Jim Benson

 TRANSCRIPT: 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:31

Who is Jim Benson? This one gets people but…

Speaker: Jim Benson  00:41

Well, yeah, Jim Benson has been many different people throughout the course of his life. I was a angry punk rocker for a while, I was an urban planner. I was an AIDS activist, I ran the AIDS Memorial quilt, the names projects Memorial quilt for the Northwest region of the US for like 12 years. I’ve owned a software company. I’m part of the team, I guess, that invented Kanban and then took that on to personal Kanban and Lean coffee. And in a nutshell, all of those things is that Jim Benson is a person who believes that people do their best work when working with others, that collaboration is the shortest path to success and they we need to build built environments, systems, visual controls, things like that agreements that make collaboration more natural and less an avenue for blaming other people when things don’t happen.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:54

That’s awesome. And I was trying to, like, do a little bit of background research and I saw that you were transportation engineer, and you quit your job and started a software company. I was like what was he thinking, you know? How did that come about?

Speaker: Jim Benson  02:10

Well so what happened was years ago, when I was an engineer, I worked with a guy named William Routan and he was the person I started my software company with. And we worked for a company called David Evans and Associates. And that was probably one of the best companies anyone could work for at all. And they were great because they had a motto that they kind of stuck to, which is we find outstanding professionals, and we give them the tools they need to do an outstanding job. So this was like the late 80s, early 90s and we had unlimited vacation days, you know, all those great things that tech invented, we had that before there was tech. And William and I, we worked in a field, it was called IPS or intelligent transportation systems and it was right at the birth of where information technology met transportation. And so we did the very first real time traffic website for the Washington Department of Transportation here. And then later with our software company, we did the very first GIS based real time traffic website for the San Francisco or for the Bay Area Council of Governments. And that was called 511.org and it was the first GIS based system. So when you go use Google Maps now, that’s based on tech that we kind of pioneered. And no, they didn’t pay us for it. But we started, we moved from one to the other because we ended up but it kind of as a fluke getting a couple of coding projects and we were trying to figure out how are we going to fit these coding projects into what we’re already doing. And we were introduced to this guy who had just written this book and his name was Kent Beck. And so we started off, you know, in XP, doing agile stuff in XP before agile I think even had a name yet. I think that it was just XP. Yeah, so it was a really fortuitous moment because we were used to building things like subways, that took 30 years to build and all of a sudden, we built this like software in two weeks and we’re like drunk with power at that point. We were like oh my God, we can have like immediate impact. That’s crazy! And so we liked it so much that we went off and started Cranial solutions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:51

What role did you play in David Anderson’s blue book because he told me that that happened through just link coffees at the cocoa place in Seattle.

Speaker: Jim Benson  05:03

Now no lean coffee came well after we started Kanban.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:08

What ways did you influence or did you influence David’s book?

Speaker: Jim Benson  05:12

So Dave and I used to spend a lot of time together. And we spent a lot of time in various pubs, drinking scotch, and talking about our relationships, and agile. And one of the things we talked about most was, you know, he had written agile management, which has a lot of great stuff in it, but it’s very, very difficult to implement. And so we kept talking about ways to implement that. And just over here in the ladies pub, in front of the fireplace, was where we first kind of drew the first Kanbany idea. And my background is psychology and engineering and kind of collaborative systems and Dave is in you know, big business, you know, making big projects happen. And so we both went off into our respective offices and implemented the thing on that piece of paper. So David and Drag Ocean and others and Corry Lattice started building on XIT project, kind of that version of Kanban, and in my office, we were building more of the personal Kanbans, small teams, high degree of variation approach. So it’s very much a symbiotic creation. Dave then went off to do the work that he did at Corbis. And then after Corbis, he came over and we started modus cooperating together. In fact, we developed this logo together. And we did that for a little while, but it kind of became clear that what our individual visions of Kanban, they were aligned but they weren’t the same and so we went off and, you know, did our own separate things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:11

Nice. And maybe just to come back to systems and psychology a little bit, you know, people define systems differently, you know, and there are a lot of different systems. But, you know, I think what a lot of times forget is the human side of the systems or human systems. I spoke with David actually, maybe a month ago now, and, you know, the way that he was emphasizing how much we need to know understand social systems and how we interact as humans within those systems was really refreshing because they never heard David talk about that before. And I think you know, that’s something as an agile-lean community, we don’t spend a lot of time talking about at all, you know, psychology. And I think I heard you somewhere say, it’s not the psychology where you’re, you know, treating patients, but more like a just understanding humans and how we think, what motivates us, you know, what’s important to us, and then also how we interact in a social environment. What are your thoughts I mean, when it comes to you have background in this; what do most professionals and companies get wrong about the human systems side?

