Nigel Baker

Transcript

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:39

Who is Nigel Baker? 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  00:42

Who is Nigel Baker. This is interesting, actually. Because just this morning, I had to fill in a bio for a conference I’m presenting online. Alan Vyse Bart’s doing an online, his online Agile summit thing. So I’m presenting a session there. So I had to write my own bio, I found it surprisingly difficult. Because who the hell am I? I find it interesting. It’s summon so many thoughts. Because I have my own image of myself. I have an image I think other people have of myself. I have what I feel is a true image. And they’re all how do you capture it? So I think I thought well, because I use the post. So when you feel like you don’t feel you got to make your name in the world like 20 years ago, whatever. 

I’ll be like, I’m one of the first scrum trainers on Earth. I’m one of this, I’ve done this. I’ve done that. And it’s so long now. So I talk about that stuff and less and less about like blogging, self-aggrandizing myself. So it’s like, oh, yeah, I trained Scrum. I coach agile that’s like, well, I guess we all do nearly. So I said, I can’t remember exactly what I said. But I said, basically, what I tried to do in life, is I tried to have two quarts of deep overthinking. So really think about a subject, everything, right? Adding a big slice of cynicism. Because Agile is about optimism and open mindedness and yes. But actually in my heart, I’m quite cynical individual as well. 

And that sort of gives me sharpness, I feel in terms of like, simple, like, people write things online. It’s very fluid ideas. And I’m always thinking that’s a great LinkedIn article. But what are you doing in real life? [inaudible 02:31]. What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work as the ultimate cynical attitude, which I think I’ve got a little bit of. And the other dash is humor, like [inaudible 02:40] a double, a shot double, two shots of humor as well, I think that’s what I realized the other day, that sort of covers everything I do. So everything I do, kind of as a joke in my mind. And that’s very powerful as a coach, as a trainer humor can be, was it Shakespeare says, many a true word is spoken in jest. So you can with a joke, you can get away with putting out some harsh truths. But also, there’s a dark side to here, which is it can be a political punching down. So if you’ll be careful with humor, you see humor too much, you could be too withering, you could be too cynical. 

And you’re like the nihilistic comments, comics sorry, referencing the decline of the universe, rather what we’re trying to be, which is change agents, helping transform the world of work. So yeah, I think that’s basically it, deep amount of overthinking, a slice of cynicism, two shots of humor, all wrapped into an agile coaching, trading dissolving package. I guess that’s me. That’s what I am.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:46

That’s awesome. And that’s why I started asking this question. I won’t ask it then at the beginning of every interview, because rather than just doing the typical intro. So based on what you just said, that made me think and jump maybe immediately into the Nigel scale, because I think Nigel scale is, is that…

Speaker: Nigel Baker  04:10

The crowning glory. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:13

So, yeah, so tell us about it, because I think in our circles, people are familiar with it, but I don’t know, I think people are outside. But maybe let’s start with a Nigel scale. How did you come up with it? And what is Nigel scale?

Speaker: Nigel Baker  04:30

So essentially, so I did a presentation a few months ago in lockdown about it. And I actually went back and read the original posts where the conversation was happening, because I’ve gotten to this huge philosophy of like, context is king, right? And what I mean by that is like, if you understand where something comes from, you understand the environment that created something, it gives you a far better understanding of how to use it and not to use it, right? And so a lot of people don’t take context into account when they’re talking about something, or worse, take it too much into account. Oh, we can’t do that here because we’re very special. 

No you’re not, you know it like everyone else actually, right? So what happened was this, basically around 2008, there was a huge car crash of a few different ideas. So around them, we were talking, they were trying to come up with some sort of exam for the Certified Scrum master course. So at this point up to about 2007 2008, Scrum was still quite malleable, Scrum was still quite flexible. There’s lots of books written on it, but each book says something different. So even the people who created it, haven’t curated it. There’s lots of different writing about it. So lots of people have a different idea of what it is and what it isn’t. And we’re trying to come up with an exam where we examine it. Well, if you don’t know what it is, how can you examine it? So famously, Ken Swaybar, was paid what I believe is a large sum of money to produce something called the scrum hub, which was like a collection of Scrum writings and ideas. And what actually came out was like a 10-page document called the Scrum Guide, which is the simplest thing that could possibly work, I guess, but not quite anyway. But that didn’t quite line up with what people thought scrum was. We didn’t line up with the test. We didn’t line up with what was on scrum master training on Google Certified Scrum master course. 

So it’s four different like a Venn diagram from hell, these four different crossover worlds. And in the scrum community, in the scrum trainer form, we’re discussing this stuff, quite a level of detail that most civilians don’t discuss. So it really was okay, you read the post, it really is a huge case of well I think you’ll find, we’ll I think you’ll find [inaudible 06:34]. Having this discussion, I believe it was actually on the concept of agile project managers, right? An oxymoron like military intelligence anyway, but caching, so I came up with this Nigel scale idea. Now it turns out, I named it after myself. And for years, I’ve jokingly said, I did that as a self-aggrandizing big, like the Nigel scale, but actually, what I was doing and I discovered this recently, I was actually mocking something called the Nokia test, which a lot of people don’t remember anymore. But if you think back 10, 15 years, those was usually popular. 

