Patricia Kong

 Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:48

Who is Patricia Kong?

Speaker: Patricia Kong  00:51

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:40

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  01:56

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:30

We’re all getting older.

Speaker: Patricia Kong  03:33

I’m trying to get over it. It’s fine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:36

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  03:44

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:21

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  05:47

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:26

No. I can only imagine. 

Speaker: Patricia Kong  06:31

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:01

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  09:59

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:55

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  13:45

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:24

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  16:55

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:30

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  19:40

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:45

But somebody benefited from this whole situation.

Speaker: Patricia Kong  21:47

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:23

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

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  24:36

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:34

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

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  30:05

Gosh, you’re going to share your thoughts.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:08

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

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  31:52

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:04

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

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  33:25

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:04

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

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  39:37

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:55

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  40:01

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:59

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  42:23

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:51

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  44:07

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:59

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

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  47:43

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:06

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  51:10

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:15

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  51:37

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:43

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

Speaker: Patricia Kong  52:57

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