Gunther Verheyen

“Scrum is more about behavior than it is about process. The process aspect of scrum is only the mere beginning.” – Gunther Verheyen

TRANSCRIPT: 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:32

Who’s Gunter Verheyen? 

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 00:38

Gunter Verheyen is a Belgian guy. I live in Belgium in Antwerp. Beautiful city, by the way. Have you ever been there?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:51

No.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 00:51

Have you been in Belgium? No? Okay, you should come over someday, once we can travel again. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:56

Would love that.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 00:57

Nowadays, I call myself an independent Scrum caretaker. And I’ve added to that I call myself an independent Scrum caretaker on a journey of humanizing the workplace with Scrum. And for some strange reason, that seems to resonate with a lot of people. So, that gives me some hope and maybe also some inspiration about the future of agile and the future of Scrum. Because the way that it resonates with people, I tend to see that as sort of indication, yeah, we’re on to something and I might be on the right track or on the right path. So there’s this hope, that’s a good thing. Because I think, I don’t know, Scrum has been around for a while, as you know. 25 years exactly was celebrated by the end of last year, the end of 2020. And what I’ve noticed, and that’s why I started calling myself independence scrum caretaker [inaudible 01:59]. What I started noticing in those first 20, 25 years of Scrum, we have achieved a lot so let’s be really happy for that and even grateful to all the people around the world that are actually applies from doing it, employing it, trying it out, and doing great stuff with it. So, we have achieved a lot. And just to name a couple of firm so that cross functional thinking of the work of development. So, cross functional teams, moving from old school, fixed price projects to a more product-oriented way of thinking. We’re getting to the idea of a product owner also, to have achieved a lot. But I started calling myself an independent scrum caretaker, when I left scrum.org. I don’t know whether you know, Scrum.org. So, the organization of catering. So, I’d been working sort of exclusively; partnering exclusively with Ken and Scrum.org from 2013 until 2016. And when I left him, I wanted to be truly on my own two feet, not be tied into any type of structure and be out and do consulting as well because something that scrum.org doesn’t do. I had to think about a name, a title or whatever, a role or description or something. Because you know, LinkedIn wants us to do that. And I felt like rather than giving myself an established whatever title because I’m just a one person company. Just me. So, I started my own little company back in 2013. Exactly, to stop partnering with Ken. Because I had been in consulting the years before that. So when I left in 2016, I had to come up with a sort of title for me. Because it’s almost like to state stupidly, a mandatory field on forms and on LinkedIn as well. And I felt like why would I not call myself for what I believed that I am, what I like to do, maybe how I like to be seen. That something I feel that reflects who I am. And that’s enough sort of intuitively came up with the idea scrum caretaker. Because scrum caretaker for me reflects the idea of taking care. So, it already has the sort of people and human notion in it. But I called myself scrum caretaker because I do care for people and the human side of our work. But I also care a lot for Scrum that I’ve been doing that since 2003. So, that’s quite a long time. I’m so passionate about it.  And it sort of turned out fine because it resonates with people, because I feel people have a need for this increased focus emphasis on the people aspect of scrum. And that’s why I say, I think we’re onto something here because in those first 20, 25 years of scrum, we have achieved a lot. But a lot of people still are sort of stuck. Can I say that? In looking at Scrum as these entities.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:11

Process or?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 05:14

Process, products and so on. But what about people? So, what about adding people to the formula, the equation? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:24

So, that’s, yeah.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 05:24

Products, process, yes, but also people. Product in a general term, that’s where Scrum comes from. Nowadays, it’s more about dealing with complex problems in general. But about that and what I call scrum’s DNA, you know is empiricism and self-organization. And I feel we have achieved a lot from projects to products, cross functional thinking, the product owner role, the business involvement, crossing bridges between IT and business and product management and so on, we have achieved a lot. But I miss the focus on that second aspect of scrum’s DNA, self-organization, which is the people aspect. So, empiricism is slowly getting through. That means a lot of organizations have, whether they like it or not abandoned the old way of thinking, the linear way of thinking large phases, the industrial approach, the waterfall approach. So, the empiricism is coming through and using empiricism to inspect and adapt, build great products, fine. But I feel still very difficult for management, leadership, organizations and unfortunately, even often teams and self to really grasp is the idea of self-organization. Being able to organize yourself for your work within boundaries against objectives and goals. Without anybody outside of your ecosystem, your team or your product or whatever.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:54

Why do you think that is?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 06:56

What you should do and how you should organize. Because [cross-talking 06:58]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:58

Why do you think that is, like, yeah? Like, and I completely agree, we’ve gone, you know, a long way. And you know, one of the things that resonated with me, with the latest thing that I did in Utah, with the co-signers of Agile Manifesto. There were six of them and they all reemphasize that focus on individuals’ interactions over processing tools and people, the people side they use. So, why do you think you know, 20, 25 years later, we’re still talking about it’s all about people, it’s all about interactions?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 07:35

Yeah. Because software development itself as one example, huge example of complex challenges, because it’s about complexity meaning, a lot of uncertainties and predictability and so, requires intelligent people to solve that, to bring their brains together and to tackle that. So in a way, the fact that people are organizations, let’s say are increasingly embracing empiricism is because although it’s really not easy but within the whole, it’s even the easy part of Scrum in that sense, it’s a lot sort of the process, what I like to call the gold part. It’s how to organize, it’s setting up a process. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:21

So, it’s also the easy part, right? 

