Category: Podcasts

Gil Broza

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:32

What are your thoughts on the current state of, you know, prescriptive approaches? Is that going to stick around?

Speaker: Gil Broza 00:40

Well, I’m pretty sure it’s gonna stick around. I mean, history has shown that approaches get standardized and there is a lot of value to standardization, depending on context, and depending how far you take it. Okay? You know, I’ll give you an example. You know, if you take a plane, when we go back to flying, right, I want my pilots to follow procedures, I want them following their checklists, no matter how awesome they are. I want them to be good. They are particularly good when they’re able to handle situations that the protocols never gave them answers for. Okay? But before regular operations, it’s okay to follow procedure. Now, we are in knowledge work. Knowledge work has lots more parameters, there’s vocab, there’s so much. Yeah, right. So there is variability, you deal with human beings, work gets created in the brain, you know, through keyboards, but still in the brain. And we’re not also looking for similarity and homogeneity, right? We want the more creative, we want the special, we want the thing that will distinguish us in the marketplace. And so when that is the case, you can only standardize so much. Now we have frameworks all over the place and they all focus on somewhat different things. And they also go to different lengths in terms of how much they tell you and what they tell you to put in place. But even the frameworks evolve, right? If you look, you know, 5, 10 years ago, Scrum says more and Safe said less. So who’s right? Were they wrong back then? Are they more right now? I don’t know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:36

That’s a really good point.

Speaker: Gil Broza 02:37

Yeah, and you know, the scrum guide always said don’t mess with Scrum. But the scrum guide actually changes every two, three years. And if you look at the version now, it is rather different from 10 and 15 years ago. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:51

And then what do you say about the Agile Manifesto where some people have said, you know, change it, update it, and they left it as it is? And you know…

Speaker: Gil Broza 03:01

So if you look at my books for instance, you will see that I have actually taken it further. Basically, what I described like in my mindset book is what I believe the consensus in the Agile community is. It is congruent with the manifesto. So the manifesto said very little, it said very little or not at all about safety. Right? There were additional matters that it never spoke about. It was software specific, but we can carry the spirit. Right? Now, should we carry the spirit? I think the results show that it’s a good idea. Okay? Now, do we have to stay absolutely true to the words? That would probably make it religion. Now, that’s not, you know, that’s neither here nor there but if we are in the business of adaptation, then maybe it’s also okay to adapt our value systems and our belief systems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:05

So maybe let’s explore those. You talk in your book a lot about, you know, values, beliefs, principles. And a lot of times, like, you know, when I talked to people, and I covered these, and I tried to, especially in the leadership classes, advanced classes, most people don’t fully understand that. So could you maybe just, from your perspective, describe, well, maybe you can start with a purpose and like, the way they you kind of structure in your book in the diagram that you share with me and I’ve looked at where you have purpose and objectives, mindset, and then tactics specifically?

Speaker: Gil Broza 04:41

Yes. So the idea is that there is a straight line of thinking between the purpose of the work we do which we might capture as objectives and the tactics by which we carry out the work. Tactics being processes, tools, practices, methods, roles, artifacts, and so on. And that straight line of thinking, the intermediate step is that of mindset. Mindset is fundamentally how we approach the work. It’s what gives, you know, color to those tactics. For instance, one of the principles in Agile is collaboration, this idea that, you know, two minds are better than one, that’s actually a belief. But the principle of collaboration is you have something to do? Get more than one person to own the result. Okay? Not to just be, you know, friendly and helpful and sharing information, but to actually take ownership for the result however they divide up to work. So that’s an abstract notion. It helps us make choices. I have work to do, should I collaborate, should I not? That’s a principle. But the higher level, higher conceptual level, the higher abstraction in mindset are values and beliefs, and those are the squishier bits, the even less visible, the more subjective, the more abstract. So beliefs are basically our narrative, they are how we see the world, how we see our customers, how we see ourselves, how we see people, how we engage with humans, and so on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:12

What we believe is true, right? It’s what we describe it but a lot of people have described it too. Which is pretty interesting. So we have beliefs and then what about values? Because I want to ask you about this too.

Speaker: Gil Broza 06:24

Right. So both of them are voluntary, we actually choose our beliefs, and we choose our values, but their significance is different. So beliefs give context and validity to our values. And value is what’s important to me. I can think of it as what I optimize for, what’s my North Star, what’s non-negotiable. For instance, when we’re being agile, one of our values is to be adaptive. Right? It is so important, it is at the highest level of significance, just below purpose. And what’s the idea? The idea is that if we are being adaptive, we’re more likely to achieve our objective. Now, do we know this for a fact? Actually, we don’t. And that’s where the beliefs come in. So if you look at the manifesto for instance, and you don’t even need to go that far, I mean, every agiler says that, change is good for you. But that’s a belief, you cannot prove that. Now, you can say well change will happen. Well, okay, that’s pretty close to fact, but is it good for you? Should you adapt to it? Is it good for business to adapt to it? And when that’s the case, how should we go about it? So I might say adapting to change is good for business, therefore, I value adaptation. And to act on it, how we will make decisions, I will choose such principles as frequent planning, collaboration, continuous learning, continuous improvement, feedback, right? All those. And so my beliefs and values kind of hold together, they’re really a mental view of what’s happening around me and how I engage with that. And from that, I derive and choose principles that make it so. Okay, for instance, you know, we value you know, the freedom of the individual in our country, one of the principles is we reelect who governs us every so often. Okay? The tactics, how you set up elections, how you count, that’s tactical, right? Is it paper? Is it electronic? That’s not the question. The question is that you have elections because you value self-representation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:39

And so do you think, you know, and I have a certain perspective, and I want to get your thoughts on this. But so like, for instance, would you consider respect of value?

Speaker: Gil Broza 08:53

I’m going to guess you took this from one of scrums values, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:56

No, no, no, no, no, it’s just like, the reason that I say, this is where I’m going with this. So if we consider which I think, you know, you could put respect as a value, right? But our belief around respect could be differ, right? Like for instance, I might say, you know, you get respect by earning it, right. And you might say, Hey, you know, you get respect this way, right? So we bought my value respect but our belief around respect could be different.

Speaker: Gil Broza 09:31

Right. And that will translate to which principles we choose. So for instance, if you believe that you get respect by earning it, as opposed to, you know, it’s just given to you out of the blue or credentials, then one of your principles could be, be respectful in every communication. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:52

Exactly. So I want to ask you this then, do you think when we look at organizations and we all might have similar values, do you think when we have conflict in organizations, is it at the belief level, mostly principal level or value?

Speaker: Gil Broza 10:14

Usually beliefs and values. Usually. Now here’s something else; all of those things that we said we valued, we just use nouns. We need to define them. So when you say respect, what does that mean? We have to define it. Right? Can I respect people and still refer to them as resources? Right? I mean, that’s a legitimate question. So if I hear, let’s say, a senior leader, that’s mostly who I work with, and if they say, I respect our people, I want to empower them. So what does it mean? So what do you mean, when you use the word resource in reference to those people? What does that mean to you? And sometimes people catch themselves and they realize that their values and beliefs are misaligned with how they act, misaligned with their principles. So we always have some set of values, some set of beliefs and some principles.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:13

But we also say that those are not really values, you’re just sugarcoating your behavior, because your values and beliefs are really the reflection of your behaviors, right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 11:23

They are, Yes. So there’s a way [cross talking 11:26]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:27

Same way I could say, I’m not racist, right? And then you know, my values based on what, you know, could be totally different. And there’s that usually an organization that misalignment of what’s accepted in society, what I need to say, and maybe possibly do versus what my underlying core values and beliefs might be. Right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 11:53

Right. So what you’re describing is that there is a misalignment between those conceptual levels, that misalignment is the very definition of dysfunction. Now, we might sugarcoat it, we might say that’s the politically right thing to do, we might say that is self-preserving behavior. We can explain it many different ways but the result is that when we are misaligned, a few things happen. First off, we act according to our real values and our real beliefs, we confuse people who thought one thing would happen and another day. And the third is, we actually lose a foundation of trust. Right? We lose a foundation of trust and that is, by the way a key matter when it comes to agile implementations and agile transformations where you have management bringing in some type of Agile framework or not and they start acting on it and following the rules and going through the motions and so on. But then people say, but they don’t really mean it. Now, how do people know that? They know that because of what actually is valued such as be ready on the deadline, on time and on budget, make your predictions and stick to your predictions, standardize everything you do, right, predictability gets right the first time. So even if those leaders don’t expressly use those words, it comes across in communications, in conversations, in follow ups, in accountability, and so on. And then people say, okay, so we kind of seem to be doing the Agile thing but we’re not really being agile. So what people are noticing instinctively is the value is mismatch.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:43

So what do you do in that instance?

Speaker: Gil Broza 13:45

Yeah. And that’s why most of my work with clients is not, you know, here’s how you do Scrum right or anything like that. It is helping the leaders make the mental shifts so that their behaviors are different, but the behaviors are not make believe, the behaviors are real. And that takes lots of forms, usually not found under the umbrella of Agile coaching. Right, yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:16

It’s more like professional coaching and that’s also like more like cognitive growth, because in order for you to shift your values, you have to change your perspectives and believes right, you kind of have to transcend what your current way of the world is. Right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 14:31

Yes, yes. Everybody has this model of the world and we need to make it explicit. And you know, a lot of coaching starts with that. Right? Okay, you want to go there? What do you think now? Right? What’s the gap? So yeah, a fair bit of it does come across in coaching, but it comes across in just plain old conversations, it comes across in teachable moments, it comes across in talks, in Oh, I just picked something up from a book, whatever it is, but it’s not about showing people, here’s what the process is like, you know, take it and ye shall become agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:06

Exactly. And that’s the whole side, you know, and I think that’s why I really love how you explain the mindset, because that’s really what it is and most of the work, this is the hard part. Like if you’re going to organization, right, and you have somebody with very strong values and beliefs around, like, I need certainty, I need to be able to control stuff, and they have a lot of authority, then there’s so much that you can do there, right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 15:37

So what I like to do is see where their need for certainty comes from. Now, some of it is in their personality, right, because we all have, you know, it deep seated value system that does change with time as we mature and collect life experiences, and so on, but it changes slowly. But the other perspective, and this is something that, you know, I have really brought to my, you know, practice in the last, I’m gonna say for 10 years, it’s this perspective that people’s behaviors are also modulated by pressures from the system. Right? So I’ll give you an example. I’m working with a marketing team right now. One of the directors, I love working with her. She’s curious, she studies everything. Between our conversations, she just went ahead and read my book, stuff like that. I mean, she really invests herself into this. Her boss who was the VP of Marketing thinks of her as a control freak. Now, is she really a control freak? Well, she likes to be in control, yes. But from my conversations with her, what’s really going on there is we just don’t have the capacity, not enough people enough knowledge, skill, and such, to turn out really good work because we’ve grown fast and there’s million other reasons and if I don’t do this, nobody else would. Now to some people, that would put them in a victim mentality. To her, it’s a responsibility mentality. So you see, it’s different mentality. I mean, mindset and mentality very similar. You know, same superficial behavior but what’s going on in the back of their minds is different.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:27

And that’s really like, you know, when I talked to other agile coaches, or coaches like, understanding just exactly what you said, and being able to contextualize your approach, like if it’s one on one coaching or if you’re working with a leader, and not having like one size fits all, but really trying to in a way understand, you know, this is where kind of empathy comes in, right? Where you truly try to suspend your beliefs and your values and try to look through somebody else’s head and try to truly hear what they hear and see what they’re saying, then you can start really seeing what you can do to help that person.

Speaker: Gil Broza 18:07

Exactly. Now, I came into this. And here’s another thing about our beliefs, right? If you believe that people mean well, that they, you know, work from positive intent, that they genuinely want to help, then you will act differently. So for instance, in this case, I first met that Director of Marketing a month ago, or something like that. Now, I already work with the rest of the company but I hadn’t known them. I did a little bit of a, you know, assessment, and I talked to everybody. So I came in with an understanding of the company, but very little knowledge of the people in marketing and I wanted to assume the best and that’s what I saw there. And so now, I look forward to working with that director. And not only that, I recommended to the VP, you know, you do need somebody to kind of help lead the journey, right? Because agile is totally new for marketing, although uses boards and they don’t even use the right. And I offered that director would be a good choice. And the VP looked at me on zoom, right, and she looked at me and said really? I said yes, because her heart’s in the right place and she spends the time, she you know, she takes those steps forward. And if there is a little bit of control, we’ll work with it. But I can tell you that the VP would have never considered her for that role because she had already in her mind kind of painted her… Yes, right, right. And it’s not even a matter of you know, stereotyping; it’s just you know, I’ve worked with you long enough, I kind of think I know you. But it’s all mind reading. And it’s all mind reading. And not only that, it doesn’t take into account again, the context.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:00

Well, it’s also the human side. So I was talking the last week with James Priests and we had similar characters because like this really interests me, this human side of things, because I think the tactic side is a lot easier than the human side. And he was, you know, saying, like, in the sense and I actually didn’t think about it, you know, before, but like, you know, how we tend to judge, right? And either positive or negative, and like, you know, just being a little bit more aware of how we’re judging other people and not making those conclusions in judging too early is so important when it comes to that awareness and being aware of just what’s going on in your head.

Speaker: Gil Broza 20:48

Which is why I really like this mantra of how do I know? So maybe I have an opinion about something or, I don’t know, I heard that somebody is doing something and already I, you know, jump to some sort of conclusion or judgment. And the thing is not just the judgment of, you know, this is good or bad. It’s like, the person is stupid, the person didn’t think it through, they didn’t ask enough people, they’re only looking out for themselves. And then the question I like to remind myself to ask is, well, how do I know that really? Is truly just conjecture? Maybe it’s right but is it just conjecture or is there actually facts here? I might be aware of or not.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:36

So what got you… just maybe and then we can shift gears but I’m interested just like what got you into this? You’ve written books on, you know, the human side, the mindset, like what was the thing that triggered you to kind of explore this human side of things? I’m curious, like, do you remember when it happened or it was always…?

Speaker: Gil Broza 21:57

You know, all of these things are a lifetime in the making, right? So when I wrote the human side of agile, so 2011 I wrote it, that was looking back on how I was helping people with agile, and I noticed that most of what I was doing was actually on the soft side. Yes, there was process, and I was teaching developers how to, you know, do test driven development and how to write clean code. And, like, all the technical stuff too. But I noticed that, you know, my biggest successes came from talking with people about how they embrace this new set of ideas. And I noticed that I was pretty consistently successful with that, you know, to the extent an outsider can change a company culture. And I figured, okay, there is something here. And that was around the time when process became a big deal, and everybody was getting certified and how you do x. And to me, this was like you know, you can’t just talk about the process. Right? You just can’t. And I remember when I came up with the title, some people told me, you know, that’s the Forgotten side. And other people were actually kind of surprised. You know, what do you mean human side? It’s a process right? So no, I mean, if you treat it as a process, you won’t get far okay.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:50

But it’s also that side is hard to measure in a sense, you know, than the process sides. So a lot of times we focus on what we can measure but how do you measure you know, the mindset? How do you measure behavior? Maybe in some ways you can, behavior specifically, you can but mind may be a little bit.

Speaker: Gil Broza 24:11

No, no, no, look, I do measure it. It’s something I do for my clients. I do give them a snapshot of really how agile they’re being, you know, how much and how well but the thing is, for most of my interactions with clients, whether again, it’s leaders or team members or anyone, the measurements are actually not the issue so much. The issue is what do we need to improve, what do we need to fix? Where’s stuff stuck? And again, I think this is also part of my question or slash rebel background and that, you know, look, I’ve been in this for 20 plus years, people have always talked about measuring. And I kept asking myself, what the hell for? Why do you need to measure everything? Clearly there’s stuff you want to measure. Yes. Okay. If bugs escaped to production? Yeah, we want to know our trends. Okay? If our turnover is high, we want to know how high and is that even normal? Okay, maybe high is normal. But you don’t have to measure everything just for the sake of measuring. I mean, you want to improve it, you have to have an idea of where things are at and a set of numbers is not necessarily how you will get that information.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:40

It gets us nice looking charts, you know, with a lot of data, and then we show.

Speaker: Gil Broza 25:47

Look, what one good benefit of measuring is seeing improvement over time, right, as opposed to a point measure, you see trends, good. Okay? And so for instance, you know, measuring your lead time, yes, it makes sense. But it is so squishy, right. And if you change your definitions, you change your states a little bit, you change how you split your stories, already your measures are gone. So my belief and it’s been like this for, you know, well over 10 years is if you are interested in getting better business outcomes through agile, then the very first thing you have to do is put people before process. Which by the way goes to the earlier question of you know, is respect a value? So respect is a value and trust has value and so on but we normally lump them under a single one which is people before process, which in the Agile sense, also goes with safety and servant leadership. So, if you see people before process that gives you the starting point, you cannot work without it. Okay, then you want to work on, you know, value and creating products that matter, and delivering services that matter, and the whole product development around them. Okay? And that will also give you some of the adaptation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:20

But that’s a huge leap though. Like, you know, and I know different people have different opinions, but like, you know, in Lalou’s work, he talks about, you know, where people value and the orange, where the values and beliefs around put the system like, you know, the company has stockholders and others before you put your employees and technically people. So in order to transcend that collective belief that it’s, you know, the company comes before people, it’s gonna take some time. And I think you know, what agile stands for is that next cognitive leap or whatever you want to call it, where we value each other and people more than processes and the company itself.

Speaker: Gil Broza 28:15

So look, there’s always going to be tension between valuing the company or valuing the people who are in it. Right? And if the company is incorporated, like pretty much everybody in our industry, then is the company the same as its people? People change over time, right? I mean, this is a philosophical question. Legally, it is different. Because right, you can have 100% turnover and it’s still the same company. Now okay, so does it have the same culture? Does it still have the same mission? And all of those questions, which we’re not going to answer today. I don’t think anybody can answer them. But then the question is, who is your duty to? And what do you think will work? So agile says or believes, it’s a belief; that if we treat people well, they will create better products and therefore that will be better for the business. So the way we help the business succeed is by making it so people can succeed; ourselves, our teams, our leaders, our stakeholders, our business units, our customers of course. And so if we create an ecosystem where they can work well together and want to work there and put their best foot forward and bring their best selves to work and all of that stuff, then we believe that our results, our deliverables, our products, and so therefore our outcomes will be better. Now, can we prove that? No. Is there a lot of evidence that shows that it works? Yes. Is it conclusive? No. So that’s where we need leadership. We need leaders who can get behind that belief and say, that’s how I want to lead around here. That’s the type of company I want to lead. And there are lots of examples in the industry nowadays. Okay? So that’s the mental leap.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:19

And that’s it. That’s what I’m curious. I don’t know. Are you familiar with the Kuhn cycle? Thomas Kuhns cycle, like the guy that came up with the… anyway, like, the guy that came up with the term paradigm. Thomas Kuhn. And essentially, I want to get your thoughts, but I wasn’t sure if you’re familiar, like, you know, the paradigm, you know that we’re in, where it is in that cycle. But maybe let’s switch gears. You’ve written a book on agile outside of software development. If I had to guess, not much changes, it’s still the same thing that we talked about here, right? What is different?

Speaker: Gil Broza 30:59

What is different? Look, fundamentally, it is in fact the same. Okay? What I find is different is, how do you make it work? And where do you make this work? So here’s an example; for the longest time, you know, well-meaning agile coaches would agree with you that agile is not the best solution for everything. I mean, if you look in software development, it’s pretty useful in many parts of it, but even then, not always. Sometimes you have better approaches. Not a ton of them, but you do. Okay. When you look outside of software, work is different. Okay? We cannot lump that all work under the same umbrella as if its needs and parameters and context are all the same. Okay? So marketing a brand has a different set of parameters than running finance for a company. And it is way different than designing your new office space. And it is way different than finding the next vaccine. Okay? So you cannot expect to give them the same solutions. So not only is there no best practice, there is no single framework that will apply to everything. The problem is that people still try to apply those frameworks and they kind of go at it backwards. Here’s the framework, it should work, I need to make some changes here but I got to keep the framework. And so they run into trouble. And that’s why I think that outside of software, you have to be extra deliberate and extra intentional about designing your methods and your structures, your tactics basically, based on, again, what you value in this situation and what you believe is true in the situation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:06

And that’s really also, that reminds me of in a sense, a lot of times we force transformations on people, we tell them what to do and what you just said is really getting people to put in people in the driver’s seat, right, rather than us trying to impose or drive.

Speaker: Gil Broza 33:30

Right. Now, most people I know, could care less about designing their process, they just want to do the work. So it does make sense to rely on people who specialize somewhat in process. Now, that does not mean that you have to take the same process every time. Right? It’s just like, you know, when we think about agile in software development, and you know, statistically, most of your listeners would still be in that space. How you build a, you know an app would be quite different than how you would build, you know, movie editing software and how you will do you know, airplane scheduling software, right? And how you will do computer assisted surgery. Why should you use the same process for all of them? There will be some slight overlap, okay. But you think about everything differently, about your user, about product evolution, about quality, who it is that you’re collaborating with on the way to determining the best solution. How do you handle disasters, right? The level of skill that your team has, that’s of course more situational, that technology is available to you. Why would you give them the same frame work? So when you go outside of software, it’s the exact same questions. Okay? So the marketing team I’m working with, they’re in an insurance company. They’re very different from the marketing team I worked with in the media company. Okay? And it’s not all about, you know, yeah, you put campaigns out there, you get some paid media. Okay fine. But it’s not. It’s about moving the needle. And how you move the needle in the insurance space is rather different than how you move it when you know, people watch your stuff on TV.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:31

Exactly. And there is a commitment difference. Usually insurance says once you get somebody you have him for a while.

Speaker: Gil Broza 35:45

So loyalty, right, not only that, right, the stakes are higher. Right? If you get a bunch of bad clients and insurance, that can be seriously bad, right? If a million people watch your show instead of a million point 1, yeah, okay, that will somehow affect the bottom line, but not as much. So, you know, the cost of being wrong, the cost of change, they have their different scales.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:14

But that requires, you know, in organization, building this internal capacity and capability to be able, you know, I use analogy of cooks and chefs in the sense, like, ingredients keeps changing, we need more people in organization to understand at a chemical level, what can I throw in? And what goes well together, right?

Speaker: Gil Broza 36:40

Yes, and that’s why I was saying that it does make sense to rely on people who do have some process specialization, some cultures specialization, right? Some team dynamics specialization. Now, more and more companies have them. You have coaches on staff, you have people who lead to change from other perspectives, in the bigger organizations, you have some facilities, some guild, whatever to you know, help make this change. And these are people who don’t just, you know, build product, right? They learn from us and others what the state of the art is, when it comes to organ culture, and managing flow, and so on and so forth. So yes, we do need to build this capacity more and more, it is, in fact happening. More and more people are joining the industry who are able to provide that capacity. You know, when I started, I’m like the first generation after the manifesto authors and I think we’re now in like the third generation in terms of, you know, new coaches, new Scrum masters, new Kanban, this and that, who really help organizations with, you know, so what’s current. So it’s happening slowly.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:08

Well in the end, there’s more interest. You know, if you think about just the and this topic of Agile outside of software development, I’m working with a company in California called Park Pacific, and they’re using lean agile, these ways of working, including, you know, what we’re discussing around mindset in construction. So it’s really interesting and I’m actually interviewing, I think, Jim Benson next week and I want to talk to him. He’s doing, you know, he has a civil engineering background and he’s said he’s doing a lot of this stuff in construction. So I think, you know, like you said, marketing, you know, HR just this morning, spoke to Rena about, you know, HR. So I think there is a momentum, where people are realizing as our work is, you know, increasing in complexity, the needs to start figuring things out, and there’s just more people trying to figure this thing out. So it’s a good thing, I think.

Speaker: Gil Broza 39:11

Yes and you know, it used to be that when companies downsize, the first to go were the coaches. I just spoke with somebody who works for a large bank today and apparently they had a pretty significant reduction, something like 20% few months ago and he actually lost 25% but that’s all he lost. They could have taken more people from his group, he has like 60 agile coaches, now he has 45. Yeah, actually, the other problem in that case is yes, he kept 45 but then he lost eight of them who said, Oh, agile is clearly not gonna work out here so we’re leaving. So yeah, which is another thing that companies do, right. When senior leadership makes all sorts of, you know, big material decisions, they don’t always consider the cultural impacts, the effect on change initiatives and so on, because they’re used to measuring. And that stuff is squishy. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:19

Well, this also goes back to like how you incentivized you know. Hey, if I know that my bonus depends on current TAs, then I’m going to look where I’m going to jump. What are some of the ways that you’ve seen companies becoming agile go wrong? You know, so that’s one. What are some of the other things that you’re seeing?

Speaker: Gil Broza 40:39

So what I normally see, and that’s the typical client that comes to me is they’ve started it, usually it’s like a year or two, three ago, they kind of have something going, usually Scrum, hardly ever Kanban. And it’s just mediocre. It’s mediocre. People are not loving it, it seems to be better than before, they’re tired of the meetings. Not just because of the zoom, right? But they’re just tired of all the ceremonies. But they’re intent on keeping doing them because their hey ceremonies and stuff like we got to do. And it’s just nothing is great. And their problem is that they don’t actually know how to fix it because they think they’re doing everything right. Right? They have the roles, all the tactics, right? They have the roles, the artifacts, the JIRA of course, and so on. But that’s it. And it’s not, the results are not quite there. And like, really, when you think you do everything right and the results are not there, well, what do you do?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:48

Get more consultants.

