John Miller

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:36

Who is John Miller? How would you describe yourself?

Speaker: John Miller  00:40

How would I myself, too curious, always willing to try something different to make things better. get a kick out of seeing people and prove in some way, it’s always a serotonin kick or dopamine, whatever that is. So yeah, curious, always I critique everything. So part of the curiosity is I also critique everything, including myself. I’m a scrum trainer as well but I critique scrum all the time, like yeah, Scrum. Great here, but some issues over there. But I’ll critique everything. So curious, also look at everything from every angle and find the weakness, but that’s also I think part of the next step of improving something is finding the areas to improve in, so yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:32

Nice. And that made me think of like, you’ve redesigned your CSPO class recently. And I think it said, you were kind of you had, you were happy but not happy with it and you went through this whole process of kind of taking apart and then initial response as you were kind of iterating through it, could you maybe discuss that whole process? Why did you decide to redesign your CSPO class? What did you learn from that experience? Because that goes into that kind of question, not question everything but look always look for ways to improve and look for this type of thing, could you share that?

Speaker: John Miller  02:13

I’m laughing because this is an unexpected question and very funny. But yeah, so I have this certified Scrum Product at our class and I did really well with it, people liked it, I was getting good feedback. And I just saw some big problems out there. And I thought, maybe I’m reinforcing some of these problems that I see. And some of my product underclass and whatever you might want to call it, feature factories, whatever it might be. And I started to think about, well, what’s the root cause of those things? And it all went back to me of just not understanding real needs of real users and understand the real problem and allow at least mine and I see other product or classes, they kind of started the vision and they go from there, but it’s too late at that point, you’ve got a solution, once you got a vision, put everything else in your mind. So that’s probably the wrong place to start.

It’s premature, so I just said I’m going to redo it, and really rethink it and try to make and it try to fix this issue that I see out there of a lot of waste, resolving the wrong problem sometimes by just getting this kind of velocity focus that we hear about, which is a big problem. I think you need some velocity, I’m not knocking on it, but it’s about me, I’d rather have no velocity if we’re solving the wrong problem, right? That’s just wasting money and time. So when back we did it, did a lot of things around jobs to be done, I found that for me, the framework for me from Tony Holick job to be done gets kind of right to the heart of trying to understand the problem and the needs very clearly. So I redesigned it, did it and my class sucked. I’m teaching some things and suddenly a little bit because some of these I haven’t done before but I knew it was the right thing. So I knew that this is the right problem to solve. I think this is a good solution than say the solution but a good solution.

So I kept that but I put a lot of my identity and pride into my teaching and my coaching and when I’m not doing well, I get depressed. So I had the spiral of depression like I’m terrible and it wasn’t awful. I’m pretty awful eyes in a bit. I mean, I got some good feedback, but wasn’t nowhere near as my other classes and if I just kept at it, and it probably took me , many iterations and I said, you know what? I’m going to do is product in our classes. It’s [inaudible 4:44] if it’s painful, do it more often. So I said, you know what? I’m going to keep doing them and doing them until I figure it out. But now it’s actually one of my best classes better than I think any class I’ve ever done. Really proud of it, opens up a lot of eyes, a lot of people do not expect to be going that far into the problem space. And I keep them all, pretty much all day one is you need to know your problem.

If you don’t know that, the rest, you can write the best user stories in the world, but they’re just ghost stories. Those are problems that you’re trying to solve. But yeah, every time I iterated, trying to find something better, some of it was just, the content was good. It was the right content was the teaching, and how do you make it understandable? So I just went back and kind of went back to basics of, okay, just pure fun foundational basics of teaching as well, I need to show an example. A good teaching practice I find from education, the education world is, I do, you do, we do. And so we saw this stuff as complicated, it was very not complicated but they’re not used to it. It’s not a habit for a lot of people, writing user stories, not really getting into that problem space. So I kind of remodeled it from the I do, like, I’m going to show you an example how I would go through, you went together, kind of in that way can give you feedback as we’re doing it, and then you go off and do your own thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:08

Yeah, a couple of things are going through my head. So when I prep little bit, that has been a lot of time, maybe half an hour. So I was reading through tweets. And one of the things that stood out is deliberately get uncomfortable. And this reminds me of that to deliberately get uncomfortable, because I can relate to getting comfortable with like, hey, its great class, nothing needs to change, but to actually redesign a class and then try to deliver that successfully is painful. Like you said, it’s up and downs. But the reward is worth it through that process. And why is it so hard for a lot of people to get uncomfortable? And is it just the human nature? What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: John Miller  07:02

