Month: March 2022

Jorgen Hesselberg

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:23
Who is Jorgen Hesselberg?

Jorgen Hesselberg   01:29

It’s one of those psychology questions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:33

I asked people, and they’re like, oh, that’s a good question or whatever. And I hate doing those traditional, so I let people introduce themselves.

Jorgen Hesselberg   01:45

What’s your title, what do you do?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:49

Because, reading (inaudible 1:51)

Jorgen Hesselberg   01:55

No, no, it’s good. And then sometimes you ask yourself, and I think sometimes you find that you change also. The person you were when you were 20 is probably different than when you’re 48. Like now, who am I? Well, I think at the end of the day, I’m very curious and I’m a person who really likes to make things better. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be products, but it could be organizations or the way people work together, or just working with people where we can take something and improve it and enhance it, and create something that was there before. That magic that we talked about when we talk about agility, for instance, it’s one of those things that has been kind of a North Star for me from the beginning, I got hooked, when I could see the difference that makes in people’s lives. So yeah, I’m a curious person, I love learning and I always want to try to improve things. I think that’s probably the simplest way of trying to talk about who I am.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:57

Great, maybe I’m not going to jump into competitive agility, but maybe that is all about improvement and how it relates to what you just said. I haven’t asked this before, but just to ask you, see your thoughts. What does Agile to agility mean to you? The name of the podcast when you think about Agile and agility?

Jorgen Hesselberg   03:22

I think it’s a good title, because I think a lot of people don’t understand the difference. So, for me agility is sort of describing, sometimes people have been saying, okay, how would you define business agility, for instance, and there’s 1000s different definitions. But I’ve been trying to get it down to sort of five or six words, embrace change, execute with purpose. I think that, to me, is what agility is about., embracing change. Certainly, it’s about changing, it’s about being adaptive, it’s about reacting quickly to market conditions, all those kinds of things. But it’s also about executing with purpose. I mean, we have collaborators, we have partners, we have contracts, we have all sorts of things that we are accountable to. So we also need to sort of execute not a long term plan, but at least some sort of planful way of working. So it’s both, it’s a balance between being completely flexible and turning on a dime and also being able to deliver in a reliable way so that people trust you, that they can rely on you and that people like your partners can say, okay, if they say they’re going to deliver something, we can trust it, that’s going to happen, they’re not going to come there a couple of days before and say, hey, we’re agile, so we’re not going to do it after all. I mean, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work but it’s that balance. And of course, the magic is then in what that balance looks like, because that balance could be different depending on the company, the context and the business environment you’re in, so that’s different. But to answer your question, I think Agile is really going back to sort of the Agile Manifesto, I think that’s more around those four values and 12 principles. It’s around sort of the tools that are typically put in that category. But agility, I think is a broader term, it goes to sort of the behaviors and the norms, and sort of the mindset behind all of this so I do think there’s a difference. I think, agile is maybe the concrete manifestation of agility, maybe that’s a way to say it. I mean, if you do it right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:38

Great. The reason for me or the way that I was thinking about it, and coming up, whether it’s last 10 years or 20 years, we’re focused a lot on agile, and I think what I’m seeing is more and more focus on agility, which is really what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to have organizations that are responding to change, and like you said, being able to deliver on what they said, or at least inspect that or that. I’ve followed your work for, I don’t know, several years, and I read your book, and there are those people I think that can see things a little bit ahead of time and I think you’re one of them. So I wanted to ask you a couple of things, I want you to first reflect on the last 10 years and what stands out to you in the last 10 years in context of this agile and agility. What are a few things that you would good or bad but if you had to summarize what stands out to you? Five years, I mean whatever you want to do but having it longer, because everybody’s going to say maybe but yeah, what are things that stand out for you?

Jorgen Hesselberg   07:02

And they say, reflect back on sort of what has happened in the last few years? Well, I was thinking about that before we sort of ended the podcast, I was kind of thinking like, how do we get there? What is that journey? And you could never plan these things, they just kind of happen. But I was thinking of, how is it that an agile ways of working sort of spoke to me so strongly, I was kind of reflecting on that a little bit. And I think it comes back to one of my earlier experiences when I first started out in the work life, I was a journalist, I was a television news producer and that is a very, very agile way of working because, of course, I didn’t have the words to sort of talk about it back then.

But if you think about what it takes to create a television news podcast, or broadcast I should say, to do that, you need to have a television news producer, who’s kind of like the product owner and then you have usually a news director who might sometimes be a scrum master, but sometimes can be a sponsor and then you have a crew typically, that will be a journalist who might be writing or interviewing people and then you have a person with the video camera and then this is happening in real time, they come back and you have an editor who’s pairing with you to get the copyright, then you have to edit the video together with the sound, making it all look great. And you have deadlines that are not months or days, but are minutes and hours if you’re lucky and then all of this has to happen very quickly in a very collaborative way and it’s a very sort of engaging because things keep happening and changing all the time.

It’s extremely energetic. It’s a great way of working and the buzz in the newsroom is just an amazing fuel. It’s almost like being drunk on work, if that’s a thing and it’s a beautiful experience, I mean, talk about flow. I mean, time just goes by. And that kind of experience is kind of how I thought work was and then I sort of grew up, it’d be a graduating from college. And then as I became professional, and had my first job as a project manager and things like that, I realized that, oh, what’s going on here? Why is he working this way? And then I was told that, oh, well, if you’re going to be a professional, you have to work this way. This is what it is.

I mean, you are a PMP after all so remember, there’s certain processes you got to follow, this didn’t make any sense, like, well, this is how it is just get along, just do it. And so it felt wrong, like it didn’t feel right to work that way. And I think when agile sort of revealed itself to me, which was probably around 2005 or 2006, I just sort of like got that lightbulb moment, which is the same thing, I think a lot of people have is where they say this makes sense. Finally, I don’t have to sort of be intellectually dishonest, I can actually do the things that make sense instead of just follow some crazy process. And I think that’s where it all started for me. I think part of the reason what’s happening now, why it’s going from agile, which is a little bit more on the technical side, typically, obviously, that’s where it came from, to broader sections of that is, of course, the world is changing. I think it comes back to the cliche being VUCA, is that we are seeing now that the world is a lot less predictable. I think it’s not just a cliche, I think it’s truth. And I think people are realizing that, that way of working that we used to do, those things that never made any sense to us, I think we realize that just doesn’t work anymore. And we’ve seen so many examples of it. And when that’s happening, well, then we got to look for something else. And I think agile, as imperfect as it is, it is certainly much more adapt to working in an agile environment or in an environment that is a business environment right now than anything planful.

So what has happened in the last 10 years that’s great, I think is that we are broadening the scope, we’re going from yeah, this is just a Propeller head kind of thing. It’s for the engineers, it’s for those crazy people that we don’t talk to because we’re leaders, and we don’t talk to those guys, or girls, and it’s gone from that to oh, this is something we probably have to deal with too, so that’s a good thing. The bad thing, I think some of it has now sort of been distilled into sort of simple solutions, where we, instead of focusing on the principles of this, the really important things like limiting work in progress or decreasing cycle time, or reducing variability where it makes sense or increasing resources via bottlenecks, like basic things that we’ve proven since the 50s, instead of those things, we are sort of putting tons of tools, tons of sort of branded frameworks and things on top of that. And I think sometimes we miss the really fundamental stuff. And then we just say, oh, if we put up a scrum board, maybe now we’re agile. And we forget that the reason the scrum board is there is to visualize progress so we can start to limit it.

That’s kind of the secret, the thing that makes it work is that we’re not going to actually visualize our work in progress but instead of doing that, we just say, oh, we have a scrum board now. And so I think a lot of that, it’s a little bit sad, because I think we just want simple solutions and those are simple things, they’re visible, you feel like you’re doing something, but you’re probably not making as much progress as you can. So that was a long way of saying that I don’t think we’ve reached the potential here or even halfway through that we should have given all the great work that those 17 signatories created for us, I mean, they laid the groundwork.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:00

I would say it’s more than just that, right. There are a lot of people that want to go hockey, or it wasn’t convenient for them to attend, I think is like there’s this shift from kind of siloed and theme thinking to more end to end flow thinking, I think is a positive thing but it’s still, when you look at lot of organizations, it’s sub optimizing parts of the organization rather than looking at the whole.

Jorgen Hesselberg   13:29

Yeah, I think you’re right and it’s hard. It’s easy for us sometimes to come in as outsiders and look at the process and say, oh, you’ve clearly got this wrong. But there’s politics, there’s careers, there’s fiefdoms, all of those things, so people who have spent maybe 20-25 years establishing themselves in an organization and then suddenly we go in, and we say, oh, here’s a way we can solve this, we just break up your group and make sure that we optimize for flow instead. And a person would say, wow, I worked all these years to become a VP of development, and then suddenly, now, I don’t have that anymore. I can understand why there might be a part of that person who says, well, this isn’t all great for me, even though it might be the best for the organization. So I think part of our job is to also help them to see that there is a place here for traditional managers so to speak, it’s just that the scope will be different, their area of responsibility might be different. But there is a life there too. It’s just they have to be a little bit open to change, though. And that is scary. I I don’t take that away from them. That is scary.

Jorgen Hesselberg   15:06

That’s a great question. And of course, we don’t know but I think it’s always fun to kind of think ahead. Because I never knew, if you asked me three years ago, what do you think was going to happen too? We would all be isolated.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:19

No, we’re sitting in, I remember at that bar in Austin, couple years.

Jorgen Hesselberg   15:29

We didn’t see this coming. But I do think that COVID certainly has changed a lot of things, I think this idea that we always have to be face to face, I think we sort of proven that we can work remotely to a much greater degree. And I think the tools around that will be much more sophisticated than what they are now. We have Nero and mural, and we had a couple of tools that sort of popped up, but they were already existing, I think there’s going to be new tools and technologies is going to grow out of this, that’s going to make life a lot easier, in terms of, telecommuting, and in terms of not flying so much, because of the environment, but also because lot of people who can’t, maybe they are disabled in any way, or something like that, they can now all contribute in a much greater way. So I think lot of positives comes with this. We also realize that’s not the only solution, either, I think we realized that we need that personal connection. I think after two years in the basement, we just kind of like, I miss people, like I want to collaborate with someone, and kind of be able to be face to face with someone. This hybrid approach is definitely something that we will see more of.

Obviously, I’m a little biased since I do run a company that believes very much in data but I do think data is going to be a big part of this. And maybe not used in the way people think sometimes, which is like, oh, you got data, now you have answers. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think it’s more around,  things like pattern recognition, more around using the data as an input to better questions, things like that, not necessarily for the answers but because it helps us ask better questions. I think data is going to be a bigger part of how we use and how we measure agility going forward. Because right now, a lot of it has been kind of based on gut feel and I think very often we use these metrics that kind of make us feel good, or they kind of like vanity metrics.

I think we need to be a little more disciplined, and use metrics that are a little closer to the business goal. Because I think that leaders have been open to this and they say, yeah, let’s be more agile. Now, we got to show them that this actually does have an impact. And the great thing is, we have nothing to hide, because this isn’t vapor, we know that this works. If you do these things, and they know what they are, we will see benefits, we will see that we will produce value faster, we will produce value with higher levels of quality, we will increase customer satisfaction, it might not be cheaper, we might not be cost efficient, those kinds of things might not happen but we do know that we will create a much faster way of delivering value. But right now, we don’t focus on that enough, I don’t think. I think we focus on all the other things that makes us move around, we got to show that value.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:27

Why do you think that we’re focusing on the wrong things? We’re not really…

Jorgen Hesselberg   18:32

I think part of it is that, very often we are not given access to those folks that are not inside of our sphere of influence. Very often it starts in product management, or in engineering or something like that. And if you’re trying to calculate things like cost of delay, for instance, it can be kind of hard to do that, if you don’t have access to finance. If you don’t really understand what actually is the cost of delaying this project within another week. So since you don’t have that access, since you don’t have those data, you kind of create metrics with the data you have. And then that’s fine, it still looks good, we can do velocity, we can do maybe some simple lead time but in a very small and not an end to end sense, but just inside our small little sphere in the value stream and that makes us feel good but it doesn’t probably move the needle as much as it could if we were actually taking a broader perspective.

So part of that is our fault, because we’ve been using language that makes it difficult for them to care for them. If I’m a finance person, why should I talk to you guys anyway? That’s one way. The other way is that maybe they also need to be made aware of this and say that, hey, this is something that affects you also. And it is definitely in leadership’s best interest to invite these people in and I think that’s part of what we’re seeing now, with this and I think that’s part of what you’re saying. What you’re saying agility is that this goes way beyond development this goes into marketing to finance, to HR.

Lisa Crispin

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:30

Welcome, Peter and Maria to Agile to agility podcast, they usually start by asking a question, who is and then but I’ll skip it. I think I’ve only skipped it one time around and I’ve really wanted to start with a question, key question from your book, Personal Agility, unlocking higher purpose, alignment and performance. And the question that you ask in there is, what really matters? So, maybe could you answer that question for me? If somebody asked you, what really matters, how would you respond?

Maria Matarelli   01:11

Are you going to go first, Peter?

Peter Stevens 01:17

The beauty of what really matters question is, it provokes one of two responses. Either you know and it just rolls off your tongue or you have no idea and there’s this long silence that you offer to pass the talking stick to someone else unless you draw your own conclusions. You know, this is actually a question that well, I mean I started doing Personal Agility or what we now called Personal Agility back in 2016. And somebody asked me once, what is your North star? What do you navigate by, what do you care about life? And I thought that was a really intriguing question and I made a column for it on my board and I just left it blank for about two months. I really had no idea what to put in there and then one day, it just kind of came to me and in a moment, it’s random, pivoted. And so for me, there are a couple of things that are on my board, one is health and happiness.

Okay, we say time is your most valuable currency and health is your most valuable asset because, well, time you only get to spend it once. And your health, if you lose it, you may not get it back. Okay, so that’s kind of, you know, having, sometimes we use the term work life balance but it’s really about making sure that your health you know, that you’re healthy and that you’re balanced. And that you can that you can function because if you can’t do that, you know, nothing else matters, okay? So that for me is very high on my list. You know, the other thing is, you know, kind of family and existence, you know, making sure that all that hangs together. Switzerland, everyone’s got to pay the light bills And Switzerland is famous for its electric light bills. So that gives me some, you know, keep the machine running. You know and ultimately, you know for me, Personal Agility is like a baby. And you know, Maria and I have been working on the book now for I guess, about four years? And we had an intensive phase for about two years and then we started seeing the cases of what people were doing with Personal Agility. And then we started collecting case studies and you know, we realized that there are millions of people who could benefit from Personal Agility.

So you know, what I have, come number one on my list is Personal Agility is bigger than me. Okay, that’s kind of a reminder that well, yes, I’d like Personal Agility to be a thing but it’s not about me. You know, it’s about millions of people whose lives could really be much you know, measurably and obviously better. Okay? And that’s what I care about, is that somehow Personal Agility is going to get out there, you know, there are already some samples of it but I hope that a lot of people are going to be able to benefit from what Personal Agility has to offer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:00

Yeah, I hope we, I do want to talk about Sharon, Sarah and Pete. As far as what you’ve, as case studies but yeah, what about Maria, what about for you, what really matters for you?

