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.
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.