Pete Behrens

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:54

So Pete, first of all, let’s start definition of leadership, a lot of times there’s different ways that people define leadership, how do you see leadership and how would you define leadership?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  01:07

Wow, okay, you’re going to start out deep on me? It’s interesting, I know, when we teach our classes, this comes up a lot, like who’s a leader? And how do we define them? And we, I guess the way I look at this is to think about that shipside, the act of leading. So I think much less about the leader as a role. The leader is a title, I think more about the act of influence, the act of alignment, the act of getting a disparate or collective group of people doing something valuable. 

And so when it comes down to leadership, it’s something everybody does, whether they’re aware of it or not, and so that’s where I think when you try to think about educating leadership, it’s how do I do those things better? How do I influence better? How do I connect better? How do I enable and do something valuable with these people better? So maybe a long-winded answer to what is leadership. But, yeah, it’s an act.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:28

And it’s also something I think that we’ve discussed this before too, that it’s situational, right? So a lot of times our situation will require a different type of leadership. So could you maybe talk about situational leadership and what that means to you?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  02:46

Yeah, and that’s really when you think about agility and we get into this concept of, what is agile? Agile isn’t adaptiveness, it’s a recognizing with data, how do we respond? I think if we go back to the root of what is an Agile process, it’s an empirical process. It’s a inspect and adapt process. It’s a, I have data, so let me make a decision versus I’m going to guess what to do. And so yeah, when you say situational leadership, while we don’t necessarily use that in our definitions, we talk about situational leadership. And well, the way we talk about this is, as a leader matures, they start to develop layers, or I don’t want to say personas, but there’s depth to a leader as they develop. 

And so a leader with one level of depth, has a hard time situationally adapting, they’ve got one tool, one hammer, everything’s a nail. As soon as you start to build another layer, now I’ve got a screwdriver. So maybe I can do some things with a different tool. So situational leadership is that ability to adapt your tools or adapt your approach or adapt your style, adapt your power, whatever it might be that you’re using to that situation. And so unless you start to create those new layers and new tools for this leader, situational leadership is kind of a waste. It’s not helpful without having some of the basic tools and infrastructure to situationally adapt.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:28

And a lot of it is also about awareness. We talked about everybody that you hear talks about awareness and being aware as a leader or as a person, right? So what is it from your perspective, how do we feel somebody that wants to lead and be better aware, what’s awareness and how do you develop that awareness?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  04:51

Well, I think what you’re getting at is the heart of probably any leadership development program and I think if you were to go to any expert or read any of these books at the heart of what you’re going to find there is self-awareness. And so this is where my understanding of myself will help me understand then how to apply that self or some level of that self in various situations. 

So yeah, self-awareness is a very deep topic, I wouldn’t even call myself an expert. In self-awareness, I’ve done a lot of study under various, what I would consider experts or expert aggregators, like David Rock, I think is, does really well in this, I wouldn’t call him necessarily that expert either, but he’s an expert aggregator, he gets experts together in neuroscience and other things. And that to me, has informed me a little bit more about okay, what is our view in terms of that cognitive awareness? What is our metacognition? 

That second operating system running in your head that’s always going telling you wait, you shouldn’t be doing this, yet you’re doing it? And how much do we listen to that? And so, yeah, I think all leadership coaching, all leadership development at its root, is really getting towards, are you aware? And how do you develop that? And how do you, in a sense, leverage it to be a better leader?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:32

Yeah, and one of the things when I took the survey, agile leadership class with you, we talked about, I think it was from leadership agility from expert achiever catalyst concept, but that’s also from Bill’s work for those familiar with Bill’s work, it’s really that cognitive growth, as humans, as adults, it’s really about adult development, how we see and perceive world and as you move from expert to achiever, to catalyst, your awareness grows, so you’re able to see situation, or situations differently. 

And I think as coaches, consultants in organizations, a lot of times we’re helping people move across that spectrum, so they can actually see things broader in their organizations and see things more systematically. How do you help leaders when you’re working with clients, and you’re working specifically maybe with executive leaders? How do, besides coaching, or maybe what are some of the coaching techniques that you use to help them develop that awareness?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  07:48

Now, this is a probably a lot to unpack there. Do you mind if I take you on a bit of a journey through this dialogue? Is that fair? You and I got a chance, post COVID. You came to my class, and I really appreciated that but even some of that, so one of the things you’ll notice, when we teach, we go back to history first. And so we think about, well, everything we’re doing now is not brand new, agile is not even brand new. In fact, if you were to go back in time, there’s this great article I was reading about the concept of prestige for service, was the name of the article, it’s very odd title prestige for what is that? So go back in human history all the way back to the nomadic time, this is before agriculture. This is two-point X million years ago, when humans were just running around the earth. 

