Kevin Callahan

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:36

So, who is Kevin Callahan? 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  00:41

That’s such a great question. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:42

Many people don’t want to know that

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  00:44

Yeah, right who cares? Well, I mean I could give you a list of the things that I like to do which is maybe sort of not particularly interesting. What matters, I have a few really deep loves in the world. Of course, my family is one of them, where I live, we’ve chosen to live in a really rural area of Maine. Well, it’s not a really rural area of Maine by comparison to most other places, it’s very rural but by Maine standards, it’s actually fairly Suburban. And it’s like I was sitting out drinking a coffee this morning out on our deck and listening to the first of the songbirds arrive which literally has happened like between yesterday and today. Yesterday, they weren’t out there singing and this morning, they’re out there singing so maybe they’re out there yesterday just had decided to start.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:43

So, my time to go back to Maine is good. 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  01:45

Yeah, your timing is perfect. It’s like the best time. Winter is behind us for the year. So yeah, I really value a deep connection to the natural world and the cycles of the natural world and being out where we live. And working from home has allowed me to be hooked into that really beautifully for the last year which is kind of one of those rare silver linings of this whole COVID thing. I really love music these days that looks like electronic dance music DJing, getting back into that. After a long hiatus, just really love the collage of taking other people’s art and putting it together in different ways that kind of gives contrast and flow to that. It’s fun, that connection.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:42

inaudible. I think it was you and your daughter like putting something I saw. What are you guys making? 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  02:54

My daughter and I are in a band so we play together. So that’s another whole angle on the music thing of actually playing live instrumental music. So yeah, that’s pretty cool. We do live Facebook streams and this year and before that we were playing out and about in the local area and played in pubs. We visited Ireland a few years ago. We played around in Ireland which was super fun. 

So yeah, there’s a lot of I think multi dimensionality about the interest that I have from running chainsaws and intending forests and being active in my food system production and music and being outside and looking forward to getting back out in the mountains, backpacking and just sitting and looking at water. People like what do you do when you go backpacking, it’s like as little as possible. Sit and watch a pool for several hours is about the speed I like to go out and just take it all in. There’s so much to see and maybe that’s a good segue into agility because I think agility is about paying attention and being mindful, paying really close attention to what’s actually happening around us and being curious and having that sense of wonder about the world and the world of work and the people we are with and how are we together and how do we show up together and how do we be together? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:32

Yeah, I agree. Been there and a lot of it is about awareness and I think it’s going back to the nature, I spoke with Dave Snowden last week or the week before and he made that connection to about complexity management and for so long we’ve used the machines as metaphor and we haven’t really looked at living systems and say how do we design organizations rather than like machines but more like living systems and that reminded me of that.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  05:08

Yeah, and it’s a profound metaphor because then there’s lots of different living systems, right? There’s highly controlled cultivated living systems like industrial agriculture which is starting to show some pretty serious drawbacks of sustainability in the long term. And then there’s like the living systems around my house which were managed by the native peoples lived here, actively managed those forests for a very long time. And you could argue that some of the forests of Maine are wilder now than they have been for 1000s of years because they’re just let alone and there isn’t an active human element of working with the forest for a specific purpose like a sustainable food production system. 

So yeah, once we start scratching that metaphor a little bit and you start seeing the other kinds of intelligence I think that are not human in nature like ecosystem intelligence and ecosystems abilities to self-regulate and achieve stasis for themselves which doesn’t always go well for all of the inhabitants of those ecosystems. Some of you often have to give up their lives to achieve that balance though I think it starts giving us a bigger, more complete picture for complex adaptive response and then active predictive control-based paradigms.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:53

How do you define agility? You just mentioned agility. I may have heard you say that before but I’m just curious. We’ve talked a lot about agility from your perspective in context of business, maybe, how do you define it?

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  07:11

Choice! It’s not a state, it’s not a thing right like oh, we’re agile. It’s like well, do you have choice? What choices are available to you and based on what and invariably connected to choice is risk and commitment and reserves and all kinds of things, preparedness and some of those things seem counterproductive like well, if you really prepared for everything, have you created so much baggage? Like if I’m backpacking and I prepare for every single scenario, can I now carry my pack? Does it defeat the whole purpose of what I’m trying to do outcome wise of going out there and so it’s a constant set of tradeoffs of what do I bring, what scenarios do I prepare for, which scenarios do I let go with the ultimate that I can be allowed or just walk back to the car if things get horrible. 

