Howard Sublett

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:38

So who is Howard Sublett? How would you describe yourself?

Howard Sublett  00:44

Can you ask somebody else that question other than me, I see, I’m just a guy that’s not been on a linear journey for anything, right? I’m, I’m born and raised in a small town in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and somehow fell into this into this amazing world of Iterative and Incremental work. And I’ve been on an adventure of my lifetime. So I, I consider myself a husband first to my bride of 30 years. Two grown kids that are both happily married to boys. Looking forward to grandkids one day. And for me, I guess the thing that’s always driving me is like, every job, everything that I’ve taken on is usually something that scares the crap out of me. It’s something that I’ve never done before. But I, I tell myself, that I, that I learn it and I’ll figure it out. And that’s what that adventure of a career growth is for me as trying to figure out what’s the next thing that is just that one increment more than I’ve ever tried before that I believe that I can achieve. So just just a, just a small time guy on a journey. Really,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:01

that’s it’s been an interesting journey. Like I think you mentioned a while back, like a friend invited you to coffee originally. And you come from non software background and they told you about Scrum Alliance. And can you maybe share how, how you get introduced to Agile and Scrum Alliance?

Howard Sublett  02:22

Yeah, I’ve done a little bit of like everything. I’ve been kind of an entrepreneur, most of my life, I’ve had a real estate appraisal business and a real estate brokerage for around 30 years I, I built up and grew a, like a cleaning chemical business and then sold that I’ve done everything from student ministry, I’ve done just about everything things that like when an opportunity shows up, I think is interesting. I’ll try that because I think that’s the need that somewhere, I can make an impact somewhere. And a friend of mine wanted me to go to coffee one day here in Hot Springs. And if you haven’t visited here, you should come it’s a wonderful place to come visit. And he said that he had this thing that he wanted me to help him do. And it was at a company called Scrum Alliance. And he thought that the skills that I had could help them in their organization.

I thought it was a joke. I thought the name was so weird. I was pretty sure it was like multilevel marketing. So I was like, I’m not going door to door selling Amway. I’m not interested in pyramid schemes. And he goes, No, no, it’s not that. And he started describing this thing that didn’t even sound real and and I said you’re going to show me so we went to go see a group of people that were working in a scrum rhythm. And so they were talking about their day to day work, but more importantly, they were talking about the way that they used to work and how that they hated to get these things that they didn’t know how it connected to a customer and they would do a task and they had no way to map that to the to an impact in a way and now they’re talking about we as a team collaboratively solve these complex problems and we talked to the and I’m much happier they were right and then we talked to the to the business leaders were there they’re like I you know, I’m able to delight my customers better now and my employees are happier and and we’re the whole product isn’t getting out in a quick way but little increments are getting out we can test the right thing if we’re building the right thing and and it was hard to get here but we love it and I’m like I don’t know what this magic way of work is it seemed like a little unrealistic to me but where employees are happier customers are happier and and owners of companies are able to delight their customer. I’m like, I don’t know what this is, but I want to part of it. I want to help. So I came on just as a contractor at scrum Alliance back in 2007 maybe early 2007 Eight maybe. And we were a very small staff at that time everybody was contractors, we were all remote quickly grew into basically a directors operations role. And then product owner for the website really started loving our community, the talented people that we have and the impact that we were making as an organization. And basically then just handed over the keys to my, to my other businesses to other people’s sold them off because I like once I once I drank the Kool Aid, I drank the Kool Aid, like I was all in because this was a different way to impact a world of work.

So then from there on often did did consulting and coaching over in Eastern Europe for a while. And then came back and helped build a consulting and coaching practice. Based on Agile and Scrum out of Boston. That company was sold to one in Seattle, and we became the largest pure play agile consultancy really, I think on the planet. I think we had 265 or so full time agile coaches and trainers. And then that company sold to Accenture. All the while I’m I’m watching what’s happening at the scrum Alliance keeping in tabs with all of the trainers and coaches because this is like it’s still part of that movement. And then the opportunity opened the door to to come back into a role that was actually a roll. I don’t I didn’t know that I would ever get. But yeah, that was two and a half years ago. And and I’m here.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:38

Yeah. So maybe just to go back to 2008 2009. How was it to work with Ken Wilber? How was the experience? Or maybe not just saying but what was the setting? What was the key? I think a lot of people will probably love to know what a scrum Alliance look then and how did the interaction and everything, especially like I’m interested to hear about your experience working with Ben and others at scrum aligned at that point.