And they talked about leadership at that time, was a pay to play service. So if you as a leader did something for a tribe, if you hunt or if you protected, or if you were good procreator or whatever it was, you got things from the tribe, they gave you things like the better tent or the better meat or you got prestige because you did something and, we don’t teach this part in the class but to me the history is fascinating. Because Okay, circle them, move up now to 13,000 years ago, and we start agriculture in cities and we start to build these walls and, all this other stuff starts to happen, which I believe today, you could argue most corporations are built on the Game of Thrones technology of fiefdoms and castles and kings and queens. 

I mean, that’s what we see today. And what’s really fascinating when you look at the human brain science behind this, our brains are built for autonomy. Back in the day when you are my leader, and you provided service great, but if for whatever reason you started to steal from me or you started to do stuff, and you didn’t deserve it, I just kill you or I run away to start my own tribe and then I kill you, right? So, we had autonomy. The problem happened when we built these kingdoms and these castles. As soon as there was this dysfunction, people were no longer safe to leave, because as soon as they left, they had no power, and then they get killed. So all of a sudden, you didn’t get to choose your leader anymore. It was because they’re the child or whatever that dysfunction…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:26

So the rules of the game changed a bit, because…

Speaker: Pete Behrens  10:29

A lot, yeah. So the brain still thinking, Oh, autonomy, but the system change. So my point of that story is, if we don’t understand history, and we don’t start to understand just the roots of who we are as humans, it’s really hard to put that in context today. And whether that’s Taylorism of the 1900s, whether that lean in stop the line mentality of empowering under Deming, whether that’s today in thinking about or even take post heroic leadership of the 1980s and 90s, or servant leadership that came out in the 60s, and 70s, all of these things have a context. 

And if you don’t put them in some of those contexts, I think leaders have a hard time recognizing the value. So when we’re working with leaders, having a bit of that history, connecting back to some of those things, agile is not new. Agile is a different context of what we’ve been doing for the last 50, 60 years. And you could even go back two-point X million years. And it’s kind of going back to some of those freedom days that humans are built on. So to me, that’s an important characteristic in helping leaders understand better about their role as leader.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:46

Yeah, that just reminded me in a sense, it’s like understanding the history, but really, it’s about understanding ourselves, right? Through that history, we get a better understanding of ourselves. And then it goes back to understanding myself individually. What motivates me, what motivates others? And how do I better lead in this context as a leader, right? 

Speaker: Pete Behrens  12:09

Exactly. And you’re bringing up things around Bill Joiner’s work, the expert achiever Catalyst, and our training does center in that realm. And so I would say, the second thing we try to do for leaders is provide pragmatic, meaningful connection to things they understand because, when I think about myself as a leader, the last thing I want is a theory that’s yeah, whatever. I want tools, I want pragmatic things that are meaningful, and most of the leaders we interact with had a fairly rich, technology centered brain, they’re thinkers more than feelers. They like to process things, but they don’t like to waste their time on agilist and a lot of places we work in, they don’t want a lot of bureaucracy, they just want to get to the point. 

Let’s go. So, the tools, the models, everything we try to do, we try to bring this down to the simplest thing possible. And so something like Bill Joiner’s work, Einstein says all models are wrong, some are useful. Bill Joiner’s, work is useful. It’s not right. It’s a model, of course. But I find it to be incredibly valuable. Leaders can see themselves even with one hour’s work of exploring the model. Leaders start to say, oh crap, I’ve been manipulating? I didn’t realize I manipulate. There’s so much bad leadership because of lack of awareness, not because of intentful misdeeds. They just don’t know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:54 

Yeah, and a lot of times it’s exactly that. When I go in organizations, you see people are trying to do the right things. It’s just like they’re not aware that they might be causing the else some people are actually suffering from some of the decisions that they’re making, and they might not even be aware of how a decision that they made has just made somebody else’s life. Or they, that much more miserable and it is very interesting and when I look at it, it is that practical stuff. 

So how do we help the leaders who are busy especially in today’s context, help understand them how to see that , what they’re doing and how they’re influencing others? A lot of it also comes to change the culture right? We’ve talked about influencing and changing the culture. So how do you shape the culture? How do you create alignments through boards, certain type of cultures? What have you done from that perspective?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  15:07

Now, you’re hitting all the big topics here. So yeah, culture is awesome, fascinating subject. The way we, the way I have found, I say we a lot when I say we, I talk about our community in terms of the Agile leadership journey, we can talk more about that a little bit later. But, this we really is a reflection of it since I helped create it. But what we talk about is, the micro culture, and the macro culture. And this is another fascinating thing that I’ve come to over time early on, everything was a bound culture posters on the wall, these big change initiatives, we got to restructure the organization, all this macro stuff, that’s incredibly hard, incredibly expensive, and takes the top-level leader to enact it. 

