Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:20 Welcome back to another episode of Agile FM, my first recording of 2023. I'm going into my second decade of agile FM. And I'm super, super happy to have Jeff Gothelf back to Agile FM, author doesn't really need an introduction, but he's the author of Lean UX, Sense and Respond and Forever Employable and Lean vs Agile versus Design Thinking. And maybe there is another one in the making, we can talk about. First and foremost, Jeff, welcome to the podcast again. Jeff Gothelf 0:53 It's a pleasure to see you. We were just talking before you hit record how long we've known each other. And it's fun, it's fun to keep chatting all these years and seeing where these conversations go. Because because they do get interesting. Like they don't they don't get stale. And it all evolves, you know, Joe Krebs 1:08 thank you. Yes, and we go all the way back, I mean, to today's we're agile are very, very different. You wrote several books in between. I've been active not only here on the podcast, but also through work. And so our paths constantly cross. And obviously, you always have interesting content to share. Today, we want to talk a little bit about our OKR's. On social media, I see you a lot of responses and material you're releasing on OKR's. And you are obviously very, very interested in this topic. And it's not brand new. So there are some people that are talking about OKRs. What is OKRs? But I did some research on it. It's It's It's old, but obviously it hasn't really taken off at that time. So it really started like, way before, but Google really started introducing OKRs as far as that's my understanding, but even at that time, it wasn't really popularized. What's what's attracted you to OKRs? Jeff Gothelf 2:11 Yeah, super interesting, right? So it's a technique, it's been around for more than 40 years, Andy Grove at Intel. And for him, you know, managing by walking, management by objective, sorry, management by objective was kind of the first name for it. And then Google popularized it. What's interesting to me about it, and it's kind of like the same thing that happened with with sort of Lean and Agile and Lean startup and all these different things is that I think the reason why objectives and key results are having their moment in the sun right now. And everybody's interested, is because the technology that we use to deliver products and services, and build businesses on top of today is continuous. And it allows us to learn continuously, and at the pace of the market. So whereas if you think about, you know, when I started working professionally, in the late 90s, I worked in America Online, you know, it was far from continuous, right? We, it was very much not continuous, we worked for nine months to build software, and then print 15 million CDs, and then send them out, and then wait to see what happens, right? I think OKRs would have failed, because it would take too long to get feedback on whether or not you had a meaningful impact on the people who used your, your product or your service. And so as a goal setting framework, it would have been too bad. But today, you can get feedback instantaneously, if you've got enough of an audience size, and certainly very quickly in in a in the majority of cases. And so this is why this is an interesting topic. For me. Number one, I think this is why it's getting a lot of attention. The interesting thing here is that, in my opinion, and I can explain this in a minute, I think objectives and key results are the gateway to agility. Right? So if we can keep capital A agile out of it for just a second, right? And we talk about the the noun agility. I think that objectives and key results, when done correctly, demand that an organization behaves in an agile way that they increase their agility, we can explain why. But to me, that's why I'm so passionate about it these days, is because for all the organizations that have implemented some version of agile some version of Lean UX for Lean startup or design thinking, and I've struggled with it. I believe that if now if they if they kind of give it another shot and they start with OKR's as their goals, they stand a better chance of succeeding.Joe Krebs 5:02 Goal setting. And I actually like your your comment about the entry point or the the access point for for agility. That aside, I've been in my career I've been goal setting and goal and strategies and etc. I've been listening to this for a long, long time in organizations since I can think of in my professional career. Why is it so difficult? There? What do you think why, from a leadership perspective? Why does it seem so, so hard? The goal setting piece, I think, and I don't want to speak for everybody, but it feels like we're pretty good whether, you know, agile on the team level, building a product, maybe scaling, things like that. So there's a lot of things we have, but it's like the goal setting piece seems to be like, struggling, why do you think that is? Jeff Gothelf 5:52 Yeah, look, I think leadership has been trained on 100 years of management, Canon that's based heavily in production, right. And we've I know, we've talked about this in the past, but their managers are trained to optimize production even today, which doesn't make sense in a software based world as, as you know. And so you've got the, the staff of a team of an enterprise or an organization trying to work in an agile way. And they have demands being put on them that are very linear, that are production oriented, that are very prescriptive, go build me this thing, make sure it does these three things, doesn't mean this way, and just try to get it done by Friday, if you can, and that grinds the gears grind there, right? You got agile sort of turned teams trying to go one way, and the organizational and leadership demands going the other way. And but but it's first of all, management's comfortable with that way of setting goals. It's super easy to measure. It's binary. Right? But it's it's you know, did you make the thing? Yeah, here's the thing. I made it, right. Yeah. So if you made the thing, then you did a good job, and I should reward you and I can, and it's easy to measure, right? I didn't make the thing that didn't make the thing, easy to measure, easy to manage, easy to reward. When we change the goal. And this is what OKR's does, right? This is OKR's. At its core, when done correctly, and why it's powerful is the goal changes from output to outcome, it changes from making a thing to positively impact the behavior of the person using the thing, right. Now, the interesting thing about that is that that is not binary. So for example, let's talk, you know, you could say, an output goal could be build a mobile app. Okay, maybe we built the mobile app, okay. And outcome version of that said, we'd like to get at least 50% of our revenue to come through the mobile channel. Like we'd like people to spend at least 50% of the money that they spend with us through the mobile channel, right? That's a behavior change. Right? The goal is not deliver a mobile app, the goal is get folks to spend at least half of their of their, you know, lifetime value, whatever you want to call it. Through the mobile channel. Yeah. Now, let's say, let's say that you give that goal to a team. And at the end of a quarter, six months, they come back and say, look, we got you know, about 27% of the revenues coming through the mobile channel. What do you do with that team? Did they do a good job? They do a bad job? Did you fire them? Like they didn't they didn't hit 50%. And that becomes really difficult. That's one of the ways why this becomes difficult, right? Is this sense of... Well, I don't know what to do with that. Because like, what if they hit 42%? Or 27? May be right. But if they got to 42%, or 43%? What do you do with that as a manager? Right. And I don't think that leadership is the folks who are in leadership positions are necessarily equipped to deal with that today. And I think that's, that's one of the main reasons why this goal setting is challenging. The other reason why this is challenging is because I think leaders are used to telling people what to do. Go make this thing, build it this way and ship it by Friday, when you change that when you change from output to outcome, or build me the mobile app. Clear, super clear in the sense that like, okay, and I want the mobile app to enable online commerce and search and make sure everybody's got a profile. Okay. Right. Drive 50% of revenue through the mobile channel, does not tell the team what to do. And that is really scary for people in a leadership position. Because all of a sudden, they don't really have an answer to the question. Well, what is the team doing right now? What's the team working on? And that's terrifying, because they feel like they should know that and a certain degree they should. And they also feel like they should be telling them that. So there's that there's a trust that they have to have in a team that the team is making good decisions. Joe Krebs 10:14 Seems to be like a cultural changes is needed, not only for OKR, but also for everything that follows the OKR. Right? Because it's the it's not only the framework of understanding how to set goals differently, but it's also how to work differently, right, to your point like 42%. I mean, is that a negative result? You know, in 50%, we are on you know, if that was a lengthy process, let's say, of building a product, there could be many things could happen, that could be still a success, right? So it's an interesting thing. In terms of leadership, there is another tool for for leaders to acquire. Right? That's, I think that's what I'm hearing. Like, it's not only you understand OKR, but also to understand the Agile piece entirely working with teams. Jeff Gothelf 11:00 It's, it's highly complementary to Agile or Agility. Number one, and we'll talk about that in a second. But the it's such a simple concept. And yet it is so difficult to implement simply by switching from managing the output to managing outcome, right? So overall, if we just I can define it for you in 30 seconds, right? The objective is qualitative, aspirational, inspirational and time bound. The reason we get out of bed every morning, right? We want to be the go to destination for online furniture sales in Europe by the end of the year. Right? That's a qualitative aspiration. Why are we doing this? Because we're trying to be the go to destination for online furniture sales in Europe by the end of the year. Okay, easy enough? How do we know we've done that the key results are measures of human behavior, right, they are the things that people will do differently, that tell us that we are the go to destination for online furniture sales in Europe. Right? That is that, that that's critical. And it's things like, it could be average order value, could be repeat customer, the percentage of repeat customers, it could be referrals as plus lots of different behaviors that we could measure. They're super easy concept. But as you start to implement it, this is where it gets difficult. So we talked about measurement, right? We talked about the fact that you're not telling teams, what to build, and then and then on top, but the compatibility here with agile ways of working and agility is, is it's nearly an overlapping circle. Because essentially, what you're saying is team, I need you to go out and discover continuous learning and improvement and iteration, the best combination of code, copy, design, value proposition, business model, that will affect behavior change in this way. So the team conceives hypotheses, begins to do discovery work and discovery work is design thinking, Lean UX, lean startup research, etc. And then based on that evidence, they start to invest in the hypotheses that deliver the behavior change that they're looking for. And they remove effort or or pivot or kill the hypotheses that don't deliver the behavior change that we're looking for. And to be clear, changing course, based on evidence is being agile. So it's highly, highly compatible. But it takes this tremendous, to your point, cultural and organizational shift in understanding how, how work has to shift to to account for this new goal.Joe Krebs 14:00 We got the leadership, there's definitely a different kind of engagement and involvement is needed, right? Coming in, you know, using OKR's. And working with agile teams, if we're going on to the agile team level. So what I hear is, the teams are focusing on outcomes rather than output. Right. And but you also and this is very interesting, because I think that brings out the self-organization, part of an often team really clearly is the team's should not be focused on the features. So we shouldn't be focusing on features we should be focusing on the on the outcome. How do we have to see that that's an interesting piece. I came across one of your LinkedIn in posts recently, and it was it was quite interesting why so not to focus on the features but to focus on the outcomes that really drives a total behavioral change on a team level? Jeff Gothelf 14:53 Yeah.Joe Krebs 14:56 And so let's explore a little bit. Jeff Gothelf 15:00 Go back 20 years in time, the delivery of software to production 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, for the majority of organizations out there was an event. Right? It was a thing. Like, I mean, honestly, we had parties. Literally, we literally threw parties when we delivered software to production, because it took nine months to get there. Right. Right. And, and you know, and we get a t-shirt with the name of the project on and we celebrate the delivery of software, right? Today, you can ship software to production, if you choose to as an organization as fast as you want. There's literally no limit on it, Amazon's doing it once every second. That's, that's kind of the speed. And so the delivery of software is a non event at this point, right? Our ability to get ideas into the hands of customers, to learn whether or not it positively impacted their behavior in ways that we expect it or not. And then to react to that to ship sense and respond if you'll indulge me a little promotion of our second book, right. Is is it's in everybody's fingertips. Right. And so this, this idea that we're focusing on a feature doesn't really matter, of course, we have to ship the features. But we can ship anything we want as quickly as we want. And so the sooner at end, any of our assumptions or hypotheses are going to be wrong to some extent. And so the sooner that we can find out where we're wrong, and where we're right, allows us to change course, and to adjust more quickly, right, that's the agility that we're looking for. And so that begins. And because the delivery of software is is a non event, the focus isn't on, did we get the thing out the door? It's getting the thing out the door, shift the behavior in the right way? And if it didn't? Let's find out why. And if it did, let's find out why. And do more of that. To me, that's, it's a really difficult conversation for everybody involved in the management and the delivery of products, digital products and services. Because it's really easy to think about features. It's a concrete thing.Joe Krebs 17:20 Well, Jeff, you have so far published 4 books, right, if I counted correctly. And this is not the big reveal, I would assume and in the world of agile books, but there is a book 5 in the making. Jeff Gothelf 17:33 There is there is and I'm super excited to be co-writing with Josh Seidenn again, I've continued to work with Josh Seiden and continuously for 15 years at this point, we wrote Lean UX together, we wrote Sense and Respond together, we've built a couple of businesses together and we continue to deliver work together on a regular basis. And he had a tremendously successful that continue to be successful called Outcomes over Output. And so we decided to join forces again on a book and put out an OKR book, we're still working on a title, but the goal is to get it out in October of this year. And it's designed to be the practical, tactical guide for justifying OKR's and then writing them and kind of what happens next and how to implement them and what what to watch out for in a large organization. So if you think about sort of "Measure What Matters" John Doerr's book, sort of as the kind of the big, lofty introduction to OKRs, which has a few things in it that I don't necessarily agree with. Anything about Christina Wodtke's book, "Radical Focus", and if it was 2.0 is being fantastic. generally focused on a single team, though so it's kind of where's the sort of the practical guide for larger teams and teams at scale? That's what we are going for with this book. Super. Joe Krebs 17:33 Yeah, super exciting right. And you also have a course like a self paced course about OKRs when you do a JeffGothelf.com if you if you had to, you know have like a thread through like in terms of topics and how they are like intertwined and you know, linked together out of those books do you see like, like lean UX obviously was a that was a big book coming out in the beginning of not your career, but authors career, right. And then obviously, now there is a book about OKR how does this all connect with each other? If you had to say like, okay, I wrote Lean UX I wrote sense and respond then lean versus agile versus design thinking and now there comes the other one, maybe even the one from Josh, that book that somehow also topic-wise fits