Tobias Mayer

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:44

Who is Tobias Mayer?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  00:49

When I saw that question, the first thought that came to mind was Tobias Mayer, who solved the longitude problem and has a lake on the moon named after him. So I thought, that’s who he is, if you google him, without the word agile, or scrum that’s who will come up. But who am I? Well, I’m someone who is involved in the scrum world. And I have been for quite some years now. I came to software development quite late in life, I was in my mid-30s. And fairly stumbled onto XP in 1997, before the book was written, there was some papers out there, and I was doing some research on process at the time. And it just grabbed me really, and as I moved into the States in 1999, and started working in that industry for the first time, really. And I never was able to really practice what I read in the book, but I found it fascinating and I wanted to and so I was always looking for opportunities to put into practice some of what I was seeing there, but I never really was part of a team or anything. But eventually, when I was made into a manager, [inaudible 02:12], I was able to introduce the ideas a bit more and some of the people that I was working with at the time, we were all into it, we were doing our best to try and create a sort of an XP team out of what we had, in a very top-down management driven organization. 

That was my first real opportunity to get there. And also being a manager on I was like, how do I manage people? I had no idea, I’ve never really done this before. So I started looking into it via the XP groups and I came across Scrum. And that really touched me and I read Ken’s kind of might be his first book. And it just resonated with everything, all the values I had in life. And so I was hooked, I suppose at that point. And I did my best to start introducing scrum in the best way I could from just reading the book into the teams I was working with, or the one team really, that I was working with. And it was a blend of sort of XP-ish stuff and scrums staff. So we would meet. I don’t think we met every day but we did meet I think was three times a week, we got together as a team. And we did pairing with testers and developers side by side, which was a model actually, I came across from reading an article of Microsoft is how I used to work. Pairs of testers and developers and I thought that was actually really successful for reducing the number of bugs found. Yeah, because we were finding bugs as we wrote them, essentially.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  03:40

What happens when you get people together and just talk to each other and collaborate?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  03:44

Amazing. Yeah, it is. We had some personality clashes and we had to navigate our way through that. But it wasn’t XP, and it wasn’t Scrum. But it was better than we were doing. And we were able to show evidence that the bug counts in our projects were way lower than the average in the organization. And we got very few calls in the middle of the night to go fix things so clearly something was working for us and I was able to convince the organization then to try out scrum proper, as it were, and so I went and got certified myself 2004. And so I became the expert, the scrum expert after my…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  04:29

I know many people maybe don’t fully understand but what did the certification look like back in 2004?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  04:37

It looked like a piece of paper that Ken Ken Ken Schwaber gave to you in the classroom, wrote his signature on it and bark like a dog. [inaudible 04:48] don’t know if he still does that or nor, the Sheepdog metaphor playing with that, right? Yeah, it was actually, my two teachers at the time, Ken Schwaber and Kurt Peterson, who was an early scrum adopter and trainer, dropped out of the scene for several years, maybe 5, 6, 7 years or something and came back a few years ago. And he’s back on board. I think Kurt traveled the world to find himself and he discovered himself back in the scrum community very well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:25

Not many people do that, they leave. 

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  05:29

Yeah, so Kurt was a great influence on me actually. What was interesting about meeting Kurt, is that prior to being a software developer, I’d worked in youth and community work. And a lot of the work I had done was influenced by Augustus [inaudible 05:46], who was a theater innovator from Brazil, who did something called Theater of the Oppressed based on power for years, Pedagogy of the Oppressed work. And so that was  my background I’d come to and I thought there was no connection between that and the software world. 

And then I met Kurt Peterson, and Kurt introduced Augusta [inaudible 06:09] work into my scrum training course. And so I was blown away. I just thought, there’s a connection, everything links, and this is where I’m supposed to be. So it was really important for me that Kurt was one of the teachers, I think that really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what this really was, it was more than just a better way of developing software. It was a way of changing organizations I guess, that’s what it was. That’s what the realization was at the time, because the workplace I had worked and even before that were just top down the usual hierarchical-management-driven organizations that didn’t get much done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:53

And how much, what do you think, as far as psychology like understanding people, how much does it have to do obviously, with the other side of things of understanding people and culture? When it comes to scrum? Yeah.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  07:09

[inaudible 07:09] it has everything to do with that, I think, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the route. I mean, Scrum of course came about several years before the Agile Manifesto was written. But the values that went into [inaudible 07:23] came out of Scrum in part and other things too, of course. Came back from developed Extreme Programming, Ron Jeffries, they were Signees and Ron and Jeff Sutherland, sorry, Ken and Jeff Sutherland were also signees so they were new with what everybody was doing, right? And so the value that says we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools that was alive, and that’s what they were doing. They were valuing people. And so the training was very much focused on that and focused on the idea of cross functional teams. So that was a novelty to me as well. 

