Category: Podcasts

Anu Smalley

Transcript “

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:35

Who is Speaker: Anu Smalley?

Speaker: Anu Smalley 00:39

That’s the toughest question of all. Who is Anu Smalley? Wow, first question is stopping me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:53

Maybe, what’s been your journey? I mean, like, how did you and like?

Speaker: Anu Smalley 00:57

Let me do that first. That may help identify who is Anu Smalley. So, I think my journey is where I started off as developer. And I went kicking and screaming into being a developer. I did not want to be in programming, but I got a job. Accidentally got a job as a programmer, I needed the job to pay bills. And 15 years later, I’m still in development. I ended up when I was leading an IT organization at a financial software company. So, I was the head of IT there, and it was just not what I wanted to do. So, I got completely, I decided I’m going to change my career. I went to an organization, a different organization, and my only ask to the recruiter was, the job must not be an IT focus job. That’s it. I do not want to be in IT. Anything, great.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:54

Why? What happened? You know, as a developer and not wanting to be in IT.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 02:03

So, I never wanted to be a developer to begin with, right. I wanted to be more working with people and products. And that’s been my passion. I like helping you figure out what is it that you need, not build it. Somebody else can do the building. I want to help figure out what is it that you need. How do you use it? Why do you use it? That’s the curiosity in me. And as a developer, yes, initially it was really powerful building stuff. But then after a while, it was like, I don’t want to build stuff for people, I want to talk to the people who are using the stuff that I’m building or be there. But I didn’t know that there was such a thing called product ownership at that point. I was an IT person, right. I went from developer to project manager to IT. I was director of IT, and I headed up the IT organization. But it was just something missing for me, and it wasn’t, I knew I needed to get out and experience something different. So, I quit my job and took a massive pay cut, because I was head of IT and now, I went into this small organization that had a consulting arm. And they said, well, you know, your entire experience has been IT, so we won’t put you in IT, but we’ll put you in this place where you have to interact with IT. You understand them, you understand the language, it might be a good place. I’m like, fine, I can never get away from IT. So, I got in there, and I was director of training and consulting services.

So, I helped with, we build software, and we had consultants who went and worked with clients, and my job was to make sure they had good training and they had all the products. So, I was director of technology for the consulting arm, eh okay. I didn’t have to build stuff. I was talking to people and saying, so what do you need this product to do? Okay, let me go talk to the people. I got into scrum because my boss came to me one day and said, so I had a very interesting conversation with the IT folks today. I didn’t understand a word they said, not a single word. And they rattled off some things at me and they said, we would like you to provide us a person who will represent you to be part of this new thing we’re doing, because I figured you had the best shot of understanding them since you were from IT. So, you’re volunteered. I’m like, what did you volunteer me for? I don’t know, some rugby thing they’re doing, I didn’t understand. Like, I don’t play rugby. He goes, I don’t know. They said something about rugby and Scrum and ah, you go figure it out. That’s how I got into Scrum. Purely accidental.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:05

So, people told you to be a product owner, I’m assuming?

Speaker: Anu Smalley 05:08

He thought he was telling me to be a product owner, but that was a lesson for me how not to implement scrum because I was a scrum master for my team and product owner for my team. It was weird. For the consulting group, I was a scrum master, but I represented the consulting group in IT as a product owner. At that time, I heard it was great. And I struggled with that job, that role that he put me into, and I was like, there’s something not right here. I felt I was failing in everything. And I, you know me, I push myself hard, I’m a perfectionist for myself, like, how can I fail? This is not okay. I cannot be not good at what I’m doing. And I was feeling like I was failing everybody.

And that’s when I actually met an Agile coach who they brought in. And the Agile coach said; what are you doing? Good Lord, no wonder you’re miserable. You can’t do both those roles. I’m like, this is what they’ve told me. He is the one who actually said, okay read this. I didn’t know scrum guide books, nothing. I was just heads down doing what I was told. He is the one who actually said here read this book, go watch this video and stuff. And I got into it, I’m like, wait a minute, we’re doing this all wrong, this is not my style. And the reason I became a certified scrum trainer, and a coach is to help people like me, so that they don’t go through the pain I went through. I nearly quit my job and said, forget about this agile thing, I’m going to go back to my, you know, traditional approach.

Because I didn’t understand what the right way to do it or that we needed a mindset shift, it was just doing. And for me, the passion about who I am today is about helping the people like me who heard all these things about, oh, agile means, you know, you can just do magic in two weeks and get a whole project done. You don’t need to do documentation or planning or nothing. You just put people together and do a daily stand up and put in JIRA, by the way, and voila, your project will be done. My passion is to help those people understand what I understood after those conversations with the coach. Go, oh my God, if you do this right, it is so different. So back then I helped that organization make a few changes, but they were stuck. So, I shifted, I went to another company where there was an agile shop. I got into product ownership there, and that was the best thing ever. I realized when I became a product owner that I was born to be working in the product side. Honestly, I was not a fan of being a scrum master. I didn’t like that role too much. I loved being a product owner. And I

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:29

Is it like the connection to the customer? Is it the innovation? What draws you in from a product ownership? Yeah.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 08:40

I go back to like, I still remember the first time I actually saw, this is way back when before agile days, right. I was in a financial software company, we used to build software for credit unions. And I bank with a credit union. So, I still remember the moment. I had taken my two daughters to the credit union for some stuff. And we were talking and the teller said, oh, we used and she saw where I worked. And she said, oh, we use your software. And we were doing something with loans, and I said, do you use this product? She goes yeah, yeah, I’m using it right now. And both my girls when their eyes went this big, saying you built that and I told the teller, I said, can you go to this screen and turn the screen. I said that screen I built it. And both my girls went [expression 9:39] and the teller went, oh my God, let me tell you how amazing this product is, blah, blah, blah. That thing of not just building it personally but my team build the product, but it was actually seeing it being used by somebody and seeing the impact it has on them. For me, the product ownership is around that. The connection to the customers to understand what is it that you truly want and building that, and then watching the benefits, watching the impact that has on them. For me, that is good

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:20

That is fine. Yeah, it’s like tighter connection too. So maybe to do like tie, like, you recently became a CC and like you’ve been big on coaching, and how do you, you know, look at the connection between coaching and product ownership. Like, you know, a lot of times people are associated with Scrum Master, but coaching is coaching, right.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 10:49

It is, and I think, so if you look at our community, or our guides community, the trainers, and coaches, there are very few of us who have come up the product ownership path. I think majority have been Scrum Masters, and that’s amazing. Because they can work with a team, they can work with the product owners, but to actually have been a product owner, and then to step into being a trainer or coach, I have. I can actually tell clients, here’s an example of how I’ve done this, rather than here’s an example of how I’ve coached it. And I think there is a difference there. And I would love and this is my goal. Every time I do a CSPBO class, I tell every student in there, how can I help you become a certified team coach. We need more product owners in the guides community. Because we talk a lot about Scrum Masters. And you know, everything is about Scrum Masters. And I want people to be more focused on product ownership as well. Because product owners control the garbage in garbage out. You can have the best scrum master and the most amazing team, but if you don’t have an effective PO, you’re not going to get far. Everybody else will have to pick up the slack there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:13

Yeah, no, I mean, you know, something that you just said kind of triggered another thorough question, which is around. You know, I think in general, we need more diversity, and we need more. So maybe I listened to one of your presentations on gender parity, and like when you showed those numbers as far as how many years it’s going to take to get to. So, could we explore that a little bit? Like, let’s first define what is gender parities? Could you first?

Speaker: Anu Smalley 12:48

Yeah. So, there’s a big misconception with parity. Parity is, if you and I have the same job, are we going to be paid the same amount? No difference, because I’m a woman, I get paid less. And no difference because oh, you’re a woman, so you cannot coach this group. I was actually told by an organization that the senior leaders in their organization would be uncomfortable with me coaching them because I’m a woman. That’s where you say there is no gender parity here. People talk about equality. There is a big difference between equality and equity. Equity is what we are going for. Equity is talking about; we are going to remove the systemic things that stop diversity from showing up. There is an image that I show and when I’m talking about gender parity, or diversity in general.

It’s about you know, if there are three people who are trying to look over a fence, and they’re of different heights, if we say, well, we need to make everyone equal, so, we’re going to give everybody a box to stand on. The shortest person still may not be able to look over the fence. That doesn’t work. You may say, well, how about we give the shorter person a larger thing up? Nobody who is not of the mainstream is looking for a handout. I’m not looking for a handout because I’m a woman. I can stand my own, I can stand my own fate. I got it. I don’t need any favors. I need equal opportunity. So, what do you do to remove that barrier of the fence? Make the fence see through. So, it doesn’t matter how high you are, you can still see across the fence. That’s systemic barriers that we need to remove.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:45

And I think that’s a really good example of systemic change when we talked about it. It’s like rethinking the whole picture and saying, what can we do here, not just sticking with the current paradigm and see what we can do.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 14:59

Exactly. It is not about let me give you an extra hand. No. You ask anybody like I know there’s been a lot of talk this past year around racial equity and stuff. And I can tell you like; I’ve talked to people and say I don’t need charity. Yes, I’m a woman of color, but I’m not looking for any favors. And I’ve had people ask me, so how do we help this? Give me your time. Give time, mentor people, find people who do not get the opportunity to be part of this mainstream events and go mentor them, right. I mentor, a group of CST candidates. It’s not all women, it’s not all people of color, I have two white men in there as well. Because this problem cannot be solved just by women. We need to come together to solve this problem collectively. And this group of candidates that I mentoring, I have one ask for that. I give them my time freely. I give them a lot of opportunities. I have one ask. When they become a CST, they’re going to go mentor some other people and people who don’t look like them, who don’t live where they live, bringing in diversity. Same thing for the CTCs and CEC’s. I am mentoring more of them to come in. And I tell every class, I’m happy to mentor anybody, time permitting, right. But if you’re a woman, a woman of color are at least I’ll have a conversation with you. Because if you look at the guide, just the guides community, right, I mean, overall, the guides community 10% are women.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:57

And we’re talking about Scrum Alliance guides community, but I think it’s really different. I don’t think it’s that much different anywhere else.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 17:04

No, it’s not. And the people of color are 3%.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:10

Which is crazy. I mean, like, it’s a shame, but it’s also like, how can we, like it’s still right there in front of us. And yeah, you know. But what’s also concerning what you said in that presentation is like, I don’t know exactly what research you had at the bottom, but like, it’s going to take 54 years for Western Europe.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 17:35

And 170 years for North America.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:39

Yeah. And like, I was looking at Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Eastern Europe is where I’m from, but it’s close to 110 years and I’m like, holy crap. Like, you know, in a sense, I could see that. I didn’t, you know, necessarily think of North America right away as that, but it’s like, what can we do, that’s way, way too long. I mean, like, if there’s even if we cut all of this in half, it’s still a lot.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 18:08

It’s still a lot, and this is why. So, people often ask, how can we help? I think the biggest thing is to do a lot of mentoring. So traditionally, when you look at trainers and coaches, right, and you travel for work as well. So, I recently told somebody that in 2019, when we were still in person, I spent 285 nights in hotels, and people went what! My kids are grown up, my husband could work from home, and I’ve had so much support from my husband to say, go follow your dream, you want to do this go, go do it, I’ve got the home. You need that kind of support. And most women because of the children, they go, I can’t leave them home, who is going to deal with this?

Because we still have those stereotypical roles of men and woman or you know, the gender roles. And we have got to start those conversations where we said no, you don’t need to have, there is no such thing as the woman has to stay home. The man has to be the one who earns the money. Yes, biologically women will have children and stuff. Wish men could have children. That would equal a lot of things. But I think fundamental gender roles have to be looked at again, because I’ve had so many women tell me I cannot do what you’re doing. I can’t travel like that. How can I do what you’re doing without traveling? And I think this also goes to I know there are a bunch of trainers who just stay in their city and work just there. And these are the trainers who’ve been around for a long time, and they’re established. For the newer trainers who are coming in, it’s very hard for them to do that. Name city where there isn’t a trainer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:20

[unclear 20:21], at least United States…

Speaker: Anu Smalley 20:23

At least in the United States, it is the big cities, yeah. If you find a little hole in the whole city, maybe you won’t find a trainer who’s established there. So, it’s hard. So that means you have to travel. And if you’re a coach, before this virtual thing, you know, you had to travel outside. I still remember…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:44

I moved to California just because of that, hey, if you want to coach.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 20:48

Right. But you know, you were able to move your family with you. But imagine if your wife had that opportunity. What would the decision be then? Would it be the same decision?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:59

Even today. And like, you know, you bring up another point. It’s so true. And you know, I joke around when I said, you know, you wish men could give birth. I think, you know, what that brought up to me is just like empathy. We talk about empathy, but like most people, like, how often do you put yourself in somebody else’s shoes or body. To think about like, what are they really thinking, doing, feeling? Like the whole, you know, taking all of their senses, you know. Yeah.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 21:29

You know, when you talk about empathy, right, I remember this one instance, I had a manager, this is years ago. Male manager, nice guy. We had to go travel to a client side. And he had said, I would love for you to come with me Anu, because you know, the client, he’s new into the role. And he said, you know, I’d love for you to come so that there’s continuity, blah, blah, blah. I’m like yeah sure, whatever. Happy to travel. We were in Pennsylvania, we had to travel to Toronto. And I said, okay, but let me know as soon as the decision is made. And he goes, yeah, I think we’ll fly out maybe next Wednesday, and this was the Wednesday the previous week. I’m like, okay, I can do that. And then he said, actually Wednesday won’t work. We’ll probably fly out Thursday morning and fly back Friday night. I’m like, yeah, that works. But it was not confirmed.

On Monday I was telling him, I’m like, dude, is this confirmed? He goes, yeah well, well, you know. We’ll confirm it today or tomorrow. And I had to tell him, I said, listen to me, you can walk out of your house and your wife will take care of everything. I’m the wife, I’m the mother, I got to take care of is that are there lunches, their food. That means breakfast, lunch and dinner for two days, has to be taken care of. My husband works. My kids go to school, I need to prep stuff. You can’t tell me Wednesday evening; we are flying out tomorrow. I cannot do that. And he looked at me and he went, oh, I never considered that. Exactly. You never considered. There was no empathy there about your situation is going to be different. It was just about, I can just pack my bag and say, Honey, I’ll be back tomorrow. And that’s fine. But it doesn’t work that way for everyone.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:29

No. And there’s also like another thing maybe to throw into this. We’ve talked about gender parity, empathy. But the other thing is this unconscious bias, like sometimes we’re doing it intentionally, sometimes it’s just unconscious. And what do you think like, you know, especially when it comes to leadership, like what is the connection between leadership and that unconscious bias?

Speaker: Anu Smalley 23:53

You know, in my leadership classes, I tell them a story about me. I never used to do that before, until I said, you know, unconsciously I’m not being vulnerable, so I need to tell them my own journey, right. We all have unconscious biases, because we have a brain. If you have a brain, you have a bias. Some biases are conscious. Like I know, I don’t like certain things, and I’m going to react in that way. But the unconscious biases are the scariest one because every human being has them, right. And I still remember one of my, I said this to somebody and they said, you have a big unconscious bias towards the younger generation. I’m like, no I don’t. and they are like yes, you do. And they pointed out something I’d said, and I’m going oh. Because as people in my generation, we have an unconscious bias towards this new generation. I have it, I acknowledge it. Can I do something about it? Most of the time. You know, you do it, I do it with my girls. And I’m like, here you go with your tik tok. That’s my unconscious bias against what they’re using. I have my own things that I use, right. And I think as a leader, it’s important to listen to what people are saying. Because nobody will come and say Miljan, you have an unconscious bias. You know, that’s not how it shows up. People will say things like, you know, that I felt very uncomfortable when you said that. When you hear words like that, you have to pause and go, okay, I made somebody uncomfortable, what did I say? Did I mean to do that? And all goes back to intention versus impact.

Miljan Bajic 25:54

Yeah. And so also, like another thing that you just remind me of, it’s also about awareness, right. How aware am I is a leader, right?

Speaker: Anu Smalley 26:02

100%. Like, when you talk about emotional intelligence, and leadership, the foundation is awareness. I’ve worked with some leaders who, you know they have no self-awareness at all, and you’re like, okay, first, we’re going to start there. I cannot help you be a better leader, until you are aware of the fact that you need to be a better leader. If you think you’re the most awesome leader in the world, there is nothing I can do to help you anyway.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:35

Well, that’s the thing. And it comes like to all of this, like, you know, everything that we’ve said, so far, it comes down to the awareness. And I know that you use, I use the Johari window in your classes. And like, it’s interesting, even just using Johari Window to help people understand their blind spots. And it’s so simple, yet a lot of times people go like, oh, wow, you know. Like, this is just, you know, a wakeup call. I just…

Speaker: Anu Smalley 27:07

Exactly. You know, and I used the Johari Window in my one-on-one coaching as well with leaders to help them understand that, yes, your blind spots are important, but it’s the unknown unknown, that you kind of need to look at, because a lot of your unconscious biases stay there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:27

Exactly. That the unknown unknown is all about experience and trying to figure out like, you know, is it really that I don’t know.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 27:37

And, you know, over the last four to five years, I have done a lot of work on self. I’ve done leadership programs and coaching programs, just to learn more about me, and the impact I have, so that I can reduce, I’m never going to be able to remove all of them. [cross talk] reduce my blind spots and unconscious biases, right. And the other thing with the unconscious bias, and I’ve started doing this more and more is, when I hear unconscious bias coming towards me, I point it out. Like I get this all the time. Your English is really good for an Indian. I’m like, I know, my English is probably better than yours. Because I’ve been speaking English my entire life. And I speak the Queen’s English. It’s probably you know, and telling people that what you just said, that’s bias towards Indians and the way we speak. And they go, oh, I didn’t mean any offence. Again, intention versus impact, right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:49

It is so true. Culture like shapes that too. Sometimes you grow up in that type of culture where it’s acceptable. So, like, you don’t even think about it. You just like kind of on autopilot, right.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 28:59

Exactly. And the number of times, like, you know, I know. Like, I’ve lived in the United States way longer than I’ve ever lived in India. I’ve been an adult in the US. I’ve never lived as an adult in India. And I still get a lot of comments like you’re unlike other Indians. I don’t know how to take that. Is that a compliment? Should I take offense to that? Because India is my birth country. United States is my adopted country. I belong to both, right. Now what? And you understand that, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:36

Oh yeah, same. Yeah.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 29:39

[unclear 29:38] Who am I? So, when you started this conversation, you said who is Anu. For me, immediately my mind went, I don’t know. Because who am I? I don’t know. Because am I Indian? Am I American? Am I a coach, am I a trainer? What am I? I don’t know. I think who is Anu is an answer I hope to have before I die. It’s journey towards figuring it out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:06

Yeah. But you know, in a sense, like, you know, if somebody asked me who Anu is, you know, like some of the things that, you know, we’re listeners, we know each other. So, this is not my first time, like some of the speakers or guests. And I think, you know, a lot of who Anu is came through this conversation in the sense that, you know, you care. I remember when I reached out to you, when I needed help, when I needed, you know, somebody to co train with. When others didn’t even respond, you were one of the people, and the way that you just embraced and helped me out. It’s something I’ll never forget, you know. I think some of the stuff that you’re doing in the community that you’ve been doing in the community, is a reflection of who Anu is. And, you know, when I look at Anu, I look at Anu as a really good human being. I don’t look at Anu as, you know, is Anu, it doesn’t even cross my mind as far as those things that you discussed. And maybe again, that’s just, you know, through experience or whatever. And I also can empathize with people that would think you know, otherwise, but it is that.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 31:21

That’s the best compliment you could ever give me. Thank you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:25

I mean, I think that’s all you know, at the end of the day, that’s the least I hope, that’s all we can wish for, right. But maybe to come back to leadership and you know, diversity, like, you know, what can leaders do to encourage diversity in the workplace and also address the unconscious bias.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 31:46

