Johanna Rothman

 TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:59

Who is Johanna Rothman?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  01:03

You might, actually if I’m being kind of a ‘why’ is asked, I hope that I can say that on this, I guess. You might have to edit that out. I have a big mouth and I have a lot of experience in various contexts, not everybody’s contexts but a lot of experience and I applied that hard earned experience to the issues of management and product development and everything that comes along with that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:42

Does that come from, before I started recording, we talked about how we’re actually not too far from each other right now. I’m in Portland, Maine, you’re in Arlington, is that in the New England edge or is it something that New Englanders, is that part of the big mouth or innocence?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  02:06

No, I don’t think so. I think it’s me. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:11

That’s awesome.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  02:13

I don’t think it’s, no, I think that there are a lot more. I know a lot of other people here who are much calmer and everything like that. So, I actually put in my bio, I offer frank advice and that helps get my clients, it helps my potential clients decide whether or not I’m the right person for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:46

That is great. When it comes to, I guess, you know books, you’ve written close to 20 books, 18 I believe right now and counting. Do you have a favorite one?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  03:03

No, that’s like, asking if you have a favorite child. No.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:09

I only have one child right now. So, you know, it’s for me, it’s easy, so maybe I can’t really relate.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  03:17

Yeah, I know I have two children. Well, they’re grown so it’s hard to call them children but they are. So, every book is unique. I don’t write the same book again and again and I really don’t like doing second editions. I do have some second editions but I prefer not. I prefer to write a book and make it so it’s, not universal but long lived, right? I’m not tied to a technology and tied to a time. So, I’ve done a pretty good job with that. So, for me right now since we are recording this and the Modern Management Made Easy books are out, the Modern Management Made Easy books are my ‘favorite’ and assumes consulting book, that will be my favorite.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:20

Great, what is your process? I think I was listening to one of the podcasts. I don’t know exactly which one and you talked about, like, you know, the discipline of writing every day. And you know, how do you get into the habit because like, I can relate a little bit to that because I started writing a book and that discipline of writing every day really made the difference. As soon as I stopped, I stopped writing, it’s been a while since I saw it. What would you recommend to those that hopefully want to write but also like, how do you get back out of that writer’s block, is it just start writing again? Or like, what’s your space, how do you kind of, not necessary, force yourself but help yourself focus on writing?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  05:11

So, well I really like what you said, help yourself focus, right? Because I actually write in, often in 15-minute blocks because I am busy just the same way everybody else is, right? So, I did a little bit of writing before we got on this morning, I actually only did five minutes of writing, that’s what I had. And I have, I put aside time on my calendar because it’s been a crazy week. So today, I actually have several one-hour blocks that I put inside those blocks to write in 15-minute increments. So, I write for 15 minutes and then I tend to walk around because I mean, I need to get my blood moving, I need a change of venue so that I have more ideas. And so, for me, it’s all about if you get out of the habit of writing, do the smallest thing you can to get back into the habit and you don’t need a lot of time, 15 minutes every single day is much more sustainable than an hour, right, at least in my experience.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:30

Yeah, that’s a very good advice and again, like I can relate though, it’s just because it is so tough and like if you think it’s too big, it’s almost like you know, when we talk about an agile you know, those be buys those smaller chunks of work and get those done. To come back to New England and summer, where would you like to spend, is there a place because for me, like between Croatia and Montenegro and New England, I always debate like, where would I rather spend the summer because I love summers in New England. Is there another place for you besides New England or maybe you’re more of a fall person because fall in New England is also nice?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  07:19

I really like it here and I was just whining this morning to my husband, that we do not have enough money to buy a mansion on the cape. We just don’t and wait, there’s something about the cape that really calls to me, Cape Cod, for our listeners who were not in the New England area. Maybe because I went to camp on Cape Cod, back when I was a kid, I loved it. It was a wonderful thing and if I could be anywhere inside of water, that would be really good. Yeah, but not, so yes. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:04

