"We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters but we can’t add more non business requirements, we have agile teams."

 

This often heard sentence from product managers or CPOs, led to this dedicated episode on agility and sustainability where host Gaël Duez welcomes 2 seasoned agile coaches: Joanne Stone, the founder of Agilist 4 planet and the We Hope Magazine, and Joanna Masraff, co-organiser of the the Agilists4Sustainability meetup group, and the Agilists4Planet conference. In this interview, filled with positive energy, they covered: 

   🛠️ Sustainability twisted technics,

   🏃 Urgency vs sustainable pace of transformation, 

   🎯 Objectives or Key Results when incorporating Sustainability into OKR framework, 
   🎬 How to kick start sustainability transformation, 

   🔥 The importance of passionate people and influencers, 

   🧙 Agile coaches as alchemists of change.

❤️ Subscribe, follow, like, ... stay connected the way you want to never miss an episode, twice a month, on Tuesday!

📧 Once a month, you get carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents, subscribe to the Green IO newsletter here. 

📣 Green IO Singapore is on April 16th and our next stop is in New York on May 15th. Every Green IO listener can get a free ticket using the voucher GREENIOVIP. A small gift for your huge support. 🎁 

📧 You can also send us an email at contact@greenio.com to share your feedback and suggest future guests or topics.   

Joanna Masraff (00:01)

I think this is where sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually, we need to take that step backward and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right?

Gaël Duez (00:24)

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools, and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability.

We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters, but we can't add more non-business requirements, and have agile teams. How many times did I hear this from product managers, CPOs or tech leads, not really knowing how to move from awareness to action? So it has been a while since I wanted to have a dedicated episode on agility and sustainability. And when Marjolaine Pillon pointed me into the direction of Agilist for Planets, I gladly connected with Johan and then Johanna about their work which was perfectly aligned with those questions. Joanne Stone is the founder of Agilist for Planet and founder also of the We Hope magazine. She has more than 30 years of experience in IT and was an early adopter of agile practices. She lives in Brooklyn, Ontario, Canada. And Joanna Masraff is one of her very early adopters.

Jo's journey in the agile world is marked by her role in co-organizing the Agilist for Sustainability meetup group and the Agilist for Planet conference. to be honest, sustainability has been part of a professional journey almost from the beginning with other topics such as inclusivity and equity. And she's also a co-founder of Green PO in the UK. I have also to tell you that I'm recovering from a pretty bad cold, so my voice is a disaster. But the great news about this episode is I'm not going to be the one talking as usual, so my guests will do. And anyway, I'm delighted to have them on the show. Welcome, Joanne. Welcome, Joanna.

Joanne Stone (02:33)

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Joanna Masraff (02:34)

Thank you very much for having us.

Gaël Duez (02:37)

Glad that we've eventually managed to have this recording.

Joanne Stone (02:40)

Yes.

Gaël Duez (02:43)

So maybe starting with the basics, you are both part of the Agilist for Sustainability group. is this group about and what is this NGO Agilist for Planet about?

Joanne Stone (02:55)

Go, go,

Joanna Masraff (02:56)

So Sustainability came about actually due to the XP 2023 conference because they had, was the first agile conference that we were aware of that had a sustainability track. So suddenly the group of us who were already working on agile sustainability got together and said, right, we're speaking at this conference. Let's gather ourselves together and let's actually create a group, a community because we have more, we know of a lot of people who are trying to do this work. So why not create a group to share the learnings that we're going through, the things that we're finding out, the things that we're trying, the experiments that are working, that aren't working. And so Agilent for Sustainability group was born. But before that, we actually had Agility Impact, which Joe Stone started. So do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Joanne Stone (03:52)

