Category: Podcasts

Crom Burgos

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:45

So let’s start with who is Crom Burgos or Cromwell Burgos?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 00:53

Yeah, it depends on who you ask that. So I am very curious, I love to experiment and at the same time, I love doing, so it’s a good combination, but it would actually overwhelm me sometimes. So, you test something like a process, and then whatever it is, and then you start improving, you start creating mistakes and failures, and you start over again, and I think that’s just my life story. From a graduate, as an engineer, did really get the hang of it. Civil engineering in like, this is not for me. And so when the construction management, started as a project engineer , every time I learned something like that, you start thinking systems and expanding. And then next thing I know, I’m in pre-construction, and then now I’m in manufacturing, at the same time construction. So I think if you look back, it’s sometimes you’re lucky and then you see the relationships between what you do. So I think if I have to describe myself, I’m a doer and very curious.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:24

So then continuously inspecting, and adapting, it looks like.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 02:29

Right, it’s a game that never ends. So you start, just like our conversation about “hey the video”, and there’s one person that is like, “oh, dislike”. That really is like I want to understand, what is that we can improve based on that simple dislike”?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:54

And just to maybe add some context to the listeners, we’re talking about Crom did maybe a year ago, or a couple years ago, I did a talk for one of the communities that I support, on agility in construction. And we’re talking about how people are watching, there’s a lot of views, and webinars or whatever you want to call it, and there’s one dislike, or one person that doesn’t like what we are talking about, you know, it’d be nice to know what that is? Can there be agility in construction? Maybe we can start with that. Maybe give us some background on how is agility and lean and some of these agile approaches adopted in construction. You work for one of the biggest construction companies in California. And you’ve been applying this stuff for years, so how do you apply, or in what ways do you apply these methods, as well as the cultural mindset side in construction?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 04:07

Right, the movement started way back. My time, I was probably still in school, late 90s, mid 90s. And it really started based on the Toyota Production System. So I think Berkeley was involved and now there’s lean construction Institute, right? So I’m trying to give you a little background. Now, it started to really take traction, when I say now, like after COVID, before COVID, a year like 2018-2019, it really started to just in that it exploded, because it works. So is there room for agility in construction? So agility is a mindset; and it’s almost like you need, if Lean is the umbrella, and agility is in that umbrella, that is something that I think you have to take that medicine and know that construction, its nature is not agile, meaning we’re bound by code. We have a lot of constraints in, especially when you’re building, once you’re building, you start putting things together, you start losing agility. So now you’re thinking of where is agility? Agility is now in the front end, right? How can you have agility during design? So that as you’re managing your budget, you’re managing schedule, you can switch and make sound decisions. And in trying to focus on planning, replanning, looking at what is the right design as you’re designing?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:13

So it is about learning, right? The whole idea of prototyping and validating things early on, is to learn, right?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 06:23

That is correct. Yeah. And then so it’s funny, you mentioned that because one of the things that we do in design, we actually prototype; there’s two ways to prototype, you either prototype physical rooms, right, or any, what we call markups, or you can prototype before you draw as a piece of paper, you use as prototype. So if you’re familiar with A3 thinking, I always look at A3 thinking as a prototype. So you get everybody together, cross functional team, hey, here’s a problem to solve. Right? How do we distribute air, right, across the building, and then you work with the people that are involved in disciplines; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, your architect, everybody as a cross functional team, you use A3s as a mock up before you draw. The problem is we draw right away. And so what is it we are drawing? You draw the rooms, you draw like you’re making decisions that are still uninformed, right, it’s based on your experience, rather than open it up, and then do prototypes. So either you prototype using A3s, or if you really want to prototype the rooms and how it feels you can use Styrofoam, right. So one project that I was part with, it was in Canada, we work with the Ministry of Health, and the nurses have the doctors actually build the rooms using Styrofoam. And there’s carpenter helping them with how to make the Styrofoam stand, and all that. But they push in real beds. And I remember one point where the initial design was about an 800 or 900 square feet operating room, and once they put that in, they put the walls in, the doctor actually said ‘this is a little too big”. So they start pulling the walls in. I think it ended up to be 600. But that right there, it goes back to agility, right? Involve the customer. So when you’re making a decision involve the customer. And it got to a point where there were five families and patients, patient families actually invited to get in the room, the patient room, and it’s all Styrofoam. And then hey, here’s the window, here’s where you sleep when you’re with your kid, right, nurses looking at outlets with light because there’s an argument between old outlets need to be right-hand, like the orientation of the room. And so they have to test it. So I guess, prototype first before drawing, rather than draw and then prototype.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:30

How do you introduce Lean and Agile concepts to teams and organizations? In construction, in context of construction?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 09:39

Good question. So really, if you’re passionate about it, if there’s no program, right in your company, start with yourself, start where you can influence right. So it’s always about starting where you are. So if you’re a project engineer, start where you are as a project engineer, and who you can influence. It may be your trade partners, it may be your superintendent. And then if you’re a project executive, start where you’re at. Now, what that means is now the responsibility is on you. So the current company I’m working with, we’re a manufacturer at the same time in construction, and our president would always tell me, “Crom, you’re introducing something that is new to some people, it is your burden, that wis what he tells me, it is your burden to actually explain it better, and then give examples, right”. So the point is, if you want to try it, if you’re curious, that’s good, but it is really your burden. So don’t make it too big, make it just for the people around. I’ll tell you a story here, so I started this company two years ago, and you’re always looking for an opportunity, right? And so okay, you start with yourself, you’re new, you’re new to the company, so they have different experiences than you, they see things differently, mindset’s different, so you’re always looking for opportunity. And it’s always about, again, if there’s a problem. So a problem is a very good time to start lean and agility because it’s very, I am going to use the word easy, right, because all you need to do is expose the problem. And before COVID, we use post it notes, so when would you talk to somebody and they start saying, “hey, this and that”, you start writing it down, you just throw it on the wall, right. And now, the person is not looking at the poster. And then suddenly, they start drawing , I think my point is, the next thing is, expose the problem or expose the work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:19

And one of the ways to do that is through visualizing work, then you have something that you know, people can focus on.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 12:27

That is where I’m going, right? So you expose the work. And what does that mean? Then you start thinking about works, and you start thinking about who’s responsible for it, then suddenly you’re, I know your audience are very advanced, so suddenly, you’re using a Kanban system. And then from there, you can see the relationship and then the amazing part is when it clicks, right? When you start with, “hey, who’s going on vacation?” Because now you’re starting to manage your capacity. And people don’t notice, is that write it on the poster, vacation, put it on the day or days. And then suddenly, people say, “hey, there’s no capacity there”. Right? Because if a person is a swim lane, and the days are capacity, you just block out your capacity. And then people started to, and I always see this, how can I help you? Once that starts like “how can I help you?” because you’re on vacation, then suddenly the team dynamics is starting to slide.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:33

And that is self-management, self-organization seems like a naturally emerges because nobody’s going to tell us we were figuring this out by ourselves.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 13:43

Yeah, because you can see it, you can see the work. Right. So yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:50

You talked about, last time we spoke, you talked about three C’s; clarification, correction, confusion, and trying to eliminate. Could you elaborate on those, if you remember?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 14:01

So, in Lean, even in Agile, we start to talk about quality. And in quality, you’re not talking about levels of quality, I’m talking about quality in terms of defective work, and rework, right? So in, I think the context was don’t accept defect, or don’t accept defective work. So let’s say you’re estimating or you’re designing, or you’re working in the line, right? You’re always waiting for somebody to give you something. And if that work, and we call it percent, complete and accurate, so if that work is 90% complete, then if I accept it, then I have to finish the work. So now, it’s either it’s confusion, you need to clarify, and also the other thing to clarify, correct, or being confused, right? That’s my determination that waste has been created, if those three things will happen, right? If somebody is confused with the work you’re giving them, somebody has to make the correction, somebody has to make a clarification, you’re creating waste. And so now you’re working on that, don’t pass rework, don’t pass defect. So don’t accept defect, don’t create defect, and then don’t pass defect. I think that’s the, if you see those three C’s happening, that means rework, defect, waste has been created.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:53

And how do you get people to understand that because like that comes, you know, more from lean than anything else that you know, eliminating that unnecessary waste? And one of the challenges is like, how do you get others to understand these things? So in construction, how do you help people understand the need for, you know, if we need to clarify things, if we need to correct things, if there’s confusion, that these are wastes, how do you get these teams and individuals to think about these? So what happens in real life, when people run against these, like, what have you seen? Like, how do people respond to minimizing clarification, correction, and confusion?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 16:39

So it’s every day. So you deal with this every day. In fact, I just deal with this before this meeting, right? Quality of documents. So it’s over communication, and really understanding if you focus on, so these are all tied, right. This is an answer that is a systems. When you ask that question, I start thinking about back to your first question, How do you start to expose the work? And when you expose the work, once you see the work, you now see where people are overburdened. Because all these starts with people being overburdened, and so shortcuts are made. Right? So it’s almost like you have to go to the source of the error, and the source of the error is when people are overburdened, when people are disrespected, right? When you don’t ask like, “are you busy? Like, can you do this? Will you please do this for me?” So, the source of the error if it’s overburdening, you expose the work, you can see that people are overburdened, and you start leveling that work. So meaning, let’s not overproduce, because it’s not needed right now. So where the conversation of defect, it’ll slowly just go away. That is because once you don’t over produce, and then you talk to your customer, hey, and the customer is always defined as in our case, in this conversation, the next step, right. You can have external customer, but in working together as a team, let’s say you have teams of five, and then there’s like 25 teams, you always want to be explicit in asking the customer. And that’s why when you expose the work through, again, Kanban system, then the work is defined to the amount that the customer needs it, naturally eliminates overburden, it eliminates the clarification, it eliminates the confusion, because it’s the conversation rather than the process of the tools. Right. And so, I don’t know if that answered your question, but…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:02

It does, and yeah, it’s brought up another question as far as the customer what you just said, which is that if I understood you correctly, that the customer since you still have in construction, handoffs and those gates like that, your customer is whoever is handling the next phase of the work. Is that correct?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 19:25

That is correct. So whoever is waiting for you, that’s your customer. Yeah, in the chain, right? Well, you have an overall customer, which is let’s say your client, and you have to engage the client, especially when you start getting overburden, you have to show it to the client, like “hey, can you help us here?” Because if you don’t engage your customer, you’re making assumptions and assumptions are, if you’re really good, it’s probably 70/30 or 80/20, right, so you still have that, again, as leaders, if you make two errors out of 10 instruction, and you say, hey 80%, that’s a good batting average, think of the people in your downstream waiting for that instruction, right? That’s why you have to engage your customer, eliminate assumptions, and then again, expose the work and then focus on quality of work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:27

So how would like just to give maybe an example, how would architects and designers when they’re designing, who is their customer and how do they engage with them?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 20:39

So we always look at the architect as the, depending on the phase, as the Pace Setter, right? So the customer, let’s say, are the stakeholders, the client, right? So they have a program, and they talk about the program, and from the program, they create the drawings, the rooms, and all that, and then they need something from, let’s say, as a general contractor, they probably need something from us as far as “hey how is this going to work?”, as far as maintenance, as far as all those things, and then we have our trade partners, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, drywall, all that. So I guess to answer your question is, you have to look at the drawings differently, you have to look at the drawings as products. And then as product, you have to organize around the product as a cross functional team, with a clear owner of the product. And so it depends on the phase of the design. Again, the architect sets the vision for, “hey this is the client’s vision, and this is how we’re going to execute it”. And so you align to that. And so the architect is our lead, we call them lead horse, right, they set the pace, because if they’re slow, we can’t really go as fast. And so you have to do things together in the beginning, all the time. If they want to say something, you have to create it right away, like, I’m give you a specific example, in our case, if they want to see how this looks, you have to bend a rebar right away, that’s how it looks. And they can draw, right. But that is really hard to do in construction, because there’s a lot of, again, there’s a lot of traditional superstitious things that people would do. So that, again, like some people would say, “collaboration, that takes time, that’s a waste”, like, what’s waste in when you go down a path and it’s wrong, and we’re all going to do rework. And so I don’t know if that helps you out with understanding that role of the architect, because there…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:03

It does, I’m just trying to better understand the customer and the handoffs, and how, for instance, you know, in software development, it’s almost like, let’s just say if you are an analyst, your customers would be maybe testers and developers in traditional sense, is that correct?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 23:24

Yeah, very close.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:27

So in a sense, you’re working with them, you’re working on your chunk of work, or the piece of the work and the bigger puzzle, and then you’re collaborating with them and making sure that they’re involved in your process, or at least there’s transparency, and you’re looking and visualizing work across the whole system. So in this instance, you would see developers, you would see testers, and they will be able to look at your work and you guys are discussing and getting each other involved. Even though you’re working in your own silo.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 24:01

And if I may add to that, right, so the other thing as you’re working together, so architects are very creative, right, they just like it’s fun to work with architects. They just have a different way of solving a problem. So once they understand what you’re offering, so meaning you have to really let them understand what your products can do. You have to unlock value, right? So we have a product and this product can do this and that and this is how you work around the product.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:44

Could you maybe give an example even like with you know, you guys have worked with Apple and then you spaceship, your product or was the product like one of the modules or like, could you maybe… [crosstalk 24:56]

Speaker: Crom Burgos 24:56

… floor and the ceiling as one right and then heating is in there. But a really good example is, let’s say you have, we have an exterior product. So an exterior facade product, so we do a complete exterior system. And our guys really spent time in trying to work with the architect from the very beginning, you have to pull it from the very beginning, pre-manufacturing is a strategy from the very beginning, you cannot conceive, once you’re in the middle of design, and you go back, everybody’s going to get frustrated. Once they know how to work around your product, so it’s like a car, right, you have a chassis, and our product has a chassis where you can put anything on top of the chassis, once they understand that, architects are very creative in organizing five different types of, let’s say, five different types of panels and it would look like 30 different types of panels. You know what I’m saying, once they understand the connections, because it’s really just the connections between the product. So I think where I’m going with this is, again, to your point, work with the architect, but give them knowledge and then educate everybody what you’re offering, because sometimes they don’t know what we can do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:27

I think something that you’ve said, and maybe this is to just focus on that too, like focusing on the outcome that the customer wants, even some of your contracts are based on, “hey, what are you trying to do? What problem are you trying to solve? How much money do you have?”, and then you kind of brainstorm and figure out how to achieve that goal or outcome based on what the problem is or what the customer is trying to do. And to me, that was very interesting, because that includes everything that they need. It’s like, we’re going to help you solve your problem within the constraints that you have.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 27:06

Right. So, that’s always very dependent on the culture of the client, right? Because there are clients that would say, “I have 100 million, I’m going to draw this, I’m going to send it out, everybody bids on it is going to come back 80 million”, right? Because you’re capitalizing on mistakes, right? And so if you have 30-40 different trades, and each of the trade, you will send it out to bid eight, nine, whatever, different trades, somehow somewhere, there’s always a low bid. And that total of the low bid like 70-80 million, they will say, I still have 20 million, right? But the problem there is now you’re going to disco, you’re going instead of what we call Value Engineering, it’s now devalued engineering, and you’re spending your money on things that doesn’t add value, because now the project schedule stretch, you’re now paying for escalation, which doesn’t add value, right? Other owners, like I’m going to give an example. I’m going to give a prop here for Sutter Health. So that’s where I learned, I started my Lean journey. So those type of clients would say, “hey, I have a problem and this is the purpose of the project. And based on my benchmarking, I have 100 million dollars for this”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:45

So, how do you set priorities, you have a concept of product ownership in the work that you do, so could you maybe elaborate on the concept of product ownership, product management, and prioritization?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 29:05

Right, so we’re starting to unofficially call our people names. So we started with, especially on this project I’m working with it, we started with, okay, Product Owner scrum master role, right, and then working together. So trying to split the what and the how, because it’s too much to manage. So how does priorities work? Everything is priority, right? So, what you’re doing is really just looking at the order of the priorities. So you’re synchronizing the priorities, and again, we go back to our first conversation, expose the work. So once you expose the work, and that work is always based on a vision, right? So it’s a cascading vision. So let’s say the project has a vision and the vision is to provide, again, back to this project I’m working on, one of the vision is to provide affordable housing, like to solve that problem with student housing. And so from there, you can now see the cascading vision because the architect based on that would have the vision as well, right? So based on that vision, these are the programs that we’re going to target, and then based on that program, these are that design that how we’re going to attack that, right. And so suddenly, you can see the priority, right, and then you synchronize on a weekly basis. And it’s always the rule, right? There’s one person that’s going to set the priority for that certain, what we call product, so we always product guys, we’re trying to stay out of projects, as a company, so we’re looking at a market. And so since we are looking at the market, you’re dealing with products.

So, a bathroom modular part is a product. And so there is a person, a product owner that has the vision, and understands the customer so that somebody is always, remember our first conversation on engage the customer, but that’s not always possible, right? So you get to have somebody, speak for the customer within your group. So that that person becomes what we call the voice of the customer and always reminds everybody, “hey”, you always start with, “Hey, this is the vision for this product, modular parts”. The customer’s here, and this, this, and that. And like, it’s a big thing for us, right now in this modular pod, there’s three bedrooms, and there’s a bathroom and a shower. And when people are working, they’re always going back to when they’re students, and saying, “Oh, that’s not going to work because when I was a student, when I got home, and I just have like, spent all night out with the guys drinking, that drain would get stuck” right. And then we start playing around with the simple things like playing around with the drains like, this cover’s not going to work, because you’re always thinking about the customer and the stakeholders. So, the priority is set by the product owner, and there’s a lot of product owners, and they synchronize. And there’s always like a Chief Product Owner, the person that is part of that vertical, as we call it, because we have to split the work, I wish I can show you pictures, but we split the project into a side, central plant, ground floor, residential, and then upper floor amenities. And each one has a product owner, and all the priorities go to that product owner. So there’s five product owners that are synchronizing based on one Chief Product Owner, right? So it’s the cascading priority.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:20

In also like the whole modular kind of aspect of construction, there’s couple of different aspects of it. One is cost, right, it’s probably a lot more cost effective if you build it somewhere else, and then you deliver the module rather than, so there’s the economic side of that, but it’s also like, you know, in what ways is construction becoming more and more modular? And even with the apples, you know, spaceship building, most of that was modular, right?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 33:55

Right. Yeah, especially that project, and I wasn’t really part of the project, but from in depth sense, right, you cannot build that on site, because you won’t get the, because Apple is very specific to the level of quality and how that’s finished, even the curves, the curvature of the stair is based on the Apple corner of the phone, right? Because that’s not really a radius, right? It’s what they call a VCA, where it’s a moving radius. So you can’t really build that on site. And so, in that part, pre-manufacturing really is superior in that sense, because we can control the tolerances, we can control the finish. Now modularization on the other hand, where you have a platform and then in the platform you put as much as you can as much system as you can, the goal is, again, to eliminate labor on site because it’s safer, right? You have lesser people on site, it’s safer, and it’s a better product. Now, if you look at modularization as a project, cost might not be effective, right? So that’s why you have to look at these kind of things as a market, and then you look at the needs of the market, in our case, student housing, and how we solve that student housing. Because modularization is not always the answer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:40

So context, like if it’s…

Speaker: Crom Burgos 35:43

Yeah, sometimes panelization, sometimes it’s just stick building is the answer. So it really depends on the politics [unclear word 35:54] but as you’re getting better at modularization, you’re going to return that savings, you’re going to get that savings. Again, plan, do study adjust on the product, product becomes lighter, the product becomes, right, you’re looking at why are we still using nail studs framing drywall? That thing has been like, what, 100 years? We’ve been using that for 100 years. Is there another type of wall we can use? It’s lighter.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:22

So it’s almost like continuous improvement side of things, from lean and edge. What are the things I mean, like that people would find interesting, like, what have you in construction, or maybe not just your company, but what’s been adopted in construction industry that really comes from Lean and Agile? Like, could you give some examples maybe?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 36:43

Yeah, so the biggest thing is the limiting work in progress as far as how things get done, right. So that is what we have, again, Berkeley started his whole movement, lean construction Institute, and it’s called the last planner system. So that really started the concept of, “hey, you don’t have to be busy all the time. Limit your work in progress by instituting a pool system”. Right? So you go to a supermarket, people are throwing things in your cart, right? You have to pull it from and then you put it in your cart as you need it. And so that’s, I think that’s a big revolution in the thinking of, “hey, Amazon, I’m going to bring 20 guy, I’m going to go and blow for one week”, and you just ruined it for everybody. Right? Instead of, “hey just bring five guys and do it for four weeks. And then we can all work together in small chunks”. Now that’s the key to agility. Right? Smaller chunks

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:55

Yeah, exactly. What else? What else do you…?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 38:00

That’s one, and then technology starting to get there, but I think the biggest shift in construction is really the focus on the well-being of the people. And I think that’s a bigger shift that lean actually brought, right. So we always say respect for people. And I think that’s the biggest, if you have to really look back at the end here, like if 10 years from now you look back, it’s really focusing on people’s well-being, rather than focusing on tools. Because construction, we love to be busy all the time. You won’t believe it, we just go in there, it’s like we work right away. Like, plan-do, plan-do, plan-do, right? So fires are burning everywhere. It’s like plan-do, but there’s no going back and learning. So people actually drive that learning. So if you start with people, and you start with that concept of “hey, how do we make sure everything’s easy and better?” And easier and better is safer. Right? I think that’s the biggest thing that Lean brought.

And the next thing is, I think process, right? That’s pool system. And then now we’re into creating flow, right? Creating a, instead of a pool planning schedule, or a pool planning strategy, it’s now a flow strategy, right? We’re now talking about leveling work. That’s a big shift the last five years, we’re talking about what is the need, and then dividing your time with the need, and then you create flow, right? So, you create the heartbeat pack. So I think that’s one biggest thing and then, again, technology is there, but as far as lean, I think it’s respect for people is probably what.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:04

Yeah. What about Scrum and Agile? Like, you know, if you kind of look at the roots of lean, and then maybe, you know, you mentioned roles, but is there anything else from Scrum or agile specifically? Some of the stuff that you mentioned, you know,…

Speaker: Crom Burgos 40:20

Right. So if you look at scrums, scrum is, you know, everything goes back to Theodore, right? It’s always like, “Hey, I got this thing. You chase it. And boom, Prius”, right? And so, just like Scrum, In 1986, they found out, okay it’s a different way of working. And so, you develop a system, you give it a name, and with Scrum, here is what you appreciate with Scrum, right? It’s the role definition and there’s a specific theory behind it. Right. So you adapt, you inspect, and then you adaptation, transparency, adaptation, inspection, those three things, right. Which to me, in the beginning, right, so I keep talking about a how do you start, start with yourself, start where you are, expose thinking, but really expose thinking, that’s transparency.