The reason that I ask, I’ve read one of your posts recently about reset and you said like, you know, summer is a good time for you to reset and kind of you know, rethink what you’re doing? Could you maybe elaborate on that like, why you think resets and readjustments are important because I think in our, you know, today’s life, everything, I feel like I’m busier since COVID. And it’s harder to reset because it’s just a continuous kind of flow, both personal as well as work related stuff. So, let’s talk a little bit about reset.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  08:44

So, in that post, I believe it was around July 1, somewhere around there and I find it, so I always have goals for the year and in order to achieve those goals, I break them down into monthly goals. And I use rolling wave planning for every single week because I have opportunities as a consultant to speak or consult or coach or something, then I did not know about it at the beginning of the week or the month of the year but I want to be able to take advantage of some of those opportunities. So, I’m always replanting in the small. However, if I don’t track what I’m doing for a yearly basis, then I don’t actually make the progress on what to make in a year. So, for example, I trust the number of published words or publishable words I have because I’m a writer, right? And that’s what writers do, we track the words and I find that if I don’t track the words, I don’t always get my 15 minutes of writing every day. So, that’s a reinforcing measure right, it reinforcing good stuff. And then if I look back at the first half of the year and I see where I am in relationship to where I wanted to be, then I can say, well, what do I need to change? Now, some people do this quarterly, I find that still quarterly is, I’m still working on those small rolling waves inside the larger months, inside the larger year already. If I’m not where I want to be at the halfway mark, I still have a chance to fix the year. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:41

So, you’re on a different fiscal year, kind of like government, you know, when it starts in July versus like, most of us, you know, think about like, what am I going to do at the end of the year? You know, what are my goals for this year but I really like the idea of reset, rethinking things in the summer. So, that’s something I’m going to try and apply myself but it’s also that rolling, kind of like, I really like, I’ve done that in the past but I think we all can do a better job of, you know, kind of, like what we preach about, talk about actually apply in our own work.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  11:19

So, I’ve been writing about Rolling Wave Deliverable Based Planning, since I think 96, or seven or eight or nine, very, a long time and I find that I mean, I use this for my own work, right? That’s how I get, if people ask me all the time, how do you write so much and you talk so much and I have the same number of hours as anybody else but I use, that’s why I find Rolling Wave Deliverable Based Planning so helpful. And that’s one of the things we have as Agilers, right? We might have a big goal for a product, for me, that’s a book or a workshop and I cannot get it all done in one day or one week or even one month, right? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:15

But it’s also easy to get all around that. Like, when I think about anything big, it’s like, it’s easier to say no, than yes. So like, you know, when we think big, you know, when we chunk it down to smaller, like you said, I really liked what you said earlier about, like, even if I can write for five minutes, it’s keeping me in that mindset of just keep going. Because that’s how I always thought like, I need at least an hour, you know, and you don’t.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  12:44

I really increased my throughput when I started to write in less time. I used to always block in an hour and I need to do it in an hour. Yeah, no, now I need 15 minutes so I write a whole lot more.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:02

And that’s what we talked about in software development too in this sense, like it’s the same principle. So, applying it to writing is also, you recently talked about or wrote about work life balance and what it means to you. It’s related to this topic because you know that’s important, too and could you talk about that a little bit and bring some light to that post?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  13:27

Sure. So, I’m pretty open about the fact that I have vertigo, I have permanent vertigo. I am always a dizzy bright, right? I moved my head in the world most of it all. I walked with a rollator, there. Yeah. And I, yeah, it’s right behind me. I walk all the time with a rollator because if I walk with my rollator, I can actually get exercise. I get nice and warm. I read hard, I get my heart rate up. It’s everything I need and the people in my neighborhood think I’m nuts. I don’t care, I am nuts, this is totally fine. However, if I don’t balance my physical health with my emotional health with my intellectual and mental health, right, all of this is really necessary for us. So, I put my health first, as if I don’t put my health first, I cannot be a good wife and a good mother. Although I’m sure that my kids were like, a little less mothering now, I cannot be a good consultant, I can definitely not be a good writer. So, for me, it starts with, how do I keep myself healthy in all ways and then how do I extend my ability to keep myself healthy, to my family, to my work, to my clients, to my community, all that stuff. And, you know, I wrote in manage your job search that I don’t believe in work life balance, you only have life and everybody needs to find what works for them in any given time of their lives but we all need to make our choices so that we optimize for what we need at the time. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:27