We don’t like it. I don’t know the answer to it. I just know growth comes from it. And every time, maybe sitting there one time thinking, how do I grow? How to get better? And I kept thinking anytime I had adversity, I grew. And when I didn’t like it, I wish I wasn’t in it. But at the end of it, I look back and I’m like wow, I’m stronger and better and whatever it might be, right? Work through land securities, whatever that was. And I just went one day and say so why don’t I just create my own adversities? Look how lucky and modern age for many of us, I don’t say everyone, I don’t want to mean that, maybe from a place of privilege, but a lot of us have a lot of our basic needs taken care of. So the idea of this big adversity, sometimes you get to manufacture it, right? To get it. And so I had to start, if I really want to grow, I kind of have to create my own adversity. Sorry, my own adversities. But why is it? I don’t know. It’s so hard, but it’s just painful. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:06

It is painful but I know personally, it’s painful. But I know it’s a good process. I used to build websites and design websites. And back in the day in late 1980s, early 2000s, computers would crash and you would lose all of the work but always knew even though it was painful, to redo everything from scratch, it was always better than where I had it. So, I was just interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Speaker: John Miller  08:38

Yeah, even this morning, we were talking about fitness before the podcast. But even wake up like I’m achy, I’m older, I’m 46 and I just started judo last week, and that’s really making me sore. I’m not good at it. I’m getting thrown around all the time. But I’m really sore and achy, like God, like, if I was in my 25’s I wouldn’t feel like that. But I woke up this morning saying I’m going to go lift weights, it’s painful but I’ll feel better when I’m done, and then there’s a pool. And it’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit right now in the pool, and I’m going to jump in the pool. And that’s cold for me anyway, it’s cold. I’m going to jump in and just knowing by jumping in, like just the mental act of doing something uncomfortable. I know, like, what’s the worst is going to happen today? If you face kind of painful things in the morning and stuff, so yeah, I think you need to face those things head on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:36

Yeah, I don’t know, you said, it’s stuff we all know probably what’s a good thing but to come back to jobs to be done and you talked about understanding customer and problems that people face rather than just focusing on features. What stood out? How did you get introduced to jobs to be done? Because you and I have talked about it and you’ve kind of shown me a couple of things that I didn’t know. But I’m curious to know. And the framework itself and the idea has been around but I’m interested, how did you get introduced to it? What do you see? 

Speaker: John Miller  10:14

[inaudible 10:14] introduced to it, just one of the things that kept showing up and then one day just get really curious more about it. Actually, no one I heard a lot about it in strategizer, they talked about, what’s the job? Would they have their camp there, value proposition canvas and they talked about customer jobs. So I probably maybe started there. But then I start to get really curious, it’s still wasn’t concrete enough for me like that value proposition canvas. I think it’s useful, but it didn’t go deep enough for me about understanding it. And not even after reading the books, so I just start researching different, it’s like agile in some ways, in some ways, is that there’s different flavors of it, like you have different camps. Just like someone will say, Kanban is this and scrums that.

You actually have this kind of divide and jobs to be done as well, like these different authors and they have their own viewpoints on but I gravitated a lot to was a Clayton Christensen’s book, he talked a lot about jobs done, I think, can’t remember the book name. But the book that really helped me or the resource that really helped me the most and what I find more useful for my style was Anthony Holics, jobs can be done, which he originally called outcome driven innovation. And he gets very practical about it, where I see a lot of these others are very aspirational. Just isn’t my thing in some ways. It’s a like, so you get a salt, like your product’s a salt, well, what’s the job? Well, I want to cut wood, right? Just that simple. It’s like to be able to cut wood. And he breaks things. It’s a very complicated, he’s got lots of stuff. But simplifying it, he breaks down jobs into what’s the basic situation they’re in when they’re trying to cut wood, or constraints? For example, say you’re a diabetic.

And the constraint might be well, I want to give myself an insulin injection but my hand shake, right? So the constraint there, the situation would be my hand shaking. So how do I get that job done, the insulin shot? And then he chops it up into three areas, which I find really useful, which is the functional job, which is cut the wood, get my insulin shot, then he has emotional jobs. How do I want to feel? How do I want to, what’s the experience for me that I like to have personally in a social job? He describes it as, how do you want others to perceive you? I add on to that a little bit, because I feel it’s a little too shallow, maybe. How do you want to be perceived? And also how do you want to relate to others? And it sounds silly, there’s some things like a tool, I think it was our social job for everything. I’m not sure but at some point even had this in my class, I said, I’m not sure about if you had a toolset if there was a social job, and someone said, no, actually, yeah, there is. If you’re really into tools, you want to show off your tool, you might have say hey, it’s brand and kind of show like, yeah, so, there’s always an opportunity to least ask if there’s a social job. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:27

It’s almost like a lens or perspective you can take that we have to but when you talk to students about the problem space in the solution space, and you said earlier a lot of times and I used to and I’ve been since I spoke with you with kind of like you said, switch to like, let’s look at the problem space first, before we look at the solution space. What are the things that you’re learning as you’re teaching around? People’s responses to the idea that there’s less problem space, and then their solution space and not jumping too soon into the solution space?

