a week, every week.

Riina Hellström: 42:06

I would say there is no way we can centrally coordinate learning anymore. There is no way it makes sense because it would be much too slow. It depends on how quickly people need to upskill themselves in different organizational positions or different teams. And if we talk about software developers, how quickly do you think their skills in a coding language or something becomes obsolete? It’s 1,2,3,4 years. So, they will need to continuously upskill themselves. And if we’d have some kind of a structure there were, think about this, imagine that just 10 years ago would work this way. You had a development discussion with your leader, then you agreed with the leader what you should learn during the next year, then that was, you know, coordinated and gathered centrally to an HR function who started looking at, okay, what do we need in this company? Then that was approximately, you know, they stopped me had a conversation with your manager in January or February, by May, they got this coordinated effort. By August, they had made plan on what people should learn the next year in the company. And they start discussing its vendors, you know, in October, then they have an offering next January, February. A year after you had the need of learning. And then you have the offering available. That just doesn’t fly anymore. Okay? Let’s get rid of these kinds of things. What we can see in L&D happening is decentralizing of learning. Having these kinds of practices such as use x amount of time of learning, have communities of practice or meetups in-house, bringing in speakers to learn, you know, go to meet other in other companies to learn about this, here is a budget for each team. You can use this budget as you wish to be able to make sure that you’re going in the strategic direction with your learning. And here, you might even have kind of gurus from different areas and domain areas to describe what the strategic learning domains are, you know. Maybe artificial intelligence gurus would write this is what’s happening this field, maybe we’ve got designers writing what’s going on in that field right now where we need to focus on. So maybe you have that kind of a map guiding your view towards something. So, we start seeing much more decentralization and also coaching so people and teams are being helped with the invisible, you know. You might know coding, but actually describe that to a junior level developer and help them upskill themselves through working with you that might need some extra help. I’m working quite a lot with engineers and I’m an engineer myself, so I get to say this. Engineers are not always very good with empathizing and expressing themselves and listening to what you really mean and understanding each other and making sure that we understand each other. So, clarifying that we really know what you’re talking about. They are very, very focused on facts, you know, and getting that written maybe and that’s it. So here coaching can make a massive difference. I mean, I’ve been coaching teams where I just go in, I have no idea what they’re talking about and that’s not my thing. But I make sure that people understand that each other, that we’ve discussed open issues or problems or conflicts in a very, very collaborative way, in a safe structure, which you and I are able to kind of create, and people feel much more comfortable than, you know, the big invisible stuff is taken care of, then they can focus on just getting that technical stuff done. So there’s a lot that’s happening in that space as well. And you know what, you know, who is who are very, very good coaches, and very, very good Scrum masters? HR people. Because we’ve been doing this forever. We’ve been working with people, we’ve been training, we’ve been facilitating, we’ve been listening, we are very, very good with that. So, I haven’t seen right now HR people stepping in as Scrum masters, stepping in as agile coaches, and even leading business transformations. Because they’ve been leading business transformations or changes before. Now, there’s this agile tab, tab unto that,

Miljan Bajic 46:34

Wish we had the Agile tab to everything, like just throw agile on it. But that’s very interesting because I agree, like, in the sense like, and also teaching others how to do that same thing and like, how do you scale coaching? Well, you know, you teach others to understand to be better listeners to, you know, try to look for better questions to understand people better, you know. I would hope that, you know, HR people understand the human side of things and you would think, you know, that’s what, you know, HR stands for, I hope. So maybe as a last question here, how do you think how has COVID kind of impacted HR both short term and long term? What are we going to see when it comes to this whole impact of distributive work force, space, like, you know, how we work?

Riina Hellström: 47:33

Do you have another hour?

Miljan Bajic 46:34

I know. Maybe whatever we can condense in the next eight minutes.

