Michael K Sahota

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:37

So who is Michael Sahota? What’s been your journey? I think I’ve known you since maybe 2015. I’ve reached out you were still in Toronto. I think I was trying to get you to come to Agile Maine. But what has been your journey? People that don’t know you well, who is Michael, what do you like to do? What’s been your journey in this Agile world and how did you get involved in it?

Michael K Sahota  01:10

Yeah, so I guess maybe the starting places, I’ve changed a lot. And so, kind of my new branding is Michael K Sahota. For what I was in the past, because there’s a really big change. I grew up here in Toronto, and I went through engineering actually went to the hardest program at the University of Toronto, and this really hardcore engineering program, went on to do my masters degree in computer science  and that’s where I did some really extraordinary research and work with artificial intelligence, robotics, of how do we actually get machines to operate in complex environments. So my work with complexity and understanding systems and how things work at a very deep fundamental started. After that I did half a PhD, until I realized, wait a minute, I like being very practical, I like creating very concrete success and academics was too theoretical for me. So I changed gears, it was on the west coast of Vancouver. I went back to Toronto, and started working as a software developer, and then very quickly progressed, senior developer architect, technically. Then I moved on to management roles. I’ve held Director, software development, Vice President engineering, and all that time, very early on, actually a couple years in, I got involved with Agile originally with extreme programming. And it was just like, well, that’s just how you get things done and I guess my experience was, I actually tried to run a project the normal way with a Gantt chart, and just like everyone, and I was like, Oh, my God, this is so painful, like, ah and that’s when  I looked and said, well, there’s got to be a better way and then got involved with Agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:06

How did you first learn about agile, what was your experience, like first learning about or hearing about agile or Scrum? 

Michael K Sahota  03:16

Yeah, so just going back to 2001 and the actual first experience was through extreme programming. And very much focused on well, let’s get unit tests going, let’s get continuous integration. I hand built an integration server with people now called continuous integration or DevOps back in 2001, step by step by hand, we were running scripts and it’s incredible and I can see the power of the technology, the power of testing, the power of pairing so it was just this really deep experience. And then my understanding of agile came through Alastair Coburn’s book, Agile Software elements a very, very beautiful book, because he goes right to the kind of the heart of what Agile is about, which is about people. I mean, he totally botched everything out with calling it crystal clear and crystal this. It was too theoretical that people need something more tangible. It’s not enough to tell them, hey, agile is about people and go work with people. It’s like, well, yeah, but then what? So that’s how I got started and then in 2004, I went to certified scrum master training with some guy called Ken Schwaber.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:31

Right? Yeah.

Michael K Sahota  04:33

It was like, really, really early on and we went to a scrum gathering in Boston, where there were, it was held at the old fire hall, and there were 80 people. It was really early days, but I only saw agile as part of my toolkit, it was never like, this is the sauce I must go and pursue this, that was their path. That wasn’t my path. My path was to go on and just use agile XP Scrum just as part of a subset of all the other things I need to do create success. And so I was very, very successful in leadership roles, team lead management roles, introducing agile, that worked really well, because I could hold the system but when I started switching gears, and I started working as the trainer and consultant, it was a totally different situation. And I was like, wait a minute, there’s so many challenges getting agile actually working in organizations. It’s like, mind boggling and I really wanted to be successful. So I was like, wait a second, what’s going on here? Well, the culture is not right, the leadership’s right. I wrote my book, and agile adoption and transformation Survival Guide and way back in 2012 to tell people that hey, guess what? Agile is a culture system and if you don’t integrate that into everything you do, you’re just going to annoy people and waste a lot of energy and create a lot of failure, which is kind of fast forward to where we are today. There’s a lot of people being annoyed by agile, there’s a lot of failure, Agile transformations still have I’d say 90% failure rate. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:08

If not higher, what’s that? if not higher.