Howard Sublett  07:07

Yeah, it was. It’s interesting because Ken was involved really heavily, I think up until 2006 When we became a nonprofit and can Rubin then became the first managing director. After a year Ken rolled off, and then they hired somebody named Jim Cundiff as the managing director at that time, and I was hired. Shortly after Jim joined. I didn’t really work directly with with Ken Schreiber at all. Ken was a member of the Board of Directors back at that time, I worked directly with with Jim Jim worked for the board of directors, I didn’t necessarily work with them. And Ken was a member of the board, but he wasn’t actively involved in what was happening, you know, the day to day operations where we were going, what we’re building, what we’re recreating was was Jim and us as the team. So I didn’t really have many interactions with Ken at all during that time. Yeah. Yeah, I wish I would have I wish that. But I didn’t really

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:15

what is it? I was talking to somebody recently about the scum gathering in Stockholm. And I think this is when the first time maybe the or maybe this is when the CFD took the CSM exam for the first time. And I think you were involved in some capacity maybe without maybe not. I don’t know if I but what was the Were you part of creating the per CSM exam? Are you involved with that process?

Howard Sublett  08:45

I was I don’t think that was Stockholm, though, because I wasn’t in Stockholm, where we were running beta tests. I remember. I remember making a trip to Bloomington at the big insurance company there. And Tom Mellor had made headway there for us to run, to take the auditorium and have a whole lot of their employees come beta test the test that that the psychometricians and the subject matter experts have created. And I remember one moment where I’ve got this whole group of people taking the practice test and learning from that real getting real user interactions and an email pops up from somebody that’s having trouble with their profile. And I noticed that their email address had the insurance name in it. And I’m like, wait, like, so where are you at? And they’re like, well, they told me what where they’re at. I was in the same building as them. So we actually met and it was a really interesting thing for me because I had had a lot of interaction with our trainers and coaches. But this was somebody that had recently taking a CSM. So we actually sat side by side and worked on his profile together. So yes, I was Part of the first test I remember part of it. I don’t think that it was in Stockholm. But it may have been before I got there that they ran some sort of a beta at that time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:09

Yeah, yeah, I wasn’t sure I was talking to somebody and dimension I thought it was talking, but maybe not. But one of the interesting things was, they said, every CST had to take the exam. And the only person that didn’t want to take it was Ken. And he’s like, and he was like, I don’t want to take it because it’s a lose lose situation. If I get 100 Everybody’s gonna think, you know, I was involved. And if I don’t get 100 People gonna say he doesn’t know his stuff. So he refused to take which I would have done the same thing, probably. And I thought that was, that was funny. So I didn’t know if you were part of that. And if you knew that story,

Howard Sublett  10:51

I was not but I don’t doubt that that story would be true. I’ve never heard it before. But that seems like a pretty plausible story because that would be a lose lose situation for him. That’s for sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:04

That’s for sure, though. So you know, from that time scrum Alliance has gone a long way a lot of people know scrum Alliance through CSM cspo. And they think that all scrum alliances that called Scrum Alliance stands for the Hey, you take this open book exam. That’s, you know, and there’s a lot of misconception about that. And that scrum alliance is just certification body that just makes it easy throws people through the classes. And that’s it. You’ve been part of the first coaching program that was developed at scrum Alliance. When you first came in 2018. You Your biggest, in my opinion, your biggest focus was how do we you know, get back to coach? Would you talk about why is coaching important to you?

Howard Sublett  12:03

Yeah, so, Scrum Alliance created the very first coaching certification in 2008. We created the very first agile certification for this with a CSM. But we also created in the very first coaching certification. And it’s been one of those things that we’ve had. But it’s never, I don’t think the organization ever applied much effort to that, for various reasons through different leadership structures. Yet all of us know that you cannot simply offer a two day training and help an organization transform, it takes more than that. Training. Classes and courseware are really good. They’re great for knowledge transfer. furnance. They are, they’re something that’s important for people to level set, and taking on advanced courses and such, but still application of Agile principles and values within an organizational system. Take somebody that’s kind of in the midst of it with you. And that’s where the role of a coach comes in. At the same time. I’m, you know, coming from my background and working with different coaches. There is a real difference in somebody that says that there’s an Agile coach and somebody that’s actually been peer reviewed and validated as an Agile coach, the success of the clients is exponentially better, the chance that the investment that they’re making is are actually going to produce that ROI.

