Mark Kilby

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:42

Who is Mark Kilby?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  00:47

I heard you ask others this question, I’m still not ready for it. So, I actually started off as electronics and robotics engineer. That’s where I started school. But in my early career but I was one of the few electrical engineers that actually enjoy coding so I was always given the coding assignments. And so, I just did more and more of it and decided this is actually fun, I will just shift. And so, early part of my career was in software. I used to joke that I was also rocket scientist for a while because I did work with NASA so I can make that joke. And then I went from tech lead to project manager and kind of started making that climb and thought, I’m seeing a whole other class of problems here that school didn’t prepare me for but I really want to get into and it was called people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:02

That is one and yet we don’t spend a lot of time.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  02:05

Yeah, which is why I was enjoyed some of the other podcast episodes that you had and it’s about the time that Kent Beck’s first book came out and I was reading that. I went wow, this is crazy enough, it might work where I’m at right now. I might try this. Because the part that I got about it was the synergy and the communication wow, that’s cool. I could really see this working. And so, since that time, I just kind of shifted over. I really appreciate my early teams and how they let me experiment on them. I would come up to them and say hey, I got this new thing, they were oh, not this agile thing. But it’s something that will help and so this is where I got into continuous integration and try pair programming. This was like early 2000s and did more of this and 2001 of course was when 911 happened and jobs were scarce. So, I ended up kind of going back into my old line of work as a software developer for the brand-new Homeland Security Department at the time and I can’t say more about that. But one of those teams that I used to work with they kind of resurrected their business and said that crazy agile stuff, we think we want to try it and that was 2003. That was actually my first official job as a scrum master. 

So, from there was several years of that company, helped them be successful and that was also a Department of Defense work where agile wasn’t supposed to work then. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:04 

I know. I was going to say I tell usually people like if you want to look at what things look like 20 years before 10 years before just go work for government and it’s a good indicator. Maybe with DoD it’s a little bit better but generally speaking.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  04:20

Yeah, but trust me warfighters understand, inspect and adapt otherwise they wouldn’t be alive. So, I have actually a lot of fun with those early Agile projects in US Department defense and then which worked for rally software and just got into a ton of industries. And the funny thing was they all had similar tech problems but they also had similar people problems. Who know?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:50

I know right and people brothers are probably the tougher part out of those two, right?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  04:57

Yeah, and strangely enough my engineering background did not prepare me for any of that. So, I had to do a lot of self-study to really understand that. And also, I had helped to manage a role. So, I saw how one could do it poorly. I learned that firsthand. It’s like okay, I’ve got to learn how to do this better for myself and for others and that’s what I’ve been doing the last 20 plus years.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:29

How did you get into this distributed remote base? 

Speaker: Mark Kilby  05:35

So completely accidentally and so some of the same early companies and teams. Because it’s department defense, it was not unusual for part of your team to be in one country and part of them to be in another country. And if I say more than that, I have to hunt you down. But it would not be unusual at times for the team to be 13 time zones apart. So, I had to figure a way to make it work. It was not so much. We were mostly doing scrum and XP kind of things there. It wasn’t so much about the time boxes, it was how can we not only deliver the software but how can we rapidly get feedback because that other product team was usually pretty close to the end users. And so, they were getting real time feedback and giving it to us and say hey, this is really a problem. It’s not really a bug but we need to change this because it’s causing issues here for how they use the system. 

And so, we would make changes sometimes every day and push it back and it was amazing to see how well they responded to that. And there was one program we were on it. We were a subcontractor to a subcontractor to a inaudible(7:00). I mean we were way down on the inaudible(07:02) and some of the government contracting officers noticed, we have to wait six months or sometimes a year for some of the changes from the prime. But you guys, we just mentioned something and it seems to change in like two to three weeks. How do you do that? He said well, we have this little review meeting we do every couple of weeks, you should sit in on that. So they started sitting in and they said can we ask questions? I went oh, absolutely. This is really a great place for you to ask questions. So they’d ask questions, the team will talk about we probably can’t do that the next two weeks but we could fit that in here soon. And they received a change and they invited their friends, they invited other agencies and so they decided you know what, when this contract is bid out again, we’re going to make it a small business set aside as it only small businesses can bid on it. Guess who got the prime contract and guess who became our subcontractors? Everyone that we used to report to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:19

