Author: agile-to-agility

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.

Dave Snowden

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:40

So the first question Dave here, what does a leader need to develop in order to sense complexity and navigate on it effectively? What in the work has to be done?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 00:56

If I was being particularly pedantic here, I’d say if they don’t already have that knowledge, then they shouldn’t be in a leadership position in the first place, right? So that there is this really strong and I think, really dangerous tendency to try and define competencies. The idea is computer model of the human brain, if this person has these competencies, they can do this. All right. The reality is we can all exhibit leadership in different contexts. So let me be a bit more positive. All right. So there isn’t a one size fits all. This is my big debate. Well, one of my many debates with Steve Denning, when he wrote radical leadership, in that he tried to shoehorn, lots of different leaders working in lots of different contexts into a single model. And say, all radical leaders have to have these qualities now. If you look at GE, Apple [inaudible 01:53] my work with all three of those CEOs, and the only thing that they had in common is they were arrogant bastards. Yeah. And yeah, I don’t see anybody writing a book about arrogant bastard read the secret to leadership success. All right. But that’s the reality of it. So I think I mean, there’s a couple of things we’ve said, I mean, you feel goes got a lot on this. It basically says leadership is about coordination, not decision making.

Yeah. And I was sea level over my life. And one of these you learn the hard way, the more you get promoted, the more you only meet angrier and angrier customers, and the fewer decisions you actually get to make. And you’re even incompetent to make them anyway, because you’re not that close to the field anymore. So your role is really much more coordination linkage, have you talked with this person? Will come back to me when you have. Those are the sorts of things you’re doing, the differences when you get a real crisis, and then you have to make decision to make them very quickly or based on inadequate information. And that’s where we say what you do is you make decisions to increase the options available downstream, you don’t try and resolve the problem. Your role is to increase the options available to create some stabilization, by which your experts can then start to make decisions again. So that’s one thing. The other big thing, the thing I’m working on at the moment, to be honest, some people just seem to have this and some people don’t is what I call anticipatory thinking. And I’d love to find a way of measuring this or training for it.

But some people just seem to be able to do small things now, which make a big difference downstream, even though the link isn’t clear. Yeah, you learn this interesting in mountain navigation, you learn it, I’ll give the illustration. So somebody said to me the other day, all right, how the hell did you find this track? And I said, well, and I suddenly thought, well, how did I find it? I was just obvious. And I thought it through and I said, well, for the last two hours, I was looking at the hill ahead and looking for patterns, because I’ve grown up to do that. And I’m constantly looking ahead and thinking, well, that’s more risky and this more risky and if you get that pattern you get… And that comes with experience. Yeah. So there’s a key framework within [unsure word 04:13] called Ashen, A-S-H-E-N. And that stands for artifacts, skills, heuristics, experience and natural talents. And the way you look at any qualities, you say, well, what are the artifacts? Because artifacts, you can train people to use. Spreadsheets, processes, what are the skills, skills you can train people on? Then you get into heuristics and habits and rituals, which I’ve written about this Christmas. All right, and rituals and habits are ways of reducing the energy cost of knowledge transfer. So they’re normally achieved through repetition. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

That’s actually really important in knowledge. And then you get experience now, very few leaders these days have right experience, when I applied to be a general manager, this is in a software company. I had to do a year in sales, a year in support and a year in production to hit my targets before I was even allowed to be considered as a general manager, right? And if you’ve done a year in sales and you can’t, I mean, I know what it’s like not to be on bloody pay the mortgage because I haven’t made a sale this quarter. You understand selling in a way that you can’t if it’s just abstract. And what we now have is people do an MBA straight out of business school, which I don’t think you should allow, they go and join a big consultancy firm, where everything is about spreadsheets and reports. And then they go sideways into management with no practical experience. So kind of the question you should be asking is, what combination of artifacts skills, heuristics, experience and natural talent that we have? Do we have that and how do we substitute for it? And is quite critical on replacement, by the way, so… Sorry, I’ve just seen you, haven’t seen you for ages. All right. So if I say, how do I replace [unsure word 06:03]? That’s the wrong question. The right question is [unsure word 06:06] has this combination of new artifact skills, heuristics, experience and natural talent. How do we replace that? Alright, that’s a very different way of formulating the question but it’s a way of formulating the question to where you can do something about it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:24

Yeah. Maybe just to expand on framework and the work that has been done. I think, Thomas, I don’t know if he’s here. But I think what he was probably alluding to is towards cognitive development, then what is the relationship between cognitive capacity and how you sense complexity?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 06:46

I’d be very nervous about that. Because we’re embodied creatures anyway. So I mean, if you read [unsure word 06:54] Seth latest work, he’s basically arguing that consciousness is a process of controlled hallucinations and is based in the body. So we know a lot of our decisions are made. And that’s why I went down the action route. Alright, it’s not a cognitive issue per sey, right? There are some interesting things we can learn from one of the things that you see, for example, military environments is a distinction between NCOs and officers. Okay, you see the same in hospitals with nurses and doctors. And that’s quite interesting, because you have one group of people who acquire experience, then get taught theory. And you get another group of people who start with theory and then get practice. And they work in combinations. So I think is much more about what interactions and experience and context do you need people to live through, rather than trying to define specific cognitive functions, which is protect, and I’m not sure there’s any evidence really to support any context that there are a set of cognitive functions which are ideal.

You also then get into the thing that Nora Bateson and I, which a hitting really heavily at the moment, which regrettably is too common in the coaching movement is adult development models, which are deeply manipulative, right? Which actually have no basis whatsoever in any real science. They all go back to PJ’s experiments, people have tried to replicate them and got completely different results, right? And they ended up privileging the person at the top of the hierarchy. This is for things like spiral dynamics. I remember how this study came back, I turquoise, you’re an angry blue. That’s just a way of avoiding the bloody problem for God’s sake, right? So the reality, all of these interact and work in different ways in different contexts. And there are some contexts where the Army is really good at this. By the way, there are contexts for example, in a weapon Sergeant can out rank a general, right? So military environments have worked out how to delegate authority without loss of status. And that’s what we call a crew, which is something we’ve been taking sideways into industry as well. That to me, you should stop talking about people. And you should talk about roles and role interactions, it’s a much better way of talking about the problem.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:13

So maybe, I don’t know if this is what I’m taking from this but based on what I’m hearing you say is that it’s really comes down to experience as far as dealing better with complexity and…

Speaker: Dave Snowden 09:30

It’s you can do a lot with artifacts. You can do a hell of a lot with artifacts, right? Tools, instruments, processes. I mean, I did a lot on head up display design for fighter pilots when I was a coder. And you do a hell of a lot with structure there to augment congresses. So we can do a lot with those. All right. So it’s not that there is one thing or one set of things, probably the most important phrase that anybody who knows anything about complexity will use a lot is please stop proposing context free solutions in the context Pacific world. Yeah, different things work in different contexts. And what we’ve had for the last 30 or 40 years, is every management movement, including agile has tried to create a context free universal solution. I mean, they were known, for example, our job is to break methods down to their lowest coherent component, and allow them to recombine and combine across different vendors. Because you scale a complex system by decomposition to the lowest level of coherent granularity, and then recombination. So DNA works.

Everybody wants to scale by getting work for [inaudible 10:43] so I’ll do the same thing. And then you get the great error of the Spotify model. Yeah. Which is made worse by the fact that nobody any good in Agile wants to work from McKinsey’s anyway. So they end up with a second rater. Sorry, I’m being deliberately pejorative to make a point here. And then they say, Yeah, adopt the Spotify model. Well Spotify lived through a complex set of journeys, which were different in Stockholm, from New York anyway. Yeah. And some of their practices are constantly shifting and changing, you can’t adopt the outcome of an emergent process, you have to create the same, you create similar starting conditions and see where your journey takes you. And that’s that decomposition and recombination. You learn from the past, but the level at which you learn it is it’s a finely grained level of learning. It’s not a total learning, not a total system learning.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:35

What we seem to be like, one thing feeds another. And this is where companies want these prescriptive frameworks, they want that so like, they’ve been fed. So how do we get to the point where we realize that none of these frameworks, like he said everything needs to be contextualized. And it’s…

Speaker: Dave Snowden 11:55

I mean, it’s interesting, I have the privilege of teaching leadership with Peter Drucker. Alright, which was a huge privilege before he die. Yeah. And one of the reasons I did that is I made the mistake at a conference in San Diego in Hotel Del, and I can still see the situation. I did something a lot of agile people did, I was young and inexperienced. That’s my excuse. And I said complexity to [inaudible 12:19] on Taylorism. And if you ever remember that famous vice-presidential debate, when it’s I knew Kennedy, I got that, right? If you ever been taken apart by a 93-year-old genius on a public platform in front of 2000 people, ended up as a total of humiliation on the stage. He decided I was redeemable so took me out for dinner. And then I actually talked with him for a long period. And one of the conclusions we came to and I stopped criticizing systems thinking, because actually, when people talk about Taylorism, they’re actually talking about systems thinking. They’re talking about all the things which came in in the 80s and 90s. Were things like business process, reengineering and Six Sigma.

If you actually go back to Taylor, and you bother to read Taylor, he was trying to humanize the workforce, if you look at what it was like before Taylor, and we all now look at what Taylor produced and said, that’s terrible. It was a downside better than it came before. Alright. He was trying to humanize it by removing the mechanical side. So what [inaudible 13:19] coming to the conclusion on is complexity theory and scientific management have a lot in common. And they both differ radically from systems thinking, its derivatives, because they both respect human judgment. If you actually go back to Taylorism, management is an apprentice model of management. What happens with systems thinking is an attempt to reduce human judgment completely from the equation and make everything, processes, incompetencies and structures and measurement.

There were no three or five-year plans until systems thinking came in. I mean, the irony of US companies adopting the planning cycles, Soviet Russia, as always, I found that ironic, all right. The reality is you have people with lots of experience who are adapted to things as we went along and did some long-term things and did some risks. And yeah, they brought in new blood from time to time, but the majority of people like Japanese companies, still to this day, will have for life. So they built relationships, and they were committed to the company long term. Now we’re bringing back that type of decision making in the work we are doing on complexity.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:32

So I know last time we had this conversation, I didn’t get a chance to follow up on it, but is it that we butchered the idea of systems thinking because we tried to…?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 14:44

Systems thinking was ontologically flawed from day one. I did a lot with cybernetics and I owe a huge debt to PT check [inaudible 14:54] systems and in terms of where we were with the 80s and 90s, it made a lot of sense, because we didn’t know about convexity theory then. All right. And if you look at it, and you look at systems dynamics, it’s all feedback loops and structure. And these nice little general statement about you should look at the system as a whole, right? And so what you see with systems thinking also comes in, it’s dominated by engineers and by information processes. So things like Ashby and Shannon, that’s where it comes from.

Yeah. And of course, engineers don’t like ambiguity and uncertainty. Yeah, and therefore we get reengineering the corporation and the famous thing at the start of Hammering [unsure name 15:40] book, nothing that has happened in the past has any relevance to the future. That’s what it says. And so what we want is a greenfield site when we’re building on a brownfield site. So this evolutionary, we’re now shifting into these more ecological frames. So from my point of view, there’s a huge dept. I’ve said many times that there’s no way that staff would be able to produce VSM, if he’d known about complexity theory. It’s a brilliant piece of work in the context of what was known at the time. But, so what? Yeah. And people say, well, systems thinking address complexity. Well, yes, it did. The human race addressed the gravity with canals, but then Newton came along. And we understood the science at which point we can do things differently, right?

So, I mean, that’s an ongoing debate, right? But I think the problem is systems thinking is transitionary, right? There’s still things in it which have value but it’s not a universal, right? And it doesn’t handle and it’s quite interesting. Listen to Joel Midgley. I was listening to the other day. Alright, this was [inaudible 16:48] he says, the definition of a system is something which has boundaries and is based on human perception. Well, from a complexity point of view, systems are devised by coherence, not by boundary, some system don’t have boundaries. And we also, this is materialism, we actually know that things actually exist. It’s not just about human perception. So if a human being wants to say a system is something when it’s something different, that’s rather like treating young creationists as they should be, as if their arguments should be accepted seriously. It’s the old phrase used with post modernists is, reality exists, live with it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:26

Yeah. Let’s transition to I think we could spend more time on this. But essentially, what you’re saying is, focus more on complexity and complexity management rather than the Agile community.

Speaker: Dave Snowden 17:40

The good news is, there’s totally spurious debate between social constructivists and critical realists, both you and the critical realist grew up as counters to social constructivism. Well. [inaudible 17:50], yeah aspects of the builder socially constructed and aspects are, so we got much better science now. And the trouble is, people are holding on to outdated models, they’re not moving on the model and understanding from a scientific point of view.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:09

Okay, well, thank you for taking the time to answer that question. Let’s move on to the next one. What do you think will be the future of corporate strategic approaches? It’s the second one here.

Speaker: Dave Snowden 18:22

First of all, I think you’re going to move from long term planning. So Porter was the arch priest of strategy. Yeah, in the system’s period. And I think in some ways that was a pity. I mean, I think Henry was actually much better. But Porter produced a structure and a recipe which was easier to follow, Mintzberg handled ambiguity better. And I think Mintzberg gets complexity. So I think strategy now starts, there’s two or three things.

First of all, situational assessment needs to be distributed. Again, when things we outlined in the EU Field Guide, is you need your employees to be a human sensor network that you can deploy in real time. Because you need to assess test situation from a multicultural, multiple experience, multi cognitive background, and you need to see patterns and outliers in that. You can’t afford to spend three months commissioning research, because things are changing too quickly. Yeah, the new stuff we’re doing on structure theory in physics, papers just come out on that, is to say, well, this is what we call in the Asteron framework. And the [unsure word 19:34] model is a good one. Because in an [unsure word 17:37], things flow both ways, dependent on the type. And there are sort of granite cliffs which is stable and there are some banks which change constantly. And you often have to read clues from the surface level of the water. So I think the strategy is going to go is into that sort of ecological metaphor of what’s stable, what isn’t stable, how frequent do we need to assess it? Where are the outliers? And then therefore, where do we start to deploy energy? And probably, this is one of the most important things that comes out, certainly my approach to complexity, whatever has the lowest energy gradient will win.

Now, if you want to put that in moral terms, if the cost of virtue is less, is more than the cost of sin, people will sin, right? So in strategy terms, if you want customers to buy your product, the energy costs of buying your product has to be less than the energy cost of buying a competitors. And as I’m saying, energy costs, not necessarily price. And I’ll give you an illustration, is after IBM took us over, which was completely unexpected. I was sent on a mission to explain to IBM salesman why we always ask them to bid. We were a systems integrators, but we never worked with them. And so, happy to do that. So we went. And so what we always asked you to bid because you were always the most expensive, and you gave us the most material, which we could put into our proposals. But we didn’t work with you because you didn’t understand what a systems integrator is about. So you tell us your kit was faster. Well, we know. So Buddy, what? All right?

I mean, we’re going to put this together with lots of other kits, with lots of software, the differences you’re talking about just disappear in the noise, right? Where a son said, if we ever need a faster processor, because the client does it, they’ll just upgrade the processor without an argument. So they’ve shared our risk. So we’re going to go with them, even though the kit isn’t as good as yours, but they’ve taken away our risk. And I said HP put three people into our library and help us write bids. So are you surprised because our bid cost we need to reduce? Are you surprised that we end up with HP kit on the proposal? Because they’ve reduced our energy cost of bidding, I said, you’re not looking at the complete process. You think it’s just produced the better mousetrap. And it isn’t, right? It’s all the relationships and everything about it.

So look at the total energy costs of what you’re trying to do,and manage that ending. And that’s what we’re doing with the Astro mapping is map the energy gradients of the system. So you can see what’s more likely or less likely. And then that becomes the new approach to foresight, is actually to map the evolutionary potential of the present, not forecast the future. Because that way, you can see what’s likely to change and what isn’t likely to change. And it’s also links in with, sorry, I’m throwing a lot of stuff around. But it’s a long day, what we call the frozen two approach to strategy, right? So this will be memorable.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:50

And Jason plays that one.

Speaker: Dave Snowden 22:53

That’s it. So basically, if you haven’t watched frozen two now, this is your excuse to go and watch it even if you haven’t got young children or grandchildren. Frozen two is a great movie, Frozen one is just Disney. Alright, but it was so successful, they have enough money to do frozen two properly, so they had fun. And there’s this wonderful moment in the middle of frozen two where the real heroine of the frozen series is the youngest sister without magic. All right, yeah, left in a position where she thinks her older sister in the snow would have lost.

Sings all I can do is do the next right thing, right? Now is Stuart Kaufman, that’s called the adjacent possible. All you can do in complexity is map where you are, and identify which next steps are coherent. And then you move into those next steps and you look again, so strategy becomes much more contingent. Now if you have to invest over a 15-year cycle, you’re taking bigger bets. And that’s a whole different process.

But for most people, particularly in software development, you’re talking about something which is much more dynamic, because stability is emerging stabilized. That is why we’re going back to a lot of the old stuff for example. But starting to talk about organizational units as objects as well as software. So you define your objects and you define the interactions, so you create stability in those definitions. But then the way that things interact with other things can actually respond very quickly to unexpected circumstances. And that’s called getting the granularity right. So you build your organization in smaller units with defined interactions and with fast feedback loops. So effectively, you’re managing emergence rather than trying to plan forward.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:41

And it seems like you’re also keeping things simple or at least you try to keep it simple, right?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 24:48

It’s why I use children metaphors a lot. I mean, the children’s party story is still the best teaching story I’ve ever created, and it explains complexity. But it also makes a subtle point is everybody manages to impacts in their day to day lives. So you know how to do it. We just forget about it when we walk through the doors of the office.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:07

All right and we manage complexity with simplicity. For most of us I guess, we don’t manage it with [inaudible 25:12].