So, diversity, one of the first things I would say is, if you are a senior leader in an organization, we often talk about the glass ceiling. That women and other different diversity, but people who belong to different diversity groups, they can break the glass ceiling. But here’s the thing. If nobody is on the ladder, how are you going to break the ceiling? If you’re a senior leader in an organization, that first rank of management, bring more diverse group of people into management at that first rank of the ladder. The thing we need to fix is the broken rank. Because studies have shown. So, the study I did was the McKinsey Report, the World Economic Forum, all of them have said the same thing. The first level of management that most organizations have, that’s not really diverse. The diversity is, two out of 10 candidates are not white male. If that’s the case, if there are only two out of 10 at the bottom most level, by the time we get to the top, there’s going to be zero, because people fall off, right. So, you got to get more diversity at the line manager level, if you want to build diversity in leadership of your organization. And here’s the thing, this is not about, women need to be there because we are women. Diversity of thought, diversity of styles is important for the existence of a company.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:25

Exactly. I was going to say like, there’s so much also, as much as you know, we’ve done research, there’s probably more research and innovation and what part of diversity plays into it. So, it’s almost if you don’t see it morally, that is correct, at least look at it from a business standpoint.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 33:41

Absolutely. And that’s well said. If you don’t see it from a moral ethical point of view, look at it from a business point of view. You are going to get diverse perspectives and thoughts about how do you solve a problem. And you may actually get to a point where you’re going to solve a problem, that will ultimately benefit your organization. And isn’t that what you truly want? Right? So, fix the broken rank. Look at the people you’re mentoring into management. Look at that group. How diverse are there? Well, how was the diversity in that group? And again, it doesn’t have to be, it’s going to be all diversity, people from different diverse cultures. Create a healthy mix. It’s not about, okay, now don’t promote any white man just be diverse women and people of color. You need both. The problem of the world cannot be solved by one group. So, for me…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:40

Don’t swing the pendulum too much.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 34:43

Exactly. Then go to the opposite direction, right. If you do that, you are going to learn about all these people, which will in turn help you uncover your blind spots and show you what your unconscious biases are. Because we don’t interact with people that much people don’t say, well, that was not right to say. So, your unconscious biases and blind spots are never uncovered. Because you don’t deal with the people with whom you have the unconscious bias. So, open up your groups. Make your first line manager group more diverse and see what happens in your organization. Wait for the magic.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:27

And take action. Like I’ve been bringing this up because it was unconscious bias that I had. So, like when I first started this podcast, I don’t know now three, four months ago, you know. It was mostly like, who would I have a drink with, you know, at the bar and just talking, you know. What came to mind is mostly guys and mostly white guys, right. And then as I started doing more and more, I’m like, well look at, you know, look at my [unclear 35:53], look at the people that I’m talking to you. And then it came to like, well, you know, one thing is to acknowledge it. But the other thing is to actually do something about it, right. And, you know, it was like, sometimes, like we need another push or just make it more actionable. Talking about it is not enough, I guess.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 36:19

Exactly. And this is what you know, I’ve been telling people, it’s the micro dos. It’s small. You don’t have to say, oh, I am going to do this, you don’t have to do that. Do one little thing. What’s a micro do that you can actually take action on that will make a difference? It doesn’t have to change the world. It has to change the world for one person. What can you do? Find a small thing. Can you mentor somebody? Can you talk to somebody? Can you help somebody? Can you guide somebody into a role, a position, a class, whatever it is? Micro dos is what we want to focus on. This is the small things. It’s like a snowball effect. If 100 of us do one small little thing, that snowball is going to be big rather than just me doing 100 things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:18

Yeah. I mean, that’s so true. And I think we just have to kind of nudge each other and make sure that you know, at least we understand that again it goes back to those experiences. Going back to Johari, the unknown [unclear 37:32], the only way that you can start realizing is by going into unknown unknown. And I think you know, something that you can probably relate to, like coming to United States. I was old enough to remember that unknown unknown. And it was scary to think about it before we came here. But like, as I started immersing myself in a new culture in the new environment, I started realizing things, for instance, like, hey, I hate people of different religion. Why do I do that? Like here in United States, it’s, you know, it’s a lot less common. So, like, it started breaking my mental models and things that I had. And that was mostly due to the experiences. It’s not like something that came up, it’s like, you know, by actually being exposed.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 38:23

Right. You know, and something you say, like I do not have very clear memories of when I moved. I was I was an adult; I was 21. But my experiences in India, where as a teenager as a child, I just turned 21, or 22, I think when I came here. So, I was so excited about coming here. And I don’t think I had formed all my biases in India yet. I was still a child and I had the biases that are passed down in family. But I don’t think I had formed enough of my own biases. And I think that happened once I came here. And now when I go back to visit India, those biases show up very differently because I now react in India, like somebody from here would do. Because my biases are formed here, not like there. It’s weird. It’s so weird. So, when I traveled to India with my husband, who is American, our reactions were so different. And he was more relaxed about stuff and I’m like, oh my God. He reacted to things just so differently, and it was just so interesting to see. And that’s what actually made me go, why am I behaving so neurotically?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:03

Well, I think I find myself in a similar situation. And in that instance, I feel like I’m less empathizing with people than somebody else that is not exposed. Almost like you’re judging them in a way or just because you’re familiar and you’re from there. Rather than, you know, somebody that’s not, just, you know, accept them for what they are. Like, you know, your aunt’s doing weird stuff that typically, your aunt won’t do here. Like shoving, you know, stuffs, you know, on your guest’s plate. Like eat more and…

Speaker: Anu Smalley 40:38

Exactly. And that’s like, I’m going why are you reacting to that, and my husband’s going, this is weird. I’m like, really the things you find weird, I don’t find weird. And he goes, things you find weird, I don’t find weird. And it’s just interesting to be able to see, from their point of view. Like I took our oldest daughter when she just turned 20, I think. We took her to India for the first time. It was fascinating to see the country through her eyes. She was still at that age where her biases have not formed. Not the her own, she has family biases, yes. And it was so fascinating to see the country of my birth through her eyes for the first time. And I’m going, wow, is that what you see when you see that? How interesting. I see something so different, and I react differently. And for me, that was the beginning of the work I’ve tried to do on myself saying, okay, that means I still have work to do on me. And that’s why I said, I think it’s a constant journey to figure out how I’m going to get to be who I want to be.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:00

And something that I recently spoke with Mike spade, and I read his book Agile transformation, like something that resonated with me, which he says, like, you know, as far as the mindset and how we shape our conscience is like, the stories that we tell ourselves. And it’s like, you know, if I’m stuck in a story that I tell myself, it’s not till I change that story to see it. And those are those biases, those are those, you know, things so like, understanding the story that we’re telling ourselves. Because everybody’s telling a different story, even though it’s very interesting. So maybe to finish it off here, I thought maybe, I don’t know about giving some tips to people. And I think you will be a good person to give some facilitation tips and coaching tips. So, what would you say to somebody that might be listening, because I think facilitation and coaching, those are the type of skills that doesn’t matter what role you’re playing, you can benefit or what your position is, you can benefit from those skills. So maybe let’s start with coaching, what coaching tips would you give to people.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 43:07

For me, whether it’s coaching or facilitation, the biggest thing is be open to listening to what people are saying. With the whole active listening thing, I know everybody goes, oh, yeah, yeah, active listening. But how often do you practice active listening? I often tell people, people hear the word active listening, and they understand what it means, but how do you actually practice it? And if so, what is your tip to do active listening? And they go while I just listened, I’m like, okay, and as you’re listening, what’s going on here? And they go, yeah, I’m thinking about stuff, then you’re not actively listening. Waiting to respond is not the same as listening. So how can you stop waiting to respond?

One of the things I do is a technique called voice mirroring. I learned this years ago, and I’m sure other people have heard of this, too. When people are talking to me, and I’m trying to do active listening, what you’re saying, I repeat in my head. As I repeat your words, in my head, limited opportunities for my head to go, oh, I remember the time when that happened to me, oh, that so not right, you know. There are limited opportunities for me to go back to my experiences or to form judgments, because I’m repeating the words in my head. And what that also does is when you stop talking, it allows me to go okay, he said all of these things, and then allows me to focus on that and then respond. So active listening, what is your technique for active listening. Figure it out, whatever works for you.

One of the coaches that I work with, she must have a pencil in her hand. And this is what she has to keep doing while somebody is talking. Her fingers have to be moving on a pen or she keeps toiling or doing something. Because when she’s not doing this, her mind is thinking other things and wandering, right? So that’s my biggest step. Figure out, what is it that allows you to focus on the person in front of you, and their words, just to listen, not to judge, not to respond, nothing. And the other thing people often say is, oh, yeah, active listening and powerful questions. I’ll ask a bunch of powerful questions. Yeah, but you can’t plan those powerful questions ahead of time. Then it’s not coaching, and it’s not facilitation. So, if you’re actively listening, when the person stops, trust your intuition to say, based on what I’ve just processed in my head, what is the right question to ask. So active listening, trust your intuition to ask the powerful question. Do not randomly ask any all-powerful question. Because it’s a powerful question. It doesn’t work that way. I’ve seen that often. I mean, I used to do that. When I first started coaching, I would have a list of powerful questions and rattle off something, and then go, that didn’t land well. Why didn’t it land well? Because it was not the appropriate question. And if you truly listen to the person in front of you, and then trust your intuition, the right question will pop in your mind and then ask that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:31

It’s almost like and I did the same thing. As far as, and maybe it’s not a bad thing to start with. But I think, you know, once I understood that it’s about expanding the space for the person, it’s about helping them figure things out. From that perspective, that listening, asking questions. Listening is key, obviously, but the questions are contextualized, to where the conversation and what they’re trying to do, rather than just you know.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 46:59

You know, and the powerful questions that you’re asking, should be asked to create clarity. For the person who’s talking not for you. If you never understand what they say, it doesn’t matter. It only matters that the person in front of you gets clarity. So, your questions should help that person get clarity, right. One of the things I repeat often is your questions should get the person speaking, explore what’s happening, and not explain away the things that they’ve not done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:36

Exactly. Well, I just maybe give example. Like, I went to that recently, where like, I was stuck, or I’m still stuck. I keep telling people and I keep exposing it because I want to get unstuck, I’m finishing my book. But I had a writing coach who had nothing. Hasn’t read my book, doesn’t know anything about what we do. And she was trying to help me, in a sense, coach me through like, how do I get unstuck. So, she was helping me explore, like, what’s going to get me back into writing. And it was all me exploring ideas about you know, do I wake up at five. What has worked for me? What am I going to, you know, do to start writing again? She was helping me figure out how do I go back.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 48:25

Yeah. So that’s a great example, right. Somebody who doesn’t know the content is just focusing on helping you figure out how to approach the content. A lot of us when we do Agile coaching, scrum coaching, leadership coaching, we also have some content authority, because we’ve been in the Agile space for so long. So self-management is key as well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:48

Using that instance, it’s very hard not to go into mentoring.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 48:52

Yeah. Oh, let me tell you what I did. No, no, no. So, self-awareness that, oh, I’m stepping into mentoring, and then self-managing yourself to go, step back, step away. And I don’t care what book you read. I don’t care when you finish your book. My goal is to help you figure out why is it important for you to finish your book? What’s important about that? And get to there and not go to Miljan, what’s chapter nine all about? Ah, so then we’re going to get stuck in content and not move forward. There we go to explain, not explorer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:30

Exactly. I think that the other thing that comes up is like, you know, a lot of times people are looking for mentoring. But we go in as coaches so like being clear and explicit about, you know, the differences in what the person that you’re working with, is looking for. Because you can’t coach somebody that doesn’t want to be coached, I think a lot of times that can backfire if you don’t fully understand that.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 49:55

Agreed. A lot of times I’ll ask people, they say can I get you as a coach? I’m like, are you looking for a coach or mentor. And the normal things I get, what’s the difference? I’m like, Aha. So, you want to mentor. You think you want a coach, alright. Let me explain to you what’s the difference. And then I asked them, now what do you want, a coach or a mentor? They go, just a mentor, thank you. I’m like alright then. That’s the difference.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:24

That is, it. And it helps clarify, because I don’t know, if you’ve been in situations, I’ve been in situation where I got myself, kind of not necessarily into trouble, but like, you know, people are questioning the value that you’re bringing, because they’re assuming you’re going to mentor rather than coach.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 50:41

You know, that again. So, if you’re going to do both, you have to work with the person in front of you. And trust your gut, your intuition to say, I think you need a little bit mentoring here, can I mentor you, and step into that mentoring stance other than the coaching stance, depending on the person in front of you, I often tell my coaching clients, there’ll be times when I’ll step into mentoring, and I’ll tell you. But I need to sense that they need a little bit more guidance, rather than just figuring stuff out for themselves. So, you have to figure out what stance you’re getting into. And it’s not about what you want to do. It has to be the stance you’re stepping into, to help the person in front of you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:28

That’s a really good point. They’re in kind of in the driver’s seat, then just that awareness to like, that you are switching those stances, and doing it intentionally.

Speaker: Anu Smalley 51:40

Intentionally switching and calling it out and saying, I’m doing this so that we can help you. It’s not about let me tell you all the wonderful things I’ve done in my life. That doesn’t help anyone.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:54

Yeah, that’s awesome. I think that those are the type of things that especially those that are, you know, diving into that space of coaching and mentoring that they might find. We’re finishing up here, and as always, I tell people crazy how an hour fly by. Is there anything that you would like to leave us with, a message or?

Speaker: Anu Smalley 52:18

You know, an older student, by older, I mean, somebody I’d worked with years ago, reminded me recently of something I told her, and I’ve been bringing that back up again. As trainers and coaches, our job is many times even as a trainer, my job is to get you some knowledge. My job is to impart knowledge. Your job then is to take that knowledge and make it wisdom. Because I don’t have your context, to make it wisdom for you. I cannot give you wisdom, I can give you knowledge. So, the example I told the student and she brought that up to me, I’m like, oh, my God, that was a good example, is, my job is to give you knowledge, so I can teach you that tomato is a fruit, that’s knowledge. Wisdom is you have to figure out that you cannot put tomato in a fruit salad.

So, knowledge is that tomato is a fruit, wisdom is that tomato doesn’t belong in a fruit salad. I can give you knowledge, you are the only person who can figure it out that wisdom, and contextualize it. So as coaches and trainers, our job is to guide, to provide knowledge, to create a container where you can grow and figure out what that wisdom means to you. Now, you could say hey, I like tomato in a fruit salad. Somebody else would say ew, tomato in fruit salad. Again, wisdom is different, it’s contextualized. So, if you’re looking to become a guide, or you’re coming to one of the guides, remember, we can give you knowledge. We cannot walk the walk for you. We can only get you started. So, if you’re going to become a guide, remember that as well. Don’t tell people what to put in their fruit salad. They got to figure that stuff out for themselves.

Dahm M. Hongchai

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:42

Who is Dahm Mongol Hongchai?

Dahm M. Hongchai 00:48

Dahm is a human, he is a happy human. Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, actually, I worked as a mechanical engineer before me fleeing to the US. I worked in Thailand 11 years. So six years, I was a mechanical engineer, and then moved to be a human resource development manager. So I’m from the two words of machines, and human.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:27

So how do you, like when you say, Human Development Manager, what does that really mean in your context?

Dahm M. Hongchai 01:37

I designed courses, workshops, to develop new engineers, new technicians, or even people who have a lot of experience at my company. And I take care of the whole employee development systems. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:01

So, it’s really in developing both the human side of things as well as, obviously the process and that whole side of things, yeah. I know you recently we talked maybe a couple of months ago, we exchanged emails, and you moved from Thailand, you were in Thailand for I think, a lot of COVID during the last year, and then you came back. So what are you up to currently? What are you doing?

Dahm M. Hongchai 02:30

Now we are in Portland, Oregon, I became a full time PhD student at Portland State University. My major is in engineering and technology management. And now I’m interested in organizational change management. So I see change is the truth of life is everywhere, and it will be forever with our life, and even our business. So I think change is really basic, classic, and challenging. I’m really into it, how to help myself first, to change myself to be better every morning, every day, that I have the greatest quality of my life to wake up every day. So I want to be a better Dahm first. And then I have energy, especially positive energy, to help to support other people to change to be a better they.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:38

Wow, that is awesome. And like, you know, when it comes to change, I mean, we talk a lot about change, we talk about changing people changing culture changing, you know, systems. What do you think, you know, looking at your background now, or I’d like to get to also is the same as a monk, how you got into that, but maybe just looking at change, like why do from your perspective, why do we resist change? Why do we sometimes welcome change as humans? And what is your thought on that? aspect when it comes to change?

Dahm M. Hongchai 04:14

Even though change is the truth of life, but some changes are really painful for us. We don’t really practice or prepare ourself to confront those changes. For example, what if I do? What if you lose your loved ones this evening? I asked myself, I think 10 years ago after I lost three friends, like three months, three months, three months and ask myself, “what if my mum died?” That would be such a big change of my life. And then my friend invited me to a temple, it is a foreign temple. I went there every week and three months, and then I made a decision to be a monk. I don’t know why the temple always introduced me to death videos almost every evening. I didn’t tell the temple what my objective was that I came to the temple almost every weekend, but kind of like someone there knew about my purpose. And then I watched videos of death often and then I got used to it. You know, after being a monk, I think 40 days, and then I came back to work. Three years later, my mom died. Like, I talked to her in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, and asked her, “have you had dinner yet?” And she said, “no, I’m going to see a doctor”, 10 minutes later, I got a call from my brother, “mom is dying, what should I do?” I didn’t cry. I was really conscious and made a decision to let her go. I took a bus back home, I didn’t cry at all. But when I saw my mom’s body, I cried, but not that much. Because I knew exactly that it would happen sooner or later. So change is with us, is with us all the time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:59

And thank you for sharing that. It looks like you embraced the change, right? You didn’t run from it, you weren’t scared of it. You knew that it was coming, we all know it is coming but a lot of times, we’re afraid of the unknowns that I think you know, when we resist the change that has to do I think with what you just said, consciousness, as far as how conscious we are about that change, and also our fear towards the unknown. And maybe that, you know, once we are okay with the unknown, maybe we’re okay with the change. I don’t know. But that is a really, really touching and interesting point that just made me think and my thoughts are going in a couple of different directions as far as that. So when it comes to consciousness, I mean, you know, in meditation, like you know, a lot of times it’s lost on many of us, and especially being in a busy world, and I think you did a talk that, I don’t think I know you did a talk, I wasn’t there for agile 2021. It was called come learn from an agile as Thai monk, stop burning a candle both ends. Could you maybe elaborate on your talk and what were some of the key messages from that talk?

Dahm M. Hongchai 08:22

Yeah, the key message is, take care of your life, your life is really short. Yeah. And, after being a monk, I learned a lot about being conscious. And yeah, after my mom died, I worked really, actually, I have been working really hard since I was a child. Yeah, I worked really hard to get to this point. 11 years that I worked in Thailand, I did many, many things for my family members, and after my mom died, I made a decision to move to study English first in San Francisco, and I got a master’s degree. And after that, I really wanted to be someone in Agile communities. I got many problems, I got many bullies, I got many resistance from many people who didn’t really want me to be here with you guys. So I worked very hard to get to where I want it to be. And then I travel around the world to see Agiles, yeah. I became sick of anxiety attacks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:48

It was too much to handle or…?

Dahm M. Hongchai 09:51

Too much to handle, too much stress, too much energy that I gave to other people, but I didn’t have energy left for myself. I lost all confidence, everything like gone from my body. My friend told me like, I didn’t see even bad spirit at all. I sat on the beach like this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:15

I saw you. I mean, over the years, as I told you before we started recording, I saw like just how much you were doing, how much you involved, but I would also argue that you got a lot of love. I mean, like, when I talk to certain people and like people that supported in community, like, I think the way that some people, I only saw the positive side, let me put it that way. I didn’t see all the stuff that you probably endured. But there are a lot of people I think that also showed you love and really embraced you. Would you say that’s correct? Or there was a mixture of both?