Speaker: Jim Benson  08:28

Wow. We’ve been taught for over 100 years that we need to pay attention to policy, procedure and that if we do those things, then the humans will just do what we tell them to. And one of the things that you know, when everybody was talking about Scrum bot, I was saying all Scrum teams are Scrum bot and they would get upset about that. And I’d be like, if you take any scrum team, and you remove two people from it, and you move two people on, does the team change? And they’re like, well of course it does. Scrum bot. Something different is happening because the individuals that are gathered to work together, form their own culture. So I want to make sure that people actually understand that yes, we’re trying to get like flow of tickets through a Kanban but we’re also trying to get psychological flow; which is I’m comfortable with the work that I’m getting, I feel protected by the system that I’m in, I feel like the system is exciting enough that I can change it in helpful ways, when somebody else has a problem, I know when I can help and when I can’t. Those things give you professional comfort and we don’t design for those. In fact, we usually designed for the opposite; we design for stopping people from exercising their professional judgment. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:03

You think there’s a tight correlation between I think I’ve heard you say before clarity and flow. Could you maybe elaborate on that, what you mean by clarity and flow?

Speaker: Jim Benson  10:14

Yeah. And clarity doesn’t mean that everything is defined, it means that we just understand how everything is. So in Agile or in software development in general, there are a lot of things that are very standard, that we can say every day, these things are going to happen, or each time I touch this, this is going to happen or, you know, this is part of our, you know, our racks, and in our racks, we’re always going to have things very standardized. And then we’re going to have things that are very complex, because that’s what we do for a living. We solve weird problems. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:50

Wicked problems. 

Speaker: Jim Benson  10:51

Yes, wicked problem. Wicked weird problems. And the problem is that we spend a lot of time inventing wicked problems because we don’t take any time to say, this is what our standard work is, this is the stuff we know, let’s just set that up so that it’ll be stable, then when something weird happens, we will have the cognitive bandwidth to be able to deal with it. And when it comes up, and it says, you know, hey, I’m just presenting myself, I’m a new weird thing, do we have a set of procedures to effectively deal with the weird thing? Like, if you come up against a complex problem, do you always have more than three people who are going to work on solving it? Because individuals can’t solve complex problems. You know, when those come up and they reach a certain level of danger, who else needs to be involved?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:51

And what you’re saying is like, we just got to start thinking, right?

Speaker: Jim Benson  11:55

We have to start valuing each other. We have to recognize that like these walking flawed globs of water and goo in our heads, those are the things that actually write the code. You know, it’s not JIRA, and it’s not, you know, GitHub, writing the code, we’re writing the code and if we set up a system, like you know, who found out this better than Electronic Arts? If you treat your people like crap, they will produce crap. And if you teach your people well, they will reciprocate. So how do we intentionally wake up in the morning and say, we’re going to set up a system that maybe has a Kanban in it, we tend to have like five or six visual controls probably for any given project that we’re working on. So Kanban is like the entry level to an effective team, it’s not the marker of an effective team. And those other visual controls are based on what information the professionals on that team need in order to do a good job you know, right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:11

So that’s, you know, in a sense, like, a lot of that is… the reason they said, we gotta start thinking because like, there’s a lot of, you know, focus on Scrum, focus on and, you know, just name a framework. And what I’ve seen, at least in reality is that, we got to start using our heads, we got to start, we can’t rely just saw a framework, and I think, you know, when you say we get a, minimize the variance or understand what the standard work is, and that doesn’t imply necessarily, you know, apply, you know, a famous or a framework but it’s more like, we get to understand our work, and we have to understand what type of work it is, based on the type of work treated differently. If you have a lot of certainty, don’t know work complicated, you know, create processes. Is that what you’re saying?

Speaker: Jim Benson  14:05

Yeah, yeah. And that when I’m working like in construction or healthcare or something outside of software and they say that they want to be agile, and then I say, well, you know, do you want to do Scrum or do you want to do XP or do you want to do less, or do you want to do data, do you want to do safe? And just sit there and list like 12 frameworks and they’re like, and I was like, yeah. So that’s what agile means to me; utter chaos. So can we take a step back and find out like what is bothering the professionals on your team and in the ecosystem that your team interacts with? And then can we start to remove the impediments that they’re facing on a daily basis to get work done? And it would be easy to dump that into the of lean, but lean also doesn’t go far enough in dealing with those relationships. And it’s a shame because lean always really, you know, tries to relate itself back to Toyota. But Toyota’s big thing wasn’t, you know, an add on cord or stopping the line or having your Kanban even. Toyota’s big thing was building better relationships with their supply chain. That’s the thing!

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:31

But it was also I think people. Like I think the way that lean and it was interpreted in a West is different than how to Toyota in the East. You know, there was a lot more focus on people and relationships. And I think that speaks to the culture, which I’m interested. Like, how do you define culture? I haven’t heard you… what is culture to you?

