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.