Jorgen Hesselberg

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:23

Who is Jorgen Hesselberg? 

Jorgen Hesselberg  01:29

It’s one of those psychology questions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:33

I asked people, and they’re like, oh, that’s a good question or whatever. And I hate doing those traditional, so I let people introduce themselves.

Jorgen Hesselberg  01:45

What’s your title, what do you do?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:49

Because, reading (inaudible 1:51)

Jorgen Hesselberg  01:55

No, no, it’s good. And then sometimes you ask yourself, and I think sometimes you find that you change also. The person you were when you were 20 is probably different than when you’re 48. Like now, who am I? Well, I think at the end of the day, I’m very curious and I’m a person who really likes to make things better. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be products, but it could be organizations or the way people work together, or just working with people where we can take something and improve it and enhance it, and create something that was there before. That magic that we talked about when we talk about agility, for instance, it’s one of those things that has been kind of a North Star for me from the beginning, I got hooked, when I could see the difference that makes in people’s lives. So yeah, I’m a curious person, I love learning and I always want to try to improve things. I think that’s probably the simplest way of trying to talk about who I am.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:57

Great, maybe I’m not going to jump into competitive agility, but maybe that is all about improvement and how it relates to what you just said. I haven’t asked this before, but just to ask you, see your thoughts. What does Agile to agility mean to you? The name of the podcast when you think about Agile and agility?

Jorgen Hesselberg  03:22

I think it’s a good title, because I think a lot of people don’t understand the difference. So, for me agility is sort of describing, sometimes people have been saying, okay, how would you define business agility, for instance, and there’s 1000s different definitions. But I’ve been trying to get it down to sort of five or six words, embrace change, execute with purpose. I think that, to me, is what agility is about., embracing change. Certainly, it’s about changing, it’s about being adaptive, it’s about reacting quickly to market conditions, all those kinds of things. But it’s also about executing with purpose. I mean, we have collaborators, we have partners, we have contracts, we have all sorts of things that we are accountable to. So we also need to sort of execute not a long term plan, but at least some sort of planful way of working. So it’s both, it’s a balance between being completely flexible and turning on a dime and also being able to deliver in a reliable way so that people trust you, that they can rely on you and that people like your partners can say, okay, if they say they’re going to deliver something, we can trust it, that’s going to happen, they’re not going to come there a couple of days before and say, hey, we’re agile, so we’re not going to do it after all. I mean, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work but it’s that balance. And of course, the magic is then in what that balance looks like, because that balance could be different depending on the company, the context and the business environment you’re in, so that’s different. But to answer your question, I think Agile is really going back to sort of the Agile Manifesto, I think that’s more around those four values and 12 principles. It’s around sort of the tools that are typically put in that category. But agility, I think is a broader term, it goes to sort of the behaviors and the norms, and sort of the mindset behind all of this so I do think there’s a difference. I think, agile is maybe the concrete manifestation of agility, maybe that’s a way to say it. I mean, if you do it right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:38

Great. The reason for me or the way that I was thinking about it, and coming up, whether it’s last 10 years or 20 years, we’re focused a lot on agile, and I think what I’m seeing is more and more focus on agility, which is really what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to have organizations that are responding to change, and like you said, being able to deliver on what they said, or at least inspect that or that. I’ve followed your work for, I don’t know, several years, and I read your book, and there are those people I think that can see things a little bit ahead of time and I think you’re one of them. So I wanted to ask you a couple of things, I want you to first reflect on the last 10 years and what stands out to you in the last 10 years in context of this agile and agility. What are a few things that you would good or bad but if you had to summarize what stands out to you? Five years, I mean whatever you want to do but having it longer, because everybody’s going to say maybe but yeah, what are things that stand out for you?

Jorgen Hesselberg  07:02

And they say, reflect back on sort of what has happened in the last few years? Well, I was thinking about that before we sort of ended the podcast, I was kind of thinking like, how do we get there? What is that journey? And you could never plan these things, they just kind of happen. But I was thinking of, how is it that an agile ways of working sort of spoke to me so strongly, I was kind of reflecting on that a little bit. And I think it comes back to one of my earlier experiences when I first started out in the work life, I was a journalist, I was a television news producer and that is a very, very agile way of working because, of course, I didn’t have the words to sort of talk about it back then. 

But if you think about what it takes to create a television news podcast, or broadcast I should say, to do that, you need to have a television news producer, who’s kind of like the product owner and then you have usually a news director who might sometimes be a scrum master, but sometimes can be a sponsor and then you have a crew typically, that will be a journalist who might be writing or interviewing people and then you have a person with the video camera and then this is happening in real time, they come back and you have an editor who’s pairing with you to get the copyright, then you have to edit the video together with the sound, making it all look great. And you have deadlines that are not months or days, but are minutes and hours if you’re lucky and then all of this has to happen very quickly in a very collaborative way and it’s a very sort of engaging because things keep happening and changing all the time. 

It’s extremely energetic. It’s a great way of working and the buzz in the newsroom is just an amazing fuel. It’s almost like being drunk on work, if that’s a thing and it’s a beautiful experience, I mean, talk about flow. I mean, time just goes by. And that kind of experience is kind of how I thought work was and then I sort of grew up, it’d be a graduating from college. And then as I became professional, and had my first job as a project manager and things like that, I realized that, oh, what’s going on here? Why is he working this way? And then I was told that, oh, well, if you’re going to be a professional, you have to work this way. This is what it is. 

I mean, you are a PMP after all so remember, there’s certain processes you got to follow, this didn’t make any sense, like, well, this is how it is just get along, just do it. And so it felt wrong, like it didn’t feel right to work that way. And I think when agile sort of revealed itself to me, which was probably around 2005 or 2006, I just sort of like got that lightbulb moment, which is the same thing, I think a lot of people have is where they say this makes sense. Finally, I don’t have to sort of be intellectually dishonest, I can actually do the things that make sense instead of just follow some crazy process. And I think that’s where it all started for me. I think part of the reason what’s happening now, why it’s going from agile, which is a little bit more on the technical side, typically, obviously, that’s where it came from, to broader sections of that is, of course, the world is changing. I think it comes back to the cliche being VUCA, is that we are seeing now that the world is a lot less predictable. I think it’s not just a cliche, I think it’s truth. And I think people are realizing that, that way of working that we used to do, those things that never made any sense to us, I think we realize that just doesn’t work anymore. And we’ve seen so many examples of it. And when that’s happening, well, then we got to look for something else. And I think agile, as imperfect as it is, it is certainly much more adapt to working in an agile environment or in an environment that is a business environment right now than anything planful. 

