Author: agile-to-agility

Andy Singleton

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:45

So, who is Andy Singleton? How did you get started? And maybe what are you up to these days? It’s been a couple of years since we talked.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 00:58

Yeah. I got started in computing at a very young age. I was about 14 years old, and I picked up programming at a local college. I actually couldn’t get the software accounts I wanted, so I wrote a virus to send me other people’s passwords, and I eventually got in trouble for that. I may have been one of the first people to ever get in trouble for writing viruses. And I ended up building my own computer, because I couldn’t afford an apple two. So that was a long time ago, but even then, there were computer geeks. And I’ve made a living as a software entrepreneur. So, I’ve never worked in a big company, in a big enterprise, it gives me a little bit of a different view of things like agile, that are really described in words for big enterprises. I have been for a long time very interested in distributed teams, and that’s a hot topic now. So, in 1999, I was running a company called power steering, an enterprise software company that I started. And we couldn’t get the programmers that we wanted; it was the last round of bubble, and it was very difficult to find people. So, I experimented with a practice that I called inspired by open source. Open-source projects have always been globally distributed.

So, I experimented with recruiting people to work on globally distributed teams. And I eventually turned that interest into a company called assembler, which makes workspaces for distributed software teams, code management and task management. And in doing that, in running a SASS company, I became very interested in the process that Sass companies use. That was, think of it as 2010, 2012 era. Everybody was experimenting with continuous delivery and cloud-based web services. That was new stuff in those days. And I became very interested in continuous delivery as a better way to run a distributed team, where you’re not having meetings. So, you take the meanings out, replace that with software builds, that everybody can see that you can do it any time. And that seemed to be very effective. I also noticed that it was an effective way to manage a big company. So, it’s now obvious that the huge winners in our economy are companies like Google, and Facebook, Microsoft, Alibaba. These are companies that use an architecture that I called matrix of services. They actually run their company on the idea that it’s run by software, and the software is composed of web services. And if they need to make a new product, they are rapidly expanding product lines. Amazon, Amazon is by far and away the best example of this and the most successful. If they need to make new products, they can reassemble those services, and they can run continuous delivery on the services, and also on a lot of different products. So, Amazon has their products, their retail delivery, but they also have warehouse fulfillment. They also have web services. They’re all using the same underlying process of continuous delivery and continuous improvement.

So that’s actually what got me interested in the Agile culture, is that, here were big companies doing something that I thought was important. They were innovating better, really, they were getting better as they got bigger. And as a small company, it’s actually hard to compete, right. I’ve always run smaller startups with them. When they use this matrix of services process, and I thought that, that might be something that the corporate and the Agile community would be interested in. Weirdly, that was back in 2015, if you look at the winners now, almost no one has crawled into that winner’s circle. Yeah, ever more of the economy and sort of stock market cap is going to these now trillion-dollar valuation companies that run this devastatingly effective process.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:28

When you say big companies, you’re really referring to the big tech companies that are dominating the markets, right?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 05:35

Yeah. And there were some companies that tried to do it, like General Electric. They went through various phases of agility, they tried to go to this more, you know, service architecture, technology architecture. It didn’t make it. Goldman Sachs, they’re better, they’re more successful, but they never crawled into that sort of, they haven’t yet crawled into that winner’s circle of software, service driven companies. And in fact, that’s what I found when I went in and talk to companies, that they would say things like, yeah, that you’re right. That’s the way we should do this if we want to beat Amazon, but I have 10,000 people, and they’re the wrong people. So, we’re not going to do that.

So, I actually washed out at the agility business, I haven’t been working on it for a couple years now. And I’m back to running startups. Actually, multiple startups now with a what I call adventure studio, and Maxo square. It’s a crypto project. We’re addressing something called decentralized finance. And decentralized finance is software that you run on a blockchain that essentially replaces banks. So instead of giving your money to a bank, you send it to some software. And instead of borrowing money from a bank, you can borrow it from some software and 98%, of the sort of the overhead of a bank is just vaporized. And what’s interesting about defi is that enterprises are not involved. It’s got some regulatory challenges. It’s new.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:10

What are some of the regulatory challenges in that instance?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 07:14

Well, you’re competing against financial institutions that are heavily regulated. A simple example is that, banks have to do what’s called know your customer, and AML, anti-money laundering. So, they have to make sure that before they send money or accept money, that it’s not money from some illegal activity, or money going to some illegal activity. And actually regulators, it’s just one small aspect of their regulation. Regulators have put a lot of controls on what they can do just to make sure that they do those checks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:50

Make sure that Miljan is not sponsoring some guy in Montenegro that’s running for president or something like that, right?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 07:58

Well, if he was on a sanctions list, right. That’s the kind of thing that they check. But in the world of blockchain, you know, do those checks, right. So, banks feel like, well, we could get in trouble by doing blockchain transactions. That’s just a simple example. They’re much more complicated examples, where really, the advantage of blockchain is that it can be innovative, because it’s not regulated. And actually, it’s much safer than the regulated market in terms of, you’re less likely to lose your money, because it’s carefully programmed, so that everything is collateralized. If you’re borrowing money, you have to have even more money to back it up. And because people are dealing with counterparties that they don’t know from all over the world, that careful structure of collateralization is something they put in place. And it’s actually very effective, a lot more effective than trying to get a regulator and people to do the right thing. So, it’s like very different approach. But the point that I’m making to you and sort of the Agile community is that, this is not a case where startups are doing something, and then the big companies are learning from that. It’s actually a case where the big companies are just being left out entirely. So that might be something to think about. As for the future.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:23

So, this is how and what’s interesting to me is like, this is how, you know, big companies go out of business, right. This is just something for them, it’s on their radar, but they don’t think that it’s that disruptive, or maybe sometimes like you said it, we don’t have the resources to deal with this right now. Maybe just as a follow up question to that out of curiosity, because this is the future in my opinion. If you’re working on it too, you probably believe in it. How far away, you know, decades, years, till this becomes something that’s real. That’s how we…

Speaker: Andy Singleton 10:03

Well, what do you define as real? So, it will cost you a market share.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:07

The fact maybe the majority of people are actually using this and it becomes the norm of how I…

Speaker: Andy Singleton 10:18

But right now, crypto is something that’s pretty much reached the mainstream. So, the idea that you can own something like Bitcoin, I think there are 57-million-coin base accounts, that’s reached a large portion of the US population. What I’m talking about decentralized finance, which is where you don’t get coin base to do it. You actually have your own crypto wallet, and you can deal with these scripts. It’s much smaller, probably a couple of million people right now. I call it a wholesale market, because there’s really only about 20,000 wallets that control about $40 billion worth of assets. So, it’s about $2 million per person. These are hobbyists that you see on the street, but they’re actually controlling a lot of money in this blockchain market. So, from that, is exactly the problem for a big company. If you look at it now, it’s just too small, and there’s too many regulatory risks for you to get involved. The problem, but it’s the classic problem of disruption.

The defi market grew about 40 times last year. 40x in one year, which is something that is almost never been experienced in business. It’s very difficult to imagine what would happen if you had businesses that were expanding 40x in a year, and yet, that’s what we’re facing. So, it grew from about 1 billion in assets to about 40 billion in assets. And it probably grew from about 2000 participants, to about 40,000 participants. That’s much smaller than a bank in Portland, Maine, a single bank, right. It’s a tiny, tiny piece of the financial services market. So that’s actually the problem that you have as a big company, you can’t get involved in these small markets. The problem is, that it’s growing 40x a year. You only have to go get a coffee and come back and you’ll be wiped out at that pace. So that’s where we are.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:18

Awesome. It’s just interesting that this stuff is really, because I think we’re due to like in the next 10 years, we’re due to some of these, like disruptions that I think, are going to be probably, you know, the biggest disruptions of our lives. And things like that are waiting to burst, because there’s in my opinion, it’s just doesn’t make sense. Some of the way that we bank, some of the way that we do things, it just doesn’t make sense. I think it’s ready for some major disruption. But maybe coming back to the distributed teams, I really want to kind of expand on that a little bit. In today’s like, you know, context, how are you seeing distributed teams? What are some of the things that you think maybe Agile community, because you’ve been doing this for a while, distributed teams are not new to you. What could Agile community and anybody for that matter learn about what you’re doing with distributed things? How are you putting distributed teams together?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 13:20

Well, I think a year ago, everything I said was new and fresh, because most people had not tried running distributed teams. And I have to say, I told you so. Because that I always told people that the reason, they didn’t run distributed teams was just because they were uncomfortable with the management practices, not because it wasn’t a great idea. And then that they should just take some time to learn some management practices. And in fact, now, the kinds of things I have to say might not actually be that interesting, because everyone’s doing it. Everyone had to do it. And it turned out I was right. It was just a question of getting comfortable with the management practices. After 20 years of doing this, most people only have about one year of experience. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I probably have been able to boil it down to its essentials in a way that might be helpful.

So, for instance, for recruiting, you’re not going to bring people in for long interviews, you need to have trial contracts. We do one-week trials. You need to have a chat running, okay, it sounds simple. If you’re going to have a meeting, like a stand up meeting every day, every week, you should always do it at exactly the same time. That way, even if it’s an inconvenient time for some people, they can plan around it and they will effectively plan around it. And obviously the more that you can write down about your tasks and your work, the better. And finally, the killer app, remember our matrix of services continuous build. So, the thing that will bring a distributed team together is not that they have coffee together, or go out for beers together. It’s that they’re literally working on the same thing. They have their fingers in the same piece of clay. And that’s what the continuous build gives you. So that’s my capsule hint. I think a lot of people have gotten close to that over the last year. And, you know, maybe we’re going into a new era with distributed teams.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:17

When it comes to management, maybe of these distributed teams, how do you manage these teams? I’m assuming, I don’t know. But I’m assuming, knowing you, you know, there are some guardrails, but it’s pretty much self-organizing teams, right? How much hand holding or how much direction? Like, what is your style? Or what have you seen work really well, when it comes to helping them get stuff done? Like, how much direction do you provide?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 15:48

Well, you have to provide a lot of direction to teams. I build software products. So, it’s hard for me to talk about other kinds of distributed teams. But if you’re building a software product, the state that you want to get into is a state where they’re releasing frequently, daily or weekly. And they actually have metrics, they can see how people are responding to that. And if there’s a problem that shows up right away, and they have to fix it, in that state, you do have self-managing teams, because they’re getting the information they need to figure out what to do. It’s a lot harder in the time before you release a product. And I usually get on the daily stand ups, and I spent 20 minutes, you know, kind of beating people up, trying to herd the cats in the right direction, you know. Doing the things that you have to do as a product manager. And I think senior executives have to actually dive into that product manager role when they’re doing launches of things that are new. I think it really pays off.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:54

How much do you like at least, you know, you have technical background and you’re playing that role of a product manager? One of the things that I see is, a lot of times, product managers come from business, and they have no clue what they can do to help what IT is doing and what these developers are doing. Have you obviously given your situation, maybe you haven’t run into that many instances, but maybe you can talk about if you have or not like how important is it to understand how you can support developers and what they’re doing?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 17:28

I think anytime that you pay attention to the product, really look at it, really use the output, talk to customers, I think that, that shows a respect for developers, and it does provide really useful feedback. That said, we’re in a transition now, where a lot more people are programmers. And what we’re seeing is in the product businesses is that, programmers are pushing out the other business guys from those product management roles. Because there is a lot of creativity that you can exercise if you really know the technology. It’s like being able to fly a plane and knowing how the plane works. You can pull much tighter maneuvers. If you’re not a programmer, I don’t think there’s any magic to it beyond paying attention. The problem, I think is that, people assume, I mean, just to give you a small example, if you haven’t checked every single thing in a piece of software, it’s not going to behave the way that you think, right. Just remember that really simple rule, right. There are hundreds of degrees of sort of variation that you didn’t think exist, it’s not going to do what you think it’s going to do. And you have to check everything. And just remembering that simple rule and having the respect to do that, and taking the time. I think it’s what I would encourage people to do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:58

What about the like, when it comes to distributed teams and some of like frequent challenges that you’ve run into? Like, what are some of the things that maybe piss you off, or maybe kind of get under your skin about distributed teams.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 19:17

The problem with distributed teams is, sometimes is hard for people to learn the domain, the stuff, the thing that you’re working on. So, for instance, decentralized finance. A decentralized finance app is actually a very structured kind of application. If you really understand how one works, you pretty much understand how all of them works. But I found it difficult to train people who don’t use defi apps to just the basics. How do you log in by connecting well? Where is the stuff right? It’s out there on the blockchain. These basic concepts which I thought would be easy to teach and maybe would be easier to communicate in a close-knit group, we’re not effectively communicating. So, I either have to figure out how to bring people through a series of exercises, make it much more structured. Or I have to get people that already are interested in it and understand it. So, I do have sort of fewer ways to bring people through learning about the domain.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:23

So, I want to talk a little bit about recruitment. How do you recruit people? I mean, you’re recruiting people, and you’re looking for top of the line developers, right. You’re looking for the best people across the world. What are some of the things that you do? How do you recruit? What are some of the things that you could maybe share with the community or others?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 20:44

Yeah. Well, I have a specific way that I recruit, which may be related to what I do, which is I build products. And products are complicated. So, what we don’t want in a product is you don’t want turnover. You want people once they’re engineers, once they understand it, you want to keep them on the team. Because they understand it. They know how to fix things [cross talk]. Yeah, so having retention is important. And for that reason, I don’t go to outsourcers ever, because outsourcers essentially give you two sources of turnover. One is that people quit, right, and they go to a different outsourcer. That’s actually a pretty high rate, there’s a high rate of that. But the other is, the best people get pulled off. So, you don’t keep the best people.

They get pulled off to a hotter project. And that, you would get less of the first kind of turnover moving to a new company. And none of the second kind of turnover, just having the best guys get pulled for a bigger client. So, I don’t do outsourcing, I always do direct recruiting, I advertise. The other thing I don’t really like to do is referrals. I don’t like to hire somebody because my cousin knew them. That doesn’t seem like a very good way to get the best people. You should be out competing in the marketplace of ideas by tuning our message, you know, what are we writing on the job post? Where are we advertising it? And then making it easy for people to participate in trials, just having that be an organized process where we have some easy tasks set aside. Everything about how to get on boarded into the project is documented. These are things that you get naturally actually in an open-source project, that we have to work for in our more commercial projects. That we know how we’re going to pay them, you know. You work for a week; we can pay you in various channels. So, doing some work on our site to set up and explain the project and that the HR infrastructure is important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:49

Do you do any, like direct? So, you said you advertise. Is that the only way that you do it? And then whoever applies, or do you do anything else besides that?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 23:00

Well, we advertise. We post on social media. We tell people what we’re doing. It’s just marketing, in my mind. Yeah. And, one of the interesting things is, when I start to recruit for a new job, usually like, I don’t get very many candidates. And then I get the wrong kind of candidates. There are subtle changes in how you describe the job and in how you communicate, where you communicate, that, that starts to really add up over time. The result of that, is another trick. It’s much more efficient to recruit in batches. And this is tough for startups to absorb. But you know, because it’s expensive, but it’s much better to recruit five guys that are good at something than one guy, you know. You’re just going to get better at it, over the weeks that you’re doing that recruiting.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:53

Yeah. And what is that, like you call it a trial. What does that look like? Do you do pairing? Or is it just, here you go and like, [cross talk].

Speaker: Andy Singleton 24:04

I try to find some jobs that are easy. First of all, it used to be two weeks. Well, you only need one week. Most of the time, if people don’t succeed in a trial, they just basically didn’t show up. So, that’s the important thing to know about distributed teams. And you have to work. Basically, the best way to do a trial is to have a project and a project team that’s already functioning. And then to set aside some of the easiest tasks. And people can join that team and work on a task that’s pretty easy, but it’s something you need. So, one thing to definitely avoid in trials is giving people a test task. Tasks that you don’t need. It’s not part of your product. Because then the trial is going to fail. You’re going to ignore that person. If you need help you don’t need the results, so you’re not going to help them. So that’s it. That’s just one trick to remember about trials.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:00

That’s a really good thing. Because it’s also you adding value and you’re paying this person, and they’re also adding some type of value to the team, by actually working on real initiatives.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 25:13

Yeah. In adding the value is important for both sides. They’re adding value, and you appreciate that, but you also give them the attention they deserve, because the task is worth your time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:26

How do you deal with conflict, and maybe some of the things? I think, like when we spoke, you said, you know, there are people that are running from the law, there’s like different personalities, in a sense, you have people all over the world. How, like, when it comes to conflict, how do you deal with conflict, on team?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 25:47

One of my goals is not to enforce cultural similarity, you know. People are from all different places, and they have different approaches. And I’m willing to accept that a lot of programmers are a little weird, they’re on the Asperger’s spectrum. And, you know, it’s just part of the price of what I do, right. I manage programming teams, and some people are not willing to accept that some people want more cultural conformity, what I do find is that, everybody on my team tends to have the same outlook. So, the way I describe it is, we’re actually more homogeneous in our approach than two neighbors. Because we’re all geeks. We sort of searched around for people that have this geek mindset, for good or for bad. And we’re all kind of similar to each other that way. But that said, we run into two kinds of conflicts. One is that people are just erratic, you know. They have psychological issues, that happens a lot. And they’re erratic in their output. And eventually, I have to walk away from people that are very talented. Because they’re just not predictable. And sometimes there’s conflicts between people and I have to make a decision about who wins, but that’s less. There are different roles you can play in, some of them are more assertive, and some of them are less assertive.

So that’s less important. Probably maybe a more interesting thing to think about is, not when there’s conflict, right. When you have to sort of use your recruiting capability, just cut the people that are causing conflict and find new ones. That’s simple. Any manager can do that. A more interesting question is, what if there’s not conflict, and people are actually working together? How do you get everyone to have a voice? And there’s some subtle things that you can do there. Like, in classic agile, there’s retrospective, very helpful, right. What do we do right? What do we do wrong? And what do we want to do better going forward? Super helpful to go through that process. But the problem is that in practice, only a very small number of people actually step forward and tell you what to do. So, one thing I found that was useful is, the happiness survey.

I forget who was promoting that a couple of years ago. They were having a survey, you send someone a note that says, or you ask somebody to fill out a form or just step forward, and you ask them, you know, what are you happy about? What are you unhappy about? And how could we make that better? And it sounds stupid, right, it sounds like people are going to step forward and say, I’m really unhappy about death and taxes, and then we’re going to be like, there’s nothing we can do about that. That’s what it sounds like. But actually, they step forward with really relevant things that you can fix about the product. And because about the process, because it’s from their point of view, they can give you their honest opinion, even if they’re not one of those kind of like, aggressive process people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:54

I think it’s one of the better metrics. I actually just did that with a client, then I actually use four categories. So, like, you know, I put it like, on scale one to five. One is like, I’m miserable, I want to get out of here. Five is like, I love it, I’m enjoying it, I’m highly motivated. And I asked like, how happy are you with processes, you know, and tools? And they can rate themselves. How happy are you with, you know, deadlines? And, you know, are they being imposed? Or do you have, you know, how happy are you with the people that you work with? Right. And what was really interesting is that they actually started discussing. So across three, four categories, they rate themselves, and they said; well, you know, we can’t really change this. This is outside of our control, but hey, we’re really good with teams and how we collaborate. The tools and technology like you know, it’s being dictated in a way to us, but it’s companywide policy. But what we can do is like with the processes, we really haven’t held ourselves accountable and helping out each other to improve how we work, so we can do that. And that happiness metric across those categories really creates opportunity for teams to be open with each other, vulnerable and talk about what they can do. So, you know, the happiness metric is simple and silly as it comes across, I’ve actually seen it work really well.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 30:22

So, you experienced the same thing I experienced, which it sounds like something that’s just going to lead to someone’s personal problems, but actually uncovers group things that people want to work on together. So, I don’t know why that works that way. But it’s one of those tricks to try to bring out the people that are less vocal and say, a retrospective.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:46

So, when it comes to, you know, I said, so, you know, to the community about distributed teams, where are things going? If you look at the trends, and assuming that, you know, the effects of COVID and distributed teams, now, you know, it’s a global workforce, as it was, you know, years ago, but now it’s becoming the norm. What do you think the next five years will look, as far as when it comes to distributed teams? What are some of the things that we can do? Is it what you’re doing now? Do you have any insights into like, what else is coming, when it comes to distributed teams?

Speaker: Andy Singleton 31:29

Yeah, I mean, to me, this distributed team move, as you can see, it’s not a surprise, I always expected it. I feel like it comes from the open-source communities that have always worked this way. There’s now 20, or 25 years of experience behind how to do this. And certainly, people are going to apply those techniques to other kinds of jobs. So, the idea of a daily software build or continuous software build, maybe doesn’t work, if you’re a lawyer. But there’s an equivalent, you’re working on the same thing. So, I think people are going to start to use these tactics that we’ve refined in software, in other kinds of jobs. So that’s the first thing that’s going to change. But the second big change is something that we had discussed, which is people are moving beyond companies. So, I like to say that there’s sort of three good ways to organize people.

There are governments, and that works really well, when you’re trying to do something big. There are companies, and that works really well, when you’re trying to do something specialized, right. You organize people into companies. But now there’s this third way, which is communities. That’s how the crypto guys organized. They’re not members of a company. But they are people that essentially share the same software, and they weren’t in the same software network. And they have their own economy, with tokens. So, there’s people who are actually making that work as communities that are organized differently from companies and governments. And I’m not sure we totally understand how that should work. But the technology and the technique of it are advancing very, very rapidly, under pressure from these coins, or these protocols that are organized that way, and allow people to make a lot of money by participating in these communities. And that’s, in fact, how defi products are organized. They’re open-source software, often maintained by a community.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:28

And if you think about it, you know, there’s a lot of references in Agile to going back to like natural world, right. Decentralized in many different aspects. And when you just said that, like, you know, both governments, both organizations are, most organizations, you know, are still structures as hierarchies. That’s very centralized. And what you’re saying that these communities are highly decentralized communities. And it seems like, it’s scary to think about the possibilities of these decentralized communities and what could actually emerge from that.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 34:07

Yeah. And you have kind of two different effects. One it is decentralized, and people are all working on their own thing. So, it sorts of increases in scope. But the other is that people can step forward and actually cease a lot of leadership. So, you can get this kind of agility, where you have the benevolent dictator, right. Lioness that got Linux through all these stages to now where it’s the dominant operating system. So, you can have people step forward and exercise that benevolent dictator role in sort of accepting and organizing all the contributions from the community. And I think those are the kinds of things we’re going to become sensitive to as we see these community’s work. They have different management structures. And interesting things happened in defi where, small defi projects were designed to be very focused like uniswap. Very small teams that could build software, it doesn’t take a very big team to build software. But then what happened is they ended up with a lot of money because their software was successful. And it started paying coins into a treasury, you know, they charge a portion of each. It’s like SASS software. They charge a portion of each trade, and people started doing billions and billions and billions of dollars’ worth of trades, using their software. And so, money started piling up in this treasury and they had to sort of retro actively come up with this idea of divisions, you know. Ways to break up work and fund it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:51

I don’t know if you’re familiar with like Kuhn cycle, Thomas Kuhn cycle, no. But essentially, he’s the one that introduced the term paradigm, right. So, in a sense, he talks about that there is a cycle to paradigms, right. And I think, you know, what you’re describing as a community is this next paradigm. And usually, at the beginning of the paradigm, there’s a lot of unknowns, and we’re figuring things out, but eventually, you know, the new paradigm becomes what’s called normal science. And I think, you know, if I think in that term of Kuhn cycle, the communities are almost the new paradigm that we’re seeing slowly emerge. And it just makes me think about just possibilities for innovation. And that’s why I mentioned that in the sense that, yes, we’re dealing with all of that there’s possibilities, this thing could go, you know, like you said, depending on architecture, depending on you know, where things go. But do you think there’s more opportunities in these communities for innovation, than in, you know, like government in large organizations? And I know, you said you didn’t spend a lot of time in large organizations, but what I see in large organizations, they are struggling to innovate, right. They are really struggling to innovate.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 37:17

Well, I have a little bit of a different opinion on that from most people. So, I think innovation happens at many scales. And actually, at the largest scale, if you want to send a man to the moon, you need governments. They’re the ones that are willing to put money in over the long term. And the US government used to take that role. We built a semi-conductor industry, we build the internet, we for many decades funded drug companies. And now we’re seeing the private sector is claiming that they’re having all these inventions, but actually, they’re just building on tools that the government has funded over decades. So, I feel like government has a very important role to play in innovation. It’s obvious that companies have a very important role to play in innovation, they can dive down deep into products, and build them. The disappointment that I’ve expressed is that big companies are so bad at it. It’s important to complain about that, because big companies can do big things.

So, remember, innovations happen at different scales, startups do small stuff. In theory, big company should do big stuff. IBM used to bet the company, you know, they would be on the verge of bankruptcy every five or 10 years, as they came out with a new kind of computer. Now nothing, right. They’ve given that roll up. Intel, they used to bet the company. Well, you know what, now they’re getting crushed, because they stopped doing that. They fell behind Moore’s law. And they’re just not investing in new product. So, what happens when these companies get to the, what’s happened with big companies, they’ve stopped doing their job of doing big innovations. And they’ve tried to outsource that. They’ve tried to get startups; oh, I have incubators, I have small startups that I sponsor, I have corporate VC. You know what, if you’re Intel, and you’re responsible for building a chip that has 4 billion transistors on it, you can’t outsource that. You have to do it. As a big company, you have to do the big thing. So, what’s maybe going to save us is these communities, because they’re very scalable. You know, they can organize a Linux which would be beyond even IBM to build. And that may, you know, that’s scalability may save us. It is going to create a certain kind of a conflict because these communities, they’re global. They’re not under the jurisdiction of any one government.

So, it makes governance a lot harder to think about, at the governance level, right. Essentially, they’re their own volunteer governments. And I knew a guy 30 years ago that proclaimed himself, the admiral of oceanis. He claimed dominion over all [unclear 39:58] the utopian thing, where people could join this utopian government that would protect the oceans. And, in fact, that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re doing with blockchains, right. We’re creating those little global voluntary governments. But I don’t believe that. I believe that there’s lots of different layers to innovation. And each organization has a responsibility to innovate in their area. And where we’ve seen the economy lag and, you know, whole society being dragged down, is when these big companies walk away from their responsibility to do big things. And you can see how stupid that is, when you look at Elon Musk. He’s a crazy guy, but you know what, he’s the only guy that’s willing to step forward and say, I’m going to put a man on Mars. And people line up behind him with huge amounts of money. So, we need more of that, you know. Why aren’t you doing that Mr. Big company? And if you’re not going to do it, then we’re going to organize 100,000 people around a coin, and we’re going to do it as a community.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:01

Yeah, it’s interesting, because like working actually, with these large companies, or some of these large companies, it’s almost like all the baggage that they’ve accumulated over the years, including technical debt, including just the, you know, the culture itself. It’s very difficult. And like, when they start looking like you said, to startups. For instance, for banks, for insurance companies, for some of these other industries, to buy somebody else’s innovation. Like they really can’t innovate themselves, they’re looking what’s happening, what are the startups so we can buy, acquire or keep an eye on? It becomes demotivating inside the organization, and it also just keep the lights running. And you can only do that till either, you know, somebody disrupts you. Or, you know, you just get to the point where, you know, it’s not disruption, but you just ran out of business because of bad business practices.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 42:04

Yeah. Although financially, it’s certainly a financial strategy. For instance, IBM is practicing that. Instead of investing in new products, they’re getting the most money that they can, out of their old products. And then presumably, the theory is that that money gets paid out to investors. So, IBM has given it out all of their product development budget, they’ve just cut that and sent it back to investors. The theory is that those investors will then go invested in startups, you know. So that works to a certain extent, but it doesn’t work if you’re Intel, and you’re responsible for actually advancing the technology that our civilization relies on. So, we can only hope that there will be more of these leaders, I think we’re moving out of a phase, they called it the great stagnation.