And those are still going to happen, those will always be really big cuts through the organization that are going to have a potentially huge impact, positive or negative. What I think a lot of leaders miss, and what we try to inspire in leaders is the micro culture. The thing is every leader at every position, in the organization can influence a decision, can influence a meeting, can influence a dialogue, a conversation. And it’s in these micro moments that culture really lives. And in this is where a leader shows up, not into, hey what are our values that we put on the posters that we put on our website? But how do I exhibit that value in this meeting, in this conversation?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:52

So are you saying it’s about behavior? Because it that exhibiting, that is you’re talking about specifically behavior, right?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  17:00

Yeah, but what is behavior stem from awareness and mindset? Yeah, so behavior is a symptom. Behavior is a symptom of thinking. I was just in a workshop with a client just yesterday and it was really ironic. We are talking about leadership power style, assertive and accommodative, and how we show up as leaders and being more aware of our own power style. And the most senior leader in the room, came across and, had diagnosis a little bit and in front of his whole rest of his team said, I think the problem is skills. We don’t trust our team because they don’t have enough skills. And so I asked the leader in that moment to just step back and reflect, okay, what power style are you demonstrating right there? Because pretty much at that moment, everybody else shut up. And he was trying to get them to think like, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? And nobody responded. And the previous day, he had asked a very open-ended question, hey, what do you guys think about this expert? And there was all sorts of conversation. 

And it was just one of those really cool micro moments of being able to call out a behavior. Okay. And notice the difference in those two dialogues. Yesterday, the rich conversation and the open question, today, the very closed question, don’t you think it’s skills? And, and how that impacted everybody’s ability to feel safe contributed So yeah, it is behavior, but that behavior stems from my own awareness, and then my own my own thinking on, what does it take to create empowerment, engagement or implant this conversation?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:48

That’s a great example. And like that, I totally relate to that, the behavior is a reflection of your thinking. So if we have, a lot of times leaders are thinking like, I want stability, I want predictability. Right? I want that control, maybe or some sense of control. So if I’m thinking that way, what are the behaviors that may stem from that type of thinking? Right?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  19:17

Yeah and the organizations reflect what the leaders are doing. So, if the leader sees competition, likely that leader is invoking competition, if the leader sees disengagement, the leader is part of that system that’s creating that disengagement. And so we’d like to start with the leader. Because when you when you start to think about any organizational initiative that tries to come in and agile transformation changing, doing scrum or whatever, it will be trumped by whatever leadership is doing. And so what we try to do is hack into that leadership and say, okay, we’ve got to start to change that dynamic. Then we can enable some of this other traditional agile stuff to happen. And yeah, you’re right. It’s creating that awareness to recognize that that leader is being mirrored by those around him or her. In the organization, we need more hers in leadership.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:18

Absolutely. And maybe this would be a good time to go back to, I think based, I was trying to do a little bit of research and just trying to get a sense of but you started agile leadership program in 2011, through Trail Ridge, your consulting company, and now it’s morphed into agile leadership journey. And there’s a lot of people that have been trained to that. And when you reflect back, what are some of the things in the last 10 years? Like, could we talk maybe, and explore a little bit about where when you started talking about leadership in 2011? Versus today? Where are we as a community? 

Where are you as far as, how have you grown through this process and through the experience? Because I think we’re about to hit this another wave of thinking or maybe even paradigm where we’re focused more on like you said, that ship? So could you talk about the maybe a little bit about the background, and agile leadership program with Trail Ridge, what you’re doing with the Agile leadership journey, and the current state? So there’s a couple of different things here that we can start a little bit at a time I would like to spend?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  21:41

Well, let me take in another journey. So I think it’s probably helpful to have some context. So, my background is engineering. And so when people say, well, okay, how do you go from engineer to leadership educator, it seems like a big jump for a lot of people. And I actually argue what I’m doing is engineering. In fact, I think what all leaders do is engineering. And if you look at, okay, what’s the root of an engineer? It’s to optimize a system. Okay, mechanical systems, electrical systems, data systems, storage, whatever. What is the job of a leader? Optimize your people system. So when I look at what I do today, I help leaders optimize people systems ,some of the most complex systems in the world. 

