Category: Blog

There has been plenty written over the last year about the need to shift from the world of projects to product-based development. These people – some of whom I provide links to in the further reading below – give compelling reasons for teams and businesses to begin to think about structuring work and engagements in terms of products that are managed rather than projects that are delivered. Here’s my perspective on this topic as it relates to the work I have done with large organizations as a coach and consultant. Let’s start by defining the difference between a project and a product.

So what is the difference between a project and a product?

Here is the definition of a project provided by the Project Management Institute (PMI):

A project has a defined beginning and end in time and is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal and often includes people who don’t usually work together. At the end of a project, the team is usually disbanded and assigned to new projects with new team members.

On the other hand, a product is a good, service, platform, application, system, etc. that is created, maintained and supported by solving problems and providing benefits to specific customer and business needs. Products tend to be maintained by a stable group of individuals who do work together regularly and who bring in others as needed.

Major shifts in mindset are needed to move to from projects to products that support a Lean and Agile way of thinking.

A job interview should be a two-way conversation. While the hirer is trying to determine if you are a good fit for the position you, the candidate, should use the interview to figure out if the company is a place where you want to work.

A few well-phrased questions can yield fantastic insights.

Questions #1: What is the span of accountability and authority that I would have in this role?

The effectiveness of the Product Owner, and of the overall Scrum implementation, depends on how much accountability and authority a Product Owner has. Let’s look at four situations where you might be called a Product Owner but have different accountability and authority:

Ordertaker – You’re primarily going to administer the Product Backlog, collect the requirements from the stakeholders and translate them into user stories for the people doing the work. You’ll be more like a Business Analyst. Your authority and accountability is very limited. This is NOT a type of Product owner the Scrum Guides describes.

Middleman – Similar to the Ordertaker Product Owner, the Middleman Product Owner has more authority and responsibilities than an Ordertaker Product Owner. You’ll be more like a Project Manager. You can expect that the major decisions, such as the business goals, scope, and desired outcomes, are still determined by the principal stakeholders such as the business owner, sponsors, or steering committees. You’re the middleman. You’re going to get frustrated daily.

Cat Herder – This type of Product Owner is well aware of the business context, market, and customers. A good example of this is when a traditional Product Manager is expected to step into a Product Owner role. This type of Product Owner will have limited autonomy since the sponsors have the real authority and the final say. Managing sponsors with competing needs is like herding cats. Expect that for sure!

Real Product Owner – Contrary to the authority bestowed upon the Cat Herder Product Owner, the real Product Owners have their own budget to spend and much more authority. This is the type of Product Owner described in the Scrum Guide. This type of Product Owner role has the maximum impact on the product, customers, and organization. They own the product and are fully accountable for maximizing the value of the product. Those wanting to change the Product Backlog can do so by trying to convince you, not the other way around.

Here’s a visual way to look at it.

This should be the first question that you ask and based on what you find out, all of your responses will need to be contextualized.

Questions #2: Who are the customers and users of the product and what are their needs?

By asking questions related to the needs of the customers and users, you will get a better understanding of what problems the product is trying to solve and for whom. You want to get a sense of how your role or position fits into the rest of the company. The main accountability of a Product Owner is to ensure that the product brings value to its customers and users. Customer and user can be the same person, but don’t have to. This is important because as a Product Owner you often need to show different value to customers than to actual users. For instance, when my wife buys a bike for herself, she’s both a customer and the user. When she buys a bike for my five-year-old son, she’s the customer, and my son is the user. My son cares that it’s a spider-man bike with awesome graphics. As a customer, my wife cares about the price, his safety, the quality, etc. As a CFO and a stakeholder, I make sure that they’re both happy and that they’re not spending a crazy amount of money on things they buy.

Question #3: Who are the main people and groups I’d be collaborating with?

This helps you understand your place in the organizational structure better than titles do. Position titles vary so much from company to company and entity to entity. This question has the potential to expose the dependencies and help you get a sense of how work gets done at this company.