So what has happened in the last 10 years that’s great, I think is that we are broadening the scope, we’re going from yeah, this is just a Propeller head kind of thing. It’s for the engineers, it’s for those crazy people that we don’t talk to because we’re leaders, and we don’t talk to those guys, or girls, and it’s gone from that to oh, this is something we probably have to deal with too, so that’s a good thing. The bad thing, I think some of it has now sort of been distilled into sort of simple solutions, where we, instead of focusing on the principles of this, the really important things like limiting work in progress or decreasing cycle time, or reducing variability where it makes sense or increasing resources via bottlenecks, like basic things that we’ve proven since the 50s, instead of those things, we are sort of putting tons of tools, tons of sort of branded frameworks and things on top of that. And I think sometimes we miss the really fundamental stuff. And then we just say, oh, if we put up a scrum board, maybe now we’re agile. And we forget that the reason the scrum board is there is to visualize progress so we can start to limit it. 

That’s kind of the secret, the thing that makes it work is that we’re not going to actually visualize our work in progress but instead of doing that, we just say, oh, we have a scrum board now. And so I think a lot of that, it’s a little bit sad, because I think we just want simple solutions and those are simple things, they’re visible, you feel like you’re doing something, but you’re probably not making as much progress as you can. So that was a long way of saying that I don’t think we’ve reached the potential here or even halfway through that we should have given all the great work that those 17 signatories created for us, I mean, they laid the groundwork.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:00

I would say it’s more than just that, right. There are a lot of people that want to go hockey, or it wasn’t convenient for them to attend, I think is like there’s this shift from kind of siloed and theme thinking to more end to end flow thinking, I think is a positive thing but it’s still, when you look at lot of organizations, it’s sub optimizing parts of the organization rather than looking at the whole.

Jorgen Hesselberg  13:29

Yeah, I think you’re right and it’s hard. It’s easy for us sometimes to come in as outsiders and look at the process and say, oh, you’ve clearly got this wrong. But there’s politics, there’s careers, there’s fiefdoms, all of those things, so people who have spent maybe 20-25 years establishing themselves in an organization and then suddenly we go in, and we say, oh, here’s a way we can solve this, we just break up your group and make sure that we optimize for flow instead. And a person would say, wow, I worked all these years to become a VP of development, and then suddenly, now, I don’t have that anymore. I can understand why there might be a part of that person who says, well, this isn’t all great for me, even though it might be the best for the organization. So I think part of our job is to also help them to see that there is a place here for traditional managers so to speak, it’s just that the scope will be different, their area of responsibility might be different. But there is a life there too. It’s just they have to be a little bit open to change, though. And that is scary. I I don’t take that away from them. That is scary.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:38

It is and it goes back to as individuals and mindset and working helping those leaders to see that, to now switch it and maybe, looking at next five years. What have we learned from COVID? What do you think the next five years and maybe I was thinking we can look maybe five years ahead and just assume what might happen but from your perspective, what do you think we might see?

Jorgen Hesselberg  15:06

That’s a great question. And of course, we don’t know but I think it’s always fun to kind of think ahead. Because I never knew, if you asked me three years ago, what do you think was going to happen too? We would all be isolated.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:19

No, we’re sitting in, I remember at that bar in Austin, couple years.

Jorgen Hesselberg  15:29

We didn’t see this coming. But I do think that COVID certainly has changed a lot of things, I think this idea that we always have to be face to face, I think we sort of proven that we can work remotely to a much greater degree. And I think the tools around that will be much more sophisticated than what they are now. We have Nero and mural, and we had a couple of tools that sort of popped up, but they were already existing, I think there’s going to be new tools and technologies is going to grow out of this, that’s going to make life a lot easier, in terms of, telecommuting, and in terms of not flying so much, because of the environment, but also because lot of people who can’t, maybe they are disabled in any way, or something like that, they can now all contribute in a much greater way. So I think lot of positives comes with this. We also realize that’s not the only solution, either, I think we realized that we need that personal connection. I think after two years in the basement, we just kind of like, I miss people, like I want to collaborate with someone, and kind of be able to be face to face with someone. This hybrid approach is definitely something that we will see more of. 

Obviously, I’m a little biased since I do run a company that believes very much in data but I do think data is going to be a big part of this. And maybe not used in the way people think sometimes, which is like, oh, you got data, now you have answers. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think it’s more around,  things like pattern recognition, more around using the data as an input to better questions, things like that, not necessarily for the answers but because it helps us ask better questions. I think data is going to be a bigger part of how we use and how we measure agility going forward. Because right now, a lot of it has been kind of based on gut feel and I think very often we use these metrics that kind of make us feel good, or they kind of like vanity metrics. 

I think we need to be a little more disciplined, and use metrics that are a little closer to the business goal. Because I think that leaders have been open to this and they say, yeah, let’s be more agile. Now, we got to show them that this actually does have an impact. And the great thing is, we have nothing to hide, because this isn’t vapor, we know that this works. If you do these things, and they know what they are, we will see benefits, we will see that we will produce value faster, we will produce value with higher levels of quality, we will increase customer satisfaction, it might not be cheaper, we might not be cost efficient, those kinds of things might not happen but we do know that we will create a much faster way of delivering value. But right now, we don’t focus on that enough, I don’t think. I think we focus on all the other things that makes us move around, we got to show that value.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:27

Why do you think that we’re focusing on the wrong things? We’re not really…

Jorgen Hesselberg  18:32

I think part of it is that, very often we are not given access to those folks that are not inside of our sphere of influence. Very often it starts in product management, or in engineering or something like that. And if you’re trying to calculate things like cost of delay, for instance, it can be kind of hard to do that, if you don’t have access to finance. If you don’t really understand what actually is the cost of delaying this project within another week. So since you don’t have that access, since you don’t have those data, you kind of create metrics with the data you have. And then that’s fine, it still looks good, we can do velocity, we can do maybe some simple lead time but in a very small and not an end to end sense, but just inside our small little sphere in the value stream and that makes us feel good but it doesn’t probably move the needle as much as it could if we were actually taking a broader perspective. 