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 08:23

Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:23

It’s the easiest part.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 08:25

Yeah, it’s the easier part compared to the people aspect, which is the, what I call the warmer parts, so not the cold, the warmer part because it’s more difficult to cross. And in that sense, it’s great that you bring up that first statement of the Agile Manifesto. Because it means that we are still working towards shifting the balance from processes and tools towards people, interactions, individuals as well. And as because a lot of organizations still are in the mindset of seeing Scrum too much as an old school process. I like to see Scrum as a process. But you know, 2001, the Agile Manifesto, when they said individuals and interactions over processes and tools, what they meant with processes by then was big phases, big things, waterfall as well as big size, large size, governors, meetings, hand over sign offs and so on. That’s what they meant with process. For me, Scrum is a very lightweight process. I call it a servant process rather than a commanding process. Because those large processes are commanding processes. They tell people what to do. They’ve got exhaustive, detailed instructions on who should be doing what, what should be happening at that point in time. Scrum doesn’t do that. Scrum actually, for me, Scrum is on the correct side of the equation, meaning it supports interactions and individuals. In essence, scrum does no more than try to invoke, sometimes even provoke people to interact, to collaborate. That’s what I said in a book I wrote about Scrum back in 2013 and there’s a third edition coming up; My Scrum, a pocket guide. Scrum is more about behavior than it is about process. The process aspect of Scrum is only the mere beginning. And imagine it’s already we always say, you know, that expressions simple, not easy.  It’s already very not easy. The next step will be the people aspect, seeing the scrum process really on the side of interactions and individuals. Because with Scrum, we create a frame, we try to create a lightweight structure that gives people focus, give them some boundaries, within which to again, self-organize. But self-organization means we’re not going to tell you how to do that. We just give you literally a frame within which to do that. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:59

Some compact of guardrails right or something like that?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 11:02

Yeah. And within those guardrails, within that frame, it’s all about the sort of, let’s say, what you get out of Scrum. The benefit, you will realize with Scrum will all depend on how well people gel, collaborate, interact. How they in a way use Scrum, to in short cycles called sprint, solve and tackle problems, do that together collectively. And that self-organization sort of the foundation, the empirical process with the events and as well, it’s just a start. Because let’s say, there’s a lot of like you would have in books, there’s a lot of whitespace. You have to fill that in. If you don’t do that, you’re adopting the process, but you’re not adopting the process as a framework within which people can tackle challenges.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:55

And change the behavior, like you said, so like, how would somebody change the behavior? So, I agree, it’s all about changing the behavior and there are certain things that influence the behavior like mindset, right, like the systems that we work in. So, from your perspective, what are the best, what are some of the ways they’ve seen that not only focusing on the process, but also the behavior side?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 12:21

Well, it’s why also in my book, 2013, I wrote about the scrum values. And I think the scrum values can be really helpful, at least as sort of what I call a compass; sort of gives direction. It has a second purpose too, I’ll come back on that. Because what I like about the scrum values is that you can translate them in a way into behavior. But in that translation, because in the end the Scrum values aren’t just five words, it’s what you mean those words, what you mean with commitment and focus and openness and respect and courage. Because you can give lots of meanings and interpretations. And then you need already some courage to translate those words, in the context for which you want to apply for meaning complexity. And again, working with people and then you can translate them into tangible behaviors is that’s what I tried to do with a blog note I wrote about it and then put it in my book. And am I even creating workshops around on scrum values to help people think about the values because you can’t, in a way, you cannot teach values to people but values drive behavior. That’s why I say Scrum, actually, it’s more about behavior than about process. And then those values in a way they give us a sense of direction, a compass to help us navigate and collaborate with each other.[cross-talking 13:54]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:54

Yeah, no, I completely agree. I’ve recently in some of my workshops started to, especially in the leadership once started to also tie in, you know, put between the value; Scrum values and the behavior, put the beliefs because we could have same values but we don’t differ a lot of times in values, everybody wants to get respected. Right? But what does respect mean to you and what do you believe about respect is a lot of times where people have disconnect and have different type of behaviors. And it’s been really interesting how we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about values and beliefs. But like you said, they’re the things that drive the behavior. 