Speaker: Dave Snowden 25:14

But there’s a big difference between being simple and being simplistic. And too many people confuse the two, right? I mean, it’s actually a big problem in America and the UK, is the anti-intellectualism of management education is really scary. Because if you don’t have people with sound theory, you can’t make things simple. You just go with what worked last time. And that’s been simplistic. It’s called practice, theory informed practice.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:51

Mary Maru, if you could please just put the questions in the tool, I just added going again, but it’s also in the email. Dave, what is your favorite case study or usage of [unsure word 26:07]?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 26:12

As a couple, all right? There’s a really good one in Helsinki. I mean, I got this weird email in sort of Finish English, right? Which said, we’ve been using your framework and I was actually going, so I met them, right? And they used it to understand teenage violence in the Baltic states, it was a brilliant project. They just published a book. And I’m actually quite proud of that, because they did it without me being involved. I mean, they’ve been on training since. There was another one, I got a phone call from the cabinet office in the UK. So that’s the prime minister’s office. And they’d actually use [unsure word 26:52] to explain the role of religion in the Bush White House. That’s a published paper. And I never forgot that because the woman who wrote it phoned me up, and she’s dying, convinced you read Karl Rayner, because he’s all the way through this. I said, Oh, my God, I studied under him. Is it not obvious? We don’t know. Karl Rayner was the [inaudible 27:11] philosopher behind [inaudible 27:13] two. There’s some of that in [unsure word 27:14]. So I think, I wouldn’t say there’s a favorite, I would say one thing I’m proudest of is if you go and search for [inaudible 27:22] on Google Scholar, 90% of the papers there will be people using the framework without a symbol. And that means it’s got utility. So the cases will be compatible.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:36

Great. Another maybe just to add to this, you talked about like making this available to everyone. Last time we spoke and you said like in context like this, and this was like last year, making [unsure word 27:49] and all the tools available to others. Could you maybe elaborate on that and how that helped maybe? Or has that changed anything since last year?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 28:02

Yeah, we went open source on the methods. So there’s a [unsure word 28:04] now. So everything there is open source progressively over the next nine months, we’re going to go complete open API on the software as well. So that we can create a development community. And the reason we’re doing that, to be honest, is simple knowledge of life cycles, when you’re creating something new, you hold it tight, otherwise, it gets corrupted. When the market starts to take off, you open it up fast, because you want lots of people adopting and copying, so we’re going down that route. The other big thing we’re doing in Agile, this concept of decomposition and recombination. And I’m working with comic agile, and also with about eight or nine other people, we’ve taken all of the different agile methods and breaking them down into the lowest component parts and producing a complete facilitation kit for that. Yeah. And we’re branding that with an independent brand, is not branded [unsure word 29:03]. So our methods of branding [unsure word 29:05] the core pack has got an independent run. And so that mean you can for example, take Scrum, I’ll give the example I keep giving, you could peel out sprint and replace it with three months time box. So and I’ll put the picture in the chat in a minute so you can see them. So the this is designed to be an alternative to things like safe, right? Which we need an alternative to the Borg because what it basically says is there are individual things in virtually all of the methods and all of the concepts and we just need to use them in different combinations. So multi method, multivendor not single framework is what we’re trying to try.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:4 8

And I think that’s where we’re kind of headed and I spoke recently with the Jurgen Appello and he was kind of I don’t know if you’ve seen what he’s been doing with unfixed but essentially just saying like we need to kind of [inaudible 30:00].

Speaker: Dave Snowden 30:03

Mean the magpie?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:06

I think I mean, like, I don’t know, it’s been interesting because I think he’s saying the same thing in the sense like that we need to stop getting away from frameworks. And look…

Speaker: Dave Snowden 30:14

He is trying to create his own framework. Look at the last picture he produced. What Jurgen does is he reads extensively. I mean, the problem with Jurgen is he’s got the intelligence to do it properly, but he chooses not to. Alright, so he grabs things from lots of people, throws it together, put some pretty pictures around it and sees if this one will sell. So he put up his alternative to safe the other day. And to be quite honest, it’s comical. All right. I mean, you talked about some of, that’s the trivial end of Agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:48

All right, let’s move on. No, I agree. I think we need to keep pushing and challenging the current status quo with the frameworks and everything. But I’ll take that over the alternatives. This next question here is from Doug. Doug’s here, do well connected themes perceived complexity different than an individual?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 31:15

Yeah, and I think the essence is, we actually evolved as collective creatures. So we evolved for extended families and tribes and part of the property [inaudible 31:24] showing up in Europe and North America, which manifests really scary North American Politics, with libertarianism is the entire focus on the individual. When the key things in complexity is defined by our interactions, not by anything innate to ourselves. If you want to change, people stop talking about mindset, which is bad science anyway, and change people’s interactions. It’s cheaper, it’s more ethical, and it produces bigger change. So seeing things in terms of high levels of connectivity, interaction, the ability to change those interactions is a much better approach to change. And it’s better based in science anyway.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:07

So you’re saying changing the environment?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 32:10

Change the environment, change the connectivity. What matters is, think about it, I get the children [inaudible 32:17]. What do you most worried about when you kids hit puberty? Who their friends are? Because now their interactions are changing from you to third parties and who they are will change them for life. All right? So Interactions matter more, there are no innate qualities in human beings. It’s why things like Myers Briggs are complete pseudoscience. Yeah, we’re highly adaptive, we can change very quickly and we change based on our interactions and our social interactions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:48

It makes sense when we first moved to United States and I was a teenager. That’s what my parents were mostly worried about who I was hanging out with, not how late I was staying and all of that. Let’s see here. Did your consultancy for military, UK Government add environmental positive impact like social responsible value?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 33:20

That’s a very broad question. Right. So I’ll say a couple of things. First of all, my experience of working with military and I’ve taught just war theory at West Point, I work at Quantico and on the big sea to command thing. And I’ve got no military experience. But I’m now considered an expert on military decision making which is quite scary if you think about it, is military people are more ethical than non-military people. I still remember teaching this at West Point. At West Point, they’re very bright kids, right? They genuinely worry about what’s killing people because they know they’re going to have to do it. Alright, so they’ve evolved various mechanisms on that. And I argued a long time ago, military train people on ethics, software engineers are never trained on ethics. But the implications of software engineering to society are really scary. And it’s like the role of AI. And the trouble is too much of AI.

So I use my favorite phrase is written by misogynist males on the West Coast of the USA, who take and ran seriously after puberty, which is grounds to be committed to a mental hospital. The cultural bias behind a lot of software development is really very scary. Look what happened with Google? I mean, look at [unsure word 34:40] paper, which is a brilliant paper and the woman who published it gets fired. Right, because she pointed out the degree to which the training dataset was being ignored by Google. Yeah, and I’ve been in and out all my life, right? I still remember with Poindexter in Washington suddenly said what do you think about AI and both of us said this is 30 years ago, both of us said simultaneously, they’re ignoring the training data. Yeah, I worked on submarine recognition systems, right? We knew that the training data from experience commanders was far more important than actually raw data. You needed that human element in the data as well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:27

Great. Let’s see a couple of questions here. Do you know appropriate tools to manage emergence in software/products?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 35:37

We developed one that’s called sensemaking. So I’ve declared an interest there that came out of all our work with Darfur and counterterrorism and weak signal detection. So I mean, the key thing about sense maker is, it allows mass generation of data but critically whoever provides the data as a human metadata layer to it, so it’s human interpreted data we use not just raw data. And there were two big programs in [unsure word 36:03]. So one was total information awareness, which is like modern big data. Now, we’ve got John into a lot of trouble with the congress. The other one, which I lead with Sri from Miller Park, was about human sensor networks and human metadata. And that was focused on creating better training datasets. So for example, when we do a massive engagement of the workforce, it’s not done with a sort of social media type contribute your ideas. It’s done in ways that nobody knows what the right answer is and nobody can gain the result. So you shift up a level of abstraction that gives you objective data. And then you can see what are the stable patterns and what’s the non-stable patterns. And of course, the stable patterns you want, you encourage, you give more energy to unstable patterns that you think are desirable, you try and consolidate and give them direction. So there’s a whole process around that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:58

Right, thank you. See here, Alex, is your theory embedded some evolution psychological theories like spiral dynamics? You already kind of answered that, I don’t think but maybe I don’t know, if you want to answer.

Speaker: Dave Snowden 37:15

Aerodynamics is a pseudo-science. It’s got no basis whatsoever in any research. The original material was done by, the original guy originated it worked on a limited sample of his own students over a limited number of experiments and their extract from that to humanity. Yeah, you’ll get it. And don’t get me into Jade organizations, because that’s a religious tract. And the guy doesn’t even, he only selects the aspects of his cases which support the thesis he wants to support. You completely ignores all the people his app was fired in order to make the buddy system work. And he completely ignores the fact that every single case was that a leader imposing the solution on people. Yeah, and the stuff you can learn from that but you’d be much better off going to mon dragon in Catalonia and looking to how cooperatives have evolved. Yeah, because there are better structures in that. Yeah, I mean, as I say, the whole Thiel concept is a religious movement. It’s one of the three worst Bach books ever written in agile, because he actually selects aspects of cases which support his thesis. And that’s not how you do research. I mean, it’s very nice. And it’d be…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:37

Reinventing organizations and a little right. So what the current state of constraint mapping? What’s the current state of…?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 38:49

I’m trying to find the picture so I can send you. We’ve now got the basic symbols work, so we’re working on. There’s a whole process on this if you’re on the [unsure word 39:03] slack group, which is not managed by the community, not by us, there’s a video you can watch on that which will update you. So what we’re doing is basically saying we map the constraints and we use images and metaphors to do that. And we use the whole of the workforce to do it. And then we divide the constraint clusters into counterfactuals. So things which can’t be changed and constructors things we should be using replicable change. So remember, I talked about S3 map, that’s where that’s coming from. So we’re making that into a series of processes using distributed intelligence to do the mapping rather than workshops, so we get more objective results.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:46

Okay, great. I’m just looking. There’s not much left here. There’s this question here. Dave mentioned in one of his podcasts that leaders coordinate decisions and rarely make decisions. You talked about this at the beginning. This is Ken, at the operational level, yes but surely the leader has to make the initial decision on strategic matters or make the key decision when presented with all the information by [inaudible 40:12]. In other words, the leader has to prove the clear vision and direction on the path forward, especially on division two be achieved. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 40:23

You ever worked in corporate strategy? It is heavyweight politics. I mean, this idea about rational assessment, the data and clear vision, that’s not how it works, all right. It’s pretty bloody Savage, right? You occasionally get really gifted leaders generally coming out of a crisis. So your guest did very well on this, right. I worked with him. And he made two or three big decisions. But remember I said in a crisis, you make decisions to hold your options. So the two big decisions he made, is he invested in a next generation of mainframes. And that’s kept IBM going ever since. And that was a good call because everybody else was withdrawing. The second thing he did is he bought companies in each of IBM major areas and sat back and watch what happened. Okay, that’s actually how you manage strategy, you hold options open.

So yeah, he’s making decisions, but remember his decisions to hold options open. So the company I was working strategy from data sciences, we were bought, because we understood services, IBM never understood services. And our management became the management of that group. It became IBM Global Services, which was for a while the biggest group, right? But he had the sense to realize he needed to import management from people who understood the fields, right? The same buying Lotus for software, and other areas. So if you look at really good decision makers, they generally interact, connect suggests, they do multiple options. Yeah. The Vision stuff, yeah, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But show me a vision statement, which isn’t a set of platitudes. It’s kind of like something you do, you go and you say, we are going to be the x, y, z part of the company, or we are going to respect our customer. There’s only so many ways you can say this stuff. And yeah, go through it, do it, it’s fine, right? But it doesn’t really make that much difference. And the reality is, you’re generally responding senior leaders are responding to what middle management are prepared to do. Again, you learn this pretty fast, right? Is you can have all the leadership direction you want, but you’re not going to fire all your senior and middle managers, because they’re doing the execution.

So you’re operating with the constraints or what they’re prepared to accept or do or whether you can replace or you promote. [unsure name 42:51] had a brilliant mechanism by the way, he had the top 300. And every six months 20 joined and 20 left. So it’s a pretty savage environment. I used to do the training of them. Yeah. And the thing he always said to them is, so far you succeeded by achieving your numbers. Now, you’re going to have to achieve your numbers and work with other people when he said very few of who you will make it. And he was right. Yeah, but one in 10 succeeded in making the transition. Right. And again, what he was doing, coming back to my energy gradient. He was managing interactions and managing context to allow things to emerge, which he can then reinforce.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:38

Right. Let’s give me a couple of thoughts or things to think about. I don’t know if there are any questions, people, while people think or is there anything else that you would like to ask Dave? And I have a couple more minutes.

Speaker: Dave Snowden 43:55

I’m open. I came home with whatever you want to talk about. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:02

So Maru.

Speaker: Maru 44:05

Yeah, I have many, a whole stack of questions, a whole graph of questions that I bring in my tongue, but I’m going to select one to make it as concise and self-contained as possible. What do you think people should approach constructing useful frameworks to understand or make sense of where the company is? And what strategies they should build? The goal here is to do competitive strategy. But what do you think they should approach? How do you think they should approach building frameworks so that they can make sense of where they are and where they should go?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 44:42

I think good frameworks emerge. If you look at [unsure word 44:47], for example, it’s 22 years old now. And it’s gone through multiple migrations and changes in that time, frameworks don’t work if they’re based on a limited number of cases. Where the big problem with safe. I mean, safe is based on Dean’s memory of three or four projects. That’s the basis of it. That’s where it comes from. Yeah, in terms of its background. So frameworks need to evolve, they need to be a mixture of theory and practice, and they can’t just be put in place. Right. And framework should also allow for diversity. The problem with Agile is the frameworks are confused with the methods. Alright, so Scrum is not a framework, Scrum is a really good collection of methods. If you think of it as a framework, you end up in the method, the wars. Yeah, I mean, I still can’t see that much difference between Scrum and Kanban. But I mean, I get into trouble every time I say that. And I just quote talking back you know, that was to sheep [inaudible 45:47] shepherds. But the devil you should be working out, it’s not a big difference, right? So I think frameworks need to be theory based, they need to evolve, they need to create structure, but they shouldn’t bind you into a single proprietary approach. And I’ll give you another illustration on this. There were three things which came to form the Agile Manifesto.

So there was XP, Scrum and DSDM. Now, there are two interesting lessons of this, DSDM if you don’t know, I was one of the three founders of that, along with my equivalent of logical and [unsure word 46:24] Holt from Cambridge, right? And we met in a pub in Cheltenham. And that’s how it started. We didn’t need to ski resort for a week, dinner in the pub was enough. All right. So that came in, and that introduced [inaudible 46:37] and all sorts of good stuff. You then had XP, which is, to my mind, really the heart of Agile. But nothing could scale around XP because it was experienced based and quite esoteric, whereas scrum was codified and abstracted to the point where it scaled very quickly. And that was where things went wrong. Because not that scrum wasn’t any valuable but it created this proprietary scaling, with training, with certification thing that everybody else then followed. And nobody went back and thought, is that the right thing?

So what we’re now talking about in terms of rewilding agile, is I say, is decomposing methods into their lowest coherent components. And there’s like three things in safe, which they haven’t borrowed or stolen from other people. So we can put those in that category. And instead of taking that massive diagram, you basically take the bits which work for you and put them together in different sequences. I put some of the cards in the things, you can see what we’re doing there. And actually, that’s what people really do with the frameworks anyway, they never implement the whole framework. They can’t work out what will work and they adjust it, and they just go under the radar. And that’s a hugely inefficient approach. So frameworks need to be generic, and they need to be at least, they really should be method agnostic. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:58

So what you’re saying, and I think we’ve talked about this before, but it’s like the future and really what works is where organization constructs its own framework and evolves it, rather than saying we’re doing safe or we’re doing this, right?

Speaker: Dave Snowden 48:11

I think you’re talking assembly not a framework. So okay. And somebody just asked about Ivan’s work, we’ve reached a provisional agreement with [inaudible 48:21] jackers, and that will move, his stuff will stay as it is, but aspects of it will move across into the [inaudible 48:27]. So that’s actually underway at the moment. And again, that’s a sort of similar approach. It is trying to break things down into essences. So we don’t think there are such things as essences, but the work then we can work with, all right. So we need much more of this. Well, I call it coherent heterogeneity. What the big frameworks do is they homogenize and so you’ve got to choose it. What coherent heterogeneity does is it says things can be different provided they’re coherent. So I’ve just shown you our attempt to do that. You can make things coherent by allowing them to combine in different ways.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:14

But that also alludes to organization developing competence in understanding this and involving more and developing internal employees rather than relying consultants to come in tell…

Speaker: Dave Snowden 49:27

It does, and part of what we’re doing as well is to build a lot of knowledge into the artifacts. For example, if you look at those axes, they get down to a method that you can understand those QR codes you can scan which will take you to why the source and such like. So you can build a lot into artifacts without the need for people necessary to have the same level of training. We can’t prove this in IBM. Is this an approach we adopted. You can’t expect anybody to be expert in all of the things available. So you need to allow them to become experts when they need. But make it easy for them to choose what they’re going to do in different combinations. For example, one of the packs we’ve put into here, which is a sense maker pack, we haven’t put in sense maker, we put in applications of sense maker. So do I want to do a cultural scam? Do I want to do distributed ideation? So we put those in as things that people can understand on the surface and then they can dive deeper into how they do it later.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:32

Thank you. We might have time for one more question. Anybody? What about I’m interested just maybe. Last time I spoke, I was surprised that you said our response generally speaking to COVID was pretty good. Do you still think about that it was very good. And any thoughts now? I think it’s been a year.

Speaker: Dave Snowden 51:01

I think it’s amazing. We didn’t have more riots. I mean, the riots are now coming. Yeah, but they’re far less than we thought there would be. Well, I think is really disturbing is the way that… Sorry, I’m having this debate with Jim [inaudible][51:18] at the moment I’m trying to decide whether Jim Ross is just basically has bad ideas or he’s a bad actor. I haven’t decided which, right. What you’ve now got is you’ve got far right money the minute there’s something which is because there is this libertarian beliefs, our work in this field, right? There’s a libertarian belief that society has to be destroyed for something new to emerge. underpins the game a game B stuff and why my name has been linked with Gabe B. I don’t, I don’t know. I never agreed to that. Alright.

So you get these sort of things. So what happens? The minute is something like the auto thing, money flows in very quickly. Which is actually why the Canadians were right to close off the money access, because what you’re seeing is not the people have been deliberately disrupted from the far right. But they’re using money and resources and social media amplification, to actually take legitimate process and delegitimize it by expansion. And that’s where it started to go wrong there. But overall, people accepted lockdowns, they accepted restrictions. I mean, we’re about to open up completely in England. What’s interesting is the opinion polls say we shouldn’t do that. People are nervous about it. But we have a Prime Minister who needs to distract from his hypocrisy. Alright, so that’s going on that side. So now the danger sign is now do we come out of this a better species? Or do we just go back to the old way of thinking and that’s where I think we’re going wrong. I think we manage the crisis really well. And human beings in a real crisis are always good. You’ve got this myth in England, alright of a certain generation they say during the war, right? It’s always during the war. Yeah. Everybody worked together. So why can’t we reenergize that and say, Well, yeah, but okay, we’ll have to get the Germans to invade again, to achieve it, right. Again, people aren’t thinking about the context. So the context of a crisis changes behavior, what good leadership should have done and it didn’t, alright, was to find a way to use that behavior to navigate a different pathway out.

Mike Cottmeyer

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:29

Who is Mike Cottmeyer and what’s been your journey?

Mike Cottmeyer 00:33

Okay, well, that’s a big question, man, who is Mike Cottmeyer? Well okay, well, I’ll take it from a professional angle. So, I’m the CEO of a company called Leading Agile, started about 11 years ago, I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia. We’ve gotten pretty big over the last couple years, we’re about 160, almost 270 people, we focus almost exclusively on Agile Transformation. More often than not in kind of either the IT product development space or IT services space. We like to consider ourselves kind of a full stack consultancy in the sense that you know, obviously, you have to deal with the work surface levels and what the teams are doing but you know, how do you orchestrate teams across dependency boundaries? How do you go up into Portfolio Management? How do you go up into investment management, that kind of a thing? What do you do with audit and compliance? What do you do with planning cadences? What do you do with Enterprise Architecture like, the whole thing, right? So like, what we really do is, I like to think of us as like, we kind of refactor organizations to be able to operate with more business agility, right, in a nutshell. And then aside from that, you know, I’m a dad, a husband, I have three boys, you know, so it’s basically family and work for the most part, for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:53

You got a lot of guitars and are those guitars in the background?