And I’ve seen that and in essence I mean like what you just described is just shorten the feedback loop and get closer to the customer, right? So, like a lot of times we overthink things but it’s really like it makes it even more difficult when you have a situation like that with multiple parties with long feedback loops or at least opportunities to create long feedback loops. So I think we still struggle with that how do we get closer to the customer, doesn’t matter if you remote, distributed. It’s all comes down to the feedback loop or shorten the feedback loop. And I don’t know I’m trying to think about somebody told me like if you want to summarize agile concept in couple of words, it’s really about shorten the feedback loop to the shortest possible loop given your context, right. 

So sometimes it can be a couple of seconds, sometimes it’s going to be two, three weeks but like we’re always pushing ourselves to shorten that feedback loop to validate with the stakeholders, with the customers and just inspect and adapt and that resonated with me. Again, I still can’t remember who said it but it was in one of the interviews that I did.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  09:44

Yeah well, what I would add to that is and give the team as much autonomy as possible to react to that feedback because that’s going to be the faster reaction. If you have to run it up the chain and back down again, that slows the response, that slows the feedback loop. And that’s what we found even in our early distributed teams was even though we’re 13 time zones apart, one, we had a really cohesive team. So, they were always 13 time zones apart. These were certain times of the year. So, we were all back usually in the same office or at least two offices and we would rotate who would go out to the site. So we knew if we didn’t respond to this people who are out there, we’d be the next ones out there so you better treat them well. 

But we were all really good about what is it you’re seeing, alright, let us work on a problem, we will get you some kind of fix in 12 hours. And because we knew they could go off shift and rest and the team back at home base could work things out and usually did because they all swarmed the problem which is what we talk about these days is whether it’s mob programming or whatever, it’s like get the team to swarm the problem, get all the brains to think about the problem. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:19

So that autonomy, that swarming requires trust, right? Without trust, everything is so much harder. So, what have you seen especially when it comes to distributed teams? How do you build trust? What are some of the things or maybe for those that are listening like having distributed teams, a lot of times I get questions, how do we build trust? And besides being vulnerable and like what tips would you give people, what are some of the ways that you’ve seen teams build trust?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  11:50

Yeah, so I’m going to do classic consultant response, which forms of trust are you referring to?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:00

Well, maybe because I think trust is so important and everything becomes so hard. So, what types of forms of trust? How do you categorize the types of trust?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  12:12

So, there’s certainly the trust within the team and then if you have larger projects, programs, release trains, whatever, that you have some dependencies I mean you try to minimize that but it does happen, what’s the trust between those teams? And then also, what is the trust between the team working on the product and the overseeing management because they’re providing the resources and when I say resources, I’m talking computers, funding not people, the people are people for me. So, there’s at least those three forms of trusts that you really need to work on and it’s exactly the same kinds of things you have to work on if you’re all in the office. And actually, you’re probably not all in the same space all the time anyway. So, let’s talk about the first one. 

So having been an engineer and knowing that most engineers aren’t too into the soft skills that much or as in the soft squishy stuff as I sometimes called. You have to look at okay, what is it that’s important to them that will build trust but also give them something of value? Well, how long do I have to wait for somebody is usually one of those things because as somebody with an agile coaching approach, you want the team to collaborate so they’re collectively solving the problem. But if you have engineers that are used to tackling their problems and they get pride out of tackling the problem by themselves, you get to kind of give them opportunity to say okay, you can’t know everything. So, let’s look at how you can respond and how others respond to you when you do you need help and it’s okay to ask for help. You haven’t lost engineering points or anything if you ask for help.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:20

Also has to do with the personality right and I think also alluding to is like sometimes, if you deal with introvert like helping them understand that and understanding them like empathizing with them for a lot of times at least the way that I’m more of an extrovert but the way that introverts have described to me is like they want closer relationships. They don’t want things. So, if you’re trying to help them, I think understanding that their preferences and then looking maybe at how does that contribute to the team goal and what we’re trying to do as a team. Is that something that you look at too like the soft side of how do we understand the human side of things? 

