Jurgen Appelo

TRANSCRIPT: 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:49

Who is Jurgen Appelo?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 00:53

That’s me. I usually describe myself as a speaker, writer and entrepreneur, those three words seem to describe most of what I’m doing. And I’m from the Netherlands, I’m 51 years old and leading a pretty happy life, I suppose.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:18

Nice, so what’s important to you, I want to dive a little bit into like you know, your current motivations and what’s important to you. So, you’ve done a lot in the sense of, for I think this whole movement and I want to come back to complexity, to why study science but like, right now when you look at your life, when you look at the just the work environment as well because I think it’s hard to distinguish between you know, our work lives and what we do and what’s important to you, what motivates you currently?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  01:59

What motivates me is, coming up with things that people find useful and then help them be happier in their jobs. That’s why I call my company, Happy Melly because it is after a famous billboard you know, Rotterdam where I live that says Melly Shum hates her job. It’s a work of art that has been there in that street for 25 years and some people wonder why is Melly Shum hating her job? It doesn’t explain, it’s just Melly Shum hates her job with a picture of Melly smiling in the camera hating her job and that for me was the inspiration of calling my company, Happy Melly because I want Melly to be happy. Why are people hating their job, they’re in the wrong job or they should change their job? So, for me that’s an explanation of what I like doing and it helps when I discover stuff or invent stuff and describe it in such a way that people say well now I finally understand it or now it is finally useful. I get these compliments every now and then like, I do the digging around and reading dozens of books and then people say wow, thank you for summarizing all of that. Now, it has finally become applicable and useful for me at this, it saves me reading all that other stuff. So yeah, being helpful, helping people be happy in their jobs that’s more or less what I love doing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:37

Why is happiness so important? You’ve written a book on it too. I mean, it’s a pretty basic question but from your perspective, you know, because most people are not happy at work.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  03:51

Yeah, well, that’s a simple and at the same time a deep question, I suppose. I just noticed that I have never done things, at least not for long that I hated. Right? When I finished my studies at the University in Delft, I study software engineering, all my peers basically disappeared into regular jobs for high paying consultancy companies or IT companies, whatever. And I thought, doesn’t seem interesting to me, that doesn’t make me happy to be as what some people say a ‘slave wage slave’, basically. So no, I you started my own company and I became a freelancer and I started writing courseware and I did very different things compared to my peers because that seemed more exciting and was riskier, more uncertain but I loved it more. And that has always been the case, every choice I made, I make the choices that make sense to me because they help me be happier in the work that I do.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:08

How much does that have to do with autonomy because I have like, similar experience where I started a software development company in colleges, started you know, writing code or designing too in high school. So, I’ve worked like you know, my you know, since I was in high school for myself but I’ve also taken pauses where I worked inside the companies and autonomy is a big part for me. Is it the autonomy that makes you happy or is it other things like, what is it for you?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  05:40

It is definitely part of it. I mean, one of the management 3.0 games or exercises that I created is a movie motivators and freedom is one of the 10 motivators in that exercise. And I have always said that for me, it’s at the top, I want my freedom, I want my autonomy because I am unhappy if others make the decisions for me like, what project I am supposed to work on and things like that, that never interested me. Even when I was CIO for a good number of years, then I was not at all interested in working on projects for customers. I was very interested in working on improving our own processes as a company and then helping the developers have more enjoyable jobs and basically inward looking in the company because then I could choose my own work basically. I could choose what I want to improve next and I was not interested in something that somebody else handed me as I want this e-commerce website and okay, whatever it’s your problem not mine. So, yeah autonomy is a big one for me definitely. It is part of why I like them but also, I’m very curious person. I am now preparing for a new workshop that I will start giving in the autumn and I love the research, I just love digging into articles and books and drawing connections between things and then coming up with new insights and then they go this is something that I need to add to the workshop because I think this is new and then turning that into new exercises. So, the curiosity part, the finding things out is important and also the creative aspect of it. So, how do I now bring this to people in a way that they like it, that they enjoy having a game with each other, doing an exercise etc. So yeah, freedom is one part but also curiosity and creativity, those combined basically make my job.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:03

