Category: Podcasts

Jesse Fewell

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:43

Who’s Jesse Fewell?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 00:44

Oh wow, it’s kind of an existential question.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:50

It’s what everybody says and sometimes I even tell people, this is what I’m going to ask you. It throws people little bit because it’s like hopefully, you know yourself better than I do.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 01:06

I got a couple of checklist items. Professionally speaking, I help change makers find the reward of driving results in impacting lives at the office. That’s what I do professionally as I mentor transformation leaders and then wrapped around that are the people that influenced me to be the me that does that. And so, I am a husband, I am a father of growing children. What do you call the children that are now like legal adults? I mean they’re not really children anymore but they’re my children and they deeply impact me.

Last night, my son got his first professional offer for a software engineering job after university and we’re all celebrating the fact that that’s happening. And I took a look at it and what it showed me was, I am no longer the software engineering professional I was almost a decade ago that he is now aspiring to become. And so, it’s exciting for me to see him moving into a place that I have gradually evolved out of. And then the third checklist item that I think is somewhat relevant to what you and I have been talking about previously is I am a failed follower of Christ. And so, I’ve regained an interest and a passion for a deeper spiritual journey and that comes through spiral dynamics, integral theory, it comes through a fascinating bit of work by the Bible project and just rediscovering a non-dual, non-sectarian approach to a spiritual side of things which absolutely relates to work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:29

When you said that, it’s almost like we spend a lot of time focusing on things outside of ourselves and not focus on ourselves and I think it’s just like anything else. It’s more like in a work, understanding who I am, what do I believe and how do I make sense of things. And for me, that was in a previous discussion that you and I had. We talked about how our environment shapes us and how we see the world by environment that we’re part of and it’s interesting. So sorry to interrupt but maybe we can explore that in a sense, how do we work on ourselves? Because most of the Agile community is working on others but how can you help others if you don’t help yourself or if you don’t understand yourself better?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 04:29

Yeah, it’s super critical because if we are change makers, if we’re the ones that are leading our colleagues to better ways of working, more competitive, more collaborative, more creative ways of working then you’re right. The distraction tends to be on the external about fixing them and they don’t get it and they’re not on board and maybe because I’m the problem.

In fact, this week, I’m doing a talk for the Loud and Agile meetup. “we are the reasons transformations fail and we are also their greatest hope.” And so, it’s that kind of embracing the contradiction that I find to be fascinating right now, confronting your own ego so that you can get out of your own way and bring your best holistic self to the work that you do instead of always second guessing yourself, instead of chasing after somebody else’s dream or somebody else’s success like you know what? If I lower my standard of living by living abroad in a different economy, I may not need a bazillion dollars to retire and be successful.

So yeah, I don’t know how much you’ve talked with Maria inaudible(06:00) but I look up to her as a role model of redefining your lifestyle to fit the work that you want to do. And so for those of you who are listening who don’t know, Marina inaudible(06:17) is a global agile thought leader who is founder of the Agile Marketing Academy, is the creator of the Agile Hero Summit and several years ago, sold off her belongings, her home, her apartment and began living as a digital nomad across the world and across the US and filming it on Instagram as a way to illustrate about how you can take control over your own professional environment. You don’t need to be a slave to the paycheck and you have inside of you, each of us have inside of us an inherent creativity to re-architect our lives and our jobs to be more fulfilling, more rewarding and more sustainable so that you don’t burn out or bore out. So yeah, shout out to you, Maria, you’ve always been a role model.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:18

I want to try to get her on the podcast too because yeah, at least I’ve thought about bringing her and also talking about she’s been pushing agile marketing and just how agile marketing along with other kind of industries or marketing along with other industries have tried to and ways adopted some of these agile ways of working. But maybe to come back to Jesse, you recently posted a question in our community like what inspires you, what keeps you fire lit these days? So, I’m going to turn this question back and even though you shared it, I’m going to give you an opportunity maybe here to share what you shared or maybe expand on it but what inspires Jesse?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 08:08

What inspires me, what gets me fired up and actually where I’m wanting to move more and more of my life’s work into this direction is when regular everyday professionals break through their own limitations to greater impact. We’re piloting right now a mentoring program, a cohort of everyday professionals. There’s an operations manager, we have a PMO manager, there is an individual contributor who used to be a supervisor for a quality group at a chemical manufacturing company. But then she was asked hey, could you just go like explore what it would take for us to build a services business because we’re all product and we’ve never done that before. You have no budget, you have no headcount, can you just go explore building a completely new business unit that’s going to be the foundation of our future growth? And that operations manager she was thrown into a new role with no guidance on what her role was and that PMO manager was marginalized for two years because her boss left and so her boss’ boss was like yeah, I’m just going to ignore your team for the next two years and don’t you dare propose that maybe you could step up into your former boss’ shoes, you’re totally not ready and that’s presumptuous.

And so, these are just three examples of the kinds of everyday people who in a matter of weeks with just a little bit of community support, a little bit of seeing through the eyes of possibility, they’re totally like generating amazing results and that’s what gets me fired up is when average everyday people are overcoming the perceived constraints of their environment. I don’t have a fancy title, I don’t have a big budget, I only have two certifications. I don’t have all of Jesse’s certifications and so I couldn’t possibly start coaching my boss to be a more effective leader which is what that operations manager is and then a facilitated dialogue across multiple departments about what a non-burnout culture might look like or actually piloting a new service pilot with one of the existing clients which is what that other woman is doing.

So that’s what gets me fired up is seeing people breaking the rules of the conventional and so those are my examples. I gave a few examples that are out in the industry but I’ll let you kind of pick the ones that you find exciting and inspiring because I wanted to share mine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:59

Yeah, that’s awesome and maybe to tie it back to what we talked about earlier about like spiral dynamics, what motivates us and things like that. It’s like it feels so good like to see other people succeed right. And like hearing those stories like they describe like I’ve had similar situations where people either have been conditioned like we’re all conditioned by a culture and how we work and it’s like people have certain beliefs around things that are so entrenched that it’s like how you said, how can I coach, I don’t have all those skills, I can’t do that and actually see them break through those barriers is motivating to me as a coach and consultant. And maybe to come back to Maria’s example I’m sure you’ve been there like where money is a factor up to the point where you want to live the lifestyle whatever they want to but after that point, the return on happiness is diminishing, right?

So, in spiral dynamics or general in cognitive development theory, the idea is that as you satisfy your needs, you’re going to look more to self-actualization to probably fulfill other needs that are more internal than external. And to me, that’s kind of when you talk about what inspires you. what motivates you, I can relate to that because helping others is what inspires me and what keeps me going or what you said is always keeps your fire lit.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 13:01

And so, one thing that’s coming to my mind right now as you’re talking about helping people achieve a higher order of awesomeness, a higher order of impact, what comes to my mind right now is cooks and chefs and I wanted to just dwell on this a little bit. For those of you who haven’t read the blog post, look it up.

Now Leon talks about that there’s a difference between cooks and chefs and there’s a spectrum between the follow the recipe cook which is like the grill dad. So, I’m dad on the grill and I’m following this recipe because that’s what the right way to do it, don’t screw it up as opposed to on the other end of the extreme where you’ve probably got a one star, two-star Michelin chef who’s innovating completely new things that nobody’s ever done before. And the metaphor really resonates with me because in order to build a better work environment, in order to build a better organization, we have to empower, enable, equip all of those people, the people who are innovating and creating completely new techniques and new practices. They get a lot of the press and they get a lot of the conference speaking gigs and there’s a place for that. So, people who are for example like innovating new organizational design models, awesome. But then there’s the a few practitioners who are just like just tell me what scrum rules are because I need to follow the scrum rules. I’ve never done this before. I need a baseline. I need an anchor. I need some kind of a guideline and then there’s a lot of us who are just casting all the love towards the innovators and chefs and all the judgment and all the cooks and the beginners.

And so, I find that if we’re going to be helpful, we need to be helpful to everyone where they are rather than being agitated and frustrated about where they should be and so that’s my take on chefs and cooks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:20

Yeah, and you just made me think of which I haven’t written that we’re discussing the article but it’s almost like there’s this shift and let’s just say the COVID has pushed the environment towards like hey, we’re going to cook more at home, right? So now you have a lot of people trying to figure out how to cook at home that they haven’t and then disappointing and judging would be like people that like that have cooked before that are more experience, shutting all over people that don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and saying like look at these suckers. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 15:59

You’ll have to bleep that out later.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:05

But like that’s really I think, as our environment has moved into more and more complexity or is more and more complex, more and more people can’t rely on frameworks, methodologies. They have to figure things out on their own. But at the same time, I think that empathy that patience with people that never done anything in that space is like and this same thing happens. Earlier this week, I spoke with Dean Leffingwell and people shadow over safe do and I tell people yeah, I mean like in a sense but there’s a lot of good stuff. But if you have people that put in like don’t understand the patterns and what safe kind of compasses, a bunch of different good and bad patterns and practices. If you’re just taking it blindly, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s almost like taking a recipe and just saying, we’re going to apply it. We’re going to have a wedding and we’re just going to try to do it ourselves. Just understand that you’re not going to be probably as successful as somebody that’s done it before and be okay with that and set the expectations to improve rather than use that.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 17:26

So, I’ve got my own observation about the Scaled Agile Community in the state of where safe is at in the industry and then I’ve also got my own conflicts with judgment and my own issues around holier than thou or agile or than thou kind of perspectives. But I view the state of the Scaled Agile community and movement to be relatively exactly the same as where the scrum alliance and the scrum community and scrum.org where roughly about 10 to 15 years ago. Just 10 to 15 years ago, there was the guru in Kench Waiver and Jeff Sutherland, there was the official statement which was one of their books, the scrum guide probably hadn’t even roughly it came out in the middle of this phase of and there were the grand disciples and everyone wanted to become one of their trainers. That’s what the ultimate aspiration of being an agile champion was to become one of the Illuminati in one of the high priests in this particular community. And everyone was casting judgment, all the scrum people because they were successful at capturing the mind share of the agile conversation. And the people that were usually upset about that were a lot of the extreme programming people because rewind 10 years before that, in the late 90s, right about when the agile movement was starting to coalesce, they had all of the mindshare and their gurus were the ones getting all the and everyone wanted to be the disciple and the heir apparent to Ron and Kent and all of those.

And so, there’s this cascading wave of envy and there’s a cascading pattern of the guru who sets a template that people follow and received criticism from all of the others who are not involved in that. And if you actually just go talk to these gurus, they’re just normal people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:45

Yeah

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 19:49

And the fundamental contribution I think that Scaled Agile has done is it has created an agile option for the cultures that need an answer to every question before I do anything. And so, for those of us who want to foster a kind of a growth mindset and agile mindset, that’s fingernails on a chalkboard because we’re trying to encourage leaning into the unknown and leading into the not having an answer. But that’s too big a leap for statistically a quarter of all professionals in all cultures in all environments at least

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:29

Yeah and maybe to bring it back to spiral dynamics and just that aspect too and maybe lose work which is based on spiral dynamics by stuff for like amber or orange to jump two levels up to like green or teal right? So, a lot of times, I tell people like look at government agencies and I don’t know how much you worked I think you mentioned.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 20:56

Hi, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Jessie, I’m based in Washington DC.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:01

I would say like we’re screwed when it comes to government because the way that they’re structured, the culture and everything. So, safe is a stepping stone for instance and even with safe, they’re having a hard time. So, like trying to remote some of these.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 21:23

Here’s an idea, how about we introduce sociocracy over at the Department of Defense? How about we do that? Let’s see how far that goes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:33

Not in our lifetime I think but exactly that so context matters. I don’t know if you’ve like also maybe to go a little bit off topic. But when I coach in Europe or in different cultures like as a coach, as a consultant, my approach completely changes based on the context based on the beliefs of people based on their values and I have to understand where they are, what they value, what they believe in and change my approach based on that.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 22:12

I just did a talk to the scrum summit 2021, this past weekend which was a virtual event that was targeted to the South Asian market and the South Asian community. And in that talk, I went off on a little bit of a sidebar. It was about culture and how do you measure and quantify culture. I’m a practitioner of the competing values framework and with that framework, you can actually measure and visualize where your cultural biases and I took a little bit of a detour about that about saying well, you don’t understand the Indian context Jesse or you don’t understand the German culture and the German environment because you’re just an American with your American beer, you’re very orange bias, right? And so, I went to the harsh data insights and I did a couple of screenshots and I said okay, let’s just compare the three places that Jesse’s lived as an ex expat in Germany, expat in Bangalore, India and then as an American in all kinds of different American subcultures and what’s interesting is that, yes, indeed, there are these country specific patterns.

So, for example, in the United States, the score is off the charts on individualism which means that the stereotype, right. Americans generally have no appreciation for the impact they have on each other or they have on others. They’re very ethnocentric and very much focused on my department and my office and I kind of forget about the other offices. And then in the Indian context, there’s a big power distance measure and that feeds the stereotype that says well, Indians don’t want to upset the hierarchy. And yet, when I was in Bangalore, I dealt with a ton of startups where they specifically recruited people that had a very creative culture and a mindset where they were yelling at their boss all day long and it totally defied the stereotype. Likewise, here in DC, if you want to talk about individualism and competitiveness and the American innovation and then I go into some offices where there are people that are just tell me what to do. I’ve been here for 20 years, I gave up 15 years ago and I have been here 20 years so just tell me what to do.

And so, yes and so the way I summarized it is your country culture informs your company culture, it does not define it. It is not your destiny and so I don’t know, do you see a similar pattern?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:06

I do exactly and like so there are a couple of things maybe that we can explore. So now is the workforce is becoming more global, what about if you have team members from different type of cultures that are impacting your team culture because it definitely influences that. So, there’s that aspect of how does outside culture, the company influence my company or my team. But then the other thing is that I look at is you could have a team of let’s just say five to seven people and each of those individuals is running what I call operating system in their head or value system or whatever it is that might be different to each individual. So, for Jesse, it might be like screw it like you said, I gave up 15 years ago. I’m just riding this agile way because before agile was something else and before that, it was something else so I’m just going to ride this way.

So, you might have somebody like that that’s disengage, you might have somebody that’s looking to retire, you might have somebody that’s actually just wants to exceed and succeed and that might be somebody that’s more of the orange type of person more of an achiever and then you might have somebody that just wants to help others and sees like what we started this conversation with. They really get fulfilled and satisfied by seeing others succeed. So how do you get a group of people that are influenced by the outside cultures that are all around the world where their company culture is shaping and then their individual thought systems are different.

So as a coach, when you go in or a consultant, if you’re ignorant to that systemic view of things influencing each other then I think at least when I started adjusting things as a coach based on the those things or those are some of the things, I find that like everybody gets more out of the relationship and the goals that we’re trying to do by helping, first of all, understanding myself and helping understand from their perspectives and empathizing with everybody’s perspectives and needs and understanding the cultures and how they impact. So, I don’t know, if you look at it that way or what is your approach when dealing with a situation like that?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 27:42

Yesterday, I held two back-to-back workshops with two very different corporate cultures. One of them is a hardware company that has a Latin American CEO, an American leadership team and German engineers. And so, I held a workshop explaining about how these are some role definitions and they’re a little bit different than your understanding of this and so after 10-minute presentation thoughts, questions? Yeah, I don’t think that’s clear. I don’t see it. Pin drop, crickets. Yeah, I’m not following. Would anybody else like to comment? And so, we just had to move forward into the awkwardness. That was kind of an awkward matzoh ball right there like oh, what are you going do so. And so, I just move forward with the agenda and kind of continued and listened a little bit and then reinforced. We have this is awkward, this is different. It’s going to take repetition and acclamation. The very next hour, I did another workshop for a creative agency where people were joking with each other, they had zoom backgrounds that were just hilarious. And they were like oh, looks like Jesse’s going to be preaching at us again today, “hahaha” and so it is completely different culture.

So I could shift my energy from being one of a patient encouragement to be one like well, if you can’t take it, don’t dish it because here it comes. And so, then I had to just being a little bit more playful and energetic and so it’s kind of what leadership is. It’s being authentic to who you are but also being sensitive to the people around you. And so, like if you have a diverse culture of different kinds of personalities and different countries represented, there’s an assertive accommodative yin yang kind of dynamic where as the leader or coach, I assert a few things but then I include what some of the unique elements that other people are bringing in. So as a coach, I defer to the dominant culture but then I assert new information into that conversation. As a leader, I might assert this is the singular core value that that I believe in and I want to emphasize and I’m going leave space for everybody else to put their stuff in.

So, coaching is leadership and effective leadership involves coaching but I think the nuance is where do you begin, where’s your starting point? So, I like hearing your take on bringing different people together.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:07

Well, that inaudible(31:08) like another thing that I’ve been trying to mess around and figure out is like when does Miljan become like that guy that pushes people right. I don’t know if you played sports but I’ve had coaches where they like piss you off in a sense in order to get the most out of you or they just blindly, from a consulting standpoint, they say in your face like what you’re doing wrong and that might get some type of reaction. So, I was talking inaudible(31:47) to Mike Cohn and both of them kind of said we tell organizations that if you don’t have this, you’ll fail at the beginning, right. So, it’s almost like that shock like and there is some value in that. I don’t know what your thoughts are.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 32:09

You had a chat with Pete Barron’s about that and he also believes in when he invites people into his leadership workshops, the first lesson is here’s why we’re all here. This is all of the things is going on in the industry and the second lesson is oh and by the way, you’re not up for it and he has a way where he can do that. So, you know what, this is an area where I think I need to grow. I need to grow with a little bit more forceful truth telling. I tend to want so much to empathize and encourage that my assertive energy is probably 90%, inspirational rather than a little bit more challenging.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:03

That’s the thing and this is exactly same thing like where our culture influences us, right? Like in the United States or generally, in western, it’s like being nice like you don’t want to offend people and just say nice things even though you don’t think them. And I was talking, I had a student from Southern Italy that was saying like here, like if you’re my friend and you don’t tell me that this is messed up, like these sucks, we’re going to lose trust, right? And that same thing, like in a part of the Europe that I grew up, people will say like if you’re presenting something or if they don’t, they’re like this is shit. And like saying that in this is where the culture like it’s expected and normal in certain cultures and in some cultures, it’s kind of unacceptable or rude.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 34:04

I guess that represents a growth area for all of us. If you have an assertive bias, how can you grow a skill set to be accommodated at the right times but still be yourself. You don’t want to be contrived or fake. I love what Brene Brown talked about in Dare to Lead about that authenticity where you got to be yourself within boundaries. People don’t need to know your deepest darkest childhood secrets and yet, you do need to kind of share your opinions and you do need to step outside of your comfort zone in Jesse’s case to be a little bit more forceful with truth. But then be able to shift gears if somebody needs a little bit of encouragement So it’s a work in progress.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:02

Yeah. It’s an art too because you really have to read the context like maybe it comes with experience but maybe let’s switch gears a little bit and maybe we can come back and tie it. Something that I thought we could talk about is in your book, Untapped Agility, the seven leadership moves to take your transformation to the next level, you talk about attack culture and structure together.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 35:36

Yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:37

Could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 35:39

So, we are in the 20th anniversary of the agile movement and if you zoom out over the last 20 years or 25 years, if you want to count the pre manifesto activities, one of the patterns that shows up over and over is what I call agile sectarianism. We bunch up into these clusters and we throw judgment bombs at each other from like your scaling model is evil, your scaling model is judgmental and one of the ways that we sectarianize into groups is around whether a transformation should be about the mindset or about the methods. You got to start with mindset first, you got to get people to a growth mindset, agile mindset because no matter what practices you install, if you don’t get that mindset locked down, it’s not going to stick or you know what all those touchy feely, fufu ninnies, they want to go talk about mindset over there, we’re going to go do stuff. We’re going to install best practices, we’re going to start measuring, we’re going to get very good results and ROI and we never talked about why. We never talked about what is important and so it turns into a bunch of noise. I saw one very large telecom spend a million dollars on training of mindset, lots of workshops, posters, surprise, a year later, nothing’s changed and that just agitated me. So, I actually created a blog post almost 10 years ago called culture comes last because at the time, I was so frustrated by that. I was like you need to start doing stuff, you can’t be anything unless you’re doing something. And then what I came to realize over the recent years is that that that can turn into an imbalance and now you forgot to create the context, a narrative and that’s what leadership is, right?

Leadership is about creating directing attention and so that’s the point in the book. The point of the book is that if you want to have a successful transformation, you’ve got to address the contextual with what you’re doing. You have to contextualize all these methods and all of these practices and you need to operationalize your mindset. I can’t tell you how many times again, Brene Brown covers this as well. How do we operationalize our core values? You put five-values up on a poster and put it around the office and just expect magic to happen. So that’s where the point of the book is going. What caught your attention about that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:42

Well, the reason I bring it up it’s in the book that I am writing. The Agile part is the structure part and the agility is the culture, right? So is the full spectrum and like if you look at the logo behind me, the four quadrants of the integral, the left side mindset and culture is being agile, the right side is about doing Agile. So, what you just described is one group focusing on doing Agile mostly when we talk about softer stuff that’s less measurable like culture and mindset.

So, to me, what that means is that attacking the whole like integral, holistic way of looking at things rather than one versus another which has been like you said, for most, it’s been between the right and left. I think last time we showed but like Michael’s book, Agile transformation is about in my opinion, new paradigm of looking at things holistically and combining so is this full spectrum, agile to agility or more of a holistic way of doing things.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 40:01

Yeah and it builds on so you mentioned Lou earlier with the book Reinventing Organizations. When that book first came out, everything is a journey, everything’s a work in progress. When that book first came out, I thought it was utterly judgmental. Like you’re going to categorize oh absolutely. You’re going to categorize people into less evolved red and kind of neanderthal orange and then there’s us who are super enlightened and we’re all the way up here. And it’s just a matter of evolving your consciousness to a higher level and then maybe someday, you’ll be as awesome as we are. And I was like and so that’s why the competing values framework resonated with me so much at the time because it just put all of that on a flat grid and said run a survey. Ask good people where they are and then you have a very democratic, non-judgmental saying oh yeah, we absolutely believe in doing things right at the expense of anything else. So even if it means going slower, even if it means we clobber people’s opinions, we do things right. And that is very much in Amber’s traditionalistic kind of follow the rules environment but I wasn’t ready to see it that way. And I think that there are a lot of people that latched on to that spiral dynamics concept and wanted everyone to jump four or five levels of consciousness right away and if you weren’t there then you’re not agile and you don’t get it.