Speaker: Jim Benson  15:53

Well, what we say is the individuals in teams create value. And so that’s kind of the operational system. And that culture is the needs of the people on those teams to that where satisfying those needs allow them to behave as responsible professionals. So they can make decisions when they need to, again, they can help when they need to. So it’s one of the biggest things that kills any company is they put barriers up for people helping other people, then someone needed help, they didn’t get it, they blame the other people. So what we tend to define as culture is often kind of the failure state of culture. You know, like we have an accountability culture here, or we have, you know, big carrot and stick culture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:52

Can we talk about that because I think that’s another important point that I’ve heard you have made recently and you may have said that like, high performing teams move from accountability to responsibility. When you said that, that was like that makes a lot of sense. So could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jim Benson  17:11

I get a lot of flack for it. I feel like a bomber in World War II. You know. flyers like… you know, all these things,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:21

I think one of the things that I think you know, that I want to bring up that [inaudible 17:27]. It resonated with me, it resonated with me.

Speaker: Jim Benson  17:31

So accountability is generally a failure state; it’s generally a failure demand model, where you’re setting up expectations of people and then you are preparing to hold them accountable when it doesn’t go right. Rather than setting up a system from the beginning that says, as a group, here are our goals. You know, these different people might be taking the lead on this thing or this other thing, but all of us are responsible for making sure that we get to that end state safely. So that when you’re, you know, if you’re on a Kanban your swim lanes, and you’re swimming along and someone down here starts drowning, you can go save them. You have to like I’m sorry, I got a deadline, you know…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:22

Yeah, so how do then… I mean, I get a couple of questions I guess, but to elaborate on this, so I agree accountability is like cover my ass, responsibility is like do the right thing maybe.

Speaker: Jim Benson  18:38

Yep. That’s it. That’s exactly it. The one thing that I learned at David Evans and Associates was that that professionalism didn’t mean I do my work. Professionalism was I make the world better for my customers, for my colleagues and for myself. But if you skip any of those, you’re in trouble. And so when we build systems that say things like the scrum master protects the team from management or demands by the client, instant fail. 100% is instant fail.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:16

So the latest Scrum guide 2020 has moved to accountabilities.

Speaker: Jim Benson  19:21

Yep. Okay, they’re always catching up. But I mean, they got a crap even from Ron Jeffries about that last week.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:39

What do you think about the commercialization of agile? And you know, I’m a CSP, I train and you know, it’s a usually two day course, people are coming for certifications. And I don’t know, I was listening to one of your podcasts and the way they you set up your trainings and one of the things that you said that resonated with me and that I tend to, like those longer spread out classes is that you can’t just jam things into two days so you purposely have designed some of your courses that are months long. 

Speaker: Jim Benson  20:13

Yeah, four months. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:15

What is it four months? It’s like marinating, right? You want the ideas and these concepts to marinate in your head. And the whole agile has moved over is that… 

Speaker: Jim Benson  20:28

Instant gratification. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:30

Yeah. So is that gonna stick around probably?

Speaker: Jim Benson  20:34

Oh, you mean the instant gratification? Yeah, it’s human nature. So right now, universities are having a problem, because people are like, you mean, I have to go to school for months? Oh, my God! And they’re like, yeah, cuz you gotta think, seriously. And we’re so used to, you know, oh, my God, this is bothering me, in five minutes I want it to no longer bother me. And then we wonder how we get things like, you know, current issues that we have with social media platforms. Is it we don’t take the time to really think about the ramifications of what we’re building.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:25

So where are we headed? I mean, in a sense, like, I know, we can foretell future but like, all the signs are saying in the sense like there’s more demand for quick wins, there’s more demand for these, you know, two days certification classes. I’m not getting even though I’ve run, you know, month long, for instance, CSM. You know, [inaudible 21:48] just that wants to take that approach that you’ve described as well where it’s like four month process in a cohort type of style, where you’re actually learning with others, you’re putting things into practice. And as humans, that’s how we lot of times learn. And it seems like the whole human side of things is still getting shoved to the side.

Speaker: Jim Benson  22:13

Yeah, and so that’s a big thing in our visual management certification and it catches students off guard. So you’ll go through the first section which kind of just uses personal Kanban just kind of say, this is what a system might look like. But immediately upon getting into the second section, that’s about interactions, the things that we claim to do in Agile. Oh we’re really good at the individuals, we kind of suck at the interactions. And so one of the homework assignments in that, and this is like, it’s a serious, like gut punch to tech people is, and this is an assignment that I had, it was literally something from my past, which we take the town of Albion Michigan, which is a town that has a little University, a little College in it, but it’s been dwindling in population since the 1950s. And people have been very good at, you know, complaining about it. And so we say, okay, you’re going to have a public meeting, you’re going to have the city and you’re going to have a college, they don’t get along. And you need to figure out a way to bring helpful industry or helpful business into the city. And we tell them about some different types of endogenous and exogenous growth, you know, some economic theories that are quite outside of agile and lean. And we say your job is to bring these people together and design a meeting that will achieve consensus. And a lot of people have a lot of problem with that because it’s something they’re not familiar with. But I was talking to one of my agile coach friends the other day, and he was like, the other day you know, we thought our company was super awesome and then all of a sudden we had all of these complaints lined up against us about microaggressions. And I’m like really? Did they teach you about that in your CSM? So what I want people to get out of our classes is yes, you know, here’s how you can visualize work, here’s how you can visualize conversations, here’s how you can visualize outcomes. But it’s so that you can deal with situations like that. Like real life stuff. Coding is not real life. The stuff that goes around the coding is! My bosses are being jerks, we got three quarters of the way through this process and we were derailed, the guy on the board of directors whose pet project this was had a heart attack last night and all the other people in the board of directors hate him. You know, weird stuff like that happens, that’s what we need to be ready to deal with. And if we are, the coding stuff is easy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:22