Really, very little new technology, except for computers that has come forward in the last 50 years, since 1970. I think we’re moving out of that; you can see progress on a lot of fronts. You know, we’ve had massive advances in biotech. We’re having advances in energy, which is really one of the cores, you know, we finally have renewable energy that works at huge scale. So, I think you’re seeing it as a breakout of this little box we were in with just computers and semi-conductors improving. And maybe that will inspire more of big companies to actually do their job. And not just be financial, you know, the private equity, extract, run out, right. It’s not actually a bad strategy as to run your company for the maximum profit and the minimum risk, right. It actually may be optimal for your shareholders, but we can only support a certain percentage of those companies doing that. Some of the companies have to be growing and investing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:52

Exactly. And I think that’s aligned with the bigger moment, right. Like, as far as like, you know, if we look at last 100 years, it was, you know, all, you know, more of like, smaller scale, you know, countries may be, you know, you’re looking at what’s good for the country, and you know, probably since 1950s 60s, to start look more like global economy, right. How the whole internet and technology made it a global economy. And I think what we’re seeing, and what’s at least interesting to me, is that whole kind of this communities and global view of things, and I think the challenges are going to be like, how do we figure out? How do we innovate, like you said, and scale? Like, how do we scale these things at a local level, like maybe within the company when it comes to innovation, when it comes to governance. And also, how global? How do we get better? Like, how do we get what you’re describing as these communities and decentralizing? How do we get better at a global scale? And I think that’s what I’m really interested in.

Speaker: Andy Singleton 44:56

I think that is what we’re going to discover right. You said that we were going to get better at it. I forgot the word you used. But we are already figuring out how to organize people in ways that I never expected. For years, we talked about what’s the business model for open source. You can have huge open-source projects. And now people are inventing this business model based around tokens. You use the software, you get the token, you contribute to the software. And that’s been a massively, a powerful force for scaling some of these efforts. So, we may find other techniques and tactics that allow us to do this. Essentially, voluntary governance and being built on things at a larger scale.

Andrew Harner & Tom Keschl

Transcript

Speaker: Milan Bajic 00:39

Andrew, it’s been a while since you and I worked together and recently, we had a chance to catch up. And you were telling me kind of what you’re currently working on and the organization that you work for, and some of the challenges that you have with your team, as well as other teams that are working as part of the delivery pipeline. So maybe it will be good just to give the audience a quick overview of, type of work that you do, the company and maybe a little bit of background on the team that you joined. It’s been a couple of years now, right? But what was the situation when you joined the team? And maybe just give us a little bit of background on that.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 01:23

Yeah, absolutely. So quick introduction. I’m Speaker: Andrew Harner, self-proclaimed agility champion. I try to not pigeonhole myself or brand myself into any one framework or methodology, but just try to absorb as many tools as possible that I can use in organizations. I joined Wex back in 2018, December 2018. Wex is a financial services company that has some exposure in the fuel business and health care and business to business b2b, payment spaces. And, Tom…

Speaker: Milan Bajic 02:13

What do you guys do, what does Wex do? What type of products and services do you provide and who are your customers?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 02:21

We are payments company. We help facilitate payments in those areas so think, HSA payments, fuel cards, virtual credit cards, that type of stuff. And Tom and I currently, we work on an open loop issuing processor in the b2b portion of the company. I’ll pause there and let Tom just do a quick intro before we get into anything else.

Tom Keschl 02:51

I’m Tom Keschl, I’m a team lead on one of the development teams for that open loop processor, which is called tag or transact global.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 03:04

So what is opening processor? What does that really do?

Tom Keschl 03:08

So imagine the credit card that you have in your wallet. As long as it’s not tied to you, there’s two different kinds of things; there’s open loop and closed loop. Open loop is typically what the consumer is going to have in their wallet like a generic MasterCard, you can use it to pay at any vendor, any merchant location that accepts that card, as opposed to closed loop, which the business and the card, and the issuer all need to be in like a shared group together, and there’s benefits for that. So other parts of Wex, do closed loop processing, particularly around like fuel payments, fuel cards and stuff. And we do the open loop portion.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 03:54

Okay, awesome. Thank you for kind of giving, I knew a little bit about it. I think it’ll help the listeners also understand. So Andrew, you joined this company Wex in 2018 and then what happened?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 04:06

Yeah, so the intent for bringing me on was they were two Scrum teams at the time. And they were looking to scale up to a third team. And so they brought me on to be the scrum master for that third team. So joined in 2018, December before that 13 was really formed and like any good Scrum Master spent some time observing, trying to figure out what was going on with people and trying to build relationships. Through that observation period, I had discovered that, there were some blind spots that they had in their operating model, so to speak. The teams at the time were leveraging kind of relative story point estimation and velocity for their sizing and planning activities and that data was being maintained in a spreadsheet that was reviewed during and discussed during each retrospective. And one of the first things I noticed was kind of how this was implemented, and how these other teams were using these things. The work itself, the customer request was split in different ways. One of the ways was aligned to skill sets, so we had a ticket that a developer would work on, and we had a ticket. Part of that ticket was a part of the requests, we had another ticket for a QA engineer to write the test cases for. And then we had another ticket that represented the deployment activities, the release activity. It wasn’t a holistic view of that work item, it was already kind of split. And then the work itself was only visualized up until a certain point in the value stream and so there was a series of release activities that included a regression cycle and deployment to our production environment. And those activities were not necessarily treated as team activities, they were treated as release activities and so those work centers weren’t visualized on the team sport. And so bring it all back, the estimating and planning that took place earlier in the sprint, didn’t have insights into those portions. And so we were estimating and planning to get work up through a certain portion of the valuation, but it wasn’t the complete picture.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 06:48

So in sense, your definition of done wasn’t really that strong. It was like a (inaudible 06:52)

Speaker: Andrew Harner 06:53

It was like Dev complete. We still didn’t have the final piece of feedback which was, does this cause a regression? Will this cause regression? And that activity was performed the last two days before the pressure started, so didn’t really leave as much time to get any fixes that would have been identified in before the scheduled prod release and so those are some other early observations. The next piece was, so I spent some time trying to bring the team together around that, I think it was the second or third month that I was there, I convinced enough people to come together for a Value Stream Mapping session. We sat down over a little one hour sessions over a couple of weeks, pulling all the people together that had a piece in that full process and we had mapped it out on a virtual whiteboard and it was really interesting conversations that took place. I remember Tom, I was asking our QA manager at the time, hey, how often are you finding bugs or finding defects when code makes it to this portion of the value stream? And she said, 99% of time we get bugs. And I’m like, so the development works better as a 1%, complete and accurate in there. And she’s like, well, yeah, and Tom’s face was like, oh, man, that is terrible. But the conversation that surrounded those were really powerful, it was the first time I think that the team had come together to see all the steps that it would take to get request out the door, wasn’t just I’m focused on my piece, they really painted that full picture. And so once I, as a newcomer had that full picture, I started to collect some data in a very manual way of work moving throughout the pipeline of the value stream and as I analyze that, and kind of historically went backwards and tried to click some stuff from previous sprints, previous iterations, I’d realized that the team really hadn’t made any significant improvements to their delivery capabilities in two years.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 09:13

How do you feel to be probably the only person that understood that, because I’m assuming most of the organization was blind to that.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 09:22

Yeah. We’re months into this now and so I have been having conversations throughout these times, and I get this feeling like I’m thinking a little bit differently than other people are thinking in the organization and some people reacted really well to that and those were great and other others were a little bit curious and questioning, which is great but those conversations try to be a little delicate in their mind and sometimes that was successful or not in those times. But yeah, so that led to this realization and what do I do with this information now, and so, enter Tom stage left or right. And so, I’ve been trying to build relationships with Tom, I saw him as a great friend, personally, but also, he was really well respected professionally across the team. And so as I’m building this relationship, we’re playing super mario brothers at lunch and talking and getting to know each other and this led to like I don’t know how to hit it but it was really great debate and discussion that you followed us out of the building into the parking garage and it was like, I don’t know, six o’clock in January. And I was like, Tom, you guys haven’t made any improvements in two years? Prove me wrong. And so he spent that next weekend is trying to prove me wrong.

Tom Keschl 10:57

Yeah, so unlike Harner, I didn’t come from a background where I would ask a lot of those questions. I came up in that traditional agile scrum methodology, and I feel like I’d been on some good teams and some unsuccessful teams in the past and so I had a really good handle on it and I knew where I was going and so at this point in my life, I was King velocity. I was talking about story points estimates, I thought I had it all wrapped up and so we get into the parking garage and Harner challenges me with this.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 11:36

By the way, this is January in Maine and you guys are standing in a parking garage.

Tom Keschl 11:43

It was unheated, freezing cold. Like we’re using the concrete blocks of the wall to show how work items are moving. I mean, the conversation went everywhere. But when he said, when Andrew said, prove me wrong, show me what substantive changes you’ve made here, what concrete changes you’ve made to your delivery process, I listed off a handful right off the bat. And he’s like, well, how did that improve, how did that improve things, show me. So I went back home, and my wife was at work the next day, this is Saturday so I’ve got the kids to myself, working through all that. And I’m like thinking over in my head like, Man, I’m going to show this guy, what’s up. I pull out my laptop, I get all the kids huddled together around the counter. And we’re eating our food at the counter, which is a big deal for them, because they always eat at the dining hall table. But I’m sitting there with my laptop, trying to play with these numbers and stuff and fend off the kids and I’m pulling all the stuff out of our tickets system, I’m pulling all of the timing information I can, get it all into a spreadsheet, get some spreadsheet magic, learning spreadsheets at the same time, too and finally, I get something together that I share with Harner, around two o’clock in the afternoon and we probably spend the rest of the day going back and forth and we get a pretty primitive now, realization of lead times throughput, some work in progress statistics, all kind of carved out on this really, really choppy spreadsheet.

And it turns out that Harner was correct of our delivery capabilities. I spent 12 hours proving myself wrong. But yeah, our delivery capabilities over the past two and a half, I think it was at the time, years of working on the project had not meaningfully improved at all. In fact, the only time that we saw like a throughput increase, which is what we’re traditionally worried about, with the number of stories we got done, the number of story points we got done, the only time we even saw that was a month or two after we hired a new person. So that was like the only way in which we improve that delivery trajectory was hiring more people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so all of us know that’s not the way it’s supposed to be in the industry. The mythical man month is a pretty seminal text and stuff. So at that point, I was like, okay, there might be something to what Harner is talking about here.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 14:31

And then what happens, so you got at least one other person, Andrew to understand what you’re saying.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 14:38

Yeah. So, Tom and I kind of set out in this mission to help align the rest of the folks that we were working with, trying to help guide them towards this realization as well. So the first step was to take that work that we had done, that I did with the value stream mapping, and tried to reflect that and visualize that for the application and we’re lucky enough to work at a company that we have tooling that supports that. Some folks use manual things like stickies on a board, which is great but we have a technology that supports that so we could put that in there, and then have that help kind of facilitate some automation of collecting this data for us. And so that value stream mapping session that had led to us kind of rethinking how we’re visualizing our work in JIRA. So each of our columns now represented our work centers, and we had a pretty high level but solid understanding of all the tasks that are being performed in each of these work centers. And again, what is the exit criteria? What does it mean, when we move a ticket from this state to this state, and in that alignment, led us to having this data that Tom spent hours and hours and hours, and I had spent months trying to kind of curate manually, we had it available to us in real time, updated in real time for us. That was hooked in through an add on, called knave, so knave allows us to pull those flow value stream metrics out. But one of the biggest changes that the team made was extending the visualization from dev complete all the way to done right. So we brought those release capabilities, those release activities, onto the board, to have it visualized that we can make that work visible.

Tom Keschl 16:44

And the reason why we decided to do that, was because in the course of that 12 hour crunch time on Saturday, where we had that spreadsheet together, we realized that the two teams were defining those things slightly differently. The data integrity was only on a per team basis, and my team in particular, wasn’t capturing that for the rest of the things after it was dev complete. So we wanted to get to alignment for everybody that was participating in our value stream, all of the things that any given work item went through. So that was the first thing.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 17:23

Yeah, so what happened in the sense that you said it was done dev complete, were you deploying it, just not visualizing, what was going on, so why weren’t you?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 17:34

Interesting comment. What are the responsibilities of this our team. Some teams, they have handoffs, other teams responsible for that regression, or integration testing and system testing and release. But in tags context, the team owned all of that stuff, we own the complete ecosystem of our SDLC. So from the identification and prioritization of work all the way through that work hitting production is our activities that are performed within our teams. We just brought that in, visualize the team’s full process onto the board. Previously, because the release activities were treated not as team activities, even though it was performed by the team, they were left off the board, but we tried to get the team realize, hey, it’s still work that you’re doing, the work is not done yet. And so instead of having work pile up in a ready for regression testing, and that being kind of done, we wanted to have that buffer, that wait state visualized, as well as the time it was taken to get through regression, and then waiting for the production release and then finally moving to done. So the old board, Dev complete meant we’ve done our coding, we’ve done our functional acceptance testing, and now we’re just going to be waiting for the regression cycle to begin, which could be the following day. But if that was completed the first day of the sprint, it could be six days from now, seven days from now.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 19:19

So how do you get the team members involved? Like, in a sense, none of this can happen if Andrew and Tom are champions, I’m assuming and based on just small things that I picked up from earlier conversation as well as this, you had to get your team members involved. So how did that go?

Tom Keschl 19:39

It was very iterative. Have you ever seen that video of I don’t remember what festival it was but there’s this guy that’s dancing by himself on a hill. We’re very, very fond of that video. We’re very fond of that because, like in that video, if you are the audience or whatever is familiar with it, there’s the second guy that comes in, we call him the green shirt guy because he’s wearing a green shirt and he comes in and he starts dancing with the dude and then not very long after that the entire hill is just a bunch of dancing people having fun.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 20:15

I thought you were going to say you gave some kind of (inaudible 20:19)

Tom Keschl 20:21

That may have been easier if we had a bunch of…

Speaker: Milan Bajic 20:22

You’re talking about the second follower…

Tom Keschl 20:26

We finally refer to that guy as, or me as the green shirt guy because once I come in, I’m like, I prove myself wrong so now I’m like, well, I want to do it the right way, I want to find some improvement here. So after we get everybody aligned, we brought in other Scrum Masters and like one or two members of the leadership team at first, once we said, hey, we want to align on measuring this stuff, we want to start capturing the full value stream in a uniform way. And everyone was like, well, okay, that’s not that big of a lift for us. Because of what Harner was just talking about, we already owned all those capabilities on the team. It’s just basically reorganizing what we decided to call things and making sure that’s standardized across everyone and so that was pretty easy left. So we got somebody say yes to that. Like, it was fine, everybody got on board. And then we let it sit for a while, honestly, we started just capturing the data, we cleaned up the data, and we started capturing it, we got the team’s familiar with like the new definitions, the simple definitions of things so that we could start getting some insight into the system. And then we waited about a month or two and we looked at our tool and to see what the data was telling us. And it was frankly, pretty astonishing at first. We started running an experiment based off that which I’ll let Harner talk about.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 21:56

Maybe just a pause here. I want to bring attention to something that I think there’s a misconception out there. So people joke around with how JIRA has become agile or is the most popular scaling. And I think it’s important to point out, just for you how the tool JIRA, and these are tools, were really to help you have quality data and to paint a picture. And right or wrong you used the tool in a way that actually helped you understand what was going on. Do you have any thoughts on that, because I think you both probably familiar with what I’m talking about, how people joke around the use of JIRA.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 22:51

That’s where I was going to call out next to. A lot of times the inverse of what we did is true, where, in the inverse being teams change their process to fit JIRA and they read that you should implement JIRA this way, and you kind of conform to it. And what we wanted to be very clear was that, I don’t want to change anything about how the team is working, There is a an Existing Value Stream. It is what it is and the teams are operating in that already. I just wanted to be able to have JIRA reflect that, reflect what reality was for them. And so Tom mentioned that kind of standardization or definitions, those things already existed, they just weren’t explicit. And so JIRA helped to surface those and make them visible to everybody.

And so work kind of naturally traverses this process already, and bring that forth, so really helped to enhance or amplify our abilities to measure our delivery capabilities, the things that already existed, right, we didn’t have to make any changes. We did change, but we changed the way we visualized it not the way we actually worked. And that was the key thing for us, is we getting everybody aligned, hey, we all agree, take JIRA out of it. We all agree this is how work flows through. And these are the types of work that we do. Now, if we are aligned on that, why don’t we have JIRA reflect those things so that we can use it to capture the data that we want? And so that was the easy sell that Tom said, it was fairly easy to get the teams to agree to that.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 24:42

So what happened when they started seeing that? I’m assuming it’s motivating to see this stuff and it’s also probably exciting for you. Now you get that whole hill dancing and it’s a party, right?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 24:59

Yeah. There wasn’t a whole lot of dancing at first. So Tom, he alluded we observed for a while. So we set this up, we put the hooks in, and then we just kind of backed off for a while I think it wasn’t a month, I think it was close to two, six to nine months that we kind of stepped back and just let the data start rolling in. And then finally, I think I’d almost forgotten about it for a bit. And then I pinged Thomas, Hey, we got like nine months of data. Now let’s go out there and check and see what’s going on. And so at that point, it reignited a flame that was like, wow, this is really powerful. We get we have all these different lenses that we can look through kind of our work. And it became very clear to us where our constraint was, it was like night and day. But there was no question that this is the area and this is why we hadn’t seen any improvements in two years. Because none of our maybe…

Speaker: Milan Bajic 25:57

Could you talk about some of those specific examples, what was like, Oh, holy shit, this is when everybody sees this, people will freak out, like…

Tom Keschl 26:08

Well, the very first thing we noticed is that there was this weird pattern we’re seeing every couple of months, where work would just sort of all of a sudden, come in, in a huge batch. And we’d be working on a ton of stuff. And anecdotally at that time, the first time we started looking at the data, my team was also starting to complain and grumble about the number of things we had going on at once and we made like internal agreements about limiting that. At that point, nobody was really talking about the data, nobody was talking about the concept of, whip limits specifically, to solve that problem. It was all just sort of like, Hey, we’re really scattered, we need to focus up a little bit. And so we go, Harner and I go, look at the data, we see this giant spike in work in progress. And at that point, that’s when Harner reached out to his team to talk about the data and try to run an experiment.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 27:09

I brought this up, and I showed him some of the little charts and graphs and I said, every time we saw this spike in work in progress, we also saw corresponding spike in cycle time. So everything kind of we have these massive kind of tidal waves of sorts of work coming in and taking longer than we purge. And then work comes in, we take longer to purge. And I said, every time we have less work going on, those things are getting done in the time that they should take. They weren’t inflated. They weren’t bloated. And so I said, Hey, let’s run an experiment off this data. This was back in July, starting in August, let’s implement and enforce some strict whip limits. And the team agreed and then the conversation was, where do we start?

What is the appropriate whip limit? And there isn’t necessarily the right place to start, but it’s just let’s choose someplace and go from there. But we use the data to make that and so we saw that the team, it was seven, seven items was like kind of below where the team had normally been fluctuating. I think they were fluctuating anywhere from like 12 to eight at any given time. And so we said let’s exploit this, let’s run this experiment of limiting to seven. And so we did that. And then we sat back and watched for the next six weeks or something like that. And man, those tidal waves were gone. They were just ripples at that point. And so, that was the only change we made, we didn’t make any change to how we find our work, how we broke stories apart, we wouldn’t make any changes to how we developed or worked as pairs or it was nothing. That was the only change. And it was just a dramatic change.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 29:06

Did you guys notice anything because usually when you create constraints, like whip, usually it forces people like Hey, I’m now a developer, I need to test or did you guys experience any of that? What happened in that?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 29:19

Yeah, absolutely. So that definitely triggered some conversations about who’s responsible for certain things. And so we started to see more partnership take place between Dev and QA because if some test engineer was out on vacation, and now we went from two test engineers to one, one of the Devs would have to come up and help kind of take over some of those testing responsibilities. So we saw that kind of wall, which is an interesting thing, because we have developers, QA Engineers and operations engineers on a team but yet there’s still like these micro silos within the team of handoffs. And so we start to see those kind of artificial walls being pulled down, which is really, really cool. As a result of that…

Speaker: Milan Bajic 30:12

And that was all natural. Did you guys actually kind of nudge them or did that happen just by itself?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 30:19

I think it happened pretty naturally because now all the work was visualized. Everybody could see it every morning. We’ve got work piling up in front of QA and so is about to hit the limit here. So let’s lend on a helping hand.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 30:38

It’s interesting. It’s almost like a lot of times what I see Scrum Masters and change agents kind of, I mean, not just a good word, it’s more like, tell people what to do or tell team members. And this is almost like you’re putting a mirror, using the data, putting a mirror to the team, and even that time, here’s what it is. And them self-organized. And I think that’s what I’ve seen naturally. And like what I’ve seen stick when it works, and when it doesn’t, is usually somebody enforcing these things or telling people. And it’s easier to do that, when you’ve seen it. You just want to jump and tell team what to do. But I also know apparently what transpired there with you teams is what is going to give you better results long term when people actually gone.

Tom Keschl 31:31

And we never really talked about that beforehand, I think Harner and I just sort of assumed that that’s the way we wanted to do this. We wanted to look at the data and we wanted to see what the data was telling us and any problems or challenges we came up with as a result of those conversations, we wouldn’t try to source the solution amongst ourselves, we would just raise the problem, we’d bring it to the team, we say, hey, we have this massive tidal wave of work in progress every two months, what do you guys want to do about it? Hey, we have this other problem, what do you guys want to do about it? And every time without fail, as we’ve started to take on these experiments, and refine them, and then reflect back on the results of those things with the team. We’ve seen the improvement and we’ve kind of gotten the team more and more involved in the process. And I think you’re right, I think it’s really, again, I don’t have much experience outside of this team with doing that but it’s a very powerful motivator, putting the data and the problem in front of the team and saying, how do we fix this? Here are some suggestions we have from our experience or whatever but how do you guys want to do this? And then, come back to it and see if we are successful or not. So after we did the whip limit, experiment, that was kind of the second time we got somebody to say yes, somebody to kind of get bought in a little bit more, get our hooks a little bit more into everybody. At this point too, Harner and I were meeting pretty much every day to learn about the data, to figure out what new we wanted to pull in to ask more questions because at that time, we were really only looking at lead times. And so we started every task…

Speaker: Andrew Harner 33:23

Every day. Yeah. Oh, what is this telling us?

Tom Keschl 33:27

Yeah, we didn’t even know how to read some of the charts. It was kind of crazy but and then we started thinking, well, what else can we get out of this? Is it just lead time? Are there other things? So we started looking at capturing a quality metric, we started trying to get all the DORA metrics and all that stuff. But the lead time picture, we hadn’t really talked about it with the teams, we did mention it, kind of almost coincidentally when we’re talking about whip, because people always want lower times, but Harner and I in the background, we were like, man, these blocks of time that we’re taking to do these things are crazy. And when we started visualizing how long work was waiting for the next phase, they got even more stark like the reality of the situation where we were living in, it turned out our regression times and waiting for regression because of the way that we structured the work. That is where all of the time was spent waiting, queued, like waiting for that activity to happen. And then spent where the work was done. There was like days, days of things just piling up and piling up and piling up there. So in our personal conversations, were looking at this and we’re like, Okay, well this is this is a little bit odd. And as we started looking at quality metrics, which we could also pull out of our ticketing system, it\ got even more obvious that, there were problems there. Our defect rate, our change failure rate as defined by DORA with hot fixes and stuff like that, those rates were actually higher than we felt were acceptable.

But what was interesting was that everyone on the team had been starting to get this feeling like our quality was starting to decrease, and you’d hear about it kind of like, not on the water coolers, because, you know, COVID, but in some of the one on ones that I was in with developers, you’d hear Oh, I’m starting to get worried about quality. And then, once we started looking at that particular data, here, we had a measure of how long this activity that was supposed to increase our quality was taking, and how not well we were doing increasing the quality of our deliverables. So that was the next thing and that was probably the one where Harner and I were like, we have to tell our boss. Well, actually, before I said that, I was like, we have to bury this, that was my immediate reaction. We cannot tell a single person about this, we just have to shutter the shop, pretend we didn’t look at it. But Harner only let me suffer that illusion for a couple of seconds, where it was like, well, let’s just bring our boss, wonderful man named Chris Browning. Let’s bring Browning into the conversation and show it to him. What was his reaction?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 36:34

It happened just like that. I was like, hey, Browning, you got a couple minutes to hop on this meet? And he was like, Yeah, sure. So we brought him in. And we walked him through kind of the logic of how we’re collecting this stuff and what it meant. And it was like, he got it. He’s like, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That’s probably where we should be focusing our efforts on our improvement.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 37:01

Did he know, did you explain it to him in laymen terms, or was he familiar with the actual the Lean and Agile and these concepts, maybe even is you talk more, it’s like, you’re combining Scrum and Kanban. Or at least some of these lean, the specific lean practices and looking at it holistically, that was your manager. Because, essentially, what I’m getting at is a lot of times managers don’t fully understand this stuff. So as Scrum Masters, how do you actually get them on the board to understand this stuff? So it’s either through just using common sense, like this is where the things are or did you talk more in like, hey, look, what happened here when our, lead times increased or whatever.

Tom Keschl 37:52

I think it was a combination of that. I think Harner had been doing a great job coaching the people in leadership about kind of the DevOps and lean practices and what we could leverage here and there and to solve problems, but also the exercise we undertook, like months earlier, where we got very simple and concise definitions of, what is a defect? What is the task? What are all these different types of ticket types? Why do they matter? What’s our process? Why does that matter? I think that all made it common sense so that we could put the data in front of our boss, and because he knew what those definitions were, because he understood what the data was and because we had started to build confidence by running these very small experiments and showing the results of those things. It wasn’t like, well, I don’t trust the tool, I think this is wrong. It was like, Okay, now we don’t have to look for the problem anymore because we’ve just found it, this was our principal constraint for lead time, it was a principal constraint for the defect, the defect metric, the quality metric that we were looking at, too. So it was kind of, okay, whether you want to improve quality, or time the market or whatever this is the thing we have to focus on, because this is the activity that’s holding us up and that’s supposed to catch defects and give in to the acceptable rate that we would like.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 39:29

As we all know, agile development or iterative development, or whatever is about feedback loops, it’s about establishing that and condensing those feedback loops. So this regression activity, this regression suite that was taking 20 hours over two days to run, it took place the last two days of a sprint, was really the feedback loop for our developers to get that learning of, is my code going to cause a regression? And so we could make the argument that the principal constraint is the output of development. But we don’t really know if the output from the development work center was good or bad until it passed these suite of tests. And so creating the capability to condense that feedback cycle so that it was within hours of a code merger, a check in versus 10 days was even more validation for me that was where we should be focusing our efforts. But it’s been proven that to us, to Tom and I, it became very evident that is a very challenging and complicated and complex constraint to solve for. It has so many pain relievers, familiar with the value proposition canvas. If having this value proposition of optimizing our regression, and our testing capabilities, optimizing, this portion had so many pain relievers, we could get work through faster, we could learn quicker.