So part of that is our fault, because we’ve been using language that makes it difficult for them to care for them. If I’m a finance person, why should I talk to you guys anyway? That’s one way. The other way is that maybe they also need to be made aware of this and say that, hey, this is something that affects you also. And it is definitely in leadership’s best interest to invite these people in and I think that’s part of what we’re seeing now, with this and I think that’s part of what you’re saying. What you’re saying agility is that this goes way beyond development this goes into marketing to finance, to HR.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:03

I think if I maybe combine what I’ve seen in the last 10 years, one of the biggest things is that essentially for the last 20 years we didn’t see as much executive like the board, and the executive senior leaders trying to understand what their responsibility for this is, and that without them, all of this is pointless, pretty much. And I think what we’re seeing more and more is that executive buy in that they don’t know yet what they need to do, but at least they’re aware of, this should be my top priority to understand how do I enable and help organization with becoming more responsive and for lack of a better word, have greater business agility?

Jorgen Hesselberg  20:58

Yes, yeah. And we are seeing the results and I think that’s a big deal here. Microsoft is a good example, now of sort of an old school type organization. Microsoft on the Balmer was sort of legendary for being not very agile. And then Satya comes in, and then changes things completely. And there he is, openly speaking about this being an agile company, and embracing a growth mindset and things like that. And then you see other companies like Spotify, or Google, and these companies that are sort of agile by birth, and then more organizations around that are looking at this and saying, what, why are they so successful? 

You know what, what can I do to try to pick up on some of this? And I think that’s a great way of starting the conversation, but I don’t think that’s the answer, I don’t think you should say, oh, I want to be Spotify because Spotify is a very different organization from, say, an energy company or a healthcare company. And that’s why I think things like maturity models and things like that might not be the way to go, I think it’s much better to say, okay, instead of trying to become something, some predefined goal, or something that you sort of look at as a destination, try to think of this as something you continuously try to improve, I think it was Mike Koon who said, agile is not something you become, is something you become more of. And I think that’s the essence of this. Look at where you are, and then try to improve and be a little bit better than where you were yesterday. If you keep doing that, you can be the best healthcare company. You might not be Spotify, but be the best you, that you can be, rather than something else, I think that’s a lot more authentic, and I think a lot more practical and more meaningful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:44

I’ve been thinking about this analogy more and more, but you just kind of brought it up. It’s almost like fitness, personal fitness, if I see somebody, I want to be exactly like them, the goal is to be fit, and your genes, your whatever your age, all of that lot of factors play into it. But the goal is to be fit, and healthy. There’s going to be many different ways, there are some patterns, there’s known things that you have to do in order, like exercising healthy, but there’re also other factors that will work against you that won’t work against others. But if we relate fitness to agility, that’s, in my opinion, a very good analogy as far as analogies can go.

Jorgen Hesselberg  23:29

You know, I love that. In fact, I did a keynote on that topic. Because if you think of the fitness industry, you have coaches, you have coaches there, you have frameworks, like keto or some sort of diet that you can use that will get you there. You have tools like exercise equipment and stuff, I mean, the analogy works really well. But at the end of the day, sort of the thesis that I talked about in the talk, which is I think where you’re going to is that agility and fitness means different things to different people. You might look at yourself and say, okay, I want to lose weight, okay, that’s one thing. I want to run faster. Well, that’s another thing or I want to be able to perhaps, maybe I want to be more toned. Okay, that’s something different, again. All of these things are different goals. 

They’re all related to fitness but they have different methods, tools, ways of getting you there. They’re not all the same. And I think it’s the same thing with agility. Agility can mean different things to different people, it doesn’t always mean just be fast. And it can also be okay, well, we really going to focus on the innovation part of this, and we’re going to be able to iterate quickly, but also deliver value at a very high level of quality, depending on the problem they’re trying to solve. It can mean different things to different people and that’s why when people say, oh, frameworks are bad, I’m not in that camp. But I’m saying frameworks has to fit the context. And it’s the same thing with a diet, if you’re looking at keto, for those who don’t know that keto is basically, it’s kind of like a way to just reduce carbs, essentially, like Atkins. And that can be really great if you’re looking to lose weight quickly but it’s probably not something you want to do if you want to be a long distance runner. That’s a very different…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:21

I think that’s a really good point. By the way, if you could mention, where did you do this talk because I would love to. There are a lot of times I’m thinking about these things and they’re like, oh, I only talked about this. Do you remember when you spoke about this because I’m definitely interested.

Jorgen Hesselberg  25:34

Yeah, these days,?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:38

Maybe up there in the description, you can send me a description 

Jorgen Hesselberg  25:40

Yeah. I’ll send you the slides and see what you think. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:45

Great. But this is another thing in relation to the next five years. I think we’re going to be moving away from these prescriptive frameworks, like you said, keto is good, scrum is great, for the right context, it’s not for everything, but it seems like people are applying it for everything, contextualizing it without knowing what they’re doing and we see a lot of bad Scrum or dumb scrum. From your perspective, I would maybe to switch topic and to kind of relate it to this in your book, unlocking agility. And the title is unlocking agility, the Insider’s Guide to Agile enterprise transformation. I really love how you put a lot of things in a single book, and it’s a really guide for anybody, executives to get a holistic view, everything that needs to be changed and it’s a holistic way of looking at things. And you talked about five dimensions or five concepts. Could you maybe talk about and give us an overview of those five dimensions in the book, because I think those give us a really good idea of all of the things that we need to look at.

Jorgen Hesselberg  27:13

For sure. And the reason I wrote the book was, it really was a reflection of what I went through when I was doing  a number of transformations sort of end to end as an insider. I wasn’t a consultant, I have been consulting since then, and I have nothing against them. I think the problem with consultants sometimes is that they don’t get to see the whole journey, they kind of come in at a certain phase, and then they leave again and I think that’s great. You get some perspective and I think those poor folks, that are the insiders, were actually doing this from the beginning, like trying to sell this to executives trying to drive it through all that stuff. That is a whole different journey and that hadn’t been represented enough. So that’s what I was hoping to do with that book. And also, back then, there really wasn’t any really solid framework. So I think that may have been existing at the time I wrote the book. 

Well, sorry, it’s from the timing on to 2008, the book didn’t come out until much later. But when I was there, there really wasn’t any great frameworks to sort of go through so I had to kind of figure out myself in a way. And so that’s the reason why I wrote it. Safe, of course, was built in many ways at Nokia, where I worked at the time. As I worked very closely with Dean, and he had a big influence on how I was thinking at the time. I was kind of thinking of this as one of the things, building blocks that have to be in place for this to work. And I was able to sort of use that as the framework that I used for all of the transformations. The first one, I called it technology and then I was like, what do you mean by that? I use that term pretty broadly, I kind of call it the methods to tools and techniques that help you do things better. So that could be a methodology like Scrum, it could be a tool like JIRA. It could be competitive agility, it could be any anything, any tool that helps you do things. 