And I’m assuming that result of understanding that what you’re doing and creating is actually helping others is very motivating as a satisfaction too.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  08:14

For sure yeah, last example, I was in Iran two, three weeks ago which was an amazing trip in itself by the way and I had coffee with someone who showed me around the city a bit and said well, I just wanted to thank you for the workshop I did with you. Seven years ago, he was in my workshop in Turkey back then. I said and thanks to you I quit my job because I hated it and then I started my own company and now he was CEO of a company of 70 people and he said that would never have happened if I had not met you and just decided okay, apparently I need to quit my job because this is not making me happy and that makes me so feel so good. I mean, I didn’t know I was completely unaware of this person somewhere on the other side of the planet, apparently being influenced by my workshop and I have similar stories from people reading my books and so that’s super cool, that makes my day when someone shares an example like that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:19

I heard coffee makes your day too and given that you were in Turkey and in Iran, I’m assuming you tried the Turkish coffee and you know, what’s your favorite coffee? Just more on the personal side because I heard that you do take your coffee seriously, like it’s. 

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 09:38

Yeah, well, to be honest, I like the kind of coffee that other people may not refer to really as coffee because I want it with a lot of milk. So, I like my lattes and cappuccinos and things like that, I don’t drink straight coffee that’s not my thing. And so, for some coffee, connoisseurs that would be spoiling the coffee, my god you throw milk in there, are you insane? Yeah, sorry that’s how I like it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:09

Yeah, I used to be like that and I don’t know, it’s been like 10 plus years I switched and I only drink black coffee up here in New England, like Dunkin Donuts again you probably, some people wouldn’t consider it coffee either so I used to like that but now it’s all large stuff and I joke around like, Turkish coffee is still my, I was born in Sarajevo so like that whole Balkans area is impacted by that.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  10:34

Makes sense.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:40

Were you surprised by the reaction, I mean you talked about like you know, the gratification of you know putting something out there that you research, that you know, you put your own thoughts on it like, with the management 3.0 and like just how much receptive the community and everybody was, were you surprised by that? Like, what was your initial, I know it’s been years but what was your initial reaction to that?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 11:05

Yes, I am still surprised that it took off that well. I can rationally explain it because as I said I love the research a lot, I love the digging around and seeing connections between things actually, this is interesting at the personal level when I was 11 years old I got this advice from the teacher back then like, all kids at that age got before they went to high school. What the teachers at the time thought, the area where I was supposed to find my job and apparently my teacher at that time noticed that I loved analyzing stuff, so he said maybe you should become an analyst or whatever. I had no idea what an analyst was, I didn’t know what analysts did but apparently, I like solving problems and checking things out to see how they worked. And yeah, that has been with me ever since so I still do that and that is something that people appreciate and I have this creative streak I like training that into visuals and good storytelling and so I often say, I just steal stuff, I just borrow stuff from many sources but I present it in a way that’s more better consumable I suppose. Because I read a lot of books and to be honest my god, they’re so boring very often. I go through them but I can imagine people giving up very soon, I like writing in a different way that is more entertaining and that still has a high information density. So yeah, that I think explains why Management 3.0 took off at the time. It’s well researched, a lot of references there but also presented with a lot of visual stories [unsure 13:04] etc.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:08

Yeah, in a sense, it’s really especially the main that you’re writing about which has to do a lot with you know, complexity science, complexity management. There are a lot of like, you said books they you know, have a lot of good content but the way that concepts and things are described is not necessarily easy to understand. I want to start maybe where, on a fun part by asking you this question, what lies between order and chaos?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 13:40

One that, complexity lies between order and chaos, that’s the whole point of systems at the edge of chaos, you can also have the edge of order because they are right there in between. I mean, that’s what scientists have been working on ever since the 90s, basically. I am so old that I remember chaos theory emerging, that was I think in 87, that it became a big thing in the mathematical department. So, I studied software engineering in Delft and we share the same faculty with mathematics. So, we and the mathematicians were in the same building, we conduct the same study society actually and one year the theme was chaos. Actually, I was the one, I remember I came up with that term chaos not because I noticed this was something big among the math people. So, I said well, let’s make that the theme of the yearbook, I still have that behind me, yeah over here. Yeah. So, this is the book, you can’t see it on the podcast but this is the year book, then I, another said the segment, chaos, you see, chaos here, the chaos, you see that? Yeah, that’s 88, 89 wow and my drawings as well. So yeah, that’s when it started and that turned into complexity science in the 90s, basically and I thought it was so inspiring, super fascinating. They explain how the universe works because everything is a complex system. So, it was wow moments all the time when I read those books and then Agile software development emerged early 2000s. And I saw all the parallels, they even use the same words, emergence, self-organization, that was the same thing. It’s just applied complexity science, basically.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:47 