in. But what is the theme here? What is what is it? Jeff Gothelf 19:51 Yeah, it's a good question. And no one's ever asked me that question. So I liked this question. So lean UX was a sharing back of ways that we had figured out through trial and error for practicing design, user experience and design in Agile software development environments. That's kind of where it started in its first edition. And it's third edition. Now, it's a bit more broad about kind of how to how to teams design and build great products in an agile environment. The feedback from Lean UX since the day it came out was generally speaking. "I love the book", would love to work this way. My boss doesn't want let me my company doesn't work this way. And so to Josh and I, that was a clear call a sent a signal from the market that said, there's there's something to be done here. People want to work this way. But their bosses don't understand why or how. And so sense and respond was literally a response to the feedback that we sent from Lean UX. It was it was a business book, designed for leaders, I think we've met I think we may be used the word agile in there twice, in 50,000 words, and that was by design, right? It wasn't it was to try to build to write an evergreen book. And that that worked out well. And what's interesting is that, then folks began to take that advice to heart. And they started getting their team's training. And so we're hearing from our clients while we're in their training with with maybe with lean, lean UX, product discovery, design thinking. You know, there's a lot of agile training going on. And the feedback from organizations was looking for training everybody in lean startup and and Lean thinking and design thinking and lean UX and, and Agile and Scrum, and the magic isn't happening. Right? Why isn't the magic happening? And it's interesting, because I felt like we were pretty successful, like, convincing folks that stuff in Lean UX was good stuff in sense and respond was accurate. And now they were trying to make it all happen. But they were kind of buying sort of ad hoc training and trying to make it all together, make it all work together. So that's where Lean versus agile versus Design Thinking came from. And in hindsight, I regret not calling it lean and agile and design thinking, right? Like, that's the only the only change I would make, because fundamentally the the philosophies is the same in my opinion underneath those, those ideas. And so that would have helped people kind of get a better sense of how to unite those processes and build those environments. And then finally, kind of coming full circle to this OKR book today. It feels like, well, it's what we talked about before, right? It feels like the product development parts of an organization get it, right, they get, you know, lean agile and design thinking. But the leadership part of the organization is still making demands on them, that reflect reflect old ways of thinking and old ways of working. So, an OKR book, if it can convince an organization to set goals in this new way, paves the way for the product development teams to be successful with everything else. We've provided them over the last decade. So that's the thread between it all. And it's almost like we should have been done the OKR book first and come his way. But you know, here we are. Joe Krebs 23:26 Yeah, no, it's it's awesome is many of those readers out there listeners, when we have read your material, they will know that not only will you write about it, it was going to be a great book away and as the other ones too. But it's also going to probably going to create a bigger interest in in that topic. So I'm excited about that. Because OKR's from what I understand is also creating a higher level of experimentation. Inspires is something I'm personally very interested about. Right. Soleaders, obviously, as we already pointed out, is is something that that would need to be coming on board with that kind of concept. And I think holistically drive this. This is super interesting. Yeah, that is, so if material out you have you you have training about this topic, you're writing a book about OKRs. And the title is still unknown. We don't know that yet. Jeff Gothelf 24:26 It's TBD. I've been asking Chad GPT to help me and it's done. Okay, it's generated some decent site overall, at least at least. Something has sparked the brainstorm.Joe Krebs 24:39 Yeah. Two quick questions at the at the end here. Before we before we depart. So if some leaders out there it's like is first time I really hear OKRs maybe something's like I've heard about it, but I really have no idea about OKR, what what's your recommendation for Leaders how to get started with that or possibly get warmed up to the topic. And also for maybe the other side, we have touched on in this podcast the teams, right? Like let's say there's a Scrum team. Let's just make it very specific. Right. And let's say there's a scrum team. How does Scrum and OKRs? How does that all link together? In your opinion? Jeff Gothelf 25:21 Yeah. So, look, I think, I think there's a challenge. I wouldn't recommend Measure What Matters any more than what's on every executive desk, just because there's some things in there. Fundamentally, he's okay with, with outputs as key results, and I'm not. So so I have to disagree with that, I'm sorry. But otherwise, and I think like Christina's Wodtk's books are amazing, Christina Wodtke's Radical Focus is amazing. I just, you know, it's generally focused on startups and single teams. And so if you're looking for for sort of a quick primer, there is, first of all, is endless content on my blog, but the OKR course, which is, which is super, in my opinion, super affordable. It's 68 minutes of video. And I think that that's a fair ask, if you're looking for a very short distillation of that. I did a, I did a kind of a video podcast about two years ago, with a show called product beats. Swedish. Okay, folks, I think, and it was like 18 minutes long. And all I did was talk about OKRs for 18 minutes. And so if you just want to invest 18 minutes, that's a great, that's a great little podcast to get into. And that would really kind of break it down very, very clearly as to the what, how the why some of the, the traps and the things to watch out for. So those are good places to start. All those are good places to start. Joe Krebs 26:52 Yeah, maybe people will later refer to this 25 minute podcast of Agile FM and say like that might be the starting point of the starting points, right?Jeff Gothelf 27:00 I hope so.Joe Krebs 27:02 What about teams? What are the changes on a scrum team? For example, if somebody says, Hey, we're going to introduce OKR's into our organization, what's the impact on the scrum team, for example? Jeff Gothelf 27:11 So this is where it gets it. This is where it gets interesting, right? Because again, like, if you don't, if you don't tell the team what to make, they've got to go discover there, they've got to go figure it out. If they don't know how to do discovery, or if they're not allowed to do discovery, then they're just going to retrofit their existing backlog into the goals that you've set for them. And that gets us nowhere, right? Doesn't we've changed nothing at that point, right. And so what changes at the team level is you have to start doing discovery, and then building that into your sprints. So dual track agile, we know that term for a long time, by discovering delivery, with the same team doing both types of work, writing hypotheses, testing them changing things based on evidence, that's key. So if you don't know how to do that, you have to get training for it. If your company won't allow you to do that, but they're setting OKRs as goals, you have to raise your hand, you have to say, look, I appreciate you going down this path. But if we can't go and talk to customers, if we can't run experiments, if you won't allow us to carve time out of every sprint for learning, then we've changed nothing. You're not going anywhere. Joe Krebs 28:21 Oh, that's cool. That's great advice, Jeff. This is, this is awesome. So we learned a lot. Jeff is working on a new book, it's gonna be about OKR's or related content. We heard a little bit about leaders, teams. We got a little bit of advice, and it's all packed into 25 minutes. There's only one sad piece about this podcast, and that is that I heard that we are not having any kind of launch parties anymore, no more printed T shirts those days are over. So for everybody releasing software today, you're missing out. But other than that, we're gonna see great improvements. That's awesome.Jeff Gothelf 29:03 It is sad. I mean, I miss my projects diamond T-Shirt. Project emerald. That was the one after diamond. That was amazing. Joe Krebs 29:13 It's awesome. Thanks, Jeff, for joining me on this podcast. Jeff Gothelf 29:17 My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. It's great chatting with us. Good to see you again.Joe Krebs 29:23 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:00 2023 marks the beginning of the second decade of agile and for the past 10 years, I've been releasing podcast episodes with a variety of speakers and topics to you. And I hope you enjoy the ride so far. I don't know how many of you guys actually know the beginning of agile, and how it all started. While I started, the idea of a podcast actually started after a visit with Jean Tabaka in New York City, where we recorded again, a audio segment for the New York City community. After the recording, she pointed out that this was a really interesting conversation. And she really enjoyed it. And she thought, why am I only releasing this content to the New York City crowd and not on a world level as a podcast? So I began thinking about it, produced a podcast, and eventually it turned into agile FM, something you'll hopefully enjoy today. So as a tribute to Jean Tabaka, which left us way too soon, in 2016, I decided to re release that original content from 2013 with her. And what's amazing after I really listened to that audio segment with her is how much she already talked about organizational agility, somehow business agility, and some collaboration issues that are still valid today. So thank you, gene for, you know, helping me to get into the podcasting. And, you know, having me indirectly meet so many people on this podcast recordings. But I also wanted to make sure that everybody out there knows how influential Ginger Baker was in a variety of ways, and how valid her books and contents still are today, in 23. So I hope you enjoy this one. And in memoriam here is Jean Tabaka. Agile New York City 2013. Joe Krebs 1:56 I am your host Joe Krebs, and today I'm here with Jean Tabaka. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Joe. Jean, you're in town for a very special event to the edge on New York City community. We're celebrating our fifth birthday. Today, actually here at Pace University in beautiful, sunny New York City today. So thank you "A" for coming to the podcast. And "B" more important is actually speaking tonight to the edge on New York City community. That's a that's a wonderful thing for you.Jean Tabaka 2:26 Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. And I guess I could take a little bit of credit for the wonderful weather I brought from Colorado. What the heck. Yeah. And to be part of the fifth anniversary. Wow, what an honor. So seriously, thank you so much. This is great.Joe Krebs 2:45 Well, thank you, Jean, when I was when I was researching a little bit around your book, actually, in preparation for this podcast, I realized that, although we're turning five years, your book is older than five years. Yeah. Well, your book prior to the creation of agile in New York City. Wow. And it's still up to date. No, no. Should we say the book is timeless? It is it's still valid. I mean, people still read it. It's still a topic of conversation. It's not like a programming language has been outdated. The book is still very relevant. It's collaboration explained.Jean Tabaka 3:23 Right. Interestingly enough. About 2003. I think it was, I'll be talking about this in my talk this evening. But I'd like to really bring it up now. So thank you very much. And I was approached by the executive editor of the Agile Software Development series that was being run by Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith. And he said, someone told me to talk to you. Wow, that was a bit frightening right there. And he said, I gathered that you have a great passion around collaboration, and specifically about how to facilitate collaboration. And I said, Yes, because I believe in the human aspect of agile, I read about it. And I don't see in the books, clear guidance about how to bring about self organization, how to make sure all the voices are heard, and how you can gather the greatest pools of insight. And he said, well, then write a book about it. I said, I could do that. But I think these sorts of things are much better transferred in person. And he said, well write the book. And it took me a long time to write the book, because very honestly, I didn't believe in it. I kept saying to him, but no one will read it. And he said, No, I believe in this book. And in fact, back to your point, Joe, he said, This is material, I believe will live on fact beyond many of the other books and he said if it doesn't, I promise su I'll work with you. I won't publish it if we really don't believe in it. And shoot. It's, it got published. It's gone beyond my wildest expectations. I am blown away, truly humbled by the people who still come to me worldwide and say, Thank you. Thank you for this book. I seriously never would have imagined and the gentleman who urged me to do this. Well, he was right. Yeah.Joe Krebs 5:40 Being persistent, right, and making you believe in, in what you're doing? Yes, even though you might not be seeing it at that point. But I did.Jean Tabaka 5:49 And I think you and I were talking earlier about our technical backgrounds. And I kept thinking, my book really isn't technical. Is it going to allow others to see that I have a technical background? Will it look like soft, fuzzy skills. And that was a part of the challenge for me as well to publish the book. And it's, again, just humbling that it's been welcomed into the community as it has.Joe Krebs 6:18 Well, the the other part of your title collaboration explained is actually facilitation skills for software project leaders. Yes. So what I actually like about this, two aspects of it, which are actually more important than ever, in our Agile community facilitation skills. And in 2006, when he was published your you talked about leadership?Jean Tabaka 6:40 Yes. In fact, that's the first chapter in the book. Wow. Thank you, Joe. Yeah, the first chapter of the book is on servant leadership, and what it takes. And there were people who had told me, Well, first of all, get rid of that chapter. And I just wouldn't, I refused. I believe that as we not just inform the Scrum Masters and the Agile coaches within our agile world, that is, we scale and have agile move outside development organizations, we move out what I'll call the value stream, that organizationally, we have to invite the notion of servant leaders, and people who believe in the insights of the teams as they bring forth their visions. That was very important to me. And that's why I lead the book off with that.Joe Krebs 7:39 So you have been doing this since 98. Yeah, the actual communityJean Tabaka 7:42 I am one of the Agile grandmothers.Joe Krebs 7:47 Since 98, there was also the word software in your book with would that be a word we could almost now like years later, almost eliminated, like because so many people do Agile outside of software development?Jean Tabaka 8:00 That yeah, I think that at the time, because my background was strictly software. I have a graduate degree in computer science learn. And that's all I've ever known about the world. And there's been this slow transformation of how I've gone from being analytical, to be more aware of the creative and humane side of how we create software. When the book first came out, I remember I had a gentleman contact me six months to a year afterward and say, he was from New Zealand. So right then and there again, I was blown away. Wow, my book was selling in New Zealand. And he wrote to me to say, why didn't you put the word software in this title? This book is not about software. It's about how to help organizations really be collaborative, how to facilitate collaboration. I knew about that, only in the software world at the time. And as I now look farther out, and around me, I see that and hear from people. This really isn't just about software. And thank you for helping software people understand the value of it.Joe Krebs 9:18 Why do you think it is that we have seen so many technologies come and go. And the topic of collaboration, facilitation is still very much a coot. I would actually say like it. It's important, more important than ever. What do you think is why technology can't solve specific problems in human behavior? We have all these tools will be now and but it seems like the projects are still not more successful from a from a collaborations perspective. Did you agree or do you do you think just been done some progress?Jean Tabaka 9:54 It's interesting. Originally, my target audience was For people who felt that more control would provide more success in the software world. And so I was trying to help command and