So that’s my concern, right? There are not that many people if you look at the interest and then if you look at like, you know, the classes out there, not much is being discussed in the agile, lean circles about exactly what you said. It’s more like oh go learn about, you know, safe and running trains, go learn about Scrum Master role and how to become Scrum Master. But nobody’s really the peeking and understanding what’s underneath all of that. The human side.

Speaker: Jim Benson  25:51

And even when they try, they do the same thing. So it’s like, I’m going to go off, and I’m going to take a two day course and get a certification in psychological safety. And it’s like, psychological safety is really, really deep. And if you get a two day course in it, you just paid for a two day course in making yourself feel better about psychological safety. But what you’re not doing is sitting around saying, wow, like, I’m going to take a whole day and think about times where I’ve totally messed up someone else’s psychological safety. And I’m gonna own that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:35

But that requires, you know, that requires self-awareness, that requires, you know, and I just, you know, my point around this is that we know that that’s important, but we don’t put as an industry, you know, a lot of leader I talked to, but the money is in the [inaudible 26:59]. 

Speaker: Jim Benson  26:58

So there’s a reason why Motus Institute and modus co-operandi do not have 700 employees. So we designed the lean, agile visual management program to attract people who would want to be in the program. And I was really worried that if we set up a two day certification in anything, I would become incredibly wealthy and no one would get any value for it but they would think they did and that would not make me feel good.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:36

That’s the thing. You know, so what are you finding out? Like, because I agree, it’s like, it feels it makes you feel good, you know, that maybe, like you said, you’re making more money, you get it, you’re certifying more people, but it probably feels a lot more better to understand that you’re equipping people to actually deal with real problems and it’s probably coming back so like, what are some of the things that you’re seeing that when people come back to you, and I’m sure you have some stories and that made you feel good in the sense that…

Speaker: Jim Benson  28:14

So there’s two things. There’s two things about that. First, is that there’s a lot of really good people in the Agile world. So I don’t want to make it… because I often state things too bluntly and then I am taken as like guy that hates all the people but talks about how nice people should be. But the system that we’ve set up is not allowing the Agile community to have the right conversations because they’re chasing, you know, their necks, they’re you know, they’re safe, you know, level 72 you know, certification. Safe is pretty much up with the Masons now. There’s enough levels in there, I think. But you’ve got good people at the scrum Alliance who are trying really hard, like really, really hard to fix some of these systemic issues. And I want to acknowledge that because like I said, I always end up painting myself into that corner. So what I found is also is that whether it’s people coming to us for new work or people returning after years, or people that we didn’t ever know were using our stuff who then show up and like say we’re doing these things, is that it’s been incredibly gratifying that from new hires, actually, we’ll just say like from university to new hires to people who have been in for a while to upper management, there is a strong realization that the problems that we’re seeing across the board in business are due to an inability to effectively work with other people. They’re not due to how fast you fail, they’re not due to how you know how many 1000s of experiments you run, or even how many times you pull the and on cord, it’s do I understand how the individuals in my group are working with the other people to provide value. And when I get a call from like, you know, say somebody my age, somebody like in their mid 50s, who has worked in like, there’s a company that we’re working with or worked with that makes tents. So like, they literally have a big, huge, gigantic tents. And when the leadership called up and said, you know, we understand that in order to make better tents, we have to treat each other better. And we have 75 years or whatever it was of experience of not treating people better. We know we’re not horrible but we’re not making the extra effort. When people lead with that,. I get hopeful, I get really super hopeful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:17

I mean, it is definitely like, if you don’t have that, like, you know the numbers, you know people are disengaged, they’re disconnected from the work and there’s no way that you can innovate or that you can do good work when you’re disengaged. When I’ve been disengaged, I’m thinking about other stuff that I want to do that I feel like is more gratifying than what I might be working on right then. I think a lot of people feel that way too. And it’s interesting that human side of things that like you said, is the trickiest, you can do all this other stuff but maybe too, like something that you said that I want to come back to is the human side and like, you know, a lot of times we have a hard time saying like, you know, developers should talk to the customers. You know, a lot of times they go to the leaders and say, developers should be talking to the customers and get closer to the customer. And they’re like hell no! Are you crazy Miljan? You want to have weird developers to talk to customers? And then you talk to developers, and they’re like, No, leave me alone.