Do you think it’s easier as a consultant versus, work both as a consultant outside and inside companies and like, I’m sure you have as well? And like, it’s a little bit different when you’re in a system that’s not also helping you make that decision, right? So, what do you think our companies are doing today to help people because ultimately, it is our decision, right? But companies can make it easier than employees to make that decision and to prioritize, you know, what’s important to them at any given moment.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  15:59

I’m going to take a little issue with that, I’m going to say, well, while companies might make that easier for employees, my experience is that very few managers actually think about that for their staff, right, for the people that they live and serve. Back when I was a manager inside organizations, I was, if I had to give myself a rate, I was a kind of 50/50 on extending enough empathy to the people I lived and served. I think I am better with that now, I certainly practiced a lot more but I think it’s really incumbent on people to say, I will work nine to five, return to six or eight to twelve and then I need a few hours with the kids and then I can come back to work. I had a job once as a manager, right, I was there from nine to five on the dot and sometimes only 4:30, depending on what my kids needed that day, right? So, and I went back to work after supper, I did a whole bunch of report generation, I call, I did phone screens for hiring people. I worked after supper but I had a very hard stop probably earlier than they wanted any manager to actually finish for the day but I had small children, I needed to do something like that. So, I did.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:43

That’s about discipline, though. Like, you have to really be disciplined about what you do, when you do it. Like, it goes back to writing too because in a sense, you know, you have to prioritize for yourself. So, it’s a two-way thing and what I’m getting, you know, from this is, sometimes, I’ve done this myself and I’ve seen others where like, we kind of put it on others and half of the work, we have to make sure that it’s on us in a sense, like I have to make that decision. I’m going to leave by 4:30 and I’m not going to make excuses but I also know that I have to finish stuff. So, I’m going to be disciplined about my time boxing and what I’m doing, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  18:26

Yeah, so I mean, I told all the people I lead, right? I was the manager for 17 people, that I explained to them, here’s my day, if you want me after, in this time, where I’m with my kids, you don’t get me. And this is back before we had ubiquitous cell phones. So, I gave my home phone number to the people in my team and I said me if you’re really need me, you can call me after 7:30 because husband is dealing with small children. I am back at work and if you really need me, if it cannot wait until the next day and I gave my boss my home phone number and my team and I think we all need to have boundaries about where we work, when we work, what we do. I’m not sure if this is discipline, maybe it is, back before I had the vertigo I worked out every single morning, starting at about 6:30 in the morning. My husband and I got up at six, I was in the gym by 6:30, I was done by nine-ish, 8:30 whatever. I had long workouts. So, especially when I was working from home as a consultant and I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed having the discipline of going to the gym every single morning, Monday through Friday, I had different workouts for different days because you know, that’s what you do. Yeah, but I happen to like my routines and I’m not sure if it’s discipline or routines but whatever it is, it works for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:21

You wrote with, I’m thinking about like remote and it is a lot of times, I guess, maybe harder. And I’m going back to the book that you wrote with Mark on remote and distributed teams, what are some of the tips that you can maybe give people, is it again just routines when it comes to working from home and it’s a little bit hard sometimes because you know, kids are at home, everybody’s at home, more probably distractions, I’m assuming? You don’t have, I know I struggle sometime of finding time for myself because as soon as I’m done here, I walk out. You were right there, where like, you know, you sometimes you had that ride or whatever it is in between, what are some of the tips they will give people to deal and be more maybe discipline or organized now that we’re mostly distributed and remote?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  21:12