Riina Hellström: 47:39

I will fix the world’s COVID and the HR problems in three minutes or less. Okay, that’s a challenge. So I think that what we’ve seen is amazing flexibility from many companies. Not just companies, but people. People both who are working, employees who are working in the companies have been shown that they are worth the trust that should have been given them in the first place. I mean, so many companies that I’m working with have been making amazing results, getting things done with amazing speed. And people are quite burned out, to be honest, because they’ve been working so hard. So, this is one thing that we need to start dealing with. I mean, HR people are also very burnt out. It’s not, you know, 10 people or 20, that I know, that are so tired, because they’ve been caring for the whole organization, the policies, the health, you know, health care, all of that, at the same time, while they are also running you know, with their families, and you know, working from home. So, health and well-being of people is one thing that I think is very important. The second what’s interesting is that now, there is absolutely no reason to say we can’t do this virtually, we can’t do this digitally. That’s an excuse that can’t be used anymore. So, it has to be very deliberate. You know, where are working? What are we doing face to face? What are we doing as a hybrid model? You know, the worst thing at least for me with training and facilitation is that some people are online, and some people are in the room, that is a really difficult discussion. So has to be very deliberate. We need to be much more strategic in what should we do, and that there’s again, can we let the teams make this decision rather than the company policy?

The third thing is, we see two things; Preference of returning to work is very scattered. So, we can’t go with averages. There’s a company called Gleethman who is doing some research where they got some 200,000 data points of if people want to return to work or not. And this is about wanting to. And that’s scattered. So some people say I don’t want to go back to work at all. Around 20, 25% if I remember correctly. Want to just work remotely. And about the same amount want to go fully into the office. But then we’ve got people scattered between one to two days in the office three to four days, you know, so there’s not going to be an average approach that works for everybody. What we need to understand is that, oh, wow, our talent base just got scattered. These people who are working remotely, if we don’t have a solution for them, they’re going to be poached very easily by companies who offer a better life work experience for them, right. And then this kind of, I think companies are making a huge mistake by creating a one size fits all policy would say you have to be in the office X amount per week. What don’t you say we will create a policy where you say, every team needs to look at your context, your customers, your value delivery and agree on what you do virtually and what you do in the office. And it has to be an explicit team commitment on how you work, right? So why don’t we do that because teams can make the best decisions for sure.

Miljan Bajic 51:06

So that’s like going from very rigid policies to more adaptive policies that are context specific. And in that instance, you decentralizing that decision of how we work to the units and teams based on you know, where they are maturity wise, where they are in their work. I mean, the whole context. Yeah.

Riina Hellström: 51:26

But what you can create as a policy is that you have to make this explicit discussion and explicit choices. And then we come to the culture. And then we come to do you have managers who are micromanagement professionals who don’t trust people? That’s another conversation again. But you know, yeah. The other thing is that digitalization and if we think about the COVID, is there’s nothing that prepared organizations better for agile than COVID. Because we didn’t know what kind of decisions to make, we needed to react every day, last spring, every week after the summer, and now maybe every month, we need to make new contingency plans, you know, so…

Miljan Bajic 52:10

A lot of people I talked to, they’re like, this was a good test in the sense of just to open our eyes to you know, as much as negative, it’s also created a lot of positive opportunities, just to our whole perception of what is feasible and what’s not feasible.

Riina Hellström: 52:30

And you know what? The change, or the kind of different situation was so long lasting, that it has changed the you know, changed behavior in a lasting way. So, people have changed behavior, people have changed opinion, I thought that I can’t do what I do virtually. But actually, now I find that what we do, train agile is working much better in a virtual setting because we break that down into five weeks instead of two days. And people learn much better and they apply it etc. So quite a lot of businesses have been also able to redefine themselves in how this works. So, I think there is a great opportunity here, but we need to be very strategic about that and the companies who understand this change in behavior, and change in I say, life work balance on purpose, because it’s about life balance really. It’s about how you bring in work into a life. And I think that’s super important to remember one side’s average approach won’t take you far.