control environments move to more collaborative environments. Some stuff I've been reading lately, interestingly enough, is pushing back on the agile movement saying, no people need to be able to work on their own to be truly creative. And I've been responding to that and a couple of posts here and there saying, I all the more believe in facilitation as a role because in this world where creativity needs to come both from the group, the the team, as well as the individual where creativity comes from both spaces. A really well informed and well seasoned facilitator is also sort of paid to be an observer, and to bring out the strengths of the team and the individual. So we raise the overall wisdom of the team, by individual contribution, and by overall team contribution. I don't know if that really answers your question orJoe Krebs 11:14 not? Well, yeah, I've seen like teams, distributed teams primarily, there was like, honestly, Cyril collaboration. They were assigning tickets to each other, talking. And that's not the collaboration I have in mind right?Jean Tabaka 11:29 Now it's not and and thank you for bringing that up. I've worked with a lot of distributed teams teams distributed within the same city within the same same state within the same country within the same continent, and then across three different continents. And again, the assumption is, well, we need to add more and more control. And I recognize that the scaffolding around these environments does require a bit more work than when the team is co located, we lose so much of the communication and the implicit versus explicit communication flow. The the tacit versus tribal knowledge. At the same time, when I've been traveling in India, and China, and Texas, sorry, I had to throw that in there. Talk about three different cultures. And what I have been doing is trying to help leaders in these types of environments understand good facilitation is all the more important. Because what I discovered that is that without good strong facilitation, in each of the remote areas, or distributed areas, as well as across the distributed teams, we can't really be reap the benefits of agile at all. In fact, people will start to become very alienated. And assume, frankly, sabotage by the other people. The only commitment the only communication device you have is a ticket. it for some reason, carries a little, little seed of blame and shame with it. Yes, that's not the intent. But boy, do I see shame and blame flying, you know, transcontinental.Joe Krebs 13:37 It's true. It's true. It's really true. Yeah. Well, you mentioned the Agile. I don't know exactly what you say as a movement or agile. You want to push back a little bit. You actually seeking a lot of advice outside of the Agile community. In your talk tonight, tell me why the Golden Circle of Agile? You you actually outline on our website, which is on www agile nyc.org. You actually say? Simon's you were very much influenced by Simon Sinek actually by a TED talk. Yes. So you're actually reaching out to totally other communities, tribes, so forth for for advice, and you map that to, to agility. Is that right?Jean Tabaka 14:24 Yes. Yeah, I want to clarify that I'm not pushing back on agile. What I'm doing is I'm inviting in and pulling in more resources into my technical world than I ever would have imagined. So initially, I was proud and eager to read as many agile books as I possibly could, and seek out the Agile speakers. Go to Agile conferences. What I'm discovering is that over time for Our agile adoptions to move into Agile transformations to move into organizational transformation. I'm being pulled to seek new guidance back to the talk for this evening. Tell me why and the golden the Golden Circle of Agile. When I saw the TED Talk by Simon Sinek, let's start with I was watching TED Talks. What I've been doing that five years ago. No, is Simon's talk about agile. No. But I listened to it multiple times, and took my own interpretations around it. They're not specifically what Simon says, oh, that sounds funny. Sorry. And then I bought his book, start with why. And it gives so much wonderful humanity underneath this thing called the Golden Circle of why, how what. And I said to myself, that really speaks to me. And it falls in line with some other authors and their books that I've been looking at, again, to broad the value of Agile to reap more benefits of Agile. They're not agile books.Joe Krebs 16:24 You do want to you want to share them with the Agile New York City community, what's on your bookshelf right now? What do you what are you interested in?Jean Tabaka 16:30 Actually, you know, oddly enough, what's more, well, yes, I have a bookshelf full of books. But, okay, this is a little bit of a nod to the Kindle. Because I love these books so much, I bought a Kindle, so I can carry them with me wherever. And, frankly, seriously, I use a Kindle as my library, as my reference library. So if you come through what I have on there, you'll discover every one of these books, I think that one of the biggest influences on me with regard to being a change agent, and therefore someone who believes in Agile transformation has been Seth Gordon. And admittedly, I haven't read all his books. But I would say this was a transformative book for me, and it's linchpin. I don't know if you've read that one, it blows me away. And it he talks about being prepared to bring your gifts and your artistry into your work. And I was thinking about how agile asks so much of us, and that our organizations deserve and should value our gifts and our artistry, I think agile invites that but it never really used those words. And he also says that we with our sense of artistry should be prepared to lean in to do hard things. And as we lean in a true artist chips, there are a couple of other things, he adds him with that. But I'd have to pull up my library to tell you this. Boy have those meant a lot to me with regard to talking about what Agile and how we as individuals work within an Agile transformation, and how an organization should be inviting our artistry and our gifts should help us lean in and ship. A book very similar to that. Daniel Pink's drive, and that has a lot to do with how intrinsic motivation is far more compelling for individuals and teams than extrinsic rewards, or extrinsic. Punishment is too strong a term but if you don't get this done, then you're in trouble. So you have to go into this depth tomorrow. Yeah. Wow, another book, I've been doing a lot. I've been going back to time and time again. And in fact, excuse me. Pardon me, I'm using sort of my metaphor for the year is Dan Heath and Chip his book switch. Again, nothing to do with agile, but has to do with when we're prepared to preparing to be transformative, and they have three metaphors there which are, drive the rider so set a vision, motivate the elephant, which is look into the emotions and the heart of what it takes to go to transformation and then shape the path so ensure that that can occur. And again, I think about Wow, all these things I care passionately with regard to agile, agile teams, agile organizations. I want to give these gifts to people about I get how hard it is. And we're worth we're worthy of what we can get out of that. And then a bit more technical.Joe Krebs 20:14 How do you fight broadening that scope? By looking into other industries? What do you what do you think is going to happen to our community? Or where would you like to see the Agile community? Getting stronger getting? Or emphasizing certain topics? Is there anything based on what you're seeing around? Yeah, John community?Jean Tabaka 20:39 I think I wouldn't be telling you anything new with this answer, but I'll give it to you.Joe Krebs 20:43 Please give it to me. You can decide.Jean Tabaka 20:46 And I believe the original agile movement, had a wonderful focus on how to help development teams deliver, and how to protect them from the tyranny that tended to surround them that held them hostage, in some ways. What I'm hopeful about with regard to reading these new things, and the way that I would invite them into agile communities, is that we are broadening, agile scope. And its focus, and inviting, and we're broadening both into the individual values, and our quality of life. And we're broadening out to the organizational view, and organizational quality of life. This is a hard sell, when I go talk to large organizations, they'll still look at the bottom line. And the reading I've been doing is that the bottom line will take care of itself sounds pretty Frou Frou, whatever the bottom line will take care of itself. When you really believe in the people. Every one of these books says believe in the people care and the people and these other things will take care of themselves. I've also been reading Don Reinertsen must be so I feel sorry. That's okay, I keep interrupting you. So.Joe Krebs 22:21 But that has to be true, right? Like a truthful. You believe in your people? I mean, it has to be, it has to be done right. From an organizational perspective. A lot of people say that it's just like I believe, just take care of your department and takes care of itself. Just focus on the customer. Or other say just focus on the employees, like whatever your viewpoint is. But some organizations try that. And it's still not successful, because they might not be really meeting it. But they're saying, right, yeah, so I guess there's a hidden agenda.Jean Tabaka 22:54 Yes, yes. And again, thinking about some of the things I've been reading in the agile and Google Groups, etc. And talking with organizations is I wonderfully I get paid to go talk with and listen to people. How did I get this lucky? And I hear that agile still puts them on Death Marches instead of one death march at the end. Now we have a death marked every two weeks. Yeah, let's sign up for Agile. And and they're under the Agile tyranny. Yeah, they're they're under some sort of tyranny of time box.Joe Krebs 23:33 So torture. Yeah, every two weeks. And that was not the intent. No, that's that's not the intent. Yeah.Jean Tabaka 23:39 And so as we're trying to do the right thing with agile, I think it's valuable for us to look outside of agile and say, Can we reinforce ourselves of what the intent was? And can we actually have it grow through our nurturing of the intent through these through these other guides?Joe Krebs 24:00 I do want to come back to something very, very tiny, narrow topics is meetings, you said, we already had focus we have created we have created where we are delivering software. So you're doing all these good things with agile but I still observe and I just wanted to ask you, obviously you're sharing this battle Holly, Holly, anyone meetings, meetings, Ali run any in any kind of shape, they run in an effective way? Do you have any advice for the listeners out there? I do like one tip or something, how to run meetings, a little bit more effectiveJean Tabaka 24:39 Habits of Highly Effective facilitator. Okay. And sometimes I think people are looking at me and saying, Well, Jean, when you see everything is a nail, yeah, your hammer is the right tool. I would like to use my company rally software as an example this coming August 1, I'm celebrating my eighth anniversary with the company. Thank you. And I was the first consultant hired into the company. Here I was writing a book I was hired in in 2004. I was writing a book on collaboration and facilitation specifically. We were very small group at the time. And I approached the CEO, Tim and the founder, Ryan, and said, I think we could really benefit from having facilitated meetings, Agile has so many meetings. And they said, Okay, ceremonies that Yeah, show us what you've got eight, seven and a half years later, we do not have any major meetings without a facilitator. We are an organization of facilitation. And this has not been through me pushing it on people. It has been through groups pulling it. This is not just the development teams, it's every department in the company. We have retrospectives, we have planning meetings. And we now actually have a facilitators group. And we check in with one another about what are you running into? What are some more things you've been reading besides genes, but we truly believe now we are a facilitation driven organization. And when I can bring that message into other organizations, because they say, agile is killing us there are too many meetings, then what I talked about with them is how effective are your meetings? What are you doing to ensure that they meet a purpose that they don't go on forever and ever, that they don't suffer from what I call LV di D? Yeah, loudest voice driven development, loudest voice decision making driven decisions. The facilitator is there to protect everyone and make sure everyone's heard and understood in a safe environment that I believe is truly critical to Agile. And that's why I think facilitation is a isn't great and necessary tool in the Agile set of tools.Joe Krebs 27:11 How do you see like social media networks, influencing the focus of today's meetings? Do you think that's like with Twitter, with Facebook with all these technical capabilities of instant messaging? Do you think that has any influence negatively on an agile project?Jean Tabaka 27:31 Well, what I can say is that being the one of the grandmothers out there, figure template inish, initially, I put push back very hard on no electronics in meetings, what I've come to believe more valuable is our intentions in meetings, and how electronic service services again, I'll just use my own company. But I've seen it in other companies, where we make agreements with one another at the start of a meeting, we declare our intentions, and the use of electronics. For instance, recently, we had a meeting where we wanted a colleague engaged. And so we just put her in Google Chat, turned in video chat and turned around and sat in a chair and major part of our meeting. In almost every one of our conference rooms, we now have very large high def, panel screens on the walls, so that we can have people in the meetings. And people will also say I need electrons, I need to have my electronics on because I need to stay in I Am. Part of it is so that we make decisions very quickly that we remove the waste of if someone's not in the meeting, we bring in their information to make decisions more informed and faster than waiting until outside the meeting. So theJoe Krebs 29:02 technology is related to the meeting itself to the Yeah, no, it's not like just chatting with somebody about something totally unrelated to the meeting. WeJean Tabaka 29:10 have meetings that still suffer from that. Yeah. And we as facilitators are learning how to check in with people about the agreements, the intentions and the norms. And I'll ask very specifically, who knows right now that they need to be in email. Okay. Yeah, email. Well, yeah, tell me that. Yes. I I have a burning issue that I need to be engaged in and therefore the rest of the group understands why that person is doing email and the others aren't. Yeah. And we still struggle with that.Joe Krebs 29:44 You said you started as a consultant with a rally Yes, but your title now is fellow keen on finding out what a fellow does for rally. Ah, tell me a little bit about Your day. What are how does a typical day of gene debate look like? What I would ColoradoJean Tabaka 30:06 in Boulder, beautiful Boulder, Colorado? Believe it or not, this is something of an emotional question and answer for me. I have loved my work as an agile consultant. I have loved and continue to love working with rally. It is the best job I've ever had in my 30 plus years in the technology community. Well, as the first consultant I help define what we would look like as consultants. One of the big things being we would be highly facilitated. When I moved into the role of agile fellow, the intention was, this is going to sound a little self serving that I would travel less travel less. But now you know something about that. What, what has been so deeply rewarding to be agile fellow is that I actually travel more. And it has to do with the fact that I read a lot more and I blog more. And I work with different levels, higher levels in organizations. And how we came up with the word fellow was we brainstormed and said we don't know what to call this. Let's just call it an agile fellow for now. But it's not an untypical definition. I didn't want to be called an agile thought leader. I thought that was pompous. And yeah, a bit assumptive. But I did want to be someone in the rally community and then in the community at large that where I made an intention of I'm here to share ideas and bring in as we talked about earlier, ideas that aren't even necessarily from agile books.Joe Krebs 31:55 What do you do to relax during boredom? I do try to get a feeling of what is are you scared? Are you ski?Jean Tabaka 32:02 Oh, well, I'm an extremely bad skier. But you ski Yeah. I just went skiing a couple of weeks ago and suffered about five major bruises all over my body and knocked my noggin my head pretty badly. I've broken a leg skiing. I skied into a tree two very badly sprained ankles. And then this two weeks ago, the worst bruises of my life. And I still get out there. It's so beautiful. Wow, I it is so beautiful.Joe Krebs 32:40 You're a skier in training. Claiming like, as we discussed earlier, we still feel like we're in graduate school. Yes, right. And you're stillJean Tabaka 32:50 I'll be in kindergarten as king. And I do love. The other thing about living in Boulder. I chose to live there 12 years ago. It's a beautiful place. There is a lot of entrepreneurship. There's a lot of sense of sustainability, and social impact and giving back to the community. And I've had the deep honor of being engaged with some of the social initiative clubs at the University of Colorado, and also helping with some of the entrepreneur programs. I'm helping set up an agile conference at the University in September. That may not sound like leisure. Okay, let's back off. When when you're passionate about your work, it bleeds back and forth. It really does.Joe Krebs 33:43 You know, it's like, what weekday is it and you will realize how I work on Sundays. But you don't feel it.Jean Tabaka 33:49 And I am trying to move away from so much of my reading, feeding into my passion about work. And actually this summer part of the rally program for having been at the company seven years, I'll be celebrating my anniversary. We get six weeks of sabbatical. So I'm intending to truly take six weeks completely away from my passion around agile.Joe Krebs 34:17 Will that be New York?Jean Tabaka 34:19 It's going to it's going to be in an undisclosed location in France, okay for four weeks of intense language immersion. And I have reasons for doing that which go back to Seth Gordon, and my need to lean in and ship.Joe Krebs 34:39 Awesome. With Thank you, Jean, thank you for your time here. It's been a delight prior to your talk. I just want to highlight that one more time. Tell me why they go in so called Agile we're gonna hear your talk later. At Pace University at our fifth anniversary. It's not a lot. Yay, but it's five years and it's good moment for us to reflect. And we're happy to have an amazing speaker like you onstage. And not only onstage, but also on the ground, actually where we have food, drinks and we can stay for some drinks. That's aJean Tabaka 35:13 hobby. That's food and drinks. Yeah. And music,Joe Krebs 35:17 drinks music, and so we have a good time. Thank you again.Jean Tabaka 35:22 Well, I'll tell you that again. Thank you so much. And thank you for inviting my topic about tell me why that is a passion of mine. I don't think I understood it back when I was an agile neophyte, and learning just how to work within teams. I now look at how passion drives us and should drive the organization. And as Simon Sinek would stay, I would say start with why and that's start with your passion and your vision. That's what I'll be talking about this evening.Joe Krebs 35:55 Thank you, Jean. Thank you so much. Bye bye.