So, the hours of overlap are so important and when Mark and I offered an hours of overlap chart and there’s Google Docs that people can also use for themselves. We only had it in ours and now what I think, I’m pretty sure that Mark and I both agree, I would not do hours, I would do either 20-minute segments or 30-minute segments because we are not, this is not normal, remote work. We are all at home and our kids are with us and I bet there are some parents out there who cannot wait for the start of the school, they are just done being home with their kids. I actually said to Mark; my husband as opposed to Mark Kilbv, my co-writer. I said to my husband and it’s a good thing our children are old and grown and out of the house as I’m not sure I would have made it. Yeah, I mean, I would have, we all would have gone nuts, this house is not big enough for four people all doing their own work. So, I think that anybody who’s home with children is just astonishing but to go back to how I would do it is, in 20- or 30-minute segments, you have the option of we will work together here, we will take a break here and we all need to do something else, we will be back at work together. So, the more you can create those little time boxes of when we will all be together and know in advance, then you can all commit to that. Which means that anybody with a really small child, that’s really hard but anybody with children who are able to manage themselves for 20 minutes at a time, this is still doable.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:16

It’s also easier to find maybe those smaller chunks and a lot of times you just reconnect, realign, you know or just, you know, from a communication standpoint, it’s probably a lot easier to do something that we’re doing here; video and probably screenshare rather than just you know, emails. To come back to your kids, you recently wrote about how you judge or how you judge if something is good or how good something is, you used the analogy with buying a dress for your second daughter, could you maybe talk about that I enjoyed reading that as well.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  23:55

Thank you, I’m so glad you’re enjoying the creative and adaptable life flow, thank you. I’m never sure how many people actually read that. So, a lot of mothers of the bride, mothers of the groom have these flowing long dresses and they look really lovely and chiffon flows directly into the brakes of my rollator. And I discovered that the hard way at my older daughter’s wedding. So, I have very different criteria for this dress than I had for the first dress. And I find that especially, if we think about that as an analogy to the products that we create, until we start to put something in front of our users, they don’t know what they really want and their criteria change. And so, we always hear at least I used to always hear this a lot in the old days of software development, you gave me what I asked for but it’s not when I need. And when we can change that and that’s all about changing the criteria. How do we get to the point where we can see what we really need? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:15

It’s all about learning that criteria evolves as you learn, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  25:19

Yeah. So, I learned at my older daughter’s wedding, I’m going to take that learning and change what I do for this next wedding. And I think a lot of us, we realize how differently we use technology now and how we could use it in the future? And can we be perfect at this, absolutely not? But we can be better at it and that means we need more deliverables, more assessment as we go and to be willing and open to changing that criteria.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:04

And that’s the O.P.I, I mean like, in a sense, it goes back to those outcomes, what are you trying to do and you know, in your instance, you’re trying to be comfortable and enjoy your daughter’s wedding as well as look good. So, whatever is going to get to that outcome. Maybe, to switch gears a little bit, another thing that I found interesting is you wrote about policies and procedures and how they increase friction and that’s really like, you know, a systemic. For me like, you talked about how over the years, we add policies, we add and maybe at some point, they made sense but a lot of times, you know, they’re outdated or you know, the context has changed. And as managers, as leaders, importance of understanding the system and understanding the policies within that system and evolving those policies or maybe loosen up those policies so they’re not, as you know, loosen up the guardrails, I guess. So, could you talk about that? Like, why did you write that? Like, what triggered that thought to write that article because I’m assuming you always have something that triggers an idea or thought?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  27:21

Yeah, several things, almost all of these, a lot of the policies I see are because somebody made a mistake and we want to, in effect, punish everybody else or we’re trying to manage risks of some sort. And the risks I see are often about money but the policies and the mistakes are often a banner of product development. So, I gave the example in there, a management sign up for deployment and this one, this was a client of mine, they had wrapped themselves so far around the axle with asking for signups that the managers no longer understood anything in the code. Right? So, the managers had to sign off on deployment but they didn’t know anything in the code. I mean, I asked these people, do you know about the internals? No, my people tell me what’s going on? Okay, fine. Yeah and because they had all these signups they needed a separate deployment team. So, the deployment team did not know what was in the code and if they did not deploy in the right order, which was the example I gave, then they did an upgrade to the database before they did all of the preparation for the upgrade to the database. They had no way to rollback. Well, no easy way to rollback and so all of this risk management with signups and a separate deployment team actually created the exact problem that they wanted to avoid. So, I said to them, what would it take for you to be comfortable with having a team, just choose any team at all? Deploy on Monday and then another team to deploy on Tuesday and another team to deploy on Wednesday, what would it take for you to be comfortable with that? They said well, a whole lot more testing. Okay? Maybe go to a staging server and tested there first, I said, okay, right, how can you get comfortable with going to production right away? What would it take? So, we talked about their continuous integration and then their pipeline to get to continuous delivery. And they’re not continuous in the sense of what a lot of other people think is continuous now, where any team can deploy at any time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:02