And if you think about, our organizations are developing products and services for customers, most leaders end up focusing on those products and services for customers, we’re trying to get those leaders to focus on the system that’s building those products and services for customers, the people, in the organization, the teams, the culture. So what’s fascinating from that perspective, is this switch for leaders to switch from the working what we call in the system, to on the system, and that switch. So when I was, in my own journey on this, I was a VP of engineering and I had worked years for Rational Software. 

I don’t know if you know, that background, but, so I was in the process space, but as a leader building tools, and doing all the good things, the bad things, the waterfalls, the Agile [inaudible 23:21] type things that we did back in the 90s and early 2000s. And I said, I want to try this agile stuff. And so as a leader, myself, I and Dean Leffingwell actually work together. In our first agile implementation, I was VP of engineering, Dean Leffingwell, was one of our investors in our company that was we’re working together on this stuff. We, we both sucked at it. And it was at that moment, I realized, this agile stuff’s cool. And it’s really hard.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:53

Yeah, it was really, I actually listened to the podcast that you did with Dean recently. And that was actually good listen, so I really enjoyed it. And I really didn’t know that you guys work together. So, that was really cool.

Speaker: Pete Behrens  24:08

Yeah. So yeah, got a lot of different history. We could explore there. But yeah,. So fast forward a little bit. I ended up getting laid off from a VP role and longer story there that we don’t need to get into. And I had a choice. And I thought, okay, this agile stuff, easy to understand, hard to do. If it was hard for me, I know it’s going to be hard for others. And so this is about 2004 and five when I’m starting Trowbridge and trying to decide how best to do this. And so yeah, what went through and tried to determine who’s the best at that time. What’s the best ship to connect to XP. There’s DSDM going on, you’ve got , even some of the Crystal stuff is out there, Scrum is out there. And it’s like a guessing game at that point. And the one thing that made me choose scrum over everything else was they had an organization. 

Everything else was scary. Yes. It was like a three number. I think it was Esther Derby. It was Mike Cohn and Ken Swaybar. But they had something. And they had created a little community with a couple of events. And so I thought, that’s probably the best bet. So that was my going into becoming a scrum trainer in 2006. But I actually joined that because I literally hated the two-day scrum masterclass, like most people do, how could you be a certified scrum master in two days? That whole argument. That was me?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:51

Why did you take your scrum master class lit?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  25:55

I took it with my comb. And Mike awesome. He didn’t do all of the Hokey stuff, I would say contributed he was much more pragmatic. Mike Cohn is awesome and even today, I just can’t imagine that guy. Circuit. What is enough? 15,16 years later, he’s still doing the damn same thing. Like how the hell do you do that? I can’t do the same thing for like two years. So yeah, so but I joined the scrum alliance to change the scrum Alliance. And my goal and change the scrum Alliance was to bring coaching into the scrum lines. And so Mike Cohn gave me the permission to create the at the time the CSC, the Certified Scrum coaching program. And we did that in 2007. With the help of like Roger Brown and a few you need to interview Roger Brown, he’d be a really good one for you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:46

I was going to talk to him while I was in San Diego, because he’s still there, right?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  26:50

Yes, retired, and, but they’re surfing. Yeah, enjoy life. So my whole point was join the scrum alliance to make it better. And that was the coaching program at the time. I never so,10 years as a certified scrum trainer, never taught a public class. Trained 1000s of people, but it was all in service of coaching and client guidance. So yeah, the whole leadership thing. That happened because in those first five years, I was consulting under my company and training and doing Scrum. I noticed a pattern. We teach them, and they say, my leader won’t let me do this stuff, or my organization doesn’t let me do this and I just really got frustrated with that. And I’m like Okay, this sucks ,like Ken Wilber says, this sucks and that makes me sad, right? 

I think that was what it is. So I would say that, but it wasn’t enough for me. I felt like we needed to do more. And so that put me on a journey of leadership. So this is 2007 Eight. So yeah, it took me a few years to build the toolset to understand culture, to dive into leadership, to look at David Rock, to I’m going on a search. I’m like, feel like one of those now. You know roamers around the world trying to figure out what’s the right stuff? And, so yeah, 2011 was the first time I instantiated the class. We called it at the time leading and coaching agile organizations. And what’s really amazing to me, everything we’re teaching today, is roughly the same tools and models but how we teach it and the nuance and the language, everything’s completely changed around it. 

