Richard Kasperowski

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:31

Who is Richard Kaperowski? Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your work? What was your journey? Maybe just…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  00:39

Sure! So, I am Speaker: Richard Kasperowski and sometimes I’m a little goofy and silly like that. Let’s see so, I’m a writer, a teacher, coach. I do a lot of work with teams. We’re calling this podcast here Agile to Agility. I do a lot of work with Agile, I do a lot of work with something called the Core Protocols. And I do a bunch of work with open space technology. How did I get here? I was a 12-year-old kid with a computer in my house, which back when I was 12 years old that was unusual. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:22

It was a big deal. 

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski 01:24

It was a small computer, it was a big deal. Yeah, it was lot of fun. So, I grew up with a computer, which implies a couple of things. One is that I was better at computers than I was at people. Right? Because computers…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  01:43

You are one of those people.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  01:46

I am absolutely one of those people. I’m your prototypical self-selected programmer kind of person. Computers are easy. They do exactly what you tell them to do. And when they do something different because you made a mistake, and you told it to do something that you didn’t intend, but you told it. So, it does whatever you tell it, whether it’s what you intended or not. People are harder, people are interesting, people are different. So, I was this kid, like all the other kids were outside playing baseball, soccer, football, street hockey, whatever, where I grew up, I grew up in New England. So, street hockey is a real thing. And I was inside playing with computer or playing piano, making music doing things that I could do solo that basically I had total control over.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:34

Nice. So, you said you grew up in New England, I saw you wrote about it. The word wicked, I have a book that’s coming up, that’s called wicked leadership. And obviously, we have a connection to New England here, where we both know that wicked mean something different than what it means in most of the world. So, could you maybe talk about… obviously you wrote about it, you said… Can you share your thoughts on the word wicked…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  03:06

So, you did a lot of you growing up in New England as well. So, when I say wicked, you know what I mean? And the way you’re using it in your book title is a little different, or maybe exactly the same? I’m not sure.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:20

It’s a little bit different has to do with wicked problems. So, which comes from New England too as far as I know, it was coined in Massachusetts…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  03:29

So wicked in the sense that I grew up using it’s an adjective, it’s an enhancer, it means very, very, very, very wicked. A wicked good time. There used to be a thing called Records. So there used to be a Record stored here. And their slogan was for a “wicked good time.” Right. So, you could have a wicked good ice cream cone. You could play street hockey with your friends. That that could have been “that was wicked, the way he scored that goal.”

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:09

It is interesting!

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  04:10

It’s fun. I used to avoid it. But I’ve come to embrace my roots. And just be more natural with the words I say. And I actually like it. I love people’s accents. The word wicked is part of my accent. I love people’s accents. I love the differences that we have between each other. I love when we say things that are a little different from each other. And it like tweaks our brains a little bit and we know more about each other because of the words we’re using or the way we use the words. So wicked is one of those words for me.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:48

Yeah, and also cultural It carries a lot of meaning with it, in implicit meeting like in a sense that, we know what it means but somebody, across the globe might think it is crazy. 

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  05:01

I joked with my wife about these words, she grew up in California. So, when we’re driving in the car, we go around rotaries and sometimes it’s wicked hard to get into the rotary and wicked hard to get out. What else do we do? Oh when I drink water from the Bubbler. When I want a bottle of wine, I go to the Paki

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:27

 I love doing…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  05:28

The package store. Does anybody else call it a package store? That’s what we call it here.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:33

I’m sure they call it something else that we would think maybe it’s weird, but I just spent the last few years in California and I miss California, but I did miss New England just for that. There’s something about New England that has its own little culture and bubbles.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  05:54

I was talking to somebody else who grew up around Boston a couple of weeks ago and we were joking. She was like, “Yeah, I grew up in the house near the rotary just on the other side of the Dunkin Donuts. No, not that Dunkin Donuts, the other Dunkin Donuts.’

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:13

That’s pretty typical up here. I was talking to Kevin Callahan last week, and he was joking about how is…, in remote parts of Maine. But for Maine standards is nowhere close to remote. So, it’s all relative, I guess. 

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  06:31

It’s all relative. I told a friend who lives in Canada. I went on our honeymoon a few years ago and told my friend, yeah, we went on our honeymoon at this place in northern Quebec. He’s like where, I’m like a true blonde[06:42]. He’s like, That’s not northen.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:47

Exactly. So, you mentioned you teach and you teach Agile software development at Harvard University. How’s it to teach at university versus when you teaching public classes?