Speaker: Gil Broza 41:50

Yeah, but then the question is, which consultants? Right? One of my best clients came to me with a total misunderstanding of the ask. They were doing Scrum like really badly and they wanted the developers to do even more practices from Scrum and tell us how to do them, like really right. And I explained all my approach like I’ve been doing with you in the past hour, and they said, Oh, interesting, never occurred to us. And this clients turned into an opportunity to help at the mindset level going all the way up to CEO, not just how to do the stand ups better. Don’t waste my time was doing stand ups better. Okay? I will gladly help you become more agile however that takes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:44

So maybe exactly what you just remind me of like the importance of alignment and the importance of looking at you know, essentially the hard stuff of the systems, which will be your policies, your organizational architecture. So, what are, you know, when it comes to organizational architecture, and alignment, how do you help clients, especially those in C suite understand like, the importance of them understanding how their systems or in this instance policies, architectures, both IT and business impact the people’s behaviors, as well as their, you know, journey when it comes to dealing with this complexity that they’re faced?

Speaker: Gil Broza 43:42

Well, look, it comes up in conversations all the time. When I have FaceTime with like, executives, those are some of the things I will bring to the conversation and sometimes they asked me all sorts of questions; Well you know, this or that happened, what do you think and so on, and I will sometimes take this to really a teaching moment, right? Because in most cases, the problem is just awareness. That’s it. That’s it. It’s not that, you know, they are intent on doing the opposite thing from agility. No, but they just don’t realize the effect the whole system’s thinking, right? System thinking has been around for quite some time. How many people actually understand it? Really? Okay. So it comes up with that. One thing I like to do with as many clients as I can, and it’s like, I’m gonna say more than half is to actually have training sessions with executives, where I teach them, you know, like an executives guide to the agile mindset. So at least I have dedicated time with them, where I can really paint a complete picture for them of you know, what does it mean to steer a system composed of human beings, not resources. And so when we have that starting point, that helps build some of the trust, and then I can have the later conversations with them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:10

But I think you said, you know, that kind of resonated for my last week’s conversations like, you know, James Priest said like you know, because I’ve made this similar point and he’s like Miljan, I could be completely aware that I’m an asshole or an idiot or be acting that way and still do it. So it’s not necessarily just awareness, but it goes back to the values and beliefs. Once I have that awareness, how am I acting based on what I’m aware of?

Speaker: Gil Broza 45:42

Okay, so I was being generous. And because again, I like to assume before knowing otherwise that you do in fact mean well. Now, these people are hiring me, right, they’re paying my bills. So they’re trying to get something. Now, I would not sign the contract with them if I can see that what they’re trying to get to, is just not at all what I agree with. Right? If the contract is fundamentally about how do I make my people work harder, I don’t want you for clients. If the contract is about, how do we come more productive here, and I can hear that you’re really a slave driver, you only care about productivity, you don’t care about the people on the other side of productivity, I won’t take you on. But I do give quite the benefit of the doubt. I’ve recently worked with a CEO who is very much about productivity. I had like two hour long conversations with him, the VP of engineering was in attendance and I helped him think differently. Has it changed overnight? No. But he is a smart cookie. A CEO at age 27 and a unicorn. He is working differently now. Has he changed everything? No, it will take more time. Right? But the conversation started earlier around how do we actually have a better culture around here?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:14

Nice. So maybe and we don’t have time to talk about culture, and I don’t want to dive into it, you know, but maybe, you know, you’ve written three books. I don’t know if you planning to write a next book. But if you were, what would it be?

Speaker: Gil Broza 47:35

I really don’t know. Seriously, I don’t.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:43

No, I was wondering, because a lot of times, you know, you might be thinking and I wanted to see if that’s gonna, you know, shed any light on what’s currently on your mind but in the sense of like, what’s going on and I think this whole space of Agile also software is on my mind by want to see you know, if there was something else. So maybe as a last question, then and I sometimes ask this is, you know, you and I’ve only spoken once before, and I don’t know you that well so you know, I know I missed some questions and what is the question maybe that I missed or I didn’t know to ask that you would say, Miljan, I wish you asked this?

Speaker: Gil Broza 48:33

Well, you already asked lots of questions I wanted be asked so it’s harder to answer. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:47

So maybe Okay, that’s good. At least I tried to do a little bit of my homework and understand kinda like, you know, your perspective. What is the message maybe that you would leave the listeners with when it comes to agile, and specifically, maybe agile leadership? What’s important about agile leadership and maybe something on that note?

Speaker: Gil Broza 49:16

I think the most important thing around agile leadership is to see people for people, warts and all, our imperfect humanity. In fact, just this morning, I posted on LinkedIn about the amazing parallels between modern leadership and modern parenting. My twins just finished high school. And you know, they were born around the time I started coaching, consulting. And knowing agile helped me become a better parent. Not that we have product owners and stand ups and boards. No, it’s the thinking behind agile. It’s the leadership thinking here. It’s the serving the outcome, responsibility, taking all of the things. You might have listeners who have kids all the way from zero to 20 years old. Anything you learn in agile and you apply at home will probably make you a better parent. And a lot of the stuff that you realize about parenting that works carries over to leading adults. And something that is common to both is you have so much in your blind spots. We all have blind spots. We think we know, we mind raids, we believe that we’ve communicated clearly, we believe that we’ve expressed the need clearly, we believe that we are being supportive, we believe that we’re being fair and No, we’re not. Most of the time, we’re not. We’re totally self-deceived, that’s a throwback to the book leadership and self-deception which everybody should read. But the thing is, there is a blind spot, work on reducing it. Can I actually plug something here?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:10

Please, yeah.

Speaker: Gil Broza 51:11

Okay. So if you go to my website @3pvantage.com/blindspots, there is just a little mini program done by over email, calling attention to common blind spots that leaders have. There’s like, there’s a top seven there that somehow seem to be trouble for almost everybody. And you know, just noticing those blind spots and doing something about them, this program comes with, you know, advice, that alone will move you forward a lot more than you know, insisting on more structure and best practices.

Riina Hellström

“I think companies are making a huge mistake by creating a one size fits all policy, would say you have to be in the office X amount per week.” – Riina Hellström

TRANSCRIPT:

Miljan Bajic: 00:34

So, who is Riina Hellström?

Riina Hellström: 00:40

You know what, asking that question over and over again by myself as well, who am I, and almost always getting to new answers, but let me just kind of give you a little overview of who I think I am. So, my name is Riina Hellström. I am a Finnish agile enterprise coach, and an organization developer. And I’ve been working with organizations or people systems, if you may, for 20 plus years. So, I’ve been working with so many different ways, and so many different things with org change, with organizational design, with management structures, with strategies, and strategy adoption, with everything you can imagine in HR apart from a couple of things, which I haven’t done, and then worked with agile quite a lot as well. So, the last 11 years, I have been focusing on what agile brings to the management side, the work development side, the org design side, and to HR. And then I work quite a lot with non-IT professionals. So, trying to help people understand what this means in their own domain. So that’s me. Privately, I live in Finland, I work globally, especially now with what happened with the COVID, our businesses all over the world starting in the morning with Australia ending with US in the evening. So, it’s a lot of work currently, which I love. And then privately I’ve got two kids and a summer home and, on an island, where we are aiming to be today or this summer as well for a while. So that’s what I do in the spare time. And I love traveling but right now one and a half years, I haven’t been able to do that privately. So, I’m hoping that the world will be opening up soon.

Miljan Bajic: 02:27

Where do you want to go once things open up?

Riina Hellström: 02:32

I would like to go to Japan, I haven’t, I love getting touched by new cultures and new ways of thinking, new world languages. And I haven’t experienced Japan yet. So that’s something that I would like to experience. And then I have a couple of things on my bucket list like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and then again, South America. I just loved South America and the vibe there. It’s very different from our organized Pakistan to Finland to go to South America. Like, you know, money on maybe, maybe does, let’s take it easy and have a mango and a beer.

Miljan Bajic: 03:10

Yeah, I know, I was talking to my wife too and like we usually it’s like travel between the United States and Europe. And you know, it’s just some of those places, especially in Australia, we have a lot of relatives there and it’s interesting. So, I think it’s everybody I talked to these days, everybody’s eager to go back to travelling so. But to bring us back to HR and agile, there’s a lot of, we hear a lot about agile in HR, agile HR. What does it actually mean? And why is it becoming increasingly important? You’ve wrote a book on it, or you co-authored the book on agile HR. So, what is it then why is it important?

Riina Hellström: 03:53

So let me take you back to 11 years ago, when I was working in organizations within HR and Management Development, I was continuously challenging how we were treating people, how we were setting up people practices and trying to support them to do a good job. But they were basically just, I mean, the way how organizations are set up are very machine like, it’s like the taken from the engineering practices and processes, practices, standardization, this is how things work. And I was challenging that might be because of my background and team sports. I’ve been playing handball for 18 years in my life. And then might be in my background, also in organic chemistry and organic, you know, pharmaceuticals and how the body works, etc. So, there’s a lot of different kind of thinking from that organic side and I was looking at organizations said; You know what? This doesn’t make sense. We’ve got brilliant people here. They are…. so, they’ve got so much potential, but they’re just bringing a fraction of it to work because our system doesn’t allow them to work together very well, so I was always challenging this. And I was looking for something that would, I was kind of trying to make up a system in my head, like, how can we bring the biggest potential? How can teams start really working together? I was thinking that we don’t need that much managers, we might need coaches to bring the best out of people, etc. And then I came across the scrum Guide, which practically changed my life. Because when I read that I was like, yes, somebody has described a system of work, which I believe in, which sounds like organic, it sounds like people can bring their potential, it sounds like we’re continuously learning and adapting to the ongoing environmental changes, needing to adapt to requirement changes, etc. And I saw that you know what? This is not just happening in software or IT; this is happening everywhere. And that kind of picked my kind of, I just blew my mind that you know what? This is going to spread from software to every about everywhere else as well, then I started learning about this. And I started connecting with people like you, who are kind of long-term gurus in Agile from the software and IT side. And that people said to me; you know what? What are you doing here, we don’t want HR even close to what we’re doing, because you’re ruining everything for us. And I went like, you know what? You just wait, because when you start scaling this across your organization, when you start scaling agile teams, and then you just start working together, and you might have 100 people working this way, that’s when you start to start to knock on my door in HR because we’re caring for the people system, we’re caring for org design, we might be caring for how we develop managers long term or leadership, we are caring for performance management structures, for rewarding, for the policies of how to work, how to recruit, how to hire and fire people, what kind of learning, you know, processes and practices you’ve got in this organization. So, all of that people back end, that’s what HR is working with. And that’s why agile HR is important. So, some people say, this is just a fad and you’ve got just taking agile from software and using it in HR. You know what? Yeah, I am, because we’ve got a lot to learn from you people, we need to start adopting the ways of working here as well to be able to create people, practices that work for agile organizations, we have to be agile ourselves, and start co-creating with people, start understanding what works, only delivering out people practices that work with the teams. So, there’s a lot in Agile HR, we talk about two things, agile, HR, or agile in HR. So how can we in HR, or people operations start using the Agile practices to deliver value out to our employees, to the managers, to the businesses? And on the other hand, HR for agile, which means that what kind of people practices, people policies, people solutions, and products, do we need to build to enable modern organizations, perhaps network flexible, agile organizations. So, these are two sides of Agile HR, which I tend to bring up.

Miljan Bajic: 08:17

Yeah, so maybe let’s explore one of those. So, like when it comes to helping in, you know, HR driving and helping with org transformation and design, in what ways could HR help with org design and transformations and these initiatives that are companywide, encompass the entire organization and impact every piece of the organization?

Riina Hellström: 08:44

So, it depends a bit in my opinion on the context, when we talk about [inaudible 08:47]

Miljan Bajic: 08:48

It always does right? Context is the most…

Riina Hellström: 08:52

Exactly. When we talk about transformations, first of all, what kind of a company is transforming? If it’s the traditional classic management structure, where we got the line organization, where you got the annual budget, you’ve got the project management, you’ve got that kind of structure, and you start gradually bringing people on board to an agile structure is setting up agile teams, maybe finding an end-to-end value stream where you start a scaled model. When you start a little bit of Kanban here, start using Scrum in certain teams, in those kinds of situations, HR can work with so many different things, first of all, capability to build. So, who is sitting on their learning and development is usually HR and then you just start building the capabilities at least half a year, if not a year ahead so that you’ve got product owners coming in and scrum masters coming in. Then you’ve got people understand agile on the business side. So that’s one part. Another part is the org design because quite, I would say how would I say this without being too cynical? Well big consultancies coming in and selling big transformations, usually come in with a model. Here is a perfect model for you. And here is, this is how you should implement agile. And I don’t believe that because I’ve been working with so many organizational changes that you just can’t implement or change, especially with agile, you have to invite people in, you have to do create with them, and bring them along to a journey, which is an evolution, not an implementation. So, when you start working with this, we in HR have seen quite many changes. And we might be able to help with that. Staging, and creating a roadmap of what to do next, and what to remember to do rewarding people practices, enablers, such as rewarding and performance, structures, leadership, so where I see quite a lot of transformations go wrong or have trouble is when we have this, we keep the same line management structure in the Agile structure, right? And we don’t need the same kind of line managers there. What we need is different kinds of enablers and people who will lie in the teams who work with impediments, work with improvement of the system. We don’t need that, how would I say, maybe, delegating, micromanaging, reporting, accountable line manager there. And to start changing the structure of management, that’s also something that HR works with? Where do we find…?

Miljan Bajic: 11:31

So that’s a lot about like decentralizing. What you’re describing is like how the context matters but assuming that we’re working, where you know, that type of like, you know, command and control, or maybe not necessarily command and control, but more of, you know, one person accountable for everything versus sharing their responsibility. Is that what you’re talking about?

Riina Hellström: 11:56

Correct. I mean, it is a lot about decentralizing what makes sense. But then understanding where it makes sense to have central services available. For example, if we’re talking about people services, I don’t think that each team should be professionals in talent acquisition and recruiting. I think that there should be a service where we’ve got, you know, shortlisted people, two teams and saying, Hey, we know that you’re looking for an arm, you know, software developer, back end software developer, here are the talents that we’ve scanned from our you know, databases from our network, they who have applied, look at these candidates and come back to us to see what you want to do with them, rather than have them do the kind of dirty work of recruitment, or the kind of operational work. So, there’s a lot of thinking here and there is not one way of doing this, there is not one model, but we have to continue to think about what’s best for the organization, how much work we can put on the teams as well and how much decision making they’re ready take on. I’ll give an example just to be clear, because it’s much easier to actually talk by examples. I was working with a transformation, business transformation, where we transformed a unit with 550 people towards kind of a team of teams’ model. So wasn’t any of these agile scalable that we are used to but the team of teams’ model, self-organized teams, who were there to sync together on how to work. Consultancy, and IT consultancy, they’re competing with the best agile, very innovative companies. And we started onboarding people onto this model. And then we onboard about 200 people onto self-organized model. And the team started realizing that they’ve got different maturity levels of making these decisions themselves. Some teams, were not quite there yet to make pricing decisions, or to make decisions about which leads were kind of okay to start working with, because if you started working with lead, it was a lot of work that went into getting all the way to a suggestion or, you know. So we instead of having a manager there to make these decisions. What we came up with, and what the managers themselves came up with is that they created a team of leaders who offered services to these teams. So, leadership as a service, and they say, here we can help with pricing, we can help you with, you know, agreeing on if a lead is qualified or not, we can help you with problems in the team, we can help you with, you know, retrospectives, we can help you with impediments around the organization. So, these are services for you as teams to be able to do a good job. Now I think, it was just brilliant, again, rethinking on how we can support the system and help that evolved, rather than creating some kind of an additional process or additional role to take in each role in each.

Miljan Bajic: 14:57

Yeah, and that’s what it sounds like. It’s almost as the and I’ve seen this and I agree in the sense of like trying to go prescriptive with like this is more organic, you create some guardrails, and you say self-organize around this. In this instance of policy, right? Would you call that a policy?

Riina Hellström: 15:14

I would call it an ongoing service that needs to kind of be it’s kind of an in-house consultancy, basically. But then if I talk about process or policy, I had, this is not our example, when we are in HR, we have two things that we need to take care of, at least. First of all, supporting the organization to do its best possible job and be healthy you know, that’s one thing. Second of all, every country has legal compliance, regarding employment laws, regarding corporate laws, what we need to take care of with employees’ health, well-being, all of these things. And you’re not a professional in corporate employment legislation, even if you’re a master of Agile enterprise, whatever, you don’t know what the law is in France, or Russia or US or whatever. But we’ve got the network to understand what we can do there and we can’t do there and how we need to support the organization within those constraints. So that’s something that we’ll need to, you know, we still need to have policies there. And I had a transformation where this executive agile, I was CHRO there, one of the Agile coaches came to say, hey, we’ve got a great idea. We are now so self-organized so we’re not going to report or record any work time anymore. Because everybody can take care of themselves. I was like, that’s a great idea. But let’s just kind of take a step back, a couple steps back here, because that is a massive risk. And that risk is at risk that the company can’t take because there’s legislation in place, if we can’t show the authorities how much you work, we are going to be in court and shut down very quickly so that you don’t work overtime, without pay or overtime so we’re killing you at work, you know, so, or that you were overburdening yourself with too much work. So, we can’t do that. And sometimes we have to be the bad police, bad cop, still and say, Hey, fantastic idea, but let’s look at the constraints. In a similar way, as you in software are looking at, for example, privacy, or security discussions, you’ve got certain guardrails, which you just need to keep and that’s the same thing with the people practices, every country additionally has different kind of legislation. So, it’s not that easy to create fair systems that work in each country. And that’s the back end that we know quite a lot about. Does that make sense?

Miljan Bajic: 17:49

It does. No, I’m just thinking, you know, in the sense of like, you know, changing those, you know, policies that are related to design, and one of them that comes up a lot is obviously the whole compensation and that’s related to that is performance reviews, right? So, from your perspective, and understanding of the traditional way of performance reviews, what does it look like in an agile context or in a complex context? How do we reward people? How do we do you know, some type of assessments or you know, what replaces annual reviews?

Riina Hellström: 18:34

What do you do even for that once-a-year discussion with your manager about how you did the whole, you know, it’s as absurd as I would be your spouse, and I would have one conversation with you a year telling you that, you know, Miljan, last year, you did your three from last year, your three out of five from the whole year for all situations, you know, it’s as ridiculous. So, let’s start looking into this.

Miljan Bajic: 18:59

To make this comparison even a little bit more crazy or funnier, if you had five husbands, if they all performed great, you couldn’t also rate them as fives, right? There’s something fundamentally wrong with that, with that approach. So, what are we doing in Agile, like…?

Riina Hellström: 19:18

So, first of all, let’s understand. I think that we need to go back to some principles. Why do we have performance management structure in place all together? What value are they there to drive, okay? And if we look at the value, it’s not actually, the value shouldn’t be about looking in the review mirror and evaluating what you did. The value should be helping you succeed as you move forward, because that’s the thing that we can still impact, right. So, I would like us to start thinking about performance management as in growth conversations, as in looking forward as an improving and again, as in target setting and knowing where we’re going even if the target would, even if we would need to pivot a little bit, the target’s there, we are aligned on where we’re going so that we can self-organize around that. Now, easier said than done. The large corporations have performance management structures that are agreed all the way up in the board. So, changing them takes at least one year, if not two years, just really start redesigning a performance management structure takes a long time, not done in, you know, a blink of an eye. Second of all, if we can’t change that big thing, immediately, what I usually have recommended is okay, let’s tweak it a little bit, let’s at least get rid of individual target setting. Because if you’ve got an individual target for a person working in a scrum team or agile team, and they are set for a year, and even if that agile team needs to pivot or even leave the value delivery, because it doesn’t make sense, these persons might be conflicted with their target versus what’s the best thing to do. So, let’s give people at least a team target if not the value delivery targets towards the customer, where we’ve got several teams connected to the same value delivery. Let’s try, remembering where we build performance management structures. We have a saying in Finland, if you bow to one side, you show your back end to another side. I’m not sure if you have that saying you know. So rewarding practices are the same, you always sub -optimize something. If you got a team level practice, you might sub optimize the unit profitability. If you’ve got a high-level target setting, say that everybody’s rewarding is connected to a high-level target, you feel that okay, but I don’t have that much to say, I can’t influence that much, it is not motivating me. So now we come to the motivating point. Do we need these targets and rewarding connected? Quite a lot of companies are decoupling the target setting from the rewarding. So rewarding is maybe connected to profitability or growth or new customer, you know, recognition. So, the KPIs or the value deliveries there for. And the targets are set, maybe quarterly, where we quarterly are looking into how can we get towards this big ambitious goal? What do we do there? And the targets are then discussed how did we get towards them? How did we do? How do we you know; how can we improve? And I hearing me use the word we continuously, it is about we, it’s about how do we go there. And now I think we could have different kind of levels of performance management as well, almost kind of influence.

The third thing I want to say about this is that which many people haven’t really maybe kind of broken down into bits and pieces but the Agile system is a performance management system. I’m going to say that, again, this is so important. The agile structure includes everything that a performance management, the traditional performance management structure included. It includes setting a big vision, it includes a goal, the KPIs of what we’re building, what the value deliveries, it includes breaking that goal down into attainable epics, or features or bits and pieces that we’re building. It includes continuous evaluation of those pieces and setting targets on a micro level, right? We’re setting targets for each quarter, or sprint or whatever you’re using. We’ve got the what we know what we’re aiming for in teams. It includes evaluation of those targets together as a team. How are we doing? Are we delivering what we should? So, it’s the evolution there as well and it includes improvement. So how can we improve as a team or as a unit or as a whatever the bigger size is? So includes all of those elements. What it doesn’t include, specifically is what we tend to have in the performance management structure as well, is the learning and development. So how do we add to growing our capabilities and skills? But that can be added as well. So why do we need an extra layer of performance management on top of agile which includes or this is a good question as well. Can we just pay people enough to bring their best to work, to do their best with the potential they have in you know, in comparison to maybe the field overall and then skip that circus of performance management? That’s one question I have.

Miljan Bajic: 24:31

Yeah, it’s I think that’s what we know we’re going see, you know, over the last 5 years, 10 years agile HR has slowly been brewing, but I think over the next 5 to 10 years, we’re going to see more organizations trying to figure this out. And like you said, I don’t think there is a specific way of doing it. You have to figure it out based on your context. What are some of the companies out there that you admire? Maybe that you worked with, or you’ve you heard of. Like, what are they doing that are kind of the forefront of this kind of change?

Riina Hellström: 25:07

Of Agile HR? I have to say I do like Spotify’s HR and analysts but if I sharing on their agile practices and how they are working with hacking their selves forward and growing the understanding and co-creating with the organization, I do like that very much. I also appreciate, we’ve got some fantastic case studies in the agile HR community that are also shared in our network where people will learn this are starting to, for example, use design thinking in delivering people products in-house. So, if we take an example, they want to develop an awesome remote onboarding practice, instead of us going with HR people into a bunker, designing the onboarding practice, and then, you know, releasing that to you and say Okay, here is we implement this. We would take you in and say, hey, you know, a couple of people who’s been recently onboarding, a couple of managers, maybe some candidates and say, let’s now innovate on how to create awesome remote onboarding practices. They would use design thinking in validating, testing small scale, what works and what doesn’t. And then when they find something that works in their contexts, in their company with the candidates and with the people who their onboarding, they would maybe then adopt a couple of different ones, couple of different remote onboarding practices. So, this is what we’re seeing across the scale with people in HR who learn this way of thinking. They don’t think there’s a one size fits all, they don’t think that they can come up with the solution themselves. They start developing with the organization. There’s some amazing stuff coming up such as I know that I can’t mention them some of the customers names because we’ve got a very strict NDA. So let me say this. A very prominent tech company, delivering technology and entertainment to many of the people in the world are right now building an inclusion in everything they do. And that’s also done through testing, evaluating, discussion with the company all over so that it’s part of what we do. It’s not something additional added on to, you know, everything we do. But there’s great things going on and it’s not about who does what? It’s about how we think of delivering these things, to the employees, to the managers, to the leaders. We don’t, we stop with this, you know, going into product development stage for a year and then coming up with something which is old, not liked, not validated. We’re talking about having a pilot test group, but all the assumptions have been built into the product anyway, you know, and that’s.

Miljan Bajic: 27:47

So, you’re anchoring? Yeah. So that’s very interesting, because its kind of like that’s what we’re dealing with the you know, agile, and I know, in your book, you talk about mindset, but could you maybe just elaborate, like, it’s a mindset shift.

Riina Hellström: 28:04

Massive.

Miljan Bajic: 28:06

And that’s easier said than done.

Riina Hellström: 28:10

May I kind of ask you another question back? What’s your typical viewpoint of HR people? What is how would you describe; this is a HR person?

Miljan Bajic: 28:24

It’s somebody that’s responsible for the, you know, HR stuff. Performance, jobs, hiring, you know, somebody that works with senior leaders on defining maybe culture, you know, in a sense, they’re responsible, like you said earlier, like, maybe health of the organization, in general. But, you know, one thing that probably stands, they’re like far away, right, they’re not engaged, and they tell us what to do. And I think that’s what a lot of people feel like, because I’ve worked in as a consultant but I also worked inside organizations as an employee, and that’s how it feels like, and for the ones that are moving more to this inclusion that you’re talking about, and co-creation, it feels more engaging you know, as an employee, you feel more engaged.

