Michael Herman

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:40

What was your first encounter with Mike Beedle?

Michael Herman  00:42

I came from a background where I was doing a lot of organization development, that turned into open space work and I did a bunch of things in open space. And then I met Dan Mesick who taught me about Agile and I had already worked with Agile Alliance and done some things and that got me positioned to be a scrum master and somebody offered me a scrum master job. And they said, you better go get certified just in case the client requires it. Said okay, so I went, it was December so not so many courses were going on and so I looked up one, and the only one available was Mike Beedle’s class in Chicago. So I signed up, and I went and that was it. I went through the class, like everybody else so okay, we sit for two days and take the test and get the piece of paper and then go do the job. That was it. But then, when I really met Mike, was when he came back. Must have been about a year later and said, I’m going to pilot this training and enterprise scrum and he was inviting everybody who trained with him to come do this, if they wanted. And so I said, okay, I’ll go back and see what he’s doing. So that started a very intense, year, a year and a half of learning around enterprise Scrum, where he offered at least four, maybe five, or whatever, several rounds of enterprise scrum training in Chicago, and he was doing them in New York, as well. But he offered these and he did two days of scaling and two days of business agility. So it was four days and took all week, and then it sort of blew my head up for another week where I had to make sense of everything that even the fourth time going through it, we were always opening new stuff. So that’s how I met Mike and how I met Mike again.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:36

And that second time around for the enterprise scrum you said you really met Mike, how would you describe Mike?

Michael Herman  03:46

The first word that comes to mind is just his generosity in this, which might also tie in with just his passion for the work and the people that the work was supposed to serve, because he was always clear about the Agile is about people first. And the enterprise scrum work he was doing was unique and advanced. And at the beginning in that first year, he was just about giving it away to everybody. And you didn’t just go to two or four day training piece. Seems like just about every day Mike was buying lunch for people in the restaurant, in the hotel. Just stories about people calling him from different places he’d been training or groups he’d worked with. And oh, yeah, these guys called me and then they had this, they were up against this, and we talked about that, and we worked out and this is what they ended up doing. So there are all these stories of people just calling him and having these conversations and after he died, there are so many of those sorts of stories, that people were just remembering that you could just call him and ask him and he was just giving his expertise.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:45

But also a lot of people that I’ve interviewed so far said that he was so generous with his time, not just buying people drinks or just making people comfortable, he would invest his time to get to know you to ask about what’s going on in your life and just in general, whatever it was, it seems, that was also who Mike was.

Michael Herman  06:10

Yeah, for sure. So he was just amazing in that way, giving his time and attention to whatever you were working on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:29

What are the things that you learned from Mike that impacted you, that maybe impacted how you do things?

Michael Herman  06:39

I came in from a background where I had practiced with people consciously, than explicitly self-organization, before I got to agile. Open space is a practice, an invitation in self-organization. When I met the Agile community before the Agile Alliance, the Agile XP universe conference in 2002, I facilitated a track in open space and when they brought me in, and they told me what Agile was, I just laughed, because I said, you’re making software in open space, why do you need me to do an open space at your conference? You’re doing this. And they said, yeah, but we don’t know how to do it in a conference. I said okay. So I had been working for years, teaching and practicing, inviting self-organization and yet, in the Agile community, most people I met, gave me the impression that I couldn’t actually get in and do the work, because I didn’t come from a software technical background. The first thing I got from Mike was validation 100% agreement, acknowledgment that what I had been doing was completely consistent with what Agile was about for him. What I told the Agile people in the very beginning that I met, I said, to me it looks like we’re doing the same thing, we put all the most important stuff on the wall, and then we get it done. And so Mike first validated that sense of the core that it was people driven. And other things could be that way that weren’t software or technology or scrum guide rules, sort of stuff. And then with enterprise Scrum, he showed me that he really, well, we used to have conversations about when you put up a canvas, do you have one big open space with lots of little boxes sort of an organized open space? Or do you really have nine or 12 or however many boxes you have in the canvas, do you have that many small open spaces all bound together? And we joke back and forth around that a little bit but we never came up with a definitive answer and it didn’t matter. The point was that enterprise scrum to both of us was as good as ongoing open space. 

