Geoff Watts

 TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:51

Let’s start with who is Geoff Watts.

Speaker: Geoff Watts  00:59

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:03

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  01:07

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:06

How did you get into the Agile space?

Speaker: Geoff Watts  02:10

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:45

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  04:20

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:34

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  08:25

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:32

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  10:37

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:39

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  13:12

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:06

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  15:56

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:29

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  18:57

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:37

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  24:34

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:22

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  28:53

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:10

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  32:16

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:48

I was gonna say survival is optional, right? 

Speaker: Geoff Watts  33:51

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:39

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  35:55

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:06

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  37:21

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:09

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  40:29

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:40

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  43:36

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:55

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  45:14

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

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:46

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

Speaker: Geoff Watts  47:05

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