Daniel Mezick

“Who came up with the idea that you go to a two-day class and you’re qualified to do this work? ” – Daniel Mezick 

TRANSCRIPT: 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:29

Dan, you and I have known each other for, I don’t know, six, seven years maybe. And I think I know who Dan Mezick is. But how would you introduce Daniel Mezick?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 00:45

Daniel Mezick is a guy who came up through technology and IT professionally, raised four kids along the way with the same girl. And now is focused on the organizational change side of sociology and trying to actually bring some progress to that domain, specifically in the organizational change space. And I’m also a guy that’s continuing to learn guitar, a guy that likes to kayak when the sun’s going down. And I like to drink beer. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:33

Nice, what kind of beer?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 00:17

Generally, IPAs with more than 7% alcohol. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:42

That’s my kind of beer. Yeah?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 01:44

Yeah. And I’m also an avid reader. So, I always have a couple books going in any given time that I’m working through. And I’m a little bit of a, I would say contrarians, a little bit of a troublemaker.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:01

 Troublemaker? Yeah. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 00:17

A little bit of a troublemaker. I’m happy in that role. You know, as part of my persona.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:11

What got you into the organization design or organizational change?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 02:17

Well, what happened was in the 90s, I had a technical training and consulting firm during the whole peak of the boom there that led up to the dot bomb crash in the year 2k, fiasco. So, the whole 10 years leading up to that I ran a consulting firm. And we did training, you know and I have a software engineering degree. And that business materially changed around 2003 or so. So, from 2003, to about 2006. I was, you know, doing well financially and everything but didn’t really know what was next. You know, the previous business, which was at one time a happy hunting ground was now somewhat, the game was somewhat scarce. And it had changed. The game of, you know, staffing had changed. So, I didn’t know quite what I was doing. And then in 2006, I started poking around and went to a CSM class, it was run by a guy named Lowell Lindstrom. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:23

Where was this, in Boston or?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 03:24

 It was in Chicago. I think there was six people at that thing. It was in Chicago in a hotel. And that began my journey through Scrum agile organizational change and I’ve been at it ever since.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:36

Nice. So, what do you think, what are your thoughts on the current state? There’s so much going on in the Agile community? What are your thoughts on the current state of Agile? 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 03:48

What dimension? I mean, there’s so many dimensions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:52

 So, let’s look at the dimension of certifications. What is your thoughts on the current state? Obviously taking that CSM class years ago? What it meant then, what it means today, what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 04:10

Yeah, so from my point of view, you know, I mean, I don’t hold the CSM credential anymore. Okay, let’s put it that way. And then let me talk a little bit about certification in general. Okay. So, if we look at the concept of certification just by itself, as a wide topic, Miljan, you know, beyond the agile for example. Here’s what we’re finding out, this is my take. There’s been a complete failure of the higher education system to deliver on its promises of a better life, a better economic life, a better future for you and your children. Young people go into higher education today and then they’re sold a bill of goods. There used to be a saying to get a good job, get a good education. Well, that might be true still but the higher education system is not delivering on the good education. What they’re doing is baptizing people into debt. And you know, kind of running a scam. So, what’s happened is that has imploded. And in response, self-organized response to this situation, we have the rise of certifications. So, if you have 7 to $9,000, and you got a year’s time of yours, you can learn about an industry, enter the industry with a credential, go to a couple of conferences, meet some people and you can enter that industry and begin, you know, becoming gainfully employed. One year, you know, 9000 bucks or so you’re in. That is a self-managed, self-organized response to the demise of higher education, in my opinion. Okay? So within that context, we have the Agile certifications. Now, the Agile certifications are done quite poorly, actually. And that’s part of the problem. So, we hear people all over the world going, you know, who came up with the idea that you go to a two-day class and you’re qualified to do this work? You know, in this kind of thing. Well, of course, Ken Schwaber came up with that, but the reality is that the PMI actually pioneered this and Ken took their best ideas and tweaked them a little bit, you know, and formed the Scrum Alliance. A lot of people don’t realize Ken Schwaber formed the scrum Alliance. A lot of people don’t realize that Ken Schwaber was also in on the formation of Agile Alliance previous to the scrum Alliance. That’s a whole other story, let’s stay on the certification answer. Certifications in the Agile world are proliferating because of what I already just said. What we need to do is we need to take some more cues from Ken Schwaber. Ken Schwaber has a couple things going on with the PSM; professional Scrum Master. And the whole range of certifications he offers through scrum.org. Number one, it’s a lifetime cert, you don’t have to renew. Okay, there is no renewal fee. You’re in the certs lifetime. Second is, you don’t have to go to a class, you have to pass a rigorous exam. It’s a good idea to go to the class, but you don’t have to. Right? So, these are a couple of changes that Ken brought in.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:38