Dahm M. Hongchai 10:53

I think many people rarely welcome into agile communities. And just a few people they bully me, they try to drag me down. And people who love me to support m, saw me and then they send me messages direct to my inbox. Even some people might, many people invited me to, to their home. Yeah, like my friend in Washington, DC, Cory invited me to stay with his family for almost a week, I think. And many people show me their love. They support me. And I feel like, wow, thank you so much. Even you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:46

You k now it is great. Again, you know, there’s also like, the way that you know, I guess, you know, you can always see, but maybe to come back a little bit more to your talk and, burning the candles on both ends. What else, I mean, how did you get out of it? Like, in a sense, like, how did you get out of that, You know, I’m assuming it’s some kind of depression or something, you know, energy type of drain, how did you get back out of it? Recently, I saw you doing all kinds of stuff and I want you to talk about that too where you were entertaining people. And some of the stuff the pictures you’re taking. What did it take to get back into it, to enjoy? I think one of the things you said you didn’t enjoy training anymore, it wasn’t fun. So what did you do to get back into it?

Dahm M. Hongchai 12:34

I took a break for two weeks, and then I stay in a resort. It was very quiet for me. So I became with myself 100%. Yeah, like, “come here, don’t send your mind anywhere else”. Come back to your breath. Yeah, come back to your breath, your life is too short. And I ask myself, like, what I want to do next. That’s prioritization. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:08

Yeah, you’re the product owner of your own life, right.

Dahm M. Hongchai 13:13

Yeah. So I then I prioritize what I want to do by using this. Yeah. It’s a Kanban. Like, this is my personal Kanban notebook that I use. I still use it, even though it’s kind of like yeah, ugly but I really like it. And after prioritizing what I want to do in my life, because now I have only 40 years left in this world. Well, I’m 41 years so, and I believe that I will die at the age of 80 years old, so I have only 39 year left. So I want to…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:02

So you know exactly in the year you think you’ll die?

Dahm M. Hongchai 14:05

Yes, of course.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:07

How do you know that?

Dahm M. Hongchai 14:11

I set my mind there. Yeah, that’s the deadline of a project. Right? Yeah. Like we have projects and we know our deadlines, and how about our life? So I set my deadline there. So I know exactly how many hours, how many months, how many years that I have left. And then I can prioritize what I want to do with my life.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:37

So you are time boxing your life in a way?

Dahm M. Hongchai 14:41

Yeah. And then I can focus.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:44

I’ve never heard anybody say that. But even if it’s hypothetically speaking, right, let’s just say even if it’s just putting sense of urgency, that time box, the saying in your mind, you know as you know, it plays games in your mind like just knowing that there is limit, that it’s not forever, that there is that mark at some point, whatever it is, that’s very interesting. And thank you for sharing. That’s just again, made me think of a bunch of different things that you know on my end and I should be probably just at least contemplating about. What about becoming a CST and training with Jeff Sutherland? What was your journey to become Scrum trainer? Sorry, I said CST, but scrum trainer with Scrum Inc. And it looks like Scrum Inc and Jeff embrace you. And I’m interested because a lot of times, you know, I’m familiar with the with scrum.org. I’m familiar with the obviously being a CST to scrum Alliance, but what was that experience working collaborating with Scrum Inc? And how did you get into that? I’m assuming maybe just last, I don’t know.

Dahm M. Hongchai 16:02

The new best name of being a trainer there, we just got in this name, they are registered scrum trainer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:12

Registered scrum trainer. So RST?

Dahm M. Hongchai 16:15

Yes RST. Yeah, with Scrum Inc. I got to do many things. They counted everything that I have done in the past, all experiences. Yeah, I think on the day, one day, they knew me that I joined product owners certification, what is that? CSPO. Yeah, at test lab with Jeff. And then I told myself, like, “oh, I want to be a trainer”. And then I want to ask Jeff, “Jeff, I want to be a trainer. The first person in Thailand, could you help me please?”. He didn’t say anything. I think no one wants to commit right? It’s hard. It’s hard to get there and I after that I researched, Oh, there is no Scrum guide in Thai. So I asked Jeff, “hey, Jeff, I want to translate the scrum guide to Thai”. And then he said, “Okay, let me ask Ken”, both of them said yes and I started from there. That is the first piece of being a trainer. I think they called it from that day that I translated the scrum guide, the 2017 version for the first time, and I did for the second time for the 2020 version, and join his workshops, scrum at scale. And I had to produce real experiences, real successful cases, even failed cases and then I report it back to Jeff. Yeah, report it back to Jeff. What I did, I report it back. Yeah, I at that time, I just wanted to share my experiences with Jeff.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:16

Yeah. What was his response? Like, how do they respond to their case studies and experiences?

Dahm M. Hongchai 18:28

Jeff, you know, in a conference in his session, and then he thought of my case study, and then he looked at me, and then he talked about my case study, that made me so happy. And he told people in sessions about my case study and that he asked me to tell people there. That is awesome, he remember me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:01

And that’s important. I mean, like, yeah, it’s just especially and kudos to you. You did also some co-trainings with Jeff, right? And how did that I mean, I attended the one of Jeff’s trainings, too, and it’s interesting, and I’ve seen them also coaching, how was that experience for you to co-train with Jeff Sutherland.

Dahm M. Hongchai 19:23

First, my dream became true. Even though when he was saying like, is unbelievable, but for me, I could say that it’s believable, because I plan for that. And when I got the invitation from Scrub Inc, I’m like, wow. First, wow, and after that, I was nervous. And then I had to ask for learning materials, training materials as well. Everything that I had to prepare myself before flying from Bangkok to Boston. When I got there, my heart like [beating sounds]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:15

So you were, I thought you were in San Francisco. But that was a long flight, and time difference.

Dahm M. Hongchai 20:24

And Jeff was really helpful, was really supportive. I still had many questions, I asked him in details and he answered all questions, even small numbers. And I asked him for feedback, what could I do better? I presented in the morning on the first day, and then I asked him for feedback, what I could do better in the afternoon. And he told me, “Ah, I love your energy Dahm, and it would be better if you worked on your pronunciation”. I didn’t practice after that. I was really quiet, try to work with myself inside, didn’t practice about pronunciation at all but I believed him. And then in the afternoon, and on the second day, I presented again, yeah, for my parts. Yeah, and then I went back to ask him, yeah, “could you please give me feedback? Tell me about my pronunciation”. And he said, “it’s much easier to understand you in the afternoon, and on the second day”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:44

Wow. So, that was immediate improvement or, and let’s see, I think you know, a lot of trainers do and it’s something but maybe for some that are not listening is that it’s always opportunity to improve and it’s never too early to ask for feedback. So even at the you know, lunch for day one of two day training, asking for feedback, and then improving for the second part of the day is really good.

Dahm M. Hongchai 22:13

That’s my way when I train people, even three hours, I ask for feedback after the first session, one and a half hours, to make sure that the second part one and a half hours left, they will be happy with me. So I don’t wait until I finish my workshop to ask for feedback. Because the feedback that I get at the last moment is useless.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:47

Yeah, it is too late already.

Dahm M. Hongchai 22:51

For people who are with me now, nothing is early for me. But everything. feedback is a gift. So I can adjust immediately, yeah, with my clients who are in front of me now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:07

What are some of the, I mean, like you’ve done I agree, like, at least, you know, energy wise and what I’ve seen, we’ve never met in person, but what I’ve just seen through your posts, and you know, like, you’ve done some crazy stuff where you’re DJing, I think you were a DJ or something. S-o, could you maybe talk about some of the stuff that you’ve done. I also wanted to maybe talk about just crazy stuff that you’ve done during the training to entertain people first. What is that? Oh the lighter

Dahm M. Hongchai 23:40

Yes, we are going to have lights here. So, online training is difficult and at the same time is boring. How to make sure that people are with you 100%. With me, just only with me, make sure that they are with me consciously. Yeah, consciously. When you listen to other people, even though you are doing nothing, but actually you’re sending your mind somewhere else. You are not with those people 100%. So I just want to make sure that people are having fun with me first, and then they relaxed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:44

And that probably that they want to be there, right?

Dahm M. Hongchai 24:47

Yeah, they want to see some entertainment before studying. I don’t want to make people spreads and then they will close everything they don’t listen to me. They even close their ears.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:03

So what are the things do you do? I mean, like I agree online training is, you know, completely different. And even though I’ve done online training before COVID, not to the extent where I’ve done it now for almost two years, or a year and a half. What other things do you find helpful to do during the trainings?

Dahm M. Hongchai 25:24

Yeah, first I dress up in many themes. I dress up in many themes, being a monk, being the Statue of Liberty, Harry Potter, a rock star, and I got like disco lights, I danced in front of people. And when, people like, “what’s going on?” And then they just leave everything and then focus on what I’m going to do. And then they are ready to study with me. Besides dressing up, I like doing like games. Yeah, so I don’t lecture. I don’t lecture people, “hey, here. Try teach you how to [unclear 26:22] like, questionnaire. and then they learn from reading by themselves. And they learn from making mistakes when they answer incorrectly.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:34

That’s something that definitely I think, even when we go back, I think teaching online has opened the doors, opened my eyes to some of the things that I would want to do when we go back to in-person. And I think, you know, definitely, there were a lot of exercises in in-person classes, but I think, how do we combine the online tools and in-person tools and how? So, it’s been interesting from that standpoint. But what about like you’ve done like, you’ve helped people understand agile and cooking, agile and drawing, gardening, agile working. Could you maybe talk about, at least what I have in my head is when you did agile cooking, I think in San Francisco or something like that. Would you talk about, you know, how did you come up with those ideas was just opportunities that presented themselves and what did you learn from that type of training environment, I guess?

Dahm M. Hongchai 27:39

I thought Thai cooking is for everyone who really want to understand about agile, or even about change, or many, many things. I think I got inspiration from my mom. My mom always asked me, “what do you want to have for your breakfast tomorrow?” This is a good product owner, right? Yeah. So, actually my agile cooking is for predicting people, behaviors at work. So I asked people like, “okay, please cook whatever you picked ingredients for this workshop?” Period. That’s it. Firmly thought instruction. And people are just okay. Yeah, within the top box, like 10 minutes, and then they came back, “here, my dish”, alright? And then ask a question, “who did you cook for?” They are like, for you Dahm. For my friends”. And I said, “Oh, you don’t really know who your customers are huh? See, they are all quiet. And I answered them, like, “oh, your customer is me”. And some people complain, “you didn’t tell us clearly in your instruction?” And then I replied, “you didn’t ask. That’s your behavior at work, right? When your boss or someone tell you to do something, not clearly, you didn’t even ask them in details, you didn’t even ask whom you are working for”, and they became quiet.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:42

But that’s also like, you know, I’ve read somewhere recently that the assumption is like the biggest, I think they use some kind of bad word to describe it, but like, in a way like, you know, assumption is the root of a lot of issues, a lot of problems. And in that instance, you know, and like you said, it’s that assumption about who the customer is, is everywhere in business. Like, you know, we don’t fully understand who the customers are, we build stuff, we develop stuff. I recently worked with a client where I came in, and I realized that a senior executive has asked three teams to work an initiative to the data is going to impress the client and keep the client. And these three teams busted their butts, they were working really hard trying to, you know, meet the deadline and everything. And then when they delivered, the client actually ended up going to their competitor, and it turned out that, you know, there was a huge assumption made by this VP, that the customer wants this and that this would keep the customer. So people were so deflated, understanding that their leader made a huge assumption that this was important and this is what the customer wanted without validating they were working on this, and then realizing that all the hard work wasn’t really, you know, what they thought it would be just because of an assumption.

Dahm M. Hongchai 31:20

Yeah, actually is good to start working from assumption, by the way, your customers are over there, just go out to ask them, that’s it right? It is easy. And besides this, I call a trap. So there are many traps in my agile cooking. And then after I ask them to cook and then I id alright, are you ready for feedback? I’m going to test your food. And then I became, I became really bad to tell them direct feedback. And for some people who were not ready for feedback, they started being mad and talk like non-stop, and they defended for my feedback. One lady, she defend, she defended great, she defended for the whole day about my feedback, until the last minute, she came to me and she said, “thank you so much for your lesson. I wanted to listen to other people more and more, to become a better me”

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:42

And become a better listener. And that’s a huge thing about you know, taking feedback. And I remember when I used to ask for feedback, and then get pissed off.

Dahm M. Hongchai 32:58

Actually people are not ready for that. And agile cooking for the first theme that I created and then I read, oh, I study from Lolly, my Agile coach in San Francisco, he told me about “a leader is a gardener”. What is that? A leader is gardener. I didn’t understand at the time, so I asked him for details, and he told me the details. And then alright, I want to share my agile experience with executives by asking them to make a guardian on a tray, in a pot or something like that, and then yeah, I have many traps for leaders to learn by getting their hands dirty from making garbage, right. And the last point, yeah, everyone were so proud of their beautiful gardens. Yeah, they build it by their hands, by the love, by the cares, and then I told them a big plastic bag, and then ask them, you have 30 seconds to destroy your garden, now. People are like, “why do I need to do it?”, “No, I’m not going to do it”, “No, no, it’s too beautiful”. Just only I think, from doing this around the world, I think not over then and people did it right away, immediately. And I asked them why you did that? You didn’t ask even the objective. Should I tell you the answer? Those people answer this question by saying like, “it’s better to disrupt my business by myself, and I won’t let my competitors, other people to do it, it is more painful to divide as a leader”. You see many people, many people are addicted to their success, and they don’t want to change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:19

We get too comfortable, right? And it’s also, you know, hard because it is comfortable. And you know, as humans were designed to preserve the energy and all of that, unless, you know, we feel threatened. And when you’re in a safe place…

Dahm M. Hongchai 35:37

That success is beautiful. That’s why they want to just hold it, they don’t want to let it go. Many people asked me, “why you made a decision to leave your career in a job in Thailand and you went to the US?” And now we see your growth in Thailand, that could be like, 10 times. And I told them, like, that’s my comfort zone, that’s my success, and I want to disrupt myself again, I did for the first time 2014. And I’m doing it again 2021.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:17

That is awesome. So maybe, I want to also ask you, since you brought it up, what do you see the differences between maybe mindset culture and how agile is adopted in Asia, or Thailand, maybe I don’t know, and how it’s adopted, here in United States. Is there any differences is there anything that you see the you know, having exposure to both, that stands out to you?

Dahm M. Hongchai 36:47

When we see other skin, everywhere, they have their own unique, they have their own styles, but when we look deeply and deeply and from traveling around the world, we are human, so, all of us resist being changed. Actually, we accept changes, okay. We accept changes but when we get to the point that we are asking to change, or we are being changed, we try to resist first. And then people try to tell us about logical thinking, logical reasons, we try to listen. By the way, at the end of the day, even though because logical thinking and logical reasons, we go back home, we become a human with emotions again. Yeah, so everywhere, we are human, so we are the same. So we resist being changed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:02

So that and you know that a lot of times, you know, when you look at leadership, and I’m working with executives, there’s a lot of people imposing change in others, yet, they don’t want to change. So like, you know, a lot of times it’s like, do Agile, you know, a lot of these transformations are being imposed in many different ways. And then when we look at, you know, leaders that they want to change themselves, and when you look at, you know, like you said, you have to kind of be mindful about your own actions and what you’re doing. A lot of that is not reflected on the leadership. And I was recently talking to Evan from business agility Institute, and I was, who else I was talking to, essentially a lot of data points to leadership in organization, like as far as their ability to change, adapt to change, business agility, it points out to lack of willingness at the leadership level to change. And, you know, what you’re just saying, made me think about that aspect where, you know, we want others to change, but yet when it comes to changing ourselves, it’s hard. And probably as a monk and a mindful person that who are, you know, the change starts within and first with us, rather than others. So, do you think like, is that something that is common and I’m not assuming you are alluded to that, is leadership doesn’t matter where you are, it’s also leadership, that a lot of times is impeding change in organization and some of these changes where maybe humans are a little bit more liberated at work and feeling better about what, you know, their work. Because I was just looking, maybe just to add to this, it’s November 2021 and it was I think this month or the pass month was the biggest month where people just quit United States, and that has to do a lot with the environment and the leadership and organization. So what do you think on that, like aspect of leadership, and where it is, and, you know, is the same in Asia, as well as in North America? That, is leadership, that’s the, you know, probably from a Laloose , I’m assuming you’re familiar with Laloose, radically Laloose work from reinventing organizations where he said, like, we can only go as far as the leaders and organizations will allow us, do you think that’s true?

Dahm M. Hongchai 40:44

I think it’s true, because it’s easy to ask other people to change. And when you need to change yourself, you still resist, right? And you have many excuses not to do it. So I see many people who are change agents, who are executives, who are managers, they are not successful of changing themselves, and they try to tell other people, you have to change Dahm. And I looked back like “hmm?”. Yeah, for example, many people try to tell us, “hey, exercise, get exercise”. And when I look back to them, like, “did you exercise yesterday, or even this morning before telling me to do that?” So it’s better to change ourselves, to be a better one first, before telling other people to do it. That view, that is a role model, and when you be a role model, when you tell other people to, I don’t want to say that tell other people to change, when you support other people to change, when you speak, your voice is something there, right? Yeah, because you have done it. Your body language, your eyes, everything is there from your body, when you try to support other people to change. But if you have never done before, even your voice is kind of like so…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:51

Well, you know, 90% of what we communicate one or not one, it is nonverbal. So it like you said, you know, it’s your body language, it’s the way your tone of the voice or whatever it is, all that combination is. What do you maybe just to see here from your perspective, like, what do you think, you know, where’s agile going? Where have you seen it? Like, I’ve talked to Dave Snowden, I’ve talked to like, the biggest names in Agile, and I wanted to know what their thoughts are, you know, people have been saying that Agile and Scrum is dead for the last 20 years, 10 years, at least. What I’m seeing and what they kind of alluded to, is that, you know, contextualizing things and you know, not being so dogmatic about you know, what framework you’re actually applying, but being able to go back to cooking and the analogy that I use is, you know, coming up with our own recipes, rather than relying you know, even on Scrum and being dogmatic about you know, having everything has to be Scrum or Kanban. But contextualizing approaches and methods and frameworks to your environment. What is your thought on, on that, like in the sense of where do you see these scaling frameworks, methods in general, heading into? Do you think we will more and more be reliant on these prescriptive frameworks? Or do you think it’s going to go somewhere in some other direction?

Dahm M. Hongchai 44:36

I think some people are going to the wrong direction and some people are going to the right direction. So for people who are going to the right direction I see a lot of them to help other people to realize that they are suffering from the path that they are now. If we help people to see their suffering, what they are doing is suffering and make other people unhappy. If they can realize that, and then wake them up, wake them up and help them to find root causes, and then help them to have better actions, how to deal with that. For example, we have a lot of things to do, right, and one person judge many projects. So, that person should speak out, because their suffering. But that person doesn’t speak up because they don’t, because he or she doesn’t realize that’s he is suffering. Even though many people try, even a scrum master and Agile Coach, try to help a him or her that, “hey, that’s not right”, but she or he doesn’t know that they are suffering and they try to resist even though we try to help them. Or a manager, or managers who doesn’t know how to prioritize work, that’s why they go around to tell many people to do many things at the same time, and they don’t realize that they are making other people unhappy, and they are making other people not really have time to their family members. So I think as an Agile coach, a scrum master should help people to realize that what they are doing is suffering.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:57

Yeah, so what I’m hearing you say is, it’s first before even I mean, we look at, you know, the methods, approaches, frameworks, whatever, just, you know, getting people to realize whatever you’re doing, you know, to have the courage, first of all, to realize, but then to have the courage, you know, this is not working. And this is, you know, let’s find a better way, whatever that better way is, let’s find a better way to work. Because I see, and the reason I bring it up, is I see a lot of developers suffer under Scrum, because either way that’s adopted, it’s not just working for them. And like you said, they’re suffering because maybe of their own perceptions, maybe or whatever the you know, how it’s posing them. And just that even scrum value of courage and saying, you know, but a lot of people just go with the flow, we are there for whatever reasons, either, you know, it’s, you know, security, some type of fear or whatever it is. Okay, so I don’t know if you answered my question, but I think you did in a way that you’re saying, it’s more on, first of all, realizing whatever framework or method you’re adopting, that isn’t working for you, you’re suffering, and then coming up with something that you’re happier, or better.