Maria Matarelli 04:14

Yeah, so for me, health and fitness is number one. It used to be something not on my radar at all and I realized that it needed to be up at the top, sustainable business, relationships and happiness and then also financial freedom. So really keeping an eye on, you know, a lot of times we’re so focused on achieving goals, we don’t necessarily look at what would make me happy or what would provide fulfillment in my life. And so, one of the things that I really appreciate is that when Peter and I started talking about this concept of what really matters, it was 2016. And I remember it was in the Western Grand in Munich, Germany at the scrum gathering.

We were in the lobby and he asked me that question and I realized that nothing that I thought that mattered had mattered at all. And so that’s where it just became my priority because I realized that health wasn’t even on my radar and that needed to be number one. And then happiness later trickled in to my list and that was after conversation with Alastair Coburn. And we were talking about where’s the joy, where’s the fulfillment, where’s that? And I was so focused on achieving goals that I wasn’t really enjoying the journey along the way. And so those have been a couple of profound realizations I’ve had over the years that have helped me really get that clarity and be able to see that on my priorities now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:31

Great. Where does DJing fall into that, the fun and happiness?

Maria Matarelli 05:35

It absolutely does, it used to be. One of my, you see my number two thing was DJing and you don’t really change what really matters too often. Though, once the pandemic hit, it didn’t seem like there were many opportunities for DJing. And I realized that it was probably a good opportunity to shift to look at, you know, the relationships with the people I value in my life. But then also, I have happiness grouped with that because I recognize you have to have happiness in yourself first before you expect to have that from anyone else around you. And so yeah, DJing absolutely falls under the happiness.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:10

Yeah. That is awesome in like, just reading through a book and some parts, I’ve read some pirates, as I didn’t have enough time, you know? But it was really like, helpful for me like to go through this and you described this concept of Personal Agility system as Pass, I’m not sure how you pronounce it. And you talked about it as a friend and I felt like it’s almost friend and a coach type of, because the type of question that was getting me to think about is something that you will have with a really good friend, that’s also a coach, in a sense, where they’re getting you to think about these things. Could you maybe talk about the Personal Agility system and describe to the audience what it is and maybe we can start there?

Maria Matarelli 06:59

Yeah, so the Personal Agility system is a coaching based framework, simple framework for being able to identify what really matters. And we have some ways that you can do this, some tools that we put together. So we have the priorities map, which is really looking at what are the things that really matter? You know, why are you using the Personal Agility system?

Why are you making a change in your life, looking at what’s important, what’s urgent, what’s your plan for the week and you can triage between those things to come up with what that plan is. And then as you start to do things, we have the breadcrumb trail that emerges, where you’ve been, which is an indicator of where you’re going, if you do things the same. We can step out and get a picture of like, that larger view of what we call the forces map, looking at these driving forces in your life of what really matters, it’s really like the North Star of where you’re heading. And then there’s several other tools we’ve come up with along the way. So we have a stakeholder canvas, being able to interview and create alignment with people around us.

This framework scales to the work context, as well as the basis for leadership framework and you’re looking at, you’ve some powerful coaching questions or coaching canvas. And then looking at the alignment compass, are you in alignment with the things that you say that matter and this all is in the cadence of a weekly cadence? Are we invited to celebrate and choose, celebrate what you’ve achieved and choose if you want to continue doing that or do things different? So, it’s really all about creating that visibility and inviting people to take that powerful moment to pause and reflect. Are the things that I’m doing every day, every week, every month, are these really the things that really matter to me and are they getting me to where I want to go? So, that I’m not just achieving the things I want to achieve in the short term but also not losing sight of long term goals and be able to make steady progress toward those.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:50

Yeah, it was great. I also liked the aspect of the weekly, kind of asking these things weekly because I used to do this you know, with myself. And I would use the you know, the wheel of change in a sense to ask myself you know, around like, you know, quarterly but I think it’s very powerful when you ask these questions weekly almost, you know? It reinforces this alignment and priorities and you know, the forces map and the breadcrumbs like, you know, by just doing the same things. And as I was reading it, I was you know, kind of processing in my head and it really resonated with me. And I do want to come back to some of these tools that you talked about. Another thing that maybe stood out that I would like to explore is about optimal, you said the Personal Agility is about optimizing your actions to align with what really matters. Could you maybe just talk about that, what you mean by optimizing your actions?

Peter Stevens 10:02

Sure. So, you know, if we look at you know, what came before Personal Agility, there were things like getting things done and there was personal Kanban. And you know, you could also say there was Scrum and a couple of other things. And you know, once upon a time, the world was simple and we thought we could do everything, you know? And all we had to do was get organized so we could get everything done. And the problem, well maybe that was true a long time ago but today, the world is just so complex with social media and everything else, you know? And with work from home, there’s not much distinction between, you know, when you’re working and you know, when you’re not working, there’s just so much stuff coming at you.

Okay, and so one of the things that’s become really important is this whole concept of making sense. Okay, and so I think, you know, well, Personal Agility is really different from what came before. It’s not about organizing the work, it’s about getting clear on what you care about. And then saying, well, how can I spend more time on the things that I care about and less time on the things that I don’t, okay? So, you know, in business, the word we use is alignment, I think it was Lisa Adkins, who talked about being in alignment with yourself. Okay, you create, you know, you’re able to answer the question, what really matters? And then you could look at what you did and say, well, how does that match up with what really matters? Okay?

Now, that could be a question to beat yourself up with or that could be a moment of clarity, where you say you know, I’ve been spending time on things that don’t matter and I want to spend more time on things to do. Okay? So, maybe I’m going to turn off the social media app during you know, and watch something I care about. Last time I had that conversation was yesterday afternoon with someone, so you know, these are real things. And they give you awareness of where you are, what you’re doing and how it relates to the bigger picture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:51

It does and like, I was thinking, as you know we teach you know, classes through Scrum Alliance and like, I do this podcast, I started writing a book two years ago that you know, I started a podcast because I stopped writing. It is an excuse not to write but you know, as I was reading the end going through, you know like, you know, I was asking myself these questions like, what’s important to me? Like, you know, is it making money or like, you know, I love these podcasts and the ability to talk to people, I don’t make any money out of it.

It’s just, I enjoy it and it’s one of those things, it takes time to both prep, it takes time to add, I do all the editing myself. And it was one of those things where, you know, it makes me happy. I love it, I enjoy it, you know and how does this align, you know as far as priorities, what I want to do. And one thing that came, I don’t know if you talked about it in the book explicitly but it’s about options, right? Like, what I want to have is options, like, hey, you know, I want to do this, I want to you know, go to Croatia, Montenegro and spend time there and work. Like for me, it was just kind of thinking through as I was going through this and saying, well for me, what matters for me is options, having options.

Peter Stevens 13:14

If you look at personal combat, they call you know, they have a list of things that you could do, they call it options. So you know, what are your options? And you could do all of these things and you know, what are your options is actually a very powerful question, I like that question a lot. In Personal Agility, we use the term possibilities, okay? You know, and possibly options to me is, you’re in a difficult situation, you could do this or this, it’s a relatively convergent question. Whereas what you know, what are your possibilities for me is much more of a divergent question, you know?

Okay, you’ve got lots of possibilities, okay? And so then, you get to reflect on your possibilities and you know, the first thing, kind of the first tip I got was the Eisenhower method, where you talk about you know, what’s urgent and what’s important? You know, the Eisenhower at the time was either General at the army or president of the US and basically anything that wasn’t urgent or important, he could delegate and most of the stuff that was just urgent or just important, he could delegate as well, as we focused on the most important and the most urgent. And that was great except for you know, you and me, we don’t have an army working for us so we don’t get [inaudible 14:24].

So, stuff that’s not urgent and not important, well we’re gonna have to push it off. Okay? And so this is the whole triage and what came much later is and this is the work life balance thing, as people started saying, well you know, like, with your podcast, I’m doing things because they make me happy and that’s the only reason I’m doing them. Okay? But actually you know, if you’re not happy, what are you? Well, you’re probably on the road to burnout and so the idea that you know, as you’re planning your life, you’re a fully valued partner in the process that you get to think about what makes you happy. So, that was actually one of the biggest changes to Personal Agility since its original creation, was to not just ask what’s urgent and what’s important but to ask what’s going to make you happy? And then you know, so you look at your possibilities and then you think about them in you know, through these different mirrors or from these different perspectives. And then say, well, of all the things I could do, what do I want to get done this week? Okay? [cross-talking 15:21]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:20

Well, that we can, I think that question of you know, what makes you happy in the sense of like, it’s so easy like, especially I feel like, since we’ve been kind of COVID to just kind of keep doing like, in a sense, it’s constantly changing. And like it, I feel like before, I had a less hectic life in a sense like, I would have loved more breaking, when it could be just me but like, just stepping out and saying, what really makes me happy? What is the you know, what are the possibilities of you know, increasing that whatever it is, is really powerful? And I think I don’t know, from your perspective, like and how do you in the book, encourage people to actually, it’s all good that you know, we have this framework but it comes down to self-awareness. And say, I need to pause and ask myself these questions because I don’t have a coach necessarily that’s there that I have. So what are your, you know, kind of thoughts or recommendations on how people can use the book to remind themselves, maybe have the book somewhere visible. Or I saw by the way, they also have the personalagilityinstitute.org and the framework’s there. So, I want to come back to that but back to the question in the sense of like, how do we remind ourselves to ask ourselves these questions about Personal Agility?

Maria Matarelli 16:43

Yeah, so we always we often talk about how there’s often too much to do and not enough time to do it. And so, one of the things that’s really powerful about Personal Agility is that, instead of just looking at limiting your work in progress, we want to look at limiting the number of initiatives in progress. And so, that’s where that question, what really matters comes into play and it’s so powerful. Because if you aren’t just going along with the flow, we often just get you know, blown off course and we use this powerful metaphor of life is the ocean. And if you are the captain of your ship, then you try to get to a destination, let’s say it’s Jamaica, well there could winds, there could be a heavy current, there could be other things that delay you from getting to that destination. And so, we use this metaphor as a powerful reminder to think about, hey, am I on my way to Jamaica?

Is there anything that I’ve done that has blown me off course or that maybe I haven’t even noticed? And so with Personal Agility, being this kind of framework, that reminding you to get back on course, it really is there to reflect back to you? What are your actual actions compared to what it is that you say is important? And so like, if you go 2, 3, 4 weeks and you say health and fitness is the number one thing but you haven’t done anything for that, interesting? Now, I have the opportunity to reflect and say, is it that I just haven’t gotten around to it? And I need to figure out a better way to set myself up for success or have more accountability or is it really not that important to me? And should I reevaluate what really matters? And so, you know, it really is a kind of framework that reflects back to you as I think the navigation metaphor is one of those things that helps.

The powerful question of what really matters, helping us reset and you make sure that we are on the right track. And then, we talked about you know, even things like multitasking, the greater the number of initiatives that you’re working on at once, the less likely you are to make a mile of progress in any one area because you’ve only got an inch of progress in every area. And so, we remind people through some of these concepts that hey, you know, you are the captain of your ship, you get to choose, you are plotting the course. And if you’re off course, we invite you to pause, reflect on that and make that decision. Do you want to change where the course is going or want to get back onto that course?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:08

Yeah. No, I mean it’s really and I encourage people to, I don’t know, when is the book going to be out?

Maria Matarelli  19:16

I was looking at, I believe it’s going to be around the end of March, we’re publishing in the business agility Institute. So, it’s in final editing right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:23

Great. Well, just for me, like again, you know, as I said you know, I don’t promote, I just tell people how it is but it definitely helped me like you know, going back to my book in the sense. Like, I keep making excuses why I’m not writing and I keep saying it’s important but I’m not doing anything about it. And it made me think well, like?

Peter Stevens  19:46

This is the whole concept of the breadcrumb trail, if you don’t spend any time working on your book, when is it going to get written? Okay? And that’s how you can see, you know, and we’ve had these moments ourselves, where we say you know, it’s been a while since we’ve written it anything on the book? We still want to write the book. Yeah, we want to write the book or do we still care about you to make it? Yeah, where’s your, [cross-talking 20:07]?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:10

Well, that’s the thing and I think you can really, you’ll be able to relate to this. You know, I work with a lot of partners in a sense of you know, the teaching classes and things like that. And like, I’m giving up my dates and I’m putting out doing my own classes and I’m prioritizing that. And I keep saying, like well, I need more time to write a book, I need to be more and those are the breadcrumbs that you’re talking about in a sense. Like you know, so what I’ve started doing even like, you know, months ago, when I was thinking about you know, what I want to do is, I said like, I need to change in some way what I’m doing if I want to finish this book, right? And I think your book was a good reminder and almost helped me reset and almost refocus and remotivate myself to focus on what matters to me and which is, finishing that book.

Peter Stevens  21:06

I like that message.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:07

So it is, at least for me, it had an impact just as I went through. You also talked about five elements; purpose, celebration, choice, emergence and kindness. Could you maybe talk about those five elements a little bit and discuss that concept from Personal Agility system?

Peter Stevens  21:30

Okay. Well, let’s start with purpose. Okay, you know, purpose is kind of the what really matters question. And if we think back to that navigation metaphor, why are we doing this? Okay, Simon Sinek says, start with why, why are we doing this? Well, that ‘why’ is your destination, that’s Jamaica. Okay? And then, you know, how do we get to Jamaica? Well, we need to navigate okay, back before there was GPS, well, you would have the North Star, maybe the Orion’s belt and your clock and you know, by looking at the North Star and by looking when the sun went down or when Orion belt said, you can figure out where you are.

Okay and that lets you know and then you plot your course and you can, you know, make your way over the ocean. And so, that’s kind of the metaphor of Personal Agility is that, well, if you want to be somebody, if you want to achieve something, if there’s a purpose, you know, align your actions to what you know, what you want to do. So, you’ve always got purpose, it’s kind of giving you context for making decisions. Now, celebration is about being kind to yourself. Okay, so many people have an authority figure from their childhood or maybe from work, say you are a bad boy or whatever. And you know, and it’s interesting, when you get things done, ‘done’ is something you can celebrate, okay? So, what we try to do is encourage people to think about what are the things that they got done, you know, even if they’re little things on a week to week basis.

You know, and they could be like, celebrating time you spent with your partner or celebrating something you did, just because it makes you happy, okay? Because these can actually be you know, glue and cement that kind of holds you, it holds you together in difficult times. And you know, the other thing is, life happens a lot faster than you can change, sorry, life happens faster than you can plan it. Okay, so you’re going to get into a situation you know, if your son knocks on the door and has a skinned knee and needs some you know, doctoring and needs some, you know, love and attention? Obviously, you’re going to drop what you’re doing and deal with it because you know what else you got to do. So you know, and if your boss calls or your customer calls, it’s kind of the same thing. So obviously, things are going to be different than what you planned but you still got things done. And you’re always you know, kind of like what they say in the retrospectives, you’re always doing the best you can. So, you made the best decisions you could, celebrate what you got done. And it’s amazing, you know, by having an emphasis on celebration, you know, you’re just happier. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:06

Well, we talked about teams having like, in Scrum, you know, celebrate at the end. And like, I think it’s a motivational factor that’s tied to that purpose, like you said.