I think Bas Vod and a few people in Nokia networks came up with a way to assess your agility. And it was very popular. I just say popular people, Jeff Sutherland slept on it and loved it. And then people realize you probably don’t want to have that type of assessment. You end up with people claiming their coffees or daily scrums. And what they will shout out is that their bosses are retrospective. But it was this assessment, the Nokia test. Well, that’s where I got the name for, is okay. There’s Nokia tested, I’ve got the Nigel scale, right? This is the context. Now basically the Nigel scale is like a three-point model. Okay, so three levels of categorization initially, when I came up with it, level one is the things that are core, the Nigel scale one, things that are the fundamental, things that you got to do. If you bend them, everything breaks, if you don’t do this, you get into trouble. 

So the example I use these days is surgery, you have a surgery, we’re going to remove something or fix something in you. And the doctor goes, well, I’m going to perform your operation, I won’t be washing my hands. I won’t be disinfecting my hands because I do not believe in bacteria and viruses. Bacteria and viruses were invented by big pharma, they don’t exist. So I don’t need to wash my hands. Is like, shut up. I’m going to dip my hands in cow manure. So I get those good bacteria on my hand. Because yeah, bacteria is good for you, helps your digestive transit. So I get loads of good bacteria to put on my hands, so when I introduce them to your body when I’m removing your spleen, you get healthy bacteria. Shut up, shut up. You can have….

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:52

We will even charge you for it. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  08:55

Yeah, charge. That’s the point. You can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts. So there’s a certain fundamental thing, as a surgeon, you disinfect your hands, you wash your hands, it’s a fundamental. Now of course, if you look into I think [inaudible 09:14] said about, if you look into actual surgeons washing their hands, the first person who suggested it was ridiculed and driven out of the world of surgery, because surgeons didn’t believe in that concept. So it goes to show you what’s fundamental may not be what you believe is fundamental. But that’s the idea of the core things. These are things that really, if you don’t do them, you’re in trouble. So in our scrum world, we tend to talk about things in the scrum guide, then they should really be those core fundamentals. 

The good stuff that if you bend it, you’re going to get into a bit of trouble, it’s not going to work very well. Now, the bad news for everyone is, most of what we do as coaches, trainers, agile people, isn’t that, it’s not Agile scale to, which is the good stuff, I used call it best practice. But since getting really into connection and things like that complexity thing to do in practice, it’s the word of good practice, the world of contextuality, the world of self-organizing good answers to your complex problems. Inspecting and adapting, experimenting, learning, self contextually understanding your own space in your own way, and finding your own answers. 

There’s loads of things in that world that other people have done. You can do them as well. They may work, they probably will work. But remember the word may and probably carrying a lot of weight. Yes, it’s like me, we’re probably careful, be very careful. But Nigel scale three is bad basically. Things that are anti patterns, things that lots of people have tried, and they don’t work and you fall over. Again, never say never. Because you could be the company that makes it work. But there’s a big pile of bodies out back of companies who thought they can make it work. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:04

And you’re talking in the context of complexity, right? They are antipatterns in terms of complexity and that environment. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  11:11

Yeah, and that space, definitely. Definitely, in fact, you could use the Nigel’s scale get outside of our world, that sort of idea of fundamental, good and bad has got a lot of applicability. But I’m really thinking about our world in the Agile space, specifically the scrum space, actually. So I’m thinking of, and the basic what I learned from introducing that idea was vast amounts of people confuse what is a fundamental thing we should do, in Scrum for instance, with something that is good, which certainly is bad. And so I always like to joke, confusing a core practice with a good practice is a bad practice. There’s the idea of like, and people do all the time. And it’s why I’m nervous. 

I’m talking so much these days about contextual understanding of Agile. But when I see it in real life, a lot of people bend the things they shouldn’t bend, and keep fixed the things they shouldn’t keep fixed. So people obsess on story points and velocity and release trades, of which are just contextual practices that don’t even work in lots of settings. And yet, completely flex the idea of self-organizing, or empowerment, or coaching or leadership and just think that’s very flexible. And that’s a huge concern for me. So I’m trying to talk more about because is it helping us understand where we need to be stiff, or where we need to be flexible. And that Nigel scale has been a, that was a revelation probably for me. But more importantly, that’s been sort of a building block on which I’ve built a lot of ideas since then. 

So a lot of the work I’ve been doing recently has been really about investigating sort of how practices change over time. How practices change over context, how should we as coaches and trainers understand how things change? So here’s a method, here’s another method. Great, which one do you pick is interesting? What’s more interesting to me is, how do they overlap? How do you change from one to the other? How do you like changing has become the huge interest for me. So how patterns change over time? And finally, how then we as coaches, trainers, consultants, Scrum Masters, whatever? How do we engage in that changing? And that’s something else I’ve been told to do some work on. And it’s as I can tell now, I have no answers, the door, but I’ve got some really interesting questions on it, which I think we should be having some more conversations on in the Agile space.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:43

What are some of those questions? I mean, because I agree, I’ve talked about it. I feel like I’m talking about it in every podcast, but the idea of cooks and chefs like there’s too many cooks out there not enough chefs to understand, and not enough people that want to be chefs, so everybody just wants a recipe. But coming back to your question, what are the questions then that you’ve been asking around? 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  14:06

Yeah, I think that cooking chef idea is a really good idea in terms of the recipes, following recipes, and when not to follow a recipe, when to invent your own. Because again, it’s a big ask to expect a normal human being to be inventing their own gourmet meals. There is a place to recipes with understanding what that place is and what that place is not. So an example I use is like estimating techniques. So whether you estimate or not was up to you, but let’s say you’ve got some like planning poker, famous technique everyone knows, lot of people know it. Some people love it, and some people hate it, right? And they love it and hate it for similar reasons. 