Michael K Sahota  06:12

If not higher. Yeah. Well, the actual truth is, it’s impossible to create a successful Agile transformation, because it has the word agile, and it has the word transformation, both of them actually prevent real change from happening. But that’s a much longer story. So let me finish my story. Back in 2012, I had that realization and then that led me in understanding, wait a minute, it’s actually about the leadership, and doing my own kind of home brewed, training work, I called it a culture training to get agile working. And then after a while, some people to scrum Alliance really great group created the certified agile Leadership Program. And it was the first person to sign up and say, yep, I’ll do that. And first person deliver training worldwide, etc. And then, train most of the people I think, for the first couple years, I think I had like 30% or 40%, all the graduates were from our training. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:07

The feedback was, I remember everybody, they were CST staking year training, everybody was just really impressed with how they came out of that training and how their perspectives have changed after that training.

Michael K Sahota  07:25

Yeah, I can talk about that in a moment. Fast forward about me is I realized that I was the limit for change, and that I wasn’t fully embodying the agile mindset. I wasn’t embodying it and evolved culture system, the way I was showing up, there’s no way I could help other leaders evolve. And so I went on this immense personal growth journey. Actually, one of the phrases that sparked it off was, you can only be kind to others, to the extent that you can be kind to yourself. And that really, opened me up and led to a couple years of really deep growth of really looking at how kind I was to myself and what was going on in my inner world. So fast forward a couple of years, did many, many experiments of trying this, trying that, and eventually wound up in India studying at a school of consciousness, because these were the guys who had the real, some really powerful technology for creating change and shifts. Actually, at there, I met the woman who became my wife, Audrey, and we’ve been working together to co-create an incredible set of technology, both around organizational change, around culture change, leadership change but also more importantly about this, how do we actually create an inner shift? How do we change at a core basic level, these really deeply ingrained behavior patterns so we can show up as a more evolved leader. Anyone can go and do a leadership circle and say, oh, I got all these gaps and then it’s like, now what? So instead of doing that, we just actually help give people these shifts that they need. We can do this because we’ve gone on our own journeys, we’ve walked through our own darkness and we’ve built an incredible technology for helping people create rapid shifts, and that’s what people have been experiencing these trainings. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:23

Those shifts that you mentioned are those vertical stage development shifts or cognitive shifts? What type of shifts are you talking about? 

Michael K Sahota  09:38

Okay, so for us to be effective, we need doing and being. So we need to have very practical skills, new ways of working, right. But without a mindset shift, or a shift in consciousness, a shift of worldview, the shift of perspective about ourselves and a shift of brain the size of about others, we call that a shift in consciousness. And we look at the book, reinventing organizations, it talks about an evolved consciousness, operating. And that’s really what we see, as people move through more and more evolved cultures, there’s a shift. I mean, there’s so many people that talk about it, for me to we and like everybody talks about this shift. But ultimately, this is a shift in our inner being, shift in how we see ourselves and how we see the world. That’s what we call a shift in consciousness as an integrative term to talk about all these phenomena, that people said, oh, you need to have a shift. But this is the core piece. People who want to show up amazing, who want to create amazing workplaces, how do we help them make that shift inside of themselves?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:48

Like you said that’s that worldview shift. That kind of perspective, that’s evolving your values and beliefs and trying to better understand, who you are, what’s important to you. You talked about cultural system and obviously, this shift in mindset is tied to that cultural shift, oh, culture system, sorry. Could you maybe elaborate a little bit on what you mean by culture system and then how the shift in mindset is tied to that culture system?

Michael K Sahota  11:35

Yeah, that’s a great question. The technology we created, there are many, many different ways to look at culture and they’re all useful for different purposes but the one I’ll share now is that we can understand the culture of an organization as the sum of all the behaviors of all the people. The way people show up is your culture. If people are kind, supportive, building other leaders around them, that’s one kind of culture, if people are covering their ass, afraid, kind of in a scarcity mindset competing, that’s a different kind of culture. So the way people behave across the organization, how everyone behaves at all levels, that is the culture. So from that perspective, you say, well, if I want to change from one culture to another, guess what, people need to behave differently. There is no culture change. So it’s like, did you notice that if you want to change culture, people actually need behave differently? And that’s what it means. And people are like, oh, I never thought of it that way. But this is kind of like the core of what we’ve created is a way to simplify teaching of what we call the laws of organizational dynamics, or these deep truths about how things work. And it’s almost like really embarrassing. It’s not like we’re trying to convince people or teach them these models, we just kind of go, hey, did you notice that things kind of work like this? People are like, oh, yeah, wow, things work like that and what that does is, it creates a shift in their worldview. And it gives them a way to start seeing how they’ve been going against the grain, to start seeing how, and this is the core of really what lets people really unlock to see how they’re the problem and they’re the solution, how their beliefs, inaccurate beliefs have been getting in the way of creating change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:39