Is complexity science the one of your favorite topics?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 15:51

It is, I don’t do much reading in that area to be honest at the time because I have read so much already and there are so many other interesting topics out there as well and the science doesn’t change that much. I mean, that’s just the way the world works, I now get the basic concepts. I’m not an expert by far but I know what fitness landscapes are and reflectivity and emergence and all that. So, don’t need to read more about it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:21

When it comes to management, when it comes to agile movement, you know, a lot of like, people that started, people that are more experienced understand, like you said, you know, we’ve taken these complexity sciences, complexity management ideas for the agile, we tend to put agile in everything, right? Like, what is your take on how much is a common knowledge around complexity management and complexity science in the agile and management circles?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 16:58

Not much.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 17:00

Do you think it’s improving or do you think the awarenesses?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 17:05

Maybe it is not really advanced to be honest, I’m not an advanced thinker by any stretch of the imagination, don’t get me wrong but in the land of the blind, the one with one eye sees most? So, but I am sometimes yeah, I’m a little bit skeptical and critical of how other people approach things because I find that there is no complexity mindset behind it. I’ll give you a concrete example, I just discussed that a couple of days ago again, there’s often this suggestion that you should not reward individuals in the Agile community that instead you should reward teams because if you reward individuals, then the problem is that people will go on to compete on teams, there’s plenty of evidence for that. I totally understand that suggestion but what people apparently don’t seem to understand is when you reward teams, you get exactly the same thing, only one on a level higher. Then the teams are going to compete with each other, I mean, it’s not that difficult to understand this, right? You didn’t solve the problem, you move that one level up, it’s not cleaning your house but just swiping the dirt under the carpet, the dirt is still there. It’s just in a different place. So, now the teams are going to compete with each other, how do you solve that? Well, maybe we should not reward teams, we should reward the departments. Alright, congratulations, you removed the problem, yet another level up. You’re not solving the problem. This is to me an example of someone who was not thinking as a systems thinker, is not a complexity mindset, to be honest.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:58

Well, even systems thing, I was talking to Dave Snowden and he was shedding all over systems thinking and I think, you know, for several reasons but I think, you know, one of them is that even systems thinking is misunderstood. And everybody talks about systems thinking but it’s not just physical systems, right? It’s social systems, there’s many different ways of looking at systems. And I think, you know, the people, a lot of times people look at systems, it’s just the physical ones. To come back to this topic of complexity and maybe even systems thinking, in what ways are the teams and organizations like living systems because living systems are complex, adaptive systems, right? 

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  19:44

Yeah. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:44

So, how are organizations because we have metaphors, we compare organizations to machines, to this and that, that is not necessarily a complex, adaptive system. In what ways are organizations more like adaptive, complex systems?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 20:05

Well, because like all those other complex systems, they consist of parts, they are the people whose performance depends on the interactions with all the other parts around them. So, I very much agree with the idea that you cannot really measure an individual person’s performance, the performance of the person depends on their relationships with the parts around them, the interactions with the others and Google has proven this already with their research a number of years ago, that also the performance is in the relationships between people and the dynamics of the group and not so much in the individual person. That’s totally in line with complexity science and I also explain that you don’t simply solve the problem of rewarding people by more than one level up because yeah, teams also communicate with each other and our relationship with each other in the organization. There is a reward system in complex systems, the parts are rewarded, they are rewarded for contributing to the other parts around them. So, excuse me, I need a glass of water, so the performance of an individual part needs to be measured in terms of how well has it contributed to the others. So, basically, that’s what 360-degree evaluations do in a way, right? Where everyone that the person has been working with decide with each other on how much value that person has contributed to those relationships. So, there still needs to be an individual reward but that reward needs to be decided by all the pipes around that individual and that is how complex systems work. They’re all always reward systems in any complex adaptive system, there are reward systems, yes, the parts are rewarded but the reward depends on the relationships between the others and not by some manager, who is handling everything. And then you have solved the problem because this is fractal, this also applies to teams and departments basically.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:41