And the important point to understand with it is, it’s not that planning poker is right or wrong, it’s the experience you’re having and your level of ability and skill is what’s driving its usefulness or its lack of usefulness. So like me, I always do some ideas in the Nigel scale, I like to graph, like a visual graph. So I’ll show the scale over time. And you’ll see it, I’ll draw like planning poker. So it decays quite quickly. It’s a good skill, new teams, I really rate it as an idea. But after a while it decays, no one’s been playing with the card six months in, it’s sort of stabilizers on a bicycle, you’re used to riding a bike. So then you get another technique like affinity estimation, put the cars in a straight line, move them around. Germans call it magic estimation, I think. Below the idea, keep it [inaudible 15:32 ]. I think again, but the duty comes unstuck. They don’t know what they don’t know. So how can they ask the right questions? But in a more maturity, it’s really powerful. So you’ve got one method that works with newbies well, and doesn’t offer value with experts. One technique that works better with experts doesn’t offer value with newbies. So it’s pretty interesting. Okay, that’s great. Those are the two recipes. Which one do I do? Well, that’s a hard choice to make. But the harder choices, as I said, how do you go from one to the other? So and this is what I think, a lot of us don’t spend, not just us, but I mean, the world of agile, do not spend enough time in thinking of the changing, the transitioning, like with two techniques, you could hard swap, you could say tomorrow, we are doing new technique, old technique bad, in bin.

Or what a lot of people do, you’ll often see them, they sort of hybridize away. So they sort of, they don’t mean to, but they evolve a new estimation technique. So there’s all we’re doing planning poker, there’s no cards, no one votes. And you look at it and go, well, this animal has seriously evolved since [inaudible 16:44]. If you ask them, why did you choose to do it that way? They’ll often look at you and go. Oh, yes, it’s changed, I never noticed. Why did we change it? Do you remember that? Should we change it back? No, it’s wonderful. Or maybe they can run them in parallel, try both techniques and see which one they like, says all these different, like nice pathways from one technique to the other. 

And I think a lot of what we do in the Agile space, is communicate photographs. So we like snapshot, like a picture of it, as a cake, he’s a masculine man, take a photo. And what we need to be teaching more or talking more about is the process of anything like, how do you get fit? How do you change? How do you transition things to be aware of? And I think, because otherwise, all that’s happening is, is in our world, we have communicated one snapshot, which was the traditional waterfall, demonic evil, like whatever. And now we’re communicating a new snapshot, which is our agile, wonderful, because what we’re trying to create in our world is a world that is agility, flexible, not agile on the big A, but actually changing the world. And that’s not just one step. It’s not just going okay, the old world, new world it’s going on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:02

Well, it’s a continuous thing, it’s more like this, right? 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  18:05

Yeah. And to do that, we need to have the ability to be able to understand and reflect on that. Otherwise, people are just and I feel this a lot. People are looking on to the new techniques with the same mindset of the old techniques. Recipe lead, follow the process, don’t think too hard, don’t change it. And that’s all the patterns that we’ve been trying to get away from, with our new approach. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:31

Just different practices. But same, yeah..

Speaker: Nigel Baker  18:35

Yeah. And you get the same thing comes back. And that’s the problem. If you take it with the old mindset, like you see it with big scaled implementations, I like to bad mouth safe, I shouldn’t but it’s so easy. It’s like a comedy. But the point is, is not that the things they do are wrong, though some are very wrong. It’s that, it’s very nature, seems to lend itself towards shifting back to the old way. So before you realize you have multiple as a management, senior leader, setting direction, teams being unempowered or very narrow follows. And because the shape, though the shape has changed a bit, the principles underpinning the shape haven’t. So it’s like a squeezable, you squeeze it, you’ve got a new shape, you let go of the squeeze and it comes back to its old shape. It’s kind of like that. And I think the stuff we need to think about in the Agile space, is not transformed the world of work, is transforming the world of work and that’s actual estate. It is interesting. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:37

It is and I mean, at the corner of this is like if we don’t understand things like using the cooking analogy, like food at the chemical level and ingredients, then you’re just throwing stuff in and you’re just without understanding. So maybe to come back to the scrum guide. You’ve been pretty vocal about for years, about adding some type of agile library, scrum appendix and moving away at least when it comes to scrum Alliance, moving away from scrum guide. Why? I mean, I know but I think you’ll be… 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  20:16

Essentially, so the scrum guide. It’s like a map. It’s like an Ordnance Survey map. We have them in the UK, the Ordnance Survey, I don’t like in America and other countries, but they sort of give you these official maps of the country, right? And so the schema is a map. But it doesn’t tell you anything about the territory. You know the famous quote, a map is not the territory. It doesn’t give you nuance, it doesn’t give you context, doesn’t give you interesting walks. If you have a map to know I want to walk over there, I want to drive over there, it’s not just about what the terrain actually is, the physics of the terrain. It’s about the human experience of the terrain. 