I guess I'll start off with Lisa Atkins has been very much a big supporter in terms of sustainability and Agilist and sustainability. if you're not familiar with her, she's done a lot of really great work in Agile coaching teams. She knew that basically from an agility perspective that us, Agiles, could do more She felt that we can work in certain disaster areas All over the world and at that point time when I was talking to her about it. This is when the Australian fires were actually happening and I got really curious as to how Agilist can actually be part some of these climate-affected changes and like how can we actually be part of something like that? And so I started basically interviewing tons of people all over the world. And Lisa kept on kind of like carrying this torch about how could we, how can we actually bring Agility, Agile Coaches in Sustainability. What she did then is she had been, I think she'd been tapping into a lot of people, a lot of stories all over the world. And she started a keynote panel back in 2022 in Nashville. And that got a group of people together and Yuda Eckstein who's been doing this work for a lot longer than a bunch of us have. She was there and we just kind of like started to get introduced to others who were doing that. And then the, so basically what we wanted to do and Joe was actually starting to talk about as well is bring this awareness of the work that great people are doing all over the world. So we met at the XP conference, and we just kind of like kept collecting their incredible, incredible stories of what they've done by using agility and with sustainability. So whether that's economic or environmental, we would say. And it's incredible the amount of people that are actually doing some of this work right now.

Gaël Duez (05:54)

And that's an interesting question because you mentioned some examples coming from using agility with a Tech for a good angle. And we tend here to focus quite a lot on green IT, which means making sure that IT teams and product teams in do take into consideration in the way that produce the IT services, produce the digital products.

some sustainability principles. how do you see the connection between agile and sustainability? And maybe it goes both ways. So could you elaborate a bit on it?

Joanna Masraff (06:30)

the way that I'm coining it now, which I think really works and everybody, as soon as I say it, they're like light bulb, right? Is that Agile has been bringing social sustainability to the workplace since it started. So if you think about Agile's true mindset underneath it all, which is what true Agilists talk about, if you know what mean, it's really about bringing collaboration, communication, and the people to allow divergent thoughts and divergence in people to be included within the solution, to allow everybody their own space to be who they are within the team that they work in. So really, this is the bottom line social sustainability within the workplace. So that link, that connection between Agile and sustainability, at least on the social side, has always been there. So it's really a case of expanding origin into the kind of economics and environmental spaces within sustainability.

Gaël Duez (07:33)

I love the idea that it's in the DNA of agility to embrace sustainably at least the social angle I've never considered it that way. But it makes perfect sense when you see how rooted in human focus values, I would say the agile principles and the mindset of agility is. So now how did you manage to onboard into it, also the environmental aspect of it?

Joanna Masraff (08:00)

So the way we see it and what we've had people try out, not many, let's be fair. This is very still kind of experimental stage, but we have had teams and people who inject sustainability into every technique that they use within the team. So I call it the sustainability twisted techniques. So for example, if we take Scrum, you can inject a sustainability goal into your product goal, into your sprint goal, into your definition of done, into your definition of ready. know, into every single user story that you have in your backlog, there can be an item that determines the metric that you're using to measure the sustainability of this piece of work, which you as a team have chosen beforehand. Or even taking it a step slightly higher, you can think about your team charter. What you as a team agree, matches to you when you start working as a team or at any point, working in a team, you can say, stop, really this it matters a lot to me. Let's inject this into into the DNA of what we do as a team. What we found though, which is quite interesting is that a lot of people are still in that awareness stage. They're not quite at that stage where they're ready to think about how they measure their carbon footprint off their software, which I'm sure, I mean, the people who are listening, you are the forerunners, right? So you're trying to help the rest of your teams get on board with what you're trying to do, I'm sure. So what we find is that a lot of teams start with something like accessibility in the sustainability arena, which is a bit sad for accessibility, because how long have they been knocking on the door saying, let's be more accessible? However, at least they're starting with something, right?

So it's interesting when we start talking about sustainability, especially when we start talking to product people, they think about the social sustainability angle much more readily than they do think about how they can make their products more environmentally sustainable. So this is where actually GreenPO work is kind of based in that space of raising the awareness as to what environmental sustainability and digital product means. And also how they can inject it into all of their processes and techniques that they're already using.

Gaël Duez (10:23)

A lot to unpack here. And I would love to ask you two questions, and they may be bit interconnected. The first one is, can you share some concrete example regarding the carbon footprint, regarding all the environmental footprint, or how you can create this, quoting you, agility twisted techniques, just to illustrate and to make it concrete what you've suggested. I really love the term actually. And the other question is, as you rightfully said, most of the teams, most of the company, they're still in awareness phase, sometimes even early awareness phase. So how would they kickstart with this techniques?