I remember one of the aha moments from that workshop. And it was several years ago now, wasn’t it? It was when I asked a question about a kind of don’t know exactly how the question was phrased. It has something to do with handoffs from UX and UI people. And I was told that there was no need for handoffs in Scrum. And I just couldn’t get my head around it at all. I thought, well, how can you possibly not have handoffs from UX? I got that you didn’t have to have handoffs to us, I can just about grasp, but the idea [inaudible 08:36] was a different world in the organization, I was in a different building, the people were strange, and we never talked to them. And they sent us emails, and we didn’t understand them. And they sent us mockups [inaudible 08:46] code, because it didn’t make sense. So the idea that we didn’t have to do that anymore was just, it took me a while to really figure that one out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:55

So it’s a big mindset shift. And I mean, even the Agile Manifesto and I was just a participant or watch the first part that was organized for the 20th anniversary. And it’s pretty clear the six signers that were there, they talked about just how much it is about the mindset, the being part of agile rather than the doing part and it’s combination of both. But do you see that, what is what is your understanding? What’s the current state of agile or agile movement or whatever you want to call it? But reflecting back, what do you think, what is the current state and is it a good state? I know you’ve sometimes talked about that this is a necessary progression or that at least some of the things that I’ve heard you saying, right? That it’s not necessarily bad, it’s part of the change or I don’t know what the correct term is. But what is your thought on where things are today, 2021?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  10:10

Well, to be honest, I don’t really think about it that much. Because I spend lots of [inaudible 10:13] that’s the state of agility. But when I’m pushed, I do. And really, if we think about it, when was the manifesto written? 2001, right? So it’s pretty 20 years. Yeah, you just said 20 years. And scrum has been around since the mid-90s, early, mid 90s. And there have been various other efforts put in before that to try and shift the way we do things, but it’s all pretty new really, isn’t it? It’s relatively new compared to everything else that we know, that we’ve followed on from going way back into the Industrial Revolution, so on some of the management methods that we’ve pulled from that. So it’s going through [inaudible 10:55] problems, and it will for some time, I think it’s the idea that we could expect it to suddenly transform things. I know I naively did. 

And many of us do and good for us that we have [inaudible 11:08] that we get started with it, and we were all cynics and never work, we were all naive. We have been and more enthusiastic, we’re passionate, as well. And that’s where this does work. Even though it doesn’t work, it doesn’t really shift things, it doesn’t really change anything because the organizations are so rooted in business as usual, the way things are, it’s very hard to move that. But there is successes of course, anyone listening to this probably go well, that’s not my story, my story is different. My story is to say it was successful, and we did make a shift and we did change things. And I’ve had some experiences like that too. I’ve seen shifts in people, more than I’ve seen shifts in organizations. And I think the organizational shift will follow, inevitably must, if you shift enough minds and enough hearts, the organizations that contain those people have got to change, they will be able help themselves. But it’s a slow process. So one of the problems we run into with the larger organizations, and this was my experience over several years of seeing change take hold in an organization and be championed and that’s key, right?

We talked about needing a champion. But then the champion leaves, the champion is usually an executive, was fairly senior executive and the champion leaves and is replaced by someone else, who is bringing their own style, their own ideas, their own people into the organization and they don’t want to just pick up what they see as the mess that was left behind by the last guy, [inaudible 12:37] we’re not going to do that. So they fire all the Agile coaches or Scrum Masters and the teams just have to report back to their managers, no more self-organization, because no one can track that and they bring in better tracking tools and then it all goes away again. And then after several years, this is a true story of an organization I was with. So years go by and it comes back again. And it comes back in force because someone else is championing it. And then they go through the same thing. So it goes up and it goes down and it goes up. And then I went back to that organization. 

I didn’t know 9, 10 years after they fired me for trying to do Agile. And they hired me as an Agile coach there. And so they were back on the upward slope. But they’d also just hired a new CEO who didn’t like agile. And so during my two years of being there, I saw it crumble again, it wasn’t my fault. It was on the cards already and I just got on time there. But while I was there and the people I worked with there, I could see a great desire and a passion to move away from this kinds of structures they were forced to work in into something that gave them more autonomy. And I think that, to me, that’s the bottom line. Working in an environment where we have autonomy, we have some control and when people don’t have that, they get ill, they get mentally or they get physically ill and they get burnt out. And so people are recognizing that and people are requiring it and they’re demanding it, in fact.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  14:07

Yeah, and working with the senior leaders in companies to like they don’t have it easy. It’s easy to point the finger to the executives and say, hey, you don’t get it, but what is your experience? What did they go through? What type of pressure? How the system forced them to act in a way and I’m talking about organizational system, to act in a way that they do?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  14:35

Well, I’ll answer that in a moment. But it’s also important to know that it’s not just management and it’s not just executives that resist this. It’s also people in the grassroots of an organization who don’t want to change the way they do things. They like what they do and they’re comfortable. They’re in their comfort zone, right? And we’re pushing them out of it. And that’s not always the kind thing to do. And I thought about it once when I was trying to worked with a group of people whose management basically saying you can do what you like, you can figure this out, you can self-organize, you can tell us what’s wrong, and we’ll fix it. And they couldn’t do it, they couldn’t do any of it. And they didn’t want to. And it took me a while to get my head around that, why don’t they keep this, it’s a massive, brilliant opportunity they’ve been given here. But then it dawns on me that when they were hired for the job that they’re doing, they were hired under a contract, essentially, right?