What we had talked about for years and years and open space community, ongoing open space, Mike had a way to do it. And so what I saw is open space starts things really well, you can start out with anything, any organization, any domain, any context, and bring people together and get them moving. And then what I’d seen through some years of working with groups in open space, is that they went back to their organization, they didn’t always know how to keep things moving. Keep the space open. Well, in the same way, Agile has its way of putting all this stuff up on the wall but they don’t always start by bringing together the right people, they bring together the small group, the team that’s going to develop it and pull in a few people from the business. 

Well, open space lets you bring in could be hundreds of stakeholders, just start designing and understanding this thing before it gets to the developers. So I saw the two of those, these ways of approaching things could go together and now, everywhere I can, when I do an open space, I show people a canvas and say this is how you can organize what’s in your proceedings document in ways that can be actionable and rigorous and structured a bit, still perfectly structured to your work but it can be structured in a way that you can keep getting things done, keep the space open after the event. Those two pieces, the way of inviting and the way of rigorously managing it, making what Mike called, he just simply called visualize everything that matters. The first training, I remember doing enterprise Scrum, he gave us the briefing, and he walked out of the room, as he often did, and just left us just like Harrison Owen with open space; you leave, you do the opening, and then you leave.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:02

Exactly here you go.

Michael Herman  12:06

So I’m gone and 20 minutes later, he comes back, and we’re supposed to have filled up this canvas and we’ve been talking about a lot of stuff but there are no stickies on the wall. And he comes in, and he had printed out these papers that everybody had a canvas on the piece of paper, as well as what’s on the wall. And he’d pick up one of these papers. Guys, guys, it’s just a canvas. Just do it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:34

Exactly, but it’s like…

Michael Herman  12:38

It’s so simple. Don’t make it complicated. Just do it. And that was another piece that I picked up. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:50

It is and also I actually just spoke with Dan Mesick before this call and we talked about how Mike was in many ways ahead of his time. He’s seen this stuff, even to acknowledge the open space the way that he did. Not necessarily that far out, but just to embrace it to understand from a complexity and from self-organization…

Michael Herman  13:18

The essence, he could see what was really happening not what we say is happening. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:25

And that’s really key. You really have to know the underlying principles and patterns of, in my opinion, to be able to detect that and say, I might not be an expert on it but that’s the right thing to do in this context.

Michael Herman  13:46

Yeah, to see that essence and to embrace it, and encourage it, and not require everybody to speak your language, whatever language you think is supposed to describe what’s happening, there are many ways and he described enterprise Scrum, in just those terms actually. He used to describe it as a language for managing change. It wasn’t the thing that was happening. It’s not the thing you’re doing. It’s the thing you’re doing, the language you’re using to describe what’s happening. So in that way, there was a lot less imposition in it and a lot more local shaping of it wasn’t allowed because it didn’t rely on being the thing we were doing. It was the thing we were using to do what we were doing, and that could change just like we make up new words and language. We could change the practice, we could adapt the practice. So understanding enterprise Scrum and other things in general as the language for managing change and learning and adaptation was a much deeper cut than most people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:22

Well, especially in the context when we talk about 2010, 2015, where it’s all about prescriptive practices and if we see now, and probably what we’ll see less focus on those prescriptive frameworks, and more on patterns and understand contextualizing things. And, like you say, using those languages, rather than just blindly following practices that you have some basic idea, but you don’t understand the underlying reason for that practice, he’s just doing it because somebody said so, it’s somewhere in the graph that says, you should do daily standup? Why? I don’t know. We should answer these questions. Why? I don’t know, it sounds like a good idea, but not having any core understanding. What other stories do you remember? Do you remember any stories that Mike would tell or anything that kind of stood out that…

Michael Herman  16:23

Well, I don’t know about story, one of the things that sort of surprised me along the way, not so much a story, but when I discovered that, in addition to his physics background, that he was a theoretical physicist, and having been advanced in that place, and then gone to finance and because he was developing software to do the financial work, he was advancing, then he got into software. And that’s how that he met other guys who wrote the manifesto into all that so this was his third cut on stuff. That arc all made sense but then after he died, I don’t think I knew until till he started talking to other people after he died. And I started seeing these videos of him playing music, and making his music and that was a whole another side of Mike that I didn’t know very well, but was this other deep cut, apparently, completely unrelated. And, I mean, everything is related everything at some level, but this other thing that he was way into, and that was just amazing. and he made mention it along the way, riding his bike down from the north side, down into the city, and swimming along the lake, and then riding his bike back and he had he’d been a big soccer player and so he had this whole athletic side that had been competitive and active in different sports. The other thing, going back to early days, when he would tell stories about all these books, he was reading as a kid, very young, he’d be ordering all these books and studying all this stuff on his own. And so in all these different dimensions, he was just such an active learner, an active participant in the game. So that was just amazing, the different kinds of things that he had gone deep with.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:38