So, from a business perspective yeah, I think agility is the ability to choose and to constantly be refining that set of options that set of choices, being very careful about what commitments are made and being very clear about what risks we’re taking on which from a complexity perspective is often really difficult to know because you don’t know. You simply don’t know what’s really happening in a lot of levels and some of those things that you don’t know about could be black swans. They could really turn your world upside down and then you’re left and pivoting like crazy. And I’ve been part of those organizations that were disrupted out of the blue. They went from market dominance to struggling to survive in less than a year.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:16

And that could also apply to us right as coaches, consultants, trainers, independent especially like having options and exactly what you just said about organizations in a sense. We do have organizations, legal entities but in your case and in my case, it’s either small company or company of one and same principles I guess apply in that context as well.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  09:44

They definitely do like when I first got started as an independent several years ago now, six years ago, I took a gig. I had a gig, I had one contract is 40 hours a week and those things tend to run on an annual basis so then you lose your job every year. And it’s really stressful around October, November sort of like what’s going to happen in January and it takes time to line up the next gig and the tradeoffs of, you know, when my kids were young, I didn’t want to be on planes every week. And so, I was constantly trying to stay close to home but the model at that time was one gig which is no choice. And sure, it makes it easy to like you just show up and you do your work and it’s steady for that year and then when the year ends, it’s incredibly disruptive. And so, I’ve switched over the last few years, I tried a couple of times, it took some time to get it going of rather than having one big gig kind of have a large ish gig and then multiple smaller things doing some training, some smaller coaching engagements, just trying to spread the risk out across an entire portfolio and again, that gives me choice and it breaks the risk from one big risk to lots of little risks. And that’s always, for me a much more desirable kind of context to be and I think most organizations would like that as well if they can negotiate their ways into it. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:33

What about organization? I know this is going to get you laughing. Well, I hope it will but agility when it comes to government. I’ve worked a lot in the government space and you work decent amount. I’m concerned about where the government is and if I look next 10-15 years, how much ways how our government operates and when it comes to that agility and options. I’m concerned as a citizen. You recently worked with a state on a multimillion-dollar RFP, how was that experience in general? What are you seeing when it comes to maybe just government specifically and adoption because usually, it’s just the adoption of these agile practices within the government?

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  12:29 

Right. So, my take is I think it’s symptomatic of large organizations that aren’t equipped to become complex adaptive entities and so I don’t think it matters. Certainly, what I’ve observed in my experience as a coach working in large enterprise systems that are either privately held organizations, publicly traded for profit organizations or public organizations like government or higher education. I think that those organizations are built to be stable and built to be predictable and built to operate in a world that doesn’t exist anymore. The ones that we pay for as taxpayers, we just I think have a lot more scrutiny and higher expectations over. Though, I see a lot of the same dynamics around governance and making big commitments based on timelines that don’t have any evidence behind them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:40

Do you see any goal?

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  13:42

Yeah, so let me talk about the work. So, I’m currently a coach at State of Maine. I work in the Department of Education and Office of Information Technology and primarily, it was a classic agile coaching effort initially to work just with the software group and then there was a murmur at DOE about some federal money that had come in around longitudinal data visualization systems so data warehouse with a visualization on top of it. I got involved in that sort of to help them initially steer them in the right way. And then with COVID, the money to pay for a coach went away but there was some money available from this federal money around the data warehouse that we were able to tap into to keep me there. 

So now, my role there is product development consultant. So, I’m a delivery consultant like a product owner basically for this data warehouse effort. And the first thing that we did was we wrote a request for a proposal because we wanted to vendor it out and I wanted to write this RFP in an adaptive kind of iterative “agile way” and that was totally novel there. I mean, they had heard of it up there, they didn’t really know what that meant or how to do it so I refer them to the US Air Force. I can’t remember the guy’s name, the chief software officer at the US Air Force he guested on inaudible(15:24) last podcast a couple years ago about how the US Air Force has become a total DevOps operation and how as part of that, they have figured out how they do Agile procurement to work with vendors in a really agile way. And so, I had read a bunch of that stuff and referred my stakeholders in the state of Maine. I’m like look, the federal government has figured out how to do this so we don’t have to figure out how to do. We just have to figure out how to do what they’ve done in our context. And people were actually really excited about it because state of Maine, there’s a lot of really smart people up there who are really dissatisfied with that big batch, pay for everything upfront, make all your commitments upfront and then kind of cross your fingers that in a couple of years, you’ll have some piece of software that is going to meet your needs. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:18