The way we are treating our tests, or thinking about our test strategy was test automation equals selenium equals cucumber. And so trying to break that mentality, and rethink how we can test this functionality, does it make sense to test all of this business logic in the UI layer? Can we strip it down and speed it up and test that logic at the API layer or via unit tests? It’s a very common, and then where do you start, you have a 20 hour regression suite? Like which of those tests do you start with and so that’s really where we’re at now. We’ve got our boots on, and we’re right in the thick of that right now, that conversation. And it’s phenomenal that the progress that we’ve made, and the feedback that we’re able to get from these changes with this data now. And so Tom and I have been monitoring each regression cycle since September, since we started refactoring and optimizing this regression suite. And at the time, it was about 20 hours. And up until last two sprints ago, we brought it down to about 16 hours, we shaved four hours off of it. Just that four hours was like a huge relief to our QA engineers. That’s a huge time savings for them. And then…

Tom Keschl 42:51

Sorry, the anecdotal evidence there at that time was, you would start hearing the QA engineers go, man, this last regression cycle went pretty smooth, this one was pretty good, this one went pretty smooth. If they keep going smooth in the future, this is going to be all right.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 43:11

Yeah. And as we’re refactoring these tests, we’re bringing Dev and QA and product together and rethinking, the intended functionality of the application for each of these tests. So what is this cucumber test trying to do? And now that we all understand that we’ll rewrite it and so it’s not necessarily a one to one swap from a quality perspective, we’re actually seeing an increase in quality because we’re testing things in the right way, but also at the right time, quicker. And we’re confident that, it’s not the test that’s broken because we’re all aligned that it’s being executed the right way. So, we know that if the test fails, it’s a real failure, we should probably think about that. So anyways, we cut it down and this last one. So we were at 13-16 hours, we set a goal for q2, of 13 hours, we want to get under 13 hours. This last regression suite ran in six and a half hours. So you’re just shattered in that just you could feel when we started to talk about we don’t know if it’s an anomaly yet, because we don’t know if it’s going to continue. But the energy that came out of that conversation was infectious, everybody’s like, let’s try to get it down even more. Let’s see how far we can get this thing and so, we’re off chasing that right now to see what can we do to maintain that and drive it down even more?

Speaker: Milan Bajic 44:51

So maybe coming back to the manager again, your boss, can you talk about him a little bit? In what ways has he helped? What was his name? Sorry. Chris Browning…

Tom Keschl 45:07

In what ways has he helped?

Speaker: Milan Bajic 45:10

Well, in a sense, like, so a lot of times, here’s without putting Chris, as I said earlier, what I want to bring to attention is, a lot of times, people like Chris have no clue what’s going on. And when I work with these people, if you build trust, they’re like, Milan, what I’m trying to do is figure out, my role has changed. I’m trying to figure out how I can help the team without micromanaging. So Chris might be, exception, where he fully understand, but 98% of these managers, in my opinion, don’t have a holistic view, don’t know how to support scrum master. I just wanted to bring that to your attention, just maybe to like, what did Chris do that was helpful? What are things that he didn’t understand that you guys coached and helped them? Because I think, if somebody is listening to this, and they have a manager, or they’re the manager, they might find value in your example?

Tom Keschl 46:09

Yeah. So previous to any of this, I had just gotten my team lead position. I was a software developer. Before that, and I feel like a pretty productive one. And in those times, when Chris first came on board, one of the only ways, the only mechanisms we really had to figure out what technical projects we should be working on next, like what tech debt, what problems we had with the code we wanted to work on was to get everybody together in a room all the devs and be like, hey, what’s the worst problem in your opinion. And so we had a couple page document, where we would go through and then once we got everyone together, we kind of did this weird voting thing. And we prioritize that list. And we got some of that work done. And coincidentally, it was those improvements that we made, that prompted Harner in that January parking garage conversation, to ask, how have those fixes that you made those things that all the developers really believed were the worst problems that we solved in 2019? How did those meaningfully contribute or change our ability to deliver software? So back then that’s the only mechanism we had, once we started getting people to buy into the data, once we got good, reliable data, once we were made aware of it, the conversation completely shifted. We didn’t have to search for the problems anymore. When we focus on delivery capabilities, we could look at the data for our delivery capabilities. And we could see the problem.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 47:52

You could see where the bottlenecks are, and then point them rather than guess.

Tom Keschl 47:57

Exactly. Yeah. And it’s invaluable, like, everything became visible. Before, the only thing you had was a gut feeling. I feel like this, I feel like that, and the only time that was surface was in retro. QA would be like, oh, yeah, this regression really sucked or the developers would be like, yeah, these tickets over here, they really sucked, and we dig into why but we didn’t really, we would have that retro conversation and then like two weeks later, everybody forgot about the previous retro and maybe we’re complaining about some of the same things or maybe it was like four or five weeks later, where the problem was stuck up again. And so there wasn’t that consistent, holistic view with that historicity or that historical nature, where you could go back and say, well, here’s been our problem all along. It was very, like, set it, try to fix something, forget it and maybe if the problem comes back up, you didn’t even remember that you tried to solve that before. Whereas now it’s like, here’s the data, what is the data telling us? Let’s interrogate that.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 49:02

And specifically to Chris’s engagement, he always trusted us but we had helped to build his trust in the process in this information, and what it could do. And he was really the advocate for this kind of outward, he was kind of the conduit to our, up our leadership chain, and as well as the business partners. Our organizational structure is a little unique so our product and technology and QA kind of report up through a different hierarchy. And so, again, the conduit that kind of helped to bring the leadership channels together, and kind of be the voice of what we’re doing. So he’s helped to get these initiatives, these ideas kind of embedded into some of our OKRs and the kind of the discussions that happen at that level. So he’s really been that outward voice outside of kind of our organizational bubble, which has been really helpful. To help grow that, we’re starting to see some of the ripple effects and other teams showing interest in some of these things, which has been really, really helpful.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 50:28

So maybe that’s what we can discuss as a last topic. This is great across a couple of teams. You publicly traded company. How do you get others involved because that’s the tough part, you can’t just tell them do what we did, in a sense.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 50:54

But to a point, all we were doing is leveraging kind of industry proven patterns. Visualize your value stream, understand your types of work, be data driven by these really high level things. While each value stream is inherently kind of unique and special, right to the concept of visualizing your value stream end to end is something that should be applied, at least in my opinion, across any product or service.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 51:31

It is, but you can say you could have another Andrew and Tom, that, for instance, one of the things that I noticed, for both of you, Tom has a technical background, I know, Andrew, you don’t, as far as I know, but you understand this stuff. So you can talk to developers, a lot of Scrum Masters don’t fully understand and that’s not their area that they’re comfortable with, so they avoid. So I think that’s one thing. You could say imagine like that you don’t have the technical back, you don’t have this and then you’re saying do value stream mapping, and you’re actually enforcing people to do it, you’re going to have a different result than what you guys did. So a lot of this comes to your leadership, your understanding, when to push when not to push and that’s the hard part to scale. The practices itself, like value stream mapping, like capturing the data, they can copy that, but it’s the soft skills, it’s all the things that you did, and that you keep navigating that what’s harder to scale. Because it’s the people side of them.

Speaker: Andrew Harner 52:38

I think it has to come from away. Your point in the words you use it force, if it’s a top down enforcement of you, you must do value stream mapping, and you must rethink everything. I think there’s going to be a natural resistance to that. I think throughout this process, I was kind of poking and prodding and pushing Tom and others to help find what that trigger was, what the why was going to be. And each kind of chapter in this book, this story that we’re telling, we’ve identified another why, another reason why we should be continuing to drive forward. And I think that’s important to other areas. There’s other areas that we’ve partnered with and it’s predictability. That’s their why, like, they want to be more predictable. I want to understand why they’re missing deadlines. That’s a great, foot in the door of, hey, well, if we map out our value stream, we can kind of see where things are getting hung up, and we can see why we’re not predictable, we can see why we’re missing our deadlines. So understanding and trying to, I guess the right word is training empathy, establishing empathy with your customers, and also, as coaches or as, change leaders, we have to establish empathy with the internal business partners that we’re partnering with to see what’s going to get them to join the guy on the hill. So I’m out there dancing, I’m out there, I could be up there dancing for a while, but Tom felt bad for me dancing alone so that was his why. I don’t know.

Tom Keschl 54:29

Yeah. I think that you’re onto something there. We’re still very much in this. So it’s not like this is a solved problem for us. What we’ve tried to do is that every opportunity that we have something to share with somebody, we try to share it and be open and transparent. One of Harner’s favorite sayings, or at least the one that he tells me most often is that we need to be bold and we need to be vulnerable. Not everything in this journey has been rosy or sunny. But every time we’ve had a success, we want to talk about not just the success and how we got there, but also the pain points along the way. We’ve had audiences with, our boss’s boss and his peers, we’ve taken opportunities that we have with, newsletters to try to push various pieces of this thing, like when we first got our value stream mapped. And when we brought everybody in to agree on that, the next newsletter we tried to send out like, oh, yeah, we just completed this exercise. And one of the questions that came back is, what’s a Value Stream Map? Why is that important? Can you give us some background there. So we’ve tried to leverage every tool at our disposal talks, one on ones, conversations with our boss, trying to talk to the larger group of leadership on our project. Because everybody has connections everywhere. It’s a corporate company, but it’s a pretty small corporate company, and people know each other. So we’re trying to leverage all those relationships as well. And just kind of tell our story, tell the story over and over and over again, just like we got the teams to kind of buy in and be involved, just like we got our boss Browning to buy in and be involved. That’s what we’re trying to do now, and have seen some people get interested in that. And we’re working with now, various people throughout the organization, just as like a small community of practice. But trying to figure out where the problems are, what’s next, and how we can help the kind of other value streams at our company start to see some progress, like what we’ve seen, progress, it’s not even going to be the same journey in a lot of cases.

Speaker: Milan Bajic 56:59

Is that not more of coaching, does it go beyond communities of practice? Do you guys actually coach, other Scrum Masters and other people outside of your value stream?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 57:11

Yeah, we got the network of change agents that we’re kind of growing. Our company uses G Suite and so we’ve got our avatars and slack. And so we’ve chosen I don’t know, we’re all Ninja Turtles, I’ve got different ninjas, we’ve got Master Splinter and so we can start to see kind of, who’s out there, who’s kind of working together and helping to grow, kind of just putting ideas out there getting people to think. But, yeah, I firmly believe it takes a need. One of the two most important works, literature works in our business I think is the goal and the Phoenix Project and the main characters in both of those, Alex and Bill, their company, or their plant, is on the brink of closing. And they have a need, right?

Speaker: Milan Bajic 58:16

Was kind of urgency, right?

Speaker: Andrew Harner 58:19

Yeah, so to speak. And so how do we create that sense of urgency or that sense of need, so that it becomes a pull instead of a push in this information? Earlier, I got so frustrated, why don’t you understand this is so logical, why wouldn’t you want to do this? But you give them these books, but then the reality is, like those characters, they had a need, they were in a position of influence and of change, they could help really kind of turn things around and that coupled with, the sense of urgency that they felt from their plant closing or their team being shut down was really what drove them to help pull that in. It’s hard to establish that urgency or need when it seems like it’s just butterflies and rainbows. But you really never know when that next thunderclouds come rolling in, I mean, COVID hit. Nobody saw that coming and that probably established a sense of urgency for a lot of different companies.

Tom Keschl 59:21

I don’t know, I think it’s been about the data to like when we were talking about things with velocity and story points, there’s that age old problem of how do you compare apples and oranges? How do you compare this team to that team or whatever, for whatever the reason is behind that desire it’s not really possible, but when we started talking about, we had a little internal technology talk about what we done and what we were measuring, and that five or 10 minutes part that Harner presents that information, it was very clear and logical to people. And there were a lot of bytes after that, a lot of people reaching out and getting really excited by what we were saying and wondering how they could leverage that and they’re part of the organization too. And really, it’s been the data that’s (inaudible 1:00:19), it may be an inappropriate term, but seductive. Those meetings that we had every day, when we were trying to just understand the data, it made me feel like I knew more about the project I was working on, than anyone else, it made me feel like I knew more about it than I ever had before, as we’ve gone from data unaware to data aware, and now I’m probably having a little bit of a data affair if that’s, probably silly but…

Speaker: Milan Bajic 1:00:50

No, I mean, it’s used both what you Andrew said, just here in the last couple of minutes, it reminded me of something that, as I’m listening to you guys, I can tell that naturally, you understand people, and if I had to guess at least I work with Andrew. So I know his people skills in his understanding, Tom, I never work with you so I don’t know that. But if I had to guess, you don’t fully understand psychology, but you understand people, right? And I think maybe just to bring it to full circle here because I think we’ve discussed a lot of different things here. And it’s like a lot of times Scrum Masters don’t fully understand the people, the culture and psychology of how do you create that sense of urgency, what sense of urgency for one person versus another. And if this is maybe just a message to aspiring coaches and Scrum Masters out there, I didn’t fully understand things till I started diving into psychology, understanding the people. And once I started reading, some of the things that you do naturally, that you just need to get feeling. Once you actually get good understanding people and how people think what motivates them, similar with the data, then you can start doing an influencing more, if you know what’s going on rather just and hold on to your gut feeling. So that’s what it is, as you guys were talking I think data is important understanding both Lean and Agile or DevOps. That’s the latest, but understanding that whole systemic view, using the quality data, having the right tools, but I would say a lot of people also forget about the people side of things. And that’s something at least that I’ve seen in an Agile community that, there’s more and more of need to understand that.

Tom Keschl 1:02:50

This is for them. This is for all of us. This isn’t about well, it’s about bottom lines, and all that other stuff, too. But I think the literature and the studies have shown over and over and over again that if you treat your line workers well, if you make their lives better, your company will see success and that’s what it’s always been about for us. It’s been about making our lives better through making our coworkers lives better, through making our processes better, through delivering a better product and making our company better.

Nigel Baker

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:39

Who is Nigel Baker?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 00:42

Who is Nigel Baker. This is interesting, actually. Because just this morning, I had to fill in a bio for a conference I’m presenting online. Alan Vyse Bart’s doing an online, his online Agile summit thing. So I’m presenting a session there. So I had to write my own bio, I found it surprisingly difficult. Because who the hell am I? I find it interesting. It’s summon so many thoughts. Because I have my own image of myself. I have an image I think other people have of myself. I have what I feel is a true image. And they’re all how do you capture it? So I think I thought well, because I use the post. So when you feel like you don’t feel you got to make your name in the world like 20 years ago, whatever.

I’ll be like, I’m one of the first scrum trainers on Earth. I’m one of this, I’ve done this. I’ve done that. And it’s so long now. So I talk about that stuff and less and less about like blogging, self-aggrandizing myself. So it’s like, oh, yeah, I trained Scrum. I coach agile that’s like, well, I guess we all do nearly. So I said, I can’t remember exactly what I said. But I said, basically, what I tried to do in life, is I tried to have two quarts of deep overthinking. So really think about a subject, everything, right? Adding a big slice of cynicism. Because Agile is about optimism and open mindedness and yes. But actually in my heart, I’m quite cynical individual as well.

And that sort of gives me sharpness, I feel in terms of like, simple, like, people write things online. It’s very fluid ideas. And I’m always thinking that’s a great LinkedIn article. But what are you doing in real life? [inaudible 02:31]. What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work as the ultimate cynical attitude, which I think I’ve got a little bit of. And the other dash is humor, like [inaudible 02:40] a double, a shot double, two shots of humor as well, I think that’s what I realized the other day, that sort of covers everything I do. So everything I do, kind of as a joke in my mind. And that’s very powerful as a coach, as a trainer humor can be, was it Shakespeare says, many a true word is spoken in jest. So you can with a joke, you can get away with putting out some harsh truths. But also, there’s a dark side to here, which is it can be a political punching down. So if you’ll be careful with humor, you see humor too much, you could be too withering, you could be too cynical.

And you’re like the nihilistic comments, comics sorry, referencing the decline of the universe, rather what we’re trying to be, which is change agents, helping transform the world of work. So yeah, I think that’s basically it, deep amount of overthinking, a slice of cynicism, two shots of humor, all wrapped into an agile coaching, trading dissolving package. I guess that’s me. That’s what I am.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:46

That’s awesome. And that’s why I started asking this question. I won’t ask it then at the beginning of every interview, because rather than just doing the typical intro. So based on what you just said, that made me think and jump maybe immediately into the Nigel scale, because I think Nigel scale is, is that…

Speaker: Nigel Baker 04:10

The crowning glory.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:13

So, yeah, so tell us about it, because I think in our circles, people are familiar with it, but I don’t know, I think people are outside. But maybe let’s start with a Nigel scale. How did you come up with it? And what is Nigel scale?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 04:30

So essentially, so I did a presentation a few months ago in lockdown about it. And I actually went back and read the original posts where the conversation was happening, because I’ve gotten to this huge philosophy of like, context is king, right? And what I mean by that is like, if you understand where something comes from, you understand the environment that created something, it gives you a far better understanding of how to use it and not to use it, right? And so a lot of people don’t take context into account when they’re talking about something, or worse, take it too much into account. Oh, we can’t do that here because we’re very special.

No you’re not, you know it like everyone else actually, right? So what happened was this, basically around 2008, there was a huge car crash of a few different ideas. So around them, we were talking, they were trying to come up with some sort of exam for the Certified Scrum master course. So at this point up to about 2007 2008, Scrum was still quite malleable, Scrum was still quite flexible. There’s lots of books written on it, but each book says something different. So even the people who created it, haven’t curated it. There’s lots of different writing about it. So lots of people have a different idea of what it is and what it isn’t. And we’re trying to come up with an exam where we examine it. Well, if you don’t know what it is, how can you examine it? So famously, Ken Swaybar, was paid what I believe is a large sum of money to produce something called the scrum hub, which was like a collection of Scrum writings and ideas. And what actually came out was like a 10-page document called the Scrum Guide, which is the simplest thing that could possibly work, I guess, but not quite anyway. But that didn’t quite line up with what people thought scrum was. We didn’t line up with the test. We didn’t line up with what was on scrum master training on Google Certified Scrum master course.

So it’s four different like a Venn diagram from hell, these four different crossover worlds. And in the scrum community, in the scrum trainer form, we’re discussing this stuff, quite a level of detail that most civilians don’t discuss. So it really was okay, you read the post, it really is a huge case of well I think you’ll find, we’ll I think you’ll find [inaudible 06:34]. Having this discussion, I believe it was actually on the concept of agile project managers, right? An oxymoron like military intelligence anyway, but caching, so I came up with this Nigel scale idea. Now it turns out, I named it after myself. And for years, I’ve jokingly said, I did that as a self-aggrandizing big, like the Nigel scale, but actually, what I was doing and I discovered this recently, I was actually mocking something called the Nokia test, which a lot of people don’t remember anymore. But if you think back 10, 15 years, those was usually popular.

I think Bas Vod and a few people in Nokia networks came up with a way to assess your agility. And it was very popular. I just say popular people, Jeff Sutherland slept on it and loved it. And then people realize you probably don’t want to have that type of assessment. You end up with people claiming their coffees or daily scrums. And what they will shout out is that their bosses are retrospective. But it was this assessment, the Nokia test. Well, that’s where I got the name for, is okay. There’s Nokia tested, I’ve got the Nigel scale, right? This is the context. Now basically the Nigel scale is like a three-point model. Okay, so three levels of categorization initially, when I came up with it, level one is the things that are core, the Nigel scale one, things that are the fundamental, things that you got to do. If you bend them, everything breaks, if you don’t do this, you get into trouble.

So the example I use these days is surgery, you have a surgery, we’re going to remove something or fix something in you. And the doctor goes, well, I’m going to perform your operation, I won’t be washing my hands. I won’t be disinfecting my hands because I do not believe in bacteria and viruses. Bacteria and viruses were invented by big pharma, they don’t exist. So I don’t need to wash my hands. Is like, shut up. I’m going to dip my hands in cow manure. So I get those good bacteria on my hand. Because yeah, bacteria is good for you, helps your digestive transit. So I get loads of good bacteria to put on my hands, so when I introduce them to your body when I’m removing your spleen, you get healthy bacteria. Shut up, shut up. You can have….

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:52

We will even charge you for it.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 08:55

Yeah, charge. That’s the point. You can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts. So there’s a certain fundamental thing, as a surgeon, you disinfect your hands, you wash your hands, it’s a fundamental. Now of course, if you look into I think [inaudible 09:14] said about, if you look into actual surgeons washing their hands, the first person who suggested it was ridiculed and driven out of the world of surgery, because surgeons didn’t believe in that concept. So it goes to show you what’s fundamental may not be what you believe is fundamental. But that’s the idea of the core things. These are things that really, if you don’t do them, you’re in trouble. So in our scrum world, we tend to talk about things in the scrum guide, then they should really be those core fundamentals.

The good stuff that if you bend it, you’re going to get into a bit of trouble, it’s not going to work very well. Now, the bad news for everyone is, most of what we do as coaches, trainers, agile people, isn’t that, it’s not Agile scale to, which is the good stuff, I used call it best practice. But since getting really into connection and things like that complexity thing to do in practice, it’s the word of good practice, the world of contextuality, the world of self-organizing good answers to your complex problems. Inspecting and adapting, experimenting, learning, self contextually understanding your own space in your own way, and finding your own answers.

There’s loads of things in that world that other people have done. You can do them as well. They may work, they probably will work. But remember the word may and probably carrying a lot of weight. Yes, it’s like me, we’re probably careful, be very careful. But Nigel scale three is bad basically. Things that are anti patterns, things that lots of people have tried, and they don’t work and you fall over. Again, never say never. Because you could be the company that makes it work. But there’s a big pile of bodies out back of companies who thought they can make it work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:04

And you’re talking in the context of complexity, right? They are antipatterns in terms of complexity and that environment.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 11:11

Yeah, and that space, definitely. Definitely, in fact, you could use the Nigel’s scale get outside of our world, that sort of idea of fundamental, good and bad has got a lot of applicability. But I’m really thinking about our world in the Agile space, specifically the scrum space, actually. So I’m thinking of, and the basic what I learned from introducing that idea was vast amounts of people confuse what is a fundamental thing we should do, in Scrum for instance, with something that is good, which certainly is bad. And so I always like to joke, confusing a core practice with a good practice is a bad practice. There’s the idea of like, and people do all the time. And it’s why I’m nervous.

I’m talking so much these days about contextual understanding of Agile. But when I see it in real life, a lot of people bend the things they shouldn’t bend, and keep fixed the things they shouldn’t keep fixed. So people obsess on story points and velocity and release trades, of which are just contextual practices that don’t even work in lots of settings. And yet, completely flex the idea of self-organizing, or empowerment, or coaching or leadership and just think that’s very flexible. And that’s a huge concern for me. So I’m trying to talk more about because is it helping us understand where we need to be stiff, or where we need to be flexible. And that Nigel scale has been a, that was a revelation probably for me. But more importantly, that’s been sort of a building block on which I’ve built a lot of ideas since then.

So a lot of the work I’ve been doing recently has been really about investigating sort of how practices change over time. How practices change over context, how should we as coaches and trainers understand how things change? So here’s a method, here’s another method. Great, which one do you pick is interesting? What’s more interesting to me is, how do they overlap? How do you change from one to the other? How do you like changing has become the huge interest for me. So how patterns change over time? And finally, how then we as coaches, trainers, consultants, Scrum Masters, whatever? How do we engage in that changing? And that’s something else I’ve been told to do some work on. And it’s as I can tell now, I have no answers, the door, but I’ve got some really interesting questions on it, which I think we should be having some more conversations on in the Agile space.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:43

What are some of those questions? I mean, because I agree, I’ve talked about it. I feel like I’m talking about it in every podcast, but the idea of cooks and chefs like there’s too many cooks out there not enough chefs to understand, and not enough people that want to be chefs, so everybody just wants a recipe. But coming back to your question, what are the questions then that you’ve been asking around?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 14:06

Yeah, I think that cooking chef idea is a really good idea in terms of the recipes, following recipes, and when not to follow a recipe, when to invent your own. Because again, it’s a big ask to expect a normal human being to be inventing their own gourmet meals. There is a place to recipes with understanding what that place is and what that place is not. So an example I use is like estimating techniques. So whether you estimate or not was up to you, but let’s say you’ve got some like planning poker, famous technique everyone knows, lot of people know it. Some people love it, and some people hate it, right? And they love it and hate it for similar reasons.

And the important point to understand with it is, it’s not that planning poker is right or wrong, it’s the experience you’re having and your level of ability and skill is what’s driving its usefulness or its lack of usefulness. So like me, I always do some ideas in the Nigel scale, I like to graph, like a visual graph. So I’ll show the scale over time. And you’ll see it, I’ll draw like planning poker. So it decays quite quickly. It’s a good skill, new teams, I really rate it as an idea. But after a while it decays, no one’s been playing with the card six months in, it’s sort of stabilizers on a bicycle, you’re used to riding a bike. So then you get another technique like affinity estimation, put the cars in a straight line, move them around. Germans call it magic estimation, I think. Below the idea, keep it [inaudible 15:32 ]. I think again, but the duty comes unstuck. They don’t know what they don’t know. So how can they ask the right questions? But in a more maturity, it’s really powerful. So you’ve got one method that works with newbies well, and doesn’t offer value with experts. One technique that works better with experts doesn’t offer value with newbies. So it’s pretty interesting. Okay, that’s great. Those are the two recipes. Which one do I do? Well, that’s a hard choice to make. But the harder choices, as I said, how do you go from one to the other? So and this is what I think, a lot of us don’t spend, not just us, but I mean, the world of agile, do not spend enough time in thinking of the changing, the transitioning, like with two techniques, you could hard swap, you could say tomorrow, we are doing new technique, old technique bad, in bin.

Or what a lot of people do, you’ll often see them, they sort of hybridize away. So they sort of, they don’t mean to, but they evolve a new estimation technique. So there’s all we’re doing planning poker, there’s no cards, no one votes. And you look at it and go, well, this animal has seriously evolved since [inaudible 16:44]. If you ask them, why did you choose to do it that way? They’ll often look at you and go. Oh, yes, it’s changed, I never noticed. Why did we change it? Do you remember that? Should we change it back? No, it’s wonderful. Or maybe they can run them in parallel, try both techniques and see which one they like, says all these different, like nice pathways from one technique to the other.

And I think a lot of what we do in the Agile space, is communicate photographs. So we like snapshot, like a picture of it, as a cake, he’s a masculine man, take a photo. And what we need to be teaching more or talking more about is the process of anything like, how do you get fit? How do you change? How do you transition things to be aware of? And I think, because otherwise, all that’s happening is, is in our world, we have communicated one snapshot, which was the traditional waterfall, demonic evil, like whatever. And now we’re communicating a new snapshot, which is our agile, wonderful, because what we’re trying to create in our world is a world that is agility, flexible, not agile on the big A, but actually changing the world. And that’s not just one step. It’s not just going okay, the old world, new world it’s going on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:02

Well, it’s a continuous thing, it’s more like this, right?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 18:05

Yeah. And to do that, we need to have the ability to be able to understand and reflect on that. Otherwise, people are just and I feel this a lot. People are looking on to the new techniques with the same mindset of the old techniques. Recipe lead, follow the process, don’t think too hard, don’t change it. And that’s all the patterns that we’ve been trying to get away from, with our new approach.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:31

Just different practices. But same, yeah..

Speaker: Nigel Baker 18:35

Yeah. And you get the same thing comes back. And that’s the problem. If you take it with the old mindset, like you see it with big scaled implementations, I like to bad mouth safe, I shouldn’t but it’s so easy. It’s like a comedy. But the point is, is not that the things they do are wrong, though some are very wrong. It’s that, it’s very nature, seems to lend itself towards shifting back to the old way. So before you realize you have multiple as a management, senior leader, setting direction, teams being unempowered or very narrow follows. And because the shape, though the shape has changed a bit, the principles underpinning the shape haven’t. So it’s like a squeezable, you squeeze it, you’ve got a new shape, you let go of the squeeze and it comes back to its old shape. It’s kind of like that. And I think the stuff we need to think about in the Agile space, is not transformed the world of work, is transforming the world of work and that’s actual estate. It is interesting.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:37

It is and I mean, at the corner of this is like if we don’t understand things like using the cooking analogy, like food at the chemical level and ingredients, then you’re just throwing stuff in and you’re just without understanding. So maybe to come back to the scrum guide. You’ve been pretty vocal about for years, about adding some type of agile library, scrum appendix and moving away at least when it comes to scrum Alliance, moving away from scrum guide. Why? I mean, I know but I think you’ll be…

Speaker: Nigel Baker 20:16

Essentially, so the scrum guide. It’s like a map. It’s like an Ordnance Survey map. We have them in the UK, the Ordnance Survey, I don’t like in America and other countries, but they sort of give you these official maps of the country, right? And so the schema is a map. But it doesn’t tell you anything about the territory. You know the famous quote, a map is not the territory. It doesn’t give you nuance, it doesn’t give you context, doesn’t give you interesting walks. If you have a map to know I want to walk over there, I want to drive over there, it’s not just about what the terrain actually is, the physics of the terrain. It’s about the human experience of the terrain.