The something like the most recent statistics that I read was like anywhere between 60 and 80% of Agile transformations fail for one reason or another. And I think I my hypothesis is that it has something to do with the caliber of the people that are helping I just last week I looked there are 401,000 people on LinkedIn at LinkedIn is predominantly the United States and a few countries it’s not globally 401,000 People that say that they’re an Agile coach in their title presently, they’re an Agile coach. Even the recent surveys that we’ve done with our state of agile coaching survey, like less than two or 3% actually have an expert level credential in Agile coaching that actually have been trained that actually been peer reviewed, that actually had been validated with their work product. And I don’t know that buyers have services of agile coaching services understand that there’s a difference. And I like we set the bar for what a two day training a two day course would be. We’ve created a lot of fast followers. It’s helped move the industry forward. I believe we lead a scrum Alliance through that and I think it’s time for us to lead again and to help help businesses help individuals know that there’s a difference and that there’s another bar that they need if they’re going to call it As an Agile coach, that they need to rise to that bar. And if we help, if we help move that bar up, other organizations will do the same. It’s not about them all coming to us. But if we elevate the practice of agile coaching, other organizations will do the same thing.

And a rising tide will rise all ships, I think it will be good for our industry, more agile transformations will be sticky, because we’ll have people that are pure validated and actually know what they’re doing and know how to help. Rather than, like, one of my favorite one of my favorite examples, got a coaching gig that I had to go to that had a expert level organizational enterprise wide transformation coach, and how people put those crazy titles on their business cards. Right. And they had assessed this organization, true story, they had assessed this organization as 97.2% agile. I’m like, this is fascinating. Number one, what does that mean? Like? Why not point three what what is like, this was the most interesting thing like this was an Agile coach that helped this company, and the leader of the company was so proud. Because they were 97.2%, agile, or whatever, whatever that

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:17

have to do with the leader. I mean, that’s exactly like you’ve deleted that looking for that, that stuff. It’s almost like you’re feeding them what they want,

Howard Sublett  16:25

right. And so here’s this Agile coach that they spent a lot of money on, giving them this magic number, whatever this specific number was. And then they were really proud to show me their most agile team their own. And they had different software applications, whether it was Windows or Mac or whatever, but and the different mobile apps, but they wanted to show me their Windows product. Milan, this was a this was a scrum team of about 85 people. They had sprints, but they were three months long. They had daily stand ups. That lasted hours, hours had daily daily scrums, that lasted hours, they did have a prioritized backlog because it was only one thing in the backlog. And it was like 180 Something page, a spec, where everybody’s assigned months.

Now it we are on halfway through the third sprint, so we’re seven months in, and they’ve yet to release any software at all. And this was their most agile team at 97.2%. And so this coach was the most important things was Do they have the role? Do they have the events? Do they have the artifacts? And yes, yes, yes, they’re agile. And you and I both know, that’s the least agile company or team ever. I don’t think that that company got what they paid for. I mean, they spent a lot of money for that person to help them and help guide them and to provide advice yet. They didn’t move the needle at all, and delighting their customers or working in cross functional teams or anything, there was nothing iterative and incremental about it. They missed the agile mindset, and they missed the heart of this whole thing. And that’s what I’m afraid of, I’m afraid that if we don’t if we as an organization, like I keep looking at what other organization is actually going to invest the money and time, energy and effort for this. Like, for us as a nonprofit or as a for impact. Organization, it seems like it’s our obligation to help move the agile movement forward. And this is something I think that’s really important for us to do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:43

Yeah, I completely agree. And it’s like, I talked about the spectrum in culinary from a book to a chef, right, and everybody hates their chef. But you know, how well do you understand ingredients? And how well can you create recipes. And I think Scrum Alliance has, you know, in culinary, you have James Beard Awards, and Mac, visual type of standards. And I think most people don’t fully understand and I cover this in classes, but the the progression or the journey from a scrum master product owner, that we’re trying to get more people to that certified team, coach, enterprise coach, and those would be your, you know, cooks with a lot of experience or maybe potentially chefs. And that’s not the perception out there. And I know scrum Alliance has done a lot a lot of work and marketing is still continues to publicize it. But I don’t know if people want to become chefs or it’s, you know, goes back to like, what is the demand out there? And what are you currently seeing I know you set some goals as far as creating more of experience coaches creating platform for people that do want to develop those skills. And I think what’s important about it too, is that it’s not by taking the exam, it’s evaluated by the peers. And that’s, I think, what makes it different than probably anything else that’s out there.