Well, that’s the thing and like, I want to explore this a little bit more because it also when it comes to like, you know, organization setting goals, or like, you know, purpose, you know, a lot of times one size fits all but if we go back to, you know, just understanding people, understanding complexity, there’s multiple levels of how we look at the purpose, how we look at the goals, how we look at rewards and how we incentivize. And if we look at the bigger organization, it’s not really set up or architected to be coming back to this is organizations in the world of systems, like our organizations are not set up to deal with complexity. And I think people like yourselves and others are trying to really describe that and that’s what underneath all of your approaches, description, that’s really, you know, a lot of times what you’re saying and yet, we still see many organizations, not fully understanding the design, architecture, policies, including, you know, some of these goals. So, how do you go about helping organizations deal with this?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 24:01

Well, good question and I noticed that organizations need patterns to be copied examples, from others. That’s why solutions quote, unquote, like safe and Spotify model and others are so popular because they give organizations something to copy and try out and adapt to their own context. And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you understand that what works for others doesn’t necessarily work for you but at least you have a starting point for experimentation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:41

But maybe let’s pause there, I think there’s a big, there’s something there that you said I want to explore a little bit more, as long as you understand that it’s a point for experimentation. And I think that’s not how it’s understood, that’s not how it’s sold, right? It’s sold as the solution and you know?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 25:02

Yeah, it will literally, the same website has these implementation roadmaps like, literally the word implementation as if you’re rolling out some software product that needs to be installed in the organization. So, the terminology is somewhat worrying. Fortunately, there are smart people out there and good coaches and consultants that know how to go about using these frameworks and toolboxes in a smart way, disregarding the implementation approach but just more on with an approach where you treat the framework as a toolbox of good ideas that you could apply individually perhaps. So yeah, that’s the starting point, you need to see it as an experiment but that is also how complex systems work. It is, I described that in the, I think in the last chapter of Measurement 3.0, there are different ways that organisms evolve. And the horizontal gene transfer is one of the most successful ways in the biosphere, there’s basically organisms flinging DNA around and picking it up from others, that’s what bacteria do. By the way, they just copy parts and from each other, this seems like a cool piece of DNA, give me that? See what it does for me, oops, that didn’t work out well. I’ll try something else. So, horizontal gene transfer is a big thing in the bias actually, what humans do, we call that sex, it’s a rather special case in the biosphere There’s a very complicated way of mixing two strands of DNA. So, just sharing, basically.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:55

So, is it more like Lean and Agile and now how agile is emerging like in other, would you call that linear where like it was adopted in you know, manufacturing mass production now that was applied to knowledge work that has more complexity to it perhaps, would that be a linear?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 27:19

Well, I think the principles of Lean have applied very well to manufacturing of course but there was the context of knowing what the end result had to be because it was all about optimization at the Toyota manufacturing plants. Then, they knew what car had to be creative, they just want it to be flexible, so that they could change things fast because yes, customer requirements change then demand change all the time. But the way they manufactured the cars is not the same as the way they designed the cars so discovery is something different compared to delivery.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:05

Alright, what I meant more is like, this is almost like what you described earlier, as is borrowing these ideas from Lean applying them to the context of agile and more software development, would that be more without horizontal gene sharing or maybe I misunderstood?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 28:28