So that’s really it goes back to the scrum guide, right? It’s like, okay, fine. And then check in daily. So this is where the, again, I appreciate agility, agile in the scrum framework, because it really is focused on that daily check in where you know what people are doing and where they’re struggling. And if you really put all that together, right, you’re transparent with the work every day, you’re inspecting, “Hey, are you done? Are you not done? We’re going to help you”, instead of sticking with the plan, in construction, we love to stick with the plan. We love to stick with a plan, like “create the plan, work the plan”. No, plans are good, but the check on the plan every week, every day, and then suddenly, you’re agile. Right? So by doing daily, it’s almost like “hey, what’s the silver bullet of agility?” Like daily check it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:36

Transparency and quick feedback loops, right?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 42:39

It’s just talking every day. So I don’t even have to help you but I think the movement starting to, there are now people consultants, right. And they did try to bring the lessons from software into construction. I think it was in 2014/2015, I got it. So as you’re doing Lean, you just naturally get into Scrum, right. And the first thing I remember I did was just for myself to be doing them. And then the only reason I did that was to just show everybody what I’m working on so they don’t overburden me, but that was very selfish. And so if they say, “Hey, I did this, with the boards, like where do you want me to put it?”. That is very selfish. And then it became a suddenly turns into more understanding. And then again, you go back as okay. Oh, lean at the beginning, you say, “Oh, that’s all lean, agility”. But you can’t really make that quick conclusion, right? Because agility is really focused on the mindset and the change, right? How you do that, which is if you really dig down to lean, yes, the Yoda is that way. Right

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:03

It talks about, I mean to Yoda, yeah, I think, but the way the lean was kind of introduced in the West, kind of forgot about the mindset and culture and there was more of the. In what ways do you think, I mean, like as we kind of close, or close up here, what are some of the things that you see, in what ways will construction industry apply more and more of these Lean and Agile approaches? Like how do you think like COVID has maybe pushed construction industry to change the old ways of working because there’s definitely need to innovate, there’s definitely need to inspect and adapt, what do you think we’re going to see in construction In the next maybe 5-10 years, that will be different than what we are used to?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 45:00

There is now a lot of talk about industry 4.0. And industry 4.0. is about automation. But then with COVID hit, it accelerated a lot of things. Because now you’re forced to use drones to look at your job site, right, and then you start appreciating it. I never believed in working from home before, when COVID hit, I spent a year, almost a year and a half working from home. The problem is you end up working more than because everybody has to schedule a meeting with you. So a five minute conversation is always a 30 minute block in your calendar. And you end up talking about golf. Right? In the first five minutes or so. It’s, there’s a plus and minus, but it did accelerate. So it accelerated the need to be transparent. It accelerated the need, because the collaboration, we always think of collaboration, there is always value in in-person and we’re starting to learn that, hey, you can pick and choose right? There are times when you are together, there are times when it’s a Teams or Zoom call, but it did accelerate in that sense, because you’re forced to do it. So the companies that were already transparent, so we started doing that and we’re just lucky and we expose a lot of work, we have Teams exposing work. When COVID hit, it took us a day to just adjust, like what we did, we went to the office, take all the pictures, go back home, and then distribute the pictures, plan based on the pictures, and then started talking about how can we transfer it. So it’s very organic transition from paper to electronic. So I think that’s what COVID brought is that. But then now the question is the learning, right? Because the coaching and interaction and because we learn better if it’s real time. So yeah, so I don’t have not answered your question. But it did accelerate, because it’s a disrupter. There’s always that one disrupter. And it was, the disruption is you can keep producing work without going to where the work is.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:39

Which is, especially in construction, it’s an interesting concept. Because when you think about construction, you always think about people being on site, from everybody. And…

Speaker: Crom Burgos 47:52

And that’s where productizing makes sense when you start pre-manufacturing. Because you can control your manufacturing, right, there’s always a person for us during COVID. Because now we have to ask for exemption for essential work. And so, we assign people to clean areas all the time, right, during, so what I’m saying is, it’s easier to control your manufacturing, because you can always control the environment. And then so you take as much as, there are jobs that we take probably 70,000, Mondays, right? For one job, imagine that. Right. So that’s a safer job site. That is a job site that you can do social distancing. The funny part is I’m talking to one of the hospital clients, and one of the directors actually say, “wow, COVID actually, some of our work was faster, because we’re not putting trades on top of each other”. Because of social distancing, they’re forced to like, “hey, work in that room, and then jump to that room”. And the flow is like, amazing. Isn’t that mazing that COVID made that happen?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:09

It is. I mean, it is definitely interesting. And you know, just being a little bit more in tuned into what’s going on in construction and how the construction industry is applying some of this stuff is really interesting, especially when I saw like some of the big names in Agile community are working with construction companies. There you see that there is some serious interest. But one of the things that I think you call it, you know, essentially thing that’s killing in the construction industry is that inspection at the end. And it’s like that definition of done and if we could get those permits and if we could, you know actually find a way to get stuff done, done, right, rather than waiting for that last thing to be inspected, so what do you think, you know, when it comes to public policy and some like inspection, like, you know, getting permits, do you think that requires change in policies and laws? As far as, you know, maybe giving you even more agility in construction of when can you call something done? And like, if you’ve finished that dorm for students, like, you can’t finish just first floor and then whatever, and then move people in, you have to get that permit, right, so do you think there are going to be changes? And is it really, you know, that last inspection that’s killing agility and lean in construction?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 50:44

So, you always have to go back, right? It’s your burden, right? Let’s say inspections are there for a reason, it’s always about life safety. And so the inspectors are doing their job, right. But they’re, I think what needs to change is the number of inspections. So there has to be clients or third party needs to be willing to have continuous inspections, rather than one big batch at the end. So it’s still on us, as general contractors to find a process that they can get involved so that we can just, I’m going to borrow the concept in manufacturing what we have, right, so in manufacturing, we have a code required third party inspections. And we also have our own quality inspections. And you have to build that inspection within that step. So meaning, even if there’s just one inspection, but you don’t accept defect, you don’t create defect, and you don’t pass a defect, you’re always going to pass inspections. Right? Now, that leads to the question of okay, you have to understand what the inspector is looking for. So I would change that first, I would say, “Hey, mister inspector, show us everything you’re looking for”. If we can change that, right, if the inspectors have a list, because if you’re an inspector, and I’m an inspector, we have two different interpretation of something.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:30

So it’s almost like coming up with definition of done or some type of acceptance criteria, like what does it mean for this to be done, including inspection, to pass the inspection?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 52:43

Inspectors are your customer, right? Inspectors are your customers. So again, the burden is on us, involve the customer, involve the inspector, what are you looking for? Educate the people doing the work, meaning now we’re going into a different, it’s no longer QA, QC. It’s now, everybody is responsible for quality. And so with that in mind, you’re no longer “do it right the first time”, right? Because that is blaming somebody like, “Hey, do it right the first time”. It’s now right the first time, right? So your everything is right the first time. There’s a difference there, right. So this focus on quality will just lead to that, passing the inspection. Now, the thing about agility that we it’s hard to do in construction is getting occupancy. Because now you don’t really occupy your building until it’s done, and you can even bring in your furniture, right? There’s a certain approval before you bring in your furniture. And so you’re first, second, third floor, if you have 10 floors of building, sitting there just waiting. But you can now, there’s a workaround, right. You can do paint and improvement, meaning build your shell, do tenant improvement and then release a floor in time. So maybe that’s a strategy, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:26

Yeah. And just thinking in those ways in pushing some of the policies and the ways they’ve been designed for previous context or what worked in the past or what needed to be done given would be interesting.

Speaker: Crom Burgos 54:40

That is always like, it’s always life safety. So in California, there’s earthquake, and then when there’s earthquake, it usually cause fire. So now your fire marshal and your IORs that’s a burden, right? If somebody dies because they didn’t do their work, then it’s. So if you understand that, then then you don’t shortcut your work. I guess, again, know what the inspector wants, and then definition of Done inspection is part of definition of Done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:20

Great. So maybe as a last thing, what would you like to leave us with the, you know, both for the people from the construction industry that are listening to this, but also from other industries, including software development that are listening? What message do you want to maybe share with them when it comes to agility?

Speaker: Crom Burgos 55:43

So, your background, agile to agility? That is really the point. So the point is not the process, the document, I’m saying like the point is agility. The point is adaptation. The point is, find a way so that your teams are comfortable to change up. And when your teams learn to plan, replan every week, then you start accelerating to produce work, right, to produce product, and it always goes back to our first conversation. How do people change and adapt and replan and plan? Always expose the work, right, always be transparent. And that transparency is like dancing. If you put your steps in the floor, and you number it, and you just follow it, right, 123 all the way to 30. And then somebody is calling “hey it’s 5678” and then you just jump 5678, right, because it’s transparent, you can see it. So I guess transparency is probably key to agility, other than inspection and adaptation but, make work visible, and then can people can self-manage, people can now adjust

Geoff Watts

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:51

Let’s start with who is Geoff Watts.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 00:59

You want me to introduce myself? I hate that kind of thing. That’s fine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:03

Do it in your own way. You don’t have to…

Speaker: Geoff Watts 01:07

Yeah, I mean, most people know me for my books, I suppose. I’ve written a few on agile and coaching, and a joke book. But most of my time I spend coaching, usually people one to one, sometimes teams, whether they be agile teams or leadership teams. And in the past, I’ve done some training and things. But largely I’m a coach. I was a coach before I was a scrum master. And so those two worlds of professional coaching and agile have been my professional life for the last 20 years. I often describe it as a bit of a Venn diagram with my agile world is one circle and my professional coaching world is another and then there’s this nice little sweet spot where they overlap and you can bring some of the professional coaching practices and disciplines into the Agile world.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:06

How did you get into the Agile space?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 02:10

Largely through being rebellious, I suppose. But I mean, some people view it as rebellious, I viewed it as practical. I mean, but I do admit that I have a rebellious side. I like alternative, I like change. But I was a project manager at a telecoms company. And it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me that we would run our projects kind of knowing that they were doomed to fail. And I just thought there was a better way of doing things. And so instead of following the waterfall approach that I was trained in, I decided to speak to my developers, so I speak to my customers and actually thought, actually, you know what, they probably need to speak to each other without me being in the middle. And yeah, it started there and then it was just a case of right place at the right time or wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it. We got a new CIO who came in from the States, who done some agile stuff at a company over there and said, you know, if this company is going to survive, it needs to change. And I was probably one of the only people in the company and in many ways the country who had done anything, so he sort of picked me out. Jeff, you need to go and start coaching all these teams to do something like what you’ve been doing there. That’s it, the rest is history.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:45

That is great. Over the years, you’ve collaborated with a lot of people, including Mike Cohn, in your recent, though maybe not recent, you’ve been collaborating with the probably Dave Snowden and Andrea Tomassini for some time but you guys developed a framework called organic agility framework. Could you maybe talk about that? Because I’m completely new to it, I’ve done a little bit of my kind of looking around, but it seems very interesting. Maybe could you talk about what it is and then we can dive a little bit deeper into it?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 04:20

Sure. But again, I suppose that came from a little bit of combination of frustration, and just sort of trusting our instincts if you like. So as agile coaches, Andrea and I, we never got involved in any of the scaling frameworks. And we never really asked ourselves why until we sort of sat down and had a talk about it and said well, they just feel contradictory. And the best way that we could describe it was they feel like they’re trying to do agile in a waterfall way and it didn’t seem to sit well with us. So we said, well, when we’re speaking to leaders of organizations who were saying, well, we can get agile working at a team level, but we can’t get it working at the organizational level, and we want to, and you’re saying that these frameworks don’t work, but you’re not giving us anything instead, so what are our answers? Yeah, sort of ad hoc could we formalize the middle bit? Andrea was already doing quite a bit of work with Dave Snowden anyway, on the sense to make a framework and the Kanban framework. And so could we actually give these leaders a way of actually visualizing what their current culture is, and see, based on the changes that they make to their leadership style, the decision making process, their structures, the way they the resource their teams, whatever changes they make, can they see real time changes to that culture and the results and then make decisions based on the changes that they’re seeing? So an iterative incremental, inspect and adapt approach to cultural change within their organization. And so that’s what we put a lot of time into doing is to creating that visualization because visualization is powerful and transparency is the bedrock of inspection and empiricism. So we managed to do that. And we detached ourselves from the idea of actually you need to become an agile organization. That was the first thing we did. Which is why, when you see organic agility, it’s written with a small “a”, that’s quite deliberate. Because actually, we say to leaders, you may not want to be an agile organization, that might not be right for you. Just because we have experienced as agile coaches doesn’t mean we’re here to tell you to become agile. We want you to make decisions based on your understanding of what’s right for you in your context, and enable your people within your organization to make those decisions consistently, even though they’re facing different circumstances to other people and other teams in your organization. So you may well have, and it may well be right for you, as a company to have different pockets of agility and waterfall and different levels of agility and different types of agility because this organization is big and it has different challenges. So that’s kind of where that came from.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:34

So it’s all about contextualizing things, you know, we’ve been living in a world where it’s all like, you know, one size fits all, do this, do that recipe type of stuff. And what you’re saying and what resonated with you guys is that context is king and not everything needs to be the big a or even little a. Like you know, within my podcast called agile agility and has several meanings. And there was a reason why that, you know, agilities, lower a. But it is about agility and like you said, it’s different levels. Not everything necessarily needs to be, you know, I’m assuming talking to Dave and talking to Andrea, and probably from your understanding, it’s about understanding the complexity, right and contextualizing things to that.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 08:25

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, all of these organizations that we work with, they’re genuinely facing, I mean, the facing a number of different challenges. But one of the big tensions that they’re facing is that they know on the one hand, they need to increase autonomy, because to be responsive, people on the ground need to be able to make decisions rather than have them escalated up. But equally, if you enable autonomy for everyone, then there’s a good chance that you get chaos because everyone’s going to do things differently. So it’s about trying to get that balance of autonomy and standardization if you like. So this element of coherence across the organization so that you can have organizational resilience. So that’s where the organic comes from, its organizational resilience by growing autonomy and an interdependent culture. And it’s, you know, it’s not something we’ve got a massive marketing machine behind, it’s not something we’re hoping is going to take over the world, but it’s something that helps us just, you know, formalize something that we’re talking about to organisations, rather than just trust us, we’ll help you work something out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:32

Well, it’s interesting because like there’s a certain pattern that I’ve noticed within some of these interviews are people that I, you know, including Dave, which is that we’re moving away from these prescriptive frameworks. And it comes down to you know, when I was looking at organic agility, and again, organic stands for organizational resilience by growing autonomy and nurturing and the independent culture, I highlighted organizational resilience, autonomy and culture in that sense. And really agility is about that organizational resilience. And that’s a spectrum depends how on the content how resilient organization needs to be. Autonomy you just touched upon, but maybe you could we focus a little bit on the cultural side, like how do you define culture and how do you influence and change culture?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 10:37

So culture is one of those things that’s been notoriously difficult to define for lots of people for a long period of time. I typically view it and this is a lot, you can imagine a lot of conversations that we had between myself, Andrea and David were around what is culture. And what we typically gravitated towards was it’s the stories that people tell about how things get done. So one of the first things we’ll do when speaking to a team, a leadership team or anyone within the organization is, tell me a story of when something worked really well here, tell me a story of when something doesn’t work well. And tell me a story that’s pretty typical of your work, your organization. Now when I used to work at this telecoms company, it was pretty easy to tell, just by overhearing a conversation in a bar, who else worked for that company because of the stories that they told. And we were said to have, the phrase that I heard back then was we have a very thick culture. Now unfortunately the English language has many different definitions of the word thick and unfortunately, one of them means to be unintelligent, but that wasn’t the intention of that definition, it was generally saying you can tell somebody from this organization pretty quickly. Yeah. And so what we’re trying to do and your second question was, how do you go about changing it, is about creating the opportunity for us to write different stories. And if you think about culture outside of the organization, it’s again stories that we tell about our culture, stories that get handed down from one generation to another. When we meet another organization, we tell stories that tell tell them about us. And so we built the organic framework around the ability to tell stories, to cluster stories and to be able to create opportunities to write new ones.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:39

And like, when you said that, something that, I don’t know how much you’re familiar with it, but from a, you know, in relation to the stories, it’s relevant to our values and beliefs. You know, the stories that we tell ourselves and the reality that we, you know, perceive or make in our heads. So really, when you said that, what resonated with me is it’s really about changing our collective values and beliefs as a company and we do that through stories perhaps, is that what you’re alluding to?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 13:12

Yeah, so when we talk about organic agility to people, to leaders, and teams, we reference the pyramid of results and basically, that’s saying, at the top of the pyramid, the first thing that you see is results. Okay, they’re visible, something’s happened. These could be financial results or they could be the result of the consequences of a decision. And results happen because of the actions that we take. And logic would say, Einstein would say, the first sign of madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results. If you want different results, you should take different actions. But unfortunately, that’s not always the case in complex environments. You can do the same thing and get different results, you could do different things and get the same results. There’s no guarantee about cause and effect there. We can’t standardize our actions in a complex environment. So what determines our actions? Well, our beliefs and our values determine our actions, what we think is right, what we think is the right thing to do, what we think other people will judge us favorably for, what we believe the consequences of these decisions to be. So we might be able to standardize beliefs so that even though we may have different actions, they’re based on the same belief system. But how do we form our beliefs? We form our beliefs through experiences. Okay, now that’s often we do something and something happens and that says, okay, well, I won’t do that again or I will do that again. It could be something very Pavlovian like that. But so what we are saying to organizations is don’t try and standardize actions, try and standardize beliefs through creating more and more experiences and recognizing and appreciating experiences. Does that make sense?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:06

It makes perfect sense to me. I’m trying to maybe, you know, because a lot of times we focus agile, the big A has been about those actions and focusing on those actions, not focusing, aligning the beliefs. But if you go back to the Agile Manifesto for instance, it’s all about aligning those beliefs and values. Within the organic agility framework, you guys have five principles. Maybe we can explore those because that’s aligning more of a beliefs and perceptions in those principles. And maybe, I don’t know, I’m interested in hearing your take on differences between values, beliefs, and principles. Where do the principles fit?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 15:56

Well, if I can just go back slightly because you did mention something that I think is really quite interesting. So as well as stories being an enabler of change, another valuable enabler of change is rituals. And where things like Scrum have come in, is to apply or to put in place rituals. So things like a daily Scrum for example that you mentioned, that is a ritual. And it’s intended to create an experience and embed an experience. And one of the powers of rituals is that it provides a level of certainty in an area of uncertainty. So it provides sort of the anchor in a storm if you like. And the more you do something, the more, you know, just becomes normal. And then most of this agile coaches that I come across and I say it’s not about the daily Scrum itself, it’s about the purpose behind the daily Scrum but the daily Scrum is just a ritual to get you there. That’s sort of Xu Hari side of things. And whether you think, looking at something like Kanban, whether you think visualizing your workflow is a principle or it’s a ritual, whether you think putting limits on your working progress is a ritual or a principle is kind of a semantic. It could be either, it could be both. But principles are to me a way of linking values and rituals, they are the explanation of why certain rituals might be useful to us and might not be based on the values that we have. That’s the way that I look at it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:29

It’s very interesting. So based on what you’re saying and it’s like connection between, you know, our mindset, or you can call it the, you know, values, principles and the culture, right, the principal sit between, you know, what we value individually and then the culture and those share. Another thing that’s related to the culture and maybe to go back is the relationships, right? Big part is that. So maybe how do you intertwine? So part of those stories, part of those rituals is also the relationships that emerge. And those shaped culture, how do we go about enriching those relationships? Do agile practices support that, like how do we? Is it the environment? One thing that we then discuss, which is organizational design and architecture and how does that impact these. And I don’t know, to me, and maybe we’re going a little bit off topic, so you can steer us. But there is an interplay between the actions, mindset and values and principles, the culture and the fourth one would be the organizational structures, policies and all of that. And I’m interested, you know, if you want to explore that, what is the…

Speaker: Geoff Watts 18:57

Yeah, you’ve given me a, you basically opened a can there and saying which one do you want to talk about? And yeah, that’s cool. I mean, I’m a big fan of relationships. I believe that pretty much, most dysfunctions, if not all dysfunctions that you see within organizations are based on mismatched expectations. Because everybody wants to do a good job. There are very few people out there that enjoy sabotaging things just for fun. It’s usually an unmet need that that is a result of that. So I spend a lot of time with people, with teams working on visualizing the expectations for one another. And once they’ve visualized, negotiating them. And there’s a point behind this because the leadership framework that we put in place within the organic scaffolding talks about different leadership archetypes and how none of them are right or wrong, none of them are good or bad. It’s about whether it’s appropriate for first of all, the context that you’re in and secondly, what the other party is looking for. Because I could come along as a leader and say, right, self-organization autonomy, that is where we’re going so I’m just going to step back, and it’s all up to you. And sometimes, that’ll be brilliant. Sometimes people would absolutely love that, the teams would just run off and do brilliant things. Sometimes they would say, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?! And be absolutely freaked out by it, because they don’t have the competence or the confidence or the conditions to be successful as an autonomous team. Equally, I could come along as a leader and say, right, there’s no argument here, I need you to do this and I need you to do it this way. No debate, no discussion, no democracy, no consensus, do it, do it this way. And sometimes that will be met with massive amounts of motivational debt, sometimes it would be met with oh thank hell for that. Oh, thank you. Brilliant. I’m just glad you’ve said that. And it’s not about right or wrong. It’s the context again, it’s coming back to that. So having that conversation about what in certain circumstances, this is the kind of leadership behavior that people are probably going to respond well to and in certain circumstances, they would respond badly so they would incur what we call motivational debt. So these relationships are absolutely key. And it’s not about the traditional leaders adopting those leadership archetypes, because we view leadership as something that is a capability to be encouraged throughout the organization, not held in the hands of those at the top of a pyramid. But in order to encourage mindful autonomy, we need to spread that leadership throughout. So understanding the context for certain leadership archetypes is something that everybody should be aware of, and empowered to adopt. And so that would be my view on the relationship side of things. And when it comes to the organizational structures, again, I think, for me, it’s got to be an agile approach. So an inspect and adapt approach to it but value driven. So for me, agility is not just about doing any old thing and then changing your mind, it’s about being pretty disciplined about, you know, focusing on what’s important, working with what you do and what you don’t know, doing the best you can and then reflecting once you’ve got through the full feedback loop as soon as possible. And I think the same for me goes with organizational structure, with architecture, with everything is use what you do know, analyze what can be analyzed, and then experiment mindfully, cheaply, carefully, and learn and inspect and adapt. So we do a lot of value streaming and then asking our organizations to be very ruthless in staffing their teams to be able to deliver value. And almost without exception, I say almost without exception, because I can’t trust my memory as much as I used to these days. It’s resulted in every organization that we’ve been with having to do less stuff in order to get more stuff done because they’re almost always doing too much stuff and spreading people too thin, and jeopardizing everything that they’re doing because that aren’t willing to be ruthless in what they are focusing on in terms of value.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:37