Write notes during the interview. If the interview goes well and it looks like it’s a fit for both parties, you can use your answers to these questions as notes for the thank you note and follow-up note you’ll write later to assure your strong candidacy.

Once I had a brief exchange with a friend who was one of my closest childhood friends from Croatia. I gave him my phone number and he said he would call me. We reconnected in our early twenties, then drifted apart and have not had a real conversation in a decade, even though he has asked for my phone number several times.

While I was reflecting on a coaching session with a client about assumptions she was making in one of her key relationships when it hit me. I have plenty of assumptions about my childhood friend, and especially his interest in reconnecting with me.

True North

Humans are naturally communal beings. We are in a relationship with others all the time—at work, at home, and in our community. And we have stories and assumptions about everything that happens in our life. Those stories and assumptions reflect our values and beliefs. We all have values; they are as much a part of us as our blood types or our genetic makeup. Values are who we are in our own deepest nature, not whom we think we should be to fit in. They are like a compass that points us to our “true north.”

They are as unique to us as our individual thumbprints. Our values determine what is important to us. Our beliefs are what is true for us. These two tend to go together. If we have a value, then we will have a belief that relates to that value. To illustrate the difference, many people commonly believe in the American Dream that anyone who works hard enough will be successful and wealthy. Underlying this belief is the American values that wealth is good, important and that it will make us happier.

Most of our actions and behavior are geared towards achieving the things that are in our values, the things that are most important to us. Our beliefs guide us on how to do that. Beliefs and values live in our mind operating system or mindset and create our perspective or filter through which we see the world. That filter or view then shapes our attitudes and actions we take. Our beliefs and values are how we see the world. Our mindset is like colored lenses through which we see and understand the world.

There is so much that we do not understand what drives people to do something we don’t agree with. We struggle to understand the other person through the lens of our own beliefs and values without trying to understand how the person thinks. Each of us has been shaped and molded over time through our experiences. Our values have developed into a mindset that we live by.

Values and Beliefs

We are often confused by people who do not share our own beliefs and values because given the same circumstances they don’t act as we would expect. To align our beliefs and our values it is important to get to know what they are. Exploring and identifying personal values and beliefs are one of the first steps that we need to do to be a better leader. Values can differ from person to person, or, taking a wider perspective, they can differ for people across all cultures. For example, if I have a value about friendship, then I will have some beliefs about what friendship means. My beliefs could be different from your beliefs about friendship. For me, a real friend is someone that loves me and likes spending time with me. For someone else, a real friend is someone who always tells us the truth. Someone said to me one time, a friend is someone who makes you feel good about yourself. Now, the last two could conflict with each other. So, each person that has beliefs about friendship, will have a slightly different set of beliefs. Their view of what friendship means will be different from person to person. The combination of the value of friendship and beliefs about friendship will drive a person’s actions and behavior. The result of that then is that we will have the kind of friendships that match not only our value of friendship but also our beliefs about what makes a friendship. People with similar values and beliefs attract each other.

Mindset is About Awareness

Most of the time, our values and beliefs are outside of our conscious awareness. If we were to ask one of our friends, “what are your values?”. It is very unlikely that we would get an immediate response. Somebody might have to take a few minutes to answer that question. Some people would find it impossible to give us an answer. That is because unless we spend time thinking about our values then it would be quite hard to know what they are. However, there are some signs that we can pay attention to because there is a connection between our values and our emotions.

In general, we feel positive emotions, so we will feel happy, satisfied, excited, etc., when our values are being fulfilled. We will experience negative emotions when our values are being violated in some way. It could be us that’s violating our own values, or it could be someone else that’s trampling all over them. When we find ourselves angry or irritated or upset about something, then that usually means that one of our values is being violated in that situation. And if we find ourselves in a situation when we are bored, unengaged, unmotivated, uninterested, then it’s usually because there is no obvious connection between what’s going on in that situation and our own personal values.