Howard Sublett  20:17

Yeah, definitely, if if, if you’re validating whether somebody is a coach by a test, you’re doing it wrong, just saying. Yeah, we were trying every different way. And it is a very complex thing. It’s not linear. So there are two day courses, and then you’re a coach, that’s not with us. That’s not what I’m interested in. And it is a multi year process, you’re going to have to have multiple years of practice of experience reports of successes and failures, you’re going to have to have lots of other courseware up underneath your belt, some from us, some from a lot of other organizations. This isn’t just like a specific, it is something you’re it’s a multidisciplinary kind of an approach. And then you’re going to have to be able to be vetted by your peers and go through some pair coaching situations and other things that they do to help ensure that it’s like we’re seeing like, even in that recent survey that we did one, there was something that we learned that agile coaches are some of the ones that take the most continuing education kind of courses, they take more courses, more self learning things than almost anybody else out there in our industry, which was really good to hear. I’m so we’re, we’re appealing to both sides of this. If you’re a coach out there, and you’re somebody that calls yourself a coach, and I believe all of them are trying to help, right? I believe that they all are trying to do the right thing. Like they, I hear time and time and time again, people that said, I’ve been a coach for six years, eight years.

And then when I started the process, and I started looking at all of the things I needed to learn, I realized what I didn’t know. And it really challenged them to learn a whole lot more like that whole Dunning Kruger thing that you don’t know what you don’t know kind of a thing. And as you get more in it, you realize what you don’t know. So this was a big eye opening for them. So helping to challenge those that truly want to make an impact to their clients and to the customers to get that peer validation. But also, if we’re appealing to the to the companies out there. So we are seeing, just in the last year, a substantial increase in job requirements that require one of our certified agile coaches as a prerequisite that has grown big, many orders of magnitude, it’s still not as much as I would like, but we’re starting to see that. So we’re appealing to companies that when you’re when you’re talking to a company, and I get to talk to a lot of companies and I start asking them, you’re going to invest what, half million dollars, million dollars over the next few years, whatever it is, in shifting your company’s way they’re working communication pathways, from here to where you want to go to solve problems. Do you want to trust somebody that just calls themselves an Agile coach? Or do you want to trust somebody that’s actually got a decade or so of experience and gone through a peer validation and continual learning requirements?

Like, where are you going to bet it’s a little bit like, like, one day in my life, I hope to like climb one of the big mountains like Everest or Kilimanjaro or something like that. I want to hire a Sherpa that has hiked that thing a lot. I want to know that they know how to get up that mountain, and where to step and where not to step I want to, I want them to help me pack well. I don’t want to just hire somebody that’s on the side of the road going I’m the cheapest out there or I’m the this out there. It’s it’s not a journey I want to take without a trusted guide. And so we’re appealing on that side as well to businesses and we’re spending a lot to try to get in front of the right businesses to help them know that there’s a difference.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:15

So if we consider the guides, the coaches, right, and in this instance, in your hiking or climbing experience you you’re the leader, right? How much how much do you think the leader needs so if you want to high climb the mountain with this guide, you can just say, hey, Milan, I trust you that you have to do a little bit of learning yourself. Right. So you’ve developed or some alliances developed over the last maybe six 710 years, the Cal therapy agile leadership courses and what I’m at least seeing and I’ve talked to others is a lot of people that are coming to these courses are middle management. And that’s great. But what we’re not seeing is C suite. And those people that are very busy and you know, we started talking about at the beginning of this interview before I think I started recording, but we don’t know how busy these people are people don’t know how busy you are, it’s until you start and put yourself or tie yourself to that person, then you see you can empathize with with the with the people that are in C suite and how busy they are. But they’re still filled this concern of I don’t have time to learn, or I only have two hours. So what do you think, from a perspective of certify agile leadership? Pat and Calpe? Pat, how? What are you doing to get more of those seats we in introduced to these concepts? So they know, they don’t have to say, hey, you know, I trust this as a good coach, but they have a little bit more insights or what it takes actually to transform and also hire people that can help them transform. Yeah, that’s

Howard Sublett  26:13

that’s always the rub, isn’t it? How do you reach all of the decision makers in organizations, you know, this agile movement 20 years ago, started out with with teams and developers, and it’s grown to this spot. I, I do think we are starting to see leaders of organizations start to start to understand when you start seeing agile on the cover of Harvard Business Review, when you start to see like, I think we’re on the cusp of that to where real senior leaders in organizations need to start understanding, and they need to start understanding the the risks and the costs involved, like this stuff isn’t easy, or cow program is good for them to go to we moved it in this year, while I say 2020, we’re in 2021. Now, last year, we moved it into shorter modules to make it much easier for those that are higher up in organizations to consume, it used to be multi days, and now they’re done in little one day modules, we broke it out to make it a little easier and more consumable for people that have very little time on their hands. And those things can actually be taught in little one hour increments over a period of time if the trainer wants to.