Speaker: Mark Kilby  15:06 

Very much so. So, in order for them to better stand each other and how they react to things, I have tried many things with remote teams. I’ve tried Myers Briggs, I’ve tried strength finder, you name it, I’ve probably tried it. Crucial conversations I could say didn’t go over so well for most so they didn’t care. But I found one exercise and I have it on my website that it can be very short or it can be very long based on what the team needs and it’s called a compass activity and it’s very simple. You have a north, south, east and west and there’s usually some attributes tied to it. 

So north is you jump in action, that’s your tendency. East is you need the big picture, why are we doing this? South is I really want to get everybody’s input, I tend to be in the south both geographically and according to this activity and then the west is I need all the details. So, people who are a little more analytical, your QA folks are usually not always. But it’s interesting and what I do is if they’re typically use a chat tool or grab their avatars out of chat so it’s something they recognize each other by. So I’ll put their avatars on the board and say okay, now that you know what the compass points are, move them where do you typically like to operate. And there’s the usual kind of put in between two, there’s always that and I just say just put where you typically tend to operate. So, you see the position and then you usually hear some oh. I say look where everybody positioned themselves. Oh, so Frank, you put yourself between north and west. Now, I know where you get mad at me when I say slow down, let’s hear from everybody else. And there’s a series of questions that if you want to spend more time, you can get them to think a little bit more about what those directions mean and I usually phrase this, we’re going to talk about work preferences so we can just better understand how we can react well to each other. I’ll usually say we can take a half hour for this, we can do a retrospective and I’ve had teams even ask hey, can we do that again? It’s been a while, we got a new person and I say okay.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:58

I’m going to try that out because like that sounds like a really good way. It’s almost like that compass is serving as a visual reflection to the team and it’s easier to discuss it and discuss the observations with a tool like that.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  18:17

Yeah and that one has by far been the easiest one for them. Just think about where they run into problems and you know it’s successful when they start joking with each other about it. We do hear them comment and you hear this oh, that’s a north comment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:39

Well, that’s awesome because I think it creates opportunity for them to be more vulnerable with each other. Because now like you’re exposing kind of what your preferences are and you’re saying yep, this is kind of what, I prefer to be more of a detail person and more of so that’s great. What else? I mean that’s a great one. What other things do you do?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  19:04 

So, honestly, for one of the best things to do is to well, there’s a couple things actually. One of the best things to do is provide space for the casual conversations. So usually, one of the ways I’ll start that out is I’ll just like it’s a stand up or regular meeting, I’ll just say hey, I’m going to be on a few minutes early and somebody will go why and I will just say because and some will get curious and they’ll come on and I’ll ask him hey, where are you at? How’s the weather and we’ll just start talking and you pull up a habit of some people showing up early, the others who come right on time go why you guys on already so they get curious and sometimes I’ll say this is the official start time so we got to start. But I will say if you guys want to continue the conversation, I got a little bit of time afterwards. 

So, I never booked back-to-back. I try to keep some of those spaces even if it’s five minutes so that they can connect. Sometimes you have to be really creative so I mentioned this in the book, there was one team that didn’t want video and I never forced anybody to use video but none of them wanted video. They just want to use Voice Over IP and this is what they’re used to. This is how they work. I said okay and I was trying to find a way to kind of tap into who they were. And so, I was really struggling and I said well, let’s try ending the meeting different ways. And so not being afraid to look stupid, I tried a couple different endings like that’s all folks. So, I would think of different ways, TV shows and movies ended and I got like no reaction for a few weeks. Okay, this is not working. I tried one more thing and I said and, on that bombshell, inaudible(21:11). Five seconds later, the quietest guy in the team reaches out to me through direct message on chat and goes, what’s that from Top Gear UK? I love that show and we spent a half hour on chat. He never told anybody about that before but that’s how we connected. 