Joanna Masraff (11:07)

Sure. So concrete examples with regards to carbon footprint. We had a team who are measuring the carbon of their product. And so what they did is they injected that into their OKRs basically. So their overall goals for their year was to reduce the carbon impact of their products, which they managed to do just by having OKRs. I don't have specific numbers I can give you, but I do know that they did manage to reduce the overall impact of their product by injecting it just into their OKRs. However, on the other side, have had members of our meetup group, and Joe can talk more about this, I'm sure, who they tried to start it. They brought up the question in a retrospective, for example, and everybody was like, is that a thing? I didn't know that was a thing. I don't know how to do that. But she kept bringing up the question. And eventually what happened is that in the company, she found the other passionate individuals and they grouped together and they had a hackathon on it. So they had a hackathon on digital sustainability and the carbon footprint of their products. And they were able to figure out how to start measuring the impact of their product from a hackathon. So it's not a quick win. It's not, let's talk about this and something immediately happens, of course. But we have had quite a lot of our members kind of tell us of their stories, their struggles actually, and how they overcame them. You know, the continuous resilience towards the lack of knowledge and lack of awareness and how they kept pushing towards it becoming a part of the team's work.

Gaël Duez (13:02)

And Joanne, this is also the approach that you see quite a lot or  got different stories

Joanne Stone (13:08)

for me, it is about bringing the the planet into the conversations with the specific teams. So how can we bring that that conversation in so people can start figuring out how best to do some of this work. we trust the teams. Like we trust that there is a lot of intelligence within the teams that they can figure this out or figure out what is really super important for them. you know, those conversations can lead to towards concrete things that the team itself will actually do. And this could change from one team to another. think within some of the stories that we share, which is, which some of the agile coaches will do is we'll work with some of the leaders as well. So one of the big things is that we're in an entire system and that system is actually sometimes controlled by the shareholders or by the performance management, by the accounting and how they have to report on all the different stats, right? A lot of things are driven outside of the teams, is, can be really, you know, it's scary in a way, especially if you want to, you feel that you want to make a what we found is that some of the coaches that we're working with in the story with Carolyn's wife is probably one of them. Like she, she worked with some of the executives to start repositioning their purpose of the vision or their why.

Joanne Stone (14:38)

so that it's not profit over planet, but it's planet over profit. And so she got that as part of their strategy, So it started to become embedded within the actual culture of the organization. And those are really cool, because if you start embedding it within the culture of the organization, it then to come down to the team perspective. And we have something more than just a recycling program. I think what I find in what I get really frustrated about and I mean we have beautiful people on the ground We have developers we have coaches. We have so many people that are out there that really want to truly make a difference But yet they're stuck within this sort of like container and unable to control and do what they would like to be able to do Right, so it's really quite frustrating

Gaël Duez (15:27)

That's a very interesting comment because I wanted to ask a question to Joanna about when she mentioned OKR, if it was the O or the KR. And actually what you described is really the O, the objective. The overall objective is putting planet over profit, which is a conversation that hopefully will happen in many, companies in the next years, but honestly, that doesn't necessarily happen a lot. And I was about to ask a question to Joanna about the KR, which is that even if the objectives are not, you know, focused a lot on the planet, is there some leeway to do things, playing a bit with the key results, whether it's, I don't know, incorporating in the design phase, for the definition of ready, a person, with other metrics? Because we know that we talk a lot about carbon footprint since the beginning of the episode, but it's not always easy to measure carbon footprint. You could try maybe to make sure that any devices older than six years would still work on it or whatever. You've got different approaches. So my question first to you, Joanne, is do you believe that it's necessary to tackle the O first and that there is not that much room for key results or even in a regular company, in a company really focusing on making money at almost any cost an agilist can find some way to incorporate a bit of sustainability in their practices?

Joanne Stone (17:05)

It's where I think this is why Agile is, we've got a lot of background in terms of doing transformations, right? So what typically happens is we have a lot of people on the bottom level that really want to adopt this thing, right? So I don't care. It's Agile, AI, whatever the flavor of the day is, right? Really passionate about wanting to do this. And right now the passion in my mind is all around climate sustainability, right? And people are frustrated and wanting to do it. So the way that we've seen this work is like a bottom-up and top-down approach, right? yes, it's great if you can get the whole organization, if you're Patagonia, right? And you're able to do this through in, throughout. Right? The cultures change. It's beautiful. But we know that there's two different ways. Agilent, we always wanted it to be done from the top down because we know that that's where the biggest impact will be. And it'll be a lot faster if it's adopted from there. Because then all the systems that are required to support, you know, the objectives and it be passed down straight to the team. reality is that doesn't happen. Right? So it really has to start from the two different spots.