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  07:01

Yeah. Okay. So, teaching a university course, versus teaching public course or the private class inside a company. I would contrast it more to teaching a private class inside a company. That’s sort of… it’s also a contrast to teaching an open public course. Teaching a university course, especially the one that I do, it’s totally an elective. Nobody has to take it. It’s in the computer science department, people take it because they want to take it. That’s the difference. People take it just because they want to.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  07:36

Nobody told them that they have to. 

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  07:39

Yeah, nobody’s boss told them that they had to, nobody’s there begrudgingly. People are just there. They’re there because they want to be there. They’re totally engaged. They’re totally in there. They’re learning together. There’s nothing distracting them from learning together. That’s the biggest difference. And because of that, there’s so much positive energy in the in the space, and I’ll say the space versus the classroom, because we’re not always in a physical space anymore. There’s so much more energy in the space. And the learning just happens, the learning is so fast and intense. I think that’s the biggest difference. People are just there because they want to be there. And the learning happens.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:31

How well do you see them adopt? I’m assuming this is undergraduate, graduate or a weekend program.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  08:38

 This is the catalog as a graduate level course.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:41

So, from a perspective of software development, I’m assuming you’re doing… in teaching some of the extreme programming, maybe some more programming, what is the class look like? how do you in a sense, what is the agenda?

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  09:08

Yeah, so let’s see for starters, for anybody watching or listening, you can visit Agile Software course.org. It’s everything about the course including the syllabus, you can see the whole syllabus, the list of topics, there’s a button that will take you to Harvard’s website where you can actually register but it’s what you might call full stack Agile, it’s everything about Agile in a semester. Oh, and the summer version of the course, the semester is three weeks so it can be really short and intensive. Everything about Agile, the people stuff, the business stuff, the tech stuff. So, we’ll start with just what is Agile? Oh, and also, every learning segment is activity based. We learn by doing versus learning by listening to somebody give speeches, that old fashioned of learning somebody at a podium at the bottom of a big lecture hall. We don’t do that. It’s all learning by doing so, activities to learn about agility, activities to learn about Scrum, activities to learn about teaming and high-performance teams, all the technical things, activities to learn about the technical things, pairing mobbing test-driven development, working with legacy code, continuous integration of apps, everything about agile, full stack agility.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:41

And people, I’m assuming are open to that, because I’ve taught at universities to undergraduate, graduate and it’s different, at least the courses of that are more like the scrum master course. And you have kids that never managed anything, or that never part of any regular process, it’s mostly 17, 18-year-olds, and their perspective is different. And I’m interested, how open are people to full stack development, to mob programming, some of the things that we see in organizations where somebody has been developer for 20 years, they’re not as open to those ideas or those practices is somebody that’s…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  11:27

Different levels of people’s readiness to try the ideas. One thing you’ve done some teaching at university as well. The private teaching that we do or the industry teaching we do, the public courses that we do “that’s wicked dumb.” Nobody should have to learn this stuff. We should, we all can continue learning, we all can learn new things as we grow in age and have new experiences. And we can bring those new learnings back into our lives and into our work. But this Agile stuff. The Agile Manifesto is 20 years old now Scrum is older than that, XP is older than that, this stuff goes back 25, maybe 30 years. There’s nothing new here. People should know this, when they leave their university program. If you’ve got a degree in computer science, or software engineering, or anything related to the business of technology, digital product development, tech product development, you should know this when you come out of your program. If you don’t know this coming out of your program, there’s a gap in your in your university program. So, this has been a dream of mine, that people would just know this stuff coming out of their CS degree or their IT degrees, whatever they’re studying.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:08

That’s interesting, because I mean, …

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  13:11

People can just know this stuff. they don’t have to learn it afterward. It’s not a big deal to introduce agility into your company, because people just know it when they join your company.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:21

And that’s what Mike Koon said. I interviewed Mike Koon last week, and he said exact same thing, which resonated with me, which was like, that’s what we need, in a sense, and I spoke with one of the either Gartner or Gartner or Tobias Mayer, but they’re at the other hand, saying, if you look at the history of things, 20, 30 years is not a lot of time. So, we have to be patient with this stuff, too. And we are seeing more and more… at least last five years, have seen more universities more so, the next 10 years look promising from that standpoint, and maybe we’re just little impatient, and we want to everything, tomorrow, but I’m seeing a lot of progress to that space.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  14:14