I’m assuming the client would be receptive to that too because like when you worked on both sides and as a contractor, you’re like let’s just win this contract and then we’re going to figure out what we do afterwards. 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  16:32 

Yeah, meet me as well and so one of the guiding principles for myself was I want to write the RFP that I would like to have responded to. And so, what we did with it was we kind of took a product development approach. And I made the statement that we should always have working software that creates value for us as soon as possible. Like let’s find something, let’s find a pain point that we can solve really fast for the department and then build on it over time and let’s make sure that we put the stuff that isn’t required for some of those high pain points but it’s incredibly risky at the very end so that if it all blows up, it’s just the tail that’s blowing up and we still have kind of a core of working software that’s creating value for the people of Maine. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:33

It’s back to those options, right? 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  17:33 

Yeah, exactly. And so, what we did with the RFP is we broke it into some phases around like both chronologically, what do we need functionality wise and kind of comparing that with which parts of this work are known versus which parts of this work are unknown. And the parts of work that are known are really low risk like for instance, we know what the database schema is because it’s an open standard. We know we want it in the cloud. There are tons of cloud providers that know how to do that. We know all of the security that it needs and all the authentication levels that it needs and all of the governance that needs to be true to have that be a compliant piece of infrastructure. That’s all known like you don’t need to like I don’t think iterate on that or be like how much is this going to cost or how long is it going to take. The vendors that we want to respond to this thing will have done this before. And so while they might not know exactly, they should be able to say it’ll be somewhere in this ballpark. 

So that’s one kind of work. The visualization libraries are all I mean there’s entire product sets that are just what we call cots. They’re configurable off the shelf products and that you just sit on top of a data set. It’s kind of like a barbell, right. On one end of the barbell, you have this known infrastructure piece of data that’s totally denormalized and then on the other end of this barbell, you have this known visualization piece that’s going to take the datasets that you extract out of that and kind of make it easier to consume them. It’s the middle part that’s going to be really hard because that piece has to be a visual report builder that is “intuitive and easy to use” and I have no idea what’s intuitive and easy to use. What’s intuitive and easy to use for me is totally different for someone else and vice versa. And so, we’ve got a divergent set of personas on this thing. We have people who understand for example the domain of education data really well and then we have people who like I don’t understand it very well, I just have kind of I’m curious about my local school. And so can somebody like me versus somebody like a data analyst at the department both get what we need out of this tool. I have no idea. And so that’s really risky, that’s really much more challenging and so what we did with RFP is to break that kind of risk into its own phase and say we don’t know how much this is going to cost but we still have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of money. So, we’re asking the vendors to tell us is in your experience as building interfaces, how often is your sense? Like how many iterations do we need and how much does each iteration cost? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:54

And so we’re just trying to backtrack, it’s almost like you’re using inaudible(20:57) or just understanding level of complexity and then you’re saying okay, if this is low complexity, it’s pretty straightforward. We use one type of approach and one way. So, you’re kind of using some type of sense making to determine and then divvy up the work rather than one size fits all inaudible(21:17)

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  21:19

Exactly. So, one of the things that Dave Snowden is really clear on is things are not homogenous. You can say sure, this thing’s complex and it’s probably not entirely complex or this thing is complicated or ordered but it’s probably not entirely or all of the same type. Like there’s liminality and there’s fluidity and there’s pockets. It’s more fractal geometry than like clean boxes. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:47

It’s easier to put things into clean boxes. 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  21:49

I know and then when you try to deliver it, it doesn’t turn out that way because that’s not the way the world is right and then you end up so it’s so frustrating. So yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of like let’s take this thing apart, let’s break it apart on the seams of risk and complexity and then have strategies and approaches that are fit for those different kinds of risks. And so, on lots of different levels, from the overall kind of like what I said earlier like let’s defer the risks that aren’t on the critical path, put them at the end because they’re nice to have really. I mean sure, we need a bare minimum of them for procedural reasons but from a business perspective and a money perspective, we don’t need them. 