Riina Hellström: 29:16

Great to hear that you’ve got, still you have quite a modern view of who HR is and what we do, because quite many people say HR, they’re doing something with admin and just sending us a lot of forms, and taking care of payroll and some legal stuff, right. So, they don’t know that we’re working with all that what you just said, but quite many people think that HR are… and yes, there are different ranges of HR people. There’re the more operational, more kind of legal background people who take care of what we need to take care of, but they’re kind of I would say, if I dare to, what’s the word in English when you kind of give a character, characterize. Characterize them quite high probability is that they are risk averse, because they need to take care of a lot of stuff regarding law, they are prone to want the right solutions, the right answers, prepare everything to perfection and have all the answers prepared for managers and leaders because they are putting quite difficult situations quite often so they want to be prepared and have everything done and polished, and, you know, show a perfect solution or product. So to start to teach these people who think this way and who have been, you know, they’ve been trained this way, that’s their dominant way of thinking. Hey, you know what? What if we would show something which is a draft? Or what if we would show something, three mock ups and prototypes to managers and ask for feedback? Oh, my God, that’s such a big mindset shift even that. How can we show something which isn’t ready? How can we even say that we don’t know where we’re going to end up? Well, how can you know something? If you’re working with, say, culture change, how on earth could you write an end state of culture change? You can’t my friends. We have to just start going in this direction, you know, as an evolution stepwise. But when we then help them understand how to do that, that’s what I think is the beauty with agile is that, the certainty doesn’t come from what you do. The certainty doesn’t come from a plan as it did previously. The certainty comes from the process. The certainty comes from I know that we will have planning time coming up every month, the certainty comes from I know that we will review together what we’ve done. And if it’s not perfect, it’s okay, because somebody, there’s a high probability that somebody who will pick up on the on the foot flaws, you know, we can fix it as we go forward. That’s where the certainty comes from, from the process. And when people start learning this, they are much more comfortable with starting to work in new ways, starting to show kind of half-done prototypes to employees, starting to bringing employees to hacking. You know, let’s have the recruitment practice together. Starting to be opening up to ideas, and even letting people very keen to get feedback. I mean, get people to shoot down the ideas, if they’re not good. Why build something in a scale matter for the whole organization if five people can tell you in the beginning that this won’t fly? You know, so.

Miljan Bajic: 32:32

And that’s more like, you know, so who’s responsible for engagement? Because most people in less than countries, at least based on the research are disengaged at work. So, is it HR that responsible? Because, well, who is it? Maybe we’re all responsible for it, but…

Riina Hellström: 32:46

Just what I’m laughing about. I mean, that’s like, who’s responsible for you breathing? Who’s responsible for having good communication? Everyone are! You know, we might have tools, practices, and supporting mechanisms or services to help you in team start engaging more, or start evaluating your engagement or bringing some kind of budgets to do something with your growth or health or whatever. Well, I think there’s two sides, by the way, engagement, but enablement as well. You can be as engaged as you want. But if you don’t have the tools and the means to deliver value, that engagement won’t take you far.

Miljan Bajic: 33:31

Well, what about this? I recently worked with a client, and one of the managers says Miljan, the only way that you get promoted here, and you climb up the ladder is by staying, you know, unnoticed, and, you know, just not raising any red flags, keeping it down and not essentially messing things up. Because eventually whoever messes up there, they’ll filter those out. So that’s not policy. That’s not, you know, that’s I would assume it has been culture, right?

Riina Hellström: 34:09

Yeah, that’s more culture. And I mean, I think that my answer is, choose your battles. There are amazing companies that you can work for, if you are innovative, if you’re ready to, you know, bring in ideas, work with others, be engaged and there are companies where there isn’t time or space or room for that. And I think choose your battles is as well as sometimes you can actually make quite a big difference as being the innovator, as being the one who is engaging others, as being the one who is always in these new initiatives. But carrying the full load old time will become quite burdening. So, yeah, it’s more of a cultural thing. And quite a lot of companies are now talking about going agile and let’s be innovative. You know, everybody has a voice, and will have a lot. But even the most innovative companies still have some structures, especially if they’ve been around for longer than 20 years, 15-20 years, they still have some structures there, which are top down. And we won’t get rid of those structures. Some top-down structures are actually quite good as well. So, I’m not fully in for or… there are organizations where full self-organizing principles can work but when we start work, working with larger structures, top-down structures and organizing principles might be as well welcomed for people to bring some clarity and alignment, etc. That said, I think that we can go so much faster in organizations that are larger when we unleash the engagement and potential. And I think that I’m not sure if you agree, but when you tell people is that, you can go and work with these people towards that goal, that’s the goal we’re aiming for. We can’t tell you exactly how to go there. But you need to figure that out together. Here is, you know, means for you to do this enablement, budgets, you know, decisions, this is how we can work with problems as we go along. And here are some clear, red lines that you can’t step over. These are the constraints, you can’t do this, or this or this or this, that’s a no go. And I think to bring this clarity to people, what can I do? What can’t I do? And then just say, tell them, run, go find out, and let me know how I can support you. That’s what we’re trying to build. And those kinds of organizations, I think will thrive in the in the going forward.

Miljan Bajic: 36:48

Yeah, I mean, I think so too. And so, what is it about like our desire to have specific framework because like everybody that I talked to, everybody is saying, you know, this kind of templatized, the way of like, the way the frameworks have been sold, the big consulting companies are doing and, you know, for, if you’ve been in the trenches, and you’ve been doing this, you know, that there’s no framework that you have to contextualize, and adjust things. So why do you think organizations buy into the scaling? And how do you work if you work with organizations, for instance, that have adopted save for one of the other frameworks? And what kind of challenges do you run into when companies’ kind of going all in on a specific framework that might not align with,

Riina Hellström: 37:37

I would say, I’m not for against any kind of frameworks. I understand most of them understand what’s good about them, and I understand their pitfalls. And I also am not naïve. If you want to start changing an organization with 50,000 people, you can’t just do that organically, you know, let agile bloom and you know, start doing something in teams and start with standing how this works. It will take too long, that’s a business risk. So, I’ve seen some companies do an implementation of one of the models which are scaling agile. So scrum at scale, Spotify model, safe, less, these types of models are used. And it’s kind of a next iteration. It’s kind of getting everybody to just work in a new way and a quite a quick way. But there might be missing on what I think is the most important thing. And I think it’s the most important thing is to reach every individual who start working in a new way in three different ways. First of all, heart to understand what the values and the principles are behind this. Why is this a new way of working? What does it mean for me as a behavioral change when I start working in my domain, or with my new team, or with the people that are around me? What does that change in how I do my everyday life, but also how I make decisions, how I react on things? And being able to recognize that, for example, just a couple of examples. How do we deal with mistakes? How do we deal with conflicts? How do we deal with impediments in this organization? Just very important questions that reveal what value level you’re on. The second part, the second was hands. How to quickly move from concept, you know, concepts and conceptualizing the models to let’s just start trying here. This is how we do it. You know, let’s meet let’s plan our stuff. Let’s visualize it up on the wall. Let’s start working on that. It will not be easy the first couple of Sprint’s or couple of rounds, and that’s integrate and improve. And that’s whole idea.

Miljan Bajic: 39:55

So that’s the whole kind of idea of empiricism and just respect and adapt, keep it transparent.

Riina Hellström: 40:02

Exactly. And if there’s something with the model that doesn’t, if we talk about kind of transforming with through models, if there’s something with the model that doesn’t work, raise that. We need to have a, some kind of a team or a unit that takes up these red flags and checks, okay, this skills model is breaking down here, doesn’t work there, let’s fix this somehow, let’s give them the freedom to do it in a different way, or let’s coordinate or let’s get these teams to work together. Because right now, I see quite a lot of this thing that organizations are adopting agile, some kind of, you know, say for or another model, and they kind of haven’t on additionally to their line or organization, they just add a scale model on top of that, and say, you know, you’re not working in your usual job, 100%. But additionally, you’re in this one trade, safe trade, and you’re there 20%. And then you’re another safe trade for 10%. And that’s not even safe, my friends. I mean, that isn’t the scaled agile model. That’s just combining two models and just making a mess.

Miljan Bajic 41:06

Exactly like that. I use the analogy of cooks and chefs, it’s like bunch of cooks, throwing stuff in without knowing what they’re doing. And this comes back to the idea of learning and development. And what I run into a lot organizations, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Peter Principle, where like, people are promoted to a position where they’re not really competent for. But like, how is learning and development changing and like, what types of things HR can support? I don’t know if you’re familiar with fidelity, but they for instance, give one day a week to the developers. Tuesdays to focus on learning and developing themselves. And they don’t ask them to report anything. Just said one day a week is dedicated for you to growing yourself. That’s a pretty big commitment from a company to say one day a week, every week.

Riina Hellström: 42:06

I would say there is no way we can centrally coordinate learning anymore. There is no way it makes sense because it would be much too slow. It depends on how quickly people need to upskill themselves in different organizational positions or different teams. And if we talk about software developers, how quickly do you think their skills in a coding language or something becomes obsolete? It’s 1,2,3,4 years. So, they will need to continuously upskill themselves. And if we’d have some kind of a structure there were, think about this, imagine that just 10 years ago would work this way. You had a development discussion with your leader, then you agreed with the leader what you should learn during the next year, then that was, you know, coordinated and gathered centrally to an HR function who started looking at, okay, what do we need in this company? Then that was approximately, you know, they stopped me had a conversation with your manager in January or February, by May, they got this coordinated effort. By August, they had made plan on what people should learn the next year in the company. And they start discussing its vendors, you know, in October, then they have an offering next January, February. A year after you had the need of learning. And then you have the offering available. That just doesn’t fly anymore. Okay? Let’s get rid of these kinds of things. What we can see in L&D happening is decentralizing of learning. Having these kinds of practices such as use x amount of time of learning, have communities of practice or meetups in-house, bringing in speakers to learn, you know, go to meet other in other companies to learn about this, here is a budget for each team. You can use this budget as you wish to be able to make sure that you’re going in the strategic direction with your learning. And here, you might even have kind of gurus from different areas and domain areas to describe what the strategic learning domains are, you know. Maybe artificial intelligence gurus would write this is what’s happening this field, maybe we’ve got designers writing what’s going on in that field right now where we need to focus on. So maybe you have that kind of a map guiding your view towards something. So, we start seeing much more decentralization and also coaching so people and teams are being helped with the invisible, you know. You might know coding, but actually describe that to a junior level developer and help them upskill themselves through working with you that might need some extra help. I’m working quite a lot with engineers and I’m an engineer myself, so I get to say this. Engineers are not always very good with empathizing and expressing themselves and listening to what you really mean and understanding each other and making sure that we understand each other. So, clarifying that we really know what you’re talking about. They are very, very focused on facts, you know, and getting that written maybe and that’s it. So here coaching can make a massive difference. I mean, I’ve been coaching teams where I just go in, I have no idea what they’re talking about and that’s not my thing. But I make sure that people understand that each other, that we’ve discussed open issues or problems or conflicts in a very, very collaborative way, in a safe structure, which you and I are able to kind of create, and people feel much more comfortable than, you know, the big invisible stuff is taken care of, then they can focus on just getting that technical stuff done. So there’s a lot that’s happening in that space as well. And you know what, you know, who is who are very, very good coaches, and very, very good Scrum masters? HR people. Because we’ve been doing this forever. We’ve been working with people, we’ve been training, we’ve been facilitating, we’ve been listening, we are very, very good with that. So, I haven’t seen right now HR people stepping in as Scrum masters, stepping in as agile coaches, and even leading business transformations. Because they’ve been leading business transformations or changes before. Now, there’s this agile tab, tab unto that,

Miljan Bajic 46:34

Wish we had the Agile tab to everything, like just throw agile on it. But that’s very interesting because I agree, like, in the sense like, and also teaching others how to do that same thing and like, how do you scale coaching? Well, you know, you teach others to understand to be better listeners to, you know, try to look for better questions to understand people better, you know. I would hope that, you know, HR people understand the human side of things and you would think, you know, that’s what, you know, HR stands for, I hope. So maybe as a last question here, how do you think how has COVID kind of impacted HR both short term and long term? What are we going to see when it comes to this whole impact of distributive work force, space, like, you know, how we work?

Riina Hellström: 47:33

Do you have another hour?

Miljan Bajic 46:34

I know. Maybe whatever we can condense in the next eight minutes.

Riina Hellström: 47:39

I will fix the world’s COVID and the HR problems in three minutes or less. Okay, that’s a challenge. So I think that what we’ve seen is amazing flexibility from many companies. Not just companies, but people. People both who are working, employees who are working in the companies have been shown that they are worth the trust that should have been given them in the first place. I mean, so many companies that I’m working with have been making amazing results, getting things done with amazing speed. And people are quite burned out, to be honest, because they’ve been working so hard. So, this is one thing that we need to start dealing with. I mean, HR people are also very burnt out. It’s not, you know, 10 people or 20, that I know, that are so tired, because they’ve been caring for the whole organization, the policies, the health, you know, health care, all of that, at the same time, while they are also running you know, with their families, and you know, working from home. So, health and well-being of people is one thing that I think is very important. The second what’s interesting is that now, there is absolutely no reason to say we can’t do this virtually, we can’t do this digitally. That’s an excuse that can’t be used anymore. So, it has to be very deliberate. You know, where are working? What are we doing face to face? What are we doing as a hybrid model? You know, the worst thing at least for me with training and facilitation is that some people are online, and some people are in the room, that is a really difficult discussion. So has to be very deliberate. We need to be much more strategic in what should we do, and that there’s again, can we let the teams make this decision rather than the company policy?

The third thing is, we see two things; Preference of returning to work is very scattered. So, we can’t go with averages. There’s a company called Gleethman who is doing some research where they got some 200,000 data points of if people want to return to work or not. And this is about wanting to. And that’s scattered. So some people say I don’t want to go back to work at all. Around 20, 25% if I remember correctly. Want to just work remotely. And about the same amount want to go fully into the office. But then we’ve got people scattered between one to two days in the office three to four days, you know, so there’s not going to be an average approach that works for everybody. What we need to understand is that, oh, wow, our talent base just got scattered. These people who are working remotely, if we don’t have a solution for them, they’re going to be poached very easily by companies who offer a better life work experience for them, right. And then this kind of, I think companies are making a huge mistake by creating a one size fits all policy would say you have to be in the office X amount per week. What don’t you say we will create a policy where you say, every team needs to look at your context, your customers, your value delivery and agree on what you do virtually and what you do in the office. And it has to be an explicit team commitment on how you work, right? So why don’t we do that because teams can make the best decisions for sure.

Miljan Bajic 51:06

So that’s like going from very rigid policies to more adaptive policies that are context specific. And in that instance, you decentralizing that decision of how we work to the units and teams based on you know, where they are maturity wise, where they are in their work. I mean, the whole context. Yeah.

Riina Hellström: 51:26

But what you can create as a policy is that you have to make this explicit discussion and explicit choices. And then we come to the culture. And then we come to do you have managers who are micromanagement professionals who don’t trust people? That’s another conversation again. But you know, yeah. The other thing is that digitalization and if we think about the COVID, is there’s nothing that prepared organizations better for agile than COVID. Because we didn’t know what kind of decisions to make, we needed to react every day, last spring, every week after the summer, and now maybe every month, we need to make new contingency plans, you know, so…

Miljan Bajic 52:10

A lot of people I talked to, they’re like, this was a good test in the sense of just to open our eyes to you know, as much as negative, it’s also created a lot of positive opportunities, just to our whole perception of what is feasible and what’s not feasible.

Riina Hellström: 52:30

And you know what? The change, or the kind of different situation was so long lasting, that it has changed the you know, changed behavior in a lasting way. So, people have changed behavior, people have changed opinion, I thought that I can’t do what I do virtually. But actually, now I find that what we do, train agile is working much better in a virtual setting because we break that down into five weeks instead of two days. And people learn much better and they apply it etc. So quite a lot of businesses have been also able to redefine themselves in how this works. So, I think there is a great opportunity here, but we need to be very strategic about that and the companies who understand this change in behavior, and change in I say, life work balance on purpose, because it’s about life balance really. It’s about how you bring in work into a life. And I think that’s super important to remember one side’s average approach won’t take you far.

James Priest

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:42

I don’t know much about who James Priest is, and I’m sure a lot of people also don’t so maybe could you take us on your journey and kind of how you got into this space that you’re currently in and what got you interested into organizational effectiveness and this whole?

Speaker: James Priest 01:07

Sure. Well, I won’t make you enjoy my entire life history. But I was in England, you go to school, you leave school at 16, you go to college and then to university, and my mother had very big ideas for me about going to university. But actually, I was also a musician, I was a pianist. And for better and worse, I got involved with a band. And so I dropped out at the age of 18 and was a semi professional musician for some years which was a lot of fun. And somewhere inside, I had a niggling idea I should do something a bit more responsible. So I also found that a couple of businesses and I was actually, at that time, interested in nature, I worked a lot with construction when I was younger. I mean, as a kid with my father and living in a rural environment. And so I got into landscape design and construction. So I had a private business for private properties and also a commercial business. Anyway, I remember asking myself a few times, this can’t be it. And when I was 26 years old, there was a series of events happening in my life at that time. And I ended up getting introduced to… you could call it like as a kind of psychological or consciousness tool. So my partner at the time was having a difficult time with a few things and she reached out for help with that and I got really interested in the process that she got involved with, which was called voice dialogue. It was developed by a couple Hal and Sidra Stone from the States. Hal was a yogi analyst and Sidra was a psychologist. They got together, it was their second marriage in the 70s and they vowed to never repeat the same problems that they had in their first marriages. And after about six months, they started to see the same patterns emerging. And so rather than be dismayed, they decided to explore that. And at that time, there was a lot of exploration being done around this idea of psychology of selves or this idea that the psyche is multiple. And so and there was some techniques, you know, like facilitating different parts of somebody, or giving a part of space in the room and having a dialogue and so on. So they started experimented with this. And out of that came a method that’s gained a lot of traction today called voice dialogue. And around it was what they came to call the psychology of selves. Anyway, I’ll get to why this is relevant in the context of sociocracy soon. But the basic idea is, you know, everybody’s unique, right? So we’re all born with our own kind of unique tendencies and traits, but then the environment influences us, our familial environment and the culture in which we grow. So this nature nurture debate, it’s not really a debate both are relevant somehow. But if you look at or one way to make sense of human development is that we tend to lean into or identify with certain behaviors that appear to get our needs better met within whichever social context we’re in. And with some encouragement, sometimes from those around us, including kind of negative feedback, we can disown certain other aspects of ourselves, so otherwise we would quite naturally and freely express. So the basic idea is that by the time we reach adulthood, we’re a kind of adapted version of our full selves with some parts known to ourselves and given freedom to express, some part known to ourselves, but not shared openly or explicitly with the world, but a whole bunch of aspects or potential in us that’s also not developed. So anyway, I was really fascinated in this work. And the basic idea was by really giving space to these different identifications, like, the part of me that was really identified with pleasing people and was very unnerved if people seem displeased with me, or the part of me that needed to know the answer to everything and not knowing wasn’t really a safe space for me to be in and so on. So I took a deep dive into this because I was really fascinated by the question, Who am I really. And so this was when I was 26. And I made a decision during that year; one that I wanted to pursue more what was meaningful for me, and I was discovering a whole new bunch of meaning at that time. And secondly, I’d been very entrepreneurial up until that point. But I had this realization that actually, it would probably serve me better if I was more paying attention to myself and to life and listening more for where I felt a sense of pool, a sense of invitation. And that rather than coming up with a plan around what I was gonna do, is be more responsive to the moment instead.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:34

Is that awareness that you’re talking about? Just higher awareness or is it something else?

Speaker: James Priest 06:39

Well, awareness is a precursor to greater consciousness, right? But I can behave like an idiot, I can be aware I’m behaving like an idiot and I still behave like an idiot, right? So awareness helps, without awareness, and it’s very difficult to intentionally change a thing, right. But in and of itself, it’s just a stepping stone. So it’s really, it’s consciousness work I guess. You know, it’s the journey for me was deeply insightful and a bit addictive in a way. It’s like I was just discovering the identifications through which I viewed the world. And as I peeled off layers, I discovered more aspects of myself. And one really interesting facet of that was their perspective on Judgment. So, you know, we can negatively judge people and feel repelled somehow by people, but we can also positively judge people, you know, when we put them on a pedestal somehow, we fall in love with them, you know. This kind of thing. And they saw judgment as a torchlight that helps us to identify identifications that we had, and also in the mirror of what we projected onto others to see aspects that were also essential to ourselves. But my point was this led to a really big, really big turnaround for me in my life and this pivot towards listening for invitation, and pursuing what was meaningful, you know, kind of not just in my head but also in my heart in terms of getting a sense where I could best contribute. And that led me into working for nearly a decade with at risk teenagers, I trained as integrative counselor, I developed a private practice. And early on in that period, so I was around 27, I was introduced to sociocracy as a concept and that a very low resolution introduction to the sociocratic circle method, in the context of working with an organization to support them in transforming some conflict into a more creative opportunity for them to learn. And so that’s where my first induction into organizations came, but it was more by accident and through invitation because I was already starting to work within that field.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:01

And I’m assuming, like that whole approach and idea behind sociocracy resonated with you because of that change. Like what was your first reaction when you learned about the higher level of sociocracy?

Speaker: James Priest 09:20

Yeah, well, so back then, there was a single web page in English, about the sociocratic circle method. Everything else was in Dutch, a lot of it was difficult to find. And I had a hand typed document, literally typed on a typewriter with correction ink, you know, describing from somebody to kind of own account of what the sociocratic circle method was. So with that kind of single page document, we experimented with selecting people by consent and consent decision making, organizing in circles and linking within the organ and in combination with some other practices as well nonviolent communication was something I was introduced to at that point. But also this perspective of judgment as a kind of torchlight, you know, as a kind of indicator of where we’re polarized somehow. Over two years, I saw a radical transformation in this organization. And I was really impressed by the efficacy of these different patterns basically, from the sociopathic circle method. But the other thing that really struck me and this goes to the heart of the history of sociocracy. So Gerard Edenburg developed the sociopathic circle method. He was a student of Case Bucur, who founded a school in the 1920s in the Netherlands, with his wife, Betty Capri, that’s of the Capri family. They were so disenfranchised by the mainstream education system that they decided to create a school. And part of the idea was very much influenced by Quaker practices around engaging the kids in the decision making along beside the adults that were involved as well. So it kind of became the self-organizing system back in the 1920s and that schools still around today. But the Quakers, it’s an interesting kind of Christian sect, they had this idea that was seen as quite heretical over recent centuries that God, or authority wasn’t just some external entity that you bow to, but that there was a bit of God in everybody or they talked about the light within it. So another way of looking at that is just looking at distributed intelligence, the idea of collective intelligence, when we’re orientating in complexity, no one of us is smart enough to navigate complexity alone, and that we need each other. And yet, it’s so challenging sometimes as human beings to be able to come together and cooperate and collaborate in a way where we can arrive at agreement together, because we so often get caught in polarization with one another because of these judgments, right? And we’re judging one another, because we’re seeing behaviors in another that reflect something that in a distant past for us somewhere have demonstrated some kind of threat or meant that we might not get our needs met, you know. So we kind of, we’re standing on one foot, if you like and banging into each other. So this was what really fascinated me about the sociocratic circle method and especially consent decision making, because what I saw was, where I was working on the interapsychic level, in my own process, but also with other people as well, to create this more integrated organization interapsychically. The consent decision making process was an optional agreement among stakeholders to come together and to show up and to bring each perspective but not with the idea of fighting to see whoever would win but to kind of transcend that binary conundrum towards a more both end perspective on the world, where the essential value of different points of view were kind of synergized towards the emergence of a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s the thing…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:26

Maybe I want to pause here because I think this is really important and I know, we might go a little bit off topic, but this is like key to everything in my opinion in a sense you know, you’ve touched upon a couple of points. One is the consciousness and understanding like I don’t know, sometimes it’s referred to as cognitive growth or adult development. But there’s a tight correlation in my opinion between that growth, that transcendence maybe, if you want to call it and how we see the world or our perspectives, our worldviews, right. So a lot of times, you know, the conflict is between these views or maybe how we judge or what we’re… Could you maybe talk a little bit more or what is your perspective on the maybe some of the, you know, there’s a lot of over the last, I don’t know, 60, 70, 80 years on cognitive growth and adult development stages; what is your thought on that and how important is it when it comes to looking at the world that we currently live the complex world and how our approaches to dealing with that complex world environment?

Speaker: James Priest 14:47

Well, so the term adult development I mean, it’s a loaded term for many people and for a myriad of different reasons. I think it’s fair to say and most people could probably agree with this. If you look at the evolution of species, we’ve been maturing, we’ve been learning, we’ve been developing in different ways and accruing wisdom through the hard earned lessons of those that came before us, you know, and then applying our interpretations of that to orientating in the world today. And I think it’s fair to say that if we don’t screw things up so badly that this place becomes uninhabitable for us in the future, then there’s a long runway still for us to continue to develop and grow. And I’m personally very curious about that and excited about that potential, even though I don’t think it’s guaranteed for the majority of us to carry on down that road, you know. So what was interesting for me about the work of Hannah Sidra, and this is just very personal to me was it wasn’t about like becoming an adult, it was about bringing consciousness to all of the different aspects of me, which included different aspects of the child in being, you know, aspects of the elder in me, aspects of the feminine and the masculine in me, just whatever I kind of discovered as I was peeling off those layers. And so you mentioned about transcendence. I think transcendence is a bit of a tricky term as well, you know, people can kind of use it as an excuse to avoid the hard, concrete knocks of life. And, you know, sure, there’s a more kind of spiritual side of ourselves, it’s beyond the kind of concrete and the mundane, but at the other end of the scale we’re physical beings and we’re very much here in the world, you know, and that comes with responsibilities and very real consequences, including inevitable death, you know, for now, at least. So how Hannah Sidra’s work, it wasn’t about transcending things, it was about integrating, it was more about expanding ourselves to be as honest as possible with ourselves and with who we are. And so it’s a kind of surrender into being. And the challenge with that is, there’s a good reason why we identify with certain behaviors, right, all of us; it’s to avoid being too vulnerable. And so, but the behaviors we learn and become habituated in our earlier life, can sometimes even end up bringing about the very things we’re trying to avoid in later life. And the more vulnerable we get, if that’s happening out of consciousness, then we tend to double down and identify even more, when what we need to do is kind of disidentify from those habitual ways of behaving, and be able to tap into other ways that compliment; it’s not to replace, you know, but it’s more on a pole, it’s not opposites, but just complimentary ends of a pole. So if I’m totally identified with pleasing everybody else all the time, I’ve got no way of caring for myself, because I’m not in touch with what pleases me and what would be needed for me, you know. But if I’m embracing both sides, and in a moment, when there’s a demand or need from another, perhaps, or a situation that might work, I can also tap into what my own needs are right now and what’s going to be important for me. And in holding that tension between opposites, it enables me to make a more kind of intentional choice rather than running on my habits.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:36

Like very context. Yeah. I mean, like, when you said that moment, that moment is all about context and having that awareness or consciousness about like, Hey, you know, which way am I pulling and being conscious about what you’re doing in that specific situation. Is that what it’s kind of what you’re describing?