Yeah, and something that struck me in the sense that you just said inaccurate beliefs. I don’t know if I would call it inaccurate beliefs because they’re all like we all have, in a way that there maybe there’s some truth to those beliefs, but it is interesting. 

Michael K Sahota  13:58

That’s a really good point. There’s dawn box quotes that all models are wrong and some are more useful than others or something like that. Our view is that most people right now, I’d say like about 90% of all agile coaches are running around with a belief system that’s actually harmful and damaging to themselves and people around them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:21

I don’t think it’s just the Agile. You said you went back to India and there is a different Eastern philosophies versus Western philosophies, and if we even go back to lean, the way the lean embrace both doing and being, like lean from Japan was a lot different than how was interpreted in the West.

Michael K Sahota  14:46

Let me just go back. Lean is the Western interpretation. So this is what happens, Toyota had a fairly evolved consciousness and they created structures that maps that consciousness, that mindset, that understanding. Some people who had a lower consciousness from the west come in and study it, and they reinterpreted through their lower consciousness, and they label it lean. That’s why lean has failed worldwide, pretty much in achieving because what they’re missing is the mindset. Really, the only case studies that were successful if you go back to NUMMI with GM and Toyota it’s where Toyota was directly involved and make sure the new leadership, everyone in the new leadership had the right mindset and then it worked. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:47

But it reminded me of what we see a lot in Agile today in the movie, in the case study, or at least the podcast I listened to, how a GM, the manager said, go take the photos of what they are doing at Toyota so we can duplicate what they’re doing. And today, we see so much of that in Agile too, go copy that framework, go copy the Spotify, Ramos would do this.

Michael K Sahota  16:13

Well, so that’s a very natural thing, because that’s what you said, it’s not just an agile, the current prevailing management mindset is a management mindset. It’s an administrative, sort of in Frederick Lewis model, or engine machine metaphor. You have the mechanical system so you want to get the blueprint for the machine, you want to copy other people’s machines, you want to install new machine parts. So copying and pasting other people’s solutions is a very natural metaphor. But this is a very low consciousness approach. So can only create a low consciousness outcome, like if you use a cut and paste solution, you’re going to get the quality of a cut and paste versus an authentic creation of what’s seeking to be unearthed in that organization, which will actually be the path to people being engaged, higher performance, faster delivery, and all that. This is where we say that the change approach itself limits the effectiveness of the outcome. And most agile change approaches are a total disaster because they use this cut and paste, we’re going to have a rollout plan, very low consciousness change approach to try to introduce a new mindset and way of being and it’s like, what, how do you think this can work? This is kind of a beginner level mistake from our view as a culture system. That’s why people have these mind blowing experiences, we just say, well, do you notice it works like this? And your head explodes.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:52

Yeah. So you talked about mindset, you talked about behaviors. I’m thinking about and I use, at least as they referenced integral quadrants. I don’t know what your thought is on that but just referencing back to that, like the systems quadrant. For instance, if we look at organizational policies, if we look at the structures, those influence behavior, as well, and in return the behavior and those policies influence the culture. What are you seeing as far as, how the organizational systems impact the behavior and culture? What are some of the things that you see or you you’re helping organizations to evolve those as well?

