Mike Cohn

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:39

How did scrum Alliance come about?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  00:41

It’s an interesting story. And it’s get somewhat lost to the Sands of Time as people have kind of selective memory about it. But mine is pretty good on this, actually dug up some of the old emails on this. The Scrum Alliance is actually not started by Ken or myself, neither of us were involved at the absolute beginning. It was started by a guy named Brian Zarnet. I believe he is now a karate instructor in Toronto, he didn’t hang around Scrum for very well. And he started as a program within the Agile Alliance. And Ken and I were both involved, we were on the board of the Agile Alliance at the time, this would have been 2002. And I was running what was called the programs program, which was to encourage new programs to form, and one of the programs was to put on a conference, one was to find the best agile articles, there weren’t very many right back then you couldn’t google them. And we had Brian wanted to start a scrum program within the Eric Colto’s scrum Alliance. And I think, you know, within like a day of starting that he asked Ken and I to get involved, right. So you know, we were not there the minute it started but a day or a couple of days later. And so we got involved, Esther got involved, probably about six to nine months later in to this, I could be wrong on that, but it was definitely six months to a year, somewhere in that range later, because we’d already been going a little bit. And what happened is, we started within the Agile Alliance and then Ken wanted to start the certification program in May of 2003. 

He also had visions of “hey, we might do a scrum conference someday”, we had no idea we would call a gathering or anything like that. But he was like, “you know, we might do something”. And that created a problem for us because now we were going to have a problem, in that we were going to be taking money in, and it wasn’t about making money. But you know, charge people $100 to go to a conference, spend all the money. You know, it was never meant to make money. But as a program within the Agile Alliance, we were going to take money and spend it on events. And we couldn’t set up a bank account because we weren’t a legal entity, right? We’re a little division, something else, right? And so we had to spin it out of the Agile Alliance. And that’s when we started kind of the, what everybody knows today as the scrum Alliance is a standalone entity. And we started out, yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:01

What was the discussion around like, you know, starting as a nonprofit, and the way you did and how was that? And somebody, I think it was Tom Miller, that told me that you were the actual person that incorporated company. Is that true? Like what and how was the discussion?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  03:18

Pretty close, so technically it’s my wife. My wife is the founder of the scrum Alliance. I hate paperwork, I hate any paperwork and my wife kind of our deal, she’ll do it for me, because otherwise she knows I’ll never do paperwork like, I remember early in our marriage, we’d have to get reimbursed for medical expenses back then, you know, you’d pay the insurance company, would pay you back if you overpaid your deductibles. And I was just like, it’s not worth the money for me, $50 you do it. And so my wife does all that paper. So she technically incorporated us. Now the reason we, we actually started as a for profit corporation, and that’s because I think Ken and I are very similar in this way. We’re both what I call the right amount of lazy, you know, where we just don’t want a lot of extra work, we don’t want to deal with a bunch of paperwork, a bunch of crap, right? And so our goal was to be a for profit corporation that didn’t make any money, right? We didn’t want to make any money from this, we both had our own businesses. We’re making money from our businesses, not great livings back then, but we had our own businesses. And the scrum Alliance was meant to be a thing to kind of spread credibility to others. That’s kind of how we started it. We talked about being a credibility transfer organization. And we were funding it basically ourselves. And Ken in particular, I mean, Ken put a lot of money into just hosting events and things like that, he would donate just do this. He’s very generous guy.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:47

How much did you put in?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  04:49

I’m not I mean, he would put in a couple of $1,000 to like, you know, start the very first, If we go way back in history, and yet the Agile Alliance, there’s people in it but nobody’s paying any money until, they are just joining, and you want to put on an event, and you know, the hotel wants a deposit, it’s like, okay, we’re an organization doesn’t have any money. We’re going to charge people, you know, maybe $500 to come to the event, but we don’t have it now, right? So Ken would fund those types of things. I don’t remember how much I did, but I did some. And but a lot of it was Ken, I think Alastair Coburn pitched in some on that. But you know, it’s a new organization, it’s got to get bootstrapped. Right. And so they were funding those things. So Ken and I started Scrum Alliance with no intention of making money. We just didn’t want to do the paperwork, right, it’s more hassle to be a nonprofit, right? You got to prove you’re not making a profit, all this other stuff, right? We’re the right amount of lazy, we didn’t want to do that. So we said, we’re going to be for profit that doesn’t make any money, you know, the end of the year, we’re going to make $87, and we’ll pay taxes on $87. Right. And it’s nice and easy, nothing big hassle. And we ran that way for I’m going to guess, like a year and a half, maybe two years, and then switched to a nonprofit organization. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:06

Why did you switch? Like, was it just, it was growing? Or like, what was the reason for switching to nonprofit?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  06:14