But a scrum board is a technology in my definition. It’s a pretty broad term, but it’s kind of a thing that supports you to do these other things. It is not the answer by itself, but it’s a part of the answer. Very often, unfortunately, people stop there like that. That’s what they do. They just do the technology part and they do Scrum and that’s it, we’re done. But that’s, of course, just the beginning. The second part here is organizational design and that’s around how we organize ourselves towards value. And it’s really two elements of that one thing is sort of the physical design, if you think about the architecture of the building, for instance. It could be even very often we can make sure people can collaborate faster and quicker. You can instill serendipity so that you meet people from different areas and create innovation. I mean, there’s lots of cool things you can do sort of from a physical architecture for perspective but then there’s also the organizational design sort of hierarchically, or maybe more of a Spotify model type of approach, like how the org chart looks, which is really all around optimizing for flow, making sure that you don’t have a lot of impediments or handovers and things like that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:17

What you’re talking about is like a business architecture governance, policies 

Jorgen Hesselberg  30:24

That’s right, there’s so much that we do right now, in the way that organizations are structured, that sort of actively goes against agility. From the beginning, the DNA of the organization is already sort of built not to be agile so you put tools on top of that, and it doesn’t really do anything, the system will always win. So this is about the system, it’s about understanding the system. So that’s another thing. Now, the third part is people and obviously, that’s a broad term, but people is something that sometimes we don’t spend enough time, thinking of those people that are actually creating value. I talked about role portraits was one thing, because right now, I think it’s changing now but when I was doing this, originally, there wasn’t a role for instance, for scrum master, there was no official role so they tried to hire Scrum masters, they would be hired as project managers and they would be evaluated as project managers and it’s very hard for a scrum master to be a project manager, because that’s not what they are. 

The same thing with product owners and developers also, who were kind of forced to, you’re not supposed to do testing like, no, no, no, you’re a developer stay with what you’re doing. So that’s part of it, but also around things, I’m like motivation, obviously, psychological safety comes into this. It’s a big topic, but the people part of it is definitely a huge component. Leadership is the fourth part, which of course, supports all of this and has a really big influence on the culture, the language that leaders used, how they evaluate people, how they can help people grow, how they can also admit failure, these are things that we don’t see too often, unfortunately, all of those things are extremely important. There’s a whole chapter on just the different models there. And ultimately, culture, which is the thing that ties it all together, in a sense. I would submit that all of these things that you have, like technology, organizational design, people leadership, that in the sense, ultimately forms the culture, that is how we work. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:30

And that’s really interesting, because that’s another thing that I’ve been thinking about. And I know you’ve used the integral and talked a little bit about it, but it’s almost like the culture is the reflection of the other ones. It’s almost simplifying it, but it’s the result. So when we talk about change the culture, it’s about changing the other things, not necessarily changing the culture directly.

Jorgen Hesselberg  32:55

I completely agree because culture is sort of like, it’s a description of something. It’s sort of like an approximation of something and it’s not so very concrete. Change the culture, oh, let me do this cultural level over here. It’s not that easy. It’s really a reflection of the behaviors and the norms and the things you see people do.  I think it was Shine who said that, the best way to look at a culture is just to observe people, when there are no leaders around. What do they do when they know that they can kind of do whatever they want? How do they act? If an emergency happens, for instance, how do they act on that? Or if they are faced with an ethical dilemma, what kind of decisions do they make? That is a great reflection of the culture to see how they make those decisions but that’s based on experience, that’s all based on how you see other leaders behave. It’s based on things like brand, and those kind of things matter too. The values and things you put on the wall. 

Yeah, sure, that can kind of influence you but at the end of the day, it’s about the behaviors that you see your team members do, what is tolerated, and maybe even more importantly, than anything else, how you rewarded. And I think that’s a very simple, easy way to affect culture is to create incentive structures, and sometimes disincentive structures for what kind of behavior we tolerate, what kind of behavior we want to incentivize, and what we won’t tolerate and I think that’s one of those things that we see in real life also, and I think that’s one of those not to get political but if you think about when we raise our kids, we talk about, okay, you’re not supposed to lie, you’re supposed to be a good person, bla bla bla, and then you sort of point to your leaders, not yourself, point to the society, and you say, look at this. Recently, we’ve had some situations where leaders of the country may not have been doing these kind of things but honestly, that affects the culture. I really think it does. When people see that that’s how people behave and it’s kind of accepted, then that does affect the culture without being too political. I think if we look at what’s happening in general, I think we have changed the culture of this, not just in the US, in Europe too over the last five or six years. And I think our leaders and the way that they have, maybe getting away with things, has affected that in many ways. It’s the behavior.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:23

And it also goes to the values and principles that we truly believe, which goes back to the mindset and everything. Another thing that I want to get your talk on, and I know you’ve talked about  AWG, agile working group, and you said, you started your book, that was the first chapter. I wanted to see if anything changed or what are your current thoughts on agile. Maybe describe it first and then as you’re thinking about agile working groups evolve and change.

Jorgen Hesselberg  35:58

The reason I think it’s still is valid is because ultimately, the Agile working group goes away, and that to me is what saves that idea. I’m not a big fan of having a team that ultimately is responsible for the enterprise transformation, it should be an organizational thing, everyone should have some responsibility. But when you start this, I think it’s very difficult in the beginning to get that momentum and I think that’s where the AWG can be really useful, I think I call it the engine of the transformation, especially when that AWG consists of people from different functions, from different areas, different areas of expertise, who has the support of management, but the credibility of the people working. And as I mentioned in the book, as that AWG starts to do its work and start to remove those impediments to agility, it seems to becoming the sort of the scrum master for the organization, when that happens, and they start to see that more agility is happening and that’s sort of when we look at that, I guess, you can see the evolution, they ultimately, disperse, they ultimately become part of the organization just like I want a scrum master, not to be a scrum master forever. I want a scrum master to ultimately maybe be done by someone in the team or maybe I want a manager to be an Agile coach, not necessarily an Agile Coach forever what I mean?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:28

That same thing is leadership. The reason I ask you is that I’ll use another analogy, and you let me know if you use this one. But it’s like having chefs, right? Agile working group is this group of chefs that you hopefully made up of internal chefs in organization that are helping other people understand, if we need to create custom recipes, we need to have people that know what they’re throwing in because the reality is, we’re creating custom recipes all the time, because we’re working with ingredients that we have. So the idea of agile working group or AWG is really to create more people in organization that are aware of what they’re throwing into the pot and making sure that they’re continuously looking at creating something that’s delicious, and we are happy with the results? Or is it something that is going to create some type of stomach aches. So that’s how I see it in a way. It’s like you’re working yourself out of the job, you’re trying to build capability inside organization where people know what they’re doing, and everybody’s job is to understand the flow, the delivery, all of that. What are your thoughts on that? Have you used that analogy before? 