Mike Cottmeyer 01:56

I do, I play guitar. So I actually, as soon as I said that, I went well, it’s not 100% try skill at hand. I play guitar and I did jiu-jitsu and I’ve been kind of on a bit of a fitness journey for the last couple of years as well. So yeah, but the hobby is all kinds of very, guitars have been persistent in my life since I was about 12 years old. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:13

Nice. How did you get into this agile space? You said, you’ve been doing this 11 years but I’m sure it’s more than that. Like, how did you end up?

Mike Cottmeyer 02:21

Yeah, well, back in the early 2000s. Well, I guess, you know I spent the first 10 years of my career mostly in IT infrastructure. So like, literally like 19, to about like, 30 or so and then, so I guess 30 put us in the early 2000s. And you know, the manifesto had just been written and I was working as a project manager in a company called CheckFree here in Atlanta and squarely like in the PMO. But I had always kind of adapted practices, project management practices to deal with variation because like, my worldview was that things were not as certain as the Gantt chart implied, kind of view. And so, I was working on this company called Check free in the PMO, doing PMI style project management and I was working with development teams and there was a guy who’s on my team now named Brian Sondergaard, who I worked for. And we were going back and forth on some things and so I inquired, I like, what do you guys like, tell me, what do you guys formally doing and they were doing they said it was extreme programming at the time.

But what they’re really doing was like scrum with technical practices and things like that, I ever more aligned, it felt like to me was Scrum. And so, I built a relationship with this dev director that I was working with and he and I would collaborate and I was reading books and you know, reading all the Kent Beck stuff, [unsure 03:48]. There were so a lot of guys writing kind of in the rough space and scale project management space, agile project management space, that time Jim Highsmith write on that kind of stuff. And then so the same guy, Brian Sondergaard, ended up coming in working for him in his dev organization and we just started doing some really cool stuff with Agile program portfolio management. We were inventing a lot of things, taking David Anderson’s work on Kanban and agile management stuff that he was doing and literally building like, what you would recognize now is like, early versions of safe, you know here frameworks and like flow based management systems at the higher tiers. And so, it’s that for a couple years, that group reorganized and I kind of find myself back in a regular PMO and I’m like, that’s not cool, right?

At that point I said that, no disrespect to PMOs out there but it’s like, we’ve done so much cool stuff like I just couldn’t go backwards. Right? And then, so I ended up going to work for Version One for a little bit and that was like my first introductory to like a pure play agile organization and I was on the team that went in, trained and consulted. And what was super cool about that was and I know a lot of practitioners are listening to this, will recognize it, when you have a tool, the tools are typically designed to work in an agile way. And if you’re working with an organization that’s not really structured for agility, like you start to recognize there’s a lot of stuff that’s broken and you have kind of two choices. You either change the tool to accommodate the organization or you change the organization and unfortunately, most of the companies that we were dealing with, didn’t have agency or influence to change the organization.

But I started writing a lot about what I would do and I started doing talks about what I do. And the cool thing about Version One is like, any talk, any conference I can get accepted to, they let me go speak and I was off speaking. Yes, going to conferences, building networks, you know, meeting with people I got to meet, you know, people who were like my heroes like, Jim Highsmith and Alastair Coburn and Christopher [unsure 05:55] and Joshua Kerievsky and you know, Kent Beck and like all these guys, right? And was fortunate to become friends with some of them through the years, right which is pretty cool to become friends with your heroes a little bit. Literally standing on the shoulders of giants, left out Mike Cohn, never really became buddies, duster dirty, you know, just all those luminaries of our field just consumed everything, right? And I was just writing and writing and speaking and stuff and then you know, when joined a company called Pillar Technology for about a year, ended up not being a great move for me personally but great company or fine.

Sold to Accenture, I think and then loving years ago launched leading agile and stated goal is I wanted to make, I want to double my salary and work part time but I failed miserably. For 11 years, became a CEO and learned a ton about stuff I’d never want to learn about like, banking and [unsure 06:57], benefits and investment strategies and you know, growth and SGMA and cost of goods sold and all kinds of stuff like that, yeah. Trying to keep the company as agile as it can possibly be so like, we try super hard to organize in ways very similar to how we ask our customers to organize and manage their processes, empower the people and you know, distribute decision making and try not to be super commanding control. And you know, that kind of a thing so we try to do what we say to do, right and we try to be that way.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:30

Yeah, that is awesome. I think you know, obviously I know they prior and you know, I’ve known other people that worked and it’s you know, from Leading Agile, at least what I’ve heard people that work for Leading Agile. Like, the way that you engage with your clients is, you know, focus more on coaching, focus more on meeting people where they are in companies. And I want to kind of go back to something that you mentioned which is, you said you refactor organizations. And I want to go to a topic, I haven’t discussed this with anybody on the podcast, I’ve done business architecture. And I want to start there and then we can kind of go down but from your perspective and you said something that’s related to this, you said, if your systems and capabilities are not aligned to your products and customers, your practices don’t matter. So, I want to come back to that but could you just maybe for those that are not familiar with what business architecture is, could you maybe just describe it?

Mike Cottmeyer 08:28

Well, so we’re in an interesting phase of Leading Agile where we have people that are deep experts in things that are not deep experts in. And so, like the Stevens who was one of my early, like, co founder kind of people, deep expertise in business architecture, I kind of think I’m just kind of a business architecture hobbyist, right? But in principle, what we’re talking about with business architecture, is we look at the organization not through the lens of what the people do or what their function is but more through the lens of what are the services that the business provides. And so like, the analogy I use, the reason why I talk about refactoring is because I think there’s like a really strong metaphor here. It’s like when you take like a legacy monolith and you want to like move to the cloud or do DevOps or something like that, right?

You can’t pull the whole monolith up and put it in a cloud, right? What you end up doing is you’re pulling out services and you end up encapsulating services and you put encapsulated services, service boundaries and contracts and all those things, you move that to the cloud, right kind of thing? And that’s what a lot of organizations are like, but it’s people and structures and processes and org design and things like that. And so, what when we do an early stage transformation, I actually don’t bring typically agile coaches. I mean, everybody’s like very familiar with Agile and Scrum and things like that but I wouldn’t call them agile coaches per se. We typically do in early stage like a startup engagement where the business architect and somebody who’s like really, like a product person but probably a little different than most people would think. Like, so we go in and we will literally do like business capability models, heat maps at your organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:13

And then I’m assuming this is somebody like pretty high up like, C.O.O. Like, because those are the people that have usually authority to make these type of changes, right or is it somebody like?

Mike Cottmeyer 10:22

Yeah. Well, that’s probably an interesting angle. Right? So, one of the things that I talked about as a company and just from us is we have to be incredibly patient in our sales cycle. Because like, it all comes down to span of control and so, you know, so if you’re dealing with like a division, right, it might be like a division head, it could be a divisional C.I.O or Senior Vice President or Vice President is working with a business partner on that side nav, span of control over like a piece of the organization. But yeah, absolutely right, the kinds of changes that you have to make, have to be sponsored at the top because they’re not process changes.

Process is part of it but like, you literally have to create a hypothesis organizationally for what you’re going to group people around. Right? And so, let me take it from the other side, like one of the, like I did a talk for the scrum gathering in Vegas, it had to have been, you know, eight, nine years ago at this point. But I did this talk called, ‘the three things’ and it was like, the three things you need to know to transform any organization. And the three things are just really simple, team’s backlogs, working test, the software and the way Scrum works, we know this, right? The way Scrum works is you have to have a dedicated team of people that own the product that are interfacing with like, a product owner who’s responsible for the backlog and they have to have the ability to produce a working tested increment, the end of every sprint, like period, hard stop. Right? And if you don’t have those conditions, then what starts to happen, right is you get teams that are breaking the rules of Scrum because they kind of have to, right? And so like, at the lowest level of the organization, you have to ask yourself is what is necessary to form a complete cross functional team that stays together over time. And what it is it comes down to is that you have to have a capability or a feature set or encapsulated service with technology boundaries, a dedicated team, a service owner or product owner and you have to have the deployment capabilities to produce a working tested increment at the end of every two weeks and that’s just true, right? And so, you can either kind of take the scrum approach that says, okay well, we’re going to start doing Scrum and then your impediments will reveal themselves and the impediments will get resolved by the scrum master. But in practice, right, that’s too low level to address these systematic issues.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:57

Exactly. Because I think what happens is like, then the dependencies are exposed and you start seeing all of a sudden, all of these dependencies, you still have delivery issues, right?

Mike Cottmeyer 13:08

For sure, right? For sure, and that’s really, so you hit the nail on the head, right? It’s like, its dependencies in some form of fashion at the end of the day, they get away, because you know, the Scrum and this is where safe comes in, it’s kind of interesting, right? So, what scrum came along and said was, okay, we’re going to encapsulate the dependencies inside the team. And we’re going to give the team agency to how to resolve those dependencies in real time, that assumes that the dependencies are encapsulated within the team. So now, when you have multiple Scrum teams that have dependencies between them, right, what’s safe came along and basically said was, well, I’m going to encapsulate the value stream and we’re going to put the boundaries of the dependencies between teams, within like a release train or a value stream or big room planning around it or any string between things and we’re going to do this stuff, right?

What we find is really complex organizations, the value streams are not really encapsulate very well, either. Right? So, what do you do with dependencies between value streams, right? Now, the last guys right, Bassford, and [unsure 14:15] you know, I think Dave actually got the model right. It’s like, you’ve got to break the dependencies, you got to put the right technical architecture and stuff but the challenge is that, it can take years in some of these organizations, right? That’s not a flip of the switch, even if you want to defund it, you couldn’t do it overnight, you couldn’t do it safely, quickly. It takes a minute, right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:35

It also takes people like, I think maybe it takes a lot of people to understand what needs to happen. Then maybe just to kind of add another thing here, which is reference architecture. So, we talked about business architecture, business architecture, just for to keep it simple, it has to do with organizational design, policies, essentially, how do you architect your organization, right? Like, you know, where does reference architecture, we’re not talking about IT reference architecture but business reference architecture fit in and what is your?

Mike Cottmeyer 15:10

Well, let me tell you the way I usually use that word, right? So, there are organizational patterns that I think are universally true. Right? And I think safe and last, and maybe some other things like discipline, Agile Delivery, some of the stuff that like [unsure 15:28]’s done with met objectives and I guess now he’s part PMI. A lot of what those people have built upon are really sound foundational principles, like encapsulated teams at the work surface level, Kanban or flow based kind of governance models on top, right, at a lean agile metrics that enable us to measure improvement, things like that. And so, I think there’s like a reference architecture to organizational design that I believe is true and I think it’s [cross-talking 16:01]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:00

But those are more like patterns, right? Like, they’re taking a bunch of, you know, patterns and just putting them together and viewing these frameworks around.

Mike Cottmeyer 16:09

Yeah. Well, that’s where I was going, right? And so, that’s always where I preface it, this is how I use the word reference architecture, right? It’s like those base patterns, the base structures, the rules of operation, just the things that we just know to be inherently true. It might be like a design pattern, like if you read a design patterns book in code, right, and I’m not a coder because I can’t write a bunch of stuff off. But like, these design patterns are universally true and then they get implemented in an organization. Right? And then all of those patterns get instantiated into an operating model for that organization and this is my challenge with last and Scrum and some of these other things is, I think all of them are built on incredibly sound reference architecture but they’re overly specific in their reference implementation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:58

Correct. So essentially, instead of dealing with complexity, where like, instead of the reference architecture being fixed, which save has a picture and then all of these. Instead of like, leveraging those patterns and almost evolving that architecture, so that architecture has to be emergent, rather than fixed, right?

Mike Cottmeyer 17:16

Also, so Dean has like, a couple of, you know, for what he’s trying to build, right? The challenge with kind of going down the path that we go down is that it’s really difficult to scale. Right? The fact that I’m in 160 ,170 people is mind boggling to me, that’s really tough, right? But like what, so Dean kind of, at least this is my understanding from the outside of that organization, what they’ve really done is they’ve packaged a reference implementation that basically gives people guidance. It’s a little bit like the rough days, where it’s like, these are practices that are good for most people, most of the time, we fully expect you to tailor them, right?

But the certification is around the implementation details and you know, like most people, even with Scrum, it’s like, you go to a certification class and it isn’t good practices that most people can do most of the time, it’s like, this is safe, right? And we don’t tailor it or we don’t [cross- talking 18:11] safe, right? And so, even if we do tailor them, sometimes we make bad tailoring decisions and it causes the system to break and all kinds of stuff, right? And so because Dean is trying to create certification, right, he’s codified all the stuff, right? And it’s a thing and it has released numbers and all these different things, more power to him, right? I mean, there’s good guidance in there and we work with safe shops all the time. Right? But it’s like, I mean Dean knows, right, I’ve had conversations one on one with Dean is that he knows that there’s an underlying organizational architecture required to support this, last I talked with him, it’s beyond the scope of what he’s trying to certify.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:52

No. I mean, I spoke to him on this podcast too and I asked him about that specifically and he’s like you know, like you said, if you have you know, somebody that doesn’t know what they’re doing, of course, they’re going to you know and he’s seeing those patterns but?

Mike Cottmeyer 19:07

And he’ll come in and consult for you and customized model for you and do all those things. Right? So again, I think it’s high integrity but just like everything, right, in life it’s like, we take the surface level stuff and the biggest problem we see in the transformation space right now is you’re taking a reference implementation, overlaying on top of an organizational design that it wasn’t meant for, it doesn’t work or it doesn’t work as effectively as you would like it to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:33

And that’s why it fails, in a sense a lot of times, so maybe to tie this together, like you know, we’ve been saying or what I wanted you to kind of expand on is like, okay, organizational architecture is key. You have to have somebody on the business side, usually supported by the board to make a decision that we have to look at the whole organization and how it’s architected. Right? And then when we look at architecture, we have to understand that in order to deal with this type organization, the architecture can’t be fixed, it has to be contextualized for our own organization rather than just relying on a recipe, like treating say for any other framework, like a recipe. And then even though we don’t have half of the ingredients, we’re saying, let’s do the same, right?

Mike Cottmeyer 20:22

Yeah. Well, so sure, right? So, like the process, so like, one of the things that we’ve been unpacking for last couple years is we talk about the difference between like a system of delivery, right, that consists of reference architecture patterns and reference implementation details and then there’s a system of transformation. Okay, how are you going to implement it? There’s a third system we call, system and continuous improvement, which is, how are you going to sustain it and continuously adapt it? And then, you know, this is something that maybe, you know, a company wouldn’t put in but we call it, a system of engagement.

But it’s like, how are we going to start to build mindshare over time to get the organization to converge into these patterns. And so, a lot of the process for us is getting everybody aligned around the reference architecture patterns, picking a slice of the organization that wants to go and do this, con expedition and then we move it to a defined steady state. And for us, a lot of times and this is another thing that I think is hard for people get over, I was literally just talking with some of our developers this morning. And it’s like, sometimes at an early stage transformation in the presence of dependencies when things are not aligned as well as we would like them to, sometimes we have to put in compensating controls and we use the metaphor of like, scaffolding.

You know, I want to build a wall and I don’t want the wall to have a bunch of metal stuff around it. But while I’m building it and it’s hardening, I have to put some scaffolding around it. So, there’s a lot of things that we do in an early stage, depending on the organization that might be heavier and save as much grief as saved gets heavy and heavy. We’ll do things that are heavier than safe because they’re scaffolding. And then as we improve the systems underneath, there are systemic transformation, then you can start to dismantle the scaffolding.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:11

I think I heard you talking, maybe you can expand on it here. Like, most of the organizations today, larger organizations are structured around capabilities. And a lot of times you might have to start with those capabilities and move them into value streams over time, rather than just quickly trying to organize by value streams.

Mike Cottmeyer 22:33

Yeah, so there’s an interesting journey that we’re starting to uncover, especially if we’ve been fortunate to work with some really large clients. And what you find is that, there’s a sequence to events that they like, A has to be true before b can be true before C can be true and so a lot of times you’ll walk in, and people aren’t even organized around business capabilities.

They’re organized around functional silos and there’s project management that stitching processes and resources and things like that, right? So again, all this depends upon the complexity of the organization, the size of the organization, like if you can walk in and you can reorganize around products or feature sets and they’re discrete and you know, that’s awesome, right? I’d rather do that first but a lot of these mega organizations, a lot of times they understand business architecture, they understand what their business capabilities are.

So as a first pass, you kind of think, okay, well, I’m organized around business capabilities because I can create complete cross functional teams are on those and I’m going to orchestrate the project work across, I’m going to deal with dependencies across business capabilities, it kind of becomes like a first pass. And then like on a second pass, now we’ve got a bunch of teams formed around business capabilities but the rub is going to be in and this is legitimate, that those dependencies left unchecked, drive orchestration costs up really high. So, because the orchestration is so high, it actually creates a business case for breaking dependencies and then as you break dependencies, you can regroup business capabilities into value streams.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:15

So, it’s almost like you’re exposing the cost of dependencies and using that as a trigger or nudge to say, hey, you know, this is costing you.

Mike Cottmeyer 24:29

100%, yeah. Because like, you walk into organizations and I mean the numbers, I can remember 20 years ago when I first, maybe a little longer than that, when I first got into project management. You know, it seemed like if you were budgeting something like and again, I’m making this up, it was like maybe six developers, two testers, a project manager, maybe split across a couple teams or something like that. And now, it seems like you walk into places and like for every one developer, there’s two testers and three project managers and a BA and like, all this stuff, right? And it’s like, the complexity has gone up so much we have all these people run around managing complexity. And part of the challenge that we’ve got is, I think that’s just a function of bad org design, right and unnecessary complexity. So like, what starts to happen is that once you get the organizational design, right, you’re able to surface, not only the dependencies but the cost of managing those dependencies. And then what you can do is you can and I’m not saying that you have to lay people off but it’s like, you can redeploy those people into other higher value functions within the organization, rather than being scorekeepers. There’s just too many scorekeepers around in most companies that we deal with.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:41

This is crazy, so like, what you’re saying is like, not almost but I think it’s exactly, like if your organizational structure policies is not aligned, that can cost you. That can almost like, you know, a lot of times, it’s going to force you to fail because that’s a lot of times one of the underlying issues or impediments to having a more you know, product value, whatever you want to call it based on organization.