Peter Stevens  24:17

Absolutely. And one of the greatest things in Scrum is this concept of ‘done’, it’s really easy to celebrate stuff that’s done. Discussing stuff in progress is intensely painful, especially. So, you know, and that’s really informed, you know how I do Scrum is we say, hey, let’s concentrate, you know, let’s concentrate on getting things done. Let’s concentrate on having things to celebrate and that just makes the morale so much better.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:42

Yeah. It’s that reinforcing loop in a sense, like, I want more of this, right? It feels good in a sense. Let’s celebrate and let’s do some more of this stuff, so yeah.

Peter Stevens  24:52

Yeah, now choices about options, okay? And you know, there are all these things that you could do and it’s your boat and you’re the captain of the boat and you’re the owner of the boat and you get to decide where to go. So you know, choose, you know, it’s your time, valuable currency, you get to spend it once. But you can also be intentional about and that’s very often, you know, you talk to a lot of people about, well, why didn’t you write your book?

Or why didn’t you do this, they said, well I had to do this and I had to take care of the kids and I had to go to work and I had to earn money and I had to do all the things I had to do and that’s all true. It’s all true but you still have a choice about how you use your time, not every minute is dedicated to you know, whatever, you know. So, there’s a fine line between an explanation and an excuse, okay? And just by saying, I’m going to make the choice, I made a choice to attend to my son’ skin knee, that’s a choice, I did it, it was the right thing to do. And all of a sudden, you’ve got a different attitude. Okay? And again, you know, you sit up, your shoulders are out, you know, you feel like you’re in command of the situation. And you know, it’s a very different thing to be the captain of a boat in the storm with a passenger of a boat in a storm, very different experience. Okay? And if you don’t believe me, try sitting on the backseat of a motorcycle on the mountains.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:16

No, it definitely is. And you know, I know how, I recently was talking to a friend and first of all, it’s crazy how time flies but like having kids. And like, how that has changed my perspective and things and you know, having passengers versus, so that influences the purpose, that influences how you celebrate, that influences the choice. The Emergence is the next one, could you maybe talk about that?

Peter Stevens  26:43

Yeah, emergence is a fun one. This is something that’s really only emerged over time that we kind of realized. So if you go back to, well, maybe let’s start what is emergence, okay? Emergence is how individual things come together and interact with each other to form something bigger than themselves. Okay, so we can think of a group of people that come together to form a team, okay? You see this at the atomic level, you know, atoms come together to form molecules, molecules come together to form organic structures, organic structures make up DNA.

You know, they combined with other, you know, we got emergence everywhere. What’s interesting, what we discovered about Personal Agility, Personal Agility is not a process to follow, it’s a series of questions to ask. Now, the idea was you asked them, you’re set to yourself but you can also ask them to other people. And it turns out, if you ask clarifying questions, if you ask powerful questions, if you you know, really focus on surfacing information you know, rather than debating, all sorts of interesting things happen. Okay? So you know, by asking the right questions and this is where Canvas has come in and you know, what we’ve really discovered is that you can shape how a group of people come together, you can create alignment, so that this group of people become something bigger than themselves. Okay? And you know, if we go back to like, the circle close when I went back, I was looking at the Agile Manifesto recently, the first value; individuals and interactions.

I don’t know if the inventors I mean, they’re all very smart people. So maybe they thought of but you know, individuals interacting with each other, that’s the basis of emergence. Okay? And this is actually how Personal Agility becomes a leadership framework is, you know, is by thinking actively about how to do you know, how to guide and shape the emergence of your organization. So it’s like, one very powerful example of this is Netflix, you know, they have their corporate culture, it was quite revolutionary when it came out. How do you deal with expense reports? How do you replace the manager who’s controlling your expense reports to make sure the money is well spent? They had a very simple rule, spend the money, expand company money as if it were your own, they’re guiding the interaction, okay? And by having the simple rule of engagement, okay, so we do a lot with that, we start with some very simple ones. Like, listen before you talk, ask before you tell and when you ask, ask a clarifying question. All of a sudden, you give these guidance and that just shapes the behavior and really amazing things happen when you can shape the behavior. This gives you the tools to create alignment, that’s kind of the holy grail of you know, organizations in a big company or organizing a big company.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:30

It is interesting and I think, you know, maybe it’s for separate discussion but emergency, you know, in general, I think alluded to it but there are some guardrails, when you have any type of you know, system. So, there are some boundaries to every you know, system and I think emergence like, you know, in this instance, the boundaries are like, you know, your future goes back to that question, you know, what really matters? And you’re working emergence within those boundaries of what really matters, it’s not, you know, emergence, you know, uncontrolled but in a sense or unfocused, it’s really within that question of you know, how are things emerging within what matters to me?

Peter Stevens  30:21

Having this what, you know, this concept of what really matters, okay, you know, having a clear goal. This enables the organization to focus on something and if you’re doing something entrepreneurial, if you’re trying to you know, make a dent in the universe, you know, having this clear goal, you know? If I were working in SpaceX, I would expect the key question at SpaceX to be something like, how does this help us get to Mars? And you know, all of us say, you got this one question and all of a sudden, you’ve got this lens to say, is what we’re doing productive or not. Okay? And so, I think that there’s a lot of, you know, power in clarity of purpose. There’s a lot of clarity in simple rules of engagement. I had a bit of an ‘aha moment’ about this couple weeks ago, you know, one of the classic examples is, you know, flocks of birds. Okay? And you know, there’s a nice video from course design, which explains, you know, how a vergence works and they talk about you know, how does a flock of birds stay together?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:20

Simple rules, right?

Peter Stevens  31:24

Pretty simple rules, fly in the general direction of the bird next to you, don’t get too close to the bird next to you, don’t get too far away from the bird next year. Okay? Rules, keep the flock together. Okay? Now, it turns out, if you look at how say, an organization works with its management, you see those same three rules in place. Okay, you know the management is kind of like, the structure that’s kind of all moving together, holding itself together, don’t get too close to the guy next to you, don’t get too far away and kind of keep moving in the same general direction. This makes a lot of sense.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:57

It does, just that in some organizations, the guardrails are too strict in a sense where that allow for bigger emergence. What about kindness? The kindness is the fifth element.

Peter Stevens  32:15

Maria, you want to take kindness?

Maria Matarelli  32:17

Yeah, so this is where we realize that you know, with a lot of different work systems, there can be, did you get it done or did you not get it done, right? And that feeling of a failure if you don’t complete and so we really look at the Personal Agility system as a kind of framework, it’s there to remind you what you said was important, which you may or may not have done. And you know, even if you didn’t get all of the things done that you had planned for the week, that’s okay.

Look at what did you get done, we still want to celebrate what was achieved, even if it wasn’t planned and then this is the opportunity to choose, right? And so, if you’re not satisfied with the things that you did last week, you don’t want to carbon copy that to the next week but we get to choose differently and we get to choose differently every single week. And so, it really is a kind of framework, just reminding you what you said was important, bringing you back to those things that really matter. And then giving you the option to say, do I want to continue going, you know, toward this North star, these things I said that matter? Or do I want to actually made a conscious decision to change that? And so it’s not supposed to be, did I get everything done or not type of approach? It’s, well hey, let me look at what the reality is of the situation and you know, understanding why did that happen?

What are the other factors or forces in my life that are pulling me in different directions? Are these the things on my forces map, are these other things to consider? And so really, it’s there to reflect back to you as a mirror and we have the problem solving questions where it’s like, hey, why did I not get this done? Is this still important to me? What are possibilities of things I could do toward this? And then we have an opportunity to reset every single week?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:59

Yeah and like another thing that made me think about and kind of Maria, you said it in the beginning that it’s a coaching framework, right? And one of the things with coaching is that, you can’t coach somebody that doesn’t want to be coached, right? So in this instance, you know, the book is really, you know, for those people, I guess that are serious about asking these questions and staying on top of it. And you know, to come back to what I was saying in like, my example is like, well you know, how serious do I want to take these questions?

As far as how serious do I want to take my question of what really matters to me? Because ultimately, if I don’t take that question seriously, then I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and probably good or bad. You know, I don’t have a necessarily a framework for improving, it’s just like more reactive and I think you know, with this framework, it’s more like, it gives you a very flexible coaching way to a powerful way to ask these questions and to weekly address them. So I think that in my opinion, that’s really what’s powerful about it is that, you have a framework here for yourself, if you truly want to improve. And you’re serious about it, in my opinion, you have it there, it’s just you know, do I want to do it or not is a personal choice, right?

Maria Matarelli  35:34

And this is one of those things where I see you get out of it, what you put into it, right even more so with the Personal Agility system. If you are looking at your priorities map on a regular basis throughout the week, the more that you add to your priorities map, the more insights that you have, when you create your alignment compass and say, am I aligned with the things that I thought that I wanted. And so, it’s really a powerful reflection back and so yeah, I mean, it’s being able to take that step that like, that pause that we’ve talked about like, take that step back and really reflect. And if we don’t pause, we will absolutely most likely be reactive in life because there’s so many other things happening and so many things that can get us driven off course. And one thing that has kind of become like, more of a thing to take note of is, there’s some things you can do to set yourself up for success, such as your environment that you’re in and the people around you. And you are more likely to stay on track with your goals when you’re around more like minded people that have similar goals.

Even just health, for example, if you have friends that eat whatever they want and order food from whatever restaurant, it’s only a matter of time before you’re smashing a pizza next to them, right, versus friends that are often ordering healthy food or wanting to go out and do something outside or go running or do something active. You’re most likely then going to be doing that with them and so there’s other things that we can do when we take that step back to look at what are the other factors that might be influencing my ability to stay on track with the things I say are important. And then we can make those conscious decisions and those choices, do I want to put myself in that position or in that situation, where I may or may not make the choice that’s going to serve me best? And so, it really can start to be very powerful when you take that big step back and look at that bigger picture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:26

Yeah, I mean it really is and I couldn’t agree more like, you know? I remember like coming to United States and my parents would, the only thing that they worried about is who I hanged out with, not what I did, just who I hanged out with. And I can see like, you know, with some of my friends that, you know, ended up in jail versus and like, why my parents were specific about you know, like, they knew, I guess as parents, you know? So, I think that that definitely, at least resonates with me, too. Maybe, you know, to come back, you know, you talk about your three cases. Sharon, Sarah and Pete, could you maybe describe, these are real people that went through this, you know, maybe pick one of them and describe or tell us their story, how they use Personal Agility? In a sense, answer their question, what really matters to me and align to that question?

Maria Matarelli  38:28

Yeah, you know, I think Sharon was one of the first people that sort of kicked off. Peter and I are starting to gather case studies, I met her here in the Tampa, Florida area. And I actually got into the backseat of her Uber, she was driving for Uber and she was working five jobs, was barely getting by, barely able to cover her rent. We started talking, I had just flown in and arrived at the airport, just give me a ride home. And as we were talking, she was telling me about what she did and she had just started, she wanted to be a private chef.

She wanted to have her own cooking show on TV and she had these big dreams but had no real idea how to go about it. And as she’s talking, I was like, man I feel like I could help her and I’m like, I don’t know if I should offer or not. And by the time that she dropped me off at my place, I said, you know what, why don’t you come over to my place on Friday. It was three days later, I said, I’ll help you shoot a cooking show, we can create a YouTube channel and that’ll create your portfolio. I just want to eat the food for free and so that’s how it started. I got a free private chef, I started working with Sharon on you know, getting out there more with what she really wanted to do, which wasn’t driving Uber, which wasn’t doing all these other odd jobs. It was really being able to step into her gift of being able to cook and by the time that we launched a cooking show.

You know the holidays came around and she started doing catering, she got so busy that we didn’t really even have time to shoot the cooking show anymore. And she started asking me all these business questions because she also said, she had this goal of losing a bunch of weight. She was over 300 pounds when I met her then I was like, well hey, let’s work out together. So, we started going to the gym together and she’d always start asking me these business questions, I was like Sharon, you know, this is what I do for a living, right, consulting? Like, you know, I could really help you if we really sat down and looked at this properly and I actually started teaching her Personal Agility. And one of the things that emerged over time was, I feel like I could have taught her agile and she could have done okay in business with that. However, there were so many roadblocks in her life, in her personal life, that I don’t think she would have gotten the same results, had it just been here’s a framework or methodology on how to get the business work done. There was a lot of internal healing and trauma that she had to overcome from years of being in relationships where she was physically abused, sexually abused, being put down, never had anyone told her that they believed in her, ever, never had anyone tell her they were proud of her, not having anyone that was supportive, that actually thought that she could do what she believed and dream that she could do. And so, as I started working with Sharon, within the first year, she brought in over six figures, she went from being negative in her bank account with over $700 of insufficient funds fees to clearing over $20,000 in a month. And then, she went on to land a six figure client where she’s now a private chef for a billionaire. And so, it’s like, look at what’s possible with absolutely possible, when you know what really matters, she actually took post it notes, put them on the dashboard of her car because she was driving Uber of what really matters.

So, she put them every single day and then we started meeting every week and going through it and doing the celebrate and choose event. And then she and I realized we both hadn’t gotten as much progress toward our health and fitness goals is we wanted, even though they were the number one thing on our priorities map. So, then Sharon came up with an innovation on the Personal Agility system and she invited me and another friend of ours to do a shared priorities map together for just health and fitness. Sharon lost over 55 pounds, I lost over 15 and our friend Jen lost, I believe, over 25 or 30. And so, what we realized was, this is so incredibly powerful, much more than just getting work done, getting things accomplished. It actually goes so much deeper when you ask what really matters. And you go deeper into, you know, what are the real reasons that I’m not getting this progress. And Peter and I write in the book about procrastination, distractions, all the things that could sneak up that get in the way that you don’t consciously realize. And a lot of times what we see, especially with adults is it’s putting everybody in front of yourself, especially those with kids and it’s okay to care about your family and your kids. However, if you’re not at your best, how can you be at your best for everyone else, if you’re always doing everything for everyone else.

So, it’s okay to put yourself first, your dreams first and what actually ended up happening was Sharon had several children that were grown in their 30s, that still relied on her heavily, they are now seeing by her example, they’re taking more responsibility. They’re getting their lives more in order, instead of her doing it all for them. They’re seeing her lead by example, by watching her follow her dream.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:18

Exactly and it’s part of, there’s so much stuff in a book that, like you mentioned, you know, some of the things that you know, distract us and like, I really do encourage people, whoever’s listening to you know, read the book. And also, another thing that I haven’t thought about but I think you just gave me an idea is like having somebody else actually go through this process with you. And the idea of you know, start with yourself, you talked about in the book about agile, how to be agile executive and how to be an agile organization.

