Mike Dwyer

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:38

Who is Speaker: Mike Dwyer? Let’s start with that. 

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  00:42

Who is Mike Dywer? It’s a really good question, I’ve been asked a lot. My daughter wants to know, my new doctor wants to know, but let me tell you who I think, I have been doing the same thing for as long as I can remember. I’m an independent thinker, I believe looking at the left [unclear phrase 1:02] and choosing the path that I think I fiddle to best. What does that mean? Well, first of all, who is Speaker: Mike Dwyer is for, as technology. I’m not a technologist, my undergraduate degrees in psychology and geography, I have a business, an MBA, I used to dig graves, and I worked in a factory. And I will tell you something, you learn more about how people work when you work with people. The amazing thing I found out working in factories, is they chose the leader, I may have been the boss, they chose the leader. And the challenge that I learned was how to become that leader and still remain the boss. I then this, this is a funny true story, I am sitting in a, you know, I worked for two companies, Fisher Price I worked for Parker Brothers, you probably heard Fisher Price toys, and you’ve heard Parker Brothers. It’s a great place to do but I’ll tell you something as a killer market, you have between February 14 and April 1st, to ramp up production to make the money to pay for next year, okay? So talk about fast cycle, talk about iterative work. Now, when you’re on the production side of it, it was let’s all work out, that’s not the case. It’s living chaos, taking this paper plan and making machines run that way. How do you do that? Well, you don’t do that, the people doing the work, what I learned, most importantly, working in factories as an industrial engineer and manufacturing managers, like I do on the job for eight hours a day knows more about the job than you will ever know. So asking questions became a big part of my life. So here I am at Parker Brothers and somebody says, Oh, there’s this guy up at Wang laboratories. Oh, I know him and I call them up said Hey, what are you doing? He says, Hey, Mike, good to hear from you, I’m building a manufacturing management control system. I said, How can you do that you’ve never been on a manufacturing floor? Well, you’re such a smart blankety blank, blank, why don’t you come here and help us? Somebody just might do that. So, I mean, I had a well-planned career path, now, it was an opportunity to keep on working better. Just prior to that, I had also been in academia, and was also fascinated with how people work with each other inside new environments. I got out of that because, can you imagine spending your entire life work being valued by some sophomore desperately trying to get B in psychology? That wasn’t for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:05

What got you interested in psychology, though? Like maybe just to get that side of it

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  04:10

I was very interested in how people work together, what causes them to come together, you know, what gets into the formalization of group? How you move from a casual acquaintance or a pop up? How you move from that into some sort of informal working thing. What are the sticky points, the glues, the connection points, and how does that progress into a formal focused environment and then how does it mature into a bureaucracy? I was interested in it from the individuals perspective, not from the group’s perspective. I was very fortunate to go to a university that had some really great professors, and I had one professor, Dr. Wagner, who when I was graduating, he says, “I want you back here next year. Here’s your research grant”. And I understood, I said I wanted to be a professor, nobody want to realize that the collegial environment, that one thinks is in an academic situation is pure hokum. It is no rules, and I just said, you know, I want to do something. And then, you know, 45 years later, I’m sitting listening to my daughter, who said, getting her master’s in education from Harvard, telling the Dean of the Graduate School of Education, Sir, I don’t want to get the doctorate. I want to be the person somebody raised their doctorate about. And he said, you know, it’s really good to have children that are smarter than you. So, I got to Wang and I found myself at home. Wang R&D was probably the most exciting place to work. We had a reputation inside the of the [unclear word 6:20] community and inside the profession of being a place where we could do anything that struck our minds. And it was one of those senior officers of the company once said about R&D is, “ you know, you’re not going to get them to do what you want them to do. They’re going to do something and you figure out, can you use it in the product, or are you going to take patent and license to somebody else?” So I mean, imagine not having to grow up with Sure, for 10 years, but that that went away, and I had to go back and act like an adult. And what I found out is that if you focus on how to get people to work together towards a goal, you can attain anything. So your job as a manager, is to lead the people in that direction, while providing all the hokum, the paperwork, the PAP, policies and procedures, that gives them that buffer points. I delivered several projects, and was thoroughly eviscerated by the PMO. The only thing that saved me is that in one case, we saved the company from a $6 million lawsuit, we did in three weeks. And another case, another team goes under the thumb, really under the thumb, the PMO had a product rolled in massively, massively fail. It was supposed to be the new flagship, and it just turned turtle. So I came to them and said, “guys you have got to get a team, we can get a team”. So we can only have a conference room, one day a week”, I said, “okay, there’s six of us here. Everybody sign up one day for the same conference room. And you do that until you’re done”. And they turned around six weeks. So I was constantly in a battle with the PMO. And for the most part, I was successful, which of course, raises no ire with the establishment, so I learned from that. You can’t want to be loved, you got to want to be respected. And that brings us to Ken.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:50