And so but now, the breakthrough which was even before Michael’s book I think was what Shawn and Larson are doing with the Agile Fluency Project which is which of these five cultures best describes yours and for that culture, here’s the next level of agility you should pursue and I think it’s genius because there’s a non-judgmental element there to say oh and it might be over the course of 5 years, 10 years, you might find yourself at another kind of culture after you’ve been investing a lot of this. Capital One is an example that has been working on their Agile transformation for 10 years.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:23

It’s probably more than that.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 42:27

And so, they might have found themselves kind of shifting what their aspirations are once they go through certain things. So, you’re right. I think that integral model is incredibly powerful but I had to grow into not just cognitively understanding it but emotionally tolerating the idea that there is a predictable sequential journey. And I think for a lot of transformation champions, it’s super agitating because I want to go get to Ben and Jerry’s culture right away. I don’t want to have to go through all this other stuff.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:04

Well, that’s the thing and like it used to be easier because like the pace of change was slower. I think now there’s misalignment between pace of change and how we can keep up. And I think one example just in the world is like if you look at capitalism or just individualism like if we keep going at this pace, we’ll probably mess things up but that’s a separate topic. Maybe another thing that we thought we could explore is the myth of the Agile Coach. What do you have to say about that?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 43:50

The myth of the Agile coach? Here’s the myth. The myth is that the effectiveness of a transformation is contingent upon the effectiveness of an Agile coach. And I have found that to be completely untrue, unrelated not even an issue. So, the state of agile coaching report came out earlier this year that put numbers to some common understandings around the fact that if you’re an Agile coach and you’re working as a consultant, you’re probably earning a little bit more than if you’re working as an internal employee. If you’re an Agile Coach, you probably have a certification and there’s a minority of those, a small number that have what are called a masters certification like your CEC or like the ICF, PCC these are high order coaching certs and only a small number of them but only a third of all agile coaches that responded even have a certification of any kind.

And so that we kind of knew but one of the things that I think is an emerging observation is that as an Agile Coach, you can help but you’re not the thing. And so, I think there’s a little bit of ego and a little bit of guilt that floats around that they’re going to screw it up unless I’m involved in everything. Actually, they’re going to screw it up even if you are involved. And then there’s all this guilt which is oh man, I wasn’t there and they screwed it up. Well, they would probably still screw it up if you were there. And I can’t tell you I’ve seen coaches that are just amazing transformational personalities and the team or the leadership, they’re just not ready. And so, it doesn’t matter if you bring in Tony Robbins and making all the C level executives cry in the middle of a boardroom like oh my gosh you talking right, I’m a jerk and I need to get it. As soon as the meeting is over, the next day they come back and they’re going to go back to old habits. It’s just the nature of the journey.

So that’s the myth, the Agile coach is you’re not the critical linchpin that you may have led yourself to believe you are so lay off the guilt and swallow your ego.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:30

And I think that’s kind of coming back to cooks and chefs. For chefs, I talk about like the goal is to create more cooks and chefs. As a coach internal or external, your job in an organization is to work yourself out of the job. So, if I think like hey, I’m coming into Jesse’s organization and I’m going to teach them how am I going to get them to understand this recipe or to follow the recipe, I’ll be screwed. What I need to do is help Jesse’s organization understand how they can come up with something that’s delicious with whatever ingredients they have. And I think as coaches, a lot of times, we’re struggling with that because we’re not necessarily developing people in a way we think like they rely on us which is I think part of that myth.

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 47:33

Yeah, there was one of our colleagues, I forget who it was but it was at a scrum Alliance event and they brought to my mind the English children’s story of Nanny McPhee who said to the children. She’s a nanny and so she was taking care of these children and she says when you want me to leave, that is when I will stay and then when you want me to stay, that’s when it’s time for me to leave and so, there’s that tension there that I thought was very intriguing.

So there comes a time where hopefully, you outgrow your mentor. I’ve outgrown a few of my mentors in my career. It’s weird, where you could see yourself well man, I really looked up to this person and now I’m having to think about why aren’t they taking this step and that step and this step and that step and I think that’s a good thing. If you were able to be a catalyst for somebody else to where they’re not even more effective. I mentioned my son, he just got an offer for his first job out of university that earns just as almost pretty much as earning the same salary that I had after 18 years of experience and that just brings me joy. So, working yourself out of a job is a nice beginning but then there’s layers to that, that can get a little bit exciting.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:18

Well yeah and so that growth and it kind of like what can we do to help others keep those fires lit I guess? So, maybe it’s crazy how time flies and I know you have a meeting after this. So maybe like what are some of the things from your book in general that you would like to share with listeners? Takeaway, anything that you think will be helpful?

Speaker: Jesse Fewell 49:52

Well, if you want to if you want to learn more then you can go to untappedagility.com and check out the book. There’s a free excerpt, there’s free templates and downloads, untappedagility.com and it’s available at all your favorite retailers. And so that might be interesting to you to help you kind of dig in and learn more but if you want to take some steps forward in this mentoring relationship if you want to break through your own barriers of self-limiting beliefs, go to agilevictory.com and book a chat with me and we can talk more about what it looks like and what it takes. So untappedagility.com for more knowledge and agilevictory.com for more results.

Aanu Gopald

Transcript:

Speaker: Miljan Baji 00:46

Who is Aanu Gopald?

Aanu Gopald 00:53

Wow. That’s actually a very good question. Who is Aanu Gopald? I’m a woman of many parts, that’s what I call it myself. I’m a Family woman, I’ve got three lovely, beautiful kids and I’m also a wife with a very supportive husband that keeps the home front when I’m in Africa. Aanu Gopald is also a dreamer. I’m so passionate about human capacity developments and I also believe that anyone can achieve whatever they set their mind to do to become who they want to be and do whatever they want to do, especially even in an uncomfortable conditions or situations especially, if you know a lot of Africa. Aanu Gopald is also a torch bearer, I move to the world in search of other people to light up especially women. I am so passionate about women maybe because I’m also a woman and my soul also draws strength from serving others and lifting them up. As a dreamer, I just want to touch lives and that’s actually the theme of Africa Agility Foundation, “touching life, one breath at a time”.

I’m also a chain catalyst and I truly believe in people, I’m very altruistic so the happiness of others actually influences my happiness. What gives me joy and fulfillment is when I see others, especially those that are my mentors, those that I have touched, achieving their goals, their dreams in life. Another part to Aanu Gopald is I’m a philanthropies, I continuously seek to impact lives in the world around me. My family and I do a lot for orphanage homes in Africa, especially in Nigeria in rural areas. Africa Agility Foundation, myself and my team, we run free programs for kids and youth in Africa, Nigeria, in partnership with Sudan NextGen led by Sally Elatta, we are moving to Sudan, also Kenya and Ghana to do so many amazing things to improve quality of lives and also reduce poverty and also employment for youth in Africa. Yeah, thank you. Other side of Aanu that most people know is I’m a business agility coach, a trainer, facilitator, a speaker and everything about agile agility, that’s another side of Aanu.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 03:54

That’s awesome. That’s inspirational too. I feel a little bit of guilt. Like, I came from another country that’s formerly Yugoslavia, Bosnian specifically and I’ve tried to help and justify in my own ways that help but I think you’re inspiring me in the sense of what you’re doing. It tells me that I should be doing more to help people where I’m from, and contribute more. Thank you for doing that. At least that has sparked a little bit more fire, doing a little bit and giving more back where I’m from. And you were just recently in Nigeria for the Lagos girls tech bootcamp that you organized. How did that go?

Aanu Gopald 04:47

It’s was revelational for me, it was mind blowing, insightful. It was a new experience for me because the first one we did last year COVID happened so I joined them virtually via zoom and although we don’t really have much COVID cases in Nigeria, I don’t know the magic that happened, they were able to contain it. They had it in person but being there physically was a new experience for me, with the two weeks plus I was in Nigeria. What made it revelational was, I’ve come to understand that the young people, not just in Africa, but every parts of the world have the power to bring about the much needed change, especially when they have the right vision, the mastery and also a sense of purpose. I saw 100 determined, audacious, courageous and resilient female youths despite all odds against them, some of them are undergraduates, majority of them are graduates with no job, the unemployment rate is very high in that parts of the world. They believed in their dreams, they have passion for tech although they didn’t study tech in school and they worked so hard during those three weeks to bring that dream to reality. So it was mind blowing and during that three weeks bootcamp, they were trained in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, web development, data science UI/UX, and also two days certified master class, thanks to Scrum Alliance for that, and Joseph Farewell for facilitating it, it was free for the girls.

The highlights of the Bootcamp and this is where the magic happened, or miracle, whatever metaphor that we want to call it. For those two days, they use scrum, doing daily scrum to develop d2 solutions to solve the top three complex challenge that we have in Lagos, Nigeria. Lagos State is the most populous and the most tribal state in Africa. So imagine, they walked into the bootcamp with no prior experience in those seats filled and they did magic in two days, daily scrum that was like, wow, miracle happening in Lagos. Where the moments of humility comes for me, and also stepped in for me, and also deep appreciation for the girls and their talents was, the state governor was at the grand finale with his cabinet members and some of the MDs of corporations, he applauded the girls of their dedication, their creativity. When they were doing the live demo of the three d2 solutions across (inaudible 8:41), waste management and traffic management, he said, he’s been thinking about this with his team, his cabinet members in the last two and half years, this is a problem, we need to fix it, we need to do something about it and what they’ve been doing is talking about it but in two days, you girls, were not like us. He actually used the word you ladies are smarter than us, you solved our problem in two days. What we’ve not been able to do in two and half years in his position. It was revolutionary, I was humbled.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 09:28

What’s going through my head now is more like just how we can enable as a community of trainers and coaches, so those girls now have some experience or they’ve been introduced similar like, maybe we can go back to how you were introduced to Agile and Scrum, but now they can become change agents in the most populous part of the Africa and be those change agents that you are and they can inspire others in a complex world, especially in areas like Africa, not just Africa, different parts of the world where we need more people to embrace empiricism, embrace what we talked about with technology and just solve these problems. What did the girls say? Do you have any stories from them sharing their takeaways with you how they were touched and influenced?

Aanu Gopald 10:46

Well, all the stories are on Africa Agility social media platforms, the girls were very appreciative of the opportunity, because it’s so expensive to run programs like this and not having the financial support makes it difficult sometimes. The fact that there is an organization that cares so much about them, that cares so much about their development, their growth, and also a path that can create opportunities, especially job and entrepreneurship opportunities for them was what they were looking for and Africa agility Foundation gave them that opportunity, opened that door for them. A good example was one of the girls that came for the bootcamp last year she spoke to her boss, she was earning less than $100 per month, the currency has changed, is really poor and the boss said, sorry, whatever you want to go and learn has nothing to do with what we do in our organization and she resigned. I love dreamers, I love go-getters, she resigned, she left the job.

And it’s not really easy to get jobs in Africa, if you have one hold on tight to it, it doesn’t matter even if the pay is not that good because you need to take care for yourself, take care of your family and two weeks into the bootcamp, she actually shared what she has learnt, what she has built on social media and before the end of the bootcamp she made times five of what she used to make when she was working in that company. And there are so many testimonials like that, even at the grand finale, five of the girls got employment with an aviation company in Nigeria (inaudible 12:58), the MD was there and he saw the innovation the girls created and like, Oh, come on some of you ladies. And right now I was told on Saturday, every Saturday, there’s a program that happens like a form of mentorship for the girls. And the MD of a company came to speak to the ladies. I had 10 of them on the spot. Tthat’s the impacts.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 13:31

But you’re also creating platform. I think it’s impact but also having Scrum Alliance and having what you’re doing with the Agile Africa and Agile Africa Alliance, and helping bring people together, create platforms where people, could you maybe talk about that a little bit and bring some light to that because I think a lot of times, and for a lot of us, it’s where you create relationships, where you meet, others where you learn your thing. How’s Agile Africa and Agile Africa Alliance bringing people together and how is that helping with this broader movement of bringing or in the sense of exposing people to these agile methods of thinking and ways of working in Africa?

Aanu Gopald 14:24

So Agile Africa and Agile Africa Alliance started back in 2000 and towards the end of 2017, then kicked off the first quarter of 2018. We saw a gap and we saw a need and that is what actually birth the platform and that was before COVID, now that everything has gone virtual. The platform was for growing a community of diverse African professionals. One thing about Africans is we love education. Our parents will do anything even sell their houses, their cars, whatever they have to send us to school. The parts of the world that I came from first degrees is not good enough. The state I came from in Nigeria, it’s PhD but I had to tell my dad, sorry, the best you can get from me is master degree. I’m not going towards the route, education is very important, so we have a lot of educated professionals in Africa.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 15:52

Is it just education, it seems expectations are high in general.

Aanu Gopald 15:58

The expectations are very high, there’s nothing like college fund, there’s no college debt. Expectations are very, very, very, very high. And the dream was like, agile is not that popular in Africa, what can you do to introduce this new way of working, this new way of thinking, everything around agility to Africa and that’s what birthed that platform and with this initiative, we are able to connect Africans with the global Agile community. The resources are mastering, bringing top leaders in the space to come and share their experiences, their wisdom, everything around agile innovation, professional coaching, personal development and branding. The goal, actually, is human capacity development and also to facilitate the needed transformation that will sustain Africa economic growth. That was the dream.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 17:12

So it’s much bigger. I mean, it’s bigger, it’s how do we,

Aanu Gopald 17:16

Yep, so what’s your question?

Speaker: Miljan Baji 17:19

No. So it’s much bigger than just software. It’s much bigger. It has to do with the problems, real problems that people are facing. You mentioned Sally Elatta, who else in the community is contributing and to helping bring agile agility to end the mindset to people in Africa?

Aanu Gopald 17:50

Oh, there’re so many, there are a list of them.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 17:53

That’s great to hear. Maybe just to name the few, who are some of the ones that you’re closely working with and you feel deserve to be mentioned.

Aanu Gopald 18:06

Well, everyone deserves to be mentioned. If I stay within the Scrum Alliance community, we have Joseph Farewell, we have Bob Galen, we have Sherry Silas, we have Michael de la Maza and I’m blanking on right now. Oh, MJ, I remember MJ talking about different types of teams. And we have also a lot of people outside, we have Luke Omar who is not really a Scrum Alliance person, he was actually our second speaker. We have my former boss at Toyota Nyjah Tolo, he actually graced the platform as our first speaker, so we have different people from different parts of the world that has supported this movement. And there are some other people that have supported us financially as well, especially bringing agility to Africa. The youth in Africa are agile, to be honest with you, we’ve gone through a lot of resilience and adaptation. In Africa, you have to quickly adapt, we are born agile in Africa, and we’ve received a lot of financial support, moral support from a lot of people from the Western world. So a great thanks to many, many, many of them.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 19:41

That is awesome. I think something resonated, saying we’re agile. When you grow up in a country or in a part of the world where there’s a lot of competition, I can only imagine in Lagos in Nigeria where it’s highly concentrated, especially in Lagos, probably similar to any big city, but it’s like you get to figure things out, nothing’s given to you, there’s so much competition and having experienced that, it’s demanding. There’s pressure, it’s not easy to grow up in a smaller town and I’ve experienced that too. As far as also motivationally, you can succeed so it motivates you, where you have a lot of people embracing that agility and empiricism and just trying to figure out and you’ll fail a lot, but you also learn a lot. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about, I still don’t know best way to express it, but it’s that environment, almost like a boiler pot type of environment where things are constantly blowing, it’s interesting. And there’s something to innovation, there’s something to learn in that type of environment where it forces you, you don’t have an option not to figure things out, nothing’s given.

Aanu Gopald 21:21

Nothing is given. There’s no privileges. You need to be agile to survive.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 21:30

Maybe we’ll come back to this topic, but there’s something there, it’s been kind of marinating in my head as far as what’s going on. You were the first black female African to achieve both certified team coach and certified enterprise coach through Scrum Alliance. Why was that important for you and for Scrum Alliance?

Aanu Gopald 21:55

Wow. Well, the importance of that for me wasn’t about the certification, but about making a difference in my community and the CTC, the CEC was just a confirmation of my accomplishments in the Agile coaching world. Throughout my career, and I’m sure you would have observed this as well, I’ve been to classes, trainings, workshops, local meetups conferences, and there were only a few people that looks like me. Few years ago, when I embarked on this journey of both certifications, we only have a few handful of black people on the Scrum Alliance guide level, we only have the Morrissey’s at the (inaudible 22:49) level. And I can’t even remember if there was any black person, at the CEC or CTC level at that point, to be honest, I can’t remember. But that was the motivation for me, I see a gap and this become a mission for me, a mission to help others that looks like me, other Africans to start this journey, to inspire them that it’s possible, it is doable. Of course, it’s a long journey with a lot of learning, with a lot of growth and the growth and the opportunity to improve myself personally, to be a better me and to be a better coach in order to serve my community and the organizations that I consult for was the motivation for me.

And right now with the other five black level guide, we are motivated, I mean CAC certified agile coaches level guides at scrum Alliance, the six of those, we are motivated, we are starting a program in September and October to bring the African Americans and the African community together and support them on this journey, that we did it and we believe that you can do it and we are here to guide, to mentor, to support you in achieving your dream because this is a dream to many, many, many people. And also, the accomplishment was a huge opportunity for me to be a role model, not just to Africans but also to women, minority women, that you know what, this is a path for you, not just an opportunity, this is something that you deserve and you can start this journey especially going through the process, the experience and I understood what it takes to become a CTC or a CAC level, supporting the women, the African male and female in this part of the town that I am and also in diaspora, you can achieve these two destinations, it belongs to you, it’s your right. That’s the word I’m looking for. It’s your rights.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 25:40

I agree. I was talking to both Bob Galen and Sherry Silas, diversity wise, from all perspective, but it’s also being able to bring different experiences of diversity to the guide level, and sometimes, I was joking around first then, I didn’t think about diversity like in my podcast in a sense. They started as, hey, I want to have these, it was mostly in my head, it was mostly these guys that I’ll have beers with and as I started enjoying the podcast more and more, I’m like, who else would I want to talk to, who else have I spoken before and for instance, you and I have interacted a couple of different times where I brought you in to speak and I also don’t want to force it, I don’t want to just bring people on just to add to diversity, I want to be able to talk to people that I feel are doing great stuff but at the same time, I can see my biases come out. And like, hey, I want to talk to guys, I want to talk to these people and it requires us to be a little bit more self-aware, I guess that’s where I’m going with this, or what we’re doing, and what we can do to help others because, as you know, especially in the scrum Alliance community, having people mentors and people that can help you is night and day as far as how you can succeed and how you can join the community and all of that. If people don’t have that platform, for instance, what you’re creating or just seeing, hey, can I make it, is it even possible for me to make it.

So the more that people see, and the more that we create equal opportunities for people to get mentors to do these supplements, I think the richer our community and not necessarily just scrum Alliance, but in general outside of Agile. Reflecting back, it requires all of us to be a little bit more conscious about what we’re doing and being more proactive and I’m trying. I’m saying, I’m reaching out, working with Bob but he was sharing some of the things that he was doing. I don’t know if you know the story where he was talking about how his daughter was pushing him, yes, you can say you’re supportive, but what are you doing about it? What steps are you actually taking to make a difference, and that resonated with me, too, same way that at the beginning of this conversation, you said, these are the things that I’m actually doing to help people in Nigeria in Africa, not just saying, I support you, but I’m also doing it through these actions. I think that’s a good example of not just talking, but actually following through with some action, so that’s inspirational to me.

Aanu Gopald 28:44

Thank you so much. My experience with the work I’m doing in Africa consciously made me to be self-aware of the role I am playing in the evolution of the human systems. I’ve always believed that, Africans are the only ones that can solve their own problems and the Girls in Tech initiative, really confirm that for me because I see transformational change happen for these girls, what they need is connecting them to the opportunities, they are ready. Africans are ready for change, we easily embrace change. We have very limited opportunities compared to the Western world and we are readily available for different types of opportunities and different types of change.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 29:50

You think technology will change things because now it’s leveled and it’s easier to connect with people, it’s easier to work remotely. I’m assuming that’ll create more opportunities. I actually just hired somebody from Nigeria to translate, not translate but I’m creating a transcript and it’s easy. I’ve hired people from back home as well. It’s a global market and it’s interesting. Another thing that’s interesting, I don’t know. When I work from people back home, I prefer to speak in English, then in Serbo Croatian because it’s easier for me, especially in business terms, express. But the point that I’m trying to make, communication wise, now, everybody speaks English. So it doesn’t matter where you are, the person working from Nigeria is fluent in English and so the competition, I think, is increasing, but it’s also creating platform for people across the world. And it’s been like that for some time now. But what do you think from your perspective. How is COVID and technology creating more leveled field when it comes to the work?

Aanu Gopald 31:23

So technology has changed the way we work and COVID actually enforced that for everybody, every organizations in every parts of the world and like you said, most parts of Africa, especially in Nigeria, we speak English, and we speak fluent English, because we’re colonized by British and with technology, people can work anywhere and work for any organization in any part of the world. And when you do more research about what people are saying about Africa right now, Africa is now poised to be one of the fastest growing regions in the world and what this means for Africa is maybe we are going to be the new China, we are going to be the new India and we are going to be the hope for human capital. So, with the news and what we are seeing and the way technology is changing, the way organizations are working right now and the way people are working right now, Sally Elatta who is the founder of Sudan NextGen, and also Africa agility, my NGO, we’ve partnered together to start a new initiative called Africa NextGen and our aim is to make Africa the next destination for digital job outsourcing. If you go to africanextgen.com, we are developing youth in Africa with the right skills for them to be able to compete with their counterparts in the Western world.

Organizations, employers can hire talent from Africa actually the youth for digital jobs, and also invest in growing intrapreneurs within Africa. In the year of COVID about 200 startups were birthed in Africa, in the year of COVID when most organizations were shutting down. The African youth, like I said, they are agile, they moved away from white collar jobs that doesn’t exist and they saw opportunities, innovation, using their creativity and they came up with companies that can help to solve the complex problems that we have in Africa. And right now on African NextGen, organizations can hire talent, African youth for digital jobs in customer experience, agile roles, (inaudible 34:10), they are certified, they’ve got the professional certification, they’ve gone through mentorship and the opportunities for them to grow. They can hire in mobile and web development, digital marketing, robotic data science, all our graduates from girls in tech, and also QA and automation testing. So we have those skills available and we have those talents available. So we are looking for organizations in the Western world. Come on, hire this amazing… Another thing about Africans, that we are very, very hard working. I don’t know if you have ever worked with an African. Normally when a job is nine to five, if we are not done with our work, we just want to deliver value and results, very, very hard working. It’s in our DNA.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 35:03

I grew up with immigrant in the United States as an immigrant, I went to ESL classes here and went to high school and even college and I had more in common with people from Africa and Asia than when we moved. Something that you said, I think it’s Africa is a great example, but I think applies for those that are listening, it’s not just for Africa. There are parts of the world that have similar situations where people are eager, and they see the potential how they can contribute to the problems and to the economy, globally. There’s so many parts of the world that are eager to be part of this bigger movement, around solving all kinds of bigger, I mean, biggest problems in the world. And I think it’s an exciting time too because I think in the next 10 years, it’s only just going to get bigger and bigger and we’re going to see the potential of what we can do when we have more people and more diversity across the globe engaged in solving problems and getting rather than just one parts and I don’t know, if you feel the same way, but I feel that the buildup, and it’s not just now, but I think COVID has really triggered it. Maybe, to come back to the question from earlier, what can we all do to improve social and professional equality? What are some of the things for those that are listening and including myself, that want to know in what ways we can help with social and professional equality?