Speaker: John Miller  14:06

Yeah, that premature convergence to that solution spaces is, so what are they learning? As I’m teaching, whatever, they’re learning their insights. I think it’s just a whole new world for a lot of people. I won’t say everyone, some people know that. All the people, especially in the Agile Scrum space, they’re just used to being hey, here’s solution towards someone told us to build. And even sometimes, here are the features that stakeholders want. And I find getting them that stakeholders’ inputs important. And usually I say stakeholders, I’m talking about internal stakeholders, different executives, or other people in the company, as well, their job isn’t to be the expert to the customer, yours is and I think that’s a big shift for a lot of people, very simple obvious thing for many people, I think, for some people, but to shift that you know  what? No, I’m as a product owner, I’m supposed to figure out the customer and lead the organization to let them know, what are their needs? And also get some stakeholder input. I’m not saying they don’t have input or information that’s valuable but the product owner is going to triangulate those things and figure out, what is the real problem to solve? So I find that’s a big eye opener for a lot of people just that, oh, you don’t have to just take orders from stakeholders, they’re not the boss of the product. And often, they don’t really know what the customer needs in many cases.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:29

Yeah, and that reminds me something else that you’ve talked about. And I see which is like in a lot of companies will still have like product managers and product owners. Product Manager focus on strategy, product owners and tactics. So when you teach and when you talk about the problem space, a lot of times people that are putting these product owner roles don’t really have the authority or the problem space is not part of their job, right? What is your thought on relating it back to the jobs to be done and what we’ve been talking about, and this idea of having product managers and product owners and that divide or misunderstanding organizations, when it comes to those roles?

Speaker: John Miller  16:13

Yeah, that’s where I put my unicorn in my class and say, talking about unicorn ideal land. And I get that, right? And I say this is what I find. The best teams are able to pull off when you’re empowered fully, what I call the full range of product ownership is that double diamond of the problem space and the solution space. And you should be able to occupy that whole thing. And I do think, lower the forms of waste, building the wrong thing is upstream, it’s not downstream. So I think they get the wise but you’re right, while they’re like, yeah, but my boss still tells me exactly what to do. And I always acknowledge that. Yeah I get that, right? You shouldn’t get fired from doing this class. But can you start having these conversations, though? Can you start working your way upstream a little bit more? Can you start bringing some of these models and ways of thinking?

So if they say, hey, the customer needs XYZ, this feature, and I might say, oh, great, write that one down, put whatever user story, whatever you want to use, but simply then ask the question, oh, what outcome is that going to provide for the customer? So you start changing the conversation. And maybe they don’t know, maybe then okay, great, let’s figure that out together. So now you start to work, even though you might not be empowered to have the authority, you can start having those conversations, right? To help other people to see that maybe they need to figure that out. Or maybe you can help guide them and helping to figure that out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:48

I mean, the issue that I see a lot of people, it’s all great job but I still have to do my job. So me understanding that is great. And I see that in a lot organizations and through coaching too. And it’s tough, because now you get more people to see what it takes. And even the deal of product manager is kind of still sticking with the old structures. And that’s why we have and product owners are just proxies. Maybe to tie to this, and I don’t know, in a sense, I see the product manager, product owner, just a leftover of waterfall that trying to do Agile and just people confused. But something that’s related to this that caught my attention. I thought maybe something that in a sense, I’ve done to you said, I use agile as a Trojan horse to make organization more sane. And could you maybe elaborate on that? What did you mean by that?

Speaker: John Miller  18:59

Yeah. So my [inaudible 19:03] was many years ago. And I was coaching at an organization that many people know, one of my first big coaching gigs and we’re making headway which we tend to get in the beginning. It was William Bridges once said, uninformed optimism always gets away to inform pessimism. And we’re getting through there, people are getting teams going great. Then things start to, whatever the stress happens, and then the management goes back to the old way. So I’m bummed out because I tend to get depressed if I feel like I’m failing and beat myself up. And Michelle Slager. She’s a CST and someone who I really looked up to a lot. She was there with me and she just pulled me aside. As young load coach outside and said, hey, John, hope is okay for me to quote Michelle here, but she has something like, hey John, just realized only about 10% of these companies will actually do it.

Just the way it is, right? This one, being uncomfortable is hard as you said earlier, change is hard, all this thing. So just realize it’s just the way it’s going to be. And I said, okay, got it, maybe feel a little bit better. But then there’s still something I can do. And its kind of always stayed in my head, but I can’t just give up. And she’s not saying to give up. But it’s still something you do for the other 90% and dawned on me as I helped other organizations and it helps. And sometimes not the agile. Someone was an agile purist, they came in and said, well, yeah, no, they’re not. But then I might help, somehow make it better and rich, usually I do in some way. And I realized, I can help organizations become more sane. So I’d have this basic mental model, sanity before agility. One, sanity is a prerequisite to agility anyway. And first, you got to get sanity in place, number one. And if you just get that that’s a huge benefit, even if they don’t get the Agile part of that which is the adaptiveness, being able to flow with the environment but can we just make work more sane for people? So I’d make that my core focus first, maybe using some of the Agile language to get in.