So sometimes you have to be very creative but don’t be afraid to share a little bit about yourself. So, for instance, you’re seeing this is not a fake background. This is my messy. This is actually my wife’s desk behind me. So, we share the office space here and it’s not unusual sometimes for kids to come in and out although I have a warning light for them do they know the cameras on now. But if kids come in while I’m working with the team, I’ll introduce them. It is because it’s just like if your kids were to walk into your office, would you not introduce them to some of your coworkers? How is this different?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:19

I think a lot of people try to which is a challenge to even before COVID separate the private life from the work life and we’ve been kind of conditioned too as soon as we walk into the office or as soon as we join the meeting like we’re different person. Well, you’re not really a different person.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  22:38

Yeah, I tried that for the first few years of my career and that just stressed me out. It just takes too much energy. And I when I found out that if I shared who I was at work and the same thing at home, you get to feel like oh, I’m the same person all the time. I don’t have to expend all this energy. So people have met my kids sometimes even on podcast like this. Right now, my warning light is on and the family working agreement is if they come in with that warning light on, they will immediately be introduced to whoever is in the video. And I’ve said they’ve come on, the recording signs on the door, the red light is on and they walk in and they go oh and they quickly close that door, they forgot.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:36

How old are you kids?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  23:38

Well, now they’re older but they’ve seen the red light now for a few years so they know the red light means you are going to get introduced.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:46

I have a five-year-old son. I get to do that with him too.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  23:51

Five-year-olds might enjoy that so they might come in all the time. My youngest is 16, 20 and 21. But when I started that, that was when I was working for fully remote organizations. That would have been 2014 because we were going through Ikea one day, I just started this new job coaching in a fully remote organization, I went like look at this light strip. This is perfect. This is exactly what I need. It was an Ikea purchase.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:30

That is nice. And maybe like just to kind of summarize this section and trust it’s really get to know your team members, be creative around how you get to know each other and how you build that trust because I think the examples that you provided a great way to go. You didn’t have to do that. It’s probably more work for you as a scrum master or as a facilitator to do that but it actually creates that connection. So those are relationships that will help and make everything better. Is that kind of what you’re saying? 

Speaker: Mark Kilby  25:04

Yes, and it’s sort of has a fractal relationship because if you sat on the team and you encourage them to do it for each other, it kind of works its way out. So, this gets to these other kinds of trust, trust with other teams and trust with management. So, one of the other things that I learned early on before it was written all over the internet was bring everyone together at least once a year. And this is not just to talk about big projects but really to socialize. And yes, even your introverts like this because guess what, what you do then is find out what do they like to do? 

And so, it’s not only planning out what are the big topics to discuss but what kind of social activities. So not everyone wants to go to the bar, great. Bring your favorite board game. We used to have like long nights of board game competitions between some of the teams and they got to know each other, the teams got to know each other. And it built sort of a broader camaraderie and sometimes we had management and they’re playable on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:17

I think that’s something that maybe this is a good segue into our next topic with going back to hybrid remote work environments. And I think I’ve been on remote things and exactly what you’re saying that we would and ones that I think it was even helpful, we would do it like quarterly or a couple of times a year. And exactly just let people self-organize, just bring people together and give them opportunity to self-organize and people will do what they like if they self-organize, right? What do you think as more and more companies are going into this hybrid remote work, it’s here to stay? I mean I think nobody’s denying that. What do you think is happening? What is the current like things that you’re observing and where do you think we’re going with the future of?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  27:18

Yeah, so the short answer and I have a longer answer but the short answer is hybrid remote was what we all remember before the pandemic is what we hated and now this has been proposed as the solution. I’ve worked on hybrid remote teams and it’s possible to do that. I talked about it in the book too. But if you look at it as a spectrum of fully in the office and fully remote, those do work best. And if you work hybrid remote, you’ll need a whole other set of disciplines. You’ll actually fight yourself because we’re used to oh, somebody here physically, let me go talk to them. We’re wired to pay attention to other humans that are around us around us and so it’s very hard to do that. 

So, some of the things that I’ve done to help in those situations, again thinking about the people connection, how do I get the people in the space more connected with those in other spaces? And I deliberately try not to stay remote because I don’t like any of the words we use right now, remote, virtual, distributed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:54

How do you call?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  28:57

Right now, I’m experimenting with the term location free and see how that sticks with people. Nomad has another connotation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:11

I know.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  29:15

It has multiple connotations but whenever I hear people use remote, distributed, virtual, it’s always especially in a hybrid situation, it’s kind of an us versus them difference and that worries me. It’s not those remote people and us. It’s no, we are the team, you have to think about it as a team. So, with that, some things that I’ve done and I’ve seen others write about this now but say I was facilitating some of my first hybrid teams, I guess it’s probably mid-2000s. I hit the classic problems of oh, everyone in the room would bring out sticky notes and then the real people are out of luck. So, I came up with the idea, it’s too much energy to try to stay in touch with remote people and try to facilitate the conversation and be the Agile coach. I need to spread some of this responsibility out. So, I would ask for volunteers and say okay, those of you in the room, let’s say we’ve got three who are not in the room, can one person each stay connected with one person each that are not here and just make sure they can hear, they can contribute if we use sticky notes because there wasn’t a lot of sticky notes apps then. I think Google Docs yeah, it wasn’t till 2010 before Google Docs really came out. We didn’t have any of those. 