The models actually held together really well. Now, so yeah, so the cow that came that came out of the scrum Alliance, saying the number one request is get leadership training. And so they asked me to come back in and help like we did with a CEC to create the Cal educator and I worked again with a couple other teams people like Peter Green and even people outside to come along. So like Pollyanna Pixum, Steve Denning, he’s another guy you got to get on your, your show. Yeah, so that was just fascinating to bring these people together and to co create the cow program was pretty was pretty fascinating. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:41

It is. And it’s, I think just from coaching, I really respect you for that, the point is to coaching and it’s so important, and I think , one of the thing that when Howard and I spoke with him ,when he was part of the original right he worked with you I believe when he You guys did the original coaching. Or he was there at scrum Alliance? Was he?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  30:05

No. The original coaching happened way before he was probably still with what solution                   [inaudible 30:10]? Or whatever . No, that was way back that we probably had even Carol as manager, I don’t even remember.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:21

[Inaudible 30:21]. So maybe I get that, but definitely what I was telling him is, at least, what he was saying when he came in recently that focus on coaching, and I think I shared that same feeling with you is like you go to the class, and then what right, how are we creating more people that I use the analogy cooks and chefs, but like, how are we creating more on that spectrum? We can just expect people to take it to the class and, and fully understand it. So how did the leadership journey come about? So you’re doing all this stuff? And then I’m assuming talking to others, because it’s a group of you that came up with that, or was it your idea? How did Agile leadership journey?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  31:11

Yeah, let’s first talk about the premise behind it. What’s really interesting, the scrum Alliance works. And even Scrum works pretty well, because there’s a really clear framework. We have roles, we have ceremonies, we have the flow and some of the key tools. And so no matter who you are, you can teach a different ways, you can have different quality, but the students going to get, for the most part, the same thing at the end. Agile leadership is a wild west, right? There’s nothing binding it. So the risk and reward for the scrum Alliance was, we don’t have a single model. So we don’t want to make a bet on a single model. Because there’s too much creativity in the world right now. 

And we want to enable that creativity. So we want to allow a diversification of programs that share learning objectives. The problem with that model, so the success of that model is you can expand it, you can grow it, you can you can create a lot of diversity, people [inaudible 32:26]. Yeah, the options. The downside is a client asking for certified agile leadership has no idea what they’re going to get. So from the clients, per say, especially global clients, they’re going to get very different models, they get different approaches, they get different, in others, there’s some shared learning objectives. But the people behind them, you have to go to the same trainer, you got to go to the same company to be able to get one thing. So the premise, behind the Agile leadership journey, is, can we get a shared group of people that we’re willing to bet on the shared model? 

And we’re okay to adapt that model through an empirical process. And so the toolset we adopted because I helped create it was what working and we train 1000s and 1000s of leaders through this program. It’s a vetted, program that works. And so we said, let’s start there. There’s some core, there’s some adjunct. But let’s use some of these core models. And if you want to come into this program, you agree to use that framework, so that we can have consistency. So if somebody chooses agile leadership journey, I know I’m going to get a certain scrum like framework, a certain leadership model, cultural model, how I’m going to go through transition model, things like that. And, then we said, Alright, let’s build this community so we can inspect and adapt, and let’s allow freedom to experiment and bring those back into the system. And it can change over time. Now, how good are we going to be at that? That’s something I think we’ve got to prove out. And there’s always risk of being consistent and adapting. And so trying to find those balances, but that’s the premise of agile leadership journey. 

In about 2016, when we started this, that agile leadership journey switch, and this is when Pete me was saying, I no longer want to teach Scrum. Leadership has become so important, so valuable, so much more meaningful to teach that. All I want to do is leadership. And so that’s when I dedicated my working career to leadership. And that’s when I started to test is this successful because it’s Pete? Is it successful because of the model? Can other trainers teach this? And so the whole hypothesis was let’s see if we can scale it, let’s see if others can teach it and get similar results. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since 2016. And today, we’ve got about just under 40, global guides who are teaching coaching using this curriculum. And the way we look at this, it’s a parallel to scaling scrum safe, less whatever it is you want to do. This is a way to scale mindset, a way to scale leadership and values in the organization, that we do not teach a specific, we don’t teach agile, which is…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:42

Exactly. I think some people also leverage leadership circle, or even some people leverage, specifically the assessments ,Bill joiners assessment, or leadership circle assessment. Maybe just a follow up question to that, then is, what is your take on these assessments like leadership circle? Like the one also Bill has, and there’s many different assessments, right to help organization assess, and I find them helpful, but  sometimes, they can be a little misleading as well. So I’m assuming there is assessment as part of the Agile leadership journey and part of that trying to approach or the combination of frameworks that you’re putting together?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  36:32

Yeah. So I look at assessments like I look at models, they’re all wrong. And some are you said, , so yeah, assessments are useful. When a leader puts in the energy they get ,the energy up, garbage in garbage out, quality in and quality out. Same thing with an assessment. So the leaders that take it seriously get a lot out of assessments, and it doesn’t really matter. I just think it’d be bad assessments, but leadership circle, Bill Joiners, alliterative agility you could argue one’s better than the other blah, blah, blah, whatever leader is going to put meaningfulness in, they’re going to get some meaning things. Yeah. But we don’t do that. That’s not a starting point for us, though. 