But we’re starting to see that because if you think if you’re a CEO of a big company, and you’ve heard about this agile magic thing, and and it’s a three step thing, and I’m just going to snap my fingers and hire some people and make it happen, you’re you’re sorely mistaken, it this is not an easy thing to do, it takes a lot of time and you as a leader yourself are going to need to change the way that you lead. There’s there’s changed that you need to do, there’s changes for your finance department and your HR department and everything else to help support a truly agile organization. So knowledge and understanding of those things would be great. And we’re also working with some of the business schools to help make sure that agility, at least as a concept and a term are actually taught within each one of those core business schools as people now move the new people moving into the workplace.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:24

That’s awesome. That’s great to hear. Because I’ve been working with schools, I thought, actually see it sent for undergraduate for graduate and also for continued education. And it’s amazing, like when I taught like, in undergraduate like these 17 1819 year old kids, like, it’s so much different. Like they don’t have all the bags, they don’t know, like, you know, they don’t have work experience. Maybe they worked at the you know, fast food place or golf course or whatever it is, right. But it’s so interesting, but it’s also helpful for them when they get out of the school. They know all the terminology. They’re already ahead. Developers are now learning in school, on, you know, some of the extreme programming practices, I think, at least I’ve tried to work with universities and tried to get, you know, Headstart for kids because it sets them up for success. When they get out of college and they’re looking for jobs. You mentioned the you know, and we talked about in the past as far as how strong Agile is reaching outside of software development. I’m working with a company here in California. That’s one of the biggest construction companies in California, and they’re using Scrum Kanban agile, really the principles and of Lean and Agile. And what are you seeing out there as far as other industries I know you’ve, you know, education is one that’s close to you, but like what else other industries, and you seem to are adopting or want to do and be

Howard Sublett  30:10

I think a lot of a lot of I think almost every industry wants to be able to delight their customers more quickly, and to produce increments of work now whether some of them can can achieve that within their constraints or not, I don’t know. I’ve been amazed that, like the US government as as slow that they are actually wanting to figure out how to move quicker. Education for sure, I’ve seen real changes in how teachers are teaching and students are learning, I did have a call at one point in time with, with a science, whether it was an agricultural scientific research thing where they were funded over a, like a five year or eight year process in order to get a result at the end of that time box. And they’re like, how do we? How do we do scientific research where we can show incremental progress along the way, when the experiment may take eight years to be able to do so?

Like, I didn’t have a real simple answer for them. But I was able to connect them to people that might be able to creatively come up with a way through the constraints that they had to be able to do that. I don’t even even people that are managing their home life for their kids homework, and whether the kids have have done their guitar lessons, or whatever it is. I’ve seen those kind of elements and just about anything, you know, my wife works for Habitat for Humanity. And they’ve got a real simple information radiator up there of what’s in progress. What are they working on? And let’s, because somebody influenced them, and just a little bit of a way to where they can map how many vacant lots do they have, what stage of a construction is a house in what are their needs, and it kind of focuses their conversation. And it’s pretty simple. It’s not it’s not perfect Scrum, but it helps them to think about how to deliver that increment, what’s most important, some of those simple, simple kind of things, those principles and practices that can really help. Sometimes complex systems be a little bit more, less scary, if you will.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:21

I’ve tried to get my wife to run and I even told her she can be a product owner and I haven’t been successful. So I don’t know how you if you succeeded that with your wife, or if you’ve given her that opportunity, but well,

Howard Sublett  32:39

maybe maybe Milan I can I can recommend a really good Certified Scrum trainer that can help you because you evidently can’t.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:46

Yeah, exactly, um, maybe some hacking. So a lot has been going on and the COVID obviously has impacted everybody. And I think we were all pleasantly surprised. You know, about a year ago when we started teaching online, how well it went. How satisfied the participants were after taking the class. What are you the unsure you get, you know, athletes question always, but what do you think how it has COVID-19 permanently impacted the way that scrum Alliance operates and how it’s going to operate in the future?