Aanu Gopald 37:06

To be to be honest with you, privileges on ramps would only show up consciously or unconsciously, especially if you are in this part of the world, the Western world and few things that came to mind for me is, number one, we have to be consciously aware of the way we show up at work, and also in the community, it’s not about color at all. It’s about showing up the way we want people to show up for us. Secondly, we should learn how to give the gift of love, the gift of care, the gift of support to the community, regardless of the color, the shape, even the field. We go out to meet people, what do we do, we put smiles on people’s face, especially those of us that we came from Asia or Africa, and maybe we live in this world, there are so many things happening in our parts of the of our world with our family that bothers us a lot, that we so much care for. And also, living and working here with the way some people behave, I don’t want to mention some few things. But we should show up with love, with care, with supports, everyday think about what gifts do you want to give to others, how do you want to put smiles on the faces or in the face of one person.

How do I want to touch one life today. Another thing that came to mind is yes, we know that we have a lot of challenges, we have lots of issues in developing countries or continents and most of the time you hear bad reporting about oh, this country is this, every country have its own vices, we have our own problems, our challenges, we should start promoting the good things that is happening in developing countries, in some other parts of the world. And also with COVID happening last year and of course COVID is still in the space right now, people should show interest in by many more about the needs of other people, the people we work with, even when you go online, you can find out about how we can improve social and professional equality in Asia, in Africa, what can we do to support?

Speaker: Miljan Baji 40:13

It’s really about, as you’re saying, what I’m hearing is empathy and experience but I also tell people, it’s very difficult to empathize if you’re not willing also to, in some ways put yourself in that experience, right? It’s a fine line between, well, it’s not a fine line, but for many people it is, without truly understanding what people are going through or what they’ve gone through. And for many people, we only and including myself, if I really want to understand what Aanu is thinking, and to truly be able to empathize with Aanu, I have to see through your eyes and experience all and try to understand what you grew up with, what has shaped your worldviews, your perspectives, in order to truly be able to support and see things from somebody else’s perspective. I think a lot of times we don’t have that experience, we don’t have that platform, I can say, I support the diversity, I support this and that. This goes back to what I was saying, I have to do something about it, I have to try to do something about diversity, only then will I start getting a small sense. Oh, what that is about, it’s not just talk, talk but put yourself in a position where you can learn more about really what we’re talking about and what other people might be going through.

Aanu Gopald 42:06

Yeah, exactly. I’ve heard a lot of people saying, Oh, we are supporting diversity and inclusion and equality. It’s all about talk, talk and there are different ways that we can support. People are hungry, people are, oh, God. Financial sponsors, $10 is a big amounts of money for some people, just that gift of $10. There are different NGOs or individuals making big impact. Share your knowledge, you don’t have money, but you’ve got something here. Share your knowledge, that’s a gift that we can give to people. I’m going to be a bit personal here. For the Africa NextGen, we need mentors, we need trainers in all those skills that I have mentioned communication, emotional intelligence, leadership, just name it, digital marketing, customer experience, empathy mapping and lead product development. Agile, you’re a CST. You can offer free certifications, you can give the gift of coaching, leadership development, because this youth are leaders not just of tomorrow, they are leaders of today. There are so many things that we can give, we are looking for sponsors, we are looking for companies to provide paid and unpaid internships for the youth that graduate from Africa next gen initiatives. And also in September, we are having another Girls in Tech.

Right now, I’m desperately in need of financial sponsor, it cost a lot of money to run the bootcamp because it’s a passion for me. My husband and I and with a lot of Africans, individual Africans, they are supporting this movement. We are going to launch a donation, help fund, any one of those out there $50 means a lot to us, support this movement. We’ve trained over 200 Girls, we’ve trained sorry, about 200 Girls, of which 50% of them are in employment right now. That’s the impacts. 15% of them are either freelancing or they are Techpreneur. One of them is actually consulting for a company in the US and she lives in Nigeria. This is the smile that we want to put on the faces of these girls. We want to close the gender gap in technology. Right now we have 25% of female 75% of male of which only 3% are African Americans and Africa and the ratio of African women in technology is 0.0 something percent

Speaker: Miljan Baji 45:10

Which is crazy. That’s the world that we live in and when you look at the numbers, and not just there, everywhere, it is insane. In a way, how can that be good for innovation if it’s so homogeneous. Getting us, our community that you and I are part of, getting scrum Alliance getting everybody just to understand a little bit, even that 50 bucks, all of the trainers, we all can chip in little bit, whatever it is.

Aanu Gopald 45:52

I’m coming to you, I’m just waiting to create it and posts it on the TCC group on LinkedIn, for my guide level families, and families and people that cares about impacting lives in Africa to support us. I spoke with, when I was in Nigeria, and I’m going to say, one of the top lawyers in Africa, there’s a state in Nigeria that, there’s a city, what the Girls does at the age of 15-17 is for the parents to send them for prostitution in Italy, that’s the business when you get to the age of that. That’s how the parents live, in a small city in that part of the country. and the dream of the man is, let’s bring Girls in tech to the city and he said, you know what, I’m going to do everything possible to sponsor you that if we can touch the life of just two girls, stop them from going to Italy for prostitution, that’s the biggest achievement for him. And I was like, wow, whatever it takes, I’m ready to do this. Those are the testimonials. Life is tough, very tough.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 47:31

It also tells you about the environment, if somebody is forced to do that, it tells you about the environment that they live in, and what type of options they have. So if we can just give people and girls options not to consider that or even be motivated or that something’s going to say, there is a potential here for me, or this is how I see myself and it is, and I think it just comes to all of us being more conscious and be more actionable about what we’re doing, it’s easier to say, it goes back to what I said at the beginning, I donate back home in both financially as well as, I support the communities where I’m from, but I still know that I can do more. And a lot I do, it can make huge difference. And I can give others like what you’re doing, getting others to evolve. This conversation, at least for me, is opening up again, it’s going to come back to me and doing something about it. But it is helping me get a little bit more motivated and put some more things into action. I wanted to ask you this earlier, just on the fun side, you’ve been doing and helping organizations outside of it adopt Agile and Scrum. Could you maybe share some of the stories or areas where you’ve helped companies outside of IT?

Aanu Gopald 49:15

Oh, I have so many examples and I’m thinking in my head, which example should I actually give? And the one that came to mind for me was Capital One. I was an Agile Coach within the IT departments in the small business and international car departments. The leader of the business team, and when I mean the business team, this is where the bankers,, the credit analyst, underwriters, booking and funding, the people you talk to when you’re looking for Loan, Mortgage and stuff like that, said, I love this agile thing that you guys are doing, I could see improvements, I could see sustainable change, I could see equality improving, morality and all those benefits productivity that comes with agility. And he said, Oh, I want to do the same thing for my business team. And I said, Okay, what problem are you trying to solve? The usual questions that we asked and he said, you know what, the turnaround time for business customers to ask for loan, and for the loan to be deposited into the account is like, Oh, I don’t want to give number because we want to reduce the lead time, the language, I will call it.

So started with training, just a bit of orientation of what Agile is, and blah, blah, blah, and they decided to call a cross-functional team, a cross-functional team of bankers, credit analyst, booking and funding and an underwriter part of a team. They do daily scrum, daily standup where they meet every morning, oh, yesterday, i decisioned XYZ loans. Today, I’m going to decision this loan, oh, yesterday, I spoke to a customer, some documentation we’re missing and today I will follow up, I have impediments, I do have impediment, so they form small pods so they call it pods. And they became more collaborative, they work together as a team. For an example, a documenters has a lot of documents to review and an underwriter is less busy, okay, oh, I can support you, I can help you. That team work, the real team work, the real scrum team work, started happening. To cut the long story short, they were able to become 40% faster and that was an amazing result.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 52:07

That’s what happens when you just put people together and let them figure things out.

Aanu Gopald 52:13

They just figured things out. It’s collaboration, the power of team collaboration, mutual accountability, it’s not my job, you are the one reviewing documents. No, we are a team and we are in it together and we succeed together as a team.

Speaker: Miljan Baji 52:34

That, yeah, and it goes back to even some type of conditioning, what we’re used to, like, in organizations, the way that organizations have been set up, it’s like, we’ve been untrained to just collaborate and figure things. A lot of times, we’ve been trained to take orders, especially in some countries, coming back to some of the cultural aspect, that’s how you’ve been conditioned, that’s what’s expected of you to just get together and figure things out. It’s like, it’s a normal thing, but it’s not a normal thing in a business setting.

Aanu Gopald 53:18

That’s really true you know, because in Africa, if I’m older than you, you don’t call me by my name, you call me by my initial, you’d say AG, because of that culture respect. It’s disrespectful for me to call someone that I’m older than, it’s very disrespectful for me to call you Aanu, we call by initials. So that’s a sign of respect, that culture (inaudible 53:51)

Speaker: Miljan Baji 53:52

I would definitely love to get your thoughts about how the cultural aspect is a global workforce. Now we have company culture, but we also have global culture, like you might have teams from all over the world that have come from different backgrounds, different cultures, and how’s that impacting the team culture or company culture, but we’ll save that. We’re almost out of time and it’s crazy how time flies by. What would you leave the listeners with? What is the message that you would like to leave everybody with?

Aanu Gopald 54:29

The message I would like to leave everybody is find something that you can give back to the community. There are different things that we can do to support the community. There are different gifts that we have within our capacity and power to give. It doesn’t have to be in Asia, it doesn’t have to be in Africa. Touch A Life every day. And another thing I want to leave is everyone has a dream. Don’t be one of those people that will take their dream to the grave without achieving it. Believe in your dream and make it happen. Just step into your superpower and bring your dream to life. Find people that can support you. I have the best team in the world in Africa. They do most of the stuff. What I do is look for money. I have the best team in Africa that makes things happen. Find the best people that will share and believe in your dream, they will support you to achieve it. I always tell people when I’m talking to the youth, when you go to the graveyard and if your eyes could be open you will see amazing dreamers that died with their dream. Do not die with your dream, make it happen in this one lifetime that you have. Make that big impact in the world. We are all created to bring a change to the world. Be that change agents.

Michael K. Spayd & Marie Murtagh

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:45

Who is Michael Spayd?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 00:50

That’s a good question. I’ve been trying to figure that out for a long time. Can I get back to you Miljan?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:58

I’ll get back to you in the next lifetime.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 1:00

Yeah, that’s a good idea. That’s a date. Well, I’m a lot of things like everybody. Most significantly, for your audience probably I am the co-founder of the Agile Coaching Institute, with Lisa Adkins back in 2010. The shaper of the designer really at the Agile coaching competency framework that people know that the X Wing diagram was facilitating coaching, mentoring, teaching. And one of the original definers of the enterprise coaching track for icy agile, and the co-author of Agile transformation using the integral Agile transformation framework to think and lead differently.

And I’ve been involved in this field for about 21 years, actually, just the same year, the manifesto was signed, it was when I was first a coach. And so I’ve kind of grown up with this industry, and have tried to bring a different kind of outsider’s perspective to an outside seeking and training like professional coaching, like organization development, that would be like culture, like leadership development, unlike systemic constellations. So I’ve tried to I’ve tried to enrich the agile environment, which was concerned with Agile transformation so much which is not a technical thing to do. Right. It’s a very odd thing to do. And I’ve recently started something new. I think that’s probably good. Anything else you think you want to ask me that would be helpful for people to know?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:16

No, it’s just, I usually like, like you said, people struggled to define sometimes who is and there’s a lot more, I think, a lot of things that you said, people know, what are the some of the things that people may not know about Michael?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 03:31

Yeah, right. Well, they might not know about Michael, that he has been a student of esoteric wisdom for many, many years, including Tibetan Buddhism, including different kinds of I hesitate to call it a cult but you know, non traditional kinds of schools of thought, spiritual schools of thought of different kinds. Shamanism. I’ve been a student of shamanism for many, many years. I don’t always say that in public. Fortunately, just the three of us here, this is the confidential room.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:23

For now.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 04:24

Yeah, right until we published. I don’t know, I try to come up with something else but I don’t know what will be useful right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:40

No, thank you for sharing that. And I think you’ve been very generous when you’re describing yourself. I think the impact that you’ve had on the Agile community and the way that you’ve helped Agile community defined a lot of this stuff and give us a direction. At least I appreciate I know many others appreciate and especially with your new work, I think this is something that will be a guide for future agile coaches and practitioners how to integrate some of these concepts they’ve been around for decades, I just think a lot of things in Agile we’ve adopted, so I just want to say thank you and for being generous in your description, or who is Michael, but I think you’ve done a lot for our community. And thank you for that.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 05:37

Well, thank you very much appreciate that Miljan. I know it, I can see in students eyes that it’s really impactful to them. And it’s like the most meaningful work that I could possibly do. I’ve had a series of what I call downloads of a vision for starting an organization for the last year and a half or so, actually, almost two years, but even longer than that. And it’s called the Collective Edge. And it’s about working at the edge of our consciousness and what we can do, in relevant things that affect, the whole planet, really, and our human ecosystem.

And I originally drafted, Michael Hamon and Lisa Adkins to help ground that and reunited after a long time apart, in 2019. And we went through a series of things together. And Lisa eventually found out sort of a more distant position from the whole thing, she wants to have a lifestyle business, rather than really growing a company seriously. But Michael and I, Michael Hamon and I had a long term partnership in in creating things together and having a really good time teaching together. And he and I started to spend a lot more time together and, really emerged an enterprise coaching school. So that became the first business line of the Collective Edge. And it’s owned by Michael, I’m his partner, and, helping develop programs and stuff, but he’s really leading there. And so in parallel to that, for the last I’m sorry, this is so long, but I think it’s going to be useful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:42

No, it’s really helpful.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 07:43

And pretty much during the exact same period, Marie and I were hanging out together a lot, we met about the same time that the downloads were coming in. And she was very curious about what was going on in the Collective Edge. She’s new to agile, but you would never know that. I mean, she studied so much stuff in Agile, it makes my head spin, it makes my head hurt, actually. I mean, the amount of time she sends me something in text, like, you got to watch this. I’m like, when do you have time to do anything else, I’ve just listened to the last thing you sent an idea. So she’s been stretching my personal thinking for a year and a half, really.

And it’s sort of finally came together as, during the pandemic, the whole thing was really quiet, right, it was just nothing was happening, almost next to nothing was happening. And then this year, it started to heat up, you could feel a shift happen. And we’ve been trying to find what’s the right seat for everybody in the Collective Edge. And the right seat for Marie is to be the Chief Operating Officer. So we haven’t right now. You can’t tell anybody going on because we haven’t announced that yet. But by the time you folks are seeing this, she’s been announced as being a COO.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:19

Congrats.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 09:20

She’s just the perfect person for this job.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:26

That’s great, that’s a good segue into so who is Marie? A lot of people might be asking who is Marie Murtagh?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 09:36

Oh, wow. Most effective way to answer that question is I’m me. But a little bit about my story anyways. So it’s 1993 or something I started into organizational IT, actually as a developer and then I graduated from there into project management and had pretty healthy career that started off and, and took me from a medium sized organization and over to the west coast for an adventure with a startup organization. And from there, I ended up going to London to the UK, and did project management within Deloitte for a few years. And in around well, a few years ago, or around 2011, or something like that, I decided to leave that because I was successful as a project manager.

And I felt my team was really sort of electrified, and enjoyed, you know, working with me, but I felt that there was just this sort of incongruence with project management, and I was very confused by that, like, what is going on here and experienced some pain sort of in the corporate environment at that time. And so anyways, I life took me in a few other directions, which is always fun, just to see where life sort of leads you. And then, around four or so years ago, I went on this deep journey to look very deeply at what is here, who am I? Who are other people, what is going on? What is the universe?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:29

Down the rabbit hole huh?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 11:33

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 11:34

She dug the rabbit hole.

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 11:40

And around two years ago, I heard about agile, and oh, my God, and lit such a fire inside of me, because I saw like, Oh, thank God, finally they get it, that we’re humans inside of this organization, right. And the humans are what make up an organization. And as I sort of journey deeper into that, and sort of reflecting back on my previous experience, realizing that, you know, I was kind of working in organizations that treated people more like machines, or more like resources. So it made sense to me then why I didn’t exactly love it. And so then it’s become, with all these things that I’ve learned and that I’ve been taking in and then the healing and then cetera, then take your look at my life, and what am I really doing with it?

And what’s the impact that I want to leave here, how do I want to help people and working inside or with organizations to help them transform and helping people to live more into their humanity so that we all have, you know, more fulfilling lives. And step more into of course, our potential. You know, agile is where I sort of settled, and with stumbling across Michael and Agile of 2019, and a couple of other big concepts that sort of came across my plate at that time, too. It’s been, you know, I was on a certain path, a trajectory anyways, upwards, but since then it’s gone really very straight up and I’m just to be honest with you, I’m just really very delighted and honored, excited, a little nervous, all of that about the role that I’m stepping into here. Yeah, I’m happy it is,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:38

It is interesting. And I think a lot of this is emerging too, like some of the things that Michael has been doing and this is not the mainstream, right, some of the stuff that we’re talking about is the next level of coaching or transformation. And it’s connected to a bigger movement. This is much bigger than agile, this is much bigger than us.

And the way that I understand a lot of times oh, not a lot of times but especially in the context of what Michael is doing with Collective Edge is what others have been trying to do outside of agile, outside of business. So as much as to some this might seem like a completely new thing. It’s not necessarily new and there are many people across the globe that are trying to contextualize these things in their context. So maybe before we kind of dive deeper into some of this stuff, what is Collective Edge? How would you describe it.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 14:48

You want to go first Marie?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 14:49

Ah well, I feel like anyways, in terms of where a lot of us have found ourselves and maybe find ourselves today, it’s in living and being in a certain way that doesn’t feel really true to our nature. And there’s a sense I think, inside of all of us to that there’s more to life or something should be different. Come on, there’s got to be something else, right and away. And I’m not speaking just from a seeking sort of perspective. But also there’s this unknown part of things.

And there’s a conventional way, right, that we’ve all been living and stepping into and working. And this Collective Edge is outside of that conventional. But that can show up in so many different ways. Right? But and I think, too, we’re always kind of living on an edge anyways, and being sort of deliberate and conscious about it, and thinking, what is the right edge anyways, what’s the right boundary, and I need to push within myself that I can help others to push, right, that’s going to expand everybody’s understanding appreciation, the ability to navigate in this very complex world, so that we can all benefit and thrive.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:25

That just made me think of, maybe before we get Michael’s thoughts, but just maybe to share my thoughts on what you just said. And I’ve heard Collective Edge a lot of times, but I didn’t see it from that perspective. And now, almost like a little light bulb went on. And I don’t know how true it is. But a lot of what I think Collective Edge stands in this moment is about the new paradigm, I think what you’re describing is…. one of the things that you have in front of the website, quote from Lion Twist, the old structures and systems are no longer serving us. And not necessarily that they’re bad.

But I think what’s happening is our paradigm is changing. And it’s changing the way where our world is becoming more complex, where things are becoming messier. And I think when you just described Collective Edge, it was at that edge of the new paradigm, I don’t know, if you guys are familiar with Tom Kuhn cycle, the guy that came up with the word, a paradigm, where at the beginning, I think of something else that’s going to emerge. So the Collective Edge is that, at least for me, what resonated is the new science, what he calls the new science, or the new normal, the new paradigms. And that’s weird to a lot of people and a lot of stuff that people hear, like when I first and when I talk to some of people a lot of stuff that, maybe Collective Edge my stand for, be like these guys are smoking something or doing something and the they allow.. and that’s okay. Like, a lot of times, that’s what it sounds to people that embedded in the current paradigm, they can’t really see their own paradigm. So now I like to Collective Edge. Now it’s making more sense to me as far as what it is. I don’t know if that’s what you meant, but that’s…

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 18:30

No, well, I don’t know if I was like, wow, yeah. I mean, you hit it on the head, I mean, in terms of the being a new paradigmatic thing. So it’s not understandable. Within the frame of the old paradigm. It’s just not, I mean organizations can’t get purpose driven organizations. They don’t understand it doesn’t make sense. And you seem stupid to them, or fuzzy headed or whatever. But we’re in Frederick Mallos terms, reinventing organizations, we’re starting a teal organization, or, more precisely, technically, I would call it a second teal organization. It’s not necessarily just teal, but people will know it, potentially as teal and that’s the idea. Its purpose driven. It’s not money driven.

It’s not materialist driven, not that we don’t plan to make a lot of money, but from like a consensus is really started, I was thinking from a consensus reality point of view. Because the Collective Edge, has a center, and it has multiple business units, about four of them have been defined. In some levels detail, one of them is actually an instance, is a real business in a real sense, making an action that Michael has, Michael Hamon has. There’s another one that’s sort of starting to come online that I’m not going to talk about. It’s too early to talk about that. But it started to form and the other ones are more, there’s energetic imprints that suggests it might happen, but we don’t know who the leader is of them, or whatever. So, there is meant to be a turquoise in spiral dynamics, incubator of businesses.

And so it’s meant to have a tension between the ownership like the Collective Edge doesn’t own the whole thing as a Collective Edge. Actually, we haven’t worked out the details of this, but it’s going to be a minority partner in the business, so that the business could detach, could buy itself out and become independent when the two or four is ready to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:47

So what that’s really… I want to pause here, because we live in an orange world where legally, we have to structure by orange rules, and you’re trying to create an organization that’s teal or turquoise. And how do you fit it like something like that into..?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 21:10

I mean, one, you have to think differently obviously, you have to be at a different level of development to be able to let go of certain kinds of ego things that really are getting away and are very prevalent are characteristic of orange. And I have a really good lawyer. And what he taught me is that what you’re doing with a contract is you’re making private law.