And it goes back to something you said earlier transparency and visualization. I think it I’ve been in so many situations where people actually just visualize what they don’t. And that goes back to also what you said about experience, that’s going to change somebody’s mind or could change potentially somebody’s mind when you just see how much stuff you have in progress and what’s actually getting done. So let’s look at the five principles because then we can tie some of this stuff. So the first one increased cultural awareness and coherence. Second one is situational decision making, focus on value creation, validating changes in small increments and optimizing for flow. Are these in any particular order and how did you guys, what was the experience working and coming up with these with Dave and Andrea?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 24:34

Like I said, I can’t really rely on my memory as much as I used to. But I know it was an iterative process, and it was one of those, it’s not necessarily a linear thing because we’ve started with different teams, different organizations, with different principles. But I think if you took a large enough sample size, you’d say this is probably the most likely sequential order and flow have them. And so this is how we teach them. This is how we, the order that we talked to people about with them, because the first principle around increasing cultural awareness and coherence, if you are not aware of what your culture is, how do you know whether you’re making progress towards where you want to be? So it’s about getting a baseline and trying to share that baseline without judgment across the organization. Because if we’ve got different perceptions, if you and I have a different awareness of what our culture is, then we could quite easily be pulling in very different directions with the same intent. But if we’re aware, collectively, we have a common coherence about what our culture is, then we can agree to make movements together in the same direction. The danger there is that we’re judging things because we tend to do that as human beings; this is good, this is bad, this is my fault, this is your fault. And that’s not helpful. We are where we are because we made the best decisions we could in the past. Every process, every story was created with good intent and every process and procedure that we had in place was valid for a reason at that point in time. There’s no point judging it, it’s just we are where we are. So getting that awareness and coherence allows us to make more coherent decisions, consistent value based decisions which is something that we move on to in principle too, which is situation of decision making, which is where we bring in the idea of the Kanarian framework and the domains and complicated in the conversation about efficiency and effectiveness. And again, neither is good, neither is bad, it’s about what’s appropriate for the context. And then once we understand there are different ways of creating value. So I can be efficient in creating value, or it can be effective in creating value, both are good, both are bad in the right circumstances. But once I’m aware of that, then we can actually focus a lot more ruthlessly and a lot more mindfully on that value. We’re not just being busy for busy sake, we can actually say, you know what, let’s channel our energies towards this value stream, this value stream, this value stream. And what it takes both structurally and mindset wise and skill base wise to create value in an effective way is very different to what’s required to create value in an efficient way. So we might as asked the guy to talk about exploit squads and explore squads and things like that. So we can focus on value creation. But we’re not going to get it right straightaway. So one of the important things that we need to put in place is this concept of experimentation about trial and error, but not just any kind of trial and error, kind of I was guilty of using the phrase fail fast for a long time and I now try and use the phrase fail mindfully instead, because it’s not just about failing fast, it’s about creating opportunities to learn richly. And it’s something that I’ve had a bit of a, as we say in England, a bee in my bonnet about for a bit.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:22

Well, it’s easy to say fail fast but what you’re saying is, you know, you could fail fast and not learn much, or you could fail fast and learn a lot from it. And also, it’s about that experience that you talked about. And that’s gonna get us to maybe even understand things better and make sense of things a little bit better. What about optimized flow? That’s the last one and you said these are in sequential order.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 28:53

Yeah, and it’s not quite as simple as that but I think it’s well enough to look at that. Yeah. So this is once we’ve got this idea of where our values coming from, we’ve you know, we’ve tried a few things we’ve got into a bit of a habit of running safety value experiments, then we can start looking at well, how can we get that value better? And so coming back to your conversation about structure, whether it be how we structure our people, how we structure our departments, the policies and processes that support all that, we can start asking the questions of well, which of these processes, policies, structures, organizational setups, hierarchies, matrixes, whatever are helping us deliver value, and which of them aren’t helping us to deliver value, not just in the short term, but the long term as well because it’s very tempting to optimize for the short term. So for example, if you’ve got an expert in one particular skill to give all that work to the expert, which is very short term effective, but it’s a long term bottleneck that we’re creating. So thinking about how we do this as an organization and then slowly, tweaking, inspecting and adapting the way that we’re set up to get closer and closer to where we think we want to be and then re-evaluating.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:10

Yeah, and something that you just said about specifically that, you know, something like a policy or something like, you know, short term, I think it goes in relates to structure. It’s been maybe a couple of years now, I was working with an executive and we’re talking about this stuff, and you know, he’s like, Miljan, I know what the right thing to do is, but I also have a kid in college. And policy or incentive was annual. Like if they can do this and delivered this, then they were gonna get their bonus. So this was contradicting what this person knew was the right thing to do but for them to get the bonus, they had to focus on short term, which actually cost the company a lot more long time. And this is hard work. So even if we look at these five principles, this is difficult. Companies want safe, they want, you know, something that they can be comfortable with. So when we look at the future of agility and business agility, and when you look at the organic agility framework, I feel like this is the future. But this is really hard work, because it puts pressure on organizations to understand these principles and what’s behind these principles. And it’s not just few people understanding the organization, this is creating a culture, an army of people that understand this stuff. So what are your thoughts on you know, the next 5, 10 years as I believe that these type of framework, these type of approaches are principle based, a pattern based approaches are not specific, but you have to contextualize, how much chance do you know the framework that we currently know have at succeeding and how much are they exposing just how, the last 10 years maybe of adopting and popularizing all of these scaling frameworks has not worked?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 32:16

And I think that’s key for me. And so there’s, for me, there’s the market side of things and then there’s the personal side of things for me. So from a market perspective, as with everything else, I think the market will sort out. There will be enough failures of silver bullets, shall we say? And the smart organizations, the okay, brave leaders, because it does take a certain amount of courage to say, I’m going to pass on that off the shelf one size fits all thing that this well paid consultancy is offering me and actually get involved and take the less clear path but the one that instinctively I know is probably right. It does require courage. But there will be more and more of those that survive. And to be honest, I think this is where I’ve changed as a person over the years is that I used to sort of lie awake, it’s slightly literal, slightly metaphorical, lie awake at night, worrying that actually there are a lot of organizations out there that were doing the wrong thing. I think now, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s the actually the ones that want to go down that route are going to go down that route; the ones that aren’t, the ones that are smarter are the ones that are more born to survive, if you like.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:48

I was gonna say survival is optional, right?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 33:51

Yeah, exactly. That’s a really, really, really good point. And they will be more and more, and I think we are, I don’t have the stats to hand, Snowden would but the number of failures of organizations now and the rate of failure, you know, the amount of time it takes for a company to fail these days is a lot smaller than it was before. But the ones that succeed, really succeed. And the, this isn’t a new statement to make, it’s something that I’ve been saying for quite a long time because it’s become part of the Agile lexicon if you like, is that an agile transformation is a misnomer because you’re never going to be transformed. But the organization of today and certainly the organization at tomorrow is one that is continually transitioning.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:39

And that comes through and I’m interested given your background, the transformation is a leftover from a waterfall world where as you probably know, we’re not quite as old as some of the other people in our community and joking obviously, but what used to happen is he would bring consulting company like, you know, big consulting company, every five years, they would do some type of transformation, they would leave and then he will probably call them back. So I think that was a leftover from, you know, 80s 90s of these transformations and then we just put it agile label on it and we call it transformation, agile transformation. But exactly same things that they did with waterfall and adapting and all of the other approaches. And I think if we look at it from a different lens, and if we suspend that idea of transformation as being a project, rather than ongoing thing that you embed in everything that you do, it’s a different lens that we’re now looking at everything. It’s not once and done but it’s something that goes back to that organizational resilience, it’s about creating organizational resilience, not transforming organization from one state or another.

Speaker: Geoff Watts 35:55

Yeah, you’re spot on. And it goes back to my point of being brave. And I’m just going to amplify that even more, because transformation is a really appealing idea, because it has a sense of closure to it, it has a sense of completeness to it. And as human beings, we’re drawn to that. We don’t like the idea of being in flux of uncertainty. And what we’re saying, when I say we, Andrea, Dave and other people, are saying essentially, you know, you need to get used to the fact that you are going to be constantly in a state of flux, organizationally. And while that might take a little bit of bravery to come to terms with. What you’ve just said is exactly right. And when you play it back to them, think back to the last year, 20 years of your organization, even if you weren’t here for that 20 years, look back to the stories, how many times have you had a transformation? What’s the cycle time of a transformation? And actually, has it ever finished before you started the next one? So it’s actually reality anyway but coming to terms with it and explicitly accepting it are two different things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:06

It’s back to the stories that we tell ourselves, right? What about, you know, what’s your perspective on how do we measure agility or organizational resilience?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 37:21

So I’m not too worried about measuring agility because like I said, there may be times when actually that’s not the right thing for us. But I think resilience is an interesting one. I think, so there’s a term that sort of generated in football in the UK called bounce back ability. And it was termed by a manager of a football team over here in the UK. So your ability to bounce back, it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you recover that kind of thing you know. And I think that’s effectively what we’re looking for from resilience. Yeah, I mean, in an ideal world, if you took that model, if you took talibs model, you’d be looking for anti-fragility, that might be too expensive, it might be too extreme. So resilience is good enough. So how do you, what’s your sort of proxy metric for resilience? Well, for me, the question I asked leaders is, how quickly and how effectively can you re-channel your resources, your money, your assets, your people, into a new opportunity or to stave off a new threat? How quickly can you do that? Because you can’t necessarily predict them. Alright? It’s not about trying to predict these threats. It’s how quickly can you respond to them and effectively. And that’s, I don’t think that’s necessarily got a label yet but that question, how quickly can you do that? And can you do that quick enough to survive, first of all? And can you do it quicker than everybody else so that actually you can take advantage of these changes? And I think that’s the measure, that’s the metric that I tend to get people to look for even if I’m not necessarily encouraging them to look for numbers, for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:09

That’s a really good way and remind me of, you know, one of the ways that will give you that it’s options, right? Once you’re, you know, options in creating those options to respond or to redirect. And you’re focused a lot on self-mastery and you’ve developed course communities and that self-mastery is also developing people. I don’t know if we’re familiar with fidelity here United States, but and they’re not the first one but like, for instance, they give their people one day a week or most programs or product lines give their people one day a week, Tuesday, usually to focus on you know self-development. You can watch YouTube videos or you can, you know, do some productive, you don’t have to report what you’ve done but it’s really encouraging people to develop that self-mastery. So I believe that I can give the company that resilience and options if they need to change and will. So, coming to self-mastery, how do you define self-mastery? What’s the importance of your obviously design courses, you’ve talked a lot about it, could you maybe shed some light on self-mastery and how you see it play the role in that organizational resilience?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 40:29

Yeah, so for me, self-mastery is becoming much more aware of my triggers, my strengths, and whether my strengths are actually working for me, or not, which might sound like a strange thing to say. But I think that we’ve every strength that we’ve got has the potential to become a weakness for us. And every weakness that we’ve got has the potential to provide some strength. So self-mastery is becoming much more aware of where those traits, if you like, are; whether we’re overdoing them, whether we’re underdoing them, whether we got them in balance. And these traits could be anything from perfectionism, to performance anxiety, or people pleasing. These aren’t necessarily hard skills, like Java development or anything like that. These are actual mind skills, if you like. And I think for us, a lot of our decisions are based on our beliefs, not just about what’s going on in our environment, or our society but also what’s going on in our heads. And a lot of that stuff happens unconsciously. So self-mastery for me is about bringing that into the conscious mind so that we can be more mindful about it in a non-judgmental way so that we can actually leverage them for us. Now, if I’m more aware and in control of my thought patterns, my scripts, then I can respond more mindfully to the situations rather than responding instinctively or emotionally. And at an individual level that is important for resilience, because it makes me much more able to cope with change, cope with what might be perceived as threats. And ultimately, our organizations are a collection of individuals, the stories that we create. So looking at that, at an organizational level, we have a bunch of self-aware people who’ve mastered them, although it’s a journey, it’s not a destination, and if we have certain higher level of self-mastery within our people, then we can expect to be more resilient as an organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:40

And that just made me think of like the first two principles in the organic agility framework, cultural awareness and coherence as well as situational decision making. So we have awareness and then when we haven’t talked about is sensemaking. Collective individual sense making. There’s a relationship with I’m assuming the more aware we are of our own thought processes, the inner kind of operating model and the better that we make sense of things and the higher collective self-awareness is, the better collective sense making is. Do you see it that way? Is there a connection maybe or some type of connection between the awareness and sense making both at the individual level and collective?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 43:36

Yeah, I think you’ve made a really good connection there. So what I can do here is in my head, is I can visualize some of the things that we do, which I can’t necessarily replicate here, certainly not on an audio podcast. But imagine a heatmap of data points and these data points all have, you can drill down into them. And so you can find out from this data point you know, who made that decision? How quickly that decision was made? How do we feel about that decision? What factors went into making that decision? And all these different sort of components to the decision. And also look at what kind of leadership style was in play at the time, what kind of team composition was in play at the time and did that turn out to be a positive result for us or a negative result for us? And we can start to look at this data. But that visualization of big data within the organization allows us to make sense of the situation across the organization. And that works at a personal level as well. So if I could become more aware of what’s going on for me and when I was thinking this way, when I was making these assumptions, this led to this kind of result and it was favorable for me or not, then I can make more, I can use that empirical approach both at a personal and an organizational levels. It’s absolutely linked, you’re absolutely right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:55

We have a few minutes left here. What would you like to share with the community? Any tips, any takeaways, any invitations? I know you’re doing a lot of stuff on your own, you’re building a community, how would you like to finish up?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 45:14

It is interesting you use the word community, that’s certainly since the pandemic started, that’s something that, I’ve always been involved in things like meetup groups, in conferences and things, but I found the disconnect and the feeling of isolation increased quite a lot across the people. So I’m lucky in that I have no connections to lots of different organizations, lots of different communities, lots of different groups. But quite a lot of people in organizations feel quite on their own when they’re trying to be a change agent, when they’re trying to make change happen. And the inability to travel and the inability to meet up in person really hit these people. So I put a lot of effort in trying to create a safer community, one that wasn’t like other potential social media channels which had a lot of ego and trolling and things, where people could share their experiences, where they could ask questions. And we’ve had special guests come on, we do little private workshops and things, sharing articles, we have themes of the month. And we’ve got over 500 people now who, from different countries, from different organizations and it’s completely free. We’ve got a code of conduct that we expect people to sign up to but that’s pretty much it. And it’s helping people just explore different ideas, but in a safe, respectful way. So I would encourage, I would invite people to come along, it’s called Geoff Sajha mastery community

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:46

And I would include it in the link below so it’s easier for people to click on. Anything else, any other tips for coaches, for leaders, for anybody or anything else that maybe we didn’t touch upon that you want to share with people?

Speaker: Geoff Watts 47:05

Because my work is so varied, it’s difficult to pinpoint on something, but what I will say is, we’re all doing a really tough job, everybody’s doing a tough job. And I think certainly recently, I’ve noticed a trend of people, people’s self-confidence and self-doubt dropping quite a lot and it’s quite easy to not see the good in what we’re doing. And first of all, do that for yourself. Take a little bit of time out, pat yourself on the back for things that you’ve been doing. But also make sure that when somebody that you see, that somebody that you know has done something good, just go a little bit out your way and let them know that they’ve been seen because people are a lot less visible than they used to be. That would be my message.

Michael Vizdos

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:34

Who is Michael Vizdos?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 00:37

Ah, I’m just a regular guy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:42

That’s what everybody says, right?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 00:46

It really is, I’ve spent 30 years in the industry, working for big companies, small companies, done a couple of startups and I’ve been pretty much on my own since 2001. I’m working on a lot of companies and organizations and military teams. How do you get better using this agile stuff? And Agile is not the outcome. Really, it delivers outcome that are important to the organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:20

How did you get into this agile space? What was your… because everybody has their own kind of journey of how… they usually say it’s accidental, it’s not… what was your journey?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 01:32

Yeah, for me, I spent almost the first 10 or 12 years of my career, working for other companies, and being super frustrated about not being able to deliver good results. Not even good results consistently, just good results. And I joked around with a friend of mine way back in the day of… that if there was some kind of methodology or framework that we could just say, let’s iterate on this and get better. That was right around the time, Alastair was working with IBM and figuring out the Crystal Method. And I worked at the time for IBM well actually it was EDS, doing contract work on this thing called LS two, some operating system from IBM. And during that time, I really came to appreciate teamwork, and did a couple startups. And then right at about 2001 I got involved with some of the early Agile adopters and started following country labor [02:44]. He delivered this Scrum master class. I was one of the really early adopters in that class. And as I was doing that, I was writing this book on this thing called the Enterprise unified process with Scott Ambler.

And it was a big, heavy software development stuff. Soon as it got published, I was like, Wow, that’s good. But now what? So during that time, I’d gotten certified by Ken and really started working with him and Jeff Suther and others early on, to get classes started, trying to figure out what is this Scrum Alliance thing and here we are. 20 years later.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:37

That’s been an interesting journey. Maybe we can come back to that, you’ve contributed, a lot you’ve mentored a lot of people at Scrum Alliance. So that might be something that come back but I interviewed Scott and I think over the years his perspective is changed. What are your thoughts on the current DA?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 04:00

It’s good stuff. Scott’s always been good at pushing back against the organized stuff. It was good to see actually that, when the PMI bought him out for the disciplined Agile delivery. It’s fun now watching Scott there, Allen and Shaley, Shaley is…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:28

I’ve got an interview with him.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 04:30

Yeah, definitely. He’d be a good person to interview. And we’ve known each other for a long time and pushed back on a lot of ideas.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:41

It seems like everybody like you, so far, I almost feel like, I’ve interviewed close to 50 people like 47 I think this is my 47th interview, like four months. And there’s a common pattern where, I think people are realizing that these prescriptive approaches as lightweight as frameworks they could be, they’re still prescriptive and that there’s still more content, we need more contextualize things in our organization, especially when we start scaling, or descaling. So that’s one thing that’s really… when I spoke with Scott, when I spoke with David Anderson with all of these top leaders that represent different maybe paths or have a common message, which is, in a sense, we got to go back to the basics, we got to go back and understand these patterns and principles, before we start doing things. And even Dean, I spoke with Dean laughing, has his own perspective. But underneath all of that he understands the fundamentals and what needs to happen. It’s up to people to fall with it, to what is the saying that goes, its still a bull, right?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 06:02

Exactly. Yeah. I’ve really tried to stay focused on a lot of the basics. Because I find that going back to the basic a lot is a super helpful, and whether it’s Scrum, Kanban, whatever kind of framework or methodology you want to use, it’s important to focus on the people and then your actions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:27

Good. When you look at today and reflect back. what is important? What are you currently working on? What’s important to you right now? When you look at…?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 06:38

Yep, so today, it’s definitely staying with training. I really only do public training, maybe once a month. I find that that’s a good way to get people introduced to the topic, but, training a bunch of people, and then setting them back into the environment that they’re in, is not really super impactful. They need support after. So I’ve been mentoring, I’ve got the Agile mentoring group with Ron Jeffries, and I host that. And that’s just an experiment where Ron and I host the Slack community and talk to people. And with a lot of slack, people come in and out. And it’s great to see different perspectives from everyone around the world that’s in that group. And then I’m also spending a lot of time right now with schools, and education. And it’s important to me to help, really, this is generational change. And the stuff that we do is stuff basically that’s taught in kindergarten, play nice with others say Please, and Thank You, don’t be ‘mmm’ about everything.

And it’s been a really fun journey. Since about 2013. I got involved with schools, from elementary up through universities, and I’ve been spending a lot of time lately too, with the administration level. So at the district level of, how do you use Scrum, at the organization level, not even deep down into the schools, with the classrooms. And the Scrum Alliance is really starting to back a. thing called Cal K 12. Where it’s going to be certification for teachers to help give teachers tools to flip the classroom without really making huge major changes. Because teachers in the world, they’ve got tons and tons of stuff to do. Adding another thing on top of it is not going to help.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:04

So that too, so I’ve been teaching like in university here. And it’s interesting, even just like you said, it’s surprising that this is not, being pushed more in schools and I think, Scrum Alliance could definitely play even bigger role in this and not just Scrum Alliance, everybody because you have kids coming out of school, and now it’s a little bit different. I think there’s more and more, but don’t even know some of these approaches, or they’re looking for a job is like Scrum what or Agile what?

And maybe it’s not the point is not Agile or Scrum but this way of working and understanding and also from like you said, playing nice from people side, how do we better work together and how do we better understand each other needs? How do we empathize better with others, what other things… when it comes to schools like your work there? What are some of the things that are different maybe from what you see in the typical corporate environment?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 10:12

One of the things that I’m still adjusting to is in education, there is still an openness to share, and encouragement to share. It, it changes when you start bringing money into the conversation, and competition. There is no single place where there’s this aha, I invented it, and it’s mine. Everything that we’ve done, any kind of huge inventions that have been made has been really on innovation, not like some light bulb going off.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:58

It is interesting, some of the ways like that ego…, I think as soon as you throw in the money in your in corporate environment, and do you have organizational structure, especially that reinforces that it becomes very difficult to innovate, because it’s less of a collaborative effort. It’s more like, “I gotta protect my fifth”. And what I’m incentivized where I don’t know if in schools and level work that administrative level or, but it is interesting, and just how that plays out. So that’s couple of questions you want to ask me, so we thought for me we’ll play back and forth. For Michael

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 11:50

So for you, you’re almost 50 episodes in, what’s different today versus day one for you, the first podcast that you did?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:04

I don’t know if there’s much difference besides…, I just keep enjoying these conversations. My first one was with Daniel Mesic, I believe I reached out to him and Jean, and, I was like, “Guys, I have an idea for this podcast, would you be willing, I want to just pilot and see , I want to do three, four of these. If it works, I’ll continue doing it if it doesn’t.” And it was just right from the get go, I don’t know, because I was maybe comfortable with them. It was really just I enjoy we having conversation here. It’s like I miss these types of conversations. And the only way to get time with people seems now is this way. So it was also a nice way to say, “hey, do you have an hour to chit chat about topics we might be interested.”