Jorgen Hesselberg  38:49

Yeah, I think I actually used it in the book, too. I think it’s a very nice analogy. I think we’re saying things like cooks basically follow a recipe, whereas chefs are the ones who kind of create the environment where wonderful things can happen. It doesn’t have to be the same dish every time. I think you’re completely right about that and I did struggle with this in the beginning, because as I was going to go through this transformation effort, there’s sort of two extremes; one is the extreme where you say what if we’re going to go Agile, we don’t need anything else but the Agile Manifesto, that’s all we need. We have four values and 12 principles, and let people just do what they do, and interpret those and it’s going to be wonderful. I’ve never seen that work. I’ve seen organizations try it but it doesn’t work. It maybe work, but it’ll take a long, long time and I don’t think we have18-20 years. Because I think that’s how long it will take because it’ll take forever. All will happen in different levels. And then the other extreme, of course, is that very prescriptive way where you go in and say, here’s a framework, they’ve done all the thinking for us, let’s just kind of do exactly what they say. 

Although I don’t think that’s really what the frameworks want you to do to be totally honest with you, but that’s very often how it’s done so I think that’s not right either. That’s where I think the AWG is a nice balance because it tries to give enough filtering so that when you talk about, okay, if we want to optimize for flow, what does that look like, and rather than having to research that entire field, which is pretty big, they can say, okay, this is something we know quite a bit about. Let’s talk about things like work in progress for instance. 

Let’s understand that, let’s create a set of classes that we all get an understanding what this means. Let’s talk about the business value of flow optimization, for instance. There can be some intentionality around it, a little bit of education, and also understand the context of that organization. As we said earlier, it’s not the same in the healthcare industry, as it is at Spotify, they have different constraints. Those people in the AWG are more often than not mostly internal people so they know that context very well. And they can apply this in a way that makes sense for them. But yeah, I think you’re right, they’re chefs, that’s what they are and ultimately, they want a lot of people to be at that level where they can kind of absorb themselves into the organization. It’s a great incubator, honestly, it’s a great incubator of talents. That’s how I look at it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:25

And I think that’s another thing that, I hope to see that more and more organizations are investing in people, investing in developing people and those incubators or these type of things are great way to develop internally, rather than relying on people like you and I now, as consultants because I worked and still spent a lot of time coaching but it is different. You are absolutely right. When you spend like, three, four years inside organization, seeing it all the way through, it’s a different perspective versus as a consultant, where you come for five, six months, and you only see part of it.

Jorgen Hesselberg  42:04

And I’m not saying don’t use consultants, because I think there’s a time and place for that. But I would never say outsource your transformation. I don’t think it’s a good idea to say, I’m just going to hire a company to do our transformation, I don’t think that’s a good idea. It needs to be owned internally, but bring in expertise like yourself, when you’re getting to a point where you say, okay, I don’t know enough about this, let me bring in a person who spent a lot of time understanding this at a deep level to upskill us so that we can move on. And of course, then you you’re not going to stay there for three years, you’re going to stay there for three, six months, and then you move on to something else, which is great for a consultant, and great for those people in that organization. 

That’s when it works when you can do that. But I completely agree with you investing in people, this is probably more important now than ever. What the pandemic has done, I think, is given an unfair advantage to those organizations that invested in people initially, like those who had a clear understanding of vision, who had a clear sense of purpose, all those kinds of things that sort of sounds like, ah, that’s everyone needs to do that. Yeah, we know that. But we didn’t really do that very intentionally. Some of those organizations that did that they got paid off many times over when the pandemic hit, because those who didn’t, it’s very hard to do this remotely, if you haven’t already got an idea what the purpose is. So now that organizations are looking at this saying, okay, how do I create a great culture? Well, it’s a little hard to do that from scratch, if you never did it before, and then show up in a Zoom meeting and say, hey, let me tell you about what we’re all about. You need to do those things. So investing in people is probably more important now than ever. And talk about competition, I mean, we’re competing with everybody now, right? I mean, you can work from anywhere. So you can’t say, oh, I’m in Washington, DC so I don’t have to compete with those folks from California or Oslo. No, no, you are. So you compete for talent. So you better be an organization people want to work for.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:10

Exactly. I think there’s more options created. Companies have more options as far as who they hire, people that are working, have more options where they want to work, who they want to work for. I want to talk to you about comparative agility. What is comparative agility?

Jorgen Hesselberg  44:29

Oh, thank you. I can talk about that for years. Well, I think, we’d like to call ourselves the Spotify of continuous improvement. That’s kind of like the easy way to talk about what we do. At the end of the day, we are a platform with what we call capabilities, which are essentially surveys to have two things in common. Number one, they’re created by domain experts. So all the surveys you see on our platform are created by people that you know and trust. Mike Koon is there, Kenny Rowman, Dr. Amy Edmondson, Esther Derby all the people you trust, have created the surveys. And the second thing is that they’ve been validated by data scientists. We have three data scientists on staff full time, all they do is making sure that these surveys are repeatable and reliable o the quality of the data you get is really high. And that’s what this is about, about these surveys and the results that come out of the surveys, we don’t do any certifications, we don’t do any paid training, we don’t do any consulting. 

So we don’t do all those other things, we just create really awesome surveys that you can use, so that you can expose where you have challenges, and then use that insight to then improve how you work, our tagline is getting better is never done. And I think that’s what this is all about. It’s about continuously improving how you work. And since we have so many surveys from different aspects, whether it’s psychological safety, or agile marketing or motivating language, it covers kind of what we’re talking about when we say agility. This goes way beyond just team level stuff, this is holistic. We also have a whole module around personal improvement, which goes specifically to your role. So if you’re a scrum master, for instance, you can take a personal assessment, see how you’re doing, and then get targeted recommendations for how you can improve. And it’s not something your manager will see but it will help you in your journey and try to improve in your craft. And I think that’s a very honest way of working, I’m not going to tell you that you need to be there because that might not be appropriate for you. But if you tell me how you’re doing now, I can show you where you might want to look next. And then as long as you do that consistently, which is at the end of the day, the essence of agility, in my opinion, then you’re going to continue to improve how you work, and it’s going to help your team, your organization, and also yourself.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:46

There’s a lot of data. You guys are working with 1000s of companies, millions of data points. Going back to what you’ve seen, what you think is happening. What are some of the things that are surprising when you look at some of this data, this standout?