Speaker: Jim Benson  32:30

I’ll give you the best example that I ever saw was, we did work for a part of the Washington State government that handles most of the social services in the state. And we worked with two teams; one team was working on maintaining an old crappy piece of software that manage all of the at risk elderly people in the state. So people who might be in home situation where they were being abused or beaten up or locked in a room and their savings were just being spent by their kids or whatever. And then the other was for kids. So all of the kids that were in the CPS system. And I said do you ever go watch what your customers are doing? And they said, yeah sometimes we’ll go and we’ll sit with the caseworkers and we’ll watch them use the system. And I was like, why do you care about that? And they said, Well, you know, we want to see like where they’re stumbling and where they have problems with drop down menus and things like that. And I was like, all right, I want you to listen to me very carefully. The people that you are meeting, when you do that are not your customers. And they’re like, but they’re the caseworkers, they’re the people who use it. I was like, no, no, you see, you seem to think that the people that you’re meeting are the caseworkers. And by then they’re just like, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. So I said here’s what I want you to do. I want you to wake up at six o’clock in the morning, already dicey with a software developer. I want you to go with your caseworker, meet them for breakfast and then I want you and then by then they’re already saying no. I want you to get in a car with them and I want you to drive around with them for the day, just one day and then watch them use your software. And so of course they’d meet with the caseworker in the morning, caseworker is like hi, isn’t it a great day and then they go get coffee and stuff and then they start meeting with people and by the end of the day, the caseworker is just a wreck. Because you’re literally seeing the worst, every hour of how human beings treat other human beings and then you’re expected come in and use a piece of software that looks like it was designed for Windows XP? You know, it was it was like a hostile program. So yeah, they could navigate it. But they were dealing with so much crap by that point that all they really wanted to do is sleep or find something at the bottom of a bottle. And I about killed those poor people. They weren’t prepared to know what being a caseworker smells like. So it’s not just meeting with your customer, it’s understanding the reality of the people who are using the stuff. And they were really mad at me. But almost instantly, they started making some pretty major UX changes that they never would have done otherwise, because logically the software worked okay. After that, they were like, what gift can I give to those people? Sorry, that was a really long answer but it was awesome.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:58

That was a really good example in the sense of like, you know, we talk a lot about getting closer to the customer, we spend so much time building the wrong things or you know, we confuse being busy with you know, something that surely solving the problem when we can just…

Speaker: Jim Benson  36:14

We confuse instrumentation with relationships. Ouch. Yes, Jim@ modusoperandi.com if you want send your hate mail there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:30

So maybe let’s continue with this because I want to bring up something else that I agree with then. So you said the basic structure of Agile Manifesto is fundamentally flawed. [inaudible 36:41] over create a toxic environment. Could you, this is another one of those things that you might get some hate mail but could you elaborate on that?

Speaker: Jim Benson  36:52

So what’s been funny is I’ve been on the stalwart stage at agile insert year several times. And this one comes up all the time, like every year, I think. And it’s because people are struggling with it. So it’s not because they hate it, it’s because they’re struggling with it. And I don’t blame the Agile community for this at all. But I think it’s snowboard, snowboard, at sunburn too, when they went and said, oh it’s fine. and then they went home, I was like, you tell people that they need to continuously improve things and then you went and said all the Agile Manifesto is fine and then you just went home? Wow, that’s some lazy stuff there guys! So congratulations on that. So yeah, so you have couplets and like individuals and interactions over processes and tools. And the problem is individuals cannot interact without processes and tools. So what that actually reads out as, like honest to God, and this is full on Jim Benson agile heretic here; individuals and interactions over processes and tools means people talking without knowing how to talk. Okay? So individuals and actions or interactions through processes and tools, that’s great. Working code through proper documentation, that’s great. But what’s happened is and I know that they say the stuff on the left, we believe in the stuff on the right, we just believe the stuff on the left more, total cop out and a total lack of understanding of the syntax of English.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:40

But I think it’s also the way that I see that it’s flawed, it’s not even English, it goes back to the humans, human side of things. And the reason I think it’s flawed is because you taking that statement of over, right. Nothing in a sense like, over is a too strong of a word where there you know, there are multiple truths. Right?

Speaker: Jim Benson  39:10

I would say so, yes and that it creates a set of false dichotomies, that people have had major anti-pattern reactions to. Like you go to places and they say, we’re agile, therefore, we don’t document our code. And I know that people will say, that’s not how it’s supposed to happen. Too bad! You created the system that is encouraging that behavior so we need to come up with a way to encourage the behavior that we wish to see which is appropriate professional, you know, professional code with professional documentation. Just that simple.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:52

But that’s also common sense. And, you know, sometimes that common sense is not the common practice as the saying goes but it’s like, you know, we tend to lean on Agile Manifesto, lean on these frameworks. And it really goes back to just I call it just going back to thinking, like you know, going back to using your head and figuring out what works for you. And maybe to shift gears a little bit, I want to come back, I worked with this company in California called Clark Pacific. And they use Lean and Agile for construction, their construction company. And given you a background, I wanted to maybe spend a little bit of time exploring, just what are you seeing in that construction space? The clients that you’re working with, what are the challenges that they’re facing with, and what common pitfalls are they falling in.