Yeah, so indeed, that is horizontal copying from one domain to the other but as I said, the context is different because in manufacturing, you know what the end result is and in software development, you don’t get the whole point of software that you make each piece only once. Because a lot of it is discovery and that means that the principles apply with the practices are very different. And I’m also somewhat against certain metaphors such as inventory, there’s been this emphasis on inventory being waste in Lean. Why that makes sense if you make a car but it makes no sense if you do software development because when you do creative work, then the work that is in progress is not necessarily waste. It is stuff that is working in your subconscious, that may need time sometimes to form into something beautiful or useful or whatever. I’m a writer, I know how these things, these creative processes work, you cannot just, I cannot just push things out by the minute and then deliver chapters one by one. Some things, you have to simmer for a while in your head and actually Jerry Weinberg call that the fieldstone method. Well, he wrote many pieces of text and they were just lying about doing nothing and then at some point, what I wrote here is actually, it connects to that other unfinished thing that I wrote back then last year and then they start cross pollinating and that’s how the new stuff emerges. So, inventory in lean in manufacturing is not the same as inventory in a creative job. So, the metaphor does not translate well because it’s taken out of context so you’d have to adapt.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:33

Well, it’s also I think, one is about efficiency, the other one is more about innovation and emergence. So, like, you know, I joke around but it’s, you know, I let things marinate in my head and I’ve been writing actually a book for last couple of years. And a lot of times I let things marinate and it’s like, you know, one morning just hits me or like, I’m taking a shower, gone for a walk or run and it hits me, I’m like, all of that inventory was there for a reason in order to make a breakthrough in this idea or concept.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  31:10

Or if it is because of a conversation you have with someone that, well, that solves the thing that I have been thinking about for the last couple of months. Now, I can write that blog post or something like that. So yeah, innovation is very different.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:25

So, context matters, right? And then a lot of times, we’re looking for easy solution, there’s something about humans to preserve energy to do whatever, which I don’t fully understand but we’re eager to jump to the quick solutions. And our environment and our context is not necessarily conducive right now to that. What are your thoughts on context and why, you know, is it important to you? Or why should it be if it is or why is it? 

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  32:05

Well, obviously, context is important but a context has changed definitely last year because of the whole COVID crisis of course, people have been working from home instead of at the office, a discussion is going on where a company said some company has to get back to the office because we’re not innovative enough anymore when everyone is at their home. Workplaces being quite productive that the research says that people are more productive when they are working by themselves that has apparently worked out for the better but when they’re not collaborating in the same room, the story goes that they’re less innovative and less creative because they don’t share as much ideas with each other. Interestingly enough, I just read a counterpoint to that last week that I never thought of before but it said, this has not been proven actually, that people are less innovative when they join through zoom calls or whatever. And actually, when people get into a room with each other, there is a much higher chance that people conform to the norm of the local culture in the organization, you adapt, like you switch to a different identity and that has an impact on how people think. It has been said by many that, people feel more themselves when they join through zoom calls from their own home because I am now in my own house being me, I joined a call so I have somewhat different identity when I joined the call. And you can say well, this is actually good for brainstorming discussions because you make it easier for people to bring their different perspectives, to bring their different personalities to problem solving because if you take them out of their own context, out of their own homes, you put them into an office, they’re going to switch identity and suddenly groupthink emerges that you may not have wanted. So, and I thought I just read that last week and I thought, wow, that’s brilliant. So indeed, it has not been proven that people are more innovative when they’re in the same room, maybe you should put them like, in seven different locations in the world. One is in Turkey, coffee block and the other is in Iran and the other is in whatever and then you have them make a zoom call discussing a difficult problem to solve. Maybe those people are more innovative then because of the different contexts that they bring to the table.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 34:58

Well, that’s what I’m like, you know, it’s been interesting for me too because like, you know, I switch between California, East Coast here and then you know, Montenegro and Croatia mostly. And it’s just, it goes back to that autonomy, it goes back to that freedom. Like, in a sense, I feel more motivated, where I can work from anywhere, it’s my decision to choose if I want to work 4pm to midnight or work, you know, from 5am to noon or whatever it is. And, you know, where even organizations going back now are saying, okay, you know, they’re defining companywide policies versus allowing teams to the side work context to really well, just their approaches to their context. Do you think or what are you seeing maybe like, as far as how organizations maybe learned anything from COVID around the context and around that self-organization that exists in living systems?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  36:07