But I think, you know, we have to start with ourselves before we start working on our businesses and our organizations. We do have a little bit of time here and I wanted to, I accidentally stumble up on Personal Agility Institute as I was looking for questions and things to ask you, could you maybe talk about just you know, where people can find more information. I’ll update the information in the description so they can get to those links also, when the book becomes available but what else? You know, for closing here, what would you like to share with the audience? And there’s plenty of templates, resources that I saw that you have, so?

Peter Stevens  44:39

Yeah, so one place to go, a couple of things you can, you know, find on the Personal Agility Institute website, the first is that you know, if you’re a registered user, which you can do for free, we have a whole dashboard full of tools. You know, our tools are all creative commons and they’re available so that you can start to you know, either in printed form or electronic forum, we got a Trello template, you know? There are all these things that you can download and get access to, there’s also the guide to Personal Agility, which you can get for free, you know, which is kind of the basics of how it works.

The next thing, you know, you notice correctly that most of our case studies, they had a coach involved. Okay, now there might be a little bit of self selection here going on but I actually think that this is a pattern because you know, having a coach, you know, having someone to ask you the questions, sometimes it’s just a celebration partner, you know? So like, I’ve been doing this with my wife for quite some time now and you know, we really find that just helping each other focus and knowing what’s going on in the week is just great for our stress. You know, lowering our stress and preventing conflict and recognizing issues early so that we can, you know, find solutions before they can become critical. So one thing, which I would suggest is to reach out to an ambassador, okay? You know, we’ve got 30 ambassadors or so around the world, you know, all of them are authorized to teach you Personal Agility in a coaching context. Some of them are authorized to offer courses, although right now we’re focusing more on the coaching aspect because that’s where the really awesome transformational stories come from. And you know, so I would say that these are probably you know, the Personal Agility Institute website is the place to start. You know, there are free tools, there are coaches and they’re also of course offerings that you can sign up for. Did I miss anything, Maria?

Maria Matarelli  46:33

Yeah, you know that’s really it, Peter. I think, you know, check out the body of knowledge, read through the case studies, the results that people have gotten are absolutely incredible. And so, you know, after Peter actually was in the US a few years ago and Sharon was like, I’d like to cook you dinner. And he’s all quiet like, I just want to say thank you to you and Maria for Personal Agility, it has completely changed my life. And that’s where we got the idea to start documenting more and more case studies and we suspected that we were on to something, we started using Personal Agility and sharing with others, what has emerged that I think really impressed and amazed me was the application in the business context.

Yes, it works for the individual but it also works so incredibly well, as far as how it can be applied when you really focus on what really matters in the business context, rather than 40 initiatives, can we ask what really matters and actually get the top, the best ones, the most revenue generating ones. And we have stories from people that have almost gone bankrupt to turning their company around and being in the green today, consultants completing 24% of projects on time to over 90% of projects completed on time. A company that launched during the pandemic and hit a $35 million valuation and completed a three year roadmap in one year’s time. And so, the stories, the case studies that you can see, you know, our ambassadors represent across over more than 10 countries. So, you know, being able to reach out to someone in your area, see the stories of what’s worked. And really, we encourage people to start to ask these powerful questions to themselves, of what really matters and look at ways to get started themselves.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:12

Yeah, you know, you just made me think about you can use it, you know, with teams and align personal goals of individuals with teams and there’s so much that you can do. Well, I do want to you know, at some point, have you come back because I feel like we could have discussed this, you know, for how long but I just wanted to kind of I was, as I told you motivated by going through the book and just you know, getting my kind of thoughts together and asking that what matters to me? So if you’re open, I’ll definitely maybe, you know, once the book is out, we can talk again and maybe, you know, dive into someone, maybe you can show me some of the tools. Or maybe we can do one of those, like, Ask Me Anything with people but I definitely would like to explore more because I think there’s a lot that we didn’t discuss and that we could actually show to people and you know, maybe share with people.

Maria Matarelli  49:06

Yeah, I would love that, that would be great.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:10

All right. Thank you, anything? What would you like to leave us with, maybe just a couple of thoughts, anything for now?

Maria Matarelli  49:18

What I would say is, you know, for people, if everything matters then nothing matters. And that’s a phrase that Peter and I say all the time because there are so many things happening in life and we’re getting hit left and right. It’s hard to not be reactive and I think that sometimes people need to be reminded that you are the captain of your ship. And you do get to choose, you can set boundaries, you can let people know how to treat you and so I believe that we’re in more control than we think sometimes, even though we think we’re getting like whisked away by our schedule. And so, I just really want to encourage people to think about you know, what really matters and encourage them to take that time to just pause and reflect because it can really help you re-shift your focus and it’s completely transformed my life. And the way that I look at everything that I do in a positive way and it’s not just about the achievement, it’s about the joy and fulfillment at the end of the day. And so, can we focus more on that and around gratitudes and can we focus more on how can I do more things that make me happy? Because then, most everything else will fall into place after you know that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:31

Yeah. No, that’s a great message and what about from you Peter, from your standpoint?

Peter Stevens  50:37

I was kind of thinking about this, I got to think about what really matters, my God, there’s so much I got to do. Breathe, you’re doing just fine and you’ll figure it out. Okay? You might figure it out by, you know, really thinking about it. You might figure it out, I mean in my case, I didn’t really think about it, it was just the question was there in front of me and then one day, bingo, I knew. Okay? So, you know, if you don’t find the answer to that question right away, don’t worry about it. You know, just look at how you spend your time, look at how you want to spend your time, look at how you end up spending your time, you know? And you’ll start to see you know, pieces will start to fall in place, okay? And it’s an iterative process and it’s okay, if you don’t get the right answer on the first try, you know, navigation and the navigation is all about what you’re going to not where you’re coming from. Okay? And you know, once you figure it out, then things will snap into place.

Maria Matarelli & Peter Stevens

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:30

Welcome, Peter and Maria to Agile to agility podcast, they usually start by asking a question, who is and then but I’ll skip it. I think I’ve only skipped it one time around and I’ve really wanted to start with a question, key question from your book, Personal Agility, unlocking higher purpose, alignment and performance. And the question that you ask in there is, what really matters? So, maybe could you answer that question for me? If somebody asked you, what really matters, how would you respond?

Maria Matarelli   01:11

Are you going to go first, Peter?

Peter Stevens 01:17

The beauty of what really matters question is, it provokes one of two responses. Either you know and it just rolls off your tongue or you have no idea and there’s this long silence that you offer to pass the talking stick to someone else unless you draw your own conclusions. You know, this is actually a question that well, I mean I started doing Personal Agility or what we now called Personal Agility back in 2016. And somebody asked me once, what is your North star? What do you navigate by, what do you care about life? And I thought that was a really intriguing question and I made a column for it on my board and I just left it blank for about two months. I really had no idea what to put in there and then one day, it just kind of came to me and in a moment, it’s random, pivoted. And so for me, there are a couple of things that are on my board, one is health and happiness.

Okay, we say time is your most valuable currency and health is your most valuable asset because, well, time you only get to spend it once. And your health, if you lose it, you may not get it back. Okay, so that’s kind of, you know, having, sometimes we use the term work life balance but it’s really about making sure that your health you know, that you’re healthy and that you’re balanced. And that you can that you can function because if you can’t do that, you know, nothing else matters, okay? So that for me is very high on my list. You know, the other thing is, you know, kind of family and existence, you know, making sure that all that hangs together. Switzerland, everyone’s got to pay the light bills And Switzerland is famous for its electric light bills. So that gives me some, you know, keep the machine running. You know and ultimately, you know for me, Personal Agility is like a baby. And you know, Maria and I have been working on the book now for I guess, about four years? And we had an intensive phase for about two years and then we started seeing the cases of what people were doing with Personal Agility. And then we started collecting case studies and you know, we realized that there are millions of people who could benefit from Personal Agility.

So you know, what I have, come number one on my list is Personal Agility is bigger than me. Okay, that’s kind of a reminder that well, yes, I’d like Personal Agility to be a thing but it’s not about me. You know, it’s about millions of people whose lives could really be much you know, measurably and obviously better. Okay? And that’s what I care about, is that somehow Personal Agility is going to get out there, you know, there are already some samples of it but I hope that a lot of people are going to be able to benefit from what Personal Agility has to offer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:00

Yeah, I hope we, I do want to talk about Sharon, Sarah and Pete. As far as what you’ve, as case studies but yeah, what about Maria, what about for you, what really matters for you?

Maria Matarelli 04:14

Yeah, so for me, health and fitness is number one. It used to be something not on my radar at all and I realized that it needed to be up at the top, sustainable business, relationships and happiness and then also financial freedom. So really keeping an eye on, you know, a lot of times we’re so focused on achieving goals, we don’t necessarily look at what would make me happy or what would provide fulfillment in my life. And so, one of the things that I really appreciate is that when Peter and I started talking about this concept of what really matters, it was 2016. And I remember it was in the Western Grand in Munich, Germany at the scrum gathering.

We were in the lobby and he asked me that question and I realized that nothing that I thought that mattered had mattered at all. And so that’s where it just became my priority because I realized that health wasn’t even on my radar and that needed to be number one. And then happiness later trickled in to my list and that was after conversation with Alastair Coburn. And we were talking about where’s the joy, where’s the fulfillment, where’s that? And I was so focused on achieving goals that I wasn’t really enjoying the journey along the way. And so those have been a couple of profound realizations I’ve had over the years that have helped me really get that clarity and be able to see that on my priorities now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:31

Great. Where does DJing fall into that, the fun and happiness?

Maria Matarelli 05:35

It absolutely does, it used to be. One of my, you see my number two thing was DJing and you don’t really change what really matters too often. Though, once the pandemic hit, it didn’t seem like there were many opportunities for DJing. And I realized that it was probably a good opportunity to shift to look at, you know, the relationships with the people I value in my life. But then also, I have happiness grouped with that because I recognize you have to have happiness in yourself first before you expect to have that from anyone else around you. And so yeah, DJing absolutely falls under the happiness.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:10

Yeah. That is awesome in like, just reading through a book and some parts, I’ve read some pirates, as I didn’t have enough time, you know? But it was really like, helpful for me like to go through this and you described this concept of Personal Agility system as Pass, I’m not sure how you pronounce it. And you talked about it as a friend and I felt like it’s almost friend and a coach type of, because the type of question that was getting me to think about is something that you will have with a really good friend, that’s also a coach, in a sense, where they’re getting you to think about these things. Could you maybe talk about the Personal Agility system and describe to the audience what it is and maybe we can start there?

Maria Matarelli 06:59

Yeah, so the Personal Agility system is a coaching based framework, simple framework for being able to identify what really matters. And we have some ways that you can do this, some tools that we put together. So we have the priorities map, which is really looking at what are the things that really matter? You know, why are you using the Personal Agility system?

Why are you making a change in your life, looking at what’s important, what’s urgent, what’s your plan for the week and you can triage between those things to come up with what that plan is. And then as you start to do things, we have the breadcrumb trail that emerges, where you’ve been, which is an indicator of where you’re going, if you do things the same. We can step out and get a picture of like, that larger view of what we call the forces map, looking at these driving forces in your life of what really matters, it’s really like the North Star of where you’re heading. And then there’s several other tools we’ve come up with along the way. So we have a stakeholder canvas, being able to interview and create alignment with people around us.

This framework scales to the work context, as well as the basis for leadership framework and you’re looking at, you’ve some powerful coaching questions or coaching canvas. And then looking at the alignment compass, are you in alignment with the things that you say that matter and this all is in the cadence of a weekly cadence? Are we invited to celebrate and choose, celebrate what you’ve achieved and choose if you want to continue doing that or do things different? So, it’s really all about creating that visibility and inviting people to take that powerful moment to pause and reflect. Are the things that I’m doing every day, every week, every month, are these really the things that really matter to me and are they getting me to where I want to go? So, that I’m not just achieving the things I want to achieve in the short term but also not losing sight of long term goals and be able to make steady progress toward those.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:50

Yeah, it was great. I also liked the aspect of the weekly, kind of asking these things weekly because I used to do this you know, with myself. And I would use the you know, the wheel of change in a sense to ask myself you know, around like, you know, quarterly but I think it’s very powerful when you ask these questions weekly almost, you know? It reinforces this alignment and priorities and you know, the forces map and the breadcrumbs like, you know, by just doing the same things. And as I was reading it, I was you know, kind of processing in my head and it really resonated with me. And I do want to come back to some of these tools that you talked about. Another thing that maybe stood out that I would like to explore is about optimal, you said the Personal Agility is about optimizing your actions to align with what really matters. Could you maybe just talk about that, what you mean by optimizing your actions?

Peter Stevens 10:02

Sure. So, you know, if we look at you know, what came before Personal Agility, there were things like getting things done and there was personal Kanban. And you know, you could also say there was Scrum and a couple of other things. And you know, once upon a time, the world was simple and we thought we could do everything, you know? And all we had to do was get organized so we could get everything done. And the problem, well maybe that was true a long time ago but today, the world is just so complex with social media and everything else, you know? And with work from home, there’s not much distinction between, you know, when you’re working and you know, when you’re not working, there’s just so much stuff coming at you.

Okay, and so one of the things that’s become really important is this whole concept of making sense. Okay, and so I think, you know, well, Personal Agility is really different from what came before. It’s not about organizing the work, it’s about getting clear on what you care about. And then saying, well, how can I spend more time on the things that I care about and less time on the things that I don’t, okay? So, you know, in business, the word we use is alignment, I think it was Lisa Adkins, who talked about being in alignment with yourself. Okay, you create, you know, you’re able to answer the question, what really matters? And then you could look at what you did and say, well, how does that match up with what really matters? Okay?

Now, that could be a question to beat yourself up with or that could be a moment of clarity, where you say you know, I’ve been spending time on things that don’t matter and I want to spend more time on things to do. Okay? So, maybe I’m going to turn off the social media app during you know, and watch something I care about. Last time I had that conversation was yesterday afternoon with someone, so you know, these are real things. And they give you awareness of where you are, what you’re doing and how it relates to the bigger picture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:51

It does and like, I was thinking, as you know we teach you know, classes through Scrum Alliance and like, I do this podcast, I started writing a book two years ago that you know, I started a podcast because I stopped writing. It is an excuse not to write but you know, as I was reading the end going through, you know like, you know, I was asking myself these questions like, what’s important to me? Like, you know, is it making money or like, you know, I love these podcasts and the ability to talk to people, I don’t make any money out of it.

It’s just, I enjoy it and it’s one of those things, it takes time to both prep, it takes time to add, I do all the editing myself. And it was one of those things where, you know, it makes me happy. I love it, I enjoy it, you know and how does this align, you know as far as priorities, what I want to do. And one thing that came, I don’t know if you talked about it in the book explicitly but it’s about options, right? Like, what I want to have is options, like, hey, you know, I want to do this, I want to you know, go to Croatia, Montenegro and spend time there and work. Like for me, it was just kind of thinking through as I was going through this and saying, well for me, what matters for me is options, having options.