So I don’t know if there is anything different, but I’m starting to see patterns. As I’m talking to people, people are saying things differently, but they’re saying the same things, in a sense of what they think, for instance, where we had the what are some of the challenges that we’re facing their own kind of journeys, and some of the biases to and some of the.., one of the things that I may be, so this is definitely something so I just the diversity, inclusion, that’s something that I didn’t think about, for instance, at the beginning, I was just, I had a bunch of white guys in my mind, because those are the people that I know, those are the people in our community that are considered leaders.

And I started thinking, look at my first 10 interviews, it’s all middle-aged white guys. And I’m like, that was something that just, presented itself to me, I’m like “how do I add more diversity,” but also, not just do it for sake of, hey, I want to diverse, I’m just going to interview anybody just to add to the mix. But what is some of the criteria? Or what are the topics that we’d like to discuss? So that’s definitely something now that you asked that I think about as far as, how do I add different voices? And maybe a couple other things that as I did this, like I started thinking about, well, if I’m interviewing top leaders, that’s great, right?

But how do I create a platform for people that are doing some great stuff, and get them a little bit more exposed to our community and highlight some of the stuff that did. So that’s the different part that, I want to do that I didn’t think of when I first started. And the third thing is Doing these, like Ask Me Anything session. So I did one with Roman Pilcher and then Mesic, I’m going ask Mike Cohen if he wants to do one. And just like these are where I’m not asking the questions that are asking the questions I’m just facilitating. So those are some of the things that come to mind.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 15:19

So for people that are listening or watching this, for the diversity part, what kind of requests would you have for maybe even the people watching or listening to help you get more diverse? Maybe people involved.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:39

So I think anything that would shed maybe different light, I feel another thing that I’m seeing is, which goes back to like those same patterns, like maybe diversity and topics, diversity in perspectives. There’s something to be said about having people disagree with some of the common. So I think, that held the differences in perspectives, which you just made me think about, another thing that I could do is hold the baits and facilitate those. But just in general, for instance, one thing that I just reached out to Nan then on Taiwan, he was a monk, the became Scrum trainer. And that’s a great example of the…, I don’t know anybody that was a monk. And that’s done. Scrum. He’s tried to do Scrum in cooking and different ways. And I love…, recently, what he’s been doing to entertain people in training. I don’t know if you seen but he’s doing some brilliant.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 16:55

Things growing up about John and Jane things. Yeah. DJing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:03

I love that. And I think another thing that I’ve been thinking about is, trainers that do fun stuff in class. So maybe compiling trainers, I’ve been doing like this piece and I wanted to this piece of remembering kind of like people. And one person that I got a chance to meet. In Dublin, I think you were there to Mike Beadle. And my first interaction with him was very positive in the sense that, he I didn’t know who it was, I was sitting next to him. And he was just the nicest guy trying to get into and then when I realized who it was, I’m like, oh, at least, you know, just so I know, people have done certain things to remember and keep his ideas. And so I’ve been interviewing people, just to kind of add a little bit more to that. So those types of kind of …, maybe deviating a little bit from typically what I’ve started and trying to add diversity in that way, I spoke with [name not clear] [18:20], and talk to her about what she’s doing in Africa and Nigeria. And those are ideas I didn’t think about when I first started, but…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 18:34

It’s awesome. So zoom forward to, Episode 99, or 100. What’s going to be different?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:46

I think, going back to what I just said that there is more diversity that there is, and I want to reflect low, but so I’m going to take mostly pause for the next couple of months is when I spent time in Croatia and Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia, that whole former Yugoslavia and maybe take that time to reflect a little bit, but I’m hoping that I can add little bit more to that diversity. And also, I haven’t gotten or asked for any feedback on these, or for an Agilist or somebody that considers them Agilist. I haven’t really gotten a lot of feedback besides just generic feedback that people tell me and but wasn’t one proactive. So we’ll see. I don’t know what the 100.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 19:37

Maybe, don’t some of that into the new flow of things will be interesting. So when you come back, you’ll be all recharged and ready to go. You’re working on a book, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:56

So yes, I’m working on a book and I tell people the reason that I started the podcast is not write. I have about 40,000 words written nine chapters. It’s really based on, it’s called wicked leadership based on wicked problems, how do we lead in a complex environment where we’re dealing a lot of times with wicked problems? So I’m writing a book, I was hoping to be done by now. But so, I…, you wrote a book, I don’t know, maybe you can give me advice. When you have a writer’s block, and you just can’t get back into rhythm, what do you do?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 20:36

Yeah, just keep writing, write every day, even if it’s garbage, write it, you can always delete it. The book that Scott and I wrote, with one more co-author, it was a long process. And one of the things I learned with writing that one, and this was back before, I mean, this was 2004 2005, when we were, writing it and creating it. It our copy editor, we had to send it out for copy, we got physical FedExed printed versions that we had to go back and do. And, I definitely came to love and respect copy editors, and the humility of just pay, this is, this is what’s needed. The, and the important thing is, you’re not going to ever get rich off of a book, maybe a couple of the early authors, you know, got some big bang for the buck on that. But really, what a book does allow you to do is get some more exposure into the into the world. And then you can lean back into that if you need to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:59

Yeah, for me, it was never, it’s just like, some of these ideas that have I’m also writing in a book is more like a novel or has stories so I tried to hide things from growing up in a war or maybe inexperience with the clients. So it has a lot of stories, intertwined in it, it’s pretty much that. And it’s also helped me to have writing coaches just to help me when I’m stuck in the…, one of the challenges last few years, it’s been California. And last year, we pretty much Airbnb during the COVID, so it was just like moving. And I keep making excuses, but I agree, one of the things that I know. And this is maybe for people listening to if they’re considering writing a book, I definitely resonated when you said write everyday, that’s the probably if I could give people one advice, I was waking up at 4:30, start writing a five to seven was my time uninterrupted. And it was, it was during that time that I made the most progress.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 23:12

Absolutely. And it’s very different than either doing a podcast or writing blogs too. And I’m seeing a lot of people recast blogs into books. And I’m like, they’re not sure

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:24

I’ve have been thinking about something like that, too. I don’t know, if it’s a blog, or what I’m going to do, but the fact is that people want different mediums. So for instance, the way that this podcast…, mostly video podcasts, I still haven’t put it like a regular podcast, which I have to in audio, just only. But there’s so much good stuff that people have said and tips. So I could figure out how to extract that and just make it available in a different format for people. Because not everybody is going to go through every single talk or discussion that I had. And I’m the only one that has listened to all of this or been part of all of this and I know there’s so much good stuff. So I got to figure out…, I’ve been thinking about possibly some type of book or paper, whatever, like my takeaways, but…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 24:21

And even just getting out and maybe helping to keep in that writing mode is just blog regularly about the topic like with implementing Scrum with the chicken and pig cartoons, I write for almost six or seven years, every single week. Right? A new comic strip came out and I wrote consistently and really over the past three or four years, what I’ve done is shifted from blogging to sending emails, and every Saturday morning at implementing Scrum you’ll get people that are subscribed there will get an email from me about implementing Scrum in the real world. And it’s really what I’m what I’m seeing in the real world working with teams today. And how do you get better implementing Scrum? Using things like the Scrum guide. I’ve recorded that that Scrum guide audio book for since like 2013 version. And…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:28

I always noted that, by the way,

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 25:31

That move sounds

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:34

Especially, it’s sometimes easier. And I’m trying to depict stuff. And even when I’m laying the bed, I feel like I have more focus and less distraction. Right? So I always [inaudible]. [25:50]

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 25:52

Yep. And in this latest version, I created an interactive Scrum guide too now. So if you go online, and instead of, if you’re like, “Oh, what is this event or activity,” you can click it, it will bring you to that next spot in the Scrum guide. I’m seeing a lot of people using that both in training and then back with their teams now, too, so it’s important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:14

Yeah, no, it is. I mean, it’s, it just gave me an idea, in a sense, what I haven’t thought about but , I can write my takeaways from each of the interviews and send out an email and people can watch it, but they also get, and then I can also put that, I mean, you said you’re writing a blog, I can put in an email, but there’s also no reason to put it like as a blog, too. So that’s something that I haven’t thought about. So thank you, Mike.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 26:43

Yeah, there’s an unending Idea Factory, I think, between both of us, we could just spin out ideas left and right, all day, every day. And one of the things that’s important, for writing the book is you writing it. When Iwas under contract to do the book back in 2005, one of the things I learned is, I think nine out of the 10 people that are under contract. Don’t finish the book.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:12

Even though you have that pressure, and it’s still Yeah…, I get stuck in this, it’s really the format, I know what I want to say. But it’s the structure, and it just the longer seems like the longer that I put it away, the longer I also…, and I feel like, things are marinating, and my ideas are getting better. So it’s also…, there’s no sense of urgency like, oh, if I write it this year, next year, like, I know that I have something, but…, so it’s just I keep making excuses at the end of the day, but even it doesn’t matter, I think it goes back to just write every day, you can throw it away, but even half an hour, like any muscle, if you train it more than you train it…, I want to get your thoughts on co-creation and pairing because you’ve done that, I’m assuming throughout your life, just looking at you having previous discussions with you, and looking at what you’re doing, you’re always, looking to help others and co-create what are… when you reflect on that, maybe who are some of the people that or maybe ways that you kind of think about co-creating or helping or I don’t know, what goes through your head when you want to do something because it seems like your tendency is a lot of times to collaborate. And even when I’ve done co-trainings or whatever, it just seems like it I work better when I work with somebody else, and it can feed off their thought process and they can feed off my thought process.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 28:58

Now, the important thing really is for you and whoever is co-creating with you are aligned. And it’s really like doing a dance together. And it’s important that you stay in alignment, and when you’re not be able to walk away from it, and be okay. Right? it does ebb and flow, we’re idea factories, we love coming up with new stuff. And we learn new things, right?

And when we learn new things, sometimes our perspective does change. So I’ve been I’ve been fortunate enough to really have awesome conversations with people like you and others in the industry over the years where we’ve been able to collaborate and sometimes that works. Sometimes they’re spectacular failures. And in my mind, the spectacular failures look like this mushroom cloud of a waste. Here’s what really is “Mm mmmm.” the world is still spinning. So it’s important to be able to also have fun while you’re doing it. Right. If it gets into a slog, it’s probably time to tap out and maybe do something else do something else.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:18

Right? Yeah, definitely, I think that were two things that really resonated like that things evolve. And I’ve had a couple of startups where I started with my friends or colleagues, and just things along and we don’t have, just we’ve learned or have changed perspectives. And in some instances has been not necessarily bad but just we see things differently, and they just walk away sometimes been just like, “hey, let me support you with this part that you’re doing” and, I think it’s maturing and getting older. There’s so much you have to go into any type of collaboration, co-creation with knowing that things will evolve.

But the most important thing is while, we have fun, something good probably, or there’s a really good chance that something good can come out of this. What have you, I mean, you’ve done also you’ve supported over the years Scrum Alliance in so many different ways. Maybe just to touch on Scrum Alliance, because a lot of times, we always tend to look at the negative side or it’s easy to bitch about this bitch about that. As you look at Scrum Alliance over the years, what are you proud of? What are you happy?

Because I remember, I think you Mike Blier, Jim York and I were in Boston for those face to face, it was a small, little room and small group of people. And you guys were not necessarily very happy with the current leadership. But still, I think we’re trying to empathize with what’s going on. So reflecting back not just in that time, but just since you’ve been part of Scrum Alliance. How have you seen Scrum Alliance grow? And what do you think of the current state where Scrum Alliance is?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 32:15

The current leadership is doing an awesome job over the past few years, and it’s really trying to maintain focus, to help really the community and people grow. When the Scrum Alliance first started, right, it was a for profit company. Right? And it was basically, Cain and maybe Mike and some others and Jeff, right. And when the trainer community was, less than 20 people, right, we were having the same kind of conversations that we’re having today with a community of hundreds. It’s good to see that people are bringing some new techniques and sharing the results with the Scrum Alliance. The Scrum Alliance right now, I think he’s still going through a “what are we going to be when we grow up?” Because they’ve got a ton of money sitting in the bank Right, as a nonprofit, and to serve a community and then what is it? Are they a certification machine? Are they really about coaching? Or what is it? So it’ll be it’ll be fun to watch how this starts to evolve.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:44

Yeah, I mean, if you look at it, and the what I would like to see for satellites, is that, you organization for impact, which they are what you said, you helping in schools, bring some of these ideas, helping teachers, nonprofits, what they’ve been doing also is, I just spoke with Kiera Harada, from Japan and going into some of these areas, and maybe, it’s not just Scrum. Obviously, I think it’s limited a little bit. And when we say Scrum Alliance, but just l helping people do better work and be happier, I think that’s something they have an opportunity to do that. And as a community, we have opportunity to be part of that and almost ride that wave. Because a lot of times, I feel like, I’ve hit a lottery with being part of this group, and we tend to get at each other.

We tend to, but we have opportunity to make an impact. Some people would wish to have an opportunity that we do as trainers and coaches. And I feel sometimes they will probably do a better job. Maybe not because we’re all humans, but it’s just it’s I feel privileged to be part of this community and I think we all have responsibility and opportunity to make much bigger impact. And like you said, maybe when we grow up, or we’re slowly growing up, that will happen. So I don’t know if you should share the same views. But that’s kind of like what I’m thinking about what I think about Scrum Alliance and how and what the future may hold.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 35:24

And really, I’m now working with people who want to do this right. It’s the people who are just you know, up against and fighting or raging against the machine, or don’t want to change you know what, have fun, right? Continue doing whatever you’re doing. Let me know how that goes. And the people that are saying, Wow, this thing can make a change. And this is possible. I’m loving working with those groups of people all around the world.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:56

Yeah, and something that I want to come back maybe to but which is related to Scrum Alliance students, some of these programs, in a sense, Scrum Alliance is known, and a lot of times people see it as 02 Day certification, but not many people know about the other training opportunities, coaching opportunities, other certifications that require a lot more time, and I really enjoy, like you said, following up and helping people develop because after that two day training, which is most of the classes are CSM, CSPO for most people. But that follow up and helping people grow, because those two days are obviously not enough. And a lot of times people don’t have the support in their organizations that they need. Do you think we’ll focus more and more on that type of service where it’s not just transactional, hey, you know, come take the class, but more of a follow up, and truly trying to help people because we all know, what it takes to succeed and to learn and two days is by far just enough to get you interested in familiar but it’s nowhere close to what people need.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 37:11

And, and it’s important to also realize the Scrum Alliance is not going to make that change, it’s us as a community to have to make the change. Right, for me, it’s very non transactional for me. And I’ve been training since right at about early 2006. And over those 15 years, I’m still in contact with people that I trained over 15 years ago, now, some of them now are like, I’m capping out, I’m retiring, which I’m getting a lot, I’m seeing a lot more of that. And most of the business that I do in training, and consulting is almost all word of mouth. I’m not the cheapest person out there, I’m not out there competing on, do my $295, CSM, I’ve kept my pricing pretty consistent. And I’m probably getting smaller classes. But again, it’s people that want to be there. I really, I actually try to tell people who are there just for the certification or check the box go somewhere else. Because it’s the experience that I again, try to create is not the one off transaction. But we’re in it, you’ve bought access to not only me, but a community of people that I’ve trained, and worked with and consulted with over the years around the world.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:48

And I’ve been messing around with that. Because I’ve explored both, in a sense, and I can tell you that, for me when it feels more or less transactional, if I’m working with a partner, and it’s all about just sell, run the class, right? I also feel I’m less motivated, especially if there’s a lot of people in there and I feel like I could do much better job in helping them if it was like, you know, 12, 15, 20 people at max rather than 30. And it kind of has a impact on me how I train, how I feel, I contributed to their growth. And it’s making me think, like he’s just said, what am I really trying to do here? Is it make more money, is it have a bigger impact? Because I think, deep down what I want is that impact and know that the hate, you’re paying, but you’re getting, what I think is right, I’m not trying to maximize just a just on my end and it’s a constant battle for me because for whatever reason, I guess, as a human and also being, I’m still fairly new to this whole training business because I come from a more of a coaching and consulting. And it’s a different model than being a CST.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 40:19

Absolutely, and recognizing that a lot of the people that come to the initial trainings come for very different reasons. So again, it’s, a lot of times, does the date work, does the pricing work, used to be the location work? That’s gone now Right. So a lot of people I would say, that are searching don’t really care who it is that’s delivering. So my focus on that is, really get people who want to do this. Again, it’s not doesn’t always happen, right? I’ll get people in the class that are like, “my boss is forcing me to be here.” And that’s a rough slog for two days. And well it’s pretty much two days of guided discussions, whether it’s in person or online, people use different technique learn and train.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:29

Yeah, it’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about is mix of…, from typical CSM. Two day class where I’ve done like advanced Scrum master classes, I spread them over, one month, and those I love because there’s more interaction, both, what we’re used to be, did couple of physical, which were great. But even zoom, this was before COVID. But now on Zoom, it’s really nice just to be able to continue that connection and people to be able to go back, apply stuff, talk to them throughout the week, and then come back and, and there’s different, a feeling to it. And you can tell the…, what people get out of those. Same thing with like CSP, and now Cal classes, I’m finding, I don’t know, if you teach those, but I’m finding that having that mix to as a trainer is really helpful, rather than just doing one type of classes. So that’s another thing that is a trainer I’m considering, what is that mix? How do I motivate myself and feel I’m contributing? Not to my bottom line, but to everybody else’s bottom line as well.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 42:55

And we are running businesses, and it’s important to understand that right? And it’s a different mindset. It doesn’t mean we have to chase every shiny object that’s out there. Right. The Scrum Alliance offers a lot of different badges and certifications. Intentionally, I am not chasing a lot of them. I’m staying super focused on what is it that I’m trying to do? Okay, so for me, it’s, again, really important to go deep somewhere and really understand a domain or industry or sector really well,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:33

Well, questions? What else you want to ask me? Because I’ve been…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 43:46

So what can what can I do to help you get the book out? Haha.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:50

You can read it. I have…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 43:52

So I read like the first day you dropped it, right? Yeah. hey, I want some feedback. I was Okay, I could see this is definitely the Point. 001. Yeah, I would love to take a look at all this look like and, and give you some feedback if that’s what you’d like. And because I read a lot, I read at least one or two books a week.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:23

I used to do that. Not currently as but yeah, maybe like it’s I don’t know, I think you were one of the first ones I asked. It’s been at least a year and I’ve added a lot more to it. But maybe even just nudged me a little bit. Just you know, maybe coach me through it, when you think of me Have you said no, how’s that book or what could you have anything to send me whatever it is to get me back into I don’t know if it’s going to help or not, but I definitely need the little nudging I guess.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 44:59

And Well, while you’re out and about on maybe hitting the reset button, one of the great books that I recommend to writers is Stephen King on writing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:13

I had read that and yeah, that’s it. I do know that I live about an hour away from so it’s, it’s a great,

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 45:24

A great reminder right again, and when I say write every day, if you get a chance to get Mike Cohn on here that he’s just a rock star in that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:37

Well, I was asking, I got Mike and he was saying the same thing, write everyday. He’s like he was even playing with Pomodoro. And just fry for half an hour. And then…, so and I’ve asked, a lot of people have written books and same message. And again, I just got a refocus, and hopefully this reset. Oh, but I’m just taking a little longer break will help with that. But I think I know, in my head is just, the actual knowing or getting back into rhythm, there’s something to be said about getting back into the habit of writing. So…

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 46:17

I mean, even at conferences with Mike Cohn over the years, or things that I’ve worked with him on, it’s, he does his keynotes. He does his talks, and then he goes back to the room. And early on, and I want to talk to him about that. I’m like, why aren’t you out there, you networking with people and I’m writing. I have a job. And he’s super focused on that. And he’s built an incredible organization of some Rockstar trainers and in products that have been super useful to people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:55

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I think he should be inspiration to all of us, in a sense, even, starting the Scrum Alliance. And one of the things that he said, that was really funny and resonated, was, you have to be just about right amount of lazy, where you’re not trying to do everything and yeah, and there’s so much to be said about that, where, think about what you’re where you focus, what you just said he could have done a network, done all that, but he knows what were his focuses? So, that’s a good advice. And yeah, anything they can do to help me.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 47:47

Yeah. So here we are at like, episode, but almost 50, so 47 48, whatever it is. Here’s my offer. If this podcast slash, videos, make it to 100 Bring you back. And let’s like, Will rewatch this episode, almost like we could we could almost do a watch party, you go. Are we thinking back?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:14

That will be fun, actually, that’s a great idea. And just reflect on it. And I agree, let’s…, I don’t know when that 100 is going be. But yeah, let’s do that. I think that will be fun. Or even if you just give me an idea, like even inviting everybody who wants to show up that I’ve interviewed, and I don’t know, maybe just opening it up. It might be too many people, but maybe it’ll only show up. But that’s a great idea.

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 48:46

Maybe did I for 50? Yeah, maybe yeah, let’s do that. Again, ideas we got we got so many ideas,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:54

Putting them into actions, right and deciding which ideas, you want to explore. What is maybe something that I haven’t asked you or maybe something that you want to highlight? As we’re kind of nearing here? Is there anything that you want to share anything that you want to ask me?

Speaker: Michael Vizdos 49:14

I’m really for the listeners, and people watching this. You’ve watched this conversation, it’s kind of has gone in and out. It’s almost we’re sitting in a bar talking. That’s what take conversations like this. Pick out one thing and then apply it on a daily basis. If you’ve got ideas, put them in action, or if you need help, like if you’re stuck or you need an introduction, contact me.