And the contract was, here’s your manager, you’ll do what he tells you to do. And at the end of the year, you’ll get rewarded if you’re good. That’s a traditional way of doing things. And suddenly, they’re being told that’s not what you are anymore. Now you have to make decisions. I didn’t get this job to make decisions, I got this job so people could tell me what to do. And so suddenly, they’re making decisions, they’re talking, they’re supposed to talk to customers, what are the things that they perhaps wouldn’t have done? Wouldn’t have joined that company if they knew about that? So it’s almost violent, I think is almost violent when we ask people to shift that quickly. It’s not always desired, that’s the point, right? So the resistance comes in, people say I don’t want to do this, not interested. And I’ve had developers on teams who’ve done their best to undermine and break it. And it only takes one or two to derail things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:21

Well, that too. And I’ve had people like, even when we talk about the physical space, people are so used to, that has nothing to do with going into open space or environment but there’s something that they’re used to, and that what they like, I remember, I was coaching one organization and I remember his name, Mike told me, Miljan, this is too much for me, this whole change, and going now into this open space is forcing me to look for other opportunities because it’s not that I hate agile, it’s not that I hate open space, it’s just, I can’t handle it right now.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  17:00

That’s one of the things that I find really annoying about the way people try to embrace agile in organizations. Companies I’ve worked for and with, have come from cubicle culture which clearly isn’t the best way of operating. And then they knock all the cubicles down and make this massive open space where everyone can see everything. And there’s visual noise in there. And so what people do is visualizing all these audible noise as well, because now you’ve got no walls to block out the noise. And so, in this giant space with all these people, you don’t know who they are, they’re not part of your team, you don’t interact with them. And so what people then did is they put screens around their chair, and they put headphones on. And so they’re now more isolated than they were, at least in cubicles we had the option to like break the walls down a bit. We could take panels down and chat to each other through the walls. But now people are doing the opposite. 

They’re closing themselves off. So the move towards open space offices is the wrong move, that’s not going to solve anything, it creates more problems, in fact. So what do we want? I don’t know, the caves in commons model that Paul Hodgetts introduced to me back in 2004, it’s a nice term, isn’t it? It’s like there’s a common area where people work as a team. And they’re a little areas where they can go off and work by themselves if they want to. That’s quite a nice thing. So team rooms is the thing, isn’t it? Is that you want the noise that your team makes is important noise, it’s useful noise, it’s noise that’s going to help you do the work. The noise of other teams is just noise, it’s noise you don’t need, you don’t want and isn’t going to help you. So the principle for me is work as closely as you can with the people who are on your team, working on the same product as you and as far away from everyone else as you can. That would be the balance fine.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:56

Yeah, I mean coming back to the senior leadership and executives, a lot of times the decision just to come back also to the idea of open space. One of the reasons that executives like this idea and talking to them is that they can move people from three buildings into two buildings and it’s going to save them money. And therefore they’re going to look good, because, hey, now it’s not about open space, so this is about saving money and moving from three buildings which is very expensive into two buildings that will get everybody to collaborate. So when it comes to executives and decision making and how they’re incentivized, what are your thoughts and experiences in that realm?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  19:47

Well, yeah, to go back to the question about the executive management and helping them make the shift. Any of them do, as we know, many of them champion this and there’s usually those people that hire people like me to come in. They hire, looking for an agile consultant or coach or mentor or something, and they bring us into the organization. Now, the problem with that is there’s many problems, actually. But I’m thinking of one particular case where I said, I was talking to this, see something smallish company, chief technical officer he was, and his complaint was the team’s, they want to do Scrum at the organization, and the teams can’t do it. So I need you to come in, basically, the message was coming on fix the teams. Now, today, I’d be much wiser and I wouldn’t do that, but I did do it. But I also said to him, I said, I’d really like it if you joined the two-day workshop that I’m going to run with your teams. And he said, I don’t need to I know agile, that was his response. Of course, he actually didn’t know much about agile at all, what he thought agile was, was being able to change his mind whenever he wanted to and have people respond to that. That’s what being agile was, and he was going to…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:02

[inaudible 21:02] type of thing. 

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  21:07

Yeah. The problem in general that story aside, I think with some executive management is the Peter Principle, which you’re probably familiar with, right? You are, when I say you might know it by different name, it’s the idea that people get promoted to their level of incompetence, right? You familiar with that? No. Okay. So the idea is, in a hierarchical system, you get promoted on the basis that you know how to do the work, and you’re good at what you do. You’re good at what you do at this level, so you get promoted to this level.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:41

Yes, yes, yes, I get it. Now I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  21:45

Yeah, you really got the skills to get good at that. So you have to work really hard to get the skills to that. And if you get it, you move to the next level. But every time you move up one, you are now at a new level of incompetence, so you have to become competent until such time you can’t get competent anymore. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  22:00

Because it gets bored. It’s a carrot and stick type of thing where like…

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  22:05

You’ve got a structure of incompetent people leading an organization because of that principle. And I said, it’s said in jest, but it’s actually true to a large extent. Now, the problem with it is that people can’t admit that they are at their level of incompetence, otherwise, all hell will break loose, right? So they have to bluff. So we’ve got these hierarchical levels of managers bluffing their way through their day, acting like they know stuff, and so they can’t admit they don’t know. So this guy telling me he knows agile, he has to know agile, he’s the CTO, right? He reports to the CEO, he has to know agile, if he admits he doesn’t know, that’s a problem, right? So he came to my workshop that’s like him saying, I had to learn something. And so he can’t do it, because he can’t learn because he knows already. And so that’s why we get lots of people who don’t know much in leading organizations. So it’s a challenge, it’s a big challenge. And I’m making a caricature out of it short, but within the jest, there is a lot of truth in that. And I think we need to be looking out for that tendency in some of the leaders we work with, the tendency to feel like they already know. [inaudible 23:20].