Dahm M. Hongchai 48:26

Yeah. But people feel it but people are not brave enough to speak up, like, “hey, it doesn’t work. And I’m not happy now, and I want to have better ways of living, of working. Hey, come and meet and sit and discuss to find better ways to work together”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:53

Yeah, that’s a that’s a good point.

Dahm M. Hongchai 48:56

But people don’t do that. Yeah, many factors.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:01

Yeah. And that’s probably has to do with outside cultural factors, too, as you know, like, you know, in certain cultures, like for, I joke around, but you know, southern Italians, people, where I’m from in the Balkans will tell you to your face, you know, “go screw yourself or this is bullshit”. In some cultures, that’s just not part of the culture. So outside culture has an impact on, you know, individual behaviors as well, what’s acceptable and what’s not. So it becomes harder in those type of cultures for people to speak up.

Dahm M. Hongchai 49:33

Yeah, that’s why we need support from managers, leaders, and many people around you to construct safe environments for people to speak their mind, no punishment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:53

Yeah, and just that’s yes. Just people to be able to comfortable and that I have that psychological safety. What would you like to share? We’ve 15 minutes I think or something like that. To end, what would you like to share with our listeners? Either a message, a tip, anything that you would like to leave us with?

Dahm M. Hongchai 50:17

I would like to share, your life is too short. You have time limited for your life. Please prioritize what you need to do. Yeah, and get rid of whatever make your life unhappy. On your way that help you to be a better you. And for being this test. Actually, you can apply many ideas, tools, whatever from agile, from Scrum, for many frameworks, or even from lean manufacturing, from six sigma, to help you to get there. For example, lean manufacturing teaches us to get rid of waste. So we have to understand the whole system. At work, we have to understand the whole change. Yeah, where verses are? And how about your life? What are you wasting your time for, get rid of them, and then come back to make your life productive. As at work, get rid of waste, and then yeah, make your work more productive, right. And when we talk about six sigma, Six Sigma offers many tools for problem solving. At work, we have many problems, and we have many tools like Try Ess [unclear 52:01] Fishbone analysis, for training analysis, we can use all of them to help us to find root causes, and set up corrective action and proactive action at work. And at the same time, having said that, your life is too short. And our life have many problems, and we shouldn’t let problems occur again and again. So we can use many tools from lean manufacturing and Six Sigma to find root causes and prevent many unhappy situation. Yes, see? So we can apply many tools for our work and our life at the same time because our life is too short.

Ken Rubin

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:56

Who is Ken Rubin? And how did you get into this agile training, coaching consulting business, maybe not many people I think know who Ken Rubin is and how much you’ve contributed to our communities. So if you could please share, like how you got into this space and tell us maybe what your journey has been and who Ken is?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 01:19

Great to be here with you today. My background’s pretty straightforward. I started off as a software engineer. And first of all my degrees are in computer science, typical path through companies, I was a developer, a project manager, VP of engineering. I was also a VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, running a number of smaller software companies. I have done 10 startups in my career, took two of them public on NASDAQ. Last was back in 2000. During that really crazy period of time, I did a two-year tour of duty with IBM in the mid-1990s, where I had a 130-person team, we’d run around North America building large distributed object systems.

And that’s really my starting point, not at IBM. But if you go back to the late 1980s, I helped bring small talk out of the research labs at Xerox PARC. And we formed a startup company called Park Place systems. And anybody who’s old enough to remember that will recall that we were sort of early market object-oriented development languages, development tools, class libraries. And that’s really where agile started for me. I think a lot of people know that a good part of the Agile community finds its roots back to small talk development. Actually, I started doing small talk long back in 1986. Before I joined Park Place, they just hired me in because I had small talk experience, which was rare back in 1988. And I’ve been doing Agile since the early 1990s. In terms of the training and consulting part, at park place, initially I was in the training and consulting department until I grew it. And so basically from 90 to 95, I ran the training and consulting department at park place and so we had a team of people who go out and we train people in small talk and object-oriented development and we were sort of the forerunner of core

Agile principles. First time I ever did something like scrum was in 2000 formally, at that time, I was working for a startup in Colorado called Genomica. And we built software for statistical genetics, some fairly sophisticated life scientists’ software, and I inherited a team of about 90 people, wasn’t functioning all that well. We gave scrum a try, and it worked out much better for us. So it’s now 21 years of doing Scrum and Kanban and doing coaching along the way. So that’s sort of my route and all of this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:40

So what is it maybe just something that triggered my thought in my head, which is like, you have Boston area where Jeff and Ken where and then you have Denver, and there’s a lot of history around Agile Scrum in Denver. Was there anybody particular that you partnered with or it was just something that was evolved naturally? So did you partner with anybody like Mike Cohen or anybody that’s in that area early on?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 04:14

I did. So I left California in 1995 and came out to Colorado, took that job with IBM, which was what brought me out here. Over the course of time when I first got here, after I left IBM, and went to this company called eventually to Genomica. The day my son was born, in 2000, I was in the hospital room and my wife had just given birth, I got called by, the CEO said, you need to come to the board of directors meeting. I’m like my wife’s in the bed.

We needed a board of directors meeting. So I went to the board of directors meeting that in Boulder, and they go yeah, we just hired the VP of engineering. And in addition to your other responsibilities, I was sort of the equivalent of like COO, I ran a lot of the other groups and she’s like, now you need to run engineering, you’re allowed to hire a new VP of engineering if you want. And I highly suggest that you do. And so I ended up hiring Mike Cohen.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:10

Oh, wow.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 05:13

And so Mike came in, we work together at that point. And that’s how we introduced Scrum and to Genomica back in 2000. And for people that are familiar with the Colorado Front Range, which is the part just east of the Rocky Mountains here. It is an intensely agile area. A lot of agile talent out here. And so it’s been a great place to live for the past 26 years, just involved with all that, park place was actually in the Bay Area. So in the early days, it was all Bay Area. Really, for the past 25 years back in Colorado.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:50

All especially agile, I think and in terms of how we know agile today there’s a lot of Scrum Alliance, offices, headquarters out there. So it is interesting. So thank you for sharing that. I didn’t know that. I just assumed that there probably was collaboration and a lot of sharing going on. Given that just there’s so much going on there. How do you define business and organizational agility? Different people define it differently. How do you look at business agility or organizational agility?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 06:27

It’s a great question. So to me, it’s the ability of an organization to inspect and adapt, right? To succeed in sort of a rapidly changing, and most certainly ambiguous, and one of my favorite terms turbulent environments. And I got to say you, the past 20 months have been the most amazing test of anybody’s organizational agility, right? If you weren’t inspecting and adapting over the past 20 months as an organization, sadly, you might not be here.

When I think of the restaurants around me here in Colorado, some really good restaurants are gone, just gone. They didn’t adapt. They weren’t very agile organizationally. Others that were predominantly sit-down restaurants realized that is a going out of business strategy last year, and they pivoted to do a good job of takeout. So that involves a lot, that involve the executive team being involved, it involved with people on the ground who actually have to do the work.

So by its nature, organizational agility pervades more than just one group. What if I said this to you, I have an idea, it’s a great way to build software, you’ll believe it’s a much better approach than how you’ve been doing it in the past. And your goal should be to adopt this and you’re going to be really, really successful. Was I talking about agile?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:57

No, I mean in a way, but what I’m thinking, and what you’re making me think is like, just change and how, nobody was talking about what you need to do in the last 20 months. It’s just like, you got to adapt. And do you have that ability or not? That’s really what it was about, nobody cared what you did. It was, are you going to change or not? If you don’t change, and for a lot of companies and businesses, it was to survive or not, which makes me think about we talk about like, change takes, time change, at least the way that are perceived, a lot of times it just in my own experience in large organizations, but last 20 months, has made me think about, it can happen really quickly, if you have the right people and the right desire to change.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 08:52

My mindset. I mean, people who are inherently very nimble, in their thinking were able to adapt very quickly. You know what I mean? When I think about it, to me, it’s agile through the value chain. That’s what I’m looking for, for organizational agility. I mean, most organizations are, we start with Dev and IT that seems to be like the natural home, for agile for a lot of companies. But if you stop there, you’re not really going to achieve the kind of desired outcomes, as a business we probably want. We may get our dev and IT groups to be highly efficient at being agile, but they’re sort of they live within an ecosystem.

And unless that ecosystem itself is aligned, all we’re going to have is sort of a mismatch throughout. You say oh, yeah, we’re agile over here, but over there finance does its own thing and legal does its own thing. And you just kind of go through all the groups and marketing in sales that keeps pushing more work into development, right? You get the idea. Organizational agility is the ability to step back, look at the big picture, and understand as a system. Are we able to inspect and adapt it to really to the environment which we have to operate, which right now still was a COVID environment?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:04

Yeah. It’s interesting, because the reason I asked, I was talking to Evan from business agility Institute and I was asking him, I was looking at the report from last year. And there were three things, it was leadership, mindset, not necessarily tied to the leadership, but just mindset overall. And silos that we’re in identifies the biggest constraints to business agility.

And you’ve done a lot of work with a lot of different organizations, you train a lot of people, I was looking, you train over 3000 people, you’ve worked with several 100 Companies. What are things that you see that are impeding organizational agility? Are those same things or do you see something different or maybe just a different perspective? I’m curious to know your thoughts.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 10:56

Yeah, I know. I think those labels are good ones. I approach it maybe a slightly different way. For me, organizations have an inertia, they’ve been doing something for a while, and it’s hard to stop that. And for some people, I guess they would call that a cultural impediments. Like culturally, we’re not aligned with doing this. That tends to be a fairly big issue in a lot of companies like these, it’s like, well, that’s not how we have done things, we’re comfortable, if they’re in a regulated environment, there’s even more of that, because we know we can pass an audit if we do it this way.

Not sure if we make a change to that. So and that aligns with sort of the siloed idea, most organizations are by their construction, very siloed, which works against this concept of achieving organizational agility. You have this idea that we should be able to go across the silos and include everybody that we need to get the job done. On that leadership one, I view that as for a lack of commitment at the top of the house. This idea that, hey, we’re going to start doing Agile at the team level, and then maybe percolates up a little bit further. And eventually, you just hit a ceiling. You don’t have the right kind of commitment, which I do think alliance with Evans leadership one, you won’t get there. And then there’s, I guess, they’re just myopic. Myopic, in the sense of it’s about Dev and IT right? That’s what we should be focusing our time on. We’ve already argued organizational agility is by its definition, larger than just that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:29

Do you think it’s ignorance or lack of understanding? Because I see that too, in a lot of times, it’s really lack of understanding about what organizational agility is, and what are the enablers and what it takes. And so mostly the Peter Principle in a sense, a lot of times people have gotten to these executive positions. But they really, a lot of times don’t fully understand the concept of systems, right? And understanding the systems and how to strike even business architecture. And that can be an impediment because if you’re not willing to make those structural changes, those policy changes as leaders, then like you said, it’s only going to go so far.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 13:16

I do think, I agree with that. I think it’s a natural consequence of where we are in the adoption curve. Maybe if you think about Jeff Moore’s work on crossing the chasm. And this idea that you got early adopters, right? You get visionaries, then you kind of get to the early majority, the late majority, things like that. Agile and Dev and IT is clearly across the chasm. I mean, almost any company you talk to today says they’re probably doing something agile.

And you’ve even hit the late majority that people are like, I don’t move into everybody else move. They’re moving, right? But that’s Dev and IT. If you start broadening beyond that, I mean, the scrum Alliance used to do a survey right up. Where are you using Scrum in addition to Dev and IT? And you start to see things like well, HR or finance or legal or marketing things of that type. Now, it suggests that we’ve been in the chasm on that for a while. So you said is it sort of like an ignorance issue. It’s not malice, right? [inaudible 14:19] I think it’s like I thought it was about Dev and IT, right?

Now you’re telling me it can be broader than that. Where the examples point because remember, if you’re an early adopter, early adopters don’t care. They’re the ones making the examples, or the majority those like, I don’t move until I see the proof points where other companies have done it. I think we’re getting more and more of the so you could argue organizational agility is coming out of the chasm to the other side. But it’s been in the chasm for a long time, years. And I think that’s one of the bigger inhibitors right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:55

I agree. And so if we also look at it from Agile in the framework side, we’ve been on that side where it’s like, give me the recipe and people are realizing that just one size does not fit all. What do you think on that curve we are with frameworks and coming back maybe to small talk and patterns? Do you think where people are or where are companies with realizing that it’s really contextualizing things and understanding my context, not just saying, give me safe or give me this framework and thinking that there’s this cookie cutter of a methodology what’s called or framework?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 15:44

I think there’s a lot, there’s a great desire for frameworks. I mean, your scaled Agile has proved that, right? I mean, you put out a framework, and it’s well pictured, right? People look at it, and it appeals to a certain class of individuals. But I’m finding, I got a request the other day from a company, I signed a contract with them to do work, they go, okay, I want to talk about your framework for adopting agile framework. On are you expecting these large pictures like you’re used to seeing I mean, because every time I go into an organization to be of some assistance, there are certain things that we talk about, and it seems to be a theme.

But every company is different. And any company that’s ever told me, we’re going to use framework X, what they really meant by that is, we will mind framework X for good ideas. I mean, it’s rare that I encounter a company that’s like, oh, we went all in it, in fact, I did a survey on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago. And I asked the question when it comes to one of these scaling frameworks, don’t use them at all. Now, they’ve got a pretty high response rate, right? Use it, but mine it for good ideas that got the most and use it in textbook-like fashion, like 4%.

Like the multiple hundreds of people that responded to the survey. So I think it’s clear when the industry is on framework, the people like them, people want them, right? And yet, to the extent that they’re a source of good ideas, why not? Mind them for good ideas and create something that is culturally a good fit for your organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:26

So maybe to use analogy, you can mind a cookbook for good recipes. But if you don’t know what you’re doing in a sense of like if you’re putting custom recipes together, and you’re like, these are the ingredients I have, and a lot of times in organizations, it can be very appealing, even let’s just say, PI planning and safe, right? It’s a great idea and makes sense. But if I don’t fully understand the context that that pattern or practice has been put into place, then you have an issue a lot of times, and this is what I see in organizations where you have cooks that think that are chefs, implementing this stuff and making something that somebody will say, well, this is agile or this is it.

I don’t want to part of it. Is that also part of that kind of just natural curve of just trying things out and figuring out? If it is, could we assume that better days are ahead, in context that we’ve been learning over the last 10 years? We do have to contextualize that we can’t rely just on cookie cutter frameworks, and that we do need to have people inside our companies that are capable of helping and guiding us rather than continuously relying on consultants, like yourself and myself. Do you think we’re heading in that direction? Do you think that’s the right direction if we are?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 18:57

To back up to an earlier piece you were saying, I would describe what you were saying earlier as cargo cult. And that I think bigger problem today is that people look at these frameworks and they adopt them. They don’t really understand the underlying mechanisms, the underlying why that they’re doing these things, they just becomes mechanics at that point.

We do that. Why do you do that? Why do you do PI planning? What’s the purpose of that? How do you manage your dependencies? Or why are you doing it that way? If you don’t understand the foundational why that underlies these frameworks, you’re in no position to do anything other than adopt them, and just blindly follow them.

I honestly had a call today with a company earlier today, where they have an enterprise PMO that they put in place with the only reason of collecting all the data and holding everybody in compliance with the safe framework as they want to execute it and which is supposed to be textbook like. I’m talking to the fellow on the phone and he’s like how’s it working for you? It’s remarkably painful, right,? And we spend a lot of our time just doing things or not doing things.

Because if we do something we’ll be temporarily out of compliance with what we’re supposed to be doing and will look bad because of it, even though it was the right thing to have done [inaudible 20:18] in the frameworks working against you, right to do that. So now, the good news about the person I’m speaking with is, he does not have a cargo cult mentality, he actually does understand the underlying fundamentals as to why we’re doing it. Most people just getting started don’t. So it’s easy just to cargo cult, the thing, right? And just follow it blindly and expect results to happen, it won’t.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:41

And that’s part and what I’m seeing also is people that have gone through that journey from company to company, it’s easier to work when you have somebody that has gone through that, has tried it. And now, like you said, understands it. And it makes a lot easier, I guess to work with those organizations where you have leadership that sees the perspective that you’re trying to help them take. How do you scale? And to add, what are, we were talking about scaling, sometimes it really about the scaling, but what are your thoughts on end-to-end agility and scaling?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 21:22

So this one’s really important to me, because when I go into companies, I’m really curious. How are they organizing? So what is their unit for organizing at scale, right? Because for example, the obvious one that a lot of companies use projects, what a horrible unit for trying to organize at scale, right? I mean, projects are by their nature, fleeting, right? They start in a darn well, better end. All right, at some point, it’s kind of idea behind a project. So if you want to start to think about scaling, end to end agility, the first question every company should ask is, what’s the proper unit f or scaling?

Is it a product? Is it an application? Is it a customer journey? Is it a business capability? if you’re using say, if you’re going to use a value stream, right? So you need some unit that you’re going to focus on. And then the important part and this is the critical piece for me, is you need to create something I call a coordinated ecosystem. And the idea behind that is I’m just trying to align, remember end to end business, trying to align first, against this durable, business focused unit. So if we’re doing products, right? Products ought to be video customer facing, and long lived, durable. So the first thing you want to do is align your ecosystems, right?

With the instances of this durable unit, whatever it’s going to be, then you want to cross organizational alignment of resources in the order now to get everybody on the bus necessary to do the job, right? We’ll put them in an ecosystem. So if I need legal and compliance, right in there, and I need design, in digital, and all these other groups that are typically aligned with the normal development teams, I need them there, then they ought to be brought into the ecosystem, bring everybody sort of together and encapsulate them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:17

So that’s almost like trying to minimize dependencies, trying to simplify things in many ways. So maybe before, I do have some question on dependencies, but I wanted to get your thoughts into it, since you brought it up, like organizing by value streams, or by customer journeys or product services. Typically, what I’ve seen asking a question first, like, who are your customers and users and then organizing? Maybe that’s a specific group of products. But how do you look at even if you’re coaching or maybe consultant like, when’s a good time? When is it good to organize by journeys or customer experiences versus product lines versus any. Is that dependent on anything? Do you have any insight f that or?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 24:15

Could actually be a kind of, usually companies choose one that they could. Occasionally I’ll see companies do new value streams or products and customer journeys, for example. Because for example, one organization that I’m working with has two separate conceptual entities that naturally go together column A and B. But they have to do onboarding. And onboarding as a customer journey is pretty much the same, right? Maybe some minor differences. So do you really want to have onboarding be part of A and B? Or do you want to just have a third, which would be a customer journey of onboarding?

Is the onboard a new customer journey? And so they may still have two products A and B or two value streams, A and B, but they complement it with this sort of onboarding journey, because it just makes sense to do that. I’m really looking for; this is a remarkably difficult problem. When people talk about it, like it’s like really easy. Oh, well, if I were an organizer on product, so my favorite question I ask is cool, tell me what your products are? Just write it out, tell me what your products are? And you just watch people fumble. Well, it’s this like, no, that’s not a product, that’s a component.

Well, what about this? Well, that’s not a product, I just asked you a simple question. What are your products? Now some companies can answer that, and they can be pretty definitive about it. And they’re going to have an easier time. I was at one company, took us three months to identify the products, the company. So anybody’s like, oh, let’s just let’s have a brainstorming session this afternoon. And we’ll sort of pound out what the products are.

Yeah, good luck with that. I mean, that usually doesn’t go that smoothly, in my opinion. So but it’s easier, you got to go down that path, you got to get away from projects, at least something, whether applications tend not to be the best unit, because you get sort of an inverse Conway problem, you start to organize your ecosystems around existing applications, which are already kind of like just as big quagmire of dependencies, a big ball of mud, like, why would I go out of my way to create ecosystems to match an application infrastructure that I have had for decades?