Oh, yeah. How did you meet Ken? Ken Schwarber.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  08:54

All right. First time I met Ken Schwarber, he was in a conference room next to me explaining to a senior vice president of IT, “I can’t give you a delivery date, you keep on changing the requirements”. I said, “oh, I got to know this guy”. I also met him in a class, his company was running a project management scenario simulation. And there are about 40 side people, teams of five sounds familiar, and this was in the 90s. And we were given scenarios to deal with and that would produce a little PDP one. And there’s this little guy with short hair in the corner doing this. And we won because the last question you’re your senior hub developer has just given notice usually in two weeks, the project isn’t critical past what do you do? Well, the options were, bring somebody else new who could do that in two weeks, trust this guy, or ask for an extension and take the hit for that. So we went off and I said, “Look, guys, we’re dead in the water. We ask for extension, we’re dead. We bring a new guy, we’re dead. If we’re going to die, let’s go somebody else with the door, let’s trust them”. And we did and we were the only team could be successful. So that’s how far back Ken’s mindset was. Now, fast forward 2002-2003, and I’m not going into Softroll. Softroll was a very interesting company that doesn’t exist anymore. It was nerd heaven.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:37

What was it like in Burlington right or so?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  10:39

Right, Burlington, Burlington mall in Massachusetts, it was a strip mall, not a big mall, little strip mall behind there. And it was a bookstore, you walked in, and it had dozens of copies of every book you never want to ever read but you had to. In the corner, they had this little conversation pit, if you want to call it that, and I hear this voice. I know the voice of from somewhere.  The man comes through and it is Ken Schwarber and he’s talking about something called Scrum. Scrum? And I sat down, I listened to him, and I said to him, I know you. And he looked and said yeah. I know you and I want to learn more. So I went over, I bought the coloring book, and that was the beginning of it. That was beginning but I think that was also the beginning of my involvement with the scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance because agile New England, which we both know… 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:50

Yeah. Agile Bizarre.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  11:52

…was once called the Agile bizarre. And the scrum Alliance website was also called control chaos. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:00

I didn’t know that one. 

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  12:02

Oh, yeah. What control chaos was Ken’s website, and his motto at that time, “it’s all common sense”. Okay, and so we started saying, where’s that on periodic table, and the joke that was worse, the rarest element in the world. And we just had a wonderful time with it. But it was all about common sense.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:24

It still is today, right, about common sense? And a lot of times the over…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  12:28

It’s buried a lot inside the lingo, but it’s still there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:35

Where do you think maybe just to stick on Ken and Jeff, what do you think they got their ideas? I mean, I think a lot of us know, and, but I want to get your perspective on, what do you think Ken and  Jeff got their ideas for Scrum?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  12:49

Well, there used to be Usenet group for small talk. And while I was working as a government contractor in the day and someone told me about this numbers. I was down in Cambridge in Kendall Square, straighten them right in the middle look, standing behind the guys from Lotus get lunch and the thing and listen to all this stuff. And slight can kind of worked inside the Usenet group and the small talk, and they were talking about, you know, “screw this stuff about all these project plans. We got to get this done and that done. And how do we smoke it? Blah blah”.  And there’s talking about the small tight work and it was all about test first, test first.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:42

Yeah, these are probably the XP guys or…? 