Johanna Rothman

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:59

Who is Johanna Rothman?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 01:03

You might, actually if I’m being kind of a ‘why’ is asked, I hope that I can say that on this, I guess. You might have to edit that out. I have a big mouth and I have a lot of experience in various contexts, not everybody’s contexts but a lot of experience and I applied that hard earned experience to the issues of management and product development and everything that comes along with that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:42

Does that come from, before I started recording, we talked about how we’re actually not too far from each other right now. I’m in Portland, Maine, you’re in Arlington, is that in the New England edge or is it something that New Englanders, is that part of the big mouth or innocence?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 02:06

No, I don’t think so. I think it’s me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:11

That’s awesome.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 02:13

I don’t think it’s, no, I think that there are a lot more. I know a lot of other people here who are much calmer and everything like that. So, I actually put in my bio, I offer frank advice and that helps get my clients, it helps my potential clients decide whether or not I’m the right person for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:46

That is great. When it comes to, I guess, you know books, you’ve written close to 20 books, 18 I believe right now and counting. Do you have a favorite one?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 03:03

No, that’s like, asking if you have a favorite child. No.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:09

I only have one child right now. So, you know, it’s for me, it’s easy, so maybe I can’t really relate.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 03:17

Yeah, I know I have two children. Well, they’re grown so it’s hard to call them children but they are. So, every book is unique. I don’t write the same book again and again and I really don’t like doing second editions. I do have some second editions but I prefer not. I prefer to write a book and make it so it’s, not universal but long lived, right? I’m not tied to a technology and tied to a time. So, I’ve done a pretty good job with that. So, for me right now since we are recording this and the Modern Management Made Easy books are out, the Modern Management Made Easy books are my ‘favorite’ and assumes consulting book, that will be my favorite.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:20

Great, what is your process? I think I was listening to one of the podcasts. I don’t know exactly which one and you talked about, like, you know, the discipline of writing every day. And you know, how do you get into the habit because like, I can relate a little bit to that because I started writing a book and that discipline of writing every day really made the difference. As soon as I stopped, I stopped writing, it’s been a while since I saw it. What would you recommend to those that hopefully want to write but also like, how do you get back out of that writer’s block, is it just start writing again? Or like, what’s your space, how do you kind of, not necessary, force yourself but help yourself focus on writing?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 05:11

So, well I really like what you said, help yourself focus, right? Because I actually write in, often in 15-minute blocks because I am busy just the same way everybody else is, right? So, I did a little bit of writing before we got on this morning, I actually only did five minutes of writing, that’s what I had. And I have, I put aside time on my calendar because it’s been a crazy week. So today, I actually have several one-hour blocks that I put inside those blocks to write in 15-minute increments. So, I write for 15 minutes and then I tend to walk around because I mean, I need to get my blood moving, I need a change of venue so that I have more ideas. And so, for me, it’s all about if you get out of the habit of writing, do the smallest thing you can to get back into the habit and you don’t need a lot of time, 15 minutes every single day is much more sustainable than an hour, right, at least in my experience.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:30

Yeah, that’s a very good advice and again, like I can relate though, it’s just because it is so tough and like if you think it’s too big, it’s almost like you know, when we talk about an agile you know, those be buys those smaller chunks of work and get those done. To come back to New England and summer, where would you like to spend, is there a place because for me, like between Croatia and Montenegro and New England, I always debate like, where would I rather spend the summer because I love summers in New England. Is there another place for you besides New England or maybe you’re more of a fall person because fall in New England is also nice?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 07:19

I really like it here and I was just whining this morning to my husband, that we do not have enough money to buy a mansion on the cape. We just don’t and wait, there’s something about the cape that really calls to me, Cape Cod, for our listeners who were not in the New England area. Maybe because I went to camp on Cape Cod, back when I was a kid, I loved it. It was a wonderful thing and if I could be anywhere inside of water, that would be really good. Yeah, but not, so yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:04

The reason that I ask, I’ve read one of your posts recently about reset and you said like, you know, summer is a good time for you to reset and kind of you know, rethink what you’re doing? Could you maybe elaborate on that like, why you think resets and readjustments are important because I think in our, you know, today’s life, everything, I feel like I’m busier since COVID. And it’s harder to reset because it’s just a continuous kind of flow, both personal as well as work related stuff. So, let’s talk a little bit about reset.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 08:44

So, in that post, I believe it was around July 1, somewhere around there and I find it, so I always have goals for the year and in order to achieve those goals, I break them down into monthly goals. And I use rolling wave planning for every single week because I have opportunities as a consultant to speak or consult or coach or something, then I did not know about it at the beginning of the week or the month of the year but I want to be able to take advantage of some of those opportunities. So, I’m always replanting in the small. However, if I don’t track what I’m doing for a yearly basis, then I don’t actually make the progress on what to make in a year. So, for example, I trust the number of published words or publishable words I have because I’m a writer, right? And that’s what writers do, we track the words and I find that if I don’t track the words, I don’t always get my 15 minutes of writing every day. So, that’s a reinforcing measure right, it reinforcing good stuff. And then if I look back at the first half of the year and I see where I am in relationship to where I wanted to be, then I can say, well, what do I need to change? Now, some people do this quarterly, I find that still quarterly is, I’m still working on those small rolling waves inside the larger months, inside the larger year already. If I’m not where I want to be at the halfway mark, I still have a chance to fix the year.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:41

So, you’re on a different fiscal year, kind of like government, you know, when it starts in July versus like, most of us, you know, think about like, what am I going to do at the end of the year? You know, what are my goals for this year but I really like the idea of reset, rethinking things in the summer. So, that’s something I’m going to try and apply myself but it’s also that rolling, kind of like, I really like, I’ve done that in the past but I think we all can do a better job of, you know, kind of, like what we preach about, talk about actually apply in our own work.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 11:19

So, I’ve been writing about Rolling Wave Deliverable Based Planning, since I think 96, or seven or eight or nine, very, a long time and I find that I mean, I use this for my own work, right? That’s how I get, if people ask me all the time, how do you write so much and you talk so much and I have the same number of hours as anybody else but I use, that’s why I find Rolling Wave Deliverable Based Planning so helpful. And that’s one of the things we have as Agilers, right? We might have a big goal for a product, for me, that’s a book or a workshop and I cannot get it all done in one day or one week or even one month, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:15

But it’s also easy to get all around that. Like, when I think about anything big, it’s like, it’s easier to say no, than yes. So like, you know, when we think big, you know, when we chunk it down to smaller, like you said, I really liked what you said earlier about, like, even if I can write for five minutes, it’s keeping me in that mindset of just keep going. Because that’s how I always thought like, I need at least an hour, you know, and you don’t.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 12:44

I really increased my throughput when I started to write in less time. I used to always block in an hour and I need to do it in an hour. Yeah, no, now I need 15 minutes so I write a whole lot more.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:02

And that’s what we talked about in software development too in this sense, like it’s the same principle. So, applying it to writing is also, you recently talked about or wrote about work life balance and what it means to you. It’s related to this topic because you know that’s important, too and could you talk about that a little bit and bring some light to that post?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 13:27

Sure. So, I’m pretty open about the fact that I have vertigo, I have permanent vertigo. I am always a dizzy bright, right? I moved my head in the world most of it all. I walked with a rollator, there. Yeah. And I, yeah, it’s right behind me. I walk all the time with a rollator because if I walk with my rollator, I can actually get exercise. I get nice and warm. I read hard, I get my heart rate up. It’s everything I need and the people in my neighborhood think I’m nuts. I don’t care, I am nuts, this is totally fine. However, if I don’t balance my physical health with my emotional health with my intellectual and mental health, right, all of this is really necessary for us. So, I put my health first, as if I don’t put my health first, I cannot be a good wife and a good mother. Although I’m sure that my kids were like, a little less mothering now, I cannot be a good consultant, I can definitely not be a good writer. So, for me, it starts with, how do I keep myself healthy in all ways and then how do I extend my ability to keep myself healthy, to my family, to my work, to my clients, to my community, all that stuff. And, you know, I wrote in manage your job search that I don’t believe in work life balance, you only have life and everybody needs to find what works for them in any given time of their lives but we all need to make our choices so that we optimize for what we need at the time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:27

Do you think it’s easier as a consultant versus, work both as a consultant outside and inside companies and like, I’m sure you have as well? And like, it’s a little bit different when you’re in a system that’s not also helping you make that decision, right? So, what do you think our companies are doing today to help people because ultimately, it is our decision, right? But companies can make it easier than employees to make that decision and to prioritize, you know, what’s important to them at any given moment.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 15:59

I’m going to take a little issue with that, I’m going to say, well, while companies might make that easier for employees, my experience is that very few managers actually think about that for their staff, right, for the people that they live and serve. Back when I was a manager inside organizations, I was, if I had to give myself a rate, I was a kind of 50/50 on extending enough empathy to the people I lived and served. I think I am better with that now, I certainly practiced a lot more but I think it’s really incumbent on people to say, I will work nine to five, return to six or eight to twelve and then I need a few hours with the kids and then I can come back to work. I had a job once as a manager, right, I was there from nine to five on the dot and sometimes only 4:30, depending on what my kids needed that day, right? So, and I went back to work after supper, I did a whole bunch of report generation, I call, I did phone screens for hiring people. I worked after supper but I had a very hard stop probably earlier than they wanted any manager to actually finish for the day but I had small children, I needed to do something like that. So, I did.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:43

That’s about discipline, though. Like, you have to really be disciplined about what you do, when you do it. Like, it goes back to writing too because in a sense, you know, you have to prioritize for yourself. So, it’s a two-way thing and what I’m getting, you know, from this is, sometimes, I’ve done this myself and I’ve seen others where like, we kind of put it on others and half of the work, we have to make sure that it’s on us in a sense, like I have to make that decision. I’m going to leave by 4:30 and I’m not going to make excuses but I also know that I have to finish stuff. So, I’m going to be disciplined about my time boxing and what I’m doing, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 18:26

Yeah, so I mean, I told all the people I lead, right? I was the manager for 17 people, that I explained to them, here’s my day, if you want me after, in this time, where I’m with my kids, you don’t get me. And this is back before we had ubiquitous cell phones. So, I gave my home phone number to the people in my team and I said me if you’re really need me, you can call me after 7:30 because husband is dealing with small children. I am back at work and if you really need me, if it cannot wait until the next day and I gave my boss my home phone number and my team and I think we all need to have boundaries about where we work, when we work, what we do. I’m not sure if this is discipline, maybe it is, back before I had the vertigo I worked out every single morning, starting at about 6:30 in the morning. My husband and I got up at six, I was in the gym by 6:30, I was done by nine-ish, 8:30 whatever. I had long workouts. So, especially when I was working from home as a consultant and I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed having the discipline of going to the gym every single morning, Monday through Friday, I had different workouts for different days because you know, that’s what you do. Yeah, but I happen to like my routines and I’m not sure if it’s discipline or routines but whatever it is, it works for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:21

You wrote with, I’m thinking about like remote and it is a lot of times, I guess, maybe harder. And I’m going back to the book that you wrote with Mark on remote and distributed teams, what are some of the tips that you can maybe give people, is it again just routines when it comes to working from home and it’s a little bit hard sometimes because you know, kids are at home, everybody’s at home, more probably distractions, I’m assuming? You don’t have, I know I struggle sometime of finding time for myself because as soon as I’m done here, I walk out. You were right there, where like, you know, you sometimes you had that ride or whatever it is in between, what are some of the tips they will give people to deal and be more maybe discipline or organized now that we’re mostly distributed and remote?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 21:12

So, the hours of overlap are so important and when Mark and I offered an hours of overlap chart and there’s Google Docs that people can also use for themselves. We only had it in ours and now what I think, I’m pretty sure that Mark and I both agree, I would not do hours, I would do either 20-minute segments or 30-minute segments because we are not, this is not normal, remote work. We are all at home and our kids are with us and I bet there are some parents out there who cannot wait for the start of the school, they are just done being home with their kids. I actually said to Mark; my husband as opposed to Mark Kilbv, my co-writer. I said to my husband and it’s a good thing our children are old and grown and out of the house as I’m not sure I would have made it. Yeah, I mean, I would have, we all would have gone nuts, this house is not big enough for four people all doing their own work. So, I think that anybody who’s home with children is just astonishing but to go back to how I would do it is, in 20- or 30-minute segments, you have the option of we will work together here, we will take a break here and we all need to do something else, we will be back at work together. So, the more you can create those little time boxes of when we will all be together and know in advance, then you can all commit to that. Which means that anybody with a really small child, that’s really hard but anybody with children who are able to manage themselves for 20 minutes at a time, this is still doable.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:16

It’s also easier to find maybe those smaller chunks and a lot of times you just reconnect, realign, you know or just, you know, from a communication standpoint, it’s probably a lot easier to do something that we’re doing here; video and probably screenshare rather than just you know, emails. To come back to your kids, you recently wrote about how you judge or how you judge if something is good or how good something is, you used the analogy with buying a dress for your second daughter, could you maybe talk about that I enjoyed reading that as well.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 23:55

Thank you, I’m so glad you’re enjoying the creative and adaptable life flow, thank you. I’m never sure how many people actually read that. So, a lot of mothers of the bride, mothers of the groom have these flowing long dresses and they look really lovely and chiffon flows directly into the brakes of my rollator. And I discovered that the hard way at my older daughter’s wedding. So, I have very different criteria for this dress than I had for the first dress. And I find that especially, if we think about that as an analogy to the products that we create, until we start to put something in front of our users, they don’t know what they really want and their criteria change. And so, we always hear at least I used to always hear this a lot in the old days of software development, you gave me what I asked for but it’s not when I need. And when we can change that and that’s all about changing the criteria. How do we get to the point where we can see what we really need?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:15

It’s all about learning that criteria evolves as you learn, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 25:19

Yeah. So, I learned at my older daughter’s wedding, I’m going to take that learning and change what I do for this next wedding. And I think a lot of us, we realize how differently we use technology now and how we could use it in the future? And can we be perfect at this, absolutely not? But we can be better at it and that means we need more deliverables, more assessment as we go and to be willing and open to changing that criteria.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:04

And that’s the O.P.I, I mean like, in a sense, it goes back to those outcomes, what are you trying to do and you know, in your instance, you’re trying to be comfortable and enjoy your daughter’s wedding as well as look good. So, whatever is going to get to that outcome. Maybe, to switch gears a little bit, another thing that I found interesting is you wrote about policies and procedures and how they increase friction and that’s really like, you know, a systemic. For me like, you talked about how over the years, we add policies, we add and maybe at some point, they made sense but a lot of times, you know, they’re outdated or you know, the context has changed. And as managers, as leaders, importance of understanding the system and understanding the policies within that system and evolving those policies or maybe loosen up those policies so they’re not, as you know, loosen up the guardrails, I guess. So, could you talk about that? Like, why did you write that? Like, what triggered that thought to write that article because I’m assuming you always have something that triggers an idea or thought?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 27:21

Yeah, several things, almost all of these, a lot of the policies I see are because somebody made a mistake and we want to, in effect, punish everybody else or we’re trying to manage risks of some sort. And the risks I see are often about money but the policies and the mistakes are often a banner of product development. So, I gave the example in there, a management sign up for deployment and this one, this was a client of mine, they had wrapped themselves so far around the axle with asking for signups that the managers no longer understood anything in the code. Right? So, the managers had to sign off on deployment but they didn’t know anything in the code. I mean, I asked these people, do you know about the internals? No, my people tell me what’s going on? Okay, fine. Yeah and because they had all these signups they needed a separate deployment team. So, the deployment team did not know what was in the code and if they did not deploy in the right order, which was the example I gave, then they did an upgrade to the database before they did all of the preparation for the upgrade to the database. They had no way to rollback. Well, no easy way to rollback and so all of this risk management with signups and a separate deployment team actually created the exact problem that they wanted to avoid. So, I said to them, what would it take for you to be comfortable with having a team, just choose any team at all? Deploy on Monday and then another team to deploy on Tuesday and another team to deploy on Wednesday, what would it take for you to be comfortable with that? They said well, a whole lot more testing. Okay? Maybe go to a staging server and tested there first, I said, okay, right, how can you get comfortable with going to production right away? What would it take? So, we talked about their continuous integration and then their pipeline to get to continuous delivery. And they’re not continuous in the sense of what a lot of other people think is continuous now, where any team can deploy at any time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:02

But it’s a step probably in the right direction. Yeah.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 30:05

Yeah, they do have automated deployment from 2am to 4am and then a whole bunch of testing as they go. And they always have somebody on call, I’m not so excited about that but nobody has to respond until 6am. So, they have a system that’s working better, that does allow for more trust and at some point, maybe they will just deploy during the day, I even hope that that happens. But I think it’s so hard for managers to trust when something goes wrong, everybody feels badly and instead of saying, how do we recover faster from that, that’s when they put all these policies and procedures in place.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:57

So, there’s that connection between policies and procedure, risk or recently, I saw somewhere written here, every agile approach manages certain risk, right? And then there’s trust, so policies and procedures, risks and trust. So, when it comes to managers, we just said, like, my people and my peeps got it, I don’t have to worry about, you know, this risk management in traditional sense. And from traditional project management was something that project manager was responsible for or maybe you would have a risk management team but it wasn’t really you know, what we talked about in agile words, like, the distributing and everybody’s responsible for risk, you know and everybody should be having their eyes open and, you know, when it comes to risk and we should have trust to make sure that we’re not putting policies in place. How have you seen this distribution of or taken like a lot of times, developers or I mean any developers, anybody on the scrum team, anybody that is doing the work has a difficult time accepting that they need to manage their own work or that they actually need to manage risk? So, how do you help people understand, I’m assuming that you agree that they should be thinking about risk, they should be thinking about manage their own work? How do we help people like that maybe see the value in managing risk and managing their own work?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 32:25

So, this is where thinking about outcomes versus outputs is so important. I am a huge fan of having a product goal, right, we are doing this product for these people, for these kinds of outcomes and if we always think about that as we create smaller stories and if we always think about that as we integrate performance and security into everything that we do, then we are much more likely to reach the outcomes that we want and manage risk as we proceed. So, this is a function of the project owner, that possibly the project managers and where management cannot take that away from the people on the team, right? If you delegate a problem and its outcomes to a team, right, it may be in the form of a product, maybe in the form of a service, then you cannot take it back. Right? That’s really important. You cannot be wishy washy about, yeah, you have the responsibility and you have the authority to do this and then on Friday afternoon, no, I’m not happy, I’m going to take it back. You’ve cannot do that as a manager in any management form, right? I don’t care if you’re called a scrum master or project manager or a people manager, you have to, once you offer the team, the problem and the outcomes, that’s the role of delegation, you cannot take it back at any time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:10

And that’s I think really important point which is hard, it also like it’s a mindset like, for we’ve been so like, conditioned over the years, right, to think certain way, to work certain way. One of those is that, hey, you know, I have a manager and they’re responsible for everything, I’m just going to go in, code or test or do my job and that’s obviously changing but like, I was teaching a class here at University of Maine and kids today and in general, like are not thinking the way or they’re not being conditioned in a way to think about it. They’re like, I’m a full stack developer, I’m a problem solver, I need to think about the customer, I should be talking to the customer and a lot of times, like, when I work with clients, especially like larger companies or government agencies, it’s like you know, I’m a back-end developer on this application, don’t ask me to do anything else. Right? So, little bit of that is I think conditioning and I know like, I’ve read that, you know, your earlier days or late 1970s, late 1980s, you worked on cross functional teams. So, what got me thinking is like, you know, like, what has changed when you reflect back? Like, what are the things look like then because a lot of times when I talk to people, they say, like, we’re agile back then and we’re doing some of this stuff. So, maybe could you take us down memory lane and talk about, like, you know, how some of this stuff back in 70s, 80s was, you know, kind of all about, had the same principles that we talk about. And at least to me, it’ll be interesting, because I’ve talked to people and they tell me stories about, like, you know, agile wasn’t, you know, born in 2001. This way of working was so, when you reflect what are some of the thoughts that come to mind?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 36:04

So, up until 1985, when the personal computer came out, we all had to share computers, right? We had either mainframes or mini computers. So, on my first job as well, we had a mainframe and there was the guy who did the JCL and we had key punch ladies, which was kind of crazy because in college I’d actually worked on a time-sharing operating system. So, we all had our own monitors. We had time slices on the computer itself but it was used to a keyboard not a key punch. Yeah, fine but there were no formal testers on our very large program in 1977. We had developers and we all looked at each other’s design, we all looked at each other’s code, we had religious design reviews, religious code reviews and religious testing as a team. Right? So, the team would go into the lab and say, is this working now? So, we did not have supposedly independent verification and validation, that worked out fairly well, I have a funny story of when I went to implement conference calling for a telephone system. I made it so that the general could only listen, everybody else talked as I flipped the bid, fine. He had a really good attitude about this because I said to him, I have not tested, this is the first time I’ve tested it. He said to me, go flip that bid the other way, fine but then, when I worked on a mini computer on analytical chemical instrumentation, there were seven or eight of us as in the software department, right, we had a department. We, again, revision of this code and design, we tested with each other and for each other because when I’m in development mode, I don’t see the same things is when I’m in testing mode and then I worked on machine vision systems on specific, on I guess, proprietary hardware. So, we all had access to the operating system, we all had access to all the libraries and we changed what we needed to do. I mean, we had to get, if we wanted to change the operating system, we really need to get permission from everybody else. Did we really wanted to change the OS? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. So, well we all work together as cross functional teams and I think for those first couple of machine vision companies on mini computers, I found that we worked in small chunks, where the chunks as small as they are now, no, except for me because I had learned about the 90% done schedule game in my first job at a school. I was 90% done for five weeks and well, I went to 91%, 92%,92 and a half percent but my boss finally took pity on me. He said would you like to know a secret advice? I said yes because I have no idea when this is going to be done and he told me that inch pebbles, right? When it’s your date task, either done or not done, does this sound like small stories to you? So, I started to use inch pebbles in 1977 because that’s when I knew I was totally broken on this particular project. When you use inch pebbles and rolling wave planning, it looks a lot like what we do as Agilers now, not exactly the same, I did not use test driven development, I was not that smart. In fact, I stared at it, for cleanroom just stare at it. So, I did not do everything back then but a lot of what we use now, I’ve been using since the 70s and the big change came in 1985 and 86 when the personal computer came up and that’s when managers thought for only four grand or five grands, I can buy each developer, his or her own computer and really focus down on what that developer needs to do. So, we had this interesting confluence of problems, project management software that was focused on resource efficiency, what is each person doing separately and a personal computer that allowed each person to focus down on their work?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:08

And that’s when they started measuring lines of code and all of that, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 41:13

Yeah, so that really changed, well it reinforced how managers thought about managing and how project managers thought about managing. I am convinced that that’s why the Agile Manifesto was born.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:32