I think they have at least, there’s this joke that has gone around last year, who has impacted the organization the most, was that the manager or the employee or the cultural COVID-19, will always be, it was COVID that pushed organizations forward because they have resisted remote working many of them for a long time. And now they had to and they know this well, it’s actually not that bad as we always been fearful of. So, that’s a good thing and fortunately, most people resist going back to the office full time, of course, most organizations want at least some kind of hybrid form, that is what they will, most of them will end up with. Then the question is, how do you decide who is at the office, when? And you said, yeah, some organizations will determine that for everyone. Actually, that’s a minority of the companies I have noticed. I believe Apple was in that category where they said at certain dates, everyone needs to be at the office but that isn’t even smart because then, on those days, the offices will be crapped. On those three days and the other two days, it will be virtually up to you, that’s not a smart way of dividing resources across all your workers. So, it’s better to leave the decision to teams and I think organizations, many of them will have found out that people can solve, organize pretty well. They did that when they were at home, still stuff got done, everyone was contributing. So, they can probably also make a decision with that team, when should we be at the office and when can we work from home. You just probably need a little bit of coordination because if you let everyone decide for themselves and most of them are going to decide that Friday and Monday are the days to work at home because that’s so convenient to have a long weekend. So, you probably want to guide that a little bit but I do believe and I see that also in the articles because I have an alert on hybrid working and things like that on Google News because I keep up to date on what’s happening there. And most organizations default to letting the teams decide when to be at the office and when to be at home.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:43

But the core like, it’s really like, you know, I think we need things like COVID because as humans, we get comfortable, you know? We will, you know, we have to get out of our comfort seats to say like, yeah, we can do this, right? So, there is that in order, there needs to be some kind of push a lot of times to get us you know, out of our current perspectives or even paradigms but there’s also so much desire for that linear kind of approach’s thinking. And again, if we just go back to kind of where we started with complexity sciences, if we look at it, like for most of living systems, you have some type of boundaries or guardrails, right and people self-organize so I think a lot of times when I work with executives, it’s about creating that ecosystem where emergence can happen and you still need alignment in order to some extent in that order in the sense of complexity but moreover, like alignment and guardrails and then in creating, you know, create that environment for people to emerge in. I’m not necessarily worried but I do think like, you know, speaking to you, speaking to like, you know, I’ve had several other people on the podcast, I don’t see this happening like, for a majority in the next 10 years where organizations fully understand the underlying principles of complexity and contextualizing things to their environment. Do you see that? Am I maybe just not as optimistic? Or do you see, are there signs that organizations are maturing in their understanding of how to deal with complexity?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 40:46

Some are, others are not, is that a problem, I don’t think so. Survival is not mandatory and as they say, I don’t care if some organizations don’t make it and die in the next decade, whatever. People will survive, they will find other jobs that better run companies and everyone will be happier. Yes, it will be slightly stressful for some having to find another job, so what? That’s just another tiny crisis to overcome. So, I’m not worried about that, we see great examples of very inspiring things happening with fast, growing companies that by the way, are always organized in a Lean and Agile sense with Lean Startup, design thinking kinds of practices. All the fast-growing company, they know how to do it, I just finished the book about Netflix by Reed Hastings and no rules are all super interesting. How they set it all up, as you see it agile all the way amazing and how they do that and they have disrupted their industry and they forced their competitors to adopt similar kinds of approaches, otherwise they would go out of business. You see the same in every industry now. Tesla has disrupted the car industry so leaving Volkswagen and others scrambling to catch up and modernize their software development departments, that’s a good thing because it means that people like me get invites and that to do workshops and presentations and everything that keeps me in business as well. So, and some of them make it and others don’t and yeah, as I said I don’t care if some don’t make it, let the bad ones perish and be replaced with better ones.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:46

Yeah, it’s interesting and it goes back again to, it’s how the nature is it, it’s how complex systems are but like yet as humans, by stores ourselves, we think we’re the center of world, we think we’re the only ones that are the most important than this planet. Right? There’s that whole bias, I want to get your thoughts on this because related to all of this and I think it’s a part that not many times is brought up but like, self-determination, theory or cognitive development when it comes to motivation, when it comes to complex systems, what is your thought in a sense on what’s important to us, how we see the world and having many different I guess perspectives, how does that contribute to complexity? I don’t know how familiar with the UI, with the self-determination theory I saw you talk about a little bit, how desires differ and house structure but I don’t know if you want to maybe just expand on that a little bit because I think that’s really important from my perspective to this whole. 