So, I would ask the buddies to make sure they are with those who are not in the room and make sure they can participate. 

So, it wasn’t unusual if we were in a conference room together sorry, I’m jiggling the camera but I had my phone here. It wouldn’t be unusual for people with cameras to be taking pictures, texting it to their friends but they sympathized with their situation and you see things like oh yeah, put this on my sticky notes. And they go okay, hold on, I got to get Amy stuff on here. And so yes, it took more time but there’s a sense of there’s others here that we need to take care of and we need to take care of them as a group not the facilitator or the coach and that was a big aha for me. It’s like yeah, that should be the way it is. It shouldn’t be one person. It should be the tribe taking care of each other.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:07

And I think that’s going to be interesting even when it comes to training these hybrids. So now, I’m not sure. What are your thoughts on the hybrid remote environments? 

Speaker: Mark Kilby  32:27 

So, I think it’s a good interim step for companies that still aren’t sure because everyone went remote when very few were planning it. Now companies like Dropbox were fully in the office but they were talking about going remote. So that’s why they made such a rapid transition. They were already discussing it as an organization. And so, it’s like well, here we are, we might as well make the best of it and so they’re an interesting one to watch. But those companies that weren’t ever prepared were never even thinking of going remote. Now they’ve got the problem of oh, we have employees that have now realized they can function remote. You might lose these valuable employees so that’s one. 

But two, I’m hoping some of the leadership has realized yeah, we really don’t need everyone in an office. Oh, wow. That’s a big problem because we’ve got a five year lease of the space but it’s a good lesson. So, I’ll go back to the Dropbox example because I just heard a talk from them. What they’re doing with their spaces right now is they’re getting rid of all the individual desk space and it’s becoming a studio space. So, they’re fully remote but they still have the spaces available if a team wants to come together for like a really deep design thinking session or something like that. Yeah, they could do it online but we know it’s probably going to work better altogether. The last company I was at, we used to this as well. While everyone was remote, if we had some new product we were thinking about, what we would do is usually get like an Airbnb house, get some flip charts, bring it in and usually that’d be set up in the living room. And then people could do whatever they can cook together. And then during the day, they would kind of jam on whatever the problem is and how they’re going to approach the project. But they would use those days to really kind of bond as a team as we’re working through because that is a better way to do it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:00

That’s been my experience too like most of those type of things, the team building and getting to know you lasts lot longer than whatever outcomes or outputs result from that. So, I think there is going to be need for that. But I also think I mean it’s like sometimes we need a kick in the butt for us to realize that something is feasible. 

Speaker: Mark Kilby  35:26

Mother nature has given us that kick in the butt. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:29

Yeah, and I think everybody’s rethinking. As you’ve seen over the last 10 years like how tools have evolved and changed, what is your thought just how much and maybe I would like to dive into a new topic of communication and collaboration and how tools have helped us with that because I think doesn’t matter what organization you’re in. Every time I go in usually communication and collaboration are like either number one issue, number two issue or number three issue or all three. 

So, what do you think when it comes to the tools and how have tools help us better communicate and collaborate in this more distributed and remote?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  36:21

Yeah so, I think tools have played a huge role especially in supporting all remote. Of course, I’m kicking myself for not having shares of zoom. But I wish I had that ability but also and this is not sliding zoom because all the current mean software’s like this where we’re really looking at the model T of online collaboration. It’s widespread, it’s now well known, it’ll get you where you need to go but don’t take it on a long trip. It will be painful. And I think we’ve all realized that day long meetings in a grid of pictures is not fun. 