And I think there’s not enough literature out there about supporting that. Basically, 12 nice country walks, what walks can we go on? What ways can we do this? Because there are recipes. Now we don’t like being too algorithmic, but there are certain recipes that work nicely. I do a Sunday roast. So every Sunday, I cook a roast for the family, right? It’s quite simple, not simple. There’s lots of things to do, but I’m not reinventing the wheel every time. My children don’t want fancy flam bay pawns, they don’t want anything, they just wants a nice basic food with nice people food. And so I can do that and teaching that would be useful.  How to make a good sauce, there’s all these other things, I think they’re making it quite rich, the Agile space, because at the moment, a lot of it is like, here are the bare fundamentals.

Good luck. And that’s why a lot of people fall into the grass of sort of more algorithmic, more recipe led approach approaches, like the Scaled Agile Framework, or even like JIRA, because JIRA is by far the most popular agile scaling technique, which is a tool, is like a skating technique, but they hold on to it, that gives them some algorithms to follow and hold on to. And I feel there’s like a gap in our space. Stuff isn’t like vitally super essential, but stuff that would be good to know that add to your repertoire. So use your chef’s analogy, right? A good chef has lots of good fundamentals of cooking, they know how to run up a room, a source, they know how to fry, they know the fundamentals. And that gives them a repertoire of skills that allow them to create quite an advanced idea in the middle. What we need to do is add that repertoire of skills to our cooks to turn them into chefs. And at the moment, what a lot of people do is, do more complex recipes rather than build up repertoire. And yeah. So I thought something like an appendix. So I saw two of…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:47

Is that more like a set of patterns and probably like practices, or is it both practices and patterns?

Speaker: Nigel Baker  22:54

Yeah, so for me, it’s like practices and patterns, or things you could add around it, things that you could support, things that are really good and viable to help you do this. And the other side of it is actually maybe annotating the guide, maybe added some detail to the guide to help basically put some context in. So when it says something like true leader, which means nothing, it literally means nothing. It’s like a platitude, where you can say some people look at that as terms of servant leadership, and sort of bring richer information in, sort of use the guide rather than the answer which a lot of people treat it as, use as a Trojan horse to introduce loads of other ideas and create a sort of a richer, broader world from it. And there haven’t been one piece of that, because you and I know a lot of Scrum trainers out there and both certified and professional scrum trainers are very, I will teach you the guide, I will teach you the guide, I will teach you this document and scaling almost like a faux religious, almost like not cold, cold is too strong. But a little bit like you must have this because the guide says so. Now it goes back to…   

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:03

Yeah. And that’s like I was talking to Tom Mellor couple weeks ago and he said like that’s like the Ken had that [inaudible 24:11] look around him. Not cult wise, but like where… and I think because he was involved in both Scrum Alliance and scrum.org, there is a little bit of that were both organizations, I would say more like both Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org, more than any other organization use the scrum guide as that baseline, right? What are your thoughts on maybe the relationship between scrum Alliance and Scrum org? I know you’ve been somewhat critical about Scrum alliance and all of this stuff. And what are your thoughts on that? 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  22:56

Yeah. So I’ve got lots of friends who are Scrum.org trainers. And the quality of their work seems to be good. I’m never ever impressed by a full profit company. We’re transforming the world of work that’s transforming the wallet of can. The pocket of can, really and with all the noble bells and whistles, it is a private company generating profit. And I just find that out, I’m not socialist or communist or anything like that. But I find that it’s a very difficult space, when you start putting money right up next to principles. I’m a bit uncomfortable with that. I know a few people who find the exams a bit unpopular, because the exams feel like they’re almost a cartel. You take it, you fail [inaudible 25:39] until you get there, which seems to be not really building the community, building an inclusive world. I would love the two community to be one by the way, I once heard the rumor that there was some conversations about that at one point, that went nowhere. But I still think that will be something pretty viable. But it would have to be in the auspices of the community led organization. Because that scrum.com really is, not dot org, the private company, scrum.com, we are genuinely pretty much the only nonprofit out there. 

That is one nonprofit, but also generally changing the world of work. Generally transforming the world. We’re got tools and avenues and methods and products to genuinely help build a community and build a world around that community. And so for me, that community aspect, that alliance is the key word here, the alliance is the key word, and the Agile has been great. I’ve been a member for a long time. But the Agile alliance is really a comfort. Really it’s a comfort and hasn’t gotten much better than that for reasons when the scrum has can. And it should, some things that should be done I think, that only the scrum alliance can do.

Like for instance, building up that supporting documentation not built off individual experts like us, but built community wide, pattern base of real research, only the alliances got the community to draw that information, only the scrum alliances got the money to pay for the research, and then only the scrum alliances got the collective strength to then publish that and give it some weight. So it’s not just another person’s opinion on LinkedIn. And so I think, taking advantage of our community, not in a commercial way, like exploiting them, but exploiting their knowledge, bringing out that information from them and showing that across the world. It’s a really powerful way to change things in companies. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:32

It is. Yeah, and you’ve said maybe not to directly perfect for instance, like scrum Alliance needs to step up their game when it comes to PR game. And one of the things that stood out that you said is like, the rumor gets around the world before the truth has its boots on.  And that resonated with me because I think we could be doing at least scrum alliance well, so scrum.org could be done much better. But at times it seems scrum.org is doing better with PR than scrum Alliance. Do you feel the same way?