Our personal values and beliefs have a powerful effect on our lives and our organizations. Values and beliefs are powerful tools that, once understood, can change our leadership style. They changed my life. They helped me get past my biggest fears and see things through completely new lenses. Values and beliefs are important concepts that make us who we are. Although similar in some ways, these are two different things that drive one’s actions and feelings towards others.

Leadership Is About Mindset

Mindset is a key dimension of leadership presence and leadership presence is fundamentally about awareness. Therefore, becoming more aware of the stories (beliefs) we hold, and validating or challenging them is not only important for creating better relationships, but it is also central to leadership presence. The longer the beliefs camp out in our heads, the more hard-wired they become. Often though, we are completely unaware of those beliefs and how they impact our values and attitudes.

Our mindset is a complex system of beliefs and values. Each of us holds a unique mindset, created from our experiences going back to our earliest years, shaped by our family and friends, our culture and geography, and our personality itself. In other words, our mindset is how we perceive reality. It is “our own reality,” if you will. Our mindset influences our perspective, our thought patterns and emotions, and our decisions. It will affect how we hire, how we delegate, and how we manage our time. Addressing mindset is one of the most important elements of the coaching I do with my clients. Using our mind, we create the reality that we live in. This idea of mindset is one of those things that we can change simply by being aware of it. Leadership in a complex environment is all about mindset. Mindset is all about awareness.

Not too long ago, I was in a meeting with the leaders of a large publicly-traded company as they wrestled with implementing a change initiative in their organization. The group’s goal sounded simple, moving from silos into integrated cross-functional teams. The conversation soon became heated. There was a clear link between silos and improving business outcomes, but they couldn’t agree on their primary challenges to innovation. The conversation soon turned to a discussion of best solutions, how to fix the command and control culture, decouple monolithic IT systems, improve organizational architecture and policies, adopt new practices, and evolve leadership mindsets and beliefs. “This is a wicked problem,” I said from the corner. “The challenges of organizational change are complex and entrenched that there is no single solution,” I added. The room filled with silence and I felt like I was the center of attention. One of the leaders turned to me and said, “Our traditional transformation approaches aren’t working, in truth they never have, and I hope that you can help us find a better way.” He looked around the room and added, “To crudely paraphrase Einstein, at the very least we need to stop the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

As leaders, we need to EVOLVE  our mindsets, SENSE  which context we’re in, and be able to SHIFT  between value systems and the ontological states of order, complexity and chaos.

Urban planner Horst Rittel used the term “wicked problems” in the 1960’s to describe problems that spring from many diverse sources, which are emergent, evolving, shifting, and will never have one right answer. Consider the very wicked problem of running a country. The problem is wicked because no one can agree upon a suitable solution. Solving the ethnic and religious divide in the Balkans where I was born is a wicked problem. The NATO peacekeepers ignored the region’s complex hatreds and tried to solve it as though it had a solution. It didn’t work, it never did. We’ll probably be back at killing each other soon, as there is so much instability in the region.

Another type of problem that we tend to prefer are “tame problems,” such as building an electric car, or sending a human to Mars. These types of problems are very difficult but can be solved with the help of experts, given enough time. Many organizations deploy an “analyze and control” approach to their problems and leadership. This model of leadership impedes creativity and decision-making during times of change and uncertainty.

Unlike with tame problems, the wickedness of wicked problems isn’t a degree of sheer difficulty, but rather, completely different types of problems. There are no right solutions for wicked problems. They evolve and shift. Wicked problems can’t be solved, only nudged and influenced.

Just as with countries, organizations face wicked problems relating to increasing competition, accelerating change, and increasing complexity. Successful organizations are developing new leadership capabilities to deal with these kinds of problems. I call these capabilities “wicked leadership capabilities.” For wicked problems we need wicked leadership. Despite the fact that many leaders are dealing with wicked problems, they try to solve and treat them as if they were tame problems. It’s a mindset shift of how we look at our organizations and problems. If you want to build an organization that lasts,treating the issues as though they are tame problems is not an option. It’s what keeps some companies stressed and overworked, and others innovating, taking risks, and making ethical, heart-driven decisions that pay off in the long term.