Howard Sublett  33:36

Yeah, this was the when I came in, like that was the one untouchable, unchangeable rule that, you know, CSM cspo, those are our beginning level certifications and must be in person, they must be over two concurrent days and they must have a lot of must be is in there. And that was like, even our community was convinced that it couldn’t be done in any other way. And I was really pleasantly surprised. I wasn’t like it was something it was a need. We had a need. We had customers that that had that need. And we either inspect and adapt or we don’t. And so not everybody was pleasantly surprised. By the way I did have a pretty good swath of hate mail. But it felt like it was the risk that we needed to do. You’re right. The net promoter scores have been phenomenal. The search surveys from every single participant. I mean, I skim them every once in a while. And the only negatives I’ve heard are like, well, that one guy in the class didn’t mute. Or like I mean, it’s it really isn’t about that they didn’t get an impactful Fire Igniting training. It was something technical, like something that, okay, like those kinds of things happen in class that you have somebody that talks too much But I do think that it’s it’s it’s probably impacted us forever. We’ve, we’ve been able to reach people in a way that I don’t think we ever thought that we could we’ve been, if you think about our particular business model in order to be a trainer, it is a, it is a ridiculously rigorous journey, like we as an organization have prioritized, impactful learning from experts in the field over the pursuit of revenue.

Like, if I was in a pursuit of revenue, I would just be minting everybody to make them trainers, because then my revenue would go way up. But like, it’s a, it’s a multi year, multi year process that even once they get to the first step that maybe have met all the prerequisites, it’s like a 10% chance that you’re actually going to make it through on your first time to do it. And some people have tried five, six times and still can’t meet that bar. So we’re prioritizing that, that impactful learners journey and now and so, because of that, in places like Nigeria, we had to fly somebody Nigeria to be in person, and now we don’t. We had to have trainers in certain markets. And now we don’t, we’re able to reach people that that couldn’t afford to be on a plane, or we couldn’t afford to fly somebody somewhere. Like it’s opened up a world that maybe we didn’t even know was a need, right? The number of emails that I’ve gotten over, over the accessibility that this caused, and people now able to do this in a timeline that works for them, they can do it every evening for five evenings, let’s say or whatever the timing is, to where they can, they can get something achieve something they’ve always wanted to achieve. But couldn’t do that, because it took two days out of their work, you know, and I think it’s changed the way we deliver courses. Now I’m looking forward to in person courses as well. Right. That’s, I think that there’s still a pent up need for being together. And there’s something magical about being around a table together?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:14

Well, you would think so here’s what I just did. This might be interesting to you as well, here’s what I’ve been asking at the end of each class. So I would ask for question, how many of you would now prefer to do it to do the class online, like we just did for the last, you know, two days or whatever it is, right? And about anywhere from a third to half of the people raise their hand, right? And then I say how much, or how many of you would be able to pay that would be willing to pay maybe 30% More for in person class. Because it costs more like we have to travel we have to run? And pretty much all of the hands go deaf. And I’ve done this for the last couple of months. And I’m like, What is this really telling me? Right? Like the ratio or the value that people see in in online is way more than they’re willing to pay? And actually, because it’s a hat as much as we everybody loves. And there’s nobody that says, I mean, there’s few people that say, I don’t miss the human interaction. I don’t miss. But it should like it goes back to what I said. Like, we all get the price how well the online training is. And those experiences tell their friend. And it’s really interesting where the marketplace is gonna go if that’s where customers want to go.

Howard Sublett  38:44

Yeah, and I like I’ve heard for many trainers. Like if you were to you said your San Diego if you were to schedule a class in person in San Diego, you have mostly people from San Diego, you may have one or two that flew in for that, but mostly it’s people there. Now if you’re hosting a class on California timezone, you’re gonna you have a chance to have people from Canada and people from New York and people from Asia that are attending your class and, and, like, you get a different view of how companies are adopting things when you bring people from all different parts of the world together and having that those discussions on online forum, which is another benefit that I didn’t even imagine like that i i didn’t know that there would be a difference in your right in surveys. I didn’t know that. But I’m not surprised. But as you know, surveys are one thing but there’s a day coming when they’ll actually vote with their money they’ll make a decision on the buying decision, and then will truly know whether they will or not like that’s because rarely when you ask would you pay more money for this people going to add on pay more money. So we’ll see and it’s going to be a really interesting model. Get dynamic, because I know of many, many companies that are waiting until that trainer can come back in that building and train their teams. Because they because they’re going to be working together and they want them in their space. And that’s important for them. So, um, but I also know do