Oh, another interesting thing was the federal money that came in was supposed to be matched by state funds. Well, with COVID, those state funds like are not there, right? They’re vapor and so this idea was created pre-COVID, the federal grant was awarded pre-COVID and so now there’s commitments that have been made and then COVID happens and some of those fundamental assumptions have totally shifted.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:08

With the money you said you’re going to have.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  23:10

Yeah, like what do you do? And so even within that like we’ve still been able to adapt and have choice because of this approach that we’ve taken to say like well yeah, we need to be able to say that we’ve met these criteria of the federal grant that came in, we just won’t be able to do them to the same degree as we could have if we had more money which is no longer on the table. Maybe it will be in a few years as the Maine state economy recovers, we don’t know. But regardless of whether or not that happens, we’ll still have a core of a working system that creates value and that’s really important. I think that’s really important.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:52

Inaudible projects like well, it’s crazy how many times I tell. I was recently working with California DMV and it’s like they are projects in the works for two years. The code has never been seen any. It’s millions of dollars invested and nothing delivered. It’s like well, it’s so easy to scrap it and let’s move on to the next thing. We get the budget next year.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  24:19

Well, yeah and I recently consulted on a coach, it’s couple years ago now, this massive effort that I can’t really talk about the specifics of. It hasn’t turned out well I’ll put it that way and they brought me in about six months into the implementation phase of their multiyear project plan. And again, they had made a bunch of commitments based on spreadsheets and work breakdown structures and established the schedule based on dollars. Like nothing was based on the actual work. It was just based on guesses. And so, they brought me in and they’re like halfway through their calendar and halfway through their work and feeling pretty good. I’m like well, is the second half of the work the same as the first half? And they go oh no, it’s much harder. And I go but you’re halfway through your time and money but you’re not halfway up the mountain but you’re telling me you need to reach the summit? And they’re like yep and I’m like well, what can you cut scope wise? And they’re like nothing. It’s 100% or zero. And I am like so you’re telling me that you get 95% done is actually 0% done because you still can’t go live with it? And they’re like yeah and I’m just seeing like red flags everywhere. I’m just like I don’t know what to tell you like you hired me I think to help and so the way I’m going to help is to tell you that I think you have some fatally critical flaws in the commitments you’ve made and I think that this thing is already like if it were me, I would already be pulling the fire alarms on this project because I don’t think you’re going to make it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:13

Yeah, I mean but like you were a developer first before you go into this stuff. 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  26:20

Yeah, for a long time. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:21

If you go back 20 years, this is how large organizations operated too and I feel like the government is there. It’s not like it’s new. It’s just that large organizations that were there 10/15/20 years ago, they have evolved past that and large government agencies seem to be stuck there. And maybe just to broaden it a little bit not just contracts but like finance, the budgeting cost centers versus budgeting some type of service product lines, what is your experience in government or maybe outside of like how much does the finance team because usually HR and finance…

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  27:12 

Oh, that needs to change drastically.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:15

So maybe inaudible(27:16) finance and then talk about HR. What are your thoughts on finance? 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  27:21

I would just make one other comment about what you just said around large organizations have evolved. Well, the ones that are still here have and a lot just couldn’t make it. A lot have failed and we know that the lifetime of companies like if you look at for profit publicly held organizations who are traded on stock markets that the life expectancy or the term expectancy of a company that makes the fortune 500, I can’t remember exactly how much shorter it has gotten over the last 60 or 70 years but a lot. Like it used to be that if you could make it to that level of performance as an organization, you’re up there for a while and that’s just not true anymore. The rate of change is too high.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:11

And I think COVID and the crisis that we’re going through will probably expedite that too.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  28:17

Yeah, any of them do and you know it’s very interesting. Like if we just look at here in Maine, there are some organizations that actually have done quite well like the grocery industry has done pretty well, the veterinary industry has done pretty well, the outdoor equipment industry has done extremely well. Go try to find a mountain bike right now, good luck. The local bike shops have done very well which has before COVID I mean that was like a shoestring of profit margin.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:00

I guess you always have to have luck too but grocery stores never saw themselves as technology companies and I usually talk about like how Amazon started thinking Amazon Go. So at least I was joking but somebody was telling me here actually in Maine a year ago, you would order your stuff online at the store, you would go to a grocery store, somebody would come out take your credit card run inside run out and then somebody would come out and inaudible(29:38)

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  29:40

Not even yeah

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:42

So that’s not options. It’s just but I joke around but like you’d said insurance companies, everybody sucks in your industry, you can make up for it. But if Amazon was more ahead and like if they had, there’s no way that any of the like even inaudible(30:07), these bigger largest grocery or supermarket companies in the world. They wouldn’t be competing because they don’t have the options. They consider themselves in one industry and haven’t really evolved to really treat themselves as a technology companies. So, I don’t know.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  30:39