Peter Stevens 13:14

If you look at personal combat, they call you know, they have a list of things that you could do, they call it options. So you know, what are your options? And you could do all of these things and you know, what are your options is actually a very powerful question, I like that question a lot. In Personal Agility, we use the term possibilities, okay? You know, and possibly options to me is, you’re in a difficult situation, you could do this or this, it’s a relatively convergent question. Whereas what you know, what are your possibilities for me is much more of a divergent question, you know?

Okay, you’ve got lots of possibilities, okay? And so then, you get to reflect on your possibilities and you know, the first thing, kind of the first tip I got was the Eisenhower method, where you talk about you know, what’s urgent and what’s important? You know, the Eisenhower at the time was either General at the army or president of the US and basically anything that wasn’t urgent or important, he could delegate and most of the stuff that was just urgent or just important, he could delegate as well, as we focused on the most important and the most urgent. And that was great except for you know, you and me, we don’t have an army working for us so we don’t get [inaudible 14:24].

So, stuff that’s not urgent and not important, well we’re gonna have to push it off. Okay? And so this is the whole triage and what came much later is and this is the work life balance thing, as people started saying, well you know, like, with your podcast, I’m doing things because they make me happy and that’s the only reason I’m doing them. Okay? But actually you know, if you’re not happy, what are you? Well, you’re probably on the road to burnout and so the idea that you know, as you’re planning your life, you’re a fully valued partner in the process that you get to think about what makes you happy. So, that was actually one of the biggest changes to Personal Agility since its original creation, was to not just ask what’s urgent and what’s important but to ask what’s going to make you happy? And then you know, so you look at your possibilities and then you think about them in you know, through these different mirrors or from these different perspectives. And then say, well, of all the things I could do, what do I want to get done this week? Okay? [cross-talking 15:21]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:20

Well, that we can, I think that question of you know, what makes you happy in the sense of like, it’s so easy like, especially I feel like, since we’ve been kind of COVID to just kind of keep doing like, in a sense, it’s constantly changing. And like it, I feel like before, I had a less hectic life in a sense like, I would have loved more breaking, when it could be just me but like, just stepping out and saying, what really makes me happy? What is the you know, what are the possibilities of you know, increasing that whatever it is, is really powerful? And I think I don’t know, from your perspective, like and how do you in the book, encourage people to actually, it’s all good that you know, we have this framework but it comes down to self-awareness. And say, I need to pause and ask myself these questions because I don’t have a coach necessarily that’s there that I have. So what are your, you know, kind of thoughts or recommendations on how people can use the book to remind themselves, maybe have the book somewhere visible. Or I saw by the way, they also have the personalagilityinstitute.org and the framework’s there. So, I want to come back to that but back to the question in the sense of like, how do we remind ourselves to ask ourselves these questions about Personal Agility?

Maria Matarelli 16:43

Yeah, so we always we often talk about how there’s often too much to do and not enough time to do it. And so, one of the things that’s really powerful about Personal Agility is that, instead of just looking at limiting your work in progress, we want to look at limiting the number of initiatives in progress. And so, that’s where that question, what really matters comes into play and it’s so powerful. Because if you aren’t just going along with the flow, we often just get you know, blown off course and we use this powerful metaphor of life is the ocean. And if you are the captain of your ship, then you try to get to a destination, let’s say it’s Jamaica, well there could winds, there could be a heavy current, there could be other things that delay you from getting to that destination. And so, we use this metaphor as a powerful reminder to think about, hey, am I on my way to Jamaica?

Is there anything that I’ve done that has blown me off course or that maybe I haven’t even noticed? And so with Personal Agility, being this kind of framework, that reminding you to get back on course, it really is there to reflect back to you? What are your actual actions compared to what it is that you say is important? And so like, if you go 2, 3, 4 weeks and you say health and fitness is the number one thing but you haven’t done anything for that, interesting? Now, I have the opportunity to reflect and say, is it that I just haven’t gotten around to it? And I need to figure out a better way to set myself up for success or have more accountability or is it really not that important to me? And should I reevaluate what really matters? And so, you know, it really is a kind of framework that reflects back to you as I think the navigation metaphor is one of those things that helps.

The powerful question of what really matters, helping us reset and you make sure that we are on the right track. And then, we talked about you know, even things like multitasking, the greater the number of initiatives that you’re working on at once, the less likely you are to make a mile of progress in any one area because you’ve only got an inch of progress in every area. And so, we remind people through some of these concepts that hey, you know, you are the captain of your ship, you get to choose, you are plotting the course. And if you’re off course, we invite you to pause, reflect on that and make that decision. Do you want to change where the course is going or want to get back onto that course?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:08

Yeah. No, I mean it’s really and I encourage people to, I don’t know, when is the book going to be out?

Maria Matarelli  19:16

I was looking at, I believe it’s going to be around the end of March, we’re publishing in the business agility Institute. So, it’s in final editing right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:23

Great. Well, just for me, like again, you know, as I said you know, I don’t promote, I just tell people how it is but it definitely helped me like you know, going back to my book in the sense. Like, I keep making excuses why I’m not writing and I keep saying it’s important but I’m not doing anything about it. And it made me think well, like?

Peter Stevens  19:46

This is the whole concept of the breadcrumb trail, if you don’t spend any time working on your book, when is it going to get written? Okay? And that’s how you can see, you know, and we’ve had these moments ourselves, where we say you know, it’s been a while since we’ve written it anything on the book? We still want to write the book. Yeah, we want to write the book or do we still care about you to make it? Yeah, where’s your, [cross-talking 20:07]?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:10

Well, that’s the thing and I think you can really, you’ll be able to relate to this. You know, I work with a lot of partners in a sense of you know, the teaching classes and things like that. And like, I’m giving up my dates and I’m putting out doing my own classes and I’m prioritizing that. And I keep saying, like well, I need more time to write a book, I need to be more and those are the breadcrumbs that you’re talking about in a sense. Like you know, so what I’ve started doing even like, you know, months ago, when I was thinking about you know, what I want to do is, I said like, I need to change in some way what I’m doing if I want to finish this book, right? And I think your book was a good reminder and almost helped me reset and almost refocus and remotivate myself to focus on what matters to me and which is, finishing that book.

Peter Stevens  21:06

I like that message.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:07

So it is, at least for me, it had an impact just as I went through. You also talked about five elements; purpose, celebration, choice, emergence and kindness. Could you maybe talk about those five elements a little bit and discuss that concept from Personal Agility system?

Peter Stevens  21:30

Okay. Well, let’s start with purpose. Okay, you know, purpose is kind of the what really matters question. And if we think back to that navigation metaphor, why are we doing this? Okay, Simon Sinek says, start with why, why are we doing this? Well, that ‘why’ is your destination, that’s Jamaica. Okay? And then, you know, how do we get to Jamaica? Well, we need to navigate okay, back before there was GPS, well, you would have the North Star, maybe the Orion’s belt and your clock and you know, by looking at the North Star and by looking when the sun went down or when Orion belt said, you can figure out where you are.

Okay and that lets you know and then you plot your course and you can, you know, make your way over the ocean. And so, that’s kind of the metaphor of Personal Agility is that, well, if you want to be somebody, if you want to achieve something, if there’s a purpose, you know, align your actions to what you know, what you want to do. So, you’ve always got purpose, it’s kind of giving you context for making decisions. Now, celebration is about being kind to yourself. Okay, so many people have an authority figure from their childhood or maybe from work, say you are a bad boy or whatever. And you know, and it’s interesting, when you get things done, ‘done’ is something you can celebrate, okay? So, what we try to do is encourage people to think about what are the things that they got done, you know, even if they’re little things on a week to week basis.

You know, and they could be like, celebrating time you spent with your partner or celebrating something you did, just because it makes you happy, okay? Because these can actually be you know, glue and cement that kind of holds you, it holds you together in difficult times. And you know, the other thing is, life happens a lot faster than you can change, sorry, life happens faster than you can plan it. Okay, so you’re going to get into a situation you know, if your son knocks on the door and has a skinned knee and needs some you know, doctoring and needs some, you know, love and attention? Obviously, you’re going to drop what you’re doing and deal with it because you know what else you got to do. So you know, and if your boss calls or your customer calls, it’s kind of the same thing. So obviously, things are going to be different than what you planned but you still got things done. And you’re always you know, kind of like what they say in the retrospectives, you’re always doing the best you can. So, you made the best decisions you could, celebrate what you got done. And it’s amazing, you know, by having an emphasis on celebration, you know, you’re just happier. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:06

Well, we talked about teams having like, in Scrum, you know, celebrate at the end. And like, I think it’s a motivational factor that’s tied to that purpose, like you said.

Peter Stevens  24:17

Absolutely. And one of the greatest things in Scrum is this concept of ‘done’, it’s really easy to celebrate stuff that’s done. Discussing stuff in progress is intensely painful, especially. So, you know, and that’s really informed, you know how I do Scrum is we say, hey, let’s concentrate, you know, let’s concentrate on getting things done. Let’s concentrate on having things to celebrate and that just makes the morale so much better.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:42

Yeah. It’s that reinforcing loop in a sense, like, I want more of this, right? It feels good in a sense. Let’s celebrate and let’s do some more of this stuff, so yeah.

Peter Stevens  24:52

Yeah, now choices about options, okay? And you know, there are all these things that you could do and it’s your boat and you’re the captain of the boat and you’re the owner of the boat and you get to decide where to go. So you know, choose, you know, it’s your time, valuable currency, you get to spend it once. But you can also be intentional about and that’s very often, you know, you talk to a lot of people about, well, why didn’t you write your book?

Or why didn’t you do this, they said, well I had to do this and I had to take care of the kids and I had to go to work and I had to earn money and I had to do all the things I had to do and that’s all true. It’s all true but you still have a choice about how you use your time, not every minute is dedicated to you know, whatever, you know. So, there’s a fine line between an explanation and an excuse, okay? And just by saying, I’m going to make the choice, I made a choice to attend to my son’ skin knee, that’s a choice, I did it, it was the right thing to do. And all of a sudden, you’ve got a different attitude. Okay? And again, you know, you sit up, your shoulders are out, you know, you feel like you’re in command of the situation. And you know, it’s a very different thing to be the captain of a boat in the storm with a passenger of a boat in a storm, very different experience. Okay? And if you don’t believe me, try sitting on the backseat of a motorcycle on the mountains.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:16

No, it definitely is. And you know, I know how, I recently was talking to a friend and first of all, it’s crazy how time flies but like having kids. And like, how that has changed my perspective and things and you know, having passengers versus, so that influences the purpose, that influences how you celebrate, that influences the choice. The Emergence is the next one, could you maybe talk about that?

Peter Stevens  26:43

Yeah, emergence is a fun one. This is something that’s really only emerged over time that we kind of realized. So if you go back to, well, maybe let’s start what is emergence, okay? Emergence is how individual things come together and interact with each other to form something bigger than themselves. Okay, so we can think of a group of people that come together to form a team, okay? You see this at the atomic level, you know, atoms come together to form molecules, molecules come together to form organic structures, organic structures make up DNA.

You know, they combined with other, you know, we got emergence everywhere. What’s interesting, what we discovered about Personal Agility, Personal Agility is not a process to follow, it’s a series of questions to ask. Now, the idea was you asked them, you’re set to yourself but you can also ask them to other people. And it turns out, if you ask clarifying questions, if you ask powerful questions, if you you know, really focus on surfacing information you know, rather than debating, all sorts of interesting things happen. Okay? So you know, by asking the right questions and this is where Canvas has come in and you know, what we’ve really discovered is that you can shape how a group of people come together, you can create alignment, so that this group of people become something bigger than themselves. Okay? And you know, if we go back to like, the circle close when I went back, I was looking at the Agile Manifesto recently, the first value; individuals and interactions.

I don’t know if the inventors I mean, they’re all very smart people. So maybe they thought of but you know, individuals interacting with each other, that’s the basis of emergence. Okay? And this is actually how Personal Agility becomes a leadership framework is, you know, is by thinking actively about how to do you know, how to guide and shape the emergence of your organization. So it’s like, one very powerful example of this is Netflix, you know, they have their corporate culture, it was quite revolutionary when it came out. How do you deal with expense reports? How do you replace the manager who’s controlling your expense reports to make sure the money is well spent? They had a very simple rule, spend the money, expand company money as if it were your own, they’re guiding the interaction, okay? And by having the simple rule of engagement, okay, so we do a lot with that, we start with some very simple ones. Like, listen before you talk, ask before you tell and when you ask, ask a clarifying question. All of a sudden, you give these guidance and that just shapes the behavior and really amazing things happen when you can shape the behavior. This gives you the tools to create alignment, that’s kind of the holy grail of you know, organizations in a big company or organizing a big company.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:30

It is interesting and I think, you know, maybe it’s for separate discussion but emergency, you know, in general, I think alluded to it but there are some guardrails, when you have any type of you know, system. So, there are some boundaries to every you know, system and I think emergence like, you know, in this instance, the boundaries are like, you know, your future goes back to that question, you know, what really matters? And you’re working emergence within those boundaries of what really matters, it’s not, you know, emergence, you know, uncontrolled but in a sense or unfocused, it’s really within that question of you know, how are things emerging within what matters to me?

Peter Stevens  30:21

Having this what, you know, this concept of what really matters, okay, you know, having a clear goal. This enables the organization to focus on something and if you’re doing something entrepreneurial, if you’re trying to you know, make a dent in the universe, you know, having this clear goal, you know? If I were working in SpaceX, I would expect the key question at SpaceX to be something like, how does this help us get to Mars? And you know, all of us say, you got this one question and all of a sudden, you’ve got this lens to say, is what we’re doing productive or not. Okay? And so, I think that there’s a lot of, you know, power in clarity of purpose. There’s a lot of clarity in simple rules of engagement. I had a bit of an ‘aha moment’ about this couple weeks ago, you know, one of the classic examples is, you know, flocks of birds. Okay? And you know, there’s a nice video from course design, which explains, you know, how a vergence works and they talk about you know, how does a flock of birds stay together?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:20

Simple rules, right?

Peter Stevens  31:24

Pretty simple rules, fly in the general direction of the bird next to you, don’t get too close to the bird next to you, don’t get too far away from the bird next year. Okay? Rules, keep the flock together. Okay? Now, it turns out, if you look at how say, an organization works with its management, you see those same three rules in place. Okay, you know the management is kind of like, the structure that’s kind of all moving together, holding itself together, don’t get too close to the guy next to you, don’t get too far away and kind of keep moving in the same general direction. This makes a lot of sense.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:57

It does, just that in some organizations, the guardrails are too strict in a sense where that allow for bigger emergence. What about kindness? The kindness is the fifth element.

Peter Stevens  32:15

Maria, you want to take kindness?

Maria Matarelli  32:17

Yeah, so this is where we realize that you know, with a lot of different work systems, there can be, did you get it done or did you not get it done, right? And that feeling of a failure if you don’t complete and so we really look at the Personal Agility system as a kind of framework, it’s there to remind you what you said was important, which you may or may not have done. And you know, even if you didn’t get all of the things done that you had planned for the week, that’s okay.