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM . Radio for the Agile community. www agile.fm. Welcome to another episode of agile FM today I have Katie Anderson with me. She has a web address not as easy ... Katie Anderson.com No! It's www.KBJAanderson.com. Just want to highlight that if you're starting googling her, she's an internationally recognized leadership coach, consultant, professional speaker, best known for inspiring individuals and organizations to lead with intentions. She has written a book, learning to lead, leading to learn that was published in 2020. We want to talk about some of those topics today. In this episode, we're gonna talk about maybe Australia, Japan, UK, United States, topics like that. But first and foremost, welcome to the podcast, Katie.Katie Anderson 1:07 Thanks, Joe. I'm so really excited to be here and to have this conversation with you.Joe Krebs 1:11 That is awesome. There's, let's let's kick it off with a fun fact. Because I was doing a little research on your website, that is KBJAnderson.com. And I did some research and you started your business in July 23 of 2013. And exactly in that week, the first agile FM podcast came out.Katie Anderson 1:31 Oh, wow. Well, we're, we're fated to talk together with the great beginnings of a podcast andJoe Krebs 1:39 yeah, I would have thought almost 10 years congratulations to that. Oh, thankKatie Anderson 1:44 and who would have thought I had no intentions previously of starting my own business. But looking back, it's not a surprise when I sort of see how the things in my past actually connected it to lead to where I am today.Joe Krebs 1:59 Right. So very diverse background I noticed by two you started working, you know, if I please correct me if I'm wrong here. Planet Hollywood or something like that was? Oh, yeah, it's good. Yeah.Katie Anderson 2:12 I was well, that my I would consider that pre my professional career starting. But yes, in the year and a half after I graduated from university, I moved to London, and was Katie from California, as one of the servers at Planet Hollywood. Now this is back in the late 1990s, when Planet Hollywood was like, you know, the place to go. So it was it was a fun, fun experience and a great kind of bridge between finished graduating from Stanford University. And moving on to my the first part of my career in academia. So, yes, I never thought I was going to be an entrepreneur. So starting as an academic, but it all came together full circle,Joe Krebs 2:53 right. And that was before 2013 way before starting point that we can say, you know, England, London, check for his country already wide covered, you lived in a country and there were other countries on your journey as well, Australia, but Japan had a huge impact too.Unknown Speaker 3:11 So prior, so I've lived in I think I six countries outside of the US. So in high school, and in university, I did exchange student programs in the Dominican Republic and in Spain, then moved to London after university. And I was a winner of a Fulbright scholarship. And that's what took me down to Australia to do my master's degree in public health policy. And I stayed there for four years. And that's when I made one big career shift from academia actually into consulting, still in the healthcare space, and then returned to the US. And that's where I got my introduction to lean and continuous improvement and operations and all of the things that now I've shifted into my my later career and then moving to Japan as well. So...Joe Krebs 3:58 it's all of those things you just touched on speaks for your diversity and it's things we have experienced that obviously have an impact on one of the things you all bring together. Right. I think that's that's what this is why when you're pulling from different kind of areas and life and professional experiences, even better, Japan, I think, had a big impact on you.Katie Anderson 4:20 He has always had, yeah, a big impact but and Japan has had a tremendous impact on me from it was almost eight years ago at the time of this recording that my family moved to Tokyo for my husband's job he actually works in works in IT and we went out there for almost two years, and has just been an incredible part of my personal and professional life since then became the basis for my book "learning to lead, leading to learn" lessons from Toyota leader Isao Yoshino Tino and a lifetime of continuous learning. And the this Japan study tours that I run, leading tape leaders and practitioners from around the world to go learn in Japan on an immersive week long trip. Right? So I'm excited to be going back to Japan and 2023. So we're post pandemic are moving through the pandemic.Joe Krebs 5:14 of course, that obviously had an impact on that as well. Right. helped me build this this connection, obviously is Isao Yoshino if I pronounced that correctly. Well, thank you. Yeah. So he, his part indirectly part of the book, because these are stories, where do you have extracted and learning from, from him, but it's so fascinating about him that you decided I want to write a book about him or about him, but you know, in the context of him from a leadership perspective, learn and extract from him.Katie Anderson 5:48 Yeah, so that mean, he is the subject of my book, we became the what what I thought was a once in a lifetime opportunity to spend the day with a Toyota leader in Japan turned into one of the most profound and connected, you know, adult relationships in my life. And he played some really important behind the scenes roles at Toyota, in the 70s 80s, and 90s, as it was really transitioning to this real learning culture, that was more people centered as well. So leading, and being part of teams that were like almost you consider the internal consulting team, some huge leadership transformation, efforts, re-training, 1000 plus of Toyota senior managers on really what it means to be a leader to create learning in organizations and achieve goals, sort of the foundation of so much of what we know, that might be considered Kata, or a A3 thinking as well. And then part of the joint venture between Toyota and General Motors when Japan was sorry, when Toyota was expanding overseas known as numi, he was in charge of the leadership development program for the training program for the American workers to come out are the American managers to come to Japan to learn the Toyota way. So really prove that you can translate this thinking across cultures, that it's these principles like work, it's just how we embody them, and how we support the development of other people, so and so much more. But I as I dug into my learning from him, and realized how much history there hadn't been captured, and just his wisdom, his own personal journey, I realized this, this needed to be brought to the world. So it's been one of my life's great privileges.Joe Krebs 7:37 Yeah, so we had the opportunity to speak more, spend more time with you. Isao I would assume that not just one one day,Katie Anderson 7:45 oh, my gosh, yes, I so I, we, he I'm recording this in my office, it's also our guestroom he stayed at my house multiple times, we, I would, when I was living in Japan, we would spend, I would jump on the Shinkansen the bullet train, almost every month, every other month, spend the day with him started writing, I was writing a blog at the time, being a lean practitioner living in Japan was a really, you know, unique opportunity, and was writing about our conversations and people were really taken with it. When I moved back to the US. In 2016, we continued our partnership, and just this idea of writing a book came to be and as you know, the concept of a book, a great idea turns into something different and it became a much larger project to once we started with purposeful interviews, but it we've I this book is the culmination of 1000s of hours of conversation, which I'm so grateful to have learned from and having the one on one interaction, but also to be able to synthesize them and put them in a really, hopefully enjoyable read, but a really helpful and useful book for for practitioners lean, agile, you know, just enthusiast about learning and leadership around the world.Joe Krebs 8:59 Right. So I just wanted to make sure right, because you know, and that anybody walks away from this podcast has actually spent a day with no, no, no. Emerging with almost 400 pages.Katie Anderson 9:11 years. And we. So I had, you know, a lot of material from previous years of conversations and writing blog posts and working partnering together. But we when we said yes to like we said, Well, yeah, let's do this book idea together. And it actually wasn't intended to be using all of his stories, it was had a different form and shape. And I talked about that in the introduction how it morphed as you learn. But through the purposeful interviews over the course of a year, it became clear that so much needed to be so much more needed to be shared in a different way.Joe Krebs 9:47 Just curious, I mean, I would assume the conversation was in English.Katie Anderson 9:51 Yes. So Mr. Yoshino spent 14 years of his career in the United States. And actually, as you discover in the book, you know, his lifelong dream was to live in the US Since he studied English from an early age, and this is quite unusual, actually, you know, he was born at around the time of the end of the Second World War. And so, you know, the US and Japan relations were, you know, they're a little different than they are now. So his English is quite fluent, and which has been great that he to through the pandemic, even though we had planned to have all these in person events, he's now able to connect with different leadership teams and help them have conversations and talk about things as well.Joe Krebs 10:30 Do you think like, even though it's not necessarily the mother tongue that something? You know, was it harder to catch something that might have gotten lost in translation, just from like, Japanese culture at Toyota's perspective, translating into English was without any kind of difficulties, just like from a language perspective. I mean, there's always ways to, you know, I say it differently, but it's not the same, necessarily right?Katie Anderson 10:57 So I would say not as much between Mr. Yoshino and myself in terms of the book, as it relates to principles from Toyota. And what we know is lean or the Toyota way didn't, whatever you might want to call it. There have been some lost in translation moments. And particularly, and I highlight this at the end of the book about the internal document that Toyota put together in 2001, to really sort of summarize their culture and what the Toyota way really means. There were two elements that I really consider lost in translation that have really, I think, impacted how people think about what is emerged as lean or agile and a little bit more focused, why we've ended up being more focused on tools perhaps, than the real essence, which is around learning and people. The first is that the Japanese, the way the Japanese words are written, respect for people, we only have one word for respect. And one sort of the one way of looking at the people but the the way the kanji symbols are written in Japan, there's a there's a nuance in those words, and it's respect for humanity or respect for your humaneness, which, to me, has a much more enriched meaning than just respect for people, which you might be able to think of as, like, Oh, I'm respecting you just because of your title. And the second element, which I think is real, a real miss actually on Toyota is part because they were the ones who translated it this way, was that the the way they the pillar of the Toyota way that they translated just as continuous improvement, actually is made up of two Japanese words, one, which is Kaizen, which we know is where we are commonly know as continuous improvement or improvement. There's that was Kaizen and wisdom "chie". And we're totally missing the word wisdom from this concept, and to me, wisdom is like that generational knowledge. It's information that we're putting into place, and it's much richer and so are the missing the word wisdom, to me, really just make sort of continuous improvement. Okay, yeah, we want to make incremental changes and improve all the time. Wisdom has a sense of gravitas, and generations and connectedness that so that that part to me is lost in translation, as it relates to my conversations with Mr. Yoshino? I don't know. I don't think so.Joe Krebs 13:27 Well, so your so your book, what's what's really standing out is in a very short period of time since 2020, when the book came out tons of reviews, and not only reviews, five star reviews. I mean, it's just very, very remarkable have to say, usually, I don't pay so much attention to that I had people on the show here with a few stars, you know, and on an on an Amazon page. But that really stands out, I have to say and what I want to say those those guests were great guests, great topics. It's just like, you know what the public thinks about it. But it's, that's tremendous, in terms of what people would like to learn from you here, and it's let's focus a little bit on the book. Why because it's I think, what's what's in there is about "Learning to lead, Leading to learn". So it's a great wordplay. Well, I love it to add, but it's it's also something where he just mentioned about continuous learning. Right? Well, I would like to go as in terms of leading is some people, at least when I started my career, they were hired, you know, because they brought a certain knowledge to the job description when they were hired to say, like, we need exactly that knowledge to come in. Right? Especially on the leadership side, right? Like, I need that leadership to come in. I need somebody who has that knowledge. So you're basically brought in for what you knew at that time. Your book is all about going forward, right? You're coming in and continue your learning journey. I don't think that you know, that's obviously what we're talking about 20,30 years ago, he might have been different and maybe it was me isolated, but it just felt like that. That didn't beginning you were hired for something because of your knowledge at that time, I think that is a concept. So how do we, you know, how would you tell the listeners here to a listening to this episode here right now, the approach at Toyota, what you have learned and what you experienced over the years since since you wrote the book in the years before?Katie Anderson 15:17 Yeah, absolutely. And this is really what I see as the secret to Toyota and why they've been so successful, and why so many companies and leaders around the world are really trying to emulate what they've done either through applying lean or agile or kata, you know, all of these things that sort of had its genesis through these, through Toyota really be applied in different