Jorgen Hesselberg  47:06

There’s a couple things that stand out. Just from a sort of a meta perspective, it’s interesting to see how we started off getting a ton of data from North America, that’s kind of where it all started, then we saw that it was a lot more coming in Europe. It’s almost 50-50 now. But we see a lot of growth in now is South Africa, we see Australia, we see APAC, a lot of Asian countries really picking this up. So it’s interesting to see how the agile movement has really become global. We have data now for over 80 different countries. But it’s interesting to see especially, I want to say the last five years a lot more growth in the Asia markets. So that’s sort of a meta perspective. In terms of the things that we see are standing out, technical practices tend to be the things that we struggle with the most. That’s one thing that really stands out. I think the other thing is things like retrospectives, which sound like a very sort of simple thing to do, have an enormous impact on performance. 

When we did some correlational studies to say, what we did is we looked at the companies in our index that do the best objectively. A lot of our companies are public so we can look at their EPS growth, for instance, their market share growth, their stock price performance, so we looked at them, and then we can say, okay, let’s look at those best organizations, and then look at the teams inside of those organizations that are the best. So now we’re looking at the best of the best and compare that to the average ones. A couple things stood out and one of them that was the most sort of determining factor to performance around speed to market quality and customer satisfaction was teams that not only did retrospectives, but took action in a timely manner. And I think that’s kind of key. A lot of teams do retrospectives. But I think a lot of them got to do it as pitching sessions and they don’t do much with them. But those teams that were successful, they did retrospectives consistently and they actually took action on what came out of the retrospectives. And that, again, is the essence of continuous improvement. 

So to see that that’s actually happening consistently among those high performing teams. I think it’s an indication that, this stuff kind of works, if you just do it. And I think that’s the challenge. How many teams are saying they do Scrum or Kanban and you just look at them for a while and you say, well, that’s not really Scrum, is it? It doesn’t apply to us, we’re so mature so we don’t need that. Well, why don’t we just do it first, and then you could customize the things if you like, but let’s skip the retrospective just because you don’t like it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:47

And I think that’s the mindset issue. What you’re saying is going back to (inaudible 49:52) so you have to have that mindset of relentless improvement in the way that you can describe and the idea behind comparative agility, it’s really that mindset of like, I really want to improve individually, I want to help my team improve, I want to help my organization improve and I consciously work on that relentless.

Jorgen Hesselberg  50:11

That’s right. In the beginning, everyone, when they come to us, they’re like, oh, they really love our World Index. It’s the world’s largest agility index. So people love that. And I think that’s great. I mean, it’s a good way to get a baseline. But what they care more about, as they understand, the real value of this, it’s not so much how you compare to the rest of the world. That might be nice when you start off, but it’s really how you compare to yourself, that really is what you should care about. How are you comparing to yourself over time, how’s your team’s doing over time, how’s your organization doing, how’s your programs doing? And being able to do that over time in a consistent way, taking action periodically, and in a cadence, part of what you start to do then is you start to affect the culture, because now suddenly, people understand that their voices are being heard, if they’re seeing things are not working, they can talk about that openly, sometimes even anonymously, but information will still be there. And that’s really useful for a lot of people who are maybe a little bit introverted. But then if people then take action on it, and the executive support it, just like you mentioned earlier, and they actually do something with it. And that’s, of course, the key to all of this, you actually have to take action on the insights, then you will see that you actually will improve and that becomes addictive. That’s the thing about agility, it’s addictive.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:29

We can go back to the fitness analogy, it’s almost like what you’re saying is don’t worry about the fitness of others, don’t try to compare yourself to others, if you’re trying to keep yourself and your family healthy, compare how your family how into centering yourself as a parent and leader, how are you demonstrating those? How are you supporting your kids and your family members in that rather than just comparison and kind of that resonates with me. What you care about is your organization and how you’re improving, not necessarily how you compare against somebody, it could be helpful as a discussion and input but you shouldn’t be stressing about and comparing.

Jorgen Hesselberg  52:15

I completely agree. It’s almost like it can be an inspiration maybe or a starting point but it shouldn’t be the thing you use every day, that it really should be you. And go back to that fitness analogy again, which I think is really nice, is that yeah, it’s all around the exercise part but it’s also about what you eat. So that goes back to agility too, it’s not just about the tools, but the culture, the leadership, the people, all these other inputs are affecting your level of agility. For instance, if you eat unhealthy, you can exercise all you want, it’s not going to really make a big difference and kind of vice versa. If you don’t exercise at all, even though you eat healthy, you’re still not going to get the goals you’re probably looking for. So there has to be a balance and that’s why those five dimensions is all about balance. It’s not about, oh, let’s just do one of these and that’s it. We’re going to be good now because leadership is awesome. Yeah, well, okay. But you have to think about work structure, you have to think about the tools and technologies you have, you still have to care about your people. All of these things play together. It’s the balance, that’s the essence, that’s the magic of the agility part, which makes it so hard to sort of say, here’s how you do it, because it is very different depending on the organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  53:29

Yeah, absolutely. And I think contextualizing is hard. It’s easy to say, give me a program so I can get fit rather than saying well, I have to everyday think about what am I doing with the goal of staying fit and healthy? What am I doing to help my family stay fit and healthy? How’s my behavior influencing their behavior? How’s the structure? In the environment, if I buy shitty food and unhealthy food, my kids will probably eat it. How am I setting up the environment as far as all of that? Couple of other things that I want to see if we can get to is measurements. A lot of times, it’s like we measure more than we need to. From your perspective, what are the things that we should be, at least considering, without being prescriptive, about what we measure in organization?

Jorgen Hesselberg  54:26

Oh, good question. And I think we are victims of that very often, we measure too much, because that can be addictive, too. And it’s great to see much data. But data doesn’t, to me have a lot of value if it doesn’t have some sort of practical application, like there has to be some sort of action that can come from the data. I am always a big fan of starting small in this sense, and only focus on a couple of metrics and usually I like them to sort of balance each other out kind of be the sort of competing, if you will. So some classics. I am a big fan of lead time. I think that’s a wonderful metric because they cannot the gamed very easily. Literally, it’s the time between you start something and finish. So that’s hard to, unless you can somehow do a time machine, which we haven’t figured out yet. That’s a really nice metric. Now, of course, where you start that timer is a big discussion in itself. In the beginning, it might be a small slice of the value stream, as you become more agile, you will hopefully, then expand that so that’s one thing. And I love that metric because it also means that more people have to collaborate to make it happen. Flow efficiency percentage is a metric I love, because it covers a lot of the things that’s in the lead time but it also talks about the waste that comes into it. 