And I think there’s not enough literature out there about supporting that. Basically, 12 nice country walks, what walks can we go on? What ways can we do this? Because there are recipes. Now we don’t like being too algorithmic, but there are certain recipes that work nicely. I do a Sunday roast. So every Sunday, I cook a roast for the family, right? It’s quite simple, not simple. There’s lots of things to do, but I’m not reinventing the wheel every time. My children don’t want fancy flam bay pawns, they don’t want anything, they just wants a nice basic food with nice people food. And so I can do that and teaching that would be useful. How to make a good sauce, there’s all these other things, I think they’re making it quite rich, the Agile space, because at the moment, a lot of it is like, here are the bare fundamentals.

Good luck. And that’s why a lot of people fall into the grass of sort of more algorithmic, more recipe led approach approaches, like the Scaled Agile Framework, or even like JIRA, because JIRA is by far the most popular agile scaling technique, which is a tool, is like a skating technique, but they hold on to it, that gives them some algorithms to follow and hold on to. And I feel there’s like a gap in our space. Stuff isn’t like vitally super essential, but stuff that would be good to know that add to your repertoire. So use your chef’s analogy, right? A good chef has lots of good fundamentals of cooking, they know how to run up a room, a source, they know how to fry, they know the fundamentals. And that gives them a repertoire of skills that allow them to create quite an advanced idea in the middle. What we need to do is add that repertoire of skills to our cooks to turn them into chefs. And at the moment, what a lot of people do is, do more complex recipes rather than build up repertoire. And yeah. So I thought something like an appendix. So I saw two of…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:47

Is that more like a set of patterns and probably like practices, or is it both practices and patterns?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 22:54

Yeah, so for me, it’s like practices and patterns, or things you could add around it, things that you could support, things that are really good and viable to help you do this. And the other side of it is actually maybe annotating the guide, maybe added some detail to the guide to help basically put some context in. So when it says something like true leader, which means nothing, it literally means nothing. It’s like a platitude, where you can say some people look at that as terms of servant leadership, and sort of bring richer information in, sort of use the guide rather than the answer which a lot of people treat it as, use as a Trojan horse to introduce loads of other ideas and create a sort of a richer, broader world from it. And there haven’t been one piece of that, because you and I know a lot of Scrum trainers out there and both certified and professional scrum trainers are very, I will teach you the guide, I will teach you the guide, I will teach you this document and scaling almost like a faux religious, almost like not cold, cold is too strong. But a little bit like you must have this because the guide says so. Now it goes back to…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:03

Yeah. And that’s like I was talking to Tom Mellor couple weeks ago and he said like that’s like the Ken had that [inaudible 24:11] look around him. Not cult wise, but like where… and I think because he was involved in both Scrum Alliance and scrum.org, there is a little bit of that were both organizations, I would say more like both Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org, more than any other organization use the scrum guide as that baseline, right? What are your thoughts on maybe the relationship between scrum Alliance and Scrum org? I know you’ve been somewhat critical about Scrum alliance and all of this stuff. And what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 22:56

Yeah. So I’ve got lots of friends who are Scrum.org trainers. And the quality of their work seems to be good. I’m never ever impressed by a full profit company. We’re transforming the world of work that’s transforming the wallet of can. The pocket of can, really and with all the noble bells and whistles, it is a private company generating profit. And I just find that out, I’m not socialist or communist or anything like that. But I find that it’s a very difficult space, when you start putting money right up next to principles. I’m a bit uncomfortable with that. I know a few people who find the exams a bit unpopular, because the exams feel like they’re almost a cartel. You take it, you fail [inaudible 25:39] until you get there, which seems to be not really building the community, building an inclusive world. I would love the two community to be one by the way, I once heard the rumor that there was some conversations about that at one point, that went nowhere. But I still think that will be something pretty viable. But it would have to be in the auspices of the community led organization. Because that scrum.com really is, not dot org, the private company, scrum.com, we are genuinely pretty much the only nonprofit out there.

That is one nonprofit, but also generally changing the world of work. Generally transforming the world. We’re got tools and avenues and methods and products to genuinely help build a community and build a world around that community. And so for me, that community aspect, that alliance is the key word here, the alliance is the key word, and the Agile has been great. I’ve been a member for a long time. But the Agile alliance is really a comfort. Really it’s a comfort and hasn’t gotten much better than that for reasons when the scrum has can. And it should, some things that should be done I think, that only the scrum alliance can do.

Like for instance, building up that supporting documentation not built off individual experts like us, but built community wide, pattern base of real research, only the alliances got the community to draw that information, only the scrum alliances got the money to pay for the research, and then only the scrum alliances got the collective strength to then publish that and give it some weight. So it’s not just another person’s opinion on LinkedIn. And so I think, taking advantage of our community, not in a commercial way, like exploiting them, but exploiting their knowledge, bringing out that information from them and showing that across the world. It’s a really powerful way to change things in companies.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:32

It is. Yeah, and you’ve said maybe not to directly perfect for instance, like scrum Alliance needs to step up their game when it comes to PR game. And one of the things that stood out that you said is like, the rumor gets around the world before the truth has its boots on. And that resonated with me because I think we could be doing at least scrum alliance well, so scrum.org could be done much better. But at times it seems scrum.org is doing better with PR than scrum Alliance. Do you feel the same way?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 28:09

May be but it’s like playing the same game. It’s really not. I think if one does good PR, the other one does. I’ve never been, my big fear with scrum.org was never, oh, someone’s competing with my scrum training. It was someone rubbish is competing with my scrum training. That was always my concern. Because remember Nigel, they didn’t remember agile, they remember the Scrum. So they have like a rubbish experience that doesn’t work. Scrum’s a thing that gets hit in the throat. Like a lot of people don’t even know they’ve been trained by scrum Alliance or scrum.org. They genuinely just don’t know. They don’t remember anything about Scrum, they went on the course, that it was good.

And they learned a lot and helped, they tell other people. If it was rubbish and didn’t help, they tell a lot of people. And so that’s always been my concern. It’s like I’ve had people challenge me. Yeah, because we’re all about quality. And if we could get, so in terms of what we do as a scrum trainers or whatever certified trainers, if our work can be high quality and value add, right? Then the commercials will take care of themselves. Then the money will come in, you’ll make our livings and the world will grow. If we over commercialize what we do in terms of the Agile space, it becomes exploits, not as Ken Beck will say explore or expand, and then you’re just mining an ever-dwindling group.

And again, in the Agile space by the horrible feeling that there are many orgs not org actually, but there are many other communities out there that feel very much in exploit. Sort of, we have got a reservoir that will eat all the fish. At some point there’s going to be no fish left. What they need to actually understand is their jobs not to exploit people for commercial purposes. Their job is to help people improve their lives and work, right? Through that help and that relationship they will have, if they design their business well, a commercial opportunity. So the tail wag the dog. And so I am…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:04

But it’s so easy because a lot of people have gotten used to the, if we just look at the, essentially the way that we train, the way, specifically there’s scrum Alliance, because I think it’s different through scrum.org. But there’s a level of expectations that CSPs have been comfortable with that a lot of times, I’ve seen it, where we put the money and financial aspects before the mission and sometimes I don’t know if it’s the environment that creates that, or…

Speaker: Nigel Baker 30:47

It’s realism. So I don’t feel bad about that and I’ll tell you why. Because I meet many agile coaches on the ground, right? Who are not genuinely making change in the organization’s for simple reasons, they’re getting paid quite nicely and if they make too much faster, they get fired and released. And they’ve got a house with a mortgage and kids, they’ve got to pay though I understand that. What I will do is give them tools to allow them to make change and not get fired. So you can do this, you don’t have to like you’re not [inaudible 31:19] you don’t have to sacrifice your career on a daily scrum. But it’s same thing with the scrum training community, I’ve noticed in America it’s quite interesting, it’s different to Europe. So for me as a trainer, okay, COVID made it different, so I’ve done a lot less coaching in the last 18 months, because it costs a lot less because of COVID.

So it’s mainly been training I’ve been doing, but mostly what I do is training for companies. So I go in three days on Zoom chatting, talking, discussing, I do some for individuals, mostly companies. So this is your company, that’s [inaudible 31:49] right? And I just discovered the other day from the scrum Alliance, that actually the majority of most people’s business in America is actually public training, where they would historically set up in a hotel and I don’t know like some small town in America and there’re seven hotels and people would come to that course. And they sort of go around place to place like a roaming. I know, sales was like going from town to town learning these courses. Now of course, that business model has been completely smashed because of COVID, completely. Everyone’s online, anyone can go anywhere, no one is in the office, that entire idea of going around as a training company, doing those individual places, yeah, got smashed. And I don’t know if that’s ever going to come back as an actual viable business model.

But I think the risk that, but for a lot of Scrum trainers, they need to understand their duty and duty is a long word, their essence as a certified scrum trainer or professional scrum trainer is not inexorably linked to their business model. So you can find a different business model in there and still achieve results and still do quite well. And so I think there’s an element of absent due to scatter. So I understand, I understand not everyone’s going to transform the world of work for me in terms of our community, how many is like 400 trainers, is there something?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:12

Not even. Yeah.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 33:13

So if 200 of those just did good scrum courses the rest of their life, they’re still changing the world a bit. They’re still nudging the world forward, they’re still making changes to helping people, they’re still delivering, they’re still doing a good job. But some of us have to do a bit more. I don’t know what more is, but we got to do a bit more on that. If all 400 of us sit there and just do Scrum courses for people, I think that’s not going to be enough. And the risk is, as we’re seeing, people are already stepping into the space with big voices, just not necessarily big voices, big opinions, but nicely the right ideas. So we’ve got to be careful because it’s not easy for this movement.

Because there’s no leaders in it. There’s very easy for this movement to be corrupted, I guess, is the word I’m looking for. And again, I don’t say, I’ve said something the other day was quite interesting to me. I said, just remember, different things isn’t long and long isn’t bad, bad isn’t evil. So just because someone’s got different ideas, you just mean as long as you’re white. If they are wrong, doesn’t mean that they’re bad person or bad. It doesn’t make them evil, good people do bad things all the time though, it’s rounded here. And so not to villainize people but generally in the Agile space, there are lots of voices out there sharing ideas that you would politely say are different, you’d impolitely say are wrong. Or you may say they’re bad.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:57

We’ve all been there, right? We’ve done the same thing [inaudible 35:00] just 15 years ago.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 35:02

Yeah, well, things were long, things improve, things change. If that was right at the time, just not right now. But the point I’m going to make is that we need to have some sort of, we need to make sure there’s some strong voices from the right angles, just to make it so we don’t just get, because I don’t very much loves the next new idea, the famous thing Agile is dead, wherever it is, is dead. So someone says, Agile is dead, Scrum is dead. Story point is dead, velocity is dead, [inaudible 35:30] is dead, safe is dead, [inaudible 35:31] is dead, bird is dead, like everything is dead. And this is the new idea that I’m trying to tell you, I’m better, I just kind of like, well, it’s good that we’ve got no sacred cows, no sacred gods, we smash everything.

But if you believe in nothing, you believe in everything. So the risk is, as those were two wonderful ideas coming in, without any quality control or fidelity on them. And the final thing on this, I think people like us in the community have a duty of care. Because we can say anything, and we still get paid. We’ll walk away and everyone’s happy. But people are running these experiments on their jobs as a huge duty of care there. So let’s say I came up with an idea. I said, you know what?

The best way to get results in your company, punch your boss in the face, best way, it’s a great technique, worked for me, I got promoted 10 times doing it, right? So just like the way to live, but it doesn’t affect me, I still get paid. But that person goes and slaps their boss, all of a sudden they’re in court. And so the idea is, we have a duty of care that we do no harm as people talking about this stuff. And again, I worry about the space, because there’s lots of hypotheses but where’s the evidence? Where’s the feedback loops? Where’s the Agile in it? Where’s the actual scrum of it, though, the feedback? So that’s one of my big bugbears at the moment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:58

Yeah. And like the Agile is getting bigger. I’m getting people from industries that you typically wouldn’t have seen. And you’ve worked with NGOs and non-IT environments, what are some of the things that you’re learning and have been learning?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 37:14

Well, is it interesting, so what I’d say is, outside IT is fascinating. What I’ve discovered is, something that when you get into the physical world of work, where work is physical, a lot of things are a lot harder than [inaudible 37:28], so slicing up a problem, like while I was doing some work with a toy company, so you can see on my desk here is a range of toys, right? Both new ones they’ve given me and old ones I’ve dug out of storage. So just this week, I did a product and a training course, true story. Product and a training, and we discussed the product management of these. That is, ladies and gentlemen, you may not have seen one of these before, if you’re an old man, you may have seen these back in the 80s.

This is what they call a rock Lord. It’s a transforming thing. It’s a monster that transforms into a, [inaudible 38:03], I’ll show you, transforms into a rock. Okay, now imagine a company invented this. a product manager manage this, teams built this, marketing advertise this. They made hundreds of 1000s of these and didn’t sell them in shops, because what child wants a robot that turns to a rock? That’s the basic premise, right? So they suffered, all these issues are from woman IT and they’ve got some better ideas. So that’s the physicality of this object is more difficult to work with but they’re also open minded. What I’ve been discovering and the outside IT space, is people have an appetite for improvement. It’s quite interesting being in tech so long, people raise thirsty for something different, how can I change what we’re doing is not working? Within IT people has now got a bit [inaudible 38:56] to the Agile world, they haven’t. So the downside is, it’s far more difficult.

My good practices, my stories work even less. So go on to websites, build websites but just the other week, I did a training course for some people, just self-driving car systems like the cameras and self-driving cars. I’ve done fire alarms. So these are interesting things. The work is different, the work is odd. But a lot of what we do has great application in their space, as long as you’re making sure we apply the right things in the right way. And we don’t take across all the good practices, just because it’s good for me not mean it’s good for you. But when you said about nonprofit, that’s the one area I found this stuff quite difficult, not because of the problem space, but because of the leadership style.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:46

Or sense of urgency.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 39:47

Yeah. Or the huge sense of urgency. You sense of like, oh my god, the world is literally burning in some cases like they’re doing but the leadership style could be quite autocratic. I’ve never worked in that ruthless places as charity. Chances are more ruthless than like, basically investment banks, you think investment banks will be cut. So they are kind of, but the chart has been far worse. Far worst as a [inaudible 40:10]. Because I don’t know what it is about it, whether it’s because people won’t leave, they care about the cause. But the actual management styles I find a bit more authoritarian than the classic companies.

And that’s a good thing for us to talk about because we love the mission, we love the purpose, but how the organization is run, if that we’ve even had this in the scrum Alliance, like, I’m a great fan of Howard, who’s the current scrum Alliance, sort of product owner, I’ve known Howard nearly 20 years, he’s a good person, there’s a good hearts in the right place. But that’s not always been true with Scrum Alliance leadership, a nonprofit dedicated to agile, agility, transforming the world of work, being run an authoritarian in a very traditional management structure.

And that’s disappointing for me, but I can understand how it happens. But it’s very disappointing. And so I think, again, the world of work is changing, the world of work not the world of IT, we can help in that space, we also need to listen in that space, because I think we can adjust as much from there as they can for us, that they got two ears, one mouth, so twice as much. But we learn from that. And also…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:26

Easier said than done, yeah.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 41:29

I’m talking, look at me talking service now. I love the sound of my voice. It’s difficult. It’s so difficult just to go but it’s what we got to do. But also not take our eye off the ball. Because I think [inaudible 41:43] would that scrum guide, for instance, is they’ve tried to make it more universal. But we’re making it more universal, watered it down slightly. And so it’s become less applicable to anyone. So if they’re not careful, they’ll have a guide or scrum that works for anyone doing anything, but offers no value. It’s so diluted, it’s so watered down. And so we’ve got to understand that as well I think. As we go outside the world of technology, yeah, we can learn, they can learn, but we got to be a bit careful. So telling them how to do their own work when we do ours properly. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:18

Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, people talk about Scrum and outside of IT. But I spoke with Dave Snowden. Also, I think one of the first ones and he said, Scrum is great for software development period. It’s not good for, in the sense of context of Scrum. And I think, I don’t fully agree, but I think there’s a lot of a lot of truth to that were again, I tell people I see scrum as a recipe. I see it as a little bit of flexible recipe, it’s still at the end of the day, it’s a recipe.

And if you don’t understand the core of that recipe, and if your context doesn’t have all the ingredients for the recipe, then you’re blindly following and trying to fit it into and I don’t know how much Jeff and people that are pushing for scrum outside of IT, how much is it just the business decision versus acknowledging that? Use whatever works and just know what you’re doing in a sense rather than hey, Scrum is for everything. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: Nigel Baker 43:36

Scrum isn’t for everything, it really, really isn’t. I think there are some deeper, so I remember, I’m going to say reading, but between you and I know, not reading, watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis was very famous children’s book, very famous film. So I think they did some films, Disney did some films recently on them. But there was a cartoon in the 1970s in the UK, they probably in the UK, always shown a Christmas or a show, very popular. Now here’s the problem. They talked about like magic in Narnia, and I can’t remember the exact plot but I do remember Aslan, the lion saying, you need to know deeper magic or you got new this magic, they kill him.

But he knows a deeper magic comes back. I only think there’s a deepest scrum under Scrum, right? And still too much of is just the fossil shape like the footprint is not the foot. Like say for me, there’s some universal patterns behind what we do that I think have a huge amount of cross applicability, sense of purpose, idea of what you’re doing, idea of empowered teams making decisions, working together collaboratively, talking to each other every day, empirically judging your work, looking not what you made, but how you made it and feeding back that’s like a universal truth within, right? Which I think has a lot of cross applicability. Backlogs, product backlogs, standing up in scrums reviews and retros. Those are all religions or recipes to try and create that underlying deeper magic. I think that students blog, basically, but in those deeper patterns have much more strength than some people realize.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:26

But those are patterns though, neither of those patterns are not scrum, right? They existed before scrum.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 45:32

Yes. But I’ve been taught recently, who invented Scrum? Who invented it? Could you say, oh, I just [inaudible 45:40] but one of the country wrote down what other people were doing, if I draw a picture of an elephant, did I invent the elephant? No. I said I just [inaudible 45:48] supposedly read the research paper, new product development game, supposedly, and I said, here’s to a team try it out. But the team already try out ideas before that. And so did he created it? No, he did not? Did he influence it? You’re the chef, if I come along, taste your soup and add a little bit of salt, did I create a soup? No. It’s like, and so like, but then you go to the kitchen and [inaudible 46:16] they invented Scrum.

No, they look to what other people are doing. That’s what I mean, there’s a deeper for another nice thing, what’s got the strength, these deeper underlying patterns have been around a long time. Daily scrums turned up in monasteries in the Middle Ages [inaudible 46:31]. So these kinds of a long time, what I think we do is focus a bit more on them. And a little bit less on perhaps specific recipes of how to achieve them. Those recipes are good. Because always you end up with, so I’ve said this story before and it’s unfair, but it’s good thing, these are finishes. Like I go to church, I didn’t go to church, let’s think I go to church. I have been to church, my mother was religious, I would go to church, and I’ll sit in a church of England church, and the church service would happen, right?

And to be honest, as a nine-year-old boy, I’ve got no idea what’s going on. Now as incense being waved, things being drunk, and I’m like, I don’t know what that is. He’s dressed up as a woman, I just don’t, I do not know, I didn’t have any context. So it just becomes a boring ritual. If you’re Christian, those things are great symbology for you, they’re great, meaning, they have real resonance that takes you to a spiritual place that gives you deeper happiness and understanding. But me as an eight-year-old child, I’m just like, I don’t know, they just like a space marine, what’s going on?

And so I think far too many people are having, ritualizing that their agility, not even scrum, their agility, but not in the right way to give a recipe to give structure and help and set the framework, a trellis on which to build their new ideas. But instead is just a ritual to follow, forgetting the real reasons behind it. Scrum is a great example, we stand up for 15 minutes every day. Why? Because my boss told me to. Not because I gain value out of it. And so I think if we can clear away some of that noise and get to the deeper truths, I think people get more value from this. It works in more contexts. People understand it better and it spreads better because people can communicate it better. But that’s not…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:25

That’s challenge, right? Because what we’re talking about is creating people to understand why we are doing daily stand ups. Why should I? Why is it better for me as a developer to manage my work than having somebody manager for me, right? But that’s difficult for people that have been conditioned, right? Not to think that way or they just don’t want that responsibility.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 48:50

The risk is, the team’s haven’t got, they’ve got responsibility for the negative side not the positive side. So people say now you’re responsible for planning your work, right? But they never say, and you get rewarded or you get more pay, right? But if you get it wrong, you’re bad. So responsibility without power is abuse. It’s slavery. It’s just a weight without support. And so I think people find it very easy to say, you now have more responsibility, but find it very difficult to add the associated power with that responsibility. And you can decide what you build and you can learn how to do it.

I think Spider Man’s uncle said it best. With great power comes great responsibility. Well, it’s the other way around as well. If you’re going to have great responsibility, you need to have great power. Otherwise if I dressed up as Superman and [inaudible 49:50] and pistol Okay, what is this? Really quickly finding I’m in a Spider man’s suit [inaudible 49:58] ability to see if that will suit you and it’s not fair without the powers to give me that job.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:02

Yeah. So I mean that points back to what you said earlier, which is the leadership and level authority that you’re willing to delegate and have you seen any shifts in that? Giving people a little bit more authority, we talked in the new scrum guide, talks about self-managing which is essentially saying that if you’re self-managing team, I’m assuming you’re deciding the what and how.

Speaker: Nigel Baker 50:35

Yeah, but they’ve redefined that by saying self-monitors, you decide to walk around the house, but then they’re including product owner in the team. So it’s kind of a bit of a cheat, but not many people’s I would like, I’d see organizations do it more naturally is, it is difficult for organizations to change to that to give more power to teams, if they haven’t classically had that power in place. So more in tech, so when I work with serious tech companies, that our technology and business are quite highly aligned, it seems to be a lot easier than when it’s like this, when technology and business are separate worlds like a law firm, the law firm is very different animal.

And so they find it far more difficult to give that ability to those teams. I think it’s crucial. What I would say is my concern, the YMCA more often than not to be cynical, but I did say that of cynicism is that with all the coaching skills we’re adding, all these people skills we’re adding, I had a concern about 18 months ago, and it seems to be coming to fruition, that with all these coaching skills we’re adding to people that need us for instance, we seem to be equipping villains with slightly more sophisticated weaponry. So what’s happened rather than changing how analogies like Oh, I know I don’t tell, now I support. Well, instead of we giving them tools to give them sharp claws to get around the side of the shells of the developers and the workers. So tell me why you think you can’t get that done by Christmas? And so again, when I was a developer, it’s quite easy. People came straight at you. They’d come straight for you, [cross talk 52:17] and it’s horrible. It’s disgusting. But at least for the straight line, you can dodge it as a developer, you got tricked, you got methods to get out of trouble, when people’s like invade sophisticated with those tools. It’s abusive coaching, is using coaching tools to manipulate. And I think I get really into ethics these days.

So some even on Certified Scrum Master, which is supposed to be an entry level course, when I talk about coaching methods, I really narrowed it down to look, do no harm, stay on work. It’s not about manipulation, it’s not about an agenda and really [inaudible 52:51] that home. Because otherwise, all that happens is we’ll just take a bad culture and make it worse, rather than changing the culture of how they work. And again, that’s something in the Agile space. I think a lot of us have been excited with these new tools and spread them for a while. And now we’ve got to make sure we sort of reap what we sow, and make sure we’re putting in the ethical side with the rest of it. Because we’re all humans, we’ll fail. I got really fat in lockdown. Well, [inaudible 53:17] I traveled 15 years for work and put weight on and got a bit chubby.

And I was always telling my wife, she said he got to lose weight, and I’m trying but it’s hard on the road. It’s like you travel, you eat and you eating the wrong at the wrong time. I’ve been at home for 18 months, and I’ve put on 28, 30 pounds or so [inaudible 53:38] turns out it wasn’t the job I like to eat. And so I decide, so my two, I got to finish on this. My two major points are, there’s a huge ethical component to this, to what we do. But correspondingly we’re all human and failing going to break those ethics, as if we can square that circle. I mentioned CS Lewis earlier on, he said about humility. He says, it’s not thinking less of yourself, not putting yourself down, is thinking of yourself less. Not putting yourself in the center of it. If we can sort of embrace humanity, embrace a bit of humaneness but I’m failing and so are you let’s try and find a way through this.

If we can embrace those things with a bit of humbleness, I think then we got a toolset to really change how things are. And that means stopping the sort of iconifying or whatever the word is, or agile people, saying [inaudible 54:26] being put on pedestals, we’re going to stop that. We got to stop as a community rely on just a couple of people and be more community based. And just understand people are fragile and make mistakes. There’ll be people saying the wrong things at the wrong time and just understanding that happens. Let’s try and work with, we’ll fail, let’s try and work and find a better way forward. And by doing that we build environments that work but still before about agile organizations, don’t make those mistakes. They’ll do things bad. As coaches we’ll go ahh but we’re just going to say okay, the Christians would say love the sinner, hate the sin.

That talks about your great human being. Let’s see what we can do about it. I think that’s all mindset, I think is what we really need to sort of help, take us to the title of this Agile to agility. Take us on Agile to agility. I think that’s what we need to do.

Joe Justice

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:37

Who is Joel Justice? And the making of the Joe justice? I want to know where did you grow up? What got you in? Because like you know how I got introduced to Joe Justice watching a TED Talk. Or maybe just learning about wiki speed, but I don’t know anything else. And I think people want to know who is Joe Justice?

Speaker: Joe Justice 01:01

What? Really, do you want to take the conversation to what we can do? But that might be a pretty niche audience. And that they’d like, they’d want to know, but I don’t think that’s going to…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:14

Just tell us. Tell things that people might not know , what’s been your journey? And if you had to look from outside in ,how would you describe your justice? What’s important to you and what got you where you are today?

Speaker: Joe Justice 01:36

I’m happy to, if you want to, I’m happy to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:39

Let’s timebox it to maybe I don’t know, what do you think is fair?

Speaker: Joe Justice 01:46

We can do. I love Jim Benson’s Lean Coffee, so we can check in seconds and say this topic or a new one?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:55

That’s awesome. By the way, I’m talking to him, I think next week too. So I have some question. But yeah, let’s timebox it. Let’s do that.

Speaker: Joe Justice 02:05

I think Jim Benson is really not as well known as his genius should suggest, I think he’s an undiscovered and not undiscovered. He’s got 1000s of people that know all about him and hundreds of companies that are all about him. But it should be billions and millions based on his contributions. And I think most people don’t know enough about how awesome Jim Benson is. So I think that conversation if you’re about to interview him,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:41

And I’ll let him know what you said, because I feel like same thing about you and others, like more people should be aware of your work and stuff that you stand for. And though I think you’ll like to hear that. But let’s come back to Joe Justice, anti box and maybe a couple of minutes and see. So how did you get started? How did you get in? Introduce maybe to building stuff and eventually to Agile.

Speaker: Joe Justice 03:17

Yeah, well, people have asked that before. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to go one step before that question. Some new content in this podcast that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about in any recording.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:32

That would even better.

Speaker: Joe Justice 03:34

Yeah, let’s make some stuff that only people can get here. So my ancestors on my mom’s side came to the United States, the boat after the Mayflower. They were the very first settlers, the second boat of settlers to what is now the United States. And we don’t know why do we do use his last name Kim, but it looked like political disagreement, wanting to, before that in England and most of Europe, if you had different religious beliefs from whoever the ruler was, you were legitimately tortured or killed, right? And it doesn’t even mean they were that passionate about whatever their religious belief was.