And that’s, I think, an inspiration. I had some idea but you just shed light on some of the other things that I really had no idea and it’s making me at least think about the current space and at least a lot of us are focused on agile and I don’t know who. I was talking to somebody recently and they said maybe it was Steve Barons, and he was saying stepping out of the Agile space, go take a class with somebody else or just try to get better at something else and you’ll be able to bring some of that back into what you’re doing. And I think what you just shared remind me of that, there is much more to what we’re doing than just the current space that we’re in.

Michael Herman  20:31

You remind me, Mike loved that new stuff coming up, going into new territory. He started out he was teaching enterprise Scrum for software scaling and then he would move on to business agility and in the first two days and then the second half of the week, he would do the business agility. And I didn’t have a business or a scaled operation I could work with, I was working with single teams, doing regular Scrum, trying to learn it. And what I did is I went and I gave him a canvas. And I said, here’s the whole thing. And we put the sprint backlog in the center, where Mike’s primary valueless was, and all the other boxes, 

I wrapped her I sort of pushed all the boxes of the canvas out to make a single frame. And what I found is that all the issues that come up in the daily Scrum or chatting with people, they all go in one of those other boxes. I started to describe the canvas as all of the stuff that we need to do but then all the stuff we need to do in order to do that, what we call the real work of developing this set of features or whatever. But then Mike never missed it, bringing this example, hey, here’s something weird that Michael did. And it’s working. And you look at this, so he loved when people did weird stuff with what he taught, and came back with some new thing that had worked. And he really believed and emphasized so much that these patterns could work in any domain. 

And so I went out from what I learned with Mike and we used enterprise scrum in economic development in a sort of midsize city department, we have been looking at how to do it with developers and city folks, developing partly to meet the housing issues, but generally just developing more human scale, developing building projects, small developers, instead of the big box stuff in cities. I’ve worked with people publishing a journal, we did an open space, and we ran in this academic journal, talk about how we do this in an ongoing way from a canvas.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:52

Well, that’s the thing. I was just talking to Evan from business agility institute. And in a sense, a lot of this is applicable to many different industries and I was asking, one of the things that came from their research is communication and collaboration. The biggest thing that people see from business agility is that communication and collaboration improves. And I think if you go in most or 99% of organizations, they would say that communication and collaborations number one issue or number two issue, number three issue, probably not any lower than that. And I think some of these concepts, including open space is all about how do we bring people together and to self-organize and to figure things out because we’re dealing with complexity and trying to limit that and constrain it in hindsight, only actually hinders it. So it really becomes how can we self-organize in a better way. And I think that’s something that most people, when you look at why we do certain things in open space or in general is overlooked, but it’s like, why does the tree grow the way that it does or why do we have these things in nature, there’s a reason for it.

Michael Herman  25:24

You remind me. This is the single most important thing I think I learned from Mike. And it goes to what you’re saying about what Evan is learning with collaboration and communication and what everybody talks about in an organization. And I think Mike put his finger on it when he said, “visualize everything”. When I stood back from the cycle that Mike described, it’s the usual scrum cycle, but in simple terms, from visualize everything to review and improve, he said, retrospective that’s backward looking. I mean, he relanguaged scrum with enterprise Scrum, and brought things like reviewing and improve. The point was, you look back, and you look forward. And so when I take the pieces of this, I see that it starts with visualizing everything. And we don’t have problems in organizations with communication. The example Harrison Owen uses as long as I’ve known him, he says, tell me the last time a really bad piece of information hit the grapevine and how long did it take to get from one end of the organization to the other went like that, you don’t have a communication problem, you got a message problem. People don’t care about the thing that you’re talking about. So the communication isn’t a problem. Collaboration isn’t a problem. 

