Rick Waters

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:51

What was it first encounter with Mike Beedle.

Speaker: Rick Waters  00:54

Meeting Mike was kind of funny. There’s a little bit of backstory here. I’ve been practicing scrum for, I don’t know five or six years before and really like to becoming a scrum master, becoming better at it. I was horrible at first and now I’m getting lots of different people’s points of view on how to be a great scrum master. And then starting to become familiar with big people’s names like, Ken shaver, Jeff Sutherland in of course, Mike Beedle. Then I figured out Mike lives here in Chicago, I’m a Chicago native. I’m like what if I had already taken my CSM class. And I was like, what if I just dropped in on him and said, hi, I just want to shake his hand and meet him. And if things go any further that’s cool, and if they don’t, that’s cool, too. But I just want to meet the guy. 

So I send him a couple of emails, they all go unanswered, and what are we talking about? We’re talking about 2013, 2014, something like that. Everything goes on answered. And then I’m like, you know what? I’m working like three blocks from where he’s teaching. So on my lunch hour, I drive over to the hotel where he’s teaching a CSM class, I drop in I go, during their lunch break. I’m like, hi, Mike, you don’t know me. My name is Rick, a big fan. I bring the black book and I have him sign it and everything. And I’m like, hey, if there’s ever any time where you’d be okay with me sitting in on a class, I would love to just sit in the back and observe. I myself want to become a trainer eventually. But it’d be great to learn from somebody like you. He goes, yes. Come to Monday’s class. This is like Friday, right? He is like, come to Monday’s class, be there at 9am. And I’m like, oh, okay, we could do that. And so I came to Monday’s class. And about halfway through the first day of class, he says, okay, Rick, why don’t you walk them through this exercise, I’m going to go do something. I forgot what he said he was going to do. So he leaves the room for like an hour and a half. He’s gone for like an hour and a half in. We’re doing like the candy factory game, that people have to pass candy between them. Like, I don’t know, if I’m doing this, right. I’ve only seen it done like three times. 

Mike and I never talked about this at all. Why would he trust me, someone he just met for like five minutes a couple of days ago. And I’ve been sitting quietly in the back of the room all day. Why would he trust me to do this and nobody in the room knew why I was there. I wasn’t participating in activities or anything I was just observing. So that was just so weird. And it was surprised things like that, that made me really love Mike because he would just do stuff and it just all sort of always magically worked out. It’s because of experiences like that, that Mike and I kind of bonded really well, over the coming years. I sat in on more of his classes, I co train with him a few times. And several years later, I ended up co training with him a lot so that I could become a trainer myself, but I think just because of that very first meeting with him, and that very first experience with him in class. That’s part of why I do what I do. And it’s a big reason why I’m a huge proponent of Scrum now, because things could have gone very differently way back in the early days. I could have fallen back into traditional project management type ways. I could have gone solely Kanban or so or a different way. 

I think it was because of Mike’s influence in him. Always looking towards the future, there was always something big brewing on the horizon, and it ended up eventually becoming Enterprise Scrum, right? There’s always something big that he was talking about, I want to do this, I want to do this. And I’m like, Mike, you’re going in so many different directions. Is all of this one thing? Or is this just a lot of different side projects, and eventually ended up being Enterprise Scrum, which is one big thing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:37

No, that’s great. And that’s really like, I mean, it speaks I love that story. Because it says, although this is about Mike but also told me a lot about you going the extra mile of like, he’s not answering trying to figure out how do I meet this guy? It’s really cool. And I think that’s something I didn’t expect. But I really appreciate you sharing that as well. In what other ways has Mike impacted you like, what did you learn from him? What are some of the biggest things through co training through talking to him, when you reflect back, what are some of the things that?

Speaker: Rick Waters  06:21

I’d say between 2016 and 2018. It was actually the public, let’s say it that way, the public development of Enterprise Scrum, they really kind of drew me to Mike, because Less was becoming a bigger and bigger thing. Less, has always been around, but it was becoming bigger and bigger. There was talks of Sutherland coming out with something some scaling framework. Nexus had been out for a while, and of course, scaled agile, was always lurking in the shadows becoming bigger. Mike, including everybody that was around him that he thought could actually make his idea better, was something that was truly refreshing to me. And it got me to start to really understand what collaboration was, you know? Yeah, of course, all throughout our agile careers, we talk about collaboration, cohesive teams, sharing of ideas, brainstorming, everybody’s vision counts. But this was like the first true application of it that I’d seen. 