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 14:44

It’s sort of an ethical side and by the way, I like how you call that beliefs. Because when I say values drive behavior, it’s very similar to saying that your beliefs will show in your behavior. So, what are your beliefs? And then what I think is important with Scrum is you can’t teach values, you can’t impose values. But you can try to reveal that. And like you said, you can try to reveal people’s beliefs by looking at their behavior and help them think about it and maybe grow into another different beliefs and another way of believing another set of fellows. Yeah, that’s great.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic15:28

Yeah. And the way that I tell people there is a litmus test. If somebody is pissing you off, there is a value that’s being, you know, violated. So, if it’s trust, you know, courage, whatever it is, if you’re getting pissed off, you know, some value is getting violated. If you’ve been happy about something, that means somebody is reinforcing the value that you have. So like, you can see, you know, and going back to the interactions, you can see if you’re living those values, right? Because we talked about, like, it’s about embracing and living those values, not just saying, I believe in, you know, in this or I value this, but actually, you know, do you live those? 

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 16:17

Can I build a little bit on that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:19

Yeah, please.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 16:19

Because the thing that you say, because you call it a litmus test, and that is exactly sort of what I just called the second purpose of this scrum values. So, values drive behavior. And the second thing is, so it’s sort of a composite in a way the scrum value to think about and the second not really purpose, but the second way to look at is that litmus test. So, what I say behavior expresses values, which means that in a way, what I call in a paper I wrote about it scrum values as your scrum adoption continuous and growth, and in a way becomes more sophisticated, that means that the people, the sort of the players, your Scrum players will focus less on the process, following the events, the meetings, the time boxes, and so on and they will start in graining and expressing different behaviors. And in that sense, in a way, what I say the way, the way that the scrum values are being enacted, is a sort of barometer of your adoption of Scrum and even the health of your team. Because in the way that you see in a team, less focus on process, more on interaction and behaviors. And in those interactions and behaviors driven by discovery and to see sort of commitment, increasing, engaging people people, re-energized and inspired by the work being open to each other, but in engaging in respectful disagreements. Not agreeing, but respectfully solving that in order to tackle complex problems that requires a lot of courage. You know, in essence, the way that values are being enacted is sort of a barometer of the state of your Scrum and the health of your teams.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:10

And key to that, you mentioned courage and you mentioned, you know, trust is a key aspect of that, and to have the courage, you know, a lot of times to be vulnerable and to build that trust is huge. And it’s tough in organizations, I think, especially large organizations. And most of my work has been here in United States. But what have you seen like, what are some of the things that are misunderstood about Scrum or that people find the most challenging about Scrum? Besides embracing values and that whole behavior, like what else do you see that maybe at the organizational level?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 18:56

Yeah, a problem with a lot of you know this things called HL transformations? I see you’re smiling, that good. So, a lot of them are about Agile and fire scrum. And they are what I call way too explicit. In that sense, large organizations, how do they try to go through change by setting up a change project. And they’ve lots of stuff that people have to now follow. So, they enforce change upon people. So, it’s really explicit. It’s in a change project, it’s a separate thing with managers and project managers and so on. But I feel that’s not how you grow, you evolve your company. I believe a scrum transformation should be more implicit rather than explicit. Because in Scrum, we’ve got this beautiful thing called a retrospective. So, by the end of every sprint, you’ll get a beautiful opportunity with a team and all teams across the organization to reflect, improve, change things.  So, in a way that should be the driver of change by every retrospective look into what can you do. But even then, what I believe is impossible, it is impossible for me to properly adopt Scrum, try to get, you maximize your benefits you get from Scrum, without rethinking the structures around Scrum. Meaning how do you deal with governance? How do you deal with this relationship with product managers, relationship with sales people, HR strategies or sales and sales processes? Well, you can’t. And that’s something a lot of management or leadership still likes to think I believe is that, you know what Scrum and agile is just for the teams. It’s just for delivery, it’s just for development. And that often, they establish Scrum teams within the existing departmental structure, silos and so on. And then you’ve got all those little micro teams, often they’re isolated.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:01

Even within teams, right? Yeah, even within the teams, you have people that are not cross functional. So, you have the scrum in silos. And then you have inside the scrum teams, you have silos of people that are not willing to step outside of their comfort zone and do that.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 21:18