contexts. The one of the, the framework that I talked about leadership is this comes out of this comment that Mr. Yoshino made one of the first times I met him, and it really summarized to me the simplicity of what leaders need to do. And it's actually inherent in the kata framework as well, or A3 thinking, whatever all the tools you want to talk about from, from Toyota leaders set the direction. So where do we need to go? And you know, what's that challenge the target we need to achieve, then provide support. So that's the coaching the development, the cultivating other people's expertise, and figuring out how to get there. And then the third part is about developing yourself as a leader. And that third element is often missed when we think about leadership. Yeah, okay. Leaders need to set the strategy with the goals, where do we need to go? Okay, yes, they need to provide support to their people, what does that look like? But this realization that we also need to be always developing and improving ourselves, both from our knowledge perspective, but also from our behaviors, and our skills and abilities to be clear on strategy and direction? And then really, what does it mean to provide support? And you highlighted what I think is one of the biggest gaps that I've observed in leaders around the world. And was also, you know, when I, when I realized for myself as a, as a manager and leader within an organization, a challenge as well, is it we have cultivated deep expertise and knowledge, and we are hired often for that technical ability that we have developed. And that's great when we're in individual contributor role, or there's a problem that specifically or strategic initiative that needs to be solved, though, when we have people development responsibility, which usually comes with being a manager or a team leader, or however the structure is, you also need to be stepping away into how do you cultivate that expertise for other people and let them learn and develop those capabilities. And so we have to navigate this leadership continuum between being an expert and developing the expertise or coaching the expertise of others. And that can be a really hard shift for us to make and something that we're like invisible to sometimes. So we're jumping in with all the answers and trying to give people our all our ideas, which is great, because we feel helpful, but it actually is missing out on that secret sauce, which is cultivating learning across the organization.Joe Krebs 18:10 And it's not only the learning for team members or team or a group I work with, it's also my own learning. Right? So that's also, butKatie Anderson 18:20 absolutely, and so you're learning. And I call this this chain of learning, like we're learning through working on a needed gold or also learning through the interaction about how to be more effective and how to do that differently.Joe Krebs 18:35 Yeah, I always think like, if you hire somebody, you know exactly through like a checklist of skills and expertise you're looking for. And let's say you have that perfect match, check, check, check, check, right, and you got more than that person would be bored coming on the job, right? Because it's like that is, you know, what's the learning path here? So you got to provide that, for a person, at least that's how I'm triggered was like, what's, what's next? How can I evolve? What is the to learn and, and that platform, that environment has to be there for somebody to flourish? Right?Katie Anderson 19:03 Absolutely. We, I mean, we know this innately as human beings, right, we always need a little bit of challenge and a little bit of something new or making progress. I mean, that's very rewarding. And when we don't have that we do feel disengaged, or, you know, unsatisfied. And so that's part of the, you know, manager or leaders responsibility, too, is making sure people have enough challenge that's stretching them but enough support that they feel like, you know, they're not like doing it all alone. At that same time, and that's where that learning zone, that sweet spot of the learning zone comes in.Joe Krebs 19:40 I just saw recently like, I think it was a McKinsey statistic it was all about like leadership and the introduction of agile, the impact on leadership, and it was like a significant percentage of people freed up time to actually focus on strategy right in a in an organization because there was so caught up in a day to day activities working like on very tactical items. Because there was so blocked and an agility created a kind of space for them. So...Katie Anderson 20:13 yeah, absolutely. And one of the unintended consequences of us kind of jumping in to participate in problem solving or taking, telling people, all of our ideas is we end up actually taking on the burden of having the responsibility for doing those things. So we don't have time and space to do anything else. And so actually, to be more effective, it's how do we how do we know which are like, our problems to solve? And where is it really our teams and our people? And what does it mean to show up differently to provide that support and that help that's needed without taking over all the all the activity? So that's the great leadership challenge, right?Joe Krebs 20:52 Here we go. That's a good one. It's let's let's explore this a little bit, because obviously, Isao Yoshina is from Toyota. So how would you respond? I'm just curious, put you on the spot here. But how would you respond to somebody who would say like, oh, that's all great. You talked to him, and you wrote a book, and it's about Toyota, and it's maybe lean? But what if, you know, somebody says, I work in a financial institution? We're not building cars or something like that? How would the topic? I feel like I know the answer, but I just want to make from you, how would a topic like this apply to you know, something more generic out there was somebody in a totally different industry might not even for profit, it could be nonprofit? Anything like that? How would you know somebody benefit from this?Katie Anderson 21:40 Well, I first and foremost, I started off in healthcare and working in large hospital and healthcare systems using the same principles to guide improvement. And I now work with industry agnostic, really, you know, I work with IT functions I work with, large, you know, biotech, pharmaceutical companies, I work with knowledge workers, you know, all across the board, what I think is really important is we have focused far too long on sort of the visual artifacts or the process side. Now, it's really important to improve the process, of course of how work is done, and how value is created for any organization's customers. The principles of all of this thinking can be applied to whatever industry. So what is your purpose, your organization's purpose? What is the value that you deliver? Or create either a product or service for your customer? How are you do that doing that in the most effective and high quality way? How are you engaging people's thinking and problem solving at the right level each and every day? How do they know where they need to go set the direction? How are you in creating that active engaged workforce? And how are you improving yourself as well. So I think, if we focus too much on like, Oh, I'm in a different industry, they this can't work, we're actually missing the whole point. Because the the way it will manifest will be different, actually different across any organization, even if you're in the same industry. So this is why Toyota never cared about if people went in and saw their, you know, went to the manufacturing shop floor and observed things because they knew they're missing. The thing that's really the secret, which is underlying everything is that they're creating, learning, looking at how they're developing people, engaging people each and every day, they were just solving the problems they needed to solve. Your problems are going to be different. So that I mean, that's my really my response. And I heard that so much when we were getting started in healthcare to oh, we do we provide health care for people, you know, we're not You're not a manufacturing line? Well, actually, there's a lot of similarity, if you look across, like looking at value and how we create value.Joe Krebs 23:53 Yeah, but it's interesting, right? As you just said, like very transparent on the on the floor, right? Build how we build things and take a look at it. We're very transparent in this. But even with the secret sauce, it's not easy to build that, that that map, like, we can still do that, because now we have the tools, why we can say, we have a better understanding of what's behind it, right. But we're still, we're still struggling to identify opportunities within organizations to try something like this. I mean, I'm just myself, you know, as we talked about before, the Kata is what I'm very passionate about the same thing, as like, you know, is this one comes from Toyota, it's extracted from Toyota with that map or apply to something else, and I see the synergies, but even with the secret sauce, it's not easy.Katie Anderson 24:41 No, I mean, that that's the that's the challenge, right? Like, actually, these concepts are very simple. And they really make a lot of sense if you just take a step back, but it's not easy to put into place. And that challenges all of us to think in a different way. I mean, I think in my own business, as well, like, I'm well into all of these principles, but to apply them in my own work requires me to, like put real effort into that and to like, oh, how am I making the invisible visible? How I how do I have clarity on where we need to go? All of those things? Yes.Joe Krebs 25:16 Yeah. So maybe there's also the answer. I'm just, I'm just gonna ask you because the book itself has the little add on. It's this workbook.Katie Anderson 25:25 Hmm. Yes.Joe Krebs 25:26 It's not a coffee table book.Katie Anderson 25:28 No, it's reflect and learn. I mean, it's beautiful coffee table book. But no, it's for Applied Learning, applied learning.Joe Krebs 25:37 Exactly. So how would you like and obviously, that's why I said coffee table book. It's not a coffee table book. It's a workbook, right? Because we do want to use a copy and we want to work in it. So how would you like the learner work through some of those things you're describing in your book? What's the style with a book? How would you envision that? Is that a start to end read? Is that a chapter by chapter and then possibly exercises? Is that something you go along with as a professional? Is that something you prepare for something? How would you like to see the reader or the professional use that and consume the work?Katie Anderson 26:13 So the book is really, you can choose to use the book however you want? The the way I wrote the book is about Mr. Yoshino's, chronological learning journey. And so it is you could you could go into one of the case studies and just read that what I think is really helpful is it shows like a real human perspective of how like someone starting at the beginning of, you know, actually, there's some backstory of his own person, how he got to starting at Toyota, but as a new college graduate, and, and experiences he had at Toyota about learning what it actually means to lead in this way, what does it mean to be a manager, what it means to be a leader, and then starting to apply them across different assignments that he had at different parts in his career, some which were great successes, and the last, you know, actually, an innovative new, you know, product for Toyota was a huge failure that cost the company $13 million. And he was responsible for that. So, you know, I think it's the human human story. And the feedback I get from those almost 255 star reviews on Amazon, is people really love this. It's a real story. And it's really human anatomy course, you can jump in at any point. And I have reflection questions at the end of each section of the book, to help people think about it. So I wrote the book, the workbook as a companion to really take some more of the concepts that I help leaders and practitioners learn about what does it mean to have intention? Who do you want to be? What are the actions aligned with that? What impact do you really want to have? And then some more some of the questions plus more questions to reflect on some space about that some different exercises to go through to really bring to life some of the stories in the principles that are talked about in the book, but how does that relate to me? You are you rather than the reader, the the learner? And then have what are you what action? Are you going to take on that? So you can use that as an individual, I also bring this into the leadership development programs I do with companies around the world. And as a core part of the learning experience, and if done as part of different cohorts of one, like small group learning I've had as well.Joe Krebs 28:28 Yeah. Well, I used to be a super well connected with the Lean community, as we know, obviously from from your background, you have worked with Agile-lists around the world. What would be your advice for agile leaders, from your experience from your, you know, seeing in workshops, and I'm sure there were some agile leaders that came across your work or read your books or give your feedback? What would you like to tell them in terms of mapping your book to the Agile community and possibly a focus on leadership and learning?Katie Anderson 29:01 Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I've had different agile leaders and practitioners join me in Japan and have been part of my workshops and learning so people also in the IT space, and in many, many, many knowledge workers as well. And, you know, I gotta go back to what I we were just talking about that the these principles go beyond and actually, do you know, any, you know, I guess, categorization of approach that you've you would you want to call it agile, do you want to call it lean? Do you want to call it you know, continuous improvement, Kaizen, all of these things are built upon these foundational principles about what it means to achieve results, how we get there, how we resolve problems, how we develop people to solve problems and how we improve ourselves as well. And so when we can get back to those fundamentals, we can apply them in any aspect of our work. Regardless of you know what that's looking like and it can help us think differently about our processes. And of course, then we can bring in the different frameworks and approaches and apply this, the, our leadership behaviors to make those more effective. And so I would say, take this, take this step back to really think about what is your purpose in your as a human being first and foremost? And then how does it apply to your role or function and what you're trying to accomplish the impact you want to have? And then thinking about how are you best going to get there? And and how you can align your actions with having that impact that you want? And then how do you take the other frameworks and tools in within your sphere of work and make that happen? So that's, that would be my recommendation. And just sort of, and I'm not trying to take you away from saying, like, we all have different approaches have a great impact applied in the right context. But this is really fundamentally about how you're a real human story. And also, what does it really mean to be a leader and be a humble leader and a humble learner? And in a way, that's not what I appreciated so much about and I continue to appreciate that Mr. Yoshino, he's almost 79, by the way, and we're actually talking later today at the time of this recording, as it he was willing to share not just the success stories, but the challenges and his personal failures, too. And I think that that's really important for us to realize, and to, you know, it's easy to look back and only see the successes, but to hear about people's challenges also validates our own challenges and our own struggle, and that the journey to success is paved with setbacks. And this is, you know, learning is inherent about having, you know, not getting things right, but what are you learning, and I'm obsessed with these dolls called Daruma dolls, I have this huge collection. And I give them out everywhere. In fact, you know, Rich Sheridan has a derma doll for me, in our shared mutual friend, and they represent the Japanese proverb fall down seven times get up eight. So when you have a goal, you fill in the dolls left eye, and it's like a little paper, well, they can be giant too. But it's a paper mache doll that's waited at the bottom. So it's like a weeble wobble and always write itself back up. And to me, this is this great sort of encompassing conte, like visualization of a goal, the reminder of the persistence and patience, we have to have an end, just a reminder to have the inherent struggle, and the setbacks that happened towards achieving the goal. But if we can keep learning, keep getting up and keep moving forward. We'll eventually get there, even if the outcome of our goal looks different than we thought at the beginning.Joe Krebs 32:44 It's also tangible, right? Because you see, and it makes the goal tangible, right? Yeah. To these. Here we go.Katie Anderson 32:57 You can really knock it down, and we'll keep getting back up. So keep going.Joe Krebs 33:01 Yeah, our listeners cannot see this. But that was a Daruma at all. And we can we can put a link