Mike was willing to take this thing that he had developed from the ground up, and open it up to his most trusted friends, and say, what do you think of this? Is the wording right here? What do you think of this concept? How can we develop this concept better? And while doing that, while almost literally wrapping his arms around the entire trusted community, he also wrapped his arms around and sort of embraced all of agility at the same time. I think the biggest problem with Enterprise Scrum and gaining acceptance was had the word scrum in it, it should have been like Enterprise Agility, or I don’t even know what the right name would be. But it was all of Agility, and including everything outside of Agility. It was, hey, let’s understand this world of work, because we talk about the world of work a lot. And most people have sort of blinders on, and they only want to look at one aspect of it. He was saying, let’s embrace all of it in when we want to move an organization towards one direction, we have to turn the entire organization and how do we do that? Do we do it in little tiny terms? Do we do it in one big, gentle giant type turn? And asking all 30 or 40 of us that were involved in helping him develop Enterprise Scrum, to help him develop Enterprise Scrum. That left a lasting impact on me because now, whenever I want to do something big, I very rarely start off alone. 

Almost always get at least one or two friends of mine who I think have the same general sort of, I don’t know creative nature, and say, hey, here’s my next idea. You guys want in on this? You guys want to help me with this? And we’ll start together. Instead of me going off and sort of burning the midnight oil every single night trying to get something off the ground, and then saying, hey, what do you guys think about this? Do you want to do it with me? After I’ve done 90% of the work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  10:00

I mean, there’s something magical about that co creation, like you said, especially if you’re aligning yourself with people that you have trust and are willing to.., but there’s not a lot of groupthink, where you’re willing to discuss, there’s not the main knowledge, but you’re also pushing each other to probably think in different ways. Or maybe to stay on Enterprise Scrum. Do you know, first of all you talk about… should be called something else. Was there any discussion, Was the ship already sailed on what is it going to be called? Or did you guys have discussions on the name for the framework or..?

Speaker: Rick Waters  10:41

I can’t even begin to count how many times I talked to him about changing the name. I think at one point we’re meeting just about every other day for several months, I think for about a one-month span, every single time I talked to him, I said, okay, so what have you thought about…, what’s your idea around changing the name to something else, and he was getting really tired. I think you know we come up with a great idea for a name for something, and then we sort of go all in on it. We buy the domain, we trademark the name or whatever, we build a lot of foundation around this phrase, this term, whatever you want to call it. And then we realize, Wait, it’s taken on a new life, it needs to be called something else. Ah, it’s that sunk cost. I spent so much time and energy in that one thing, and that was going over here. 

How do I change that? And I think that’s where Mike was going with that is, there’s so much invested, time, money, energy. All in one thing. If we call it something else, what do I lose? I mean, he had an entire company named Enterprise Scrum. So this thing that he created…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:08

And I can relate to that. I mean, as you were talking about, so like I have a book that I’ve been writing that’s based on wicked problems, and leading in wicked and complex environment, and the title of the book is wicked leadership. But it’s been, like you said, as the book evolves, and things like that. And it’s like kind of get input from people, like, probably wicked leadership, is not necessarily the best title for the mainstream, right? They probably for people out familiar with wicked problems. It might be, but I have that same type of feeling that sunk cost, like I’ve invested, I have the domain, I paid for the domain, all of that crap that at the end of the day, doesn’t really matter in a sense, or maybe it does, but I definitely relate to that.

Speaker: Rick Waters  12:59

You know not to go off on a tangent, I am likely to do that anyway. But wicked leadership, I like that, because it can go in so many different directions. If you’re in the northeast, that could be mean, great leadership, or if you’re anywhere else, it could be oh, that’s horrible leadership, you know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  13:16

Exactly. So that’s yeah, but it’s just like, same things are going through my head, which is like, sometimes I’m having doubts about that’s the latest, I’ve probably gone through five, six different working titles. But I can relate to that. When it comes to Enterprise Scrum, I mean, like, what attracted you to Enterprise Scrum and what Mike was doing with Enterprise Scrum. Compared to others, you know Less and other scaling frameworks that were out at that time.