Speaker: James Priest 18:54

Yeah, and it’s, you know, one way I find this simple to be able to grasp it conceptually. It’s just about developing beyond the kind of binary view of the world. It’s, you know, developing the capacity for nuance, recognizing the essential value in different points of view, both not just outside of ourselves, but within ourselves among those different aspects of our inner contradiction, if you like. But fundamental to that is the fact that if we go up against a habituated way of behaving and perceiving the world, then it’s inevitable that we will be confronted by the vulnerability that that behavior sought to help us avoid. And so that’s the challenge, right? Because, you know, we could we can go out there and be all powerful in the world and cause effect all over the place but what we often run from is the fact that we can be affected by things right. And so we’re strategizing to make sure that we’re only affected in positive ways and we avoid the negative ways. And that’s what this you know, kind of family of identifications is helping us to achieve. So my point is to acknowledge vulnerability is on the one hand, a vulnerable thing to do but at the same time, it’s a pre-condition towards transformation, and being able to realize a more integrated version of ourselves. Because if I’m consciously holding the baby, so to speak, then all of those internal parent aspects of me that were trying to take care of it somehow relax a bit, because it’s like, okay finally there’s somebody’s home, you know. And in the absence of that, they’re just going to keep running and doing the things that they’ve always done. Let me see if I can help us both to make a segue towards the modern day in sociocracy 3.0 right, because S3 is a menu of human behavior patterns that have emerged through human collaborative endeavors across time. And they’ve prevailed and evolved because of their usefulness in certain contexts. And in organizations today, we’ve got people like you and me, all of us who’ve gone through our own developmental journeys, all of us unique in our own rights, but also influenced by whichever familial social cultural context have got their hands on us somehow. And we’re trying to work together towards some kind of common objective in an organization. So much as our habitual ways of doing things work, there’s not really any need to look at doing anything different. I mean, why change if everything is good enough as it is right? We’ve got enough to think about without changing things as well. But what happens for all of us of course is that we bump into situations where despite our best efforts, the results we see are sometimes different to what we expect or wish to see. And that’s a vulnerable moment, right? Especially if we’re working so damn hard, and bringing everything we know and have to that situation and it’s still not good enough, you know, individually and together somehow. So one way, I like to help people understand S3 is these behavior patterns were there long before S3 was, but if you’re struggling with your current habitual ways of dealing with things, and you’re banging into situations where it’s just not good enough, and you’re prepared to acknowledge the vulnerability that comes from that somehow, and you were looking for alternatives, then there might be some patterns within the menu of S3, that are going to be helpful for you. At least to consider to enrich your current approach. But also as a contrast, which in its own way will help you become more conscious of your habitual ways of doing things before. So I’m saying this to try and tie that whole story together psychology of selves and meeting sociocracy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:03

Exactly. And like, you know, the way that I see it is, and maybe the first let’s come back to S3 and your journey like as far as maybe fast forward to early, I think you said it was 2014, 2015 of the S3 or sociocracy 3.0. So maybe let’s just bring everybody back and some people might not be familiar with what S3 is. So maybe describe now on your journey how you get started with S3 and then I would like to tie a lot of what you said into S3 and also back to that consciousness and our willingness. One of the challenges that I see is people seeing some of these approaches or these patterns as maybe too far-fetched or not, you know, not maybe for my environment because of that precondition, like you said, like we’re so used to certain things. But let’s come back to how did you get started with S3 and you co created that right?

Speaker: James Priest 24:17

Yeah well or co-discovered it maybe is a more humble way of putting it. So well, I played around with the sociocratic circle method for many years since 2001. Around 2008, 9, I started to get the idea that in the future there would be more of a place for sociocracy inspired thinking in the world. And so I got involved with a start-up organization called Sociocracy UK around 2010. We were looking to help raise awareness around sociocracy and the sociocratic circle method in the UK. And I was a bit of an evangelist for the sociocratic circle method at that point. I thought it was pretty cool and I think mainly, I was so excited about it because I was so naive about organizational development in general. And I didn’t really know about much else. And I personally had such a good experience with it, and because of its overlap with these other areas that I was much more experienced in you know and entrenched in. So by 2014, I was in the nonprofit and social sector. I think I was the most booked sociocracy trainer in the world that year. And you know, I can’t profess to have been like the world’s greatest expert, but I was just seem to following that invitation, I just seem to keep finding myself in the right place and I was really passionate about it. And then I met Bernard Bakubrink, in a workshop organized by Lily Davids who’s the other co-developer of S3 and now my wife as well. And he was an agile coach, he worked as a CTO, he had a background in software development. And he came to the workshop and I spoke to him in the break and he said, I’m here because I’m interested in what sociocratic thinking can bring to help get over this hurdle in many organizations where there’s a huge investment into agile operations, Agile product and service development but you kind of hit this where the front somewhere up the system, and on the other end is the business end. And it’s a really kind of uncomfortable and often unproductive and wasteful kind of situation. And he was looking to sociocracy for ideas about how to bring agility, not just a more agile perspective to the whole system and a more lean approach rather than a lot of the waste that can come with unnecessary decision making hierarchy within systems. So fast forward three months, he sent me an email with a link to a web page called a web page, it was like 140 PDF pages with illustrations of his first draft of an interpretation of his understanding of sociocracy synergize with aspects of agile and lean. And what he wanted to do was create a set of free learning resources for the tech industry sharing these ideas. And I took a look and I didn’t know very much at all about agile and lean back then, and I read it and I thought well, he’s got some understanding but doesn’t know so much about sociocracy either, I better go see this guy. So I went back to Berlin and we spent a week together with the idea of creating these resources. And at the end of the week, we had like, five times more on our backlog than we’d had at the start. So I decided to go back there a few weeks later. And it was during that second visit that we realized that there was this potential for really like creating resources that can really help people to learn some of these different patterns that we were seeing. And the pinnacle moment was a moment when Bernard asked me, based on all of my experience with the sociocratic circle method over the years, how many organizations did I know of that had kind of stay true to the method, you know, and we’re just running the whole system over the years? And I said, Well, I don’t know any actually. And just to be fair, I think there’s a few but there’s not many in the world today. And so he said, Well, what do they do then? And I said, Well, they take what works, they adapt things, if they think that’s valuable, they discard the things that don’t seem to be relevant to them and they synergize all of that with everything else that they’ve done already for better or worse. And he said to me, then I think we should tell the world about that. And that’s how S3 was born, we decided to rip down the sociocratic circle method, many frameworks and methodologies coming out of the world of agile and lean and look for key patterns there that we could articulate in a manner where we give people the option to kind of take these building blocks, you know, rather than having to take frameworks and methodologies as a whole.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:22

And that’s so key. I mean, like, you know, in like, I’ve been doing these interviews for a couple of months now. And like every person that I respect their opinion in Agile outside of agile, right, it says, you know, we’re foolish to think about like frameworks will solve our problems and we’re selling people are buying, the companies are buying them. I do a lot of training in that aspect. But going back to your story, how many organizations do you actually know that apply these frameworks and have not modified those? And I think the future of… it’s kind of like you said, it’s something that I listen to you said, like, you know, this is like wisdom of life. S3 is a remix. It’s like, you know, it’s something that we’ve known, it’s not necessarily completely new. And I feel like the future of organizational change, organizational human then is based on these patterns and exactly what you just described in that scenario; it’s like you take what works, you evolve it, you change it, and there’s no recipe for it. Yet, you know, in our world, there’s lot of demand for that give me a recipe. And I want to bring this back to that consciousness, how much our need for predictability, unease with complexity and uncertainty is driving desire for recipes and frameworks, because there is I think connection between why frameworks are so popular methodologies, and why they’re so successful, versus these pattern based custom approaches seems to be what really reality is all about.

Speaker: James Priest 31:12

Yeah, well, maybe you can kind of come back a bit on your own question there. So for you why is it so unsuccessful from your perspective?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:22

Yeah, so maybe I’ll share my thoughts on that. I think each context is different. Right? So and I talked about, like having a recipe without ingredients for that recipe, right? It’s great if you have all the ingredients but if you don’t have all the ingredients, you get to make something that’s somewhat tasteful with what you have. And a lot of times if you think about scaling frameworks, if you think about even Scrum, you know, if we look at, you know, the most popular framework in the space at least I’m working, people can’t even implement Scrum which is a pretty basic framework, how could you, you know, some of these frameworks that have a lot of different patterns, practices, principles embedded in them. On the surface, they look [inaudible 32:10] you know, CEO or somebody that’s responsible for implementing change looks most likely they’re like oh yeah, this looks good. But if we don’t fully understand complexity, in my opinion, it’s easy to buy something or to see the value in it and then when you actually try to implement it, it’s like oh shit, you know, what do I do now and how do I get out of this situation? Because it’s not working. Because going back to what you said, ask any agile coach or transformation, not necessarily just transformation, how many the same question that Bernard asked you; how many organizations do you know that implemented Scrum across the company and they’re truly doing that year after year? Most of them will say they tweaked it, there’s no.. So that’s my response to it. Patterns, principals based approaches and what S3 stands for, is I think future of where we’ve going into and dealing with complexity and I think probably S3 is going to evolve but it’s those type of approaches or pattern based approaches that have much better chance against complexity, rather than what we’ve seen the last 10 20 years with framework, agile and lean frameworks.

Speaker: James Priest 33:29

Yeah, yeah, well, I would agree a lot with what you’re saying. To be fair and to pluck out that grain of gold or truth in some of these bigger systems for organizational transformation that we see. S3 is a menu of kind of micro methods if you like. You could break it down and say well, to be fair, you know, there’s just several micro frameworks and several micro methods. So one way to look at this situation is around scope and scale, right? It’s like, how many of these micro methods and frameworks are there under the hood of this meta framework? And what’s the need that pulling in any of these things helps to address? Because you know, I’ve spoken to people in organizations who opted for holacracy for example. And they went all in according to the recommendation of holacracy one and had a terrible time. I’ve spoken to people in organizations who went all in and now they’ve kept what works, changed things didn’t and thrown out a bunch of stuff and it’s even different throughout the organization. You know, different people emphasize different aspects of or use different aspects of holacracy more or less. But then you’ve got these other people in organizations who say, man, best thing we ever did. You know, we pulled in holacracy by the book, it was really difficult in many ways, but it really, really helped us and we like it and it helped us deal with the challenges that we were facing. So I think it’s rather than kind of falling into that binary conclusion that no, anything of this size framework is bad. One, we’ve got personal choice and of course in an organization of scale, it’s not just one person’s choice, it’s everybody’s of course. And then you’ve got need and context. And so I don’t want to throw large frameworks out as being antiquated, you know, and of yesteryear. I think in most cases, they’re going to be a stepping stone. Now we can look at Scrum as a stepping stone. It’s like, it’s gonna make you learn how to collaborate, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:50

Exactly. But like, for instance, this is where also you’re gonna trip. So in S3, a lot of it has to do with decentralizing and how authorities distribute it, right? So like, if you have Scrum, you can implement scrum but without changing the authority you know, and accountability. So who makes the decisions? Then that falls apart. So my part in all this, yes, context matters and there’s, you know, it is some of these frameworks are great stepping stone. I tell people safe is a great stepping stone. Like if your organization for government, specifically, it’s a great stepping stone. And you’ve been in public sector, you probably I don’t know how it is in Europe, but here in United States is a very messed up situation. So for them to do anything in that step is great. But like, if you don’t fully understand the reason why in complex environment, we want to decentralize, why we want to create guide reins for like, you know, in a sense for allow people to figure things out, then it’s almost like misunderstanding and not fully being able to depict these patterns. I think ultimately, what we need to do is be able to depict and take these even these patterns are part and say, how do we create new patterns for our context are based on this? What have we learned right?

Speaker: James Priest 37:15

Absolutely. Yeah. And this is maybe, you know, if we look at a holacracy implementation, I spoke with John Bunch recently. He was responsible for bringing holacracy into Zappos not responsible for arriving there but he was responsible for helping a lot of people learn how to how to use holacracy. And he was saying, and I spoke to many people at Zappos over the last couple of years, they were mostly happy with where that holacracy implementation took them. Even several of the people who left at that time came back later into Zappos again. But it was always intended as a stepping stone somehow. What it did is it kicked everybody in the ass. And of course, not everybody liked it and there’s a whole moral question and this is the conversation around imposition, you know, of transformation versus invitation based change as Daniel Messick calls it and so on. I think that’s an important conversation to have. But my point is that choosing something like that and running with it can be a great stepping stone. And one of the arguments you hear Brian Robertson give, one of the arguments you hear advocates for the sociopathic circle method is, if you don’t implement the whole thing, then you can’t know if the thing is mesocratical for that whole system to remain coherent and do what it says on the on the tin. And I think that’s, that’s a fair argument. And if we zoom in to the micro, if you look at particular patents from S3, some of the process patents, you can show them. But there’s a bloody good reason why those process patents include all of the steps that they do. And it’s not about a rule that says you can’t ever change them. But as you were saying, what’s important is do we understand the principles that are behind these patents, do we understand why these patterns were the particular patterns that emerged and prevailed over time? Why were they useful for our ancestors? Why didn’t they evolve in a different way and look at something different today? And I think that’s one of the challenges at the other end is a pattern based approach, people interpret these things through the lens of their current paradigm, misunderstand a ton of things, take a low resolution slice of these patterns, and implement them according to how they think they are and kind of missed the mark, you know, because they interpreted things in a way that wasn’t actually as they were intended to be and they haven’t got the experience yet. They know enough you know, to think they know but they don’t know enough to realize what they don’t know yet. So, yeah. So there’s an argument there for installing constraints of some kind, you know? Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:04

And I think it’s all good like you mentioned earlier, it’s about experiences, right? So I think frameworks and all of these approaches are more prescriptive. They’re fine as long as people come with that mindset of, we’re going to evolve and change these and contextualize, and we’re going to learn from these, rather than just, hey, this is a recipe, this is what we’re doing. And I think one of the challenges is that we’re been so conditioned, right, over the years to think certain ways, to assume that you know, this is… and it’s really hard to get out of that paradigm that we’re currently in and consider another paradigm. I was talking, I don’t know how familiar you’re with Kuhn cycle, the guy to actually come up with it. So the guy that came up with the term paradigm, if you want, look it up but in a sense, I feel like you know, we’re entering or a maturity of a current paradigm and entering a new paradigm, which I think, again, is where we’re going to look at complexity differently and embrace complexity and look at it from a patterns and practices and leverage everything that we’ve learned, like you said, from maybe came across them bashing agile and Scrum but there’s a lot of good stuff. It’s just that most people don’t have any clue what are the things… why Scrum, like if you read the scrum guide or if you look at Scrum, let alone any of… they have no fricking idea what it is. It’s just like, oh, it says on page 10, it says this, so therefore, I shall follow it. Like, that’s just blindly following things without fully understanding why they are there so.

Speaker: James Priest 41:52

Yeah, and context is king, right? And one of the dangers is, the process becomes the purpose. Instead of asking, why do we need to change anything at all? And where are we challenged? What are our priorities, where our current approach is inadequate to bring about the results we expect to wish to see. Because, you know, one, if there’s a clear why then people can kind of contextualize why they’re doing what they’re doing. It also gives you something against which to measure outcomes and establish whether your attempts at improving things achieve anything useful at all, as well as monitoring the myriad of unintended consequences that are going to come as well, as you mess around under the hood of complexity and forget you’re part of it too. You know, so its keeping a focus on the need on like, what’s the situation that you’re trying to interact with, what’s needed there, taking an iterative and incremental approach to those interventions and monitoring closely outcomes so that you can learn, it’s bringing that agile mindset that people are so familiar with in terms of product and service development to the management of the organization as a whole as well. So that for me is fundamental in my message around S3. When someone contacts me and says, we’re interested in S3, my first question is, why the hell would you ever want to do that? You know, let’s talk about it. But it’s a serious question. It’s like, let’s look at where the issue is. Sometimes I say, I can have an hour’s conversation with a senior manager in an organization who’s just curious about S3, and all we do in the conversation is make sense of what’s happening right now that they can’t deal with well enough and lay them out in a coherent way and they go off happy as you like, because now they’ve got a clear why and I said, well get back to me, if you think S3 might help, you know?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:47

But just know you’re doing that instance to help them understand their context, and then they can decide what they want to do. You’ve said in one of the things that I’ve read or listened to that, you know, one single pattern, you know, S3 has a lot of collection of patterns is the principles; why is the principles one pattern that you highlight or is it still something that why are S3 principles so important?

Speaker: James Priest 44:17

Yeah well, we think of principles as guidelines for behavior. They’re like actionable guidelines we can consider. If people value principles, then they become values, right? And so another way of looking at values is principles that people value. The reason we talk about them as principles rather than values is who the hell am I to tell you what you should value right? However, I can say, hey, look, these guidelines for behavior seem pretty useful actually on their own and together, maybe you want to check them out or something. So the principles are principles, they’re not patterns in themselves, although you could argue that each principle is a pattern because it’s an actionable guideline. But the pattern is adopt the seven principles. And that is when a group of people in an organization see value in those principles and decide to put them in place as kind of general constraints to delineate some sort of parameters within which action and decision making can take place. So they kind of guide and inform behavior. And why that’s important is, if you take a pattern based approach to organizational change, sooner or later, probably sooner than later, you’re going to bump into situations where the pattern isn’t good enough. And so when you start messing around with those patterns, especially if you don’t have a deep understanding of the ancestral lineage of those patterns, and why they evolved the way they did, you need some higher order of reference to fall back on, right. And so the seven principles provide some kind of guidelines, parameters so when you start changing things, having those in mind is going to help you to refine those in a more sophisticated way than you might do otherwise. And at the end of the day, Miljan, it’s not about using S3 patents for the sake of using the patents. Ultimately, it’s about becoming more sophisticated, informed, more conscious, and just being able to make smarter choices individually and together, to be able to navigate the myriad of challenges and opportunities that we face. And all of that comes down ultimately to the consciousness of human beings involved and their ability to make an evolve smart enough choices to be able to generate kind of outcomes that life giving rather than life denying and take the organization in the direction that it that it needs to go.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:47

Yeah, like this is just something that you mentioned that kind of resonated with me, like, you know, one of the principles is consent. And then if we look at the issue of like, how do we govern ourselves, right, in a complex environment. So and that concern, you mentioned Daniel Meswick, and you know, the whole idea of inviting. But in a context, if I’m a leader and I know I have a highly complex organization that I’m leading, that for me just to tell people what to do and coerce people into doing things is not a good pattern in the current environment, right? What are some of the things that I can do to design a system or influence a system that it’s maybe more decentralized because as a leader in that instance, I would know that, you know, decentralizing things, inviting people, creating good governance structure that is more fluid, right, is going to help me and everybody else solve our problems. If I don’t know that, if I go to, you know, Miljan as an agile coach and Miljan is saying, hey, you know, here’s safe or here’s this framework, and I’m blindly listening to what Miljan is saying, and I have no idea how the stuff that he’s selling me is gonna impact it, you know, I’m blind this situation. So my question is then, how many people in organization, how much work do we need to do as change agents to help leaders and people in organization understand how much of their business is actually understanding the patterns and the picking these patterns and breaking them down to understand how they can do their job better rather than listen to experts on what to do? Because I use the analogy you may have, I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, like chefs and cooks; we need both chefs and cooks. But if we have too many cooks, and nobody that understand how to put recipes together, and our ingredients keeps changing, then we don’t have enough people to come up with something delicious with what we have. And a lot of times in organizations, our ingredients are all the things, all the practices, patterns that keep changing. So I’m coming back to my question is like; is there a hope organizations that are not investing in people to better understand, you know, what we’re discussing here, the patterns, the principles behind complexity management, I guess, or whatever you want to call them

Speaker: James Priest 49:39

So you’re asking is there any hope for organizations…?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:43

Is there any hope because nothing is working yet. Is there is there anything going back to your question? Like it is working; maybe I’m being a little bit more sarcastic than that. But there’s a lot of failure when it comes to if you look at you know, transformations and all of these there’s a lot of waste. So there is lot more of what’s not what working and what’s blindly being applied than what’s working. And I’m generalizing, and maybe, you know, going to extremes. But is there a hope for organizations if they’re not focusing on, on investing in their people and people understanding?

Speaker: James Priest 50:18

Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe I could break that down into two questions. Is there hope? And if whomever has the authority to make the decision is failing to invest in people as a whole within that system, what is the future look like for those organizations? And I would say that, especially in complexity, right, if we’re in a clear or complicated environment, then maybe you can just have ultimatums who just get on and do stuff and if they don’t, then you fire them and find someone else instead. You know, I mean, that was kind of the rhetoric of the old worlds. But these days, mostly speaking, that’s not going to be good enough because as you say, we’re facing the complexities of the world, and you just, you need to be able to harvest collective intelligence throughout the system, you need people to be able to move fast for themselves, you need people free to create value as much as possible for themselves, every unnecessary dependency eliminated, and any unavoidable dependencies clearly marked with clarity around who’s going to take responsibility for those and people who are highly skilled in being able to make and evolve agreements that are good enough and safe enough to be able to proceed in an iterative and incremental way, and who appreciate complexity, who are able to embrace failure, you know, unexpected outcomes as all of them as kind of stepping stones towards learning and developing and being able to apply that hopefully to improve over time. So you know, and I could probably go on for another five minutes, just laying out these different aspects that are so vital today. And I agree with you, because that’s really bloody hard and you know, we are not good at doing that generally, you know, on a even a moderate scale. We can struggle just in our marriage or something, you know, with just one other person. So dealing with this at that scale is not easy. So why would investing in people be important? Well, one because there’s a whole bunch of skills around organizational management, that most people in organizations need to learn. If you decentralize organizational management, then when people take responsibility for that, they need to know enough about how to deal with the challenges and opportunities they face to do that in a coherent way within the system. But secondly, who wants to break their back facing all of those challenges if they’re in an environment that’s not nourishing and fulfilling and meaningful for them. And also, engagement is way down in the world. And we’ve disengagement comes, people just kind of, you know, talking the talk and doing whatever they need to but organizations need people who are in there with their heart and soul, right. And for that, that needs to be an environment where I’m nourished, where I’m energized and motivated to be. So the whole whether, if let’s say, I’m an owner of a company, and all I’m interested in is maximal profit, and I speak the rhetoric of caring about people but don’t really give a damn about them but I just want profit, and I’m dealing with a complex context; it’s irrelevant, I still need to think about the people. Whether I want to or not, I have to because if I don’t, they’re just gonna leave, they’re gonna start up my ultimate competitor and eat my ankles out, you know. And on the other end of the scale, you know, we’ve got people who are deeply inspired around creating human organizations. But that can go too far as well, right on the other end. So it’s all about the people but what about the organization and the reason it exists to start with? So on that side as well, there’s this need for deep investment into learning how to manage organizations effectively; not just centralized but that distributing the wisdom of organizational management to everyone throughout the system. And as you said, having a dynamic system where we can continuously move, shift around and redistribute power to influence in ways that help everybody ultimately to create the value for themselves.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:40

Exactly. It’s not just about like, you know, I think it’s that balance and like, you know, one indicator that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing is like if this pendulum is swinging too much, one way or the other, so like, a lot of times people say, oh, you know, like hierarchy or command and control is bad; you know, this is good, like, I think it’s just our ignorance and not fully understanding the full spectrum and then being able to say like, okay given the context, what could we experiment with? What type of things could we try out and see if it’s truly working? And, you know, embracing that principle empiricism and saying, can we at least what we can see and know and experience, figure out if this is actually working or not? And that’s at least been my experience. What do you see as a future for S3? Like, what do you you envision? I’m assuming there is going to be if I had to guess, there’s going to be a similar pattern based approaches in the next 5 10 years. I’m curious if you think that that’s going to emerge or if you’ve seen it already emerge? And what is your vision for S3 in the next maybe 5 to 10 years?

Speaker: James Priest 56:01

Yeah, well, you know, we’ve been continuously on the backfoot in a way. The last years, Lily and I especially we’re really busy traveling around the world, helping people learn about S3 and in a way, we were a bit of a bottleneck to helping people learn about S3 exactly because of that, because so much of you know, this yourself as a learning facilitator or trainer, there’s a lot that you can tell people face to face where you don’t really need to be there. What would be helpful is engaging media and learning resources that can help people access that for themselves. And then you’ve got those aspects of practice, you know, applying learning in practice, where it’s great to have people with more experience who can be there and kind of offer feedback and live as you apply these things on the go. So since COVID, we decided let’s double down on resource development. And that’s something that we’ve been doing a lot of. There’s a ton of things we want to do with S3 in terms of just like integrating and evolving things on the basis of objections that people have raised over the past years and insights that we’ve had. And also just to flesh out our articulation of many of these patterns, because it’s no small task. You know, there’s a 74 patents and some of them, you could write an entire book about just one in and of itself, you know so. So that’s something that we’re working on right now. And so part of what we’re aspiring toward is, we’re developing e-learning, we’ve got an e-learning program coming out in July; the foundations program and from there, we’re going to break that down into micro learning. We want to try and apply the spirit of S3 to itself in terms of how people learn. So what’s your entry point? What’s your specific need that you’re facing, either individually or as an organization as a whole? And what’s the minimum necessary aspects of S3 that will be valuable for you to explore so that you can learn about that for yourself, start experimenting, and then connect with others who have some experience around that, you know, so that you can keep your system open and learn as you go? So that for Lily and I especially, but Bernard Lily, and I, in terms of just developing the guide, is definitely going to keep us busy for the next years ahead. Yeah. And besides that, I think that for me is this, like you say, there’s so many pattern based approaches coming up out there in the world, we’re not interested generally in like reinventing the wheel or integrating those into S3. We’ve got the kind of niche in terms of areas that we’re interested in focusing on. And then we’d recommend people elsewhere to look at other pattern based approaches for different aspects of organization or complimentary approaches, you know, that compliment S3. Yeah, so for now, I think that’s where we want to go to

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 59:02

Do you think it’s gonna be more collaboration between pattern based approaches and people that stand behind those and communities that support them versus right now, you know, if you look at the scaling agile, like everybody’s at each other’s throats, or at least talking crap about the other, you know, this framework sucks, our framework is better. Do you see I mean, maybe that’s a human nature. But if I had to guess there might be more opportunity for co-creation and collaboration across these different patterns based communities.