Speaker: Jim Benson  40:52

So the beautiful thing about construction is that it is hundreds of years old and it has new so like, you know, you have like old money and new money. If you have like old process and new process, software is all new process, so people are just trying to spend it as quickly as they possibly can. And you know, by working with Clark, that you’ll meet people there who have worked there 35 or 40 years, you know. There aren’t any tech companies that have been around that long except like, except Microsoft and Apple, you know, so. So you know, the beauty there is that the misbehaviors of various actors are incredibly known and almost taken for granted. So let’s say you’ve got a general contractor on a project, you’ve got an architect, you have two structural engineers, you have one environmental engineer, you have 15 trades and those are all coming together to spend millions of dollars of somebody’s money or in case you know, with me in probably with your projects as well, billions of dollars of somebody’s money. So the size of these projects makes startups look like a joke. And every project is kind of given, you know, carte blanche. Is like you can be what you want to be. And the so what I loved with working with Turner is that they took that seriously. And so when I said you know on like this project, I would like to develop a better relationship with the designers and the architects so that when we’re processing paperwork, that paperwork just flows through, and it’s not a big fight to get stuff done all the time. And I’ll save everybody money, it’ll save everybody time. But the only thing that we’re going to do really is get together and agree not to be jerks. And everybody of course, said well, I’m totally willing to do that but those other jerks aren’t. And then we got all the jerks in the room and they’re like, I thought you were the jerk. Awww and then there was a big hug. And I love that stuff. I absolutely love that stuff. Because in that field, you can’t hide from who your customer is, and you can’t hide from the trades. Because if you do, they’re gonna fall off a ladder and hurt themselves literally. So software is like so safe. You know, the only hurt you ever get is your feelings or because you’re treated like crap, you know, those are the only two things but you very rarely, you know, have a rivet go through your skull or something. Almost never happens in software. But what was your experience?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:53

Well, it’s just like understanding you know, challenges of dependencies right, challenges so like you said relationship and communication and visualizing work and what’s, you know, it’s always amazing when people start talking to each other and they start understanding and you know, develop that relationship. Like you said, it seems like the human side of things kind of fixes everything else. If we have that trust if we have those relationships. And I thought it was interesting how Clark Pacific combined like they didn’t necessarily care about Scrum more or agile or lean, that they were looking at you know, just what works for us and how can we help others understand what we’re trying to do here, how we’re visualizing work, how the work is flowing?

Speaker: Jim Benson  44:48

That was it. That was what made every day at Turner construction feel like I was going to like a business spa. Is that people might do things that you wish they didn’t do, they might not do things as quickly as you want, but people were just ridiculously practical. And in the end, even though, you know, I like to avoid unnecessary deadlines, when you’re building a multi-billion dollar building that already has tenants who are slated to move in, and their rent in their current building is two and a half million dollars a month, there is real penalties for missing the real deadline and so you need to make sure upfront that that deadline is acceptable, that there are allowances for different complexities, and that you have the ability to deal with those complexities as they come up, and that you, you know, the one of the guys that I work with a Turner he just did a series of events with some of their suppliers and initially, the suppliers were like, all right, you give me millions of dollars for the business every year, so I’ll come to your stupid thing. And then a couple of days into it, they’re like, wait, if we do this, can we really do this? And they’re like, yeah, we can really do this and we want, we want to make sure that you have a safer environment that you know, when other people are going to be on the floor when, but you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they’re like, and one of the guys said, you know, if we go through a couple projects, and you know, the all these projects do this and we get into a rhythm, you can bet that our estimates for you are going to come in 20% lower, because they instantly could see where the savings were going to come from. And the savings were all relationships. So it wasn’t like we’re going to make the cost of wood lower. It was we’re just gonna stop treating you like dirt.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:54

And that’s what I’m seeing too like that relationship side, that culture side, they they’re talking about changing that because again, another thing that I’m seeing and I didn’t know this till I got into the space a little bit. But lean construction Institute is big, and you know, they’re looking at agile and then like I saw Jeff Sutherland and scrumming diving into this construction business

Speaker: Jim Benson  47:24

God help us all.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:28

So I’m like, I wanted to get your thoughts on like do you think it you know, as agile is going outside of software development, and there is an interest in construction to learn about these because they see them as management approaches.