What do you think maybe we’re going off topic here. But how much did that have to do with the differentiating from Scrum Alliance to offer that type of… so it’s like, you know, Scrum Alliance has its own hey, you know, you have to attend two days. What do you think? Did that had planning or is it just more like maybe a lesson learned from Scrum alliance?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 08:05

I’m not sure, what you should do is get Ken Schwaber on here and ask him that question. That will be an advantage. I’ll help you. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:11

I wanted this.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 08:12

I’ll help you get him on the show, if you want. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:14

Awesome. Yeah. That will be great. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 08:17

He’s quite a character. So, here’s the wider picture. certifications aren’t evil, and they’re not bad. But they have become part of a wider set of, I would say, concerning and alarming trends in the Agile industry. Right? So, for example, we have a lot of imposing of Agile practices going on throughout the world. And well-intentioned but misinformed executives are led to believe through omission. Because we don’t tell them anything different, that they can just roll it out and everything’s going to be great. I mean, they really believe that and they’ve got, you know, when they’ve got budget authority to say, three quarters of a million or a million dollars, it’s going to be kind of hard to push back on that when they’re ready to sign a cheque. So, as a result, the whole agile industry looks the other way on the fact that imposing practices disengages people, and that’s why it doesn’t work. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 09:27

How much do you think it’s part of the just, that process is just part of a natural pathway, because I’m seeing more and more organizations that have gone through that imposing change and leaders actually realizing what they’ve done, now they’re going back and saying, shit, I don’t know what I’ve done.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 09:46

Yeah, but here’s the deal, right? They’ve taken a tremendous financial haircut. That lesson has cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Okay? So, we have done a serious disservice to the executive leaders, the decision makers by not informing them of the probability of failure with the “rollout” of the “transformation”, right? So, this is a failing of the Agile industry, in specifically the Agile industry leadership who hasn’t said a single thing about this issue. There’s no statement of position you can find anywhere from Scrum Alliance, agile Alliance, IC agile, or any of these other esteemed institutions. So, we’re going to have to fix it ourselves. And the way that’s done is by making sure executives are informed so they can give informed consent to the imposed mandated rollout. So, they know what they’re getting into and the likelihood of failure and how much that failure is going to cost. Right? So, if we can turn the clock and act in the past, of course, no one can act in the past, every executive that was ever going to buy an agile transformation would be informed of the probability of failure of various approaches and the probability of success of various approaches and then they’d be asked to pick one. And then they could own the probabilities. You’re a coach, how long you’ve been coaching, how many years?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:38

Close to 10 years.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 11:40

10 years? So many times you have shown up after the smoke has cleared and all the coaches have left, and that has been 1.1 million spent.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:51

It’s more of a case right now than what it used to be. But yeah.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 11:55

Yeah. So, when you show up and you see the damage that was done and you see the credibility of the whole thing being questioned, you know? Obviously, serious disservice has been done to your profession. So, you know, that’s something we can move towards going forward as far as certifications go, certifications provide credible proof that the person has made an investment of time, money and attention in learning the craft. So, I am pro certification. I think certifications are good and it’s okay to have easy going certifications that like the level one. But those are just entry points and there should be much deeper learning that’s involved, that takes more time, and is involved with social learning with peers instead of just taking the class and checking off a few boxes on a test.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:00

Yeah, so I think you know, maybe just looking and I’m familiar with Scrum Alliance because I’m associated with that organization. But like what Scrum Alliance has done with CSP, CTC, where the bar is like higher now, if you want to be considered a coach. So, I don’t know, is that something along the lines, maybe it’s not perfect, but I don’t know how familiar you are with the scrum Alliance. It’s path to CSP and also the introduction in the last couple of years of certified team coach.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 13:35

Yeah, I liked that progression. If you look at any certification, society or body or community, they start off fairly loose. And well, only a few certifications that have a very low bar and then over time, they add certifications, they raise the bar, and so forth, and so on. And that’s what’s going on with the scrum Alliance. And of course, we saw the advent of the CPUs, you know, maybe I don’t know, five or seven years ago. And that’s just a direct copy of the PMI group.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:00