But again, you got to get foundations and I have no right or wrong. But four attributes, I think of sanity, but by focus, and I find if you have this four, it makes scrum possible, agile possible camp, whatever that you’re doing. And sometimes you don’t need the other things. One is just focus. And we all know, multitasking and doing too many projects don’t seem fun. Can we just focus and that’s usually a personal thing that people have influence over? So even if you have to, like you know what? I have 10 projects and I can’t control it all. See, you’re doing Scrum, could you do two sprints just on that one project and avoid the multitasking at least? So there’s something you can do to minimize the amount of distractions and multitasking, and in within almost everyone’s power to some degree.

The other one would be the ability to break things into small increments, small pieces, right? So you get things done faster, quality and if you have to multitask, switch to another project, you’re done, right? You don’t have to do the back and forth. And those two things are both I think within everyone’s influence to some degree. But then there’s the other two. I think some people would disagree with me out there and that’s fine, is if I can get all the skills needed on a team to eliminate the dependencies and the waiting time and the drama, every time something changes, you have to go back to the other personnel but they’re working on something else. So I got to get all the skills I need in order to get whatever is done, cross functional team, as we say in Scrum. Sorry, I don’t know if you can hear it. But apparently landscapers.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:53

No. I mean, it’s not breaking, maybe a little bit.

Speaker: John Miller  22:58

And then obviously, I’m a big believer, at least with organizations that don’t have this competency yet of having them dedicated stable as possible. So I find if you have those four things as bottom two though, those last two are more organizational things like a person can directly influence that usually, that will take some leadership or management buy in. But I find if you start with the two then add those other two, you get like 80% of the benefits, I think in any agile framework from those four things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:32

No, the reason I asked him to tie it back to this discussion that we’ve had is, a lot of times when I’m teaching, like you said, you see what’s going on in organizations, in many instances it’s been there you know what needs to happen generally. So some of the things and it’s easy to get demotivated as a trainer, it’s easy to get the press sometimes as a trainer, because you see how much people struggle and a lot of times, there’s lack of that sanity or awareness or whatever you want to call it and I think it’s a good reminder. And what I liked about the Trojan horse is that baby steps or in some ways people need to get that sanity. And sometimes it’s easier to say you have to get here from there.

But it takes time and going back to Michelle in a sense, like if such a small percent of organizations surely make that ship or understand it, it takes time. I don’t know who said it, but I was interviewing and it’s like a lot of these organizations’ survival is not guaranteed. So the more competition, the more so, to switch gears a little bit. I did want to and I was going to ask you first and I’m sure you get a lot of questions around agile education. But I want to ask you, what is the current state? You spent a lot of years and you still involved agile education. How would you describe the progression in agility in all Agile education?

Speaker: John Miller  25:21

Yeah, it has progressed quite a bit. I was just talking to someone today, Jennifer Manley, who does a lot of training and coaching, agile education. And I was like, no, it’s interesting when I started, there’s nothing, we’re just like hey, this might be interesting to try and see if we can apply and what would happen. But now it’s becoming a thing. It has a name, people know, agile education. And there’s people all over the world that are trying this thing, they’ll contact me and say, hey, we’re doing this. And so one is, I wouldn’t say it’s widespread or any kind of mass, nowhere near any kind of getting to mass adoption. No, but it is spreading. And people recognize it. And they see it as an answer to some problems in education. So, but I started in maybe 2010, 2011 as knights, we tried it with a classroom, a fourth-grade classroom, and we had no clue what we’re doing. So now people have to have a clue, which is funny.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:27

Why do you think the adoption is as much as it has? It makes sense the way that and what I also like, you recently talked about at least I was aware of it, how you design the class, or you give level of authority, or you know what I’m talking about based on the maturity. And I thought that was great too, because it’s kind of what we have in organizations to giving the amount of maturity or whatever you want to call it, you kind of have more autonomy. Could you maybe talk about that first? And then maybe just elaborate on, what would for or what are the impediments to more organization’s schools adopting some of these Agile values and principles?