Look at what did you get done, we still want to celebrate what was achieved, even if it wasn’t planned and then this is the opportunity to choose, right? And so, if you’re not satisfied with the things that you did last week, you don’t want to carbon copy that to the next week but we get to choose differently and we get to choose differently every single week. And so, it really is a kind of framework, just reminding you what you said was important, bringing you back to those things that really matter. And then giving you the option to say, do I want to continue going, you know, toward this North star, these things I said that matter? Or do I want to actually made a conscious decision to change that? And so it’s not supposed to be, did I get everything done or not type of approach? It’s, well hey, let me look at what the reality is of the situation and you know, understanding why did that happen?

What are the other factors or forces in my life that are pulling me in different directions? Are these the things on my forces map, are these other things to consider? And so really, it’s there to reflect back to you as a mirror and we have the problem solving questions where it’s like, hey, why did I not get this done? Is this still important to me? What are possibilities of things I could do toward this? And then we have an opportunity to reset every single week?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:59

Yeah and like another thing that made me think about and kind of Maria, you said it in the beginning that it’s a coaching framework, right? And one of the things with coaching is that, you can’t coach somebody that doesn’t want to be coached, right? So in this instance, you know, the book is really, you know, for those people, I guess that are serious about asking these questions and staying on top of it. And you know, to come back to what I was saying in like, my example is like, well you know, how serious do I want to take these questions?

As far as how serious do I want to take my question of what really matters to me? Because ultimately, if I don’t take that question seriously, then I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and probably good or bad. You know, I don’t have a necessarily a framework for improving, it’s just like more reactive and I think you know, with this framework, it’s more like, it gives you a very flexible coaching way to a powerful way to ask these questions and to weekly address them. So I think that in my opinion, that’s really what’s powerful about it is that, you have a framework here for yourself, if you truly want to improve. And you’re serious about it, in my opinion, you have it there, it’s just you know, do I want to do it or not is a personal choice, right?

Maria Matarelli  35:34

And this is one of those things where I see you get out of it, what you put into it, right even more so with the Personal Agility system. If you are looking at your priorities map on a regular basis throughout the week, the more that you add to your priorities map, the more insights that you have, when you create your alignment compass and say, am I aligned with the things that I thought that I wanted. And so, it’s really a powerful reflection back and so yeah, I mean, it’s being able to take that step that like, that pause that we’ve talked about like, take that step back and really reflect. And if we don’t pause, we will absolutely most likely be reactive in life because there’s so many other things happening and so many things that can get us driven off course. And one thing that has kind of become like, more of a thing to take note of is, there’s some things you can do to set yourself up for success, such as your environment that you’re in and the people around you. And you are more likely to stay on track with your goals when you’re around more like minded people that have similar goals.

Even just health, for example, if you have friends that eat whatever they want and order food from whatever restaurant, it’s only a matter of time before you’re smashing a pizza next to them, right, versus friends that are often ordering healthy food or wanting to go out and do something outside or go running or do something active. You’re most likely then going to be doing that with them and so there’s other things that we can do when we take that step back to look at what are the other factors that might be influencing my ability to stay on track with the things I say are important. And then we can make those conscious decisions and those choices, do I want to put myself in that position or in that situation, where I may or may not make the choice that’s going to serve me best? And so, it really can start to be very powerful when you take that big step back and look at that bigger picture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:26

Yeah, I mean it really is and I couldn’t agree more like, you know? I remember like coming to United States and my parents would, the only thing that they worried about is who I hanged out with, not what I did, just who I hanged out with. And I can see like, you know, with some of my friends that, you know, ended up in jail versus and like, why my parents were specific about you know, like, they knew, I guess as parents, you know? So, I think that that definitely, at least resonates with me, too. Maybe, you know, to come back, you know, you talk about your three cases. Sharon, Sarah and Pete, could you maybe describe, these are real people that went through this, you know, maybe pick one of them and describe or tell us their story, how they use Personal Agility? In a sense, answer their question, what really matters to me and align to that question?

Maria Matarelli  38:28

Yeah, you know, I think Sharon was one of the first people that sort of kicked off. Peter and I are starting to gather case studies, I met her here in the Tampa, Florida area. And I actually got into the backseat of her Uber, she was driving for Uber and she was working five jobs, was barely getting by, barely able to cover her rent. We started talking, I had just flown in and arrived at the airport, just give me a ride home. And as we were talking, she was telling me about what she did and she had just started, she wanted to be a private chef.

She wanted to have her own cooking show on TV and she had these big dreams but had no real idea how to go about it. And as she’s talking, I was like, man I feel like I could help her and I’m like, I don’t know if I should offer or not. And by the time that she dropped me off at my place, I said, you know what, why don’t you come over to my place on Friday. It was three days later, I said, I’ll help you shoot a cooking show, we can create a YouTube channel and that’ll create your portfolio. I just want to eat the food for free and so that’s how it started. I got a free private chef, I started working with Sharon on you know, getting out there more with what she really wanted to do, which wasn’t driving Uber, which wasn’t doing all these other odd jobs. It was really being able to step into her gift of being able to cook and by the time that we launched a cooking show.

You know the holidays came around and she started doing catering, she got so busy that we didn’t really even have time to shoot the cooking show anymore. And she started asking me all these business questions because she also said, she had this goal of losing a bunch of weight. She was over 300 pounds when I met her then I was like, well hey, let’s work out together. So, we started going to the gym together and she’d always start asking me these business questions, I was like Sharon, you know, this is what I do for a living, right, consulting? Like, you know, I could really help you if we really sat down and looked at this properly and I actually started teaching her Personal Agility. And one of the things that emerged over time was, I feel like I could have taught her agile and she could have done okay in business with that. However, there were so many roadblocks in her life, in her personal life, that I don’t think she would have gotten the same results, had it just been here’s a framework or methodology on how to get the business work done. There was a lot of internal healing and trauma that she had to overcome from years of being in relationships where she was physically abused, sexually abused, being put down, never had anyone told her that they believed in her, ever, never had anyone tell her they were proud of her, not having anyone that was supportive, that actually thought that she could do what she believed and dream that she could do. And so, as I started working with Sharon, within the first year, she brought in over six figures, she went from being negative in her bank account with over $700 of insufficient funds fees to clearing over $20,000 in a month. And then, she went on to land a six figure client where she’s now a private chef for a billionaire. And so, it’s like, look at what’s possible with absolutely possible, when you know what really matters, she actually took post it notes, put them on the dashboard of her car because she was driving Uber of what really matters.

So, she put them every single day and then we started meeting every week and going through it and doing the celebrate and choose event. And then she and I realized we both hadn’t gotten as much progress toward our health and fitness goals is we wanted, even though they were the number one thing on our priorities map. So, then Sharon came up with an innovation on the Personal Agility system and she invited me and another friend of ours to do a shared priorities map together for just health and fitness. Sharon lost over 55 pounds, I lost over 15 and our friend Jen lost, I believe, over 25 or 30. And so, what we realized was, this is so incredibly powerful, much more than just getting work done, getting things accomplished. It actually goes so much deeper when you ask what really matters. And you go deeper into, you know, what are the real reasons that I’m not getting this progress. And Peter and I write in the book about procrastination, distractions, all the things that could sneak up that get in the way that you don’t consciously realize. And a lot of times what we see, especially with adults is it’s putting everybody in front of yourself, especially those with kids and it’s okay to care about your family and your kids. However, if you’re not at your best, how can you be at your best for everyone else, if you’re always doing everything for everyone else.

So, it’s okay to put yourself first, your dreams first and what actually ended up happening was Sharon had several children that were grown in their 30s, that still relied on her heavily, they are now seeing by her example, they’re taking more responsibility. They’re getting their lives more in order, instead of her doing it all for them. They’re seeing her lead by example, by watching her follow her dream.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:18

Exactly and it’s part of, there’s so much stuff in a book that, like you mentioned, you know, some of the things that you know, distract us and like, I really do encourage people, whoever’s listening to you know, read the book. And also, another thing that I haven’t thought about but I think you just gave me an idea is like having somebody else actually go through this process with you. And the idea of you know, start with yourself, you talked about in the book about agile, how to be agile executive and how to be an agile organization.

But I think, you know, we have to start with ourselves before we start working on our businesses and our organizations. We do have a little bit of time here and I wanted to, I accidentally stumble up on Personal Agility Institute as I was looking for questions and things to ask you, could you maybe talk about just you know, where people can find more information. I’ll update the information in the description so they can get to those links also, when the book becomes available but what else? You know, for closing here, what would you like to share with the audience? And there’s plenty of templates, resources that I saw that you have, so?

Peter Stevens  44:39

Yeah, so one place to go, a couple of things you can, you know, find on the Personal Agility Institute website, the first is that you know, if you’re a registered user, which you can do for free, we have a whole dashboard full of tools. You know, our tools are all creative commons and they’re available so that you can start to you know, either in printed form or electronic forum, we got a Trello template, you know? There are all these things that you can download and get access to, there’s also the guide to Personal Agility, which you can get for free, you know, which is kind of the basics of how it works.

The next thing, you know, you notice correctly that most of our case studies, they had a coach involved. Okay, now there might be a little bit of self selection here going on but I actually think that this is a pattern because you know, having a coach, you know, having someone to ask you the questions, sometimes it’s just a celebration partner, you know? So like, I’ve been doing this with my wife for quite some time now and you know, we really find that just helping each other focus and knowing what’s going on in the week is just great for our stress. You know, lowering our stress and preventing conflict and recognizing issues early so that we can, you know, find solutions before they can become critical. So one thing, which I would suggest is to reach out to an ambassador, okay? You know, we’ve got 30 ambassadors or so around the world, you know, all of them are authorized to teach you Personal Agility in a coaching context. Some of them are authorized to offer courses, although right now we’re focusing more on the coaching aspect because that’s where the really awesome transformational stories come from. And you know, so I would say that these are probably you know, the Personal Agility Institute website is the place to start. You know, there are free tools, there are coaches and they’re also of course offerings that you can sign up for. Did I miss anything, Maria?

Maria Matarelli  46:33

Yeah, you know that’s really it, Peter. I think, you know, check out the body of knowledge, read through the case studies, the results that people have gotten are absolutely incredible. And so, you know, after Peter actually was in the US a few years ago and Sharon was like, I’d like to cook you dinner. And he’s all quiet like, I just want to say thank you to you and Maria for Personal Agility, it has completely changed my life. And that’s where we got the idea to start documenting more and more case studies and we suspected that we were on to something, we started using Personal Agility and sharing with others, what has emerged that I think really impressed and amazed me was the application in the business context.

Yes, it works for the individual but it also works so incredibly well, as far as how it can be applied when you really focus on what really matters in the business context, rather than 40 initiatives, can we ask what really matters and actually get the top, the best ones, the most revenue generating ones. And we have stories from people that have almost gone bankrupt to turning their company around and being in the green today, consultants completing 24% of projects on time to over 90% of projects completed on time. A company that launched during the pandemic and hit a $35 million valuation and completed a three year roadmap in one year’s time. And so, the stories, the case studies that you can see, you know, our ambassadors represent across over more than 10 countries. So, you know, being able to reach out to someone in your area, see the stories of what’s worked. And really, we encourage people to start to ask these powerful questions to themselves, of what really matters and look at ways to get started themselves.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:12

Yeah, you know, you just made me think about you can use it, you know, with teams and align personal goals of individuals with teams and there’s so much that you can do. Well, I do want to you know, at some point, have you come back because I feel like we could have discussed this, you know, for how long but I just wanted to kind of I was, as I told you motivated by going through the book and just you know, getting my kind of thoughts together and asking that what matters to me? So if you’re open, I’ll definitely maybe, you know, once the book is out, we can talk again and maybe, you know, dive into someone, maybe you can show me some of the tools. Or maybe we can do one of those, like, Ask Me Anything with people but I definitely would like to explore more because I think there’s a lot that we didn’t discuss and that we could actually show to people and you know, maybe share with people.

Maria Matarelli  49:06

Yeah, I would love that, that would be great.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:10

All right. Thank you, anything? What would you like to leave us with, maybe just a couple of thoughts, anything for now?

Maria Matarelli  49:18

What I would say is, you know, for people, if everything matters then nothing matters. And that’s a phrase that Peter and I say all the time because there are so many things happening in life and we’re getting hit left and right. It’s hard to not be reactive and I think that sometimes people need to be reminded that you are the captain of your ship. And you do get to choose, you can set boundaries, you can let people know how to treat you and so I believe that we’re in more control than we think sometimes, even though we think we’re getting like whisked away by our schedule. And so, I just really want to encourage people to think about you know, what really matters and encourage them to take that time to just pause and reflect because it can really help you re-shift your focus and it’s completely transformed my life. And the way that I look at everything that I do in a positive way and it’s not just about the achievement, it’s about the joy and fulfillment at the end of the day. And so, can we focus more on that and around gratitudes and can we focus more on how can I do more things that make me happy? Because then, most everything else will fall into place after you know that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:31

Yeah. No, that’s a great message and what about from you Peter, from your standpoint?

Peter Stevens  50:37

I was kind of thinking about this, I got to think about what really matters, my God, there’s so much I got to do. Breathe, you’re doing just fine and you’ll figure it out. Okay? You might figure it out by, you know, really thinking about it. You might figure it out, I mean in my case, I didn’t really think about it, it was just the question was there in front of me and then one day, bingo, I knew. Okay? So, you know, if you don’t find the answer to that question right away, don’t worry about it. You know, just look at how you spend your time, look at how you want to spend your time, look at how you end up spending your time, you know? And you’ll start to see you know, pieces will start to fall in place, okay? And it’s an iterative process and it’s okay, if you don’t get the right answer on the first try, you know, navigation and the navigation is all about what you’re going to not where you’re coming from. Okay? And you know, once you figure it out, then things will snap into place.

Jurgen Appelo

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:38

All right, we’re all going to thank you for taking the time and I’ve only done a couple of these, ask me anything sessions. So this is the first time that I’m using this tool for questions. So the idea and the goal of this session is just for audience to ask Jurgen the questions that you might have. As I said, I’ve had opportunity to have Jurgen on my podcast agile to agility where asked him a lot of questions I had for him by thought would be fun for others, to create a platform for others to ask questions. So Jurgen, let’s start with the first one. What is the unFIX model?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo   01:19

Yeah, well, first thanks for the invite Miljan and I appreciate that I love experiments. So if the tool doesn’t work as well as we expect it, doesn’t matter. It’s is great to try things out. What is the unFIX model? Yeah, well, let me let me begin. I haven’t explained it like that as I’m doing now. But that’s an experiment as well. With an analogy when I was young, I love Lego and my brother love Playmobil. I don’t know if other people had that similar fight in their families when they were young. I collected Legos and my brother had all these Playmobil stuff and I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why he liked it. Because you couldn’t build anything with Playmobil. It was all fixed. You got your castle, it was completed already and then you could just move your fingers in an hour. I thought that was dull, that was boring. I prefer Lego blocks. Where there were elementary pieces and I couldn’t build anything I wanted with my Lego, I could build hospital and airplanes and whatever with the same blocks.