Speaker: James Priest 59:40

Yeah, well recently, I’ve been trying to have more conversations with people who are more familiar or favoring holacracy for example. There was a conversation with John, you know, because I was really curious. I wanted to help share his story with the world around what happened at Zappos because I just find him such a fascinating and wise guy to speak with. But I’ve had conversations as well with holacracy practitioners and with Emmanuelle, with Rendanhay recently and we said let’s try and get together and look at the kind of common roots of which all of these different approaches are emerging. And instead of getting into arguments about what’s better or worse, just looking at each of them in their own merit and seeing, you know, some people like them for different reasons. So let’s look at why and what the common needs are that they solve and what are the unique value propositions of each of those two. So I think that that’s possible. Certainly, I’m very much heading in that direction, and see the merit in those conversations. I don’t think at the end of the day, it’s about any of these frameworks, actually. It’s not about holacracy, it’s not about safe, it’s not about Scrum; it’s about stepping stones that help people to develop more conscious and intelligent ways of interacting with the world you know, and that’s…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:01:10

Well ultimately you know, making our lives better right. It comes down really to making the lives of everybody better and not just, you know, and going beyond that constant is also human ego, maybe, you know, making better place for the entire planet rather than just and which goes back to the, we talked about principle, not principles, but you know, principles around like satisfying the customer and just, not customer, the stakeholders, and that whole ego-profit driven kind of environment we currently live in. Maybe to conclude here, what is something that I didn’t know to ask or what is one message that you would leave us with as we conclude here?

Speaker: James Priest 1:02:10

What comes to me, I don’t know if I can say it in an eloquent way, but clumsily is, you know we’re maybe as a species, we’ve always been a kind of important moment in our development. But I think in recent times, we’ve never been so able, as we are now to make or break the world. And we’re so interconnected and interdependent on one another, I don’t see how that can really go back the other way. So we stand in this moment with such enormous potential to achieve things beyond anything we can even imagine and we also stand here together with the potential to destroy, I wouldn’t say destroy this world, because the world is gonna be just fine without us over time. Right? But you know, for us personally, there’s certainly the potential that we could mess things up.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:03:13

It’s getting easier and easier to fuck it up. Right?

Speaker: James Priest 1:03:16

Yeah, exactly and with bigger and bigger consequences and harder and harder to undo some of those consequences over time as well, right? So this whole question of how do we cooperate and collaborate together in more effective ways, I don’t think it’s just a nice idea, I think is absolutely fundamental to the well-being of those who will follow us that we right now invest our energy diligently and with some priority into figuring out more sophisticated ways to organize together, to communicate together and to interact with this world. And I don’t think we should underestimate the potential for negative consequences that flow out of that and I also don’t think we should underestimate the absolutely extraordinariness of what we’ve achieved as a species to this point. Just look around you what we’ve managed to manifest and the potential and I would argue that that is well worth preserving and that this experiment is one that’s worth running into the future and to explore those vistas of possibility around what it would look like for us to realize our fuller potential during the time that this world will support life like us, you know, and to make the most of this opportunity and finally, to be able to look our children in the eye at the end of our lives and feel proud about what we’ve left them and to be able to say listen, you know, there’s a lot of mess and there’s a lot of things we didn’t do so well but I really did my best here you know, and we’re doing our best here and to feel proud and at peace with that. I think that’s an important reflection worth having for all of us.

Jim York

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:37

Who’s Jim York? How did you maybe briefly get into this Agile space? And then I think I want to discuss some of the topics around product ownership.

Speaker: Jim York 00:49

How did I get into the agile space? Well, harsh, I guess a little bit of osmosis, a little bit was the way I’ve always kind of thought and my mind kind of works that way. I started off as a management consultant and I found myself building applications, little boutique applications for my fellow consultants who did economic and cost analysis and industrial engineering. And I didn’t have any formal methodology training. I have a mathematics and an English background and with a loss of any guide to follow, I just did what made sense. And so, started off as a team of one kind of did everything soup to nuts from the analysis, gathering requirements, building, design, writing code, testing, doing deployments, operations maintenance, customer support, face it, I was a team of one so basically had to do everything. And the industrial engineers that I worked with, I learned lean concepts from them and I was expected to be an eight hour a day billable management consultant.

So, all this building of little applications was kind of on my own time and so I had limited capacity and limited time to really work on those things. So, I built things in small chunks and they had to work because people began to rely on them. And over a period of time, I found myself building teams because I couldn’t do it all by myself. So, I recruited similar minded people and with our methodology, we just kind of got into the work and I taught them the way I was doing things. And so certain advantage, no shackles, nobody telling us exactly how to build things. We just did what made sense.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:50

Did you get into the training piece because you’re one of the earlier trainers?

Speaker: Jim York 02:54

Well, training was part of it as well right so I had to teach people how to use stuff. When I arrived at the company I was working at that time, they only had one PC and nobody was using it. They just bought it and I was the only one using it. Until I started writing these applications and then other people started use it and then the demand expanded and they started wanting to have more computers so I became the network administrator. So, I was teaching people how to use the applications, I was teaching them how to use computers, it was just kind of a natural need.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:30

You’re dating yourself there.

Speaker: Jim York 03:33

I mean definitely. Back in the day, let me just paint the picture a little bit more clearly. I was building the hardware. We bought the first computer ready out of the box but every one that we built after that for the next couple of years, I built by hand and I strangle cables and I installed all the NIC cards and managed all the various connections. You had to manually move pins on the card to get different network addresses and the like. So yeah, I’m definitely dating myself.

But I found training is to be part of it and I was also coaching. I was teaching others how to work as I was working so I was acting as that advisor, mentor and coach and I was still that eight hour a day billable management consultant. So, I found myself building teams and after a period of time, some clients found I could build teams and they asked me to come help them build better teams. So, I kind of fell into the Agile thing really by accident and through the years I met more and more people and stumbled into the Agile space through extreme programming and Scrum in the late 90s. And in the early 2000s, I had the opportunity to work with Ken Schwaber and others that are early pioneers in this space. I was one of the CSTs that got my stripes by co-teaching with Ken over a number of years and he essentially at one point knighted me and said, go forth and make other CSMs. That’s all there was in those days was certified scrum master training. There wasn’t the product owner or the developer training or any of the advanced classes. You basically took people as far as they could go.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:22

What do you remember about Ken and how did you meet him?

Speaker: Jim York 05:29

How did I meet Ken Schwaber? Well, let me see. I think I originally met Ken when I took my CSM. It was I believe mid-November of 2004. I went up to Boston, little town outside of Boston. We had a class and I was working for a client at that time and the client was adopting agile in a big way, was a large financial organization here on the East Coast and they were interested in having Ken come and train for them. And I said oh well, I can help with that and I made the arrangements to bring Ken down and to teach the class there and that was December of 2004. And Ken arranged for four of us to co-train with him for that CSM class for that financial services client. I’m trying to remember all the folks who were there. I remember Bill Wake, he was one of the people who was co-training along with us and Bill was also working with me at that time down at that financial services client.

So yeah, I met Ken through that experience and we became friends and I co trained with him. I also had along for the journey at that time, we had oh gosh Kurt Peterson who helped Ken to improve I should say upon the original CSM class. We incorporated materials with the support and blessing of Mike Cohn. So we always joked about we had Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn and it was the Dow and the How. So Ken is the philosophical kind of leader so he was the Dow and Mike Cohn is he’s the pragmatist and he was the how you do things. So, we have the Dow and the how and Kurt Peterson, he introduced a theatrical element to this. He had a theater background so a lot of the exercises and improvisational kinds of techniques that you see in the training that many of the trainers still do today have their roots in what Kurt Peterson contributed to the movement. Of course, Kurt worked with Matt Smith an improv artist out of Seattle. And so, we had an interesting blend and eclectic mix that came about and I think I was like number 17 CST.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:57

Yeah, I remember you and I talking there early on.

Speaker: Jim York 08:03

So, we did a separate coaching, right. I mean it was all wrapped in when you were a CST that time you had to be a coach. So, we had a bifurcation in that I guess 2008 when the scrum Alliance created the certification program, the guide level for the coaches. So, we have a certified scrum coach, originally now we’re certified agile coaches and that’s further bifurcated into team coaches and enterprise coaches. I think really, you’re a team coach and an enterprise coach, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:35

Correct! Because I think I may have been I’m not sure scrum coach and then when they changed it was enterprise Agile coach and then when they introduced the certified team coach, you essentially become a team coach by default or something like that.

Speaker: Jim York 08:51

Right! Well, you would already hit like the peak of the guide level with a certified scrum coach. So certified team coach was kind of a stepping stone towards that or at least that was originally envisioned. It’s kind of changed a little bit since then.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:06

It is and I think there’s that like distinction and I don’t know what to make of it but like there are enterprise agile coaches, there are trainers but there are trainers that are not enterprise agile coaches and vice versa enterprise agile coaches that are not trainers and I think like you said training and coaching is part of the whole kind of experience and skill set that you need to have as a trainer and coach and another thing that is part of that skill set is understanding business and I think a lot of trainers and a lot of scrum masters and coaches and even sadly product owners don’t really know what product ownership is about.

So, I thought maybe we spent a little bit of time or a decent amount of time. I really want to dive deeper into the product ownership. So maybe to start with how do you define a product? Because if you own a product and your product own the product backlog, I think it would be helpful to hear your perspective on what is the product?

Speaker: Jim York 10:16

Yeah, the product is one of the big questions that often comes about anytime I’m coaching within an organization and it often comes about during trainings is what’s the product. And I don’t think we necessarily start with the product, I think we really start with who’s the customer, who’s the target customer. And then we think about that customer and using another approach the jobs to be done. So what is that customer’s job to be done? And it’s only when we understand the customer and the job to be done that we can start thinking about the product. And I think about the product is being the thing that satisfies the customer’s need. So, the need that I’m talking about is the need within their job to be done which isn’t currently satisfied, optimally. So, we’re targeting a specific customer, we’re targeting a specific job to be done within that customer’s world and within that job to be done, we’re targeting a space where there’s opportunity for making things better for that customer.

So ultimately, I think of that product is as not being the tangible instantiation of the product in this moment. I’m thinking of the product is that thing that evolves through time as that customer’s need changes, as new technologies emerge, as new laws or regulations emerge, as cultures evolve and change. All those different shifting dynamics can affect the possibilities of what it is that is needed.

So, I typically think of the product in a nutshell is the thing that addresses the customer’s need. So that frees us up to come up with a variety of different potential solutions and also to evolve or perhaps even discard and replace a solution because it’s not about the solution, it’s about the thing that solves the need.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 12:20

Exactly. What’s your thought on customer versus user?

Speaker: Jim York 12:28

I mean the customer classically is the one who’s buying the product right. They aren’t necessarily the person that is going to use the product. There’s often this separation between the customer, the user and sometimes the word client gets thrown in there. So, client is a little bit more like user except clients typically thought of as being professional services so more of a services orientation as opposed to a physical, tangible product.

So, the basic difference that I see between the customer and the user or client is the person who pays for it, who actually buys it is the investor in the solution and the person that is taking that solution and using it in their job to be done, whatever that might be. And of course, those two could be the same. I mean you could have the client who is also the person who uses it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:24

Yeah, and the reason I ask a lot of times in my class is people don’t fully understand the difference. So, I joke around and describe exactly that. Like if I’m buying a bike for my son, he is the user, I am the customer, right and mommy is the stakeholder, very powerful.

Speaker: Jim York 13:42

Very important stakeholder.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:45

And then if I’m buying bike for myself, I’m both customer and user. And in a situation where my son is a user, he loves Spider Man and from that perspective, you want to make sure that you design something for the user but at the same time, mommy has told us that we can’t spend more than 100 bucks. We’re working within maybe a limited budget or we can go back and always ask for more. But in a sense, I’m working with the budget and he is interested in getting the bike that he likes. So, if you’re providing that service or product, you have to think about both, right?

Speaker: Jim York 14:26

Yeah, I’ve often thought of the metaphor of an architect for a product owner. So, back in the day, when we were able to conduct classes at a hotel facility, we’d be in a meeting room typically within a hotel and I call out think about the architect that was responsible for the room that were sitting in. Were they the investor, was it their money? He was like no, that’s somebody else’s money. They’re simply making a design within what it is that investor wants to buy. It’s like okay, alright. Is the architect going to be the user? Are they going to come and use the meeting facility? And they’re thinking well, maybe but probably not. So it’s okay so they need to consider the needs of the investor, the customer, the buyer. They have to consider the user who’s going to be using the space. Alright, so what about the other things that are related to what happens with the space?

Often I was in Marriott’s, right so it was like okay so Marriott’s, if you were in say a courtyard for example, a Courtyard Marriott, there are certain color schemes and the way that the building looks for most of them. And I say do you think the architect had the ability to just discard those branding standards that Marriot sets for their courtyards or do you think that’s a constraint that they have to operate within? They’re like oh no, that’s a constraint. So okay, so as a product owner, do you sometimes have to operate within branding constraints? They are like oh yeah sometimes. What about zoning regulations? Does the product owner, can they just disregard the zoning regulations? No, they have to comply with them. Okay, so local laws and regulations are things a product owner might need to comply with as well. What about all the disciplines related actually in building this facility?

So, we have structural engineers, mechanical engineers, specialist in HVAC, plumbing, electricity, you name it. So, is the architect an expert in all of those domains? No, of course not. I say oh, but do they have to understand what those things are at a high level? Oh, certainly. They have to rely upon those experts in those domains to provide the information. They’re like oh yeah, absolutely. Is there ever a conflict? Oh absolutely, sometimes there’s fireworks. It’s like good because healthy conflict is essential to getting the right information available so that you can then assimilate that into your decision process. So, what about the actual physical building of this facility? Oh yeah, there were people, there were carpenters and electricians and all these people. It’s like yeah. So does the architect have to nurture that cadre of people who are doing the work so they come together as essentially an ensemble and then they actually work as a team to create this product? Absolutely! And while they’re doing that, do they have to manage that coalition of stakeholders like the investor, the zoning folks, all the other things do they have to make sure that they can hold that coalition together and preserve the integrity of the vision of what this is all about? Like yeah.

So, I kind of think about what a traditional kind of holistic architecture would do and say you know that’s kind of like a product owner. They have to keep in mind all of these things and I don’t expect them to be expert at all of the various disciplines and domains in that space but I do expect them to pull that together.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:05

What about decision making and from authority standpoint and I don’t know that much. I’m diving into the construction space but I’m not sure or I don’t know what kind of authority I’m assuming.

Speaker: Jim York 18:22

That’s when who you hire but I mean I think the ultimate authority when you’re talking about an architect is really the customer. At the end of the day, it boils down to that individual who’s paying for the product and I think about the extension of that. It’s not necessarily who’s funding it, the initial investor. It’s downstream are people actually going to buy the product because that’s what we’re ultimately looking for is cash flow. And in the absence of cash flow, that product is not going to be sustainable. So, you’re really taking a lien perspective on this. You’re looking at the end of the value stream and that’s ultimately where your funding is going to come from. You might have some upfront investment but that investor is looking for a return on that investment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:11

Would that be that like the investor or the customer is delegating that authority to the architect in this instance?

Speaker: Jim York 19:20

I think so. I think a certain trust that has to exist between the customer and the architect or the product owner to kind of move away from the metaphor of the architect. They have to trust that individual is going to be doing the best job they can to make the best decisions based on what they know at the time. And then of course, we want to activate a learning loop because it’s unlikely in the environments where product owners are appropriately applying agile techniques that there are unknowns, right. So, every item in the product backlog is essentially hypothesis. There is no empirical data that the decision around that item what exactly it is and at what level of robustness or quality if that item is a good fit for purpose.

So, an effective product owner is going to activate a learning loop of quick and hopefully, cheap learning loop where we try something and get a reaction from real customer. And then once we get that reaction then we have some data, then we have something we can work with.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:31

Yeah, so for that like there needs to be some kind of or at least you know and I think you’ll probably agree with this or in large organizations and it’s getting better people that put into product ownership role don’t fully understand about that feedback loop and that validation. And then the second thing is, they don’t have the authority even if they understood what product ownership is about, they don’t have the authority to actually make the decisions around how do I create some type of what am I trying to validate here? How could I align with people that are doing this as quickly as possible, validate going back to the jobs to be done or the problems or opportunities that we’re trying to help our customers?

Speaker: Jim York 21:19

Yeah, I think that’s one of the biggest shortcomings of the way the role is put in place in many organizations and there’s many different models of product ownership. I tend to take a more holistic perspective, cradle to grave, so addressing the customers need. Needs tend to persist through time. They might shift a little bit but needs tend to persist. So, I think that product owner is owning the product over the entire product lifecycle which is long as we can pivot and address whatever the customers need is and how it’s shifted then, that’s a long tail. I mean this is not a time boxed exercise, this is not a closed ended game, this is an open-ended game and we want to play it as long as we can as long as we’re creating value for the customer.

So, in order to effectively do that, having a product owner is truly empowered to act in the best interest of the customer and think about both short-term execution and creation of value as long as long-term sustainability of that value and make decisions around that. So, there’s a lot of influences on product owners’ decision-making processes and I encourage those influences. I want to have people with strong opinions, different opinions. We want to get as much information out and available to the product owner so that they can make a better-informed decision. In order to do that effectively, we need to fully empower that product owner and I’m going to use a definition of empowerment that I got from Rob inaudible(23:00) from Australia. He was a project manager. I would say he is a project management guru. He wrote a book called extreme project management. And Rob shared with me years ago probably in 2000 I think it was kind of what is meant by fully empowered and he called these the characteristics of a business sponsor and he used two very visual metaphors here.

He said the business sponsor needs to have the baseball bat and the bag of money and the baseball bat is the organizational authority to resolve any and all conflict within the product space. So, you could second guess but you had to respect that authority. When that individual made the decision, no one could kind of usurp it or take away from that decision. So, the second is the bag of money. It’s not that there’s endless money but once you have that bag of money, whatever that is it’s made available to the product then that business sponsor can unilaterally decide how to spend the money. No one can tell them how to spend the money. It’s fully in their control.

So, again, thinking about the product owner role in scrum, the product owner I believe has those same characteristics if we look at the scrum guide and how the role is set up. This is the person who is responsible for the creation of value. This is the individual who is managing the return on an investment. In order for them to be effective and doing that job, they have to have the authority to make the business decisions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:45

I was talking to Daniel Mesic and I think he articulated it really well, in a sense. One of the things that he said that kind of resonated with me and I’ve heard him say it before but like specifically. He said like the decision rights in scrum are the hardest thing to do and most companies try to implement the process. But to have a product owner that’s truly empowered and like you just described, to have the teams that are self-directing or self-organizing, to have a scrum master that’s a true change agent with that type of authority is very rare for organizations to implement. And yet, they doing daily stand ups and retrospectives when we’re doing scrum and they get 10-15% that he calls improvement and they’re happy and he’s like, they don’t even have to do scrum to get those type of results.

Speaker: Jim York 25:46

I mean there’s tremendous potential in having more effective decisions. If we can truly get the product backlog ordered with the most impactful work at the top, we can pull off Pareto and get an 80/20. And an 80/20 is essentially four times return during that 20% of the effort that we’re spending. In the initial part, we get 80% of the return, that’s four times versus a randomized execution of items in a list. If somebody’s saying oh, we got a lift of 15 or 20% like you’re telling me you’ve done everything in scrum except improve your process and improve your decision making because it’s not just four times the value potential by having a Pareto possible. It’s also that scrum master having the ability to work with the organization to improve its delivery process. And if we can get a shorter cycle time for example, by eliminating a lot of the waste in the handoffs, by working together as a team as opposed to having to go through silos in the organization, when you do that, you can shorten the cycle time substantially easily by multiples at least twice as fast.

I remember one organization I worked with, they were implementing change requests and they had a manager that would take in the request and they’d say oh, I need an analyst, I need a developer and I need a tester and I need somebody to fix the documentation and they go into this matrix pool of available people and they’d find each of these people and try to find an opening in their schedule and get them all together. And we have a discussion about okay, we’ve got this this request and then we would send a requirements analyst off to have a conversation and document the customer’s request and then this manager will try to find a time to coordinate all the people to come back together again to walk through the documentation of that request and then hand it off to somebody who’s going to do the design changes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 27:58

And if you’ve ever done that, you know what that looks like and how difficult that is and you’re always behind and you always feel like driving it and seems like the wrong person is driving all the time.

Speaker: Jim York 28:13

Well, and you have things that slip through and you have to make fixes and you kind of have to go back. The average cycle time to get even the minus change would be something like oh, change the case of this word from lowercase to uppercase. Literally, their cycle time on average was three weeks to make any change and from all these kinds of minor requests. And what they decided to do instead was we’re just going to take a group of people, a team essentially and have them include the various skills that were necessary to make the average change. So, you’d have somebody who could do analysis, somebody who could do design, somebody who could code, somebody who could test, somebody who could do documentation and that became essentially a pod or a team. And when a requester had a requested pop to top of the queue, they would look and see well, what teams are available. Okay well, let’s assign it to this team and they would call up the customer and say can you show up on Tuesday at 9:30. And so the customer would walk in the door at 9:30 and they walk into a room and here’s these people and they say well, what do you need and they start describing what their needs were and they shortened their cycle time including deployment from three weeks down to three hours.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:29

Some people don’t fully grasp and I didn’t initially grasp the importance of that feedback loop and that cycle and I don’t know who it was that was describing and said, maybe it was, I’m not sure I was interviewing somebody and they said if I could describe agile in a simple term. It’s about how short of a feedback loop can we create and validate things.

Speaker: Jim York 29:58

And how fast can we learn? And we’re learning about a lot of things that are happening simultaneously, we’re learning about the product, we’re learning about the customers job to be done and how our product fits into that. So, there’s this whole stream of things that are product related where we activate these really fast learning loops but it’s also our processes. So, it’s learning what works and what doesn’t work and how to improve our processes and we also have that human dynamic of our relationships because a lot of the things that are going on with an agile team are kind of a social or emotional level and how do we work with a new requester? Hey, we’ve never worked with this individual before, what are their preferences? Do they trust us? And we learn over time how to accelerate that process of building trust, and learning the dynamics of the human system. How do we work with the various stakeholders and that very quickly grows beyond what was often traditionally thought of as the traditional scrum team which was the coders and the testers and documentation specialists.

And what we’ve seen in the latest version of the scrum guide this 2020 issue of the scrum guide is that concept of the strong team has expanded to include customer support, operations, maintenance, strategy, sales, marketing. Those are all considered to be developers in the scrum framework and this is the way it’s now expressed in the 2020 version of the scrum guide. But those are new words, that’s not new spirit. The spirit of scrum is the same from the early days that was a whole team concept. It’s simply through implementation over the subsequent years that it got kind of scaled down in more myoptic to being oh it’s just the development groups. And we see some implementations where literally, it’s only coders that are doing scrum and testers and the UX folks and others are kind of shoved off to the periphery not a very good instantiation of scrum and like organizations do that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:04

You just remind me, in a sense like going back to the 2020 version of this scrum guide and I think I have some personal issues sometimes with the scrum guide, sometimes I don’t. Some of the issues that I have is okay, I understand that we have to dumb it down in order to understand it. But a lot of times, it’s also like unpack the what’s behind it, right? Like why are you putting this in the scrum guide. And I think another example which I like is getting rid of roles and putting accountabilities. I think as we’re dealing more and more with complexity, it’s about understanding complexity and how to understand the patterns and how to context and how to work within the situation that you’re at rather than just say oh, the scrum guide says this on page 10 and therefore, this is what I do right just blindly applying something without fully understanding it.

And I think it turning back to the roles, getting rid of roles putting accountability, we’re moving towards not almost but as a group of people working to solve problems. It doesn’t matter who’s the scrum master, who’s the product owner, who is the developer, they’re all expected to be able similar to leadership, they’re all expected to come and step into these roles. But it is helpful to at least at times clarify the accountability so it makes sense to focus on accountabilities rather than roles.

Speaker: Jim York 33:37

When we talk about a soccer team, we have we have team members and we have a team member for example that’s called a goalie, right? We don’t talk about who’s going to play the role of goalie. When we talk about the goalie, we talk about their accountabilities, what is the purpose of the role, what is their reason for being on the team and then we talk about their rights and responsibilities and not every team member has the same rights and responsibilities. There’s only one goalie on the field for a given side in a game. If somebody else tries to act in that way you get penalties, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:27

Although when you do play street soccer, anybody can jump in play the goalie. Obviously, you can’t use your hands but at least the one that I played.

Speaker: Jim York 34:39

Oh, certainly. Well, and you can also jump in there and use your hands. You just have to be willing to accept the consequences.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:47

Well, yeah true which reminds me of I don’t know. I think somebody within our community was saying like how they are different versions of scrum and how they are different versions of American football and it made me think about yeah, there are different versions of soccer especially the street soccer that played is different than you know what a professional FIFA rules are around the game but it’s still soccer in the sense. It’s slightly different and I think when you apply that to scrum in that way, are there different versions of scrum the way that they are different versions of soccer? I don’t know it just made me think of that analogy.