Maybe this is something you alluded to this as you’re asking the question, there is a difference between teaching these ideas to younger people, versus teaching it to people who are already working in industry. I’m sure you do this in your courses. Everybody does this. We start a class about Agile or Scrum and by making the case that waterfall [blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,] doesn’t work that well [blah, blah, blah.] And here’s Agile and here’s Scrum and [blah blah blah blah blah], and everything’s better. The first time I did that to a group with a group of younger people, they were like…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:56

Exactly what you’re talking about.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  14:59

Really, they were like, so what?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  15:04

 I did that they’re like, what’s waterfall? What’s Agile? in a sense? they have no…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  15:10

 It’s a little bit of that, there’s no objection that you have to attempt to overcome. When you’re teaching younger people, it’s just, this is Agile, this is Scrum, this is pair programming, [blah, blah, blah,] let’s just learn the stuff. And for the most part, they just want to learn this stuff and try to do it. Oh, and here’s another one, when I’m teaching people, the various technical skills at any of these skills really, that they use every single one of them doesn’t really matter. Right? But okay, so people are resistant to pair programming. And that even comes from the way university programs work today, if you get caught doing your homework with somebody else, that’s cheating. So that means pair programming is cheating. So, people are just resisted, we grew up, like me, self-selected, kind of introvert, loner kind of person. I loved playing with computers more than playing with other people. Okay, not so much anymore. I like people more now than I like computers. 

But for people who like being alone, still a lot of us are drawn to working with computers, and we just don’t want to have to write code with another person at the same time. Okay, so we go from being a solo programmer to now we’re learning pair programming. That’s a big step. I’m open to learning this here in the classroom with you Richard but and I’m never going to do this at work or my other courses. And then we take it up another level to mobbing together, like in a group of five writing code together. And it’s like, once they do that, they’re like, “I could never do that at work, or in my other courses.” But pair programming, that’s not so crazy. I could do that every day.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  17:11

Humans are interesting, right? In the sense that, it’s all about perspectives. And a lot of times we don’t know till we try it. So yeah, it is…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  17:22

Anything new is hard. Anything that’s different from what we had just been doing. We automatically rejected it. It’s the way we are as humans, there’s some news, my wife loves knitting. There’s this knitting website that has a huge community, they even made political news during the Trump era. Because the community is so big, that it actually was important. They changed their UI. And the whole knitting community went nuts. Because it was different. It was part it’s better than the previous UI. And of course, it has its little, it has some new bugs that they introduced. But the community went nuts, mostly because it was different from what they had been used to. And that’s just how we are as humans, and whenever we encounter something different. It’s hard.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:16

So, the core protocols are different. What are the core protocols? Maybe for those that are not familiar.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  18:24

Okay. So, imagine that you could watch some really amazing team at work. Really, any group of people, two or more people, this is how I define team. It’s because I started as a as a solo loner kind of person, two or more people, that’s a team aligned with a common goal, especially to be aligned with a common goal. Otherwise, maybe two or more people is just a coffee party or something. Two or more people aligned with a common goal, although if enjoying great coffee and pastry is your common goal, maybe your team,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:58

Exactly, I was going to say, it could be…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  19:02

I miss great coffee and pastry during the COVID era. So, imagine you could watch a really great team. And imagine you could watch a lot of really great teams, and that you watched so many really great teams that it became apparent that there were some common patterns. You could sort of identify what those patterns are between all of those really awesome teams. And teach those behaviors back to other people and other teams. So, they could also be awesome. That’s what these things called co-protocols are. It’s a set of behaviors learned by observing really great teams and written down so that you could read them, you can learn them, you can adopt them, you can use them with your team, you can make them your team agreements, and they are different from normal from default team behaviors, and that makes sense because average behaviors that are not an average team is not the best team. Most teams are average. Now that turns out most of us are average. 