into that.Katie Anderson 33:09 Yes, either. Exactly. I'm usually I'm often holding a Dermatol. So you'll see many. And actually I gave Larry Culp, the CEO of General Electric, a larger during muddle when we were on stage together. In October of 2022. We were he loved my book recommended it to all GE employees across the company, which was, you know, amazing. And then I had the opportunity to have a fireside chat in front of 1000 people at the Association for manufacturing excellence. And when we talked about this concept of struggle, and learning and also, you know, the things we have to unlearn as leaders to get there. So I gave him a daruma doll, because I'm sure he has. I know he has some big goals out there. But he said the same thing. He had to unlearn everything that he was trained in business school about what it meant to be a leader. Not maybe everything but we have to get out of do what I call break the telling habit get out of this mindset that we are supposed to have all the answers. We have a lot of good answers. But are they the right answers? And so anyway, it was really, it was really wonderful. And, and awesome to hear directly from Larry and have the chance to talk with him. And really see, you know, I put him like with Rich Sheridan, these leaders who are really embodying these concepts that we're trying to develop in organizations, about what it means to really be an effective leader and an inspirational one toJoe Krebs 34:35 I don't even want to ask you a question. It was such a wonderful, wonderful end you just close it out so nicely, that I don't even want to go and ask you another question. But this is this was really awesome. I want to I want to thank you for your time. We can we can tell from your schedule that you're very busy. I'm happy you spent some time here with the listeners on agile FM that are out there and say that was very interesting. I might be They might pick up book, I might visit your website that is KBJAnderson.com. And there is ways to find you speak ways to engage, ways to find a path to your book or anything like that. And I'm super thrilled you had time to share your story here a little bit with us your story, right? I think that is great.Katie Anderson 35:20 Thank you, Joe. Thanks for inviting me here. And I'd love to hear from your listeners about what's one takeaway that they had from this conversation. And definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. If you're interested in how to break your telling habit, I also have a free downloadable guide on my websites that's KBJAnderson/telling-habit so you can go there. Alright, Thanks, Joe.Joe Krebs 35:48 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM radio for the Agile community. www.agile.fm. Thank you for tuning into another podcast episode here with Agile FM I have a James Grenning with me. He is famous for being part of the Agile Manifesto signing the Agile Manifesto back in 2001. And he wrote a book test driven development for embedded C a lot of people know him. From that embedded work, we will talk about that we might start off with the Agile Manifesto. We'll talk about planning poker. And we will be talking about training. There's a lot of stuff you have to cover in this in this podcast episode. But first and foremost, welcome to the podcast gents.James Grenning 1:00 Joe, thanks so much. I really appreciate you inviting me. It's really nice to be here. And I was looking through your list of other people that you've had on the podcast, listen to a couple and great really nice to be among the company that you keep. Joe Krebs 1:11 Oh, thank you so much. And obviously this is way overdue that you are joining me on this podcast, we had folks from Agile Manifesto, other other folks that have signed the manifesto, we had folks that have little to no exposure to agility, but we could always connect the topic to agility. But this one, I have to say when we're talking about embedded software and software development, and agile practices for that, I myself will be a little bit out of my comfort zone. So are many of our listeners, possibly. And that is probably because it feels like a niche, but it is not a niche in the in the software world out there. And I think it's growing. Is that Is that correct?James Grenning 1:58 Yeah, well, there's certainly millions, I don't even know what the right number would be millions of embedded software developers. And I'll tell you, one of the big secrets is that embedded software may be special. But that doesn't make it special enough that agile test driven development and the modern practices wouldn't work for it. So dependency on hardware is like a dependency on a database. If you're going to accelerate your, your development, you've got to manage those dependencies. And so at the core, it's the same problems. And they just look very different. Joe Krebs 2:33 Yeah. What I wonder, because your background was already before 2001 was in that territory, right in technology that was related to embedded software, telecommunications, things like that, right? As far as I know. And you came to the Agile to the snow Snowbird and actually the funny thing was just yesterday, before we do this recording here, I saw a person with a baseball cap that said Snowbird on it, and this person had nothing to do with agile, but as a tourist is famous, and I will be speaking with James Grenning tomorrow. And he obviously acquired that and snowbird. But when you went to the Snowbird, you were maybe the only one that somehow related all these discussions to embedded software development, James Grenning 3:20 Actually, actually, there were at least a couple of us, a few of us, let me say, because Bob Martin and I grew up at a company called Teradyne. He was there a little bit before me, and he recruited me to Teradyne back in the early 80s. And we were both working on embedded systems in larger systems at Teradyne. But that's where we started. And all that later when I joined Bob, and his consulting company in the mid 90s. We did a lot of work and large embedded systems like these big printers at Xerox and such. So Bob had a lot of embedded background. John Kern worked on fighter planes and avionics and things like that, if I remember correctly. And Steve Mellor is also known. We I got to know Steve Miller better because we would cross paths at Embedded Systems conferences quite a bit. And Steve Mellor was really into model driven, but he also his depth also was in embedded systems. So there were a few people there with that perspective.Joe Krebs 4:22 Did you guys look through the lens of embedded software development during those discussions? Or were they like more like, discussions around agility and how to build software in general and just embeddedJames Grenning 4:31 real embedded really didn't come up there. I was learning from all the people there and I also tell people the truth and I went there because it's like, you go into Snowbird camp, I want to go and Bob had invited me I worked with Bob at the time. And I love to ski so I was there. In the meeting was really interesting, because the guys that I'm with were kind of my extreme programming heroes, Kent Beck Ward Cunningham and Ron Jeffries and Martin Fowler. And I am getting to know these other people. Right. And so in Bob Martin, of course, a long, long time, friend and colleagues there.Joe Krebs 5:11 Yeah. So so that obviously had a huge impact on on your career and you continue to writing that book, maybe roughly 10 years later about test driven development for embedded C, going forward a little bit in time today. When people are listening to us right now to this to this podcast, when they're hearing embedded software development, what do they have to picture? What is? What is a good definition for that? So they have a feeling of what kind of problems arise there? And, and then we talk a little bit? James Grenning 5:42 Sure, well, embedded systems are everywhere. Now. I mean, we rely on them. They're extremely powerful, too, they can be very small, like it might be cheaper to have a microprocessor in your pen to turn on a light than to actually have a physical switch, which is kind of crazy, you know, so you could have an electronic rather than a different kind of switch. So embedded software is everywhere. I generally have, I have my definition, which is, you don't recognize the thing is a computer. And that's a very broad definition, because I would like to have a lot of people be able to learn something about agile for embedded and about test driven development for embedded, you know, things that were mind blowing to me when I bumped into them with extreme programming 1999. It's like, oh, my gosh, why didn't we think of this before, this solves so many of the problems that I have to live with. And so while we hadn't, and it took some real geniuses like Kent (Beck) and Ward (Cunningham) to come up with this way of working for the engineer, I'm an engineer. So I kind of think of this from an engineering perspective. But you know, so the difference is, you don't really think of it as a computer. It's not a website there. Although now embedded systems have web servers in them often, many of many do like your printer is an embedded system, but you can connect to it through your local network and open up a web browser page and configure it. Right. And so, you know, the lines are blurring, your car is unbelievably complex, hundreds of millions of lines of embedded code, talking through various ways to make sure when you put on your touch your brakes that they come on. Joe Krebs 7:29 Yeah, it's self driving car capabilities?James Grenning 7:33 Yeah, well, that's scary. I mean, knowing how generally bad software is, excuse me, some of mine as well. Knowing how bad software isn't just me driving the current, the best thing I heard about best reason to trust a computer over a human is that well, humans are even worse than, than computers at driving cars. It's like, no, no, there's probably a pretty good argument. Because humans are can be pretty bad. Yeah. But yeah, so that that time is coming here. It makes me a little bit nervous. My car has a few things, which I do like, but of course, I don't over trust. You know, I'm letting it break for me and slow traffic, but my foot is ready. And paying attention it really completely trust it. But it's done so well. So far. Yeah.Joe Krebs 8:17 Well, I think it's maybe it's a combination of two things are fully self driving right now. Right. But we are in a situation where cyclists can help you can help protect you more as a driver. So it's not like you're not alone. You have cameras now. And they help you make decisions.James Grenning 8:31 Yeah, no doubt getting out of my driveway. Now, if, if I go back to you know, I'm in Florida right now, but I often might be in Illinois. My 2004 Honda in Illinois doesn't have any of the modern stuff. So I feel very vulnerable backing out of the garage. Now. My modern cars down here in Florida. I can't make a move without them getting mad at me. It's like, did you know you're about to back into something? You know? Yeah. you have a wife to help with that. But then also the car house?Joe Krebs 8:59 That's right. Yeah. All the help we can get right. Absolutely. So I used to be a long, long time ago, I programmed in Smalltalk, and there's garbage collection and Smalltalk. So if we're going a little bit to technologies, like what kind of technologies are being used, I would assume Smalltalk is not suitable for that because of garbage collection. Right? James Grenning 9:22 Well, originally, interestingly enough, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham were building oscilloscope in Smalltalk in the 90s. Right, and so they actually were working in embedded systems, even though you know, they didn't look like it because they're developing Smalltalk. Still in embedded systems, C is the king of all languages, as it is for developing Linux, and other things to kind of get close to the hardware. C++ is also popular, I'd say that they're similarly popular. Python is making a move. I worked on a IoT radio system a few years ago, I was building a product I put my brother's company. And there was a, I guess they call it an ecosystem, where you have a small Linux box, you know, this, like a super Raspberry Pi, with this radio that makes a mesh network. And then these little radios, which are microcontrollers, and the the language that you program the little Linux box with was Python, and you had a micro Python in the radios. And we chose this vendor just because well, we can build a prototype really quickly, if we don't have to worry about all the multitude of things you have to worry about when you're working in embedded C. There were some new problems, though, because a millisecond isn't very fast. When you're talking about the real world, you know, when you're talking about peripherals and things, and the best we could get from a timing perspective, where we could actually cause something to happen frequently was about a millisecond. That wasn't if I wanted to get away from that we would have had to program in bare C. So we figured out a different way, we actually made up for the limitations of Python, because we needed to look at something at the microsecond level, like 100 microsecond 10th of a millisecond, we had to look at that cadence. And the Python couldn't look at that. But we could read some we could create some hardware, that would extend the signal that we were interested in watching. To a long enough duration that we could see it in Python, which seems kind of crazy. We made up for the lack in software with hardware, usually you're making up for the lack of hardware with software. But you know, we're in the beginning, it's like, okay, what can we do? It's like, oh, we could build a little delay circuit in here and, you know, stretch that signal out. And then we can see it from the Python code. It's like, Great, let's do that. You know, what's all bright breadboard anyway? You know, we didn't, we weren't building millions of these yet.Joe Krebs 11:49 Curious about is James is like in product development, right? So in embedded software development, there is a there's another product as either let's say a robot, or there's an arm or something that moves. The software control is like, let's say a hardware. And that's like, for me, like just helped me understand like this chicken egg kind of situation. So is the hardware first, is this software first? Or? Or is it a parallel effort? Which I think it sounds like it but how do you develop software for something that might not even exist yet? In terms of hardware? Phases? Medical specifications?James Grenning 12:25 Yep. Yeah. So there's, there's a few different things you can do. And I've got a couple of resources that might be interesting. One is, I wrote a paper long ago, talking about progress before hardware. So if you knew what you're trying to build, but you didn't know what the hardware looked like, you can build the core of the application out towards the hardware, pushing the interfaces out and out more until you reach this end, where you know, there's a radio there now, and I need the radio, or there's some IO pin signals that we can control. Right, eventually, you push so you could start in the middle and work your way out. Another thing you can do is you can start in the out and work your way in. And I'm sure you can mix these together as well. So in the early extreme programming project, where we didn't know what the hardware was, we started working on the business rules of a police radio system, right from the beginning, based on the requirements documents in the you know, conversations with the customers and what we know the previous system did. So we're able to start in the middle and work our way out. While the hardware engineers had time to figure out what the hardware looked like. This IoT system I worked on more recently, we, and I've got it, I've got a video, which people can watch a conference presentation, which is tracer bullets and something in a Greenfield. In a greenfield project, those are some of the keywords were we recognize that there was a number of risks to the project that we're going to do like, what radio system should we use, okay, that has a performance we need, you know, 10 pressure readings per second with 10 sensors. That's what we needed. So we knew we needed to be able to handle that traffic. And then what was going to happen next, well, that radio would have to talk to an analog to digital converter thing that takes real world signals in an analog and converts them to digital, right, you know, so a pressure sensor reading might come in as a digital number which could be converted through some characterization of the hardware into a psi. Now we got to get that all the way up through layers and layers to a tablet for the technician who's who wants to know what the pressure is. And they can read the reading on their phone or whatever it is. So we looked at their in architecture that might work with that and we identified about five layers of risk. And so what we thought here, our biggest risk is can we find an effective technical solutions. So we built a walking skeleton, which involved? Can I just get messages between these two computers? And 10 radios at 10 readings per second? Will it keep up with that? And I, I got the vendor to write me a script that did that. It's like, oh, great, okay, so I could run it, I could run around with the radios, take them down the block, you know, put