But it’s a step probably in the right direction. Yeah.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  30:05

Yeah, they do have automated deployment from 2am to 4am and then a whole bunch of testing as they go. And they always have somebody on call, I’m not so excited about that but nobody has to respond until 6am. So, they have a system that’s working better, that does allow for more trust and at some point, maybe they will just deploy during the day, I even hope that that happens. But I think it’s so hard for managers to trust when something goes wrong, everybody feels badly and instead of saying, how do we recover faster from that, that’s when they put all these policies and procedures in place. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:57

So, there’s that connection between policies and procedure, risk or recently, I saw somewhere written here, every agile approach manages certain risk, right? And then there’s trust, so policies and procedures, risks and trust. So, when it comes to managers, we just said, like, my people and my peeps got it, I don’t have to worry about, you know, this risk management in traditional sense. And from traditional project management was something that project manager was responsible for or maybe you would have a risk management team but it wasn’t really you know, what we talked about in agile words, like, the distributing and everybody’s responsible for risk, you know and everybody should be having their eyes open and, you know, when it comes to risk and we should have trust to make sure that we’re not putting policies in place. How have you seen this distribution of or taken like a lot of times, developers or I mean any developers, anybody on the scrum team, anybody that is doing the work has a difficult time accepting that they need to manage their own work or that they actually need to manage risk? So, how do you help people understand, I’m assuming that you agree that they should be thinking about risk, they should be thinking about manage their own work? How do we help people like that maybe see the value in managing risk and managing their own work?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  32:25

So, this is where thinking about outcomes versus outputs is so important. I am a huge fan of having a product goal, right, we are doing this product for these people, for these kinds of outcomes and if we always think about that as we create smaller stories and if we always think about that as we integrate performance and security into everything that we do, then we are much more likely to reach the outcomes that we want and manage risk as we proceed. So, this is a function of the project owner, that possibly the project managers and where management cannot take that away from the people on the team, right? If you delegate a problem and its outcomes to a team, right, it may be in the form of a product, maybe in the form of a service, then you cannot take it back. Right? That’s really important. You cannot be wishy washy about, yeah, you have the responsibility and you have the authority to do this and then on Friday afternoon, no, I’m not happy, I’m going to take it back. You’ve cannot do that as a manager in any management form, right? I don’t care if you’re called a scrum master or project manager or a people manager, you have to, once you offer the team, the problem and the outcomes, that’s the role of delegation, you cannot take it back at any time.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:10

And that’s I think really important point which is hard, it also like it’s a mindset like, for we’ve been so like, conditioned over the years, right, to think certain way, to work certain way. One of those is that, hey, you know, I have a manager and they’re responsible for everything, I’m just going to go in, code or test or do my job and that’s obviously changing but like, I was teaching a class here at University of Maine and kids today and in general, like are not thinking the way or they’re not being conditioned in a way to think about it. They’re like, I’m a full stack developer, I’m a problem solver, I need to think about the customer, I should be talking to the customer and a lot of times, like, when I work with clients, especially like larger companies or government agencies, it’s like you know, I’m a back-end developer on this application, don’t ask me to do anything else. Right? So, little bit of that is I think conditioning and I know like, I’ve read that, you know, your earlier days or late 1970s, late 1980s, you worked on cross functional teams. So, what got me thinking is like, you know, like, what has changed when you reflect back? Like, what are the things look like then because a lot of times when I talk to people, they say, like, we’re agile back then and we’re doing some of this stuff. So, maybe could you take us down memory lane and talk about, like, you know, how some of this stuff back in 70s, 80s was, you know, kind of all about, had the same principles that we talk about. And at least to me, it’ll be interesting, because I’ve talked to people and they tell me stories about, like, you know, agile wasn’t, you know, born in 2001. This way of working was so, when you reflect what are some of the thoughts that come to mind?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  36:04