And most of the things we do, although we all say we’re above average, most of us are average. The average person says they’re above average. So, most of us don’t do all of these sorts of things all the time. And they’re as simple as, share how you’re feeling with each other. That’s something that most of us don’t do most of the time. Share how you’re feeling with the people around you, just to tell people, I feel glad. I’m really happy to see you today. It’s so great. It’s been a while and it’s nice that we’ve got some video connecting us. We can see each other’s faces, and I can see you nodding, smiling And, it’s great.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:01

I do miss in person though.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  21:04

I’m sad that we’re not actually in that room that you’ve synthesized. That would be better if we could be a team of two or more people enjoying some coffee and pastries together and…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:21

Dunkin Donuts, what led you down the road, to the core protocols? How did you get introduced?

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  21:31

Yeah, so, I told the story about being this loner solo kid with a computer, playing music, playing piano, whatever, by myself. I was a really good programmer. It was just natural and easy to me. And my skills grew and grew. As I grew. I did this as work. I was sort of a natural people leader because I was so good at the tech things that I had credibility. People believed me, when I answered a question said this is how we should do it. I was usually right. Or maybe something about my voice and body language, at least it seems like I knew what I was saying. went along with it and followed me. As I as I rose as a technical person and a leader of technical groups, I got more and more interested in it. Maybe this this new problem for me to solve was not how to write the code. The new problem was not how can I be the best writing code? The new problem was, how could we? How could we be the best at writing the code? And then it was like, how could we even know what code we should be writing? 

What’s the problem we’re trying to solve? Not just writing great code, which is amazing for its own. It’s amazing fun on its own. I love that stuff. But what code should we be writing? And that led me into various things, that led me into Agility, Scrum, extreme programming. And we started, the extreme programming book came out around 1999, or 2000, or something. We started reading that and using those ideas. Reading about Scrum and using those ideas, I got more and more interested in how could we be our best together. So that was Agility Scrum, all the different parts of Agility. That was learning about emotional intelligence, that was learning about how people work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:38

The tough part. Would you consider the people [cross talk] [23:40]

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  23:44

Most interesting part. People are way more interesting than machines.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:54

Right now, maybe.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  23:58

A life amongst people is so much richer than a life without people. This is how viruses spread. We need to be around each other. And virus will take advantage of that. Humans need to be near each other. We need each other. Even when we know that we’re going to get infected by a deadly virus, we have to get together, we need to do we, we need other humans around us. We cannot be around other humans and life together so much richer than life sitting alone, writing code by yourself.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:40

So just to build on that, as far as core protocols, and maybe who influenced that, as far as I believe it’s McCarty. Yeah. Could you maybe talk about that a little bit. You wrote two books on the core protocols too so how did they influence your work? 

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  25:08

In fact, the core protocols is their work typically. And I’m one of the people fortunate enough to have befriended them, I learned about it from them. And I get to share the ideas, spread the ideas through the world and help other people put them into practice. I guess that’s a lot of what I do, I don’t know that I’ve… I’ve probably invented something or come up with some new idea at some point. But I think one of the things I’m really good at is taking other people’s ideas or finding research that other people have produced and helping people apply it to themselves in their teams. And I guess that’s what a teacher does. That’s what a coach does. So that’s one of the things I guess I’m good at, that I really enjoy doing. 

The full origin story of core protocols is that Jim Michelle McCarthy, we’re working on an average or worse team at Microsoft, the took a few steps to make the team better. But they were like shooting into the wind, they didn’t really know how to make the team better. Turns out the team was amazing. It was I say, high performance team as a team that’s measurably better objectively better than other teams that do similar work. Their team was that, it was like the best in their in their niche. They felt like they got lucky, which is my experience with so many of my past teams, I just got lucky, really no original. And we did a few things on purpose. But mostly, it was just lots of random group of people. And turned out we liked each other enough that we spent enough time together that we got some good results happening. They left Microsoft and opened with a describe as a team research lab. And they invited some groups of people into the lab, they would give them an assignment, sort of a work assignment, and deadline five days and not do anything else, just watch. So as observational research, they did these enough times with enough teams that they started to notice patterns in the teams that were successful at the assignment. 