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 44:09

Well, sure, well there are a number of theory indeed; self-determination, research theory is one of many them are referred to exact in my work. And for me, those human desires, self-actualization and freedom and social connectedness and whatever you have a number of categories, they all emerged through biological processes of survival of the fittest, that’s the foundation of how the biosphere around us works. And at some point, this has resulted in humans as a byproduct of whatever else happened in the biosphere, we’re just an accident; a fortunate accident for us.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:04

Yeah, from my perspective not fortunate from, if you look at some of the other species.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 45:09

Yeah, well I sometimes say humans for Planet Earth are just like a bad rash, it’s like, this annoying itch and at some point, you will probably get rid of because we don’t mean much on a geological scale to be honest. And also, okay, we starting to mean a little bit in that in terms of the footprint and the bio mass but still, I think Atlantic krill still outcompete us in terms of bio mass on this planet, there’s more Atlantic krill than human beings.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:49

Than human, yeah.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  45:49

And ends also, outpace us 10 to 1. So, we’re unimportant in that sense and we human beings we have, because of our biological needs, etc., we have this on the one hand, we have this need for freedom but on the other and also there’s need for social relatedness and sometimes those are compete with each other, etc. And all of that is really fascinating when you stick to the human perspective and of course, I do that as well, with my work, my presentations, I want to help humans be happy because that fascinates me and it also gets me paid, which is important to get to a point because I have a life to live as well. But when I go to that higher level, I sometimes think it’s all irrelevant because you get to that philosophical level of what are human beings doing here in the world? Yeah, we’re making a little bit of a mess of it, causing a sixth extinction. Well, Planet Earth has survived the previous five so it will probably survive this one as well. One of my favorite fragments, I think I’ve included in one of my books that I got from a science article was many billions of years ago. No, that was just 2 to 3 billion years ago, there was this new gas that emerged that was highly toxic and it wiped out like 95% of all species, it was amazing and we call that oxygen. That’s an interesting perspective, isn’t it, it was an accidental byproduct of plants or emitted oxygen as a waste, as a product into the atmosphere and it killed 95% that we never punished plants for that, wiping out so many other species where they’re waste. I love that kind of thinking. So, we’re not as bad as plants yet, in what we have done to the world. Let’s hope it doesn’t always get that, also doesn’t get that bad. So, but it’s nice to have a relativistic perspective on things every now and then

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:21

If we bring this back to the organization, to teams, right? And if we will look at, you know, from that theory of even cognitive development, self-determination or whatever you want to call it but essentially, there is, like you said, there are many different thoughts, frameworks around this concept but there are common patterns around this, which is that our environment influences what we want, what we consider important, what we believe it, right? So, growing up in Sarajevo, during the war, where my dad was in, you know, three different concentration camps shaped me as a person differently than, you know, maybe my peers, when I moved here as a 13-year-old to United States. I had different beliefs, growing up in that culture, going through that experience versus people or kids my age. So, fast forward to where Miljan is now professional working, it’s going to be different to motivate me as a person versus somebody else that grew up in New England or in California or whatever it is. So, a lot of times, there is one size fits all when it comes to motivating, leading people and we don’t take into consideration that context of their beliefs, their values, how do you go because that’s like, you know, when we talk about systems and when we talk about, you know, physical systems is one thing, when we talk about social systems and how we interact relationships and what’s driving that, that’s more of a softer side, human systems? How do you see that human side, human systems and how it ties to the living systems in the context of organizations and culture, maybe?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  50:14