Rather than like in the past, what you had is sort of work being thrown over by individuals to each other. It’s by individuals within teams. But let’s say that we might go pass that already. But still on top of that, it’s sort of micro teams throwing work over the wall to each other. So, there’s no view to sort of end-to-end value creation and the total delays that all those teams have. So, what I miss with those organizations is, here we go again, the courage, to what I call rethink the structures around Scrum. Rethink, think in terms of what is a product, what is a service or more generic, what is the complex problem that we’re trying to solve? And then organize your Scrum to tackle that problem or deliver that product or that service optimally. And everybody sees the value but nobody has the courage or the insight, whatever, to sort of tear down all those departmental walls between those teams. Because those teams in different departments, you’re working for the same product or the same service. So, if you would organize your Scrum for your product, you will start with product, and then set up your Scrum teams to ultimately serve your product. And that would be regardless where those skills and expertise would come from, which department. You would organize your scrum teams across those departments. But then you can’t like, chop rotate then, hierarchy status [inaudible 22:49] 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:50

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you know, I would even go further and I would say like, you will start with the customers and users and see what products and services that they’re willing to pay for right? And then go down. But you’ve probably seen this too, where it doesn’t really take hold or the so called agile transformations, which by the way, I think most of them fail to do anything that they intend to. They fail until like, really, the board in large companies or the top people in the company fully understand the differences between agile and agility. And that it’s not just the implementing bunch of processes. That really they need to change the complete structure of the organization, to be that product based, service based, experience based whatever it is. And if you think about it, who can do that? Only few people and organizations. And where I’ve seen it work is where you have a support from the board and president or somebody like president to actually make those changes. Because I’ve been in a situation where I remember this guy, I was telling him like, just as far as previous experiences what happened and he’s like Miljan, you know, this means you know, I’m going to lose my authority in a sense in that, kind of those words like you know, I thought this was only for the teams and you’re saying now that you know, everything, you’re going to flip everything, or we going to flip everything upside down. And it’s like you said it’s not courage. People don’t have the courage and willingness to, you know, you describe yourself as a caretaker; Independent Scrum Take care, sorry, caretaker. But not many leaders see themselves as the organizational caretakers. And I think that’s one way to look at yourself is how are you taking care of the organization and the people in it. And then sometimes it’s doing that certainly without serving, you know, serving the people in the company, not serving your own needs. Any thoughts on that?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 25:11

Yeah, absolutely. It’s sort of what you say, it’s in a way about agility. Because what I like to say is Scrum cannot be the purpose of Scrum. You don’t do Scrum, because of Scrum, you do Scrum for some different purpose, for some different reasons. And, like you said, is to build better products and services, increase customer satisfaction, to get more, to deliver more value to your users, discover new services that might be valuable as well. But also, in a way to increase what you just call the agility of your organization. So, like when I worked with Ken back in 2013 to 2016, we try to stay away sometimes even move away from the term HR because it became a very confusing term because everybody asked, given the success of a HR and a manifesto, everybody was giving a different meaning also. So, we try to help people think in terms of what you just said; agility so, that totally connects to your baseline of your podcast, from agile to agility. So, we try to help people think about agility. And agility for me essentially is a state, a way of being but a state for your organization. And that’s not business agility, that’s not technical agility, it’s not IT agility, because we want to transcend all those sort of specialized focuses let’s say. So, it’s about agility. So, enterprise agility, organizational agility, the ability to act with agility, swiftly with speed, responsiveness, being able to change direction, being able to innovate, to be able to innovate maybe drive your competitors crazy with all the things that you do. So, and we say that, if you want to do Scrum, it’s to increase your agility, which probably expresses itself in your ability to go to market faster or increase your customer satisfaction, increase your financial benefits as well. But also make in a way your people happier, more engaged. So, it’s not just about value for the user, it’s value for the organization but also value for the people doing the work. And that’s why I like sort of a 360 degrees on things. But agility, scrum as a tool to increase your agility and your ability to respond and to deliver value. And then how to achieve that, because a lot of the existing organizations are very rigid organizations. For me, a rigid or rigidity is the antithesis of agility. So, rigid versus agile, where do you want to go? We have established large organizations. And then what I tried to bring to leadership and CXO teams often is because at some point in time, I started describing this thing called the illusion of agility. So, a lot of organizations grow through HR transformations and I fully agree with you, most of them, if not all, tested, end up what I described delivering an illusion of agility. That is not truly agility. You’ve gone to lots of things, you’re imposing a new process on people. You make sure that all your teams across the organization now all work on two-week sprints with the same start and end date. You make them apply the same practices, use the same tools, the same digital tools and some same electronic tools. They all have to use JIRA, TFS, whatever. And you’re building up what I call an illusion of agility. You are fooling yourself into believing that your agility is growing. But you have all those micro teams handing over work to each other, which means that the overall value stream is still very long, it’s full of delays, it’s full of waste, it’s full of rework and so on. And it’s not helping so at some point in time, I know most organizations go to something what I call, so they build up an illusion of agility and that is shown by what I call the deflation by reality or the illusion of agility.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:32