Michael K Sahota  18:44

So the evolution of organizational systems and structures, it’s a very natural process. Once there’s a shift in people. It’s a very, very natural process. Sometimes we can use structures to support creating a shift with people but mostly there’s a lag. Now, here’s where you get into a chicken and egg problem. The structures promote established people showing up a certain way and people showing up a certain way fits hand in glove. So I mean, it’s really, the technology we created to crack this this puzzle and it’s a very, very powerful model is the Sahota  or called the shifter one for culture model, which is understand that all these elements of cultures, both the structural as well as the people or the mindset, they’re all interconnected, so deeply interconnected, that when you try to change one piece, it’s actually trying to change the whole thing. So it attempts to change structure. There’s Craig Larman, who says culture falls structure and he’s created immense damage to that. It’s actually true in a very…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:58

It’s a partial view of it because you’re only looking at, you know it’s a feedback loop. 

Michael K Sahota  20:03

It’s true, if you change your structures, it can support a shift in culture, but hold on, who is changing the structures? What is the mindset from which they’re changing the structures? Are they changing the structures with the people or making the change and imposing the structures on the people. There’s so much about how the structures can change. I’ve talked to (inaudible 20:24). They’ve been very successful with up to 100 people, where the leaders have already made some sort of inner shift, they don’t really think about it that way. But when I listen to them actually describing real case studies, that’s what was their leaders willingness to grow, then a structure change can be used as an aid, like a job aid. But here’s the challenge. What comes first do people change first? What we’ve seen is that it’s actually the people changing first, that’s actually what’s going to lead enable structures be changing in an effective, intelligent way, otherwise, there’s no way to break this kind of deadlock.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:05

Yeah, a lot of things that I do, I try to reference back to my experience and try to make sense out of things. I grew up in Sarajevo, and that part of the Balkans, we’re killing each other every 50 years. The World War One once started there. When there’s mess in Europe, or in the world, we’re involved. And one of the things, I was contemplating and thinking about just the whole idea, what would happen, you change the system, we had a leader at the end of the world war two through 1980s and he created a system, which changed the minds by his leadership, dictatorship style that created that system in his peers. And how that whole mindset creates the behavior or influences behaviors and influences the system and how they in return influence in each other, it’s in everything, it’s not just organization, like you said, it’s right in front of us here. This whole thing, we’re making this so much more complicated, a lot more complex than what it is. But most of these transformations fail and yet, the answer is right there in front of us, in a sense that until we kind of cognitively grow, it’s really hard to make any of these changes attainable. And maybe to that question, how much does the environment then shape our mindset? And how do we involve the mindset then? You’ve written two, three, now, three books, you have a book coming out soon. I mean, what’s your take on evolving mindset, how do we go past the current perspectives and worldviews that we have?

Michael K Sahota  23:20

The question is, of course, immense. And there are many, many different levels I can answer. I think the one that’s coming to me now is that if we look at changing mindset within an organization, is it the mindset of the leadership or the mindset of the workers that needs to change first to create a shift in the organization? Oh, well, it’s those who have power, because the masses will follow the lead of everybody else, so it’s okay. So what’s going on with the leadership and I say leadership at all levels, because every manager can change. So change in culture and leadership is a local phenomenon. It’s not a talking about the whole so anyone in any organization who has any power, either formal and formal can lead a shift. So just want to clarify that. Now that we’ve clarified that we have many, many leaders in organizational systems, the question is, well, what’s the prevailing mindset? And we look at things like oh, well, people believe in servant leadership. And this is where we go into our book, upcoming book leading beyond change is that servant leadership is a 50 year old paradigm, and it’s failed. It has failed to produce a shift, was a fact. When people try to save it by adding all these extensions and bla bla bla, and it’s not working. There’s information about this on our website, people can download PDF if they want. A term that’s been used before and we’ve coined our own definition of it, which is evolutionary leadership. And we define evolutionary leadership is the choice to evolve oneself, and learn how to evolve the organization. So imagine if you have a leader, who’s ready to evolve themselves, their inner state of being their mindset, and so on their skills and how they approach things, and learn practical skills to have that shift land in the systems. They know these new patterns of interaction, based on their evolved mindset and consciousness. Imagine if you have a leader like that, what will happen with their team, their department, their group, their organization? Oh, it’s going to start changing. So that’s the kind of the fundamental element of evolution now. And why do we say there’s a fundamental element?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:03

Fundamental element.