Organizational changes and transformations are wicked problems. The problem is wicked because leaders in the organization cannot agree as to what counts as a solution. Every new executive brings their own team and their own solutions. One person’s solution becomes another’s failure.

Beliefs conflict, and even if they agreed on beliefs and values, it’s hard to know whether a plan was as effective as it could have been. Complex organizations are full of wicked problems. Learning to deal with their wickedness is essential to the art of leadership. The first step to dealing with wicked problems in organizations is recognizing that they exist. Many leaders prefer to pretend that all wickedness can be removed with enough time and expertise, and that those who disagree are wrong.

Philosopher and former Artificial Intelligence researcher David Chapman argues that the things we experience in life and organizations always have a mixture of predictable patterns and unstructured ambiguity. Although we always experience both, it’s a common human reaction to reject the ambiguity of things and want to insist that there really is a deeper predictable pattern that we don’t yet understand. Wicked problems undermine this view because they can’t be solved in a way in which everyone will agree, although you can take a wicked problem like running a company, protecting the environment or becoming successful, and transform it into a tame problem, such as enacting control, eliminating emissions, or earning a lot of money. Such transformations risk sweeping away some of the original problems.

Ignoring ambiguity doesn’t eliminate wicked problems, it merely ignores their wickedness.

In classic and traditional leadership models, for example, where centralized leadership has existed, the ideal has been to get and keep control. Because wicked organizational challenges usually have non-linear solutions, organizations won’t benefit from a traditional leadership approach. Uncertainty and ambiguity are the way of the world today, so we must break from the norm and learn to manage uncertainty rather than attempt to remove it. An organization’s job is to create a climate that enables people to unleash their potential in this volatile environment. In his book, Inviting Leadership, Daniel Mezick talks about an approach on creating truly engaging organizations and invitation-based change. What this book does is isolate perhaps the most fundamental shift needed for a successful transformation – a shift in decision authority from a few to many.

We can’t wait for a hero to come along and fix things. This is going to take all of us, bringing what we can, and playing our part. This means we need to get informed, get engaged, get involved. We need leadership at all levels. We need wicked leadership.

In wicked leadership, we must embrace this idea of leading with a lack of control no matter how uncomfortable it might be. To enable people to contribute to what is valued by the organization, they have to be part of that organization’s leadership, not removed from it. Therefore, wicked problems don’t require leadership as we know it today. We need to fundamentally change our thinking paradigm and approach things in context-appropriate ways. We need leadership space that is constructed and occupied by many empowered people, in the space formerly occupied by a small group of people at the top of the organization. For wicked problems, the leadership space needs to be occupied by unguided deliberation, conversation and mutuality among organizational members. This means disempowering traditional leadership and embracing collective leadership at all levels. The outcome of wicked leadership is that we start to understand leadership as a non-excludable collective good, owned and drawn on by all.

Wicked leadership is norm-based, principled, inclusive, accountable, multi-dimensional, transformational, collaborative and self-applied. The wicked leadership model is based on personal growth and relationships. It’s about permission giving. You have to give people permission to change their pattern of behavior and step into the leadership role. In their book Leading from the Emerging Future, Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer describe three “openings” needed to transform organizations. Opening the mind and challenging our assumptions is the first opening. Opening the heart to be vulnerable and to truly hear is another. The third opening is the letting go of pre-set goals and agendas to see what is really needed and possible. These three openings tend to be blind spots for most of us. We have to let go of our rigid assumptions and agendas so we can see that transforming organizations is ultimately about transforming relationships among people who shape the organizational culture.

The status quo of forcing and imposing change in organizations can only be transcended by leadership first accepting what “already is”. Acceptance is the first step of transformation. Then you can invite and inspire.

Making a positive change first requires that we embrace our genuine selves. It is the great paradox of change that sometimes the most effective adjustments occur by accepting what already is. This is certainly something that I have struggled to embrace throughout my life.