Speaker: Jim Benson  47:44

What no, what they have bought is the bullshit arguments that agile actually works for people. And the reason that those arguments persist is because nobody ever actually measures what’s really going on. So we cherry pick routinely, you know, good stories, and then we tell those good stories a lot. And what we’re not doing is saying, what does agile actually mean? Like for the love of God, what does this thing mean? Because it doesn’t mean two week iterations, it doesn’t mean small teams, it doesn’t… you know, everything that we ever try and give it as a definition, it immediately wiggles out of that definition. So right now literally, the definition for me for agile is good shit. And I love the drive to do better things and continuous improvement but the malpractice that has been perpetuated in the name of agile, you know, that’s how we have 737s falling out of the sky.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:00

Yeah. Which is crazy. And I mean, and like then all the big consulting companies are into this. And, you know, this is not just what you’re saying. It’s not just that false perception outside of software, it’s in software too.

Speaker: Jim Benson 49:16

Yes, yeah. We don’t know what it means.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:19

Yeah. And companies are falling for it, they think, you know, like you said, they don’t really know what it means but everybody’s doing it so my company must do it as well.

Speaker: Jim Benson  49:28

Yep. And so that brings us back to the beginning. You’re bringing a coach, the coach has gone through a couple of these certification programs, they’ve got enough of a resume to say I’ve done things for people, no one really checks your history. But, you know, questions that I would ask a new agile coach were what’s the weirdest problem that you came up, that confronted you and how did you solve it? How did you deal with it when you got a team working in a comfortable way and somebody else came along and derailed it? And to see if the responses to those things are humane, or if they’re complain.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:11

Yeah, exactly. And that tells you a lot about that person and there’s, you know, their state of mind and what they’re thinking.

Speaker: Jim Benson  50:20

So I’ll tell you like, there’re a lot of people that I would trust immediately in the Agile world with one of my clients. You know, Ron Jeffries and I spar all the time, I would totally trust him with one of my clients. And I guarantee you that if you go back and look through all the clients that Ron Jeffries has ever had, he’s never done the same thing twice. He’s done what the client has needed and I respect the hell out of him for it. You know, I would trust Alister Coburn with any of my clients. You know, there’s a long list of people that I would trust. I’m not going to say who I would not trust but what makes me untrusting is the number of people running around claiming to be experts who have never managed anything, have never dealt with a serious interpersonal issue, who don’t understand the relationships between serious interpersonal relationships, or issues and agile or lean or making a better culture. And, you know, we’ve had to deal with horrible things since we started Modus. Not in our company, with our with our customers. And there have been like sexual assaults, people posting on Facebook, I’m going to drive to the office and blow everybody away and everybody knows that person has a truckload of guns. You know, upper management specifically laying traps for people so that they can make them look bad to not just fire them, but to ruin their career in the future. Crazy things! And or even just simple power dynamics where a company’s set up to have like incredible positional power centered in two or three senior vice presidents, and everybody else just lives in fear and you’re brought in as the coach, how do you create positive change in an organization that is scared to death? How do you create positive change in an organization that has just been brought up on charges by the federal government for mishandling the information of the people that subscribe to it service? You know, your Scrum Master training isn’t going to help you with that. And I’m being all ranty about this, because that’s why people hire us.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  53:02

But it goes back to like where we started and maybe this is a good way to conclude it; it goes back to the systems, understand the systems and not just in I… think I spoke with Dave Snowden and he was shedding all over systems thinking, just because they think, same way that you know, with they get certain things too extreme, we’ve taken systems thinking too extreme, just to mean, you know, one type of system, like physical systems or but like it’s really understanding different types of systems including, as I said, human systems are humans side. And I agree, you know, most of the coaches, most of the trainers don’t have that experience, can go in and understand that. The question is, if I had to guess it’s very small of people that can do that. And yet, our world is dealing with challenges that require more than that small percentage of people that can do it, and what I respect about what you’re doing and what some of the other people are doing in the industry is creating and helping develop people to understand that broader spectrum of skills and understanding that you need to have to do that. So maybe as a last kind of thought here is what would be your message to people that are aspiring to be those culture that you describe that you would like to work with?

Speaker: Jim Benson  54:35

Can I share my screen? So here we go, I’ll quickly share my screen. So this is a LinkedIn post that I put up the other day and I use the LinkedIn post just to make sure that I got the fully redacted version of this. So Tony and I just did a week-long event with one of our larger clients and we have kind of a half format. And so I’m showing this to kind of show, the half format. It’s kind of like a ramp if you will. So we got this group together and they’re are a hyper distributed team, no two people on this team are actually in the same city, really. And so they’re spread all over the world. But they have a very pivotal role in in this large company. And they also kind of work on that dividing line between research and development and release. So they have to be able to speak super creative and super buttoned down. They’re really amazing special group of people. So what we did initially was he got together with them, and we did a value stream mapping exercise and that’s what this part is. And in that we go through and we say, okay, basically, what is the problem that you’re currently having? You know, and then we say, okay, what is the process behind that? And we get together, and we know, you know, what happens in the process, what problems are in there, what possible solutions are in there, who you can collaborate with, etc, and so forth. And we always start with this because it’s kind of like calisthenics. It’s just like a warm up exercise but it’s super valuable. So in this, you get everybody in this mode, where they’re thinking about things that happen both procedurally and culturally because no work is handed off without either helping or harming the person that comes after you. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  56:34

It’s almost like exposing the system or visualizing the physical system of the value delivering, you just try and try to reflect it back to them. Right?