Michael K Sahota  26:05

Because everyone’s heard this phrase, you can’t change anyone, you can only change yourself. And so it’s really a matter of individual choice of do people want to evolve? That’s it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:21

Exactly. I see a bit troubling, because a lot of times because of that, whatever you want to call it, ego, or, I recently…

Michael K Sahota  26:35

Ego a good word, ego is a very good. That’s what this whole game is about.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:42

It is, it is, but, it goes back and I’m puzzled by this. I know, but I don’t, which is I asked the leader why wouldn’t they do something in a sense, like they were debating, and they’re like, well, my bonus is impacted by this. So they struggled. They knew what was right and they want that border, from ego, where do I let go a little bit of my ego where I don’t, but at the same time, the environment is like, I’m paying my kids college tuition, which is very expensive, which probably you can relate to that. I know, last time we spoke, you said it, and they’re like, it’s between me doing the right thing, what I know is right, and then supporting my family. And I go back to people, what was the first thing when COVID hit? What most people thought, you didn’t think about how am I going to help somebody else? Usually, it’s like, is my family safe? So how much does the environment dictate and that’s what I’m puzzled. I don’t know if you have an answer to that.

Michael K Sahota  27:51

Yeah. So…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:56

You know what I’m saying, though, do you understand?

Michael K Sahota  27:58

We only ask people to make themselves successful. If I’m working with the leader, his bonus is tied to destroying the team and getting your product out and really just eliminating and reducing long term profitability, it’s totally fair game for them to do that because that’s what their bonus structure is and they need to look after themselves and their family. Now, probably what I say at the same time, though, is like, maybe you want to talk to whoever gave you this objective, what the consequence of it will be, and see if there’s some other way to create a win-win, because right now, there’s a win-lose going on and that’s why you’re in conflict. We don’t want people to be in conflict. We don’t want to tell people they need to be evolved and make sensible choices. That’s not how it works in high performance organizations. In high performance organizations, and this is one of the key principles, actually everything we put together is part of what we call this shift, evolutionary leadership framework or self-framework. It’s a framework for how to evolve people in organizational systems from where they are to higher levels of productivity and success. One of the core principles is that employee self-interest is the highest form of corporate alignment. I’ll say that again, it’s really important, employee self-interest is the highest form of corporate alignment. It’s just basically a recognition that people have egos, people are optimizing locally what’s good for them, it’s the fact of the ego we optimize locally for what’s best for me. Let’s just make sure that everyone’s personal interest, their ego lines up to end up with good outcomes for their team, for their group, for the whole organization. Why fight the ego, you can’t win against the ego. If you can’t fix it, as I learned a soft phrase if you can’t fix it, feature it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:57

Which is like, it’s ingrained in us. So something else I’ve heard you say this is a slow process. It takes time, we have to be patient with it.

Michael K Sahota  30:08

Who said it’s a slow process? That’s the truth but there’s only one limiting factor. Which is our rate of evolution. And so part of what we’ve created is evolutionary tools to help people evolve very rapidly. You know, in the old world is like, oh, I can’t change, I had this behavior my whole life, I might have to go to psychotherapy for 20 years, no, no. That thing will change in a matter of weeks and months with attention, it’s not that complex, we have the technology to do that. Once people have a clear choice, that’s what they want for themselves. So the core of our work, whether it’s one hour luncheon learn or something like that, or an executive briefing or that or (inaudible 30:57) training, it’s creating desire and the willingness and the path. Once people have the desire, they understand how they’re getting in their own way, there’s a very natural desire to start getting out of our own way. And when we give them the actual tools and path, it unlocks profound change. People routinely get promoted after six months, the ones that you get it, use the tools and so on, like it’s very, very normal. Because what happens is we stop learning how to stop creating conflict, and stop helping other people around us be successful and then it turns out that people really like that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:36

Amazing, right? I was going to say. So much of this stuff is just nothing new. Do you think we’ve been conditioned into some of this stuff?

