Jurgen Appelo

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:38

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  01:19

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

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:41

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  08:21

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:17

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  09:22

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:24

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  11:18

Otherwise, we pick from the list.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:32

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  12:51

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:22

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  17:43

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:14

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  20:35

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:42

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  20:44

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:57

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  23:23

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:00

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  24:24

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

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:52

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  27:59

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:08

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  30:25

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:57

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  33:24

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:51

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  36:03

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:11

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  37:43

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:23

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  39:36

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:13

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  40:35

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

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:05

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  43:14

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:39

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  44:54

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:57

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  46:43

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:55

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  48:34

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:10

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  50:16

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:00

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  51:20

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:56

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  53:40

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:05

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

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  54:06

You’ll find more information there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:10

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