Mike Cottmeyer 26:15

Yeah, the other fascinating thing and I literally just previous, our as talking, we have kind of an emerging practice within our methodology group. It’s kind of like, the broad arc is methodology and then we have kind of product and business architecture and kind of within product, there’s a specialty that’s starting to emerge around finance and financial management. Because what we see a lot and I know this will resonate with you, it’s like, as you start to build out, even if you’re building out these little expeditions that are like team, program, portfolio, right, that kind of thing. It’s usually a layer, an audit and compliance type layer, governance layer that rides over all of this, that is still looking at three to five year plans and 18 months cycles and annual funding and all these different things. And you know, I think that is indeed an artifact of an organization that struggles to make any commitments, right?

So, they’re planning and scorekeeping and doing all these things, even at the highest levels of the organization and what’s been pretty cool. And these are some big names that we’re working with is that once you get the organization performance and it can make any commitments and it can deliver in small batches, then the next trick is to go up a layer and say, okay, how can we exploit this new organizational capability. So that we can make better bets and market, get faster feedback and be able to learn from what it is we’re doing because what my team is doing is, they were pitching a white paper they wanted to do with us. And you know, one of the things that we’re talking about was the idea that we’ve installed agile but we haven’t really and maybe we’ve even reduced costs and increase efficiency but we haven’t really maximized the product value or gotten to where we can actually put things in market and start selling them earlier. And again, that’s an artifact of the way we’re governing and doing audit and compliance and such is not congruent with the improved way that we’re doing software delivery or product delivery, you know right?

So, what are the steps necessary to be able to bring those top level functions into alignment with this new deployment capability. And the way that you’re going to maximize value at an enterprise level is to take your multi year annual planning cycles and to break them into some sort of quarterly cadence with quarterly funding, right? Where you can fund a quarter or maybe two, right, I’m not being super dogmatic, it’s probably not continuous at that level but I can fund a quarter release and maybe by the end of the second quarter, realize that maybe I’m not quite on track. And maybe I have the opportunity to go correct something in quarter two or pivot into quarter three and I actually become more adaptive and agile at the senior most levels within the organization. And I think that’s where the and again, in a mega organization with value streams that are global, I mean sometimes that’s where you got to start attacking.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:15

That’s really interesting, I’m also interested to hear your thoughts, how do you move from funding capabilities or cost centers to funding value streams? Like, that also needs to happen at the highest level and that needs that shift, what have you seen and like, that’s working, that’s not working in that shift?

Mike Cottmeyer 29:38

Well, like I said, right? I mean, I’m dealing in a world where I have people that this is their specialty. Right? And so, that might be a topic for another podcast to put vows of it. Right? But this is literally what Larry and I were just talking about, right? They’re hitting me with all this detail, right and I’m like, well really like if you think about it what we’re really doing is we’re trying to get them to break big projects into small projects and run the small projects on tighter cadence. Like, yeah that’s exactly it, I’m like, okay well, then sometimes we just need to say that, you know because that’s all it is. Right? So, how do you get them too, right I mean, it all comes down to understanding what their constraints are and what they’re trying to accomplish. And to be able to build a system that gives them what they need, is agile is sometimes and this is a reason why we came up with this little quadrant model and our base camps and expeditions and things like that, is agile is a lot of times what we want is, we want everything to be adaptive and emergent. And you know, it’s just like, just going to park it really fast.

Yeah but if I’m building nuclear submarines or I’m building cars or I’m building missiles or I’m building large scale financial services, infrastructure, things like that, right and these are differently building websites or consumer products and things. And there’s lots of things that have to come together in order for that to be able to happen. And so like, one of the things that I talk about and I’ve done this for a minute, like the earliest revs of our website, say this right up at the top, it’s like most the time, like people aren’t using or they don’t aspire to use agile for like, hyper adaptability and exploration. What they’re really using Agile for is because they believe it will help them become more predictable and that’s why that tends to be the first step on the journey is because when you organize complete cross functional teams and you get them to establish stable velocity against a known backlog. And they get to a really clean definition of done at the end of every sprint, that is a much more reliable indicator of project progress than you know, Gantt charts and progress reports and all that kind of stuff, right? And so, we can do is we can use Agile concepts to actually get to a place where we can make any commitments more effectively than our traditionally managed counterparts.

Okay? And so now we have dedicated stable performance teams that we can count on, that are aligned to business capabilities or value streams or products, I can start to think about how to fund those things in a more stable way. Right? And now this need for predictability in control isn’t done by top down edict and rules and tight governance and things, it’s more like, fun, stable funding and periodic measurement of progress. And I believe, in order to have that conversation at the most senior levels, the necessary precondition is to be able to actually be a performance organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:59

I mean, that reminds me of what you also described, like the almost the trust influence loop, it’s like, let’s deliver a first on let’s meet the organization where they are and meet that, you know and it’s almost like in order to help them evolve, you’re building that trust and you’re delivering them what they want and slowly.

Mike Cottmeyer 33:20

The very first, the very earliest thinking this of this is like everybody, you know, this is like 15, 20 years ago, right? So like, everything I would hear would be like, you have to trust a team. Well, the ecosystems that they’re working in, their practices, their org design like, nothing lends itself to trustworthiness, right? And so, it’s like, what I would tell people is like, you’re asking these leaders to trust these teams but these teams have no track record of ever living anything on time. Right? And I was talking with one prospect one time and they’re like, well the executives need to stop asking us for dates, they need to stop giving a scope, they need to stop giving as much as you need to just give us a big pile of money and just let us do it whatever we want.

They didn’t say quite like that but that was certainly what they’re saying, right? And I’m like, okay like, seriously, if you were building a house or doing whatever, would you just give the contractor half a million dollars and just say, just go for, just do the best as you can? You’re the guy that’s close to the ground, you know what kind of house I need, like no, right, you want to know what you’re going to get for your money. And there’s some reasonableness, right, there has to be some ability to deal with variation and respond to change and exchange requests and things like that but you want some idea what you’re going to get for your money. Business owners are no different than matter, executives are no different than that, they want some reasonable controls to know they’re going to get pretty close. And so, if you’re going to go up to the most senior executives with some form of, you need to trust the teams, my belief is that you got to get the team’s trustworthy first.

You have to create the organizational design, you have to create the process, you have to create the metrics, you have to get instantiate, you have to be able to put stable inputs in and get stable inputs out. And this is all scrum basics from, I’m not saying I don’t think anything unethical, I mean, [unsure 35:01] was writing about this stuff in his earliest works about basically how to deal with variation and process control. I mean, that was like early stage stuff, I mean, David Anderson’s been writing about this and Kanban and has Agile Management books.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:16

I mean, that’s the whole lean, like in a sense, if you can manage the variance, you want to minimize the variance but sometimes, you know, right, it’s not as easy as you know, mass production plants and then things like that.

Mike Cottmeyer 35:29

So, what the trust influence loop came in and so what we’re talking as that little, like that little figure eight thing on the side and it’s been a while since I’ve talked about it but like one of the things that we were talking about earlier is consultants. And I would say this is 100% true of internal change agents as well, is that there’s an influence loop, which basically goes something from like, you have access to somebody, you have to have empathy for their problem they’re trying to solve, you have to have a point of view that actually they believe will solve their problem and then you create safety for them. A lot of times, what we do is agile is, we come in and we say we know your problem, this is what you need to do to fix that. And then they go well, not quite my problem and even if it is my problem, it’s not the problem that has my pants on fire, right?

So it’s like, I’m not dealing with that right now and so this whole influence game is a game of access, empathy, point of view and safety. Right? So, you loop through that and then on the backside, the trust side is you get permission to do something, you have to do with integrity, you have to do with competence and you have to share results. Right? And so, there’s this virtuous cycle and so this is reason why part of what’s up underneath like this base camp model and the reason why we do incremental.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:42

That’s what I wanted to hear, maybe you can talk about that next, which like, how does the base camp get the expeditions and how is it supported by that, trust influence problem?

Mike Cottmeyer 36:52

So, you think about it, especially from like a marketing perspective, a sales perspective, an early stage engagement perspective to piloting and to roll out and to growing like a large account. And again, right, all this stuff, I’m a consultant, that’s the world I live in but even from a practitioner perspective, you’re doing the same things, right? There’s marketing, you’re selling, you’re getting started, you’re scaling, right, all these things. And there’s an influence game that has to be played, right, you have to tell a story that convinces somebody that this is worth doing and then once you do it, you have to get the results you promised. Right?

So if I say, hey, you’re going to get all this greatness from doing Agile and I train everybody on Scrum, I train everybody on safe and it ends up being a chaotic mess for three years. And you don’t get the results, like why would anybody continue to invest in that, right? It’s just a [unsure 37:38] system at that point, right? And so, what we recognized very early on was two things and again, this is through the lens of a consultant, running a consultancy, is if we didn’t demonstrate tangible value really quickly, we didn’t get to stay for very long, right because, no, seriously, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:57

No, I’m laughing because I’ve been in many of those situations and I know you’re sure most coaches and consultants have.

Mike Cottmeyer 38:04

Yeah, and it’s like, you go in, everything’s great. It’s like, it takes a minute, it was six months and you’re like, yeah okay, I can’t get the next tranche of funding. It’s great, man, I appreciate you, see you later, right kind of a thing? Or maybe you have some success but it’s just not mind blowing. Right? And so, the evolution of these expeditions, the base camps and so just to put into software language, like an expedition is like a slice. So, I think of an expedition is like an increment of the organization and then base camp is like an iteration. If you guys go back to like, you think about like Jeff Patton’s, Mona Lisa metaphor, which I think is just brilliant, right?

So for Dewey, he’s using it to describe incremental and iterative and he uses increments is like, okay, I’m going to take the Mona Lisa canvas, I’m going to split into six, I’m going to work on the upper left corner of it, right, that’s an increment. An iteration is like, taking it from like a sketch to a watercolor to an oil painting, kind of a thing. We’re making it more rich as we go and so like, we think of transformation incrementally and iteratively, as well. So, but we can promise typically and like a three to four month early stage engagement is we can take a slice of this organization, team level to portfolio, structure, governance and metrics, all the practices, culture, all that stuff and get it to a predictable state. And that’s what we promise and we can do that repeatedly in three or four months and then they go, wow, this is actually really working. And they go, okay, let’s do the next chunk and then the next chunk.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:38

What do you do in a sense like, when you’re taking those vertical slices, there’s almost like prerequisite to what they need to have in order to create that vertical slice, right? So, there’s some type of expectations that you set you know, if we’re going to do this, this is what we need from our organization to create that vertical slice.

Mike Cottmeyer 39:54

Yeah, so remember, I talked about system of delivery, system of transformation, system of engagement? So, from a system of delivery perspective, you’re building on patterns, reference architecture, filling in reference implementation details, things like that, right? So, we have a hypothesis of what this is going to look like at base camp one. And then we might have some idea of the first couple of slices and then the system of transformation is all about how you run the expedition to base camp journey. Right? So, we have outcomes, based plans and a bunch of guidance that we’ve evolved over time, right? So we’re going to move this slice into this known state but on the system of engagement stuff, which I think gets to your question is, the way we do that is we’ll get like all the leaders in a room and we’ll walk through, here’s the reference architecture, here’s the things that you’re going to have to do, here’s the things you’re going to have to overcome, here’s going to be the nature of your dependencies, here’s going to be your challenges. Now, are we 100% right, I think we got 80 or 90% of them.

The details of people in particular architecture issues are all going to be all over the place. I mean, there’s a lot of uncertainty but the patterns, the failure patterns are fairly known. So, we walk them through, we say this is your failure patterns, this is what’s going to happen, these are things we need to fix, this is how we’re going to do it. So, we start off with a workshop that brings everybody into a cognitive box and then we expand that box into a bigger piece of the organization, then you can go for breadth or depth or whatever and lots of different strategies. We do something called the find the end state, it’s usually about two months and we’ve got that scripted out too, we look at business architecture, technology architecture, org design, product architecture and literally create a team formation hypothesis. We put names in boxes, we help them figure out what tooling and instrumentation they’re going to use, we help them figure out what they’re going to measure, what they want to control, what success looks like, all those things, that takes a minute. And then what happens, then we create a plan for a pilot and then we’ll do a pilot and then the pilot is going to work back to all of those core things we’ve been talking about all along. And they’re going to see, okay, this pilot is going to go to Basecamp one and this is going to be the characteristics the organization, they’re going to build or make any commitments, they’re going to be able to deliver on quarterly boundaries, we’re going to be able to do it in a reliable, predictable way.

We’re going to have dependencies managed, we’re going to have economics trade-offs dealt with, we’re going to get value, right? The risk in this early stage, right, is that you build the engine and you get really good at building the wrong product. I mean, that can happen, right? So, now you’re in the stance of like, okay well, if we focus on building a product but we don’t have a delivery engine, is that better than building a delivery engine and not knowing what the right product is? Right? So, as we’ve kind of advanced, there’s a little bit of a dance right and in early stage, we might literally help them get better at building the wrong product but now they have the ability to start to deliver on regular paths. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:53

The right product.

Mike Cottmeyer 42:55

And then as they start realizing, okay, I’m getting data now and I start to realize that we’re building that then, that’s when we might start introducing more product management practices. Or if we know we have dependencies, that we need to do like product extraction, technical decoupling, things like that, we might start laying, bringing in some more like XP software, craftsmanship coaches and start laying the foundations and building the capability internally so they know how to do red, green refactor, things like that. And so, we just layer these capabilities as we move them from predictability to smaller batches to fully encapsulated teams and so that’s how it works. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:32

So, maybe, just to pause on that because I think you know, we can take it lightly, like that’s how it works, that’s been my experience in a sense of how it works. But that takes a lot of effort on organization committing, the other big part that I would like to know from your perspective is, how do you make it sustainable? So, you bring coaches, consultants to help organizations realize this and then eventually, what you want them is, you want to work yourself out of the job, so they can do this long term. What are some of the things that you do and some of the challenges that you face because they think long term in our organizations to be able to deal with same type of issues that they dealt when they brought you in?

Mike Cottmeyer 44:17

Yeah. So, the metaphor that I use and they’re all systems metaphors, right? Is it leading Agile is like transformation in the cloud, right? And so, in an early stage transformation, you might subscribe to our services and we come in and we help you do all these things. But an any non trivial sized company, there’s two dimensions you have to deal with it, at some point they want to take that in the cloud service, they might want to make it like an on premise service, kind of thing. They might want to have their own instance of it. Okay? And so, typically on the lots of words but typically the word we use most commonly it’s like a setup like an Agile transformation office. And the Agile transformation office needs to have all the core services that Leading Agile has, right?

So, we’ll help them identify a playbook, will get a coaching and development services, like a talent service, a way to manage the transformation and Expedition readiness service, right? All these different services that we’ve got that are in Leading Agile, will help our client build them and then we’ll teach them how to run it. And then, you know, obviously, we’d like to maintain a presence to help sustain it and nurture it and things like that. But what we found and I know you know this, there are not enough Agile coaches or technology coaches in this world to help the companies that need to be helped, right? And so, I don’t believe, I don’t think there’s any scarcity in this and so like, one of our largest, longest standing clients we’ve invented a lot of this stuff with them, which has been a very cool relationship is we built an Agile transformation office with them. It’s their transformation office, they run it and at one point in time, I want to say, I had 45 consultants on the ground with them doing senior level transformation, leadership, Expedition leadership, we would call integration coaching, some specialists around product and finance and all those different things.

But at one stage, they had 250 coaches, they were on the ground doing team level stuff that were sourced all over the place. They were sourced from other consultancies, internal people and then over time, they started inserting their people in expedition leads and transformation and things like that. Right? As they started getting more confident in their ability to do it and then now it just kind of ebbs and flows, like if we’re going into like a gigantic company, right? So, you did the first 13,000 people and there’s hundreds of 1000s of people will have to go, right? And so, we’ll go into incubate another slice of the organization and we may be at this for 10 years or so. Because they want to go but what we’re leaving is we’re leaving behind the capability for them to sustain it themselves because we’ve instantiated the playbooks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:17

But also, you’re kind of you know, essentiated the playbooks, you’re developing the skill so they can develop and maintain and evolve those playbooks. Right? And what’s interesting is that I think, you know, based on what you’re describing and that’s why like, you know, I wanted to talk to you is like, that’s what it takes for organization to transform. And if we look at the last 10 years and we look at you know, Agile transformations, like 99% of them failed.

So, and that’s a huge number, it’s not like, you know, at least most of the organizations that I’ve been part of and the ones that have been part of, that have been successful is essentially what you’re describing. So, I’m curious to hear your thoughts you know, in a sense, like if that’s what it takes for organization to succeed and most organizations are not doing this. What are your thoughts? Like I mean, what do we need to do as a community, what do we need to do as coaches because it’s a big ask to do what you just described in here for organizations to be able to transform?

Mike Cottmeyer 48:23

So here’s the thing that I think is, there’s a couple of factors, right? So, there’s like a belief factor and then there’s like a pragmatic reality factor. And so like the belief factor and this is the one thing I’ve been, I’m a little too extreme on this and I’m going to acknowledge this. But it’s like so many people in the Agile world, they lead with culture and they say, well, it’s a culture change and we need to change mindset, we need to change attitude and we need to change the way people behave and stuff like that and that’s true, right? But the reality is that, people are operating in broken systems.

Okay? And unless we get the systems that they operate in right and bring the process into congruence with the operating system or the structure this, yeah, right? It’s really difficult to ask people to change their minds, the way that I articulate is like, I have two salespeople and they’re both in the same region. And I want them to cooperate but I have them incented for, you get paid based on what you kill, I get paid based upon what I kill but they want us to cooperate. I can’t ask what to cooperate if our financial incentives are to compete. Okay? And so, we have to create the ecosystem, we have to change your org design, I have to change the process to encourage the collaboration that we want. So, I think leading with culture, it’s just the way I term to say but leading with culture I don’t think is a winning strategy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:01

I mean, it’s almost like, what less guys and what it’s like, you know, change the system, right? And changing the system will force you to change you know, the culture as a result of that you know, the practices would change. But here’s the trick, right, which I think is the biggest of them all. In order to do this, you have to have a leader with the mindset that is willing to change the system and if you don’t have that?

Mike Cottmeyer 50:30

That’s the chicken and the egg problem, right? But I don’t need to get to change their entire leadership style. So, like a little bit of the way that you flip that influence, as you say, look, I get you have to make any commitments, you have to be financially responsible, you have to be a good steward of the resources, you have fiduciary responsibility, your stakeholders, all these things. I’m going to build you a system that’s radically different than what you’re doing today, that is going to achieve better results.

Are you willing to take a bat? Right? The other side of it is like, because and I’ve been in this world where there was a consultancy, where I kind of partnered with 10, 11 years ago. And this lady goes in and she’s like, telling all the leaders well, you need to change all of your behaviors, you need to be more empowering, you need to do this and they were just like, out, right? So it’s like, you got to like, it’s like the influence trusting you, you got to tell them the story they need to hear and then evolve their thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:26

Exactly and I think that’s what’s so powerful what I liked, when I first heard about base camps and expeditions. It’s like, if somebody was asking me and saying like, Milan, you have to do this, I’ll be like, go fuck yourself. Right?