Speaker: John Miller  27:14

I’ll start with the spectrum. We call the spectrum of collaboration and a spectrum of choice. So I’m like, maybe it’s like a little bit like work companies. But if you’re doing Scrum or some other agile thing with a team, there are dots, they’re professionals, at least most of them are and you go and you say be self-organizing, and many of them can pull that off. Not always, not always, but many pull that off. These are dots that have executive functioning, they know how to drive a car and act responsibly and all those things. But if you do this with a kid, self-organize, it might work. Mostly it has, I’ve seen it work kind of instantly with some teams but some others, these kids are not ready for it, the teacher isn’t ready for it and just goes into chaos, right? And it’s not a very good selling point for teachers to try this out, like, hey, let’s try a little chaos in your classroom. And again, it’s just because they’re not quite ready for it. Their brains are still developing in many ways, their executive functioning. Same with the teachers, they are not used to learning, how to have an environment to allow that to happen. And sometimes they’re under some very tight constraints around curriculum and in eastern United States state standards and state testing that they have to comply to.

And so working with teachers, where we first tried it and we just bought a little bit of Scrum, a little bit of Kanban and we realize, okay, some of that work but some of it wasn’t right fit. So we started to play around, and as it started to spread in the classrooms I was working with, after one classroom did, others start to pick it up, I just would go in, they would ask me to help out or coach and I’d pair it with the teacher who really knew education. And I just noticed I just wrote down patterns. I was like, oh, there’s one class, as you said I actually caught myself saying it, you’re doing it wrong. I didn’t say that loud but you’re not doing it the way you taught it. And I was like, no, hey man, maybe there’s something for me to learn. And I just noticed, they’re doing the structures and the visibility, but they didn’t bring in the empowerment part of it. But that’s what they needed at that time. So I just started, I just made a really quick mental model of what I was noticing.

And I noticed there was these four categories that kind of categorize classrooms and it was based off these two things, which was collaboration and choice. And I was just like we do a management, we make a two-by-two matrix and voila, you have a framework. And that’s my agile classrooms framework is a two by two of going up in collaboration. And I realized [inaudible 29:58] traditional classroom, low choice low collaboration, what’d you think of as sitting in rows, listening to the teacher. Some classes were doing individual agile, they would do passion projects, or just working their own capstone project.

I was like, no self-organizing team  there , no teams but they’re doing the structure, the planning, the review, the retros, all that but it’s more of a personal level. It’s a personal agility, you might say, so it’d be low collaboration, high choice. Bottom of that would be high collaboration, low choice, which is a cooperative learning environment where kids are in the groups, the students are in groups, but they’re still doing what the teacher tells them to do. Here’s the assignment, here’s what you need to work on, but you support each other in doing it. And then the upper right-hand corner is what you think of Scrum or an Agile team, which is high collaboration, high choice, self-organizing, self-directing teams, self-managing teams. And so it popped up there then I got more granular.

So what does it mean to be along the spectrum? So I created and some others helped me refine this part of the Agile education group I’ve been working with. But these basic five steps under each one. And so the cool thing with it, is you can start wherever you are just like you said, it’s, you take these steps, you don’t just go all in and they take years. So the great thing with this is a little bit like, hey teacher, you want to try this out in a safe way? Well, first get the sanity part, I guess, in some ways, it’s a cute new structure. Here’s a rhythm and it’s inspired by Scrum, it’s not quite Scrum, because it’s not by the scrum guide.

But you’ll see a lot of Scrum in there of basic sprints, and a framework. And so try that, give it a rhythm, start modeling that and say, hey, here’s what we’re doing. We’re going to plan today. And this is what I’m thinking about doing, so you see, you start modeling that first, getting students to understand it. And then you put some structures, some visible, I call visible learning artifacts, like the boards or the big team agreements, whatever it might be, you start with that and then you start inching up, they started to learn the process and they’re like okay, now, this time, how about you figure out the how? I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.

But maybe for this part, you can come up some ideas about how and once they got that you can kind of work their way up and what we call scaffolding and education. And same thing for collaboration, maybe do it by yourself, let’s try it out with the team, with a small group. And then let’s really see what it means to have shared ownership where you’re not dividing and conquering the work, where you Miljan does this and John does that, which is a level three, the collaboration spectrum cooperative learning, what does it really look like to be a real collaborative self-organizing team, which is, it doesn’t really matter. As long as we get that work done, we’re all swarm on that together.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:50

It’s interesting, because I did maybe three, four years ago, CSM type of class for undergraduate University, and I ran it. It was really fun from an engagement standpoint, and the feedback and some of the things that I got, which reminded me of me being in school, which is, I mean, even coming from Europe, where education is different, the way that you learn, the way that you collaborate, but even in the United States, it’s not necessarily very collaborative. I hated college. I mean, in a sense, like, I don’t think everything, I paid mostly for the social experience of going and for, but when I saw how they interacted during the class were in a sense, these are maybe 17, 18-year old’s, how they self-organizing the responsibility, I told them, if you want to show up, show up, if you’re not like you’re part of a team, you guys have to figure things out.