But I think from the bottom up, this is where your tech community is super smart. So they know that there is front end changes that they can make, the back end changes that they can make. They know that they can make changes at a lot of different levels. And so really it's back to them. I would be going at the team level having the first step as to what discussions do we want to have? Modify the product in whatever way that we feel that we can make it greener. If we don't know, can we research it? Can we come to podcasts like this, where I can figure out different ways? I was listening to one of your podcasts around how do you balance the energy, basically, and where can we host some of the servers so that it's more greener? And that was so brilliant. I think we have to go out and we have to figure out the different ways and different parts of our applications to make greener. But it could just start with a bunch of different ideas, a backlog, something that we can then incorporate every single sprint and then ask the question though, because from an agility perspective is how will we know it will work? So it is one of those things where we create experiments where we kind of look at and try and figure out what the results are that we want. So we run that experiment every single sprint to kind of see whether or not the results, we're gonna get the results and then we reflect on it and figure out where we need to go next after we've learned it. So that's the way that I would sit there and approach it. I don't think there's any concrete kind of way in terms of we start here in the front end or the back end or whatever the case may be from a tech perspective. I think you have to work with the team and the team's expertise and start getting them excited about doing this and start including it as part of the backlog so that they can start working on it. So that's the way I would kind of approach it.

Gaël Duez (20:21)

It's a great reminder that agility is about experimenting things and that we don't have necessarily to change the definition of ready or the definition of done, whatever, so my question might be to you, Joanna, is like, what kind of experiments did you experience in the different coaching situations that you've been doing?

Joanne Stone (20:25)

Yeah.

Joanna Masraff (20:44)

Yeah, absolutely. can I just jump and answer a little bit of the other question first, if that's okay. So just to bust a myth a little bit, because one of the things that you said, struck a chord was, you know, what key result can you use? Yeah. And actually cost generally you can use. So if you reduce your cost, you are making your digital product more sustainable.

Gaël Duez (20:50)

Be my guest.

Joanna Masraff (21:12)

So, and that is one of the ones which is a win-win-win, let's be fair. It's a win for the people who are interested, a win for the company, and it's a win for the planet. there's lots of studies out there that are ongoing and information you can get to show that being sustainable is profitable. So if you have some stakeholders who are, you're trying to talk about sustainability and they're coming back and saying, we don't want to do it or whatever, you can go to them and you can say, do you want to save money? Because this will save you money. Whether you care about the fact that we're destroying the world or not, that's up to you. But if you're only interested in money, then actually we can save you money by doing this. And I believe that that's actually one of the experiments that one of my coaches did was to actually look at their cloud costs as they reduced their energy use rather than trying to translate it directly to carbon. Because let's be fair, I'm sure most of your audience are aware that the figures that you get on our hyper scalers and our cloud providers are not correct when it comes to their emissions. So instead of looking at that, they actually chose energy. They reduce their energy usage a variety of different ways and managed to reduce their cloud costs as well.

That's just kind of one of the experiments I can remember off the of my head. So it's thinking about who are your stakeholders? What might they be interested in seeing and therefore setting up your experiments so you're not just kind of satisfying your own curiosity, but also you can help push the agenda for the planet towards your stakeholders as well. and I think this is where… sustainable thinking actually comes in we're very used to thinking very specifically about the problem, about the solution that we're trying to do, but actually we need to take that step backwards and think wider, more holistically about both the problem and the solution space, maybe slower thinking is needed rather than all this now, now, now, right? And now I've forgotten the second question that you had.

Gaël Duez (23:21)

Let's put it another way. If I'm an agile coach, seriously convinced about the sustainability challenge and starting to work with an average team, not like climate denier, but not people waking up every morning thinking, how am I going to save the planet? Okay. Just average, nice folks. What kind of ideas should I put on the table for them to start thinking about it?

Joanna Masraff (23:45)

Yes, it's a great question. And I'm a little bit stumped by it, be fair. So in my mind, this brings us back to awareness, because it always starts with the awareness. one of the things that we've done at Anne Digital, so this is not a team level, this is more thinking about… and just to kind of go backwards a little as well is what you'll find, especially in Europe especially, is that a lot of companies do actually have something in their strategy now, which relates either to sustainability, net zero policies, or even responsible business, which is such a wonderful phrase, isn't it? Here's sarcasm. So maybe take that bit out because I might get fired.