Mike Cottmeyer 51:41

I didn’t know you could say that word on your podcast like I’ll be all down?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:44

You can but you know, because in a sense like, you know that’s not, but if they’re actually walking me through and I say, this is what I want to do and they show me and help me and they say, okay, what do you, like it’s easier for leaders to do that. If they’re going through that type of and I think that idea of expeditions and base camps is?

Mike Cottmeyer 52:03

Yeah, I had a colleague in the industry and an Agile conference a couple years ago. Yeah, there’s a little bit of liquor involved, though, I’ll acknowledge that but we’re having this very intense conversations. She’s like we need to empower and trust your people and just let them decide and I’m like but it’s my money that pays their salary. If they jack up the account, I’m still paying their salary, regardless of whether they’re damaging your reputation and my economics and my family’s livelihood and all these things. And so like, a lot of it is like balancing between what’s sufficient control to make sure that we don’t lose the wheels on this thing versus empowering people to make local decisions. But you know, getting back to the question that you had asked me about like, what’s getting in the way? I lied with, we’re spending too much time on culture, right?

There’s still a big problem 20 years later, I think the other thing is, you said, what do we need to do with the community? I think pragmatically, this is the challenge, is that most people if they’re independent, are in a small company, they’re trying to make a living and they’re doing the best they can within the agency that you’ve been granted. So, a lot of times, they don’t have the span of control. Sometimes they don’t know how to go tell those executive stories. I mean, I have my team, could not sit in a conference room of the C level suite and tell those big stories, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:17

Which goes back to that access, you can’t influence if you can’t.

Mike Cottmeyer 53:21

Yeah, well, you don’t get access, if you can’t influence, right. Yeah, for sure. Right? So, they tell a good story to a director or VP and maybe they make some good local changes but they don’t get the broad base changes that they need. I mean, it’s taken us 11 years to even get to the place where, I think I’ve had a pretty strong story and market but it’s taken me 11 years and I mean, there are more people that used to work for Leading Agile in this world and currently work for Leading Agile in this world. Our hypotheses on like, what are the right kinds of consultants and what do they need to know and what kind of work designed I put them in?

And what personality attributes do they need to have? I mean, like, we’ve changed everything, we reinvent this company every 9 to 18 months and it’s constantly evolving to solve this problem. And we were fortunate that we had enough early success and I was able to accumulate enough working capital that we can take chances and risks and build marketing teams, all these things go on, tell these stories. But what the thing that I actually can’t comprehend right now is why like the bigger consultancies don’t deeply understand the story because we, you know, obviously, almost anytime we go into an organization, there is a gigantic world class strategy firm in there or something like that. And what I find is that the strategy firms are making the same mistakes as small firms, a lot of times.

And so, that’s the thing, it’s a little mind numbing to me because they have business architecture practice, they have product construction practices, they have the ability to do this stuff. So then I have to believe that it comes down to their beliefs about what to do and what’s in their economic advantage. So, I think that there’s some belief stuff, I think there’s some structural stuff that’s getting in the way but I feel very fortunate the way we built this company is that we generally get to do work on our terms and get in. And so like, what happens is we market and tell stories and you’ve clearly read a lot of our content and the companies that resonates with, they call us, right, our phones ring. I’m on three to five sales calls a week, I’m not going to close everything, of course, [cross- talking 55:26].

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:25

But like you said, there’s still more, there’s like you know, in a sense, there’s way too much work and there’s way too many companies that need the help. It’s just that like, that’s what kind of puzzles me too in a sense, where are we going to be like, in the sense that, you know, there’s been this whole buzz around Agile and it’s really failed, in a sense to really help organizations the way that the organizations need help.

Mike Cottmeyer 55:52

The reason I think we’re still in the game and I think there’s still a conversation around it is because I think organizations recognize that it’s principally sound. And they believe that if they can crack the code, that will make them more successful and they’re right. But as a whole, we don’t have good operating models for how to get there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:18

Well, unified voice.

Mike Cottmeyer 56:21

Or unified voice, well I’ll even say, you know and maybe this is you know, maybe somebody will get some nasty phone calls or emails as a result of saying this is, I actually think the Agile conferences are trending in the opposite direction. As I look at like, I’m probably not going to submit to Agile 2022 this year because I look at the tracks and you know, I mean these are important topics but it’s like a lot about it is diversity, equity inclusion, it’s about all these different things and again, all important stuff, right? And I’m not diminishing that in the slightest but I feel like the voice of okay, transformation and business architecture and doing this in a structure, I don’t think that’s what people want to hear. Right?

And I think to some degree, they want to deal with the easier issues and this is tough, right? Because as an individual practitioner, it’s tough to take what I say and go do it because you almost have to, I mean, I hate to say it’s self-serving but it’s like, you almost have to hire us to do it. Or you have to be like, really deeply entrenched in it and like, really understand it and you might have a shot but like I said, I’ve got a lot of [cross-talking 57:24].

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 57:24

Well, that’s almost like, I use an analogy with the cooks and recipes and chefs, right? Like, it constantly has changing ingredients, so you can bring me in, if I’m a chef, you can bring me in to help you come up with the recipe. But what happens if you don’t have the ingredients, the same ingredients and I’m not there and you’re a cook that doesn’t know what they’re doing, you’re going to mess it up. So like, in a sense like, what we need is like, how do we develop more chefs in organizations and you know, that they can actually deal with whatever is given to them. Architect based on context, not just, hey, here’s a safe and we went through a four day training on safe or whatever, right?

Mike Cottmeyer 58:05

So, here’s like, the interesting hard part, right? I have thought of the idea of like building a certification or building a program or something like that. But you think about it, you know, Jim kind of works with me and Jim was in the Scrum Alliance and really helped that organization make a lot of inroads into PMI and really took it from kind of a niche to and really kind of blew it up. And I think he would tell you directly, it’s like, people want to pay $1,200 or $800 now maybe and get a two day certification and they want for the resume, right and that’s a market and they want employment. And so, and I watched what the Scrum Alliance does with the advanced Scrum and things and it gets traction to a point but it’s like, the money is isn’t selling these [cross-talking 58:54]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 58:56

Like, I said the money is selling recipes and training people on recipes not creating chefs.

Mike Cottmeyer 59:02

Yeah, I used to get onto the marketing team at Version One because they want to say, they weren’t saying marketing agile made it easy on them. No, this isn’t easy, it’s hard. Right? And then so, I think they said Agile made it easier or something. And I get it, right, because it’s like, you need to sell an easy but it’s not easy. You know? So I’m like it’s team’s backlogs, working, tested software, if you can figure that out, it’s super easy. But getting the team’s backlogs, working software is taking us 11 years to figure out of that. So yeah, and we’re still figuring it out. Right?

I mean, I’ll be the first to say it’s like, I mean, I was telling the guys today we’re going to do a podcast and we’re going to just talk about stuff that’s just super exploratory. Because it’s like, we don’t have every answer, I think we’ve got the base patterns, right? And I think we have the principles right but the practices and the how tos are constantly emerging as we learn more stuff. You were talking to clients about using Agile to build the next rev of nuclear submarines and and you know, battleship and things like that and defense. Like, I mean, this is like cutting edge stuff that people want to use this for so that the industry still has poll, right? I mean, people want this, we just need more mature practitioners that understand how to apply these concepts in a less dogmatic way. So?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:16

Exactly. And I think that’s going to be the trick, I know it’s been an hour and I feel like we could continue talking but I do have to go, [cross-talking 1:00:24]

Mike Cottmeyer 1:00:24

Yeah, we should do this again sometime.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:26

Yeah, definitely. What would you like to end with, like a message or invite or?

Mike Cottmeyer 1:00:30

No, I think where we left it is pretty cool, right? I mean, if anybody’s [inaudible 1:00:34], I mean obviously hit our website leadingagile.com, connect with me on LinkedIn. We’re super happy to answer questions and talk about this stuff. I mean, it’s kind of what I do for five hours a day is just talk to people, right? Whether it be my teams or clients or whatever and super passionate about this and if you’re in the market, you’re looking for a job, we’d love to have you reach out on our careers page. It seems like I got 20 or 25 open positions all the time and so for the right people, it’s a great place to be and we’re doing some really cool stuff. And I do believe we’re on the cutting edge of a lot of this stuff so hit our website and just check us out and if it looks like a fit either work together or to work here. love to hear from you.

Jardena London

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:35

Who is Jardena London? What’s been your story?

Speaker: Jardena London 00:40

Well, my story is, I’m an introvert and I studied math and computer science and I thought that I wanted a job where I didn’t talk to the people but then I ended up here in a job where it’s all about people. So what happened was, when I was in college, studying computer science and math, these are smart people, these are the smart people on campus. And then when I got into the corporate world, and found out that the IT departments where all of these computer science and math people ended up, is one of the most hated departments (inaudible 01:11) though it’s better now, years later, thank you to agile, but it was why could we not get software out the door and why could we not seem to cope with the other departments and collaborate and why were we failing with so many smart people? So that was a problem I set out to solve, and ended up finding out that software wasn’t the problem, the human system is the problem to be solved. So I kind of left software behind and moved into business agility and business transformations.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:42

When you say human system, I’m assuming based on your book, it’s the culture kind of its or…

Speaker: Jardena London 01:49

Well, it’s both. It’s the culture and it’s also the processes that we use to be able to do things that are bigger than one person. So you have process, you have structure that brings people together to create something bigger than a one person thing and that’s a human system.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:07

So you have a book called cultivating leadership transformations, reading transformation. How did the book come about? We all have journeys, idea for a book, the first spark, what was your first spark and how did you come up with idea to write cultivating transformations?

Speaker: Jardena London 02:33

So it’s funny, a colleague of mine, Phil Parrington, just based on the consulting that I do, when we were consultants together, he kept urging me to write some of the stuff down that I use in my consulting business. And I was like, I’m busy, I’m busy, no. And then we had the pandemic, and he was like, just write an outline. And I was like, Phil, an outline for exactly what book that I’m not really writing are you talking about? And he was like, come on, just write it and I was like, I’m not writing it. And then two weeks after I had that conversation with him, where I was like, what book are we talking about? I sent him an outline, I sent him a first draft of the book, actually, not just an outline, because, I wasn’t under the impression you were going to write it and I was like, I wasn’t, it just like one day, it just came out. So really, there was some divine intervention, I think, where it was not pushing a rock uphill, I just spit out everything I’ve been doing for 12 years into a book.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:29

Just like that. The book is divided into three parts and you look at it through three different lenses. You described as looking at the organization through three different lenses; me lens, we lens and the system lens. Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about those three lenses? And then maybe we can explore those three.

Speaker: Jardena London 03:49

Yeah, absolutely and I did not invent the lenses by the way, they’re out there and a lot of leadership literature integral theory uses four lenses, but those are three of them. The idea here is that, especially with transformational leadership, and all leadership, if you don’t focus on yourself first and get yourself right, because you have an impact on everything that happens so getting yourself grounded as a leader is the first and most important thing. And then the second, the we is how you interact with other people and how you bring people together. So it’s like that human, how do we create a force greater than ourselves as a leader? And then the third is the system. So what are we creating that lives beyond the people that are there today? That’s the systems that are in place that will keep churning out long after we’re gone.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:39

Great and I’m thinking about, like there’s so much stuff in the book as I was going through it, in the sense of practical things and look at each of these sections you kind of summarize here are the things for this. One of the things that stuck out to me in the me section, the first section is grounded leader and I think you said, grounded leaders, talks about self-awareness. So maybe let’s just first explore what does it mean to be a grounded leader and what does it mean to be around leaders who are grounded?

Speaker: Jardena London 05:19

Yeah, let me just address one thing you said, and we’ll get to the grounded leader, about the practical. It’s so important that, I mean, I do feel like we’ve gone through this time period where we have the practical and business results over here and then the feel good, have a nice, a team building or like happiness at work it’s like a whole different section of our world and those two things need to come together because being happy and being productive are not different. Those are not two different things. So to me, those need to be integrated. In terms of grounded leaders, grounded leaders are the people that bring those two things together. I mean, you know a grounded leader and you know an ungrounded leader, when you are working with one. The grounded leader make you feel like, you’re important, and you’re an important part of the team and anything is possible. And they sort of bring people together and it feels energizing and it feels exhilarating to be around a grounded leader that’s kind of pulling people together with some excitement. The ungrounded leader is the one where you don’t feel safe and you feel like you’re always hustling to get approval and to feel like you’re worthy, that’s the ungrounded leader. If we go back to the me and the we, the reason is because they’re not grounded in themselves so how can they give groundedness to other people. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just they haven’t done their own work, their own internal work (inaudible 06:52)

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:52

It’s almost like going back to, I guess, the integral and kind of the development of me space. You talk also about ego in this chapter. So I’m assuming, the grounded means that having understanding of your ego and not the ego is bad, but like, when we have too much ego, we become ungrounded, right?

Speaker: Jardena London 07:18

Right. Yeah, of course, ego and I don’t mean to ever say that ego is bad because, of course, if you’re not you who are you, you’re somebody, you’re not completely selfless, you do have to live with yourself. But when our ego is taking center stage and the people that we’re leading are pandering to our ego, for example, or it’s all about us looking good. That’s when ego really gets in the way, because we lose sight of what the real purpose is. So when people tell me, I want to have a role as a transformation lead so that I can get promoted, that’s one of those things where it’s like, yep, maybe that’s not the most important thing, hopefully, you do get promoted and go on to do wonderful things but if that’s your reason, then your ego’s taking a front seat.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:11

You also talk about self-awareness. In the book, you say the more self-awareness you gain, the more you realize how much you lack. Let’s talk about this and then I would like to kind of look at the me space in general, and talk about what leaders need to do, because essentially, the me part of the book, which is I think, first third of the book, is really about working ourselves as leaders. And this is also going based on all the research over the last probably 10 years. This is the biggest impediment to organizational transformations. So let’s talk about self-awareness and then we’re going to talk about in general the me space. Could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jardena London 08:55

Well, so first of all, you hit on it, I mean, it is a paradox, the more self-awareness you gain, the more you realize how much you lack because you’ve opened up whole new doors to big areas that you may have been blind to. But self-awareness is really just about understanding the impact that you have. So I’ll tell you a story. When I was younger, I went to a client and when I was developing software, not so much in this space, and I was right and I told him whatever the thing was, and he was getting mad. And so I said it again, and maybe with slightly different words, but I said it again and he was getting madder and then I said it more and he got even madder. And when we left my colleague said to me, did you notice that he was getting mad? And I was like, Yeah, but I was right. And he was like, but when someone’s getting mad, you might want to consider changing your approach. And honestly, as an introverted techie that just never occurred to me, just never occurred to me. So with that, I lacked self-awareness. I wasn’t paying attention to his reaction. I was only paying attention to the facts.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:01

I’ve done the same thing and I think which is related to this, it’s like, it’s part of your identity. It’s like you’re not willing to change your perspective, or it’s almost like self-feeding, feeding the ego because, I know I’m right, I know you’re wrong. If I say you’re right, or if I change my stance, I’m going to look weak, so I’m not going to look weak. At least that’s been my perspective in the past and when I reflect back on it, it was really my ego that was holding me back in my identity. And I think a lot of times, when we look at that me space in developing ourselves, is willing to let go of our perspectives and our strong identity that we cling to. Do you think…

Speaker: Jardena London 10:47

What’s important, (inaudible 10:51) like in relationships, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? So it’s placing that relationship above the facts that I was really trying to make sure that we got the facts right. I don’t even know if it was about my ego or it was just the facts were the facts and why are you mad about the facts?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:10

Which is interesting, because, like you said, in relationships, in your personal relationship, work relationship, it is all about coming from a perspective that the other person is coming with positive intentions. It’s just that the way that they see it, might contradict your perspective but most of the time, people are not out to screw you over or to make your life miserable. It’s just from their perspective, similar how you were thinking like in that situation, you were thinking probably you were doing the right thing. But from that other person’s perspective, probably didn’t look always since they were getting frustrated. So when it comes to developing ourselves, and maybe even to awareness, you talk about there are two parts to awareness but why is this from your perspective and what are some of the tips that you share in your book that you would maybe like to highlight around developing the me space and looking at things from me lens?

Speaker: Jardena London 12:14

We just talked about knowing your impact and knowing that you have one, I think I wasn’t always aware that when I walked into a room that my impact mattered. And no matter whether you say a word or not, when you walk into a room, virtual or otherwise, because we’re not walking into rooms lately, but you have an impact, when you show up on a zoom call, you have an impact whether or not you say anything. And knowing that is important, and knowing how your energy is. So if you’re sitting on a zoom call, and you’re multitasking, or it kind of look like you’re not paying attention, that has an impact on everybody else on that call and realizing that, that’s the self-awareness of your impact is so important. And then the other piece that I think is huge, I mean, there’s so many things, we could talk about with the me space. But the other thing that I think is huge is emotional literacy. So most humans can identify three emotions, the mad, sad, glad, which is of course, we love that in Agile, but to understand the subtleties and the nuance with different emotions and what mad really is, sometimes mad is afraid, and sometimes mad is nervous, and sometimes mad is feeling unsafe. There’s a lot of different subtleties to why these emotions show up. And one of the things we’ve said in traditional leadership is, you have to manage your emotions. I don’t know about manage, but knowing them, the information and then what I talked about is transformational leaders can identify the emotion and then decide what to do with it, rather than letting it take over. So I guess you can call that managing emotion, but it’s not suppressing it. It’s just using it intentionally and that for a leader is humongous.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:05

Because you can use that to motivate yourself, it’s that EQ in a sense and goes back to awareness. The more that you’re aware, the more that you can observe. It’s almost stepping out of your body observing your reactions to a specific event, rather than just being in and reacting to it.

Speaker: Jardena London 14:28

Your emotional twinge that’s in the back of your neck or in your stomach is telling you that something’s not right but you haven’t quite identified what that is yet. So it’s a ton of information that you can use, but it’s just not to react immediately.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:44

Yeah, and maybe just to kind of conclude on this part as far as the me space, there are assessments out there like a leadership circle, obviously, you can do coaching. Coaching can help develop in this space. What else do you think is helpful for individuals, leaders, coaches, consultants, that really want to work on themselves and I guess the me space or really the mindset, the me is really the individual mindset. What other recommendations do you have on helping develop in this space?

Speaker: Jardena London 15:24

Any of the things that you can do and there’s a lot of self-help books out there and they’re all really good, actually but anything that you can do to peel back some of those layers. Brene Brown talks about armored leadership versus daring leadership and so the book dare to lead by Brene Brown is great, after you’re done reading mine of course, but that’s a great book, because what it talks about is peeling back those layers of armor. So we talked before about my lack of self-awareness. So armor for a lot of people especially in the technology field is knowledge, or knowledge is armor. So in that example, I was using my knowledge as armor. If I can know everything, then no one can ever say anything about me, I can use that to protect myself. And so peeling away all of those layers of armor that you’ve built to protect yourself, that you maybe don’t need anymore, that’s another great thing but it requires a lot of introspection and self-examination. Coaching helps because you have somebody that can hold it right up to your face. There’s a tool also called the Johari Window, and it’s free online, where you can actually put kind of what you think about yourself, and then you send it out to a bunch of people who know you, and they put what they observe about you and you can then see what are you not seeing about yourself.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:43

It’s essentially exposing your blind spots to you.