Well, one of the things that struck me when I read one of the complexity science books that really was an eye opener to me was that, I don’t know who it was or wrote it. It was like, there is no such thing as freedom. He said it because you only exist thanks to the environment that has produced you and that sustains you and that nurtures you until the environment decides that it’s time for you to go. That is not freedom, right? I depend on oxygen, I depend on parents having birth me. I depend on so many things that my freedom is a figment of my imagination and that was an eye opener to me because I’ve always said my freedom is so important to me. And that was for me, like, obvious that it would also be important to everyone else around me but apparently, it’s not. And it made me understand other cultures a little bit better, where they have less emphasis on freedom and more on relatedness and social cohesion, for example, I was not able to criticize that as much anymore because of reading that complexity perspective. Is that your sense of freedom? Yeah, that’s just your personal illusion. Be happy with it but actually, there is no such thing because everything depends on everything else. And in a way I thought it was beautiful but also explain to me that my feeling of freedom, yes, that has also been fed to me by my environment, just the concept of freedom is something that I received from the environment on which I depend. So, that is ridiculous to think that I invented it or something, right? So, all these memes as Richard Dawkins famously came up with many years ago, they yeah, the influencers and your background is obviously very different from mine. I’m Dutch so that also means that I behave in a way that is similar to other Dutch people, I might think I am autonomous but I am almost ‘copy-pastable’ across the country because there are many people like me here in this part of the world who are thinking the same way and behave in a similar way, that makes me not really autonomous, does it? Because I am just a result of my environment and I need to accept that as a human being and the same in organizations. The people form the organization but the organization also forms the people, it goes in two directions that’s called reflexivity. In a complexity science, they depend on each other. So, the mindset of the people, hopefully an agile mindset, growth mindset will inform the organization’s culture but it’s the same the other way around, the culture in organization will shape the people working there and hopefully, that is a positive, virtuous circle but in some environments, it’s a bad, vicious circle that you get. And then maybe it’s time to get out of there, we go back to where we started. Some people are happier when they just quit their jobs and some systems you can only get rid of by letting them die because you cannot break that vicious circle, you just have to let it die. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:07

Move on.

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo  54:10

Yeah, move on, get the part out of that environment, put them somewhere else so that they can grow something new.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:19

Yeah, I was going to say so something else can emerge. So, maybe as a last question, which ties to all of this is, you know, we put term agile on you know, dealing with complexity, you’ve called it, you know, management 3.0 but really, we’re talking about same thing, which is, how do we deal with complexity that we’re increasing complexity that we’re in. So, what do you think is going to emerge from this, I see a new paradigm emerging. I don’t know if you see that but something’s going to emerge from this sooner or later. You know, over the last twenty years, do you think it’s, what is it? Do you think, you know, what would management 4.0 look like? Or what would the new paradigm look like if we look at the environment currently and what we do?

Speaker: Jurgen Appelo 55:17

Well, a number of things are happening. First of all, the obvious one is hybrid workplaces that is a very practical thing that we need to solve in the next year or so that’s going to change how we work. But at another level, I have noticed, we made this really good switch or transition in many organizations from projects to products, which is good, you need to be responsible for the entire lifecycle of a product and not just from one hand over to the other. That’s done, we have many organizations have accepted that but I think we’re not there yet. There’s still a handover happening in organizations between those who make a product and those who provide all the other communication around it, which is finance, marketing, customer support, etc. And it has happened quite often that I was either very happy with the product but totally disappointed with the rest of the organization because customer service sucked or marketing screwed me or finance was just the pain to handle or the other way around, it has happened that products were mediocre but workable but the company was so enjoyable with such great people. And finance was fast and their response and customer support was really good then, I’m okay with the acceptable product because the whole package is positive. So, I think we need to switch from product to experience because and this is what they have already done in service design and design thinking with journey mapping, for example, understanding, what is the old journey of a customer, of a client with all that touchpoints, with our company. They sometimes call us, sometimes they chat with us on Facebook or WhatsApp, whatever. Sometimes they use our product, sometimes they come into the store and that’s an entire experience, we need the response for the entire experience and the product is only one part of it. And I think such organizations as Apple and Tesla said that they understand this because I have some friends who ordered a Tesla from the moment they ordered it is already an enjoyable experience, just ordering it. They don’t even have the product yet but already the relationship with the company, they found that enjoyable; the way they were treated. And then I think that’s a company that understands that is not only about the car and that is at some point being delivered, there’s a whole phase before and whole phase after that you need to be feel responsible for. So, we need to switch from product to experience and maybe rename the product backlog to the experience backlog. They need to be experienced owners instead of product owners etc. And that makes us more inclusive of the others in the organization such as finance, marketing support, who also impact the net promoter score and whatever you have of the customer. So, I think that’s the next step.