And it was interesting how those 17, 18-year-old kids embraced this idea of ownership of collaboration, how engaged they were. And I’m like, this is such a foreign thing to most universities here. If I asked all of these people if they remember concept from this class, if they remember their experiences, if they remember and develop better relationships with people in the class ratably setting, they all said yes. And I was like, I wish I had classes like this in college, maybe I could have justified. So coming back to the question of why do you think there is not an explosion of using these methods and these ways to essentially collaborate, learn, in all ways?

Speaker: John Miller  34:58

Yeah. I think it’s a bit schools, I find are fractal of what we do in corporations. I mean, it’s very similar if you think we have a bigger societal thing that we all share. So one is just very similar things of the idea of what if let go of control? It’s very scary, right? Especially with and this is one reason, it’s not the reason, I think many educators would like to but there’s a lot of fear in them. There’s a lot of eyes on the educator, a teacher, especially in public schools for sure, I’m sure other privates as well. But definitely public schools where not only you have a bunch of kids, you don’t want to fail. Their lives are in your hands, their futures in your hands, that’s a big risk. 

Two, get parents. Also, that might even say some will support but some might be like, aren’t you supposed to be teaching my kids how I learned, right? When I was in school. So you get your parents now that are…I find a lot of parents actually love it, what I’ve seen, they love it, because the kids go home and share it with their parents. But there’s that fear. And then you have administrators, principals, and all that do classroom observations, who might not get it, they’re like, hey, this isn’t quite what we’re expecting, maybe out of the classroom. So I think there’s a lot of fear, a lot of eyeballs on them, that makes any kind of risk trying to do something innovative or different, makes it really risky.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:25

So this made me think of jobs to be done in feature factories versus jobs to be done. And looking at the problem, right? The problem is to get students at least in university to be ready for work, right? And if you think about it, it’s just a bunch of like let’s give them a bunch of classes, create this program and have a diploma at the end. But when you look at it, the job to be done is really for students to be ready to work. And I don’t know, do you think maybe from that perspective?

Speaker: John Miller  37:02

Yeah, I actually have jobs to be done for agile classrooms work that I do. And it’s pretty much something like that, it’s really difficult to get your future ready, right? For 21st century ready for life and work. And I like the life part because there’s these real skills, how do I communicate with people? How do I connect? How do I set my own goals, right? My own personal and see it through. And I find that the students who do this actually apply it in their real life, but they get a sense of actually, remember, I’m going to go deviate a bit, but I remember working in one school and also underprivileged school and while these kids have a hard time economically and other things that are against them. But I just remember showing them a basic kind of Kanban board, scrum board. And said here, think about what you want to do that day in your life, you can see them all lean forward.

And I was like, wow, and what I realized just intuitively, it’s like, wow, they’re seeing there’s a tool here that they can control their life. And that’s really useful to them, like, wow, I can use this to have agency in my own life. So yeah, I do think that is a big job to be done. Is that sense of agency in your own life, and to able to make better choices and learn from those choices and the consequences. So yeah, I think that is the big job is in….and the great thing with Agile education, at least agile classrooms is as you’re going through the content in which again, teachers don’t have control over for many of them, it a state standard curriculum, some good, some maybe not useful.

But some of those might be realistic in real life, like really useful, some of them might not be but the skills of applying like you did in your undergrad classroom, those skills are always useful. So the cool thing with this, and I kind of get two birds with one stone is that, you still can use your basic learning content go through your curriculum, right? You still can do that. It’ll be your backlog in some ways. But by applying this, you don’t have to teach 21st century skills, which a lot of teachers like education approach as well. We’ll teach collaboration, we’ll teach critical thinking. And I think it’s the way to do it. I think what you have to do is use it all the time. And by doing this, they’re constantly wrapping the 21st century skills around any of the content they’re using today.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:25

Everything that they do. Yeah, everything.

Speaker: John Miller  39:27

Everything and the exact same thing, impact that you saw, I saw from third grade, fourth grade all the way up is those deepening relationships. I say it well, I say it deepens learning and it deepens relationships. And the connection they have and the idea of them supporting each other, instead of teasing each other in the classroom. It showed up even on the playground where they saw someone bullied like they would be like, hey, they hold accountability to each other like they will learn to speak up if somebody wasn’t honoring the right thing to do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:01

Another interesting thing that just reminded me and we kind of go a little bit off, but like,  how in college when we went like you would take your individual notes, and a lot of times I joke around, I did pay people to take notes for me for whatever reason. And I was in a class and like, recently, and this was like class for mostly students, not the class. And everybody’s taking notes in mural, like, on my mural, and I’m like, what’s going on here? People are making notes as I’m sharing ideas and talking. And I can like, what’s going on? And they’re like, we always we do this, like we share notes, we have one document where people add things to it. And that was interesting from that relationship standpoint to and collaboration, because now you had people collaborating and exchanging thoughts and adding to the conversation while I was talking. And there’s we are all collaborating through this because it triggered their comments, what they were doing. Have you experienced anything like that, that points to maybe a generational shift of how we learn and collaborate? What are some of the other things that you’ve seen that maybe people would not expect to see? 