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:21

Yeah, I think also along those lines too because of the silos and journals specialization that we’ve seen in organizations, you also get promoted but if you’re a developer, and you get promoted, you’re kind of promoted through the silo. And then ultimately, when you’re responsible for something that’s more end to end, you don’t have a full experience or understanding of the whole system. And sometimes I’ve seen that that can be limiting factor as well, because of that specialty, and not necessarily that it’s bad, it’s just that people, for instance, that get promoted through one silo don’t fully understand or empathize with others.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  24:09

Yeah, they don’t need to, right? If you’re an engineering manager, you need to understand how to write code and how to get other people to write code. You don’t have to understand anything about someone else’s job. We know the structures of organizations called siloed structures cause lots of problems. Yeah, we know that this syndrome of thinking we know things. I was just thinking recently, my wife asked me why I don’t go to many agile conferences anymore. And I said, because there’s nothing more I can learn. I know it all. And when I said that, I thought, Oh, my God, I can’t. But I said it, I meant it because I really felt like to be fair, there are a lot of agile conferences, I was speaking to people who are in new to agile, which is fair enough, that’s who we need to speak to. 

But I got this level of arrogance where it’s like it doesn’t apply to me anymore. But happily, I recently did a Certified Scrum Product Owner training as a participant, I joined a class with [inaudible 25:18] Qureshi. And what a fantastic class by the way, that was a fantastic class. And I learned a lot. I learned a lot from him and didn’t learn about Scrum but I learned how he sees Scrum and his experience of Scrum, angles of viewing Scrum and XP. In fact, he talks about that a bit, not so much XP but software development. And everything he did related back to the Agile Manifesto, which is something I’ve drifted away from. So that anchored me back in there. So it was a lovely learning experience and it reminded me that I don’t know everything.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:57

And that reminds me of just like how much I love coach training. And you’ve co trained, I’m assuming with Ken and others, how much did you enjoy that? Do you miss that part of learning? Because I feel I learned so much when I co trained or just peer with anybody to do anything. I feel like I learned a lot.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  26:18

I do. I mean, the way I structure classes now is that almost everyone’s facilitating something so there’s a multi way learning, back in the early days, yeah, I co trained with Ken a couple of times. And he was very much his class and me doing a little bit here and there. But following that I worked. In the early days, it seemed like pairing was natural, and everyone was doing it. And then it became a bit more about the money. Because when you’ve got two trainers, it’s might be a nicer experience for the participants. But you’re only making half them out. But I worked with Michael [inaudible 26:51] a lot in the early days and worked with Lisa Atkins and a couple of things. And a whole host of other people, Colton, who we were just talking about here and I’ve had on CSM a few times. So part of it was to help people to become CST’s themselves, so that a lot of the code training was on that. But in the earlier days when it was Cain, Martin and Michael James and Victor Salvy and myself, we would pair just as a matter of course because we were all CSTs already. We weren’t teaching each other anything we made. We was learning from each other in the styles and stuff like that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:34

Do you miss that? Do you miss those?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  27:37

I do to some extent, and I still partner with people, but it’s in somewhat different ways now. I’ve recently struck up a partnership with a guy, a Belgian guy called Francis Loman, he works on my certified scrum master training as a product owner. So we have the teams build products, and he’s the product owner for that, because he’s an educator. And so what the teams are building are educational tools using Scrum. So I’ve got that kind of partnership now, which is somewhat different to doing co training. I’m a customer, he’s a product owner, the team, the participants are teams. And then I have Scrum masters who are experienced people who’ve done the workshop before, practice it, come in and work as Scrum Masters with the team. So we recreate the whole kind of Scrum structure in a three day workshop. That’s just been fun. It’s different but I learned a lot from all of the Scrum Masters I worked with and from Francis and the participants, yeah. So I still have that experience of collaboration, I’d say now. But I went through a few years of not having it so much. Definitely. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  28:57

Yeah. So coming into this, I didn’t know this before that you kind of shifted careers. And in your early mid-30s, made that shift. If you could go back in time, and talk to your 18 year old self. What would you tell him? Because I think about this a lot of times, obviously, through a lot of stuff that I’ve been through both personally, growing up in Boston and living through the war, and then coming to United States, obviously, it’s all based on decisions, even decision that my dad decided to come here and having an opportunity to just even think about what would I do if I had the knowledge that I have today. So what would you tell your 18 year old self?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  29:44

Well, whenever I get asked that question which is not often, I have to say, but the sort of general feel, I mean, you sort of think about what would have happened if I had made this decision instead of that decision?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:56