So I love flow efficiency. Another thing I like, and this is sometimes maybe more of a lagging indicator, but I do think defects in production over time is a decent metric to look at trends, really not just a snapshot, but trends. Entity are, meantime between failures, but also recoveries, and how long does it take when a bill goes down for you to get up again? I think that is a metric that covers things like pride in your work, it has a lot to do with your tech debt, for instance, is kind of covered in there. There’s a lot of things that are covered in that metrics. I love MTTR. I do sometimes like NPS, I know that sort of like people are like net promoter score but I just don’t know if there’s a better customer satisfaction metric that you can compare across multiple industries right now, I think that’s kind of the best we have. And again, looking at that over time, I think is good. But one thing that I think is really cool, then is to try to do this against each other. So if you do, say, for instance, lead time, and quality metric, those are good, because they kind of compete with each other, lead time, yeah, that’s sort of a way for you to get stuff done fast. But then quality, of course, if you do really quick, fast work and not have the quality in there, you’re going to have a negative impact on the quality part, so you have to balance this out. 

So I do like that. Those are some of the things I like, ultimately, it’s about the company in a what is it that they’re trying to accomplish? What’s the problem they’re trying to solve? And there might be metrics here that are different from these but typically, when you talk to organizations, quality, speed, customer satisfaction, it tends to be kind of central to what they’re trying to accomplish. There’s some more sort of exotic metrics you could do around innovation and things like that to that. I know it all depends on where you are in your journey.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  57:31

Great. I know we’re almost out of time. Are you okay, with going for five more minutes?

Jorgen Hesselberg  57:36

Yeah, I love geeking out man, this is fun otherwise, I would talk to my wife about this. And she would like, can you please stop? She doesn’t like this stuff as much as maybe you do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  57:49

Actually, that’s one of the reasons I started this podcast, is because, during the COVID, and everything, we didn’t have the conferences, and this is usually when we geek out and talk about this stuff. I wanted to then talk to you about, this is another concept that you talked about in your book, alignment between business strategy and operational strategy. And I think this ties back to the metrics, if you don’t have that alignment, how do we know what we measure, what’s important to us? And could you maybe talk about those two things and importance of alignment.

Jorgen Hesselberg  58:22

Yeah, and I know that can sound sort of a little bit esoteric, but I’m really concrete about it. Because, if you think about, the business strategy is really why. What are we trying to accomplish? But why are we trying to accomplish this? What are we about? What’s our purpose? And then the operations that are really around the how, and the reason these things need to connect and why is they very often don’t is because if you think of stuff, like let’s say very often people will say our business strategy is to be the most efficient at producing widgets, try to make it simple, we do it in a very cost effective way. Well, that operational strategy is probably not going to be an agile strategy because if you’re going to say, okay, we’re going to optimize for cost that means that you want to try to get a lot of repetition, you want to squeeze out all variability, and you’re going to do something that is probably going to be fast and relatively good in terms of cost efficiencies, but it’s not going to be very innovative. 

So understand that an agile way of working has been optimized for other things. If you want to be in an organization that’s really innovative and has great sense of purpose around, creativity and things like that, well, then your operational strategy has to allow for things like Slack, it has to make sure that you’re not saying, oh, why are you not working 12 hour days, that’s not an operational strategy that will support that goal. So that’s something I think we miss. One thing that I think is very damaging is when you say, agile is great and everything great is agile. That doesn’t mean nothing because it’s not always true, if you are in an environment, and I will say that, that’s not as common anymore but if you are in an environment that’s very controlled, and there’s very little variability, and there’s really not a lot of incentive to optimize for any type of innovation, maybe like a very well defined process that’s actually working quite well, that does need to change and there are some of those still left, then maybe agile isn’t the way to go, that’s not the right context for that. If you use Snowden’s models, you’re talking simple or obvious domains, don’t necessarily think agile there. But part of what has been happening, and I think this is what you said initially in the podcast, is that we’re moving more and more into the complex and chaotic domains and that’s where agile ways of working are really great.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:00:51

So that’s the thing. Another thing that you’ve talked about, I think we all talked about, and I feel like a lot of times, we’re hearing same stuff, talking about same stuff, but like the how long corporations are staying around. And it’s pretty short and it’s getting shorter and shorter and this, you’ve talked about as disruptive innovation, I just think about tools like zoom. I remember using zoom seven, eight years ago, and that time, WebEx and all of these tools were tools of choice, in a sense. And you can just see how small thing, not small, small event, it’s still small events, compared to like, It’s a small virus. Well, it’s a small and then somewhere that happened at first transmission, and how I quickly in that highly complex environment, which is our world, it can kind of have so many, the enormous effects, including on companies like Cisco and companies they use. 

So if you don’t embrace uncertainty, if you don’t embrace that disruptive innovation, you’re more likely to get disrupted. I think I was talking to Evan, from Business Institute, and he said, you will get disrupted so it’s more like how well do you actually prepare yourself and how well you embrace for that disruption. Could you maybe from your perspective, talk about, in everything that we’ve said in relation to what we’ve said that the importance of that disruptive innovation and how organizations go about developing capability for or competence for that.

Jorgen Hesselberg  1:02:42

Yeah, well, it goes back to what we said around what business agility is, which is embracing change and execute for purpose. That balance, I think I typically talked about it as a barbell strategy. It kind of looks like a barbell, where there’s a one part is a little bigger than the other, usually, depending on where you are, and it is all going to be contextual. But the part that is around executing might be a little bigger than the one that’s around change, depending on, how volatile your environment is. But you do need to always have listening for those weak signals. I think that’s a good way looking at it, these little things that, you could see things as sort of like, okay, something’s happening here, we need to be in that space. Large organizations have a challenge with this, of course, because they already have a business model that’s really entrenched in that execution mode. 