That, to me is a pretty deep place to go. And it’s pretty intensive. And so what we try to do is separate awareness from practice. And we use those terms rather than teaching and coaching because for a leader, it’s about inspiring the awareness and developing the practice. And this parallels Cal one Cal two are now they’ve separated Cali, Kelo, Kelty, and then Cal two, so what we do is we want to inspire as many as possible. So we try to make that as easy a bar as possible. So it’s just about self-awareness. So put yourself in there. What do you think? 

And how do you ,and you get value from that, you get value from those tools, and you can self-assess to a certain degree, you’re going to we all lie to ourselves, but it gives you know, people get value without a formal 360. But then we move that 360 into the practice program. And so when you come with us for six months, okay, now, let’s go deep. Now we can put it into practice. Exactly. And so yeah, we leveraged assessments. And that’s true on the leadership side, as well as the culture side. We have assessments on both of those sides. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:39

And, yeah, so it can help. And I like what you said about the awareness and separate the awareness and practice. And that’s a really good way to look at it. It reminded me of a lot of times I use Johari window just to help people create that awareness of like, hey what’s not known to me, and just creating that going through that exercise or introducing that to a concept, but the practice is next on the person if they really want to start developing that awareness and start exploring, especially that unknown.

Speaker: Pete Behrens  39:20

Well, you came up, why would I want to, maybe I’m going to turn the circle on you here a little bit. And you came through our awareness workshop last spring. So I’ll put you on the spot of being interviewed here on the podcast. What was your experience in going through that program? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:39

It was so good, in a sense that I really liked the group. I liked the cohort, it was a small cohort, and I really liked the exchanges and what we learned from you, but also what we learned from each other. And there was also some of the things that I didn’t know that, when we start talking about I started in making connections, right? So, it was, again, that awareness, and then I was able to put it into practice. After ,it’s almost like when you have a light bulb go, like, oh, shoot, I didn’t think about it that way. But the way either pizza or aircon or whoever it was in that class was, I never actually looked at it from that perspective. 

Now I have a completely different view of this thing that no, I was looking at it from my own. So it was like that, those learnings from each other, and then going back and in some way, trying to put it into practice, or we’re talking before I started recording, I’m writing a book. So it was like, oh, now I have a new way to explain this thing that I wanted so. So that was, it was still short. I think we all agree. I wish it was longer. And it was, even though we did I think it was like four or five, six weeks where we met. But it’s still flew by. And I feel like I haven’t done yet the Cal two .

And I teach now Cal one, I want to start teaching Cal two. But it’s that ongoing discussion with people that have desired to learn to grow. And being, also I think another thing was really that I liked how you created the safe environment. We all, there was a couple of us that knew each other. But there was also, some people that , I never met before. And it was great to develop that trust and safety. So we could talk about some of the things that a lot of times, it’s not easy to talk about in a group. Yeah. 

Speaker: Pete Behrens  41:52

Yeah. Thanks for that. And talk about an accident of COVID or a driver of COVID. A lot of people say, COVID’s been the best digital transformation enabler. But I would suggest COVID’s been probably one of the most creative drivers for a lot of people in a lot of industries. And that includes me in teaching online.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:17

And I was going to say that, because I don’t want to point to that without sounding like I’m kissing speed. But, it was no, I learned ,this was, so just for the audience that are listening, this is like, March or April 2020. And I believe this was the first-class leadership class, they did. So, I was just impressed, your preparation for the class combination of the videos, and then the way that you organized mural , that also made me, like Man, I get to step up my game, this is really cool, how it’s organized, how much effort and time I can tell how much you put into it. And that was another thing besides just how professionally you took this whole thing. And I remember you saying, I’m playing around with cameras, I have one camera here. And you were learning through this whole process, as you were putting the class together. So, I did learn from that perspective of delivering online content. You gave me ideas of what I needed to do it in the classes I was teaching. 

Speaker: Pete Behrens  43:31

 It’s interesting a lot of people say, well, what is going to stay when COVID goes away, like, what changes are going to stick. And I do think while , remote education for our elementary schools, and high schools is probably really pathetic. I, believe adult education remotely, is not going away. In fact, it’s probably going to continue on escalated path. In fact, we had clients asking for us for better remote education before COVID. And we were hesitant and really stuck in our ways. And now that I’ve gone through this process, and we’ve learned a lot since your class, even extending our modular times how much we’re spending. 