Retrospectives aren’t hard, or learning. What I learned with Mike was visualize everything. That’s the weird thing. That’s the thing we tend not to do, when all we show you part of my story, I don’t want you to see this other stuff down here that I’m holding it, that’s my expertise. That’s the black box, when you throw it over, I put it in there and that’s my magic and I can’t show you that. And so we don’t have that learning together. But once you visualize everything, whether it’s on a canvas, rigorously or loosely, I mean, I’ve seen canvases work after open space, where we just took several hours of open space notes, and took 20 minutes and threw everything into a canvas. And I’ve seen community art center, watercolor artist, like the water and so once you visualize everything, the natural way, there’s always too much to do. So people stand back and they say, oh, shit, that’s a lot, how are we going to do that? And somebody says, well, what if we start over here? And somebody says, well, no, this seems more important. And bang, you’re into prioritization. Absolutely naturally, couldn’t stop people from prioritizing…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:25

And also enabling collaboration, right? 

Michael Herman  28:29

Yeah. And then once you’ve had that conversation, you say, well, these are the few most important things, well, then the obvious thing is to do them, pull those, you don’t even have to pull them, they jump off the board at you and they jump into this extra side pile that you say, this is the stuff we’re going to focus on for now. And whether you define now as every two weeks, or a month, or whatever now is, we’re at least going to work on those. And once you get those going with that focus, you will deliver them. And yeah, there are ways you mean, we can teach people different ways to prioritize, and we can bring different ways of taking that break and looking back and looking forward to reviewing and improving. But all of those other behaviors we talked about, happen completely in my experience after I work with Mike, I see that those happen completely naturally. If we do the first weird thing of visualizing everything and what Mike’s Canvas in enterprise scrum did different canvases was give people a framework for visualizing their work, visualizing everything, don’t leave anything out. Everything that matters goes on the canvas, and then working with some of these nonprofit and public groups, neighborhood association, for instance. It’s not just everything that matters that goes on a wall. And I never got to share with Mike but he would have loved this learning. 

Everyone who matters goes on the board especially matters in nonprofit community organizations, but it matters in businesses too. Whenever anybody joins, and when you start everyone in the group ought to see where their work is on the board, and a new person joins, and they say, oh, how can I help? And you say, well look around and put your name on some of these things where you might be the guy to do this. Or if you look around and say, yeah, but what about x or what about y? Well, you put that on the board and put your name on it because if you see something that you can do, that we haven’t thought that we could do, and it adds something, and this is an open space piece of it, put it up. So everything that matters, and everyone who matters, and you know you’re in this group, you know you’re a part of the work, because you’re on the board, as well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:08

And as you were saying that, that remind me because the biggest takeaway that you describe is visualize everything. You have to unpack that, right. And I think what I’m seeing, it’s really understanding human beings that we’re visual people. And the reason that you say, visualize everything is because at the end of the day, it’s those behaviors, it’s that mental models that we might have and when we visualize, it’s easier to get on the same page, it’s easier to collaborate. Visualization is a tool to help us as human beings to get stuff done or to organize around things. So that makes me kind of think that maybe and I haven’t really heard anybody say this, but between the lines, I bet, Mike knew a lot more about people and people’s behaviors, and psychology more than what probably people give him credit for because he probably didn’t talk about it, but he knew exactly because people are talking that he was it’s all about people, it’s all about some of the things that people are describing, make me think that he knew a lot more about people and how people interact, and social side of that, as well.

Michael Herman  32:32

Yeah. And had the capacity to hold with some comfort, more comfort than most. The complexity of all those relationships and interactions and it came out in his technical descriptions of subsumption, and how the different parts of an organization could work in subsumption, which I think I’ve met one guy along the way since I learned this word from Mike, who knew what subsumption or subsumptive logic was or is. 

But Mike described it in terms of the robots and the subsumptive logic that they built into these robots, that they wouldn’t have to be loaded with all the knowledge, all the different parts, when you turn on the robot, they’d flop around each leg would learn, and would report back what it was learning and it would learn again how to walk every time you turned it on. What that required was every part doing what it could, how Mike described it, doing what it did best, and contributing that to the whole. So you needed a way for the different parts to understand each other and that’s where you get to this enterprise scrum as a language. So language for all the different parts of the organization to talk to each other about their work so they can do this very specific, very specialized kind of work, what they do best and still have a framework that maps to everybody else, and a way to connect it. We’ve talked so far about what a canvas could do in terms of visualizing everything for a group but the next leap of that was that this canvas could be adapted with small adaptations in every part of the organization and when you put them all together, they link and everybody can speak the same language, can describe their work in the same framework, so we could talk to each other and learn together and people can change places within that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:23

That’s like, when I see maybe sociocracy, it’s understanding systems, and understanding homes and understanding that structure that we see in nature, and what I’ve seen especially more emphasis over the recent years in understanding how things work in nature, and trying to say what can we learn from that? What are some common patterns and how would we contextualize that to the business world and the world that we as humans are constructing, and making collectively.