Speaker: Rick Waters  13:51

Yeah, at the time, I didn’t have much exposure at all, to Less or Nexus, like, almost none, I’d heard that Ken Schwaber was coming up with his own thing. That’s the extent of my knowledge of Nexus. And I had read a little bit of Less the third book hadn’t come out yet. So I had read a little bit about it. I wasn’t too turned on but I wasn’t turned off. The thing that clicked with Enterprise Scrum was number one, I had its creator pretty much in front of me talking to me about it all the time. That’s going to influence you one way or another, right. The other big influence was I was working at Nokia at the time. And that’s when Leffingwell had come to Nokia and said, hey, I’ve got this idea on how to take lots of connected groups, and scale their agility in one way. And he definitely did not use those words. And over the course of time, he, at least at Nokia, I’m not going to say what happened at other companies but at least at Nokia, he pretty much destroyed the culture there. It was a huge agile culture there. And he pretty much just destroyed it. And that really turned me off to anything with Dean Leffingwell’s name on it. So I’m left with Mike Beedle, with Enterprise Scrum right here. we’re working miles apart, not 10s or hundreds or 1000s of miles apart. We’re working literally a couple of miles apart. I can meet him for lunch pretty much every day. And we did frequently. 

And he’s talking about Enterprise Scrum the whole time. So the beauty that I found within our price scrum was that it actually didn’t matter if one area of the organization was using Scrum, and another area or even the same area and different teams was using something like Kanban or was waterfall or spiral or V model, it didn’t really matter. The beauty of Enterprise Scrum was that if you wanted an organization to go in one direction with how managers work, Enterprise Scrum accommodated that change. And I still think the beauty of Enterprise Scrum today, is the idea of constant change, understanding that there is constant change. And how do we deal with it as a company? Not how do we deal with it as a scrum team? How do we deal with it as a company? So, that’s really much my journey to ES,

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:34

And is there a company or when we look at Enterprise Scrum today, and Mike’s legacy, what’s left of it?

Speaker: Rick Waters  16:50

Well, Enterprise Scrum as an idea, as a concept is still out there. It’s very cloudy, there’s a lot of mystery around what’s the legal ownership of it. Do his children own it? Does his ex-wife own it? Does his company that doesn’t exist anymore, does that own it? It’s really suspect where the legal ownership of Enterprise Scrum is right now. What I think the lasting legacy is that everything that I see coming out in not just since 2018, but also 2016, 2017, 2018 and beyond every new thing that I see coming out. I think Enterprise Scrum has impacted in one way or another, especially all of the focus of the last four years around business agility. I think Mike had a huge impact on this new trend towards focusing on business agility, mainly because he worked with the business agility Institute before it became a thing. He was working with them in trying to get them to adopt Enterprise Scrum. And once he passed, obviously, that sort of fell away, and but they still got his ideas ahead of time, and they’re still using them today. So I think that’s his lasting legacy with Enterprise Scrum is the business agility part, in that Business Agility Institute is still using it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:33

And maybe perhaps the foresight that he had, that that’s what’s coming. And like you said, everything probably was boiling up to that point, but now everything’s focused on that. Any other stories, anything that you would like to share about Mike or anything that maybe we missed?

Speaker: Rick Waters  18:58

I don’t know if we missed it, but there is one thing that I wanted to share, and that is just a few months before he passed. He had been traveling a lot trying to get Enterprise Scrum off the ground trying to solidify a relationship with the Business Agility Institute. He was in Chicago, and another CST was in Chicago. I hadn’t become a CST yet. I didn’t get my CST until after he passed. But also a really big friend of mine in the training industry, in the south of the United States. She was in town, and I just said, hey, Mike we’re supposed to have dinner tonight. Do you mind if… Mike Studerman joins us and Mike Studerman as you might know, he’s a CST up in Minneapolis, right. I’m like, do you mind he’s a friend of mine. I don’t know if you’ve ever met him before, but he’s in town training today. Do you mind if he joins us? Mike said sure yeah, bring him along. 

And I said like a couple hours later I said, and you know what? Another friend of mine is in town and she would love to meet you and he goes yeah, bring her along and we had a big old dinner together and here’s the thing I don’t remember ever having, and I had a lot of meals with Mike. I don’t remember ever having a serious meal with him. It was always a lot of joking, a lot of smiling. Obviously a lot of drinking but just a lot of fun and it was me and him and a couple of other people who had never met before just all having a great time and I attribute that all to Mike’s personality. He was just you know what, he was just an all-around great guy.