Joanne Stone (24:34)

HAHAHAHA

Gaël Duez (24:35)

Keep it, but I will use AI a to mask your voice. And nobody will ever know if this is you.

Joanna Masraff (24:43)

That's it.

Gaël Duez (24:45)

So you see I've got a use case for AI.

Joanne Stone (24:47)

Hahaha.

Joanna Masraff (24:48)

Nice. So yeah, we're finding a lot of companies, especially in Europe, because of the new regulations, you know, they have some form of sustainability within their strategy. But there was some quote, I think it might have been Reuters that came out with it, which said something like, I'm going to forget the numbers. So I'm going to have to check it for you. it's 65 % of those businesses that have it in their strategy have no idea how to action that strategy. So they have it up there, but they think, you know, your recycling policies or cycle to work policies or, you know, electric car policies and things like this are going to solve that problem for it where of course it's not going to. So this is where you start with the start of your company's sustainable transformation where we believe you need your agile coaches.

What we did and digital is we started with an awareness week. So sustainability and inspiration week. We had various speakers from both inside the company and outside the company come and tell whoever wanted to attend to tell them about different aspects of digital sustainability. So it was one week this year and over 10 % of the company decided to come along off their own back, which was excellent. But we didn't stop with awareness. What we did then is we took that and we created an action week. So the action week was basically a discovery split over two days to allow people to come and take all this awareness that they had established and determine a very high level roadmap for the company as to how we can become more sustainable and create more sustainable products. So instead of it being, you know, completely a top down transformation, which we know, again, if you force change upon people, it doesn't work. What we did is we brought the strategy together with the passionate people at the bottom who were interested in what to change and how to make this change. So we created this high level roadmap. And one of the top items that everybody came out with was upskilling. So training for every different capability within the business.

So we're currently creating that training material internally, again, because then you have internal experts on specific areas that the rest of your company can go to. However, of course, there are specific people who are doing digital sustainability training that you can reach out to. But we're in the middle of creating these training sets among the different capabilities so that each different capability, starting with those who are interested, and then of course it will become mandatory as the company take on new policies and regulations. But everybody's going to end up going through this, but we start with the passionate people, the people who want to, so we're not forcing change upon them. We use those people as the influencers, the proud shouters of, I did this. You know, it was cool. I learned some really new stuff that was wonderful. You you use the power of the people rather than the power of command.

Gaël Duez (28:09)

But then it takes quite a lot of time mean, let me play a bit the devil advocates here, but basically this company had an awareness week, which then lead to an action week, which then lead to, we need to train people. And sorry to be a bit provocative here, but there is not a single gram of CO2 or water or material or whatever that has been saved so far. Am I right? Or they also managed to get some quick actions.

Joanna Masraff (28:37)

Well, the quick action was the CTO realized that he needed to clean up the cloud space. So that was great. I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but I know that that's what he, scooted off quickly to when he had that awareness as to how much money again, that he was losing because of the unsustainable practices with how we were using cloud. He was like, yes, we have to adopt this.

Gaël Duez (28:42)

Okay, that's good.

Joanna Masraff (29:05)

So we made a, not a denier, but maybe not a huge supporter, a bigger supporter, and we cleaned up our clouds. So not as much as I would like, and yes, it's a lot slower and I grind my teeth a lot, let's be fair. However, I believe it's the way to bring the people with us in the transformation.

Joanne Stone (29:23)

And I feel this urge of action, right? Like we gotta get in there and gotta do it, right? Because, know, the time is of the essence, right? And I think this is when we talk about agility, what I really like is the fact that we do these things at a sustainable pace so we don't burn ourselves out is one thing. the aspect of what Joe's,

Joe's saying is how do we inspire people to get into action? How do we get more people on board? what's the minimal amount of energy that we need to expand on to kind of get that going, right? That is indeed an approach where you can, you know, get everybody, the people who really want to be able to do, bring them all together in a room, talk about it, figure out exactly what we need to do and then start creating the plan. You know, get the leaders on board, know, realize that they made this, you know, my gosh, this is, this is the, this is the mess that we've created. You know, that, that starts to inspire people to get into action as well. But I think when you're asking the question, like I have a team, I'm an Agile coach, I don't care, Agile coach, Agile leader, person X, right? I want to do more work in from a sustainability, right, or to make

