Jesse Fewell

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:43

Who’s Jesse Fewell?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  00:44

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:50

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  01:06

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:29

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  04:29

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:18

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  08:08

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:59 

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

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  13:01

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:20

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  15:59

You’ll have to bleep that out later. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:05

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  17:26

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:45

Yeah

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  19:49

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:29

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  20:56

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:01

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  21:23

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:33

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  22:12

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:06

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

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

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  27:42

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:07

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  32:09

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:03

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  34:04

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:02

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  35:36

Yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:37

Could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  35:39

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:42

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

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  40:01

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:23

It’s probably more than that.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  42:27

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:04

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  43:50

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:30

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  47:33

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:18

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

Speaker: Jesse Fewell  49:52

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