Wake up call?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 29:34

 Yeah, some morning, it’s a hard wake up call, very painful. They wake up finding out that customer satisfaction not improving, benefits not improving, market share not increasing, teams still leaving the company, top skill people still leaving the company, unable to hire great, new people that are full of brains and so they wake up, it’s deflation by reality. And they wake up, oh my God, this wasn’t truly HR. My sort of antidote to that because, you know, in scrum and HR, you know, it’s all about feedback loops. So gathering feedback and then acting upon that feedback. So, it’s not just about gathering feedback, it’s more about acting upon that feedback. In Scrum terms, I like to say that inspection without adaptation is pointless. None of the things in Scrum are about collecting data, reports, logs, whatever about the past. No, we start by looking at the past, observing and inspecting but the goal is always to adapt. So, everything in Scrum for me should be what I call forward looking. Every Scrum event and Sprints as a whole should get your eyes on the future. So, we start from the past, but the goal is to look at the future. Well, if our observation is an illusion of agility, that’s not enough. It’s good to make us laugh and we can whatever and brag about, you know. But what are we going to do to help people get across that and do better? And that’s what I ended up with saying illusion of agility avoid it. If you’re soon enough, or get over it, once it does shows. Reimagining your scrum. Because the message I bring to a lot of CXO teams is, let’s reimagine your scrum. And in that sense, let’s make it manageable again, let’s make it controllable again, by making it small again. Meaning my suggestion is, let’s look at all scrum initiative that you have going in the company, and let’s pick out one, a meaningful, a real one. Let’s look at it and let’s go back to the basics of scrum, the original intent of scrum. What is the product that Scrum initiative is about or several initiatives? So, let’s look at the product, let’s reorganize the scrum teams to ultimately serve the product or the service. Let’s have a real product owner, somebody with ownership over the product.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:04

That’s a big one too, right? As far as like just business buying in and another one that I don’t see is like you have, unwilling to combine those product teams and combine business and IT and you really have product owners without you know, any say. But if maybe you then build on this inspecting on the past and you know actually doing something about it in the future, I spoke with Tobias Mayer last week and he said that we should be happy. Like you know, this 20 years, like these, if you look at the history of management, history of you know, kind of how these 20 years is not a lot and maybe these last 20, 25 years, 30 were about agile and maybe the next 20 years will be about agility. What are your thoughts on how does the future look based on where we are today and where we’re coming from? What are some trends?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 33:07

I had a test of several years ago that when you look at the future itself and for me what I said by then is the future of HR is in the small because it connects to that idea. Rather than trying to transform and transition all teams across the whole organization almost overnight or over the weekend towards something that is sort of an industrialized version of Scrum and agile. I like to make it small and then go take it step by step. So, initiative after the initiative, convert that into what I call a small product hub, that might be a round of service. So, have it sort of ecosystem within the organization around a product. Have all the skills, expertise within the hub to ultimately serve that product. And then gradually move from that old school pyramid structure to a network structure of prototypes where leadership and management is about connecting those hubs but not interfering with the self-organizing aspects of them. And then for me, we create HR organizations, because those become more flexible structures, rather than the pyramid rigid structure. Go from HR structures, meaning network systems [cross-talking 34:30] Ecosystems, yeah. They can grow, they can shrink, they can disappear, they can pop up without sort of destroying the whole of it. So, it increases flexibility. And that’s where I want to go with reimagining your scrum. Rethink your scrum, one initiative, let’s do that initiative, then take the next initiative. And by then, gradually transform, literally transform your pyramid into a network structure. So, away from the industrial, large folding, whatever thinking making it small. And you know what, when people, organizations go through that phases, yes, often of that illusion of agility, often two, three to four years, imagine how much work you could have done in four years time by making it small, growing something, expanding it, adding something to it, doing something more. But it seems to be organizations want to go too fast and therefore, they become very slow.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:39

Well, also like, I think what I’ve seen, it goes back to what you said about HR and about, like, you know, a lot of times leaders come in, transformational leaders, right, that companies hire and they don’t have a lot of time. So, they know and they’re in a, you know, under a lot of pressure and they try to push without, you know, a lot of, in my opinion, a lot of experience, they bring in the consulting companies, big consulting companies, tell them what to do. But under that pressure, they just try to do whatever they can and they try to build on top of, you know, usually it’s not a first transformation. By now, it’s, you know, companies of, at least in IT companies have gone through several of those. And how, you know, from an HR perspective, what have you seen in some of the shifts in HR and how HR and finance too, how we budget, you know? Going from cost centers to funding products and services, what have you seen in that space?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 36:49