Yeah, they’re getting there and another thing I do want to hit on getting back to this idea of government and it’s rate to adapt and shift and change and sort of evolve. Before we jump over there, one of the things, again I think Dave Snowden is one of the clear thinkers we have in our world these days and in our space so I’m a huge fan. I refer to his work extensively. I’m a member of the cognitive edge whatever they call their premium networks. I get access to a bunch of stuff and not sort of an authorized to teach the inaudible(31:20) framework which is always whenever I get pulled into an organization, that’s step one. It’s like we got to be talking the same language around complexity and at least having a working understanding of the fundamental dynamics of it. And so, one of the things he spoke about was more a couple of years ago. He’s talking about apex predators that ecosystems evolve to support a certain kind of basically an apex predator. And when the ecosystem changes, the things that gave that predator the advantages to be the top apex predator suddenly become liabilities and they tend to struggle if not just go extinct. So, the big example that of course is the dinosaurs. The adaptations they had for a world that world that literally just vaporized with this impact and the things that were able to thrive then were these little furry, warm-blooded mammals that prior to that moment were basically just like food for everything else. 

And so, when the environment shifts and it does shift like it’s not always catastrophic like that. COVID was kind of like that. The internet was kind of like that but it took a little longer for it to really kind of roll in and disrupt everything but COVID was like that. It fundamentally disrupted the economic global ecosystem and some organizations that have evolved to be really effective suddenly were irrelevant. Think anything in the travel industry that entire industry just evaporated. Certainly, there’s ways that it’s coming back but there was a lot of pain in it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:23 

I spoke to him. I asked him about the question. He posted it while ago but essentially, the correlation between efficiency and effectiveness with agility and essentially his response and based on what he researched said that the more efficient you are and the more that you try to specialize in one, the less options you have because you’ve inaudible(33:56) and a lot of companies are trying to do that without thinking more diverse. I think if you look at Amazon is a good example of trying to go deep but also broad. That was something that kind of resonated with me when it comes to agility. It’s funny when I talk to Dave, he always picks on you know who he’s going to call out and he was inaudible(34:30).

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  34:31

Yeah, those two kind of go at each other a little bit.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:35

But he couldn’t come up with any other words so he was joking poking fun at Nassim about using the term anti fragile. But using the context of organizations and what is that correlation between being effective and efficient and being able to respond to change. 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  35:09 

So, that again I like these kinds of more open-ended conversations because they invariably end up finding threads anyway which is kind of a complex, adaptive thing. You let things emerge, you trust that the right thing will happen. 

So, we started this talking, you asking me kind of who is Kevin Callahan rather than like from a LinkedIn bio perspective or sort of a professional persona like who are you really and what’s important to you about your identity. And when organizations optimize for any one dimension which usually these days is efficiency and profitability and that becomes the only force that acts on them and that’s the only force that they cultivate and kind of reinforce.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:13

Measure against

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  36:15

Yeah whatever, they hire for it, they fund it, they all of it, right. They fire by it which we had talked about before the recording, they balance their books according to it, when that is the only kind of operational force on that entity, you incur risk over time that often will take a very long amount of time to come to bear and then it comes to bear in the unpredictable combination of small things that on their own are relatively harmless but when they come together create catastrophic failures of that system. And there’s a guy named Sidney Decker who does research. He says, I study what happens when things go wrong and so he’s done a lot of research into the aviation and aerospace industries about major catastrophic failures. And that body of work I’ve seen it referred to as called resilience engineering. And so, one of the takeaways from that is you must actively bring multiple forces balancing forces to bear often in direct tension with each other. 

And so like, if you want a true safety culture, a perfect example is up the state. I’m working right now with a group, we mob programming. I’m trying to introduce some more modern and have been really effective in introducing and people are starting to see the value of like behavior driven development and mob programming and test-driven development. And one of the things that I’ve been just really a hard ass on is like you can only do this for so long before you start having diminishing returns. And it’s time to stop when you start making errors, when you’re tired. And it doesn’t matter if you still have an hour left in your “work day” that from a capacity utilization perspective, we would count and it’s not like oh, you just screw off for the rest of the day. No, you find something else to do that’s valuable but you stopped doing that thing because you’re starting to make errors, you’re starting to write bugs and just continuing to pretend that you can go because there’s still time on the clock is false. 