So you’re making a law that can’t violate everybody’s law, obviously. But it can be exactly how you want it to be within those things. So we create private law around how those organizations fit together to give them by structuring into the operating agreement, buyout clause we haven’t worked out all that detail, because it hasn’t been pressing to do that yet. And when you’re doing a startup, you’ve got way too much. So, there’s four business units that have sort of appeared, one is operational, and Marie and I hold the center. So Marie and I are in the center of this, which is sort of the umbrella of it. And Michael leads ISA and I’m his partner in that. I’m, one of his principles, so I love doing that kind of work, but it’s his business.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:42

So could we talk a little bit about…., so maybe we can explore. So the TCE Center is in the center, the Collective Edge center. And as you said, when I saw this diagram that was shared with me, it reminded me, obviously, of [inaudible] [23:01] and sociocracy, holacracy. So it’s more of a when we’re talking about going back to the quote from Lyon Twist, the structure and systems are outdated. We’re talking about more a decentralized network type of organizational structure. And if you’re saying you’re pushing towards turquoise, you’re probably pushing even sociocracy, holacracy. I’m assuming to another level, maybe not.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 23:32

I think that’s really plausible. But I wouldn’t want to stand behind that. Yeah, because I don’t know. But I think that seems pretty likely. Marie, you’re trying to get in, I think, before

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 23:47

To comment on your question, actually, Miljan, about coming from second tier in the orange world, and one of the things that just sort of came up for me is you have to, so acknowledging and noticing, right, the orangeness of what we’re all trying to navigate and then you have to kind of step outside of it and look at it sort of objectively and from the outside, and there’s where things like what Michael, his lawyer, organized in terms of, you know, seeing it with a new lens and doing a private law type thing.

That’s what I was saying and I appreciate very much, sort your particular question there around sociocracy and holacracy. And what really comes up for me is those are fascinating. And they’re doing a lot of amazing work, right? And also in sort of shifting and bringing in new paradigms and giving people new options of a way of working in a being thank God right. And I feel like anyways, also to that from my perspective, and where I sit sort of in the Collective Edge, I look at organizations like that and I feel that it would be good for us to have a good.

Like, I don’t want to call it a…. it’s not a working relationship, but be organizational sort of buddies, whatever. And when I think about even like how I am with my buddies, right, there is this whole sort of really truth telling right to each other and having fun. And there’s also a little bit of accountability right. I wouldn’t expect any organization to step in or to take that on per se. But that’s where I kind of put a flag in the ground for me anyways.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:34

So what you’re saying is, and I think, let me just paraphrase. So like sociocracy, holacracy, represent this new paradigm. So what you’re saying is really, like we all believe, or have similar beliefs in the sense of, we should be partnering and talking to each other and finding out ways to collaborate. When I was talking to James freeze, he was specific about because I was trying to push him a little bit like, why S3 is not expanding a little bit more, in a sense.

And one of the things he was saying, hey, I have a niche, right. And which is totally understand totally, but he understands similar stuff that we’ve talked about, he has the same perspective, same understanding of the emerging future. And it feels good, at least to me, the doctor, is not in everyday life, I can get a chance to talk about some of the stuff that’s emerging. So is that really what you’re describing when you said, like, we need to partner and things like that, that it’s more of a that type of partnership?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 26:40

I think it’s interesting. So, partnership and in a way, I don’t necessarily have a whole lot of expectations on that. But I feel like it’s a playfulness. And it’s more like a buddies and buddy system..

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 26:52

Well, and then what Marie was saying before, James Priest is actually on our list of.., we’ve identified a number of what Marie was talking about organizational friends, like you have friends, and then if you have a spouse or whatever, you have couple friends, right? And organizations can have friends too. And not that not just strategic business relationships. I mean, that might happen, but it might not, you might just want to hang out with each other because you do similar kind of things, you could learn from each other without an agenda. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:29

Exactly. And that’s what I meant, like, you know, maybe what I… don’t know maybe partner wasn’t the correct term. But yeah, that’s exactly what I meant more like a friend.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 27:39

No, it could lead to a partnership, for sure. But that’s not the criteria for doing it. The criteria for doing it is you share purpose and you like each other.

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 27:49

And it’s different from the orange paradigm. Right? It doesn’t have a competitive nature. It’s not a competition. There’s no shortage of ways to help.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 28:01

Yeah. True.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:06

Cool. That’s very interesting. Maybe I thought we could explore. And no, Michael’s not here. But like the school of integral sense, making an action. Because they think that’s important. And that’s another example, I think that we’re not necessarily Agile community, but pushing things to what’s coming, what we need to focus on, I think, I believe, if I was in your shoes, I will be doing that. So it’s like seeing you do it’s like, oh, this guy or this group is thinking in the same lines as me. And why was it for you, maybe just to see your perspective, and maybe you can speak for Michael Hamon as well. What was behind the school of integral sensemaking? And, I want to focus on that integral sensemaking in action.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 29:00

Sure. And I’m going to also kind of a theme I’d like to explore is how we’re using our own methodologies to start and run the Collective Edge. That’s really important, I think. So integral sensemaking in action is a transformational leader, training and Development Program, often enterprise agile coaches, but they could be a transformation lead from a company or something. We have to two parts of the core curriculum. One is called Master camp, which is like a five day thing that’s spread over two weeks plus, there’s a follow up a significant follow up session, a couple of weeks later, so it’s got a fairly big container. And it focuses on everything about enterprise coaching at the learning level, not at the competency level, but at the learning level, right?

Systems entry, how to do leadership development, what’s your own leadership development style, like in terms of leadership circle, which is our standard tool for that. How do you work with culture? Where’s the culture math? How do you work with structure, all those kind of things, actually exploring the four requirements from the book. So the really the program is a synthesis of my book and Michael’s book. So Michael wrote a book called involve agility. I wrote Agile transformation. And we sort of mash them up in integral sensemaking in action and actually we have started to include human systems development Glenda Young’s [30:49] work. Marie, I knew about Glenda, but like, with a lot of things I knew about Glenda. But she was in the session, we actually met without knowing it in Glynda OEMs session at agile 2019. And then Marie took the certification in HSD.

And that encouraged me to take it. So I crashed the party joint. So the thing about evolve agility, Michael’s book is about deliberate sense making. And the whole mindset, the whole I leadership quadrant, is about sensemaking. How we make sense, right? And there’s, the interval levels describe, from Amber to orange to green to teal describes a different way of making sense. Not necessarily about the content, but the how one thinks and how one makes meaning, how one makes…, what’s the patterning of how we tell stories to ourselves, we always tell stories to ourselves about who we are, which are, frankly, false stories, but we believe them. And they shape our lives very well. So one of the things we teach in the master camp, and we continue it in the expert cohort program, is delivered sensemaking. So the expert cohort program is like an eight month program, to become an IC agile expert in enterprise coaching, and to also get our certification in enterprise coaching.

So it’s a competency-based program instead of a knowledge-based program. So deliberate sensemaking is a thing for us, right? And so we’re using that in the company, I mean, we have a practice ourselves of deliberate sense making of revealing, and getting, I’m finding myself getting a little nervous right now, I’m finding myself getting anxious to say this, we’re not sure, revealing our own…, what’s coming up for us, because that’s part of how we make sense. So that it becomes public in the meeting, or whatever. And then everybody can understand their own sense making better and we can make better decisions together. Orange argues for its point, it debates. Second Tier wants to construct wants to co create.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:31

Well, that’s the thing. And there’s a couple of things that I guess, need is kind of the coming up for me and sense of like, what’s going through my head. One is that sensemaking I think from a perspective of maybe next organizations next coaching, especially in Agile, to me, it’s really essential like for us to understand that. So for instance, if I’m going in and understanding organization, what type of leaders I’m dealing with, if I can get people to do exactly what you described now, what you describe as people being vulnerable and being open because I have to have courage and be vulnerable to say that, hey, I’m nervous.

This is what’s going through my head. So that amplifies that collaboration, that amplifies that co creation. So I think from that perspective, that’s a huge gap that in the business world, across the gap that we have, that I think is being fulfilled, or at least being made aware of more from that perspective. So that’s what came to mind from that, but what are you seeing when it comes to applying this to your collected edge and you have several partners, you have several of these structure, how are you using sense making with each other?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 35:12

Well, let me let me talk about a slightly different angle, if that’s all right, it’s. So one of the things that we wrote in the book, and that I have emphasized in my consulting for quite a while is, what I really understood from working with the leadership circle for the past nine years. Which is that if you’re a leader of an organization, if you’re the top leader of an organization, that your consciousness constrains, what can possibly happen in the organization, you’re the upper limit. So things could go above your developmental level for a little while, but they’re not going to last.

So what that translates into is what I call me first problem solving, that if I’m the leader of an organization, that I’m the first problem to be solved. And I know this directly in this case, because I tried to do this six years ago, I tried to start the equivalent of a Collective Edge six years ago, and it didn’t work, didn’t work at all. It was a very painful experience. And I can feel that in the six years since then, that I’ve grown into a different person into a different leader. And part of why I’ve hired Marie, is because so find the first problem. You need somebody to be aware of that you need somebody who can give you really intimate and detailed and not pulling punches. Yeah, candice, and Marie does that. Marie does that for me better than anybody I’ve ever known in my life.

So she can get inside my defenses, and tell me how it is. And that’s, like, so important as a leader, usually people comply to senior leaders, right? They just oh, yeah, that’s a stupid idea. But I’m not going to tell you that because I might get fired, or you’re acting like a jerk right now. I mean, you don’t tell senior leaders that most time, but that’s bullshit. That’s like so not right. Yeah. So Marie, you want to say anything about that? Don’t make me spit out my water, okay.

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 37:55

So first of all, I would say, it’s not, and I would say quite like that. Because things you used there to describe, how I do… And, it gets reflected back in the system, too, right. But I also just want to say what I feel like anyways, and all of this, and I think congruent even with what you were talking about Miljan, is well, you as your own leader, and how are you having conversations with yourself? What are you talking about and what are you ignoring? What are you depressing? What are you glossing over? What, are you bigging up? What are you putting down? This conversation within myself, is what I’ve been having, and what I continue to have? And what is sort of my guide to for how to have that same conversation with other people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:00

So essentially, I have to work on myself before I can help others.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 39:05

Exactly. That’s the premise, both of the ISA enterprise coach training program, and it’s also the position of the transformational coaching that we do in consulting.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:22

So now I get it, I heard you say, Michael, that we’re screwed as a society. Now I get why we’re screwed as a society. How many people do you know that want to work on themselves, how many leaders of the ceiling and what you’re saying is also….

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 39:39

I’m working with one right now. And there are significant, I mean, they’re a small company, but they’re significantly growing and they’re decidedly successful. So, it’s not anybody… Well, I can’t even say that I want to say it’s not fortune 1000. But that’s not completely true. I mean, the leadership circle has clients, Roche, pharmaceuticals, Honda, Disney, where the very top leaders are taking a really serious look at themselves. I’m not involved in that work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:15

You’re familiar with the with the percentage of people that are part of that second tier or thinking or seeing from the… so it’s a very small… So that’s why I joke around because the complexity in our world is increasing, it’s a big ask to get people in organizations to focus on developing themselves focusing on that inner work so they can help others because they don’t even see themselves as a bottleneck, they don’t even see themselves as the ones and a lot of times people have right intentions from their perspective. It’s just that they’re not seeking.

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 40:59

You know, and I just want to say, too, I wouldn’t want to place blame necessarily on anyone except for our Western culture, to be honest with you, because I think it really sets everything up from the way when we’re born and how we’re developed in our education, etc. All of that is very externalized. Right? All external work. And I think in Eastern cultures, they have kind of the opposite, it’s a little lopsided, possibly in the other direction. I don’t know, I’m making something up there.

But I do want to say so I think for us anyways, it is, this self in a way is kind of the next frontier. But I also want to say, though, I feel and what has been my own experience is that it’s through myself, right, that I can help others. But it’s also because then you recognize the Unity ,the interconnectedness, like in a really deep level of all this.

So I feel like and within the ISA, there’s another course or cohort program, right, the inner path, which is beautiful, right, leading into the self and looking, taking really deep looks about nonjudgmental as well, right, compassionate looks at ourselves. But then I feel like, what seems to happen is then and even actually congruent with the integral or spiral dynamics, right? Yellow, you’re kind of self and systemics, sort of oriented, right? And then when you go into the turquoise, right, then you integrate that with the unity consciousness.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:42

So maybe that’s a really good point, and maybe to bring it back to Collective Edge and how you’ve structured so essentially, is the second theory type of organization. The governance and ownership is something that is pretty interesting in how you have.., essentially, you’re creating a platform for partnerships for friendship, for people that have that same purpose. There’s also that battle between agency and communion. And how are you balancing that as far as that structure and what we want individually versus as a group, what we want to show?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 43:26

One of Marie’s favorite topics. So I want to talk about the advice process. Do you want to say something else first, about Asian communities more general?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 43:42

Just, of course that it really leans of course, into the polarity nature of the universe, and that the agency, right is really the masculine in the communion usually being associated with the feminine. And anyways, the point is, is that in all of us, and everything, there’s sort of a spectrum of that, and I kind of look at all the same ways, and you look at the Dow right, and the flow and things of that nature, right. And you’re going in between and out of the other one, and I’m sorry, I’m getting a little bit lost, but I’d come back around. What I’m saying I think with it is that, change..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:25

It’s a balance, right?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 44:26

It’s a balance but things are constantly moving, changes constantly happening. You are flowing from one to the next. Balance, I think, is largely, it’s my favorite thing to say that it’s asymmetrical. And then I also feel that from the other research and things that I’ve done and what I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to test out here in the Collective Edge is that when a system is imbalance, change is simple.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:01

That’s a really good point. So how do you.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 45:04

Easy is right, is one of our watchwords. If it’s easy, it’s because it’s right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:15

So like, maybe just to explore that. And I think I touched upon it before, but right is defined differently from different perspectives. So when we talk about Collective Edge, it’s a collection of like-minded people looking possibly, or wanting to look from that second tier. How do you add the versity and avoid groupthink, yet, at the same time, acknowledge that we need to look from that second tier in order to deal with..?

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 45:52

Well, so I want to come back to the advice process and agency communion, that’s what I think, from at least partially addressed, what you’re asking. So what Fredrick Lalo described in teal organizations was that they don’t make decisions by you know… the person in charge or their rank or something, makes all the decisions. But they also don’t make decisions by consensus, because that’s what pluralistic green does. And frankly, little is more annoying than being stuck in consensus Hell, where you can’t get to consensus. It’s not at all useful. It’s a stage that people go through, it’s reasonable, and it’s better than autocratic decision making. But it’s completely inefficient.

So the advice process is about that the person who has the scope, where it’s their business, do something that you can’t just go out. And if you’re the event coordinator, you can’t just go over into the sales person’s business and make decisions for them. But within your sphere of what you do, you get to make your own decisions. And the rule is, or the guidance is that you have to have a conversation with the people who will be impacted, who are stakeholders in that decision. You don’t have to agree with them. And you don’t have to get them to agree with you.

You have to listen to them. And then after you’ve listened to them, then you have to take accountability. Marie and were just talking about this last night, that the question to ask is from the outsider’s point of view, let’s say it’s my decision, right, to make, your each question to me is, so are you ready to take accountability for that decision? Which means if I’ve given you my advice, which might suggest that you slow down, and you’re deciding to do it anyway. Okay, that’s your prerogative, are you ready to take accountability for it? I mean, that’s like, the perfect balance for me of just seeing communion because, I can make my own decisions. I don’t have to be constrained. But I also have to take the communion consequences of it. I could screw up, it could be a totally a stupid decision. But if I have to convince everybody, I can’t trust my own gut, completely, and I can’t be autonomous, I can’t have really sovereignty.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:30

My question was to just to build on that if you have somebody thinking from a green that likes consensus, and that is like this advice, process, automate and you want to have people in green and orange in the sense to have a healthy system, you don’t want to just group of, you know, part of Collective Edge group of people that are just, you know, so that I’m assuming you haven’t dealt with that yet. But that’s something that you’re going to probably deal with, at some point.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 49:01

Just starting to. Marie were you trying to get in there?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 49:04

Well, I want to say.. okay, right. So well, we all know too, or it hasn’t been presence or anything here yet. But of course, the developmental lines within all spiral dynamics and within integral, right, and so and kind of each and every moment, or each one of those developmental lines, right, people are individual self can be at different levels within that intelligence and will. And so there is in a sense, a lot of diversity that’s already here. If you get that level.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:41

Which one dominates?

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 49:44

Yeah, and what’s happening in the moment, right, what are we talking about? What’s the subject? What’s the context? And I think also though, what is so funny to me and I feel the need to say is that with just being the really very centered sort of in green. What occurred to me as we were having this discussion, and what makes it such a difficult sort of, and we call it consensus, hell, right, is that if you think about us as individuals, we’re so freaking unique anyways, right? No two life experiences are the same, no two minds are the same. So for you to try to really go for with just a complete consensus-based organization. I’m going to wonder why.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:37

It is. And I think I’ve really liked the advice process. But you have to come from that. I think the advice process in anything below the second theory can be very challenging, because it’s judging, I think the you know… So that’s why I said in a sense, somebody from Orange will probably dislike the advice process. And there will be lot more judging than you would be, like, just saved from green or teal.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 51:15

Maybe so you bring it, you lead us to another point, which is we’re setting up a deliberately developmental environment, what Bob Keegan and Lisa Leahy talked about, and I never went organizations, which is people are put in an assignment both because they at least couldn’t be good at it, but also because it will develop and grow them. So you don’t just put somebody in a position where they’re great, and they just keep knocking out of the park that doesn’t help them at all, that doesn’t grow them at all.

So part of having orange or green diversity in the Collective Edge will be in helping them be in the advice process, and get over their concerns about that, or help them sort of do a little hand holding of them through that process, including what they’re uncomfortable with, or whatever. And also a little push. She needs challenge and support both. So it’s like, if you don’t have enough people at second tier is going to be hard to hold it. Right. So you have to have a critical mass of people at second tier, I think to hold the whole structure. But then within that you could have people that are at different developmental levels, younger people or, whatever. I mean, that’s absolute [52:39], we’re about to hire somebody like that. Pretty sure..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:44

Same way that we have people that are holding the orange, and you have different but yeah,

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 52:49

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 52:52

I just want to say, too, I think it’s very important to recognize, though, that all of those stages are absolutely necessary in all of our developments, right. And in our job within ourselves and with each other within organizations is to help the healthy side of that manifest.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:14

And full growth through those I think we haven’t had a chance to talk about the shadows and all that stuff. But full growth through those. And I think that’s something for a separate topic, but maybe to come back again to the Collective Edge. So in summary, what I understand it to be is a platform to experiment and understand what the second tears organizations would look like. So in a sense, what Loulou describes is that teal and turquoise type organizations, the mission for Collective Edge, I’m assuming, is maybe to show the world, what those type of organizations look like to incubate those type of organizations to bring together friends, partners that want to build that. Is that how you see it? Because through our conversation, that’s what’s emerging. And that’s what I’m seeing.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 54:14

Right, I’ll give you first crack.

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 54:16

Oh, I just was very excited, actually, what I was hearing so, and you were presenting actually something a little bit differently for me that I’m kind of set into a little different sort of thinking, and I’m going to have to get settled before I can say much. Thank you Michael.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 54:35

Mine is less intelligent than that. So I would say that that is aligned with our mission. I wouldn’t say that that is our mission per se. I mean, it’s aligned with our purpose, which is to work at the cutting edge and help other people work at the cutting edge, in the interest of anti-fragility, awareness and love. So I think that’s an instance of doing that. But it’s not like, we’re specifically trying to model as our product or whatever had to be a second tier organization. That’s an artifact a little bit. But, it’s all integrated, right? Because for us to actually use the practices we’re advocating to run our own organization just as like, drinking your own champaign.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:29

I mean, yeah, it’s like, the way that I see it is like, you can, we don’t know, but maybe we can imagine what it was to go into orange before… So like, there were a lot of companies that will probably look weird that we’re trying to figure things out, they didn’t know. And, you know, 100 years later, you can reflect back and say, this is what came out of that, this is how we have always learned, what I see Collective Edge I guess, or companies like Collective Edge, are trying to figure out how we’re going to deal with the challenges that, we’re currently dealing with, that we’re not doing a very good job of solving, but also how we’re going to go forward. And I’m assuming you don’t have all the answers, but you have a purpose, and you have a vision, you have a mission short, I’m assuming the way that I look at it is you have a broader purpose and vision, and then your mission is something more achievable.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 56:31

Well, in teal, as Loulou, identified for us. People at that level, trust, the wisdom beyond rationality. So we’re being guided, where we’re going, we’re not inventing this out of, like, some kind of master plans or something. In the native traditions, they talk about becoming a hollow bone, that spirit can blow through. And that’s what I feel like I’ve been trying to do for 20 or 50 years. And I’m better at it than I used to be. I’m not perfect at it, of course, but I’m a lot better than I used to be. And so this is a new level of being able to manifest that, like this may be seem like a silly example. But, I ran a agile Coaching Institute, like a $2.2 million organization, and sold it to Accenture, which was, pretty, I was proud of that. But, now, my sights are a lot higher than that I mean, I hope to grow $5 million organization in a few years. And part of being serious about that is hiring people like Marie to challenge me. And also, like, completely trusting, you got to find the right seat for people, right? You have to find that.. you go here like the first one was Michael belongs as the leader of integral sense making and action, not us together.

Even that was tempting to be us together. But that wasn’t the right answer was him on my job as a senator not that so finding those right people, and entrusting them, and the example I was going to give you with, like, marine I’ve talked about lately, like the importance of health, of diet and exercise, as you know, that got kind of totally blown out by the pandemic, all those habits and stuff got, you know, kind of crushed for me at least. But that would be if I wasn’t in really good health and, and whatnot, I can’t do this job as well. It’ll help me to be clearer and cleaner, like just turn me to a keto diet. Now, to burn cleaner fuel inside me, helps me get out of the way. It’s not just my laziness or my indulgences of myself.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 59:23

So, it does I mean, you’re looking at the whole thing you’re not just looking at the.. so, it’s a holistic without getting… you looking at it holistically as a whole person. So yeah, I mean, that is very interesting. And I think I’m excited to see how this is going to shape and where it’s going to go because I think it’ll encourage others to try similar so.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 59:59

Yeah, I certainly hope so.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:04

So what would be as we’re finishing up here, and I feel like we could talk for another two hours. What will be your message maybe to the community? Or maybe something that I didn’t know to ask you? What would you like to say in closing? Marie.

Speaker: Marie Murtagh 1:00:32

I think what’s coming up for me anyways, and the question that I asked myself as I am becoming myself, and of course, we’re all always in a process of becoming ourselves. And sometimes it comes more online and becomes more conscious and deliberate. But then same thing is happening, right for the Collective Edge. As an organization, it’s becoming itself. And, that, sort of when I think about any purpose of it, is not necessarily right for the Collective Edge to have be a star that, when we go away, or whatever, or something, right, that it burns out, but how do we become ourselves at the same time, but builds something so that there’s a legacy?