PMI? Yeah.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 14:02

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, all that’s good work that the scrum Alliance is doing. But as far as like the state of Agile today, a lot of dubious, ethical things have been going on during their watch. And also the Agile Alliance during their watch, a lot of bad things have happened. So, for example, if we look at the Agile Australia keynote from Martin Fowler, he had some things to say about the state of Agile. In fact, it was called the state of Agile. Have you read that essay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic14:41

Of? I don’t think I have. I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t think I actually read it.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 14:46

Yeah. So, let me if I may, allow me to show you. Let me read some quotes to you. Okay?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:58

Sure. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 14:59

This is all from file 2018, there’s actually a lot of disquiet, a lot of disappointment and a lot of unhappiness in the air. The reality is troubling because much of what is done is fake agile disregarding completely agile values and principles. This is even worse than just pretending to do agile, it’s actually using the name of Agile against the basic principles. We should focus on fighting the habit of imposing process upon teams. And he goes on to say, our challenge now is dealing with fake agile. A lot of what is being pushed is being pushed in a way that, as I said, really goes against a lot of our principles. And yet, what I’m hearing so much is the “agile industrial complex, imposing methods on people. And to me, that is an absolute travesty. I was going to say tragedy, but I think travesty is the better word”. Now, these are direct quotes, I’m quoting him. And then you know. So he said, all those things. Now, the shocking thing about all of that, is that he said those things in 2006, 12 years earlier and the leadership in the Agile industry just ignored him. Had nothing to say about his statements there and he’s an Agile Manifesto signatory. So, all of us collectively, have allowed a lot of dilution and pollution to enter our community, our industry and our careers. We can do a lot better, I mean, agile had past tense, had the potential to be world changing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic16:59

So, what do you think? What is something that’s probably mostly misunderstood by agile, by the leadership I guess? Because a lot of this has to do with, you know, imposing change, as you say, and you talk a lot about inviting. So, what do you think, what is something that people seem to misunderstand about agile and the leadership?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 17:25

Yes, the number one thing that most folks either misunderstand or not emphasizing enough, is the link between success with bringing change to an organization and the engagement of the people that are affected by the change. So, without engagement, you have exactly zero chance of being successful. If those folks don’t engage, there is no way that you’re going to be able to be successful. So, I’m going to read a quote to you now. Here it is, it comes from Jeffrey Moore, he wrote the book, the zone to win. And he’s probably considered one of the greatest management consultants that are living today in the United States. Here’s his quote, he’s not an agile guy, by the way. Okay? Here’s what he says. “Transformations cannot be accomplished without others helping voluntarily. And people don’t help unless you engage them first”. Okay, so that’s the number one thing that’s misunderstood in the Agile industry today by coaches, by Scrum masters. It’s not in the teachings, it’s not emphasized by the institutions, everyone’s looking the other way on this, you know? I want to tell you why. I have a theory about it. If we start talking about engagement and how it’s essential for success, for genuine and lasting organizational change, then it begs the question, how do we engage the people? And nobody wants to go there in the Agile industry? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:07

Why not? 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 19:08

Well, could be bad for business. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:12

Short term or long term?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 19:14

Short term, could be bad for business. When we start talking about how to engage the people, first of all, if the transformation is dependent on anything at all, then it reduces the number of sales opportunities. Right? Because some places won’t have the necessary things in place. Right? So, we wanted to say, it’s all going to be great. It doesn’t depend on anything. No, that’s simply not true. What it really depends on is engagement of the people that are affected because I want to let’s, can we talk, go a little deeper on this? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:45

Alright, yeah. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 19:47

If you’re my manager and you’ve got me by the performance review, which is typical in most companies, well, and I know that you’re dragging your feet on this agile stuff that you don’t like it, and there’s 14 other people like me that report to you, you got 15 people, we’re all picking up on your vibe. Okay? And because you’ve got us by the performance review, if you don’t like agile, I hate it. Okay? I mean that’s how it’s going to go because you got me by the review, and I’m working for you. And if you’re a good manager, you know what, you’ve engendered some loyalty in me. You’ve taught me how to trust you. So, when you say something, I believe you, right? So, even if I’m not afraid of you, even if I just really want to work for you, I’m supporting what you say. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:38