Speaker: Nigel Baker  28:09

May be but it’s like playing the same game. It’s really not. I think if one does good PR, the other one does. I’ve never been, my big fear with scrum.org was never, oh, someone’s competing with my scrum training. It was someone rubbish is competing with my scrum training. That was always my concern. Because remember Nigel, they didn’t remember agile, they remember the Scrum. So they have like a rubbish experience that doesn’t work. Scrum’s a thing that gets hit in the throat. Like a lot of people don’t even know they’ve been trained by scrum Alliance or scrum.org. They genuinely just don’t know. They don’t remember anything about Scrum, they went on the course, that it was good. 

And they learned a lot and helped, they tell other people. If it was rubbish and didn’t help, they tell a lot of people. And so that’s always been my concern. It’s like I’ve had people challenge me. Yeah, because we’re all about quality. And if we could get, so in terms of what we do as a scrum trainers or whatever certified trainers, if our work can be high quality and value add, right? Then the commercials will take care of themselves. Then the money will come in, you’ll make our livings and the world will grow. If we over commercialize what we do in terms of the Agile space, it becomes exploits, not as Ken Beck will say explore or expand, and then you’re just mining an ever-dwindling group. 

And again, in the Agile space by the horrible feeling that there are many orgs not org actually, but there are many other communities out there that feel very much in exploit. Sort of, we have got a reservoir that will eat all the fish. At some point there’s going to be no fish left. What they need to actually understand is their jobs not to exploit people for commercial purposes. Their job is to help people improve their lives and work, right? Through that help and that relationship they will have, if they design their business well, a commercial opportunity. So the tail wag the dog. And so I am…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:04

But it’s so easy because a lot of people have gotten used to the, if we just look at the, essentially the way that we train, the way, specifically there’s scrum Alliance, because I think it’s different through scrum.org. But there’s a level of expectations that CSPs have been comfortable with that a lot of times, I’ve seen it, where we put the money and financial aspects before the mission and sometimes I don’t know if it’s the environment that creates that, or… 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  30:47

It’s realism. So I don’t feel bad about that and I’ll tell you why. Because I meet many agile coaches on the ground, right? Who are not genuinely making change in the organization’s for simple reasons, they’re getting paid quite nicely and if they make too much faster, they get fired and released. And they’ve got a house with a mortgage and kids, they’ve got to pay though I understand that. What I will do is give them tools to allow them to make change and not get fired. So you can do this, you don’t have to like you’re not [inaudible 31:19] you don’t have to sacrifice your career on a daily scrum. But it’s same thing with the scrum training community, I’ve noticed in America it’s quite interesting, it’s different to Europe. So for me as a trainer, okay, COVID made it different, so I’ve done a lot less coaching in the last 18 months, because it costs a lot less because of COVID. 

So it’s mainly been training I’ve been doing, but mostly what I do is training for companies. So I go in three days on Zoom chatting, talking, discussing, I do some for individuals, mostly companies. So this is your company, that’s [inaudible 31:49] right? And I just discovered the other day from the scrum Alliance, that actually the majority of most people’s business in America is actually public training, where they would historically set up in a hotel and I don’t know like some small town in America and there’re seven hotels and people would come to that course. And they sort of go around place to place like a roaming. I know, sales was like going from town to town learning these courses. Now of course, that business model has been completely smashed because of COVID, completely. Everyone’s online, anyone can go anywhere, no one is in the office, that entire idea of going around as a training company, doing those individual places, yeah, got smashed. And I don’t know if that’s ever going to come back as an actual viable business model. 

But I think the risk that, but for a lot of Scrum trainers, they need to understand their duty and duty is a long word, their essence as a certified scrum trainer or professional scrum trainer is not inexorably linked to their business model. So you can find a different business model in there and still achieve results and still do quite well. And so I think there’s an element of absent due to scatter. So I understand, I understand not everyone’s going to transform the world of work for me in terms of our community, how many is like 400 trainers, is there something?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:12

Not even. Yeah. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  33:13

So if 200 of those just did good scrum courses the rest of their life, they’re still changing the world a bit. They’re still nudging the world forward, they’re still making changes to helping people, they’re still delivering, they’re still doing a good job. But some of us have to do a bit more. I don’t know what more is, but we got to do a bit more on that. If all 400 of us sit there and just do Scrum courses for people, I think that’s not going to be enough. And the risk is, as we’re seeing, people are already stepping into the space with big voices, just not necessarily big voices, big opinions, but nicely the right ideas. So we’ve got to be careful because it’s not easy for this movement. 