I think Ken and I would have kept it as a for profit corporation, we would have just continued again, that little bit of lazy, you know, it’s already incorporated, why change it? I think we would have continued. What happened is a fair number of the trainers were pushing to make it a nonprofit. And I think that was the right answer, I didn’t really care. But some of the trainers were pushing to make it up a nonprofit. And I think part of it was that it was starting to see some money come in, trainers were paying $50, a person they trained that was funding it. And Ken and I were still putting money in the organization to keep it going in the early days, but it was starting to get some money coming in and I think trainers, I’m guessing this might have started to see wow, this thing’s going to make money someday. I’m not sure I trust those guys to, you know, and that was probably why it’s good. I don’t know if I would have trusted myself, at the point where the  Scrum Alliance you know, whether you’re training, you know, 10s or 100,000 people a year, I don’t know that I wouldn’t trust myself to not say, “oh, I need to salary from this or something”. So pushed by the trainers, I think it was good. I wouldn’t have done it on my own just out of laziness, though.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:21

Yeah. You mentioned conferences earlier. And in 2007, I believe you guys had like, you know, less than 50 people, I think maybe 30. And people are already complaining how big it was. Could you talk about maybe a little bit about those early conferences and what was going on?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  07:43

Yeah, the very first one was hosted by Boris Glover, who was one of the early Certified Scrum trainers. And I think it was in Austria, it might have been Germany, but somewhere in that area, and very small you know that. I mean Ken liked the idea, and Boris had come up with the name gathering. And so Ken liked the idea and wanted to put more events on, and my wife did it again, she contracted with the first hotel that we really did like a formal gatherings in Boulder, Colorado, and the Boulder Auto Hotel there, which is very fundamental to the history of Scrum, we’ve had a lot of events there. And it has one big room that we could set people into. And we like to end the gatherings with everybody in a big circle, one big circle around the room, and everybody would say I don’t remember exactly what it was, but Esther Derby, Dinah Larson would facilitate this and you know, say something like “you are appreciated about the gathering or something”, you know, one of those types of debriefs at the very end. And a year or two later, all of a sudden, we had to have two circles, right? We wouldn’t fit in one circle around the room. And there started to be a huge amount of uproar, we can’t ever get bigger, it has to stay this size. And I remember Ken and I talking about it’s like, that’s not an option, right? I mean, you know, I don’t know how you would do a 50 person event in the scrum world. You know, what would you charge people you know, you’d have to charge or have it be in a lottery who gets in or something, and that just doesn’t feel any better, right? And so a lot of people wanted to keep that intimate feeling but you can’t do that if you’re going to really create a bigger movement so, we started to realize we had to get into bigger events, just you know, because there enough there was enough demand. The early ones are invitation only, you couldn’t register, you had to be invited to attend. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:31

Yeah, that’s so cool. I even heard like I think it was in 2008, it was important, I believe, and there was even like a fist fight about I don’t know if you remember that but it is interesting. It was the night before and then the gathering, there was some guy that I think either Ken or somebody hired as a bodyguard or security.

Speaker: Mike Cohn  10:01

Oh Jesse. Yeah, that’s true. That happened, I think he had the bodyguard at Portland but it happened because of some things at a prior gathering. And my memory could be a little wrong on this but that had to do with when the push to move from being a nonprofit to a profit, and people were mad at you know yelling about that and I remember somebody being very vocal and aggressive in criticizing Ken, and I always have like a couple $100 with me just, you know, I have weird credit card issues, like my credit card got declined buying a carwash or whatever so, normally have like a couple $100 just in the corner of my wallet type of thing. And so I remember pulling that out and go over to the person “here’s your refund for the event, go home”, because the person was just being super disruptive at the event and attacking Ken, criticizing all of this. And after that Ken decided he needed a bodyguard. I think that was a bit of an overreaction. It was kind of fun because Jesse was the name of his bodyguard, and Jesse kind of went everywhere with him for, wasn’t very long, maybe a year at the most, but I think it was more in the terms of months.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:18

What was your experience working with Ken?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  11:21

Ken was always a lot of fun to work with. He is very passionate about Scrum, willing to, I think it was one of those athletes that just collapses at the end of the game, right? You know, just like, think like Michael Jordan playing basketball with the flu and still winning the game and stuff, right, and then just, you know, being dead afterwards. And Ken was always very much that way, he kind of leave it all on the court, you know, give it everything he had. So I had a lot of respect from that way. Just kind of, I mean two kind of fun stories from the early days with him is that Ken just never met a schedule he could stick with and so he and I would co-train quite a bit, we co-trained the very first CSM, we co-trained the very first cspo course, and many times in between, they’re probably co-trained, I’m going to guess 30 or 40 times. And he’d have an agenda like, you know, we want to be here by 10, we’ll be here by 11 o’clock, and he would just decide he wants to spend an extra three hours on you know, why the scrum master can’t also be the product owner. It’s like, okay, great topic, but you just spent three hours on it. Now, how do I get the afternoon back on schedule. So great guy, and he could lecture for three hours on any topic, but just really, really never met a schedule that he liked.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:39

Is it true that he had like 250 slides, and he will just go through them? Like what was his training style?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  12:48