Humans have a fascinating relationship with change. There is no entity in the world that has not witnessed and experienced growth or decline. While we may ride change like the current of the ocean, we often resist it and actively fight hard against it, usually out of fear. The strange fact is that we often resist change even when we know that it will likely bring us better outcomes in the long run. There is something about the familiarity and comfort of now that causes the human mind to push back against any threat of change, whether it be good or bad.

As digital leaders, we support a whole industry of professional change agents dedicated to showing us how to improve our organization and business practices.

On an individual level, of course, change is at the very heart of personal and professional development.

Without change, we can’t grow, we can’t learn, and we can’t improve the quality of our lives or the lives of those around us.

When I was ten years old, my family was torn apart and separated by the civil war in Yugoslavia. My father spent 18 months in three different concentration camps across Bosnia. By the time he was released, he was sick of every sight in front of him and was desperate to leave the Balkans. He got drunk one night with his friends and they decided to head to Belgrade the next day in order to apply for visas. He applied to Denmark, Germany, Canada, the United States, and Australia. Perhaps my father accepted what already is.

My younger sister loved the idea of living somewhere new. I did not share her unrivalled enthusiasm. I was afraid of the thought of having to learn a new language, making new friends, and getting used to a very different way of life. I was afraid of change. Would my friends see me as a deserter? I was conflicted. Part of me wanted to experience a change from my life just outside Sarajevo during wartime, as it brought both misery and fun in equal abundance. While the living conditions were terrible, it did bring me joy that schools were cancelled most days due to tank shellings. Perhaps a change was better for my education as well as my wellbeing.

We all want to change. No matter how big or small, how seemingly life-changing or insignificant, we all have parts of our lives that are unhappy. And yet we resist change more often than not, no matter our true and underlying desires.

Change, for me, was a matter of new identity. I knew who I was, but I didn’t know who I was going to be. I imagined it was going to be a fantastic adventure wherever we went, and yet I felt a sense of comfort being where I was. There was an inner fight between who I was and who I could become.

As I got into coaching and organizational transformation many years later, I realized that change does not take place by insight, interpretation, coercion, or persuasion. Rather, change can occur when a person abandons, at least for the moment, what they would like to become and attempts to be what they are.

In other words, the possibility for real change opens up when the individual or organization stops trying to become what they are not and fully acknowledges what they are. This can be a hard concept to wrap your head around, which is why many of us have such fierce internal battles over change.

Many of my clients seeking change are in conflict with at least two internal or external opposing sides, the force for change and the force for comfort and consistency. Caught between what should be and what is, yet never fully identifying with either, the client is paralyzed between competing commitments. One of the first things that I do when I’m working with new clients is to ask them to make a sincere effort to be fully invested in the opposing sides, one at a time, with awareness and without judgment.

First, the point of view and values of the current “what is” situation are sincerely explored and, from the inside, the client shifts their mindset to what it should be. In doing so, the client may simply live in the moment.

If the client is to be able to truly stand outside the current situation, they must risk identifying with the opposing point of view or views. In other words, and here lies the paradox, to be able to change, a client has to want to change badly enough that they are willing to approach problems in a radically different way by identifying with the opposing perspective. When this happens, opposite differentiations melt into creative irrelevance, fresh possibilities emerge, and the client is free to step into an entirely new “what is.”

Accepting the current “what is” becomes the source of transformation. Leadership starts from within, and if you don’t understand and acknowledge what lies within, how can you make the necessary changes to bridge gaps between the leader you are now and the leader you strive to be?

Look at your current life or business now. What are you resisting? Identify it, name it… then accept it. Accept who you are right now, including your flaws, your contradictions, and your inconsistencies. Accept your resistance. Accept you. Accepting is different than liking or agreeing, it just means you are willing to confirm the reality in which you live. Acceptance is the first step of transformation. And when you transform, your beliefs and views evolve, and you grow.