Joanne Stone (30:37)

like from a climate perspective or environment perspective, I want to improve what we're doing right now. And the thing that I've heard in and out of all the conversations that we've been interviewing people is the Green Software Foundation. So what Joe was saying, I think you were talking about this before too, but this is aspect of bringing in knowledge or awareness. You know as a team I might come in there and go, hey guys, let's just, why don't we go to the Green Software Foundation and learn exactly what's there. Take a course, one of us take it, let's do it on one of our learning days or whatever the case may be so that we can learn more as to how we can actually apply this. So that would be potentially a place where I would start, how we as coaches work, we're known to utilize and empower the team, right? So, the word, not the, it's been overused a huge amount of time. But within that is like, we know that we don't have all the knowledge, right? But we can point them into different directions. But starts within the team itself. So, either they have the knowledge or we have to there's a quest for knowledge, right? So it's like, we gotta learn more. Okay, where would you start? Software foundations. Okay, let's go there, right? But I would actually, for me, always starting with the team, having a conversation, putting it out there. What do you guys feel about this? Do you guys wanna do something about this? Can we try something about this, right? And then just start it, like those conversations, know, week over week when we're building the backlog or planning out what we need to do next. would do that. And if I was a leader, a manager or something like that, I would work with the team to go, okay, will be our objectives? How do we wanna measure this? How do we know we're successful at it? I would be, let's try and improve our product by, or improve our product, or basically let's ensure that 20 % of the stories that are coming in every week, it has to do with sustainability, right?

So I would do something like that. So it would encourage the team to actually start taking on the work. We did this, by the way, with DevOps and tech debt before in the past. And it was one way to allow for space for the team to actually do that work, which is really important because it's hard to stop doing the product work that we need to do right now. So someone has to create the space for the team to actually do that work.

So by giving it like 20 % or whatever the case may be is a great way of allowing for that space for that team to actually create some of that work. But I would definitely be starting off with that conversation.

Gaël Duez (33:29)

And if I try to wrap up what you've both said, it's old story again, because it's all about raising awareness, getting some training, empowering teams. as you say, Joanne, starting the conversation. Having at some point middle management some space, that's crucial here because otherwise… You know, the good intentions are squeezed between the bottom of the top down approach, but hey, it's middle manager most of the time who have the key to truly kickstart and even ramp up more than kickstart ramp up things. So is there anything specific about sustainability and more specifically environmental impacts in this discussion or is it? Quite similar to how we had to incorporate cyber security, inclusivity, or accessibility, as you mentioned. Is there anything specific to the environmental topics when it comes to onboarding them into agile practices?

Joanna Masraff (34:31)

The only thing I is back to the thing that with all of those other things you've mentioned, it hasn't been a cost saving. So that one thing generally makes it easier to bring your middle managers in because their bottom line usually is cost. Apart from that, the transformation itself, it's really not that different, which is why...

Gaël Duez (34:42)

Okay.

Joanna Masraff (34:56)

We brought Agile and sustainability and Agilist and sustainability together because we, you somebody called us, a friend of ours called Agile Coaches, the, the alchemists of change, which I really liked. So that's why I'm using it. So we really are change makers. We know how to come in and help make those changes. And I believe in JoJo's, the two Jo's minds, the next transformation is the sustainability transformation. And we can help with that. We want to help with that.

Joanne Stone (35:35)

And the reason why is because I look at all of these particular problems and challenges as wicked challenges. So and when you look at the definition of a wicked problem, right, like it's like something where, you know, we have many stakeholders, many different symptoms of the specific problem, many different solutions, right? There isn't one specific expert that knows how to do that. You need to have a diversified team in order to solve it. You, the only way that you can actually work on it is through small little experiments where you iterate and adapt, there isn't a linear way that we can actually tackle that problem. So the problems and challenges that we have today are all wicked, very much wicked. And the practices of Agile are perfectly suited to this space because we're utilizing the collaboration of the team. We have to empower the team because we experiment, because we have to slice things into small little things.