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  13:45

Oh, no, this was yeah, it was the XP it was Ward, it was Jeff, it was…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:54

I mean, I spoke to Ken…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  13:58

It was Martin. Okay. And it was all about heavy duty hard, hard ball coding, to get the work done. And it all boil down to,  they don’t know what the heck they want, they mean business. And that led to the whole test first model. Okay, and it led to some really great work and testing, the whole test first, exploratory testing. But that’s where the energy started. And the Agile Manifesto, most of the guys that came there can believe we’re on small talk. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:46

What do you think as far as like, you know, I want to get your thoughts on, you know, XP, was probably a one-time more popular than Scrum and had the bigger maybe  movement and then probably Ken and Jeff, specifically with Ken, you know, with Scrum alliance, that kind of propelled and it was almost like a market I don’t know? Definitely scrum became what people associated with Agile. What are your thoughts on just how XP and Scrum evolved and how scrum became the, what people associated with Agile?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  15:30

Oh, I’m going to give my personal opinion. I never did a project without XP. Even before I knew it was called XP, my technical proficiency is in testing at the enterprise level. Okay. Amazing, when it gets to unit testing, okay, I’m okay. But if you give me an enterprise level testing with layers and layers of stuff, I’m happy to do it. It’s got enough to keep me interested. But, at all levels, it becomes what’s the expected outcome? And then what are the parameters around that outcome? And I totally buy into and I totally support Jeff and Warden in XP, if you talk with Chad, he will tell you that the way he builds a product is first get the functionality to work. If the customer wants two plus two to add to three, figure out how to do that, get customers sign up that is what he wants, and then go back and refine it, you know, the other parameters. Okay, lines of code, and you’re hammered out and then you laminate, the layer, you stratify. And then you can slip back forth integrate that. That’s the essence of writing good code. I love my conversations to Ron. Okay, but we just disagree. We disagree on…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:04

Ron Jeffries, right?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  17:08

I think that he helped me explain to myself and to others where I was. And I think at times I helped him understand the difference. I mean, but Ron is adamant about the fact that this is about writing good code, it’s a software model. And I’m not sure that, I think we need to take extract the value of XP and the logic flow of XP, and make sure we implemented in other environments. Okay, so yeah, hats off to Ward and Ron, and Bob Martin. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:58

Yeah. Or Ken either. I mean, like…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  18:02

Well, not and, Ken made that happen. Because he, and in my opinion, he and Jeff at IDEX…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:13

No, I mean, Ken Bach. But Ken, and maybe to come back to Ken Schreiber, you took his first or one of the first classes that’s from the line

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  18:24

I think it was the first or second public class? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:27

Yeah. What was that like?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  18:30

I think anybody took one of his original classes and play the George Tabor game, still is traumatized. And still the problem you’re dealing with unreasonable illogical product owners or business that wants you to figure out how to make them happy. And you have to learn how to say yes, no, and I don’t understand. And he did it so well. I mean, of all the and I, you know, my trainings and coaching is all about simulations, but I learned a lot, just those two days and I had a lot of fun. And that led to a relationship with Ken and with Jeff that I still cherish today

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:35

It’s crazy, that small area outside of Boston and be like that, you know, used to drive through Lexington and that area from Rhode Island going up to Maine from college. And it’s interesting, you know, Burlington is by that way to, you know, by 95 and all that so it’s… But maybe to move from Massachusetts to Colorado, the first Scrum meeting in Boulderado. What was that like? Because I get stories from people, so what’s your memory of…?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  20:10

Okay, so I’m sitting at home. My company, three sided coin is floundering, which was the middle of the “.com bust”. I had had two small contracts, none of which to do with software. And I get this, this email says you’re invited to the scrum gathering in Boulder. Okay, so I check in, okay fine. Then I said, “I’m not comfortable with too many people”, and he said, “no it’s only going to be I think 50 or 60”, maybe it was 30. I get there, and there’s Ken and Mike and Esther. And they’ve got other people there too, and everybody’s doing their spiel. And there’s this energy about where we’re going with this thing. And Ken is pulling and pushing and why because you’re pulling and pushing. And to be honest with you, I was more aligned with Esther.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:21

What was her take on this?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  21:24

The importance of retrospectives. Okay, how do we plot where we are and data where we want to be? What’s the next small tack we take in our course. And I have always had a soft part for the pain, that’s you can flip that. But there was a lot of energy, there was a lot of enthusiasm. Oh, I don’t remember too many things other than sitting in front of Ron Jeffries and looking at him and saying, “you know something, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing [inaudible 22:16]. Well see, here’s part of Ken, he knows people that add value and he knew Ron added value, so did Allister. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:32