If you don’t know, right? It’s obviously one thing leads to another but maybe let me put it this way. What would you recommend to somebody today that’s 18-year-old based on your experience and knowledge what you know today? Maybe not to yourself, but to somebody that’s, yeah… that’s undecided what they want to do in life. And anything is possible.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  30:27

Yeah, I’m not much of an advice here. But I have two sons who live in the States actually now, and one is how old are they, like 26 and 24? I think something like that. And I tried not to give them too much advice, because they didn’t see me as a particularly successful person. So I was going to hold off on that. But I think the advice really is make your own mistakes. That would be my advice for anybody. We don’t want to make other people’s mistakes or other people to tell us not to do X because of the outcome of that. And we all fall into that with our own kids. Probably no, listen to me, I know better. I’ve made that mistake, you don’t have to make it. I think sometimes we do. We do have to make our own and I’ve made plenty mistakes. But I think another bit of advice that might be useful and I might give this to my own 18-year-old self is don’t regret the past. You do your do and you use it, you utilize your screw ups and your mistakes and your failings and your embarrassments. You utilize it in some way and move forward on it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  31:41

That’s a really good one. And that one I can definitely relate to. Last time, I think it’s been a couple of months ago, I attended a webinar that you participated, and that the topic was of metaphors. And you’re big on storytelling, metaphors, what are your favorite metaphors when it comes to, that you use and that you share with others?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  32:18

Well, a colleague of mine, Carrie, was working as a scrum master in one of my CSMs. And she very kindly wrote down all the metaphors that I came up with, and she took it. But it was fun to read my own words back, well, in her words. Are you talking about metaphors for Scrum? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:39

Any I mean, it’s really like which ones resonate? Which ones do you speak about frequently, when you’re teaching or when you’re talking to somebody? For instance, I have several that I use and teach, which ones do you find yourself using more frequently?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  33:04

It varies, and it changes according to sort of, the metaphors themself emerge out of the conversation. So I don’t really, but there are certain things that I fall back on. I use the gardening metaphor quite a lot about Scrum, and in organizations. You know that the scrum master role in an organization is like a gardener nurturing the soil, creating the right environment for the plants to grow, he doesn’t use the plant and he doesn’t shout at the plants to make them grow and he doesn’t get annoyed when they don’t grow, because he looks back at what’s wrong with the environment. And so that metaphor of a good gardener taking care of the soil, I think is really useful for people trying to do organizational change. We focus way too much on trying to change the people, we know systems thinking that we forget about the system, but the system is not just the processes that we do. It’s what the room looks like, just what I was talking about earlier, the giant shared space and looking around and seeing people crouching over their computers with their headphones on their screens around them. And being aware of that and figuring out how you can because that’s like toxic soil, essentially. So how do you do, what do you do? Perhaps a more accurate metaphor would be an organic gardener. It’s not just any old gardener. The gardener’s going to put chemicals over everything to get rid of the problem. Is like going down to really nuts and bolts of it and cleansing and active cleansing.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  34:42

Would it be more like a community garden to or where it’s not just a garden but…?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  34:47

You could say you can tell exactly, you can take that metaphor, can’t play with it and yeah, I do like that. The other metaphor I use which a lot of people really dislike, I have to say but it works so well for me is the Old Testament prophet scrum master. Let me explain that one, right? Prophets are not about telling the future, they’re about seeing where people are straying and helping them get back on the path. So the Old Testament prophets, the Bible is basically an endless tale, it seems of people doing the wrong thing. That’s really what you’re looking at it. Just continuously, people just doing the wrong thing, making mistakes and messing up and not keeping to the law. And the prophet suddenly arises out of the midst of these people, and he tells them what’s going on. 

He speaks truth to power, he talks to kings. And he tries to get them, he said, and the telling of the future is like, if you keep doing this, this will happen. And if you don’t want that to happen, then don’t do those things. And we can say the same thing in organizations and our Scrum Masters do that. If we continue to reward individuals, you will get individual behavior, you will not have teams, we can predict that because it’s going to become true. So that’s us telling the future and our job as Scrum Masters is to say, if you’re choosing to do Scrum, right? If that’s a choice that you’ve made, then do it properly. Don’t have plans, don’t say, well, we’re kind of doing Scrum but we don’t have stand up meetings. So that’s like straying off the path. Scrum Masters job is to say, well, okay, you can do that if you want to, but let’s not pretend we’re abiding by the laws of Scrum for what it’s worth.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  36:33

What I like about it too, I’m thinking back about what we just spoke about the parent thing, right? And I think the big difference here is like, it sounded like from parenting, don’t do this, do this, right? But I think one of the important things that you just said is, if you decide to do Scrum directly and I think there’s a big difference versus telling versus saying, if that’s your decision, that’s what you want to do, then at least do it.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  37:06

Yeah. The [inaudible 37:06] approach to this would be like forcing  and this does of course, this happens when someone is forcing people to do Scrum. And they don’t want one to. If they don’t want to, they won’t do it and it’s easy to break, isn’t it after all. But organizations are saying they choose to do Scrum, then the Scrum Masters job is to keep them on the path, that’s all. And looking around at the environment, and so on. But when people are saying we’re not going to do this or we’re going to do this instead. If you don’t have an understanding of the why behind it all, then you could mess it up. And then we can predict where that’s going to go, it’s going to start falling apart. I remember organizations saying to me when they’re starting off with Scrum, and they’re doing really well with it, and suddenly some catastrophe hits, some horrible bug gets reported from the field and everyone’s in a panic. And they say, we’re going to stop doing Scrum until we fix this problem. And then we’ll come back to it as if Scrum is somehow getting in the way of their strength. And of course, they don’t go back to it. So the scrum master…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:14