So, up until 1985, when the personal computer came out, we all had to share computers, right? We had either mainframes or mini computers. So, on my first job as well, we had a mainframe and there was the guy who did the JCL and we had key punch ladies, which was kind of crazy because in college I’d actually worked on a time-sharing operating system. So, we all had our own monitors. We had time slices on the computer itself but it was used to a keyboard not a key punch. Yeah, fine but there were no formal testers on our very large program in 1977. We had developers and we all looked at each other’s design, we all looked at each other’s code, we had religious design reviews, religious code reviews and religious testing as a team. Right? So, the team would go into the lab and say, is this working now? So, we did not have supposedly independent verification and validation, that worked out fairly well, I have a funny story of when I went to implement conference calling for a telephone system. I made it so that the general could only listen, everybody else talked as I flipped the bid, fine. He had a really good attitude about this because I said to him, I have not tested, this is the first time I’ve tested it. He said to me, go flip that bid the other way, fine but then, when I worked on a mini computer on analytical chemical instrumentation, there were seven or eight of us as in the software department, right, we had a department. We, again, revision of this code and design, we tested with each other and for each other because when I’m in development mode, I don’t see the same things is when I’m in testing mode and then I worked on machine vision systems on specific, on I guess, proprietary hardware. So, we all had access to the operating system, we all had access to all the libraries and we changed what we needed to do. I mean, we had to get, if we wanted to change the operating system, we really need to get permission from everybody else. Did we really wanted to change the OS? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. So, well we all work together as cross functional teams and I think for those first couple of machine vision companies on mini computers, I found that we worked in small chunks, where the chunks as small as they are now, no, except for me because I had learned about the 90% done schedule game in my first job at a school. I was 90% done for five weeks and well, I went to 91%, 92%,92 and a half percent but my boss finally took pity on me. He said would you like to know a secret advice? I said yes because I have no idea when this is going to be done and he told me that inch pebbles, right? When it’s your date task, either done or not done, does this sound like small stories to you? So, I started to use inch pebbles in 1977 because that’s when I knew I was totally broken on this particular project. When you use inch pebbles and rolling wave planning, it looks a lot like what we do as Agilers now, not exactly the same, I did not use test driven development, I was not that smart. In fact, I stared at it, for cleanroom just stare at it. So, I did not do everything back then but a lot of what we use now, I’ve been using since the 70s and the big change came in 1985 and 86 when the personal computer came up and that’s when managers thought for only four grand or five grands, I can buy each developer, his or her own computer and really focus down on what that developer needs to do. So, we had this interesting confluence of problems, project management software that was focused on resource efficiency, what is each person doing separately and a personal computer that allowed each person to focus down on their work? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:08

And that’s when they started measuring lines of code and all of that, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  41:13

Yeah, so that really changed, well it reinforced how managers thought about managing and how project managers thought about managing. I am convinced that that’s why the Agile Manifesto was born.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:32

To bring us back and to go back there. Yeah, that’s probably interesting.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  41:38

Yeah, 15 years of resource efficiency thinking was horrible.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:45

Assuming that we can get the you know, people confused with being busy developers, writing code and getting stuff done and if you look at it from that side, you can get easily confused. I wanted to maybe to switch a little bit here. I was interested in, I wanted to get your thoughts on your recently collaborative business agility Institute and their job number four title, reclaiming management. So, I wanted to get your thoughts first on, has management become a dirty word? Like, a lot of times people now use management and it’s like, you know, it’s a dirty word like, you know, management is bad or so I wanted to ask you first that and then maybe you could elaborate on what did you learn from being the editor and being involved in that project?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  42:37

So, I think that for too many Agilers, management is a dirty word because they use control; command and control as equivalency for management. A management’s job is not about command and control, a management’s job is to create the environment where everybody can succeed for a greater purpose, for that overarching goal, to answer the why, to answer the value that each person, each team, each products brings to the organization. So, management is all about the culture, creating and refining the culture that will create great products, right? If we have a culture and that people can really succeed in, they will create great products. So, management is all about the guardrails and constraints that allow people to do great work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:30

[not sure 43.31] in the system, in a sense, right? 