I would say, your systems going to reflect the communication channels of the teams that built it [inaudible 26:40]. Here’s what I want, this is the system structure I want. Maybe I create the ecosystems to get me to that. So there’s a number of ways to approach it, typically, products, value streams, business capabilities, or journeys, are going to be your top choices. And you’d have to figure out in your organization, which one makes sense, if you’re going to save, you’re going to use value streams.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:03

Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s really interesting, because it reminded me and maybe just to go back to what you’re saying, so for instance, onboarding, let’s just say, this happens a lot when I work with insurance companies, you might have a same onboarding process, right? Then you might have a dental insurance and vision insurance, right? So those could be separate. And what you’re saying is, the onboarding process could be the same for everybody. But somebody might just want vision and somebody might want dental, somebody might want all of those.

But the other thing, that’s interesting too, is what you brought up is systems, so like, you could have same system supporting both products in onboarding or different. And that’s a good example of why you wouldn’t want to organize by systems because they’re almost underlying and supporting those products or customer experiences. So I that makes sense to me. And I think that’s what I’ve seen also work well. And I don’t know if that’s a good example, from your perspective, if that’s what you meant.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 28:07

I mean most companies today, at least the ones that I encounter, are doing some form of tech modernization, they’re doing that because their system structure is not fit for purpose. If it was fit for purpose, they wouldn’t be doing tech modernization. So there’s an issue there. So why would you organize around that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:27

Another thing I see is some company, especially they’ve been around for too long, have too many products. And in a sense, it’s very difficult to organize when you have a lot of products, and you can’t prioritize, and you have limited resources from IT resources, human capability side. And sometimes it’s tough to get into the insurance space if you’ve sold the plan, 30, 40 years ago, you can’t buy, its always that it’s hard to let go of products. And sometimes the best thing is to shred things off and focus on what your strategy is. Do you see that to or where companies have just too much going on, too many things, products, or whatever it is that they’re supporting, and not enough capability and capacity?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 29:21

Yeah, and I think that problem occurs along multiple dimensions, not just the physical number of products, but think about the just the version, like you mentioned, like the 40 years, it’s been out there. So if you’re a product-based company, one of your questions is, how many versions back device support, right? And in the world of continuous delivery, what constitutes a version, right? So you do it by time, you will support something, a release that we did up to 18 months ago, and anything older than that.

We don’t, that we could be up giving you five updates a day. And on that I call those new versions, right? But you have to have the ability to spin up an environment to match a customer’s environment for a system that was installed 15 years ago, so you can try to replicate the problem. I’ve watched that particular issue, cause enormous grief in companies like, oh, we spend so much of our time just trying to do so. Well, maybe you shouldn’t do that. Oh, but we promised our customers. Yeah, maybe you need to make different promises.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:24

And make some tough decisions when it comes to that. But that’s another thing when, if you don’t have somebody to say like, this is what our direction is, envision this is where the focus is, we have to have a strategy to either get rid of these products or whatever, it’s a strategic decision. But maybe that goes back to the silos. It’s tough to say that, unless you’re either president or part of the board that you’re pushing. I don’t know. But that’s something that I see. Maybe to come back to the organization dependencies. So you’ve recently written a lot about that. You’ve talked about that. What are organizational dependencies, and why are they important?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 31:10

So yeah, this is to me, dependencies are what’s killing company’s ability to structure for flow at scale. And I define the dependencies to be pretty simple. I’ve got these two entities, two activities or resources and there’s a relationship between these two. And it requires some level of coordination in order to achieve good flow. So that to me is where the dependency is. These two things have to collaborate. And we have to orchestrate this in a way that we get good flow. And if we don’t, we can get blocked, which is where the problem comes in and blocked in the way like my team is dependent on your team to do the work.

And if your team doesn’t get it done, when you said you could, then my team is blocked and can’t move forward. And that causes a lot of big problems. So these organizational dependencies, the problem is, they tend to be woven into the fabric of most organizations. Now, those are the dependencies I call structural dependencies. It’s the equivalent like, hey, every time I need to do a UX, I need a UX design, I have my guy here, we’re agile, right?

We got to have post it notes, or it’s just not agile, right? That’s the feature I want to deliver to a customer, but the UX design team, I have to tear that off. And I have to go over it and put it into the backlog of the UX design team. Well, if every time I have to get a design, I have to tear my post it note and go give it to the UX design team, I have a structural dependency on that, meaning, it’s woven into the fabric of how we’re organized. So then I can use the complementary term, which is instantiated dependency.

So if I have 50 different designs, I need that team to do each one is an instantiation of the structural link, it’s classes and instances, right? The structural dependency is the class and the actual work like hey, design team, I need to design for the onboarding screen, right? And I go give that to them, then that’s an instance of that dependency. Now imagine, if you want to make real improvements in your organization, where you ought to be focusing your time, is on the structural dependencies, not on the instantiated dependencies.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:31

Almost like a root cause type of thing.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 31:33

If I get rid of the structure, mean what if I moved a UX designer onto my team? So next time, I have a post it note that pops up, right? I don’t have to tear it up. I could just add it, give it to the team and do it. I have eliminated all future instantiated dependencies. So that one move eliminated 50 instances of that dependency at some point in the future. So if you want to really get on top of your dependency problem, you need to focus on the structural dependencies first. Most people when they talk about dependencies other than feature teams, creating feature teams is a solution, one of the seven strategies for addressing structural dependencies.

But other than that, almost the entire rest of the conversation is all about instances. It’s the instantiated dependencies and blockers. And people use the term blocker and dependency as if they’re the same thing. And they are not, right? A blocker is a dependency that moved into the block state. I’m relying on the UX team to get this done by Monday. I have a dependency on the UX team. If they get it done on Monday, I never got blocked. Sorry, they didn’t get it done on Monday. I got blocked. So your every dependency has the potential to become a blocker, but every blocker is the result of a failed coordination of the dependency that bends. They’re not the same. So most of the world focuses on how do we manage and visualize and deal with instantiated dependencies. And when they become blockers, how do we manage it? I’m like great, what if you could avoid that altogether?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:17

So besides addressing structural changes, how do you help? I think one of the things that’s very eye opening for people is just when they see the dependencies, and when they see just because a lot of stuff that we do is not transparent or visualized. So what are some of the things may be, is there anything that people can do to at least create awareness about that those dependencies exist? And then the follow up question to that is, there is also economic side and economic consequences of those dependencies, which a lot of times we’ll get leaders to listen more carefully when you’re talking about, the economic impact of those dependencies.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 36:10

Well, let’s go in that order first. The economics of dependencies are pretty compelling. First, they affect three things principally, dependencies, when are out of control, impact your predictability, I think about the predictability, the state of knowing when something’s going to happen, right? In the presence of a large number of dependencies, pretty much predictability is gone, right? Because I can show you the math behind it.

But for every dependency that we add to the problem, we cut in half the probability of completing what we said, when we said we could do it. And it really goes up by exponentially. So if you cut in half every time, so if I have six dependencies, I have a one out of 64 chance of getting it done. So predictability at that level is really, really poor. So what’s the benefit company to having better predictability? What’s the value to you of actually being able to deliver when you said you could? The commitments that you make, and you meet with your customers, so one of the large costs, one of the biggest impacts is predictability. The second is cycle time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:24

I was going to say, yeah.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 37:27

Constantly getting blocked, right? Then it my analogy is click the click on the stopwatch, to start working on it, click, when you finish working on it, click. That click the click is going to be pretty long time, if you’re getting blocked, I mean, most people who do value stream maps inside their company to look at a particular process, every time I do them, 90% of the time the work is sitting idle, because it’s blocked by some dependency.

I mean, what kind of improvement could you get? If you could squeeze waste out of the 90% number, you think the value is in having your Scrum teams be tenure, let’s make our Scrum teams 10% more efficient to doing Scrum. They’re idle 90% of the time, they spend 10% of their time doing Scrum, which means you squeeze a 10% improvement out of the 10% of the time you move the needle 1%.

If I could figure out how to address the idle time, usually through dependencies in managing whip better than I could 10% improvement there gives me a 9% return on investment immediately. We’re watching the wrong thing. And then lastly, pressurization. Oftentimes, the existence of dependencies forces us to work in an order that is not optimal for us. I want to do a B, C, then D, but I can’t because there’s some dependencies that are messing up that ordering. So now I have to do B, A C, D and that’s worth 1/10 the value if I do it in that order, that’s unfortunate. Do ABCD, I can’t, the dependencies are going to block me if I try. Combine all that together and you realize your life cycle profits are taking a big hit. So if you’re a senior executive, you ought to be staying up late at night worrying about your dependency problems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:14

Yeah, no. And like, what I also think is people don’t realize is that dependencies create rework most of the time. And a lot of times because of the rework, it’s a lot more costly to go back and do things. And I think if you just look at the dependencies in it, if you look at the deployment pipeline, and how much just within that many companies, how many dependencies there are where the work, stays.

I dial and many companies, I don’t know what your experience has been, but nobody has any clue where those are, if you again, just had an idea, where those bottlenecks are windows with things standstill, you will be able to address them. But it’s almost like we talk about MBA and we talk about even in IT, but nobody has that really knowledge of that holistic view of what’s going on and addressing really the underlying issues. It’s almost like, at least in my experience, it’s very reactive from a leadership from people that are, in my opinion, accountable for addressing those dependencies.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 40:29

Yeah, and I agree with that because they haven’t modeled them, right? My approach to doing this is, I work with companies, I do dependency class. And almost always after that, I get called by companies, oh, hey, could you do a workshop, facilitate a workshop to help us do what you talked about in the class? And then the doing part is rather straightforward. It’s like, let’s create a model. I mean, just imagine boxes in lines that says here’s our team, here’s the UX team, and there’s a line that connects the two that says, I got a structural dependency on that, right? But well, stop there.

Then you fill it out with data, right? You collect information, like, well, how often do I make requests across that link? Do I go to a UX team once in a while, once a year, every day, right? How often am I doing that? And what is the cost of delay if they blocked me? If for some reason I make a request, and they don’t fulfill it, right? How likely am I to get blocked? So imagine you’re collecting all this in a big old spreadsheet and then you start to analyze that. And you can start to say, now I understand the picture. And then we look at some of those dependencies and go not worth my effort. We’re not worth doing anything about it, right?

Because if there are structural dependencies, very often you require structural changes to fix them. And hence my point earlier, but if you don’t have people up here committed, it’s not going to work. Because you’re going to get to a point like, well, we’re going to have to restructure these teams, chances are the people on the teams can’t make that decision on their own, kind of go up here. And if you hit that ceiling, then you’re not going to be successful, because you’re going to be stuck in the structural situation you’re at.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:11

Yeah, but I don’t know, you have a lot more expensive than I do but what I’m seeing is lack of that awareness at that level. So I don’t know if it’s like COO or somebody who’s responsible for that organizational architecture, understanding these dependencies and then helping others understand it. I just don’t see it in organizations, I don’t see the maturity of leadership to understand and look for those things. Do you see that? Maybe on maturity or maybe on the curve? What percentage would you say, of companies actually have leaders that understand it? Because if the tendencies and everything that we’ve been talking about here, is at the core of issues of impeding agility and then if we have like, 5% of people in companies actually understanding this, then that’s an impediment to the agility. Or how do you see it?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 43:15

I’ll say the way it’s coming to my mind right now. They’re praying at the myth, the praying at the altar of the dependency myths. They believe certain myths about dependencies are true. And therefore they believe that it is a manageable problem, because the believes these myths are true. And the problem is they’re myths, and they’re not true.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:40

Or assumptions. I saw you talked about assumptions, is that assumption and what type of assumption would that be?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 43:48

Well, I’ll give you some examples of the assumptions, these myths that they’re like, oh, one size problem, one size solution will fit all types of dependency problems. If I just have a program board up on the wall to show my dependencies and path read string that connects cards, it’ll work for a small number of dependencies, it’ll work for a large number. No, it almost certainly worked for a small number dependencies. Anybody who’s ever done that, with a large number of red pieces of yarn up there knows it doesn’t work. Alright, so that’s one myth. Another myth would be if we could just figure out what all the dependencies are that mostly solves the problem.

Wrong, it doesn’t at all, the problem isn’t our inability to identify the dependencies. I mean, look, I know I have a dependency on the UX team. So I got this magic. So I didn’t know that I knew that. The problem is this, in the presence of a large number of dependencies wins in the organization, it’s the asynchronicity that kills you. It’s the when. I know that the UX team has to do this work. What I don’t know is when they’re going to do it and I don’t control the when, because it’s a shared dependency, so they think you identify them, then you’re good won’t work, or that, oh, you know what, this is just a problem with project management.

If we just hired better project managers and more project management process and had better tool support, we could totally get on top of this dependency problem sorted out. That’s got to be one of the king of the myths. Yeah, I know that’s not a problem. This is not a failure of project management. At large scale, this falls under the category of don’t do that, right? You’re not going to fix it with more project managers. So it’s these kinds of myths, there’s at least nine that I identify and talk about. And the problem is some of them are really damaging, like centralized demand management, oh, my goodness, the killer in most large companies that I visit. Oh, we’re going to do this, it works brilliantly.

I had a call two weeks ago with the companies, they start describing their problem, they’re like two minutes, I go centralized management. Like, what’s that? I go, let me explain what you’re going to tell me next. And you tell me if this is accurate. And I just grabbed, that’s pretty much it. So what should we do, I go stop doing that. We will have you on this call, because we want you to help us figure out to make it work. I go, I can’t, because it won’t work, right? How do you know that?

Give me a reference, show me papers and say, okay, I don’t have any papers at all but I have this time in the trenches with a lot of big companies that tried to do exactly what you’re doing. And I can tell you the 15 reasons, it won’t work. And you can tell me whether or not you think those are going to be problems for you. At the end of the day, yeah, we have a problem knowing what you do. Because we believe this myth that this will solve your problem and it won’t. To me, that’s what’s going on at the executive level like, this is a manageable problem people, just look, if you can’t do the job, right, I’ll hire people who can.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:46

And it goes back maybe to, it’s a leadership into mindset. And maybe we have about 10 more minutes left, I do want to get one more thing in here, which is related to what we’ve been talking about so far, which is not all cross functional teams are created equal. And you talked about how it’s important to have cross functional teams that are composed of T shaped individuals, essentially minimize those dependencies by having people that can get stuff done and not rely on UX department to finish work. Could you maybe elaborate on that topic a little bit, and why is it important? I call it almost like, maturity, one team and maturity two team.

Like we have cross functional team with bunch of specialists. Like developers and testers. I joke around, maybe it was seven, eight years ago, when developer told me that testing is below the paygrade. They want to test because they were senior developers much better to start item for next sprint that actually helped the team test to get the stuff done. And maybe is that’s a bunch of people that are silos and special cross functional team versus actually having people that help each other, developing those T shaped skills and develop the other skills that can help their teams deliver.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 48:14

Yeah to me, this is a very important topic. And it’s one of the seven strategies for addressing structural dependencies. Let’s make sure everybody’s clear on the terms, right? Because 20 cross functionality is a concept that you’d apply at an ecosystem and at a team level. And I want to put an adjective in front of it, completely cross functional is my goal. So the idea is, if a team is completely cross functional, it has all the skills on the team into achieve that team’s definition of done, whatever that might happen to be, they can get it done. So if I need UX designs to happen, then [inaudible 48:51] it, I got a UX design person on my team, otherwise, we would not be cross functionally complete. And I’d have to be carrying my posting notes, that happened. So that in an ecosystem level, I want the same thing.

So if I bring all these people from across the organization together into one ecosystem, that ecosystem should be completely cross functional in its abilities. You typically do not apply the term completely cross functional to an individual. Some people try Oh, they’re a full stack engineer. And the idea was, well, they’re supposed to be able to do work at any different layer at their tech stack, and they might, don’t get me wrong but do they also do the legal work and the design work?

So they’re not completely cross functional. They may be teaching, right? Teaching it on the other hand, typically applies to the individual, not to the ecosystem or the team, although you hear people use it at an ecosystem or team level, an ecosystem that would mean, our ecosystem can do more than one type of work. At a team level could be, our team can work on product A or product B, right? That might be how you hear people using T shaping at the team level.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:02

So essentially, T shaped doesn’t really address the tendencies when you say you have cross functional teams, that you started addressing the tenants, because you’re saying you need to have everything plus when you add the T shaped individual layer to it, it gives you more options to minimize those dependencies.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 50:21

So it makes you more resilient. So for a reason, T shape just means vertically deepen some area, and can work outside their area, but wouldn’t be as deep, so their broad. The benefits of having individuals on your team that are T shaped, you actually do get a dependency benefit. But it reduces the structural dependencies that would happen inside, right? So think about it, let me start with the instantiated dependencies, there’s only one person on our team that does testing. So all the testing work has to go to that individual, there is a dependency within our team on that individual.

And if we T shaped our people, so that more than one person could do that, I no longer have that unique dependency on that one individual, a bunch of people can do it. And the second big benefit I get is resiliency. If only one person can do it, what happens if she goes out a sec? I guess it doesn’t get done. And we don’t meet our sprint goal. So teams that have people that are comprised of T shaped skills are more resilient, when things go wrong, and can better deal with the variability of the work that is presented to the team from sprint to sprint.

The sprint we’ve got a little bit more database work in the stories in the next sprint, we’re going to have a little bit more UI work, but that’s okay. Because people are T shaped and they can swarm to where the work is. So I get that kind of benefits, right by doing it. So whenever possible, what I’m looking for is completely cross functional ecosystems and teams, and somewhat T shaped people. I don’t want them to be completely T shaped because then people are going to freak out and go, oh, you’d not be able to do every task. I’m like, I did not say that. I did not need that. I’m just saying wouldn’t it be nice if they could do more than one thing but do a few things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:17

Yeah, I think, really important point. And also not forcing people to do something that they don’t want to develop, right? Like, in a sense, if somebody doesn’t want to test, then it’s waste of everybody’s time to get people. And that’s a lot of times, it might go back to the mindset where somebody just has that belief or that assumption, they don’t want to develop certain skill. So I think that’s where you have to have a discussion as a team, where are gaps and what are we going to do? If we only have one tester, and nobody wants to test, what options do we have? How are we going to deal with this as a team?

Speaker: Ken Rubin 52:57

Right. Developing the skills is really a team focus.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:02

What would you like to leave us as it’s been almost an hour? What parting message would you like to leave us with here? Anything that I didn’t maybe ask you or anything that you usually maybe tell people.

Speaker: Ken Rubin 53:23

I actually think you hit on the topics that to me are the most important today. To me, it’s all about structuring for flow at scale. Now, my focus on dependencies, just because it’s like the killer problem that’s preventing that, but that dependencies aren’t my goal. So action for flow at scale is my goal. I’m just trying to figure out what in the world is getting in my way, that’s making it difficult for pretty much every company I visit? So if you want to be successful, and I’ll define what I mean, meet your targeted business outcomes. So if your company’s got like OKRs, than aligning with us, then you better figure out what’s getting in the way of you achieving those goals. And if you’re trying to do it at scale, my guess is, its dependencies and too much whipping your system or the things getting in your way. So go focus on those.

John Miller

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:36

Who is John Miller? How would you describe yourself?

Speaker: John Miller 00:40

How would I myself, too curious, always willing to try something different to make things better. get a kick out of seeing people and prove in some way, it’s always a serotonin kick or dopamine, whatever that is. So yeah, curious, always I critique everything. So part of the curiosity is I also critique everything, including myself. I’m a scrum trainer as well but I critique scrum all the time, like yeah, Scrum. Great here, but some issues over there. But I’ll critique everything. So curious, also look at everything from every angle and find the weakness, but that’s also I think part of the next step of improving something is finding the areas to improve in, so yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:32

Nice. And that made me think of like, you’ve redesigned your CSPO class recently. And I think it said, you were kind of you had, you were happy but not happy with it and you went through this whole process of kind of taking apart and then initial response as you were kind of iterating through it, could you maybe discuss that whole process? Why did you decide to redesign your CSPO class? What did you learn from that experience? Because that goes into that kind of question, not question everything but look always look for ways to improve and look for this type of thing, could you share that?