And so, a belief in quality is going to in some cases come up against your belief in efficiency or a belief in the dignity of human beings is going to come up against your belief and efficiency and that’s good. That’s we want. We want those to be countering forces and it seems like oh but that’s making us less efficient. It might be but it’s making you more effective and it’s making you more resilient and it’s preserving your optionality because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:08

Or the belief in the flow being developed you probably can relate to that. There’s difference when you’re in the flow and when you’re not going versus when you’re not. So, being aware of that. It goes back to you started with that and when you introduce yourself, it’s that awareness, right. If you are aware what’s going on then it’s easy to step in and say hey, I’m going to step away from this and do something else.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  39:39

And so, to bring it back to the organizational perspective, it’s like well, how does that matter to organizational life? We definitely need to be measuring things absolutely because we have constraints. Even in in government, there’s still a finite amount of money and a finite amount of time and the currency that I’ve taken to speaking in terms of with my work in state government around helping people to articulate the why of prioritizing one piece of work to another piece of work is are there financial implications like with funding and often there are? And if there aren’t, well, how much time are we going to save like a superintendent or someone out in the district or how are we going to improve the lives of students or parents or whatever if we do this thing? Like are we putting roadblocks like I don’t know, does the government or government in general have a reputation for being easy to interface with as a citizen? No, it’s awful, right? It’s terrible. Like finding stuff is just atrociously difficult because our time is precious, our time is valuable. And so, if we start talking about time as a currency then that helps drive prioritization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:01

I compare inaudible(41:03) to spectrum and the provider and people that might be outside of the United States, it’s an interim provided. You don’t have any options at least in the areas I’ve lived like they’re the only. It’s same like government. It’s like if they had any competition, they will be out of business if somebody was just doing a little bit better than them but because they don’t, it’s a good spot to be in.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  41:33

Yeah and I guess if we pull thread of this RFP like one of the things that was incredibly surprising to me is as we wrote this RFP and we were kind of in a little pod of like data managers and whatnot in DOD and we’re kind of writing this thing and I was terrified that when we brought it to like procurement that they were just going to be like that’s not how we do things around here. Go do it as a traditional RFP, like go redo it. And it was a beautiful surprise when we started showing this to other people like lawyers and accountants and procurement people that they were like people were really excited and they were like this is a better way, we’ve been looking for a better way. I think it’s important to remember is Berne Brown says like look, these are just people here. I’ve been working off and on in state government for a few years and sure there’s your kind of stereotypical bureaucrat there though that’s not everybody. Again, it’s not homogenous. There are huge amount of people who are incredibly passionate, very purpose driven far more so than in the public sector, that are mission driven, that are invested in the long term, that are invested in what they’re doing as public servants to make government work on the behalf of the citizens better. I think it’s just a really important thing. I think it’s really cool

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:23

What about going back to inaudible(43:24) and the system will be the person.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  43:29

And the system has also been built to not change, right. So, you have these incredibly passionate, mission driven people in a system that is literally I mean it requires a literal act of legislature to change it. I saw this in the large organizations that you and I met and worked in as well. The people that end up staying in those places for long periods of time have a resilience and a survivability that I respect very much. It’s like people figure out how to get stuff done regardless or in spite of the organizational structure not because of it. And especially when we start talking about agility and responsiveness like frontline people are always finding novel ways to get around stuff and get stuff done and make their customers happy. It’s just incredible.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:31

It is and back in 2011, I worked with the state of Idaho health and welfare. This is where Obama Care and state-based exchange came about. And it was a deputy at the state of Idaho on welfare essentially that really understood. He took a lot of agile classes trying to understand this agile way of working. Essentially, he created an agile structure on top of the traditional government bureaucratic and it was amazing. It was over a couple of years and you will have anywhere from 5 to 13 teams over that period. But it was just like amazing things can happen if you have senior support and understanding. I’ve been doing a bureaucratic and well, you technically can change the jobs but he was acting as a product owner as a deputy. So that was a big thing where he is involved and like understanding what needs to change, how do we get dedicated teams and if you have leaders with authority that can change the system even just layer on top of existing system, it makes a huge difference than having system that influences or dictates a lot of things you need to do.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  46:01

Yeah, it’s a great point. Some of the work I’m doing right now with that Dewey IT group which when I showed up was very much like an S&M mentality and has now shifted. I’ve been there for a while now the narrative has changed. They talk about we and they reach out to each other directly and they have conversations and they include each other. Of course, it’s not perfect. There’s still hard things and conflict and places for improvement though there’s been some really powerful coming together and collaboration which has been allowed and enabled and supported by the senior leadership of those groups. 