Well, again and you’ll confirm, indeed, the fact that it’s often way too explicit because you’ve got all this feeling and exerting pressure on people is not helpful. But what we’ve tried to do is help companies and organization leadership, at least managers move away from continuously judging people for that individual performance. And try to look at in terms of agility in a way ability to deliver value or to create value. For instance, [inaudible 37:23] rather than a cost center, which is the typical view on old school IT but we delivery part of it, turn it into a value center, many focus on value and then look for balances. How much value are we getting out of this versus how much money in away goes in. That means value, not just money being earned. But it might also be customer satisfaction, competition being blown away and so on. And in order to do that part of the end of that, that people aspect of Scrum self-organization, that requires a very different stance in a way from people from HR. Because it’s in a way people from HR, first of all, we have to get rid of the term HR; human resources because humans aren’t resources.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:09

Alright, yeah. Somebody said… you know about that joke, sorry to interrupt. When developer was referred to as a resource and I think it was a manager and developer and one other person. And the developer turned around and said, if you call me a resource one more time, I’ll call you overhead to the manager.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 38:33

Great. That’s a good answer, yeah. Because people are people, people are not resources, right? Because resources, like sounds like people would be considered as robots, programmable, replaceable pieces of machinery. It’s not what we are. We are people, human beings. We’ve got emotions, we’ve got a private life and so on. And what we try to build on and that’s actually part of an agile transformation tool, certainly with scrum. You try to build on people’s natural ability to be agile, to adapt, to able to capitalize on new insights, new experiences and so. So that’s what we tried to build on. Now, how can you convert your HR human resources to something more respectful and more like a facilitating services towards helping people, really self-organize, develop themselves? So, over the past year, I spoke a lot about humanizing the workplace with defenses or with people it resonates. Before that I called it engagement is the key. Engagement of people across the world is extremely and I would almost say dangerously low. That means across the road, it turns out from surveys and research that only 50 and up to like 30% of people of the workforce say that they’re really engaged, meaning believing their company, coming to work in a spirited way with energy and so on buying into what the company is doing. Most of people go to work like sort of couldn’t care less attitude. More of I wanted to go home as quickly as possible again. So, there’s an enormous 15 to 30% only are really engaged. Look at the room for improvement. We can try to re-engage 70, up to 85% of the workforce. That is massive, that is huge. So, engagement is the key. So, how can we build on people’s ability to self-organize, people’s ability to be agile, adapt with Scrum and help them develop themselves, rather than telling them what to do?  All again within a framework, within those boundaries.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:48

Just to build on that, that the you know, telling them what to do. Like, I usually describe that I actually asked people in classes and workshops, how many of you actually wake up every week excited to work? And it’s roughly like that, you know, only 30% of people, right? But the other thing, the other two points that are interesting too, is if we are working on multiple projects and the whole cost of context switching is another thing. And then we, you know, I don’t know what it is today. But you probably know, you know, in the past how much we’ve spent on building stuff that’s not valuable. So, you have people that are disengaged, you have people that are context switching and building things that are not the most valuable things for the company. And somehow Scrum is going to fix all of that, right?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 41:37

Yeah, but it’s part of the idea of thinking in terms of what is value, what is valuable? And like only use features in a system that value will get them out because it will improve your life a lot, not engaged workforce that is not adding, that is not helping your ability to deliver value. So, something that you want to work on. We want to do that in HR, we want to build on self-organization, we want to check in with people regularly. But again, we got an event by the end of every speech that checking with people regularly, how do you feel about this stuff? And I hope that those things will also reveal the idea of multitasking or multi-projecting and so on. And it’s good to bring it up because that’s self-organization. Self-organization means for me more than just allowing people to organize themselves in sprints. In essence, being self-managing. So we’re not going to intervene as external, whatever, within your sprint. But there’s more to Scrum. And I’m glad you bring it up because I’ve seen it in a lot of organizations. Sometimes teams become really what I call highly collaborative, they really gel, they get to know each other, they are really flowing. In that sense, performance emerges from that because performance for me is not the goal, collaboration is the goal and performance is a side effect of that. And then a lot of them often plummet again. Why? Because they are being pulled out of the team or their product owner are being sent to another team or the main developer, whatever. And like yeah but there’s more to Scrum self-organization. Scrum self-organization means for me also that if people have the intelligence, the creativity, to organize their own work in short cycles, called sprints and openly, transparently show what they’ve done by the end of the sprint to learn from it, capture feedback as well, if people can do that, that for me also means that people can be accountable for their own team formation. That means external forces outside of the team are not only stopping to interfere in sprints but they should also stop to interfere in team composition.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 43:48

So, do you think that’s why the latest Scrum guide went from self-organizing to self-managing teams? Because the way that I read it, you know, self-organizing teams decide the how, but self-managing teams decide what and how, do you think that’s the case or am I misunderstanding that?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 44:06