Because there’s no leaders in it. There’s very easy for this movement to be corrupted, I guess, is the word I’m looking for. And again, I don’t say, I’ve said something the other day was quite interesting to me. I said, just remember, different things isn’t long and long isn’t bad, bad isn’t evil. So just because someone’s got different ideas, you just mean as long as you’re white. If they are wrong, doesn’t mean that they’re bad person or bad. It doesn’t make them evil, good people do bad things all the time though, it’s rounded here. And so not to villainize people but generally in the Agile space, there are lots of voices out there sharing ideas that you would politely say are different, you’d impolitely say are wrong. Or you may say they’re bad.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:57

We’ve all been there, right? We’ve done the same thing [inaudible 35:00] just 15 years ago. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  35:02

Yeah, well, things were long, things improve, things change. If that was right at the time, just not right now. But the point I’m going to make is that we need to have some sort of, we need to make sure there’s some strong voices from the right angles, just to make it so we don’t just get, because I don’t very much loves the next new idea, the famous thing Agile is dead, wherever it is, is dead. So someone says, Agile is dead, Scrum is dead. Story point is dead, velocity is dead, [inaudible 35:30] is dead, safe is dead, [inaudible 35:31] is dead, bird is dead, like everything is dead. And this is the new idea that I’m trying to tell you, I’m better, I just kind of like, well, it’s good that we’ve got no sacred cows, no sacred gods, we smash everything. 

But if you believe in nothing, you believe in everything. So the risk is, as those were two wonderful ideas coming in, without any quality control or fidelity on them. And the final thing on this, I think people like us in the community have a duty of care. Because we can say anything, and we still get paid. We’ll walk away and everyone’s happy. But people are running these experiments on their jobs as a huge duty of care there. So let’s say I came up with an idea. I said, you know what? 

The best way to get results in your company, punch your boss in the face, best way, it’s a great technique, worked for me, I got promoted 10 times doing it, right? So just like the way to live, but it doesn’t affect me, I still get paid. But that person goes and slaps their boss, all of a sudden they’re in court. And so the idea is, we have a duty of care that we do no harm as people talking about this stuff. And again, I worry about the space, because there’s lots of hypotheses but where’s the evidence? Where’s the feedback loops? Where’s the Agile in it? Where’s the actual scrum of it, though, the feedback? So that’s one of my big bugbears at the moment.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:58

Yeah. And like the Agile is getting bigger. I’m getting people from industries that you typically wouldn’t have seen. And you’ve worked with NGOs and non-IT environments, what are some of the things that you’re learning and have been learning?

Speaker: Nigel Baker  37:14

Well, is it interesting, so what I’d say is, outside IT is fascinating. What I’ve discovered is, something that when you get into the physical world of work, where work is physical, a lot of things are a lot harder than [inaudible 37:28], so slicing up a problem, like while I was doing some work with a toy company, so you can see on my desk here is a range of toys, right? Both new ones they’ve given me and old ones I’ve dug out of storage. So just this week, I did a product and a training course, true story. Product and a training, and we discussed the product management of these. That is, ladies and gentlemen, you may not have seen one of these before, if you’re an old man, you may have seen these back in the 80s. 

This is what they call a rock Lord. It’s a transforming thing. It’s a monster that transforms into a, [inaudible 38:03], I’ll show you, transforms into a rock. Okay, now imagine a company invented this. a product manager manage this, teams built this, marketing advertise this. They made hundreds of 1000s of these and didn’t sell them in shops, because what child wants a robot that turns to a rock? That’s the basic premise, right? So they suffered, all these issues are from woman IT and they’ve got some better ideas. So that’s the physicality of this object is more difficult to work with but they’re also open minded. What I’ve been discovering and the outside IT space, is people have an appetite for improvement. It’s quite interesting being in tech so long, people raise thirsty for something different, how can I change what we’re doing is not working? Within IT people has now got a bit [inaudible 38:56] to the Agile world, they haven’t. So the downside is, it’s far more difficult. 

My good practices, my stories work even less. So go on to websites, build websites but just the other week, I did a training course for some people, just self-driving car systems like the cameras and self-driving cars. I’ve done fire alarms. So these are interesting things. The work is different, the work is odd. But a lot of what we do has great application in their space, as long as you’re making sure we apply the right things in the right way. And we don’t take across all the good practices, just because it’s good for me not mean it’s good for you. But when you said about nonprofit, that’s the one area I found this stuff quite difficult, not because of the problem space, but because of the leadership style. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:46

Or sense of urgency. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  39:47

Yeah. Or the huge sense of urgency. You sense of like, oh my god, the world is literally burning in some cases like they’re doing but the leadership style could be quite autocratic. I’ve never worked in that ruthless places as charity. Chances are more ruthless than like, basically investment banks, you think investment banks will be cut. So they are kind of, but the chart has been far worse. Far worst as a  [inaudible 40:10]. Because I don’t know what it is about it, whether it’s because people won’t leave, they care about the cause. But the actual management styles I find a bit more authoritarian than the classic companies. 

And that’s a good thing for us to talk about because we love the mission, we love the purpose, but how the organization is run, if that we’ve even had this in the scrum Alliance, like, I’m a great fan of Howard, who’s the current scrum Alliance, sort of product owner, I’ve known Howard nearly 20 years, he’s a good person, there’s a good hearts in the right place. But that’s not always been true with Scrum Alliance leadership, a nonprofit dedicated to agile, agility, transforming the world of work, being run an authoritarian in a very traditional management structure. 

And that’s disappointing for me, but I can understand how it happens. But it’s very disappointing. And so I think, again, the world of work is changing, the world of work not the world of IT, we can help in that space, we also need to listen in that space, because I think we can adjust as much from there as they can for us, that they got two ears, one mouth, so twice as much. But we learn from that. And also…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:26

Easier said than done, yeah.