And I feel like too that this is where, it’s around the, the organizational buddies and friends and things like that and holding each other sort of accountable to that legacy. And yeah, right, which will become the thing right that a couple 100 years or whatever, from now people will look back and that’s what they will determine was, the benefit or what really came out of it, or what was the advantages of it. So

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:01:54

That’s a good way to put it, that talks about the mission, and the vision and the purpose.

Speaker: Michael K. Spayd 1:02:03

Yeah, that’s why we’re ending with that.

Melissa Boggs

Speaker: Milan Bajic 00:35

Who is Melissa Boggs?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 00:37

Oh, my, who is Melissa Boggs? You prepared me for this question and I did not prepare an answer right off the bat. But that’s probably a little indicative of who I am. So I’ll give you the business version and then I’ll give you the human version, I guess. So currently, I am a leader in the Agile space. I am the vice president of business agility at Sauce Labs and I am also for now starting to call an employee engagement coach and it’s related to being Agile coach but I’ve started to realize that my superpower is really in helping leaders and employees increase their engagement and helping them to see each other because sometimes there’s societal, cultural, sometimes generational gaps that exist and so in helping them to identify those and sort of work through them, then they’re able to connect more fully, and therefore, everyone’s engagement increases. And it’s not just in, ping pong tables are nice, so are snacks in the kitchen but that doesn’t actually increase your engagement with work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:01

Because alcohol having a full bar?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 02:03

Sometimes. It increases your engagement with something. But yeah, I’ve really sort of honed in on that lately, because especially coming out of that, we’re still in the pandemic, but as we’re nearing that, what we hope is the end of the pandemic. I think a lot of leaders are grappling with how do I lead now, people want to stay remote, etc. so there’s a lot more there we could unpack later but I just began to realize, I have a lot of passion for that. So that’s sort of part of me. And I think in parts, I’ve been on both sides of that equation. Personally, I am a mom to two, have a teenager and then also almost a teenager, a wife, a roller skater and I roller skated a ton as a kid. And then in January, well, for Christmas, my family bought me a lovely, really nice pair of roller-skates. And so in January, I picked that up again, and believe it or not, it is like riding a bike and when you haven’t done it for 20 years, you can still do it. So that’s been fun to have a new exercise hobby type of thing. And so I’m sure there’s more but that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:22

I was listening to your discussion with Aaron Sanders about roller-skating and what you were saying, I found the analogy or the what you use to describe what you’re really learning and differences in skating a rink versus going down the hill and I thought that was really cool in a way, you might be familiar with one area and just skating in general, but a different environment requires you to adjust even though something might look familiar. One form might be very familiar, but the environment forces you to really learn or adjust.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 04:10

I was not counting on that at all. So yeah, it’s funny, because you can and allow me to apply it to Agile for 10 seconds, but you can know the practices and you can apply them in one place but you have to know the underlying principles, because if that environment is 20% different, like a sidewalk versus a rink, then you have to go underneath things like balance and things like kind of skating in your environment and roller skating. So yeah, there’s definitely a metaphor that I think sort of just came up when I was talking about there. But now I’m living it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:57

Yeah, so that’s fun, and I think it’s interesting how we tried to divide and even you’ve said it, this is who I am professionally, this is who I am personally, but it’s hard to divide those two, like Melissa is one person and it’s a lot of times hard. When is Melissa’s best or when are you at your best? When do you think you’re operating at your optimal?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 05:27

So I have to say, as soon as those words came out of my mouth, as soon as I divided the two, I was like, oh, he’s going to ask me that, because I would have asked myself about that. I have some very strongly defined values for myself. I went through this actually, when I was applying for my CEC years ago, is when I really did the soul searching. So I know very clearly that my values are courage, empathy and creativity and so at the lack of, or at the risk of sounding cheesy, I think, whether it’s with my kids or my husband or work, when I am applying those values actively in combo, it’s one thing to be courageous but if you don’t also have empathy for your situation or if I personally am not getting to be creative, then I’m not at my best. And so I would say any situation where I have the ability to apply all three of them at the same time, it feels like there’s no ceiling.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:34

So courage, empathy, and creativity. Nice. I like those. Let’s maybe unpack a little bit of courage and maybe we can kind of segue into the wild hearts at work and the new podcast that you’re launching, because I think that has a lot to do with courage. You talked about being a rebel wild at heart. Could you give us intro as far as how the idea for the podcast came about and maybe just how do you see our relates to the current environment, because I listened to your intro, and I thought it was really nice the way they described it so it might be helpful to share that. And I definitely encourage you to follow Melissa on podcast, I believe you said the way that you said it or the way that I understood it, it’s going to be a major podcast platforms but you’re also going to have a video kind of unedited version on YouTube. So tell us a little bit more about wild hearts at work?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 07:49

Well, thank you for first of all, watching the trailer and second for giving me a chance to talk about it because it’s definitely a passion project. It’s definitely all about courage. The podcast itself, kind of came from this idea that through these stories that I’ve kind of collected over the years of coaching, there are people out there doing crazy things and then I mean that in the most wonderful way but we don’t necessarily know about it. And so if you are someone who is like, you feel sort of stuck in the corporate world, and you have all these creative ideas, but you feel like you’re the only one, then I think you’re less likely to take the risk and try something in your company. The other thing is, being a coach, one of the phrases that I heard all the time, and it drives me absolutely crazy and I guarantee all of the other coaches listening to this have heard it. That’s nice, but in the real world. And so what I want to do is give people something to point at something to say, yes, in the real world, so and so at this company that I heard on wild hearts at work did this, they did exactly what I’m talking about or something really close and it kind of gives people, I don’t know equips them with some resources to say, it’s not just me, there are other people doing this and they’ve done it successfully so I want to give it a try. Those are two of the big reasons and then third, I realized, even Friday after I published the trailer that some of this is selfish. I don’t want to feel alone, I don’t want to feel I’m the only one who kind of looks at some of our work structures and workplaces that were built back in the 70s and 80s and I look at that and go like it is a whole new world now. Why are we still behaving the way that we used to when there’s so much more that we have to offer as a society. And so yeah, I think selfishly part of it is just, as people started sending me over the weekend their suggestions, and I started seeing new story that I hadn’t heard of, I was like, some of this is just me wanting to connect with those people and also feel like, I’m in it, there’s a revolution, if you will…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:25

Or maybe as you’re saying that, it reminded me of and the way that I look at it, it’s a paradigm shift. So, what we’re talking about is in this like it doesn’t happen the real world. It’s mostly when we’re stuck in the current paradigm, and we’re kind of only seeing from that lens of the current paradigm. And there’s a lot of things that people are pushing in that new paradigm, I think if you talk to anybody or most people will agree that there is a shift and I think COVID is also towards that shift. I think at any point new paradigm is weird, is maybe tied back, it is wild, because it’s something that not everybody is comfortable with. It’s out there a lot of times because it I don’t know if you’re familiar with they keep bringing it up, not many people in Agile community are familiar with Thomas Kuhns, circle of change, or paradigm change. But essentially talks about how we go through these paradigms and it’s hard to accept a current paradigm, but when it starts breaking down, you have a group of people that see the new way. And I think that’s a lot of times in these stories that you’re talking about people sharing these stories, it’s about this new paradigm that’s emerging, new way of working where, like you said, I think when you talked about the new company that you work at sauce lab, where transparency is a big thing, ideas over hierarchy. Those are type of things that are not common in most organizations but if I had to guess in 20 years, when we reflect back, be that will be like a normal, that will be I think, something that people will expect to have in organizations. So is it about highlighting and sharing stories about this new paradigm that’s emerging?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 12:31

It’s a mix. This is the creativity part, I really do want there to be a mix of format, some of them will be interviews, some of them will be me talking about topics that I think might appeal to or wild at hearts might be struggling with, like am I the only one that is thinking about compensation right now? And how do we compensate differently? No, you’re not the only one. Also, I have a whole stack of books that I would love to share with people that have either inspired me or I have some that I haven’t even read yet, that I’m going to read intentionally for the podcast to be able to give people a hot take, like, I just read this book, and it was great or maybe it wasn’t. And so yeah, I’m really intent on kind of mixing things up so that every time it’s kind of different. One other thing I wanted to add to is when you’re talking about that paradigm shift. I don’t think we have enough empathy for leaders in that situation, specifically for people who have been managing or leading for a very long time in a very certain way. And I’ve been guilty of that too. Definitely years ago, I would have said, how leadership doesn’t understand or they are the thorn in our side or we can’t do this because of leaders. And while that’s often true, again, I mentioned at the beginning, there’s this gap. Now, having been in those shoes myself, part of the podcast is, I want to create some empathy in both directions. There’s also a bunch of wild leaders that I know that I want to bring onto the podcast who can speak to other CEOs and say, hey, I tried it, it’s scary, but it worked, whatever it may be. I do want to make clear that when I talk about effectively and respectfully rebelling, it’s because all of these people are humans. The CEO who you feel is getting in your way, has an immense amount of pressure that you don’t know about. They are being asked questions that they don’t have the answers to. And so I definitely want to create that balance in the podcast as well so that they feel seen and heard. But maybe you start to understand a little more themselves about the people who are trying to rebel respectfully. So we’ll see where that goes to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:15

I know you love storytelling and what you did in scrum Alliance, as far as with people sharing stories. What will be some of the stories that you would be open to sharing about wild hearts, real wild hearts out there. Who inspires you, maybe even give us some hints of who you’re thinking about bringing on to talk to. But going back to real examples, who are some companies or people that inspire you?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 15:49

Some of these, I can’t claim to have a contact with yet so if you are watching this, and you have a contact with these people, I would love you forever. I’ve always been inspired by Zappos, who is the largest company to have adopted holacracy. And now, frankly, if you read the latest book at Zappos have evolved even past it, it’s really amazing if you read it, I think the book is called The Power of WOW and I’m not being paid to sponsor that, I just love the book. But they adopted holacracy biggest company to do it and many of the teams that we work with, who start with Scrum, and then start to add in other things, that’s kind of what happened with them. I get really annoyed, because there’s a lot of articles out there that say, oh, they dropped holacracy, that’s actually not true. If you read the book, they just added to it. And I think like we see with Scrum, sometimes people start going well, that’s not holacracy because they’re doing other things with it. So we can be elitist, I guess. So Zappos is like a huge one. Absolutely loved Menlo and Rich Sheridan and introducing Julia into the workplace, Buffer and their perspective on transparency. If you were to go to Buffers websites, least this was a couple months ago, this is true, you can see they have salary transparency, not just internally, but externally. I mean, they are so incredibly committed to transparency, transparent to their customers even. And I’ve always said, I haven’t had a need for Buffer services, so far, their products, but the minute that I do, I won’t look at anyone else because I’m so aligned with who they are from an internal mission perspective. And these are radical things, I mean, sharing your salaries with the entire world on the internet, I don’t think it gets wilder than that

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:58

Exactly.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 18:00

So those are kind of like the big company names.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:04

And it’s also engaging, I think, when you do things like that, those type of actions promote engagement employees, because some time in my life had like, oh, how much does this person make, how much is the other person making? Am I fairly compensated? And I think, by company going out of the way to do that kind of encourages more of that engagement, more like we’re supporting in a way, and I think that’s engaging and supporting from a company standpoint.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 18:39

Absolutely. I don’t want it to just focus on the big names either and that’s part of what the podcast is about, I know that there are a bunch of just individual people, in companies that are like, let’s try to do this differently, let’s try to just leave this team differently. There’s a lot of HR people who are doing, kind of rebellious practices, if you will, where it’s like, it’s still the right thing for the company but we’re also going to take the employees into consideration when we do this. And so those are the stories I also want to elevate in addition to the big names that we already know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:27

I don’t know if you’ve heard from Fidelity that they give their employees one day a week or most of the Fidelity. They still leave it to each of the I’m assuming product lines. But every week, Tuesdays are for self-development. And for somebody as Fidelity to do that, I thought that’s amazing. You don’t have to report so if you want to go screw around and not do anything on Tuesdays, if you’re lost because they’ve given you a day to focus on developing yourself and sharing and collaborating with others not necessarily, their company and I thought that’s a commitment from a company encouraged to trust the employees to develop themselves because we all in busy environment, it’s tough to find time to dedicate to learning and creating that space for people is nice.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 20:25

Yeah, and I hadn’t heard about that, and I love it and I’d love to learn more. I love that, first the trust that demonstrates by the company into their employees, all of their employees. And then secondly, I think we’ll all be amazed to hear what comes out of that and those are the types of things I don’t think we hear enough out. It’s like, oh, I think Google kind of did that, too and we did hear some of the stories, they did a good job of saying, yeah, we did this, was it 20% time is what they called it. And there’s some cool products from Google that came from that time. And so yeah, I’m excited to hear how that will bring new things. Cool.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:09

Maybe to shift gears a little bit, I want to talk to you about self-awareness. When you talk about bridging that gap between leaders and employees, or people that are typically doing the work, self-awareness is needed on both ends. What is self-awareness in your own words?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 21:32

Oh, goodness. To me, self-awareness is a constant practice. It’s almost self-explanatory. It’s this constant, like, how did I show up in that situation? How am I showing up to this other person right now? It’s maybe a blend of empathy for whoever you’re engaged with in that moment, or however you’re communicating in that moment and yourself. Because I also think, through therapy, I have learned that self-awareness can also border on, sort of, I know self-parading sometimes, and so you have to be really aware of that line that you’re walking, and also have empathy for yourself. But, yeah, I mean, it’s a constant, what is it that I need to be working on right now? How am I showing up? Being aware that there’s many things so sometimes you have to be willing to go okay, I’m just going to focus on this one thing for myself right now, knowing I have other things to work on. But yeah, and more context for your question, in what situations self-awareness like, lead me, Miljan?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:03

It’s interesting, right? So the way that I look at it aligned with empathy and what you were saying, but the way that I look at it, is willing to suspend your own beliefs, willing to question what do I believe in? What do I stand for? What do other people stand for? It’s almost like taking yourself out of that situation, trying to empathize, trying to look at things, maybe in a bigger perspective, and saying, how well am I aware of things? What is my sense making around? What’s going through Melissa’s head? What are the values that Melissa has and how do they align with my values and beliefs? What are the experiences that Melissa went through the shape her values? How does that come across to me and how aware am I from her perspective, versus how it’s impacting my values? And I think it goes to how well am I managing my emotional states, because a lot of times in self-awareness, I tell people I used to play soccer all throughout college, and I would swear in several Croatian, like referees and that didn’t feel good. I had to swear in English, so they understand me. But as a teenager, I really wasn’t self-aware and I think maybe it’s just being shocked coming to a new country where you don’t know the language, you don’t know the culture. So I think it was one way for me maybe to express even but definitely when I reflect back my self-awareness, I was reactive. So I think when you have more awareness, you’re more creative, coming back to one of you, rather than reactive and I don’t know if you see it that way.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 25:00

Yeah, and actually, I love how you said that because I think self-awareness is more proactive. And it is things like getting really clear with yourself, about what is important to you and being aware, as you said, how it shows up, but also what you’re willing to accept and what boundaries that you’re going to put around yourself in order to be true to those values. Brene Brown, who I worship, and yeah, that would be an amazing guest to have on my podcast, she has a really cool YouTube video, she was actually on Russell Brand podcast. And the question that he posed to her was, well, it’s her question, and then he posts it back to her, do you believe that people are doing the best that they can? And I’ll tie it back to self-awareness in the second. And so they had this really funny interesting, with some swear words, conversation about whether or not you believe people are doing the best they can based on their circumstances, their knowledge, their own self-awareness, etc. And I recommend everyone go watch the video, because I’ll never represent it as well as she did. But basically, she said, you kind of have to believe that because you can’t control the other person anyway. So if you believe they’re doing the best that they can, then what do you need in your boundaries and your self-awareness to have a healthy relationship with them, because you can wish all day that they’re going to show up the way you want them to. But the only thing that you can control is your own awareness of yourself and your own actions and your own boundaries. And so I think that’s sort of what you were getting at is that self-awareness is proactive. And it’s like, what’s important to me? How am I showing up? How am I checking that? Am I kind of having a mini retro in my own head after a conflict or after something good? After this podcast, am I going to sit back and go, how did I show up for Miljan? Did I help him achieve the goals he had in the podcast? And so …

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:14

I have no goal besides conversations, maybe that’s a good goal which I question. Just maybe to add, and to build on what you’re saying, a lot of times we focus so much on knowing others and I think self-awareness is, how much do we know about ourselves? And when I think about that, I don’t know crap about myself, kind of like, why I do certain things, like if I spend little bit more time thinking, why am I just pissed off right now? Or why am I happy right now, trying to tie back and there’s this exercise that I do in classes, which is I tell people, anytime you’re pissed off, or somebody’s pissed you off, one of your values, or beliefs was either, shattered over, violated, whatever you want to call it. And I started thinking more and more about that, even I joke around. When I piss my wife off, instead of trying to think about, why is she mad, I’m thinking what did I do? I know she loves me, what did I do to piss her off that much that she’s angry. And that helped me at least understand myself a little bit better and understand her and that made me think. Before, I focus so much on understanding the kind of the process is the hardest stuff, other people even, psychology yet, when I put a mirror to myself, the guy that you’re looking at or the person that you’re looking in the mirror is not as clear as you think you will be to yourself. I don’t know, that’s my thought on that.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 29:19

So one thing I’ll add, when you’re talking about teenagers, it kind of occurred to me, I referenced earlier the generational gaps that exist. So my daughter’s 15, she’s Generation Z, because it’s what they’re calling them and they are more self-aware, they’re more awake, they are more in touch with how they affect other people. Then, I could have dreamed of being at that age and sometimes even more than myself, and I look at her and I’m like the information that they have access to and the understanding that they have of how they affect the world, which I’m sure is what our parents said about us, I hope, but it’s like exponential with this group that’s coming up. So for me, when I speak with leaders or we’re talking about closing this gap and I’m like, you think that we are bad, we’re not bad, but you think that we are pushing the boundaries, you just wait, she just wait, because our kids who are raised by us, they’re going to push it even more, and I’m so proud of that, I’m so happy for that because I think that means, there’s a better world coming but it certainly creates challenges. Exactly. But it certainly creates challenges when you have, you know, my daughter’s maybe three or four years away from being in the workplace, if you will. And you still have I mean, that’s a lot of generations and a lot of perspectives in the workplace. And so that self-awareness is going to be paramount.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:03

But there’s also things they won’t tolerate. I’ve been teaching a university, undergraduate, graduate too and it’s crazy, kids don’t have, I guess, they haven’t been molded or impacted by some of the things that we have grown up. So, there are certain thing they don’t really understand, why would you work in non-collaborative way? Why would you just specialize in one thing like being a generalist is a good thing, and being aware of the broader environment, not just my own, and maybe that’s how our environment shapes us. Where I grew up and growing up was a lot different than when we moved here and the environment who creates you, is a person. Anyway, I thought that was really interesting and I wanted to get your thoughts on self-awareness. I don’t know if you have anything else maybe to share. To kind of stay on that topic, how do we support others in their leadership journey? What ways can we support both people on the ground in the trenches who are leaders? So I’m assuming helping them with their self-awareness is one of the things but what else can we do to help them on their journey?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 32:38

Sure, I think the self-awareness part is huge. But also, no matter who you are, empathy for others is huge. We say that like, it’s really easy, like, oh, just understand where they’re coming from. But often, if you don’t have a lived experience that crosses that chasm, you can’t just immediately have empathy. And so that’s actually where storytelling really comes in, where podcasts like yours and mine come in, we help them by creating a place for those stories to be told so that whoever you are, whatever place you are in a hierarchy, you have an opportunity to learn from other people. Most people, one way or another, I do believe people are doing the best that they can. Again, it has to do with the knowledge they have, the co-creation of their environment and the circumstances that they’re in. So I’ll tell you, I know, we’re probably going to talk about Scrum Alliance a little bit. When I was in my role as chief scrum master and Co-CEO, there were times when my team was saying, why can’t we do this? Or why don’t you understand this and sometimes, I’m a huge believer in transparency but sometimes there were things that I would just was not allowed to share, whether it was legally or from an HR perspective, for whatever what it was. And it was such a difficult place to be in. Because we now have this sort of gap between us and I would do the best I could to kind of close it but sometimes, literally my hands are tied and I couldn’t share the whole story at that moment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:29

I’m sure it affects the trust too. We stand for transparency, we talk about all this stuff, but then things like you said legally or whatever, you can say, I can’t see how that would help the trust. Only the theory of trust, if you have with your team could expect you to do that.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 34:47

Yeah, to certain extent. I mean, I think if you have developed a good foundation of trust with your team, and you just tell them I’m sorry, I totally understand why this is frustrating, this is just something I can’t share right now, I will share what I can when I can. But in both cases in that situation, you feel like you’re on separate sides of something, even though you want to be on the same team. And so this is where people like us can ask the questions to help them understand each other? And say okay, so you’re in a specific place being asked questions or being told that you can’t say something, but you need information too in order to feel secure and so it’s self-awareness combined with empathy. And we can help people on their leadership journey by helping them to understand that, simply that, which is everyone in any given situation has needs that need to be met, questions they’re probably being asked one way or another, and they’re all doing the best that they can. And so how do we help them close those gaps and whatever situation that might be? That was a very general answer to your question.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:08

Maybe to build on that, I’m sure like, coaching, to support people on their journey, self-awareness is one thing you can help them as a coach. A lot of times, when we come in, is just creating that space for people to figure things on their own, or just to have somebody to talk to and let their frustrations out or just talk to things and I think there’s coaches and people that are supporting both at the team level and somebody that might be at the senior level or having more decision rights. Those are things that we can do. What do you typically do or what have you done, maybe we can even switch over a little bit to scrum Alliance, what have you done and what have you seen in those situations as a leader, so it goes both ways. And being in both roles I’m sure there were times that were frustrating and I think I heard you say a couple of times, that it was the most challenging time but also the most exciting time or I don’t know exact word that you use, but you use those two polarities in the sense that it was tough, but it was also fun and you learned a lot.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 37:38

Absolutely. I think the word I usually use is rewarding, the most rewarding and the most challenging. If I could remember, there’s a quote from I think it’s Wuthering Heights “the best of times the worst of times”. I wouldn’t say the worst. My goal at scrum Alliance was to unleash people in service to the mission and so in my particular role of the two, my focus was really on helping the organization internally to pursue the mission in alignment with their values, in alignment with the mission. And so that meant changing organizational structures and design, changing the way that we made decisions. And again, unleashing them like there were some incredibly creative and innovative people in that staff.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:38

Yeah, who’s the lady? Sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to bring up the story from HR, the lady in HR when you introduced the new way of hiring and why it was a full day on interviews. I see that as an unleashing from an HR standpoint, what you did, it wasn’t necessarily it was done before, but definitely for scrum alliance to do interviews that way, that was like unleashing the HR. What was the lady’s name that was…

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 39:07

Alex Arbuckle. I just have to shout out to Stacy too. Hiring events actually started a little bit before Alex, when she arrived, she just wrapped her arms around it and helped me make it even more awesome but Stacy Summers also, I love Stacy so much and she knows I tell her story all the time. But the very first time I came to Stacey and said, I want to bring all of the candidates at the same time to the office and I want to play games with them. She was a little shocked and I think she would say a little terrified and I was like, I promise it’s going to be okay. It’s an experiment. We’re going to try it once, maybe twice, see how it goes. And it was a smashing success frankly, some of the best people we hired came from those hiring events because we design them to find people who could be unleashed in alignment with our values and with the mission. And so they were fun, they were hard. It was it was a complex event to put on but not only did we find great people, but we created community, even with the people that we did not hire. And that was one of my goals. Even the people who didn’t join our staff, some of them still follow me on LinkedIn, and comment on things I’m doing now. And so that part was just incredibly rewarding.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:43

And I think if you look at Alex and Stacy too, we all move, nobody stays for long anywhere, anymore. So those are the things I think that you brought to them and supported them in their journey, leadership journey so they’re going to go to another company, and they’re going to say, hey, let’s try this. And I think, that’s what’s powerful about what we do, you can cross pollinate these ideas, people can figure out what’s working for them, introduce them in other places, and what a in my opinion, great way to support others, and showing them what you’ve done, but also let them create their own journeys along the way. Maybe as we’re kind of closing here, what’s the favorite story that you’d like to share from scrum Alliance experience?