And then they turned it into experimental research. The variable they introduced is, what if we taught these behaviors back when we taught these behaviors to the teams that entered our lab. So they did that. And every time they did that those teams were successful. They replicated that with real teams that industry. Other people did it with real teams and industry. So, the variable wasn’t just the McCarthy’s. The variable was these behavior patterns that other teams could learn and adopt. And they wrote about them, they call them protocols. Where protocol in this sense is a description of a script, a team agreement, a contract, maybe that’s how we behave together. Protocol in this sense is like a medical protocol, healthcare protocol, like, surgeons wear masks in the operating room, and then all the people in doing a procedure communicate very clearly everybody’s role is clearly defined and so on. Also, like a diplomatic protocol, a way of behaving so that we achieve our mutual goals, and there are no misunderstandings. Right, so that’s what protocols are. And these are like Team agreements that you could adopt with your team to read…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:57

I think also more than that, in a sense, the way that I see it is a belief too. For instance, positive bias, right. It’s an agreement, but it’s also belief you have to believe in that and also value positive bias and then your behaviors will reflect that.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  29:20

But yeah, it’s interesting, sometimes I don’t know what comes first, the mindset or the behavior. With enough practice at the behavior, the mindset does change. With enough practice at saying yes to people, your mindset does change versus automatically saying no, you build a new reflex. It’s a kind of deliberate practice.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:46

One influences the other, right? So, it’s like…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  29:50

There’s a feedback loop there, they amplify each other. I learned some of these things from the community of Agilists like you and me. Stop saying but, start saying and. Right? And if you catch yourself saying no, you catch yourself saying but, and then you go yes and right. And the more you practice it, the more you become aware of it. So, your mindset changes, the more you’re aware of it, the more you catch yourself, not doing it. So, your behaviors change. Yeah. And you’ve started to build up this this kind of bias toward positive outcomes, which I think actually is the foundation of, of success of great teams of success on an individual level.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  30:37

Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things I want to ask you is, you talked about awareness, right. And I was maybe months ago talking to this guy, Greek guy, Zak, on a beach down in La Jolla, in San Diego. And my wife was playing with my son and his daughter, and we just joking around. And we have some common interests and things like that. And after my wife said, you know how many times you said no, but because I told her, I teach people, we do the improv in classes. 

And I’m like, I had no idea. I was having a good time talking to him. But I wasn’t aware. I didn’t practice awareness. So, what do you tell teams? I mean, awareness is core of a lot of things, including the core protocols, how do we become more aware? What is typically your suggestion? How can we practice and get better at awareness?

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  31:44

Yeah, I call it self-awareness. It’s one of the one of the building blocks of great teams, probably one of the building blocks of great anything self-team product. Deliberate practice, right. So deliberate practice is finding the things you need to practice, finding the things that you haven’t already mastered. And practicing them. I’ve done a lot of this in my life with athletics. I did a lot of deliberate practice practicing Marshall arts. I do it with music, I’m back to piano after 30 years off piano, doing a lot of deliberate practice. I’m at hands Exercise number 29 out of 60. And I’m just blowing through the deliberate practice the finger trainer, and I can play piano better than ever, in my life. It’s amazing. A lot of it is because of the deliberate practice. In physical activities, we call it building muscle memory. Right, so that your body just knows what to do without having to stop and think about it. If you’re sparring with somebody in Marshall arts, you can’t just stop. 

Because they’ll kick you or whatever, and they’ll score points for you, you playing music, you can’t just stop and think about what note to play next, just play. And the way your body just knows it’s the muscle memory, it’s from the deliberate practice, the same thing with anything that any complex skill that you hope to acquire, even though this positive, just this bias toward positivity, it’s complex to change the way our brains work. How do you change it deliberate practice, you find the right way to practice it, you find the gaps that you need to work, you find the right feedback loop to notice when you’re doing it right. Or doing it not quite the way you want. And make the right adjustments. 

A really easy example is this emotion check in I mentioned earlier, how do you practice that emotion check in, in a deliberate way. Every time you get together with your team? You do and you share how you’re feeling with each other. That’s how you practice it until it becomes second nature. And then you can just do it without thinking. Do it without thinking comes from you just test driven development. How we do that, we do deliberate practice. So that by the time you get to writing your real production code for work, you just do it that way. You don’t have to think about it. You just do it, you’ve built the metaphorical muscle memory. And it’s just how you do it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:30

That’s just remind me, you could do a lot of things… I joke around but you can do with your family. So, even with your significant other, checking in talking about how you feel is probably going to strengthen that connection in that relationship. Right. So, it does apply. probably No, but it’s interesting. We talked about work and we tried to separate work in life. A lot of this you can’t really separate it Same thing,