Loyalty? Yeah.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 20:40

Yeah. Like, you’ve looked out for me over the past two or three years, you’ve gone and you’ve defended me a couple times, managers at your level and higher, you pull my fat out of the fire a couple times and that’s just made me just want to work for you constantly. And I will totally go as far as necessary to help you achieve your goals, because I trust you. Right? So, that’s one kind of management relationship. The other one is the fear based one. Both of them are going to respond to your cues about agility. So, if you don’t like agility, I hate it and other people who were if you hate it too. So we talk about engaging the people, we think about the teams. No, the managers, the directors, the other people that might be displaced by this agility stuff. They don’t like it and they have direct reports of this huge cascading effect. And now we can see why the Agile transformations fail because we fail to engage in managers, directors, and everyone else who has a few questions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:54

And I think those are the ones in my experience that are most confused. They don’t know what to do and they don’t have a lot of support as far as what to do but a lot of times, they’re the backbone of the organization. We’re talking to the teams as well as the senior leaders.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 22:10

That’s right. So, that’s the engagement angle, right? So, that’s the number one thing that’s misunderstood and needs to be emphasized throughout the Agile world. Because unengaged people leads to epic fail.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:22

So, you brought up Jeffrey, you brought up Martin and if you could have dinner with three people that are alive that had impact on what we call this, what I call Lean and Agile moment, who would it be and what kind of conversation would you have with them?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 22:44

Yeah, so the first two that I’d want to talk to and I think they both still alive is the guys who wrote the Nunu product development game, Nonaka and Takeuchi. The professors in Japan, who inspired the naming of Scrum and a lot of the concepts in Scrum. In the book and in the article, Nunu product development game and in some of their other articles, they talked about something called subtle control. And if you read their literature, they go, you know, sometimes this can be translated as control by love. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 23:21

Control by love?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 23:23

By love, yeah. So, their whole set of ideas because they don’t translate directly into English. I’d like to sit down with one or both of those guys and go through some of these papers that I read from them and listen carefully to how they describe or what they actually mean, a little deeper. I’d be interested in speaking with them because they had a profound impact on the world because they had a profound impact on Jeff Sutherland. Right? So, a lot of that and later Jeff and Ken. So, these guys are world historical guys who don’t get the credit they really deserve. I’d like to speak with them. That’s two. And then do you have questions on that before I go to the third one?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:13

No, it’s just that I’ve remember reading, I don’t know if it’s them or somebody else. But coming back to the management, directors where they said something around like 15 to 20% of those people all over the organization needs to understand the whole process, the Kaizen thinking and as you were saying and you brought up their names, I was thinking like I would love to, that’s a great idea to actually because a lot a lot of little gets lost in translation and trying to get them to explain what they meant would be an awesome opportunity, so yeah. Cool. But who is the third person?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 24:58

Yeah, the third person well, before I go to the third person, let me just say that I completely believe that those two gentlemen, Nonaka and Takeuchi, they understood fundamentally, that the way to engage people is to give them authorization to influence some of the decisions around the work that they’ll be doing. That deciding how to do your work and making decisions about the work is very engaging and will build a tremendous morale and enthusiasm for the work. I think they understood that implicitly, if you look at their writing, it’s really clear. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:49

Yeah, and you talk about that a lot too as far as like how authority is distributed and how important that is.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 25:57

Yes. Especially the authorization to decide. Right? So, that’s a very special kind of authority, the authorized decision rights. That’s actually the key to engagement. So, I want to just make that point before I go to the third guy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:13

So, that’s all just to kind of for my own curiosity, so that, the decision, right is almost you know, not almost but it’s related to the autonomy, right? 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 26:26

Completely related to autonomy. Yes. And let me go further and say that when we talk about self-organization, what we really mean is self-management in a business goal seeking context, okay? Now, when we talk about self-management, what’s being managed, is decision making. So, if teams are not making enough decisions locally at their level of scope, they will never self-organize because they have no decisions that are important to make so there’s nothing to organize at all. So we’ve talked about self-management, we’re really talking about the management of decisions that affect the group. Right? So, self-organization and what you call autonomy, what I call authorized decision rights, those two things are highly correlated. You will get a lot of self-management, self-organization if people are authorized to decide at their local level, you know, at the team level to say. Okay, so this is like really important. And the other thing about this is that we call people who have a strong need for control, we call them control freaks. But actually, if you read the psychological literature, here’s what you find out. A satisfied need for control is associated with strong psychological health and resilience. Okay? So when people feel out of control, that’s a recipe for depression. That’s a recipe for the opposite of well-being, right? When you feel good, you feel like, okay, I know where the levers are, you know? When I do this, the world does that, my world does that, and I know how this thing works, okay? And then there’s a certain amount of mastery that’s associated with that and it makes me feel good. So, this whole idea that we’re going to get, you know, wonderful, virtuous, agile, self-organization, out of external decision making is just a fairy tale. Just a complete fairy tale. Right? So, I mean, I can tell you how I really feel about that. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:44