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  43:33

Yes. If managers are not meta about the work, about the system, the environment, the culture, then managers are probably commanding and controlling, not all that useful. So, and what I learned from this issue, so I’ve been the technical editor for Agileconnection.com for six years, several years ago and I really enjoyed it. I really love helping writers find their voice, show their gems, their thoughts that are really useful. So, I really enjoyed that but I don’t want to be a book doctor or any of that, that’s, no, that’s not for me. That’s why I offer writing workshops because I want people to be able to do that for themselves. Now, when I learned, I had such a good time with this issue, first of all, there were several other people I’ve wanted to invite for this issue that they’ve been doing really great work about agile management and I could not invite them. Evan Laybourn, the B.A.I leader, director, whatever he’s called said Johanna, you have to keep to a word count, fine. I will keep to my word count well, right if you have to, you really have to worry about the word count for the paper cut, yeah, fine. So, I had a strict word count, well, not strict but a boundary.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:09

Probably a range, yeah.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  45:12

A boundary. So, I had to really manage my desire for all the people I really wanted, that was a challenge. And I got some wonderful essays from amazing people who you might or might not know. So, let me see if I can find my, I’m going to find my…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:39

Yeah, I had that list. I actually took a look at I don’t know if I have it handy but I definitely looked at the articles and people on that list and I agree. 

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  45:51

Well, it’s a combination of consultants and practitioners, right? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:57

Which is always a good mix.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman 45:59

Yeah, Kath, Doug Norton. Boris Gloger, Jeffrey Frederick, Barry O’Reilly, Gunter, Esther Derby and Douglas Squirrels are all consultants and well known, really smart people. And then there’s Shawn Flaherty and a case study by Barry O’Reilly and Steve Leist. So, we have a nice mixture of real practitioners, people who might speak about this but only in their kind of a context and a whole bunch of other people who have seen many instances of interesting management and Agility in Agile Management and so, I’m really happy about this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:52

It’s great and it’s coming out soon, right? It’s not out yet.

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  46:57

It’s not out yet and all I know is when I was supposed to be done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:05

I think I’m assuming the next couple of months but yeah. You talked about? Yeah. We’ll let people know, yeah. I think so because the other report is coming. Yeah. So, one of the things that made me to come back to you said, you know, managers are responsible for creating a culture. How do they do that? What’s culture? I mean, like, we talked about culture and mindset and these there but nobody really, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly. So maybe, what is your definition of culture and how do managers and leaders help create a culture or maybe some of the ways?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  47:41

Yeah, I’ve adapted my mind definition from Shine because I find that shine has artifacts, values, assumptions, they all get me confused and they’re not concrete. So, the concrete thing is, there are three pieces of the concrete pieces of culture, there’s working people discuss, how do we treat each other and what do we reward? And of the of all three of those, what do we reward is the most important piece. If we say, we don’t want firefighting but we reward individual work, that looks like firefighting, then that’s what we reward. Right? And if we say, if we reward managers on their deliverables, managers are not going to extend trust to the people who need to do the work, they’re not going to delegate work to people in terms of outcomes, right, not problems and outcomes. So, the rewards drive so much of the culture and the rewards are so hard to change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:55

And that’s the interplay between the rewards and the system and behavior and then you know, what cap of culture we create, which is a lot of times, you know, especially in the organizations that most of us deal with, work with, where we have a lot of layers in hierarchy where, you know, people that can change the policies and those rewards, is small percentage of people in the organization. So, for those managers and leaders to be able to do that and to enable the type of culture that’s maybe healthier for today’s environment is key. And I think, you know, I’ve been looking in interviewing people from HR and I think HR and finance is finally catching up to understand what role they play in this movement and how they need to help organization change those policies and maybe loosen up the guardrails. So, people can have a little bit more flexibility in defining those policies. So, managers can do their job in a sense and leaders can do their job. 