one on the other side of the garage door, bring them into a industrial setting and put them on the other sides of machines and things we could experiment to see if they worked. And we found out they did work, they worked fine. It's like, okay, we can build with that. So that was one risk removed. The tracer bullet idea comes from Pragmatic Programmers. So we just shot an idea at that was like, okay, we can do that. Now. What are the some of the other risks? Well, we've worked with this analog to digital converter before, and it has a special way of interacting with it, I wonder if this radio can talk to it? Or do we need to change that hardware too. And so we figured out how to get that radio to talk to the other thing. And then we worked our way up, how do we get to the tablet, through the little Linux box web server there to a tablet, and eliminating risks, and we're able to get a pressure reading from the lowest from an actual sensor to the screen. Right. And so we're able to prove that it's possible to do what we want to do. And a cost effective way with software, we understand each of the pieces throughout the throughout the slice. Right? And that was decide whether or not we're gonna build the product. Joe Krebs 16:30 Yeah. Is this fascinating? While I was listening to you, it's like, it's like, I think this is just an example of how complex the world is. And what people should be aware of when they're writing a text message to somebody who sits next to somebody else is like, what is happening, you know, text messages in nanoseconds when this is just, James Grenning 16:48 it's amazing. Any of it works.Joe Krebs 16:50 Yeah, it's amazing that it works. But it's also interesting to see like, how, what kind of technology is involved involved? You're literally sitting next to each other and just dropping some texts. Right? That's it. James Grenning 17:00 Yeah. My little example was all before we even connected to a cloud, because the next thing was going to happen, which we hadn't explored yet was, how do we get the data that is needed now to prove to an insurance company that has the right water pressures here for these fire pumps? How do we get that into the report? Right? And that's really what all they want us to report, all this other stuff is a means to an end. Right. SoJoe Krebs 17:23 it's fascinating, right? We, you know, we are potentially while you were talking I was just thinking about where embedded Systems are like it could be I mean, this is just the sky's the limit. Right? And probably is, this is James Grenning 17:37 where aren't they? They're in your doorbell. They're in your key fob. Joe Krebs 17:41 Yeah, it's everywhere. It's okay. Let's talk a little bit. Yeah. So complexity, is there the hardware software kind of connect, and how they're being developed? Obviously, there's product development, life cycles, etc. But there's also an it's obviously I want to connect the dots with you here is what makes all that so special about agile development practices. When you are working, let's say in an embedded world, what's what's happening to unit testing? How is testing being done for somebody who is not familiar with us and the complexities of that?James Grenning 18:12 Okay, great question. So what really was an aha moment for me, in late 1999, when I went to the extreme programming immersion that was being hosted by Bob Martin's company, object mentor, and hit really didn't know that much about XP or test driven it was called test first programming at that time. And it's kind of blown away when Kent Beck started demonstrating test first programming. And he was writing the core code that he needed in a test environment. And the light bulb in my head was, oh, my gosh, for 20 years, I have 20 years of experience at this point in my career. We've been waiting for hardware, we'd write code, without the hardware, and we'd wait till the hardware came. And then we start running our code with the hardware that we have. And the hardware has problems. And the software has problems, of course, because humans wrote it, and nothing works, lots of pressure. And we're under the most pressure to try to get something to work late in the development cycle, where there's so much unknown. And you know, so many problems because we have this code that we couldn't really run and Kent is running his code in a test environment. I thought, I'm trying that next week. I was with a client, and we're working in C++ and embedded radio again. And so we just started the next Monday said, I learned some crazy stuff last week while I wasn't with you, will you guys try it? And at first they were the engineers were afraid because it's like, no, we are processes we do it like this, you know, we write the document and we write that we do a design then we write some code, we have to get all this stuff reviewed. Bla bla bla bla bla, and I said, Well, let me let's go talk to the director, you know, because I was the outside influence here. They hired me to come in I help them with some stuff. It's like you might want to know about this. And he said, that just sounds crazy enough where it might work. So he was an experienced guy. And he said, I will give you guys, I'll do what I can to clear the way in the organization as much as possible for you to try this. And we tried it and it worked. And that was kind of my entree into it in C++. And I got pulled into the C side of it a few years later, when a friend of mine said, we'll come to China and work with me with these European companies in China, and get these people doing TDD and C. And then I did that, and then ended up leading to the book. It's all all an accident. Yeah. I talked to I was asking Ron and I said, you know, we had to go to the embedded systems conference with this Ron Jeffries. I remember him saying, don't, don't the embedded systems, people think they're electrical engineers. They didn't really align themselves with software. It's like, that's kind of right. But so I started going and talking about this stuff at Embedded Systems conferences, and they were pretty much, you know, evil. James Grenning, you can't do that you can't work that way. And, you know, slowly, people started to think maybe it would help. Yeah, I started to see it differently. You know, soJoe Krebs 21:15 yeah, you have to go back also, it's like, this was a while ago, right. So like, obviously change and this new stuff at that point, like talking about these topics, but also shows the point that you can learn at conferences right? conferences are important to, to attend and to share and connect. And yeah, James Grenning 21:15 I got to tell you, the sales cycle was really long, we're gonna talk at a conference, and it would be three years later. And then I got a call from somebody, it's like, you know, that stuff you're talking about, you still do that? And it's like, yes. Joe Krebs 21:44 Come on, James Grenning 21:45 Come and show us.Joe Krebs 21:46 Exactly. Come back. He was like, Oh, wow. Like, hardly remember your name. You know,James Grenning 21:51 One of the guys I saw at the conferences a few times, and you know, it was like one of my, when I went independent from object mentor in 2008. His company invited me to Finland to help them learn, it's like, Okay, I'll do it.Joe Krebs 22:07 Fantastic. James, you're not only like, although we have been talking about, you know, embedded software development. For a little bit, we touched on the topic. And I, I just hope that listeners are getting a feeling of the complexities of that. It's just like, unbelievable, we could probably go on for a while. But I also want to make sure that listeners know that you're not only known for the work on embedded software, software development, it's the whole focus on on software engineering practices, like in general, test driven development test first design, refactoring, etc. So and you also behind the original planning poker. So that's what I wanted to touch on, too is I gave just so many, I don't know how many people are doing planning poker on a, on a bi weekly basis, or more often, right? So here's the originator. And how did didn't come up with this technique?James Grenning 23:05 Well, I happen to be in Salt Lake City with a client. And it was post Agile Manifesto, I believe, but we were out there object mentor group, by Martin's company, we were coaching a company and because my career had taken me not just through engineering, but also in the management, I often ended up coaching their managers, and facilitating planning meetings, you know, but I had never really done it before, of course. And so we're in this planning meeting, and there's the engineers trying to come up with their estimates. And I was responsible for them, getting through it and coaching them through the process. And the, I noticed that in the beginning of the hour, the two senior people would talk and they would come up with a number and then they would justify it for an hour with different approaches. And at the end of the hour, nothing had changed. Except we understood it better. And that was really valuable conversations to have, when we're trying to just go through a planning thing and take a stack of cards and estimate them, I realized we're gonna be there for three days. And that's really not what we're trying to do. We're trying to just pick the next two weeks for the work and we can't spend three days planning for that. So I had ever and the rest of the group, the other eight people were just kind of napping. They were not engaged because the two guys were dominating, you know, they were the dominant, dominating few figures. And something we learned at the big company was Teradyne, back in the early 90s was part of TQM, which was brainstorming techniques. And one of the brainstorming techniques was to silently brainstorm, right everybody get their ideas out all at once. So for some reason that day it came to me it's like, let's have everybody grab a note card because as as test as Extreme Programming aficionados, we always had no cards. So I dealt out note cards, everybody just said, listen to the story, write down your number. And then we're gonna all reveal at once. If we agree, we're gonna move on, we know you want to do it one way, you want to do it another way, we don't care, we just want to get an idea. If they differ, then we'll talk about we're making this up at the time, okay, I was making it up to solve a problem, the meeting was going to take too long. And so we got through the thing pretty quickly, then, with probably as good of information as we had before. And then I went and wrote the paper and put it on the object mentor website. The next time we went back to the client, the manager who was totally against agile, said, Come here James, we went off into a room, he goes, I gotta talk to you. Close the door goes, you guys are making all this stuff up. I read your paper. It's like he's mad at me. It's like, well, well, yeah, we're making it up and solving your problem. So it's kind of interesting, but that's how it that's how it started. About a year later, I told people to stop doing it. Because one of my other one of my colleagues grew up at the same company Teradyne, Lowell Lindstrom, he said, You know, there's another technique we use kind of like planning poker, which was affinity grouping. Let's go try that. And so we started doing that in some of our classes to, to get the feel of it, which would be basically stacking, you know, organizing the stories, easy ones on one side, hard ones on the next side, and then spreading them between and putting numbers at the end. And it was super, it was fast, you could do hundreds of stories in an hour. So I would if people want to do estimates, I would steer them that way. And I would also tell them, if it isn't a one or a two, you can't you don't know it well enough to work on it. Okay, don't pick a don't pick a five, don't pick an eight, don't pick a 10. Don't pick a 50. You don't know enough? Joe Krebs 26:54 Yeah, don't pick an infinity.James Grenning 26:56 Don't don't take those. If they're the most important things, you got to peel some learning out of them. And appeal, like we did with the water pressure system. We look for little stories that demonstrate that we understood how to build the system. Right, you know, demonstratable progress.Joe Krebs 27:17 I always tell folks that are doing planning poker, that this is a facilitation technique rather than estimation, right, it's disagreement brings out another conversation. That is facilitates that conversation. So a quick way for facilitating the number at the end site. It's it's not a contract, but..James Grenning 27:34 the funny the funny thing about that, because that's the most cited benefit to, to planning poker I've heard. And my motivation was to get people to shut up. Because these two guys wouldn't stop talking and get the other people involved. Right. Now, as it turned out, we talked when we needed to, when we agreed, this is one of these techniques to find where you agree, something that would be really important to us in our world today. Right? What do we agree on? Okay, we can make progress on what we agree. And if we don't agree, we can either put it aside for a while. Or we can find out what our differences are, and see if we can get closer or put it aside for a while. Right. And so, you know, it was one of these amazing techniques came from Deming originally, I'm sure and then went to Japan and, you know, got validated there and came back here. Back here. So, right. Joe Krebs 28:25 Interesting. Yeah. James, this is fascinating to talk about. And obviously, we talked a little bit about the past, we talked a bit, you know, what's what's currently in the near past what's going on? I want to take a little bit of a look into the future with you. Because you have worked on so many cool things, and you were part of so many cool things. That whatever you're working on next, must be a cool thing. And so we chatted a little bit about that you're currently developing some form of or you're utilizing your own training platform. And it sounds super interesting. And I would like listeners to hear about that. And, you know, maybe you can share some thoughts of you know, where you are with this product and where this is going?James Grenning 29:11 Yeah, okay, thank you. I'll just go back a little bit because I wanted to travel less. And so I started doing remote training about eight years ago. And it turned out that that worked nicely to be able to involve people that were smaller groups and not maybe the early adopters and accompany whenever there was a way to get to them. And it was a disaster. When I started with the people that took it said, Oh great, I learned something would have been better if you're with me. And I started evolving my system to support that remote delivery, and it's evolved quite a bit. Now I'm not a web developer, but through the school of hard knocks. I've developed a system to help me deliver my remote training And you can tell I've been around a while. So I'm, I'm trying to find ways to work less. But I feel like I still have a mission to help people learn this test driven thing, especially the millions of embedded systems engineers, if there are, so I've, I've started to create learning content. And I looked at some of the platforms that were available, I looked high and low. And I spent several months looking for a platform that was going to work for me, which meant, so for instance, one of the platforms teachable is great for somebody that isn't an engineer, I suppose. But it wasn't great for me, because if I had a video, I wanted to post there and also featured on my website, and also use it in my live training, I've got to manage that thing three times. And that's just not sustainable for me. And I know my weaknesses in that would be one of them. It's boring work, and I wouldn't do it. So what I needed is a way to have my course in a repository in a way that I could configure it for, if somebody wants to take it all on their own. And I've got maybe 20 people going through it all on their own right now. There's an early the first people going through it, or if I'm doing a live remote course, people can, I can get more done with the time we have together. And if you're going across a lot of time zones, really four hours is about the most time you can manage a meeting. So there's stuff for people to do before and stuff for people to do after each meeting. That gives them a good experience in learning. So we, they watch some of the lectures on video, but we get together to do exercises, right and give them feedback and answer questions. And so I've been building this platform. And it's I think it's working nicely. I've learned a lot about web development. Luckily, my son is an awesome developer that happens to have web skills could help me with some of it. And so that's my that's my system. I'm hoping to get people to hear about it. Yeah, it's kind of hard to get the word out.Joe Krebs 32:05 We can help right, it's people can get in touch with you at wingman-sw.com James Grenning 32:10 That is wingman-sw.com that is rightJoe Krebs 32:17 People can get in touch with you and possibly even sign up for training right there and experiencing it if they're interested. But also to experience the platform is that does that include like, even like, different versions of video sizes of video? Because all of these platforms have probably different kind of requirements, right? In terms of high definition or not? James Grenning 