We’ve had a lot of people go through our program that have gone through the person and go through this and say, this is better. Yeah, we’re not in the same room. But the modularization spreading out over time really being able to little bit of practice in between each session. Think about it, process it. There’s so much gain that we get through this process of remote connection and learning. I’m really starting to think, do I want to go back to the classroom in such an intense microcosm where, it’s engaging it’s fun, but it’s that really big up and down and now forget about it versus a little bit lower energy but it sticks with them longer. So it’s going to be really interesting to see how our community training coaching community responds in the long term on remote education.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:13

It is really interesting, so I started doing a [inaudible 41:18], like three, four years ago in that same kind of format longer pool. And what I found with that, and I still I tried it with CSM too, is the man, most people that are taking especially screwed by Scrum Masters, a certified product owner, they just want to go in and get it done. Right. But you said, it’s that quick, it’s drinking from the firehose, or whatever you want to call it. 

But people that are really interested in taking a month-long approach to consuming these ideas and techniques, putting them back into practice, is really more valuable for them and everybody else because you have a chance to digest. And I was listening, Jim Benson is also working, and I had to, I’m going to interview him as well. But he was talking about how he purposely designed his certifications to be four months long, based on how we learn, that you want to it’s almost like you want to let things marinate.

Speaker: Pete Behrens  46:26

And that’s when you joined our class, we went through that design process quickly in March, April. With that long term in mind, we said this isn’t a COVID response. Let’s design this forever. Let’s design this for what we want as far as what’s going to be really good education. And, that’s the intent. So I love what Jim Benson’s doing, I think more trainers should do that. In fact, I’m pretty upset with a lot of trainers who don’t haven’t refactored their training in a way that makes it valuable online. 

And we’ve had a lot of people like you that hesitated doing that, than they came to our class, because we get a lot of coaches and trainers come to your class. And they’re like, ah, I don’t know if I ever want to teach the other way again, because they all of a sudden start to see it. And so yeah, that’s, was our thinking anyways, and I’m not saying we’re perfect. I’m not saying we’ve got it all worked out. But it’s, definitely causing me to think, what’s going to happen when stuff goes away? Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:30

Yeah, and I’m trying to think about that, too. Because another thing from learning. And even if we go back into training, I’m thinking about, how do I bring some of this stuff into a physical? How do I combine some of these tools? And if we go in a physical, how would we use neural in a class and combine some of the things that work really well in virtual? Would some of this work also in a class where people are there, but they’re for some parts, they’re interacting on murals? So it’s going to be interesting to see how things pan out, hopefully, when we go back. 

What is your thought about, where are communities heading? Again, I do think there’s a lot of things that indicate to me, maybe it a lot of it is subjective, but where there is a paradigm ,that’s shifting, and I think we’re going to be more focused maybe on the people side of things. I’m not sure. But are you seeing anything slowly shifting? Do you see any new paradigm or anything? What has COVID triggered besides training that you think we’ll be seeing in the next maybe two, five, ten years? I don’t know.

Speaker: Pete Behrens  48:58

Yeah. I appreciate the question. Certainly, I don’t put myself up as a futurist. But I don’t think, but yeah not just take COVID out of it. I think the writing’s on the wall. There’s a lot of commoditization and art right, so scrum training commoditization, you can learn Scrum and a lot of different ways you don’t need a $1,000 course to probably do that. And so I think, that’s going to threaten a lot of Scrum trainers. I think the coaching side and that’s what I love about Howard. So I was on the board of directors when Howard came in and pitched and to be honest, he blew me away. The simplicity of his pitch to the scrum Alliance was really impressive. He uses that card technique, he did that technique as his presentation to the board. Yeah, that’s awesome.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:01

So for people that are not familiar, Howard is the CEO and the Chief Product Owner scrum Alliance. So when he communicates to our community, it’s via video, and he doesn’t have any slides. It’s on these little cards with couple of words on them. So yeah,

Speaker: Pete Behrens  50:19

Yeah. So unfortunate though, I think, and I’ve seen this, I’ve been predicting this for the last five years. Scrums commoditizing. And that’s part of my reason for getting out of Scrum .I think, okay, there’s enough people that can do that. So what’s the next wave? Well, I believe some of this wave we’re seeing right now is we’ve got to focus on leadership, we got to focus on the organization, we’ve got to focus on the systems. And those are becoming more complex, they’re more remote, they’re more global, they’re more dynamic, we’re seeing faster, you look at the auto industry cars go from a six to seven-year cycle, from design to deployment down to now two to three years. So we’ve cut that in half. That’s huge pressure, right? 