I want to make sure everything that I’m saying is with love for Ken, it’s just fun memories of the stuff. We all have our own weird things, I could point out some about me. But he also was the only guy that loves the Comic Sans font. Right? So he had slides that were in Comic Sans. And for some reason, they were portrait mode instead of landscape mode. So he’d be on a landscape mode screen with portrait mode slides. I guess it’s nice because they print but that’s what his slides are like, no graphics, just text up there. He was not a read the slides guy at all, that’s not his training style. Again, very engaging trainer, but he’d have a slide up there he wouldn’t even look at, he might be on one slide for an hour, just telling stories about whatever the point is, and then he would jump 30 or 40 slides ahead. So he didn’t have a huge slide deck that I recall, but he had lots of different slides where he could tell different stories. So he might be on this slide for a half hour, jump 30 slides down the next slide for an hour, jump 30 slides. So he uses the slides more as like “don’t watch the screen while I’m talking”. It was not ever, It’s not a crutch, that’s not his style where he needs the slide as a crutch or reminder. It’s more “oh, yeah, so let’s talk about the product owner”, and he talked about the product owner, it would relate to what was in the next 30 slides but he was not fast forwarding through slides. That’s never the style.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:10

Oh, yeah. You hear these stories and like, you know, I wish and I’m going to reach out to Ken as well and see, you know, if he’s open. I know he’s had some health issues but I would love to talk to him and Jeff, as well. So maybe let’s shift gears a little bit. I asked earlier about what was Jeff in all of this? I know, you all have your own companies, was he involved like it just as far as like checking in with you guys, or what was your relationship with Jeff? 

Speaker: Mike Cohn  14:48

Jeff wasn’t involved in the early days of the scrum Alliance, very early in Scrum, right, you know, first guy to really talk about Scrum and some of the old use net forums is where he was first posting about it. But he wasn’t really involved in the scrum Alliance, because he was kind of late to the game as an independent trainer, he was working as a CTO or VP of, he was working in the company called PatientKeeper. I think was that the company? I might be wrong in the name of the company but he was running a company as their CTO, essentially. And so he was not there, like training different companies and so he wasn’t as involved in that way. He wasn’t involved in founding the Alliance or creating their courses or anything like that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:36

You have written I believe seven books, starting back in ‘96, or something like that. How did you get into writing? 

Speaker: Mike Cohn  15:48

Yeah, I would say, my background is as a programmer, I was a C++ programmer, and I would post a lot on one of the Usenet forums helping people with, you know, how do I do this in C++? How do I do this? And so I just answered a lot of questions. And they’re just, you know, like, you might spend time on social media today, comp dot Lang dot C++ was the UseNet forum on C++. And I helped, I enjoyed it. And a book publisher noticed me posting a lot and said, “hey, I have an author who just bombed out on his book, he was supposed to meet the deadline hasn’t, you know, he’s written like four pages, do you want to take over the book?”, and it was a topic I was interested in, it was about database development using C++. And so I was asked to take over that book, did that and then I was very early maybe in ‘95, I was fairly early in the Java beta program. And same publisher said, you know, we want to come out with some books on Java, can you do some of those? And so I did three Java books in like ‘95 through ‘97, early days, early days of Java.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:00

What is your process? How do you write? Like, do you have a, you know, some people have a specific time of the day, what’s your process for writing?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  17:09

I tend to outline the book kind of one level down, I definitely list the chapters, I just have an outline of the chapters. And then I list the main points that I want to do in the chapter. And then often, I kind of start in the middle of the chapter, I’ll just kind of write what I want to want to say in the middle because for me, the hardest part is the introduction story into the chapter, how do I get into the topic. And so I tend to try to write part of the topic, and then I back up and do the beginning. For my books, what I’ve done is I’ve always worked in this very much, very much the Pomodoro approach now. And I remember talking to I think it was Francesco Cirillo, who came up with that, and he and I were doing something very similar, and he totally invented Pomodoro, but I was doing something identical, because I’d read a book about writers’ block, which I don’t really suffer from, but I worry “Oh, no, I’m not going to be able to do it”. And so I was doing essentially a Pomodoro type of technique right around when he came up with that, because I would have a glass timer, if you got one here, somewhere off his hips right over there. I’ve got a, like a sand timer, and it’s a 30 minute timer, and I turn the timer over. And while the timer is running, I write and my promise to myself is I will not stop, I won’t check social media, I won’t get bored and go get something to drink. I’ll just keep writing for 30 minutes. If it’s junk, I’ll throw it away. I don’t have to keep it but I’m going to stay focus for 30 minutes. Then what I like to do is I like to turn the timer, this works a little bit from a Pomodoro, if I’m on a roll, I’ll just turn the timer over and keep going for maybe two hours. But if I feel like I’ve worked for the 30 minutes, and I want to break, check my email, make a call something like that, I’ll stop the timer and do whatever I need to and then I’ll start another one. And I would just try to run a I just called the sprints, of course, right? I would just try to do those writing sprints, you know, trying to get like five or six a day and when I was really focused on a book.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:07

That’s really cool. In the sense you make a commitment to yourself, you don’t do if you turn that, you make a commitment. Interesting. I know you stopped traveling some years ago, at least I know I’ve reached out to you, I tried to get you to come to I think Maine once and to Europe, to Serbia, and obviously now COVID has changed the game and in many different aspects in our personal life obviously, in work environment, how has COVID impacted you and what you can do both, you know, personally as well as professionally?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  19:50