To bring us back and to go back there. Yeah, that’s probably interesting.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 41:38

Yeah, 15 years of resource efficiency thinking was horrible.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:45

Assuming that we can get the you know, people confused with being busy developers, writing code and getting stuff done and if you look at it from that side, you can get easily confused. I wanted to maybe to switch a little bit here. I was interested in, I wanted to get your thoughts on your recently collaborative business agility Institute and their job number four title, reclaiming management. So, I wanted to get your thoughts first on, has management become a dirty word? Like, a lot of times people now use management and it’s like, you know, it’s a dirty word like, you know, management is bad or so I wanted to ask you first that and then maybe you could elaborate on what did you learn from being the editor and being involved in that project?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 42:37

So, I think that for too many Agilers, management is a dirty word because they use control; command and control as equivalency for management. A management’s job is not about command and control, a management’s job is to create the environment where everybody can succeed for a greater purpose, for that overarching goal, to answer the why, to answer the value that each person, each team, each products brings to the organization. So, management is all about the culture, creating and refining the culture that will create great products, right? If we have a culture and that people can really succeed in, they will create great products. So, management is all about the guardrails and constraints that allow people to do great work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:30

[not sure 43.31] in the system, in a sense, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 43:33

Yes. If managers are not meta about the work, about the system, the environment, the culture, then managers are probably commanding and controlling, not all that useful. So, and what I learned from this issue, so I’ve been the technical editor for Agileconnection.com for six years, several years ago and I really enjoyed it. I really love helping writers find their voice, show their gems, their thoughts that are really useful. So, I really enjoyed that but I don’t want to be a book doctor or any of that, that’s, no, that’s not for me. That’s why I offer writing workshops because I want people to be able to do that for themselves. Now, when I learned, I had such a good time with this issue, first of all, there were several other people I’ve wanted to invite for this issue that they’ve been doing really great work about agile management and I could not invite them. Evan Laybourn, the B.A.I leader, director, whatever he’s called said Johanna, you have to keep to a word count, fine. I will keep to my word count well, right if you have to, you really have to worry about the word count for the paper cut, yeah, fine. So, I had a strict word count, well, not strict but a boundary.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:09

Probably a range, yeah.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 45:12

A boundary. So, I had to really manage my desire for all the people I really wanted, that was a challenge. And I got some wonderful essays from amazing people who you might or might not know. So, let me see if I can find my, I’m going to find my…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:39

Yeah, I had that list. I actually took a look at I don’t know if I have it handy but I definitely looked at the articles and people on that list and I agree.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 45:51

Well, it’s a combination of consultants and practitioners, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:57

Which is always a good mix.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 45:59

Yeah, Kath, Doug Norton. Boris Gloger, Jeffrey Frederick, Barry O’Reilly, Gunter, Esther Derby and Douglas Squirrels are all consultants and well known, really smart people. And then there’s Shawn Flaherty and a case study by Barry O’Reilly and Steve Leist. So, we have a nice mixture of real practitioners, people who might speak about this but only in their kind of a context and a whole bunch of other people who have seen many instances of interesting management and Agility in Agile Management and so, I’m really happy about this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:52

It’s great and it’s coming out soon, right? It’s not out yet.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 46:57

It’s not out yet and all I know is when I was supposed to be done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:05

I think I’m assuming the next couple of months but yeah. You talked about? Yeah. We’ll let people know, yeah. I think so because the other report is coming. Yeah. So, one of the things that made me to come back to you said, you know, managers are responsible for creating a culture. How do they do that? What’s culture? I mean, like, we talked about culture and mindset and these there but nobody really, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly. So maybe, what is your definition of culture and how do managers and leaders help create a culture or maybe some of the ways?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 47:41

Yeah, I’ve adapted my mind definition from Shine because I find that shine has artifacts, values, assumptions, they all get me confused and they’re not concrete. So, the concrete thing is, there are three pieces of the concrete pieces of culture, there’s working people discuss, how do we treat each other and what do we reward? And of the of all three of those, what do we reward is the most important piece. If we say, we don’t want firefighting but we reward individual work, that looks like firefighting, then that’s what we reward. Right? And if we say, if we reward managers on their deliverables, managers are not going to extend trust to the people who need to do the work, they’re not going to delegate work to people in terms of outcomes, right, not problems and outcomes. So, the rewards drive so much of the culture and the rewards are so hard to change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:55

And that’s the interplay between the rewards and the system and behavior and then you know, what cap of culture we create, which is a lot of times, you know, especially in the organizations that most of us deal with, work with, where we have a lot of layers in hierarchy where, you know, people that can change the policies and those rewards, is small percentage of people in the organization. So, for those managers and leaders to be able to do that and to enable the type of culture that’s maybe healthier for today’s environment is key. And I think, you know, I’ve been looking in interviewing people from HR and I think HR and finance is finally catching up to understand what role they play in this movement and how they need to help organization change those policies and maybe loosen up the guardrails. So, people can have a little bit more flexibility in defining those policies. So, managers can do their job in a sense and leaders can do their job.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 50:07

Well, if we can get finance to move away from managing with cost accounting to managing by throughput, that will be a huge thing. They saw after we’ve worked in cost accounting terms. Yeah and that’s a problem, when you would change the whole dynamic for the project portfolio instead of asking people to predict when they would be done or how much it’s going to cost, they could change the conversation. That’s how much do we want to invest for now? What’s the cost of delay of not having this thing? Are there any other pieces that would help the entire organization if we did them to reduce the friction all through the organization? Right? And it would change the conversation and if we can get HR to drive moving away from personal, individual rewards, we still need some of that. And the teams are much more likely to know who is actually done a good job and who has not, right? In an actual team, there’s not a lot of room for hiding.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:19

Self-regulating?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 51:21

Yeah, it’s much more self-regulating and if we can move away from just individual rewards to a combination of rewards and based on outcomes, based on the team’s value, I think that we are much more likely to succeed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:42

Right. Maybe, you know, for our last topic here, the podcast is called Agile to Agility and I talked about, you know, how you know, last 20 years were a lot about just agile doing agile, I hope the next 20 years will be about agile and agility because those two go together. And I want to tie back another thing that you wrote, which I really like about finite and infinite games. When we look at our agile community and what has happened and what where we’re kind of going, what do you think, you know, are we playing the finite or infinite games? Where do you think agile is going? What are next maybe five years, ten years? I don’t know. You’ve seen it all. So, do you have any insights into where we might be going?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 52:35

So, I’ve got to tell you, I’m an eternal optimist. Right? So, I need to preface it with that. I really hope that we stop fighting about the frameworks. I find frameworks, well, some frameworks are sort of useful, some are not comprehensible to me. I will just stop there. And I find that, the more we think about how do we use all the information we have for better business outcomes and if we start to focus on business outcomes, we are much more likely to get agility. I actually am working with a client right now, it’s a small client so I’m not sure if this is generally kind of transferable to anybody else, where I said to them, don’t worry about the teams, the teams are smart, they will figure out, they want to use scrum, they want to use flow, doesn’t matter. Whenever they want to use, it’s totally going to be fine but what really matters is that the managers have this same overarching goal and that their job is to create business outcomes, not outputs. And so, if you get the managers to collaborate, that will enable you to get to business agility. They said, I know Johanna, right? This is six months ago, I don’t know, you kind of looking crazy over there. I said, what have you got to lose, right? Try for three months and see what happens, so I’ve been coaching them all this time. They had this enormous breakthrough, where and of course, I’m under NDA, I cannot talk about who the client is or where they are but they had this enormous breakthrough and the teams are collaborating in ways that they had never collaborated before because the managers all had the same overarching goal. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:48

All in alignments, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 54:50

Yeah, some teams use scrum, some teams use flow, there’s a couple of programs that are using safe that’s fine. As long as they deliver on a regular keenness for those overarching business outcomes, that’s what really matters and this company is having their best quarter ever.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:15

And that points to it, you know, I’ve talked to several top leaders and it’s the same message essentially, we got to start thinking for ourselves and start contextualizing. You won’t see any more like where, you know, you’ve probably been part of, you know, I have like, where, you know, a publicly traded company of you know, 1000s of people everybody gets trained in Scrum or Kanban but it’s one or the other. And, you know, everybody has to do it this way or safe or whatever it is and I think what we’re heading into is more of contextualizing things, not written so like you just explained. It’s like, you know, give things freedom to understand what their context is and design whatever works for them rather than limiting them to a specific framework or you know, way of working. So, very interesting maybe as a last thing, what message, what do you want to leave us with for the end?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 56:15

So, I would like you to think for agility, I would really like you to think about what business outcomes can I contribute to? And who do I need to work with to contribute to them, right? How can we work as a team of a cross functional product team, a team of managers at all levels to really focus on business outcomes, so that we deliver what we want so our customers are happy for agility? And I will try doing my marketing thing, I’m not very good at this. So, I’ll try anyway, I offer a quarterly writing workshop that really helps people get out of their heads and get words on paper. So, if people are interested in that, they should email me or contact me in some way.

Patricia Kong

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:48

Who is Patricia Kong?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 00:51

Oh, my goodness. Patricia Kong is her mother’s daughter, I would say it like that. I am a very curious person that is always looking and finding myself at different intersections in the road. I’ve been at scrum.org for almost 10 years. And I’m really interested in people’s and organization’s behavior and misbehavior and why things work the way they do. So naturally, what I’ve been focused on is thinking about how at scrum.org, agility can work or does not work at the organization level. And so, you and I have talked about things like leadership and culture and all those things. So we’re trying to mesh those together.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:40

And maybe just to go back even a little bit. Before the scrum.org journey, you didn’t know agile, you were in a different industry, finance, if I remember correctly.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 01:56

Yeah, I started. So I started out in the financial industry in investment services, and it’s usually, gosh, I don’t know, it’s kind of like when you’re Asian American first generation, it’s like, you’re supposed to go into medicine, you’re supposed to go into maybe be a lawyer but my family isn’t straight up, you come here, you go to school, you are going to study business. And I went that way. And so my culture and even the beginning professionally, was very much of a certain, a culture and understanding that was based off of authority.

And then I actually moved out into, it’s just this curiosity thing where it was, is this how it is? And when we talk to young people about the future of work and how these things, it’s really interesting, because I had a lot of knowledge in the financial industry, but I will look to develop skills. And so I was recruited into research firm. And then I really started to do marketing strategy and tech and started to work with really big one be blessed companies. And I found myself in France, in Paris for love. And had some different stuff there, but really started to work with startup firms. And then I think like everybody, we’re working on technology, building stuff that didn’t work back against the wall. Let’s do that agile stuff. And so now, I think people are going to know that I’m really old.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:30

We’re all getting older.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 03:33

I’m trying to get over it. It’s fine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:36

You took Ken’s class, right? How did you get introduced to Scrum and Agile?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 03:44

Well, when I was in France, and we were building this technology. And I was in the ad space, we started to say, we had teams in France, we had teams in US, we had teams in Eastern Europe, and nothing was working. So we started to say, and the CTO was like, hey let’s look at this. Let’s look at this agile stuff, there’s a better way of working for us to collaborate. And so that was my exposure really to Agile and Scrum, we start to think about those things and that was really the exposure to this notion of product ownership. But of course, I was doing it quite bad thing, right?

Everything is like we must do this, we’re going to do it this way and you guys are the developers and here it is. We had a team in the UK. And because of love, I came back again to the US. And what I found was myself starting to work at smaller and smaller, smaller organizations. And at that point from that org was still quite small and I met Ken and he was working on something called the continuous improvement framework. So I started to get masterclasses from him. And also as an employee, joined the organization, thinking about how to streamline business and starting to develop new stuff. And that’s really been, and he and I are very friendly, and his wife and he’s always challenging me to think. So it’s always, every conversation is a masterclass with him.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:21

And you must I mean, like also staying with one organization for a decade is also indicative of just, you have to enjoy it, you have to be challenged otherwise, it’s probably not intrinsically motivating. So what are maybe the things that you’ve learned from Ken and what are the things that keep you at scrum.org?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 05:47

Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. And there’s Ken, there’s also the community and people like yourself, when I talk about community, I’ll extend it, right? We’re not just talking about professional scrum trainers of Scrum at org. But I never specially with the way my personality, other than my marriage would think that I would have such a long relationship that I would be sitting at a company for 10 years, I even still think about it now. And I wouldn’t say that I’m locked in a golden cage, right? I think that that’s something, have you heard that term?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:26

No. I can only imagine.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 06:31

There you think about the golden cage. As I talk to you, there’s a rock wall behind me, but the golden cage is this notion like, if I were to think about, right? You’re working in an organization and you don’t really have a clear view of the goals of the organization and the vision. And you don’t really have a great environment with trust and safety and those things, what might keep you there. And it must be, and I’m thinking it’s like a golden cage, you must be getting paid really well, there’s something else that just motivates you. So I just think of when I think of that, I’m thinking of a two by two, thinking of a golden age. So I think it’s just there’s still a lot of interesting problems to solve that are worthwhile, and I have the autonomy to do it.

And even some of the things that I get to talk about in conversations with people like yourself, and people who are very experienced and different thought leaders. There’s things that are provoked and provocative of how we can help people address problems. Because the flip side of that is that, we are having conversations, trying to help teams, help organizations, help people become more professional. And yet, what we find is that there, I don’t know, if you see this, I feel so sad when I can have a conversation, it’s like, that’s the same conversation I had 10 years ago, right? And there’s still a lot of people to help. And so it’s that full spectrum that I’m trying to serve. And Scrum.org gives me a platform to do that, right? And scrum gives me a platform to do that agility.

And these chocolate, Scrum and Scrum values and all the things that we’re thinking about. And then when people are thinking about just the journey that I’ve had and the stuff that I’ve worked on scaling, agility, does that make sense? What are you doing? How do we make sure that we’re doing this for the reason? Can you get into that as an organization? So right now, what we’re looking at is, what are the principles that we might think about for enterprise agility? And how can we start to use something simple like that, where we might help Scrum Masters or Agile coaches and leaders, people who are leading agility in the organization to take those and start to think about what they’re doing, what they’re not doing, where they can improve?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:01

Yeah, and maybe just to stick on that, the principles based, I was talking to Jeff Watts yesterday, and he was talking about how he’s working with Dave Snowden and [inaudible 9:14] on this order, they’ve developed this organic agility framework. And they have five principles there to. Why do you think, I mean, what’s the connection between values, personal values, principles, and then the specific behaviors and actions? Because I think the reason I ask is I believe we’re moving towards almost going back to the basics, understanding the principles and how they influence our actions. So what is the maybe my question is why principles based in how are things emerging for you when you talk about scaling in principles-based frameworks?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 09:59

Yeah, and for us, it might be some principles that we’re using, like you said, to get back to something foundational to anchor to see if what we’re trying to help people with is making sense. And if they don’t, we throw them away, if there’s more we improver or don’t improve. And it’s not like we’re trying to rewrite the Agile Manifesto, it’s really trying to dilute it, but it’s to focus on it not dilute it. But there was something that I was, I’ve done a lot of work, obviously around evidence-based management. And that’s really an attempt to help people use evidence as suggestions for how they make decisions, right? And it’s really about empiricism. And when I think about that model, there were three aspects that really struck me and struck the team. When we thought about, why measurement matters? Why this notion of evidence matters?

And the three things that we were using that we asked people to think about, was when you’re thinking about agile, when you’re thinking about how you run business, how you work together, we found that there’s this really interesting relationship for people to think about between their goals, their measurements, and their behaviors, and the relationship between those three things, start to bring out the values that you’re talking about in a few different ways. So if you think about the relationships, okay, now we know we have measures, but what are those measures tied to? Are they tied to the goals? Are they not? Is that goal transparent? How will that act? How will the people behave as a reaction to that? And then this notion of. what does that actually represent from the values of an organization? So we’re trying to say of course you could have a really big consulting company that’s helped this company write out their vision and their values and stuff.

But for me, when I think about, we just look at these three things, what are the goals, measures and behaviors? Maybe you’re not capturing any measures. Maybe you’re not thinking about the behaviors. But the interesting thing is because the human part or the behavior part of it is certainly what drives a lot of the complexity, right? So you start to think about all those things and how it works together. And that’s driving us to think about are there other principles in terms of how that affects the organization start to get into to do more detailed things, right? So goals, how do we think about outcomes? What about the portfolio? How do we reward teams, not individuals? What is it in terms of activity? What’s is the reward system? What does it mean to be crossing dependencies? What does that drive into a system? So those are a lot of things just from…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:55

Yeah. There’s the interplay between goals, measurements and behaviors and the actions. One of the things that I always find companies and people struggling is defining business value. And even in classes that I do, I ask people, raise your hand if you know how your product owner or how your company defines business value. And it’s like 90% of the class doesn’t even know how value is defined. In the ABM, you kind of look at four key values areas. So could we maybe spend a little bit of time just looking at how do you define value? And do you see the same thing? Where we talk about delivering value yet nobody has any freaking clue what value is.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 13:45

Yeah. That’s one of the reasons that we created the four key value areas, or we’re trying to have this conversation and we’re still having it, right? This notion, somebody just referred it to as, what is that value gap? But it’s still, do you know what value means to understand what that gap means, right? Like, is that just the little space when you’re taking the T, like, the little gap there or the tube, the metro. So was years ago is just, oh, we got to do Agile, we’re going to scale, we’re going to use Scrum. And we’re going to do this and we’re doing this in pursuit of value. And it’s like, well, what does value mean for you guys? Or the other side of it was, hey our organization leaders say we need to do Agile, but we’re not actually sure they know what that means.

So we need to measure stuff and show them and that comes back into the value. So we start to think about value in different ways. We start to say, hey, at that point, there were three current value, where are you in the organization? What do you have, right? If you think about how venture capitalists invest or if you think about how you run your portfolio or business, right, what do you have now? And then we say, well, that’s interesting but all companies usually do that. What do we have? Who are we? And we said there must be something about the market or outside unrealized value. So what is it that the customers actually want? What are those outcomes that we’re trying to fulfill? What is the opportunity there? What is the satisfaction gap for the customer, right? And so if we think about that as market, then the other key value areas that we talk about are your time to market, right?

So the time to get feedback, everybody’s usually focusing there, people sometimes confuse that with just how fast we are. But this is really about time to learn all those things. And then there’s ability to innovate. So can you actually innovate or you being held back and when you take those four things, and start to look at them in two ways, one holistically, so when you make a decision, what else does it affect if you’re trying to increase your speed? If you run really fast, is that great or are you running in the wrong direction? That’s how I think about time driving current value. And then the other one is that, you must know if you have a pain point somewhere. So it could be like a lens, let’s look at your, you can’t release, takes you to 14 months. Let’s look at your time to [inaudible 16:15] and build to innovate and see what we can do and see if we can start to affect some change in the other area using experimentation hopefully.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:24

Yeah, and maybe those another thing that kind of interests me in ABM, as far as when it comes to experimentation. So how do you measure an effect of an experiment? I think it’s more and more becoming evident that we need to innovate and try things. So from your perspective of the end perspective, how do we measure the effect of an experiment? Or do we just run?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 16:55

No, I think we should just keep doing stuff. That’s the easiest part, right? Well, for us, it’s really thinking about just the goal, right? So it’s like, if I think the notion of an experiment is that you’ll know if it’s true or not, what would you look at? And so if you’re trying to test things, so for instance, let’s say, I’m trying to have a small goal of releasing a new class, I need to one because of the company where we’re talking about how we scale our training, I need to know of this material, what is good? But let’s say I’m going to focus on is a transferable, is a knowledge transferable, it’s very different to create something that I will teach, versus 300 people are going to teach, right? So I need to test that and they need to say, what will I know to see if this is the sexually transferable knowledge?

And so it’s really getting into the, why are you doing something? Or what are you trying to learn? And I think ultimately, what’s good about that is that if we can think about these different goals that we have, we’ll just use that language, then we can say you know what? That thing that we’re trying to pursue out there, and that North Star, it’s not valid anymore. And if we think about COVID, right? The things that we’re trying to do, it’s not the same anymore, we have to do things differently, might not be relevant anymore. And then of course, COVID was trying to go down, open up, change again, right? So there are so many things in terms of just understanding why we’re doing stuff is just a little bit more streamlined.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:30

Yeah. And I don’t know, I mean, this is something again, I find in many organizations, many clients that like going back to those goals, that everybody understands the goals or you talked about focusing on activities, outputs and outcomes and even impacts, right? What are those longer-term impacts that we’re looking for? What do you think when it comes to leadership, why is there maybe a gap or lack of knowledge around like just goal setting and understanding how to get people organized, or not organized but motivate young girls, because people that I’ve talked to a lot of times are so disengaged, because they don’t really understand what the goals are, and what those goals are just delivered this, which would be some type of output. And what are you doing, how does ABM help with that? Because I think that’s one of the key when it comes to leadership, product ownership, whatever you want to classify it as we struggled to help people understand the goals?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 19:40

Yeah, there’s so many layers in there and your question was long enough. My first sarcastic answer will be softened now whereas I think is it might just be sometimes because I’ve been in a golden cage. You just got to protect your territory and your little golden egg kind of thing. But I think there’s a few things, which is, when we use, like I said before, when you’re just talking about evidence, it’s kind of as a product owner, I should be paying attention to some of the things that work or don’t work and be able to say that just because even something for instance, it’s like, we have, we’re really successful, we’re setting up future teams, future set teams, that assumes that the future should live forever what I mean? Like, you start to think things that are the behavior that starts to get in there.

The other notion is, is that there’s this whole notion of complexity in there. And when you’re talking, I was talking to a consultant, and he was saying you know what? I hated it when I was a project owner. And I had to try to predict these things, because we could put in [inaudible 20:53] future A, point in future B, nobody uses them put in feature C. Now everybody’s using it, right? There’s just what experiments are you going to try to run, why? And I think leadership when you’re talking about activities, outputs and outcomes, when we start to think about outcomes, and why somebody else is using or is buying our product. It will drive us to think and act in different ways.

And then you can use that for good or bad, right? And that brings up for me when I think about societal impact. So think about Amazon, how they’ve been driving their business during COVID and all these things. Yes because people want to buy things easily, they want it to come to their house, they don’t want to have to go to the store and all these things. And then you see like bass was going to the moon and a cowboy hat and he’s like, Thank you. You paid for all this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:45

But somebody benefited from this whole situation.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 21:47

Yeah. And I think that that’s where we’re starting to see. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with Colada Perez, and how she talks about the different pivots in time. But there’s two things and we’re starting to see it line up right now and I think COVID in the economy kind of drove it out is that, when we start to look at companies and leadership, employees and people are starting to say I have beliefs and I have a value system. Do you support that? And what is your organization trying to do to support the things that I believe in? and if you don’t, then I have another option. And there’s all these other different things that have started to come up where leader start need to start to think about things because people have more options where they work.