So he had that the neck for like understanding like, essentially, looking ahead, understanding who can help with his vision, because it is clear to me now, that in some ways Ken had an idea and vision because I don’t think, maybe this is something that I want to get your opinion on, do you think that Scrum and Agile would be where it is today without Ken? Like if you take Ken out of the… 

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  23:02

No, I don’t think so and I’ll tell you why. When the Agile Alliance began, Ken was a plank owner. The Agile alliances was pretty amorphous, pretty passive, I guess the term, they wanted to be very much let it generate itself and let it go out freely to the people. Ken, I think believed in all that but also Ken saw the need to have some sort of statement, some sort of mark about agility that you could measure? He also wanted to make money. I don’t blame him for that, right? I mean, if you can do this all on goodwill, then you’ll send me a donation. So in the end of the first agile Conference, which I forgot where that was, was this meeting, he contacted a bunch of ….

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:11

Wasn’t it like somewhere in Europe? I thought the first, no?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  24:19

I’m talking about the split between the scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. I remember walking…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:25

This is where Mike, Esther, and Ken kind of had some type of conversation or something like that, right?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  24:35

Well, they had a conversation and they called a bunch of people together and said we’re going to start the scrum Alliance as part of the Agile Alliance. And I was like…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:44

And Mike was saying, when I interviewed Mike Cohn, he was saying like, in a sense, it was really like somebody else from I can’t recall the guy from Canada that almost started as an incubator inside Agile Alliance, but then morphed into something you know, the Scrum Alliance.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  25:00

And I don’t remember that. Okay? Because I was more interested in listening to, again, how the Agile Alliance was talking about people working together. And what was missing was how individuals work with each other. Okay? They were going, I felt the Agile lunch is going a very soft direction, and from my experience, inside industry and business, I realized that there’s a lens of focus that has to be to that interaction pattern. And that’s why I chose more strongly involved in the scrum Alliance.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:45

That makes sense, that’s really interesting. And like, every time I speak to somebody that’s been involved in that, I get the, you know, better and better picture of what was going on. Maybe, to talk about a couple of funny things that I’ve heard you say before but like scrum master as a sheep dog, could you talk about that and share that?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  26:13

So we’re talking about how the scrum master was somebody was supposed to protect the team. So I’m going to lay this on Mr. Cohen. Mr. Cohen, came in and walked up to Mr. Schwarber, and went “woof, woof, (sniff sniff)” and that was a secret greeting between Scrum Masters. We were sheep dogs, and we all have to know who we were, “woof woof sniff sniff”. And it got to be funny. Yeah. Periodically, we’ll remind each other that there were “woof woof sniff sniff” in a comment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:00

What about the another one that I like, I’ve heard you say when we spoke in the past, in relation to scaling. Small scrum people and big scrum people.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  27:16

Yeah. And this is a bit of an axe of mine, I guess. And I’ll ask you this, how many small team situations have you gone into coach and they see your success and go, “oh, wow, we want more?” Did you ever not have that happen?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:35

Always, or more often than not.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  27:37

Okay, so here we are wildly successful. And even with Scrum initiative mapping, in my own experience, I was brought into contract with a small company that was doing incredibly valuable work with ill people. And the board was going to shut down because it couldn’t control the right team process, they couldn’t meet the customers’ needs. So I got brought in by a friend who just met vice president of development. He said, “Mike I just made, I was just promoted and offered the job of Vice President of Development is blah, blah”. I said, “ oh, congratulations”. He says, “I’m not going to take it unless you come”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:23