Speaker: Nigel Baker  41:29

I’m talking, look at me talking service now. I love the sound of my voice. It’s difficult. It’s so difficult just to go but it’s what we got to do. But also not take our eye off the ball. Because I think [inaudible 41:43] would that scrum guide, for instance, is they’ve tried to make it more universal. But we’re making it more universal, watered it down slightly. And so it’s become less applicable to anyone. So if they’re not careful, they’ll have a guide or scrum that works for anyone doing anything, but offers no value. It’s so diluted, it’s so watered down. And so we’ve got to understand that as well I think. As we go outside the world of technology, yeah, we can learn, they can learn, but we got to be a bit careful. So telling them how to do their own work when we do ours properly. Yeah. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:18

Yeah. I mean, a lot of times, people talk about Scrum and outside of IT. But I spoke with Dave Snowden. Also, I think one of the first ones and he said, Scrum is great for software development period. It’s not good for, in the sense of context of Scrum. And I think, I don’t fully agree, but I think there’s a lot of a lot of truth to that were again, I tell people I see scrum as a recipe. I see it as a little bit of flexible recipe, it’s still at the end of the day, it’s a recipe. 

And if you don’t understand the core of that recipe, and if your context doesn’t have all the ingredients for the recipe, then you’re blindly following and trying to fit it into and I don’t know how much Jeff and people that are pushing for scrum outside of IT, how much is it just the business decision versus acknowledging that? Use whatever works and just know what you’re doing in a sense rather than hey, Scrum is for everything. What are your thoughts on that? 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  43:36

Scrum isn’t for everything, it really, really isn’t. I think there are some deeper, so I remember, I’m going to say reading, but between you and I know, not reading, watching The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis was very famous children’s book, very famous film. So I think they did some films, Disney did some films recently on them. But there was a cartoon in the 1970s in the UK, they probably in the UK, always shown a Christmas or a show, very popular. Now here’s the problem. They talked about like magic in Narnia, and I can’t remember the exact plot but I do remember Aslan, the lion saying, you need to know deeper magic or you got new this magic, they kill him. 

But he knows a deeper magic comes back. I only think there’s a deepest scrum under Scrum, right? And still too much of is just the fossil shape like the footprint is not the foot. Like say for me, there’s some universal patterns behind what we do that I think have a huge amount of cross applicability, sense of purpose, idea of what you’re doing, idea of empowered teams making decisions, working together collaboratively, talking to each other every day, empirically judging your work, looking not what you made, but how you made it and feeding back that’s like a universal truth within, right? Which I think has a lot of cross applicability. Backlogs, product backlogs, standing up in scrums reviews and retros. Those are all religions or recipes to try and create that underlying deeper magic. I think that students blog, basically, but in those deeper patterns have much more strength than some people realize. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:26

But those are patterns though, neither of those patterns are not scrum, right? They existed before scrum. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  45:32

Yes. But I’ve been taught recently, who invented Scrum? Who invented it? Could you say, oh, I just [inaudible 45:40] but one of the country wrote down what other people were doing, if I draw a picture of an elephant, did I invent the elephant? No. I said I just [inaudible 45:48]  supposedly read the research paper, new product development game, supposedly, and I said, here’s to a team try it out. But the team already try out ideas before that. And so did he created it? No, he did not? Did he influence it? You’re the chef, if I come along, taste your soup and add a little bit of salt, did I create a soup? No. It’s like, and so like, but then you go to the kitchen and [inaudible 46:16] they invented Scrum. 

No, they look to what other people are doing. That’s what I mean, there’s a deeper for another nice thing, what’s got the strength, these deeper underlying patterns have been around a long time. Daily scrums turned up in monasteries in the Middle Ages [inaudible 46:31]. So these kinds of a long time, what I think we do is focus a bit more on them. And a little bit less on perhaps specific recipes of how to achieve them. Those recipes are good. Because always you end up with, so I’ve said this story before and it’s unfair, but it’s good thing, these are finishes. Like I go to church, I didn’t go to church, let’s think I go to church. I have been to church, my mother was religious, I would go to church, and I’ll sit in a church of England church, and the church service would happen, right? 

And to be honest, as a nine-year-old boy, I’ve got no idea what’s going on. Now as incense being waved, things being drunk, and I’m like, I don’t know what that is. He’s dressed up as a woman, I just don’t, I do not know, I didn’t have any context. So it just becomes a boring ritual. If you’re Christian, those things are great symbology for you, they’re great, meaning, they have real resonance that takes you to a spiritual place that gives you deeper happiness and understanding. But me as an eight-year-old child, I’m just like, I don’t know, they just like a space marine, what’s going on? 