How do they work? Should they work for themselves? And we’ve started to see fun things now where people can still do good work from anywhere. And they will make those choices or at least they’ll feel dirty about it if they buy from a company or work with somebody they don’t want to. And eventually somebody is going to hear about that. So it’s really interesting, this dynamic, they’re looking at how can organizations and leaders start to think about the societal impact that they’re having on and what that means for us as a whole society. So there’s this whole mindset shift from not just the fixed mindset to the growth mindset, which is about the individual. But this beneficial mindset of what I do, hopefully helps somebody else.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:23

Well, it’s also like, I think shifting in almost influencing the organization, it used to be where stockholders were the major group that was influencing the direction of the organization, and employees just had to suck it up and just do whatever the company did. Now, the shift is, like you said, more and more people have opportunity to pick and choose. And since we acknowledge work, people or companies work the smartest people in their organization.

So those strategic goals, maybe to go back to the key elements of ABM and maybe explore the goal section, like those strategic goals are now impacted or influenced by employees as well. Could you think of a strategic so you have strategic goals, intermediate goals, intermediate tactics, tactical goals? In what ways, for instance, maybe we can take some that work or some, in what ways are strategic goals influenced by the employees or partners or people that have?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 24:36

Yeah, well, this is too easy because, for us, we’re a mission-based organization. So we’re always trying to figure out what is it outside of the White Tower that we’re trying to work on. And for us, let’s just talk about enterprise and agility and it’s just there’s been an interesting thing, transparently of seeing sometimes coaches and consultants. So we have, we work with a network companies or work with professional scrum trainers, our courseware is really collaborated on the feedback that we get from trainers who are teaching in the field to provide a very defined and updated and consistent experience. And so at least from the enterprise level, there’s two things that are interesting, because there’s people actually work with organizations. This is the wall that I keep hitting, same wall and I engage in, my colleagues engaged with organizations, and we work with other companies, is the same wall. So we’re trying to solve that.

And then what we see at the same time is that we’re doing, that we might have trainers and consultants who really only were at that point, comfortable working or only wanted to work at the team level, they’re starting to naturally work and it becomes your great coach, somebody wants to talk to you, you’re working with larger organizations. But the strategic goal that at least I’ve been thinking about for enterprise stuff that we work on is how do you stop zombie transformations? That’s a thing. You know what I mean? Like the lipstick on a [inaudible 26:18]? Or what is it that you can actually use? How do we actually make that valuable for organizations so that it’s not just lip service? So that whole term of zombies scrum or zombie transformations, that’s the thing that we’re looking to do.

And it’s the course that’s around evidence-based management is one attempt, evidence-based management in itself is just one attempt. We tested that and when you talk about breaking that into smaller goals, we released an assessment certification, didn’t mark it, it just wanted to see what would happen and start to see what do people struggle with. So we have a lot of that firsthand data about what people struggle with. And interesting thing around product ownership is the area when I would just see, because we have different areas in our assessments of where people perform really well, and they don’t. And product owner, for the people that take that test, the last time I checked, it was around this notion of value, and value management. And that not was interesting, because I think in the PSM one that we have, the worst performing session was on just the scrum framework. There’s a lot of interesting things there that start to drive those conversations.

But if you want to bring it back even to the goal, sometimes what we find is for a larger organization, it’s hard to have that conversation and find out about the goals. That’s been easier in smaller companies as you would probably know, you know, can we have that goal conversation and see what experiments we need to run? That becomes a lot easier in a larger organization where there’s a lot of different factors, it might just say, where do you hurt the most, and then start to evolve from the goals because now especially where we’re just saying, we need to be smarter about what we do with our time, where we invest our money, where invest our energy as people and as organizations, the conversation makes more sense around ABM. And we can say, well, your goals are this. So what are you going to do when we think about weapon capacity? What do we want to invest in? And so that’s been interesting, especially, what are the ideas that the teams can come up with to try reach those goals?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:34

Yeah, and another thing that I see that’s tied to this is like when you have organization that’s all-in silos and you have a specific goals like an enterprise level, then at some point, the interests start conflicting, if you have multiple goals, and if you don’t have that, Northstar. So that alignment around tactical goals and how they align to intermediate goals to how they align to bigger goals, a lot of times can be messed up just by how we are structured. Do you see that? And maybe you know some of the Agile frameworks help with that, or don’t help with that.

Because I mean, last five years or 10 years has been all about scaling frameworks. And the more people that I talk to, the more people are saying, we’re moving away, not necessarily quickly, but we’re going to move away from frameworks. And it’s going to go back to understanding those fundamental principles, and then contextualize and creating frameworks that are specific to our need, current needs. Do you see Nexus, Safe and all these other frameworks living on and getting more and more popular? Or do you think what you alluded to earlier, like, we’re going to see a little bit more flexibility in the framework stem cells or back to the principles? Any thoughts on that?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 30:05

Gosh, you’re going to share your thoughts.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:08

Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, if you think about it and we want to be honest, most people that are doing scrum are not doing Scrum. Most people trying to do any of the scaling frameworks, don’t know what the heck they’re doing. So it’s almost I use the analogy of a recipe. It’s great, recipe and I don’t know, if I told you like my New England clam chowder recipe, in a sense, it can look really nice and you can be very excited about that chowder. But if you don’t have all the ingredients, and you’ve never cooked anything or improvised then what are the chances that you’ll mess up? And I think that’s what we do, we take people through classes or through assessments, and we assume that they understand the recipe.

But when the ingredients change, they don’t know what to do. So imagine that if it’s with Scrum, which is pretty lightweight framework, when you start talking about scaling frameworks and my own experience, as a coach and consultant is name a company that has successfully implemented these frameworks by the book if they didn’t have chefs, and some really experienced cooks in their organization to contextualize those frameworks. So my thought is that we’re going to need to build that capability inside organizations to come up with frameworks and maintain frameworks or context specific, rather than what we’ve seen over the last years is…

Speaker: Patricia Kong 31:52

You see that something like here’s what works for us and Scrum and we’ll take the pieces that or do you think that there’s always just, this is the basic part that you need to keep.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:04

I think you’re always going to go, this is the basic part. So like understanding parasitism understanding like the, but if you don’t even have the basic parts, and a lot of times even when for instance, if you talk about government agencies, they don’t even have the basic stuff. So how do we even help them move from very rigid structure, even if you ask them have cross functional teams, they’re going to say, well, we can restructure to have cross functional teams. So I think it’s harder but I don’t know, if we want to put a mirror to ourselves as a community.

Look at what we’ve created, we’ve created something, a movement that’s very popular but not very successful in my opinion. It’s successful if we want to rate it against them, compare it to what was before, yes, but boring promises versus what it actually does, in my opinion, including going back to evidence based management or just like understanding, how do we know that we’re improving? Most organizations don’t, they focus, like you said, on those activities and outputs, they don’t even… Yeah, so that’s my thought. I don’t know if you agree or disagree.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 33:25

No, there’s so many in there. So I don’t know, if I mentioned this to you. But EBM came the crux of this whole notion of EBM. Because I remember I said I was thinking about continuous improvement, right? It came out of, we have to scale, we’re going to scale agility, we’re going to $2 million, roll up that chain training, and we’re saying, hey, hold up. Do you know that if that works for you, why don’t you find some evidence that it’s actually working how to use it. And that’s actually how that came up. And this very people talk about its super, it can get very theoretical about how we’re working on things in EBM, and you just talk about empiricism, the KBAs. But when you think about when I’ve seen different implementations of EBM, I don’t care what you’re using, it just show me that you’re trying and that you’re getting better.

And that you have a goal and you understand why you’re working on it. Is to me what is relevant, and you’ll identify opportunities, and then you make a decision whether you should pursue that opportunity and or not, right? So when you talk about just in a product equality gap, or if you talk about, there’s this whole new market we want to pursue or there’s something that there’s this opportunity for people in virtual training, why would they do that? But to get back what you’re talking about this getting back, I think the words will change but hopefully, the things that the spirit of the things that we’re trying to help organizations really accelerate and sustain will stay. So even if you think about that goals, measurements, behaviors, when people think about that relationship there, right?

So these are just words, they are concepts, they are manmade concepts, people-made concepts, the whole notion and how that works at your organization, and what would we have to do to try to cultivate the culture that we want, maybe it’s just that. What I love about the scrum framework is that it is simple, is complex, and that it lives on values. But then we start to say things like values, all the commitment, and it becomes crap, because people are saying, what does that really mean? And how are you demonstrating it? And how can we make that real? And for my experience, it’s just working together as a team, right? If we’re saying that the teams are actually the people who are responsible, I don’t want to get into words, but who create value, that we can start to look at things maybe a little bit differently.

And it’s not about you know, there’s types of different behaviors and personalities that I’ve noticed where it’s just like, I don’t really like this leadership stuff, it’s just too theoretical, and I don’t understand it. Whereas I prefer this book in this way of thinking, because it tells me exactly what I need to do. And there’s those different types of mindsets, even of leaders that are coming up into the management world, I see that people around me and it seems that they get these different pointers, and then they start to say, okay, now I understand where that’s starting to express itself and how I have to start thinking about the behaviors that I’m causing to happen or not happen. And then or in a team, let’s just say.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:04

It’s interesting, I think the COVID, I don’t know who said it, I was talking to somebody and they said the COVID created the uncertainty impression in organization just at the same time, there always has been the I was [inaudible 37:23] leadership, business agility, and they said that COVID has created essentially single disruption across all industries in a short period. And COVID if you think about it has impacted what we’ve done and has forced people to look at agile, the community that we’re part of, and said, what have we done? How are we really helping people with the agility? And I don’t know when you think about resilient organizations, how do you think maybe COVID or we talk about developing capabilities, what are your thoughts on the connection between COVID, how it’s impacted how we work?

We talked before we started this [inaudible 38:23] and burnout, developing capabilities, is one of the key things, how do we develop the capability for organizations to deal with complexity? So as far as COVID, in what ways has a force us to rethink our society? What are our I guess blind spots? Because I think, at least forced me to think about mine. It opened my eyes to certain things that I wasn’t aware of, because I was an outer pilot. And one of those things is that, we have to do a better job as a community, helping organizations not just going and get the money. Look at the diversity part. Look at the burnout part. Look at the everything like where before, I wasn’t really thinking about as much and now I’m more conscious, I guess about it. So maybe what are the things that COVID forced you to rethink? And what do you think have forced us as a society and community?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 39:37

Yeah, good for you too. I think there’s I don’t know what stage I’m at, like, just from a personal level because it’s like COVID then it’s like party. Then it’s like freedom, then it’s like Just kidding. But the notion…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:55

I feel that’s going to be [inaudible 39:56] for next couple of years, just messing with us.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 40:01

Yeah, this is an interesting one. And I don’t say this lightheartedly, but it’s certainly a little bit of this notion of war, something that affects something globally. I think that COVID, we talked about this previously, it’s this notion, like you said, you brought up a lot of points actually, that I want to make sure your listeners are going to start to pull apart too, is this notion that there was around leadership and management. So one of the things that came up is people were saying you know what? We need to be more careful about how we’re doing stuff, and who want to be more agile and want to make this better, the same questions still came up? How do we measure the performance? How do we know we’re actually being successful? What are we trying to pursue?

Can we change faster, what’s holding us back? So that and really having an outcome conversation has been something that’s really resonated and been helpful, and I’m not talking about any specific process that you have to follow. It’s just having that so that when you are thinking about and we’re working in remote environment, and by the way we’re seeing that people can do great work remotely, is that we’re seeing things like, okay, well, if we’re working on these outcomes, and we’re not just trying to produce widgets anymore, we now have an opportunity to work together on something. We understand from the team level what success looks like, and I can understand what progress toward that success looks like. And now when you’re in a middle manager role, what we’re seeing in companies is that they have the ability to say, well, if they’re not being managed on budgets, and we’re trying to reach for this outcome, I don’t need to manage the same way that I used to, right? There’s a relief that we saw. And so..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:59

I think there’s also trust. It feel like letting go a lot of times helps develop that trust or indicates the trust, because if I was unsure, and I was more involved as a manager, now, I’m seeing almost evidence base, that things can operate by themselves. Then I’m indicating that I trust you. I don’t have to be so hands on as a manager.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 42:23

Yeah, I think it’s kind of, because it becomes out of your control maybe, but there’s this thing, and maybe it happens internally, but to build trust you needs to go through some conflict. So there’s been maybe some internal conflict, or there’s kind of a fight against if it’s something that happens, and then you pivot and that conflict might be COVID here, but there’s some sort of you know that the conflict we can get through that and still be okay, that’s what builds trust. And so it’s acquired, and then what we would see, especially when you talk about the trust or just the I’m in it, I’m along for the ride, is that we see from an executive leadership standpoint, is that they said, we’re now able to look at information and it’s not just lines and graphs and colors.

That’s the status of a project, I’m able to look and understand the status of my product of what I’m trying to do, we need to do this quickly and we need to do this effectively. And if it doesn’t work, we need to try something out again. So this is already natural when there’s heat on you. The other thing, I think that COVID, not just COVID, think about all the other things that came up because we were in COVID, we’re staring at our phones, a lot of stuff happening in the US and around the world. We’re now very much engaged in different issues. So when we look at social and civil issues, the thing that you brought around diversity inclusion is really interesting, because now we’re talking about the capabilities. And is there…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:51

An innovation because I think with diversity and inclusion, I think, at least based on what I’ve seen, personally, you get more innovative because you’re getting more perspectives, you’re getting more…

Speaker: Patricia Kong 44:07

Exactly. Yeah on a basic level, you could just say, these people are really different, and they’re going to fight. However, if they understand that they’re trying to creatively come up with something, what you do is you’ve gotten different perspectives, hopefully they create something that’s better. And by the way, now, a person that I never would have befriended before or worked with before I have the opportunity. I’ve have seen to be honest there’s like, oh, this whole diversity and inclusion thing, it’s harder for me to get a job or we have to recruit more people, but there’s just been, there’s really the success of your own teams where we see when there’s diversity there and diversity of thought.

And that kind of ties back into now this notion of, what is our social and civil obligation? I now have a choice because COVID has made, you can literally there’s some industries where you can go out there, get a job and ask for 20% more, because there’s just not a lot of people wanting to work in certain jobs, or they just have a lot of choice. And so what a company stands for is really interesting. And the question that I think HR leaders and senior leadership is thinking about is, what is that boundary? How do we at least make sure that people understand what we stand for and employees can engage, opt in or out? And I think the other thing is around mental health.

I was probably in a different place six, eight months ago, where I just felt really down. I didn’t know what was going on. It’s just the notion of our work or talking to a wall all day or talking to a screen, doing conferences, where it’s just like, I don’t have that interaction. That was draining on me because of my personality but the thing around mental health, and what do we do as teams to support because we have a goal that we’re trying to achieve? And I want to support you so that we can work together toward those things?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:59

Yeah, and some something that maybe just as we’re getting closer here, I do want to highlight in a sense, and this is kind of how, before in the focus, we started the conversation, how there’s more focus on what the employees want. And they have more influence. It used to be where company would say we’re all about employees and still kind of cadence to the stockholders. I feel like this is not the same thing where it’s mostly talk, like, oh, we need to talk about diversity, we’re getting pressure on diversity, we were getting pressure about thinking a little bit more about mental health and other things when it comes to employees, but it’s mostly just to comply with the pressures that are creating, I think, probably what we’ll see more and more out hoping that companies do really mean it.

They’re not just doing to comply with the pressures, but they actually become innovative, about how do we and understand that the essence of complexity that inclusion and diversity is key to complexity, right? Same thing is understanding that if we don’t take care of our employees, not just mental health, well as a whole being that we’re not going to have healthy organization. So I hope that’s the case that, again, I’m seeing more of a talk rather than true belief around. But I don’t know what your thoughts are on that. And maybe with the last couple of minutes that we have, what would you maybe your thoughts on my comment there? And what would you like to leave us with? What is a message that you would like to leave the audience with?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 47:43

Yes. I think that it’s kind of like the talk is cheap thing. And people talk about it a lot. And they talk about how they’re trying to be socially aware and their understanding. And we have this now fancy mission statement around our diversity, inclusion beliefs, but it’s kind of not only what are you doing, but why are you doing it and what are you hoping to learn? And do you bring in expertise? In the same way we might have agile experts, there are people out there who’ve done a lot of studies and work and what are you trying to do to give back if that’s what your company believes in. But when people think about their employees, and I’ll close it in this way, is that I used to think a lot about employees as the asset into the organization, there’s a lot of knowledge there. And when I think about that from a key value here in EBM, it’s about the current value for you. And I think that organizations are probably already facing this or thinking about that. But if you were to flip the model on its head and say, when we think about the future of work, and the future of knowledge work, and all these different things, what might that look like? What experiences do we have to provide?

Are our children going to be going to university or is there something else that they’re learning on the field? Those are interesting things to think about to see if people are actually able to practice what they’re preaching, not only through a fancy certification in a class, but actually through the work they’re doing and how they express themselves. And the way that I think that that calls out on why it’s really important to an organization because I think that and some of my colleagues, you choose that we’ve had this conversation about employees in the relationship to innovation. So employees are not only the acid in the organization, there’s value that great people talk about that old time, value value, value. But it is so because of the ability to innovate and how employees can be great at that or not, because of what’s driven around artificially around them. They’re multitasking, they’re unhappy, mental health, the environment that’s around them. So I would think about employees in relation to innovation and What are the pros, the cons? What inhibits that? What motivates that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:06

Yeah. I think we have to like I was recently talking to people at Scrum Alliance, and I don’t know what it is at Scrum.org and other but we need to use our own back rule too from practicing what we preach well, so to look at what we talk about, including but when you look, at least when I look at Scrum Alliance and diversity and all of that, it’s not what we most of us talk about and also, Scrum Alliance recently started focusing on education in schools, if we want to change the world of work, how are we actually helping people die or go into the workforce understand this stuff. So I see some promising stuff that as a community doing, and it’ll be interesting to reflect maybe in a few years to see how has COVID really forced us to reinvent maybe or innovate, is we’re telling other people, you should innovate in these other things. Let’s see how we’re doing as a community.

Speaker: Patricia Kong 51:10

We have to really start to I think, challenge yourself.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:15

Do you feel though maybe, just as last thing, I’m interested, do you feel like we’re just reaching a lot and not implementing ourselves? So do you think it’s maybe a mix? Because a lot of times, I feel like anything else you do in life, you feel like even when I tell certain things to my son, I’m telling him, but I’m not doing that?

Speaker: Patricia Kong 51:37

Well, I think you’re thinking about something you might have answered your own question. I don’t know it’s a week. But can we always do better? I think we can always start to do it. Because there is some people who are trying to help and whatever path you might have to take to get that foot in the door to help, whatever. And if it’s more of a get rich scheme, and you’ve told yourself a story now, believe it, challenge yourself to think about why sometimes at least from some of the companies and people I talked to, Agile has become a dirty word. What’s going on there and how we contributed to that. And also I think about, what is the work that we need to do on ourselves? We talk about coaching, coaching, coaching, do we get that coaching for ourselves? Do we experience what it’s like to be given feedback? That kind of stuff. Nobody generally wants to be like, oh, you’re totally messed up you spent, I don’t know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:43

Or do we want to be like, yeah, that’s really good way to I think end this. I’d be willing to get the feedback and get the coaching and help the word down other people’s…

Speaker: Patricia Kong 52:57

Yeah. That’s the skin, the thick skin and then maybe if we know that then we can be more understanding when we work with others.