How do you get a system, that’s been working forever to restructure like that, or you’ve got a medical company that basically has been built on two, three-year hardware cycles of diabetes pens, and all of a sudden need to go into two three months cycles on software for the pens that updates the data so they can manage the data. So you’re talking about massive shifts in the way business is done. And scrum’s a tool and agile is a tool, but that the system, how that system works? That’s to me where the meaning and the purpose is. And I don’t think there’s an answer there. I don’t think there’s a one way to do that. And that’s why it’s a fun space to be operating in. As a coach, I really enjoy the complexity. And I really enjoy the co-creation that we have with our clients. 

In fact, I’m working with a medical client right now that’s going through that hardware to software process. And one of the senior leadership said Pete’s you’re not like most consultants. So yeah, how is that? Well, most consultants come in, and they sass and then they give us recommendations. And so they, yeah. And she happened to be going through, we’re teaching the class at the same time, because our philosophy is, we’re not coming in here to tell you how to do your business. We’re coming here to teach you leadership, and help co-create with you and your business. And so our engagement model matches our teaching style. And so as you start to see, what I’m trying to be is trying to be more catalyst. I’m an outsider here, I could tell you what I think, but that’s one data point. 

You’ve got a lot of really smart data points in this room, just like you said, in our cohorts, there’s a lot of smart people there. If it’s only the teacher teaching, you lose a lot of data. Same with the organization. Yeah. So I think it’s about bringing out that power that’s already in the organization. It’s about, there’s going to be a whole subsystem of AI most of these jobs are going away. It could be at some point programmers go away. So what are you getting into now with having a living wage or just get into that concept of jobs are optional. Does everybody have to have a job now? So, I do believe that’s where some societies will continue to head and, many jobs, white collar, blue collar, etc., will continue to be mechanized automated. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  53:52

It [inaudible 53:53] that’s why, it’s tough to guess or there’s, it is a guess and it’s tough to understand how things will change because it’s all complex and dynamic. But I definitely see those things changing. What would you recommend to maybe Scrum Masters and people that are aspiring to get better at understanding leadership, agile leadership, maybe as a last thing here? What would you recommend to them? Or maybe as far as, if you were in their shoes, what would you do? Obviously, again, it context matters, but is there anything that you would like to share?

Speaker: Pete Behrens  54:45

Yeah, well as a good coach consultant. I’ve always got an opinion. I found, so when I go back to what what’s helped me the most, I find ,I learned the most when I can learn something outside my systems, so I think actually going to scrum gatherings, going to Agile classes, is very limiting for many people and isn’t going to really shock you that much or create that much change. There’s a few and  we like to think our program is starts to bring that in, but what our program is doing is actually trying to bring in some of that outside versus so bring in leadership, bringing culture, bring in change. So studying those different elements, change management, organizational development leadership, meditation mindfulness, I mean, there’s a huge swath of things to think about how humans, how organizations systems work. That, to me is, where I think if you’re in that, I like process, and I like to improve systems, that’s where I would encourage people to explore. 

And that’s one of the reasons I’ll put a shameless plug in here. We started our podcast called relearning leadership. And the reason yeah, the reason we did that is our whole goal here is that I think all leaders need to continuously relearn, all leaders need to rethink how we’re doing things today, because it’s going to change in the next six months, nine months, few years. And so we’ve got to be on that same growth curve. And so our goal with three learning leadership is to bring in interesting problems, how are we thinking about them, and then help leaders understand maybe how they could apply that in their world and connect some of those dots for them. So just explore outside your bubble is my recommendation.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  56:46

And it seems like relearning leadership is also all about awareness, because it’s a constant re-evaluation and being aware of what’s going on. So that’s a really cool way to look at. I don’t know if you guys intended that. But that’s when you were describing it. That’s at least what I saw. What I’m interpreting it is.

Speaker: Pete Behrens  57:07

Yeah, well, there’s so much creativity that’s going out there. And the latest podcast episode we have, , which is awesome is rethinking the procurement process with Lean agile procurement. We’ve got another one coming up with how do we do what’s called participatory budgeting. So getting the community involved in the budgeting process, not just giving feedback, but actually bidding and saying, let’s buy this or this. So it’s, rethinking all of these systems in different ways. And that’s what’s fascinating to me. And that’s like you, what keeps me engaged, is all this creativity that’s going on in the world and finding different ways to do the problems we’ve been faced with for decades.