And for me, that’s the analogy that that I use, I could use to describe my love-hate relationship with frameworks, agile scaling frameworks, because I think they are like Playmobil and not like Lego, because they come with fully finished pictures of okay, well, this is what your organization is going to look like once we are finished with the Agile transformation. And there’s a lot of good stuff in there. As I’ve always said in many talks over the last years, there’s just common sense good practices in there but the way they are collected and joined together, it feels like it’s rigid. That’s the whole idea of framework, it’s in the word itself, is this iron harness, basically. So that’s why I would like to try something myself, keep the good stuff, good patterns, good ideas, but then use the Lego metaphor analogy, keep them as building blocks and then you can build any organizational structure with it. So I have a couple of building blocks like the value stream team. Anyone knows what that is, Scrum teams, Kanban team but also the facilitation crew that’s like a team of agile coaches, but also the platform crew which is something that does is not mentioned in some other frameworks, but it is a common pattern, it comes up in team topologies for example, but then also a few things that I did not see in Agile, the

Agile scaling framework that we do have, but they are good patterns that I picked from other sources like, give the managers a place that they can recognize. The governance crew, it is not there and safe, it is not there unless it is not there in many of the other frameworks. By design, they try to say okay, well that’s not describe management and I think that is a problem. You need to show the managers where they go, they go over here and stay out of everything else. That’s the good pattern. You have your own little box there and keep the rest self-organized. And I have the acquisition crew and experience crew, which is an idea that I have from organization design, where they call this the front back model with a focus on experience, because product is still a sub optimization. I could talk about that later if you want. But everything we do in the Agile world is still about product, product, product. Product ownership, product management, product backlog, product roadmap.

Well, guess what? The product is just one part of the whole customer experience. And there are many parts in the organization also with touchpoints, with customers that are not product but that are logistics or micro team or service. So that’s why organization designers say you need to have something that covers all of that, not just the product, but everything. And I have that on the customer side, and on the supplier side. So I offer a couple of new things, I think that are not in safe for agile scaling frameworks such as safe and less and the others. And the way I tried to offer it is more like Lego instead of playing [unsure word 06:11] . Or like these are building blocks, you can recombine them in any way you want. And even if you only have a value stream crew, well, great. That’s the starting point, that satisfies the unFIX model. That’s a first step, then you could add Lego, other Lego blocks later. So that’s the idea of unFIX, I tried to add some patterns that are, do not yet exist or have not been embraced in other agile frameworks. And the way I presented is more modular, at least that’s my intention.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:41

So maybe to break because I think this is really important than I know, at least when I looked at this and other people have said, How’s this any different? I think to me, the biggest difference here is a couple of things. You talk about patterns, and all of the other frameworks, if you look at save, less, and name it are based on patterns. But I think a lot of the patterns are embedded into practices, and people don’t fully understand those. And they’re more, when it comes to these patterns, they’re embedded in the framework to a point where it’s hard for people to understand how to decouple those patterns if you need to change the context, the way that what I see here, at least with unFIX model is that what you’ve done is you create a structure, and you have these patterns but it’s a lot less stricter than any of the frameworks. In a sense, you’ve created some guidelines and guardrails and you’ve kind of defined these aspects of value streams, governance and these labels, but it’s still loosely kind of loose structure or loose model where it allows for contextualization. So you can contextualize this, and then add to it which I don’t think especially with safe and like you said, there are a lot of good stuff, but there’s too much stuff in it where people don’t fully understand how to contextualize. Do you see it that way or am I miss reading?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  08:21

Yeah, I think back of that big box of Lego that I had, that was a big box of options that I had as a kid, you don’t need a platform crew maybe, it’s an option. You don’t need forums, it’s an option. You don’t need an experienced crew. But hey, you might want to think about it. You probably need a governance crew, because most organizations have management teams. But hey, if you can do without it, good luck trying. So yeah, that’s how I would like to offer it. And of course, I show a picture here as an example. And then some people say, hey, this looks complicated. Well, then you have not read my blog post because this is just an example. You don’t look at one big statue that was created with Lego and then say, hey, Lego looks complicated.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:17

It’s the possibilities, you showed in one of the structures.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  09:22

Legos are actually just very simple. But if I make a big thing out of Lego, it doesn’t mean that Lego itself is complicated. They just mean you can make complicated things with Lego for sure. And you could also make very complicated organizations with unFIX and I’m pretty sure. It’s a first version of the box of components. And I’m sure I’m going to iterate on this and find some new patterns that we’re going to add over time. But I want it to be mainly descriptive and not prescriptive. Like if you look at the Scaled Agile Framework, it is in a certain ways quite prescriptive in the iterations, the cadence, the iteration planning and all that process stuff is quite prescriptive. I try to stay away from that. I would like to have options with suggestions like, well, this option works in this context, but you might want to consider this one in another context. Let’s see if that works. How far we get.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:24

Yeah, great. So I don’t know like, I’ll open it up. As I said, we’re experimenting here. So I’ll open it up. We’re on the first question here. What is the unFIX model? So does anybody have any follow up questions? There’s at least one follow up questions on here. But anybody else want to ask anything related to the unFIX model? Don’t be shy. Well, what is that video with the first follower and just need one. How would the dancing guide [inaudible 11:01] we just need the one person to start. So I’m sure you guys have questions.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  11:18

Otherwise, we pick from the list.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:32

All right, well, let’s again, feel free to jump in. But maybe Jurgen, going back to this, like you said, and it resonated with me too. About, like, if we look at the frameworks last 10 years, if you look at any of the frameworks, if you look at the success of those frameworks, we have a lot of case studies but they’re mostly selling points and specific time you said that, it’s time to look at these patterns or to a look at scaling in a different way or through a different lens. And you’re not the first one that’s saying that, I think everybody’s saying the current frameworks and all of this is not working, we need something that can be contextualized to each client’s situation at any given time. As the organization’s will evolve and change. You work with a lot of clients, you see a lot of things, what triggered your idea for okay, we get to start this discussion around something new, something double evolved, but what we currently have and provide us options to our clients is not working?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  12:51

Well, I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, I spoke with a couple of people or coaches, consultants who do Scaled Agile Framework consultancy, for example, one of them literally said to me, the only reason I do it is because there’s nothing better out there. But I agree with all the criticism on it. And then I thought that is so sad. If that’s the best we have, then we need to do better somehow. So I at least try with my contribution to start again and do something better. And hey, I leave it to the audience and to the public to decide whether indeed, I am doing better or not. I just got started, save started 15 years ago or something. So they have quite a headway. I mean, I’m by far not covering everything that saved us. And I don’t even think I want to. But there are reasons for also addressing management and HR and marketing and finance, etc. Because most frameworks are just framing to only cover the product. And then as further as they say, well, we leave that to others. And I think that’s a missed opportunity. We need to be a little bit more holistic in how we approach things.

How the first thing I did was I said, okay, let’s give management a place that they can recognize. This is why we need to be in the governance crew. That’s the management team basically. And they need to stay out of everything else, there has needs to be a self-organizing base or tribe, whatever you would like to call it. And then a couple of things came together. As I said, I also was inspired by organization design, because guess what, we do not invent everything in the Agile community. Back in the days when Henrik Nyberg and [unsure name 14:53] Everson came up with the Spotify model, which is actually just a matrix organization. The organization design world had already figured out and matrix organizations don’t really work well. They already knew. And then we started introducing a matrix picture. In our community, I mean, isn’t that a little bit weird? Maybe we should learn from others what they had already discovered before trying to introduce something that was already discredited in the community. So I tried to be inspired by others, including organization design and design thinking, etc. The jobs to be done community, which has great insights on customer experience far beyond the product.

And I mean as an example, look at large scale scrum or less. They call their teams, feature teams. I think that’s such a missed opportunity. As Kathy Sherif, the famous product designer said, your goal is not to create awesome features. Your goal is to make awesome users, make the people, make users and customers feel awesome about themselves. And your product with its features is just a means to getting there. But I think and that’s typical for the Agile world with our product obsession basically, and we focus on the product and the features and yeah, there’s some people there saying, well, we should talk about value. I agree. But they call them feature teams. They didn’t call them value teams, why not? Because that’s what they’re supposed to do, right? They’re supposed to offer value. That’s why I call them value stream crew, not feature crew, you’re not making features, you’re delivering value, that’s your job. You’re adding to the customer experience. And that suggestion comes from the jobs to be done community and design thinking among others. So there’s plenty of wisdom out there beyond the Agile world. And we should embrace that and learn how to do better with our scaling frameworks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:22

Great. Okay, so let’s maybe look a couple of these. So next one here is, are you applying unFIXmodeling in any firms? So is anybody actually using this? Do you have clients that have tried to apply some of these patterns in the model?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  17:43

That’s a question that obviously comes up all the time. Let’s be clear, the picture is one month old. So it is too early to say, are you applying this already? I depend on organizations that say yeah, what you have drawn looks exactly what we are doing. Only we use different words and different names. Actually, this week, the first case study will be published that a company in Germany has written and I have reviewed it, they said for years, they’ve already done basically what I suggest with the unFIX model only unfixed never existed. And now they say, oh, this is so cool. You basically drawn a picture of what we have already had to discover the painful way. We wish it was available earlier. So I was happy with that because it means that we know how the first case study and I’m also talking with other companies to discuss what they’re doing and matching that with this picture. And as I said, all the patterns are common sense patterns, many organizations have platform crews, many organizations have facilitation groups, many of them have capability groups, there’s just I cannot simply mention now one specific company that does all this in this picture because this picture is new.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:14

Well, I don’t think it’ll be the picture. So it’s interesting what you say. So on my podcast I’ve interviewed you, I’ve interviewed Dean, I’ve interviewed the people from discipline agile, I’ve talked to people from less, right? And I’ve talked to people that have been around for a long time. And everybody says the same thing. Like whatever framework you do, you need to contextualize it and adopt it to your own needs. It’s almost like here’s a recipe. Some recipes are more detailed than others but if you don’t have all the ingredients, you have to contextualize it, right? That’s what everybody said even Dean himself, like from safe said, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to mess it up in a sense, like safe is just collection of patterns and things that he’s put together. Is just that it looks like a very delicious recipe that my organization can use and people use it blindly. And I think what I see here with your kind of example recipe, first of all, you’re not saying, here’s the recipe or saying, here’s a potential cake, what cake will look like and here’s the recipe for it. But you need to learn what type of cake you’re building. And here are some patterns that you can use and ideas to build your cake. And I think that’s kind of wrong, right? In the sense that it’s not prescriptive. It’s just an example.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 20:35

Yeah, to use that analogy, which is also a nice one, I don’t even think it’s a recipe. It’s more like I offer the ingredients.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:42

That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 20:44

Is your job to make the recipes indeed. So that’s maybe the difference with the other ones that are in more like recipes instead of ingredient, then you have to sort of reverse engineer, what are the ingredients actually in this recipe? Well, I offered just the ingredients and not so much the recipe. So that’s a little bit of a different take. And I understand that Dean and others say, well, you need to be inspired by and modify according to context for sure. But safe says you’re not doing safe if you don’t have an agile release train with a cadence. Well, that sort of limits your options significantly because that does not apply to many organizations. Take a games company, I was at Rovio, in Helsinki, famous for Angry Birds and many other games, they would not be able to do safe over there, that makes no sense at all.

Because every team has a different game, that they are responsible for, the release completely independently. Actually, the teams compete with each other because every game competes for the same eyeballs, you can only play this one game at a time. So those products are all competitors within the same company, you cannot manage that with safe, that makes no sense. You don’t do a PI planning for all those for all those teams, that does not apply there. But you can perfectly paint that with unFIX, you would have a fully segregated base in that case because I described four different types of basis, where safe would be like the fully integrated base, all the teams work together on one product that is released at the touch of a button, perhaps. But all those teams are part of that same product creation endeavor. And that’s just one kind of organization, there are many others where the safe assumptions are not applicable.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:57

So the key message is I guess you’re going to have to based on ingredients that you have, you’re going to come up with your own framework. And that’s what we need to do in organizations rather. It’s good to I think one of the things that stood out talking to the different people on my podcast, as well as outside is that it helps to have a base, it helps to have some type of structure to start with and then evolve it but try to keep that lightly.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  23:23

Yeah. So if I may have finished that question are you applying unFIX in any firm? Yes and no, the patterns individually, they are well known patterns, is the collection that is new so we are now at the point where people say okay, well, this looks like a great idea. Let’s start implementing or let’s start trying this. I have heard this dozens of times already in the last two three weeks. Great. So I hope people are going to let me know what they have tried using this picture instead of other toolbox, but we need to await those results.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:00

Or at least what we can do is start having the conversation about these things. Great. All right, I know Mia has a question in chat, which I’ll either add or address. But let’s go to the ones that we have here. So the next question down is which practices you see as foundational to be applied with the unFIX model?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  24:24

Right. Well, thank you Marcelo for asking, I think the base, you see the word at the very top, at the very bottom, sorry, that’s the one and that’s the idea and basically only the Spotify model has done that, they call it a try. It is the place for a sense of belonging. It is the place where you feel at home that is not addressed in safe or less or any of the others that I have found, they’re all product groups, they’re all mechanisms for making a product. But where do people feel at home? That’s a different thing. So for example, if you look at this base picture and the yellow horizontal bands, if those yellow ones are individual products, this could be three less implementations, three separate less implementation, because they are three different products with their own product manager. But where do these people feel at home? Where’s their sense of belonging?

That’s the base. There’s the tribe in the Spotify model. And I think that’s more important than what product are you building, at least for employees because people do not leave organizations, they don’t quit their jobs because of a process framework or whatever, they quit their jobs because they lack a sense of belonging, lack a sense of recognition. And I shared a couple of times example of myself, I was at a company 20 years ago working as a software engineer. And it was a typical consultancy company the kind that where they rent out your brain to the highest bidder, right? So my brain was rented out to some customer, I was with three other guys and I love my team, we had a really cool team. And that was basically my home, for me my base that was the only the team, I didn’t care whatsoever about the company and nothing at all. And then within a year I quit, I went somewhere else, because the company had done absolutely nothing to make me feel that I belonged to something that was larger than just those three people that I happen to be working with on that project, zero.