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 41:40

Oh, my goodness. So, toward the end of my tenure there, it was coming up on Christmas and Hanukkah, and the holidays of 2020, we hadn’t seen each other in person in nine months and we put on a virtual Christmas party, which is like, okay, another zoom. But I mean, there were some really cool things that, our events team had done to make our own event really cool. They had put together some swag packages for the employees and we opened them all together. We had one of our employees at the time, who did a lip sync to a couple of songs and they were all dressed up and throughout the entire time, the entire zoom of probably 90 minutes, I can’t remember, I just saw individual people standing up and being themselves in that moment. And particularly with the lip sync, they lip synced to seasons of love from rent, the musical, which the entire song is about, how do you measure a year? How do you conceptualize for yourself what this year meant. And I mean, I was ugly crying, like ugly crying, because in that moment, I was like, we’ve done it, we’ve unleashed all of these people, and whether it’s at scrum Alliance, or somewhere else in the world, they now know that they are valuable as they are, that they have something to offer as they are. And some of them continue to offer that scrum Alliance, some of them like Alex have gone on to other places. But what I wanted, especially for that time and scrum Alliance history, was for those individual people to know that they were valuable. And so to see them stepping up, and sharing of themselves, kind of told me that, that happened. And I still hear from a lot of them, and I know that they know, they’re valuable, and they know that I think they’re valuable.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:21

That was awesome. And it’s probably liberating for them too. And as I said, it’s about that journey and I think that’s part of their journey that they’ll remember and that they’ll want to share and create environments wherever they are with others. Maybe as a last thing here for those wild hearts at work and for others, what is one thing that you want to share with them or invite them to do or anything that you want to finish this with? Because I know you have a meeting.

Speaker: Melissa Boggs 45:02

So I have a tagline that I am already planning to use on the podcast. I’m sort of outing myself right now. But it’s loaded so I won’t always get to explain it on the podcast so I’m going to share it with you and then explain it. As cheesy as it sounds, I will end every podcast saying until next time, dear hearts, stay wild. And this might make me cry when I explain it but it is really easy to get disillusioned. This is hard work, and it is hard to push against decades of this is the way it’s always been. And so what I want to encourage people to do here with you, on my own podcast, anytime I talk with people who are creative and radical and innovative and are pushing against the status quo, is to continue to do that, to stay wild, to find other people like you, and connect with them so that you can kind of build each other’s cups up so that you can stay in the work because it’s not going to happen overnight, like COVID did help cope. I hate to put it that way. I experienced during a pandemic accelerated this revolution, but there’s still a lot of work to be done because even when people begin to recognize that we need to change doesn’t mean they necessarily know how and so we have to stay wild in order to get to the other side to the new paradigm.

Dean Leffingwell

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:40

Who is Dean Leffingwell?

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 00:42

So I keep some pictures of some of my keynote talks with a picture of a 10 year old with a colander on his head and a bunch of wires and goggles on like some kid aerospace engineer, that’s me, I still think of myself in that persona. When I was 10 years old, I remember sitting in my living room and seeing Sputnik on the TV. And I thought, wow, that space, that science, that’s off outside of the earth and not necessarily. And by the way, it’s really scary, those are the Cold War days. So I decided at that point, I was going to be an engineer. So I think of myself as an engineer, a systems engineer, first and foremost as a software and as an entrepreneur second. And then of course, you know, my major pride in life is being a parent, I’ve got four daughters and five grandchildren and I just got back from spending a week with them. So I’m a combination of those things. But from a business standpoint, I’m a systems thinker, I’m an engineer, I love software. I love the art of it. But I also missed as I entered the field, the engineering of it. When you study aerospace engineering and I did and biomedical engineering, there are laws of physics that apply and you come to depend on them. So when you build really big bridges, you know what the statics and the dynamics of that bridge is. And when I entered the software field, it was it was kind of pure art. And that’s a fascinating thing, because it still is pure art and science. So my goal has been to add engineering discipline to make better reliability and efficacy. Kind of grew up in the medical business, writing software for medical systems and helping others write it, making sure they’re safe, and yet leave the fun and the art in it. And honestly, I think that’s a paradigm for why I like agile so much. It’s fun to be on an agile team, there’s an art in it but there’s also a discipline process. And a lot of people you know, who are not familiar with the industry look at agile as we don’t need your stinking requirements, we’ll write what you want. We know that’s not true. We know that actually to create good working software in a time box is an extremely disciplined endeavor. I like structure. I like thinking and structure. But I like the greater freedom that comes with being part of an agile team. I like the creativity of software. So I started out as a developer, I wasn’t that great at it, moved into management within a few short years, I started my first company when I was 27 and you know, some, you know, some 40 something years later, I look back and say what a lot of careers in there but they all had software in them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:16

Great. That is, you know, and I spoke with the Dave West, I spoke with Debeed and some other people that you had huge influence on and they had nothing but just great stuff to say about you. And maybe when you reflect on those 40 plus years and you’re dating yourself here as you know Dean…

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 03:37

Absolutely. Look, I have Froggy voice today so everybody will know already that I’m not 35 years old, so.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:46

So what do you think of the current state of agile and agility? And what have you learned and maybe where do you think things are shifting? What do you think on that?

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 03:59

Well, obviously for me, the big shift is agile just for small teams in a small company or can people at Raytheon or Capital One or AT&T or CVS Aetna, people working in very rigorous environments, people at the Air Force, is it not for them because it’s so loose and free? And what do you if the challenge you’re facing can’t be solved by two one piece of teams? Well, that’s really the challenge. And I got into agile because it was the next best method that I found. But I found within months that it didn’t scale. I coached some small entrepreneurial teams and one of my between career hiatuses that was incredibly powerful. I remember one team in particular, that was iterative and incremental and yet they really weren’t agile, and within literally six or eight weeks, they were on a different game. We were delivering value incrementally, the board goes, what did you do to those guys? Did you fire them all, hire them all? All I did was coach them in agile methods because I think the intrinsic motivation to do good work lives in every developer and the structures that we’ve imposed were the best structures we had at the time, like waterfall. I mean, it’s so fun to waterfall now, right? That’s just a blast. So we should go ahead and write the code without understanding what the requirements are. Or I know, let’s write the test first for a piece of code where I don’t even what I’m supposed to be building. So the reality is there’s a logic in waterfall, it’s very logical, and it just doesn’t work at scale and it doesn’t work at the velocity we need. So I’ve been a follower of those methods throughout my career, certainly wrote about waterfall. I mean, I wrote many words on requirements books that were people followed and followed today. So where we’re at, I think is that, you know, 10 years or so after we started this company, we’re at a state where now scaling agile is a known thing. It might be argued by maybe a fringe case that you shouldn’t scale agile, you scale XP, no, but you’re gonna have lots of XP teams. And they’re probably going to need to operate within the context of an architecture. So we’re at a place now where probably most of the global 2000 enterprises, whether it be IT or tech or not, are using agile, either as the branded method, or Scrum of scrums, or just as being really good DevOps teams that can shoot stuff out the door really quickly. However, we’re also in a state where the interesting thing that’s fascinating about my career, and yours as well is the problem is always bigger next. Every time we come up with a new tool, we build bigger systems. So there was a time when the space shuttle was huge, and the first satellite had a few 1000 bytes in it. Well, now cars have 100 billion lines of code. So we have this, we now have systems to thank, right? AI is a real thing. We use it every day. We don’t necessarily talk about it, but you can’t get in your iPhone without it. You certainly can’t, you know, you certainly get our recommendations based upon it. And so the industry is driven by systems. I like to think that my mission and the company’s mission, this is not on our website, but it’s what I believe, is we help people build the world’s most important systems. So the state of Agile is certainly more advanced, I’ve combined it with lean, because I needed that that body of knowledge to extend agile, and that’s relatively mature. And I think a lot of those thought leaders Dave West and Pete Barons and that person would say, you know, we know a ton. So the problem is not that we don’t know what we need to do now, the problem is execution, culture, mindset, you know, getting everyone in alignment to the method and the practice common taxonomy, etc. So we have more than enough in our arsenal. Safe is a is a big framework and that’s because people build really big systems with it. But it also scales. Our company runs safe. My daughter is a startup with one team, she runs portfolio safe and a single team. And they iterate, they do a demo every week, two week sprints. So those methods and practices scale to any extent and it’s up to us to apply them. And whether the thing is agile is not what that thing says on paper, it’s whether the people that do the work can do agile with that thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:25

And I think that’s the key. And then it goes back, I heard you say this, somewhere where like, you know, you within the safe framework, you’ve collected a lot of good things that I think you even said, like I stole or borrowed a lot of goods thing from other. And it is a collection of a lot of good patterns. But when it comes to people actually understanding those patterns, right, when you look at it, there is a gap between the competency and actually, and you put that even back into the measurements, that competency part because you can have the tool or you can have these patterns but if you don’t know if your people in the organization don’t know what to do with it, then it can backfire. And I think you get a lot of crap for safe and most of us do because people don’t know what they’re doing with Safe. A lot of times just, you know, with good intentions just that don’t fully understand what’s behind those practices and patterns.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 09:27

Yeah, and then we have you know, there’s all kinds, there’s Scrum bots and there’s safe bots as well. I come from one of the longest afternoons of my career was spent in Asia and I won’t say where was one of the world’s largest enterprises who had applied safe by looking at the big picture and that was it. And they’re going we’re really having trouble and each questions like no wonder you have [inaudible 09:50]. You don’t really understand the responsibilities of the product owner and No, they don’t actually own it. They can’t. So there’s a lot in safe, we make no apologies for that. And all of science stands on the shoulders of our forebearers. I mean, I think I probably have as much influence from Deming as I do from the combine community in my thinking. The goal of safe was to reduce, right, by induction 10s of 1000s of pages of brilliant work and is something people can read and apply. So we have, you know, a very light work around, for example, Lean UX. And, let’s say design thinking. My bookshelf has this many books on design thinking. Well, how much does an executive or a tech leader need to know about design thinking? Are they going to personally create empathy maps? No! But they need to know they exist and they serve a purpose. So safe is that distillation and we stand on the shoulders of others, for sure, other stand on our shoulders as well. I didn’t have to invent Scrum or Kanban to see how brilliant they were. But if you try to apply Scrum, without a sense of workflow, you’ve got a hand tied behind your back. And if you do Kanban with pure flow, without any kind of planning model, then you’re going to probably iterate more than you need to without stopping and thinking what are we trying to build. So in my view, none of these methods were perfect by themselves for the large enterprise. So little by little over the course of a decade, we started doing things like you know, if there’s more than two teams, there’s probably going to be some architectural governance necessary. And there’s such a thing as intentional architecture, there’s such a thing as emergent architecture, both matter. And we put that in perspective and say, absolutely, architecture emerges. But it can emergent by you, like, you know, like the monster from the swamp or it can be planned to a certain level of abstraction and then implemented with emergent design. Those are the things we think about as a systems engineer and safe is a system. I mean, if you want to pick on safe, the thing I would pick on is the fact that it is a system. So you can’t just say I’m going to do this but we don’t need any product owners or let’s run safe big time, but we’re not going to do value streams because it upsets my organizational model. The downside to safe, you have to do it, because it is a system, it’s a car and it has all the elements of a car. Have to be there or it doesn’t work. Now, having said that, you can start with essential safe, and there are ways to get started. But the reality is that at enterprise class, if you’re building a system that takes a few 100 people or a few 1000, you need virtually everything that’s in there. You don’t have to do it all, you don’t rip the band aid off, you don’t have to through Lean UX and you know, and really great epic decomposition or adopt lean portfolio management, or worry about model based systems engineering, what you need to worry about if you’re building a big cyber physical system, but the stuff that’s in there is in there for a reason. And it’s the minimum set that we can provide to help people scale Lean and Agile to enterprise class problems. I mean [inaudible 13:09] aircraft and robots and incredibly complex medical systems with safe, you got to have a lot for those people. They might go, for example, I think we’ve been working on recently is you know, safe is basically a set of value streams in a portfolio. Well, what happens if I have more than one of those and I have some cross cutting initiative that hits multiple portfolios? Well, they don’t say Safe is complex and it shouldn’t be more complex, they say, help me, I have this problem, we have GEPR and we have to do it across eight value streams or you know, Seven Arts and it’s not optional or we have this compliance issue or we have this initiative where we need to figure out a better way to understand what our customers are gonna leave us. Those are really big problems and it takes a pretty serious framework. So we’ve distilled and continued to still the works of others and the only invention in there probably is safe itself. And in addition, I would take some small amount of pride in lean portfolio management because that simply didn’t exist. If I could have found it, I would have. Instead when [inaudible 14:22] it took, you know, five or seven years to really get that to where that actually really works well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:28

You mentioned that safe is a system and you know, I think you’ve described it as a flow based system. What do you think most leaders get wrong about flow and when it comes to organizational flow, economics of flow and things like that because I think that a lot of times that’s lost on people.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 14:50

I think the heart of flow is a very small batch and hard to think big and implement small. So we’ve been taught to think about the problem, what’s the whole system, what are all the elements and how to do it. But busting that down into really tiny vertical stripes, down to a user story level is really, really hard. So the concept of flow is all about kind of implementation at the micro level and knowing that this story is going to be fed by another story and that even a story can be split in half during the implementation. So safe is a flow based system and certain things like weighted shortest job first, only work in flow based systems. You don’t use weighted shortest job first to force rank a big group of priorities that are all going to be done at same time. You use weight first to pick the next job. So the influence of flow and frankly, the DevOps community which gets flow for sure, they didn’t call it that initially. They just started [inaudible 15:57] too. Those are the heart of I would call that really modern software engineering practices, the rest of the things, the way you manage the portfolio, okay, that’s flow based as well but at macro level. The project management practices that we use, you know, why you meet and when you meet, those are helpful, but the heart of safe is a flow based DevOps centric way to deliver good, solid, highly specific, high quality software more quickly.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:30

So coming back to the leaders though, like you know, a lot of times I see leaders that don’t fully have the background that they don’t understand, like when it comes to organizational structure, architecture, governance, you can impede the flow or you can create more just by not understanding what you’re doing. So like, what are some of the things that you do? I mean, I’m assuming you help them understand through value stream mapping just to visualize the bottlenecks.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 16:54

We start by acknowledgement of their roles and responsibility and empathy and by training them to the new ways of working. The first four or five years that I spent implementing agile at scale was mostly Scrum and Scrum of scrums with some XP thrown in. It was kind of before Kanband was really there for flow. And I will say we’ve succeeded in part but we didn’t succeed in the largest part because you can’t just Scrum inside an enterprise that is not quintessentially agile. So after one of those events and frankly, a flare up that we all just decide to throw up our hands and said the heck with it. I was asked to say what went wrong and what would you do different? And I said, I would never again approach implementing agile or agile at scale without training the leaders first. And that company took me up on my bluff and they said okay, you can train them first, how much time do you need? And I said two days. And they pretty much laughed. They said our leaders don’t have time for two days of training. Well then I don’t have time for your initiative. Because I can’t do what you need to know and two days. And the reality is that’s a starting point. It’s not like, you know, you take a two day class, you walk out some kind of genius, no, all you know is what you don’t know but you have a taxonomy and no places to learn. So the first course that I ever wrote wasn’t called leading safe, but it is leading safe now. And that is really a franchise course. We’ve trained, I don’t even know the numbers, over a half a million people, leaders, first line managers, architects, PMO people, project managers, Scrum masters, all the way up to C minus one and C minus two in leading safe. That’s two days, it’s one day of principles, lean agile principles and flows including. It’s about a half a day of PI planning, because the reality is the people that do the work, have to plan the work. And then the other half a day is okay. And here’s everything else that’s in safe that you might need to know. But those are the key lessons. And it’s a principle based method that we plan face to face or at least we plan contemporaneously because and the people that do the work plan the work, so there’s no centralized planning in safe. So if you take a set of teams and say they need some architectural governance, their leaders need to be trained in the new model and frequently, we’ll get them together to plan together, that’s kind of the essence of safe. And don’t forget to demo every week and you’ll probably be fine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:23

No but those are some of the like fundamentals right? And I think and you talked earlier about like, you know, the importance or you alluded to importance of having the same terminology or having the same understanding. And I was just thinking as you were also saying, like, I was talking to Michael Cohn and he said, like, you know, usually he goes in organizations and they say, you’re gonna fail or he’s like I tried to scare people away and I was thinking, well, you know, Mike Cohn can do it, Dean can do it, but everybody else can do it. I mean, like, you know, why not? You have the authority to say that and to decide who you want to work with and what type of conditions you need in order to work with the clients. So it’s probably easier for you to say that but I think all of us coaches, trainers, consultants do exactly the same thing.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 20:16

You mentioned taxonomy. And I will tell you, I probably underestimated the power of taxonomy. And it wasn’t purposeful that I set out to say, I’m going to create a taxonomy, I just started seeing the words, I needed to describe certain behaviors or responsibilities. And I remember spent quite a few years back that we had a couple of early experiments with translating safe. And we were in Germany at the time, and we were dealing with a large International Bank, and we were proud to tell them, we’re going to translate safe. And the VP said, please do not do that. I have people in Vietnam, I have people in India, I have people in China, I have people in the UK, I have people in the US. I said we need a common term for things that are common. So if epic gets translated in some other thing, we’re not gonna know what we’re talking about anymore. And if you want to do a quick spike to figure out how to translate lean portfolio management into simplified Chinese, there isn’t any way. So we decided not to do that. Now we do translate our training materials, because learning about it is different. So it’s very difficult to you know, if you’re not an English first speaker, to learn effectively from an English speaker for English slides, however, the framework itself is not translated and there’s no plans to do it, because as soon as you do that, dispersion will set in, and the people in India will think this story isn’t epic, right or, you know, emergent design is intentional architecture or pick your phrase and it all will fall apart. So integrating a common taxonomy is a huge benefit and we stick with that. Now, it’s not perfectly aligned, and will never be because it was ever perfectly consistent, you know, that’s the end of the road, right. If we stopped and made it all consistent. But it’s consistent enough and it has conceptual integrity, so that the meanings are the same. So there might be a term that, we had a big discussion today and the framework slack about release versus deploy. Okay, there are times we use deploy, and there times we use release, and we don’t really discriminate necessarily, which is which in that case. It’s okay. Right? People know enough about deploy and release to get by that. Would it be better if every instance of the word was the same? Maybe, maybe not. Because some people do release management, they don’t do deployment management. So those are just the [inaudible 22:46] areas where you have conceptual integrity by agreeing to a meeting, even though the word is not necessarily exactly the same in every usage.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:55

So maybe that made me think about like, what like, if you reflect on the last maybe 10 years, the last five, like what were the biggest surprises over the years? Like you just didn’t expect and that hits you like, oh, wow, you know, I didn’t… So either something that you like implement the framework or what were some of the like, oh, shoot… I don’t know?