I still travel, not now, but I mean up until COVID hit I still was traveling so I just was kind of cut back and what I was doing is kind of cutting maybe like two trips a year. Kind of winding my schedule down instead of being on the road 30 weeks a year, let’s go to 28 to 26 to 24. So it’s kind of going down. And what I’ve learned with travel a long time ago was I had this theory that I had to travel to different cities because you know, somebody would want me in Minneapolis, right, but then I couldn’t come back to Minneapolis until demand had built back up. And what I learned is I was better off going to a smaller set of cities more frequently, because what would happen, I’d go to a city, people would, I think like the class, and then recommend it to their friends. But if I wasn’t coming back for six 9-12 months, the friend would go take from somebody else. So I was kind of compressing my schedule, and just going back to a smaller set of cities more frequently. And that was why I kind of cut down on some of the International stuff unless I was trying to build up a presence in an area, I really didn’t want to go there because I was going to go back four or five times, or go back multiple times a year, it just was impractical. What COVID did is, we were actually very lucky, we do the least twice a year, we were getting together in person, all the people in my company. And we would set big goals for the next year. And we had done a meeting in December of 2019 in Santa Barbara, California, and set our goals for 2020. And one of our goals was to do a non-certified course online and just see how that would go. 

Because I like the ability to deviate from some of the stuff that this rumblings mandates being a CSM course. And, you know, I mentioned earlier that I’m not just a scrum guy, I want to teach other techniques, and so we were starting to go down that direction I’d already had in January and February, I already had a couple of conversations with some university professors on how are you teaching online? What’s the best mix? How are you assessing whether your students are learning, what’s helping them learn? And so we had started to think about, we hadn’t really done much but have been rolling around in my head quite a bit by the time COVID hit. And so we were started down this path. And then when COVID hit or shut everything down in early March, we’re already a little bit planning for this. And so we switched our courses to where we do very much a hybrid model now where we do the live online stuff in zoom. 

But if you think about any course, there’s always a time when the teacher has to lecture, right? You know, taking a class on math, and it’s in calculus, you’re going to solve calculus problems but the teacher has to explain, you know, “hey, here’s how we do this. Here’s a do the next step”. And so what I had done in January and February, I recorded all of my classes, I wore a little mic while teaching, had all those transcribed, and then I was able to look at it and see where did I go five minutes, or longer lecturing. And I took all of those little five minute things and turned them into videos. And so our courses now are videos where all the boring lecture, I’ll call myself boring, or all the boring lecture is pulled off into video and you can watch that whenever you want. And then that lets the live parts just be, if they’re interactive, I mean, it’s all exercises, it’s all Q&A. So I talk a lot, but I’m not having to lecture, I’m responding to a question, right? Yeah. And so we did that. We also hired, I think, five trainers to deliver some of the courses. Because I’m really focused on using my time in a little bit more leveraged manner. And so I don’t want to be teaching all the time, it will be easy to fill up the courses with just me, but I didn’t want to do that nonstop.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:32

And have you been surprised by how well the online training has been received? Or you just kind of given the “you already tried that”,  I’m assuming the feedback is positive, because I think that’s what a lot of trainers, including myself are seeing.

Speaker: Mike Cohn  23:50

No, I’m not surprised because we were starting to experience that already. I had done something, I used to teach a course called Agile estimating and planning based on one of my books, and I would teach that in person. And then I moved it to be a pure video course with no live element, just video. And I did that, like eight or nine years ago. And when I did, I gave people a test at the end of that course, just a little optional test, you know, take this test if you want to help me out to see how my course is doing. And I gave it two out of four or five courses, four or five in person groups, and the first couple 100 through the videos. And the people watching video did better on the test than people in the live sessions. And so I’ve always believed in the power of that. And part of it is that in a video course, you can rewind, right? Something I didn’t get that I want to rewind or I lost attention, my dog walked in the room, I lost attention for a second let me rewind. And so it lets people rewind, it lets them rewind without having to ask the instructor, “can you explain that better? Can you say that again? I didn’t get that right”. People can get embarrassed by that. And so we were seeing better educational outcomes with the video courses. So when we move to having a hybrid live online plus videos, I fully expected to be able to do very well with it. And we put a big investment into our, we build a platform for doing exercises in the course. And so we put quite a bit of money into that over the last year. And so that’s really helped. But we’re seeing people enjoy the courses quite a bit. So I’m happy about it, not really surprised that it’s worked out, though.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:28

You’ve been a visionary, you’ve seen things before they come, at least that’s how I see it. What do you think? Is going to be the next five years? What is the balance between in-person versus online? What are your thoughts on what’s coming?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  25:48