Michael K Sahota  31:56

Yeah, we’ve been deeply conditioned. We take our best and our brightest, and they go into an MBA program, Masters of Business Administration. And we teach them the way to create high performance is to think like an administrator, to think like a manager and manage people and manage resources and manage things, and give orders and give directions. And you know what, but the funny thing is, what we see from every case study is high performance doesn’t come from management, it comes from leadership. It comes from inspiring people. It comes from nurturing, looking after people. What if all the best and brightest were given training in business leadership instead of business management? Boom!

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:45

Well, you look at the big consulting companies, you look at, like a scaling frameworks. All of that is more of the same that you just described.

Michael K Sahota  32:59

Yeah, I mean, the next structures is all focused on managing was all this. So basically, none of these agile frameworks, there might be some exceptions, but I’ll paint a very broad brush. If you look at them agile, the core definition is about individuals and interactions over processes, tools, or people over process. All these frameworks put what process over people? Oh, no. So all of them are in violation of Agile. None of them are true Agile frameworks. I mean, they’re frameworks about agile process, or agile process frameworks. They’re not agile frameworks. They don’t include the doing in the being, or they need to have a lean agile mindset, or you need to have some values and blah, blah. But that’s just lip service. But after they do Agile, they’re just about the doing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:56

And that’s right. The podcast is agile to agility, which you need both. You need agile and agility. But we focus so much on agile, and like you said, not on agility. So what do you think? I mean, it’s been 20 years, We talked about it at the beginning, since the Agile Manifesto, a lot has changed, but at the same time, not much has changed because we focused on that big A, and doing Agile, what do you think over the next five to 10 years? Do you see more and more focused on being agile and what you’ve been promoting for years now?

Michael K Sahota  34:38

So just to be clear, what we teach in our training is to stop doing Agile period.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:45

All together? In a sense of the big A…

Michael K Sahota  34:50

I’ll repeat. Now here’s the deal. When we look at the core of it, Agile is a means to an end, whether the end is agility or business performance or organizational success, agile is a means to an end. So when I say stop doing Agile, it’s about you stop doing agile and focusing on agile, instead of using Agile where it fits. So Agile is optional. There are many organizations that have agility without agile, therefore, agile is optional. And it’s brilliant. Agile has so much value to it. And it can help many, many organizations, maybe even most organizations. However, focusing on Agile is the problem. Anyone who self identifies as an Agile coach, they’re part of the problem because they’re wedded to the word agile. And I’ll even go back. I remember when I was being interviewed for being this is 10 years ago, maybe 11 years ago now for being a certified enterprise coach with the scrum Alliance. And I was getting tested and they said, well, Mike, do you have any concerns, this is the live interview. And one guy says, well, Michael, I’m really concerned because you’re only talking about Scrum. And I go, well, I thought I was only supposed to talk about Scrum. You want me to talk about all the stuff I do with Kanban and lean and how that interoperate and integrates. And they’re like, yeah, could you tell us about that? And they started talking, they’re like, Oh, my God, this is amazing. We were really concerned that you only were focused on scrum, give a broader view and that’s what it is. We’re talking with a certified agile leadership course in the scrum Alliance. It’s not about Scrum leadership. It’s about agile. And then what I’ve realized and what not realized, but the core of our training is not about agile leadership. We don’t teach agile leadership, evolutionary leadership, we don’t recommend agile leadership. In fact, agile leadership doesn’t mean anything. There’s no meaning to that term, always just a leader who can create an agile environment. Well, if they can create an agile environment, they’re not thinking about agile, they’re thinking about a lot of other things. I got a bit excited. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:15

No I do and it reminded me, I spoke with Mike Kuhn last week, and he said, something along the same lines like, not even call it agile, if it makes sense, do it. And don’t even call it just, that’s like helping you with what you’re trying to do, then just do it. Don’t put a label on it. And I’ll call it agile. And I think, yeah…