Michael Herman  35:57

Another pattern you remind me of is, I told him early on that what I thought was kind of marvelous about the canvas and of course, he borrowed from Alex (inaudible 36:12) but the canvas, in itself has this one end that starts with the suppliers in production sort of inputs and it ends with a customer. And he put purpose at the top, which was an adaptation from Alex and Alex put the purpose in the center, Mike put the purpose and Alex called it the value proposition. But Mike sort of elevated that and called it mission purpose, different things like that, and put metrics at the bottom. And so he set up these tensions between purpose and where it got realized and measured, and stuff coming in, and the benefits coming out. And so the way Mike’s canvas took shape was that it looked like a medicine wheel wrapped around a piece of work. So you had a Western get it done in the center, and you had the Eastern or native, the older traditions, the notion of the tensions in nature, in terms of the 4 points of the compass, and all the story that these were, very new story in the center of a very old story.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:41

Exactly but I think it goes back to looking at things holistically and bringing things not just looking from the doing part, but looking at things. You need both of those and like you said, the Western part, as far as I understand what you’re saying is focused more on that doing part or the measurable part, where Eastern is more and usually one points finger at each other, but you really need both. What would you like to end with? This has been great. I think, this is my longest conversation, so I’ll definitely have to make this .(inaudible 38:18) I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.

Michael Herman  38:21

Good luck. You got your work cut out for you, at least with me because I end up bringing stories from everywhere. I just think we’ve covered a lot of the things. I’m just glad you’re doing this. Thank you for doing this. Because I think Mike had a lot of things a little bit figured out, in the sense that he could see them, he could taste them, he could draw them, but they’re not really figured out until we had all figured them out. And so all of what I learned from Mike, in the couple of weeks, right after he died, I said I’ve got to stabilize my own learning and if it’s helpful for anybody else, that’s great and so I put out this guide. And I think that helped me stabilize what I learned and the stuff he had figured out won’t be really figured out until lots of people figure it out and so we need to keep telling the stories. We need to keep sharing and developing the stories. So I’m just glad that you are gathering another take on these stories so that more people can understand the genius of what he was into.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:25

Exactly. And I think the next 10 years one of the things that when I thought about my podcast this Agile to agility, I think the next lot of last decade was about agile and practices. The next I think 10 years will be more about agility and figuring out what Mike was discussing and we need both. But I think we’re slowly starting to figure out that, just looking at frameworks alone and prescriptive practices has not worked. And how do we look at things from Mike’s perspective, and looking at these different patterns, and visualizing things, and not being dogmatic about what we do, but like you said, and what you shared here is, how can we get a lot more people to understand these things, because only to get them when we’re on the same page, and we understand the importance behind these things, will be able to move us collectively.

Michael Herman  41:26

Yeah, and you remind me that it’s even more than understanding, we have to just do them. It’s just the canvas just do it and learn it and do it. You remind me that there’s a tyranny of sorts in these things where you said, everybody was asking right after Mike died, where’s his book, where’s his book, he was writing this book. And reflecting again, on my time with Mike, and what we’ve been talking about here, his different stories, it’s all about the learning, the doing and the learning. To his credit, Mike was so deep into the learning of all this stuff, he couldn’t finish the book because he kept learning, his learning was moving too fast to edit out and write what he has learned. And it shouldn’t have to be a book to keep going. You have to get out of have the learning and lock it all down in a book and make it…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:41

So somebody else give me the recipe, right? Yeah.

Michael Herman  42:45

You make it that kind of solid, and then it all collapses. Because it’s this point in time that now is obsolete, and how do you get back to the learning? The good news is and the bad news is Mike never got to write the book, because he was so deep into the learning and advancing what he was doing. So I think that’s really something to aspire to where we’re just in it and telling the stories and learning from the stories and we just keep going. It’s not about the book.