It’s just that they didn’t want to switch belief based on whatever the ruler did. So it’s more of a political stance probably, is what it looked like. So imagine someone who leaves for the new world on a boat, these are hardy people. These are hardcore principles and goals driven people. And that’s my ancestor. There’s this book called The Book of Dewey. And it links Dewey’s line as parents directly back to Charlemagne. So whether Charlemagne is good or bad, Charlemagne was strong and that’s my ancestor. And then we go further down. And they were big people in small towns during the Gold Rush, they ran the furniture store and the coffin making store, you know what were people who make stuff do.

So you have a carpenter come to a town, what can they do? They can make furniture, they can make coffins, they can make hardware. And so they sell that to the folks going out to the gold rush. Well, and then they’ve made the majority of the money in this pop up, this mini town that just happened, right? So they started the bank. And then they buy stock in the minds. And they became the biggest to do people in these tiny little towns. And that’s my family. It’s like successful start-ups. That’s what a start-up was in the gold rush.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:50

Back in the day, yeah.

Speaker: Joe Justice 07:39

Well, they went on into World War II and my grandfather became a one star general, Brigadier General. And what he was famous for was how humble he was, he always introduced himself as a farmer. And as soon as the war ended, he went back to a farm and he never in his small town said, I’m General Dan, I was told he died when I was really small. I didn’t meet him, but I was really small. But I was told he always introduced himself as farmer Dan. And his brother became a three-star general, they don’t make many of those, that is completely unusual. And he oversaw the construction of Houston Space Center, he was head of the Army Corps of Engineers.

And he oversaw the construction of Fermi lab, and all types of massive infrastructure projects that then allowed all types of innovation to happen. So I like to think of this as the ultimate start-up incubator. Well, not the ultimate but the concept of a start-up incubator right after World War II is Fermilab, or NASA, right? That’s what they were. And that’s my family. Then my other great uncle is one of the heads of one of the Ivy League universities or was. And then my mom gets born. And she’s an army brat. And she’s beautiful. I have a beautiful mom. And she’s the general’s daughter. And think of this dynamic. The general who’s like, you report to the general, right? The general tells you when you can eat.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:34

Is this where the Croatian side comes in, the Croatian dad or?

Speaker: Joe Justice 07:39

Yeah, it’s all about to make perfect sense, it’s all about to make perfect sense. So you have this European long legged, Swedish, Finnish, German, English generals’ daughter, and as the general, she grew up in Turkey, and then occupied Japan, they had servants, they lived in a movie stars house, which is part of the awful thing that happens with war. I mean, you just take the nice house and whoever’s living there leaves or is jailed, right? I mean, and that my mom grew up in that, in this privilege. Interestingly, that wasn’t lost on her, the sense of justice and its stock, which is good, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:27

Yeah, it tells you a lot about the person if you aren’t aware of that. It’s easy to get used to the world that you live in and to be humbled and to actually understand it. And that tells you a lot about the character I guess of the person because, what I’ve learned is, it’s easy to get used to good and nice things, right?

Speaker: Joe Justice 08:55

Humans seem to legitimately get used to anything. But I love you resonating with what I was also wishing to communicate that some people choose to think is this just, what can I do to improve the justice of this situation? Not only just cope with the reality whether it’s awesome or not awesome. Eventually she was stationed in Hawaii. Well, her dad, the one star general, Ray Dan, General Ray Dan was stationed in Hawaii. That’s where she went to high school.

And everybody wanted to date her as my understanding. I mean, I of course wasn’t born yet. But that’s told by my nanny. She’s beautiful, she’s the general’s daughter and they have the ideal arguably post in in Hawaii. And she then goes to St. Mary’s College, the sister school of Notre Dame College in South Bend, Indiana. And My dad is 100% Croatian. And as I think, you are too, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:08

I’m from there. Yeah, I grew up in Sarajevo not necessarily but used to be all part of same country.

Speaker: Joe Justice 10:13

Well, and there’s some really..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:16

Same people.

Speaker: Joe Justice 10:17

Yes. Same people, and extremely similar, not same but extremely similar culture. But I mean, really you go down the street in Croatia and Bosnia and Serbia and Montenegro, you go down the street, and the culture is a little different. So arbitrarily drawing national boundaries is pretty weird in a place like that, because it’s really similar and yet completely nuanced. And what a beautiful part of the world in terms of people and culture and architecture and rocks and lakes and..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:53

Everything. Yeah, I was so happy to hear that when you said that you have the roots in the Balkans. I’m like, man, now I see why I gravitate towards this guy and why. And it was just nice to hear. Yeah, so sorry. Yeah. By the way, checking, I’m enjoying this. So I think we just keep going with this.

Speaker: Joe Justice 11:17

For now. And I’ve never talked about this in any kind of a podcast or anything. So if anyone was interested in this, this is the only place it’s been discussed today. So my dad, both his parents came over from the Balkans, Croatia, specifically, but in any case they all moved around inside ancestrally. So they’re in the Balkans in general, that part of the world happened to be Croatia. And they both came to the United States. Many people do ask about my name. And now I finally get to answer it. My grandfather on my dad’s side his name was Eustace. Eustace and in Pearl Harbor at that time, they would Americanise everyone’s name. If you were Paulo, if you were Powell, it became Paul. Right period. You became a simplification of all those things. And Eustace became Justice. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:24

It’s Eustace. Yeah, Croatian. And just now like if somebody gave me whatever, I wouldn’t have guessed. But that didn’t just happen in Pearl Harbor, happened in New York, right? like when people….

Speaker: Joe Justice 12:41

Everywhere. Sorry [inaudible 12:42] in Ellis Island, or wherever.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:47

Ellis Island. Yeah.

Speaker: Joe Justice 12:48

And that’s what happened to my grandpa. Well, my grandpa met my grandma in Chicago, and she was also 100% Balkans, 100% Croatian in this case and they got married. Now interestingly, she like her mother, which was not that uncommon back then had been sold as a house servant when she was like eight years old. And so it was completely out of touch with her roots. And maybe the same with her mom before that. The world has become way more civilized in the last two years, a little bit and it’s already pretty hardcore, right? So they meet and they marry and they open a restaurant in Los Angeles when Los Angeles was not a big city, like basically a port town, a hard-working town.

And my grandpa laid bricks, totally uneducated, really hardworking, super muscular Balkan dude. And they had three kids. One went to be a pro football player. So that’s my uncle, uncle John. Uncle John Justice became a pro football player in America. And get out of being born from pretty much poverty, they ran a cheap diner and laid bricks. And the whole family grew up working in the diner in LA, but it wasn’t the LA we have now, right? This is 60 years ago. And then my dad was getting beat up all the time. His brother, John would take him to the park and say, who wants to fight my brother? And for uncle John, who’s already big and muscular to prove his chops, but also to try to toughen up his brother to do him a favor, right?

He got a broken nose, he had a deviated septum. And from youth, right? He was just constant. And he wasn’t small but he wasn’t big like uncle John was, he was like a normal but kind of fit. Well, so he poured himself into academics. He’s like, how am I going to get out of this? And he got his PhD in Nuclear Physics from Notre Dame under scholarship. He had no money. So it was all scholarship, but not much money. The restaurant did okay, but they were lower middle class at best, and from nothing. So already a success story, I think. And he put himself through private college, one of the most prestigious colleges at the time. In the new nuclear engineering, nuclear physics department. He then taught nuclear physics at Notre Dame. And he invented a device that helps treat cancer with radiation therapy. Got the patent on that, I think, his PhD was on the beginnings of that device, and then I think patented it. And then he moved around setting up what’s now called radiation oncology departments, mostly in the US.

I think mostly in the US. So every three or four years, he’d go to a new city, because he’d been hired in to found their radiation oncology department, he would install his machine or a derivative of it, and he would use it and also the business of the hospital to run it. Well, when he was teaching at Notre Dame, the sister school is St. Mary’s, and there was this beautiful lady walking around, taught himself to play the guitar. And he would play in the park and so you have this like, not as huge as my uncle John, the pro football player, but this pretty muscular, fit, really smart, tan skin, and he’s playing the guitar he wooed her, and…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:59

Things we’ll do for a woman.

Speaker: Joe Justice 17:02

Oh, man, the things people do for what they really like.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:06

Like, it’s crazy. Yeah.

Speaker: Joe Justice 17:08

And he decided he really liked this lady and she decided she really liked him and they had six kids, they got married and had six kids. They did it in the right order at that time. Not everyone did, right? But they did, got married and had six kids. And I’m the last one. I’m number six. And everyone in my family has gone on to do nutty interesting stuff. And it’s a bizarre parallel life. Yeah, and me being the last one, like, everyone except me, went to what’s called classical education, most people call it that, whether you spoke Latin, studied Greek, learn to play the recorder, all your school plays where Shakespeare similar classical education, I didn’t.

Those schools where folks went were really changing by the time I was coming around, and the finances were quite different. And a lot of stuff was happening. So I didn’t. But I grew up with four sisters and a brother speaking Latin, writing in Greek, pinning bugs to cork boards for biology class, actually studying vivisection and stuff. And that, by the way, is one of my earlier memories is being so freaked out at the injustice that we would kill, it was a cricket, is what it was, grasshopper to study it, like, why? How unfair if we’re thinking from the grasshopper’s perspective?

This hand comes over it from somewhere huge, and then puts it in a jar with a mothballed nail polish remover, and so it fades out and its life’s over. Like, why is that fair? And I was screaming let the grasshopper go or otherwise I was screaming. I was crying let the grasshopper go. I was like 6, 5 6. Yeah, that’s one of my most early memories. And I was born legally blind. And no one noticed because there was five other kids. And they’re like, just really clumsy. And I was riding a bike, they’re like, why didn’t you stop for the stop sign? I was like, what stop signs? I could not see. And people did not know and I was really smart. So I kept up in school even though I couldn’t see. They’re like his handwriting is really bad. They didn’t know until I was seven.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:52

And people probably wouldn’t especially like it probably for your parents too. It’s like that’s the especially with the sixth child. I guess that’s the last thing to think about because…

Speaker: Joe Justice 20:01

Totally, they’re like, is everyone alive? Did anyone lose a finger, right? And it’s just different when you’ve got that many. And so as an adult, I completely forgive everybody. But at the same time, it’s frustrating, that shows how much attention I got, right? That’s just real. That’s just what it was. He was blind and no one noticed for seven years, that’s legit. That’s what happened. Three eye surgeries later, now I see really well. Although now I’m 41 and almost 42. My eyes are starting to get bad again. So I’m sure I’ll get glasses again soon or maybe another eye surgery.

But something. Yeah. So that brings me up to seven years old. Because everything was blurry, and like, severely blurry. I saw light and color, but it was just I didn’t know who was who. I didn’t know who was my family, who wasn’t. So I’d really clean clothes. And when you’re three, that’s okay but when you’re seven, they’re like something’s wrong with that boy? Like, if I lose your hand, I don’t know who you are, I can’t find you again. And no one understood that. So they’re like, why is Joe clinging? But what I would do is draw and that’s one of the reasons why people didn’t think I was blind. And it was impressionistic, colors and I would spend a lot of my time doing that, because I could just sit there and draw and then I knew my family would come find me again.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:45

That’s crazy. Because I can personally relate to it, because I always had good eye sight, but my son has, he’s four years old.

Speaker: Joe Justice 21:54

Congratulations.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:55

Thank you. And he has some sight issues and you can’t really I mean, I can try to empathize, I can try to put myself into but I can only imagine, like you said, you clinging to something because you don’t know, there’s a lot of unknown, right? And that probably shapes you as a person, right?

Speaker: Joe Justice 22:21

For sure. Yeah, for sure. It’s awesome to try to understand the continuation of the emotional connections, the stimuli that helped make companies, that helped make products, that help make services, that help make people. And we have no bigger data set than ourselves. So trying to understand other companies, other people, other systems by looking back at our chain of connections is super fascinating. Because it works, right? You can see the connections. And parents have such an edge, because they get to study something with an adult mind from when it was born up until wherever it is now.

And parents and grandparents really get this stuff. They’re like, why see how that company did X? Because they can see how kids in general do this, especially if they all grew up in the same neighborhood, where kids played together. So they see a sample size of like 20 kids, and know something about their upbringing. And then they look at a company and they’re like, oh, yeah, I see why they have a culture of sit-down meetings and slow innovation. Just get it, is funny how solvable the problem is. It also makes sense why companies repeat, and so often have the same failure modes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:49

Failure modes, yeah. So maybe to shift gears a little bit that just reminded me and what I want to talk to you about is you’ve recently worked at Tesla, and that whole experience working at Tesla, could you maybe talk about it? What did your day look like? And when it comes to agility and innovation, what are they doing that most people wouldn’t know? Because, some of it, based on what I’ve heard you say, it’s out there. There are that many companies at least, it’s not well known that they’re doing that, or maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. But what did you learn at Tesla? What do you think people will find interesting?

Speaker: Joe Justice 24:28

Just this morning, I was in a meeting that I’m really grateful for, put on by Steve Denning. And Steve Denning was a manager at the World Bank, which is still a force globally, but during its heyday is when Steve Denning was even more involved. And the other attendees are all movers and shakers that care about agile, so it’s really accomplished people many of whom have billions of dollars that they influence how it’s spent whether euro or yen [inaudible 25:05] and they all care about agility and they meet on a regular cadence to discuss mostly management issues is what it comes down to.

And despite how cool these people are, and how awesome Steve Denning is, that agile mindset Leadership Summit, kind of that’s not what it’s called but that’s sort of what it comes down to, conversations about leadership from people who care about agility in positions of power. Is so flipping boring. It’s so irrelevant. They’re talking about do we use fast goals or do we use smart goals? What kind of meetings do we have? What kind of leadership attributes do you hire? And I just stay on mute most of the time, when I do unmute people look at me like I’ve got three heads, because it’s such a different conversation. Wow. So to segue into what you actually asked, the musk companies are so different, that even the successful agile companies look like irrelevant.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:26

Because maybe they’re not agile, I think, if you look at it, like, mass is all about agility and having options and a lot of us call ourselves, including myself agile, but we have no idea what these companies are doing. So what are some of the insights? Give us examples because I’ve heard you talk about it, how does it work at Tesla? And the people will go like, yep, that’s how…

Speaker: Joe Justice 26:56

I will say it. There’s some stuff that I really wish I could say that I don’t get to say. It’s still under non disclosure. But interestingly, there’s really powerful, I think, effective stuff, I do get to talk about. And so I’ll talk about that. There aren’t meetings, there aren’t leaders. And I’ve said, I’ve tried to say that before. And I think people then don’t know well, then what is there, right? I’d like to try an analogy that maybe years ago, I thought and said but today, I think it really matches. So I haven’t said this at least recently. Elon Musk wants there to be people living on Mars self sustainable, right?

He’s got this goal that if a meteorite hits the earth, or whatever happens, there’s a backup of the human species in as many places as possible, starting with Mars because it’s the next likely most achievable, sustainable place. So that’s the goal, right? Elon Musk isn’t trying to make a company to sell. Elon Musk isn’t trying to make a product that he wants to sell. Elon Musk isn’t trying to make a service that he wants to sell. He’s got this goal. And it’s how do you fund that? And so now you bring in the idea of business. Okay, so first, there’s this goal. And then how do you fund that? Okay, well, there’s two circles, Elon says, there’s how many people can afford to go to Mars?

And how many people want to go to Mars? And he says, you got to grow both of those to make them overlap. So you have to make it cheaper to go to Mars and you have to increase global wealth, which is already interesting, most people are like, how do I make a service that people want to buy? That’s not the mind at all. And then the other side, it’s how do you make more people want to go to Mars, have people that are interested in growing their wealth so that they’ll overlap. And so now you’ve introduced business, and that business already has a social good angle. One is, get people to Mars, which is arguably the biggest social good, a backup of the human species.

And the other one is, how do you grow people’s wealth so that they can afford, right? So he’s like, how do I make other people have more money, right? Like an anti business model? Well, that drives all the decision making, then the company is, it’s a it’s a printer. SpaceX is a printer, Tesla is a printer, like an inkjet or laser jet printer. If Musk could buy a laser jet, or an inkjet on Amazon that would print out starship rockets, that’s all he would do, and it’d be done. But he can’t write that, that’s not a product yet. So he’s like, how do I make that printer? And that’s it. Well, how many leaders do you need inside your inkjet printer?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:09

Depends how much you want to print.

Speaker: Joe Justice 30:11

Zero. You want some pieces of metal that move around an ink and it’s about materials. If you look at SpaceX hiring list, there is not one executive position. They don’t have them and they don’t hire them. Gwynne Shotwell is CEO. Well, what she actually does is everything, right? But functionally, the primary responsibility is sales. And not a traditional sales organization. I mean, actually booking deals, being a little bit facetious here, but how she does that is even different than most sales organizations think they’re run. So calling it a sales organization is a bit of a misnomer. But what she does is she books launches; she gets satellites booked. She’s basically the Buy It Now button.

You have questions about the Buy It Now button, talk to Gwynne Shotwell. And there’s no leadership positions. They don’t exist. What they have is welders. I mean, think about it like a printer. If the printer was making spaceships, what would happen in the printer, there’d be welders, there’d be a lot of robots. Do you need some people? Yeah, you need maybe now with the current state of technology, some people, you need people that program robots. Look at SpaceX hiring the robots, you need people who buy metal. Now largely that’s automated, right? Because you write software to do what people do. So people do creative work. And this is something that I am becoming famous for saying.

And it’s totally true in the most companies, people do creative problem solving, automation, robot software is for everything else. So if something’s a standard operating procedure in the Musk companies, it’s a software script or a robot, and it’s a printer, there’s no leaders, there’s managers in that, there’s like group leads not to answer questions, but to model good work to keep people upskilled. It’s almost like an apprenticeship model and fast forward. And there’s that. There’s no hierarchy, it’s flat, there are no meetings, there’s no chairs, there’s almost no chairs, there’s no desks, there are not thought leader positions.

I mean, search like agile leader in the Musk companies, it doesn’t exist. Search leader anything, if you search project manager, you’re going to get almost no hits. And there’s 1000s of open positions across the Musk companies. So this is not a, it’s a meaningful search, the sample size is large. But what you will get is new product introduction technical project manager. And that means you’re programming robots, you’re pulling sleds of parts, you’re buying parts, you’re configuring machines, you’re anchoring machines to the floor with bolts. It’s a printer, and the only positions are what you would have inside a printer.

Elon Musk says the factory is the product. That’s what he means, he’s making a printer that makes spaceships, he’s made printers that make cars, he’s making a printer that makes neural link systems, you look at neural link, there’s not like Chief Architect, it doesn’t exist. Instead there’s like, if we’re going to make a million of these neural link implantable devices a year, what do you need in the machine that makes these positions? And it has physicians.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:39

But that seems like it’s the future right? If you can do that as a business, that’s your competitive advantage. That’s seems at least when I think about like, look at the car manufacturer not even car, they don’t even call them cars anymore, right? Technology that moves or whatever slogans are. But it’s is who’s going to do exactly what you just said.

Speaker: Joe Justice 34:12

What’s interesting is the Musk companies continued to ramp in value, and their products continue to ramp in terms of quality. Already Tesla has had the highest quality marks of any car company ever made. They didn’t before but they do now. And they had the best financials. They didn’t before but they do now. And Hyperloop looks like it might do the same thing. Starlink looks like it might do the same thing. etc, etc, etc. And then that question, who else is going to do this?

It’s Agilists. It really is and I will introduce a divider in Agilists. Agile started from a few people who were doing work and helping other people do it. They were charismatic lead developer types. And they were really good at making stuff, mostly software, they’re really good at making stuff. And they would like to help other people make stuff. And they discovered what’s a really lightweight way to coordinate with groups of people to make stuff in really effective ways. And then some consultants came in, and tool vendors came in and said, how do we make..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:32

[inaudible 35:32] everything up?

Speaker: Joe Justice 35:36

How do we make consulting and tool vendors and training out of this stuff? And they had nothing to do with these charismatic people doing work. Well, if you look at Musk, Musk doesn’t do any agile training, except what I brought in, that’s the only agile training the most companies is the ones I did, my setup are conducted. And they don’t do any consulting. And if you look at all the big established consulting companies, they’re too slow for the Musk companies, they’re irrelevant, they have no value to add the musket companies, so they don’t get in. None of those other agilists, tool vendors, consultants get in.

Who gets in? The people who make products in groups, who are some of the original agilists. And some of the people I still tremendously respect, though they’re super welcome in Musk companies, because that’s what you’d want inside a printer. How many training classes need to happen inside your inkjet? None, it doesn’t matter. How much training do you need to be a really good nozzle to spray ink? All you need is a good definition of done and definition of ready, which is part of agile, right? You don’t need any waterfall plan to do that either. So it’s not like waterfall versus agile. It’s like doers versus not doers, and agile doers will be able to thrive in a Musk company.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:11

And why do you think that is? Is that the mindset is that just that people have [inaudible 37:15] like, what distinguishes the Agilists from others?

Speaker: Joe Justice 37:22

Well, I actually think you could answer that question better than anybody. So I’d actually like to ask you that. And then if any of its really didn’t match what I thought I learned in the Musks companies I will say no, but maybe not that part. But would you try?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:36

Sure. So if I would look at it, I would say that it’s experience. It’s a holistic view, right? If you just focused on your own way of doing things or specialization that you’re doing, that kind of limits you. But if you understand the bigger picture, of we’re creating, like, what’s the goal? And what are we trying to do here? And you can say, Yes, I can help here and I can jump on this. That’s what people want. They don’t want people sitting around. They want like you said doors like, hey this is what I’m… here’s a problem. I can jump in and help on this. Here I am, right? So that would be my kind of answer to that.

Speaker: Joe Justice 38:20

May I add to that, because I only agree. I have to put a fine point on that. I will say what I’m trying to say here by agilists is people who have a functional user facing definition of done in mind all the time. And folks who think in phases, but it’s a phase that doesn’t yet get to the customer, like I do design or I do field validation, they don’t fit. They don’t fit in these companies. And they’re frustrated in these companies, because they’re being asked to think end to end all the time. But people who are comfortable working wherever they are, maybe the product doesn’t exist yet. Or maybe it’s a Legacy product or a collection of legacy and new, that doesn’t matter.

You walk up to a system and think with the functional value creating end in mind, what do we do next? And that’s what a sprint was supposed to be. But now you have planning sprints and PSI and all kinds of stuff that wouldn’t fit in a Musk company. So you have these doers, and they’re comfortable working alone or with groups or with huge groups and it’s faster when they work in groups. There’s awesome data around mob now and almost everything I did in the Musk companies is basically mob. But they’re comfortable walking up to a system at any state and helping the end state and they’re not thinking in terms of segments.

Most people will say phases, but you could also call a version of phase, a v1 faces the customer v2, that’s fine, right? But what we don’t want is a plan phase. So people say, I’m a planner, they have no place in these companies. People who say I’m a test and field automation engineer, they have no place in these companies, people who say I work on products, that’s this agilist. And they fit really naturally and really well. And Silicon Valley is so full of these people, that they just can’t even talk to traditional consultancies anymore. Because they’re like, you don’t understand me, you don’t understand my companies. What do you mean, you’re trying to improve my financial validation phase? I don’t know. No, I’m not going to hire you. And in fact, I don’t even want you talking to my people, you’re going to slow them down and pollute them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:53

But look at the agile, like, you refer to it. Like the whole, the weird part, at least partially, I guess, the consulting training, it’s we all know, it’s bunch of BS, in a sense, right?

Speaker: Joe Justice 41:11

For a broken, slow company, it’s a stepping stone. And I love that. So scaled agile framework, many people will accuse as being the most complicated and slowest of all agile frameworks. It has a really valuable place in the world, because some companies are on 12-month, new product introduction cycles, or slower, and everyone’s arranged by non customer facing phase, yes, introduce Scaled Agile Framework, it’ll be so much better than the horrible world you’re in. By comparison, that’s also a slow horrible world. So at some point that will need to be transcended. But yeah, those are stepping stones, if you want to go into GE Power and Light, or anyway, some massive company, all these frameworks, all these trainings have a place. But then someone like me is frustrated, because you’re at these slow, toxic companies all the time, way more to actually go into one of these fast companies that doesn’t need any of this training. They don’t need any of these stepping stones. You just do, you just work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:26

Yeah, it’s like, at some point things are going to catch up with you, right? I joke around, but look a year ago when COVID hit and look at the grocery stores, like they never thought themselves as, like, my grocery experience should be a lot better than what it is today. And it’s like, when everybody sucks, it’s okay to suck, right in an industry? But eventually somebody like either Amazon or, like with Amazon, somebody is going to come in disrupting us. In that point, it’s screwed, because you can’t fast track or you can’t, it’s going to be very difficult,

Speaker: Joe Justice 43:00

like Musk manufacturer, having these really distributed slow global supply chains. So it gets disrupted, and it’s four months or more till new Musk come. And really, maybe that was actually a bad idea. This is lack of agility, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:20

What was the biggest thing that you learned at Tesla? Well, maybe thing that stood out to you, maybe someday you were surprised by that you didn’t expect.

Speaker: Joe Justice 43:33

I’d been working as a consultant and trainer in so many slow, wealthy but slow companies for the last six years before that. That’s what stood out to me so much is that this agile stuff actually works. I’d wiki speed before, which is what enabled me to know this well enough to do all the consulting and training I did after that. And then I spent six years making money, and I think helping companies, but helping wealthy slow companies almost exclusively, and that is disillusioning, right? Because all you see is silo-based skills, separated slow companies, getting into the Musk companies. And I dabbled before during that time, but actually fully dedicating myself as a full-time employee. What that did for me is it was validating. Oh, yeah, okay. You don’t need any hierarchy. You don’t need any leadership.

Every time I internally felt frustrated being in a planning meeting. I remembered. Yes, you don’t need any planning meetings. You don’t need any meetings and it’s okay to not tolerate that slowness and waste. It’s okay to have this allergic reaction to slowness and waste. Because if you don’t in a Musk company, you won’t fit, right? You need to just not tolerate not action. It’s not only a bias towards action, it’s also a comfort and confidence. Okay, here this stood out. How do you make this sustainable pace, and the Musk companies are famous for 12-hour shifts, for people in their 20s without kids working there? What stood out to me is in the area where I worked most of my time, I worked across the entire company. But I had a home base, essentially where I worked most of my time. In that area, more than half the employees were women.

And most people were not in their 20s. There were some 20-year-olds men and women, super strong. They can just really work because of your genetics at that age. But there were some people in their 70s. And it was more than half ladies, which some people think the culture might be too macho for that. Not at all, not at all, it was more than half. And what stood out to me is what made it sustainable for those people because it’s you’re doing all day, right? Well imagine someone who works in a department store. Like maybe they work in the shoes department yet pre COVID, I don’t know if we’ll ever have this again. But I think some of us still remember, someone who worked in a shoe store. And they’re always cleaning and arranging the shoes, they are checking backstock because there aren’t many people working in the shoe area.

And they’re like, how many of these do we have and what size and what color? A guest comes in, a customer comes in? What would you like? And they’re on their feet all day, they have no desk, right? They don’t have one. And they’re getting up and getting down. They’re sitting down and sitting up; they’re putting shoes on guests. They’re being polite and cordial. Well, some of us have met people that have done that their whole career. And maybe now they’re a grandparent, and they’re still working in the shoe department. They have no desk, they’re on their feet all day.

And maybe they’ve been doing it 12 hours a day. Maybe they own the shoe store, right? Well, people have been doing that for generations. That’s who succeeds in the Musk companies. And if you think of some elderly lady who runs a bakery shop or something, they’ve got their own boutique or a cosmetics store or whatever. And they’re just on their feet all day, they don’t have a desk, maybe there’s a stool, they sit on behind the cash register sometimes, but they’re doing their store and they maintain the sign, their full cross functional, they understand the business, they keep their own books. That’s not a new concept, that’s agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:10

Yeah and that just reminded me to just bring the whole circle back. So when my family immigrated here in 95, my dad was engineer electric power station and like coming to United States without no English, they work two jobs in like minimum wage. And it’s that you have some kind of purpose, they never felt like they were tired, they worked two jobs, they were excited to be out of that mess, right? I don’t know, obviously to work at that capacity and that you have to have some type of higher purpose or alignment to the higher purpose or maybe I don’t know what do you think?