Michael K Sahota  37:42

That’s it. Actually, let’s just highlight that. I remember when I first started getting started introducing agile when I didn’t have permission, or authority to do it, I just saying, hey, would it be useful we just did our work in iterations. And why don’t we just check in how we’re doing? Let’s play what we want to do the next two weeks, and I just started doing what I call stealth Scrum. That’s what I invented on my own which kind of lines up exactly with what we’re talking about. And I remember this really land to my system when Gojko Ajijic said the most successful transformation he’s ever seen in his entire career was when they banned the word agile. And after a year, he came back and it was such an agile environment. They’re doing all the agile practices, everything, but they weren’t doing Agile because their CIO ban the word agile. So when you ban the word agile, it gives you the chance to introduce agile in a way that makes sense. Otherwise, it’s like, well, what’s our agile maturity? What’s this? What’s that? And we’re working with competitive agility on this. We don’t have an agile maturity metric, we got an organizational performance index, which is like, what’s happening at the organizational level? Like what’s actually really, really happening? Is the organization functioning. Because that’s what it’s all about is about, are you helping your organization function? Not about are you doing the Agile thing? Are you being an agile person? Because being an agile doesn’t mean anything, either, because agile is pointing to evolve cultural system. So it’s only an incomplete specification.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:16

Yeah, maybe that’s what’s next. I mean, in a sense, maybe that, we’ve gone through this agile phase and the more people that I’ve talked to, I think, more and more people are aligned with this thinking. But you also have the laggers. Now, what we’ve seen 10,15 years ago, I’m also seeing a lot of that now, too, so maybe it’s a good sign that at least there’s more and more people thinking the same way and what you just described, because it’s a sign towards really growth and realizing what we needed to do or what we need to do in order to help organization or organizations to help themselves. We all have people that have inspired us and probably we have mentors. Who would you say has inspired you, still inspires you and has had a huge impact on what you do?

Michael K Sahota  40:23

So I’m an inventor, I’m an inventor, and I get these insights and I don’t know where they come from, but they’re just profound. So if I had to describe it, I’d say the universe, because that’s the source of most of my information, I’m just looking at something and then I just get this insight out of the blue. So for that reason, it’s hard. I mean, in my book, I’ve got a list of 20 different people, I think, and so on, and so on and so on. You’re looking for a very concrete answer so I’ll give you something which is this. If I look at who embodies we can call a more evolved leadership and a more evolved way of being as a leader of a larger organization, it would be Ricardo Semler. Ricardo Semler, the founder of Semco. He actually created a teal organization. People co invent teal organization all over the world, but he was actually able to do that from age 21. So he really embodies what evolve leadership really looks like. So yeah, I would say, that would be a good example of I think of well, okay, I’m reacting this way, well, how would Ricardo Semler react right now?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:54

You said the universe so what I’m thinking is, and I know, you probably do that but how much time do you spend meditating, contemplating? I’m assuming that’s probably source of some of your innovations or maybe not? 

Michael K Sahota  42:12

Yeah, no, no, it doesn’t really work like that. So what happens is that we all have access to guidance, or the wisdom of the universe. But the thing is, we’re often so busy trying to do, and putting our own effort that we don’t take time to be still and just receive. All of us want to get stuff happening in our lives, or so busy trying to do it ourselves that we just can’t receive. So I’ll just be really clear, my daily practice is to do like 10,15 minutes of yoga and what that does is, the body and the mind are actually connected. So it actually opens up certain energy channels, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff we can go into Chinese medicine and how there’s actually like a primary mechanism of energy distribution in the body, then blah, blah, but we won’t go there. But they tend to even see yoga. And then that we do a meditation practice of actually a technology that Adri created. It’s actually a new chakra system for humanity. We have our website up, but we haven’t actually launched training and really announcing it to the world. And so that’s our core practice that we do every day. It depends, if we go into a really deep state, things get slowed down a lot. But it’s roughly about 30 minutes.. So it’s really about 30 45 minutes every day. I think the other part and the tools we teach in our work, it’s actually a moment by moment practice, having awareness in the moment of well, am I in an emotionally charged state? How am I reacting? What’s my body feeling like? And then using the tools on an ongoing basis throughout the day because we just spent our whole day in a clear, calm, present, neutral state, everything becomes effortless, like we’re in a flow state. I guess out we get this email, we get frustrated, we go into fear, we get some conditioned behavior. When someone does something, we trigger a response. There’s so much that’ll happen through daily life, we’re in a triggered responding state. The other part that goes with it is maintaining that state throughout the day with just an awareness and sometimes it’ll be like, oh shit, there’s this thing going on inside me, I’m crunchy inside. I’ll just go and I’ll sit quietly and just breathe through it and get back to resort state.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:47