Speaker: John Miller 02:13

I’m laughing because this is an unexpected question and very funny. But yeah, so I have this certified Scrum Product at our class and I did really well with it, people liked it, I was getting good feedback. And I just saw some big problems out there. And I thought, maybe I’m reinforcing some of these problems that I see. And some of my product underclass and whatever you might want to call it, feature factories, whatever it might be. And I started to think about, well, what’s the root cause of those things? And it all went back to me of just not understanding real needs of real users and understand the real problem and allow at least mine and I see other product or classes, they kind of started the vision and they go from there, but it’s too late at that point, you’ve got a solution, once you got a vision, put everything else in your mind. So that’s probably the wrong place to start.

It’s premature, so I just said I’m going to redo it, and really rethink it and try to make and it try to fix this issue that I see out there of a lot of waste, resolving the wrong problem sometimes by just getting this kind of velocity focus that we hear about, which is a big problem. I think you need some velocity, I’m not knocking on it, but it’s about me, I’d rather have no velocity if we’re solving the wrong problem, right? That’s just wasting money and time. So when back we did it, did a lot of things around jobs to be done, I found that for me, the framework for me from Tony Holick job to be done gets kind of right to the heart of trying to understand the problem and the needs very clearly. So I redesigned it, did it and my class sucked. I’m teaching some things and suddenly a little bit because some of these I haven’t done before but I knew it was the right thing. So I knew that this is the right problem to solve. I think this is a good solution than say the solution but a good solution.

So I kept that but I put a lot of my identity and pride into my teaching and my coaching and when I’m not doing well, I get depressed. So I had the spiral of depression like I’m terrible and it wasn’t awful. I’m pretty awful eyes in a bit. I mean, I got some good feedback, but wasn’t nowhere near as my other classes and if I just kept at it, and it probably took me , many iterations and I said, you know what? I’m going to do is product in our classes. It’s [inaudible 4:44] if it’s painful, do it more often. So I said, you know what? I’m going to keep doing them and doing them until I figure it out. But now it’s actually one of my best classes better than I think any class I’ve ever done. Really proud of it, opens up a lot of eyes, a lot of people do not expect to be going that far into the problem space. And I keep them all, pretty much all day one is you need to know your problem.

If you don’t know that, the rest, you can write the best user stories in the world, but they’re just ghost stories. Those are problems that you’re trying to solve. But yeah, every time I iterated, trying to find something better, some of it was just, the content was good. It was the right content was the teaching, and how do you make it understandable? So I just went back and kind of went back to basics of, okay, just pure fun foundational basics of teaching as well, I need to show an example. A good teaching practice I find from education, the education world is, I do, you do, we do. And so we saw this stuff as complicated, it was very not complicated but they’re not used to it. It’s not a habit for a lot of people, writing user stories, not really getting into that problem space. So I kind of remodeled it from the I do, like, I’m going to show you an example how I would go through, you went together, kind of in that way can give you feedback as we’re doing it, and then you go off and do your own thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:08

Yeah, a couple of things are going through my head. So when I prep little bit, that has been a lot of time, maybe half an hour. So I was reading through tweets. And one of the things that stood out is deliberately get uncomfortable. And this reminds me of that to deliberately get uncomfortable, because I can relate to getting comfortable with like, hey, its great class, nothing needs to change, but to actually redesign a class and then try to deliver that successfully is painful. Like you said, it’s up and downs. But the reward is worth it through that process. And why is it so hard for a lot of people to get uncomfortable? And is it just the human nature? What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: John Miller 07:02

We don’t like it. I don’t know the answer to it. I just know growth comes from it. And every time, maybe sitting there one time thinking, how do I grow? How to get better? And I kept thinking anytime I had adversity, I grew. And when I didn’t like it, I wish I wasn’t in it. But at the end of it, I look back and I’m like wow, I’m stronger and better and whatever it might be, right? Work through land securities, whatever that was. And I just went one day and say so why don’t I just create my own adversities? Look how lucky and modern age for many of us, I don’t say everyone, I don’t want to mean that, maybe from a place of privilege, but a lot of us have a lot of our basic needs taken care of. So the idea of this big adversity, sometimes you get to manufacture it, right? To get it. And so I had to start, if I really want to grow, I kind of have to create my own adversity. Sorry, my own adversities. But why is it? I don’t know. It’s so hard, but it’s just painful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:06

It is painful but I know personally, it’s painful. But I know it’s a good process. I used to build websites and design websites. And back in the day in late 1980s, early 2000s, computers would crash and you would lose all of the work but always knew even though it was painful, to redo everything from scratch, it was always better than where I had it. So, I was just interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Speaker: John Miller 08:38

Yeah, even this morning, we were talking about fitness before the podcast. But even wake up like I’m achy, I’m older, I’m 46 and I just started judo last week, and that’s really making me sore. I’m not good at it. I’m getting thrown around all the time. But I’m really sore and achy, like God, like, if I was in my 25’s I wouldn’t feel like that. But I woke up this morning saying I’m going to go lift weights, it’s painful but I’ll feel better when I’m done, and then there’s a pool. And it’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit right now in the pool, and I’m going to jump in the pool. And that’s cold for me anyway, it’s cold. I’m going to jump in and just knowing by jumping in, like just the mental act of doing something uncomfortable. I know, like, what’s the worst is going to happen today? If you face kind of painful things in the morning and stuff, so yeah, I think you need to face those things head on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:36

Yeah, I don’t know, you said, it’s stuff we all know probably what’s a good thing but to come back to jobs to be done and you talked about understanding customer and problems that people face rather than just focusing on features. What stood out? How did you get introduced to jobs to be done? Because you and I have talked about it and you’ve kind of shown me a couple of things that I didn’t know. But I’m curious to know. And the framework itself and the idea has been around but I’m interested, how did you get introduced to it? What do you see?

Speaker: John Miller 10:14

[inaudible 10:14] introduced to it, just one of the things that kept showing up and then one day just get really curious more about it. Actually, no one I heard a lot about it in strategizer, they talked about, what’s the job? Would they have their camp there, value proposition canvas and they talked about customer jobs. So I probably maybe started there. But then I start to get really curious, it’s still wasn’t concrete enough for me like that value proposition canvas. I think it’s useful, but it didn’t go deep enough for me about understanding it. And not even after reading the books, so I just start researching different, it’s like agile in some ways, in some ways, is that there’s different flavors of it, like you have different camps. Just like someone will say, Kanban is this and scrums that.

You actually have this kind of divide and jobs to be done as well, like these different authors and they have their own viewpoints on but I gravitated a lot to was a Clayton Christensen’s book, he talked a lot about jobs done, I think, can’t remember the book name. But the book that really helped me or the resource that really helped me the most and what I find more useful for my style was Anthony Holics, jobs can be done, which he originally called outcome driven innovation. And he gets very practical about it, where I see a lot of these others are very aspirational. Just isn’t my thing in some ways. It’s a like, so you get a salt, like your product’s a salt, well, what’s the job? Well, I want to cut wood, right? Just that simple. It’s like to be able to cut wood. And he breaks things. It’s a very complicated, he’s got lots of stuff. But simplifying it, he breaks down jobs into what’s the basic situation they’re in when they’re trying to cut wood, or constraints? For example, say you’re a diabetic.

And the constraint might be well, I want to give myself an insulin injection but my hand shake, right? So the constraint there, the situation would be my hand shaking. So how do I get that job done, the insulin shot? And then he chops it up into three areas, which I find really useful, which is the functional job, which is cut the wood, get my insulin shot, then he has emotional jobs. How do I want to feel? How do I want to, what’s the experience for me that I like to have personally in a social job? He describes it as, how do you want others to perceive you? I add on to that a little bit, because I feel it’s a little too shallow, maybe. How do you want to be perceived? And also how do you want to relate to others? And it sounds silly, there’s some things like a tool, I think it was our social job for everything. I’m not sure but at some point even had this in my class, I said, I’m not sure about if you had a toolset if there was a social job, and someone said, no, actually, yeah, there is. If you’re really into tools, you want to show off your tool, you might have say hey, it’s brand and kind of show like, yeah, so, there’s always an opportunity to least ask if there’s a social job.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:27

It’s almost like a lens or perspective you can take that we have to but when you talk to students about the problem space in the solution space, and you said earlier a lot of times and I used to and I’ve been since I spoke with you with kind of like you said, switch to like, let’s look at the problem space first, before we look at the solution space. What are the things that you’re learning as you’re teaching around? People’s responses to the idea that there’s less problem space, and then their solution space and not jumping too soon into the solution space?

Speaker: John Miller 14:06

Yeah, that premature convergence to that solution spaces is, so what are they learning? As I’m teaching, whatever, they’re learning their insights. I think it’s just a whole new world for a lot of people. I won’t say everyone, some people know that. All the people, especially in the Agile Scrum space, they’re just used to being hey, here’s solution towards someone told us to build. And even sometimes, here are the features that stakeholders want. And I find getting them that stakeholders’ inputs important. And usually I say stakeholders, I’m talking about internal stakeholders, different executives, or other people in the company, as well, their job isn’t to be the expert to the customer, yours is and I think that’s a big shift for a lot of people, very simple obvious thing for many people, I think, for some people, but to shift that you know what? No, I’m as a product owner, I’m supposed to figure out the customer and lead the organization to let them know, what are their needs? And also get some stakeholder input. I’m not saying they don’t have input or information that’s valuable but the product owner is going to triangulate those things and figure out, what is the real problem to solve? So I find that’s a big eye opener for a lot of people just that, oh, you don’t have to just take orders from stakeholders, they’re not the boss of the product. And often, they don’t really know what the customer needs in many cases.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:29

Yeah, and that reminds me something else that you’ve talked about. And I see which is like in a lot of companies will still have like product managers and product owners. Product Manager focus on strategy, product owners and tactics. So when you teach and when you talk about the problem space, a lot of times people that are putting these product owner roles don’t really have the authority or the problem space is not part of their job, right? What is your thought on relating it back to the jobs to be done and what we’ve been talking about, and this idea of having product managers and product owners and that divide or misunderstanding organizations, when it comes to those roles?

Speaker: John Miller 16:13

Yeah, that’s where I put my unicorn in my class and say, talking about unicorn ideal land. And I get that, right? And I say this is what I find. The best teams are able to pull off when you’re empowered fully, what I call the full range of product ownership is that double diamond of the problem space and the solution space. And you should be able to occupy that whole thing. And I do think, lower the forms of waste, building the wrong thing is upstream, it’s not downstream. So I think they get the wise but you’re right, while they’re like, yeah, but my boss still tells me exactly what to do. And I always acknowledge that. Yeah I get that, right? You shouldn’t get fired from doing this class. But can you start having these conversations, though? Can you start working your way upstream a little bit more? Can you start bringing some of these models and ways of thinking?

So if they say, hey, the customer needs XYZ, this feature, and I might say, oh, great, write that one down, put whatever user story, whatever you want to use, but simply then ask the question, oh, what outcome is that going to provide for the customer? So you start changing the conversation. And maybe they don’t know, maybe then okay, great, let’s figure that out together. So now you start to work, even though you might not be empowered to have the authority, you can start having those conversations, right? To help other people to see that maybe they need to figure that out. Or maybe you can help guide them and helping to figure that out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:48

I mean, the issue that I see a lot of people, it’s all great job but I still have to do my job. So me understanding that is great. And I see that in a lot organizations and through coaching too. And it’s tough, because now you get more people to see what it takes. And even the deal of product manager is kind of still sticking with the old structures. And that’s why we have and product owners are just proxies. Maybe to tie to this, and I don’t know, in a sense, I see the product manager, product owner, just a leftover of waterfall that trying to do Agile and just people confused. But something that’s related to this that caught my attention. I thought maybe something that in a sense, I’ve done to you said, I use agile as a Trojan horse to make organization more sane. And could you maybe elaborate on that? What did you mean by that?

Speaker: John Miller 18:59

Yeah. So my [inaudible 19:03] was many years ago. And I was coaching at an organization that many people know, one of my first big coaching gigs and we’re making headway which we tend to get in the beginning. It was William Bridges once said, uninformed optimism always gets away to inform pessimism. And we’re getting through there, people are getting teams going great. Then things start to, whatever the stress happens, and then the management goes back to the old way. So I’m bummed out because I tend to get depressed if I feel like I’m failing and beat myself up. And Michelle Slager. She’s a CST and someone who I really looked up to a lot. She was there with me and she just pulled me aside. As young load coach outside and said, hey, John, hope is okay for me to quote Michelle here, but she has something like, hey John, just realized only about 10% of these companies will actually do it.

Just the way it is, right? This one, being uncomfortable is hard as you said earlier, change is hard, all this thing. So just realize it’s just the way it’s going to be. And I said, okay, got it, maybe feel a little bit better. But then there’s still something I can do. And its kind of always stayed in my head, but I can’t just give up. And she’s not saying to give up. But it’s still something you do for the other 90% and dawned on me as I helped other organizations and it helps. And sometimes not the agile. Someone was an agile purist, they came in and said, well, yeah, no, they’re not. But then I might help, somehow make it better and rich, usually I do in some way. And I realized, I can help organizations become more sane. So I’d have this basic mental model, sanity before agility. One, sanity is a prerequisite to agility anyway. And first, you got to get sanity in place, number one. And if you just get that that’s a huge benefit, even if they don’t get the Agile part of that which is the adaptiveness, being able to flow with the environment but can we just make work more sane for people? So I’d make that my core focus first, maybe using some of the Agile language to get in.

But again, you got to get foundations and I have no right or wrong. But four attributes, I think of sanity, but by focus, and I find if you have this four, it makes scrum possible, agile possible camp, whatever that you’re doing. And sometimes you don’t need the other things. One is just focus. And we all know, multitasking and doing too many projects don’t seem fun. Can we just focus and that’s usually a personal thing that people have influence over? So even if you have to, like you know what? I have 10 projects and I can’t control it all. See, you’re doing Scrum, could you do two sprints just on that one project and avoid the multitasking at least? So there’s something you can do to minimize the amount of distractions and multitasking, and in within almost everyone’s power to some degree.

The other one would be the ability to break things into small increments, small pieces, right? So you get things done faster, quality and if you have to multitask, switch to another project, you’re done, right? You don’t have to do the back and forth. And those two things are both I think within everyone’s influence to some degree. But then there’s the other two. I think some people would disagree with me out there and that’s fine, is if I can get all the skills needed on a team to eliminate the dependencies and the waiting time and the drama, every time something changes, you have to go back to the other personnel but they’re working on something else. So I got to get all the skills I need in order to get whatever is done, cross functional team, as we say in Scrum. Sorry, I don’t know if you can hear it. But apparently landscapers.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:53

No. I mean, it’s not breaking, maybe a little bit.

Speaker: John Miller 22:58

And then obviously, I’m a big believer, at least with organizations that don’t have this competency yet of having them dedicated stable as possible. So I find if you have those four things as bottom two though, those last two are more organizational things like a person can directly influence that usually, that will take some leadership or management buy in. But I find if you start with the two then add those other two, you get like 80% of the benefits, I think in any agile framework from those four things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:32

No, the reason I asked him to tie it back to this discussion that we’ve had is, a lot of times when I’m teaching, like you said, you see what’s going on in organizations, in many instances it’s been there you know what needs to happen generally. So some of the things and it’s easy to get demotivated as a trainer, it’s easy to get the press sometimes as a trainer, because you see how much people struggle and a lot of times, there’s lack of that sanity or awareness or whatever you want to call it and I think it’s a good reminder. And what I liked about the Trojan horse is that baby steps or in some ways people need to get that sanity. And sometimes it’s easier to say you have to get here from there.

But it takes time and going back to Michelle in a sense, like if such a small percent of organizations surely make that ship or understand it, it takes time. I don’t know who said it, but I was interviewing and it’s like a lot of these organizations’ survival is not guaranteed. So the more competition, the more so, to switch gears a little bit. I did want to and I was going to ask you first and I’m sure you get a lot of questions around agile education. But I want to ask you, what is the current state? You spent a lot of years and you still involved agile education. How would you describe the progression in agility in all Agile education?

Speaker: John Miller 25:21

Yeah, it has progressed quite a bit. I was just talking to someone today, Jennifer Manley, who does a lot of training and coaching, agile education. And I was like, no, it’s interesting when I started, there’s nothing, we’re just like hey, this might be interesting to try and see if we can apply and what would happen. But now it’s becoming a thing. It has a name, people know, agile education. And there’s people all over the world that are trying this thing, they’ll contact me and say, hey, we’re doing this. And so one is, I wouldn’t say it’s widespread or any kind of mass, nowhere near any kind of getting to mass adoption. No, but it is spreading. And people recognize it. And they see it as an answer to some problems in education. So, but I started in maybe 2010, 2011 as knights, we tried it with a classroom, a fourth-grade classroom, and we had no clue what we’re doing. So now people have to have a clue, which is funny.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:27

Why do you think the adoption is as much as it has? It makes sense the way that and what I also like, you recently talked about at least I was aware of it, how you design the class, or you give level of authority, or you know what I’m talking about based on the maturity. And I thought that was great too, because it’s kind of what we have in organizations to giving the amount of maturity or whatever you want to call it, you kind of have more autonomy. Could you maybe talk about that first? And then maybe just elaborate on, what would for or what are the impediments to more organization’s schools adopting some of these Agile values and principles?

Speaker: John Miller 27:14

I’ll start with the spectrum. We call the spectrum of collaboration and a spectrum of choice. So I’m like, maybe it’s like a little bit like work companies. But if you’re doing Scrum or some other agile thing with a team, there are dots, they’re professionals, at least most of them are and you go and you say be self-organizing, and many of them can pull that off. Not always, not always, but many pull that off. These are dots that have executive functioning, they know how to drive a car and act responsibly and all those things. But if you do this with a kid, self-organize, it might work. Mostly it has, I’ve seen it work kind of instantly with some teams but some others, these kids are not ready for it, the teacher isn’t ready for it and just goes into chaos, right? And it’s not a very good selling point for teachers to try this out, like, hey, let’s try a little chaos in your classroom. And again, it’s just because they’re not quite ready for it. Their brains are still developing in many ways, their executive functioning. Same with the teachers, they are not used to learning, how to have an environment to allow that to happen. And sometimes they’re under some very tight constraints around curriculum and in eastern United States state standards and state testing that they have to comply to.

And so working with teachers, where we first tried it and we just bought a little bit of Scrum, a little bit of Kanban and we realize, okay, some of that work but some of it wasn’t right fit. So we started to play around, and as it started to spread in the classrooms I was working with, after one classroom did, others start to pick it up, I just would go in, they would ask me to help out or coach and I’d pair it with the teacher who really knew education. And I just noticed I just wrote down patterns. I was like, oh, there’s one class, as you said I actually caught myself saying it, you’re doing it wrong. I didn’t say that loud but you’re not doing it the way you taught it. And I was like, no, hey man, maybe there’s something for me to learn. And I just noticed, they’re doing the structures and the visibility, but they didn’t bring in the empowerment part of it. But that’s what they needed at that time. So I just started, I just made a really quick mental model of what I was noticing.

And I noticed there was these four categories that kind of categorize classrooms and it was based off these two things, which was collaboration and choice. And I was just like we do a management, we make a two-by-two matrix and voila, you have a framework. And that’s my agile classrooms framework is a two by two of going up in collaboration. And I realized [inaudible 29:58] traditional classroom, low choice low collaboration, what’d you think of as sitting in rows, listening to the teacher. Some classes were doing individual agile, they would do passion projects, or just working their own capstone project.