Let’s, yeah, yeah,

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  28:27

I went there. And president of the company couldn’t stand me. And the reason is, he was the biggest disrupter of all, every time a customer called up a big problem, he would take an old hand cranked siren, walk out in the middle of development. And every player said to my buddy, “we can’t stop this”. I said, “we are going to stop this, let me try”. I walked in and said,  “I think you’re a genius”, to the president. You built this out of nothing, no funding, is what we’re calling like rock and roll. So I’m going to totally hear to your principal that when you bring up that air raid siren, we’re going to shut everything down. We’re going to rearrange, just do that and drop everything else”. And his eyes got about this big. He said “what?”. So well, I mean, “you’re the visionary. We can’t do all these things we’re going to do them all half as bad. So whenever you do that, I promise you, we will drop on that and that’s [inaudible 29:32]”. He looked at the buddy, “is he serious?” “Oh yeah”. He did that the last place we worked. I got control of the development teams and they grew sixfold in 18 months and when they were acquired, one of the reasons they were acquired is they couldn’t believe that they could keep this development staff the same size, and increase their market share, and their volume and have high customer satisfaction. So I went to the other company and they couldn’t do it. I was there five, I said I stay six weeks, I was here four and a half years and I left. So it’s all about management’s trust in you, and their agreement that if you screw up, you’re dead. Which is one of my axioms for coaching and Scrum and Agile is, we have great freedom, right? We are free of the one create anxiety help people who were careless, I’m going to get fired. Because we know something. We’re not going to be here forever. That’s, liberating. Think about it. I did do things that nobody else could do because you can’t fire me. Okay, I’m here because you need help, I’m going to give you the help. They don’t like it, I was looking for a job when I found this one.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:17

It is very interesting, because that feeling is liberating. And it’s also like as, especially as a change agent if you’re coming in or helping organization to have that mentality. And I think that same mentality can happen with people that are internal employees. Like we sometimes feel like, especially for Scrum Masters in like any type of chain, everybody should have that type of mentality where like, I don’t know who said it, but like, you know, the scrum master should always be at risk of getting fired because you’re pushing…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  31:56

I had senior managers that, “I would never let an employee do this. You’re successful, but…”, so what you’re saying is you would forego having success because you are wanting an employee to do this, why? And they would look at me and say, “what do you mean why?”. I said, “you met your goals, just kept on your budget, your employee numbers are good, your turnover rates down, you’re rocking it, product marketing is afraid of you, product development can’t wait to get a hold of you. They can’t feed you enough stuff that you’re doing. And you try to get rid of the guy that I’m trying to make that happen”,  “get out of my office, you make making too much sense”. But you know, I don’t expect other coaches and trainers to be the same as I am. Why? Because I would rather be true to the goal than have an allegiance to somebody that doesn’t or can’t or won’t make that call.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:13

So you speak as you like, you’re still doing this, and I thought you’re retired. So…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  33:22

I am. I have actually planted my first turn my wife. And I got all those whales to stand up straight. I gave them all the support they need and they’re blooming.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:38

So how does it feel? I mean, like, and what are some of the thoughts when you look at, you know, kind of your past experiences and you know, what we’ve discussed here, and then when you look at our community, and just in general the movement, where it’s going, what comes through your mind?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  33:58

First of all, I don’t think the struggle for us to be here today, if Howard was not the chief product.  He embodies in my mind what we need to help companies understand they have to have on board with them. Maybe not as CEO but as maybe master the ship. Secondly, the scrum alliance that I was part of has morphed, it’s no longer concerned with delivering an outcome in a specific time increment. We used to argue, almost had jihadist arguments about definition of duck. But not they’re not happening. Is that because we decided it’s too hard? Or that It’s not our purview anymore. So, we’re more into a soft statement about Scrum than we were in the past. And I think that’s probably due to a shift in the industry. We’re away from mostly hard coders, the Martins, the Henderson’s, the Becks, the Cunningham’s, and we’re into people that are using these development tools, okay, now, I am old school. Okay, given a choice of learning some new language, who are dicing up what’s going on the registers, I hope choose the registers. I definitely have no trust in anybody who writes the language. Okay, as a professional tester, my first job was understanding how the language was put together and how it makes itself to understand where to go poke holes. So I think the movement is moving in that direction, I am not sure that I could work in a distributed environment because I need to read people in a group. And here’s why, over the years, I’ve developed a couple of techniques, one of which is the simulation I use, which is basically a two phase; one is the Kobayashi Maru, no matter what you do, you will fail. And then it’s fun, I mean, at any level, I’ve done it with kindergarteners all the way up through executives, and PhDs. First, the first thing, the first round, everybody blows one way or another, and then the power, the retro. And I also reminded you…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:04

To learn, inspect and adapt.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  37:07