Speaker: Jardena London 16:48

Good and bad, there may be good things about you that you’re not aware of.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:52

I also like the Johari Window, just to explore the unknown things that other people don’t know and you don’t know and this is where you ask yourself a question, what type of experiences do I want to create in order to expose these areas? And I know, for instance, a lot of times for coaches, trainers, I know for me, originally was training. That was something that I didn’t know, I never trained, at one point, and just actually doing it, I realized I actually like it but I suck at it so I need to develop skills in order to do it but it was good to at least explore and then realize, yeah, this is something that I definitely enjoy. It’s just like anything else that you start with. You’re going to have to develop the skills in it but they’re just actually (inaudible 17:45)

Speaker: Jardena London 17:45

That’s great awareness. There’s a great book by Gay Hendricks called The Big Leap and he talks about the different levels of competence but it just talked about the two top levels. There’s the levels of incompetence that, of course, we don’t want to be incompetent, we don’t want to just be competent at things that nobody cares about. But the third level he talks about is your zone of competence, stuff that you are really good at. People keep coming to you and you keep getting opportunities in that space, but it’s not your zone of genius. So the top level is your zone of genius that you love, and you’re in flow and that energizes you and the trap is not to get stuck in your zone of competence, and not make it to your zone of genius. So trying things where it’s like, I love this, I need to build some skills, but it’s my zone of genius versus I’m really good at spreadsheets, everyone comes to me for a spreadsheet and I’m going to keep doing that even though it doesn’t really energize me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:43

Energize me. Yeah, it goes back to having fun and enjoying what you’re doing. Let’s move to the we lens or let’s look through we lens. Could you maybe describe the lens and I want to talk about a couple of topics there.

Speaker: Jardena London 19:01

Yeah, I mean, the we lens is about being able to bring people together, that’s mobilized, well, that’s what a leader does. I think there’s some quotes about if you call yourself a leader, and you turn around and no one’s following you, you’re not a leader. It’s being able to bring people together and create energy for groups. But also being able to connect one on one with other people, which you’ve now prepped yourself for, by working in the me space.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:28

You talked about the we space about leader as organizational healer, could you maybe elaborate on what is an organizational healer?

Speaker: Jardena London 19:41

If we look at a lot of organizations today, the organization is in pain. The organization may have toxicity, there’s some kind of pain there. Not all organizations but many, and even ones that don’t, can probably still use some, everyone can use some healing right? So it is about healing that pain because really to move into transformation, you can’t move into transformation for an organization that’s in pain. A lot of organizations I go into, they’re just working on too many things, and everyone’s overcapacity, and they’re not managing priorities and that’s causing people pain, people are over capacity. That might be pain, it might be a toxic culture that’s causing pain, it’s different but until you address that, that you’re not doing business transformation, you can’t build it on top of pain. So you need to heal that pain first.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:34

When I think about healing pain or organizational healer, it’s also being there for the people. A lot of times leaders are imposing things, rather than co-creating with people. And I think when we impose stuff as leaders, we are actually adding to the pain and when we try to be more involved and try to co-create with people being there for the people, I think that’s more being a healing leader, right?

Speaker: Jardena London 21:05

Yeah. And there’s a lot of talk now about empathy, is a big thing in a lot of organizations now and I think it’s great, because being empathetic to how people feel is really important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:18

Empathy is about, I tell people at least from my perspective, it’s suspending your own beliefs and suspending your own kind of identity. Even if I really want to empathize with Jardena, I will suspend my beliefs, I will suspend what I believe is true and then try to look at it from your perspective, what you see and how you see the world how you like all of your senses. Because only then can we actually empathize with somebody. And I think it’s a tough skill to develop but it’s also tough to do when we’re all so busy, especially the higher that you go up, the more it’s like, let’s just get it done rather than let’s take the time to truly understand and empathize with people.

Speaker: Jardena London 22:05

I think one of the life changing moments for me, and again, it was Brene Brown that said this was that empathy is not about seeing their perspective on the situation, it’s about understanding how they feel. Again, when I say it, it sounds so obvious now, but I was trying to understand the situation, and I couldn’t. But can you understand someone being frustrated? Yeah. Can you understand someone being sad? Yeah, I can’t understand the story you just told me or why you would do that but I understand that you feel frustrated. And that was really life changing for me to try and understand their emotion and not their situation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:43

Situation. Which is also another thing that you talked about in the book, about doing the impossible and how the first step of doing the impossible is shifting from problem first mindset into a possibility first mindset. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Speaker: Jardena London 22:58

I still get trapped in this because as any kind of technologist and mathematician, of course, problems are front and center, right. Our world is math problems. It’s technology problems, we love that. The thing about problems is that, it puts you into a box pretty quickly. There’s a great example. I’ll give you an example of what’s happening right now, we have this thing, the great resignation where a lot of people are leaving their jobs. So companies are looking at that with a problem first mindset of how can we keep people, the problem that they’re saying is, how do we keep people, we’ve narrowed that problem down to this tiny box? But the possibility first mindset would be, we have a lot of people, we’re seeing a lot of turnover in jobs, what’s possible now? When I say what’s possible now, it’s like, well, how might we take advantage of the fact that we can now get new talent? How can we create systems that allow for turnover, and take advantage of that cross pollination that we’re getting? And maybe we can create a situation where we need less people to do some of the work or we can shift how to work is. There’s all kinds of possibilities if you look outside of the key people box.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:10

That’s exactly and I think I’m working with a client. And this has been in general, clients have been around for longer, they have too many products. It’s hard to say no to products and I say this is opportunity, also, like you said, not just think about how to create happier places to work and happier employees, but also to look at your whole organization and say, what else could we change and improve? How else can we align and having that you talk about systems thinking and systemic view in your book, it’s also about that systemic view about the whole organization, not just like you said, focus on this specific problem.

Speaker: Jardena London 24:52

Because everything’s connected so if you look at things in isolation, you miss the whole system. But I love what you said there too about working on too many things, and what can we let go? Corporations, companies are historically horrible at ever letting anything go. I mean, we are great at starting, we are not great at stopping.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:16

Well, it’s the general idea of entropy, like, the older you are, the bigger you are, you moving towards higher complexity and chaos. So I think, as a leader understanding that and saying, well, who has the authority to change the system and maybe this is a good segue into the system. Who has the authority to change the governance structure, how we budget or structure. So let’s maybe move into the third lens, which is the system. Give us an overview and then I have some things that I’d like to explore.

Speaker: Jardena London 25:57

As leaders move into becoming a transformational leader, it’s less about managing the work, and more about creating conditions for a healthy organization, a healthy system, so it’s that systems thinking. So there is a shift there a shift in how we spend our time to building structures, to building channels for communication to building competencies. It’s not just org chart when I say structure, it’s all kinds of things that feed into the way the organization works and that is a shift for a lot of leaders.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:31

How the value flows through the organization, right?

Speaker: Jardena London 26:34

Yep, yep. So it’s looking at the flow, tweaking that flow.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:39

Also, you talked about shifting and this has been said for a long time, you’ve reinforced it in the book as well, about shifting from the organization as a machine type of metaphor, to more organization as a complex living system. Could you give us overview of what you mean by that, when you say, we should treat our organizations as living systems?

Speaker: Jardena London 27:07

Yeah, sure. It all comes together there and we’ve done this for so many years, we say like the IT factory, we say what is our (inaudible 27:16), I know all these words about it being a factory, and resources and all those things, but those are just all factory words, industrial revolution words. But when you look at a machine or you think about designing a machine, the machine only does mostly for the most part, what you’ve designed it to do. But when you think about a living system, and you’re creating conditions, you’re planting seeds, that system can do more and adapt and do more than you designed it to do. It grows in ways that you haven’t planned and it can surprise you, it can do things that you didn’t want it to do, it can adapt in ways that you really don’t have to manage. When you create a machine every time there’s a change in the market and there’s a change in the ecosystem, you have to rebuild that machine or add on to that machine, but the living system, you don’t, you may change the conditions, but you don’t have to rebuild the whole machine. So that’s kind of what we mean when we talk about living systems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:13

I think one thing that comes with the living systems is emergence, which you usually don’t have with traditional way of looking organizations. As we look at organizations, they’re looking to innovate more and more to figure things out to help them solve the problems and the challenges that they’re facing and the property of a living system and looking at organizations as living systems gives you that advantage, I think of embracing that emergence, and what’s possible.

Speaker: Jardena London 28:48

I love that emergence and that adaptability that you just don’t get from a machine. And the other thing to understand is we’ve treated organizations like machines all these years, we’ve tried to turn our organizations into kind of assembly line factories. And every time something breaks down, we go oh, it was just human, there was human problem, no, the machine’s fine, the humans ruined it. But if that happens every time, we need to acknowledge that it wasn’t a machine in the first place. It never was a machine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:17

Who’s designing the machines?

Speaker: Jardena London 29:21

Just humans.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:24

You also talk about natural hierarchy. If you look at the scaling frameworks, if you look at everything is moving towards end to end, less hierarchical structures in the sense like value streams. But let’s first talk about hierarchy. People think hierarchy is bad, you have hierarchy and everything. I think what I like about what you put in your book is natural hierarchy. What is your perspective on hierarchy? How do you see it and what is natural hierarchy?

Speaker: Jardena London 30:06

I think hierarchy has gotten a bad rap and it’s kind of bad rap because we’ve seen it used so much for superiority for like, just because I’m above you in the organizational hierarchy, I’m better than you or I can tell you what to do and now I have power over you. So I talk about a tree, if you think about a tree, a tree has hierarchy, but it’s not like the leaves are the boss of the trunk, or the trunk is the boss of the leaves and the roots, there’s no boss, there’s no superiority, there’s no power over but there is a hierarchy. When we think about organizations, the flattening of the hierarchy is not a terrible thing, because it was used, first of all for superiority but also there were too many handoffs, there was too much up the chain down the chain approval. But getting rid of making things flat, is unrealistic because it’s the scope of work, the same with a tree. You have different functions. There are different functions at different levels. There’s no reason to get rid of that. And when you look at some of the frameworks that claim to be flat, they’re not, no, they’ve turned squares into circles, but they still have a hierarchy. They just call it different and they don’t have superiority.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:21

Exactly. And to me, it’s understanding contextualizing things. Sometimes things could have a lot of hierarchy and that might make sense and sometimes they don’t. Naturally large organizations that have 1000s and 1000s of people will have to think about how do we actually design these systems, so they do embrace some of these properties of learning systems, and how do we continuously design and create guardrails? I think that this is another thing with hierarchy in general in organizations. It really goes back to complexity management. If you look at it from how do we design these guardrails or boundaries? Every system has some type of boundaries, how do we design organizational structures and governances with boundaries that we can keep an eye on and change them, as is needed based on the purpose of the system. So system could be our product line or whatever it is. And I think that’s something that it feels like we’re 20 years away from organizations understanding that. I don’t know if you feel that way but when I coach and consult, that’s what it feels like.

Speaker: Jardena London 32:45

I think that we have not yet cracked the code on how to organize large groups of people to get worked on. We still have the Dunbar number of 150 and we haven’t really quite cracked the code on how to get beyond that. But you’re right about the boundaries. I mean, of course, and living systems have boundaries, like a cell is bounded, it’s not just this flat. So I always say, it’s not like if you take your water and pour it on the table that’s like a flat organization, it needs to be in a glass.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:19

Another thing I found interesting is the way they you talk about common organizational tensions. Could you maybe talk about those and how you address those? What are the common tensions?

Speaker: Jardena London 33:36

We identified 10 core tensions but each one can show up differently in different organizations that I’ve kind of shared. If you look at my white paper on structural agility, I break it down into different, each one has different ways it might show up but there’s 10 core tensions that show up. When I say tensions, a lot of people use the term polarity, or paradoxes but these are two opposing forces that are not, not opposing forces, seemingly opposing forces, but that can actually work together. So they can be destructive, and they can be generative. So a couple of the ones that show up, and especially in the Agile transformation space, if you think about stability and change, so we say we’re disrupting things, we’re changing things but there’s some legacy business there that’s stable, and providing the revenue to fund this transformation so those two things need to work together. I’ve seen companies separate the two, like there’s the wrong people and the transform people but those two things, they need to work together. They’re generative. They’re not opposites. The other big one in the transformation space is structure and flow. So we just talked about that a little bit, but we need just enough structure to be able to get work moving and value flowing, but not so much structure that you’re stopping it, but your structure creates flow. I mean, these two things need to work together. Again, they’re not at odds with each other.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:05

Exactly. And I think that goes for a lot of things in life. I think we look at things as opposites, but it’s just a spectrum and that spectrum needs to be decided based on context not that one is bad, the other one is good, which we a lot of times tend to look at.

Speaker: Jardena London 35:23

And it’s also not a compromise. It’s not like, well, let’s meet halfway, it’s no, how can we actually leverage each other for more possibility not less possibility.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:37

Yeah, I mean, it’s almost like in the Agile Manifesto, individuals and interactions over processing tools is a good example. It’s not one or the other. Those are tensions. And if we take it too far, we can definitely improve interactions and how we do things, if we have the tools, right tools, and the right processes.

Speaker: Jardena London 36:01

That’s a great example. That’s structure and flow. So individuals and interactions over processes and tools is structure and flow. So the tools are a structure and the human interaction is flow. And again, the manifesto doesn’t say no tools, of course, we need tools to help us with our interactions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:19

What do you think is the correlation between especially the me lens and the system lens? Specifically, what I’m asking, and I don’t know, we haven’t talked about vertical development by (inaudible 36:38), Michael Spade, on the context of developing both vertically as well as horizontally. So vertical development is working really on me, in the sense of working on my self-awareness, working on my emotional intelligence and then the horizontal development would be like learning how to be a better coach, learning coaching skills, like listening might be something. So what do you think is the correlation between the me lens or me space and system space? Is there any preference, I guess any, it’s all intertwined but from your perspective, is there any connection?

Speaker: Jardena London 37:26

Well, we’re seeing that there’s a lot of talk right now about the human bias that shows up in AI. That’s an example of where, if you’re not grounded in your me, it’s going to show up in your system. I worked with an organization that, we estimated that probably 90% of the productivity went into what they call feeding the beast. So PowerPoints approvals for all internal stuff, that was non value add to the customer in lean terms. So that is, if we’re pandering to the preferences of a leader who’s ungrounded, that means that the system is now built around satisfying and pandering to leaders, that’s what it is. So your system is going to reflect your biases.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:19

Exactly. And I think that’s a really important topic, too. I think this is why we’re seeing more and more leaders that are diverse, like in a woman, people from other backgrounds. Because I think generally, if we look at over the last 20-30 years, we had leaders in organizations that, I would say not very grounded, like you said, and that they were ego driven. So you get the type of structures, you get silos, you get functions in organizations, you probably work and still the case. Are my authorities determined by how many people I have reporting to me, so people fight over that, to make sure that hey, I don’t want to lose any of these and I’ll take more work on just so I have more people, so I have more authority. So the ego and the me is feeding and influencing a lot the system, which is the structure.

Speaker: Jardena London 39:20

And what about the forced ranking, which is like my other favorite process. Managers get together and duke it out of whose people are better. So if your manager is not good at fighting with their peers, you’re not going to get as much of a bonus or promotion or whatever the case may be. I mean, if that’s not about ego influencing the system, I don’t know what it is.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:45

And that’s also a polarity in a sense, that’s not necessarily completely bad, like having that competition could be very healthy, but unchecked and unbalanced, can create a culture that’s very toxic.

Speaker: Jardena London 40:00

Absolutely and we’ve seen that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:02

What are soulful organizations?

Speaker: Jardena London 40:06

Yeah. So I think the easiest way to think about soulful organizations is to think about what is it like when they’re soul crushing, it’s much easier to, because we know what that feels like. So it’s a place where we don’t feel safe, we don’t feel like our contribution is valued or it may be shot down, or ideas might be shot down, where we feel like our energy is sucked out of us when we walk into the workplace. And when we say, you kind of check your soul at the door when you walk in, and you’re just there to make the money, so that’s so less. Soulful is, you go to work, and it’s as energizing as when you’re not at work. I don’t know why those two things need to be different. I love my work so I want the whole world to feel like that about their work. But we talked about there’s this phrase that I just really despise is work life balance, and now they’re calling it work life integration. But I still don’t understand why work and life are two separate things, are you not living when you’re at work, are you not alive? The soulful workplace is a place that’s, it’s part of your life that you enjoy just as much as the part that you’re not working.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:17

And I could relate a lot to what you wrote in your book about your experience. I started a company, software development company in college and had similar experiences, where early in my life, I tasted what it is to work for yourself, then I went back and work inside organizations where they’re soul crushing and then coming back again, working for myself, and I’ve done that several times. And it is very interesting to see how the me space or the mindset have been shaped for people that have been working in a single company for 20-30 years and when they check in, they are different people. And so with some of these people I’ve developed relationships where I’ve gotten to know them outside of work and especially the leaders. I mean, it’s crazy with leaders, like they have to show up certain way at work. And I remember one guy that he was actually from back home, and he was a COO of a large publicly traded company and we developed this relationship in a sense, where we became friends and he was saying, Milan, I have to show up a certain way, it’s almost like the pressure of looking and behaving certain way, that was a burden. But in his belief, that was the only way to portray confidence to essentially do his job. And you can’t do that, like you said, if you’re going to think about the whole work and your life is just one thing that, the way that Milan shows up to work the same way they show up with my friends, that takes some courage coming back to courage to be vulnerable, courage to actually let go of that, or take off that shield and that’s tough. And it’s easy to say, but I think for people that haven’t experienced that, that’s a tough thing to do. So as a coach, maybe I have couple of things but what do you do in that situation if you’re working with executives like that? What do you do to help them kind of take off their shield?

Speaker: Jardena London 43:52

So I was going to say it, it’s exactly about that. It’s about peeling back that armor, and being aligned with your values. Knowing your values is super important, because until you know them, it’s hard to stand up for them. But working in a place that doesn’t align with what you believe in, is this great resignation , I think that’s a lot of what’s driving it, people are realizing that they’re working in a business that doesn’t align with their values. I know somebody who turned down a job recently at a company that produces confectionery, but their job was going to be to promote it, so that more people eat more sugar and more children in particular, but there’s nothing wrong with the company, I buy things from this company of course, but their values didn’t align with promoting sugar. So it’s just being aligned with your values every day. And the same values that you have at home are the same values you have at work. It doesn’t have to be like I’m going to be all crazy at work now because I’m like, I go out drinking with my buddies, now I’m going to have to go out drinking at work. It doesn’t have to be like that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:01

Yeah, no, I agree. And I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole of values but I think it’s also important for people first of all know your values, and also be open to question your values. The only way to grow through the me space is actually to understand what your values are, and then saying, okay, how can I transcend and include these values but how can I see things from a different perspective. And when I work with leaders, that’s one of the things that, first exposing and making sure that we understand and we’re clear about what our values are, but then also not clinging to those values in a way that if they show up or influences us towards that more destructive or negative side, given the circumstances. But we’ll leave that maybe for another time. What about the role of finance and HR? Because usually, they’re the last ones to go in organizations and it seems like they should be the first ones to go, in a sense when it comes to transforming and coming back to the title of your book, cultivating transformations, what is your thought on…?