I wish I could say that I’m visionary. I don’t know that I am, I think I’ve gotten lucky on a few different things. But you know, I’ve also been wrong about things. And those are not always the ones that people notice, right? Because you’re wrong, and you know, it just doesn’t stay. So I’ve been wrong about plenty of things. I think as soon as companies get the chance, they’re going to want people back in the office. And I think it’s really great the stuff that we can do with video. But you know, the Zoom fatigue thing is real. People do get tired of that. I mean, you know, as an example, you and I are making total eye contact right now, that’s not normal, right? That’s not normal, right? If we were in-person, you would know that I’m paying attention, but I might be looking off to the side, just kind of looking at something, right. And I noticed when I do that, I’ve kind of a nice view off to this side, this side is bathroom, this side is a nice view. And I’ll be in a meeting with my team, and I’ll look off to the side like this and I realize I’m being really rude, right? They think I’m being rude. They think I’m not paying attention, right? They think I’m watching TV or something, and I’m watching The Bachelor. And so I’ve had a couple of times in meeting, say, “I’m thinking, I’m listening to you, I’m thinking I’m just kind of staring off into space for a second”. And so I think companies are going to be very eager to get people back into face to face things. I do think all the predictions about it being a hybrid world are going to be true, right? We’re not necessarily going to make everybody come in every day. 

But I think companies are going to have people in, they’ll be there for two or three days a week instead of the five days a week. Instead of the core hours idea that’s been so popular, companies I think we’ll see more core days. Right? You know, your team is all here on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the other team is here on Thursday, Friday or something like that, right? So we’re not overfilling the office. And I’m not about COVID stuff, I’m about, you know, shrinking office space.  So you know, the offices will shrink, it’ll be a little bit more for the hot desking or Hoteling it’s called. And, but I think people are going to be back in there. In terms of like what we do with travel and stuff like this, I think a lot of companies have learned that the live online, the Zoom type classes work. We’re planning to do this, like I said, in December of 19, we said we were doing this anyway, right? So I know that we would have done it. It was a goal, would we have met our goal? I don’t know. In March we had to. But I think that’s going to continue. So I anticipate us having kind of a hybrid where we’re able to do some live online courses, and then some in person courses. That’s the future that we’re preparing for starting to think about, you’ll have some little like internal best, just me and some of my team like, okay, when will we hold the first event? And you know, when will we first be back on an airplane, right? So we’re taking over a few internal bets on where we think that’ll be.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:29

So what are you betting on? Like, when do you think we’ll go back? Months? Years?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  28:35

I think that will be just months. I think I could right now do an in-person course in August. I think we could announce one for August. And we’re in March as we do this, end of March, right? But I think it’s going to be August that I could do a course I don’t think we’re going to because the summer, but I think you know if we just look kind of chronologically, I think that would work out. And so I think we will probably do a class in September or October in person. And the reason why we put it off a little bit is you know, I can’t do a course tomorrow, maybe everybody’s healthy tomorrow, COVID vanished from the earth, I can’t do a course when nobody knows about it. Right? So you know, we have a month or two to promote the course, get the hotel, all that type of stuff. So I think we’re going to feel comfortable in May or June booking an event, putting it out into September, October. So I fully expect we’ll do something in-person this year.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:29

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I think a lot of people are looking to go back to some type of normal and I think that’s a good indicator that at least, you know, we’re moving in maybe in a better direction. What are your thoughts on the current state of agile, obviously with the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto a lot of things have changed, a lot of things have not changed, what are the things that you see, as far as the, you know, where Agile, Scrum and that whole movement that I believe, but you and your peers started, where is it in 2021?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  30:18

I think well, you know, I think the thing that we see that’s obvious is that Agile is moving outside of software development and IT projects right, and the whole business agility type of discussions. As we do that, I think we see a watering down of what it means to be agile. Because I think agile in a software development is, we’ve got pretty well figured out in terms of like, you know, here’s the type of stuff you got to do, it’s not easy to do, but we kind of know what you have to do to be agile, be flexible, to be nimble. And I think so, it’s a hard set of things to do. But to call ourselves an agile organization, what do we have to do? And I think a lot of companies just look at that as like, you know, be more responsive to customers than we used to be, be faster than we used to be,  more agile, and, you know, it just means be better to the, you know, businesses agility just mean to be better than we are. And it doesn’t mean a core set of things. And as we’ve gone in that direction, I wonder about some of the stuff that are in things like the scrum guide, and where the scrum guide has become less and less software focused, or even product focused over the years. And you know, that’s fine. I understand it, I probably would make the same decisions with that. But, man, I’m a software guy, right? 