Speaker: Jim York 35:37

I think the whole idea of staying true to the spirit of the game is and you and I as coaches. I mean that’s what we do with organizations and the teams that we work with. It’s let’s stay true to the spirit of this and not worry so much about policing the rules so much. But we do want to make sure we realize the underlying intent of this and of course, there’s always fit for purpose with the approach. Is an agile approach even appropriate within the nature of the environment that the organization finds itself? If you’re in the business of cranking widgets and that’s how you make money and that’s how you satisfy customers or there’s not a lot of innovation, agile might not be the tool to pull out of the toolkit. You might want to apply something more along the lines of a six sigma process for example.

So, I think that’s staying true to understanding the underlying intent of the various tools in the tool box and pulling out the agile tools when we’re in the context where those are appropriate and pulling out the more prescriptive or standard operating procedure or six sigma type of things when we’re in environments that are more complicated and complex.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:53

What are your thoughts when it comes to sticking with the scrum guide 2020 and the product goal?

Speaker: Jim York 37:03

Yeah, so the product goal I think is an interesting and again, it’s not an ad. The focus has been a core value of Scrum from day one and I’m sure you’ve seen it in the various product backlogs that you’ve seen as a coach is often there’s an eclectic mix of stuff in there that’s pointing in all sorts of different directions at a given point in time. And I think, there are things that are done in the scrum guide that are corrective actions, that are reactive to things that we have seen and I often liken it to trying to catch lightning in a bottle. Trying to capture something is as complex as scrum in into a few words is extraordinarily difficult to do. So, I think we have these various attempts and it’s like thank goodness, we’re agile. We don’t write it down and then say those are the words and we’re sticking to the words. It’s we’re writing down the words and going okay, how did that do and then we observe for a while and see the behaviors.

So, I think the idea of a product goal I think there’s some really interesting elements in this latest version of the scrum guide, the product goal. I like the words that you must attain or abandon one product goal before taking on another. And it’s like okay, so I’m thinking about all the infrastructure support agile teams that I work with. It’s like what exactly is your goal? And then they’re starting to question things and wonder about their organizational designs and is that truly appropriate.

So, if the rationale behind putting the product goal in there and being specific that there can be only one and only one at a given point in time and it must be either fulfilled or abandoned before taking on another, if that causes organizations to step back and kind of think about more deeply their current organizational design and if there is perhaps a better way, I think that’s going to lead to a number of interesting experiments over the next couple of years and we’ll see. I mean we’re not going to know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:15

So, you think the emphasis on product goal is to help organizations focus obviously but also to rethink their structural.

Speaker: Jim York 39:26

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think a lot of a lot of the problems that we have is from unnecessary complexity in what we’re trying to do in our organizational designs. If there’s one thing that COVID-19 has done, I think it has made us realize how precious time is and we need to use the limited time that we have available to us especially the limited collaborative time that we have to those things that are most important and to those things that actually require collaboration.

So, to have the establishment of a product goal, it’s like okay, that’s a simplifying technique. There’s one and only one goal. And of course, that’s not the only way to do things, you can have multiple goals obviously. If you want to be effective in delivering and you’re struggling at being effective at delivering, simplifying things is often one of the first techniques is let’s step back and rather than try to juggle nine balls simultaneously, let’s see if we can juggle one. Can we toss a ball up and down in our hands?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:38

inaudible

Speaker: Jim York 40:41

Once we’ve mastered that then perhaps, we can master doing more items simultaneously. But what’s the benefit of doing that is the additional complexity, is the benefit that we receive offsetting the additional complexity and again, that’s a question that’s out there. I don’t think there’s necessarily an answer for that. I think that’s something organizations need to discover.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:12

Do you think the scrum guide has gotten more explicit on the backlog refinement in 2020 or what are your thoughts?

Speaker: Jim York 41:19

Well, in many ways, I think it’s gotten less explicit but also clearer about what it is that we expect to be going on. I mean product backlogs used to have the different attributes right. You had to have the definition, you had to have the value, you had to have the estimate and the order and then the optional grouping. All that’s gone from the 2020 scrum guide. It’s like no, we’re not going to be prescriptive and tell you what the attributes are of a product backlog item. I don’t know if that’s good or bad that those discrete attributes are no longer there. It’s not going to stop me from having conversations with people about what is value and why should that be something that’s considered when you’re talking about a product backlog item and how do you model that value? How do you compare the value of one item versus another? Is a value something that is an actual or is a value something that’s also like the level of effort, an estimate? So, people begin to realize in those kinds of conversations all of the stuff that goes on in product backlog refinement is all hypothetical.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:32

At the end of the day, it’s also about building that shared understanding and it’s one of the biggest I think misunderstandings and biggest challenges that most teams face is they don’t fully understand that this goes again back oh, I think we’re supposed to be adding acceptance criteria but the underlying nature is about how are we getting on the same page, how are we building a shared understanding and how can we do that without wasting each other’s time? Like, how can we get to the shared understanding is like taking a lean approach with the smallest amount of waste when it comes to time when it comes to collaboration and a lot of developers hate backlog refinement just because they’re either not well facilitated or they’re just purely waste of time. What do you do? I have my own things that I tried to help teams but how do you help teams with improving their backlog refinement?

Speaker: Jim York 43:35

Well, number one, again simplify. During this last year, I’ve been encouraging product owners to reduce their actively managed product backlog to be no more than six to 12 weeks. It’s like why are you planning out longer term. Now, there might be some good reasons in certain environments where yes, you need to have a longer planning horizon but we’re trying to figure out this new dynamic of how we work together when we’re working at a distance and not in a shared team space and again, that’s nothing new. We’ve always had remote team members, we’ve just kind of never faced up to the fact that that is something that we really need to address within our teams. We don’t necessarily treat them as equal team members but now that everyone is kind of on a level playing field for most people still. There’s a lot of folks that are working remotely.

Simply simplify and make the work visible. When you have a physical team room, typically have four walls. A lot of teams unfortunately, these days don’t take advantage of the four walls they lock all of their product backlog and their sprint backlog into some sort of electronic tool which is fine. You can put stuff in electronic tool but don’t lock it in there. Get it out on the walls, get information available so people can see it. When you walk into a team room, you can absorb a lot of information visually just by looking around at the four walls and see oh, there’s our mission or a purpose why we exist. Here’s a product roadmap. Oh, here’s the product backlog, here are the things that we’re thinking about doing over the next quarter or two. Oh, here’s the current sprint backlog, I can look and see exactly what’s in flight right now and who’s working on what and you can look around the room and actually see people working on stuff. When you’re remote, now you are dealing with even more limited real estate. Most people are dealing with one maybe two computer screens but a lot of people are looking at one computer screen. So, it’s like well, how are you agile and 24 inches?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:32

Well, it’s not even about agile. It’s just understanding the fundamentals of communication. How do you communicate and collaborate and then how do we through that whole communication and collaboration, how we’re building that shared understanding? That’s really all it’s about.

Speaker: Jim York 45:46

Yeah. So, using the tools that we have available to us and putting the most important information out there and don’t clutter it with lots of other extraneous unnecessary information so having a shorter product backlog. If I’m a stakeholder and requester and I’m looking at that product backlog and I am hey Miljan, my items not on there. It’s like okay then it’s obvious to you we’re not working on that right now. So making things obvious I think is a big part of the product owners job. So Miljan, I really want that. So you’re going to push back on me and say okay Jim, prove to me why it is that your item is of higher value than the items in my current product backlog. And oh, by the way, based on our current rate of delivery, it has to fit in what we expect to get done over the next 6 to 12 weeks. So that’s the section of the product backlog and a lot of stuff grows stale really quickly in an agile environment. Again, we’re working in an environment where there are unknowns, we’re trying to activate those learning loops so we get smarter all the time. So, a lot of the things that we had in the backlog earlier were put there when we were less informed. So many of those get overcome by events just because they become obsolete over time naturally. Other times, they evolve into something different because we have a better understanding as we go through.

So, I encourage product owners not to build out a really long queue. Keep the queues really short. That improves visibility, that improves the team’s understanding. If I’m a developer and I’m coming to a product backlog refinement activity whether it’s a meeting or just a hallway conversation, if we’re talking about something million that we’re going to be working on maybe in the next couple of sprint’s, hey, you’ve got my ear because well this is another part of a strong belief I have with scrum is that idea of self-managing. I expect teams to become the teams they need to be by the time those items arrive in a sprint planning meeting. So, I want to see it coming and if we are not the team that can do what it is that’s at the top of the queue and is being introduced as a candidate for the sprint planning meeting, shame on us if we did not call out in advance hey, we need training, mentoring, a supplemental staffing because this is just kind of a one off.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:02

That goes back to the authority and then being able to get that. A lot of times themes are screaming and not getting that because really you implement scrum but you don’t change any authority or how the decisions are made. And at that point, things are going like okay, this is scrum and you talk about it but we have same level of decision making. our hands essentially tied behind our backs and who asked us to do this.

Speaker: Jim York 48:30

Well, we have to test whether there is an interest and actually getting to done right. So, we have to have a really robust definition of done what that truly means and that’s the only way we activate that learning loop of is it a good fit for purpose, right. So if we are going to implement a really robust definition of done and we’re going to activate that feedback loop, what that essentially means that well and this is actually my favorite line in the scrum guide, the 2020 version. “The moment a prime a product backlog item meets the definition of done an increment is born.” I was like so that tells me as a product owner how I need to craft product backlog items, right.

So, product backlog items have to be such that they can be done within a sprint and when they are done, they become an increment and an increment is something that is useful and valuable to a customer. So once I have a product backlog item reached that definition of done, I can show it to a customer and they could actually use it and give me feedback on fit for purpose. So that’s going to tell me a lot about what I need to do in terms of defining what a product backlog item is.

Now, when I present that to my team in a sprint planning meeting, if we now look at the way the scrum guide describes the scrum team and who developers are, they are everything soup to nuts from marketing, sales and UX and design and if it requires a DBA if it requires a security auditor, if requires compliance if it requires whatever.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:03

Whatever it takes, you have to get the done.

Speaker: Jim York 50:07

All of that has to happen within sprint. So, what that means is that as a developer on the team, with the rest of my developers along that whole value stream, we have to all be there in the sprint planning meeting so when that item gets presented and said hey, team, can you take this on in this sprint. We need to be able to look around and consider the entire value stream and say can we do everything and is everybody here? So we’re all agreeing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:36

And committing right

Speaker: Jim York 50:39

As a real team not what’s considered traditionally as the kind of the core scrum team but as the real team that’s going to get this thing done soup to nuts. Can we say yes, we will get it done and if we’re working in two-week sprints, we’re going to get it done in a fortnight. If we can’t say that then that item is not going to be ready so we’re not going to bring it into the sprint. And a lot of times, people use this ready concept to beat up the product owner, it’s like shame on you, you didn’t make it ready. Well, ready is not just the product owner’s responsibility. I mean ready also includes the requester. Is the requester going to be available for the inevitable questions that are going to rise through the act of building the thing that they’re asking for? If the requester isn’t available, we’re not ready. That’s not on the product owner. That’s on the requester. Are we the right team? Well, if we don’t have the right people with the right skills, knowledge and experience to do that item, shame on us because we saw it coming through the product backlog and if we didn’t act on that, shame on us. Oh, maybe we did act and we made a request but the organization failed to deliver on the request. Well, then shame on the organization. So, it’s a whole team effort to get these items to ready.

So if we are disciplined in our sprint planning meeting, we are not going to take on anything that we cannot get to done by the end of the sprint. Now, there are unknowns right so that’s just the nature of the environment. There are unknowns but part of what I consider to be a characteristic of ready is that we’ve reduced the amount of unknowns to a reasonable level where we believe that we’ll be able to sort that out by the end of the sprint. We’re never going to completely eliminate the unknowns but we have to through the process of product backlog refine it, eliminate enough of those unknowns so that we can make a responsible decision that we’re going to take that on and get it to done. So, if we can instill the discipline that means we would not take on items that aren’t truly ready and you could conceivably at the extreme not be ready to do anything.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 52:47

Well, that’s the thing but like we’ve been so conditioned and like the team’s know in the back of their heads. But like in the past, we’ve been so forced and conditioned to take things on when they’re not ready. We’ve been like trying to just implement scrum and not change the mindset of a developer that should be saying something and isn’t when things are like giving the team’s authority to say no and not forcing them to work on things.

Speaker: Jim York 53:17

That’s the backend, right? So, if the developer is not willing to stand up and say hey, and that can be just learned behavior. They’re not willing to step up because that’s the way things have been done around here and that’s what they’ve learned. When we get to the sprint review and this is another item in the latest version of the scrum guide that’s explicit this time around. Again, it’s been true from the beginning in terms of the spirit but this is now explicit. If a product backlog item does not meet the definition of done, it may not be shown at the sprint review.

So again, at the extreme, if I’m a developer that doesn’t say hey, we can’t do that, we’re going to have a review where it’s going to be obvious, we fell short if we’re disciplined and true to our definition of done. So, on the front end, we have the possibility of not taking anything in if we fail on that and we take things and even though we’re not ready on the back end, we’ll get caught. We get called out on that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:17

Yeah, what I like about that is even if I inaudible(54:21), a lot of teams are demoing to themselves, nobody’s shown. They’re not really getting any feedback from the customer. But even that it makes it explicit. Don’t show it to yourself.

Speaker: Jim York 54:34

Don’t show it, it can’t be shown. So, we talk about feedback loops and accelerating learning. So one of the things I’m always questioning coming in as a coach in my own mind is when somebody says hey, we want to be agile. I’m like well, what does that mean to you? And if what it means to them is that we want to get the done. I mean, we want to have a shorter cycle time and truly get the done and so there’s actually a learning loop here for us as coaches and for the customers, the clients that we work with is that when we work with the teams to instill these disciplines when the team doesn’t accept the things into the sprint because they’re not ready, does the organization hear that feedback and then act on it. If they fail to act on it, that’s a signal perhaps that the organization wasn’t really meaning it when they said it was important to get done.

And likewise, on the back end, if we show up at the Sprint Review and we have nothing to show because we accepted things into the sprint that we couldn’t truly get to done, that’s going to be obvious to everyone and so that’s going to be new information, perhaps. And again, those same individuals who are saying getting the done is important, they’re going to go okay, we were falling short of that so here’s the information on why we’re falling short. That’s part of the retrospective is where are the opportunities to improve? How can we close this gap between what our current state is not being able to get done and what we think could incrementally get us towards an ability to get to done? If the organization fails to act on that, again, that’s feedback.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:12

Well, that’s the thing and like I think most organizations they don’t take their definition of done or what they define is definition of done too seriously. So, it’s just like as long as you make progress or you know, just keep working on it. Maybe it’s a last question here as we’re running out of time, what is one advice that you will give the product owners when it comes to product ownership?

Speaker: Jim York 56:41

One bit of advice, you will make mistakes. The measure of an effective product owner is your response and your ability to remediate the mistakes that you make. So, you are human, you will make those mistakes.

Cherie Silas

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:43

Who is Cherie Silas? How would you introduce yourself and describe yourself?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 00:54

Yeah, well, I am a coaching advocate, I have a lot of passion around professional coaching, and bringing professional coaching into the Agile space for coaches, for masters, managers, whoever is in that space because I think the skills are really important. And I’m a certified enterprise coach, Master certified coach with ICF. And I lead a coach, an ICF Coach Training School, where I focus on agile coaches, Scrum masters and, you know, do a lot of executive coaching. So, kind of a wide range, everything coaching is what I love.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:40

So, what is coaching? You know, a lot of times I think people misunderstand what coaching is, how do you describe coaching?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 01:50

Coaching is a partnership. It’s being in a relationship with another person that helps you to see things from multiple perspectives, that challenges you, that ask you a lot of questions that make you really think. But it’s not just about questions. They give insights. And they give observations and challenge you a lot. And what it’s not, is an advisory role. So, if I’m actually serving in a coach role, I’m not being a consultant or a mentor. It’s actually different. With coaching, you rest on the client’s expertise and knowledge. So, if I’m coaching an organization, I have to look at those clients knowing that they are competent, they ran their business before I got there, I’m not here to fix them and tell them what to do. I’m here to partner with them to find out what changes they want to make, and to help them to accomplish those changes. And they are in control of the change and responsible for making the change in their own life or in their own company because I can’t change them, I can’t do that for them. I can partner with them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:11

Right, yeah. And you know, another thing that maybe just before we dive into some of the more deeper topics, a lot of times people don’t fully understand what the difference is between coaching, professional coaching and agile coaching. How do you help people understand the difference between the two?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 03:29

For me, the model that Lisa Atkins and Michael Spade came up with years ago, it’s just perfect. Right? So, I guess agile coaching has a piece of it that’s professional coaching and it should be conducted from a coaching mindset. So, if you’re saying you’re a coach, you should behave like a coach and think like a coach and act like a coach. And there’s also an aspect of it, that is facilitation. So, those two things focus on using the client’s expertise. And then there’s another kind of side of the coin that uses the coach’s expertise. So, there’s a consulting space where I’m actually going to give you my professional opinion about you know, what’s going on, what your problem is, from my own experience. There’s a training aspect of it because we go into organizations and they need to learn. And then there’s also mentoring to raise up the talent in the client organization so that they can have a sustainable change in place. Then many agile coaches focus in specific areas. I think most people are more familiar with an agile coach that focuses on transformation, on adoption of agile. And then there’s others, I don’t think enough in the space that focus on business agility and product management and helping the company to think about the way they design and deliver products. And then there’s also technical coaching, which is focused more on technical craftsmanship and raising up that standard.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:14

Yeah, I think it’s a lot. I did a class recently and somebody said, well, you know, the scrum master and agile coach role looks like you know, you’re a jack of all trades and Master of Scrum. I kind of settled on that. In a way, like, you know, they’re right. But what I see also a lot of times is people and I listened to a podcast that you did with Alex and I believe that Suzy was on it, I’m not sure I’ve watched or listened to a couple of those. And you talked about differences between coaching, advising or consulting. And a lot of times, coaches, Scrum masters have a difficult time balancing those and understand fully those two stances. So, in what ways do you help people understand the differences between the coaching and advising consultant? And I call advising and consulting the same thing. It’s just some people know it more as advising, some of them it’s consulting, some it’s mentoring.

Speaker: Cherie Silas 06:20

Yeah, so I think what happens often is because humans are kind of programmed to solve everybody’s problems, people jump in too quickly with their own content, with their own information and so, holding back a bit can be really helpful, because then that gives your clients the ability to figure out what’s going on. Because the reality is as a coach, you’re not going to be there forever, you shouldn’t be. You should be creating sustainable change and then leaving them to do it. And so, this is where I think the coaching mindset comes into play. Because your role as an agile coach, it’s going to be just a little bit of it that is actual coaching conversations, maybe 10, 20%. And for the rest of the time, you’re really working from a coaching stance, not necessarily doing professional coaching but doing things the way a coach would do it. So, for example, if we’re doing this advising or consulting piece, rather than coming in, making an assessment and saying, okay, this is everything that’s wrong and this is how you fix it, that’s like a pure consulting stance. A coaching stance would be to come in and ask what’s happening? What is it that’s working and not working? What is it that you think would be the thing we need to focus on to change? Prioritizing those things with the client. And then partnering with them to help them change that, giving them your professional opinion along the way. And so, same skill set of consulting or same knowledge set of consultant just approached in a way that is more the way a coach would do it and it leaves the client in power, which creates more sustainable change. If they get used to you giving them [inaudible 08:18] answers to all the questions, they’ll never grow in their own abilities.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:24

I heard you talk about high performing coaches, that what you’re describing, is there a difference? Because I took a note, like, in one of those podcasts, you talked about high performing coach and the way that I understood it, the way that you were describing it, to me, it was like understanding that balance, but I don’t know. Could you recall that term, high performing coach?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 08:53

Yeah, I don’t remember using that term but I can talk about kind of the levels of how coaches grow in skill and competency because coaching is a competency-based profession. And so, I think in the Agile coaching space, we have a lot of Agile coaches who actually don’t understand coaching at all. They don’t even know what exists professional coaching. So, they’re doing consulting and mentoring, which is great. It’s just not coaching, it’s consulting. So, they’re agile consultants. And so, I think that’s kind of a base level of what agile coaches have. And then as they move up, if we compare that to ICF, there is an associate certified coach, which is like an entry level coach. People who understand coaching, they understand the coaching mindset, they know how to have a coaching conversation. And I think that’s the skill set that’s needed for Scrum masters and other agile professions. As you move higher in the organization as an agile coach and you’re working more with leaders and executives that may be working more with whole systems, you likely need to lift your skills to the next level. Someone who’s at the professional coach level is going to have a lot more insights and observations and intuitions and partnership, more partnership with the client. Someone who’s at the ACC level may stick to just simply asking questions. And so, there is this misconception that coaching equals asking questions, like powerful questions that’s coaching. I disagree. So yes, there is one skill set that is coaching, but there are many other competencies and skill sets that you need to be an effective coach. And then at the master certified coach level, there it’s very organic, very relationship based and a lot of challenge observations, things like that.

Speaker: Miljan Silas 11:02

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, when you said, you know, a lot of people believe, you know, coaching is all about asking questions or you know, your listening skills, and those are two very important skills. But, you know, I think, something that comes to mind that most people don’t fully understand is that awareness, coaching awareness. Or just awareness of how, you know, you talked about coaching is a competency. I think most people don’t fully understand what we mean by when we say competency. So could you maybe describe you know, from your perspective, you know, what is competency? I can’t even pronounce it, but how’s that different than just knowledge and understanding?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 11:52

Yeah, what I’ve seen over and over again is that people who read by coaching books and videos, they may get a lot of knowledge, that when they go to actually do the coaching, there’s a big gap between what’s in their head and how they can describe what coaching is and actually doing the things. And so, because coaching is competency based, knowledge is one aspect of it but the only way you can actually build competency is through doing it and getting feedback from people who actually know what you should be doing so that they can help you make corrections along the way. So, simply experience doesn’t know competency. It’s experience with guidance from those who are ahead of you. So, that mentoring and that training aspect, so that you can grow in that competency.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic12:53

Yeah. So, like, you know, I joke around but you know, I played soccer all my life. I played in Europe, before I came here, I played in United States. And my college buddies would kick my butt in FIFA, you know? They knew all the game, you know, like, they understood the game of soccer, right? But when it came to like playing, you know, they had no experience. So, I thought a lot of times, like the difference between the knowing the game and what to do and actually having the competency to play the game. And same thing goes with skiing. You know, I grew up with, you know, mentioned before we started recording in [unsure 13:33] and like skiing in [unsure 13:36] is different than skiing in New England, which is mostly like sliding down the bunny hills versus, you know, in a West in Utah, you know? So, by having coaches, you know, I had skiing coaches, I had soccer coaches, I had mentors right through this whole process, and experiencing different terrains or environments helped me get better in that competency there of soccer and skiing. And a lot of times people come to classes, will take a couple of classes and they think that okay, now, you know, I understand what agile is about or what Scrum is about. And sometimes people just want quick, you know, answers. You’re mentoring, coaching, probably more coaching than mentoring a lot of people. What do you see, what are some of the challenges that maybe on Scrum masters and coaches are facing that you see? Maybe there’s a pattern that you’re seeing yourself?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 14:40

Yeah, I think the number one question that people ask me is, how do you deal with resistance? And it may not always like my expertise, say stop creating it. So, people inherently, change is hard. Right? And because change is hard, we have to have patience and allow people to change at their own pace. Often what agile coaches will do is they’ll come in not looking at the client as competent, I’m here to fix you. I’m here to fix your agile, I’m here to show you how to change your company. And so, they push up against the people who aren’t ready for that change and the resistance grows. And so, people become number one resistance change, and number two resistant to you. And so often, the problem is you. So, stop creating resistance, treat people like they know what they’re doing, have respect for people, give them, look, fix their problems, focus on what they think needs to change not what you’ve looked around and said, these are the 10 things you need to do. Stop telling managers to sit down and be quiet, I’m going to do your job; you’re not supposed to tell people what to do. All those things create resistance. Instead, create an environment where people want to work with you. Focus on momentum. What you focus on will get the biggest attention and that’s where people will shift to. So, if you focus on resistance, you’re going to get more resistance. If you focus on momentum, you’re going to get more momentum. And remember that to you, as an agile coach, this is just one change, right? We’re just adopting agile, it’s one thing. To them, it’s hundreds and sometimes thousands of changes. And so, we have to understand change tolerance and allow people to change at their own pace and in their own direction. And we don’t want to get compliance. We can get this up and running in three months, that’s compliance. What you want is sustainable change and that takes time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:56

And you know, creating that environment, a lot of times requires having that coach agreement, explicit coaching agreement. And a lot of coaches were people that do want to coach don’t fully understand the importance of coaching agreement. Could you maybe talk about that a little bit, from your perspective, how do you see coaching agreements?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 17:18

Yeah, that’s the second most high question that people ask is or they complain about is, they want me to be a consultant, they don’t want me to be a coach. And first that goes back to the original agreement. When you joined with this company, did you explain to them what coaching is and what it’s not? And in what kind of agreements did you make about the work you’re doing? Because that’s important. Often people just jump in, they’re like, yes, I’m an agile coach. And I want to do transformation. And they want to adopt agile or adopt Scrum or some other framework. So, there’s a mismatch. As you get into the organization, there is the making an agreement with the organization itself, the leadership, generally of the organization. But taking the pulse of the whole organization. And what is it we’re going to work on? What’s the coaching plan? Here’s the four or five themes that we’re going to focus on. How do we measure success? How are we going to get to that change? What’s the current state? What’s the end state? And so, there’s that agreement at the organizational level and how often are we going to check in to make sure we’re on pace or we may need to shift? And then as you work with individuals, you should have a coaching agreement with them. What’s the work we’re going to do together? Why are we doing this work? Same thing with team. What is it that we’re trying to fix? What is it we’re trying to change? What is it we’re trying to grow? We need to know what that is, how we’re going to measure success so that we can be in alignment with where we’re going. And the answer to the, they want me to be a consultant, I think it’s an excuse. Your ability to be in a coaching stance is on you. It’s a matter of self-control and self-management. So, I’ve never had a problem with people telling me they want me to be a consultant or a coach. I’ve done consulting and I’ve approached it from a coaching stance and I’ve never had anyone tell me that I can’t do that. I think if that’s happening to you, either you need some more coaching competency or just some more self-management.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:48