Speaker: Jardena London 46:16

Well, so I’m just going to quote from Evan Leybourn from the business agility Institute “you’re only as agile as your least agile department”. You talked about what is the role of finance and HR, it’s similar to the role that they’ve always had. Well, we’ll talk about HR, but finance, the role is the same. It’s all about the how, and it’s about the structure and flow. It’s about creating a structure that will allow for flow. So I worked with a client where product development was producing all these products, and they were getting stuck at finances door, because finance had trouble being able to charge clients for them, like we couldn’t quite figure out how to bill for these products. So the products are, it’s like having these cars come off the line and sitting on the lot rates basically. So that alleviating some of those that friction, so that things can get out the door and money can flow through the organization to produce some value is important. The budgeting process is important, like how are we making sure that money is where it needs to be to maximize value and not stopping value. From an HR perspective, though, I do think that there may be a role change in some organizations, because HR in a lot of organizations is looked at as compliance. It’s about compliance and it’s about protection and it’s not about maximizing the value of the human system. There may be a shift there for some organizations, some organizations maybe it’s just about knocking down obstacles.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:47

One organization that comes to mind, had friends at work that worked with a little bit is Vistaprint. And for instance, how they looked at HR, what does HR stand for? How do we enable other people in our organizations? What policies are too strict? Why are we actually creating bottlenecks because of our HR policies? And I think that comes to finance as well, which how do we budget for things? Is it by cost centers and are we actually reinforcing this silos and functions or should we be looking at things more holistically from a customer product? And then they say one is better than the other, obviously, context matters, but just even being willing to question the status quo, and say, how do we take that systemic view is important. And that’s something that is becoming more common, but it’s still not the norm in most of the organizations.

Speaker: Jardena London 48:53

You know, we talked before about the feeding the beast, about doing internal? Well, so two things. So budget planning, that takes a whole year to do for a year. I mean, that’s just a lot of energy in an organization that could be spent on value and then the other one is performance reviews. If you’ve been a manager in an organization, it feels like you’re always assessing and judging performance and to what end? It doesn’t improve performance, we’ve shown that. It is so that we can know about promotions and bonuses, but other than that, a lot of energy goes into performance reviews that you don’t get back, you don’t get the ROI. So those are some of the blockers that maybe can be alleviated.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:38

There’s so many things that are wrong, especially performance reviews is one, which is feedback loop. In a sense, how quick is the feedback loop, having more of a quicker immediate feedback loop? I know when I worked in organizations, I used to get fired up because it’s like, oh, here’s what you did two months ago and now I’m telling you about it. I remember first time I realized, when the manager told me, well, I can’t put you on a high performing, or I have to put somebody else this year, when I started realizing what does it mean? What does that mean? Everybody takes their turn because you can put everybody on that scale.

Speaker: Jardena London 50:25

So that’s one of the things that cracks me up. A lot of things about companies crack me up, but the one where it’s like, I can only have one person that exceeds expectations. And I was like, you just said you can only have one person that exceeds expectations so you don’t want the rest of us to exceed your expectations?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:42

That type of policy reinforces individual, or maybe not even individual versus where HR could look at and say, how do we look at motivating and reinforcing individual behaviors and individual motivations, but also, at the team level. It’s almost like how sports teams like hey, if you know how many points you score, versus how many games you win as a team, and how many assists you have whatever that is. So it’s a more holistic view on this and you don’t take away the individual performance, but you also incorporate into a team performance.

Speaker: Jardena London 51:21

And it’s also promoting scarcity. So it’s promoting that scarcity and fear instead of abundance, like why can’t we all be great, but I think you hit on an important point and Agile has been so great for this in companies is, we spend a lot of time developing individuals, but we haven’t spent a focus on developing teams and I think you need both. Some agile coaches would say, let’s focus on the team and not the individual but I think it’s both but I think putting some effort into developing teams is important too.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:52

I agree. Again, it’s taking that holistic view and also looking at the me space, or the me lens, look into the me lens, different people are motivated differently. I’ve worked with people that are close to retirement, they don’t care about climbing the corporate ladder, they’ve done that. They’ve seen it, it’s more like, okay, I just want to enjoy life right now, I would love to mentor somebody and share what I know. And then you might have people that are coming out of college or younger, that have more desire or making more money or climbing and you have to respect both perspectives, and both needs rather than just one. We’re almost out of time. What are some of the things maybe I didn’t ask you or things you would like to share with the audience?

Speaker: Jardena London 52:47

We’ve talked about so many interesting things. I just think the importance of focusing on, we talked about the me, but I talked about resonance and dissonance in the book as well and that’s such a key concept of how am I, it’s about self-awareness too but is my message actually resonating? Am I on the same wavelength as the organization and it sounds kind of woowoo but we know what it’s like when we feel it and we know what it’s like when we don’t. But as a as a transformational leader, you’re creating some dissonance, of course you are you have to, but you need to bridge that with enough resonance so people can hear you. And I think that’s a key piece is that we have some disruptive leaders that are so disruptive, then they either get fired, or they’re just ineffective. So you need to really carefully walk that balance between dissonance and resonance. I think that’s a key thing to remember.

Gojko Adzic

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:38

Who is Gojko? Adzic?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 00:42

I’m a developer, I like to work on interesting stuff. I’ve kind of been fascinated by technology since I was a kid. I started building software by copying and pasting stuff from German language manuals for Commodore 64. I had no idea what they do. I’m currently working on two products. One is a text to speech video maker that is aimed at developers and people who are not Video Professionals, helping them make video materials very easily. And I’m working on mind map that’s a collaboration tool used by millions of schoolchildren all over the world that’s been around for slightly longer time, I think for 2013. I tend to write books to dump my short-term memory into some longer-term storage. So, I can make space in my head for new things I want to learn. So, I’ve written a bunch of books. And I like to go around speaking at conferences, that’s a good way to meet new people and learn about things a couple of years before the books around. So that’s me, in short.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:57

What was it like? Maybe just to give people perspective, what was it like growing up in the Balkans and trying to be a developer? And how did you…

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 02:10

When I started making money with software, I had two jobs really, because one wasn’t enough to feed the family. And it was all like ridiculous outsourcing. I remember, one of my outsourcing gigs, I was being paid. This was before the.com, bust. So, before the.com bust, so when the money was good, so I remember I was being paid something like $5 an hour, and I knew that they were charging $150 an hour for my time in the US. So that wasn’t the best experience to have. But it was fun. I guess. One of the things that forced me to do is learn lots and lots of different things. So, I used to be a Linux admin, I used to program in assembly, in C++, in Java, in Python, in Visual Basic as well, and whatever pays the bills. And I kind of ended up learning a ton of things, because we’ve constantly had to find new gigs.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:27

That’s a really good point in the sense. And I think I’ve heard you say this before, but when you look at developers today, and how much knowledge they have on some of these other areas. And I think you were talking with Dave, I was listening to the podcast, Dave. And you guys were discussing just, how today you could have somebody programmed something without having a lot of fundamental knowledge. And in that instance, you were discussing your friend’s daughter how she built? Could you maybe just elaborate on that issue, because I thought that was a great example.

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 04:09

So, I have this friend whose daughter built an app that helps people engaging in ecofriendly sustainability activities. And I was totally amazed with how far she got. She got into some deep technical trouble. I think about the communication protocols and because my friend, her dad is a business analyst, he didn’t really know these things. So, he recommended she talked to me. And I realized she built this wonderful app, using drag and drop builders and designers for mobile apps and a couple of these cloud back end services that were just plug and play connect. And from one perspective, it’s totally amazing and fascinating that we are expanding this area of creativity and people who don’t really have formal development training or don’t even understand how HTTP works are able to launch useful apps. And it’s totally amazing, I think that’s how much cloud is advanced and lower the bar for these things. On the other hand, it does get a bit scary that, people can build these apps without really understanding how things work. And I guess this is probably my reptilian old brain, trying to find reasons why, like when I learned java, it was really uncomfortable for me to not do memory management manually, because I was used to doing memory management in C++ and in assembly, and C, but letting go was really difficult. And now erasing that several levels, I think over the last 20, 30 years, that bar has been raised.

So, we have application builders, cloud services that do wonderfully complicated stuff like multi master database replication all over the world. And you as an application developer don’t need to care about that, all you need to know is connect to that. And that’s wonderful. I think that’s opening up so many new opportunities for people to create apps. I remember being in this internal of conference organized by a large cloud vendor for the insiders. And they brought in some analysts to predict trends and to talk about what they see as interesting things that will happen in the future. And I remember this was 2018. I remember this analyst saying that they expect the number of developers to quadruple over the next five years. And that just didn’t feel good to me. It’s like how on earth are we going to educate all these people push them through the pipeline? And the part of the justification the presenter was giving is that what we think as developers is not necessarily what the industry thinks when they say developers, and how lowering the bar to do getting people to develop things is really critical, and reducing the complexity and tackling the complexity of this stuff.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:57

So, you have that aspect of it. And then you have aspects of companies, large companies still having large systems. I was just working with a client recently. And they were looking for COBOL developers, and they can’t find anybody, and yet they are stuck with these with the systems, and I don’t know, what is your thought like, when it comes to these large organizations?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 08:25

That’s a big danger of these things, technologies that are too magical, because you end up with, especially today, these magical technologies are getting old really quickly. And you have this app that somebody on one hand, this is brilliant that somebody without a lot of networking fundamentals can build an online distributed app. But on the other hand, five years from now, that knowledge is going to be totally obsolete, because different application builders will be interesting, different technologies. I mean, even forget COBOL, you have lots of companies that are stuck now in Angular 1.0. That’s kind of been deprecated. They can’t migrate of that, because they’ve used magical libraries to very quickly create applications. And now the stuck maintaining that forever. And there’s a big difference between of course, the small nimble, minimum viable let’s launch a product and the massive enterprise that has 1000s of developers where I mean, even the internal complexity of their systems is overwhelming not launching new products. And yeah, I think complicated systems and complex systems are always going to be a challenge and complex organizations lead to complex systems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:00

It does. So, how do you deal with that? How do we simplify things? And what do you think are the challenges because a lot of listeners and a lot of people that work, probably in the United States here, but as well as in Europe and across the globe are working for large organizations. And when we look at the Agile movement for the last 10 years or so, a lot of it has been about changing the processes, but not really looking at the technical side of things. And where do you think things are going? Or what are some of the challenges that you’re seeing when it comes to organizational agility? Not just from changing the process, but actually, from a technical standpoint, given that a lot of these companies have legacy systems and legacy mindsets, I guess, as well.

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 11:00

With the massive legacy system, one of the biggest challenges is actually kind of the knowledge that’s encoded in the system and being lost from humans. And the system is, it’s all sorts of tools, nobody really knows what it does. And people are in a constant state of trying to figure that out and then implement something on top of it, I used to do a lot of work as a consultant for large financial organizations. And I think migrating off legacy systems was a constant thing there where by the time you finish migrating from a legacy system, your system is already legacy, somebody else has started to migrate of that. And I think where a lot of it is just how we focus on short term kind of perspective, and lacking a longer-term vision for where these things need to go. I read somewhere like don’t hold me to this, I can probably Google where it is, that the average lifetime of a CIO in a 4 to 5 company is something like 18 months. It’s a revolving door for technology that doesn’t really reward long term thinking. And I used to meet when I was working as a consultant, lots of people who would have these lovely long-term architectural ideas and how to fix these things, but the short-term pressure…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:42

Then you have a leader come in, and it’s like, well, I’m not going to do the same thing that this guy did, he just got fired. So, I’m going to either rebranded or do something else. So, like that…

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 12:53

Then before you know it, they’re gone. And somebody else takes over. And they’ve collected the bonus. And I think that there are ways of dealing with that, and working around that. And I think part of it comes to having a strong big picture vision for what something needs to do, and being really brutal about not being a feature factory, but focusing on achieving business value and having kind of clear, clear idea for the business value that people need to produce. But yeah, that’s very rare. And it’s much easier to just deal with short term stuff and focus on low hanging fruit. And yeah, that I said, I’ve been building my own products for the last few years. So, I’m not really up to date with the big challenges that people are still fighting with COBOL. So, it’s very unlikely that something massive has changed in large organizations, since I started building my own products.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:03

Well, it’s measurement. And I think there’s lack of holistic view, or systemic view, and it’s like, everybody’s still thinking about their own little Silo organizational structures, still reinforcing that type of mindset. So, from your perspective, a lot of times people are making assumptions across the company, and I wanted to get your thoughts on, what is the best way to validate assumptions, a lot of what you do, and what you’ve done in the past in the way that you’ve contributed to the community is focusing on validating those assumptions. So, what is the best way?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 14:45

For me, the best way to validate assumptions is to observe real users working, real users struggling with using whatever software you’re producing or struggling with using something else and figuring out why they’re struggling. And then when you do something, then again, observe them to see if this has reduced their problems. I think, in especially larger organizations, there’s too much opportunity for information to be lost. Translated into something that doesn’t make sense. Then updated to fit in whatever object somebody has and, and aligned and synergize, the whatever the buzzwords are. And by the time it comes to the developers, a lot of the original reason for something is lost. Also, ironically, what the Agile movement is produced, if being very such a thing in large organizations these days is too much, trusting the users to know what they want.

I think when I started kind of making money with software, I think the average cycle for the stuff we were doing and our clients were expecting was measured in months, if not in years, and there was a lot of documentation writing, there was a lot of analysis, whatever, designing and things like that. And information was being lost there. And eternity delivery came as a revolution against that, and no rebellion against that, because people saw how crazy that is. And close customer collaboration was kind of the solution. But somewhere along the line, I can’t really put my finger on it, I would say something like early 2010s, or something like that. I started noticing more that this close customer collaboration is basically take whatever the user is saying at face value, and do and delegate the responsibility for system design to users delegate the responsibility for features and whatever decisions to business users have no context to make these decisions. They’re not software designers, they’re not even experts in analysis, there are people who have their own business problems, they are not the people who should be deciding what goes into software…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:40

Do you think it’s people confusing customer feedback with understanding the customer? So, a lot of times I talk about in the sense of like understanding the psychology of a customer, and what problems they’re trying to solve and, and what problems or what needs they have in trying to dig deeper into that, and not necessarily listening to what they’re saying, but understanding what’s going on? What’s going on in their heads and from motivations is this…,

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 18:08

It’s a multi-dimensional…, it’s a wicked problem, it’s one of those wicked things you mentioned. So first of all, people are generally really bad at expressing what they need, they usually talk about what they want, but not what they actually need. And figuring out what they need is an art in itself. And naively trusting that, if somebody says, I want this button that actually that’s the button that should be added is insane, but people keep doing it. There’s a wonderful book about this, called what customers want by Anthony Ulwick who was the program manager for IBM PC, Jr. That’s one of the worst product launch failures ever. It was totally driven by customer research, but rogue type of customer research, and that was his conclusion. And I think the more we’ve democratized access to the customers, and it’s brilliant,

getting closer access to users getting closer access to customers is wonderful. But when we’ve democratized that we’ve kind of removed the skills from it as well. And I think that’s wrong. We need to teach people how to talk to customers. Putting in a business analyst specialist like that years ago, that’s wrong, because that’s a bottleneck. But letting people who don’t know how to talk to customers talk to customers is also good. And we need to teach them this is a teachable skill. And the second thing is that people confuse feedback with analysis. And the third thing is, people don’t know when to ask for feedback. They tend to ask for feedback too soon, they tend to also feedback too late and that’s really troublesome.

And because it can it can mislead people very badly. One of my friends worked with this company that was doing planning software for doctors. And they got two doctors assistants to work with them on this planning software. And they spent, I think nine months in full throttle agility, changing requirements, reacting to customer feedback. So, the feedback from these two ladies that worked with them was overwhelmingly positive because the developers would act on their every whim, everything that they said needs to be changed was changed, but they spent nine months doing stupid admin screens. And they spent the project budget instead of delivering business value that was somewhere else. And so the big problem there was, they were asking feedback too soon, they built some screens, they showed them to these admin assistants, and the admin assistants kind of played around with the stuff doing their best with their best intentions. And very often I see or used to see, while I was working as a consultant, people assigned to a team from business perspective to sit there and try to provide best possible feedback they can. But again, these people are not software designers, they know they don’t have any experience with large scale software systems, they don’t have it, they probably domain experts.

But at the same time in large organizations, they’re probably not decision makers, because if you ask for two full time employees to sit with the team, you’re going to get the cheapest people from the business not someone who is high up the ladder, and who can make serious decisions. And there’s a lot of this going on. And I said it’s a multi dimensional problem. And I think part of it is actually educating developers, educating testers, educating product owners, that how to talk to customers, how to talk to business people, how to observe them, when to ask for feedback, and how to ask for feedback, and how to trust the feedback. Because, again, you know, when you ask for feedback, people often want to please you, and they give you sometimes overly optimistic information. And all of that is not rocket science. There’s kind of basic UX techniques and basic product management techniques, you don’t need to get every developer in a bank to be super powerful product manager or the best UX researcher in the world. But people need to know at least the basics of these things to be able to have good conversations, many people get into our industry, because they’re good at talking to machines, not good at talking to people.