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:17

Yeah, I think there’s definitely going to be so if there is need for an in person, I think there’s, there’s definitely people, it’s just, again, I’ve been surprised by the feedback that I’ve been getting, just from that. So the scrum Alliance has a, the project that you described the level of expertise and knowledge, the power of Scrum alliance is so amazing. I mean, you have some of the people that have been, you know, part of the movements in the beginning. But we also like any organization have our own challenges, and your job is not easy, we don’t make it easy for you, that there’s probably good things and bad things like everything else, what are some of the things that you enjoyed the most about the computing community, our community, and what are some of the things that kind of drive you crazy and make you want to have a drink and cancel the day

Howard Sublett  41:26

who said I don’t have drinks at the beginning of the day. I, I love the passion that that our community has, and and the the collaborative nature and the passion that they really have to make a you know, to make a dent in this bringing humanity to the workplace like that. The people that are our trainers and coaches are not here, it’s, it’s not a job for them. This is their passion, this is what they’re, they didn’t just attend a course and get a sticker to where they could go teach. This is something that that that’s in their blood, right? These are people that believe in a movement, and that’s always a thing. Um, but because of that, sometimes their passion is so much it overflows, and they can be pretty demanding stakeholders. So in a in an interesting way, when you have a bunch of expert agilus As some of your customers, they’re pretty critical of how agile I might be or SS an organization might be or they’re, they’re really quick at pointing out flaws in the way that we’re trying, like every organization is trying to be far more agile as they go along. And we’ve still got a long ways to go. And I realized that sometimes I don’t necessarily need, you know, 500 stakeholders telling me that like, I already know that like, thank you. But their passion is is is so infectious to be around. And that they’re there, they really want to help people, that’s always you know, the the other thing that is the tension.

So we’re a membership organization of about 1,300,000 members around the world are as a for impact organization, you know, every bit of revenue that we get is a byproduct of impact. So we make an impact in the world, and the byproduct of that is revenue, that revenue, then I have to make sure that every dollar is spent towards making more impact. And so as many of you in our community that are agilus, you want us to go faster, you want us to innovate, you want us to create new things. Well, then the moment that we create something, our lovely community ago, well, you didn’t ask me about that. Why didn’t you ask me about that, you know, I could have contributed different to that you should slow down. And then but if I go slower, and I involve the community to help build products, it takes me a long time to get something new out the door, then I have the tension of I’m not going fast enough. And so there’s a that that that demand to be highly collaborative, which is a good thing, yet move extremely fast. When I’ve got stakeholders all around the world, there’s a tension there, like there are times I need to move fast, which is going to mean it’s going to be slightly less collaborative, I’m going to take a very small group to get as as much SME need as I can in order to move quickly. But then I’m going to make the rest of the community may be upset because they weren’t involved. So it’s there’s that tension in having to move the organization forward at a pace that I believe is far more agile, but also involving all of our key stakeholders and and members of the community in that slowest down in a way, but maybe because build better products, but it’s a much longer loop.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:10

Right? No, it is. And I think it is that passion is that the buyer also, you know, remember last year when the COVID head how quickly we got together to figure things out. Like, you know, we’re jumping on calls where, you know, so like when we need to, I feel like we do jump and we help each other. But that’s what I like about the community. I think as far as, you know, the like any, you know, community that that’s, especially with the guides level, you know, where you have hundreds of people, it’s always challenged, but it comes with the goods and Bad’s and sometimes, like you said, you might have to have a drink in the morning. But, you know,

Howard Sublett  45:53

I I was well versed in this community and their passion and their idiosyncrasies, right. So I didn’t I didn’t take this role with blinders on. I knew what I was getting into. So it’s okay, right, I think that the, the, the that sometimes annoyances of those idiosyncrasies or that passion exuding is worth it, for the impact that we can make as an organization and our mission. So it’s okay, I’ll take it. I would rather I would rather have really, really, really passionate, engaged people that have very strong opinions than people that don’t care. Like I, I can

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:44

engage people, this engage people is the worst thing, right?