The more important thing is I say, No, you failed. Okay, so get rid of that axe, you failed, okay, you blew it, you spent too much time, you didn’t deliver enough, you deliver the wrong stuff, okay? Or you gain the situation, but you fail. But here’s why you failed, you didn’t listen to each other? How are you going to do this better? So I made those I said, “okay, so what do you do different?” So we put a box, so why don’t you ask these different teams, what they did and what they saw you doing? And sort of talk to him said okay, now I understand conversation. The question is, how do you get better? It is, you will not fail if you get better. That’s how you will…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:58

It is also making it okay. Make it okay to fail, and the failure is okay, that you are learning right and acknowledging that in that instance, or that simulation that you’re talking about, it’s almost giving them permission that, “hey, it’s okay”.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  38:12

More than giving them permission, telling them that failure, small failures lead to big successes fast. Okay? And then we put a second round, and I get to play more with the dynamics of the people. I was at a seminar once and I learned a really cool trick. You know, you’ve had Scrum masters for people and projects, and they’re just so excited and getting it done. And they start talking and talking and they suck up all the air. So I learned this technique I worked on Similan [unclear word 38:46], you’ve got to learn [unclear word 38:48] your doctor just called you can’t talk. Okay, the only thing you could do is nod your head like this, or like this with your team members. But you got to get this done team, figure it out. Guess what comes out of the ideas, the team is more than happy to sit back and wait for you to kind of do it. No, then it’s your fault for not making it right? Ah, but now the teams have got to step up and you have to listen. And all of a sudden better ideas coming. But then I explained to the Scrum Master, here’s the problem, when you do that, you lay yourself open to be criticized. It isn’t us it’s you. Don’t do that and embrace it, “wow, that makes total sense’. So those are a couple of things that I learned because remember my focus initially was on the individual interacting with a team and how to improve not just the individual but the team. And all this comes back to listening.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:07

Listening and probably empathizing too. Trying to understand and maybe to come to this back to, you know, like, where do you see like, for instance, maybe to come back to scaling, or to talk about scaling frameworks, to like these different frameworks and methods, do you see scrum still kind of being pro dominant? Do you see like, people just trying to adopt and contextualize things like, what is your thought like, you know, maybe for I’m sure, some of the people from our community will be listening to this as a reflection back on what you’ve done, maybe what are your thoughts as far as what should our community or community members be focused on? And where are we going from your perspective, given that you’re now outside, or maybe looking a little bit from the outside? 

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  41:04

No, I haven’t given up my license. I’m on sabbatical.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:09

But are you still monitoring some of the discussions?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  41:15

I’m not going to say yes or no. I will tell you this, I am taking time off. Will you just interject this, a lot of people listen to this conversation are going to be trainers and coaches. And they’re going to be fully involved like 25,000%. You can’t do it, I’m a proof of this. The last five years I work from 15 to 20, or actually 15 days, the last three years. I have lost my spark, my body was yelling at me. It took me two years to get my doctor to get off my back. You know, this is not a healthy lifestyle. Not when you’re traveling 48 weeks a year. This is not a healthy lifestyle, dealing with all the pressures we have. So make some moderation there. The other thing is, understand why you’re in it. If you’re in it for the money, you’re in a death spiral that we were at $1,400 a seat, you’re now down to 400 a seat, alright? We were highly interactive, face to face, and now you’re mostly distributed looking at a screen. There’s a chemistry part of the interaction. I’ll tell you one of the things I learned was I had a very interesting roommate when I was doing my research. He was a biochemist. And we’re talking about reactions, he went phenols. What are you talking about phenols? He said phenom is have a direct impact on how we interact with each other. You mean how I smell? Yeah. And I haven’t really delved into that, because I cannot memorize all these big long words. But that’s one thing I don’t think I want to do or could do. When you feel like you’re mailing at home, put away the postage stamps, take some time off, right? We have to find a way to get people to want to work towards goal. No, I think one of the things that I’m concerned about in the scrum Alliance, and in all coaching is that we are not coaching people to forge the tip of the spear to make progress, we’re not finding ways to get people to buy into this. And that’s because we focus too much on leadership. Let’s face it, a leader does not exist unless there’s somebody following them. And rank does not equate to respect. One of the things that I think we need to do as agile, as scrum and Pisco is put power back into the team member understand they are the ones that do the work, and as product owner is there to help them understand what the customers change their mind to, and the scrum master is there to protect them and to encourage them and listen to them, support them, in voicing their opinions towards that goal. I think that we’re going to a great extent we have lost that. We’re trying to make people feel good about themselves, it’s not something we do in business. How many days a week you feel really wonderful, whatever you’ve done, right? So you think you’re different than anybody else, so our job is to take goofy people and help them figure there’s going to be the up days, the down days, and then there’s going to be the daily work every day.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:08