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 23:17

There were a number of surprises for me, aha moments. One is when I started, when I became an agile coach, the productivity and culture and engagement of the team skyrocketed. So I’ve been involved in VP or CEO of software company my entire career, I’ve never seen the type of change, we certainly didn’t have this waterfall, we didn’t have Word wrap, we didn’t have with FTD. So I’ve never seen the impact that happens when you decide that a team only has 10 people and somebody is going to worry about the backlog and we’re going to have a servant leader and we’re going to work together to ship software every day, every week. That was amazing. That’s why I do what I do now because and my mission is to bring that goodness to everyone. I’m on an agile team, I’ll bet you are. I‘m never gonna work in a company where that’s not my environment. So that was surprise number one. Surprise number two is while I recognize the problem in the industry with scaled agile, I actually didn’t want to start this company. I mean, there was people who started the company around me with my permission, I didn’t want to start another company because that would have been one to many. I’m honestly surprised that what an amazing velocity we have, and how with a relatively small company can have a huge impact. And it’s pleasing to see just today I had two vignettes go across my desk kind of in demo mode. One was a company that said with safe we were able to dramatically enhance distribution of our COVID vaccine. Another one said this is the only Large scale change I’ve ever had, that once we initiated we had pull from an entire development community. Those are heartwarming wins and things that really motivate you to say this is really good stuff. So I’m surprised, not that we’re successful but I would not have envisioned a relatively small company could have the impact that we have in the industry. So this is, you know, either lots of good business experience coming together with various business models. I’ve been a CEO and a director of companies all my career, or maybe it’s as my dad would say, even a blind pig gets an acorn once in a while. [inaudible 25:39] we hit a bottle rocket and that’s been really fun.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:44

So maybe I agree. And it’s also like it’s still short period of time. And I know, there’s also a lot of critics of safe and I think a lot of times just because lack of understand whatever it is, and there’s always going to be critics but are you surprised or you know, any comments on that? Because I think unlike any other framework, I think you and safe get more crap than anybody else.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 26:16

So leaders have critics, right? Anytime anybody disturbs a market, you’re going to have critics. That’s just natural, it comes with the territory. What has surprised me, however, is that in our world of respect for people and culture, and the notion of Agile as we’re continuously discovering ways of doing new work, how some of those critics have been well beyond the pale, and not about the method or the customer results, but just, you know, in the nature of, you know, bizarre personal attacks, from people who consider themselves to be thought leaders. I can maybe understand that, but honestly, I can’t respect that, because that’s not the way we behave. So critics for sure, bring it on, I think we put criticisms in two categories. Some are just really unfounded. I mean, you see things all the time, I saw one the other day that said, you know, safe overloads the teams. I guess we could or somebody could, but safe, does capacity allocation and has uncommitted objectives to make sure that not everything that you plan for you have to commit to. That’s just bizarre. Others are over time, especially are pretty good, solid technical concerns. Well, it says version five, but it’s actually the eighth major release of safe. So when we find things that we think have merit, we fix it. And the rest of it is just you know, water off a duck’s back, it’s just not a concern. If leaders spend their time looking behind them and saying, Oh, I need to address my critics, they’re not looking to the future. So we look to the future, we look to business outcomes, we’re rewarded every day. I mean, the criminal justice system of the FBI is built on safe and they told my team, the whole company face to face that there’s a lot less bad guys on the street because we [inaudible 28:12]. Okay, well, critics be damned, that’s [inaudible 28:17] honest outcomes. And those honest outcomes are great, we’re happy boys and girls. And we just serve the ecosystem, right? And these ecosystems are based on economics, make no mistake about it. There aren’t any philanthropists that I’m aware of wandering around saying, here’s my method, and I’m giving it away for free. So the economic determined, there’s an economic factor in all of that, that affects it. But I don’t think that gives an excuse for, you know, a sensible thought leaders to reduce themselves to statements of not fact and statements of inference and implying motivations that aren’t present. We don’t do that and I wish they wouldn’t, I don’t think that’s appropriate, but I don’t control that part of the world. I only control how we [inaudible 29:05] others and you know, never heard us or anybody that I can influence speak like that about anyone else in the industry that makes a contribution. So that’s our culture, it’s the way I grew up and it’s the way I also believe that if you’ve got to criticize a competitor, there may be something wrong with your offering, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:25

Well, either that and I think sometimes it’s just like, you know, picking at the you brought up earlier, the big picture, it’s like well, it’s challenging anyway. If you’re gonna, like, you know, just pick on somebody because, you know, they’ve tried to visualize a lot of concepts on a single page, like you said it’s tough. So maybe to kind of turn around a little bit on a fun side, like, what are some of the challenges that you’re dealing with when you try to visualize so much stuff on a single image? Like what type of discussions are you guys having and what are maybe some interesting or fun stories that you might have around…

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 30:01

Well, there are configurations of safe now, which there weren’t initially. But I will tell you the original debates were should we have a matrix view? Should we have a role based view? Should we have a asset view? Should we have responsibility view? And the answer was always No. I drew the first big picture in a discussion with a few 100 PMO people that weren’t enamored by this agile method thingy, and I had them in small groups, 45 minutes a session, because it’s a big, you know, kind of Agile day. And I decided that before I went into that, there’s a whiteboard on the wall and I said, they know how they work now, they know they struggle for sure but they don’t know what an answer might be. So I’m going to draw an answer so they can envision a future case. And I said, yes, there’s agile teams, but they’re going to work together. And we’re probably gonna, we’re allocating space work because teams branch their code, we do that, I do it, you do it. We’re not supposed to, we’re supposed to check it every day, well [inaudible 31:03] need to upload. And we want to create a situation where they bring that code together. And you’re responsible for governance. So rather than us giving a report about what it should be, why don’t you come see what it is. So we’ll turn to objective evidence and help you do your job. So I started sketching it out and showing the pattern, showing the teams working together. And I said, you know, architecture matters in building big systems so somebody is going to be responsible for that. That was the genesis. Then we decided only one page. And I had a fun conversation with one of my daughters who works in a nonprofit and she has asked, these new learning modalities that she’s trying to deliver. So she’s got a storyline together and I said, put it on one page. And we all laughed about it and looked around and said, yeah, one page tends to work dad so we put it on one page and start there. Now, what you wouldn’t know unless you started integrating backwards is that page is never the same. So here, each release, we take things off when we put things on. Otherwise, the density is already a retina burn and I admit it, right. It’s a retina burn. So what happens is, when things get to be known, we no longer have to talk about them. And when we talk about them, we take them off the big picture and we put new things on. So things like, you know, DevOps needed to be integrated front and center. There will be a time when DevOps is kind of assumed, and kind of integrated, we won’t have to devote that real estate. So maybe we’ll devote it to the next technical challenge. But for now, if you don’t make DevOps front and center people don’t get it. So when you see anything on safe, and you see real estate know that we put a ton of thought into that icon and we had to figure out how much space we could do to that, how many iterations we show, you know, how a P.I. boundary looks, how bold it is, and we debate that stuff constantly. But we do it as a team with input from the field, we have safe fellows and SBCTs from all over the world and they help. But in the end, we have to decide that this goes on to BP or it doesn’t. And we have honestly little luck with, we have an area for advanced topics, there’s a ton of good value there. For example, you know, the whole discussion on team topologies and some of the examples and advanced topics, people don’t find that. They go to the big picture and click. So if a thing is important, it has to be there. And therefore we use the big picture as to put the things that are important now. And when something is no longer important, it’s going to leave the big picture and something new that’s important will come on. So you know, the amount of space we devote to backlogs, the amount of space we devote to expressing iterations, the amount of space we devote to teams, the icons, they’re all thought with consideration of the fact that this is going to fit on an eight and a half by 11. And in an elevator, I can teach somebody safe. And when we use it face to face, I’m in front of a big picture and I literally put stickies [inaudible 33:56] on culture, and it gives people an orientation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:01

And I think that’s what’s powerful about it are orientation and at least, you know, when I’m talking to people, and it gives them some type of map, a discussion point or something that we have in common that, you know, that we can understand.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 34:18

Yeah even though if you don’t agree with it, at least you can talk about it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:22

Well, I think most of the time, it’s incomplete. Right? Like you said, you’re selecting based on where the industry is going, what you think it’s by nature and I think it’s a framework that’s made up of collection of good patterns. And, again, with people that don’t know what they’re doing, you know, a lot of you know, bad stuff can happen. What are you thinking about next? I’m sure you have a roadmap for like, what’s coming challenges that we’re facing, what are some of the things with 6.0 maybe or what’s in your mind?

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 34:55

So we’ve been dealing in a couple of areas. We’re certainly been addressing this what we used to call the portfolio portfolios problem. And really now we’ve surfaced that under the enterprise article, that is a big issue. We have six or seven additional themes, we’re looking at, you know, what effect does the cloud have on development today? Oh, my goodness. Well, we don’t really talk about that, right. We actually don’t talk about data which as we move forward in the marketplace, and we think about, you know, smarter systems and customers hearings and that type of thing, those are all being incorporated. So we’d have eight major themes that we’re working on, I don’t generally pre-disclose those outside of confidential arrangement. What I can assure you is there’ll be a six, might be a five-two or five-three, I don’t really know. We basically build up a bolus of enough new to warrant changing the BP and then we ship it. And we do a ton of work behind it. We’ve got I think, eight new articles on our backlog in this PI and none of them require a change to BP. So as those accumulate we’ll say, you know, we could have rendered this better if this is a busy area, we don’t need to talk about food anymore, because everybody’s doing too well. And here’s somebody that didn’t get this. They assumed this, I read this big misconception that the system demo was a team demo. And that at the end of PI, you bring all those demos together. That’s just not true. Right? The system demo was a demo of integrated demo of all the new functionalities that has been developed by all the teams in the last week or two weeks. So that’s a misconception. We really try hard to deal with that. But there’s only so much you can do about misconceptions without being defensive about it. But I saw that thread that says, we don’t use safe, we don’t recommend it because they only integrate at the end of a PI. That’s not true. It’s absolutely not true. I mean, we do continuous delivery of the framework and the PI boundaries are completely decoupled from any releases. I don’t know a time where we sat down and said, okay, we have objectives for the PI, but rarely is it I’ll release that thing by that date, it can happen. It’s not bad to have a forcing function. But we do continuous delivery, our customers do too. But if you don’t want to use safe for some other reason, you say, oh system demo, or they only integrate once every PI, that’s not true. But unless somebody clicks, somebody else would go guys, you don’t do that. That’s terrible. That’s like your waterfall busted up in the eight week chunks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:30

But you would also like, I’m assuming, like, if you understand what you’re doing, you would also just make that assumption. It’s only like somebody that probably doesn’t have experience that’s looking for like step A through Z, that I need to do and you would make that assumption. So I can see why you know, it could get… You spent a lot of time based on what I heard on the new metric guidance.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 37:55

We did because that’s hard. I have a you know, off again, on again, love hate relationship with metrics, because many metrics change behaviors in ways that support the metric, but don’t change the underlying behavior principle you’re trying to get to. And we all know the, you know, the CMMI experience and what it’s like to be audited by others and I swear we will never go there. So I was really late to metrics in terms of my thought leadership. What we did do is we compiled things that work. Cumulative flow diagrams, right? The program predictability and we put them in an article that was honestly a collage. It’s like, here’s lots of interesting metrics to talk about. And we organized it by level because we need an organizing model. Well, that never really worked, frankly and there was no way that you could go to an executive and say, how do we really measure progress in this digital transformation? We’re going to invest x million dollars, we’re going to train people, we’re going to refactor the PMO, we’re going to hire product managers, we have to bring in some Scrum masters. Show me what kind of progress you’re making. So at some, that has been on the backlog for probably two or three years, for some reason, in the last six months, partially because we had some people that really cared about it, we said, let’s rethink that from scratch. And we backed all the way up to say what are we trying to measure and why? And it started out with, you know, four inputs and one output and simplified it and it finally evolved to really, there’s three things. We do measure competency, because you can’t improve if you don’t measure competency and mostly that comes through training, but not only. We need to measure flow. This is a flow based system. And frankly, if you don’t measure outcomes, we’re all wasting our time. So the key that we said these are the three things that matter. Now CFD, okay, that’s part of flow, a predictability measure that can be part of flow, a set of iteration metrics, well, okay if you want to measure a percentage of coverage of unit testing that can be part of flow. So we had to repackage things in this major carrier. But it’s been a real hit because people get that. Say I need to improve my competencies, I need better flow and I need better outcomes. So that really simplified, I think that’s another example of induction. Right? There’s so much there that you couldn’t understand any of it, and when we simplified, simplified, simplified and reduce it to the three things that really matter, then I wouldn’t say the article wrote itself, because I think it’s the second highest record for most revisions. I have the leadership mantle there, the organizational agility article went through 18 major revisions. That’s not probably by the way, that’s how far off I was to begin with. Metrics [inaudible 40:47] 13 or 14 before it went live, but as soon as we collapse on those three, we said that’s, we’ve got it. And then [inaudible 40:54] it’s a flow based system, we’ll show where you measure outcomes, where you measure flow and how you adjust competency. So we’re really pleased with that and I think, very pleased by the reaction because people do need to measure. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. I mean, Taiichi Ohno said, you know, without standards, there’s no caisan. And so you have to do that. It’s just that it’s been done so badly and so often that I was just burnt and I didn’t want to walk out into that. And you know, I actually don’t care how safe you are. I care whether you’re getting the outcomes that Lean and Agile at scale matters. So there’s no, there’ll never be in under my watch a third body that comes around and assesses your safeness. Never! But I know who can assess your safeness and that’s the people that are implementing it. And they can do that as a self-assessment, they could do that as a coach assessment, they could bring in an outsider, and they can introspect and say, you know, I know we’re have good predictability but I don’t think the velocity is there or we have some performance issues that are gonna need to be addressed on the team. Only the teams can do that and empowered model, they’re empowered to do more than they were before. So you got to give them the tools they need, you got to give the executives tools they need. And if we don’t crack up and metrics again for a few years, that’ll be fine by me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:16

Great. No, it is. And I think there’s also like, you know, when you look at these, you know, from outcomes flow competency, you can actually look at, you know, for instance competency, you can look at, you know, individual competency, organizational competency, even like from skills you can look at, you know, competency as far as skills versus emotional intelligence, like, you know, how big is the cup versus how full is the… like, it’s just the I really liked that aspect. And maybe we could talk more about that another time. But I want to get maybe last topic here, safe for startups, Luke Holman, recently wrote an article about startup but first route. I wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 43:00

So safe does scale. We didn’t design it for startups, I’ll be honest. We didn’t design it for our company. We run our entire company on safe but guess what? The operational value streams don’t fit as well on safe as [inaudible 43:14] value streams do. So there are some stresses and strains on that. But kind of by example, my daughter started a company a few years back to basically build some intelligent technology, some applications, potentially some machine learning around autism, diagnostics and remediation. And in order to kind of get her started, I gave her my usual you know, lean startup books, and, the Crossing the Chasm and all those kinds of things. But then she started asking questions like, well, you know, how do we meet? Well, you’re just a single scrum team. Well, what’s that? Well read this article and see. So there are a single scrum team, but they run two week sprints, and they use the portfolio. So we actually do PI planning, we bring in other stakeholders for PI planning. We just converted the system demo from every two weeks to every one week because we’re approaching some milestones that we can’t really afford to miss. So most times when her company struggles with process we just go back to safe. And they don’t you know, they’re not as release train. They don’t they don’t have a system architect. They don’t need it. Their lead developer is a system architect. Most of it, they don’t need, but the stuff they do need, they need really badly. So you know, if you think about agile, it’s basically the plan, do, check, act cycle, right? And you have get that all the way up. Well, they’re just one team, but they really benefit from safe and as I mentioned, whenever they get in trouble, we find solace, we find words. I mean, we had a discussion about the system demo. And I said, Marcy, have everybody read the article. And she read the article and she said, Dad, we’re not doing that. So now they are, okay? And all of a sudden she’s saying, Dad, I think I’m seeing higher velocity. Because we’re really focusing on the outcome, we’re focusing on what the user would see, not what our process is or what you know, what infrastructure we’re deploying, or how we’re doing with Amazon Web Services. These demos are now about what my user sees. And she says, I think the velocity went up and the developers are going, our velocity did go up. Are they working harder? I don’t know. Are they working more effective? Absolutely! So the principles of Scrum, principles of flow, the principles of systems thinking, how would they not apply to a startup?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:29

Exactly! I think like you said, like, it’s that cycle. It’s just like, how short does your feedback loop need to be? And, you know, for startups is probably a lot shorter, like you said and your adjustments. So that’s really, at the end of the day, what it comes down to.

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 45:47

You know, the principles matter. I remember, many, many years ago, working with a leader in one of my organizations. And we ran one way experience generally because we were in an unknown area, we’re inventing the future, we couldn’t afford to wait two weeks to learn anything. And we came to a time where there was a release scheduled in about three weeks and the leader, you know, basically the, you know, the scrum master agile leader said let’s do four week, four day iterations. And everybody’s going well, how does that make any sense? Well, you and I know. And what he said was, otherwise there’s not enough time to fail. So when you talk about the scalability of a framework, and understanding your principles, cutting down to four week iterations makes sense as you approach a deadline. But he could have said, hey, there’s only three weeks away, we need to dispense with all these dang meetings and we’ll just do one three week sprint because it’d be way more efficient, a lot of people would have said, well that makes sense. But he didn’t and I didn’t and they said absolutely makes no sense. And talking to my daughter about her situation and development, she said, well, there’s not much, we’re still really early in development, there’s not much the demo. And I said time for demo.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:05

Exactly. Get some feedback. So maybe the last thing, what would you like to leave us with? A message, anything that you would like to say or maybe anything that I didn’t ask you?

Speaker: Dean Leffingwell 47:17

Honestly, it comes down to leadership. And I think respect our leaders and have empathy for them, we need to recognize that they probably weren’t raised, they probably didn’t go up in this model and it’s going to take a journey for them to get there but we have to be relentless, we have to not be arrogant but we have to stick to our guns, we have to know this is what agile is, we have to coach our leaders and when we find a leader that’s exhibiting wrong behaviors, we have to say that doesn’t work in an agile model, it doesn’t work to motivate others. So in the end, it’s about leadership because most of the rest of us work in a system and we can’t change that system. Only the leaders or managers can change the system. So focus your attention on the leaders, have them get whatever training they can, do a book club, read Reinertsen, attend leaning safe, do whatever, but get people’s minds around the lean agile mindset because it’s not a trivial mindset. It’s you know, lean boot camp and lean manufacturing used to be six weeks of training. These are not trivial thoughts so it’s going to take for our leaders to get it but they need to. If they don’t, they will be displaced for sure. And if they do, they’ll have an opportunity to contribute to the next digital age.

Mark Kilby

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:42

Who is Mark Kilby?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 00:47

I heard you ask others this question, I’m still not ready for it. So, I actually started off as electronics and robotics engineer. That’s where I started school. But in my early career but I was one of the few electrical engineers that actually enjoy coding so I was always given the coding assignments. And so, I just did more and more of it and decided this is actually fun, I will just shift. And so, early part of my career was in software. I used to joke that I was also rocket scientist for a while because I did work with NASA so I can make that joke. And then I went from tech lead to project manager and kind of started making that climb and thought, I’m seeing a whole other class of problems here that school didn’t prepare me for but I really want to get into and it was called people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:02

That is one and yet we don’t spend a lot of time.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 02:05

Yeah, which is why I was enjoyed some of the other podcast episodes that you had and it’s about the time that Kent Beck’s first book came out and I was reading that. I went wow, this is crazy enough, it might work where I’m at right now. I might try this. Because the part that I got about it was the synergy and the communication wow, that’s cool. I could really see this working. And so, since that time, I just kind of shifted over. I really appreciate my early teams and how they let me experiment on them. I would come up to them and say hey, I got this new thing, they were oh, not this agile thing. But it’s something that will help and so this is where I got into continuous integration and try pair programming. This was like early 2000s and did more of this and 2001 of course was when 911 happened and jobs were scarce. So, I ended up kind of going back into my old line of work as a software developer for the brand-new Homeland Security Department at the time and I can’t say more about that. But one of those teams that I used to work with they kind of resurrected their business and said that crazy agile stuff, we think we want to try it and that was 2003. That was actually my first official job as a scrum master.

So, from there was several years of that company, helped them be successful and that was also a Department of Defense work where agile wasn’t supposed to work then.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:04

I know. I was going to say I tell usually people like if you want to look at what things look like 20 years before 10 years before just go work for government and it’s a good indicator. Maybe with DoD it’s a little bit better but generally speaking.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 04:20

Yeah, but trust me warfighters understand, inspect and adapt otherwise they wouldn’t be alive. So, I have actually a lot of fun with those early Agile projects in US Department defense and then which worked for rally software and just got into a ton of industries. And the funny thing was they all had similar tech problems but they also had similar people problems. Who know?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:50

I know right and people brothers are probably the tougher part out of those two, right?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 04:57

Yeah, and strangely enough my engineering background did not prepare me for any of that. So, I had to do a lot of self-study to really understand that. And also, I had helped to manage a role. So, I saw how one could do it poorly. I learned that firsthand. It’s like okay, I’ve got to learn how to do this better for myself and for others and that’s what I’ve been doing the last 20 plus years.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:29

How did you get into this distributed remote base?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 05:35

So completely accidentally and so some of the same early companies and teams. Because it’s department defense, it was not unusual for part of your team to be in one country and part of them to be in another country. And if I say more than that, I have to hunt you down. But it would not be unusual at times for the team to be 13 time zones apart. So, I had to figure a way to make it work. It was not so much. We were mostly doing scrum and XP kind of things there. It wasn’t so much about the time boxes, it was how can we not only deliver the software but how can we rapidly get feedback because that other product team was usually pretty close to the end users. And so, they were getting real time feedback and giving it to us and say hey, this is really a problem. It’s not really a bug but we need to change this because it’s causing issues here for how they use the system.

And so, we would make changes sometimes every day and push it back and it was amazing to see how well they responded to that. And there was one program we were on it. We were a subcontractor to a subcontractor to a inaudible(7:00). I mean we were way down on the inaudible(07:02) and some of the government contracting officers noticed, we have to wait six months or sometimes a year for some of the changes from the prime. But you guys, we just mentioned something and it seems to change in like two to three weeks. How do you do that? He said well, we have this little review meeting we do every couple of weeks, you should sit in on that. So they started sitting in and they said can we ask questions? I went oh, absolutely. This is really a great place for you to ask questions. So they’d ask questions, the team will talk about we probably can’t do that the next two weeks but we could fit that in here soon. And they received a change and they invited their friends, they invited other agencies and so they decided you know what, when this contract is bid out again, we’re going to make it a small business set aside as it only small businesses can bid on it. Guess who got the prime contract and guess who became our subcontractors? Everyone that we used to report to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:19

And I’ve seen that and in essence I mean like what you just described is just shorten the feedback loop and get closer to the customer, right? So, like a lot of times we overthink things but it’s really like it makes it even more difficult when you have a situation like that with multiple parties with long feedback loops or at least opportunities to create long feedback loops. So I think we still struggle with that how do we get closer to the customer, doesn’t matter if you remote, distributed. It’s all comes down to the feedback loop or shorten the feedback loop. And I don’t know I’m trying to think about somebody told me like if you want to summarize agile concept in couple of words, it’s really about shorten the feedback loop to the shortest possible loop given your context, right.

So sometimes it can be a couple of seconds, sometimes it’s going to be two, three weeks but like we’re always pushing ourselves to shorten that feedback loop to validate with the stakeholders, with the customers and just inspect and adapt and that resonated with me. Again, I still can’t remember who said it but it was in one of the interviews that I did.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 09:44

Yeah well, what I would add to that is and give the team as much autonomy as possible to react to that feedback because that’s going to be the faster reaction. If you have to run it up the chain and back down again, that slows the response, that slows the feedback loop. And that’s what we found even in our early distributed teams was even though we’re 13 time zones apart, one, we had a really cohesive team. So, they were always 13 time zones apart. These were certain times of the year. So, we were all back usually in the same office or at least two offices and we would rotate who would go out to the site. So we knew if we didn’t respond to this people who are out there, we’d be the next ones out there so you better treat them well.