What is something that people seem to misunderstand most about agile? Is that like, the Agile or Scrum is just a tool or an option or what do you think is the most misunderstood thing either about agile or scrum specifically?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  38:37

I think people have all kinds of weird understandings about it. Now, the example I gave earlier was agile means being able to change your mind anytime you want to. Now, that’s not altogether untrue. It is about when we have better ideas, we want to be able to follow the better ideas. But when you’ve just got one person in the organization changing their mind and saying, don’t do that, do this instead, it’s interrupt driven development all over again, under the guise of Agile. And then I can’t speak for agile in general, Agile and Scrum get muddled quite a lot, don’t they get conflated but when organizations are doing Scrum, or will they say that we’re doing Agile now, we’ve got product owners, they’ve got Junior Bas, being told they’re now product owners with absolutely no decision-making ability. 

No power at all, basically for anything, so you’ve got a flashy product owner, so you’re not really doing Scrum. And the scrum master is usually another junior developer or someone who’s like a manager, a release manager or something like that, who’s told that their scrum master even renamed the role in a lot of situations. It’s not that any of these things in themselves are bad. They might work for you. But clearly, they’re not what we understand about as being Scrum or agile, if we’re not following the principles of the Agile Manifesto, we’re not doing Agile, not doing all of the 10 practices of XP, we’re not doing XP. We’re doing something else. And we need to call it by what it is. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  40:24

Yeah. What I’m seeing too, is like kind of what you just said about the scrum master is like, the role is so misunderstood. Yet, at least here in United States, it’s paid very well. So when I talk to leaders and people that have made making decisions around hiring, and the structure of the teams, they can’t see in their heads, a justification to pay somebody 100, 270k here for a facilitation role. So they resort to Okay, we’re going to have somebody facilitate. And a couple of years ago, I wrote an article, essentially, it was titled, demise of the scrum master role. And a couple of points that I made is that most scrum masters are not trying to be better scrum masters, they go, take a two-day class and it’s a promotional job. I’m moving for project managers to this new role. And the other one is that organizations are not seeing the value. Are you seeing same things? What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  41:30

Yeah, I see that too. I mean, the scrum master role has been crushed into like a team-admin system or something, scheduled meetings and of course, they’re not going to pay someone to do that as a full-time job. People missed the point, I don’t know how they miss it. So clear in the scrum guide, there are three focuses for the scrum master. You focus on the team, you focus on the product owner, and you focus on the organization as a whole, which is massive, right? Is massive. Thousands of people [inaudible 42:02]. How is that not a full-time job? And of course it is but people think that the scrum master was. I think I know what it is, they’ve got this idea because of the hierarchical structures we have. Jim Janelle and I did a video on this one time. The difference between a scrum master and Agile coach, right? So now scrum masters work with the teams, agile coaches work with the organization, and their higher paid, their better qualified and we need them, right? You scrum master, you can stay with the team, make the coffee and schedule the meetings and report on them and give us some charts and things. 

And we’ll get a proper Agile coach to come in and do the rest. In most HR departments, there’s no slot to put Scrum Masters in, right? So they have to rename them as something else. Some kind of manager or something or project manager or release manager or something like that. But the role of coach is a bit more well known in organizations, I think it’s kind of a bit more respected as a role. And it might even be an HR slot for that one. So you can be a coach in most corporation, can even be a scrum master because it didn’t fit anywhere, it’s a whole new role. [inaudible 43:22] deck of cards. Where’s the place for the Joker when you’re sorting out your cards into picks, is no place, right? And the Joker’s wild. That’s the scrum master, right? And we have to be able to embrace that in organizations. When we can’t, we try pigeonholing them, and then they become something else. A problem.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  43:41

And that points to HR, right? If HR doesn’t see how it needs to involve, if finance doesn’t see how involves within the organization. Those can be sometimes limiting or impeding factors, right?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  44:00

Absolutely. There are people who are working on agile HR at the moment. That’s how Dunc is one of them. She wrote a book recently about agile HR. [inaudible 44:11] Jim Janelle, my friend, he’s known as Jim jelly.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  44:17

I know, I love the stuff that he’s doing. I’m going to try to interview him too, because I do really appreciate everything that he’s doing and…

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  44:25

Yeah, but he’s been working less so now but several years ago, he was working on with HR people, he was able to love, it was very much. He would run workshops with HR people and recruiters, particularly recruiters. So there’s inroads being made into all these parts of the organization. Finance is another one, probably less so there but marketing certainly and this is early days, it really is still early days. We say it’s 20 years old and that’s nothing in the history of organizations, is it? It’s very new. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:05

So what do you think is next? I know it’s hard obviously to predict, we can’t really predict, but what are some of the patterns that you’re seeing that might be different than what we’ve seen in the last 10 years?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  45:19

Well, it’s hard for me to say that from where I am at the moment, because since I moved back to the UK in 2016, and I’ve done almost no corporate work in years now. So most of my work now is public facing workshops. So I rather than going into organizations, I entice people out of organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:43

It’s probably a couple of years ago, maybe. But that’s a good way to put it.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  45:48

I’m going against the general wisdom of meet people where they are. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:55

Yeah. You said something along the lines, I have no interest in going back in or something like that. I don’t know. 