The first place I worked as an agilest, we spent five years transitioning into a truly agile organization especially the technology group. They hired a new engineering VP about four years into that and he walked into the place and was like I feel like somebody just handed me keys to a Ferrari. You guys are amazing how fast you can pivot, how well you understand things, just our agile practices were humming and he was just blown away and then shortly, another year later, we had some executive changeover and the new leadership was not as supportive of what we were doing and what took us five years to build took about three months to just reduce to rubble really.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:55

You and I had seen that.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  47:57

Yeah, over and over again like and that’s a pretty common story. One of the people I work with she’s like yeah, it took us a decade to build a school district organization like a truly high functioning organization that with leadership change it just fell apart within a matter of months. So, the stuff is it’s really elusive. It’s really in its own way resilient but it’s also from an ecosystem perspective, if you don’t understand how to feed it, care and feed for it and keep it alive like it’ll die on you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:37

It will die. It’s also like the disengagement numbers of the United States in general in the workforce, they’re high, right? And like it’s so easy for people to disengage when you spend a year, two years buying into something, leadership changes and it’s a completely different direction. And it’s like it’s demotivating as an employee to buy into something to support it and then we’ll have somebody come in and just completely shift. And then these leaders are asked to change it, right? If I hire you Kevin as a CEO or CIO, whatever, you’re not going to say oh, I’m going to do exactly the same thing as the other person to build on it. No, I mean you’re going to say oh, I have a completely different way.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  49:23

Well yeah, I mean it would be nice if that weren’t true if there’s a little more humility around like let’s find out what’s actually working about this place before we start changing it. Again, I think there’s a lot of pressure to not do that and just tenure. 

Another thing that I’ve just seen time and time again is that people understand the fragility or the dependency on those senior leaders and if they’re not incentivized to stick around, it’s just constantly churning. And so again like one thing state government does really well is it’s very stable, right. And so, when you do have the right people in the senior roles, they tend to be there for a long time and they really care and they really want to build things that last and that work. And that’s very different from certainly the companies that I’ve worked in that are for profit, the senior level managers are constantly jockeying to try to get to the next level and like get the next thing and so if they stay in a role for one or two years like that’s… 

Even in manufacturing, I did some consulting work when I was in grad school at a manufacturing facility and they rotate their general managers of their plants every two years and some of those general managers are really good. Like the guy that was there when I was working there was incredibly well respected and loved by the factory floor. He would walk out on the floor, he’d go talk to them, he knew who they were, he knew it was important to them, he respected the work they did and they were all concerned what happens when he rotates out and we get a new guy. Because the new guy like to your point like in the American system at least, I have not seen with the exception of one, the VP of engineering that I reference to who showed up and said I feel like somebody handed me the keys to the Ferrari, he spent the first month or two just sitting and listening and asking questions and just trying to figure out like what’s the game here like what’s the landscape in this company before starting to make changes to it. But most people I think show up quite the opposite. They’re like, I’m going to put my mark on it and here’s how I roll and oftentimes, they bring their own people with them and clean house.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:03

At least in the director level in government they are appointed roles. So new government comes in and they appoint.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  52:14

Well, at the commissioner and deputy commissioner in Maine are appointed and then once you get below that, at the director level, they are government employees. I mean commissioners and deputies they’re employees as well. But again, they’re appointed so they change with and then there are certain chief executive roles that also I mean they’re still hired, they’re not appointed. You have to get your hiring process with them. I’m thinking of like the CIO at state of Maine, people that have been in that role have gone across what do you call it when the governor changes? Just losing the word you know what I am talking about.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  53:07

I know exactly what you are talking about.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  53:08

Administrations right, they can persist across administrations whereas commissioners and deputy commissioners change out. Then when you get churn at that level, you get a lot of those same challenges where how do you get a coherent strategy when you go from a Republican to Democratic government and vice versa like it’s not just a small change. It’s like a paradigm change of values. And so, departments are trying to navigate that and again, like that churn if you think of that as sort of like oscillation or whatever in some ways get smoothed out by the bureaucratic structure beneath it and the people that are actually in there.  They’re just trying to get stuff done for the people of Maine that’s why they’re there. And so, in some ways, they’re able to respond really effectively and in some ways they’re totally hamstrung. 