Speaker: Joe Justice 49:01

Yeah, well that’s interesting.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:05

Why would you like, if you don’t like what you do and you don’t believe in what you’re doing, why would you want to… is it just because of the money? Maybe it’s not a mix? It’s a not a single.

Speaker: Joe Justice 49:23

Yeah. Oh, man. It’s definitely not because of the money I believe. A lot of the people in the Musk companies are either there because they’re mission driven. It looks like or because they don’t think they have a choice. And the second category might sound super loaded, but I think it’s true. Quite a few of the people I worked with were career factory workers and in the Musk companies, they might be in a knowledge work. Well, everyone does knowledge work like everyone programs robots, and everyone hauls equipment I mean, it’s labor and knowledge, labor and knowledge. But a significant percentage of the people there are career factory employees.

Maybe they have a criminal record, a lot of the people I talked to were ex convicts. And they’re like, it’s just hard for me to get other types of work. They maybe were just to be frank, really ugly. And they’re like, people don’t want me working front of house in a restaurant. Maybe I can be a porter in the kitchen or a factory but I’m born the way I’m born. I had this accident so I came to the factory. And truly, in a Musk company, I’ve never worked anywhere, where it didn’t matter even more what you look like, it did not matter. Most companies, there’s this cast of handsome people that are managers and up and which is weird. I mean really, it’s actually corrupt. And that does not happen in the Musk companies at all.

It’s just not a thing. LGBTQ, lesbian, bi-transgender, gay, more than that, has ranked them Tesla, specifically, the best place in the world to work more than five years, some big number of years running. And I think that’s because you are only your output. I mean, truly, so if you want to just go and work somewhere and not be evaluated on how you did your hair, or what norm you fit in. This is a really good place to do that. You just go and you’re a printer, you’re a printer. And are you making this thing or not? And that’s it. Like truly that is it, more than anywhere I’ve ever been. And that’s good and bad. Because say you’re handsome, and you’re like, people should give me preferential treatment, and I should have an office with a window. I’m handsome, and this is what I’m used to. You’re not going to like it then because…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:29

That’s not going to work for you. Yeah.

Speaker: Joe Justice 52:31

No, that is not an advantage.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:36

That is it. Like you said, there’s good and there’s bad and it’s really interesting. Do just get a peek inside that and understand I’m trying to also think like what’s coming? In a sense, what are the next five to 10 years going to look like for the rest? Because I’m assuming that some of this will be in some ways, right one be understood and applied in other industries in and what’s coming after the big A, Agile?

Speaker: Joe Justice 53:18

Well, the Musk model, and I want to give it a better name. But it’s a specific type of agile, because there’s a lot of agile now, or things that I mean, anyone can call anything agile. So there is a lot of non helpful garbage that people call agile and even spend a lot of money-making pretty pictures and advertising is agile. So it’s hard for a lot of folks to know. So the Musk model, which I will say is a part of Agile is going to be impossible to compete against, is already impossible to compete against. But it takes a very specific type of leader to implement. And I think very few people are going to implement it. The recipe is very simple.

To be Elon Musk is actually a very simple recipe. And I actually even did it for a little while and had huge success. And I think I might do it again. I’m relatively entrepreneurial, and I think many people will but it takes a very specific personality to do it. And it’s a decade longer, longer plan and a lot of people think in two-year, one-year increments, so there’ll be a lot of failures. There’ll be a tremendous amount of failures, but anyone who’s not trying it won’t be able to compete. So we are experiencing now see change across all industry and that’s just going to keep going. There’s a real opportunity, I believe, for you. And it’s to take some of the best people practices, delight in your work practices, sustainable pace practices that don’t slow down companies and bring those to the people who are going to be attracted to the Musk model.

Elon gets it, Elon leads with make it fun. Elon has awesome coffee service across all the Musk companies, I mean world class, you would be challenged to get a better cup of coffee anywhere in the world. And is there for everyone. It’s totally janitorial. It’s not like the manager level gets this copy. No, there is no manager level. Everyone, the janitorial staff, everyone gets awesome coffee service all the time. And the coffee people get awesome coffee all the time, right? And the food service, they really tried to make it Michelin three star right? So you Elon gets it, make it beautiful, make it fun, make it fashionable. And he’s always lead with that. If you are a supermodel, you should feel comfortable working any of the jobs in any of the Musk company. That’s the aspiration right? Well, a lot of people won’t have that mindset and they’ll just see the execution. And that’s going to make really bad working conditions. So what we, as an Agile community can do is reproduce this model, the part that works, but also the human centered design, the developer centered design, a low cognitive load, walk up simple, self organizing, all of which amplify the execution. But as someone who’s only thinking in terms of execution could easily miss.

Having really excellent working conditions that are cheap, is an art that is not well understood. And I think is going to be missed by a lot of companies, it’s going to make some really awful working conditions, they’ll probably be not in the Musk companies because they get it but they’ll probably be companies with series of awful accidents, and burnout and employee theft really unhappy people. And I want to minimize that or dampen the negative impact and help companies do the better thing, how without slowing down, how without big cash output, can you make super fashionable, desirable comfortable places to work that are performing at this level?

And that’s really Elon’s genius. Like his first office for ZIP two, I was not in there. But he says they rented the office, they didn’t have, he and his brother, he and his cousin. They didn’t have money to rent somewhere else. They slept in the office, they showered in the way and they didn’t have enough to pay for two computers. So they had one that was and at night they would shut the server down and code. Because they have one computer and they would stop coding and turn the server on. So the service ran, zip two and I sold it for 20 million or something. So it worked. And how do you do that? Well, you make it the office, as far as I understood, was like a super fun place to work. It’s where you wanted to crash at night. He had dates. And the office was cool enough that you could bring your date there. It wasn’t [inaudible 58:38] It was cool a cool office.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 58:41

Oh please. Yeah, that’s

Speaker: Joe Justice 58:43

No good, even though they slept there, they made it nice. And so it was charismatic and it was fashionable. That’s important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 58:53

And I wanted to spend time there and like, it’s like yeah, that’s amazing.

Speaker: Joe Justice 59:02

So let’s make a lot more start-ups and make it really easy for people to take those as a package. This is where agilists word Cunningham really are phenomenal. That thing, the Agile Manifesto, it’s four sentences. Yeah, with a header and a footer, but four values. It’s super simple. And there’s 12 principles behind it. And they’re all good, but you don’t have to know all 12 to get started. Well, that’s the game. How do you make this so simple, it can play in the back of your mind, like a poem you like, like four sentences long? That helps you totally kick ass. And that’s what the Musk companies do with no management, almost no management with I mean, it’s the real agile, none of this training [inaudible 59:55]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 59:57

Simple, right? It’s don’t complicate it, keep it somewhat simple, right?

Speaker: Joe Justice 1:00:03

But there’s a lot of uncomplicated stuff that wouldn’t make what the Musk companies make. Oh, it’s this very specific implementation that’s not complicated.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:16

I’m excited about the future, I think when I look at things, I think, like we talked about, and again, maybe just to wrap it up, if we look at just the history lot has happened. And we’re in a sense, yes, a lot of things have changed. But I’m excited about the future, because he used to be, if we just look 200 years ago, 50 years ago, it was, in my opinion, a lot worse, but…

Speaker: Joe Justice 1:00:45

Right after World War II, there was, well, actually, during World War II, there was an innovation boom globally, everywhere that could, people were willing to throw themselves at work, and make it their life. And you’re going to have victory gardens at home to grow some of your own food, so you’re more self reliant. It’s okay to work the factory jobs swing shift, it’s okay to work double shifts, riveting airplanes together and designing while you rivet. And there’s no new product introduction, making the Mustang to prop fighter plane, its parts are changing on the line all the time, like this was normal. This was normal. And that generation kept that going in business.

And so you had the containerization movement of shipping, which completely changed global supply chain. You had many, many, many innovations rippling out. And then what happened is their kids were all entitled. And as they got jobs, they’re like, well, I want to sit in an office and have meetings because meetings are fun. Well, then what happens? People in meetings that don’t do with their hands, got all frustrated and bored. Like imagine if you had a Lego set where you didn’t get to touch it. You only could tell someone else what piece to put together, play that way, and they get angry and fight. Well, that’s a company’s now. That’s companies now.

And it’s the kids of the kids or the kids from this highly productive generation that made the lego sets, right? Well, what we’re seeing now is people who are going to be making themselves. Elon works the line in Tesla, he glues parts together. He rivets, he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the factory. When the executive team at Renault is willing to do that, then I’ll buy Renault stock. But until then, his kids telling other kids how to put lego sets together and those are all going to fail.

Tom Mellor

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:37

Who is Tom Mellor?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 00:40

Oh, that’s a really good question. I’m nobody special, I just happen to be in the right place at the right time, many years ago. I didn’t know anything about agility or what was going on, I happen to have been promoted to a project manager in one company. And I already knew the futility associated with being a project manager. This idea that you’re going to predict the schedule of something and programming. And I was new to programming. I came from the business side and knew very little about technology when I transferred over to the technology field in my company. So I came into my company’s IT department as a business analyst. Because I had told the person there, I don’t know anything about programming, I know very little about technical products.

And they said, well, we can put you to work as a business analyst. And I didn’t even really know what that was. But they said, you’re really going to work with the business side to try to figure out what they need and products that we build. And they didn’t use the word products at the time. That’s a term that we use now. But they used applications or systems. And I said, okay, and they said we call those requirements. So you’ll gather these requirements that people need and it sounded so easy, just go talk to them and ask them what they want. And then transfer that back to the programmers and the programmers build it, and then we deliver it back to the business people. And everybody’s happy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:45

That always happens, right?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 02:50

And it seemed to me that it’s a type of manufacturing process, right? It had a kinship to that to me, in that you determined what you were going to build. And then you went built it, and then you delivered it, like building a house really, and it was explained that way to me in our department, that it’s effectively like building a car. And I went through some pretty rigorous training as a business analyst. I taught many classes and I mentored with people. But as I was developing an aptitude for that and becoming familiar with the acumen and that sort of thing. I also started to detect sort of this underlying tension that maybe things don’t always go as they think they’re going to go. And as I moved along in the process of becoming a business analyst, I quickly learned that things often don’t go that you think they’re going to go. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that’s because there’s a disconnection between what people want or what they think they want, and what’s delivered to them. And this is back in 2001, 2002. And we had a very rigorous process that we followed, we actually used a form of Cooper and Lybrand summit de methodology. And it was brutally bureaucratic. The irony behind that I later found out was when Ken Schwaber and I were developing a working relationship and a mentoring relationship, I asked him, what were you building when you first started using Scrum?

And he said, well, we were working for a client and we were actually automating some processing for Coopers and Lybrand, summit de methodology. And I just exploded and laughed at him, and he looked at me very strangely. And he goes, why is that so funny? And I said, that happens to be the methodology we used at my company. He started laughing. And he goes, oh I feel for you. It was horrible. And very bureaucratic, I don’t know how else to describe it. So I had been a manager on the business side, stepped out of management, stepped into what we call, a business analyst position. And then I was encouraged or enticed or coaxed, however you want to characterize, into becoming a project manager. And I had worked with project managers for a couple of years and as soon as I got put in that hot seat, I was promoted. That’s what they called it. I was sentenced to become a project manager. And as soon as I got put into that hot seat, I immediately understood that they’re often in a no-win situation. And I had mentors, of course, and I went through probably one of the most extensive and exhaustive training regimens in project management in private industry, I essentially went through two years, the equivalent of two years of academic training and project management.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:57

How much of that did you use?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 07:02

Yeah, we were expected to use, so it was very defined, right, the process was very defined. And we were expected to align our learning with the methodology and to, and we had a methodology book, you’ve probably seen those Milan, flip them open, and they tell you exactly what you have to do the process manual. And we were expected not to deviate from that and we were audited. To assure that we didn’t, or, if we did that we had, I guess you would call it the permissions to do that. And, so it was probably six months after I had become a project manager, that I picked up an old copy of software testing and quality assurance magazine, STQA was called. And it’s now called Sticky minds. And it’s been around years and years, but it was laying on a coffee table in a room that I happen to be taking a break in so, in the back of it was an article by a guy named Ken Schwaber, who was describing this process that he used, it’s probably a four- or five-page article. And the magazine was a maybe a year old, so I was probably reading it in November of 2003. And it was probably late 2002 edition.

So I looked at the cover, and I said, this has been around a while because it was all this magazine was already a year old. But at the bottom of the article, it said if you want further information, please email Ken Schwaber, and they had the address down there. So I emailed him, I jumped on a computer and I said, this sounds fascinating and I work at a huge company and I’d like to try it here. And we’re having trouble delivering things under the traditional way. And we’re expected to comply with all of the compliance sections of methodology and I said I’d be interested in your opinion. And I don’t have the email response, but I remember it struck me because he, I’m paraphrasing here, but he basically said, hi, Tom, you’re either the dumbest person I’ve ever heard from or the craziest. Either way, give me a call and you put his phone number down.

So I picked up the phone and I called him immediately, and I said, hi, this is the dumb crazy guy that read your book, using Scrum at a big company. And we talked for probably 45 minutes. And basically, he did everything, I think that he could do to convince me not to do it. Oh, he told me this is going to be dangerous for you. I’m sure you’re just loaded down with processes that you have to follow, you probably have a rigorous compliance division, you probably even have a project management office and he goes, look, all those things that these huge companies use to govern their software development is exactly opposite of what we do. And so, I got to thinking and, he finally got to the point, he goes, Look, I think if you use this there, and you’re caught, you could get fired, based on what he told me. And I’m thinking fired for using this? Wow. I just paused and, there was one of those awkward silences, and I finally said, I’m going to do it anyway. And he goes, okay. And he said, well, if by chance, you get fired, and you need a reference, I can probably pitch in one for you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:43

That’s nice of him.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 11:46

He doesn’t even know me. And he’s go out on a limb for me. So I said, Okay. And then he said, if you try it, let me know how it goes for you. And I said, Sure, I’ll, oh, I got your email, I’ll drop you a line. And we started keeping that connection open. Because I tried it. And it worked. I mean, I felt that it worked. And we actually stunned some people at my organization, because we delivered a program much faster than they anticipated. Without the deviation and quality that you would expect. Now I will say we did avoid or even circumvent some of the auditing procedures. And I had told my supervisor, we were going to do that, because they were demanding this system, be delivered in a pretty short period of time. But we’re also working for a vendor, you may know the vendor EDS, the Rosborough’s old company. And they had no idea. Anything about what we were doing. As far as the processing, right? The process of building none of the nomenclature they knew the people I was working with, was, in any way familiar to them, they were sort of reticent to use the vernacular, the vocabulary, because it wasn’t broadly understood. And interestingly, it wasn’t full of acronyms.

Because all of these methodologies have nothing to do. [inaudible 13:33]. And it’s funny when you use an acronym, and then you look at somebody you go, do you know what that acronym actually spells out? And, they’re like no, I only know that the acronym. I don’t know what the entire phrases. So anyway, it worked. And I stayed in contact with Schwaber. And we started forming a relationship, mentoring wise. He was fascinated that I’d actually tried it fortune 50 company. I said I didn’t get fired, obviously. But I said, I think there will be some challenges and problems with this, because we’re not culturally, organizationally set up to do this very well because his concept, even back then was to have an encapsulated team. Right, an autonomous team that was dedicated to that work. And he closely aligned with the theory of constraints.

We talked about things like that a lot. He said, the reason we can’t get things done in these organizations is people are multitaskers . They’re working on way too many things at once. And I said, well, that’s a problem we have. He goes, if you just allowed people to be dedicated to work, you get that work done so much more efficiently and effectively, that you would amaze them. But because their minds are married to this manufacturing mindset, they don’t really want to do that with people. They think it’s going to actually slow work down. And he asked me one time he goes, you have way more work than you can do, don’t you? I said, Oh, God of course. I mean, would they want us to cook all of the meals on the menu and I said, we bake, we can basically get to one side of the menu any kind of lab. Well, you’re not in any unique position.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:56

I mean, Ken likes to from the get go, he even invited you to serve on the Board of Scrum Alliance. How was that experience serving on the board?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 16:08

Yeah, I as we got to know each other, I had been involved in nonprofit boards since the 90s. In the early 90s. And in passing conversation, I talked about that, and I think that’s what caused him to ask me to come on was, we’d already had one board member, fellow named Steve Fram, and his dad was actually a university professor, and had written several books on nonprofit governance. And so Steve made his way onto the board, Steve was an aficionado of Scrum. And I think had been trained by Schwaber in it. But along the line of conversation, he discovered that Fram, his father, basically expert in nonprofit board governance and working so he asked Steve to come on, Steve was a startup entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, was extremely bright, and very even keel emotionally and everything. So, I think it worked out well, for the board to have Steve on there. And the other people that he had on the board were, I would call them qualified professional level people. He had a vice president from key bank. In fact, when I looked around the board, my first meeting, I’m thinking, if you really want to categorize people by level of position in their companies, I’m a peon. Yeah, I was a project manager and then Scrum Master. I mean, I was sitting next to people who were startup entrepreneurs, Vice President of a development in a bank, large, huge bank, and he didn’t really care about that. But to me, it was sort of a little bit on nerving that, and I think the thing I fell back on was, I’d had many years of experience serving on nonprofit boards.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:35

So what type of stuff did you guys talk about? Yeah, what was some of the challenges? So, from 2008, 2010. And then he even asked, you served as a chair of the board, as well. So what are some of the, what do you if you reflect back, what are some of the biggest decisions that you guys, challenge that you had to deal with, just in general, like, as a board?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 19:01

So in nonprofits, the board is responsible for acting in a fiduciary capacity to manage the financial functions and the operational functions of the nonprofit. And there are certain state and even federal laws, like we have to publish a 990-tax form, and there’s quite a bit of leeway about whether you can make money in a nonprofit. And that’s been a discussion in associated groups that you and I belong to for many years. What’s too much money? And those are called reserves and it’s not unusual for nonprofits to have large cash reserves. And the interesting thing about that this nonprofit was it did not have a, what I call a fundraising division. In other words, if you look at the Red Cross or nonprofits like that, they typically have a fundraising division that goes out and solicit contributions, donations, things like that.

Here, we didn’t have that, because we had a fairly steady supply of income through certification fees that were coming in, because we were providing at that time, a unique certification, and it was highly in demand. And so we didn’t have to go out and solicit money from anybody. We didn’t have to solicit contributions. We didn’t have to get financing for things. We just had a steady cash flow into the business. And the thing was, is when you look at our operations, we had very little in expense, we didn’t own a building. We did all of our staff was contracted staff at the time, we had, I think, three employees, so when you looked at those kinds of things, we were really in a very unique position and an enviable position for many nonprofits. We were cash rich, and getting richer, and we were expense. We had strong expense management there, because we just didn’t have a lot of expenses. And that so really, the problem was serving on this board was, many of the people on the board didn’t really know how to function on a board. The by-laws were not always clear as to the specific duties, they were pretty generalized.

And the chair of the board, Schwaber was intimately involved in the operations, you hardly ever see that. Typically, you try to keep an arm’s length distance from operations, I mean, usually have a director or somebody that reports to you, right, and then you stay out of their business, you manage his performance, we typically reviewed performance twice a year and, I wasn’t on that committee but there was a committee that reviewed and Jim Kondo, when I was on the board, Jim Kondo was the managing director. And Jim had come from the Indianapolis Chapter of the American Red Cross. And he was a certified nonprofit executive. So I mean, he was a very capable, competent director, he knew how to handle the deal. And these directors know the political fraud that’s inside these organizations. There’s always politicization of what’s going on but it was paramount in this organization.

And really, the politics of it stemmed from the fact that one of the founders of the organization was so intimately involved in the management of the organization. In fact, basically did not believe he could make a move, I would say a strategic move, or even a tactical move in support of any kind of strategy we had without getting the blessing of Schwaber. And we on the board, were somewhat oblivious to that. I mean, we functioned I think as a typical board functions. We went through an agenda at our meetings, we had answers, looked at strategies, but we really didn’t have a lot of strategic thought because this growth of certifications was growing exponentially.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:24

It was crazy.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 24:28

And $50 is a pop and sometimes they were certifying 10,000 people a month Milan, think about 10,000 people a month times $50 is $500,000. And that wasn’t every month, yeah, it was steadily increasing to the point where that was going to be the norm. And I remember having a conversation with Steve Fram around our concerned about are we going to get to the point where, we basically have so much money, that we’re going to draw unnecessary attention from the Internal Revenue Service. And so, we had a treasurer and he said, not really, because as long as we’re not profiting, in other words, no person is profiting from it, the institution, the organization can basically hold in reserves a lot of capital. We call it reserves, but, like he said, Dan Hansi, was the Treasury guy. Dan said he goes, Look, what happens if the economy suddenly takes a big dive, and this starts to dry up? Yeah, we still have ongoing fixed expenses granted, not a lot. But…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:00

So what happened in 2010 rolls around you as a board member? And have to get Ken or you ask him to leave or [inaudible 26:17]?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 26:18

That was September of 2009. And I can’t really go into the minute details of that. We found some problems. Well, I wouldn’t say we found problems, problems were brought to my attention specifically, by some people. And it doesn’t matter who it was, it was somebody with knowledge, obviously. And so, I was at a conference in Denver, and I got this information. And I’m thinking, wow, this sounds peculiar. And so I called some other board members and I said, maybe we should get together and talk about this. I think I emailed them and made a call a couple of them. And I said, let’s get together and find out or at least figure out what’s going. And we did. So, we got together and I happened to be in Denver, with a couple of other Certified Scrum trainers guy named Lowell Lindstrom, who later became the interim Managing Director of the scrum Alliance for a while, and a lady named Michelle Slager.

And Michelle and Lowell and I were putting on a presentation at this insurance conference about agility in Scrum. Because, most of the people there, this is 2008, Most of the people there was that were not familiar with the concepts or anything. So we were going to have them do some fun things. And, just introduce the concepts too. So they weren’t really involved in anything except that I had to tell them I’ve got some scrum Alliance business I need to attend to here and there, and we were only had one session. So we did our session, and that was that. But we had some meetings, that we actually got together on a conference call while I was there, the person who had the information explained what had happened. And I remember thinking, and I wasn’t the only one that, what if the information now suggests that some impropriety had taken place?. And we, molded over for about, I don’t know, 10 days, what action we would have to take. And the conclusion we came to was, at a minimum, we would have to ask Kench Schwaber to step down as chair from the board. Because to us, the circumstances presented a clear conflict of interest for his service on the board.

And we were all in agreement of that, so well. I guess they’re sort of an irony here, but Schwaber was supposed to come to my company and speak. And I got a call from his wife, Christine and this is after I got back from Denver. So I got a call from Christine and she says Ken is not going to be able to make it to your meeting. He’s been in a serious accident with his bike and a car, he was riding his recumbent bike, and it collided with a car. And I said, is he hospitalized? And she said, yes, he’s hospitalized. So he was in the hospital in Boston, we continued to have discussions. And it basically came down to, we agreed he’s got to leave. We need to tell him that the best way is to get his agreement to leave, his voluntary leaving, that’s what we thought. And so, they said, the rest of the board said, you’re probably closest to him Tom, why don’t you facilitate the discussion? Meaning why don’t you talk to him? And, we called him and he was in the hospital. And he and Chris, his wife was there. And he wasn’t really reluctant about stepping down, but he immediately wanted to negotiate. And one of the things he wanted to negotiate is he wanted to keep authority over a new program that he was developing with Microsoft called the Certified Scrum developer program. Right, so he wanted to retain, for lack of a better word ownership of that. And I was sitting in my company space, right, this is on a conference call so I couldn’t see the, other board members. But I was thinking to myself, no, that’s not going to happen.

So I just woke up. And I said, we’re not going to do that, Ken, when you step off of the board, the board and the operations management, meaning Jim Kondo will take over all ongoing strategic initiatives, basically, is what I said. And he didn’t like that, of course, right. So the phone call ended with his resignation. I wanted it in writing, but he was in the hospital. So I said, I’ll follow up with an email to you. And I’ll confirm that you’re resigning from the board of directors of the scrum Alliance effective at 5pm, Eastern time today. And whatever date that was, September 17, or whatever it was 2009. So I did that. And I didn’t get a response. So that was notice enough for us. Yeah. so he’s off. And then it was about, I don’t know, there was, of course, the news of his departure from the board spread like wildfire through the organization, there was no way you were going to, we’re going to keep that from getting that. That wasn’t going to happen. And so I immediately began fielding inquiries and questions, and what about this? What about that? No. Okay. And we can manage that. I mean, that was be expected. But then I got a call from Steve Fram. I think we had our meeting on Wednesday with Schwaber and , late Friday morning, maybe early Friday afternoon, because I was in Central Time and Fram was on West Coast time. He goes, I want you to enter this URL into your browser, and I want you to look at it. And the URL was www.scrum.org. And I put it in and I was shocked. And I’m like, what? Steve’s on the phone. I go, what is this? And he goes, welcome to Ken Schwaber’s new business. And so I’m navigating through the thing, and it’s obvious that it’s a training business.