And we also have to do this at a sustainable pace because these problems won't be solved in our lifetimes, right? It'll be solved in multiple lifetimes. So we need to be able to do it in a way where we can thrive and be resilient at doing that. So that sustainable pace and the way that we've been doing things from an agility perspective has set us up to be able to work on these particular wicked problems. The cool thing though, The ability to kind of like what Joe was saying in terms of cost reduction, we can totally make that transparent, right? you know, we're all about outcome basis and producing the value and making sure that we do it in the most effective and efficient way, right? With people. And we're all about doing, not actually about planning forever. We're into doing action. but in a sustainable pace way, using the word sustainable from that perspective.

Gaël Duez (37:39)

And I really enjoy the way you wrap it up because I won't have to do it in the conclusion, but also because it's sort of a reassuring that if I'm an agile coach, if I'm a product manager with a good grasp of agile techniques, actually all my tools are not to be challenged. And that's a bit reassuring. You say it's like, okay, so I've got this extra burden But you know, my way of thinking, my way of working, the agile practices that I've honed over time, they're there. I don't have to challenge them. It's just yet another issue, yet another wicked challenges, as you said, that I need to incorporate in into my way of working and I don't know, I find it reassuring. Even if you say that problems will not be solved over a lifetime, it's still, at least this, don't need to change how I work. I just need to incorporate this question and these challenges in a, well-crafted way of working, Am I right also to see it in such a positive way?

Joanne Stone (38:46)

I would say that the one thing I would add, because I struggled with this too, is how do we bring the planet into what we're doing? there's so many great practices that we can learn from the sustainable area, for sure. Circular economy, doughnut economy, regenerative. There's so many beautiful things that the sustainability experts in this world have been doing.

And those things are not incorporated in our practices. So I say, on to our practices and bring together all the other sustainability practices which are out there and how we think about how do we reduce the waste.

Joanna Masraff (39:26)

I agree and disagree with Joe, because I think, yes, of course the sustainability has added ways of thinking about our product and about the economy, which bring the planet further in. But I don't think the changes that we may need to make to our techniques are… big, if at all. So this is why I call them the twisted techniques, right? And you've mentioned some of the ideas, you know, bringing in Maria Len, Planet as a stakeholder. So that idea can actually be added to a lot of our design techniques that we already use in the product space, right? So your customer journey mapping have a persona who is nature, for example, this can also be applied into your product techniques your and delivery phases.

Gaël Duez (40:14)

Really interesting. Thanks a lot, Joanna, for adding this other perspective. There is one angle that we didn't discuss that much is putting things the other way around, which is not usually what Green IO does, but it's also make a bit of sense to have this other perspective, the two of you, you work on, you know, agile for sustainability rather than sustainable for agile. have you been using agile techniques to accelerate projects, even if they're not like in IT per se, and even if it's not about reducing the environmental footprint of the structure using them? Because I think that, Johan, when we had early discussions, you mentioned something was a food bank, am I right?

Joanne Stone (40:58)

Yeah, love to experiment, right? So one of the things that we started to do was work with our local communities. So my first experiment was, OK, let's get in there and try and see if I can work with this restaurant owner who wants to make the restaurant more sustainable. so I brought a team together and I thought, okay, let's just do a little small little slice of that particular problem we can figure it out. But we took about two months of just discussing what sustainability is. this is where, you know, we went, okay, like, is there another practice? Like, what other tool I pull from my backpack? And so one of my friends is a design sprint facilitator, And so what we did is we utilized the design sprint techniques. We found this beautiful, passionate lady not too far away from me who has a local community garden. And she says, well, you know, I have a problem right now. I want to get more volunteers in because I want to produce more food. And if we can produce more food, I can give more food to local food bank. We went, sure, OK, let's try this thing out. So we did the design sprint. And so we have people from all over the world. And they come in. And we interviewed the clients. We interviewed the subject matter experts.

Gaël Duez (42:12)

Excellent.

Joanne Stone (42:22)

You know, we had a huge amount of problems and challenges. had stickies like galore of the problems. We sliced it down. We got it into what is a small specific thing that we can do. We created a prototype, right? So we created a flyer would bring in more volunteers, that would attract more volunteers. We tested it out, and then we provided that data back. So this is us in action. Like, Gaël I cannot believe how this is. I don't want to overanalyze. I don't want to blah, blah. But Google and the technique that they have for doing design sprints is Bella. It's brilliant. It's beautiful because it's done within 32 hours. And it has the only interview so many people. You only get just enough information. So that you can test it out, so you can figure out what to do next. So we call it SIPs, Sustainability Incubator Projects. we're SIPsters. yeah. And it was a bunch of women who were actually doing it. So it's been amazing what we're doing. Like I am really excited about it. But back to your point where we talking about earlier, and you brought it up, Gaël.