So, who’s the third person? 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 28:46

Third person is Deming. Yeah, Deming, I want to talk to Deming and I want to ask him about human nature. What he knows about human nature? What motivates people? What doesn’t motivate people? What engages them, what doesn’t engage them? What are the basic human needs? How does that play out in business? I’d like to have that conversation with him because my sense is that he completely understood that stuff.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:14

I think so too. And that’s one of the things that I see, at least when I talk with Scrum masters and coaches, they don’t fully understand or even see the need to understand the psychology, the human side, the culture side and without that, you don’t see the half of the picture. So, what are your thoughts? What would be your, I guess tip or recommendations or understanding the human nature and psychology thing. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 29:53

I think people go to work to earn a living and then they try to derive meaning from that work. And if I can’t derive meaning from my work, then I’m going to go somewhere else where I can, right? So, it’s not enough just to make money, I also have to feel like I can understand what it means to be doing that work. So, you know, you’ve got some questions around culture and you and I have had many conversations around culture. I wrote this book in 2012 called the culture game. And I said some things in there about culture. That book is not an org change book, it’s a local optimization book. So, if you’re in a big company, and you’re never going to change the system, but you’re a manager, and you have budget, you have some higher fire authority, you can be in meetings, this book will show you how to make things better in your little corner of the world and how to spread those ideas to other managers so that you can do local optimizations with them and make the world, your little corner of the world a little bit better. Since I wrote that book, which is, like 9 years ago, I’ve come to realize something about culture and Scrum and I’d like to share it with you now, if that’s okay. Scrum is a system of decision rights in three roles. We can think of it as an authority distribution schema. Okay? So, when you use Scrum, here’s what you’re doing. You’re saying, the way we make decisions around product and value creation isn’t really working for us or if it is working, we want it to work better. And we’re going to set aside what we were doing before because we’re not satisfied with the results. And we’re going to drop in Scrum. And we’re going to use the scrum decision rights to produce more value faster, with happier people. Okay? That’s the idea with Scrum. So, if you do really good Scrum, the thing I’m about to say is definitely true. If your Scrum is good, very good or great, then you have fully implemented the decision rights as described in the scrum guide. Okay? So, Scrum is a system of decision rights in three roles. And here’s the secret of all the bad Scrum that’s gone around. You can do the full Scrum without the decision rights, all the roles, all the events, all the artifacts, most of the rules but if you don’t implement the decision rights, you’re still going to get a 10 to 15% improvement in everything in measurement. And that’s good enough for most companies. They’re very happy with that. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:49

Which is pretty sad.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 32:50

It’s pretty sad right? But here’s the kind of odd beauty on it. They don’t really have to change anything about how decisions are made in the company to get that 10 or 15%. They just have to pay attention to the detail a little more. And that’s what they’re doing when they bring in Scrum. We might call it Scrum Bot. But you know, the scrum bot that we’ve always heard about for the past decade, all that is a scrum without the decision rights because the decision rights are the hardest thing to implement in Scrum. Okay? Now, here’s the next thing and it relates to culture. I can change the culture of a corner of an organization or the entire organization in three days. Cultural change is ridiculously simple. This is the thing I understand now 11 years later after after I finished writing this book. Okay? And here’s the secret. All you have to do if you want to change the culture, is change the way decisions are made and who makes them? It’s all you have to do. It’s not complex.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:05

So, that’s not necessarily even a structural change. It’s a policy change.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 34:09

Oh, it’s a structural change because it’s how decision get made and who makes them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:13

It forces structural change.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 34:15

And who makes them? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:16

Yeah.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 34:17

Yeah. So, if you bring in true Scrum, you drop it in and the executives and everyone else agree to it and then when the boundaries are tested, you know, everyone gets to talk into when they try to breach these boundaries and they’re like oh, look don’t breach that boundary, that’s going to change your culture in three days.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:37

So, structure or change in really systems, changing the systems and policies within the larger system is probably what you’re talking about?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 34:48