Evan Leybourn

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 00:55

What is your definition of business agility and how is it different than maybe how it’s been described in the past?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 01:04

Yeah, so our definition is fairly straightforward. Business agility is the set of organizational capabilities, behaviors and ways of working that affords your business, the freedom, the flexibility and the resilience to achieve its purpose no matter what the future brings. There’s a couple of elements in that definition. It’s a set of organizational capabilities and behaviors. It’s not a framework, it’s not something necessarily that you do. The behaviors are how you act and the capabilities is what you is… by acting in a certain way, you create capabilities, new capabilities for your organization. When we talk about affording your business the freedom, flexibility, and resilience to achieve its purpose, you don’t have to be a proprietary company, you can be a not for profit, you can be a government organization, you have a reason to exist. Now, I’ll call upon another author, Frederic Laloux. Frederick wrote about teal organizations for fairly the top end of business agility. Let’s think of it that way. But in it, he says, profits is like the air, you do not live to breathe, but you do need to breathe in order to live. Now, this is quite important. Your organization has a purpose. And that purpose is not to make money. Money, certainly for a commercial organization, is an indicator that you are achieving your purpose, but it is not the purpose in and of itself. So organizations that understand what their purpose is are able to pivot and adapt, they’re able to respond to global crises like a global pandemic, in order to achieve that purpose, even when everything they’ve done in the past is no longer true. Which is then those last six words, no matter what the future brings. And this is where, this is the agility part here. Because I don’t know what the future is going to hold. I can’t plan for it. And I don’t. Right now, the business agility Institute, we’re organizing a physical conference in New York City in March. And…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 03:52

Hopefully, it’s going to be a little bit different than the last time you guys…

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 03:57

Absolutely. In 2020, we held this conference in March and I literally had to stand on stage on that Wednesday, I think it was the 11th and say the World Health Organization has just declared a pandemic. But we’re planning a physical conference in March. All right. But all right, we consider ourselves to be an agile organization. We know that but, I don’t know when people are going to be listening to this, but it’s currently July, right? So we have about nine months. Anything could happen. Right now we’ve got the Delta variants, maybe we get a gamma variant and Iota variant, something that’s going to impact us. Maybe people just refuse to go back to work. It’s like, nope, no one’s gonna go face to face. Or maybe everyone’s just so sick and tired of being locked down that is like, a chance to meet all my friends face to face again? I haven’t done that in two years! And maybe we’ll sell out within a week. We don’t know. But the truth is, we don’t need to know because as an agile organization, we have the, we know how to adapt our strategy plans based on an uncertain future. So we have multiple real options open to us and there’s certain thresholds and milestones are met, we trigger one set of options versus another. So there’s always that agility is how you survive uncertainty. And COVID is a bad example. Because it’s so easy to point to COVID and go COVID makes an uncertain future. And yeah, that’s true. But it’s too easy. The truth is, we’ve always been or had uncertain futures. The truth is that while COVID is at a scale that most organizations and basically most industries have never seen or certainly haven’t seen since like the last 40, 50 years, this kind of… before that, we’ve had the global financial crisis, we’ve had wars and civil unrest, we’ve had currency crashes and major industrial disruptions. So uncertainty is just a fact of business.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 06:33

Way of life, yea.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 06:35

It’s a way of life. So COVID, I don’t like using COVID because it’s too easy. And it makes people think that, oh, once COVID is over, we’ll just go back to normal. No! There is no normal, there’s never been a normal. Your company is going to be disrupted, right? COVID just disrupted everyone at the same time. That’s the only difference. All right? But your company is going to be disrupted again in the next 10 years, I don’t know where, I don’t know how, you don’t know where and you don’t know how. All you know is that you have or need to have the ability to respond, not react, to respond to whatever the future brings. And that’s business agility.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 07:15

And that like maybe to just stick on that a little bit because I think it’s a really good example. And it starts with you, right, as a leader, to embrace the uncertainty rather than, like, what we a lot of times do is lie to ourselves that, you know, there is certainty. So what you just described is, I think, is a good example of a leader or somebody saying, things are uncertain and I have to look at the world as uncertain and be able to understand what my options are and deal with those options rather than run from those options. You know, so I think there’s a lot of data, there’s a lot of especially over the last five years that indicates towards including Laloux, depending on leader and their perspective and cognitive capacity, there is high correlation to how you know the organization is agile or tolerant towards you know, that uncertainty. So what are your thoughts on that relationship between the individual leader and their mindset and organizational agility or business agility?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 08:30

So, I may give you two answers and they might seem a little contradictory, but they’re not. So the first is, for those who don’t know about the business agility Institute, we are a research and advocacy organization. We’re not consultancy, we don’t do training, we’re funded by our members. We’re a membership organization. But as a research organization, we have currently 14 research teams, exploring everything from the relationship between diversity, equity and inclusion and agility, the relationship between company performance and agility, looking at different, we have one paper coming out called deliberation of leadership, that is talking about the necessity and it’s looking at literature around the link between power and leadership and the need to disconnect that in many cases. But our main publication, the one that everyone knows about is the business agility report. We publish that once a year, we’re actually doing the data analysis for 2021 right now. And in the business agility report, leadership and various aspects of leadership is identified as the top challenge and has been identified as the top challenge to adopting business agility really much since the beginning of every year. Now, this comes in many flavors, sometimes it’s leadership buy in, getting them to actually recognize the need and the importance of this. Sometimes it’s around change management, communicating the need for agility, communicate the need for change. And sometimes it can come down to the generic culture and mindset, which is very much expressed by some of those leaders. Now, in my own personal experience, as I said at the beginning, I was a consultant for a long time, I would say that the top executives get it, people who run companies are exposed to that uncertainty every single day and it’s you can’t become a top executive without having an agile mindset. Even if you don’t have an agile organization and let’s face it, most don’t, those executives have a natural agility, it’s why they’re successful at that level. What we’re talking about those, is sometimes called the frozen middle, those layers, C minus three, down to like, division heads or team or like section heads. These folks are, they exist in a world of process, they exist in a world that is certain or at least the systems pretend that things are certain. So when ambiguity and uncertainty is exposed to them, it’s actually a problem because they’re not ready for it. And so when a transformation comes through, because you want an organization that can adapt, that can respond, you’re hitting against the training, and sometimes decades of experience that says, hey…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 12:31

Conditioning, that gives the conditioning.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 12:35

It’s like Pavlovian training. The truth is the uncertainty has always been there, the organizational momentum and inertia has just kind of hidden it but that’s not good enough anymore because the markets are moving so fast. We’re in a point now where in economics is a concept called information asymmetry. And it boils, and any economists who are listening, I’m very sorry, but very simply, too simply there is a disconnect in the information available or known to two parties. And that disconnect, right, the person with the most information controls the price. Sales has operated for centuries, I’ll just say decades, but forever on information asymmetry; the seller knows more than the buyer. For one of the first times in history, that is no longer true. As a consumer, as a buyer, you have so much information at your fingertips. There is no excuse for you as a buyer not to know more than the person that you’re buying from. And so information asymmetry is at best now equalized, at worst flipped. So your consumers and your customers know more about your business and how and what you’re selling, than often your own sales people. And this is a problem. No, it’s not a problem; this is an opportunity. This is a challenge. And because of this, this is part of the reason why disruption is so rife, it’s why industries are so ripe for disruption because a new company who can address a customer need better and faster than an established company can completely cannibalize the market base of an existing company. And that’s information asymmetry in action and that’s agility, oh, sorry and that’s disruption in action and that’s why we need agility. And it’s the leaders who if they do not have the skill, and it is a skill, it can be learned; if they do not have the skill to create an agile organization and to lead an agile organization, then the company will fail, maybe not today, but definitely within the next five or ten years.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 15:00

Yeah, so maybe just to expand on that the third in last years and I’m assuming there was similar silos, and I’m assuming silos are tightly tied to the organizational architecture, business architecture and you know, as you were talking and referencing like how things evolve, like, I was recently re-watching in a class, Gary Hamel talking about like, you know, at the beginning of the last century, there was, you know, an average size of a company was four people. Right? And, you know, like, over the last 100 years, especially last probably, you know, 40, 50 years, we’ve tried to scale things up and structure things. And you could say sometimes it worked, but like it’s definitely not working in the context of dealing with that uncertainty and Volker world that I guess, not a guess but we’re in. So organizational structure, governance, architecture, the other part of the of the coin I’m assuming, what are you seeing in that space and what needs to change?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 16:20

Yeah, let me go back to an earlier question. What is business agility? And let me add something to that before I answer the question you just asked because I’m gonna answer what business agility is not. Business agility is not agile business, is not agile outside IT. This was actually the mistake I first made when I got into this space. So in 2008, as I mentioned, I was a director in the Australian public service. I wasn’t a great director. I was a good team leader, I was a good project manager but I’d never run whole of government program. I was never responsible for a section. So it was an entirely new skill set and one I’d never learnt. So it’s an entire another story as to how [cross-talking 17:15]

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 17:16

Peter principle right?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 17:18

Yeah, no. It definitely was the Peter Principle; I got promoted to my level and competence. And it took a very good leader above me to point out my arrogance and the assumptions and get me to look at how to be better. And so one of the things I did was I looked at agile because remember, I’ve been using agile as a developer and as a team leader, as project manager since 2003. So I looked at that and it’s like the problems I’m facing as a director are the same class of problems I face as developer right? Coordination, cooperation, uncertainty, getting groups of people to actually develop a product quickly and of quality, could the same principles that I used in an agile space work in a business setting? Now the answer was yes. And so. But this wasn’t business agility, this was agile business. Capital A agile business. And so I took concepts like iterations into running the section, I took concepts like pair programming, I just called it pair work, into the organization. And it worked. Like writing a memo, a ministerial brief with two people, creates a much better, much faster documents than one person writing. Now, the problem is, there was no agility in the system. We were constrained and going back to Theory of Constraints, we had constraints to agility, those constraints were organizational governance and bureaucracy. We could do agile, right? But it was very difficult for us to be agile at a business context. So we could do pair programming or pair writing, we could write this brief, but we still had to send it through the 4 layers of hierarchy. So I was the executive director, then there was the assistant secretary, the first Assistant Secretary, the deputy secretary, and then the secretary. So even as an executive director, there were four layers above me.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 19:31

Typical government structure with public.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 19:35

So that minutes had to go through four layers of executives who were not agile in the slightest. Anyway, there’s an entire conversation around delegation and different types of delegation; are you delegating heads or delegating hands? And in the government setting, those executives treat delegation like I just need an extra pair of hands. I’m the head, if it matches my own mental model, it will pass. So all I need is another pair of hands to do what I’m thinking as opposed to delegating heads which is here’s the outcome, you do it as best as you see, my job is quality control and just as validation, making sure things are within tolerance, not exactly as I want them to be. Anyway, that’s an entirely different conversation, I’m getting sidetracked. But sending this minute up, we weren’t agile in the system. So do you actual question, governance, structure, processes, when we talk about business agility, it’s not the same as saying agile business because what we need is agility in the system, we need different capabilities to emerge that enable an organization and organization to respond to whatever happens. And these capabilities are things like the ability to lead through empowerment and influence. Think about that. We don’t need leaders to lead through, well definitely not fear but through direction. It’s about, it’s that delegation through heads. It’s I need this minute to go to the secretary or go to the Minister to explain something that’s critically important. If I’m going to lead through direction, it’s gonna take three months, if I’m going to lead through empowerment, it’s gonna take three days, right? We need the ability to continuously improve. Those feedback loops, inspect and adapt. Like that’s agility 101. And we need a company to inspect and adapt. Not just a team, not just a product; we need the ability to seize emergent opportunities, right? If something happens out there in the marketplace, if you take longer than your competitor to seize that opportunity, your competitor are gonna own that space, they’re going to own the market, not you. So and again, we’re a research organization, we actually have a research model, a behavioral and capability model built on 82 behaviors and 13 capabilities. That’s just three of the capabilities that I’m talking about. We’ll run out of time I talk too long. But the point is that we need an adaptive governance structure that promotes agility. I want to add one last thing, because there’s like a principle that underlies all of this. And that principle is trust. So think about trust in; when I was a consultant, I used to work for IBM. And like every single large consultancy, their travel processes were bureaucratic and slow. I had to get approval to travel. I never once got declined approval but I always had to ask for approval. And if it was q4, I had to go to the country manager to get approval. Now the reason being IBM is trying to save money, they want to stop unnecessary travel, all that kind of thing. But the problem is, sometimes I wouldn’t get approval to travel till the day before. So I can guarantee you that governance, which was designed to save money, cost the money back because…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 24:08

You’re paying three times the price of the tickets.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 24:12

Now, remember what I said, I never once got declined. So I was trust worthy. But the system was designed not to trust. It was designed to assume that I don’t know when is the right time to travel. I don’t know when it’s appropriate. And so the system wasted money because it didn’t trust. Now, agile governance is built on trust. It’s not blind and that’s why we talk about audit, governance versus approval governance. Approval governance is stop until I tell you to continue. And that stop is a delay. It increases costs, it increases both real cost and opportunity cost. Whereas audit governance is continue unless I tell you to stop. Because if I make a mistake, I buy a flight, I don’t need to, that audit will pick it up. And then if I’ve made a mistake, I guarantee I’m not going to make that mistake again. Right? Because and learning from your mistakes, I’ve got a nine year old child, it’s how she learns. It’s how we all learn.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 25:30

As you’re saying that like it reminds me of just going back to understanding the systems, understanding the both human systems and why trust is important to us as humans, but also, just from a systems perspective and complexity or looking at organizations and we’re saying it’s almost like looking organization is a complex adaptive system, adding human spice to it or side to it and saying like how do we decentralize? How do we create those guardrails rather than having go through a stupid process that doesn’t make sense, it’s costing us more, because we don’t understand how to design systems and we don’t really understand people, we’re assuming that people are not trustworthy or that they’ve dumb so? Or not necessarily maybe, you know, dumb maybe too strong a word but that’s what it indicates when you look at how the system was designed or the process was designed. We can switch gears a little bit. Another thing that caught my attention and I wanted to get your thoughts on it, is when respondents described communication and collaboration as the single biggest benefit that business agility has brought to their organization. And this was a huge jump from, I believe, the year before. And in every organization that I go to, you know, usually collaboration and communication is the biggest issue. So, you know, just figure out how to better collaborate and communicate and you know, you’ll be much better off, don’t worry about any of the Agile stuff, right? And I wanted to just maybe get your thoughts on, were you surprised by that or what do you think about that jump from the year before?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 27:20

So the year before, I think customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction. But last year’s report was… so we published it in September 2020. We’ve been collecting data since September 2019. So we had completely coincidentally, 6 months of data pre COVID and 6 months of data post COVID. In fact, I think the numbers were like 45% pre, 55% post in terms of number of respondents. So we could actually see some real impact variation that COVID-19 brought because companies had to respond. And we saw some real substantive changes. For example, manufacturing jumped to the number three industry. Manufacturing had, in fact, I think in year one, I don’t think it was in the top 10. It was so consulting and technology has always been one and two. I think they’ve swapped a couple of times, but they’ve always been one and two. And that makes sense. Consultants, especially the midsize consulting firms, it’s there for people who you become a consultant because like you want to push boundaries, you want to try different things and so they often try it to themselves. Maybe not so much like the big four, but certainly the midsize consultancies. Tech firms, they’ve been doing agile since the beginning. So it makes sense that tech firms have greater agility. But manufacturing jumped and a large part that’s because a lot of these organizations, they saw what happens when you lean too far. Right? And so their supply chains, they’ve been applying lean since the 80s. And their supply chains was so lean, that they were fragile. So they wanted to keep the lean benefits but bring agility into the system, not fragility into the system. And so that’s where business agility, that’s why the spike in business agility. We also saw that regions shifted. And if you’re American listeners, I’m very sorry, but agility dropped in North America quite substantially. Agility in Asia jumped 25%. Agility worldwide grew 15%. But agility in North America dropped 10%. And this hasn’t been published yet, because we’re still doing the data analysis but right now, America is dropping again. The 2021 report, which will be coming out in about six weeks is showing that America has gone from being number one in the world to I think second last after Middle East and Africa. So we have some, I have theories as to why that is, no evidence as to why those theories are holding true but definitely have some theories as to why this is the case. But that’s not sort of what you asked. When we’re looking at communication, COVID was a communication challenge but because it was such a challenge, it forced organizations to really, really focus on it. So we definitely saw that over like, pre March 2020 and post March 2020, the improvement to communication and collaboration increased, not because you can communicate and collaborate better when you’re working from home but because it forced people to be deliberate about it, it forced people to actually invest in new, both technological tools as well as just like processes and approaches to improve collaboration. So because of COVID-19, because of that focus on improving collaboration, especially in an agile setting, that’s like business agility, enabled greater collaboration and communication in a time when communication collaboration was most needed.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 32:06

Do you think, in what ways is it going to continue to challenge that? Because like, as we look at, you know, going back or the going back, or going back to work, in a sense, in what ways do you think the taking of blood that we got from COVID, as far as like, you know, just how we work, how we collaborate and communicate, is it going to continue to kind of push the organizations towards that greater collaboration and communication?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 32:37

So I think we’ll see greater agility just in general. So people often ask me is top down or bottom up, what’s better? And the answer I used to give and I think the answer that most people give is both. But it’s a cop out. It’s also the wrong question. Because it’s a false dichotomy. It’s not top down or bottom up. I think of organizational transformation like brewing a cup of tea. So there’s no point, at some point, you have a cup of water and another point, you definitely have a cup of tea, right? There’s no point where suddenly, water becomes tea. It’s about strength and infusion. You put the tea leaves in, heat, motion, stir around, you let it brew, and then over time, it gets stronger and stronger, you get more tea. And the same is true of agility. I don’t like to use the word transformation, I prefer the word journey, right? You have change agents throughout the organization, you have motivation. A global pandemic is a good motivation towards agility. That’s the heat. You got motion, people moving around, working in different projects, engaging in different things. And so these change agents are infusing agility throughout the organization as it moves, as the pressure and the heat is made. And so this organization, there’s no point at which it’s suddenly an agile organization like that tea. There’s a point where it’s definitely not agile. There’s a point where it definitely is agile.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 34:35

Or if you add some more water or something else to it.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 34:40

And there’s all sorts of things that happen. At a certain point, water becomes tea through infusion. An organization has agility, builds greater agility through infusion. And so COVID-19 has created the heat, right? It’s created one of the environments for agility to flourish. And so the need for better communication and collaboration will continue. And agility will continue to be an approach, a very good approach to actually creating that. And so this kind of, if you think about the, if we think about organizations, we think about how they grow and they progress, I think 2021 through to 2022, we will see more and more organizations become deliberately agile and we will also see more and more organizations become organically agile, and they may not even call it business agility. They may not call it anything. Those behaviors will naturally emerge because it is what is necessary and because the organization values those behaviors

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 36:17

And that’s yeah. That remind me of just like I had a discussion with Mike Cohn and he exactly said that. He’s like I live for a day where we don’t call these things, you know. Do you think in that sense, the frameworks and the whole business around certifications, frameworks, and all of this is also at its peak?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 36:40

That’s a good question. Yes and no. So I believe very strongly in education. I think education is important. Now, education is different from certification. I think we will see, business agility education expands. So we’re running one of our research projects right now that we’ve just started is an evaluation of 100 MBA schools and their MBA programs, looking at the level of agility. So think of it like an MBA agility index, right? Which MBAs naturally promote agility and which ones do not? That we’re very, very early on, I can’t, there’s nothing I can share on that piece of research. We’ve only just literally only just started in the last three weeks. But I think we’ll see education and learning around the concepts of agility, not necessarily agile, but the concepts of agility instilled through all professional leadership, education, like MBAs. You already see things like the PMI when they bought disciplined agile and they bought flex. They’re doing it because they’re trying to build agility into the project management profession.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 38:24

Well, that’s good and like what, I’ve been talking to several people that I respect and I feel like I have, it’s almost like going back to the basics, going back to like decoupling or taking apart these frameworks and looking at the patterns within these frameworks and then almost constructing something that works in your context a lot rather than saying, hey, you know, use Scrum, go to Miljan two day class or go to somebody else’s class. And, you know, but rather like, you know, you got to start thinking like, why do you have daily stand up? What is the purpose of it? How would I contextualize that in my environment rather than that Scrum says, you have to have a daily stand up.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 39:05

Yeah. And so that’s critically important. Because as I said early on, business agility is not agile business. And there are things that we can learn from agile frameworks and there are practices that we can adopt. But it’s contextual and every organization needs to look at, they want agility, they want all those capabilities, those 13 capabilities I was talking about.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 39:31

That’s why I put this agile to agility.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 39:35

Yeah, that’s exactly it. So we can learn from agile, we can take a lot from it, we can respect the heritage, but we don’t have to do it. And even the Agile community says this. Don’t do agile, be agile, right? Being agile is agility. That’s the goal. That’s what’s important. So more and more organizations are going to be… So more education is going to be integrating these concepts; they may not call it agile, they may not teach stand ups, but they’ll be teaching agility, natural native agility. In terms of the… right now, organizations are in pain and they need help. So I’m not a consultant anymore. And as I said, I don’t think transformations are necessarily like… A journey to agility is not a project, it doesn’t have a start and an end. It is an ongoing journey; it’s that agile to agility journey. But I do think that organizations are going to be looking to experts, those who have done it to guide them and help them on the journey. And there are good experts and there are bad experts. And I’m not going to get pulled into the…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 41:06

Cooks and Chefs

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 41:08

Yeah, yeah, all that kind of stuff. But organizations need that support. Many organizations need that support. Where they need that support, they’re going to be calling on education to teach and to learn. And where there is education, there is validated learning and that’s what a certification is. The certification is not saying that you are an expert in something, is not saying that you can do something. A certification is saying we validate that you have learnt something. Right? Now there are professional level certifications which are different. So IC agile expert certification, Scrum alliances, CEC, CTC, CSPs for example, which are not education based but they’re valid is like, it’s not validated learning, it’s validated practice. Yes, I’ve done this, here’s evidence that I’ve done it. That’s a different level of certification. I think those will become more valuable over time. Our community has a habit of very short term thinking, which is ironic given what we’re talking about. But quite often, someone sees oh, there’s money in certification so that they build up their own and they actually devalue the thing for the entire industry. And they have a problem. But right now, those professional level certifications actually do, for the most part, show that someone can do something. I think that will become more important in the mid-term. And the validated learning will be important for as long as organizations see the struggle and they need help on the struggle and thus the education. At a certain point, we’re not there yet. I believe agility will become…

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 43:11

Something you don’t talk; it’s just what you do, right?

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 43:14

It’s just, it is how we do business. Right? In the same way that no one goes to a class to learn traditional management, most MBA programs do I suppose. But when I got promoted and the reason I had the Peter Principle when I first became a director is I never got taught how to be a director. It’s just how leaders operators and what was assumed and expected. At a certain point, we’re just going to assume and expect leaders to be or to have agility or to be agile. And that days is probably 10 years off.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 44:03

Yeah, no, I mean, that aligns with mine. So maybe just, I had another question which we don’t have time around like how business agility, perception of business agility varies drastically based on who you ask? Well, we’ll leave that as a something that people can go and read the report. But when it comes to the 2021 report or anything else, leave us with some insights that you have or may have that most people may not based on what you do. If you have like a nugget or two.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 44:42

So first of all, I call you back to Theory of Constraints. There’s a constraint to agility in your organization and it’s probably not the software team anymore. 20 years ago, or 18 years ago for me, 2003 I was doing Scrum and we were deploying every two weeks. But we weren’t applying to production, we were deploying to staging because we had an operations team. And our operations team had a release window. And that release window was once every six months. So whilst my team’s agility was measured in weeks, the system’s agility was measured still in months. Now, I left the technical world by about 2008. But around that time, DevOps starts to emerge as this thing. And DevOps was the system, finding ways of improving agility. And so now Amazon can deploy into production every 11 something seconds. Fantastic. What does that mean? It means the constraint to agility was software, we invent agile, then it was operations, we invent DevOps. So but where’s the constraint today? In your organization, your natural agility is not measured in days, weeks or seconds, it’s measured at the speed that you can recruit, it’s measured at the speed you can get a budget change or a budget approved, it’s measured at the speed that your steering committee or project control board or change advisory board meets because they are the ones who approved the next phase gate.

Speaker : Miljan Bajic 46:28

Or maybe there you can change your policy.

Speaker: Evan Leybourn 46:31

That’s it! These are the constraints to agility. So find the constraint, figure out which part of your organization is the limiting constraining factor to agility and that’s where your coaches should be. I guarantee that for most of the listeners, the investments in the Agile or business agility transformation is not at the point of constraint. They’re probably already reaching diminishing returns of their transformation investment because they’re the point at which their transformation is being focused has reached a local maximum, right? And we need to get to move that transformation focus to the area of constraint so that the entire system can improve. And that’s probably the biggest insight I can share. And I’ll say, look to HR, look to finance and look to your governance and compliance processes. Those are right now for most organizations, the biggest constraints.