No, I have to say that I agree, that’s another thing. For me, self-management, meaning managing your own work on a daily basis in sprint, it’s only the start of self-organization. Self-organization, sort of the next step at least will be for me, what I call not just self-managing teams but also self-designing teams, meaning teams that know who should be on our team, who should not be on a team. So, for me, the self-managing already means the what and the how and the why. On top of that, I believe that we should go for what I call self-designing teams, so not just self-managing. Self-designing teams, people stopping to in a way tear teams apart all the time. Because you break up team dynamics, you break up personal relationships, you break up a system that you can’t really express in words. Which is, again, more much more than the process. So, from self-managing to also self-designing and also to avoid what you just described as context switching because that’s crucial. Because context switching, people, I don’t sometimes do PMO, the department head to senior, whatever saying that you should now go work on that team for the next couple of sprint and I need you over there. That is, at least not helpful. It’s not respectful again, for people. And it expresses a way of thinking in terms of utilization. And that again goes back to the idea that people are considered as resources. Because if you don’t consider people resources, you wouldn’t be trying to take a piece of machinery from one machine and put it into another one. You will just leave the team be for what it is, a combination of people that get to know each other. And you know what I’m thinking in terms of you ever have to feel that one person’s days and weeks of work because he has some sort of special skill. That’s again utilization in this whole view on what is actually should be a creative process. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:17

How much have we been conditioned, to actually be commanded and control because like, I go in large organizations and somebody that’s been there for 20 years or so doesn’t want any responsibility. Just give me, tell me what to do. And I see as a result of being conditioned in that culture and that system and it’s hard.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 46:43

I agree. It’s a result of a couple of decades of conditioning, also what I call oppression. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 46:52

That’s a good word for it, yeah.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 46:54

Yeah, we have taken out all initiative, all ideas that people might bring up. And why did we do that? Because or how did we achieve that in a way because every time in the past, we said to people, you can bring in your own ideas, whenever we didn’t like it, we chop their heads off. And if we keep doing that, for a couple of decades, of course, people will show no more initiative, every now coming with scrum and beautiful ideas about self-organization and they don’t believe us anymore. And I totally get that. So, we have conditioned people. So it takes quite a while to remove that sort of layer of conditioning and show them that now, no, we really mean it. This is serious. And that’s sometimes what you need to do with management and leadership, ask them to be patient because you can’t suddenly over 1, 2, 3 Sprints of time, undo all of that conditioning of the past decades.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:54

That goes back to the behaviors and only started with. Maybe, to conclude here, let’s talk for a little bit about the scrum master role. You know, it’s been 25 years since Scrum was defined. And still it seems today that the scrum master role seems to be so misunderstood by so many. Do you share that thought and why do you think that is, yeah?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 48:27

I’ve seen at least some ups and downs in those 17, 18 years of Scrum in the perception of that role. Although I think essentially, it’s still the same role. It looks like they’re struggling with it a little bit in the scrum guide to describe it as well. And it seems to be this tendency nowadays that it’s just a coach role, sitting back you’re not doing anything. Like, I don’t think so. I think Scrum master is also about doing something. The only thing you don’t do is command and control. But you’re not just sitting back, sometimes even by we do nothing, it includes some aspect of doing something because it means being connected, observing and ultimately, at least always in scrum, by the end of everything spent at a retrospective, try to inject, sometimes indirectly, sometimes in a very subtle way, try to inject some of your observations of what happened during the sprint into the team. But in a way that you want to get people to think about it for themselves, not tell them. So, it’s quite an active role. What I’ve seen over the past five, six years in some organizations where they didn’t have scrum masters anymore. Because in all of them were I don’t have all this over there but in country, I live in Belgium but I work a lot in the Netherlands, also organizations and they’re sort of a form of country, which is beautiful. But at some point in time, it all had to be like things like DevOps or something and so on. And suddenly the scrum master role was at least less prominent. And then it disappeared a little bit. It was sort of something you did if you had some time left. And again, sometimes things take time. So, it took a while for a lot of organizations to see why is this not happening anymore? Why is that not happening? Why is that problem not being handled? And then you’re going to ask, oh I think we have a role for that thing. Oh yeah, that’s right, Scrum master. Because but we don’t have a scrum master. So sometimes you try to [cross-talking 50:32]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:32

How much is it like the perceived value of the Scrum Master? Because a lot of times when I talk to senior leaders and, you know, it’s like, why am I paying this person so much? Because all they think is they facility. And then on the other hand, there’s a lot of Scrum masters that see this as an opportunity just to switch from, you know, what I’m doing to the scrum master role without really embracing and understanding what that role is about. So, it’s kind of twofold. One is misunderstanding about the role and the other one is desire to get better at that role as a scrum master.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 51:11