And that self-control and self-management is all about awareness. Right? How well are you aware of what’s going on around yourself within you? Do you do any coaching or what is your perspective on how do we develop awareness or how do we help others develop awareness?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 20:08

Yeah, so, coaching is actually all about helping others create awareness. It’s not about get to the end goal, let’s have a checkbox of things you’re going to walk away with and go do these tasks. Coaching is about helping people become more aware of what they don’t know or what they don’t know they know, I should say so that they can have a change of mindset and then have a change of behaviors. And so, yes, the coach needs to build awareness in themselves. The number one way to do that is through curiosity, developing curiosity. It’s not easy because our innate nature is to be self-centered, not to be other centered. And so, developing curiosity where we actually want to know things about other people, where we’re curious about what they can discover, what they can learn, will help us to become more aware of them. And it’s our own reflective practice. One of the best choices I’ve made in my life was to actually get professional coaching training. And the reason why is because I went in one person and I came out a completely different person. Because coaching builds a ton of awareness, it helps you to see who you are, and to become what you want to be. And so, I literally was like, a whole different human when I came up the other side. As coaches, even if we’ve been through coach training and we know all that stuff, I believe, and I practice coach supervision. And what that is, is a place where coaches, agile coaches, professional coaches, can go into a confidential space, like a coaching space and reflect on the work they’re doing with their clients so that they can figure out where they’re not managing themselves well and figure out how to change. Maybe the client’s stuck, maybe they’re stuck, maybe they keep getting triggered and going into a consulting stance. That’s the place for them to work through that, so that they can show up more powerfully with their clients. So, I guess long answer, there’s a lot.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:30

No, I mean, yeah. And that makes sense. And I was going to ask you about the supervision, I think you just answered in a way that you know, a lot of times we need help as coaches. We need help with awareness, we need you know, maybe just you know, somebody to help us through a difficult situation. And that is a powerful way to do that. And I think a lot of times people misunderstand, don’t fully understand what supervision is. Another thing that I wanted to get your thoughts on is pretty much like everybody that I’ve interviewed so far, that understand psychology and sociology says, you know, it’s key in Agile, it’s key in everything, right? Understanding the people and understanding the social aspect of that psychology. What is your thought on psychology and sociology, when it comes to agile, when it comes to coach? Understanding other people, understanding, you know, relationships. You said, coaching is all about relationships. So, if it’s about relationships and we don’t know anything about relationships, how good can we actually be able to do?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 23:38

Yeah, I would. Actually, I think it’s a little bit easier for people to swallow when you talk about emotional intelligence, which is that self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, social management. Yes, back in those psychology factors. It makes me a bit nervous when I hear coaches talking about psychology, especially when they are struggling with already is the client broken, am I going to fix them? Right? So, human psychology is important because you need to understand the way people think, the way people react. You don’t need a psychology degree to do coaching. And you need to make sure that I hear people say the scrum masters is the armchair psychologist or something like that. I don’t think that’s true. I think that because psychology is about fixing broken stuff. Yes, the same theories are underneath and the same understanding of human behavior is underneath. But as coaches, we are not fixing people. They are not broken. If they need to be fixed, they should be with a different helping profession.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:54

That’s a really good point because I think, I don’t know if we need a new term or the way they just describe it. We need to understand how people think, what motivates them, right? But you know, the aspect of psychology of like you said, fixing people and doing that is definitely not at least what I consider. But that importance of like, understanding, you know, the values, the principles, the beliefs that people have and trying to meet them where they are with those beliefs without judging, I think is what coaching is about. And so, what other coaching anti-patterns are you seeing out there that maybe you’ll help listeners understand, watch out for those or maybe work on those?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 25:46

I think those are the biggest, most common ones are the ones I said. The working with resistance, the thinking that coaching is just asking question. Let’s see another one I think would be, it’s more about, it’s more in the Agile coaching space and it’s about change management. So, the piece that I think people don’t bring in as agile coaches is this piece about change manager. They may not understand it. And so, people have changed tolerance, organizations and systems have changed tolerance. And because people have different levels of change tolerance and they also need to understand the change that’s happening to them, so there’s a lot of we’re doing this, but not why. Right? They don’t understand the why we’re making these decisions, why we’re doing these things so that they can understand, then, well, what’s that mean for me? And then be able to make that change. So, as an agile coach, just because we know Scrum or we know agile, doesn’t mean we understand organizations, an organizational manager. So, I think people need to study more in that area. And they also need to be careful about thinking they’re experts in places they’re not. So, an example for me, that I’ve seen is coaches who have never, maybe they’ve been a scrum master, maybe they’ve been a product owner, but they’ve never managed people and they’ve never been in leadership or executive positions. And they want to tell managers and leaders how they should behave but they don’t understand what’s happening on the other side, right? There’s the here’s what it should be, here’s the book, this is how you should act. But what they don’t understand is all of the things that are systemic, that are coming up against those managers. And so, they’ve got to be able to understand the other side of it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:22

Isn’t that empathy? So, what you’re saying is really, they’re not really good at empathizing and understanding the challenges that leaders and managers are facing. They don’t look into their eyes, is that?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 28:33

I think that’s a big part of it. It’s empathy. And it’s also, thinking they’re broken. Like, you’ve got to do this a different way. And it’s the coaching agreement too. You cannot coach someone who doesn’t want coaching. And so, when you’re trying to force people to accept the work with you, it just doesn’t work. And then I see people wanting to coach executives but they don’t understand the executive space. So, they’re trying to shove them into some agile thing that’s by the book the way it should be but they don’t even understand why it’s not the way it is. And so, we can’t go from zero to hundred. Sometimes we have to go from zero to one.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:28

Yeah, I think that’s a huge, you know, and what you also make me think is, like, people that not have the experience with it and might be going to space that they’re not familiar with but there’s also Daniel Mezick, I think wrote about it or like, there are a lot of coaches and I’ve been in this situation too. And this really comes down to integrity, right? Like you’re doing things that you know you shouldn’t be doing. And as coaches and I know I’ve struggled with that because sometimes it maybe the situation and like, you know, sticking to your integrity and your values is key as being coach. This goes back to like, you know, being non-judgmental, having that neutral stance, right? And we’re all humans, we all deal with the challenges that everybody else does but I think a lot of times what we do is not fully stick to our kind of like, hey, this client is, you know, paying me well, is keeping my family fed but I know deep down, I shouldn’t be doing this. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 30:40

Yeah, that often it happens in [inaudible 30:43]. Yeah, that does happen. Right? And this is part of that, the ethics, the integrity, the neutrality. So, the work can’t be about you, it’s got to be about the client. And if it’s time to disengage then it’s time to disengage. You will mostly disengage when the work is not done from your perspective. However, the client has reached the tolerance for we’re not going to do anything else. Here’s the ceiling, we’re done! And so, I think that coaches misunderstand what companies want. And some companies just wants Scrum adoption. It’s going to stop at that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:29

Installation.

Speaker: Cherie Silas 31:30

Installations. Some companies want agile adoption. Most companies want agile adoption, not agile transformation. And so, we’ve got to be able to understand where the ceiling is and stop. Yeah, I mean, you can’t just keep hanging out getting paid. I mean, I guess you can, but in my perspective…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:52

It’s not fulfilling, right? At least it’s not for me. In some instances, where I’ve done it and, you know, I’ve realized, like, you know, it’s a mistake, it’s not fulfilling, right? You know, that you’re not doing yourself a justice, you’re not doing the company or the client, the justice. And at least for me, it was a learning experience because, you know, especially early on when you don’t know and I think also in today’s environment, where you have a lot of big consulting companies that are going out there and you know, the Agile coaching or coaching is so popular that the waters are getting diluted of what agile coaching is and what the professional is about. And, you know, integrity is one. The other thing that I wanted to explore with you is diversity. I mean, starting with then, you know, when I was looking at just people that I interviewed, right? When I look at the scrum Alliance, it’s mostly, you know, white, older men. And sometimes it’s just, you know, it’s right there in front of you but you don’t see it. Sometimes it’s just some other factor. But I think, you know, the organization that you and I are both part of or association or Alliance, Scrum Alliance, it’s gotten better and better, I think when it comes to diversity. But some of the things that I’m seeing is that only there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to diversity. And I think this goes, same way Scrum Alliance is not any different than most organizations. But what is your thought? And I know, I told you before we started recording too that I really respect you for embracing that diversity. What are your thoughts on that without getting yourself in trouble?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 33:52

I am not worried about getting in trouble. This is a very passionate space for me and thank you. Thank you for even telling me that you recognize that because I don’t like go out and make a lot of noise about it. Yes, I think people get tired of hearing you say look around and say wow, it’s mighty white in here. Because it is. And so people of color, there’s a lot of talent and what happens is it’s not, I don’t think it’s intentional, right? You attract people that look like you. And so, Scrum started with a roomful of old, white men, right? There were technology people and we already know technology doesn’t have, it didn’t start out with a lot of women or people of color, right? And so, that happens and you draw who you’re used to and that’s why diversity has to be intentional. Right? There are people who you can reach out to who have talent and you need to reach out to them. The thing that I’ve been seeing recently, and I praise companies for what they’re trying to do. So, for example, Scrum Alliance, they’re doing a lot to say the door is open, you are welcome here. And you are welcome here. People of color, women, men, white men, everybody. However, just saying you can come here isn’t enough. You have to go out and get them. So, if I invite you to my house for dinner and you don’t have a car and you don’t, you can’t afford a plane ticket, and you’re up in New England and I’m in Dallas, Miljan, you can come over anytime. You can spend the night at my house, you can hang out with my family, you can have dinner with us, the door is open. That doesn’t create diversity. I need to get you here. I need to go and get you and bring you here. Right? So, I’m going to say something that might be really surprising to people and it needs to be said. Right now, in the leadership, the CEC community, CTC community, yes, diversity is increasing, there are more people of color. I want to specifically talk about black people. There are six black people who have CEC or CTC credentials.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:42

Out of what do we have maybe, is it 100s?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 36:46

Credentials, there’s about 150 CEC credentials floating out there and about 200 CTC and a lot of those people have both, right? So of that, only six are black. All this time. And so, I’ve been really passionate about this. There are three women and three men, which is really cool. I’ve actually worked with, I didn’t realize until the other day that I have mentored all three of those women who’ve been there. I’m not their only mentor, I didn’t put them out there. But it’s kind of an honor to have worked with the very first black female CEC in the world. That’s a big thing. Six, that’s a problem! And I’m not saying that Scrum Alliance is saying you can’t come here but the reality is, when you go to a conference and you look around and you’re like, wow, totally white in here, I’m not sure I belong here. Right? And you look around and you’re like, oh look, there’s a black person! That might sound weird to people who are white. My family is black with the exception of me. And that is a reality. When we travel for business and we go to conferences, they come with me and they’re like, are there any black people here? Can black people even come to this? It’s a reality.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:17

No, I know and like, the thing is like, it goes back to that invitation or the dinner that you said. It’s not just that, but like feeling welcomed by others. And I think, you know, when we look at the community, online community, what’s being discussed, how people are being welcomed, when you look at the gatherings in person, gatherings before COVID, I mean, it’s the system, right? In the sense, it’s like how we treat each other. And this is I don’t think it’s just necessarily white or black, you know? Like, I’m white but I’m not, you know, I wasn’t born in United States, I come from a different country, different culture. Right? But and I could have all my life even here, you know, there is a mixed bag of experiences, right? So, I think it’s just like you said, most of it is, I think unintentional, right? I don’t think like, you know, 90% of people even know that are doing that intentionally. But it goes back to that awareness. If we don’t take a pause and think about like, hey, you know, how are we actually welcoming? And I mean if Cherie invited somebody, am I also making sure and going out of my way to say, hey, you know, welcome, whatever it is, right? Because it’s that type of feeling that’s going to or that type of gesture that’s going to help me feel more welcome rather than just one person in the community, where Scrum Alliance is saying the door is open. Right? I think it’s going a little extra step to do that.

Speaker: Cherie Silas 39:48

Yeah. And there’s also like you’re saying, it’s diversity in all ways. Women, men, people of color, people from different countries. What scrum alliance are doing right now are doing a really great job of opening up the CEC or the CTC applications so people can submit them in different languages. So, we’ve got several different languages that we’ve rolled out just recently because we need to increase diversity. And if Scrum Alliance is a worldwide organization, then they need to provide a space for the world to be there. So as more people come in who speak different languages, they’re trying to make that space for that to happen.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:36

And I wrote something else down that I think kind of ties all of this back. Coaching is all about action and accountability. Right? So, if we come back to this topic of action and accountability, it ties a lot of these things together as far as diversity with coaching, the awareness. Like ultimately, you know, what actions are we taking or helping? And then from a coaching perspective, what actions are we helping our clients take and how are we holding them accountable? But at the same time, what actions if we come back to diversity, what actions are we taking and how are we holding each other accountable?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 41:19

Yeah. I think that’s true. One way we can increase diversity is just to reach out. One of the things that I do is I watch people in the industry and I will personally say, hey, can we talk? I’d like to mentor you. I think you’ve got a lot of promise and I want you to be here, I want to see you successful. How many of us are doing that? If we just each mentor one person a year, it’s not a lot, it’s not a lot of effort, we can make a lot of impact.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:59

No, I agree. And as I said, like, you know, looking at the people that I’ve interviewed, I was like, holy crap. I have a lot of white man and no females. This started as almost like, you know, I was starting like, you know, who would I like to talk to and this goes back to, you know what you said also, like, you know, you relate to mostly people that, you know, you associate with but also like the Agile community is full of, you know… Infact, when I started looking at like, you know, I want to interview people that were part of creating Agile Manifesto or that started the Scrum Alliance, there is no diversity there. Maybe there is, like, at least there was one female and two guys. But it is, it takes that action and awareness. And you know, what I’m promising to myself and I started reaching out to do and identify list of how can I diversify? Not just from you know, it’s different topics that you know, people from different countries, different perspectives to add more diversity to my podcast and the topics that I discussed. Because I think that’s going to make the podcast richer in a sense from perspective that I’m just interviewing people with same mindset. That might not be the most valuable thing for everyone, might be for some people but I’m not sure how others could relate to it. What is something that I didn’t know to ask but you would ask yourself or something they would like to share that I didn’t know to ask, Cherie?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 43:44

I don’t know. Let me think about this for just a second. I should know this was coming, they ask it all the time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:58

I’m sure I didn’t. Because a lot of times, you know, as much as like, you know, we’ve seen each other and interacted at conferences and retreats, but it’s in minimal capacity I would say. So I know that there are some things that you know that I don’t know.

Speaker: Cherie Silas 44:18

Yeah. I want to just hit on two pieces we talked about. One last thing on diversity that we didn’t really talk about is why is it so hard for people? And I think it goes back to that coaching competency or skill of curiosity and self-management. Being okay being uncomfortable and not knowing and being interested, being fascinated with other human beings. My client base is all over the world and I’ve worked with almost every country and I’m fascinated by people. And that’s what creates that invitation. The other thing, let’s go back to coaching that we didn’t talk about is confidentiality. So, one of the challenges I think agile coaches have is confidentiality, not realizing that coaching is a confidential space. So, we can’t run around talking about what happened with our clients, we can’t go grab other agile coaches and talk about it or go tell managers and things like that. And so we have to have those agreements and understanding about what is confidential, what is not confidential. And is the Agile coach or performance management person or are they something else? Because that’s often where that confidentiality breach comes in. We are not there for performance management. We’re there to help people and teams and organizations grow to higher performance. If there’s a performance issue, that is a manager’s job, not the coach’s job and we should not get in the middle of that. Because you lose all of the trust that you gain with the organization if what they do and what they’re struggling with is going to get reported to their manager and now it’s going to hit their paycheck. So, I think that that’s the big thing. Just being really understanding and having agreements. So, if the manager comes to me and asks what’s happening, I say you need to go talk to them, because it’s not my place to share it. We’ve got agreements about that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:42

Yeah, I think something else that we didn’t talk about, that you just mentioned is trust. I think, you know, a lot of it is like and that trust and honoring that confidentiality, sorry, it’s too early here. Confidentiality and trust go hand in hand because without trust, it’s tough to coach, without trust it tough to help clients, right? So, like, if we don’t have that trust and sustain that trust, everything kind of crumbles underneath it. And I think a lot of us and I know I’ve been tempted in some ways to break that trust. And it goes back to like, how good of a person really, are you? Because like, how would you, like if you shared something with somebody and you know, you felt like, you know, I’m sharing this with you and I’m speaking my mind in that intent that it won’t be shared and then you go and share with somebody just so you can get, you know, a little bit of insight on something else. And I think that is something that I’ve seen, you know, happen in organizations where coach goes and runs to the managers and shares what’s happening without even thinking. Sometimes intentional, sometimes it’s unintentional. And that can create a ripple effect of all kinds of things.

Speaker: Cherie Silas 48:19

And this is where I think supervision is necessary because that’s a confidential space where, like, if you’re stuck, if you need help, if you’ve got challenges, supervision, someone who doesn’t work in that company and doesn’t know your clients, is the confidential space where you can dump all that stuff and talk about it and get insights and figure out what to do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 48:44

Exactly. You think supervision almost like gives you opportunity to pause and say, you know, let me, you know, I’m not sure what I should be doing here, I have somebody that can help me with this or potentially help me figure things out. And sometimes all we need is that little space between, you know, our thought and our actions.

Speaker: Cherie Silas 49:11

Yeah, it’s a reflective space. And it can have a little bit of mentoring or just like, hey, we’re both professionals, let’s share experiences and see what comes out. And then there’s a bit of coaching, too. So, it’s different than coaching. But absolutely, that’s the intent. It’s that reflective space, where you can look at the work you’re doing and like, whoops, I broke confidentiality, what do I need to do? And so, we’re humans, we need to get stuff out and we need to think through it. And so, as coaches using a confidential space is most important. Doctors do it, psychologists do it, why wouldn’t coaches, agile coaches do it? It’s not I’m a bad boy, I need somebody to be my supervisor and be like, over me. It’s a peer. It’s not that. It’s about you and the impact you make on your clients.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:07

And your growth too. I would argue that you know that space allows you to grow and reflect and that’s how you can get better as a coach.

To wrap up here, what would be one advice that you would give inspiring coaches, agile coaches, professional coaches? Your biggest tip?

Speaker: Cherie Silas 50:29

Yeah, is to work with someone whose credential, knows what they’re doing, they get feedback to be able to move from that I know about coaching, to I have competency and coaching. Professional coaching is the number one skill that’s going to change as a scrum master and as an agile coach, that’s the thing that’s going to move you from okay to fabulous, so get in there and learn it.

Daniel Mezick

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:35

So let’s start with the what is the value or value of Agile to an atheist? So whoever came up with this one, could you maybe talk about what was behind this, and we’ll discuss it, we’ll timebox it to 10 minutes. And then we’ll decide upon if we want to spend more time on.

Speaker: Peter 00:54

Okay, so it’s Peter, who’s responsible for getting four ticks. It’s the highest vote I’ve ever achieved in life, which is amazing. The cool thing about value is, you spend a lot of time wandering around talking to different people in the organization. And it’s how you identify what value is, in that sentence that you can hook to start into other conversations. So value to a business person is one thing but value to an SME in a team might be something different. What’s important framework to apply when you do all that conversation? Make sense?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:30

Let Dan answer that first.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 01:34

Sure. Are you going to leave the screenshare on or I’ll just move this and…?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:40

Let me stop that. Yeah, we can stop.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 01:43

I can do the gallery view, I guess Side by Side Gallery. Okay, that works good. Okay. You can leave it like it is. First of all the lights a little funky here, the sun’s going down so you know, there’s going to be some weird lighting, you can see. Yeah, so let me address the question as written. What is the value or value of Agile to an atheist? First, let’s define what you mean by agile, right? So I’m going to assume that the questioner, by agile means learning through direct experience, and experimenting and then acting based on the inspection of the results, right? So empirical process control. Can we agree on that? Okay, so given that, the value of Agile to an atheist is it’s like you can’t even name how priceless it is because atheists don’t believe in anything revealed, especially as it concerns religion. And they want evidence, and they want data, and they don’t want a lecture. Right? So in my view, the value of Agile to a…

Speaker: Peter 03:07

take it as a nonbeliever to keep out the religious implication, if you will, Dan.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 03:13

Yeah, that’s cool. Well, if we look at empiricism, what it actually is, is it’s a branch of philosophy, it’s a theory of philosophy that says that, you know, knowledge comes from sensory experience. So the value of agility actually comes up in out of chaos. So if you’re not in chaos, or near chaos, agility is actually overkill for you. So I have here the Stacey complexity diagram, sort of, you know, just summarized up here in red, this is all chaos here. And this is the edge of chaos where complexity is, right? Down here we have, in blue, defined process, things that are really well understood, where you know, we have total certainty, total agreement right here, right? Here, we have no agreement, no certainty. So up here is where Agile is going to do the most for you. In the value of Agile is in reducing things that are not understood to things that are understood by using empirical process and eventually converting it to define the process as you gain understanding. That’s actually the value. So if you’re not in a complex situation, if one single person has the single source of truth about this, whatever it is, agile is not going to help you at all. But if no one person has the answer, agile is probably a pretty good way to go through empiricism. And that’s my answer.

Speaker: Peter 04:45

To it’s really about how you get people to agree that they don’t know what they don’t know and have stopped in the direction they want to go. And then to me, it’s okay, we’re going to try this experiment. Definition of a good experiment is one that I actually do, and it has two results, both of which are very successful. Either it didn’t work or it worked and we can continue on from there. It’s a whole bit of how I throw out experiments I find people struggle with. The moment you get up to this C level people that kind of bit nervously, just give me the results.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 05:14

Well, the C level people get paid for right answers, and they totally don’t enjoy ambiguity or uncertainty, right? If you ever seen the TV show Alone, where they drop the people in the middle of nowhere with like, 10 survival things out of 30 that they pick for themselves, the people who make it out of there alive, who thrive there, who win the game, they’re agile people. And concerning experimentation, they won’t do any expensive experiments. So let’s say that the currency is calories. They won’t do any experiments that don’t have a potentially very high learning yield, or like a food yield of some kind, in a very low cost and calorie terms. Okay, so one guy who, you know, went out defeated, found some clay and he said, “oh, this is great for building a fireplace. I’m going to build a cabin here”. And then he cut down like 17 trees over two days. Then he shows up, and he goes, “oh, I just tested the clay and I found out it’s no good for making a fireplace at all. This whole thing is a complete failure. I’ve totally wasted two days of energy cutting down these 17 trees”. Well, yeah, guess what? You get to lose now because you chose an experiment that was very expensive relative to its yield what you say you want. In other words, he did it wrong, he should have tested the clay and then moved on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:50

And I think like, you just reminded me, Dan, of something like, I don’t know who I was talking to in one of these interviews that was done, and they said, If I could boil down agility to two things, it would be like feedback, and how short that feedback is. Right? So that whole kind of criticism of validation. So like, how quickly can we create the hypothesis or something that we want to validate? And then what’s the shortest and quickest way to validate that?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 07:21

Yeah, and what has the largest potential payoff in hard currency and soft currencies? Like, what’s the total range of outcomes? What are the total range of payoffs? What’s the total value of those payoffs? And how much does it cost me to find out, like entrepreneurs, you know, people who start businesses and startups and stuff like that, they do this thing where they try to figure out, “okay, how much does it cost me to find out if I’m wrong? that’s my risk”, the total cost of that, so that if you can reduce that to a very low cost, and there’s a potential very high yield, when you’re correct, those are the experiments to do. So effort might be overrated.

Speaker: Peter 08:13

That’s really down to what product, your example, we’re getting to what a product owner really goes after, when they’re trying to decide the value, when to pick it up, and how to do that small value to see if it actually works in the marketplace. And if it doesn’t, that’s great, we’re not going to dick around anymore trying to produce something that’s not going to be acceptable. So that to me is a small experiment that’s got great value. And then it’s selling it to the CEOs, which is you’re going to pay like 50,000 for this team to run for 10 working days, call it Sprint, or whatever you want. And you want to see some value out of it.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 08:46

Exactly. Yeah. And furthermore, if you look around the world at people who are doing Scrum, the scrum in previous versions, I don’t know if the current version has this, but it says that there’s a value attribute in the backlog. How many of you, I mean, the estimate is the presumed cost, but where’s the benefit number, we don’t usually put that in. If you have a score for the, you know, value save, you know, five is totally great value, one is like not very valuable at all, one to five, and then you have the estimate, whatever it says story points or whatever. If you do a simple divide, then you’re going to find where the highest effort yield is, and you’re going to do those things. That’s a quick way to auto prioritize a backlog, is to create a calculated column on those two pieces of information, right?