So I already saw this in 2020 and it’s accelerating even faster and 2021. There’s a huge number of startups now that are trying to crack this problem and not just new meeting tools but there’s a lot more activity in the AR, VR space. So augmented reality, virtual reality that has some issues because I played in that space for a while too. But I think we’re still in that model T era where yes, we have the common platform to connect us but it could be better. So, it’s not just zoom, WebEx, we are all in the grids and everything. And it’s not the best way for us to collaborate and kind of going back to your hybrid question, none of them do a great job hybrid. Zoom supposedly is coming out with some feature to support that I don’t know the details of that. I just heard it in their newsletter. 

But even in 2015/2016, there were some very interesting solutions where I was experimenting with. There was not just the robots that drive around but just see the tabletop versions where you could get an iPad Mini tablet, you could sit it on the robot and it becomes sort of your eyes and ears if you’re remote and you can remotely kind of pivot so you could look around the table. Now we have things like the meeting owl which is something very similar but that’s more expensive solution. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some more pragmatic solutions out of the maker space. So, somebody who’s going to come up with a kit where you can make your own AR, VR robot. I’m sure it’s going to happen and you just plug it whatever tablet you have to go.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:36

It is and I don’t know like for me like I think if I just go back or even if I go back, my family moved here in 95 and I remember my dad spending close to $1,000 on phone bills to call back to Sarajevo. And we talked about the vlog like imagine like where you could see other people when you call them and I feel like we’re going into that space now where like we still think about it as like imagine if I could just come into my room and put some type of gear on and I’m going to have a hard time distinguishing between reality. And I think I won’t be surprised in 10 years where like we’ll mostly be all remote in these types of things. It’s just the question for me is like goes back to the people side of things. It’s not something humans are used to for who knows how many 1000s of years where we’re been more of touchy feely that type of close proximity. But I do think that technology is getting pushed and what we’ll see in the near future is going to shift even more how we work.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  41:07

Well, I would say when the technology gets to the point where we don’t have to turn it on, put it on, it just kind of runs in the background so that you can’t tell somebody physically next to you or not then it will make the difference because I realized I didn’t really answer your hybrid question and this kind of goes back to it. I think with where a lot of companies, big companies in particular are going and being hybrid too it depends on whether they’re seeing it as a way of not losing staff or really providing a benefit. So, if it’s really providing a benefit, my guess is they’re eventually going to shift more and more remote because they’re going to realize that’s really going to be a better way to implement this. A hybrid situation, it’s tough inaudible(42:02). They’re probably going to lose those employees that want to go remote and then they’re going to say okay, we’re just going to all go back in the office. 

So, I will be very surprised in five years if there’s a lot of hybrid implementations unless there’s a major technology change or actually, that’s the only thing I can think of. I could be wrong so it is just hybrid is difficult for us as humans.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:44

And this reminds me, I was looking at your Twitter profile which I think you either posted a question or it was in one of the I think in clubhouse or the question does remote rebase line salaries which I think HR in general which was like in general like how does HR need to look at this whole thing because a lot of times they’re driving some of this change.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  43:16

Yeah. And it also depends on some broader issues. So, you can look at how does it impact our company, our customers and our employees? But if you take a wider view of if we allow our employees to be remote, how is that going to help their local economies? How is that going to help the environment overall? We’re already starting to see plenty in the climate change region or the area climate change and as company, do we want to help with that? Do we want to promote that? So, some will some won’t. And I want to be clear, I don’t believe remote is for everyone. I’m not on the everyone should be remote bandwagon. I don’t agree with that because I know actually many people that this last year and a half not being able to go in an office and see their colleagues was psychologically difficult for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:31

How much do you think that is? Like something I’ve been thinking about since like I recently had a group of people in my CSM class that were mostly like college students and I’ve taught like undergraduate classes, graduate classes and what’s interesting is that especially with undergraduate especially even younger that like this is way of life for them. Even like as I was teaching class in mural, they were taking notes as I was speaking, they were adding stickies as I was speaking. The other ones would add like rephrase like what somebody else said and it’s like a continuous collaboration and we’re all talking. And I’m like this is like a lot different than my typical class and then they thought I was weird for thinking that that’s was weird.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  45:28

It’s like, why wouldn’t you do this? That’s a whole other thing is. So, we talked about the kids in class. So, I have three millennials and I’ve watched how many apps they use. I’ve watched how my boys more so than my daughter, my daughter was never much. She will do Minecraft and things like that. She likes that but the boys jumping from game to game with the same group coordinating the discord like a team. And it’s just amazing how they jump from game to game with different objectives but they stay together they yell at each other but it’s like they are growing up with this skill set. It’s common. They’re going to be very used to operating this way. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:23

Well, that’s the thing. And like even you said as a developer like what I’m seeing today is like we’ve been conditioned to like I’m a front-end developer on this application right or back end. And today like kids are learning that problem solver that’s solving customer problems and yes, I know that I have to be a full stack developer and I might need to develop other skills to understand how to help my team. 