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  50:07

Well, if we can get finance to move away from managing with cost accounting to managing by throughput, that will be a huge thing. They saw after we’ve worked in cost accounting terms. Yeah and that’s a problem, when you would change the whole dynamic for the project portfolio instead of asking people to predict when they would be done or how much it’s going to cost, they could change the conversation. That’s how much do we want to invest for now? What’s the cost of delay of not having this thing? Are there any other pieces that would help the entire organization if we did them to reduce the friction all through the organization? Right? And it would change the conversation and if we can get HR to drive moving away from personal, individual rewards, we still need some of that. And the teams are much more likely to know who is actually done a good job and who has not, right? In an actual team, there’s not a lot of room for hiding. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:19

Self-regulating?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  51:21

Yeah, it’s much more self-regulating and if we can move away from just individual rewards to a combination of rewards and based on outcomes, based on the team’s value, I think that we are much more likely to succeed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:42

Right. Maybe, you know, for our last topic here, the podcast is called Agile to Agility and I talked about, you know, how you know, last 20 years were a lot about just agile doing agile, I hope the next 20 years will be about agile and agility because those two go together. And I want to tie back another thing that you wrote, which I really like about finite and infinite games. When we look at our agile community and what has happened and what where we’re kind of going, what do you think, you know, are we playing the finite or infinite games? Where do you think agile is going? What are next maybe five years, ten years? I don’t know. You’ve seen it all. So, do you have any insights into where we might be going?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  52:35

So, I’ve got to tell you, I’m an eternal optimist. Right? So, I need to preface it with that. I really hope that we stop fighting about the frameworks. I find frameworks, well, some frameworks are sort of useful, some are not comprehensible to me. I will just stop there. And I find that, the more we think about how do we use all the information we have for better business outcomes and if we start to focus on business outcomes, we are much more likely to get agility. I actually am working with a client right now, it’s a small client so I’m not sure if this is generally kind of transferable to anybody else, where I said to them, don’t worry about the teams, the teams are smart, they will figure out, they want to use scrum, they want to use flow, doesn’t matter. Whenever they want to use, it’s totally going to be fine but what really matters is that the managers have this same overarching goal and that their job is to create business outcomes, not outputs. And so, if you get the managers to collaborate, that will enable you to get to business agility. They said, I know Johanna, right? This is six months ago, I don’t know, you kind of looking crazy over there. I said, what have you got to lose, right? Try for three months and see what happens, so I’ve been coaching them all this time. They had this enormous breakthrough, where and of course, I’m under NDA, I cannot talk about who the client is or where they are but they had this enormous breakthrough and the teams are collaborating in ways that they had never collaborated before because the managers all had the same overarching goal. Right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:48

All in alignments, right?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  54:50

Yeah, some teams use scrum, some teams use flow, there’s a couple of programs that are using safe that’s fine. As long as they deliver on a regular keenness for those overarching business outcomes, that’s what really matters and this company is having their best quarter ever.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  55:15

And that points to it, you know, I’ve talked to several top leaders and it’s the same message essentially, we got to start thinking for ourselves and start contextualizing. You won’t see any more like where, you know, you’ve probably been part of, you know, I have like, where, you know, a publicly traded company of you know, 1000s of people everybody gets trained in Scrum or Kanban but it’s one or the other. And, you know, everybody has to do it this way or safe or whatever it is and I think what we’re heading into is more of contextualizing things, not written so like you just explained. It’s like, you know, give things freedom to understand what their context is and design whatever works for them rather than limiting them to a specific framework or you know, way of working. So, very interesting maybe as a last thing, what message, what do you want to leave us with for the end?

Speaker: Johanna Rothman  56:15

So, I would like you to think for agility, I would really like you to think about what business outcomes can I contribute to? And who do I need to work with to contribute to them, right? How can we work as a team of a cross functional product team, a team of managers at all levels to really focus on business outcomes, so that we deliver what we want so our customers are happy for agility? And I will try doing my marketing thing, I’m not very good at this. So, I’ll try anyway, I offer a quarterly writing workshop that really helps people get out of their heads and get words on paper. So, if people are interested in that, they should email me or contact me in some way.