I was like, no self-organizing team there , no teams but they’re doing the structure, the planning, the review, the retros, all that but it’s more of a personal level. It’s a personal agility, you might say, so it’d be low collaboration, high choice. Bottom of that would be high collaboration, low choice, which is a cooperative learning environment where kids are in the groups, the students are in groups, but they’re still doing what the teacher tells them to do. Here’s the assignment, here’s what you need to work on, but you support each other in doing it. And then the upper right-hand corner is what you think of Scrum or an Agile team, which is high collaboration, high choice, self-organizing, self-directing teams, self-managing teams. And so it popped up there then I got more granular.

So what does it mean to be along the spectrum? So I created and some others helped me refine this part of the Agile education group I’ve been working with. But these basic five steps under each one. And so the cool thing with it, is you can start wherever you are just like you said, it’s, you take these steps, you don’t just go all in and they take years. So the great thing with this is a little bit like, hey teacher, you want to try this out in a safe way? Well, first get the sanity part, I guess, in some ways, it’s a cute new structure. Here’s a rhythm and it’s inspired by Scrum, it’s not quite Scrum, because it’s not by the scrum guide.

But you’ll see a lot of Scrum in there of basic sprints, and a framework. And so try that, give it a rhythm, start modeling that and say, hey, here’s what we’re doing. We’re going to plan today. And this is what I’m thinking about doing, so you see, you start modeling that first, getting students to understand it. And then you put some structures, some visible, I call visible learning artifacts, like the boards or the big team agreements, whatever it might be, you start with that and then you start inching up, they started to learn the process and they’re like okay, now, this time, how about you figure out the how? I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.

But maybe for this part, you can come up some ideas about how and once they got that you can kind of work their way up and what we call scaffolding and education. And same thing for collaboration, maybe do it by yourself, let’s try it out with the team, with a small group. And then let’s really see what it means to have shared ownership where you’re not dividing and conquering the work, where you Miljan does this and John does that, which is a level three, the collaboration spectrum cooperative learning, what does it really look like to be a real collaborative self-organizing team, which is, it doesn’t really matter. As long as we get that work done, we’re all swarm on that together.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:50

It’s interesting, because I did maybe three, four years ago, CSM type of class for undergraduate University, and I ran it. It was really fun from an engagement standpoint, and the feedback and some of the things that I got, which reminded me of me being in school, which is, I mean, even coming from Europe, where education is different, the way that you learn, the way that you collaborate, but even in the United States, it’s not necessarily very collaborative. I hated college. I mean, in a sense, like, I don’t think everything, I paid mostly for the social experience of going and for, but when I saw how they interacted during the class were in a sense, these are maybe 17, 18-year old’s, how they self-organizing the responsibility, I told them, if you want to show up, show up, if you’re not like you’re part of a team, you guys have to figure things out.

And it was interesting how those 17, 18-year-old kids embraced this idea of ownership of collaboration, how engaged they were. And I’m like, this is such a foreign thing to most universities here. If I asked all of these people if they remember concept from this class, if they remember their experiences, if they remember and develop better relationships with people in the class ratably setting, they all said yes. And I was like, I wish I had classes like this in college, maybe I could have justified. So coming back to the question of why do you think there is not an explosion of using these methods and these ways to essentially collaborate, learn, in all ways?

Speaker: John Miller 34:58

Yeah. I think it’s a bit schools, I find are fractal of what we do in corporations. I mean, it’s very similar if you think we have a bigger societal thing that we all share. So one is just very similar things of the idea of what if let go of control? It’s very scary, right? Especially with and this is one reason, it’s not the reason, I think many educators would like to but there’s a lot of fear in them. There’s a lot of eyes on the educator, a teacher, especially in public schools for sure, I’m sure other privates as well. But definitely public schools where not only you have a bunch of kids, you don’t want to fail. Their lives are in your hands, their futures in your hands, that’s a big risk.

Two, get parents. Also, that might even say some will support but some might be like, aren’t you supposed to be teaching my kids how I learned, right? When I was in school. So you get your parents now that are…I find a lot of parents actually love it, what I’ve seen, they love it, because the kids go home and share it with their parents. But there’s that fear. And then you have administrators, principals, and all that do classroom observations, who might not get it, they’re like, hey, this isn’t quite what we’re expecting, maybe out of the classroom. So I think there’s a lot of fear, a lot of eyeballs on them, that makes any kind of risk trying to do something innovative or different, makes it really risky.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:25

So this made me think of jobs to be done in feature factories versus jobs to be done. And looking at the problem, right? The problem is to get students at least in university to be ready for work, right? And if you think about it, it’s just a bunch of like let’s give them a bunch of classes, create this program and have a diploma at the end. But when you look at it, the job to be done is really for students to be ready to work. And I don’t know, do you think maybe from that perspective?

Speaker: John Miller 37:02

Yeah, I actually have jobs to be done for agile classrooms work that I do. And it’s pretty much something like that, it’s really difficult to get your future ready, right? For 21st century ready for life and work. And I like the life part because there’s these real skills, how do I communicate with people? How do I connect? How do I set my own goals, right? My own personal and see it through. And I find that the students who do this actually apply it in their real life, but they get a sense of actually, remember, I’m going to go deviate a bit, but I remember working in one school and also underprivileged school and while these kids have a hard time economically and other things that are against them. But I just remember showing them a basic kind of Kanban board, scrum board. And said here, think about what you want to do that day in your life, you can see them all lean forward.

And I was like, wow, and what I realized just intuitively, it’s like, wow, they’re seeing there’s a tool here that they can control their life. And that’s really useful to them, like, wow, I can use this to have agency in my own life. So yeah, I do think that is a big job to be done. Is that sense of agency in your own life, and to able to make better choices and learn from those choices and the consequences. So yeah, I think that is the big job is in….and the great thing with Agile education, at least agile classrooms is as you’re going through the content in which again, teachers don’t have control over for many of them, it a state standard curriculum, some good, some maybe not useful.

But some of those might be realistic in real life, like really useful, some of them might not be but the skills of applying like you did in your undergrad classroom, those skills are always useful. So the cool thing with this, and I kind of get two birds with one stone is that, you still can use your basic learning content go through your curriculum, right? You still can do that. It’ll be your backlog in some ways. But by applying this, you don’t have to teach 21st century skills, which a lot of teachers like education approach as well. We’ll teach collaboration, we’ll teach critical thinking. And I think it’s the way to do it. I think what you have to do is use it all the time. And by doing this, they’re constantly wrapping the 21st century skills around any of the content they’re using today.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:25

Everything that they do. Yeah, everything.

Speaker: John Miller 39:27

Everything and the exact same thing, impact that you saw, I saw from third grade, fourth grade all the way up is those deepening relationships. I say it well, I say it deepens learning and it deepens relationships. And the connection they have and the idea of them supporting each other, instead of teasing each other in the classroom. It showed up even on the playground where they saw someone bullied like they would be like, hey, they hold accountability to each other like they will learn to speak up if somebody wasn’t honoring the right thing to do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:01

Another interesting thing that just reminded me and we kind of go a little bit off, but like, how in college when we went like you would take your individual notes, and a lot of times I joke around, I did pay people to take notes for me for whatever reason. And I was in a class and like, recently, and this was like class for mostly students, not the class. And everybody’s taking notes in mural, like, on my mural, and I’m like, what’s going on here? People are making notes as I’m sharing ideas and talking. And I can like, what’s going on? And they’re like, we always we do this, like we share notes, we have one document where people add things to it. And that was interesting from that relationship standpoint to and collaboration, because now you had people collaborating and exchanging thoughts and adding to the conversation while I was talking. And there’s we are all collaborating through this because it triggered their comments, what they were doing. Have you experienced anything like that, that points to maybe a generational shift of how we learn and collaborate? What are some of the other things that you’ve seen that maybe people would not expect to see?

Speaker: John Miller 41:23

Yeah, it’s interesting, I just hear what you said about mural and just the share just got me thinking, like, oh, how can I maybe apply some of that? That’s interesting. I’m not sure about the generational thing, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say, this generation is like this and that generations like that. I can steer a tight people. But what I find least with younger people in school is, they haven’t been conditioned yet like we have. And it’s actually easier, actually find if I get a fourth grade, I find like Elementary School is the easiest, to some point maybe, third grade, fourth grade, they’re the easiest ones to start this with. Because they just pop, they’re like, yeah, this just makes sense. That’s the way they play on the playground. They don’t wait for someone to tell them the rules.

And actually, they’ll make up the rules as they go and they’ll agree to it. There’s this natural social interaction that happens, they naturally create these self-organizing rules and they hold accountability to it. So I find it’s natural, especially if you see that state of play. Of course, there’s accidents and fights but they’re human, just like anyone. But what I find is they’re not conditioned yet that we have to do it this way. And I find being agile for a fourth-grade team is a lot easier than doing it in an adult team in many ways. They just go at it, they’re open, they’re vulnerable. The vulnerability is actually what astounds me, is where, I just want activity called my world map, and they’ll interview each other. So my daughter and her school, they’ll do like, tell me everything about you. And they’ll do a little thing, and they bring it in. And I always say, well, why not just talk to another kid? And figure out everything about them, you do a project, and then you’re learning empathy or learning listening. So I have this one activity called my world map where we just sit down, it’s like a little mind map, and a little visual mind maps and pictures. And I’ll say, hey, what are your strengths? What are you proud of? And I write that down. But I’m asking you questions, I’m learning and we bring it out, and I’ll share it out. Hey, here’s what I learned about Miljan.

But the cool thing is, when you get into, I’ll say weaknesses, but I say is where do I need support? Where am I needing support in? And what can my work or whatever. And I find it amazing, high school kids, just how vulnerable they are, like one kid, say I get really angry, and I don’t like it, I don’t like that I get angry, I try to control it. And when they did that, the team just was really…they went around them just start hugging them. Like, it’s crazy. So I think it’s in some ways, they’re just more open to these things. And when you give them the opportunity to do it, and treat them like real, like true humans that are really capable of these things is quite amazing how they rise really high up.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:18

Yeah, it is. And we’ve talked about in professional setting how important it is to do those things, because that’s what builds trust, that’s what builds great teams, Yeah. It’s either that conditioning or whatever it is that it makes a lot more difficult in a professional, I guess setting. We don’t have a lot of time and I’m thinking about questions that I still haven’t asked you but I do want to get your thoughts on one question that’s also a little bit off or in a different direction about Mike Beedle. Recently, somebody told me that you’ve been part of that initial group and I’ve been doing the series so like, I haven’t had a chance to ask you but what is your memory of Mike Beedle and how has he impacted your thinking and perspective on Agile and Scrum?

Speaker: John Miller 45:07

Yeah, Mike Beedle’s been impact on a lot of people for me as well. He’s the one who helped me become a scrum trainer. I think he helped his co trainees with them. And he really helped guide me along with some things, a lot of things. I think what I remember about Mike is, there’s a lot of egos out there. And if you haven’t noticed, a lot of people do this maybe in some in the Agile space, perhaps in the scrum committee made a few. And with Mike, even though he had this pedigree and so… I don’t know what you call it, but it was the Agile Manifesto, co-author and help break the first book on Scrum. I mean, he’s been around, he’s got a name.

He just never used it; it was never a thing. And he’d always champion you, at least would mean others I saw. He’s always saw what you’re great at, he tried to champion you and cheerlead you, and never seen him put anyone down. He was always optimistic about what you could do. And he would even throw it out like I’m a nobody, right? But he would just turn and John, he said this, and you just talk to others and he some way bring you into it to make it feel like you were, I don’t say special, but he knowledge you and I never saw him put anyone down. So that’s the thing I think I remember most about Mike, was just his optimism is, I think, really belief in people that they can do some really great things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:42

What about Enterprise Scrum? I was involved a little bit when he started, involved in a sense of where, once involved in malware. But some of the stuff that he was thinking was, others have said this, he was ahead of his time. What are your thoughts as far as like Enterprise Scrum and how that kind of still sprinkled all over what we do, what’s being talked about today?

Speaker: John Miller 47:13

Yeah, I think what I liked about what he’s doing in Enterprise Scrum was very much mirrored what I was doing Agile classrooms is that you need to help people configure it for them. And they adapted to different environments. And so that’s one thing I really liked about it, it wasn’t like you must do the scrum guide by verbatim exactly how it says. It was really about context driven, like, what’s your context? What’s going to work for you and to get people to think through that not one framework is going to… one prescriptive framework is going to fix your problems? That you need to design your syllabi, but he gave you some tools to help you through that. So I do think though that it was still early on, and had to be polished or expressed a little bit more for people to really get to where it could maybe be spread a little bit further. But I think it was just very in the early phases of it, but I really loved his approach to it. That here are some ways of thinking that you can configure this and make it work for you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:15

Yeah, and the reason I asked is like we live currently, and probably for the foreseeable future, meaning next five or six years in the land where these prescriptive frameworks are popular, companies are buying into this stuff. Yeah for a lot of us and going back to what Mike was saying, it’s in what you’re saying, it’s about contextualizing, it’s not about taking these recipes and trying to apply them, but actually contextualizing. So, when I look at the future, the future is the ideas in a sense of Enterprise Scrum and some of these ideas that you have to contextualize, you have to look at the context and what to apply in that context, what worked. So what is your perspective on the current state of agile, where we’re going, where it is? Maybe as the last question.

Speaker: John Miller 49:15

I don’t know. I guess the only thing I think it was, there was many states of agile, that’s all I can say. There’s many states of agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:22

Maybe let me ask you this way, what pisses you off about the current state of agile? What makes you excited or maybe optimistic about what…?

Speaker: John Miller 49:35

Well, I guess what pisses me off is when and I don’t think it’s right for everyone. So I don’t, I think hey, you got to find what’s right for you agile, maybe agile might not be. So I don’t push, I’m not like a pusher of Agile. But what pisses me off and when people say Oh, agile doesn’t work or it’s dead or you’ve seen all this stuff, and then you go ask the question, why isn’t it working and it’s because they’re not doing nowhere near anything that agile says. And then you hear the other rebuttal which I get where they’re coming from, that well, it sounds like if everyone’s using it wrong, it’s designed wrong, like, no, no. I see people doing the wrong thing in the gym all the time, lifting weights, bad for him, doesn’t mean a squat is design wrong, they’re just doing it wrong, and they’re going to damage themselves and they’re going to say, squat suck, working out is not good. Like, no, you need to learn how to do some of it with some integrity with some discipline. So I think that makes me, irritates me a bit, seeing the comments and when they say it with such confidence as well.

So yeah, that bothers me a lot. And at the same time, you need to be able to doubt things to your environment to, but it doesn’t mean you do it, you bastardize it. And I think it’s the way it is, that good things get more popular. People started, it becomes a buzzword as it is, people will start using it, the name of it, and you know how it is. Seeing complaints, I don’t have any pride of. And it’s just not at all with… Ron Jeffries calls it dark stronger, dark agile [inaudible 51:14] Get a hold of planning meeting and well doesn’t matter. If you have that agile [inaudible 51:22] you’re hanging up, it’s not going to be a good sprint planning meeting, it’s going to suck.

So that’s fine. I think with the popularity, that’s kind of just the natural state of things, I personally think what will happen is, it will some point, arc out, die out, something else will come up, but it’ll be the same thing, just with a different name. I think that’s always happening in some ways, it gets reincarnated. And because it’s the old words, it’s the old tools, have bad baggage, and they recreate the new thing. And it’s really the same thing and a new wine model kind of thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:58

So not a true paradigm shift, just maybe a shift. What about the positive stuff? What is motivating you?

Speaker: John Miller 52:10

I do think there’s innovation happening in the Agile space for the people that really get it. And the idea that you don’t need to be shackled to following every prescriptive rule and that people really do get the bigger principles or the paradigm that’s behind it, and that they will take it and try some things and do some new things. And so I do think that is happening out there to. You don’t hear a lot of those stories out there. But there’s people who are like, does it work and that it makes people happy happier and more productive or more engaged? Like, yeah, great and even though of the book somewhere, it’s not in a class. So I think a lot of those things are happening. And actually, I wish organizations that are out there that have money and resources like Scrum Alliance or whoever else that are out there. I’m sure they’re doing some things, I wish they would further the agile movement versus just say, here’s what it is and let’s just keep it going. I’d rather say, what is the new thing that’s out there? Do learn, what are the great things that are happening out there, bring it back and share it so we can evolve? Agile versus trying to institutionalize agile and keep it still.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:24

Exactly. Yeah, that is, and that could be a separate topic. What would you like to leave the listeners with like a tip message? What is one thing, maybe you want to share? Maybe what you do in class, I don’t know. Just the tip, maybe final talk.

Speaker: John Miller 53:47

I’ll use the frozen tool mantra, which is just do the next smallest right thing. That’s it. Just add the smallest part of it there. So that’s it. It’s like what you talked about? How do you get to an ideal version? Well, it’s based on where you are, what’s the next right thing and what’s the smallest thing I can do to move forward and learn if it’s the right thing? And that’s it. I think it’s all you can do in life and work.

Jon Jorgensen

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 00:22

I’m going to call this a Mike Beedle quote, agilize everything.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:33

How did you meet Mike?

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 00:36

Yeah. So Mike was just starting to tell the world about his enterprise scrum framework and looking for people that want to learn it and train it. And I was on a coaching engagement with Harold Shin Sato. And I remember just turning to him and saying, Harold, let’s talk to Mike, let’s, let’s support him on this. And so I think I just answered or posted something in LinkedIn, or Facebook, I forget which, but we set up a phone call the next day and we started talking in easily, we went over an hour. And I had agreed, like, I’m going to fly out to Chicago and I’m going to take your first course and your second course. They are offered in the last week of January. And it’s really funny because there were other people just kind of in my circle that wanted to go, but couldn’t be there for the very first one. And so they’re like, tell me who’s there. Who shows up for the first class? And I went way early, it was this beautiful hotel downtown. And I remember sticking my head in the room and thinking like I’ll help him set up and stuff, be useful. He’s a great guy and nobody was in there, I’m like, oh my gosh, it must be the wrong hotel, go and check the room, is it the right room? And I’m thinking how is this actually going to happen? Anyway, people started to trickle in. And Michael Herman was one of them. And so we started talking about open space and then more people came in, I found out like, you know what? He had gifted this class to other people, maybe some of them were in transition between jobs, I’m like, oh my gosh, I paid full freight for both classes but with the intention of eventually training it and I started to realize there are a lot of people that Mike Beedle cares about and wants to make a difference through in the world. And so anyway he came before it’s time to begin, and kind of a big entrance, he’s bigger than life. And he commands a presence. And I remember him asking me, John, you’re all into open space, I was part of the open space agility community at the time. Do you want to open space in the class? I’m like, oh my gosh, like Michael Herman’s sitting right there. He’s asking me, absolutely, I would never pass that up. And the rest of the class, it was an unfolding of that same kind of attitude and really personable connection that characterized our relationship all throughout. And so we had lunch together that first day, that was when we started talking one on one, mostly about community building and purpose. And I think I remember seeing, his children came by with his significant other and I could see, what a warm father he is to his children. And there were some other people at the table with us and just yeah, everything he would do and say would be so considerate. And I think it was in that moment at that lunch, thinking this is the kind of guy I want to be when I grow up. I mean, he’s up to something, something good and so inclusive. There were people in my class that I think that they were maybe restaurant tours or restaurant owners, operators and they’d seen that there are things that they could maybe use from scrum in their own organization, their own restaurant. And other people, maybe it’s just his infectious energy and optimism. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:26

That is awesome. And I’ve already interviewed several people and that’s a reoccurring theme. In what ways has Mike impacted you? You said, you want to be like Mike when I grew up, what did you learn from him? What do you think when you look at yourself today, what are some of the things that you maybe credit to him?