So, again, it’s always a more complex thing. There are always more things at play than it seems on the surface and it’s easy to just, you know, I’ve had these conversations a lot of people who are like government this government that. It’s like you haven’t been inside of a large corporation, have you because large corporations operate in a lot of the same ways and are just as screwed up. It’s just you don’t have the transparency into it that in the same expectation but it’s all very interesting stuff. Scale is hard, operating at scale is really hard.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:53

Scale maybe the last question here. Scale and what I’ve seen over the years and even dating back to that engagement with state of Idaho health and welfare, that was a safe kind of initiative. I see more and more scaled agile framework in government. The state has now saved for government. What are your thoughts on inaudible(55:30). Have you had experience with that? It’s the last question here.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  55:37

Okay so my personal opinion of it is that the safe is an accretion or an accumulation of a lot of really amazing patterns that on their own are powerful and amazing and when you put them together, you get this just monster that’s incredibly unwieldy. I think it takes a very senior level agilest to be able to understand what’s happening with safe and what’s happening with all the different pieces and how they work. I’m over a decade into this work and there’s parts of safe that I don’t know that I understand that. And so, we’re taking something that’s difficult to understand and then just throwing it around like it’s a prescriptive solution and it’s not. 

So, if you look at like the Department of Defense at the federal level, they released a draft, a white paper a couple of years ago called detecting agile BS which was supposed to give guidance to government procurement people who were working with vendors who are claiming to be agile and it’s like well, here’s some guidelines around some questions you can ask around what’s truly agility and which is just kind of like process change. And so, it had some stuff in there that safe violates like do your teams actually talk directly to your customers? Like show me a safe implementation where the teams have any access to customers. 

And then the US Air Force, they actually have named the commercially successful scaling frameworks as problems and that you should actively avoid them. So, every once in a while, I get to talk to the senior decision makers who are deciding kind of what are we going to do and inevitably safe comes up and I go well, when you scale, you just get more of what you have. And so, if you’re trying to get a better business outcome but you don’t know how to do that but you’re going to scaling to do that for you, I would suggest that you’re not thinking about it correctly and you’re just going to scale your risk not your benefit. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  58:09

Sometimes, it’s about descaling and not scaling. 

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  58:11

Yeah, then that’s what inaudible(58:13) is about, right? Like do you scale first and so I always coach to say and back in the early days of safe I think like back in 2012, I went on a webinar with that inaudible(58:26) himself was giving and he was really clear. Some of those early proponents of safe were really clear like safe is built on the effectiveness of high-quality technical practice and really high performing collaborative delivery teams. And if you don’t have those, that’s the foundation that you scale off of. And so, if you don’t have those, I think the first step is like go figure that stuff out like go figure out how to build products that aren’t full of technical debt and that are high quality not only in how they’re built but they’re high quality and that they actually achieve the business outcomes you intend them to achieve. 

So, they’re either making your money or saving people time or whatever that thing is and that you have high performing teams that you’ve invested in, doesn’t mean they don’t change their makeup. It doesn’t mean people don’t move around and Heidi Helfand stuff around dynamic reteaming is really powerful at that. 

But regardless, you need to have a really high performing delivery capability that you protect and foster and cultivate and then you can start talking about how do we like amplify this out throughout the organization. So, I take a very evolutionary approach to scaling which is you’re going to have to figure it out in your context. Again, we know that from complexity, when you take things that work in one complex context and just map them into another is probably not going to go the same way. There’s a lot of reasons for that so don’t try to do that. Take the long view like take an organic view, grow an evolutionary process that you measure and can verify and have feedback loops into it every step toward strategic outcomes that matter to your business. And most places don’t even know the strategic outcomes that matter to their business are so it’s like well..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:00:30

And I think this is what I have spoken to six, seven people that I consider thought leaders in our industry and they said the exact same thing right now which aligns with my thinking too that I pledge allegiance to no framework. Like you said, there are good patterns and there are better patterns, there are anti-patterns. But it’s really adjusting things to the context and the situation and like you said then start it off with the creating those options that are in some way positively contributing to your business.

Speaker: Kevin Callahan  1:01:18

Yeah, I think the thing that I would sort of wind down with is that agility I believe really comes back down to just sound business fundamentals. They look a little bit different but it’s still like do you have a strategy? Do you understand your purpose? Do you have systems in governance that allow you to action that purpose, do you have the people you need? You probably do because people are pretty resilient, pretty adaptive so are they able to perform as your business needs them to and if they’re not, how are you investing to shift that? And when you do all those things, the culture is sort of a trailing indicator of organizational effectiveness comes along and you see people starting to say different things about how they make sense and make meaning out of what’s happening. And when people start changing their behavior at that level, you know you’ve gotten a cultural shift, you’ve achieved a cultural shift. But you can’t start with that because culture is never something that you can directly change. It’s an outcome. It’s a result.