We just talked about my first books were on software, my company name has software in the company name, and so I’m a software guy. And I think groups like the Project Management Institute, and I don’t want to put them down, this is what that’s about, but I think about the PMI and their project manager professional thing, right? They’re going to teach people how to manage any project in the world, right? I’m going to die happy if I know how to manage software projects well, right? I’m not that ambitious to manage every type of project in the world, right? I mean, I’ve been on a drive, and I’ll drive through a city where there’s a lot of construction going on,  airport is a really good example, when the airport is, you know, adding a new runway, and they have to close all the other stuff. And all the trucks have to go a different way. And I always look at that, and I am like, how do they figure that out? Right? How do they figure out where to route the trucks? And you know, I can’t visualize that stuff very well. And so I just want to perfect managing software projects, right? And when we see things like PMP, project managed professional, manage everything. Or we see agile going to be agile and everything, it’s like, wow, that’s awfully ambitious, I don’t know, I’m not up for that. I mean, I’ll help companies become more agile but that’s a really tough challenge. And it gets watered down sometimes, what agile means, gets watered down when we do that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:50

Yeah, I mean, someone said, you know, I talked about Scrum as being the recipe, and everybody wants to take that recipe, but they don’t have the ingredients. It’s challenging, but it’s interesting. I’m seeing there’s a company called Fornia, called Clark Pacific, that are applying lean and agile to construction. And they’re one of the biggest companies in Penang. Recently, I hosted the product owner just to share what they’re doing, and I think there’s a lot of benefit, although it’s not software development, but just the aspects of Agile principles, like visualizing, interaction, clarifying things, I think a lot of that could be applied in, you know, other industries. So it is more. 

Speaker: Mike Cohn  33:38

Yeah, absolutely. But here’s what happens. We applied in those other areas within a company, and then the software group sees that and says, “oh, that’s what Agile is”. And all of a sudden, the software group doesn’t have to go to the same extent that we’re talking about today, right? Because they see, “oh, that’s enough to call ourselves agile”. And so we water it down a little bit, not saying it’s bad, right, but we water it down, because it cannot be as rigid in things that are harder to change, right? Software, its software, it’s easy to change, right? When we go into construction, we have to water agile down a little bit, right? It cannot be, you know, a nightly build of your building, you’re not going to have those concepts. And so it gets watered down, software teams see that and then they water it down. All of a sudden, the software teams are not as agile as we might have pushed them to be today. So that’s the part that I worry about it as we broaden it out. I worry what it does to the software teams,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:29

Software teams. Yeah, that’s a really good point. I haven’t thought about it, you know, from that perspective, because in general it is good it’s getting, you know, broader, and people applying it, but it’s also getting watered down. What is your take on the scaling of agile? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak on that. It will be interesting to hear your thoughts on scaling.

Speaker: Mike Cohn  34:54

Yeah, it’s not my thing. You know, I think what happened is, I don’t know when it started, but it’s probably seven or eight years ago, people started to see consultants like me saw, “whoo, there’s money in bigger contracts, let me go after the big companies, what does the beer companies need? They need to know how to scale”. And so we started to see a proliferation of scaling frameworks. You know, “Ooh, there’s money there. Let me let me do this”. And some of them are good, they’ll have some good to them. But some of them are more empirical, right? They were derived from things that weren’t, others were created by somebody who sat around in a quiet room and said, “Hey, here’s what teams should do. 

Let me just make up some practices that I’ve seen, let me pretend they all go together”. And it’s just not my thing. One of the things that I feel very fortunate about is having been early into this, I get to pick and choose a little bit more who I work with, getting super selective whenever, never like desperate for work that I have to say yes to every client. And so I do a little bit more focused on software projects, right? I mean, I will help non-software teams, but a little bit more of my focus. And I’m much more interested in helping, I don’t want to say small projects, but I’m not interested in the 500 or 700 person project, because I look at that and go, you probably shouldn’t be that big, right. And so I like the projects that are more like 100 people or smaller, because I can go into those and I can make them dramatically better, I can go into a 700 person project and get them to the point where they’re as productive as a 100 person team would have been. And that’s not a very good place to be. Right. So I get much more interested  in kind of small scale stronger than large scale Scrum, like how can we help, you know, small sets of teams collaborate? So I definitely do stuff with scaling, but it’s more kind of scaling across 50 or 100 people,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:41

Or more like descaling right, rather than scaling?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  36:45

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, always want to see, you know, how much can we do with, you know, with fewer people? Right, you know, can we can we be better? And there are studies that show that we can I mean, there was one study, in particular by Doug Putnam that showed that the most productive teams were five people. And I don’t mean most productive per person, most productive. So a five person team was outperforming a seven or eight person team, again, not per person, but in total. And so what can we do to coordinate the work of a bunch of five person teams to get a lot of stuff done?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:19

Yeah, no. And I think that’s another thing that topic that’s being diluted, and there’s more scaling framework, there’s more approaches, everybody’s pushing for their own kind of recipe, and that’s creating a lot of chaos in organizations as well, because one of the things that I’m seeing is leaders are not educated or don’t have the time to learn, so they rely on consultants. But if we have a buy in, like, this is why I’m recommending this framework, which is that framework, they blindly go with what somebody recommends, rather than understanding it.

Speaker: Mike Cohn  37:56

Well, it leads to methodology worship. And this kind of fits in with something that again, Mr. Ivan Jacobsen is doing, he is the inventor of use cases originally, and does essence these days, kind of approach to communicating about agility is how I describe it. And he has a bunch of talks that he calls, I think they’re called free the practices, basically get rid of all the methodologies, there’s just a collection of practices and go assemble them the way you want to do. 