Specifically, the way decisions are made about value creation. So, when you change the way decisions get made, the culture changes right away. That’s been my experience. And now we know why there’s so much crappy Scrum going around because you have to change the way decisions get made if you’re going to do good Scrum. So, you know what I have going on now. And what’s exciting me now is something called the Open Leadership Network; Openleadershipnetwork.com where people can learn about some core patterns, right? So, I have a prediction, I think we’re going to move away from practice frameworks. And we’re going to move towards a focus on patterns that power those practices. So, patterns free us from the tyranny of practice frameworks, right? So, a pattern, that’s like a pattern, for example, like leadership invitation or boundary management or explicit agreements. Those patterns can be implemented in many different ways, with using many different kinds of practices some of which haven’t even been invented yet. But if we focus on the patterns and then we make sure that practice expresses the pattern, then that’s a good practice. Yeah. And I think we’re at that point, in organizational change, we’re starting to realize the static nature of practice frameworks. It got us to a certain point but now we need to embrace the customizing, the tailoring, the empirical nature of how organizational change is different in each company and it’s different from time to time as they move through time and changes. And the patterns are really the future not practice frameworks.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:45

I agree. And recently, I wrote about, I use the analogy of cooks and chefs and following recipes. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 36:51

I saw that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:52

And I talked about, like how we can’t just rely on recipes and these frameworks. Like we need to like step up our game, right? You can’t just have, you know, cooks by the book blindly follow recipes, but we need to have, you know, more experienced cooks and chefs that, like you said as time changes, we need to look at patterns, we need to understand how ingredients interact with each other so if I have not only stuff in there, I know what kind of side effects it’s going to create. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 37:19

Yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:19

So, that means everybody will have to step up their game, which goes back to what you said about, we can’t just send people to a two-day class and expect that they know a recipe. They actually have to develop themselves into good cooks and chefs, so they can leverage these patterns. 

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 37:37

Yes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:38

And build, essentially evolve their frameworks and practices based on the need, rather than blindly following these frameworks.

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 37:46

Yeah, I like that metaphor of cooks and chefs. And I want to add to it now. You know, if we take like a restaurant or fine dining metaphor and you have you have a cook, you know, and then you have, you know, a certain kind of patron sit down. Parton needs to be advised about the meal, right? So, if the meal has certain ingredients in it, they have to know in case they were allergic, right? They need to understand the level of spice that’s going to be in the food or the cook needs to you know, the waiter needs to find out, you know, what level of spices do you like, you know, this kind of thing. So, and we all know, a little bit of spice in food is great, too much kills a whole meal, right? So, there’s that. Right? So, I think the biggest thing that could happen now to manifest progress in the org change space, is imagine a world where every coach knew and understood and then executed on the idea that we need to educate the executive about the risks and rewards of various approaches that range from pure command and control, delegation approaches, rollout and imposing and at the other end, seeking voluntary participation, by inviting people and seeing who the new leaders are, putting those leaders in a spot when they’re bringing anything forward on behalf of the executives sort of like the executive on the ground and work with the willing people that would be at the other extreme. So then, executives need to understand this range of options from pure old school legacy command control, all the way down to you know, a purely Invitational approach and then all of this sort of spectrum in between, right? If we do that, then we’re going to manifest real progress in the world.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:02

But doesn’t that start on the top of the organization, with the board, with the senior leaders? And how much do you see that actually there is buying, there’s that type of understanding at the right level of the organism. Essentially, with that authority level that you can change the fine, you know, how you budget, you can change your compensation policies and other policies. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: Daniel Mezick 40:31

Well, if we take a couple steps back from that, we look at the relationship between the consultant and the executive buyer. The very first thing that needs to happen in my opinion is concerning like the implementation of Scrum. We need to sit down the entire leadership team and spend four to six hours with the whole leadership team, where we’re going to walk through some of the highly controversial rules and statements and decision rights that are described in the scrum guide and ask them if they really want to do this and explain what it takes to support what the issues, opportunities and risks are and make sure that they’re really down to support Scrum and their organization. Then they have a legitimate shot at doing something great. Until then, they’re just shooting in the dark, they not getting a full education. I’ve done this lots of times with lots of executive teams and I’ve actually had executive teams just go we just can’t do this, that’s not right for our company, we’re not ready for it. You know what, they saved a whole bunch of money and they also sidestepped a lot of harm to people.