Yeah. I was talking to Richard Kaspersky just before our call and we’re talking about that just being more aware and practicing self-awareness and that seems like it’s a constant self-awareness practice.

Michael K Sahota  45:07

Self-awareness is really, really important but without the tools to act on it and create a shift, that’s not enough. It’s really just the entryway. And most people do not have the tools to have a good level of self-awareness. Most people are relatively unconscious of what’s happening in their bodies, what’s happening, their emotional system, what’s happening with the state of their thinking or cognition. Most people are not even aware or haven’t been trained in how to become aware. And when they become aware of what’s happening, how do they take countermeasures to restore them to a more resourceful state. And that’s this whole technology we created. It’s not this weird Eastern blah, blah, blah, crazy stuff. It’s very practical. Oh, I want to be resourceful at work, how do I do that?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:59

That’s awesome. As I reached out before, our lives are so busy and we’re so conditioned. But I’ll definitely love to join and learn about these tools. You mentioned Lalu, you mentioned Thiele, what’s your take on spiral dynamics and some of the ideal development stage frameworks? I know everybody has their own opinion. I’m interested to hear yours.

Michael K Sahota  46:31

Yeah, so my background training as an engineer and my cognitive predisposition is, if you can’t explain it to me, like I’m a five year old, it’s too complicated. And so what happens is, I have this unique knack for taking models and theories and simplifying them down to the essence. And as part of this business of staring down the essence, there’s an evolution that comes in. So what we’ve done is create an evolution, a lot of people use a lot of different models, for culture, for can elfin model. So what we’ve actually done is create an evolution of those models that have these nuanced refinements that given unlock. If I look at spiral dynamics in that context, it’s way too flipping complicated, is too many words, too many models, too many concepts all mixed together, that you have to have a brain the size of planet to understand it, and is very difficult to put into practice. So that would be my kind of like, high level summary. And there are some people who have brain the size of planet, God bless them, they can go use that. But what we’ve done is create models and tools that normal people like you and me can actually use to create a shift in ourselves and organizational systems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:53

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think that’s one of the challenges of any kind of framework or anything that a lot of times too much for people to do and want to understand. So it’s great when somebody can take that, and simplify it to a point where it actually can be applicable and people can use it to make change. 

Michael K Sahota  48:21

When people ask me, well, hey, Michael, do you still use the Schneider culture model that was in your 2012 book? And I go, like, well, no, because I tried using it for three years to create culture change, and it doesn’t work for that. It doesn’t help with culture change, so I stopped using it, because it’s really good to understand what’s happening, but it doesn’t help create change, yeah, not so much.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:43

And that’s a good point. Some things are really good at understanding and for you to help understand what’s going on, but not necessarily making the shift or change. I haven’t made that distinction before, I think that’s a really good one. Maybe as a last question, what do you do for fun Michael? What do you like to do?

Michael K Sahota  49:06

I am so deeply in my life purpose right now of drilling out a profound technology for shifting people’s lives on planet Earth. That’s really my greatest source of inspiration and joy. It’s a pleasure to create and work and it’s like I don’t have a morning where I go like I got to go to work today. That’s not part of my reality system. But what I do for looking after kind of my body and my soul is I love going for bicycle rides, walks at nature. You know what I missed right now with COVID is traveling. There’s so many beautiful parts of planet Earth that we love visiting and spending time and so many really majestic and magical parts of those places. I’m thinking about botanical gardens in Sydney, Australia, a walk into Kensington Park and in London, or the town center in Antwerp. There’s just so many beautiful places.