And it’s obvious to us and in fact, he’s already announced certifications. And I incredulously tell Fram who laughed at me. I said he can’t do that. He’s a certified scrub trader that’s against the contract. And I can remember Fram effectively telling me, do you think he gives a damn Tom? That made me even angrier, so that put into process, a link the [inaudible 35:05] call it a process, there were letters and, you’re in violation of your contract as a certified scrum trainer. You cannot represent competing organizations blah, blah, blah. Never heard a word back from him, Miljan. Never heard anything. The only thing I heard was he had posted. Well he sent me one email reply. And it said at [inaudible 35: 38]. That was the only thing it said, obviously inferring that my allegiance and loyalty to him are madly violated, right? But he condemned me publicly called me [inaudible 35:55] said I had no business, even being in the organization. I mean, this coming from a guy who didn’t beg me to come on, but I hope pretty good insistently asked that I come on the board.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:10

And he liked you too , so he probably felt betrayed, right?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 36:13

Oh, he felt horribly betrayed? Of course he did.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:18

But you had to do it I mean, what was going through your head? Obviously had a conflict too, you had a good relationship with him. But you also wanted to do what’s right.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 36:25

Right. I knew I had to sacrifice our relationship, because my duty as a board member specifically, called out in the by-laws. Yeah, it was clear to me. In fact, I guess my only regret looking back is that I thought we should have taken more serious action. And I did not support that at the time. Yeah, I didn’t. And that sits crossways with me sometimes. Yeah. Because, I thought what he did was great [inaudible 37:13] that there should have been more done than just asking him to leave the board. I know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:20

But if you look, with good, there’s bad with bad, there’s good, right? None of us would be where we are, if you take Ken out of the scrum picture. So, more than anybody else, I think even what he did, and his personality, we would not be where we are. Scrum wouldn’t be agile probably for at the moment wouldn’t be what it is, and what has become without Ken. So what are some of the things if you reflect back, you really appreciate about Ken? The things that, well proud to be his friend, maybe proud to, like hey, I’m associated with this guy. That’s yeah sometimes is, you going crazy with things and sometimes.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 38:25

I think pride is a little bit of a strong statement, I would say that I felt indebted to him. I mean, he really went out of his way to mentor me, I think more so than he did other people. I don’t know, because my relationship was quite personal with him. And we didn’t really talk about what his relationship was with other people. Whether he was helping other people or tutoring them or mentoring them, however you want to characterize it. I know it was quite close to Mike Cohn, because they trained a lot together and they actually started the scrum alliance together. So but his relationship with Cohn was more professional. That’s what I thought. they trained together. And they were friendly and continued to be even after Schwaber left the board and left the scrum Alliance. They continued to remain in contact. In fact, lots of the information that I got about how Ken was doing and things like that came from Mike. Because Ken would not respond to me. I reached out to him probably about six months ago by email just to see, never heard anything back. So and I think it really stuck in his craw.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:53

What would you tell him if he did pick up?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 39:58

I don’t know. I would, my intentions would be to repair a relationship that went sour, over 10 years ago. I remember I ran into Sutherland in an agile conference. And he jokingly said, you should come to the coffee shop in Lexington where there both lived [inaudible 40:19]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:20

I know.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 40:24

And I said, it would be interesting if I walked through the door. What would happen?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:29

And Lexington is a dear place to me too, because that’s where I learned about agile. I went to school in Rhode Island and Lexington is this trip between Providence and Boston where all the big companies were so…

Speaker: Tom Mellor 40:43

More known for its revolutionary war history than anything. They just both happen to live in that area. And they meet in Lexington, they have coffee. So one time I was out at an agile games conference in Boston, and I drove by his house. I just wanted to see, I don’t know, for posterity, I guess I just drove by and looked and the lights were on. And I’m thinking I don’t have the nerve to stop. And I don’t think it would even be appropriate to stop. Here I am, probably within 100 feet of him. And I’m not going to be able to talk to him. And he taught me a lot. In fact, people will tell you when they take my classes and when I interact with other people, I can recall conversations I’ve had with him at least my recollections of them very vividly. Things that he told me, things that he instilled in me and I’ll never forget that I once called Tim to his face a mystical. I said, people see you as mystical. And he laughed, and he goes, what the hell do you mean by that? And I said, I don’t know you sort of mesmerize them. And the biggest time I ever saw that happen was in Minneapolis at a Scrum gathering. We were in the closing circles. So this is back in 2007, I guess.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:18

Is it this one, you had to have two circles instead of one and people and people were freaking out?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 42:22

No, I’ll explain to you. So we’re in the closing circle, because Esther Derby, Diana Larson where there facilitating. And Esther had had a falling out with Ken, over whether the scrum Alliance should be nonprofit or should be for profit. Esther was quite insistent, it be nonprofit. And then she eventually bailed out of it. And she went over. Basically, Mike sided with her and said, we should we should keep it nonprofit. And of course, Diana was there and I don’t know what kind of relationship Diana had with Ken. He often had precarious relationships with people that had big names in the movement, often on kind of relationships. And it wasn’t for me to pry, and I didn’t get in the middle of them. But anyway, for some reason, he was not at the closing circle. He was actually at in the bar of the hotel. And at this scrum gathering we had, I want to say exactly 70 attendees. Now, I might be off a few. But that’s just the number that comes to my mind. There were 70 there. And there was a big roar over this notion that 70 people was way too many to have at a gathering.

That there’s no way and we certainly should never have more than 70 at a gathering. And it was getting pretty tumultuous in the room about this. Some people were like, well, wait a minute, we’re a growing community. Don’t you think we would expect to have more people and other people go, we’re going to ruin it, it’s just going to be overrun. And then pretty soon we’re into one of these big conferences and blah, blah, blah. And it was. So I went up for grabs, and I left the room and I went and I found him and he doesn’t drink. He was having a coke, he’s not a drinker. And so I said, I think you need to come into the room. And he looks up at me, he’s got those straw with coke in his mouth and he goes, he doesn’t even take the straw out and he goes, why? And I said because there’s a big argument going on about whether 70 people in scrum gathering is too many people. And all he said was, oh dear, he gets up. He doesn’t say a word to me. He just gets up and walks away. And he walks towards the room, the hotel, I guess you’d call it a conference room or whatever, right? And so I just get up and followed behind it. And he walks into the room and you would have sworn that the Messiah had walked into the room, honestly, the whole place just went immediately dead quiet you could hear a pin drop on the carpet in there.

And he went into this sort of Soliloquy about, think about it, we’re trying to grow a movement here. We’re trying to embrace people’s entrance into our community. We’re trying to help people gain traction with this blah blah blah, and he went on. And I remember he got to the end, and I’m thinking they’re in a trance, Milan, they’re in a trance. He’s got them in a trance. And he goes, who knows, someday, maybe we’ll have 150 at a gathering. Maybe even 200. And you can hear some of the gasps in the room like, wherever it ends up, let’s be a community, let’s help people understand and embrace what we’re doing here. And with that, that was it and everybody was happy, you would have thought we all drank the Kool aid. And I can remember I standing at the door thinking to myself, my God. I have just seen a deity completely in trance, his followers. I don’t know, I’m sure Diana and Esther were sort of standing back going, Oh, boy. But that’s the kind of belief that people had in him. It was surreal in some ways. I have had people ask me was cult-like? And I go, no, because in cults basically, there’s evil in those . I mean, if you think of Jim Jones, when he had the cult down again most people ended up committing suicide. I mean, this was not a cult, because I didn’t see it as nefarious or as evil. No, I just saw it as people really sort of like the minions, attached here to the god and anyway.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:57

Now that’s really interesting. What would Jeff Sutherland done during this time I know he was CIO, a company around this time, right? He got involved maybe around 2010. When did Jeff……..

Speaker: Tom Mellor 48:13

Yeah, no, Jeff was involved early. Here’s the deal with Jeff. So if you go back, this is Schwaber telling to me that when they went back, when Trooper said, we need to get scrum out in the public. And he said that Sutherlands attitude was, if that’s what you want to do fine. I’ve got things to do. But that’s not a quote, that’s yeah, I came across. Jeff was about doing Jeff’s thing. That was, one making money, which you don’t blame the guy for that. But two it was, helping companies he was associated with, deliver products faster, better and that’s what he saw here. He did not see his position as being any kind of altruistic one. Where I need to get this out to the rest of the world to save the world, that he could care less whether anyone else used Scrum. And this is 94, 95, so Schwaber is the one that presented the paper on scrum OPSLA [inaudible 49:24] Programming conference, Sutherland as I recall, Sutherland really wasn’t involved with that. And Sutherland wasn’t involved with the creation of the scrum Alliance. I don’t think he was even involved with the creation of the Agile Alliance, although I may be wrong about that he had signed the manifesto. Yeah. Oh, but he did that. I think because he wanted a voice in having scrum be part of that voice.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:05

Yeah. I was talking to Mike Cohn. And he said, I didn’t know this but he said that scrum Alliance came out of a program within agile lines. And which was interesting. I don’t think many people know that.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 50:24

Yeah. In fact, that’s how Esther and Mike and Ken got together because they were members of the Agile Alliance. And I grew up. The inspiration of it was Schwaber. In the Agile Alliance at the time, it was really an infant organization, trying to find its way. And my sense was, this never told me, but my sense from talking with Schwaber was, Schwaber was not going to have an influential position with that organization. In other words, if he started his own, and got some buy in for that, he would be able to guide that in that organization the way that he wanted it, that’s why, I won’t call it the dark side of Ken. But this is the side of Ken that was probably fought by Esther, cause Ken could probably see some money here. Right. And it did notch. It only made us laugh that scrum.org is a for profit organization, even though it has.org. URL, we laughed at that so hard. I can remember Dan Hints going, Oh, boy. He’s just taking it to the extreme. He’s put, the typical handle on the URL that you would see for a non profit. Yeah, holy profit

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:59

I haven’t thought about that. But that’s a really good observation.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 52:03

Oh, yeah. That irony hit us like, bricks in the face, man. We were like, oh, my God, he’s playing it for all it’s got. And it’s one of the things we never took away from the man was his shrewdness and his intelligence. And he had probably what most people would deem a fairly balanced combination of those two things. He was relatively shrewd. And he was also quite bright. And you had to sort of understand when he was being shrewd, and when he wasn’t. So. Yeah. And so Sutherland was never really interested in the scrum Alliance, his only interest was money. And this is the certification which just drove Esther crazy. It drove her crazy that somebody would pay for a certification that was effectively meaningless. That showed no competence, that had no way of assessing knowledge. We didn’t even have a test Milan, basically just got blessed at the end of the class, and you felt really good. And you boasted and you go, I’m a Certified Scrum Master. What does that mean you can do? I don’t know. But I’m a Certified Scrum Master.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:47

But it was a good timing though. Because at that time, I mean that is now any different but certifications were a big thing, right?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 53:56

They were starting to emerge, I actually chalk it up to Schwaber as driving the certification process even more. So PMP had been around a long time. And it was the leading certification in the IT industry. But there…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:13

I mean in any industry like PMP and what PMI did, and I remember getting my PMP back in the day. Well, not back in the day, I guess it’s been 11 years ago. So in grand scheme of things is now but it was a big deal. And the standard the PMI set, it’s like your you get respect from others, and when you get your PMP and it was, something that PMI did I think really about the position and to make it what it is.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 54:49

I asked Schwaber I said so well, how did you come up with certified scrum master? And he goes well we were starting to do the class and people that graduated wanted to know, what am I? Am I a certified scrumer? Am I a professional Scrumer? What am I? I don’t know the exact details of the deliberation I think Cohn was involved with it maybe but maybe not either. But I do remember Schwaber specific telling me that it was a thumb of the nose at PMI that they came up with CSM and he goes, if PMI can have the PMP we can have the CSM ,we will show them. And I said they’ve got, I don’t know. There’s 400,000 PMPs Ken. And he goes, we’ll have over 400,000 Certified Scrum Masters Tom.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:55

Which is just crazy. I was looking at the report by indeed last year, and certified scrum master overtook the PMP. He must have been laughing but it’s also like, to have that vision and to…

Speaker: Tom Mellor 56:13

And of course, people love it when they laugh at your vision. And then later on it’s like, when I heard Jeff Bezos talk in 98 in Seattle, and he goes, you know what our vision is for this company called Amazon? If you can sell it, you can sell it on Amazon. And the whole group of about 150 people laughed at it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:34

You can just think about what people can , all the jokes that they can come up with, just after he said that.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 56:40

I mean, I can remember sitting in the audience and a guy couple seats down from me said this guy is certifiably crazy. I’m wondering how certifiably crazy is he now? He’s crazy because he got divorced and gave his wife $36 billion.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:58

But still, yeah.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 57:01

I don’t know. It’s these kinds of entrepreneurs I call Schwaber that he had his company ADM, application development methods. His company ADM. In fact, originally, this scrum Alliance is operating under the ADM moniker? Yeah. Because it was, and that’s when they had to basically separate it out and take it nonprofit and stuff. But, when I say was shrewd, some of these things, you think the foresight of them is just remarkably brilliant. But sometimes it’s just a throwing of the dart at the dartboard. And thing sticks, and you go, wow, and it stuck. I can remember being on the board and looking at, I don’t remember the numbers, but I remember the trend line, go crazy going up, like there was not going to be. And everybody would say, we’d have a board meeting, they go, damn, we’re looking forward to level off, leveling off, just increasing at an increasing rate. So…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 58:24

So, what do you think, based on words from alliances today serving on the board? How would you rate, what do you think? Where are things right now? And…

Speaker: Tom Mellor 58:36

Well, [inaudible 58:37] it’s a mature organization now. Right? So it’s gone from developmental. It’s even probably gone past cash Cal .And it’s now a mature business. It’s a mature organization. And the problem with these kinds of organizations is what happens when your population of potential purchasers starts to decrease, either due to competition or due to market penetration, what happened? And so, in some ways, and some trainers would agree with this, they’ve been their own worst enemy, because they kept putting more and more trainers out into the world. And people would say, let’s say there’s 300 trainers now, I don’t know what the number is, but people would say, in a world of 7 billion people, 7.5 billion people, two or 300 trainers is not very many. And even if you reduce that population down to let’s just say, technology people, right, there’s probably, two or 300 million technologies people in the world. So have you really penetrated your market? I don’t know. The problem is they haven’t differentiated themselves very well. And I think Schwaber’s organization has done that. Now Schwaber has stepped out of Scrum .org’s day to day management. I don’t think he’s doing all that well, health wise, but he’s effectively turned it over. And I think their current management is doing a good job of promoting it. And the other thing that I don’t know, for better or for worse, the CST is now allowed to be a PST, a professional scrum trainer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:40

Or any for that matter can teach save classes, you can teach whatever you want.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:00:45

So the branding has taken a hit, because it’s not that exclusive anymore. In any time, your branding, it’s like, when Coca Cola was an infant company, and that was the big thing. And then all of a sudden, Pepsi Cola comes along, and RC Cola comes along and now there’s Colas all over the place. Coke is still a dominant player, because it’s done a really good job of protecting its brand, promoting that. But, the same thing could be said with beers, Budweiser, King of beers, blah, blah, blah. But now craft beers have taken a pinch plus the population, the market has changed. You don’t have as many people drinking beer as you used to. So, and now people are…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:01:42

Now people have doing the other drugs and things like that.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:01:45

Yeah, there’s competing substances . Don’t you legalize marijuana? No, I’ve got nothing to compete. Yeah, it and so those kinds of things, I think, affect the brand. But this, it’s an unusual situation, because its largest stakeholder group, its most vocal one, most political one ,is its trainer group. That’s the one with the most vested economic interest in the organization. And when it starts to feel pain, it becomes very vocal, and there will be people that drop out. I’m probably going to drop out in the near future, because I’m old enough now to work. I don’t want to train like that anymore. But what happens to a person like you, or even younger, I’m mentoring people that want to become CSTs. And they still have many years left of working life. So what’s going to happen with them, these things are going to evolve, they’re going to ebb and flow, but it makes people uncomfortable, uneasy about what’s going to happen with their future, because a lot of them have either heard or actually seen people like me make really good money off of this. And not just me, many. Right? So if there’s no doubt that this, that I was a huge beneficiary of this organization’s economic model,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:03:34

I think we all are, that’s why I said we as much we’ve all benefited, it’s just not just people that are associated with Scrum Alliance, but just in general. It’s created a whole new set of opportunities for a lot of people that otherwise may or may have not, if I had to guess probably not. But it’s been very interesting from that perspective. And I’m not sure, what would I mean, what do you think is coming? If you look at the next five years, what do you think, what are some of the obviously we can just guess, but what do you think is something that people might not be expected?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:04:20

Here’s what I think is coming. So you’re seeing this, the pace of this increase rapidly, and I’ve talked to friends that are still heavily involved in programming, so you’re going to see no code programming taking over. People won’t be writing code anymore. So that’s the first thing you’re going to see. So you’re going to see the, longevity of solutions shrink way down, if it was long enough when we were doing it the old way, but now and it’s going to give you the opportunity to change things. You’re also going to see systems become simpler and less intertwined or coupled. Now, some companies are going to still have difficulty decoupling things. But as those companies start to fade out, like the company I worked for, they got highly coupled systems. But they’re either going to uncouple these things, decoupled them, or they’re going to go the way they’re going to vanish. Some of that’s going to happen. But younger companies, companies that are more organically institute these kinds of changes are going to drastically affect the market. So there’s still going to be processes that need to happen. Anytime you do work, you have processes in place. But I think what’s going to happen is in the next 10 years, people are going to look back and again, remember that thing we call the agile, remember that? People go now I don’t remember that. I read about it in a book. And I don’t know what’s going to come along. But I think that the cultural manifestation of what we call agile now, and that’s what I’ve pushed for the last three or four years, right? I don’t think Agile is a way of doing work. I think Agile is a way that organizations institutionalize themselves.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:06:30

Being agile, right, rather than writing.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:06:35

And I think that’s going to become archaic as well. People aren’t going to say we’re agile, they’re going to say, Yeah, this is what kind of culture Yeah. We have a really open, strong culture, we have a very organic culture, things like that. The sense that you’re going to categorize it in the sort of dichotomized ways like we do now, either I’m so tired of this where you’re either waterfall or you’re agile, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:07:09

Like buying [inaudible 1:07:10].

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:07:11

In fact I am not sure you may do this, but I do this in my classes, I go, okay this is for a full refund of the class, identify where the term waterfall came from? Without researching, just off the top of your head, tell me where it came from. And I’ve had people go Winston Royce, and I go wrong. I said Winston Royce first described a process that was later called Waterfall, but he didn’t call it Waterfall. He called it sequential development. And it’s actually a paper written in 1974, by a business analyst that coined the term waterfall, which was four years after Royce wrote his paper, and I have the paper. So I pull the paper. Look at it, they go, look right here, it says waterfall. And I have this paper there. And they’re thumbing through it, they go, it’s a waterfall, ., but it shows this thing. And I go, you could call that the stair step process. I mean, he doesn’t call it anything except that he calls it sequential.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:08:24

Which waterfall sounds just so much better ?

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:08:29

[inaudible 1:08:29] yeah. So and I go, waterfall should never have been used to describe a culture. What you’re talking about is a traditional, autonomous culture, driven by traditional management, that’s what we’re talking about, and I said, there’s still a place in the world for defined sequential development. There is, and there’s still, there’s always a place in the world for empirical based development, but an organization that we would call agile would, as I always say, would hand the problem to a group of people and go, here’s the problem. Go figure it out and solve the problem as quickly and effectively as you can. And we’ll support you, that is what was the basis of the new product development game paper, right? In that paper, these autonomous teams were fully supported by management. Like, what can we do for you? What is it that you need from us, so that you can solve this problem? Because they put a timeframe around the problem, typically 90 days, they go, we got to have a new print out in 90 days. We have to have a new concept vehicle in 90 days. So, and that’s why Schwaber told me one time he goes, I’m glad that they fight with each other over waterfall versus agile. But he goes it that isn’t the fight, Tom.

And I’m like, what’s the fight Ken? He goes, the fight is do you give people the authority and the autonomy to figure out how to do the problem? Because organically, they will do that in the way that we describe. They will do it that way. And I’m like, wow. And he goes, absolutely. He goes, they only do it the other way, because they’re told and forced to do it the other way. But he goes, if you just gave them the freedom and the latitude, to organize themselves and approach it how they should, which is exactly what we did in my organization, we just said, we’re not telling you, you have to use Scrum. And we’re not telling you, you have to do any kind of defined process, we’re not telling you, you have to do that. We’re telling you, you figure out how to do this. And what does your experience and your intelligence tell you about? We got things done a lot faster, Milan, and a lot better. Right? And did we use Scrum? I don’t really give a damn whether we did. All I know…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:11:21

This is a means to an end, right? In a sense, it’s about agility and having options rather than …

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:11:29

Agility, Schwaber told me is the ability to move Omni direction quickly.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:11:36

Which is having options.

Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:11:41

When you’re in sports, you’re agile because you can move quickly, one direction or another. Right? That’s what an agile athlete does. When somebody goes, that guy’s really agile. What they’re saying is that guy can move, change directions on a dime. Whether he’s dribbling a basketball, or he’s dribbling a football, a soccer ball or anything like that, whatever he’s doing his agility suggests that he can move quickly, in any direction that he wants without changing stride. And that’s why, and see this is the shrewdness of Ken Schwaber coming up. He thought [inaudible 1:11:23], I was like, it just drives me crazy [inaudible 1:12: 26] you’re fighting, cause it shouldn’t drive you crazy. It should enlighten and please you. I hear he’s so yeah, he’s a lot brighter than I am. And I’m looking at him. He goes, think about, the more they fight, the more we stay out in the front. Right? If we were to change the world overnight, and everybody was to suddenly do Scrum, we would lose all the traction we ever had. But because we have resistance, it actually helps us. And he goes that’s why I condemn what they do, but I don’t fight them.

Giora Morein

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:32

Who is Morein, what’s been your journey when it comes to agile, or this agility world?

Speaker: Giora Morein 00:47

Yeah, so I started off my career as a software tester. So in the mid to late 90s, at the height of the .com boom, I was a tester for a little while, at some point, I tried my hand as a developer and I was a really, really bad developer, like really bad, super bad. And I think for a lot of people like me, who are passionate about technology, but not particularly talented in technology, I started off sort of, I spent most of my project career as a project manager, right, I got PMP certified and I was really good at it. So maybe I think some people think that a lot of the Agile guys went towards agile because they were they weren’t very successful using the old model. And that wasn’t the case for me, like I was a turnaround project manager and I did pretty well in that world.

And somewhere in late 2001, early 2002, I got promoted to head up this professional services group responsible for growing revenue and increasing profitability. And finding new accounts. And this was a little while after 911 and the .com boom and come to a close and I looked around my organization, I realized that we had zero competitive advantage we didn’t have any proprietary software, we could leverage, we didn’t have any IP, we could piggyback we had the best people just like everybody else did. And so we use Scrum to create that competitive advantage. So one of the guys I was working with George Schlitz, he sort of introduced scrum to me and so we use that as our competitive advantage. So at a time when, if you’re one of our customers, you’ve gone to one of our competitors. And in the first three to six months of engagement, maybe ended up with a report or discovery statement or some specification, but in that first three to six months engaging with us, you ended up with the live deployed product and so seeing that transformed our business and seeing how that transformed their relationship with our customers.

But most important for me, seeing how that transformed our relationship with our people, just improve retention and engagement and reduce churn. I decided very early, this is how I wanted to work right now. There’s no way I would have guessed in like 2004 that one day, this is how everybody was going to work. But I decided very early that this is the way I wanted to work. And so in 2005, I became a full time Agile Coach and Trainer. And pretty much since then, I’ve been spending most of my work time either helping organizations introduced Scrum and Agile or improve their adoptions or mature them or scale them somehow and I’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing brands and all kinds of different industries work heavily with companies like Fidelity Investments, and StateFarm and Accenture and Blizzard Entertainment and Nike, an, McKesson and Bell Helicopter and a whole bunch of other companies that probably just can’t think of at this very moment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:46

What are some of the common things that you’ve seen across those companies? Like when you think about the current state of agile a lot has change since 2005, but also law has not changed. So what are some of the things that, reflecting back you’re seeing now and patterns that you’ve seen organizations trying to adopt agile?

Speaker: Giora Morein 04:07

Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I think one of the things that shows up a lot, at least from my field of view, is that there’s a maturity that comes at the overall adoption of agile the way organizations think of it. And that seems to be a pretty common pattern. Some companies fast forward, some a little bit slower. But for example, in most organizations, certainly in the mid-2000s, most organizations started dabbling in scrum because some manager somewhere had to get something done, you know, had to do something impossible, had to do something important, and they got just enough permission to try this new thing. And it was successful. And so all of a sudden, like their peers, other managers somewhere else said, oh, I want me some of that, what he or she did over there and so they started doing, so there was series of skunkworks that usually started off and then eventually somebody usually in some PMO or maybe it’s a centralized methodology office say, well hang on a second, there’s a lot of that stuff going on. We need to somehow institutionalize that, like, we need to create our version of that thing, that agile thing. And they did, right. And so usually, that’s what I call sort of, we go from skunkworks level to sort of institutionalized project level agile, where every project has a fork in the road where there’s a decision, do we do Agile? Or do we do that traditional SDLC approach? And then quickly, organizations realize it’s not that simple. It’s not as simple as how do we do projects.

Because when you shift to this sort of collaborative, adaptive approach from a more coordinated, sort of predictive approach, it changes everything, it changes how we structure teams, it changes how we fund and budget for this work that we do, how we recruit, who we recruit, how we incentivize how we measure success. And so the ripple effects of that simple decision, right? Are we doing this way or this way, is far more than just how you work on a project. And so companies start to realize that and they realize, well, now it’s more of a transformation. And that’s usually where the transformation parts are really kicks in, where we need to become an agile organization, which usually starts at some delivery place, right? Some development, not everywhere, usually not the legacy places, but the places that are maybe more customer centric, where we need to get things out the door faster, and then they start to work that way for the route. And one of the important things that I’ve realized, and I think a lot of organization realizing is that it never ends that.

So I think transformation is a problematic word, because it implies some metamorphosis that starts off sort of in a cocoon and ends up as this butterfly. But I think in reality, it’s a never-ending transformation, transformation is the new norm. And so I think that, where I think a lot of organizations get surprises, they think we’re going to spend this amount of time and this amount of money, and we bring in these coaches and consultant trainers, and then we’ll be there. And I think the reality is, is that there is no there that there’s constantly an evolution, as companies grow as their markets change, as their managers shift. If everything stayed the same, then I think maybe that sort of transformative idea of start to finish might work. But it doesn’t as your organization is adopting and transforming. So is everything around you, the market your customers, if you look at the global pandemic, this is sort of put that on steroids, where you have to adapt really quickly. And so I think this is sort of maturity where organizations start to realize that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:35

Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit about big visible and how you started, I think big visible is, I got exposed or at least heard of big visible, I think from Bob Sarni. Can you talk a little bit about how big visible came about some of the people I think, you know, I was talking to somebody and you have an eye for talent, in a sense, somehow you seek people you understand. And I think if we go back to big visible, there are some great trainers and coaches that work. So maybe talk about how big visible came about how the journey went as far as selling it to solutions IQ and [inaudible] [08:21] behind it, I think it would be helpful just to record that in the history books as far as big visible, because I don’t know, correct me if I’m wrong, but big visible was one of the first or agile consulting and coaching companies, maybe I’m wrong, but is that true?

Speaker: Giora Morein 08:42

Sure so, the story big visible is a pretty long one. But if I can condense it big visible, I think we were, I don’t know if we were the first but I think we were certainly in the forefront of what I think we used to call or maybe we still call embedded coaching beside idea that coaching isn’t just something you show up on for two or three days. At the time when we launched big visible in late 2006 2007. The alternative model was what was known as the rally model right, rally at the time was the leading tool provider, they also provided services and they would sell these three pack, five pack and that was essentially three days or five days of coaching. And the goal there was to get you started well enough to use the tool. At least that was my interpretation of it, our interpretation. But there were a lot of coaches out there who were certainly as independents working longer right would show up and be there for the duration. And so, George Schlitz and I we sort of looked around and we realized, well, like I think at the time George was working for ThoughtWorks and he was doing what were a project at Barclays traveling from Boston to San Francisco every week. And then I knew other coaches who were flying from all over the country into Boston every week.

And so originally, it started off with this regional model, right, which sort of said, Look, let’s trade planes for cars, where, let’s take really talented coaches, where they’re located. And let’s see if we can put them to work doing good work at local customers, because then we can support those customers better, we can service them better. And then also those customers arent paying for travel. And so that was sort of the rudimentary initial idea. And that’s how we started off, right, so we start off sort of very localized in sort of the Boston area. And then at some point, George moved to San Francisco. And so we built out sort of the west coast there. But as we started getting larger, and we started working with more and more customers who are more national, or international, at some point, that model had to change that just wasn’t enough, right. So think of your large fortune 500. Client, like they have sites all over the place. And if you’re really going to support them, it’s not enough just to support them where you are, you have to be able to support them where they are. And so the basic idea was just, we call that a talent monopoly, if we could find the best talent, if we could recruit the best coaches, the best trainers, then everything else would take care of itself, right, then it would be easy to sell them, it’d be easy, we wouldn’t have to worry about satisfied customers because they would be. And so it was a very simple sort of philosophy. And quite frankly, we never plan to grow it to sell, it was really just a way to support you know, what we wanted to do, as founders do the kind of work we want to do, if we had a slight larger footprint, we have more choice or selection of the type of work we want to do. And quite frankly, we grew by accident. So I remember. You know, George, and I would talk on the phone and we keep using the reference of 10 people, we have 10 people, we got like 10 people, 11 people, that kind of 11 people.

And then one day I was sitting I remember in a hotel room in Hartford, Connecticut, we’re on the phone. I’m like, you know, we keep saying 10,11 people, but maybe we should count them. And we had 18 people. And so and then got fun. Right then we brought on Jim Cundiff, who’s previously Managing Director of the scrum Alliance, he joined I think, in 2010, or 2011. To help us grow, we’re able to add some other talented folks like Howard Sublette, and others. And so the basic idea is to fill the room with people smarter than me, that was essentially the philosophy. And so we had some amazingly talented people and people who are tremendous coaches, and some of them have gone on to do some incredible things. And, one of my proudest, I think, accomplishments is the idea that I helped create a company that other people want it to go work for, right, this idea of a destination company. I was talking to some former Big visible sort of people, and they say, we feel like we still work at Big visible, but we’re just we’re temporarily assigned somewhere else right now. And so I think that’s certainly something I’m very proud of. And it’s the thing I miss the most about it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:25

How do you come up with the names big visible, think louder, is this something that you come up on your own? Like, what’s your process for, coming up with the names for companies?