And so I think far too many people are having, ritualizing that their agility, not even scrum, their agility, but not in the right way to give a recipe to give structure and help and set the framework, a trellis on which to build their new ideas. But instead is just a ritual to follow, forgetting the real reasons behind it. Scrum is a great example, we stand up for 15 minutes every day. Why? Because my boss told me to. Not because I gain value out of it. And so I think if we can clear away some of that noise and get to the deeper truths, I think people get more value from this. It works in more contexts. People understand it better and it spreads better because people can communicate it better. But that’s not…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:25

That’s challenge, right? Because what we’re talking about is creating people to understand why we are doing daily stand ups. Why should I? Why is it better for me as a developer to manage my work than having somebody manager for me, right? But that’s difficult for people that have been conditioned, right? Not to think that way or they just don’t want that responsibility. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  48:50

The risk is, the team’s haven’t got, they’ve got responsibility for the negative side not the positive side. So people say now you’re responsible for planning your work, right? But they never say, and you get rewarded or you get more pay, right? But if you get it wrong, you’re bad. So responsibility without power is abuse. It’s slavery. It’s just a weight without support. And so I think people find it very easy to say, you now have more responsibility, but find it very difficult to add the associated power with that responsibility. And you can decide what you build and you can learn how to do it. 

I think Spider Man’s uncle said it best. With great power comes great responsibility. Well, it’s the other way around as well. If you’re going to have great responsibility, you need to have great power. Otherwise if I dressed up as Superman and [inaudible 49:50] and pistol Okay, what is this? Really quickly finding I’m in a Spider man’s suit [inaudible 49:58] ability to see if that will suit you and it’s not fair without the powers to give me that job. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:02

Yeah. So I mean that points back to what you said earlier, which is the leadership and level authority that you’re willing to delegate and have you seen any shifts in that? Giving people a little bit more authority, we talked in the new scrum guide, talks about self-managing which is essentially saying that if you’re self-managing team, I’m assuming you’re deciding the what and how. 

Speaker: Nigel Baker  50:35

Yeah, but they’ve redefined that by saying self-monitors, you decide to walk around the house, but then they’re including product owner in the team. So it’s kind of a bit of a cheat, but not many people’s I would like, I’d see organizations do it more naturally is, it is difficult for organizations to change to that to give more power to teams, if they haven’t classically had that power in place. So more in tech, so when I work with serious tech companies, that our technology and business are quite highly aligned, it seems to be a lot easier than when it’s like this, when technology and business are separate worlds like a law firm, the law firm is very different animal. 

And so they find it far more difficult to give that ability to those teams. I think it’s crucial. What I would say is my concern, the YMCA more often than not to be cynical, but I did say that of cynicism is that with all the coaching skills we’re adding, all these people skills we’re adding, I had a concern about 18 months ago, and it seems to be coming to fruition, that with all these coaching skills we’re adding to people that need us for instance, we seem to be equipping villains with slightly more sophisticated weaponry. So what’s happened rather than changing how analogies like Oh, I know I don’t tell, now I support. Well, instead of we giving them tools to give them sharp claws to get around the side of the shells of the developers and the workers. So tell me why you think you can’t get that done by Christmas? And so again, when I was a developer, it’s quite easy. People came straight at you. They’d come straight for you, [cross talk 52:17] and it’s horrible. It’s disgusting. But at least for the straight line, you can dodge it as a developer, you got tricked, you got methods to get out of trouble, when people’s like invade sophisticated with those tools. It’s abusive coaching, is using coaching tools to manipulate. And I think I get really into ethics these days. 

So some even on Certified Scrum Master, which is supposed to be an entry level course, when I talk about coaching methods, I really narrowed it down to look, do no harm, stay on work. It’s not about manipulation, it’s not about an agenda and really [inaudible 52:51] that home. Because otherwise, all that happens is we’ll just take a bad culture and make it worse, rather than changing the culture of how they work. And again, that’s something in the Agile space. I think a lot of us have been excited with these new tools and spread them for a while. And now we’ve got to make sure we sort of reap what we sow, and make sure we’re putting in the ethical side with the rest of it. Because we’re all humans, we’ll fail. I got really fat in lockdown. Well, [inaudible 53:17] I traveled 15 years for work and put weight on and got a bit chubby.

And I was always telling my wife, she said he got to lose weight, and I’m trying but it’s hard on the road. It’s like you travel, you eat and you eating the wrong at the wrong time. I’ve been at home for 18 months, and I’ve put on 28, 30 pounds or so [inaudible 53:38] turns out it wasn’t the job I like to eat. And so I decide, so my two, I got to finish on this. My two major points are, there’s a huge ethical component to this, to what we do. But correspondingly we’re all human and failing going to break those ethics, as if we can square that circle. I mentioned CS Lewis earlier on, he said about humility. He says, it’s not thinking less of yourself, not putting yourself down, is thinking of yourself less. Not putting yourself in the center of it. If we can sort of embrace humanity, embrace a bit of humaneness but I’m failing and so are you let’s try and find a way through this.

If we can embrace those things with a bit of humbleness, I think then we got a toolset to really change how things are. And that means stopping the sort of iconifying or whatever the word is, or agile people, saying [inaudible 54:26] being put on pedestals, we’re going to stop that. We got to stop as a community rely on just a couple of people and be more community based. And just understand people are fragile and make mistakes. There’ll be people saying the wrong things at the wrong time and just understanding that happens. Let’s try and work with, we’ll fail, let’s try and work and find a better way forward. And by doing that we build environments that work but still before about agile organizations, don’t make those mistakes. They’ll do things bad. As coaches we’ll go ahh but we’re just going to say okay, the Christians would say love the sinner, hate the sin. 

That talks about your great human being. Let’s see what we can do about it. I think that’s all mindset, I think is what we really need to sort of help, take us to the title of this Agile to agility. Take us on Agile to agility. I think that’s what we need to do.