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  35:00

It’s the same thing. Your best work team is an example. A work team is a relationship with a group of other people, your best work and is with you, if you have a best work team, then you have had a best relationship. And if you’ve had a best relationship outside of work, everything that you’re doing in that relationship that made it the best you can take to your work team. A work team is relationship, anything you do in your non work team, you and your wife, you and your family. You can take skills and ideas from the best parts of your work and bring it into that as well. There’s no, you’re the same person, whether you’re at work or not at work. So, there’s, really a lot of…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:47

A lot of times the work forces us to almost, at least in the past, especially to do a check in when you go into the building and be somebody else than what you are outside. Connection, like deepen connections, is also something that’s part of core protocols. But how do you deepen connections in today’s virtual environment, I’m assuming that’s a little bit different, right?

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  36:13

A little different. And it’s mostly the same. You and I can share how we’re feeling right now. And it totally works. We’re missing our complete set of senses, right? I can see you but I can’t see all of you. So maybe I have half a sense of sight now. I can hear you but I can’t hear all of you, there’s some signal processing, I can’t hear your voice. As if we are in the same room, it’s a little different. You have you have good audio gear, I have decent audio gear, we can we can hear each other pretty accurately. There’s no sense of smell, there’s no sense of touch, we’re losing a lot of our senses that we would have if we were together. And yet, we can still connect our brains and hearts. Right? 

We could share our feeling as an easy example. We could share with each other with enough self-awareness if we knew we could share what we really care about what’s the most important thing in my life? What’s the most important thing in your life? We could ask each other big questions. We could have a big talk kind of conversation. And really, we’re having a big talk kind of conversation, we can really connect with each other. And we know when it’s happening. I can’t tell whether it’s happening for you. I know it’s happening for me because I feel it. No, no. Yeah. And right. That’s feel it happening. I know it’s happening, at least on my side.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  37:40

And that’s what I said like before…

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  37:42

I think that’s the only way I can know because as humans we communicate at least 50% using words. Okay. And yeah, we are losing some of our communication because we’re not physically present with each other. But I feel it right now. I feel like we’re connected and we can get geeky about it and call it, at really high bandwidth or whatever. But I feel it right now.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:06

Yeah. And that’s why… I feel the same way. And the reason…before I started recording, I said, the reason I started this podcast is, I miss people, I miss talking to Richard, I miss seeing Richard, I miss seeing these people or, opportunities to meet somebody they didn’t so… when I was making a list of who I want to talk to,  I was like, Richard, I haven’t spoken to Richard in a long time. I was like…,

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  38:31

Your podcast title. It’s like Agile to agility. Because I wanted to talk to Richard. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:40

You’re one of the people that I thought I was… what would be a good way to talk to people, record it share it and see if anybody else is interested in hearing what we were talking about. So, it’s…, we’ll see how it goes. But that’s the intent behind what Milan is doing here. How do we amplify team’s awesomeness? You talked about awesome teams, we’ve talked about in the past. What are some of the things that you help teams do to become Awesome? Yeah, yes, wicked awesome.

Speaker: Richard Kasperowski  39:20

Wicked awesome. You want a wicked good team? What do you do? Well for any kind of team, I got interested in this these core protocols stuff and emotional intelligence and safety in these ideas. Because they just apply to any group of people. Any group people you care about. And then I often say it like that, as I teach a class on this, as I go through the class that turns it. It transitions from talking about your work team, to just talking about any group of people you care about, because that’s actually what we’re talking about a group of people you care about. You can practice, you can do deliberate practice to get into the state, you could pick up one idea and try it and sort of, I realized yesterday, I used to talk about move the needle to the right, right, like you’re driving a car on the accelerator. 

Yeah, but we don’t have a needle that moves to the right in our car anymore. It’s just a digital readout. You can make the number go bigger. Make the team a little bit better every day, you can make your best group you can make your favorite group of people a little bit better every day. Just to try one of these ideas like, explicitly sharing how you feel all the time, not just when you’re mad about something all the time you could be happy about something and share it. You don’t it doesn’t just have to be I’m mad about the way you left the bread crumbs near the toaster. Okay, but if you only tell me that you’re mad about things, and all I hear is that you’re mad at me about things. I never hear that you’d like me. Share how you’re feeling all the time. Oh, this is an idea from extreme programming. It’s if something is good, turn it up to an extreme do it all the time.