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  46:07

Yeah, I don’t. To be honest, I don’t because I woke up to the fact in the last consulting work I did, in a company that’s full of wonderful people that I really had a good time working with, but the structure was so rigid, it just wasn’t able to change. And the actual software they were working on was so broken, it was never going to survive, and it didn’t in fact. But I came to the realization that, for me, was sheer folly to think that I could change an organization. I can’t help people to change the way they think about their work, I can’t do that. And I don’t do that. But I can’t, and I don’t think I’ve ever changed an organization, never had. It’s unchanging organizations of the future, not organizations at present. That’s what I believe. So if I didn’t even believe that, I wouldn’t be doing this at all, I suppose. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  47:06

Yeah. And maybe that, like you said earlier, that little bit of that naiveness of just, even false belief, but something that’s you still believe in and that motivates you, mindset and culture are pretty big buzzwords, how do you see culture? How do you define culture?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  47:35

I’m very wary of the idea of changing culture. That’s what missionaries did in Africa a few 100 years ago, didn’t end up well, did it? Changing someone else’s culture, that’s the height of arrogance, surely. So the idea we can go in and say we’re going to help you shift your culture. And if you’re really really truly invited in for that purpose, you need to tread very warily.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  48:01

Now, what is that? What is it like, how would you define before even we talk about changing the culture, what is culture from your perspective? How would you describe it?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  48:14

Let me describe it in terms of groups of people in the world in an organization. And we come up to that word a bit, haven’t we? In our organizations or relational culture? I mean, it’s just the culture of an organization is its patterns, I suppose, isn’t it? It is patterns and its traditions and its stories. That’s what the culture is of an organization, the stories they tell, the patterns they work to that creates the culture. And so I suppose you want to talk about culture change, I guess what we mean is we’re going to tell different stories, we’re going to introduce new patterns. 

But it has to be a collaborative event. We can’t, if people expecting us to come in and impose agile, which is really what a lot of people ask for, come and make my company agile. So I’m coming in, like a missionary to help the poor natives to change their horrible culture into the culture that I approve of, right? That’s kind of the bare bones of that approach. So the good consultants go in and they listen. They listen to the stories and they observe the patterns. And they work with people to explore when those patterns are the best patterns, and other patterns we can use. Are there other stories we can tell? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:38

So it’s almost like you can apply that to the mindset too. We talk about changing mindset and it’s also rude to go and say, I want to change your mindset. It probably seem that same approach of listening, understanding the patterns and then seeing if changing the mindset is actually beneficial or not. Would you say that, is there a correlation there between the culture and mindset?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  50:00

And there’s something curious about that term mindset, isn’t it? Because the last thing we want in an agile environment is a set mind. You want [inaudible 50:09], you want to moving more in one amorphous mind, in a mind that is changeable and malleable, you don’t want to set mind. So we talked about changing the mindset, it might be the wrong metaphor, we want to change something else, it might not be the set of the mind. We don’t want to go from one set mind to a different set mind, because then you’re stuck in this new truth, which is being saying everyone has to follow this truth. And my mind is set on doing Agile, I don’t want to work with people whose mind is set on doing Agile, I want to work with people who want to explore newness, better things.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:48

So maybe like broaden their perspectives is another way to look at it, who are willing to broaden their perspectives and…

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  50:55

Yeah, Broaden. That’s a nice way of thinking about it, isn’t it? Broaden perspectives or move your mind, perhaps, open your eyes. Someone pulled me up on this keeping an open mind thing, if you’ve got a mind that’s too open, your brains fall out.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:20

There is something to be said about not going to any extreme, right?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  51:24

Yeah. You want to keep an open mind but you also have to be discerning, which requires judgment, you have to make assessments sometimes, you can’t embrace everything. Yeah I mean, most of the work of helping organizations change is very little. Well, that’s not fair. I can say very little about the software that developed but actually quite a lot is about the software they develop. But it can’t live independently from helping the rest of the organization support that work. I suppose it’s cultural and I don’t love that word. I don’t like using it really, but if it is about patterns and stories and traditions and process, then yeah, we can help organizations look at those things and address them differently. So maybe I don’t have to keep doing this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:20

Yeah. And that resonates with me and the way that I usually describe culture, it’s a reflection of the system. So the practices, behaviors, habits, right? The mind, our perspectives, collective perspective, so it’s more of a reflection and you can’t change their reflection, you change the other things in order to change that reflection.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  52:45