Speaker: John Miller  41:23

Yeah, it’s interesting, I just hear what you said about mural and just the share just got me thinking, like, oh, how can I maybe apply some of that? That’s interesting. I’m not sure about the generational thing, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say, this generation is like this and that generations like that. I can steer a tight people. But what I find least with younger people in school is, they haven’t been conditioned yet like we have. And it’s actually easier, actually find if I get a fourth grade, I find like Elementary School is the easiest, to some point maybe, third grade, fourth grade, they’re the easiest ones to start this with. Because they just pop, they’re like, yeah, this just makes sense. That’s the way they play on the playground. They don’t wait for someone to tell them the rules.

And actually, they’ll make up the rules as they go and they’ll agree to it. There’s this natural social interaction that happens, they naturally create these self-organizing rules and they hold accountability to it. So I find it’s natural, especially if you see that state of play. Of course, there’s accidents and fights but they’re human, just like anyone. But what I find is they’re not conditioned yet that we have to do it this way. And I find being agile for a fourth-grade team is a lot easier than doing it in an adult team in many ways. They just go at it, they’re open, they’re vulnerable. The vulnerability is actually what astounds me, is where, I just want activity called my world map, and they’ll interview each other. So my daughter and her school, they’ll do like, tell me everything about you. And they’ll do a little thing, and they bring it in. And I always say, well, why not just talk to another kid? And figure out everything about them, you do a project, and then you’re learning empathy or learning listening. So I have this one activity called my world map where we just sit down, it’s like a little mind map, and a little visual mind maps and pictures. And I’ll say, hey, what are your strengths? What are you proud of? And I write that down. But I’m asking you questions, I’m learning and we bring it out, and I’ll share it out. Hey, here’s what I learned about Miljan.

But the cool thing is, when you get into, I’ll say weaknesses, but I say is where do I need support? Where am I needing support in? And what can my work or whatever. And I find it amazing, high school kids, just how vulnerable they are, like one kid, say I get really angry, and I don’t like it, I don’t like that I get angry, I try to control it. And when they did that, the team just was really…they went around them just start hugging them. Like, it’s crazy. So I think it’s in some ways, they’re just more open to these things. And when you give them the opportunity to do it, and treat them like real, like true humans that are really capable of these things is quite amazing how they rise really high up.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:18

Yeah, it is. And we’ve talked about in professional setting how important it is to do those things, because that’s what builds trust, that’s what builds great teams, Yeah. It’s either that conditioning or whatever it is that it makes a lot more difficult in a professional, I guess setting. We don’t have a lot of time and I’m thinking about questions that I still haven’t asked you but I do want to get your thoughts on one question that’s also a little bit off or in a different direction about Mike Beedle. Recently, somebody told me that you’ve been part of that initial group and I’ve been doing the series so like, I haven’t had a chance to ask you but what is your memory of Mike Beedle and how has he impacted your thinking and perspective on Agile and Scrum? 

Speaker: John Miller  45:07

Yeah, Mike Beedle’s been impact on a lot of people for me as well. He’s the one who helped me become a scrum trainer. I think he helped his co trainees with them. And he really helped guide me along with some things, a lot of things. I think what I remember about Mike is, there’s a lot of egos out there. And if you haven’t noticed, a lot of people do this maybe in some in the Agile space, perhaps in the scrum committee made a few. And with Mike, even though he had this pedigree and so… I don’t know what you call it, but it was the Agile Manifesto, co-author and help break the first book on Scrum. I mean, he’s been around, he’s got a name.

He just never used it; it was never a thing. And he’d always champion you, at least would mean others I saw. He’s always saw what you’re great at, he tried to champion you and cheerlead you, and never seen him put anyone down. He was always optimistic about what you could do. And he would even throw it out like I’m a nobody, right? But he would just turn and John, he said this, and you just talk to others and he some way bring you into it to make it feel like you were, I don’t say special, but he knowledge you and I never saw him put anyone down. So that’s the thing I think I remember most about Mike, was just his optimism is, I think, really belief in people that they can do some really great things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:42

What about Enterprise Scrum? I was involved a little bit when he started, involved in a sense of where, once involved in malware. But some of the stuff that he was thinking was, others have said this, he was ahead of his time. What are your thoughts as far as like Enterprise Scrum and how that kind of still sprinkled all over what we do, what’s being talked about today?