Gaël Duez (43:31)

Got it.

Joanne Stone (43:41)

We have as Agilist a lot of these beautiful skills it's not just scrum like it's not just Kanban right we've done change management we've changed culture we develop software right and it allows us to get right in there roll up our sleeves make a change make see something and then and then allow people to figure out and learn what to do next. By the way, it's been amazing. The success stories are great, and I get paid in hugs and drinks. So I'm really super happy right now. But it's lots of fun, and the people that are with this right now really enjoy it, and they want us to continue to do more.

Gaël Duez (44:25)

Agilist, get paid in hugs and beers or drinks, Join the sustainability space. Okay. It's excellent, but it's also a good illustration that you can use agile techniques also for doing tech for good

Joanne Stone (44:28)

Hiya! Hahaha!

Gaël Duez (44:41)

Being mindful of your time, I'd like to wrap up. mean, you've beautifully wrapped it up, Joanne, so I'm not going to add on what you've said, but just maybe, is there any resources that you didn't share or that you want to mention?

Joanna Masraff (44:56)

So the Agile Alliance actually has a sustainability initiative and they created a sustainability manifesto, which is really quite also, Ines Garcia is recording conversations with all of the signatories to try and spread the word that we do have an Agile sustainability manifesto.

Gaël Duez (45:00)

Okay.

Joanna Masraff (45:17)

So it's well worth people going and having a look at that. even if you don't agree with it, come and discuss it with us, you know, we'd love to have that conversation.

Joanne Stone (45:25)

Yeah, the resources that I feel would be really great is in the We Hope magazine. So there's some really amazing stories which are in there. We've just launched the last third edition. And it gets into some of the Agilists which are out there. They're doing different things from leadership to some of the projects that I've done in the past we have some tech people that are there as well. So I think that a lot of those stories that are there are a great, specific resource for people to actually look at as well.

Joanne Stone (46:01)

including what Joe just said, and that's Garcia's just doing some amazing, amazing work.

Joanna Masraff (46:07)

Interestingly, the We Hope magazine is on the Agilist for Planet website as well, that also still has, recordings of our old, the last two conferences. if you're interested, go and have a look, there's some great presentations on there. We touch into regeneration. We have the business case for sustainability. We talk about circularity, degrowth. We talk about cleaning up your digital space in your personal kind of digital space as well, your digital data. There's lots and lots and lots of different stuff on there. So please go and have a

Gaël Duez (46:42)

That's a positive trend to close the podcast as well in this episode. So thanks a lot, both of you, for joining. It was really interesting to deep dive a bit more in the agile world and agilist world, which I'm not that familiar. I've used the techniques, but I've never been an agile coach. Thanks a lot for joining.

Joanne Stone (47:00)

Thank you.

Joanna Masraff (47:00)

Thank you so much for having us. Lovely to chat.

Gaël Duez (47:04)

Thank you for listening to this Green IO episode. If you enjoyed it, share it and give us five stars on Apple Podcast or Spotify. We are an independent media, relying solely on you to get more listeners. Sharing this episode on social media or directly with a colleague or a relative would be a nice move. Everyone deserves to get this energy booster than Joe and Joe provided during this interview.

In our next episode, which will be quite technical, I will welcome Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki to talk about sustainability in cloud computing using new open source solutions for containers and orchestration in the Kubernetes world. Stay tuned. And one last thing, Green IO is a podcast and much more. So visit greenio.tech to subscribe to our free monthly newsletter, read the latest articles on our blog, and check the conferences we organize across the globe. Singapore is in one month, and its full agenda is now available. New York is in two months, and many speakers have now been disclosed. As usual, you can get a free ticket on any Greenio conferences using the voucher GREENIOVIP.

Just make sure to have one before the 100 free tickets are all gone. I'm looking forward to meeting you there to help you, fellow responsible technologists, build a greener digital world.

❤️ Never miss an episode! Hit the subscribe button on the player above and follow us the way you like.

 📧 Our Green IO monthly newsletter is also a good way to be notified, as well as getting carefully curated news on digital sustainability packed with exclusive Green IO contents.