Yeah. That’s a nice one looking at it. I feel like I’m on the fringe of all of this whole agile movement, really. I wasn’t around at the beginning, when this was all formed. And I love the Agile Manifesto. I kind of forget about it and kind of move away. That was what was nice about doing arbites workshop, was bringing me back to center in a sense on that, it’s  a powerful document. I like that it’s not changed a single word in 20 years and I might be unusual for that, because it was, we have to update. But we don’t, it’s a document of its time. And it’s an anchor, if we start changing it, we lose the anchor, the scrum guide hasn’t done itself much favor I think, by continually changing. I kind of get, it’s useful, and then you get people who don’t like it. And there’s aspects of the new scrum code I don’t like, I really cringe at the word accountability.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  53:48

I see frameworks like Scrum and maybe it’s too naive of me to say that, but it’s like a recipe, right? So if you have a recipe, and collection of patterns of course, with time recipes evolved, people have different opinions on it. And if you from a culinary perspective, you’re not looking at the essence of that dish and you’re just looking at the recipe and ingredients. You’re going to want people to change the ingredients. They don’t necessarily want to change the outcome, which is delicious meal. But they want to change the actual recipe just because we’re humans, we love to mix it up.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  54:37

Yeah. The scrum guide is there. And as you and I are both trainers of this, we teach Scrum. We certify people. We have to have a basis for that, right? And that’s what the scrum guide is. And when the scrum guide changes, we change what we teach. And it’s like you said, we’re not changing the outcome. But we’re changing some of the ingredients. So now, instead of talking about roles, now we talk about accountabilities, because that’s what scrum tells us to talk about. And I’m okay with that. I have no problem with that. But if I wasn’t doing certification, and during those years that I wasn’t teaching certification, I didn’t worry too much about what was written in the scrum guide. I don’t think I ever read it, in fact. I knew what scrum was in its essence. And you can write what Scrum is in half a page, probably and capture a page perhaps and capture everything about what it is. And that’s what the scrum guide says. It says what Scrum is. When I teach Scrum, I try to teach why we do Scrum or I teach the why of Scrum. The document the guy tells us what and the how is in the action, is in the doing [inaudible 55:51] the people will figure out how to do Scrum by doing Scrum. The guide is only there to tell you what to do, like have a planning meeting. Common sense, of course.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  56:02

How many students do you have that come in and want to know the why versus the one?

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  56:07

Yeah, a lot of them. They all want to know, I think but they don’t know that they want to know it necessarily. For anything we do, we want to know why we’re doing it. We’re not good at complying. We’ve been taught how to comply in our school systems, and now in the corporate world, immediately following that. But it’s not a natural thing to do. It’s a natural thing. It’s good to learn from people who know stuff, to some extent, but we also allowed me to make our own mistakes. And we also need to do our own explorations, because that’s how progress is made by people coming in with new ideas. Like I love having junior people join senior teams, because they kind of deal with a whole different way of looking at different perspective. Yeah, pull the rug on. And they might always be right but they’ll get us shaken up a bit. So we need that. So compliance is not, nobody really wants to comply. People want to have a sense of like being in control of the work that they do. And if you understand why we do Scrum, you get that, it just allows people to really embrace it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  57:23

Yeah, that’s a really good point. And I think that’s and also true, [inaudible 57:26]. And I think the reason that Agile is where it is and Scrum is as popular as it is, and Alistair Cockburn said something in this latest anniversary that individual’s interactions over processes and tools was the best thing that they did, by putting it as the first value in the Agile Manifesto, because so many people resonated with that statement, and the why behind that statement.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  58:03

I would agree with that. Absolutely. It has that primary place in there. And that’s where it should be. Absolutely. And you know that it was written about how to develop software, and it has the word software in it a number of times. And people want to use it for other things. And that’s fine. You can adapt it, for sure. But it is essentially written about software development and I think it’s important to remember that because there’s something about the nature of developing software that is different to most other things. And the principles around it, it was also all of those agile practices are built around object-oriented programming, a particular kind of program, a particular kind of way of looking at the world if you like, and that matters. And I think that if we lose, that’s what we can do incremental delivering of value in small pieces, because we’ve got the right model for it. We’re not trying to do these big bang releases of things, which you might have to do if you were using different patterns to build your software. 

So there’s dependencies in there. The Agile Manifesto is dependent on software and is dependent on the object model, I would guess I don’t know, because like I said, I wasn’t part of the group that put that together, of course, but people doing sort of, most of those teams are doing small talk and some of that which is pure object. So it’s important to remember that and this is part of doing arbites workshop as I was reminded of the [inaudible 59:35]. So we can take the principles of the Agile Manifesto. But remember where they came from, and understand where they came from, as well. Like if you’ve never learned how to code and you don’t know what an object model is, learn that first. And then apply your agile manifesto to marketing into billions of dollars.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  59:51

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Great, well, thank you, Tobias. I know we’re over time and I really enjoyed the conversation. And this is why I wanted to start this because I don’t get a chance. I don’t get a chance to do this, obviously at conferences, we had a little bit of planning to do this but not as much because obviously there’s a lot more people and a lot more going on. So I hope that you enjoyed the conversation today as much as I did.

Speaker: Tobias Mayer  1:00:21

It really was. Having read some of your writing as well and particularly the stuff that you relate back to your early years, I found that fascinating, and how you connect it. I love it when people do that, just like everything connects. It really does. And if we forget where we’ve come from, then we get lost, I think. And so you routed what you wrote back into them, so lovely. So it made me want to meet you and here I am.