Speaker: Jim Benson  56:43

100%, but also to get them to see it, because no team ever agrees on what it is. Ever!

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  56:49

And you will probably say the most valuable part of this is the conversation that goes into this right?

Speaker: Jim Benson  56:54

Totally, totally. It’s that and it’s getting them ramped up. And then we go into this thing and this thing is what we call the charter. And we do for affinity mapping exercises around vision, which is kind of like, you know, what does the team do? Who do they do it for? What value do they get out of it? How are their lives better? And then the next one is expectations. What do we expect from each other of people giving us work, of people that we give work to? The next one is boundaries or collaboration; when do we need to talk to each other? And then the last one is victory, which is like if we were 100% successful right now, what would that look like? And we go through each of these, in this case, this was Monday, this was Tuesday, this was Wednesday. So we’re already halfway into the week, and we’re supposed to do all these things. So then we get into Thursday, and I’m like, alright guys, you know, we’ve really got to turn up the heat. So we go into the communications agreement, which is what do we need as professionals to know? How do we know it? Where’s the information stored? Why do we always have to ask each other? Where do we lose stuff? And we start to build out what the communications agreement for this is, so that we can give people this stuff so that we can do this thing. And then we didn’t get all the way through it. Then we got to here, it became clear that the team already had what they needed to know out of this exercise. And rather than going and doing this next thing, and it doesn’t even matter what that thing was, we went and did a second value stream mapping exercise around what their future state was. So alright smart people. If everything worked fine, what would that generic thing look like? Because this was a particular thing they did and they did, like 20 or 30 particular things. So we said all right, what’s your particular you know, what’s the genericized version of that, that looks perfect? And then after that we did this is called the low hanging fruit orchard where we create, we basically have them move all of the solutions that were in these previous things down into here, we did a little effort and impact thing and then we created a roadmap for them to actually do that. And while we were doing that, they were like putting silly pictures in here and doing all of this stuff and it was filled with their personality. But the key here is that our goal originally was to do these nine boxes and in the end, we did these two and two thirds, or two and three quarters and then after that all this other stuff is just made up on the fly based on the needs of that team. Why is that important? Well, that’s important because if you go into your client, to your customers, and you do the same thing every time, we’re going to do stand-up meetings and we’re going to ask what you do yesterday, what’re you gonna do today and you know, do you have any blockers? We’re gonna do retrospectives every two weeks and they’re going to look like the this format and we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that. If you have that script, you helped no one because they have problems that are independent of software development.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:00:00

Yeah, and like what I mean, like what I saw there, just as you quickly describe that is like, let me help you understand the current state, let me clear the platform for you to discuss it better understand that. Let’s talk about, you know, how we’re going to work, what is the future look like, right, in the sense of policies and you know, what we need to do as a team and then let’s visualize the future state. And with that you’re giving the I’m sure that’s not the end, now the hard work starts, which is how do we evolve the system, right?

Speaker: Jim Benson  1:00:32

How do we take the momentum of this really emotional week and make sure that your culture that you’ve defined here is operationalized, it’s part of your overall obeya. So I know we’re probably going long so I’m going to try and make this super short. But I want to share just really quickly our, you know, the one of the guys that invented Kanban, this is their current Kanban. And the reason for this is, this is our podcast, these are our newsletters, these are our blog posts, this is marketing, this is all the crap that goes into actually building a company. This down here is one of the courses that needed to be shored up. So at any given point in time, you need to know more stuff than is just going to be on a Kanban. So I say this because I don’t want the Agile people to think that I’m just ragging on agile. I’m ragging on our current state in software development.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:01:41

I think most people, at least I agree and why I want to speak with you because I respect that. Like, as much as we teach as much as we’d… like any person that can, that has been and done any of this stuff, understands what it takes. And what you’re describing is the same type of patterns that I’ve seen that work. And I know what also doesn’t work. What doesn’t work is saying, go do Scrum when people don’t have no clue or they don’t have the environment to do scrum. And maybe the last word that you know, to leave us with is integrity. I think I hold myself a little bit more to integrity and doing the right thing. Sometimes even though it’s you know, taking less money. And but it goes back to like, really people and I think a lot of times we do what customers want, we do what we want and we know that’s probably not serving anybody want better so

Speaker: Jim Benson  1:02:47

And just to close on an to agree with that and to close on that as at right now, as software people, we have the fate of the world in our hands. We can build reliable pieces of equipment and code that flies planes, drives cars, restarts hearts, or we can focus on dividing things into two week iterations or on tickets moving from left to right. We need to make sure at any given point in time that we understand there are a lot of unintended consequences of our faulty work and that we can’t accept that malpractice or that laissez faire attitude anymore. We have to grow up and build some real software.