And that’s very aligned to how I’ve talked about agile for probably a decade, I remember giving a keynote talk at a conference about a decade ago and talked about how I wanted to kind of make a list of all the practices out there, and then you know, just pictures, a whole bunch of practice and then circle that these 20 and say, that’s what you do, if you’re scaling, circle these 20, that’s what you do, if your pharmaceutical company, circle these 12, that’s for you if you are a game studio. And so I was kind of looking to use their term patterns a moment ago, right? I want to figure out all those practices. And then certain groupings are good if you’re this type of company, or that type of company, and we shouldn’t all be doing the same thing, right? We don’t want everybody in the world doing the exact same methodology or process.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:02

Exactly. But there is, there’s so much demand for like, that’s why, you know, certain frameworks are more popular than others, because, hey, it creates sense of safety, I can just change some things and you know, make it look like we’re doing Agile. There’s a lot of focus on doing Agile versus being agile. What are the things that you do for instance, when you go in when you’re coaching or consulting, to help leaders understand the importance of them understanding these things, don’t just rely on consultants? I call it like, someone’s like bringing in a chef, to tell you what to do but your ingredients keeps changing. So eventually, you’re going to develop your own chef’s right, or cooks. You know, you can’t just rely on recipes. 

Speaker: Mike Cohn  39:49

One of the things that I do with executives is I try to scare them, I try to make them, I try to explain how hard Agile is going to be, right? Everybody goes and wants to sell the benefits and what I have learned that works really well with kind of executive audience is to go in and just tell them, you know, agile is great, you’re going to get some benefits, I’ll start with those. But then I start to talk about all the hard things they’re going to do, and tell them why they’re not up for it, you know, you’d have to do this, and you know, that’s going to be really hard in your culture, you’re not going to be able to do this, and you know, it’s going to be tough. I’m not sure if you can do this here, I’m not sure if you really want to commit to this. 

And what I find when I do that, is if they argue back with me and say, No, we are willing to do that. Now. I’ve got them hooked, and they’re willing to make the hard change. But if I just go out there and say, look, you’re probably not going to be committed to this. I don’t know that I would do this if I were you. If they go, Yeah, you’re right. I just saved them a ton of money with a failed transition, right? And, you know, heartbreak and loss of time and all sorts of stuff. And here’s why I started doing that. I started thinking about some movie I was watching but it was typical, like romantic comedy movies, you know, romance, and I don’t remember who it was. But you know, the girl breaks up with the guy, the guy was going to break up with the girl anyway, but as soon as she breaks up with him, now he wants her. You know? And I mean, yeah, that’s just that’s just like human nature. You dumped me now, I want you back. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:15

I know that from a personal experience.

Speaker: Mike Cohn  41:19

But I think we all can relate to it to some extent, right? And so it’s the same thing with agile. You go in and you tell the company why you know, you’re not right for agile. If they start arguing, yes, they are. Okay, now you’ve got one where it’s going to be successful. And they’re going to do the hard work, they’re going to do what needs to be done to make the change. I’m not just going to, “oh, let’s just hire some consultants, and all of a sudden, we’ll be agile, we don’t have to do anything, they’re agile. No, you got to do stuff, too. And here’s the hard things you have to do.”

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:49

Yeah, and I think I spoke with Dave Snowden two weeks ago, I think. And we talked about like big consulting companies, and you know, them coming in selling the playbooks they’re doing. And I asked him, you know, he’s been around for a while too. And like, you know, what his thoughts were on the big consulting companies. We saw, you know, what’s happening with Agile companies, and everybody wants to now jump on the Agile and Scrum bandwagon, what are your thoughts as far as like, what is the future of consulting coaching? Do you think it’s going to be more of smaller companies partnering? Or do you think that the big consulting companies will keep doing what they’re doing?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  42:37

Oh, I think there’ll always be room for independent consultants, boutique consultancies. That’s never going to go away. But what I think will go away, and I to some extent, hope goes away, is the emphasis on agile, right? I mean, you know, at some point, we just want this to be what people do. We don’t have to keep harping on being agile, of course, we should be agile, right? You know, imagine, you know, your whole thing is, you’re a consultant and you tell companies, they have to be profitable, you need to make a profit, right? You’re like, yeah, of course we do. Right? And so I want Agile to get into that category. We’re saying, you got to be agile, like, yeah, of course. Right? We’re working on that. And so at that point, I don’t think anybody’s going to be making any significant money from agile, whether they’re, you know, a big consultancy, you know, Bain, 

Boston, anybody like that Accenture, or if they’re, you know, small companies, like minor independent consultants, there’s got to be money in helping somebody be agile, it’s going to be like, of course, and we have 300 people who’ve been agile before, right? You know, we’ve hired over the last 10 years, 300 people that from various companies, we know how to be agile. And so always be kind of a cultural fight, you know, you’re always going to be fighting to be more profitable, you’re always going to be fighting to be more agile, but you’re not going to be bringing in consultants just for that. So I think that’s going to, I mean, I don’t even think that I know that, that’s not even a guess that’s a guarantee, right? How many people are out there right now making money teaching object oriented design, right? Compared to how many there were in the 90s, right? You know, it’s going to go away. There will be some there’s always some need for some of that but I don’t think it just gets swallowed up by big, I think it just gets, it just becomes how we do things at some point. Yeah, I know soon that happens.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:17