But we were all really good about what is it you’re seeing, alright, let us work on a problem, we will get you some kind of fix in 12 hours. And because we knew they could go off shift and rest and the team back at home base could work things out and usually did because they all swarmed the problem which is what we talk about these days is whether it’s mob programming or whatever, it’s like get the team to swarm the problem, get all the brains to think about the problem.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:19

So that autonomy, that swarming requires trust, right? Without trust, everything is so much harder. So, what have you seen especially when it comes to distributed teams? How do you build trust? What are some of the things or maybe for those that are listening like having distributed teams, a lot of times I get questions, how do we build trust? And besides being vulnerable and like what tips would you give people, what are some of the ways that you’ve seen teams build trust?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 11:50

Yeah, so I’m going to do classic consultant response, which forms of trust are you referring to?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:00

Well, maybe because I think trust is so important and everything becomes so hard. So, what types of forms of trust? How do you categorize the types of trust?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 12:12

So, there’s certainly the trust within the team and then if you have larger projects, programs, release trains, whatever, that you have some dependencies I mean you try to minimize that but it does happen, what’s the trust between those teams? And then also, what is the trust between the team working on the product and the overseeing management because they’re providing the resources and when I say resources, I’m talking computers, funding not people, the people are people for me. So, there’s at least those three forms of trusts that you really need to work on and it’s exactly the same kinds of things you have to work on if you’re all in the office. And actually, you’re probably not all in the same space all the time anyway. So, let’s talk about the first one.

So having been an engineer and knowing that most engineers aren’t too into the soft skills that much or as in the soft squishy stuff as I sometimes called. You have to look at okay, what is it that’s important to them that will build trust but also give them something of value? Well, how long do I have to wait for somebody is usually one of those things because as somebody with an agile coaching approach, you want the team to collaborate so they’re collectively solving the problem. But if you have engineers that are used to tackling their problems and they get pride out of tackling the problem by themselves, you get to kind of give them opportunity to say okay, you can’t know everything. So, let’s look at how you can respond and how others respond to you when you do you need help and it’s okay to ask for help. You haven’t lost engineering points or anything if you ask for help.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:20

Also has to do with the personality right and I think also alluding to is like sometimes, if you deal with introvert like helping them understand that and understanding them like empathizing with them for a lot of times at least the way that I’m more of an extrovert but the way that introverts have described to me is like they want closer relationships. They don’t want things. So, if you’re trying to help them, I think understanding that their preferences and then looking maybe at how does that contribute to the team goal and what we’re trying to do as a team. Is that something that you look at too like the soft side of how do we understand the human side of things?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 15:06

Very much so. So, in order for them to better stand each other and how they react to things, I have tried many things with remote teams. I’ve tried Myers Briggs, I’ve tried strength finder, you name it, I’ve probably tried it. Crucial conversations I could say didn’t go over so well for most so they didn’t care. But I found one exercise and I have it on my website that it can be very short or it can be very long based on what the team needs and it’s called a compass activity and it’s very simple. You have a north, south, east and west and there’s usually some attributes tied to it.

So north is you jump in action, that’s your tendency. East is you need the big picture, why are we doing this? South is I really want to get everybody’s input, I tend to be in the south both geographically and according to this activity and then the west is I need all the details. So, people who are a little more analytical, your QA folks are usually not always. But it’s interesting and what I do is if they’re typically use a chat tool or grab their avatars out of chat so it’s something they recognize each other by. So I’ll put their avatars on the board and say okay, now that you know what the compass points are, move them where do you typically like to operate. And there’s the usual kind of put in between two, there’s always that and I just say just put where you typically tend to operate. So, you see the position and then you usually hear some oh. I say look where everybody positioned themselves. Oh, so Frank, you put yourself between north and west. Now, I know where you get mad at me when I say slow down, let’s hear from everybody else. And there’s a series of questions that if you want to spend more time, you can get them to think a little bit more about what those directions mean and I usually phrase this, we’re going to talk about work preferences so we can just better understand how we can react well to each other. I’ll usually say we can take a half hour for this, we can do a retrospective and I’ve had teams even ask hey, can we do that again? It’s been a while, we got a new person and I say okay.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:58

I’m going to try that out because like that sounds like a really good way. It’s almost like that compass is serving as a visual reflection to the team and it’s easier to discuss it and discuss the observations with a tool like that.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 18:17

Yeah and that one has by far been the easiest one for them. Just think about where they run into problems and you know it’s successful when they start joking with each other about it. We do hear them comment and you hear this oh, that’s a north comment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:39

Well, that’s awesome because I think it creates opportunity for them to be more vulnerable with each other. Because now like you’re exposing kind of what your preferences are and you’re saying yep, this is kind of what, I prefer to be more of a detail person and more of so that’s great. What else? I mean that’s a great one. What other things do you do?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 19:04

So, honestly, for one of the best things to do is to well, there’s a couple things actually. One of the best things to do is provide space for the casual conversations. So usually, one of the ways I’ll start that out is I’ll just like it’s a stand up or regular meeting, I’ll just say hey, I’m going to be on a few minutes early and somebody will go why and I will just say because and some will get curious and they’ll come on and I’ll ask him hey, where are you at? How’s the weather and we’ll just start talking and you pull up a habit of some people showing up early, the others who come right on time go why you guys on already so they get curious and sometimes I’ll say this is the official start time so we got to start. But I will say if you guys want to continue the conversation, I got a little bit of time afterwards.

So, I never booked back-to-back. I try to keep some of those spaces even if it’s five minutes so that they can connect. Sometimes you have to be really creative so I mentioned this in the book, there was one team that didn’t want video and I never forced anybody to use video but none of them wanted video. They just want to use Voice Over IP and this is what they’re used to. This is how they work. I said okay and I was trying to find a way to kind of tap into who they were. And so, I was really struggling and I said well, let’s try ending the meeting different ways. And so not being afraid to look stupid, I tried a couple different endings like that’s all folks. So, I would think of different ways, TV shows and movies ended and I got like no reaction for a few weeks. Okay, this is not working. I tried one more thing and I said and, on that bombshell, inaudible(21:11). Five seconds later, the quietest guy in the team reaches out to me through direct message on chat and goes, what’s that from Top Gear UK? I love that show and we spent a half hour on chat. He never told anybody about that before but that’s how we connected.

So sometimes you have to be very creative but don’t be afraid to share a little bit about yourself. So, for instance, you’re seeing this is not a fake background. This is my messy. This is actually my wife’s desk behind me. So, we share the office space here and it’s not unusual sometimes for kids to come in and out although I have a warning light for them do they know the cameras on now. But if kids come in while I’m working with the team, I’ll introduce them. It is because it’s just like if your kids were to walk into your office, would you not introduce them to some of your coworkers? How is this different?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:19

I think a lot of people try to which is a challenge to even before COVID separate the private life from the work life and we’ve been kind of conditioned too as soon as we walk into the office or as soon as we join the meeting like we’re different person. Well, you’re not really a different person.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 22:38

Yeah, I tried that for the first few years of my career and that just stressed me out. It just takes too much energy. And I when I found out that if I shared who I was at work and the same thing at home, you get to feel like oh, I’m the same person all the time. I don’t have to expend all this energy. So people have met my kids sometimes even on podcast like this. Right now, my warning light is on and the family working agreement is if they come in with that warning light on, they will immediately be introduced to whoever is in the video. And I’ve said they’ve come on, the recording signs on the door, the red light is on and they walk in and they go oh and they quickly close that door, they forgot.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:36

How old are you kids?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 23:38

Well, now they’re older but they’ve seen the red light now for a few years so they know the red light means you are going to get introduced.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:46

I have a five-year-old son. I get to do that with him too.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 23:51

Five-year-olds might enjoy that so they might come in all the time. My youngest is 16, 20 and 21. But when I started that, that was when I was working for fully remote organizations. That would have been 2014 because we were going through Ikea one day, I just started this new job coaching in a fully remote organization, I went like look at this light strip. This is perfect. This is exactly what I need. It was an Ikea purchase.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:30

That is nice. And maybe like just to kind of summarize this section and trust it’s really get to know your team members, be creative around how you get to know each other and how you build that trust because I think the examples that you provided a great way to go. You didn’t have to do that. It’s probably more work for you as a scrum master or as a facilitator to do that but it actually creates that connection. So those are relationships that will help and make everything better. Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 25:04

Yes, and it’s sort of has a fractal relationship because if you sat on the team and you encourage them to do it for each other, it kind of works its way out. So, this gets to these other kinds of trust, trust with other teams and trust with management. So, one of the other things that I learned early on before it was written all over the internet was bring everyone together at least once a year. And this is not just to talk about big projects but really to socialize. And yes, even your introverts like this because guess what, what you do then is find out what do they like to do?

And so, it’s not only planning out what are the big topics to discuss but what kind of social activities. So not everyone wants to go to the bar, great. Bring your favorite board game. We used to have like long nights of board game competitions between some of the teams and they got to know each other, the teams got to know each other. And it built sort of a broader camaraderie and sometimes we had management and they’re playable on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:17

I think that’s something that maybe this is a good segue into our next topic with going back to hybrid remote work environments. And I think I’ve been on remote things and exactly what you’re saying that we would and ones that I think it was even helpful, we would do it like quarterly or a couple of times a year. And exactly just let people self-organize, just bring people together and give them opportunity to self-organize and people will do what they like if they self-organize, right? What do you think as more and more companies are going into this hybrid remote work, it’s here to stay? I mean I think nobody’s denying that. What do you think is happening? What is the current like things that you’re observing and where do you think we’re going with the future of?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 27:18

Yeah, so the short answer and I have a longer answer but the short answer is hybrid remote was what we all remember before the pandemic is what we hated and now this has been proposed as the solution. I’ve worked on hybrid remote teams and it’s possible to do that. I talked about it in the book too. But if you look at it as a spectrum of fully in the office and fully remote, those do work best. And if you work hybrid remote, you’ll need a whole other set of disciplines. You’ll actually fight yourself because we’re used to oh, somebody here physically, let me go talk to them. We’re wired to pay attention to other humans that are around us around us and so it’s very hard to do that.

So, some of the things that I’ve done to help in those situations, again thinking about the people connection, how do I get the people in the space more connected with those in other spaces? And I deliberately try not to stay remote because I don’t like any of the words we use right now, remote, virtual, distributed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:54

How do you call?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 28:57

Right now, I’m experimenting with the term location free and see how that sticks with people. Nomad has another connotation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:11

I know.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 29:15

It has multiple connotations but whenever I hear people use remote, distributed, virtual, it’s always especially in a hybrid situation, it’s kind of an us versus them difference and that worries me. It’s not those remote people and us. It’s no, we are the team, you have to think about it as a team. So, with that, some things that I’ve done and I’ve seen others write about this now but say I was facilitating some of my first hybrid teams, I guess it’s probably mid-2000s. I hit the classic problems of oh, everyone in the room would bring out sticky notes and then the real people are out of luck. So, I came up with the idea, it’s too much energy to try to stay in touch with remote people and try to facilitate the conversation and be the Agile coach. I need to spread some of this responsibility out. So, I would ask for volunteers and say okay, those of you in the room, let’s say we’ve got three who are not in the room, can one person each stay connected with one person each that are not here and just make sure they can hear, they can contribute if we use sticky notes because there wasn’t a lot of sticky notes apps then. I think Google Docs yeah, it wasn’t till 2010 before Google Docs really came out. We didn’t have any of those.

So, I would ask the buddies to make sure they are with those who are not in the room and make sure they can participate.

So, it wasn’t unusual if we were in a conference room together sorry, I’m jiggling the camera but I had my phone here. It wouldn’t be unusual for people with cameras to be taking pictures, texting it to their friends but they sympathized with their situation and you see things like oh yeah, put this on my sticky notes. And they go okay, hold on, I got to get Amy stuff on here. And so yes, it took more time but there’s a sense of there’s others here that we need to take care of and we need to take care of them as a group not the facilitator or the coach and that was a big aha for me. It’s like yeah, that should be the way it is. It shouldn’t be one person. It should be the tribe taking care of each other.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:07

And I think that’s going to be interesting even when it comes to training these hybrids. So now, I’m not sure. What are your thoughts on the hybrid remote environments?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 32:27

So, I think it’s a good interim step for companies that still aren’t sure because everyone went remote when very few were planning it. Now companies like Dropbox were fully in the office but they were talking about going remote. So that’s why they made such a rapid transition. They were already discussing it as an organization. And so, it’s like well, here we are, we might as well make the best of it and so they’re an interesting one to watch. But those companies that weren’t ever prepared were never even thinking of going remote. Now they’ve got the problem of oh, we have employees that have now realized they can function remote. You might lose these valuable employees so that’s one.

But two, I’m hoping some of the leadership has realized yeah, we really don’t need everyone in an office. Oh, wow. That’s a big problem because we’ve got a five year lease of the space but it’s a good lesson. So, I’ll go back to the Dropbox example because I just heard a talk from them. What they’re doing with their spaces right now is they’re getting rid of all the individual desk space and it’s becoming a studio space. So, they’re fully remote but they still have the spaces available if a team wants to come together for like a really deep design thinking session or something like that. Yeah, they could do it online but we know it’s probably going to work better altogether. The last company I was at, we used to this as well. While everyone was remote, if we had some new product we were thinking about, what we would do is usually get like an Airbnb house, get some flip charts, bring it in and usually that’d be set up in the living room. And then people could do whatever they can cook together. And then during the day, they would kind of jam on whatever the problem is and how they’re going to approach the project. But they would use those days to really kind of bond as a team as we’re working through because that is a better way to do it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:00

That’s been my experience too like most of those type of things, the team building and getting to know you lasts lot longer than whatever outcomes or outputs result from that. So, I think there is going to be need for that. But I also think I mean it’s like sometimes we need a kick in the butt for us to realize that something is feasible.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 35:26

Mother nature has given us that kick in the butt.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:29

Yeah, and I think everybody’s rethinking. As you’ve seen over the last 10 years like how tools have evolved and changed, what is your thought just how much and maybe I would like to dive into a new topic of communication and collaboration and how tools have helped us with that because I think doesn’t matter what organization you’re in. Every time I go in usually communication and collaboration are like either number one issue, number two issue or number three issue or all three.

So, what do you think when it comes to the tools and how have tools help us better communicate and collaborate in this more distributed and remote?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 36:21

Yeah so, I think tools have played a huge role especially in supporting all remote. Of course, I’m kicking myself for not having shares of zoom. But I wish I had that ability but also and this is not sliding zoom because all the current mean software’s like this where we’re really looking at the model T of online collaboration. It’s widespread, it’s now well known, it’ll get you where you need to go but don’t take it on a long trip. It will be painful. And I think we’ve all realized that day long meetings in a grid of pictures is not fun.

So I already saw this in 2020 and it’s accelerating even faster and 2021. There’s a huge number of startups now that are trying to crack this problem and not just new meeting tools but there’s a lot more activity in the AR, VR space. So augmented reality, virtual reality that has some issues because I played in that space for a while too. But I think we’re still in that model T era where yes, we have the common platform to connect us but it could be better. So, it’s not just zoom, WebEx, we are all in the grids and everything. And it’s not the best way for us to collaborate and kind of going back to your hybrid question, none of them do a great job hybrid. Zoom supposedly is coming out with some feature to support that I don’t know the details of that. I just heard it in their newsletter.

But even in 2015/2016, there were some very interesting solutions where I was experimenting with. There was not just the robots that drive around but just see the tabletop versions where you could get an iPad Mini tablet, you could sit it on the robot and it becomes sort of your eyes and ears if you’re remote and you can remotely kind of pivot so you could look around the table. Now we have things like the meeting owl which is something very similar but that’s more expensive solution. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some more pragmatic solutions out of the maker space. So, somebody who’s going to come up with a kit where you can make your own AR, VR robot. I’m sure it’s going to happen and you just plug it whatever tablet you have to go.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:36

It is and I don’t know like for me like I think if I just go back or even if I go back, my family moved here in 95 and I remember my dad spending close to $1,000 on phone bills to call back to Sarajevo. And we talked about the vlog like imagine like where you could see other people when you call them and I feel like we’re going into that space now where like we still think about it as like imagine if I could just come into my room and put some type of gear on and I’m going to have a hard time distinguishing between reality. And I think I won’t be surprised in 10 years where like we’ll mostly be all remote in these types of things. It’s just the question for me is like goes back to the people side of things. It’s not something humans are used to for who knows how many 1000s of years where we’re been more of touchy feely that type of close proximity. But I do think that technology is getting pushed and what we’ll see in the near future is going to shift even more how we work.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 41:07

Well, I would say when the technology gets to the point where we don’t have to turn it on, put it on, it just kind of runs in the background so that you can’t tell somebody physically next to you or not then it will make the difference because I realized I didn’t really answer your hybrid question and this kind of goes back to it. I think with where a lot of companies, big companies in particular are going and being hybrid too it depends on whether they’re seeing it as a way of not losing staff or really providing a benefit. So, if it’s really providing a benefit, my guess is they’re eventually going to shift more and more remote because they’re going to realize that’s really going to be a better way to implement this. A hybrid situation, it’s tough inaudible(42:02). They’re probably going to lose those employees that want to go remote and then they’re going to say okay, we’re just going to all go back in the office.

So, I will be very surprised in five years if there’s a lot of hybrid implementations unless there’s a major technology change or actually, that’s the only thing I can think of. I could be wrong so it is just hybrid is difficult for us as humans.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:44

And this reminds me, I was looking at your Twitter profile which I think you either posted a question or it was in one of the I think in clubhouse or the question does remote rebase line salaries which I think HR in general which was like in general like how does HR need to look at this whole thing because a lot of times they’re driving some of this change.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 43:16

Yeah. And it also depends on some broader issues. So, you can look at how does it impact our company, our customers and our employees? But if you take a wider view of if we allow our employees to be remote, how is that going to help their local economies? How is that going to help the environment overall? We’re already starting to see plenty in the climate change region or the area climate change and as company, do we want to help with that? Do we want to promote that? So, some will some won’t. And I want to be clear, I don’t believe remote is for everyone. I’m not on the everyone should be remote bandwagon. I don’t agree with that because I know actually many people that this last year and a half not being able to go in an office and see their colleagues was psychologically difficult for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:31

How much do you think that is? Like something I’ve been thinking about since like I recently had a group of people in my CSM class that were mostly like college students and I’ve taught like undergraduate classes, graduate classes and what’s interesting is that especially with undergraduate especially even younger that like this is way of life for them. Even like as I was teaching class in mural, they were taking notes as I was speaking, they were adding stickies as I was speaking. The other ones would add like rephrase like what somebody else said and it’s like a continuous collaboration and we’re all talking. And I’m like this is like a lot different than my typical class and then they thought I was weird for thinking that that’s was weird.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 45:28

It’s like, why wouldn’t you do this? That’s a whole other thing is. So, we talked about the kids in class. So, I have three millennials and I’ve watched how many apps they use. I’ve watched how my boys more so than my daughter, my daughter was never much. She will do Minecraft and things like that. She likes that but the boys jumping from game to game with the same group coordinating the discord like a team. And it’s just amazing how they jump from game to game with different objectives but they stay together they yell at each other but it’s like they are growing up with this skill set. It’s common. They’re going to be very used to operating this way.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:23

Well, that’s the thing. And like even you said as a developer like what I’m seeing today is like we’ve been conditioned to like I’m a front-end developer on this application right or back end. And today like kids are learning that problem solver that’s solving customer problems and yes, I know that I have to be a full stack developer and I might need to develop other skills to understand how to help my team.

So, I guess the question is how much is that shaping what people want versus the age differences? And if the organization is looking at the next 10 years and how invests into where it wants to go, who are they going to focus on and how is that going to shape personal preferences because at that point, we’re talking about personal preferences. I like talking to people, I like being in person versus like no I’m fine with you know.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 47:28

I think we’re going to see the ripples of this time period for a few years. I think there’s going to be more shifts. I know April 2021 was the big shift reported in the US labor statistics four plus million quit but I don’t think that’s the last time we’re going to see that. I have a feeling there’s going to be other shifts probably one in the fall would be my guess as people experiment with this hybrid where the company says oh, we don’t like this or whatever happens and there’s going to be more shifts in the labor market because of that and I think it’s going to happen a couple times. And at the same time, we have these newer generations who are already very comfortable working face to face and online and they’re going to have some opportunities, I think.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:29

And then I think have some say in what their preferences are. Maybe to kind of like and because I tried to bounce it between some tips and also like what Mark and Mullah would talk if they were having a couple of drinks and just chit chatting. But that’s how I started in a sense so there is a little bit of what interests me and what might interest you but also like what could people get out of this or maybe some tips. So, what I would like to end on maybe is when it comes to remote meetings, what will be your tips on making remote meetings work better or what tips would you give people to make meetings better?

Speaker: Mark Kilby 49:18

Yeah, so good facilitation skills are still important. They are different online but having purpose having an agenda, following that but also being willing to adapt. So, there’s a human side to this as well. It’s not just sticking to the agenda but being very clear this is why we’re meeting, this is who we need. This is who we don’t need. We don’t need everyone piling on the Zoom call to see if we can get all 50 little squares on the screen and being very focused. This is another interesting thing about where those companies who’ve been remote for a while have experimented with asynchronous. It doesn’t mean they never meet. It means they’re very deliberate when they meet, they’re very focused. We need to make a decision, we need to brainstorm some options, we need a high rapid feedback cycle so that’s why we’re going to meet on Zoom tomorrow. Everything else they’ve figured out okay, if it’s information sharing, we can do that online. We don’t need to be. If it’s a Q&A great. But let’s see what we can do online and then anything else we can do in a meeting but they are very deliberate in their meetings. And as I was saying before, you might provide a buffer space around it for the human connection. How are people doing, anything you need? So however it works in your culture to provide that buffer but going from meeting to meeting to meeting, that’s inhuman.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:00

It is. I think we’ve all been there. It’s like you just there for the sake of being and I actually shared the concept of the law of two feet from open space and one company implemented it and they said they loved it because they were just showing up to meetings because it was on their meeting invite. And when it was made okay, the meetings were a lot more focused and a lot more efficient because they could say these are the people that need to be here, can we organize? And another thing that you said which I think is so important it goes back to the story of people taking notes for people that were not. I think it’s that accountability that we’re all responsible for the success of this meeting and that it’s not just the facilitator. But we all need to think about given the context what can we do to focus, to understand what it is that we need to do in order to make this meeting effective for everyone. I think a lot of times that’s misunderstood. It’s like the scrum master should think about that and it’s their meeting.

Speaker: Mark Kilby 52:14

Yeah, instead, look at how do you spread that responsibility out? So, one practical tip is if you tend to take notes in Google Doc, first thing you should do is say here’s the notes, purpose and agenda. I’m running the meeting, who’s going to take notes? And then keep your hands off the Google Doc. Don’t start taking notes even if you’re tempted to do that. Let others jump in and you’ll usually find 1,2,3 other people will jump in or if they’re of the appropriate age, they’ll all jump in and put sticky notes as you said.