Speaker: Peter 09:45

Basically looking at those pictures to find out which shape the payback curve is, and whether you start.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 09:50

That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. So what’s the value of Agile to an atheist? It provides sensory experience upon which you can take action

Speaker: Unknown 10:00

Dan, you mentioned one other thing early on there, I thought was interesting, which is the amount of certainty somebody would have. Right? And which is interesting because another test also be with multiple people had the same answer to the question that you’re trying to pursue. It might be a test where there’s options available, you need to explore and consider.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 10:21

Yeah, say like, where on this graph are those guys in the middle of woods in the show alone? They’re up in the red zone, okay. So their job is to get shelter, fire, water, and food in that order. So the cheapest possible way to those things, is how you win in the survival game, right? The guy who won the first season, it rained for like a week, and he spoke into the camera how he just wasn’t going to move, or do anything, just stay in the tent and conserve his calories until the rain broke. He was doing something smart right there. Nothing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:06

And sometimes, you know, it’s like, keep it simple. And sometimes not doing anything is better than doing something.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 11:16

Yeah. Well, go ahead.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:20

Ah, are we good with this one? Do you guys want to discuss this one? The time is up. Peter, it’s your topic, how happy are you…

Speaker: Peter 11:31

It is a long way because I’d react if we get to the end. I’d reverse it the other way, which is, how do you get somebody from being a total believer to try and see some sense of value when they want to do everything as the other version, but we should give everybody else, the other questions or conversation first. If we’ve got time, we can visit that at the end.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:49

Yeah, that’s a good question. So maybe just add it to the list and then we’ll come back to it. So this one here has four, how do I get these people to work as a team? I added this one. I was just having conversation before this with like, what is the benefit of Cal classes through scrum Alliance? So essentially, they’re like Cal essentials, Cal teams, and Cal organization, and somebody was asking, like, what’s the benefit of each class or like, why should I care? What’s you know, we’re talking about jobs to be done, and I phrased it as how do I get these fucking idiots to work as a team? I cleaned that up here a little bit. But that’s actually what somebody told me specifically. So like, you know, that Cal teams is all about, like, how do I help people work better as a team? And what do I need to know as a manager? Because a lot of times I’m working with managers, and they really don’t know how to help the teams. So my question to them is, and everybody else, for that matter is, you know, what have you seen? How can we get the teams to work better as a team, or individuals on a team or group to work as a team?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 13:11

Well, first of all, they have to want to do it, you can’t make people do anything they’re unwilling to do. That’s just the fundamental, that’s a fundamental like, axiom of being human is, people don’t do what they’re unwilling to do. They do what they want to do, what they’re willing to do. So the real question is, you know, if there’s a dealing with the individuals, you know, do you want to work together as a team? A lot of them don’t. You’re not going to be able to solve that, they have to want to. Usually, that has something to do with having influence over decisions that affect the life of the group. So if I have some influence over decisions that affect my work, and the work of the team, the work of the whole group, I will tend to want to go along. But if I’m going to be dictated to or behave passively based on someone else’s set of decisions, “hmm, why don’t we just have Bob do it? Okay, I’ll wait here for Bob to tell me what to do”. So when Bob gets around to telling me let me know, and I’m over here, you know what I mean? So that’s the first thing, people have to be willing and then if they are willing, they are going to have to get membership and shared agreements about something, anything, right? Like, how about the goal? Like, what’s our stated task, right? Like, why are we even teaming at all in service to what? So if we can get agreement on that, on a shared goal, then we can have belonging in the shared goal. So what I usually do is I work with the leadership team first, and I put really really awkward statements from the scrum guide in their faces. And I asked them individually to rank themselves on a scale of one to 10, where 10 is perfect agreement, and one is I would never agree to this in my lifetime. They rank their own, you know, score, and then I asked them to rank the leadership team score with them included, where do they think the leadership team is on this? So a great example would be, for the product owner to be successful, everyone in the organization must respect his or her decisions. Okay, rank your level of agreement with the statement. Next, rank the level of the leadership teams agreement as you understand it. And then we have that conversation. And we go through various other quotes in the scrum guide, and then we get to shared agreements. Now one of the things about shared agreements is that they generate very positive feelings, feelings of control and belonging. So if we agree like right now, we agree, this is going for an hour, and you can ask me anything, we all have belonging in that understanding. So membership, and belonging is a basic human need. So is a sense of control. So by agreeing to something, we are all in it, when it’s not mandated upon me, I’m choosing, there’s the controlling red, and then everyone else who chooses I have belonging with them, that’s this in black, right? So these are basic human needs, you need to have the perceived sense of these things to be happy. In fact, if you don’t have these things, it’s easy to get depressed or have bad psychological health and mental health.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:53

That’s really cool. And I’ve really like what stood out to me more than anything else, is that perceived sense. Could you talk about that?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 17:01

Right, so the perceived sense of control, so the idea that I know where the levers are, and if I do this, you know, the environment, or whatever it is I’m moving, does that, right? The idea that, for example, if we were to work together, if you became, you demonstrated being predictable and reliable, like say, with respect to agreements about when we would meet online, like you’re always earlier on time, then you become predictable and reliable in my mind, and then I can trust you. Okay, so that gives me a sense of control that I know what to expect from Miljan, and Miljan knows what to expect from me. And now we both have the sense of control and belonging in the agreements. And there’s something very powerful about that, when you look at like, why organizational change breaks down, it’s because people do not have these perceived senses. Okay, so you don’t need control, you need the perceived sense of control. Like, I can’t control you, but I can predict your behavior, that’s good enough for me, see what I’m saying? And then if we both agree to meet at eight o’clock, and then, you know, tomorrow at nine, and then the next day at 10, and those are predictable and reliable things where you show up earlier on time, we develop a sense of belonging around our respect for each other’s time, and the punctuality. So these things are very important, even though we’re not controlling each other, we have the perceived sense. And we also have this perceived sense of belonging to something here, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:38

So that’s really good then, like in a sense, like, how do I get these people to work as a team? I mean, it’s really like understanding psychology and social psychology, like, in a sense, and being able to yeah.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 18:52

Yeah, can I tell you a story about this sort of in the middle stage of my total coaching career? Very first time I, I had anybody follow me around, and I was mentoring them for coaching, I was going to teach them how to coach I say, “come on into my account, watch how I do this, you know, we’ll see what happens”. We sat down, and it was a messed up company, like they all are. If they’re not messed up then they don’t need me, right? So I show up, and we’re working on, you know, some stuff with the team, and the team is complaining about all these external forces outside of the room that are ruining their lives and screwing up their work and making everything so difficult. And the guy that I was mentoring, I wanted him to sit directly across from me so we could have direct eye contact, and I looked at him and then I looked at them and I said, “Listen, you know, I’m going to do something really dramatic right now”. I stuck my elbows out so, “I’m going to get up and I’m going to do something dramatic, are you all ready for this?” And they’re like, “What the? What is this? Like? Yeah, we’re ready. What’s it going to be?” So I got up and marched over to the door, and I fricking slam that door shut. And then I paused for a fact, and I said, “now it’s just us, what are we doing about that?” And they all were like silent, and you could hear a pin drop. And then they all started laughing. And I said, “what are you laughing about?” They’re like, “well, that’s so funny”. I’m like, “what’s funny about it?” They’re like, “well, we do have a lot of things that we could do, and agree on here without depending on anyone from outside”, I said, “Yes. And you could develop a culture that’s completely different than the culture outside this room. And you could live in that culture, the exact culture you want to live in. And I can help you do that. Would you like me to show you how?” And they were like, “Yes, please”. And then I just walked him through, you know, some stuff around discovering what their core values were, that they held in common. That’s another important thing, is you can’t team with anyone who doesn’t share your values. So you’ve got to have some, like, right now, I will team with anyone who wants to advance the cause of employee engagement, opt in participation, human agency, motivated individuals, individuals and interactions, I’ll team with anyone, I don’t care what your politics are, I don’t care what your gender is. So you can have four genders, I don’t care, but if you agree on these other things, then I want to work with you. So if you share those values with me, then we’re going to do great together, you know. So you have to have that, if you don’t have some shared values, you’re sunk. So I immediately took them through a values discovery exercise, and they discovered what they all shared in common. And we put that on the wall so when you came in the team room, you couldn’t avoid looking right at it. It was on the opposite wall from the door. And right next to that poster, we also listed the current five top impediments to this team success. So they could see the difference, like over here, here’s what we value, and over here is this shit that we need to slog through. Okay, how are we going to, you know, resolve that? So and that’s what I did with them, and that worked out pretty good.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:37

Nice. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know, let’s open it up to others, and we have 30 seconds for this time box, but what about others? Do others have any thoughts? Is this helpful? Are you enjoying the conversation so far? Or do you have any suggestions?

Unknown Speaker 2 22:56

Yeah, I really like this one, Miljan. And the reason being, you know, as companies have inflow and the Agile progress, you know, you even get some overarching new company policies that might sort of backtrack or derail that congruent shared team experience. And so even for a team that’s been around, you know, going through those situations, I think that was great advice, Dan, to, you know, take another step back and kind of revisit your team’s agreements and belonging. And, you know, even if you’re told that your results are supposed to be more individual now, you’ve still got to come to some agreement, that you are a team and you still have a goal and it doesn’t matter what’s outside the room.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 23:55

Beautiful. Now, what do we do Miljan?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:01

Other thoughts, comments on this before we move on to the next one?

Speaker: Peter 24:06

I’d comment you went down to five quite quickly with them, which is good. Because we used to say, “okay, let’s take a dozen things”, and all you’re trying to do is get him to pick out the important items and sort through them. So you’d like, “give me a dozen, oh screw it. Give me half a dozen”. And then the nice one with teams early especially at their content [unclear 24:24] is, “hey developers do you have like ones zeroes?” So you’ve only got like two you can go after, pick your two. And suddenly they’ve started to agreeing like, “screw it. Let’s just concentrate on two things”. And they’ll start playing with that. I tried to once using a cricket analogy, the team was in India and they got it but you only have two batsmen in the team of 11. So you can just pick the analogy that belongs to the team you’re working with and coaching.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:57

Awesome, I’m enjoying this and I think I’m going to do more of these sessions because they’re really interesting. So we have two here, which we’ll probably be able to do we have about 20 minutes left, so we should be able to get through these two. So what is the Agile answer to? Who had this one?

Speaker: unknown 25:20

Right? That was mine. So you get this a lot, right? So there’s the, and I put just in a dot, dot dot thing, because you could actually play around with different, people might have different questions they could kind of plug into this one, right? And you get this a lot. So what’s the Agile answer to…? Binging all my dependencies and getting through that big body of work that we have to do, right? What’s the Agile answer? You get those types of variations of those themes all the time? Right. So what do you do there?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 25:49

Well, okay, is that the full, final question? Okay. First of all, if you have an agile hammer, everything is not an agile nail, right? So, like when you go when you profile projects, 20% of them in an organization will not benefit from agility at all. Their defined process, they’re not going to fit, right. And there’s a sort of a hybrid group that can benefit from some empiricism, but not like full-on Scrum, for example, right? And it has to do with, you know, the Stacey diagram, right? They’re really far away from the edge of chaos so they’re not going to benefit from full-on. So right off the bat, there’s not an agile answer everything, right? So there’s that. So if there’s complexity, if it’s near the edge of chaos, then the Agile answer to whatever that is, is to do a little, learn a little, have a collective conversation in harvest learning, and do some kind of small pivot, do a series of experiments until you get closer and closer and closer to the truth of what’s going to work. The exact wrong thing to do at the edge of chaos is to get involved in central planning. So central planning is a terrible idea when you’re at the chaotic edge or you’re in a complex space, you’ll fail. And if your survival depends on it, you get to die. You know, that’s what people go to die, central planning at the edge of chaos, right? So, if we’re up here, then let’s do some cheap experiments that have a potentially higher learning yield and go learn something, right. So for example, again, that show alone, guys are totally alone in the woods. They can use anything that washes up on the shore. I don’t have one with me now but this guy found a plastic water bottle. He cut the top off, so it had like a little funnel, you know, because he cut the top off and he turned it upside down it was like a little funnel, and he shoved it inside the bottle. So the funnel was funneling in. And then he put some, some mussel, some meat from a mussel, you know, the shell fish, and he shoved it in there, and then he put it inside rock so when the tide went in and out, it wouldn’t go away. You got a bunch of baitfish inside that bottle. Don’t you know he used those big fishes bait, got himself some big honking fish. No, it didn’t cost them very much an effort to do that, and if it failed, big deal, try something else. But what he did after he did that experiment was, he built a bigger fish trap out of twigs and brush and stuff, because he’s like, “well, this is actually working small so now I’m going to scale it”, you know? And that’s the Agile answer to whatever the question is, if you’re not at the edge of chaos, agile is not going to help you. Do define process instead.

Speaker: unknown 28:56

Oh, that’s great, right? Because you’re actually what you mentioned also was profiling things right in terms of qualifying the situations but stamping out Agile would be a very useful thing. But you typically go from pilot project to let’s transform the entire organization that we’re in and away we go, right.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 29:12

Yeah. Well, I want to tell you the biggest source of…

Speaker: unknown 29:17

and then we put a project plan together to do it. Well,

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 29:20

Well, yeah. But there’s a reason for the desire for the project plan. And there’s a reason for the desire, the motivation behind the question, okay, right. I’m going to tell you what it is. It’s one of the biggest problems in the world of being human. And here’s what it is, we’re all suckers for a coherent story that’s bullshit. Okay? We’re suckers for a coherent story that could be true, but might not be. It doesn’t actually matter if it’s true. What matters is, is it coherent? So when you’re talking about the project plan for the stuff that’s not at the edge of chaos, it’s because people want to get the right answer, the Agile answer and they want to apply it universally right. But to oversimplify the reality of the story, right? There is no story. I mean, by definition, with empiricism, there’s no story.

Speaker: Unknown 30:16

Well, not everybody’s not on that one spot on that chart. Yeah,

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 30:20

That’s not. so this explains why people are suckers for like, political rhetoric, that’s bullshit. Organizational consulting rhetoric, that’s bullshit. All forms of bullshit are coherent. We’re suckers for coherence, because we’re so afraid of not knowing the right answer.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:44

So how do we get people to get comfortable? Some of us are more tolerant to unknown, and some of us just, you know, coming back to this question, what is agile answer to? Like, we feel like that there’s answer to these things. We go nuts if we don’t know the answer, so Dave tell me the answer otherwise, you know,

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 31:07

This explains like, a big huge, cumbersome framework that we all know. It explains it because it tells a coherent story that’s bullshit.

Speaker: Unknown 31:21

Well it makes you feel very comfortable, and it’s close to what you do already and it feels really nice, right?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 31:29

Coherence. Coherence is what everyone’s seeking.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:34

So what can we do to turn this around if the coherence is what we’re seeking? And what we’re seeking, what we’re being fed, is not very healthy, how do we turn around and use this in a positive way?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 31:49

Here is the primary thing. You’ve got to adopt supporting beliefs that support an empirical approach. Right? So if you don’t have supporting beliefs around that, then you’ll never take an empirical approach. So here’s a way to actually build some supporting beliefs. Go and take an improv class. Go and learn improv, okay? In improv, you don’t know anything except the next moment. And your goal or the rule is you’re going to be additive. Whatever, for example, Dave Miljan says, I’m going to say yes, and I’m going to add on another chapter, a paragraph to his story. Whatever it is, I’m going in the direction of Dave, okay? And then when I come back, and I do my thing, Dave’s job is to be additive with the piece that I added on, and not block. And that’s very, very difficult for engineering type people. Engineering type, people can’t do improv, they actually suck at improv. And it’s because we have a very strong need for control, engineers have a very strong need for control. That’s why we’re engineers, because we like that environment where we can control a little microworld, you know, and you drop someone like that into an ambiguous space, and they just can’t get out of their own way. But if you learn improv, you can learn how to do it. So what I do is I coach executives to go find the improv people in your city and go to the class. You’ll learn more from that than anything else. And then the other thing about this fancy question Miljan, is not through the revealed wisdom like this, like through a lecture, interview, or talking. No, direct experience. Like in this case, go learn some improv and come back, tell me what you learned about leadership.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:57

And maybe that experienced goes back to, you talked about values, you talked about beliefs, it’s really that experience going to help you align tor will change your beliefs about, through experience.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 34:10

Right. Because improv is all experimentation. All experimentation has a learning yield. You’re basically admitting you don’t know anything. Let me tell you something, man. I used to teach software developers, and they’re a tough audience man, I don’t know if you realize how tough they are. I mean, they’re tough. And you better have the goods or you’re not going to have any respect from them at all. So I used to teach software developers object oriented programming, and, you know, Microsoft platforms and tools and one time, early in my career teaching this stuff, I got caught making shit up. It was awful, it was terrible. It was a complete fail. And I vowed never, ever, ever do that again, ever. And then what I would do in my class, which I, you know, and I knew a lot, I was a teacher and everything, every so often I get a really tough question, and I’d say to the guy, “I don’t know the answer to this question but I promise you, I’ll get you the answer before the end of this class”. You know, I don’t know, I think it might be this, or it might be that, but I’m not going to commit to that, I’m going to give you the right answer before the end of the class but it’s not going to be now because I don’t know. People would come up to me and they’d say, “this is amazing, you know, so much and you are willing to admit that you don’t know. This class is so awesome”. So the lesson, the moral of the lesson is, like leaders need to say that they don’t know once in a while.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:02

Is that about vulnerability? Being vulnerable so…

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 36:06

Well it is beyond vulnerability, right? What you’re doing is you’re basically saying, I don’t know, but you can still trust me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:18

Well, that’s what I was getting at. Because, like, isn’t vulnerability about, you know, trust, and ultimately, it boils down to trust and courage. Having courage to do?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 36:29

Yeah. And that developer came up to me, he’s like, basically, he in so many words, he said, “I don’t even know how to do that, how to say I don’t know, but you actually said it in front of everybody”. And I realized, like, I could do that, like maybe two times in a one week class, right? If I, did it more than that, then I lost credibility with them. But I could do it a couple times.

Speaker: Unknown36:52

So the alternative is a Microsoft used to call it flipping the Bozo bid. I think if they actually tell us respect points, it was.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 36:59

Yeah, that was from Jim McCarthy’s book dynamic to software development. It flipping the bozo thing was Jim McCarthy thing. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:10

So we have time for maybe one more. I get this one, Dan, from an article that you were referenced. The customer’s always right: How do you help them when they they’re wrong? That resonated with me. Do you want to talk about this?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 37:29

Yeah, sure. You know that comes from a thing that I wrote that I want to show you actually.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:35

Let me stop sharing.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 37:38

Yeah, it was right here. Now, I have that same link, you know, handy, because he was writing about something that I wrote about. And here’s, here’s what it is.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:48

Do you want to share or do you want me to get…?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 37:52

Let me put it in context, because I want to show you what he was writing about, okay? And here it is right here. I wrote this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:06

We can’t see. Oh, there we go.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 38:12

Just take a moment and read that, or I’ll read it to you. You’re an independent Agile Coach visiting a potential client with 1500 employees. It’s obvious that the intelligent well-meaning executive that’s interviewing him does not really understand that employee engagement is essential to success. His org wants to quote, roll it out, they plan to use this big huge framework that will not be named, they already decided with the training and everything else, it looks like 200 grand coming your way in the next eight months if you get this account, but you’re 100% sure it’s the wrong approach. You figure there’s a 60% chance your concerns will be completely lost in translation. You have no more than 45 minutes in this 25 minutes left. And you know some other consulting firms that are good at marketing will also be interviewed as service providers for this engagement and you realize it’s now or never, and you’re not too happy about this. Nick, in his article, customer’s always right, was actually responding to that essay, and oh, by the way, that LinkedIn post, earned 35,000 views, and like 128 shares or 38 shares and like 150 likes and comments and stuff. So it resonated with a lot of people. Okay, the customer is not always right. And the customer is often quite ignorant of what it is they actually need. And in our industry, it’s okay to just take their money and not tell them that the people have to be engaged for any of this stuff to work. It’s okay to do that in the Agile industry.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:01

And that’s really interesting Dan, because like, resonates what you said earlier with how you had executives rate what they were willing to do. I was talking to Mike Cohn and he said exactly same thing. Like I go in and try to scare the shit out of them, and tell them that it’s not going to work, and tell them like, these are the things that you have to do. And not many people, including myself, don’t have the guts so whatever it is right, to a lot of times, tell them what they don’t want to hear.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 40:32

All right, so stop right there. Mike Cohn and Jeff Sutherland and Kench waver and people at that level, they can get away with it. Why? Because they’re already desperate. That’s why they called Mike Cohn. Okay, they’re not going to be desperate when they call you or me because we don’t have that level of authority. So it’s easy for Mike Cohn or Jeff Sutherland to say that, but how do you and I say that when we have creditors, right? So here’s the bottom line, the Ambien norm in the Agile industry is to just take their money, and to not get into the awkward and difficult conversations about employee engagement. That is a serious disservice to the clients we’re purportedly serving. And the leadership of the Agile industry is silent on the issue of employee engagement, that’s a crime. So this whole thing is going to tip eventually, it’s inevitable, in spite of the efforts of influentials to maintain the status quo and just take their money, but we need to teach executives that the people need to be engaged for any of this stuff to work. And then we have the conversation, what does it take to engage them? But first, we need to establish the fact that engagement is essential. Because it is, because there’s I mean, like by now, if imposition worked, there would be 1000s and 1000s of examples that we could point to about how imposition work. I can’t find any of those examples. Can you? Okay, so there’s a big elephant in the room in the Agile community and furthermore, agile runs on feedback and continuous improvement, does it not? So, how’s the Agile industry doing processing feedback and continuously improving? It actually sucks at that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:39

No, it’s actually really good at taking money and improving how we take the money? It’s getting really good.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 42:46

Right. So, let me just say one last thing about this and that’s, there’s a fella named Stafford Beer you ever heard of him?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:55

I think you’ve mentioned that one in a lot of the conversations.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 42:57

Stafford Beer was an organizational consultant guy, and he coined the phrase, “The purpose of a system is what it does”. Have you ever heard of that posse with? The purpose of a system is what it does. So this dude right here is the one who coined that phrase, Stafford Beer, okay? In other words, don’t listen to what they say they do, look at the outcomes. That’s the actual thing that they’re organized around. The Agile industry, really, really good at generating transactions. Really good.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:47

Big consulting companies are getting, you know even more into right, so it’s…

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 43:53

Millions, 10s of millions. So that’s very alluring but is that the business that we’re in? Is that what we’re actually representing when we go into a client company? Hey, we’re here for a huge transaction, you okay with that? No, what we tell them is, “oh, we’re going to give you something really great. You’re going to have, everything’s going to be beautiful, and nothing’s going to hurt. We got to do a, we’re going to do B, we’re going to do C, then we’re going to rest at Basecamp one, then we’re going to go and do e, f and g and then we’re going to go to the second base camp, and it’s just going to be so great”. Can you follow the story? The coherent story? Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 44:32

But ultimately, it comes down to like people thinking for themselves. And I think that I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to and you know, the common theme across it’s just we got to start thinking

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 44:45

That’s changing because now CTOs and CEOs and CIOs have been to two or three or four companies and they’ve seen how the imposition stuff doesn’t work. If you want to really get to transformation, you have to use people you already got, engage those people, have good coaches come in who transfer skills to them, and then let them take the thing forward, the internal champions. They’re actually highly invested in the success of the company if they’re full time employees, and they’ve been there a while. So why don’t we put the transformation in the hands of the people who actually care, authorize them, teach them, mentor them, kind of disciple them, and then get out of the way and let them do their thing. That’s my story.

Unknown Speaker 2 45:29

You know, there’s a really detailed scenario that I’ve been thinking while you’ve been talking about this. So in my world, software engineering on a scrum team, getting requirements from the customer, write that question on the board. How do you tell them “No, you don’t need the “are you sure pop up?” Because after the first week, that’s stupid. I know, it’s stupid. I know, you’re not going to like it”. You know, it’s that same thing. So I’m getting requirements for detailed coding changes and trying to do what I’m told I’m paid to do and say no, and that doesn’t work. It’s the same exact story you were just talking about, funneled all the way down to lines of code you’re being asked to update.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 46:23

Sure. That’s beautiful. Can I tell you another story that goes to add to what you are saying? Do we have time for that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:30

We have one minute left. So let’s do it. But if people want to drop, thank you for joining us and I hope you’ve enjoyed as much as I have. So but yeah, please.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 46:43

Really quick. I was just teaching the class the CEO was there, I was going to put him on this activity where they’re going to learn by doing. I gave him like a 15 minutes time to learn about the kit, I gave the all the teams a kit and they had to make the kits connect and everything like this. And they said, “okay, Sprint, number one”, he’s like, “no, we are not ready, we need more time”. I said, “Sprint number one”, he’s like, “we’re not ready, we need more time”. I’m like, “you’re the CEO, but you’ve authorized me to lead you through some learning and I’m telling you, we’re doing sprint number one right now, here we go, boom”. And I rang the bell, and we did sprint one, and I went 20 minutes long. And I told them, “you’re going to get some learning here, you need to just go with it”. So he did, and his team made tremendous progress in the first sprint, and he was completely amazed that there wasn’t any real, you know, big upfront planning required. And that everyone found their little niche, and they did the thing, okay. And that’s the way you teach them through direct experience. That’s how they learn. They don’t learn through lecture, they learn through direct experience.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:47

And that’s really good, and kind of summarizes like the whole discussion around experiences change the beliefs. So I’m sure that person thinks differently about upfront planning after that experience,

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 48:03

He thanked me, he thanked me for being firm with them about it. And I reminded him that he had authorized me as the leader of the thing that day, not him. Right. So everyone was looking at me, like, “how can you say that to him?” And I was like, “well, here’s why, because he paid me to do this that’s why. So we’re doing it this way”. And he got the learning. So I hope that’s helpful to everyone. And, you know, I hope that it made you think a little bit

Speaker: Unknown 48:28

And some variations on that right today. And I think you’re in your case, how do you help the customer when you’ve been given the requirements? Well, you don’t have to do all the requirements right? You do a little bit, you get the feedback, you let them see it and they might come back with the now that I see it thing, right you give them a little bit of that something, and then change comes from them not from you actually like to Dan’s point here, right. He was just saying you don’t lecture them onto things, you let them experience the thing you are deliverable to them. And then their own experience of that might change their minds on what they think they need.

Unknown Speaker 2 48:59

Yep, great point and balanced with that I heard the opportunity to say one way or another, you paid me to provide you with this.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 49:10

That’s a whole other universe that I want to have get on this show and do someday with Miljan, is the issue of authority and authorization.