Now we’re getting to talk to people. And I did this research a few years ago, I’m trying to remember the numbers from off the top of my head, but I can send you the link for this later, where we’ve interviewed lots of people online to figure out how frequently they talk to their users. And about half of the group that responded has never seen or talk to a real user in their life, which I think is really kind of depressing. The best kind of products that I’ve worked on came from directly talking to people and figuring out what is it that they actually want? And what is it actually needs? And how do we provide that. And I think it’s a great skill to have as a developer, it makes you a lot more valuable, it makes your products a lot better. And I think I’ve had this…, we started talking about crazy outsourcing when we were younger, but a part of me trying…, always having to find new gigs and things like that was learning how to figure out what these people want and what these people actually need. And I remember, one gig we had was for a Bluetooth peer to peer message communication system. This was like very old stuff. And we’re programming Nokia engage devices in Python. And I remember the original request for samples something totally crazy that was undoable using Bluetooth devices the time they wanted to live stream video based on location when you come close to something Bluetooth location starts streaming video or the device is like we just basic bandwidth calculations show that this is totally impossible, but instead of saying it’s impossible, or spending time to build it and then realizing it’s impossible. We spoke to the clients and the clients were a museum who were doing so digital stuff, and they wanted to have like a digital guide thing and we realized, Okay, how many of these works of art do you have like, okay 300? Well, 300 videos, we can put it on a SD card jam into the engaged device. And instead of streaming the video, we can just send the code like play this video. And it worked perfectly, and then it was like a million times simpler than what they wanted. It gave them what they actually needed, everybody loved it. And that’s what you can get with a combination of kind of somebody who has a problem is somebody who knows how to solve these problems, but find a common language. And, we didn’t spend time overly architecting some crazy, or new protocol over Bluetooth that be able to stream videos, we didn’t waste their money or time we implemented a simple solution that was at the end, satisfied more than what they need is from a business perspective. And going back to what I said, I think lots of teams in large organizations now have given up on the responsibility for designing the systems. And they’re kind of doing it from a technical perspective, like features, whatever the business is, or whatever the business wants, we’re just started that. And that leads to totally stupid systems that are overly complicated and difficult to maintain. And ultimately, I think that’s a big driver for why these things are legacy. Because legacy is a good way of saying, Look, we’ve given up on the knowledge viruses, or nobody knows. And I think as developers, which is kind of delivery team members, testers, analysts, we need to be product owners, we need to be much better at talking to these people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:05

That reminds me, I teach impact mapping in a lot of my classes and it’s really helpful and a lot of things that I do I think people resonate with impact mapping, especially in the product ownership class I do. I’m interested maybe just to explore that a little bit. How did the impact mapping come about?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 27:35

So how impact mapping came about, I really don’t know because I did not invent that. The wonderful Ingrid Dominguez and colleagues from the [inaudible][27:49] interaction design agency, Sweden invented it. My best understanding is that they did it to prevent the Swedish government from wasting money on stupid IT projects. But I think you’d have to check with them, I became acquainted with impact mapping as a result of losing almost all my money on a stupid IT project. I was CTO of a company where I wasn’t taking a salary, I was working for shares. And we had an amazing technical team. I still think, the best technical team that I’ve ever worked with to this day, but we were just building stupid [shit]. And the company went bankrupt, because we were not building great things. And there was a big wake up moment for me, because I thought we were doing great all the way up until the point where I didn’t have the money to pay the rent next month. And then I realized we’re not doing that great. I mean, if we were doing great, so I would be swimming in money and not having to figure out how to pay rent. And I started trying to research, how do other people solve this problem because they thought it’s impossible that we were the only ones with this problem. And when you’re a startup and you’re burning very short runway then doing stupid stuff for a year is a death sentence. If you’re a large organization, you can do that for decades and nobody cares.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:30

Or government you just get the money.

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 29:33

I mean, an unlimited supply of money but not even an unlimited supply of money. If you look at the waste in large organizations today in software is just ridiculous. There’s a data point I pulled out while I was writing the impact mapping book. I don’t know of any kind of more recent research, but it’s like something around 100 something billion euros wasted IT projects every year in Europe like, insane. Totally insane. And so anyway, so I started researching how people avoided that problem and focused on building the right things. And around that time, the whole product management in software kind of started emerging. Product Management didn’t really exist as a discipline software before that. And I ended up reading every book I could find on stuff like that. And I read the book about impact mapping, that has been published. And it was totally, yeah, amazing. It just clicked. And I realized, more people need to know about this. And it’s a shame that this is not that popular. So, I decided to write a book about it that is more approachable, I guess. And hopefully, that’s made some people question it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:59

I think definitely impacting. You’ve read and written a lot of books, what are the books that had like the biggest impact on your thinking?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 31:11

Impact mapping definitely is a book that made a big impact on my thinking, I think, Gary Klein’s book, or Gary Klein’s book, The sources of power was very impactful in my work. It’s a book about how people make decisions under time pressure, when they don’t have perfect knowledge and they don’t have a lot of time to make decisions. So, it’s like a bunch of really interesting stories about firemen and policemen and things. And that helped me a lot to clarify my approach to getting decisions in software processing, getting decisions or requirements. And that impacted a lot, my approach to spec by example. And Ulwick’s book on what customers want is also phenomenal, it got me thinking quite a lot about outcomes and outcome driven planning and things like that. Pragmatic Programmer, the very old is a phenomenally good book. I remember reading that. And that helped me shape my career a lot. Of course, Ken Vic’s book Extreme Programming Explained was wonderful. Worth Cunningham, Eric Magritte, book fit for developing software was also really good for me at the point when I was trying to figure out a good approach to software quality. Yeah, those are kind of the key books I think, had a big impact on me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:09

I heard you talking about, to tie it back to water waste. The book by Lauren Graham, the ghost of the executed engineer, could you maybe talk about that, and just related to how we see that stuff in organization?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 33:24

It’s a wonderful book about a guy who invented lean startup 150 years ago, and was killed for it. And then he’s the executed engineer. He’s a guy named Jotter Paczynski, or Peter Paczynski, who was some kind of minor Russian nobility around the time of the Russian Revolution. And he was genuinely a systems thinker, that we would call somebody like that systems thinker today. And because he was such a good systems thinker, he was an engineer, he was constantly being sent to fix construction projects and minds and things like that. And I remember in the book reading about how, between the two revolutions in Russia, he was constantly in and out of prison where they were put into prison because he’s aristocracy and represents the old government. And I think he was even in the government and then they realize that he’s the only one who can help them fix up something. So they pull him out of prison and he fixes it and I think he’s kind of approach has a lot to do with doing small tests, figuring out what works, thinking about the systems and kind of figuring out the kind of inflection points and points where you can control these systems and then build from that, and at the end he met his end, because I think in the US, they build the Hoover Dam and stallion wanted a bigger kind of hydroelectric dam than that. And they gave the project to this guy.

And he was constantly objecting to that and publicly objecting to that project, because it was a lot easier to get the same kind of electricity by building smaller dams, it was cheaper, it didn’t require that much, changing the infrastructure and drowning half of whatever, basic they were going to drown to get this massive lake. And at the end, he was killed by the KGB and his wife was killed by the KGB for raising too much noise about that. Being the voice of reason in an organization, doesn’t want to listen isn’t always kind of good for your health. And I think, in a sense that there are lots of parallels, of course, on a much kind of more benign level, with people in large organizations, that proposal, let’s do it this way. Or do it that way, it’s a lot more logical, it’s going to be a lot more productive, where people don’t even understand the politics of it, like Stallion wanted it, the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world, how much electricity is producing, but just…,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:22

It reminds me of a lot of times as a coach and a consultant, when you go into a company, it’s not what you want, it’s what the customer wants, and the…

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 36:35

And it’s not the single voice of the customer a lot of politics at play there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:38

Exactly. So, I sometimes I feel like the Peter or a lot of coaches feel like Peter, because they constantly keep bringing you in, but they not really looking at things systematically in organization not willing to make systematic changes. So, it’s almost like, you come in, you get fired, in a sense, in many ways, and then you go somewhere else, it’s the same thing.

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 37:07

Yeah, I mean, lots of times, people hit these political barriers that have nothing to do with software, really. And you mentioned, that you worked for a client that really wanted their old screens and things like that. And there’s a justification that they were more productive. So, I think whoever was figuring out what to do, they will not again, be thinking and observing users at work and figuring out okay, how do we get these people more productive? Instead of okay, how do we upgrade this to Java or Scala or whatever, but I remember one of my workshops a few years ago, we were doing this thing in Italy, and there was one of the workshop participants, every time when we pause for questions would ask, How do you do this? If nobody from the business wants to talk to you? I was like, really a bizarre question. I mean, how did you get into the point where nobody from the business wants to talk to you? And it’s really difficult to do a good software, if nobody from the business wants to talk to you.

So, we’re trying to unpack that. And after, him asking the same question. For the millionth time, we decided, okay, let’s pause the workshop, let’s talk about your use case, because you keep bringing this up, it’s disruptive for everybody else. So let’s finish that topic and move on. And we started talking about his use case. And he was working for some software organization that was doing a new municipal government software that nobody really wanted. And they were perfectly happy with the old software. The new software didn’t bring any new any benefits to anybody. And the more he was talking, the more I realized that, that project succeeded at the point where somebody signed the contract and a brown envelope full of money kind of went the worst direction. And that’s it, the project succeeded before the first line of code was written. The software they produce is irrelevant. Of course, nobody wants to talk to them.

So, in situations like that, you start hitting politics on a crazy level. And there’s nothing we teach people that can help in that situation, the only thing you can do is quit and go somewhere where your work is appreciated. But on a smaller level, these things happen. In larger organizations where you have multiple stakeholders, different people want to protect their own different kind of power centers and things like that. I remember, while I was still doing a lot of consulting work, we had a gig for an investment bank in London where they wanted to figure out how they do Agile testing and the manual testing was flying them down. They had this outsourced testing team of a few 100 people somewhere halfway around the world and it was taking these people between a month and a month and a half to do the basic testing cycle.

So, if you want to go to a two-week iteration, you can’t afford to have a month and a half of testing within the two-week iteration. And most of the testing was quite deterministic. They were not really doing some crazy, highly skilled testing stuff. They were basically following scripts in play keyboards. So, they got the idea of automating this and the team we were working with, with a proof of concept we looked at most of these things said, really all deterministic, there was an element of skill testing, but not more than a day within that thing. So that could easily be done by an expert, exploratory tester. And yeah, we’ve automated the good number of these tests. And then they decided that, yes, automation is good, but they’re still going to manually spend month and a half testing, why? Are they finding anything? No, are they doing anything different from what we want to make? No, they’re not. And, this went on and on and on for a couple of cycles.

And the people I was working with, were confused as well, because, somebody hired up the organization was, was blocking this whole thing. And when we got to finally speak to somebody why, and there’s two levels higher, they basically said, they’re doing that as a favor to somebody else was paralleled in the organization, they admitted that, but that’s it, and the person who’s parallel in the organization, so not a stakeholder of this team at all, they are from a village where these people have 500 testers. And when this person goes back home, he’s the hero of the village because everybody works for his company and replace them with the shell script. He’s no longer the hero of his village, and he will be the villain because, there will be no justification for these people working anymore. And so, politics like that is really difficult to approach from a logical perspective, because it is not optimized, it is not aimed productivity, is not aimed for a good system or something like that. But that’s the unfortunate reality of politics in large organizations.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:30

That is crazy. I love your stories, by the way, you have so many good stories, what’s your favorite story to tell, or client example? Or things that you’ve either heard read or experience? What are some of the crazy ones that maybe you’re open to share?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 42:48

Well, I don’t know, there’s kind of lots of crazy stuff. But my favorite story is not that crazy, it’s kind of for the stuff I’m working on, myself. And it’s amazing how, knowing all these things occasionally, we can get blindsided by our own gut feeling, our own impressions. And so a couple of years ago, I started building this I told you video automation tool, that is used to do promotional videos and demo videos and kind of documentation videos for Mind Map and to do a five minute or for video to take me three or four hours recording, re-recording, listening to myself and getting angry for all the mistakes and then trying to align these things, I start building this set of shell scripts that helps me do that. And the set of shell scripts evolves into a product and is…, I’m kind of demonstrating this thing to people. It’s reading markdown, and it’s enabling people to create videos from markdown files and automate all of it. I constantly get into discussion that this is all great, but it’s kind of too complicated. And I was talking to a couple of people about what their processes when designing videos and how they’re doing it and kind of every something, clicked when one person was showing me that their processes basically they start with a PowerPoint, they kind of do the slides they go through every morning. Yeah, storyboard it, and then they think about what they’re going to record. So then they record, for every slide, they record what they want to talk about, and then they slowly replace the stuff in the PowerPoint with animations and make it hard, high fidelity, and then evolved it into video and I realized, okay, I don’t have the capability of doing this whole storyboarding thing. It’s a bit too complicated to do quickly. But what I might be able to do is just input PowerPoint, your PowerPoints, let’s say, I’m going to meet you halfway there. Instead of recording and re-recording, maybe just use speaker notes and type up what you want this thing to say. And then I’m going to use text to speech to create a nice video out of it. And then I built that is kind of halfway thing really is something that I was going to replace. And then after launching that, about two weeks later, 95% of the usage on the product was that interface. And it was this other thing you never realized, okay, that’s the product, it’s amazing how we can get, as I said, misled by our own impressions and our own thinking. And I remember reading something very similar, about PayPal, I think, PayPal, the first version when they launched, because it was supposed to be a mobile to mobile money transfer thing, like the US money transfer really is confusing to me. It looks like it’s still in the Middle Ages, because it’s difficult for some reason to send money from one bank to another.

Coming from Europe, I really can’t understand that at all. But anyway, PayPal was supposed to be something that was mobile to mobile money transfer before smartphones, before anything else and sending SMS is was expensive. So, they built this testing website so they can test transfers, without paying for SMS’s all the time. And it was just a test interface, a stupid thing. But when they launched it, the website usage was far more frequent than actual money using SMS on the call SMS ID and just focus on the website. And I think these surprises and being open to these surprises and learning from what users actually do. Again, we go back to observing users, as a way of getting good feedback is critically important for successful products.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:22

It’s feedback also. As humans, we tend to overcomplicate things. And keeping things simple is hard. But what role does that feedback, that communication have, from your perspective, how do we keep things simple?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 47:40

Feedback is actually quite a complex topic. And there’s a scientific side to it, people have been working on feedback systems as ways of systems of control for a couple of 100 years now and more, I think, more actively since electronic computers started emerging after the Second World War. And there’s a whole science feedback actually there and control systems in general. And a lot of it is, there’s a couple of really good books about that. And I kind of read some, so I’m dabbling in that I realized how naive I was approaching my kind of feedback systems. And actually, there’s this. So, one of the ideas of feedback is being able to control a very complicated system and a complex system that we don’t really need to understand by quickly adjusting course. And one typical example of a feedback system is cruise control on a car where you can tell it to keep constant speed. And all it needs to figure out is, am I slowing down? If yes, then kind of speed up a bit. Am I speeding up too much that kind of slow down a bit, it doesn’t need to calculate vectors, it doesn’t need to know…, what’s the expected acceleration or some type of ground or some other type of ground, it can control a horribly complicated system with a relatively simple system. Thermometers are also an example of a feedback system where you can do all sorts of crazy rocket science math to predict how the temperature is going to expand and what not. Or you can just like measure the temperature and say, look, it’s too hot, it’s not too hot, or it’s too cold, keep heating or don’t keep heating and the feedback systems kind of rely on the speed of this loop, and they rely on accurate measurement. So, there’s two ways of messing that up. One way of messing that up is measuring the wrong things and measuring it to early or measuring too late and doing feedback on admin screens where you should be measuring how much are the doctors calendars are being filled up or something like that. That’s a brilliant example of being misled by the wrong feedback. That’s like putting a thermometer on the outside of your house and controlling the room temperature inside. The system works, but the data is totally wrong. And the other kind of mistake, the other thing that feedback systems kind of tend to have to deal with is correcting the error, and correcting the error both in terms of overshooting and undershooting. And there’s some really complicated math that gets involved into that, if you have a delay in the feedback. But the shorter the feedback, the shorter the delay between the feedback and the action, the math becomes simpler, and you can almost kind of just work on the basis of what’s going on now. And I think that’s why if you have quick iterations, if you have fast feedback from the customers, and you can show them something, iterate, observe them working, observe the error and fix it that can help us build really complicated systems and control complicated systems without a lot of knowledge of kind of the underlying stuff.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:29

It’s also like understanding the intent of a system, right? if you don’t…,

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 51:33

Absolutely, if you don’t understand the intent, if you have a thermometer and you use it to control your speed or car speed, that’s never going to work. I mean, it’s…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:45

But it’s also like with the car speed, or cruise control, it’s like understanding that I just want to stay within this range, not to get a speeding ticket or whatever, for safety, whatever, you define it understanding that helps you understand this, how to design measurements for that, I think a lot of times people design measurements without understanding the intent and outcomes.

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 52:10

Absolutely, and especially if you look at software today, we are obsessed with measuring efforts, absolutely obsessed with measuring efforts. And we pretend we’re not measuring effort by giving it fancy names, like scoring points and things like that. But essentially, behind most of that, if people are honest, is efforts, and measuring effort is really good if you want to do short term capacity predictions. So, if you want to know, do I have the capacity to take this user story into my next week or not measuring effort is the right thing to do. For pretty much everything else measuring effort is the wrong thing to do. And we pretend that we’re measuring value. By looking at effort we pretend that we’re measuring, I don’t know, what we’ve delivered or achieve then, and this really bugs me, when I hear people saying, Oh, we’ve delivered 50 story points, no, you’ve not delivered 50 story point, but spent 50 story points of effort, you’ve not delivered that it’s, you’ve delivered something else. But do you even know what you’ve delivered? Or how you’re measuring that? That’s a big question.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:31

It is! which goes back to a lot of wasted software development, like just not fully understand. Maybe the last question, it’s, already an hour. So, I want to be respectful of the time. But maybe the last question is, I want to come back to the best thing that you described that you worked on, but the labor shares, in a sense when it comes to business outcomes, right? What are the things that you feel like are characteristic? So, if you were putting a team together? What would you focus on? In a sense to have a highly productive team? So, what will what do you think would be the characteristics?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 54:20

If you put a team together that means you’re focusing on the people you’re putting together and, I think people who are good with technology but curious about solving the problem and not really just implementing a solution. Those would be kind of the ideal people to work with. I think on a team like that. I think technology is relatively easy to learn. We pretend like oh, we will only work with people who use React version seven point Whatever, I don’t even know what the activation of that is, these things are trivially easy to read. And somebody who’s done web development for a few years can pick up one of these things in a few weeks, it’s not a problem at all. But somebody who’s interested in learning and interested in actually solving the problem is much more valuable on a team than somebody who’s an expert in a specific, very narrow kind of technological area. And I think, when…, it’s really a shame, the way people are being hired trained today through resumes and CVs is all about what technology worked on, and where and how. I have a friend, who’s a software tester and the software testing industry particularly suffers from this because they’re obsessed with stupid certifications much more than developers are. And I remember him basically saying that he was able to get in front of so many recruiters by including a line at the bottom of the CV saying, I do not have any of the following certificates, and then all the keywords you can get.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:14

They we’re just searching for keywords. It is crazy. And I think that’s the craze, if you think about just certifications. I teach scrum master class, I teach, product owner, and there is a craze around these certifications. And I tell people, I really don’t think anybody gets hired because of the certification, you might get a screened, for a person that’s searching, and you might get that initial first thing and interview. But in my experience, most of the time, it’s like, when you get to talking to the team and talking to the hiring manager, it’s about, are you a good fit? And are you going to be able to help us solve the problems? And I hope that’s what, people are looking for, and not just which certifications you have. And which certifications, you don’t have.

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 57:15

oh, yeah, I don’t know, we go back to the craziness of large organizations., It’s a big question. How to get into that and whether certifications are useful or not my opinion is that certifications don’t tend to correlate to people’s knowledge. Yeah. I guess I don’t have a lot of respect for IT certifications.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 57:49

No, I agree. Even though I teach a lot of these. I think, and I tell people and for me, at least, it’s been just opportunity to look at okay, what things do I need to learn where might be my gaps and that was just one of the things that I use to identify things that want to dive deeper to learn and also put into practice. What would be the last thing, a message or a takeaway that you would like to share for the end with the audience?

Speaker: Gojko Adzic 58:20

I guess learn how to speak to your customers if you don’t know already and, get in front of them and observe people in action don’t necessarily trust what they’re saying. You will get much better information like that.