The unfortunate thing is that even Scrum masters themselves misunderstand the role often. It’s like yeah but I’m the Scrum Master, I can’t do anything. Of course, you can do something like indirectly ask open questions, challenge people, there’s a lot of things you can do. Sometimes you want to teach a technique, bring in a technique and so. The question I often ask in classes, also in leadership is, how many professional sports teams do you know that are both successful, performing whatever you want to call it and do not have a team coach or a team trainer? No, of course not. Because a team sports with a group of people, there’s always a trainer. Let’s call him a trainer for the time being. And then the second question is, what does the trainer do while the game is being played? Well, there’s not much you can do, you watch, you’re on the sideline, you can try to shout and so on but the team probably doesn’t hear you, doesn’t hear your anyhow. But once again, you’ve start asking questions to the team, you think about strategies and tactics and so. That’s the role of a scrum master. Now, in a world of utilization, people are considered as resources. The value of the role of the Scrum Master is fairly difficult to get across. Because you can’t say in terms of utilization, you can’t say how much time you will be spending or what sort of work but you’re making the whole system more fluent. And the only difference is with the game in teams sports is that by the rugby, I believe you have, and that’s where we get the name scrum from. On a daily basis, there’s this little huddle, of the team coming together. So, even during the game taken already make some corrections. So, it’s even more dynamic. But you’re like the team trainer, you do more, you think about psychology, well-being of people, you talk with people individually, talk with them as a group, you take it to the retrospective. If needed throughout the game, if you want and a player comes down to the side line to ask, hey trainer, and you’re there to answer questions as well but you’re making the whole, sort of a well-oiled thing. But the difficulty is that a lot of organizations only see the value of a scrum master once there is no Scrum Master anymore. That’s difficult because it’s a very civil role. And that don’t get skipped from the scrum guard again, which is my view sort of unfortunate. I truly believe in that servant leadership. Now, that they changed in the scrum guide because it was often reduced to servancy only. No, you’re a leader by serving people, you have authority without power. Your authority is from your knowledge, insights into Scrum, into how the game is played, and your leadership is in how you help people develop themselves become better as individuals. And as a team, so you are serving the team but at the same time, you’re the leader. So, it’s not just all the services, it’s not just old school bossing people around, it’s a combination. And that’s a difficult thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:26

What do you think about the part that they added that the scrum master is responsible for the team effectiveness? That’s something new that’s been added that’s pretty explicit now what Scrum Master is accountable for.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 54:43

Well, the funny thing is that in a way, it’s sort of it has always been because you’re in that sense accountable for the effective use of Scrum to help them become better as a team, deliver more value, be also be more engaged, more inspired as a team. And you’ve got a whole toolset available for that. The only thing you can’t do is command and control. So even in Scrum terms now, new Scrum guide, even if you’re accountable for the effectiveness of the team, how are you going to try to increase the effectiveness? By serving, leading by example, teaching, facilitating, coaching, sitting back, observing, asking nasty questions, challenging the status quo, whatever, help them think about things. Every possible technique except command and control. So, in a way that hasn’t changed. And I think it’s even a little bit way around. People might now take accountability almost too seriously and stop behaving as a boss because this scrum guide now says that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:50

Yeah. That’s very interesting. 

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 55:52

So, I hope we don’t shift the balance from servant leadership, from it used to be only service, you know, in leadership. I hope we don’t turn that around and people forget to also help and serve people. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:06

Yeah, that’s a really good point. I haven’t thought about it that way. And I use also the coaching analogy a lot. I describe the product owner as a GM, the scrum master as the coach and the developers as the team. And it’s you know, who gets fired when the team is not performing? Right? Usually it’s the coach that’s accountable. But what we’ve seen in sports too, is that command and control does come in when you’re under pressure. So, it’s interesting to see now that we, you know, have that highlighted as accountability. And like I said, is it going to shift where under pressure Scrum masters thought are acting certain way so?

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 56:55

And as we know from sports, firing the team coaches and replacing with somebody else, only in a minority of cases really helps. So, people give the idea we’ve done something, we’ve fired somebody but in the end results often do not really improve. It’s not replacing the team coach itself is not but yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 57:16

Yeah. No, I love that analogy. And also, like I pointed out to LA Lakers, I played soccer all my life, but for some reason I follow basketball more than I follow soccer. But I talk about like, how LA Lakers in the 2000s had, like, you know, five or six Hall of Famers, really good players, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant at that time, you know, Karl Malone, all of these superstars, Hall of Fame, careers, and they couldn’t win championships. So, it’s also not just putting budget superstars together, they have to understand how they’re working together. They have to have that chemistry and willingness to you know, so, you know. Coach by themselves can help but also team if they don’t want to help themselves, or don’t have a common goal, it’s the same thing almost.

Speaker: Gunter Verheyen 58:10

Yeah, they’re building on the same analogy. So, I like that a lot, it’s cool.