So when we talk about things that go, into exploration, they just sort of like, whoa, what’s this? Ways that they can try to combat that is to of course, acquire other companies, that’s one way and a lot of companies do that really well, they see and comment and they just acquire them right away. Problem is very often they then crushed the culture not the purpose. But some other companies have done a good job of actually acquiring companies and keeping them as spin offs, where they say, okay, why don’t you stay over there, do your thing, we get to follow you, and learn from you. And so as things develop, we might be able to embrace some of that, knowing that not all of them are going to make it. That’s part of this too. We got to be open to failing. 

One thing that’s been wonderful is that governments, I think about the people that sometimes called me up to do executive workshops and stuff, it’s usually large companies. But lately, there’s been government’s coming to me saying, you know what, we thought that we really didn’t think this agile thing really applied to us. In fact, we had a mandate to not use any type of online tools whatsoever but once the pandemic hit, we realized we can actually do it. It took us about 10 days, so we did it. So now we’re kind of thinking maybe we can be more agile also, so it’s been opening up. That disruption has opened up people’s opinions about themselves and they realize we can do this. Just because we’re a government doesn’t mean we can’t be agile. So I think it’s really opened up a lot of opportunities and kind of helped us see that there is a better way to do this, which we didn’t do before. So disruption, you got to be open to it. But nothing is better than actually seeing it in action. And I think we will use this as an example for a long time now, and I hope people will have that resonate.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:05:19

Well, it’s a good example codes, a good example of just system change, like when you enforce certain policies, when certain event, our behavior changed. It’s still changing. And also, culture is changing as a result of that. What we used to consider normal, two, three years ago is today, not normal, like hugging?

Jorgen Hesselberg  1:05:46

I completely agree, it’s going to be fascinating to see what this means two or three or four years down the road. Do your questions early, around five years from now? There’s going to be second and third order effects here that we haven’t even thought through. And we’re going to say, oh, that’s why it all started with this pandemic, I had no idea that this is going to be the result of it but it never would have happened if it wasn’t for this disruptive event. I’m ultimately very bullish. I am optimistic of nature. And I think things like this is, it is tragic. Let’s not mince words, that obviously, lots of people have died and lots of people are sick. But I think there’s some really positive things in the end here for humanity as a whole. I think we’ve learned some things from this, I hope. And I also think that, part of what’s been really working well is collaboration between and across borders. I think that’s been really great when you see that work. Yes, we can definitely be better. But you also seen that none of the work we’ve done, wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t collaborate better together. So yeah, lots of good lessons here and ultimately, I think this might be a saving grace for us, because we were kind of lucky, because this was not a very lethal one. A couple years from now, we might have one that’s a little more lethal. It’s good for us, then that we know how to handle this

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:07:05

kick in the butt, just to be like a wakeup call. 

Jorgen Hesselberg  1:07:11

I think it may have been exactly what we needed, honestly. As terrible as it is, I think it might have been exactly what we needed to be better prepared for bigger and more deadly things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:07:21

Great. Last question. Importance of balance between resource efficiency and flow efficiency, I really wanted to get your thoughts on this, and then we’ll wrap it up.

Jorgen Hesselberg  1:07:32

Well, that goes back to the to the essence of business agility, in my opinion, because resource efficiency, of course, is when you optimize for the resource, that means that if you are a professional, you’re a doctor, for instance, I want to make sure that you spend all your time seeing patients. Optimizing for flow means that I actually optimized for the patient rather than the doctor. So the difference, then is that I might not be so effective or efficient when it comes to the resource, but I’m optimizing for flow, but I will get valued on much faster. That’s a very simple way of sort of talking about the differences. In environments with large amounts of uncertainty, flow efficiency is always the way to go. It’s my default, is where I consider you want to go first. 

When you’re in environments with less amounts of uncertainty or environments with lots of constraints, maybe regulatory constraints, and maybe you have certain mandates you have to follow, then resource efficiency might be more important than not. But ultimately, the balance is what’s going to be particularly for your context, I would say, more flow efficiency than resource efficiency, but it’s never one or the other. It’s always a balance. And I think that’s sort of the magic of this is to find that right balance for your organization, in your context. If you’re a fire department, you definitely want to make sure you optimize for flow, because you want to react very fast. But if you’re creating widgets in a factory, resource efficiency might be very good, because you want to be cost efficient, and you don’t have to change very fast. So it all depends on which context you’re in. But that is the essence of it, is all the things we talk about around the tools that we use, the culture, the people and all that stuff, all supports that balance and how we achieve that balance is expressed, essentially, in how our investments are in those five dimensions.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:09:27

Yeah, and when we think about how we measure currently in most organizations, how we reward, it’s unbalanced. We need to measure both, but it’s very focused on resource and that type of efficiency rather than looking at both resource and flow efficiency and saying, collectively, how are we looking?

Jorgen Hesselberg  1:09:51

Exactly, you completely. Like we were saying earlier around organizational design, we’re actively sort of punishing people for trying to optimize for flow very often. I’ve had many clients who’ve told me that, hey, I see what you’re saying, I understand what you’re trying to do here but what you’re asking me to do now is essentially to give up 25% of my salary. And I say, whoa whoa, why do you say that? He says, well, because based on what you just taught me, I should now help this person in this other sector, because the cost of the day there is much greater than here and that would be the best thing to do for our company. But if I were to have my people go over there and help that person, that means I won’t hit my goals and that means I will not reach my bonus of 25%. So that’s what you’re asking me to do. And I’m like, whoa, I’m sorry but that wasn’t what I meant. But that’s the systems that we have in place. We’re saying, you need to meet your goals to stay in your silo. The system itself is essentially, while eliminating agility, which is really sad. This is why this has to come, at least from the executive level in terms of support. AWG and groups like that can help inform and educate executives, but executives need to sort of say, I believe in this and I’m willing to change also, it’s not just going to be the people working for me that’s going to change, we’re willing to change as an organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:11:09

Exactly. That’s great. What would you like to leave us with, a message, anything that you would like to finish?

Jorgen Hesselberg  1:11:19

Well, getting better’s never done that. That’s the thing that I think is really important. That’s my motto these days, just hey, just keep improving. Check out comparative agility.com if you have a chance, it is free, I should say that. Yeah, we have paid plans, of course, but it is free for everyone to use. So I think if you just want to see how you’re doing, compare yourself to the rest of the world and kind of how you’re doing over time. I think that could be a great place to start. And just want to say that I’m just really fortunate to be part of the Agile community. I’ve always felt very welcome in this community. It’s just a very diverse group of people, everything from people who talk about what color you exude to people who do TDD. There’s a nice range of people. I just really feel at home in that tribe. So I just want to say I was really, really fortunate to be part of this community.