I think there’s also that vision, right? Like that vision helps us motivates us understanding like, how do we create something or purpose, there’s something that people will be certainly motivating intrinsically, now, you know, to not, you know, in a sense, design a system where it reinforces people to try to solve problems, and they believe in solving those problems, rather than, you know, just talking about it, who should be doing what? So… so

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  45:41

What if we did this, supposing that we fed them, righteously fun, we can good problems, and then worked with them to understand how the failures help the customer,  the business, understand what they can’t happen, and what the team can learn how to do better. A quick story, I had a client, and they wanted to have this really great thing for her healthy. And they built this matrix of this and this. And, they said, code that. And so I sat down with my technical guy and I said, “we can’t code that”. So now my job was to go to the customer for over a period of twice or three times a week meetings, going through their logic with them until they understand it was wrong. And explaining what we were trying to do this and it failed, and here’s how it failed. These are the conditions, and they come back and they finally said, we still think it can be done but we understand that the logic, not us, the logic isn’t there. Do we teach product owners to do that? No. Why? The advocacy is what I think we’re missing, and the leadership because we don’t get into team first.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:21

And that’s, it’s a really good point. Why because a lot of times, we still feel like we need to kind of drive and I’m just thinking about like not necessarily scrum Alliance, but in general like that theme first, and just giving people like you said, like that, I love how you throw in there, the wicked problems. The earlier, you know, give them the wicked problems or interesting problems to solve and let give them more than more autonomy to and trust them, something that you’ve said. So, that really resonates and it’s like, you know, to come back to the beginning, it’s that the simplicity going back to the fundamentals, you know, and what this whole movement…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  48:12

Really Miljan, if we started asking people, what’s the outcome you want? What’s the outcome you can deliver based on what we told you and we started refining the outcome, it will change. One last thing. Are we going to last things [inaudible 48:27] he also got me started on this book. 1976, if you read this book, you’ll find everything about Agile, Scrum, lean and team management. It’s all here. So if you want to know the source of…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:50

Further up the organization, yeah, and who’s the author?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  48:53

Robert Townsend.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:55

Great. So maybe yeah, I never actually heard about the book. The cover looks kind of familiar, but I don’t know. I’m going to get it and check it up.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  49:07

Well, you heard you [inaudible 49:09]. So Townsend was running ex, Amis Hana. Problem was number two. They really clever by Hertz.[not clear 49:14] So we came in so let’s make better model. We’re number two, we try her. It’s in the book. They had this thing about they were trying to figure out well, how to do things like where to put the new corporate headquarters. So we looked and said, “okay, so let’s pretend we’re the man from Mars. Coming down, we asked this man from Mars, where should we put it? What questions would he hit? What would we ask? Well, where are the two Bs concentrations and your people? Well, one was caddy and the other one was Manhattan. He said, Oh, well, maybe we should put her into two of them. But the other thing that I think most companies don’t do is they don’t take people in the office and make them go down and  work in front of the customer. He talks about financial people drowning in terror when they had to actually address a customer, an irate customer. And when I worked for Fisher Price, every manager had to work on the floor, on the shift, but firmly third shift for a month to understand where their paycheck came from.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:39

And that was a more of a practice with lean earlier on and like you had to understand the work that people were doing and have at least a little bit more context rather than, you know. Maybe to finish with like, what are some of the other things that you would like to share? Or maybe that I didn’t ask you? What are some of the other things that we want to make sure that we record here? You and I have had a lot of discussions so there are some really good stuff I’m trying to think about if there’s anything else, but is there anything that comes to your mind that we didn’t discuss, or that we should bring up here, and some of this stuff shouldn’t be recorded, but songs that can be recorded?