Speaker: Giora Morein 13:38

I wish I could tell you that it was like, I meditate for 30 minutes, and then some light bulb moment goes off, and there’s the name. So I think big visible was a product of a we had no money. So like we couldn’t buy someone’s brand or buy someone’s domain. We didn’t have any money to spend on it. And so I wish I could tell you that big visible was the first one we came up with, and that’s the one we did it wasn’t there was a long list of things that we were looking for big visible just happen to be available when we look forward. And so it wasn’t the only domain we bought, like we bought through a four and I think we just said well, big visible is related to agile, right? This idea of big visible charts and big visible information radiators, so it had some association with agile, but I think more than anything what I liked about the name and sort of my current company, which is think louder is the name is aspirational, right? So it’s something that you want to aspire to you want to aspire to be big and to be visible you want to aspire to be able to sort of think louder. And so I think what I like about those names is aspirational, but I got to be honest with you. There were other names that were nowhere near as successful. So I think we just got lucky that was available.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:58

Nice. Yeah. I just think both of those names are pretty cool. And they are inspirational like in the way that you said, you mentioned, Howard, what would you do if you switched places or you were in our shoes as far as the Chief Product Owner, or the president or whatever you want to call it, somebody that leads this from the alliance? What would you do if you were Howard?

Speaker: Giora Morein 15:26

So I think Howard, as the head of the scrum alliance is right now in a really challenging spot, and full disclosure, when they were looking for a CEO, prior to the when they hired in the previous round from when they hired Howard, I was one of the candidates for that role. I think I was one of the two finalists for that role. It’s a job I really wanted. And ultimately, I think the board decided that I was the right person. And I suspect because A. I was too expensive maybe. B. I was pretty adamant that I wanted to bring in my own team, that I thought that ultimately that the team at the time that the scrum Alliance had lacked certain leadership in specific areas. And so I think the board was looking for someone rather, that was really excited about working with people who were there.

I also think that the board at the scrum Alliance is a challenging one to work with, for anyone for any CEO, mostly because there’s a lot of turnover, right? The way it’s structured is, there is a lot of new community members coming in like every six months, there’s a vote or some like that, and then every two years, there’s another vote. And so it’s very difficult to work with them. Because it’s very unstable. There’s new people, so they don’t go through protracted periods of stability where they can operate as a unit, you have to keep introducing new people, reorient them to the mission, reorient to the people. And so that coupled with the fact that for the longest time, we had interim CEOs, right, we didn’t have permanent CEO roles where even one of the CEOs prior to Howard was previously on the board. And so historically, the board took a much more heavy handed approach, like they were responsible for a lot of decisions, and which might be okay. But then when you add the fact that it’s so dynamic, its membership in some flux, it’s very difficult to see any sort of consistency in that. And so that was certainly and so I think that that was the right decision, I think that I wasn’t the right person, for that job, as much as I wanted it. And I recommended Howard for it.

So when Howard was applying, so I was one of the people who recommended him. And I think that Howard’s done a commendable job. I really do. But I think that the scrum alliance has been on a path for a while that not just Howard, but I think his predecessors have been very hesitant to move off of right. And so I think there’s a number of challenges that historically it’s had is number one, what is the value proposition of the organization, right? Like, why are they around and unfortunately, so this idea of transforming the world of work, although it’s a cool soundbite, but it doesn’t actually at its surface mean anything, like I don’t know what that means. Other than that, it sounds good. I like the word transforming. And we certainly like the world of work. And so it seems like it means something. But also, I think that the products that the scrum Alliance has are rather disconnected right, like coaching and training, there’s very little relationship, at least in terms of how the scrum aligns position them, if you go to the scrum Alliance website, you can get certified or you can go Agile, and one means coaching and one means training.

And so I think if I were in Howard’s position, I think number one is there needs to be sort of rethinking of some sort of unified product strategy that should be connected. And so that’s the first thing the second thing is they fall into a trap where we need to make our different products somehow look the same so we can somehow market them right and so everything now is like, CSM, ACSM, CSP, right CSPO, ACSPO CSP so now there’s going to be a CSD and ACSD. And so it implies that the pattern that the product roadmap is the same for all products, which is highly unlikely if you think about any other product space that’s trying to solve a particular problem. Like they need to be looked at, sort of as independent products trying to solve specific problems for specific customers. Because if you look at those different product sets, they have different customers, they’re they have different goals, they have different users. And so just like we advise our customers and we coach them or train them, I think the scrum Alliance needs to reexamine that. And I think it needs to sort of revisit what its ultimate what’s its business model, right because it’s starting to look more and more like everybody else. It wasn’t always the case. But it’s very difficult now to differentiate the way the scrum Alliance, the role that it plays in the market versus some of the other alternatives that are out there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:12

Yeah. What do you think as far as the Scrum Alliance, and the trainers and coaches that are part of Scrum Alliance are highly qualified, right, the process that everybody goes through, is scrum Alliance doing or maybe how would you read or do you think Scrum alliance is leveraging trainers and coaches, effectively, for branding?

Speaker: Giora Morein 20:36

I mean, I think that there’s definitely a lot more opportunity, right, so I’m not a certified coach from the scrum Alliance. So I’m hesitant to comment on sort of what that community is like. But certainly, if you look at the trainers, we’ve got like maybe 300 Certified Scrum trainers or somewhere there about us. I’m willing to bet you if you were to check those contacts, those people have they probably spend like the fortune 5000 right across those 300 people in terms of the companies that they’ve worked at, or served or people that have gone through, it’s pretty far reaching. And so I think the network of those trainers could certainly be better leveraged by the scrum Alliance. And so I don’t know exactly what that would look like, or how that would look like. But I think there’s a tremendous opportunity there to do more. I think the scrum Alliance from my perspective, and I don’t feel like I’m in it, so I can look at it sort of slightly more, external. Like, I think that the scrum Alliance has a tough time with the coaching value proposition. Right? And is it always been the case like, what’s the value, not of a coach, but a certified coach.

And that’s the problem, right? I think that unit formerly we understand what the value of an agile coaches are, maybe more and more people do and in a scrum coach, but then there’s a question about why, like, what do I get it from certified? Like, what’s the benefit there? And so I think part of the problem is the scrum Alliance isn’t promoting coaching, right. They’re promoting certified coaching, and quite frankly, even I have a tough time, sort of articulating that value proposition, right, like, so I think that I don’t know how well the scrum aligns vert the people that go through, right, I don’t know what that process is. But I’ve always thought that if you’re going to have sort of a model, sort of a triangle model with the people at the very top are supposed to be the experts of all experts, then you better make sure that they are right, and then build a brand around that. So, you know, CC should be the best of the best. And, you know, CSTs should be the best of the best, and that’s the brand. And I’m not sure that that’s the there’s a universal consensus that that’s the case.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:54

Yeah, I agree. And I mean, it may have been you or somebody that mentioned, you know, like, as a CST, you used to be able, like, the brand of CST was lot more influential, you know, 10 years ago, then what it is today, and I think Same thing goes with the CC brand or product never got to that level. But they are I went through that process. And the vetting is rigorous as for the CST, and you do have to have the background. It’s just I think, from a positioning like, you know, you should have all of these companies are looking for qualified coaches, knocking on CC, CDCs doors, saying like, we want to work with you, because we know what you went through and what you represent, in a sense, from experience from knowledge standpoint. So that’s something that.

Speaker: Giora Morein 23:49

Yeah, I think that maybe looking at the trainers and the coaches and treating them the same as part of the problem, right. And so if you go back 10,12, 13, 15 years on sort of history, first of all of the CSTs and I’ve been I’ve been in that community long enough where I can remember and then how the what was then the was CSCs, how to get started, right, the Certified Scrum coaches before we had a CC and a CTC. So prior to all that, the CST was the coach right like understand that. You couldn’t become a CST at least back then, without being showing deep deep practitioner not just as a scrum master and not just as whatever but as a coach, which meant you brought the coaching capability when you hired that trainer. And so when we talked about the best of the best, it was the best of the best practitioners, right? These are the best of the best of practitioners in this field. And so when you hired a CST Yeah, they were calling Hold the trainer. But what you were hiring was an expert, right? You were hiring the best of the best in this field, when the CSC got started in order to differentiate the two, right? That’s when sort of that this idea that bifurcated, well, one is a trainer, and one is a coach, and they’re different.

They didn’t have to be different, like they’re different in terms of function, but they didn’t have to be different in terms of role. But at the time, I think when the CSC first came about they had a really tough time promoting that value proposition. And so I think that put it on a path where once it got split into two, it became very difficult for those two things not to be competitive, because I don’t know how it is today. But for the longest time, the overlap of CSTs. and CES or CSCs was something like 70%, or 80%, which means 8 out of 10 people who are certified as a coach, were trainer. And so I think anybody else looking at that would be like, well, why do they need to be separate? Why not make that the requirement for being a trainer? And I think one of the reason was, because we wouldn’t have enough coaches maybe or some like that we needed more volume.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:11

Also, I think still we struggle with defining what Agile coach is, right? Like, in a sense, so what is an agile practitioner? And if you look at it, like you said, it’s both of those things, it’s also understanding organizational design. It’s understanding, you know, the concepts. So you know, from lean, it’s like, you’re the expert, right, like you said, and I think as a community, we’re still struggling, ask, you know, 10 people, how they define Agile coach it’s different, even in the CC community, or CSC. there have been discussions where we need to sit down and redefine, what does it mean to be an Agile coach?

Speaker: Giora Morein 26:58

Yeah, I think, you know, I certainly we as a community over the years, we tend to find stuff to debate, right. And it’s more of a mental exercise than sort of a real market facing one, right? Like, why is Kanban better different from agile or why whatever. And so, like, this is this is largely, in my opinion, just a fun exercise that we like to debate and argue internally, because one of the things we do really badly, and maybe it’s one of those things where the cobblers kids always have no shoes. But we don’t apply the same market facing thinking to our own products and our own community, the way we recommend and advise and consultant coach our customers to write like we don’t, if you think of sort of your product owner class, maybe you do an empathy map of your users or your customers, or maybe you sort of think about what’s the job to be done, like, what’s the job that someone’s hiring this product to do? We don’t do that with coaching, right? And so instead, we debate well, what’s the difference between a consultant and a coach and a mentor, and an advisor, and whatever. And at the end of the day, if we just stopped and looked at it from the perspective of our customers, and define our product that way, right?

So define the product that the customer needs, not the one we want to deliver or the one we want to produce, like, that’s the classic trap, right? Like if you’re coaching a product owner, the first piece of advice you tell them is, don’t build the product you would use, build the product your user, your customers wants to use, but we don’t do that. And so we end up with this debate of what’s the difference between this and the other thing, but in my opinion, if you put yourself in the position of the customer, the customer is very clear in terms of what they want, right? They want a successful outcome, whatever that means contextually to that company, that organization, but if they’re going to spend money on your time, right, if they’re going to spend money on your services, they’re doing it because they expect some sort of positive outcome at the end of it, right. They’re not going through the same mental exercise we are, like when you show up to do your day of coaching for them. For you, you might make sure like what’s my coaching stands and what’s my whatever, but from their perspective, they don’t care. Right? Like they want to make sure that they get ROI on their time in terms of something tangible, both short term, maybe long term.

And so I think that if we want to have a debate, let’s debate the best way to position that, versus I’m a, you know, coaches and prescriptive and consultant is or whatever, like, honestly as a guy who spends the majority of my time talking to customers, I can guarantee one thing your customers don’t care.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:35

That’s a great point. And obviously COVID has changed the game is influenced, you know, and, you know, coming back to talking to the customers, how, from your perspective, how has it changed from a customer standpoint, and maybe how has it changed from our coaching and training perspective? How has that changed the game.

Speaker: Giora Morein 29:55

I think the pandemic has been very interesting experience in so many different levels. It’s also I must say, it’s been surprising how people in our own community have responded, right? Like I remember when as a CST when classes went virtual, and you couldn’t do them in person anymore, right? You saw how some trainers reacted the same way different industries reacted, some trainers said, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to virtual, I don’t want to do virtual. So I’m going to take a sabbatical, I’m going to sit this out for three or four months or six months, I’ll be back at the end of it going back to the same way we did before, right. And so they stopped. And just like some restaurants who were shut down like oh, we don’t know how long this shutdown is going to be. Let’s close our doors lay as many people off as we can take a sabbatical, we’ll ride it out three, four months, six months, how long could this be? We’ll come back at once we know. Right. And so I think that we teach and coach about taking an inner approach to deal with uncertainty, trying to iterate solutions to adapt when you don’t know what the future holds.

And yet, it’s so interesting to see how people in our own community, right when put to the test, I think are really exposed in terms of how what their tendencies are, right, and what they’re going to do. I’m going to go take a full-time job to ride this out, because I don’t know what it’s going to look like, or I’m going to sit it out and write a book, I’m going to sit the next six months writing and doing things. And so essentially, the bunch of people treated us as temporary. And so one of the first things I teach or I coach, my customers is, beyond the crisis, once you get past the crisis, be careful not to apply any solution in the short term that you can’t live with in the long term, right? Because that’s a surefire way of too crazy, sort of unsustainable solutions. Like if you decide, like, for example, in the pandemic, I’m going to keep my kids at home for the next three months, because I’m afraid to let them out. But then after that, you know it will be fine. If you can’t live with that for a year, then then don’t implement it as a three month solution either, right?

Like you have to commit yourself that this might be a long-term thing, not just a short-term thing. And I think a lot of instructors, a lot of trainers, a lot of coaches said, well, this is just temporary, right? So we’ll be back. And I think if there’s one thing that we’ve learned is that it’s not temporary, and we’re not going back like, Sure, a year from now isn’t going to look like today, just like it’s not going to look like a year ago. But like 2019 isn’t coming back. Right. It’s not coming back and anyone’s model on, we’re just waiting for that to get back to that, I think is setting themselves up for failure. And so I think we’ve got customers who’ve realized that we’ve got practitioners and coaches and trainers who are realizing it. And I think in the process, we’ve realized that we can get really good at doing things virtually Right. Like before, even for me personally, like there are services and coaching that if you would have asked me in January 2020, can I do this for you virtually I’d say no, there’s just no way it would be done. But the reality is, I was just never forced to explore it, right that I’d gotten, I had 15 years of experience of showing up at your doorstep and helping you in front of you. And so I got really good at that. I didn’t get good at doing it virtually. But the pandemic has forced us to get good at doing it virtually where there’s the tools or the approach or the cameras and lighting or the things that you use. We’ve gone over the last year.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:30

[cross talk]

Speaker: Giora Morein 33:34

But what I mean is like, over the last, I mean, your lighting is actually looking pretty good. It matches your virtual background, it blends in nice. But what I mean is like I literally have spent only the last year doing things virtually. And I’ve seen, you know what I can deliver be so much better in just 12 months or 13 months, I had 15 years prior of doing an in person. And so if you think about as our capabilities grow, how we’ll be able to deliver services and coaching virtually, I’m pretty excited about that. Like I think there’s a lot more things that we can do, which all of a sudden means that we become more accessible, right? Like you can now support teams that you couldn’t before, there are organizations that you can now work with. That just wasn’t feasible before. And so I think that creates tremendous opportunity. I’m pretty excited about that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:27

Yeah, and you’re big on data analytics. You’re big, obviously talking to consumers. Yeah, I think in my opinion, you’re really good at reading the market. You experiment a lot. What do you think is coming in next couple of years that probably many are maybe not aware of yet or don’t fully want to admit it?

Speaker: Giora Morein 34:47

I don’t know if I’m right or not, because I tend to you know, I think the reason why I experiment a lot is because my base position is usually that I’m wrong, right? So I tend not to value my own opinion maybe as much as others do. But my opinion, first of all, I think in the next three to six months, we’re going to see a lot of volatility in our marketplace. Right. And especially as trainers, I think that there’s a world of people who’ve been sort of spent the last year closed in doors. And so now that they can go out because of vaccines because of sort of a changing landscape, I don’t know that they’re going to want to sit home and do virtual classes, but I’m not sure they’re running to get into a class either. And so I think there’s going to be a period of volatility when there’ll be, it’s very unpredictable, right? So we’re going to see the level of complexity in our marketplace, sort of significantly increase over the next three to six months. A year ago, the answer was easy, right? It wasn’t easy to figure out. But at least the question was, we knew we couldn’t do things in person, we’re now going to be doing virtual. That’s the only option. So that was the answer you didn’t have to consider well, if it’s not virtual, what’s the alternative? There is no alternative.

Today, I think in the next three to four months, you’re going to see that change a lot. Right. And that I think that once we get past the next three to six months, I think we’re going to find some new normal, where I do think that there’s a segment of the population that doesn’t want to take classes, virtually, maybe their expectations are pretty low and not something they want to experience. I think the last time I saw the scrum Alliance numbers around their certifications from you know, from January 2020 to 2021, I think they were down like 9 or 10%. But if you consider the fact that they’re all of a sudden part of the 2021 numbers included people who couldn’t before go to a CSM class, right, because they weren’t close to a location that like trainers would go to, right, they were somewhere, you know, more than 60 minute drive from someplace where people go do trainers, and all of a sudden, so those people started taking classes, whereas before they couldn’t plus, the price point has gotten low enough where it’s become more accessible, right? There are people now who can afford to take these classes that you know, because they’re 600 Pop, or 500 pop that just couldn’t or wouldn’t spend $1,000 or 1100 or 1200 a pop when it was in person. And so I think that, even though the numbers are still only down 9 or 10%, I think because it includes a brand new set of customers that weren’t part of the set a year ago, that there’s a group of people had COVID never happened and the growth would have would have continued.

There’s a big chunk of people who have held off on getting this training on going down this path that now when it starts opening up again, the question is, will their resume, will they want to come back to it? Right? And I think they would. It’s just, it’s unclear how and what interest level and what that’s going to look like. So I think the next three to four months, five months, I think past the summer until we get to sort of late q3 or q4, I think we’re going to see a lot of volatility, my opinion into how I see what I think is going to happen, say next year. And again, I’m heavily involved more in sort of the training market than other things. But I think that I think there’s going to be three types of like CSM or cisbio classes, I think the markets heading towards two to three types of experiences. The first is what I like to call the special experience CSM, right because you want to go to that class because of that instructor. Right. You want to go see Mike Cohn’s class because it’s Mike Cohn. And so you’ll travel to go there, you’ll pay a premium to go there. Or maybe it’s a special experience, like we’re going to do a CSM with 3d printers. Right? And so yeah, because it’s a physical product thing, we’re going to go somewhere because the experience is what the value proposition is, and I’m willing to pay more for it. I’m willing to go somewhere and travel somewhere to get it. And so I think that those people who can put on that type of experience that special experience, right, for hardware for gaming, right we’re going to go do a Minecraft CSM.

And so I think or someone with a very well-known brand, I want to go and experience Mike Cohn’s class, I want to experience Jeff patents class. And so I think those will, you know, will be one setting, they’ll be able to charge a premium and get people to go, I think there’s going to be a pretty significant what I call the backyard classes, right? The my backyard classes, if you’re a trainer who’s fortunate enough to live in an area that a lot of people you know, are interested in training, right? So if you living near Manhattan, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, if you live close by you’ll be able to put on a class locally. And you won’t have to travel somewhere so it’ll still be sort of profitable, right? Like you if you can avoid spending the 2000 or 2500 bucks to travel somewhere and hotel and shipping materials and all that stuff. Then you’ll be able to do it in your backyard. You’ll be able to find a cheap venue probably because you know you’ll be experienced doing classes there. And so I think that they’ll still be sort of these localized classes that exist. And then I think the third tier will be the big room class, right? The 60, 70 Person class, and the biggest driver of this is ultimately the price point will be, if the price points don’t rebound, much from where they are today, then the only way that you can make these things profitable is if you make if you fill them with enough people to lower the cost of acquisition and delivery. And so think of 60, 70 people in a room. And that would make it worthwhile for you to travel somewhere to deliver that and then come home and ship your materials. But I don’t know how many trainers want to are capable of effectively doing an effective class with a large volume. And also, I don’t think there’s going to be that many companies and trainers that will be able to get 70, 80 people in a room.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:01

There is no way scrum alliance would actually allow that right, in a sense, but before it was.

Speaker: Giora Morein 41:06

Well, previously there were no restrictions on size, right? So prior to virtual, the in person classes had no cap, I don’t know why they would have a cap. I think that the scrum Alliance as a trade organization, it gets very precarious, when all of a sudden you create limits on what your members can do, right? So think of the International sort of thing of this sort of Board of Realtors, right. Like if you’re a realtor, and you’re part of that sort of association. Imagine if the Board of Realtors came out with a rule that said, you’re not allowed to have more than 10 listings at a time or you’re not allowed to sell more than five houses in a month. Like that would be ridiculous, right? Like because these trade organizations are intended to exist to promote the opportunities for its members not to make sure that everyone is it has the same right but that everyone has the same opportunity so that the best can thrive like trade organizations aren’t supposed to make everyone’s income the same. They’re supposed to make an environment where if you’re better, you’ll perform better. And so just like if you’re a realtor who’s really, really good, you’ll get all the listings, you’ll get all the customers just like if you’re a trainer who’s really, really good. Why would a trade organization want to limit access of students to that trainer that wouldn’t be in line with its mission, it wouldn’t be in line with quite frankly with I’m not sure sort of what their nonprofit, not for profit status would allow. And I’m not really sure there’s much appetite for that. Like why would we do that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:38

Yeah. And you’ve gotten decent amount of heat for the prices, right? Like there’s been a lot of discussion, at least in our community about the pricing, and what is it that people don’t get, like, you know, in the sense like about the pricing and current pricing model and why the prices have dropped?

Speaker: Giora Morein 42:58

Well, so I think what some people have it wrong is some people blame the scrum Alliance and say it’s a scrum alliance is fault that pricing is low. And maybe the Scrum Alliance turns on, no, no, no it’s the trainers fault, because the trainers are the ones who actually set the prices. But the reality is the market decides the market decides what is the value of something. And sure, if the market is selling these things at half the price that you are, you’re not getting any customers and to say like, well, I’m not going to lower my price, but I’m not going to have any customers. That’s a ridiculous concept. And so I think that the market is performing the way the market is supposed to perform. This is a high volume product, right? There are 1.3 million certificates around the world. And you know, and 10s of 1000s of them getting more every month, this isn’t a premium product for a select few.

This is a bulk product for everyone. And I think that’s happened I think what a lot of people don’t understand is with the lower price point. You get people more diverse backgrounds, like in my classes, for example, today, consistently, half or sometimes more than half of people don’t come from software technology. They come from marketing, a lot of military veterans are coming through these classes, right like I recently had a class when the same class I had someone who was a NASCAR pit crew chief, another person who was a an officer of a military special forces unit and a third person was an opera singer, all in the same class. And the only reason you can get that that diversity is because the price point aligns with, these aren’t people who already get paid $150,000- $120,000 a year. Let me get more like they are not nurses and intrapreneur isn’t like these aren’t people who are…. $1,000 is a lot of money for these folks, and most more and more of them. There’s not some other company paying them to be there. And so I think what people are missing is with the low prices, it opens up for new opportunities for new people that we can reach that that prior they never would have been in your class.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:13

Yeah, and if you look at like the mission of the scrum Alliance, right, the change in the world of work, you would think that, you know, actually like what you just said, getting people outside of software, getting more people trained is actually align more with that mission. And maybe, I don’t know if our community or trainers have gotten too comfortable or to use, you know, the world before this. But when I look at it, it’s in a sense, it’s good because you are getting people outside of your typical software. And I’m seeing Scrum and Agile and construction. I’m seeing it in other industries that you wouldn’t, generally assume, how can they do Agile and Scrum in construction? And yet you know, one of the biggest companies, California, is adopting that. So I think that’s an interesting and important perspective to go back to the mission of Scrum Alliance and say, like, okay, you know, what are we and how are we aligning to that and how are we helping? What do you think is maybe, as a last question here, what do you think is the future for Scrum and Agile outside of software? What are you seeing and how quickly do you think other industries will catch up?

Speaker: Giora Morein 46:35

I think it’s becoming the new normal, right? Like, this is how everybody works. It’s not a surprise. You know, I sometimes joke in my classes that there’s an entire generation of college graduates. And now it doesn’t even matter what field it’s in, it used to be just software or assisted computer science isn’t like that. But there’s an entire generation of college kids that have graduated in the last four or five years, who have no idea what you’re talking about, when you say waterfall, like literally like, like when you talk about the QA phase or the analysis phase, they look at you like you’re talking about the good old days of riding bicycles without helmets, and drinking water straight from the hose like, yeah, the good old like they have no personal experience because they didn’t learn about it in college. The first job they took was for some startup or some agile group or some scrum team or something like that. And those college grads, they they’re getting promoted right about now to frontline managers, right?

And they’re responsible for interviewing and recruiting and leading and managing other sort of entry people, right, other college grads and all of them have no contextual, firsthand perspective or experience about what the hell we’re talking about when we say waterfall when we say these things. And so, in five years from now, those frontline managers will be mid-level managers leading other managers like, we’re aging out, right? And some people thinking like, I used to thinking I’ll be honest, when in 2005, when I was coaching, my first team was at Fidelity Investments, I would joke with them today. It’s a pendulum today I’m here as an Agile Coach 10 years from now I’m coming back as a waterfall coach. But I think if there’s one thing that surprised me at some point that we’ve learned is there is no going back like I don’t think this is the end we’re going to continue finding new ways and adapting and finding new tools techniques. But I know we’re not going back it just doesn’t work for us anymore. We found things better the markets changed our customers have different expectations. And so I think sure that might have started in software but we’re seeing it everywhere marketing today, marketing today any sort of predictive campaign like you think I’m going to spend $100,000 I’m going to upfront decide this I’m going to spend it on these creatives that’s nuts it’s craziness.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:50

Or planning yeah head like I’ve been involved in some of the large market initiatives where you put five mil down for the whole year you get your schedule you know exactly when you’re at, we have no idea how it’s running like you set it you know in January for me and especially you know with television like you had been really good way to gaze so

Speaker: Giora Morein 49:14

And television ads used to have a really long lead time so used to fit right. Like it’ll take you four to six months from the time you picked your ad agency the time you picked your director to tell you had your storyboard and your concept like yeah, when it takes four to six months to shoot an ad, but today like their ads being shot on cell phones, right, there ads that are looked like social media, people talking to a single camera. Like during the pandemic advertising didn’t stop it’s just there’s not big camera crews showing up right like there’s somebody ships you a little DSLR camera, you hit the record button and you record it. And so I think that even in traditional areas like TV advertising and radio advertising, we’re starting to see AB test and set based approach in different markets and sort of different demographics targeting different times on different channels. And even then, I think a lot of companies are realizing nobody watches TV ads anymore, right? Because nobody watches TV anymore. And so like now the idea of these creatives even that take recruiting you’ve tried if you’re trying to find candidates, like in the old days, you know, from the time you first talked, put a put out a job description, you talk to a candidate, it was totally cool that two months later is when that process would complete. There’s no good candidates hanging out for two months waiting for you to hire them.

And so if you want better candidates, you can’t take a long drawn out big batch process. Let me let me get all my resumes. Let me look, evaluate them all. Let me set up all my interviews that at the first interview and see who goes through, set up my second interview, it just doesn’t work. Those candidates aren’t going to stick around. And so I think we’re seeing it in everything today. It’s not just software it started in software, because software is easy. Because software, unlike a building, you don’t need to build don’t need to big a dig hole before you do anything else like software is easier because you can start anywhere you want. I think it’s more challenging in some of these areas. I think it’s going to look a little different like to us purist is going to look maybe not how we would do it or that’s the wrong way or the right way. But I actually think that as these industries, explore different approaches, we’ll figure out newer ways of doing these things. And I think that’s great.