And that’s a big mistake. If you do not create a sense of belonging. So I think that supersedes the products that people are working on, of course, they need to create value for customers. But why would they work at your company in the first place? That’s where it begins, that’s the employee experience. So it’s not only customer experience, but also the employee experience, for me that’s the X in unFIX, is the experience in general for everyone involved, the customer and the employee. And for the employee, that means you want to belong, there’s not just diversity and inclusion, belonging is the next step. So that is for me foundational. And once you have your base, then you could have a self-organizing group of people who work on fantastic projects and products and whatnot.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:52

Right. Is there any other foundational besides the base that you would say?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  27:59

Well, I would say the obvious one is value streams. But I don’t think I have to explain that to anyone on this call. I mean, that’s your basic scrum, Kanban team or whatever method you would like to use or doesn’t matter to me. Just offer value to your customers. And I happen to have a weak spot for the role of managers. I mean, I wrote whole books on that topic. And so I see having a place for managers, as I said earlier, also as a very important thing, because let’s face it safe and less and other frameworks just specifically do not describe where the managers go. And by not doing that, they seem to make it easier for themselves because they can say well, you don’t need to change any management relationships when you enter to safe or less, but then guess what, you will have a matrix organization creeping in through the back door, that will be the result if you don’t fix that and the organization design community has already said try not to do that. Because the result of matrix organizations as they found out is that things get escalated more often to higher management, because different people on teams have different managers and those managers have different managers and then things can bubble up far more often. Is like an uncaught exception in software development language, it is uncaught, it bubbles up the chain. And the interesting side effect is that basically you get a more centralized organization because more problems are bubbled up to higher management layers. That is the result of a matrix organization as they found out in organization design in practice.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:08

So maybe this is tied to a question that Mia asked in the chat, which I think you answered it, but I don’t know if you want to add anything to it. How does that fix prevent the organization from having a lot of hierarchy? I think you could expand on that.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  30:25

Sure. So as I said, I try not to be too prescriptive, but I am prescriptive in the sense that your base has a management team, I call that the governance crew. And it has managers nowhere else, that is prescriptive, there are no managers allowed on the validation crews, like you don’t send managers on airplanes with the stewards and stewardesses, right? They stay at home. They don’t go with them on the journey, you don’t need that. So there’s no managers anywhere except in the governance crew. So it’s not allowed to create middle management basically with this model. And then what happens above the base, well, that is undefined at this moment, I am very inspired by higher for example, I’ve been at higher Chinese company, the biggest producer of household appliances in the world. And very famous company for the management practices, they basically have 4000 basis in a self-big, self-organizing network, where they collaborate and compete with each other, and they practically have no management above that. Well, that is super inspiring. I spoke with the CEO, he wrote the foreword for the Chinese translation of my book management [unsure word 31:57] . And that would be like the ideal, you have this pool of bases that collaborate, compete, coordinate with each other in an ecosystem, a market basically. And each base has a management team. That’s it. But I do recognize probably you will begin in a traditional organization with existing management layers. Okay, cool. That’s your starting point, you would like to take a chunk of that organization and turn that into a base as I described with my Lego box of options. And if you have a successful implementation there, you remove middle management in that part, you do the same elsewhere. And if you do that, well, you will see the amount of management shrinking. Fingers crossed. That’s the idea behind it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:57

Great, thank you. So there’s couple more questions in the chat. But I want to go back for the ones that people put in here. So let’s see here, this was just said, yeah, let’s discuss these and then we have about 20 minutes left, how would you suggest to build that sense of belonging more effectively?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  33:24

Gosh, a good question. Julia. Well, I wrote a book called [unsure word 33:30] where I touched upon some of these things. I offered moving motivators at the time as a way to understand what motivates people. I now have a newer version basically called the 25 drives grid, a bit more extensive model of human motivators. Because as I always said, people are wired differently. Some people are motivated by beauty and others are motivated by influence or they’re motivated by friendship, etc. So it’s yeah, thanks for that. And I am personally motivated by curiosity, I love learning, I just want to run experiments and see what I can learn from that. That’s what I want to see in my job but if you recognize that the diversity of motivation among your employees and you somehow give them an opportunity to play with that to see that recognized in the jobs, you’ll have a good starting point for belonging but hey, management is an art, is not a science as far as I’m concerned. So it takes a lot of good feeling

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:51

And I appreciate maybe just to at least my thoughts on this, I think both unFIX model and this, it comes across as like I have no business partnership or anything with the Oregon, I really enjoy and appreciate what he has done for the community. But like, I really like how you package these things in a sense, like even the 25 drivers. This is understanding what motivates us as humans, you can use this with not just the work, but it’s about how do I better understand people? How do I better understand cultures? So like the way that you for instance, visualize this when I first saw a couple months ago, it was really kind of like, oh, thank you, thank God somebody did this, because I don’t have time, I probably wouldn’t be able to do it, like this. And I think it’s the same feeling that I had with the unFIX model. Like, thank God that somebody started discussing that we need to move away from these frameworks that are not working. And you’re not saying like, hey, this is exactly what you need to do. But the fact that somebody has brought it up and said, hey, let’s lift our heads up and see what else is possible.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  36:03

That’s my job Miljan, and that is what I hope to get paid for somehow, like I always say, I’m not a coach or consultant, because that allows me to do these things, I do totally understand that people who are with their feet in the mud on a daily basis, they don’t have time to do that modeling and thinking and endless reading, which is what I love to do. So I’m always like one step away from the real action. But that 30,000 feet level view allows me to do these things that are then useful for those who have to try and put some of those ideas into practice. So that’s exactly what I’m trying to do and what the value is that I’d like to offer. And I created 25 drives because I want to understand what motivates customers, as well as employees because moving motivators at the time was only focused on the employee relationship. And then I thought, okay, well, customers, they have other motivators and drives to use picture. So I needed a more holistic model for that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:11

You can use this, what motivates you significant [inaudible 37:15] . It doesn’t really matter in a sense. Great. Well, let’s address on these. I’m not sure how this is, it is ask me anything. So [unsure word 37:32] John , sorry, I’m going to pronounce your name correctly says, should we define focus time? I guess work focus time, say three hours or five hours while working in Corona timing.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  37:43

Yeah, I think it’s definitely worth a topic worth thinking about. And mainly, I understand for what I have experienced myself and also in a lot of what I’ve read, there is a much higher chance of burnout with online meetups etc. compared to being in an office. And hybrid working itself adds another stress level of not moving back and forth between home and between an office and figuring out where your stuff is and planning hot desks and everything, it adds to the cognitive load of human beings. And you can have a couple of hours of meetings per day, perhaps when you do that remotely, you can have more of that when you’re at the office face to face because it is less draining. This is something that we need to think about. I try to keep it down per day, the number of meetups or meetings that I have to not more than three hours sometimes four, that is exceptional but preferably less, definitely not more than four then I reject or deny any further invites. Because I need to protect myself. And it is more challenging to do this online. But the level is different per person. I know some people can handle less and other will be able to handle more but you need to think about these things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:23

I think just maybe to add to that, it’s more about having discussion about, when is our focused time? How much do I need it? It might change from time to time but just having that as a discussion.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  39:36

And be respectful about it towards others. I mean, there’s so many things that people ask each other that require a synchronous, ever syncing their communication that could also be done async, like it has happened to me every now and that’d be what can we call [inaudible 39:54]  has my number and tries to call me and then I don’t pick up my phone and then it’s and the message okay, you see, you could have send a message about that, right? Why are you trying to call me? I was trying to concentrate or reading something. So you need to be respectful about that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:13

Great, I think that’s something that all teams, at least the teams I work with the need to continuously discuss and figure out what works for them. What are the differences with unFIX between creating new organization and transforming organizations?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  40:35

Thanks, Paco for the question, this not something I have really thought of yet. I think everything is easier when you start with a new organization. I mean, with a blank slate [inaudible 40:48] . If only that was possible all the time, you’ll have to work with what you have and that is often existing companies. I think the difference is, and that sounds obvious perhaps, you have a starting point and then you might have an ideal situation that you could draw with your Lego blocks, with your own fixed model. And then you need to figure out, okay, which small steps can bring us in that direction. And if you have an existing organization, you might have a longer road to take because if you have a new organization, you can immediately put the right blocks in the right place. But if you have an old organization, like for example, you have a manager on a team, well, you have to get rid of that manager somehow, you need to put that manager somewhere else, it’s not something you do like that. Because this is a human being that we’re talking about. So that might require a couple of additional steps. So it takes longer, that’s the only thing I can come up with.

And thanks for the question Paco. I do believe that it is worth creating or designing multiple futures. So do not create like one ideal organization, just create a couple of models like, okay, the organization could look like this. And the organization could look like that, I am now actually creating a mirror template that should allow people to do these exercises. And then if you have a couple of these examples, like these are possible futures for our organization design, then step back and say, Okay, well, this is where we are now, what are the next steps that we can make that still keep all those options open? And then at least you get things going, like you can say well, in those three scenarios, in all the scenarios that will require us getting rid of this manager from this team. So okay, let’s make a journey, a scenario for that. How can we do that in a respectful way with that person?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:05

Great. A next question that’s somewhat tight today is, how do you see the future of business and team agility?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  43:14

Well, what I hope to see is that nobody’s really talking about agility anymore, position, just a means to an end. And Agile has sadly already such a bad name in some parts of the world because of bad transformations or whatever. But I think the experience, the customer experience and the employee experience, I’d like to call it the human experience. That is a big thing. It has its own acronyms, the customer experience is CX, and the employee experience is EX, you will find that out there when you Google a little bit. That’s a big thing, also for us as an Agile community. And once you realize that it is actually about the experience and about the product, then we realize that we have a couple of things to learn from the jobs to be done community, as I said, and from design thinking and service design and other communities out there are quite a bit more about experience than we do in the Agile community. Because our obsession is still so much about product that even today I was listening to a podcast, and they were talking about how to move focus in an organization from project to product. And I thought, no, no, it has to be experience, not product. What is the experience?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:39

And sometimes I think it’s also like that stepping stone, I think related to at least what I’ve seen is like with transforming organizations there’s more steps. So the experiences is kind of the longer-term goal but you might have to move to products before you move to…

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  44:54

Definitely. And I’m not saying it’s wrong. I totally agree there. So I’m happy that we made that step from project to product. But the question is, how do you see the future? I see that the next step to take is Okay, let’s stop calling them feature teams, let’s call them value teams just to emphasize, to stress, you’re not building features, you’re making awesome users by having something valuable for them. They don’t care about your features, they care about feeling awesome. And I do a lot of painting in my house that some people notice on Facebook, among others. I feel like an awesome painter because I get compliments from my friends and family. All this looks so good. That is the job of the paint. That is the job of the rollers and all the materials that I use with all the features is to make me feel awesome as a painter. That is what it is.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:57

And something else that’s related to this. And static themes, you said this small one fixed model was influenced by theme topologies. And also highly spoken reteaming, which in that book she talks about how it’s in the future, or at least she talks about is right now, but I think in Agile, we’ve talked about stable things, we talked about and her point is like, we need to be able to have dynamic themes that are reteaming. So the question here is, what is the reason to believe that the static things are not agile?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  46:43

Well, it depends on the signals from the environment. Things happen in the environment that might require you to have a different combination of people. I’m sure, you have noticed a couple of months ago that the Facebook was offline for six hours or something. Do you think that at that time, they formed a new team and gave them the chance to go through some team building exercises with forming, storming, norming performing? Hell, no. They had to go and fix the problem like that immediately, every minute cost them millions. And these things happen, you do not have time in each time to go through that Tuchman process of forming, storming, norming performing and because things happen faster and faster in the environment. And there are plenty of other industries where they have already figured this out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:55

I mean, Tesla is one. I was talking to Joe Justice, and he worked at Tesla. And by the way, you can check out if you’re not familiar with my podcast, I’ve interviewed Joe there, Heidi, you can check out everything that I’ve said. But Joe Justice said, like the future, the way that he describes agile teams is like, well, you’re essentially a team until you get something done. And then you have option to rethink after that. You stay together until you finish something, it could be half a day, it could be three hours, but they have a backlog of things that they finished, and then you have opportunity to rethink.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  48:34

Yeah, and so that’s why I call them crew. Because you’re on a mission together, you’re on a mission to get something done. When you’ve done it, you might form a new crew, like they do at airlines, like they do in hospitals, like they do at fire departments, they get something done, when they’re done, they might form a new group, you don’t have to, but you need to, you want to have that option as a company to allow people to reform because it makes you increases your agility. It increases your versatility as a company. And that is again, why the base is so important, because the people’s primary allegiance should not be with the team, with the crew, it should be one level up with the base you need. Well, it doesn’t matter which people I work with. Because everyone here at the base, my colleagues, my friends, we are big, we are a community of 100 people or something. And no matter which people I ended up with, we’re going to do an awesome thing on that crew for the next couple of weeks, months or whatever. And then we might form different crews. Now Joe has painted an extreme picture at Tesla. They do this every three hours. And he said the learning goes through the roof, of course, within a couple of weeks. Joe explains, you’ve worked with everyone in the base. Imagine that, how much you learn is such a short time and how many people you get to know which is tough in the beginning, but there it pays off at a larger scale.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:10

It just gives the company I think options and it gives company like…

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  50:16

And the less extreme options are explained by Heidi indeed, in her book, dynamic reteaming as she mentions Redgate software as an example, Chris Smith wrote a couple of articles about reteaming once per year. Well, that sounds good to me. And they say, yeah, when we do reteaming? There’s a little bit of dip in velocity in the few weeks after that, but no customer notices it. And the benefits are bigger than the drawbacks because it helps people with a personal development, it helps to create bonds across the base instead of just within the team. And it helps the company to be more agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:00

So I think we’ve addressed all of the questions, except one because I think even the ones that Mia had associated with crew, you address but I’m also interested in this one on colors, the colors play any significance or?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  51:20

Yes, I tried to honor team topologies where they also use colors. And they also have yellow, red, purple, and well actually turqoise for the platform team. I had a discussion with Matthew on LinkedIn a couple of days ago. And he said, Well, maybe you should have made that blue, because in team topologies, the one at the bottom, the platform one is turqoise. So you can interpret that as either green or blue. And I said, Well, in that case, I prefer green because the grass is green and the sky is blue, that seems psychologically seems like the good thing to do. So let the management team and team topologies does not have a management team box. So that’s one that I add. I said let the manager to be in the sky. And the platform team in the grass, it seemed more psychologically a picture that made sense to me. So I tried to stay a bit through honoring team topologies. But the ones that the sides are new, like the acquisition crew and the experienced crew, they are new, but you can see them as special cases of the purple one. And that’s how you can interpret the color and yeah, I needed to other colors, so that’s why those are yellow and pink. Those were the two remaining colors that I hadn’t use yet.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:56

Great. Good question. Yeah, I thought maybe there might be some correlation. But thank you for explaining that. So I think that’s all the questions. I hope that your questions got answered. As I said this is a pilot, have tried it out once or twice before. I have one with Dave Snowden coming up in a couple of weeks to three weeks and one with Gunther, I don’t think I could pronounce his last name [unsure word 53:25] . So check out those if you haven’t. But I hope today was valuable for you and I hope to see you in the future and Jurgen, thank you again as always for taking the time to answer these questions. Thanks for the

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  53:40

Thanks for the invite, Miljan. Thanks for the participants for asking questions. Questions also helped me think and rephrase myself better each time. So I appreciate that. And if you’re interested, go to unfix.work. I am happy to continue the conversation. You can ask me questions there as well. So unfix.work. Yeah, that’s the one.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:05

I’ll put in the chat. I think I already put it there.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  54:06

You’ll find more information there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:10

Great. Well, thank you everybody. I know it’s late in Europe. It’s just one o’clock here on the East Coast. I know some of you are in different parts of the world where it’s even later than that. So have a great rest of the day and hope to see you in the future. Thanks, everyone. Bye.