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  51:32

I have to think about that. I think that I would like to see a bigger us have a bigger understanding of the followers. You know, because followers literally choose their leaders. You can be the greatest word for the world, no one showed up, you just a guy stand on a soapbox in the middle of the street, right? So we have to help followers, ourselves included, understand how to discriminate good leadership based on the outcomes we personally want. And make sure that we’re doing it for us, not just for our individuals. And that’s where I think Scrum in a more dynamic sense, okay, plays a major role. We need guides, we need doers, we need an outcome, we need interface, but more importantly, who do we choose? And, you know, in mature teams, as you probably have happened, you can’t tell who the product owner and Scrum Masters sometimes, and that’s a level 14.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:50

And the true self organization where, you know, the lines start getting blurry as far as soon as well. But that’s true on the same like, you know, if you think about good sports teams, I tell people, you might have superstars, you might have really good teams, nobody’s saying he’s a defender, I’m a scorer, it’s just whatever it takes to win. And those lines are getting blurry as far as like, you know, what the expectations are? It’s like whoever can chip in and help.

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  53:23

I couldn’t [unclear word 53:24] college, you know, rowing. And people say, what does that sport tell us? It’s not much I said, just find yourself a balance me. Find eight guys who are over 6feet tall, they can do calisthenics backwards for three and a half to four minutes, and casually increase the rate of the frequency of the calisthenics and then have a little guy at the end of it, or a little person at the end, yelling and screaming and calling you nasty things, and do that every day. It’s all about the goal, the outcome that you would subject yourself to that abuse, and I will tell you it is abuse. And if I were to say anything, and I dearly love Howard, because he’s doing this gently. What is it that we want to do? What is it we can do? And how we get there as things change? So yeah, I’m a fanboy of Howard’s but that’s because I know him very well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:30

No. It is great. I mean, especially if you know, like I think what Howard has done, what Melissa has done, and together it’s been amazing because if you look at previous leadership, and what has happened, I think we’re finally on the right track. And that we truly have the potential to, as a community, to be what scrum Alliance stands for, which is organization for impact and have an impact on the broader world. So I think, you know, time will tell, but my…

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  55:04

Don’t forget this. Is that we would not be if someone didn’t have the focus, the commitment, the vision, and that was Ken and also someone like Jeff, who went out there and practice this to refine the abstract, and R&D study, Ken was working on IT settings, okay, and then driving up and down the layers. We wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for that, we wouldn’t be here without Ken, we wouldn’t have been here without Jim Canduct, or Mike Cohn. I mean, these are all important people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  55:53

And I think we all, at least I know I’m very thankful to you, to others that you just mentioned, and many other unnamed or I mentioned, who contributed to this movement because I think it is something special that was an accident.  Like from Snowbird, to all of this, most of it was, you know, in a sense, unplanned and evolved into something that I think is great. And in many ways,

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  56:24

oh, you weren’t around in the days of the anvils project. Okay. If you look, there’s a video out there called the Bradley fighting machine. Watch that disaster, but many of us work on projects that never get anywhere. And what Agile…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  56:44

I’ve definitely worked on projects, and I’ve gotten my taste of what was happening, but probably on the tail end of a lot of that traditional what was happening in 80s, and 90s. 

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  56:56

Imagine the earth shaking statement that kind of rock, the project management role play, so all practice can be no longer than 18 months. And then it was a year, then six months, that was all precursors to where we are now. Also, the era of where project managers would say, “this is what I want, you can’t do that”. And people would always say, “it’s in there, you find it”.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  57:33

It’s crazy. I mean, like so some people that, you know, some of the people that I’m mentoring and so the people that you see in classes, like never experienced any of that. They are younger, you know, maybe in early 20s, and it’s like they can, you know, a phantom working in that type of environment but it reaches far worse than that. And some, I think, you know, the current way of working is still doesn’t feel natural. So I think there’s still a lot to do but I agree, you know, at least with where we had it and leadership, I’m glad to be especially part of Scrum Alliance community and also part of this whole bigger moment. So, anything else? 

Speaker: Mike Dwyer  58:24

Let me leave you with this last thing. This pandemic has revealed a lot of interesting data. We all expected the economy to tank, we all expected productivity to be awful, to be disharmony, and yet you look at the numbers, productivity is up, margins are up, revenues up. All these people worked at home. So maybe the next big question the scrum alliance and the Agile Alliance needs to answer is, why are they bringing people back into offices? What value does that add? That should take care of the next 15 years.