That’s why I started this and I called it agile to agility, because the agility is the goal, right? It just means to the end, or means to an end. Great. What are your thoughts around culture? Like a lot of times, you know, we’ve talked about culture and mindset or about being agile. How do you define culture? And is culture something that you change? Or do you think it’s something that’s more like a shadow or reflection of something?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  44:57

I mean, I think we’re playing semantic games when I say it this way, I don’t know that we can change culture, but we can evolve culture, right? You know, I can decide to go keto tomorrow, and all of a sudden, I’m just eating protein, right? I mean, that’s the change and I can do that overnight. I can’t decide, Okay, tomorrow, I’m agile. I’m a big company tomorrow, I’m agile, right? But I can evolve my culture, as a big company, a small company, I can evolve the culture. And so you know, that’s kind of your point about, you know, moving from Agile to agility. And so I can evolve the culture to be amenable to agile, I don’t think I can go in and just, no company, no consultant can just go in and just change it. It has to be a longer term commitment, it has to evolve over years, even to really get to where we want to be. I don’t know exactly how I would define culture, my initial thought on this probably from somewhere else is that it’s kind of like how people in that company behave when they’re not getting evaluated on it, or watched or something like that, you know, is our culture customer-centric? And will I do the right thing for our customers, even my boss will never know, I did the right thing for the customer? 

As a little example, that we had a, my wife and I bought a new dishwasher and we had it installed, took months to get it and the guy came out, installed it and took a couple hours, got the thing installed. And then that night, it wouldn’t start. He started it as a test, showed my wife how to start it, and then that night, we went to start the thing and it wouldn’t start and it’s like 630 at night. And we call the appliance store just expecting leave a message, we got the salesperson, not the one who sold it to us. And he came out to our house that night, he came out to our house and fixed it and his boss unless we tell his boss was never going to know that. I mean, he just you know, so you guys are on my way home, I live in that city, and we’re about 10 miles from the store. And he stopped on his way home and fix that. I made sure to, you know, send something to the company letting them know, but that guy did the right thing with no expectation that his boss, would ever know. That’s an amazing culture, right? When you can say you are customer-centric, whatever, but that’s a company that was living it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:05

So yeah, that’s a really good example. And you know that I mean, we’ve all experienced that type of either you’ve done it or somebody has done it at some point in your life where you know that they’re really looking for your best interest, and they want to make sure that you’re satisfied as a customer. And those types of cultures and organization, are the one that is I think that resilient and that key people and people want to be there. I mean, you know, you’re familiar with the numbers as far as how many people are disengaged at work? And, you know, they’re very high. So when it comes to mindset, how, you know, we talk also in Agile communities, change the mindset, change the culture, what are your thoughts on mindset, similar to culture? Because I see those as being agile more than doing our job?

Speaker: Mike Cohn  47:57

Yeah, I think the mindset is what drives the culture, they go hand in hand, right? You have to have the right mindset; the right mindset, the right values to create the culture. So I think that culture comes as a result of having the proper mindset. And I think one of the things I encounter with that is a lot of times, it comes again, it comes from the values, but it’s like, we value predictability over all else, right. And so I see a lot of estimating problems, wrote a book on it, right. And so it’d be, you know, a company that values predictability over all else, while they’re going to be predictable by going slow. Right. You know, you and I scheduled a webinar or interview here and, you know, if I’d asked you how long and you said, “well, I want to be safe, let me tell Mike six hours, right?” Well, we’ll go on the phone for less than six hours, right? That would have been really safe. I can’t imagine you interviewing anybody for six hours, right? And you’d have 100% success rate, right? You know, versus if you told people half hours like, “Okay, sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t”. And so the companies that value that predictability, people are going to behave that way, they’re going to give padded big estimates. And it creates a culture where we don’t be honest, a culture where we don’t trust each other. And that leads to all sorts of problems on teams. So I think it’s values to mindset to culture.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:13

Yeah, that’s how I see it too. And that’s important. And I think the Agile community, and Scrum community are getting more of that. And I’m seeing that more in trainings, more in coaching, and I feel like that that’s the next step where we need to better understand as a community and help the clients

Speaker: Mike Cohn  49:32

It’s an interesting situation. It goes back to our very early discussion, we’re talking about the beginnings of Agile. I remember the early agile conferences, there’s about like 2003, four or five. There was a lot of what I considered Karate Kid conversations, right? Can you be agile, if you just do the practices? You don’t know the values of agile, but you do daily stand ups, you integrate often, you test like crazy, do all these things, can you be agile? That’d be a you know wax on type of thing, right? I’m just going through the motions. And there were arguments, can you learn to be agile if you just go through the motions long enough, right? And I know those debates, I don’t hear them anymore but I mean, every conference you would go to early days, that values versus practices, principles versus practices, huge conversation, huge debate at every agile conference.