Speaker: John Miller  47:13

Yeah, I think what I liked about what he’s doing in Enterprise Scrum was very much mirrored what I was doing Agile classrooms is that you need to help people configure it for them. And they adapted to different environments. And so that’s one thing I really liked about it, it wasn’t like you must do the scrum guide by verbatim exactly how it says. It was really about context driven, like, what’s your context? What’s going to work for you and to get people to think through that not one framework is going to… one prescriptive framework is going to fix your problems? That you need to design your syllabi, but he gave you some tools to help you through that. So I do think though that it was still early on, and had to be polished or expressed a little bit more for people to really get to where it could maybe be spread a little bit further. But I think it was just very in the early phases of it, but I really loved his approach to it. That here are some ways of thinking that you can configure this and make it work for you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:15

Yeah, and the reason I asked is like we live currently, and probably for the foreseeable future, meaning next five or six years in the land where these prescriptive frameworks are popular, companies are buying into this stuff. Yeah for a lot of us and going back to what Mike was saying, it’s in what you’re saying, it’s about contextualizing, it’s not about taking these recipes and trying to apply them, but actually contextualizing. So, when I look at the future, the future is the ideas in a sense of Enterprise Scrum and some of these ideas that you have to contextualize, you have to look at the context and what to apply in that context, what worked. So what is your perspective on the current state of agile, where we’re going, where it is? Maybe as the last question.

Speaker: John Miller  49:15

I don’t know. I guess the only thing I think it was, there was many states of agile, that’s all I can say. There’s many states of agile. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:22

Maybe let me ask you this way, what pisses you off about the current state of agile? What makes you excited or maybe optimistic about what…?

Speaker: John Miller  49:35

Well, I guess what pisses me off is when and I don’t think it’s right for everyone. So I don’t, I think hey, you got to find what’s right for you agile, maybe agile might not be. So I don’t push, I’m not like a pusher of Agile. But what pisses me off and when people say Oh, agile doesn’t work or it’s dead or you’ve seen all this stuff, and then you go ask the question, why isn’t it working and it’s because they’re not doing nowhere near anything that agile says. And then you hear the other rebuttal which I get where they’re coming from, that well, it sounds like if everyone’s using it wrong, it’s designed wrong, like, no, no. I see people doing the wrong thing in the gym all the time, lifting weights, bad for him, doesn’t mean a squat is design wrong, they’re just doing it wrong, and they’re going to damage themselves and they’re going to say, squat suck, working out is not good. Like, no, you need to learn how to do some of it with some integrity with some discipline. So I think that makes me, irritates me a bit, seeing the comments and when they say it with such confidence as well.

So yeah, that bothers me a lot. And at the same time, you need to be able to doubt things to your environment to, but it doesn’t mean you do it, you bastardize it. And I think it’s the way it is, that good things get more popular. People started, it becomes a buzzword as it is, people will start using it, the name of it, and you know how it is. Seeing complaints, I don’t have any pride of. And it’s just not at all with… Ron Jeffries calls it dark stronger, dark agile [inaudible 51:14] Get a hold of planning meeting and well doesn’t matter. If you have that agile [inaudible 51:22] you’re hanging up, it’s not going to be a good sprint planning meeting, it’s going to suck.

So that’s fine. I think with the popularity, that’s kind of just the natural state of things, I personally think what will happen is, it will some point, arc out, die out, something else will come up, but it’ll be the same thing, just with a different name. I think that’s always happening in some ways, it gets reincarnated. And because it’s the old words, it’s the old tools, have bad baggage, and they recreate the new thing. And it’s really the same thing and a new wine model kind of thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:58

So not a true paradigm shift, just maybe a shift. What about the positive stuff? What is motivating you? 

Speaker: John Miller  52:10

I do think there’s innovation happening in the Agile space for the people that really get it. And the idea that you don’t need to be shackled to following every prescriptive rule and that people really do get the bigger principles or the paradigm that’s behind it, and that they will take it and try some things and do some new things. And so I do think that is happening out there to. You don’t hear a lot of those stories out there. But there’s people who are like, does it work and that it makes people happy happier and more productive or more engaged? Like, yeah, great and even though of the book somewhere, it’s not in a class. So I think a lot of those things are happening. And actually, I wish organizations that are out there that have money and resources like Scrum Alliance or whoever else that are out there. I’m sure they’re doing some things, I wish they would further the agile movement versus just say, here’s what it is and let’s just keep it going. I’d rather say, what is the new thing that’s out there? Do learn, what are the great things that are happening out there, bring it back and share it so we can evolve? Agile versus trying to institutionalize agile and keep it still.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  53:24

Exactly. Yeah, that is, and that could be a separate topic. What would you like to leave the listeners with like a tip message? What is one thing, maybe you want to share? Maybe what you do in class, I don’t know. Just the tip, maybe final talk.

Speaker: John Miller  53:47

I’ll use the frozen tool mantra, which is just do the next smallest right thing. That’s it. Just add the smallest part of it there. So that’s it. It’s like what you talked about? How do you get to an ideal version? Well, it’s based on where you are, what’s the next right thing and what’s the smallest thing I can do to move forward and learn if it’s the right thing? And that’s it. I think it’s all you can do in life and work.