So, I guess the question is how much is that shaping what people want versus the age differences? And if the organization is looking at the next 10 years and how invests into where it wants to go, who are they going to focus on and how is that going to shape personal preferences because at that point, we’re talking about personal preferences. I like talking to people, I like being in person versus like no I’m fine with you know.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  47:28

I think we’re going to see the ripples of this time period for a few years. I think there’s going to be more shifts. I know April 2021 was the big shift reported in the US labor statistics four plus million quit but I don’t think that’s the last time we’re going to see that. I have a feeling there’s going to be other shifts probably one in the fall would be my guess as people experiment with this hybrid where the company says oh, we don’t like this or whatever happens and there’s going to be more shifts in the labor market because of that and I think it’s going to happen a couple times. And at the same time, we have these newer generations who are already very comfortable working face to face and online and they’re going to have some opportunities, I think.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:29

And then I think have some say in what their preferences are. Maybe to kind of like and because I tried to bounce it between some tips and also like what Mark and Mullah would talk if they were having a couple of drinks and just chit chatting. But that’s how I started in a sense so there is a little bit of what interests me and what might interest you but also like what could people get out of this or maybe some tips. So, what I would like to end on maybe is when it comes to remote meetings, what will be your tips on making remote meetings work better or what tips would you give people to make meetings better?

Speaker: Mark Kilby  49:18

Yeah, so good facilitation skills are still important. They are different online but having purpose having an agenda, following that but also being willing to adapt. So, there’s a human side to this as well. It’s not just sticking to the agenda but being very clear this is why we’re meeting, this is who we need. This is who we don’t need. We don’t need everyone piling on the Zoom call to see if we can get all 50 little squares on the screen and being very focused. This is another interesting thing about where those companies who’ve been remote for a while have experimented with asynchronous. It doesn’t mean they never meet. It means they’re very deliberate when they meet, they’re very focused. We need to make a decision, we need to brainstorm some options, we need a high rapid feedback cycle so that’s why we’re going to meet on Zoom tomorrow. Everything else they’ve figured out okay, if it’s information sharing, we can do that online. We don’t need to be. If it’s a Q&A great. But let’s see what we can do online and then anything else we can do in a meeting but they are very deliberate in their meetings. And as I was saying before, you might provide a buffer space around it for the human connection. How are people doing, anything you need? So however it works in your culture to provide that buffer but going from meeting to meeting to meeting, that’s inhuman.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:00

It is. I think we’ve all been there. It’s like you just there for the sake of being and I actually shared the concept of the law of two feet from open space and one company implemented it and they said they loved it because they were just showing up to meetings because it was on their meeting invite. And when it was made okay, the meetings were a lot more focused and a lot more efficient because they could say these are the people that need to be here, can we organize? And another thing that you said which I think is so important it goes back to the story of people taking notes for people that were not. I think it’s that accountability that we’re all responsible for the success of this meeting and that it’s not just the facilitator. But we all need to think about given the context what can we do to focus, to understand what it is that we need to do in order to make this meeting effective for everyone. I think a lot of times that’s misunderstood. It’s like the scrum master should think about that and it’s their meeting.

Speaker: Mark Kilby  52:14

Yeah, instead, look at how do you spread that responsibility out? So, one practical tip is if you tend to take notes in Google Doc, first thing you should do is say here’s the notes, purpose and agenda. I’m running the meeting, who’s going to take notes? And then keep your hands off the Google Doc. Don’t start taking notes even if you’re tempted to do that. Let others jump in and you’ll usually find 1,2,3 other people will jump in or if they’re of the appropriate age, they’ll all jump in and put sticky notes as you said.