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 05:58

Yeah. Well, the first thing and I’m going to call this a Mike Beedle quote, agilize everything. He said that and he really meant it, which is looking at the values of the Agile Manifesto and putting the relationships, the interaction, your way of being with other people in any aspect of your life, is the way of being with everyone in your life. And it’s the relationship between you that makes all the difference. And so putting that first at the front of my mind and being with people, really being with people and letting them know, through your way of being that they matter. And that was the biggest impact that Mike had on me, is after Mike was gone, Facebook, I used to hang out a lot on Facebook, I don’t anymore, but Facebook sometimes would give you this announcement, how many years you’ve been married or how many years you’ve known somebody or an anniversary, whatever. This one came up and it said, your best friend according to how they’ve liked your posts, Mike Beedle. Yeah, I’m like, that’s not a coincidence. Mike would see the best in you and the way he would make you feel, was that you mattered.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:42

That is such a, not necessarily skill. I guess it is a skill, because it is that empathy that everybody talks today about empathy and all of that but to truly embrace it and live it in everything, I’ve known people like that too, you can separate the BS from real stuff. Enterprise Scrum, I was talking to Rick. And just enterprise Scrum and where is it today? And he was describing this, who owns enterprise Scrum? And he’s like I can see parts of enterprise scrum everywhere in the sense of people, even with business agility and everything. What are your thoughts? I mean as far as, what was the potential of enterprise Scrum and in what ways does it live today and other things?

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 08:44

Well, so for me. I think I’d have to look at a timeline. I believe that Daniel Mesic and I and Mark Sheffield announced Leadership Scrum after Enterprise Scrum. It could be close, I don’t know. But all that I want to say is that, in the ways that I have worked with executive teams, and that they have embraced Leadership Scrum, which is probably just Scrum now, with the new scrum guide, it’s not a way of saying Scrum. But that’s the way that Enterprise Scrum is living, which is to say, Scrum teams everywhere. Scrum teams throughout the entire enterprise. And not dividing the enterprise by disciplines or line function silos, whatever you want to call it. And I’m seeing that, where I’m working today, we have these crosses discipline game developer teams and if you would have asked them several years ago, certain teams, they would tell you, no, there’s too many disciplines to fit on one team. There’s artists, there’s animators, there’s background artists, there’s voice and sound effects artists and producers and programmers and all these things. And so already, you’re over the head count for a scrum team. But then it works like you do find ways to have people maybe overlap a little and swarm. Anyway, so I’ve discovered that in movie production as well, I was just on this Scrum Alliance page the other day. I don’t know if the people who did that heard of Enterprise Scrum and that’s why they brought scrum into Newfields. But when I see it, I think of Mike and I think of Enterprise Scrum and he was just so straightforward about that. Basically, divide your organization by user demographic, by persona if you will, and have Scrum teams focused on satisfying the needs of the persona. And if you want to have more personas then slice the demographics that are great, have more sprinting’s, but that was his thinking. And I would like to see more business agility in the world in general, I think it’s easy to talk about and very hard to do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:44

But I think the next 10 years will be about that business agility, where the last 10 years were all about, we talked about business agility, but really, it was just getting in trying to understand Scrum. And I think the next 10 years will be trying to understand what business agility is. And then maybe after that is actually understanding how to do it well or the concept that we’re talking about, probably what Mike and others have talked about is the whole structural change or factual change, the whole cultural change. I think that’s probably what we’re going to start seeing and pasting more and more on what we’ve been talking about, what people have been talking about for 30 years or so.

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 12:30

For sure. And one idea there, I don’t know, if I would imagine some of the people you’ve talked with, they mentioned subsumption architecture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:38

Exactly.

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 12:39

And in the beginning I thought like, oh, come on, this is another gimmicky thing and we’re just pulling that out because it’s part of the origin story of Scrum, right? Like the little robots, that just settled in, I guess was making in Boston or whatever. And maybe it is, maybe it’s not. And there was this big thing about like, okay, how can we define and explain subsumption architecture to a business person that is not necessarily program robots? And the cool thing about the way that Mike asked that question was, he put it out to the community, just like defining what’s the definition of enterprise scrum as a thing. He made it a collaborative process, which I think would be difficult, the community enterprise scrum community was not small at that time. But what I started getting out of it is that, there is a certain kind of empirical mindset, something that, we get out of our head, which is what contains our model of how the universe really is how, what so, what’s the physical reality out there, we get out of our model, and then we go, we get the information, and we operate and behave based on the information out there. That’s my version of what subsumption is, and I think organizations, maybe that goes by different moniker, maybe they call it like market mindedness or customer centrism or something like that. And I think that there is a lot of room for organizations to be outward facing rather than inward facing workplace. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:31

And that’s kind of not just, the people that interviewed for this initiative for remember Mike but in general, I think everybody’s collectively saying the same things which could be part of group thing, but which could also be part of this paradigm truth, I think at the end of the paradigm we’re going into this new way of thinking, how do we structure organizations? Not just talking but actually doing it, and learning from and evolving from it. So I think at least, I’m excited about what’s going to come and like even COVID is going to force us to rethink and give us a kick in the butt to rethink and redo things. So what other stories do you remember? Do you remember stories that Mike would tell, I mean, anything that you think would be?

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 15:31

So the funniest memory I literally have of Mike was, in his training, it really had this entrepreneurial spirit. And I don’t know whether that was just a function of the economics of the time. People are between jobs sometimes. But also, there was these big booms, Facebook being a unicorn and acquiring other unicorns, and the curriculum was focused on the meantime, the unicorn is shrinking it like an exponential rate. So all this is unicorns, that’s unicorns and we would make these business models, business plans as part of the course. So there’s a lot of, what would you call that? Like Fractal design to the course. And anyway, so there was the first conference of enterprise Scrum. We also did an open space and in the open space, we were kind of just talking about different memes and phrases that come up a lot. And Mike said, because I want to get one of those, what do you call it? I guess a costume. I’m forgetting the name and he goes, I’m going to put on this unicorn hat or unicorn and walk up to the mic and say like, so do you believe me now, guys? It was just the dry pan look that he said it with and I couldn’t stop laughing. I just completely just, my sights were aching and everybody that was there to hear the joke, I just thought was the funniest thing. And we really were saying yeah, we got to do this. But that’s kind of his undying optimism. He was really serious. He keeps saying to people, we give our presentations to the rest of the class, like share back. And it’s like an execution ready, like operational model right there. He goes like, if you don’t do it, someone else will. Go on, make that business right now. And I think the people that had over the course just a couple of hours, you made this business plan, like really? Could I do that? He’s like yeah, like seriously. That’s the next unicorn. There’s a unicorn, there’s a unicorn. And yeah, and so, it was half in just, but half really serious, like he really could see these incredible organizations arising just out of people doing what we’re talking about like, say it now do it, execute, learn, rinse, repeat. And then I think like him also saying, you hear me saying go do it. But I don’t think you really hear me. Hear me now. What are you going to do? Dress up like a unicorn? So all of that, it’s my most vivid memory of Mike is enough humility to laugh at himself. But also the authentic belief that people are creative and people are industrious and people are brilliant. And they can.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:14

It’s possible. Yeah. And you remind me, I’ve had that feeling in the past. And I know how, it’s a fine line. And I think after a period, at least in my own experience, you lose the will and hope. But I know that there were certain startups that I was part of, where it’s a small, small part that made us and things that made us less successful than industry leaders. And when you taste that, when you see that, it is possible, I think and that’s probably where he was coming from, like go do it. It is and having people in your life to motivate you like that, and just to say it is possible, I think it’s priceless. And I tell all these people like having mentors and coaches in life, at least expedite my learning journey so much, because go ahead, do it. And I’m like, what’s the worst thing? Let’s do it.

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 20:23

Yeah, that was another thing that I, so what’s the worst thing that could happen? He wouldn’t say it, the way that he would say it is like, it’s all funny money anyway, like, investors, they don’t know what to do. They just want to see something grow and get a return; you’ve actually got an idea. It’s like, if you just tell them, the organization that you envision, the problem that you’re trying to solve, they’ll throw the money at you. Because it’s to them, it’s all just funny money anyway, what do you got to lose?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:56

Exactly.

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 20:58

Yeah. That is coming from that kind of mindset. Because he was the CEO of an organization that he actually grew through running Scrum. And I think maybe that’s where a lot of his optimism came from, is like look, I’ve seen this actually work in real life. And so I’m not going to just kind of back down and say, well, it was a good idea. Or I’m just trying to cheer you up. No, it was real and palpable for him. And he really wanted that reality to connect with people so that it inspired them to action, not just like, oh, I got a job, I got certified. He it got me a job interview, he wanted to see people really run with it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:48

Exactly. And be happy. Just remind me, I don’t know if you’ve had friends but I’ve had, I always used to hang out with older kids. And I remember first time I jumped off the cliff, right? And it was like for lot of them, it was really what at least I remember specifics in situation, where I think it was just you get a feel this great feeling that we’re feeling and they’re pushing me to experience that, because they’ve experienced it. And I think that’s what reminded me of people that have seen scrum work, especially at the agile, they’ve done it. And I think, almost part of your mission becomes to get others, you get motivated and fulfilled by seeing others actually experience what you experience. And when you said that, that reminded me of that and there are certain things that I wanted others to experience. Because what I experienced in my belief in that experience.

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 22:57

So there was another moment that for me, it’s a crystallized moment in time. So, I had finished the two courses, it was like a Friday night. And the candidate trainers were all in a semi-circle around Mike. And this was where he’s going to ask us the question, which is, do you feel like you’re ready to be an enterprise scrum trainer? And I don’t remember whether I was first or not. But I remember how I felt and it was like Mike, I’ll be ready soon. There are so many books that you mentioned, that are part of the curriculum now. And I can’t teach this course without having read those books. Whether I said that, I don’t remember but that was going through my mind. And I remember on the other side of the horn, he’s going around the room and Michael Herman was there. And I hope I’m not misquoting or miss remembering. But Mike was like, Michael Herman said, yeah, I’m ready right now. And I could just see Mike Beedle’s eyes light up. He’s like, okay, we’re off to the races, go train this class. And that was really his energy, his intent and his mantra like, great. So we have all these trainers. And there were classes, people were running them. I think Simon Roberts was one of them. But he’s like, come on, you guys. I want to see more classes, offer them up and I’ll give you the support, whatever it takes. And he’s like, and if you don’t, I’ll go find some more trainers. Trainers are supposed to train and that was a good kick in the pants. That was I mean, he was taking huge risks financially and with his time, attention and health. And I think it was the right thing to do. I think it’s the right approach to take. And the other side of that is, so both boisterous, if you ever seen Mike or maybe I don’t know if you’ve heard this, when Mike Beedle wants to get attention in his class, he doesn’t put his fingers in his mouth and blow whistle. He just goes, guys, guys, guys, guys, guys, big booming voice. I mean, he will have you pause, and then make his announcement. So very loud volume to get attention. But when he talks about Jeff Sutherland, he gets very quiet. And there’s a sense of reverence in his voice. And he told us, I think it was in the training, maybe the train the trainer, he said, I drove out to Jeff Sutherland’s home. And I told him, this is what I want to do. And I’d like to have your approval, I’d like to know that this is something that you see as being good for the world. And just so and gave me that approval. That’s what he told me. And maybe Ken Swaybar too, I’m not sure. But that said a lot for how much gratitude he has towards the people that made scrum available to the world. And it was years later that I learned the personal sacrifices that Ken Swaybar made, that he took out a second mortgage on his home. And he didn’t have income for a year as he would go and present Scrum to all the people. And I’m sure that there are more stories that Jeff Sutherland could relate about how he made sacrifices to make scrum available for the world. What’s important and relevant to me is how seriously Mike Beedle took that throughout his entire life and had gratitude towards Jeff Sutherland.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:21

I don’t think it’s just Jeff Sutherland, I mean, I think that says a lot about character. I think whoever it was, it’s probably not just Jeff and Ken that he was. It’s who he was probably. And it’s just that that speaks volumes in my opinion about the character and…

Speaker: Jon Jorgensen 27:43

Yeah. Genuinely grateful human being. Yeah. And another thing, so we had dinner at, I guess it was one of the conferences, and I happen to be sitting directly across from him at the table for dinner. And it’s no exaggeration to say I didn’t know much about his family, his children until that dinner, and he began telling me about his oldest, his son. And obviously, brilliant. I mean, gifted, brilliant and a great students. And we probably talked about his children and how much like, they were really great children, brilliant children with a wonderful bright future for like, hours. And I just thought this so great to see such I mean, a proud father doesn’t just describe it, like he was really a part of their lives. And they brought him so much joy, and so much gratitude.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:57

Yeah. I mean, it makes me think even stories like that, either it’s sometimes makes me feel guilty of like, do I spend enough or it’s just because, it’s a personal choice and for him to do that again, I’m sure he was busy and could have picked to do other things and I make excuses, I got to do this, I got to do another podcast. I got to prep for this. And it’s a good reminder. I think before everybody just, that we do have a choice of where we focus our times.

Karim Harbott

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:35

Kareem, how did you meet Mike Beale?

Karim Harbott 00:38

I met Mike. I traveled to Berlin, I believe it was to take his enterprise scrum course. So a few of us went out there, VCST’s and CECs. And we went out to because I heard he created this thing. And I thought oh, that sounds interesting. And I’ll go and do that. And so we sat through his course. And we spent we went out a few times in evenings. And so that was where I initially met him. It was a really interesting couple of days and then worked with him subsequently. After that, but yeah, it was kind of spur of the moment thing really. But I’m glad I went for sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:18

This is a reoccurring theme where people talk about going with Mike, to dinners and it seems like he was big on these dinners. And people have described him in a similar way. But what was your take and how would you describe my both in class, as well as in these like more of a social after the training events?

Karim Harbott 01:44

He is passionate, right? He was passionate about business and about business agility, enterprise agility, but he’s is passionate about so many things right. And of you never had a dull time when you’re around Mike something interesting will always happen, interesting conversation or some interesting food or some exotic cocktails or whatever it was. It was never going to be just another night when you’re out with Mike. And I think that was the same with his work. Right? It was never just another class, he would always have an interesting spin on it. That was, you know, a lot of ways ahead of his time. So you’re always learning from Mike for sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:28

What are some of the things that you took from him in a sense of like, oh, this is a new way of thinking or maybe just the way that he impacted you. And the way that you look at things.

Karim Harbott 02:40

Yeah, he’s kind of one of the pivotal people in my career. Because at the time, I was I don’t know, I always been a scrum person. And I was teaching less large scale Scrum. But product development and software in particular for me, right, so software development, product development teams, one team, multiple teams, programs, and beyond. But Mike encouraged and challenged me to take what I was doing in that space and apply it to the whole organization, which I was aware of was happening and was necessary. But I’ve never really gone down that road in earnest. And it was after his enterprise scrum class where, you know, he was talking about in his words subsumption. Right. But well, we can just call that inspect and adapt on multiple levels, including at the organizational level. And actually creating truly agile organizations or business agility is the term I would use now. And I’ve never really gone down that road and it was after a few conversations with Mike that I thought, you know, what, actually, we can just create organizations that can create whole new products, services and whole business models, while still operating with what they do. And that was a big impact on me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:59

What other ways like did enterprise scrum specifically, like, impacted the way that you look at frameworks and how much do you see of enterprise scrum in current frameworks? Because at that time you didn’t see as many maybe it was less, maybe a little bit of safe. I mean, that was, I guess, you know, but the scaling, I guess, was just starting to, probably…

Karim Harbott 04:30

Yeah, so you see bits of it. And I think for me, the strength of it was kind of the idea, right? It was that we can apply these things more broadly than at the product level. And at the center of it was the canvases right, he was really big on creating canvases and you can inspect and adapt on the product on a cadence around this big visual canvas and previously, I’d been a fan of the business model canvas and it fit quite nicely into that. And it was a big influence to me when I created the business agility Canvas because I was thinking about how can we visualize the transformation across all areas of the organization. So, you know, I come at it from a slightly different angle, but I mean, there’s no doubt that the canvases and the entier subsumption that might use to talk about in enterprise scrum has made its way into many different areas now, particularly my work but lots of work to so and I really enjoyed the visual elements of the canvases and the fact that we can all get around and talk about how various parts of this organization fit together. And that’s incredibly powerful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:41

Yeah, and just visualizing work, I think just there are so people that I spoke and been talking to about Mike and one of the things that keeps coming, you know, which is, you know, what was he saying? Like, you know, idolize everything or something like that, and then also visualize everything. Do you remember any stories that Mike would tell that still stick around? Like, do you remember anything that he said, or some of his experiences that..

Karim Harbott 06:20

So I used to talking to him about the kind of the lead up and the kind of the aftermath of that Snowbird meeting in 2001. And I learned a lot about what was going on at the time from Mike. But there’s a quote that sticks in my head, and I say it in almost every one of my leadership courses, and he used to say it all the time, I tried to find it written down somewhere when I referenced it in my book, but he obviously didn’t write it down. He said, it’s easier to grow a unicorn than to transform a dinosaur. And he used to say it all the time. And I had it in my head. And as I started thinking, well, actually how many unicorns appear each year? Right? It’s a lot, and how many big traditional organizations truly reinvent themselves to be agile organizations. Maybe, you know, Satya Nadella to a certain extent with Microsoft and, highup potentially, but actually, there really aren’t very many of those. So and the more I think about it, the more I think you know what, he’s actually right, it maybe is easier to grow a unicorn than to transform a dinosaur. And then I start thinking, well, why don’t I just grow a unicorn, then instead of trying to help transform? I would be a lot more interesting. But yeah, that’s one of the quotes that stick with me the most from Mike.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:40

That is interesting. Because yeah, I mean, like, but what do you do? Like when the most of the world is dinosaurs? In a sense, they just let him die out. What was his take on it? Like, was it more, I mean, he talked about agility across the whole organization, business agility, he was probably one of the first people in our circles to talk about business agility. What was his take on like, changing the world and dealing with dinosaurs versus creating unicorns? I mean,

Karim Harbott 08:14

His take was that a lot of them are going to die out, right, the dinosaurs died out, right? Apart from some birds and some will be able to reinvent themselves, and the rest will die out. Because the organizations that are growing, that are being born, they are born with business agility in their veins. And so they have to go through a big transformation, right? They already are agile. And so you’re competing with those people now. And you are going start to struggle, and I think the next 5 to 10 years, we’ll see more and more of them disappear. And we’ll see more and more of these agile organizations appearing. So it’s going to be less a case of reinventing the old and more just that the new taking over. I think we’ll see a lot of those disappearing. And then I think he used to talk about, he used to predict that happening. And when it happens, who knows, but I think it’s coming for sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:06

Yeah, I agree. Definitely. I mean, like, it’s the environment is becoming so disruptive that like, if you can, you know, inspect and adapt quickly at organizational level, I joke around unless you’re government agency or insurance company, maybe a bank, but those are getting more and more pressure. So

Karim Harbott 09:30

yeah, where there are very high barriers to entry, you can get away with it, right. But those barriers are coming down and down and down. And suddenly you have these competitors. You know, I heard in the in the UK that one of the starter banks, the challenger banks, the so called Small challenger banks now has a bigger market capitalization and one of the big established retail banks like one of the four or five big high street. And you think that’s incredible. You never would have seen that coming five years ago. But in that short space of time, and what’s going to happen in the next five years, you know, these banks are going to have to update game right and he was talking about this all the time. And so it’s interesting to see it play out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:07

Awesome. What would you like to finish with about Mike? What would, maybe to those that are listening anything that you would like to maybe conclude with?

Karim Harbott 10:25

I did a CSPO for Mike once out in the US. And I remember saying to him, Mike if there’s any bit that you want to like kind of do because obviously Mike’s a CST, Mike, know scrum a bit. And I was like I’ll just put you in every now and then he said yeah, sure, sure. And quite early on. I was doing the bit about, talked about traditional project management, and then they started to do the bit about the manifesto and how 17 guys came together. And the breakout and I was about to do the Snowbird thing. Maybe you should do this bit given you were there, and he just sat back and he just went, nah I want to watch you do it and then just laughed. Talk about intimidating. I had only been a CST for not very long. And then suddenly I’ve got to teach a whole bunch of students about the manifesto and Mike sitting right at the front grinning at me. I was like thank you, thank you for that. But I realized that was he was he like to have fun as well as well as work hard. So I survived it and apparently I got it pretty much right