Howard Sublett  46:48

Yeah. And we do not have that we have very engaged people. So I’m, like, I actually see each one of those interactions, even if there may make me want to have a cocktail. At the end of the day, I actually do look at them as a blessing. Because they are very engaged, and they’re passionate in the care. And all of them have a perspective that is valuable and interesting. And something that I need to consider. It’s, it’s, it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:18

I think so too. Yeah, that’s always healthy. Maybe what a last question here. You and Melissa did a great job, in my opinion, when you came in 2018. I think if we reflect back, it’s just amazing what you’ve been able to do together. And recently, you introduced the role of CEO. Could you maybe just talk about like, what is the current vision for that role, and maybe vision for scrum Alliance? Just briefly in a couple of minutes. I’m sure people would like to know, just from that perspective,

Howard Sublett  47:57

I guess. Yeah. And thanks for that what Melissa and I wear a lot as Moses was a ton of fun to work with, like we were able to dream and create. And we were both co CEOs of the organization as product owner, and Scrum Master and CO CEOs can have complications. Anytime you have both people with the same decision making ability, it makes it, it can be difficult, but we were able to move the organization a long ways and into truly cross departmental teams. It was not an easy lift, and she carried a ton of it now. And it move forward. She’s moved on to something else of her own choice. She’s, I don’t even know the name of the company. But she’s working at another company and seems to be having a ton of fun there. My role mostly is external facing, right? I need, I need to spend time with customers. I need to spend time with stakeholders need to understand where the industry is moving, I need to start thinking three to five years ahead. And I needed somebody to help me on the operational side to help see what was what’s happening internally, like how do we actually deliver in an incremental way in a better way than what we have and I needed somebody with some experience in, you know, operational experience and truly understanding organizational systems budgets and those kinds of things. I was very fortunate that Renee Bozek was available. She was here for five and a half years earlier, she was chief of operations before, she had come from a very large company of around 600 employees on a global scale that she was chief of staff directly to the C E O. And she’s been a wonder to come in and like her charge really is to help us. Make sure that we’re still working in a scrum rhythm that we have great Scrum Masters and product owners that were falling within budget. We’re hitting our KPIs that we’re delivering towards our goals. It was the role that she had had before. And it was a role that she needed. I still, I still call myself a product owner, even though I, you know, legally, I think I hold the role of CEO as well. And she’s not, she’s not working as what you would think of as a traditional organizational CEO might. But I needed somebody to have a title that was decision making ability. For us as an organization that didn’t always require me to weigh in to make a decision on something or, and I didn’t necessarily want us to have another situation where we had a two headed decision making things like, I think co leadership, by the way, could be extremely powerful in a large company, when you could divide, like every example that I’ve found Milan have, like, two CEOs, but it’s a company of 1000s and 1000s of employees, and you have somebody that’s basically co CEO of like a European division, and somebody that’s got a North American Division. And they they bump into each other on a on a, on a rare basis, with 55 employees having a CO CO like, we were we were overlapping like that, that Venn diagram, the overlap was larger than the other parts. And that made it more difficult sometimes, and we need it. So it’s not that Cosio was a bad thing. But we learned a ton from it. I learned a lot from Alicia. So yeah, it’s been very helpful

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:35

pressure they Yeah, it I think, you know, everybody saw that is a very interesting experiment. And I think, you know, like anything else, there’s no silver bullet and anything that we do. So some type of balance. So

Howard Sublett  51:50

we’re, we’re, we’re still running in cross departmental Scrum teams, every team still has POS and Scrum Masters. We’re, we’re just about to finish kind of our first quarter. We didn’t get started right on January one with this. But we’ve got a retro at the end of that, to look at our organizational structure to see what we can learn from it to where we can maybe make a slight tweak. So we’re, instead of saying this is our structure, this is how we work. We’re saying this is what we’re trying for this season. And we’re going to look at what’s an increment we can do to shift to help help our team be more joyful to be more prosperous, to be more sustainable in the work that we’re doing. And we’re involving the whole team involved in that to take that retro and I think that’s coming up mid April. So our structure now is what it is based on products. We’re going to see what the shift is, I don’t know exactly what it will be. I have the feeling we will make some slight shift.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:46

Yeah. And I think that’s what’s great about the you know, what’s been going on as much like I’m sometimes frustrated with some of the things that are happening again, without any knowledge. But I just think I really admire this content, the relentless improvement and continuous search, or, Hey, we know that we can be better or you know, let’s let’s try something else. I think that’s something as a member of the community that really stands out. So we’re out of time. I know you probably have another meeting to run to but I do. This has been fun. I hope you had a good time sharing and talking to me, and I’m sure I’ll see you soon.

Howard Sublett  53:33

I’m sure you will. I’m sure you all thank you so much.