32:40 Sure. Well, you'll see that I've learned a lot in the process. So I've kind of gone to a shorter style of video, I think I record them in 1080p. But because it's it's served through Vimeo, you get to adjust your site to whatever you need. And I've had a lot of fun with it. I made a green room, I've kind of discovered how I can have fun doing it. And have it hopefully not be too boring for people. There's two example videos on the front page of wingman-sw.com, which I have a little bit of fun with my wife is one of the frames I tried to draw upon. Well, a lot of stuff. So yeah. And try to use visual metaphors for people to help them learn something.Joe Krebs 33:30 And also like the the training approach, right, especially for, you know, I would assume software engineers, you know, how long can you focus on something probably not eight hours, but if you're learning on your own place, and then you come together for, you know, exercises, what a great model that is. I think that's more engaging.James Grenning 33:46 Yeah, and the videos are typically no longer than 20 minutes, sometimes a demo will last longer. But I've been trying to cut them down into smaller bite sized pieces as I've been learning, you know, what is effective, and for people to be able to find their way through the second time, because it's kind of hard to find your way through. And it's subtitles because one of my clients said, you know, it's hard to really hear every word you're saying. It's like, okay, so it's like, how can I do subtitles? It turns out, there's an integration with Vimeo, you can get subtitles added with no problem. And I could actually probably convert it to another language without huge expense. So it's been an interesting learning curve. But then the other thing is that integrates with an exercise environment. So people can actually do programming in my environment where they don't have to go through the hoops of setting up environments and things for all they can just go do the exercise and learn the thing that I'm trying to help them learn at the same time to experience it, right. You can't learn without experiencing. And so I wanted to make that easy. So I've got this cyber Dojo based delivery system, which you know, so I'm managing several servers now, which of course is way outside my area of expertise. But as an engineer, I have fun doing those things. So...Joe Krebs 35:09 sounds like it sounds like you're really, you know, surrounding yourself with very interesting projects and products you're developing. James, I want to thank you for spending some time with me. But the listeners out there so that they get an impression of who you are how they can get in touch with you that they see embedded software development that could be done in an agile way. You have written books, and you know, every time they are holding up their cards for planning poker, teams, James Grenning, right? And and they do that a lot. And most importantly, they can get in touch with you for your training software is there a name? you want to share is this the name for your framework for your tool? James Grenning 35:52 Oh, I don't really have a name for this would be the wingman software, why I call it my training center. Okay. I also use another system called gather town, if it's live training, which is I don't know if you've seen that or not. But if you do any training, or if any of your listeners do training, gather town is pretty awesome for getting collaboration to happen. Zoom, you've got breakout rooms, but somebody has to manage that in agather town. You've got a little icon to just walk into the room that you're supposed to be in. And it's kind of it kind of turns into a virtual world. It's really very impressive. It changed my life. I get there several things that have changed my delivery mechanisms over the years. That's another one of them. But I appreciate you having me on and letting me start about the stuff I'm doing. It's always kind of fun. Joe Krebs 36:41 Advice for the experts. Thank you so much, James, and I'll put all the links up on the Show page so that people can get in touch with you. Thank you and, you know, enjoy the rest of the day. James Grenning 36:53 Okay, you too. Joe Krebs 36:54 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www.agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM radio for the Agile community, www.agile.fm. Welcome to another episode of Agile FM. Today I have Willem van den Corput with me, I hope I pronounced that correctly out of the Netherlands. Willem is the VP of Engineering for a very interesting company I want to talk about today. That is lightyear. And if you're interested in that company, that is, the domain name is Lightyear.one. So that's how you can see the amazing products. Willem's company is producing those I want to touch on but before we get started, welcome to the podcast Willem.Willem van den Corput 0:54 Thank you, Joe. Were really good. Really nice having pronounced very well. Willem van den Corput. It's really a Dutch name. But yeah,Joe Krebs 1:03 yeah. Awesome. Yeah, awesome. Great. We want to talk a little bit about electric vehicles today. I'm a big fan of electric vehicles. But the one from lightyear is a very special one, because it is a solar powered is that the right word for that solar powered electric vehicle or of SEV vehicle. So that's a very interesting one on you guys are about to release products into into the market. So there is it's beyond the concept at this point. And that's why I'm so thrilled to talk about the product a little bit. But it was all about agile as you're running your VP. As a VP, you're running your engineering organization. So I'm interested in bothUnknown Speaker 1:47 yes, indeed, it's a solar power electrical vehicles. So we call it SEV. And it is indeed filled with solar panels on the roof and on the tailgate. But solar is not the only only deal of it is the total concept of the solar EV because just putting a solar panel on a regular TV doesn't make it really efficient. So we make it really efficient, aerodynamic solar powered electric vehicle. Yeah, because they'll charge you by by by connecting but if you put it in the sun, you will least gain your daily commute in your battery. So yeah, yeah, that's what lightyear comes from. So as as we talked before, I think we originate from the solar challenges in Australia races, and our founders actually in the Netherlands going from the university in eindhoven. And in 2013, won the world championship first time on the cruiser class. And already show that we can you can bring a lot of people to, to finish in 3000 kilometers.Joe Krebs 2:48 That is unbelievable. I want to go a little bit deeper on that race, as well with you. But I had a few episodes ago, I had a person you guys also connected with through electric vehicle, agile development practices, Joe justice, he's experimenting a lot with electric vehicles he owns, he owned the company, the wikispeed, all of those things. So just as not to make this only about one particular company, but a very interesting one. But what's interesting is there's so much innovation in that space, right? Where vehicles in general the charging speed, as well. But there is something Joe Justice has always said in that podcast and and user group events is like that experimentation really, you know, gets you like through failing fast in these kinds of approaches while failing possibly often, and getting to your goal faster. And that's why he was also interested in the Agile kata we have talked about that as well. But what I want to talk about is it this was eye opening when I saw your presentation in Agile Amsterdam. And I said, I have to have you on that show. Because it's thinking about, well, you're charging your car on a on a solar powered or solar EV / SEV, as you as you said, that is one aspect of it. The charging times are going lower. So you could say, well, so what's the point? Right, but the interesting point that really was so so my main takeaway was, is that the grid, the electric grid, is getting a break by solar power, right? So if everybody is charging and if the amount of electric vehicles is going up around the globe, how does the grid actually support that? And I think that was like a breakthrough moment for me. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What why that is so important and how you guys incorporated that.Willem van den Corput 4:46 So the importance of electric vehicles in this transition in in global warming in that sense. It comes to the point that a lot of EVs are being pushed to the market and you already have a waiting list on a charge pole, because there's not enough on our breaking down on either work or anything else, we're looking to our concept, we are efficient. So we can charge one stone faster than usually because we only use half of the energy. So that makes makes a big, big thing out of it. And in that sense in the summertime, and definitely if you would bring our car and that will be a future goal to us out to California, Florida, where the sun shines at during the day, you can, you can just recharge your battery overday, so it's 7080 kilometers in a day's charge 50 miles in a day, if you talk about one, you don't need to go to a charging pole in order to go home. So efficiency is the key of of a product in order to bring it there. And in order to do this, we have to adopt agile and we actually, we are not adapted adopting as you were already agile when he said that. So from the start on what we started with working with creative beers and duct tape, in order to build a car, we use some some stools to have a steering wheel and a hand and making sure that we would would see how it would look like this car. Yeah, how big it was and how many people we could get in there. With a group of when I joined them five years ago into 2018. We were 30 boys or girls, and that sounds in a small room and playing around, making sure that we can make a car in a few years time. Currently, we've grown to the point by by doing doing constantly iterations and constantly testing to make sure that we have an efficient car. And actually we managed it because we think last month so that's in like September 2022, we we launched the most efficient aerodynamic production car in the world. Okay, that is one of the key things. So aero and aerodynamics in a car is is half of your energy consumption. So the faster you drive, the bigger drain you will have on your battery. And as far as only the your ways to trial fast, test fast learn fast. And actually, that's just a mindset on and we didn't use the an agile manifesto in the beginning, we just started on this one from day one.Joe Krebs 7:28 Just like a typical startup you mentioned those races initially I think they were in Australia right is the big the big long distance race for solar cars is one I think three or four times or something like that. And if I remember correctly, how important whether it was for you guys in the in the production but also in terms of the culture for the for the organization.Willem van den Corput 7:53 The culture started from that because I was small teams and the team members from the first three races at least and the fourth reason is also when it was actually more or less can canceled due to COVID reasoning in 2021. So they build a camper van. But still all members team members of the students in that time many of them are have joined Lightyear. So many of them have been in the students teams where they have to set up their own business deficit and their own programs work Agile to within two years create a new car according to the specs of the organization, so it's a Bridgestone solar races in in Australia, where they drive from Adelaide to Melbourne from Adelaide to Darwin, that's 3000 kilometers but it's the mindset to test past in order to come to the most efficient car but on the other side is also think things system engineering, meaning that you think the total system and it's also adding in the agile mindset thing from the beginning to the end what what is your what's your goal? Where do you want to go? And that mindset helped us building our culture. Yeah, indeed, from the start on wants to start agile without being it but I think it was first.Joe Krebs 9:18 But it's also got to be like the celebrations right? It must feed into the culture. You're winning this race. You're like, this must be a great moment for the for the culture. Huge success. Willem van den Corput 9:30 And we still celebrate small things. From the beginning. Almost every Friday, we added Friday afternoon drinks in order to celebrate a week and we kick off the week with with a Monday morning kickoff. And we still do this. Even now we've grown, not a start-up anymore, we've grown to 600 people. Plus as a big scale up. We still do the Monday morning kickoff with the CEO and all the teams to share at least it's more information sharing but still it's like Stand up meeting but half an hour, just on small updates on culture on sometimes finance or sometimes on the projects in order to keep everybody up to date in in the process.Joe Krebs 10:12 Yeah. What's What's also interesting about this, this story is right, so you you had these cars on the road, you were winning races, but it's now time to transition into like road ready, cars that are being reduced. I think the first batch I think for the majority of people, I'm sorry to say it's probably financially out of reach. But it's to make a point, right, so you can get these cars on the road for you know, a high price tag, but the car is, I mean, it's obviously a great, great looking car. And I can't wait to see this car in in action, right. But there is a second car coming that is a little bit more mass produced and obviously, more interested for other segments. So how do you guys prepare for such a big transition? Like going from a road race, one single car winning this race? I would, I would assume it was one car and participate in that race and do like a small batch of cars? I don't know. Like, how many how many cars? Are you guys producing in batch one?Unknown Speaker 11:18 Yeah, so we actually, three years ago 2019, we may one prototype furs, do a year later, we made another one. So the first one was statical. The second one was already a proof of concept. We brought in there, the investors we brought customers and start showing them as well what we made because we share that story constantly also, we celebrated with them last year, so 2021 till till today mid 2022 .We produced around about 10 prototype vehicles, where we also started working on so gradually building the organization by making from one step to another to make it bigger, because the end goal is start production as we have by the end of 2022. That the first customer car will roll off the production line with our partner that we selected, because also we would have we focus on development, first, make sure that we have an efficient car that the product is perfect, and the product really works well for the customer production and producing it ourselves is as far as also the next step. So we outsource that for now. Because now we have people that really can build something really nice as a manufacturing. So we first focused on the product. So it's a statement product. It's indeed not affordable for for all of us. But that's also part of the plan going forward, that we got a mission in that sense as clean mobility everywhere. So that we can gain with a lighter, one can drive and everywhere we go drive to South Africa from the earth. And I've always charged by the sun and wait for a day and you can you can continue. And the next step is Joe claim mobility everywhere is everywhere for everyone. And the second bit of that one that we create a logic too where we're working on it that will be affordable. For for everybody. In order to bring it to the to the world. You're first entered US. And three, four years from now.Joe Krebs 13:25 So it's very interesting, right? So for somebody who might be listening to this podcast, and I'd say I'm not in the car and automotive industry, right. But the interesting pieces you can filter out from here is why do you guys have a mission, you guys have really big goals for your, for your company, good ones, sustainability things that are needed. But on the other side, you also breaking it down into achievements, where it's like, well, we prototypes that what the company entered the workforce at that time can actually achieve in and the stepping stones, it's very interesting to see and and obviously your mission to take everything to the to the mass market, right and that everybody can enjoy driving a solar, EV, that is from an from an agile perspective, like something you can take away for any kind of product development. It doesn't have to be a car that you will be using. And I hope that people see that link. What we're talking about that is it's not really about the cars and etc. This is just an example. It's like a metaphor for that. Now, you mentioned that you're getting incredible increase in workforce from a small team that work together. Like probably in one room right or in one factory Hall to now 600 people. You guys are in the process of bringing on more people scaling and a culture of scaling, agility within your organization. How do you envision 2023 Or possibly 2024 With that Out of growth. How do you how do you envision keeping that culture? Any any thoughts you just let that organically happen?Willem van den Corput 15:07 A mix of both I think it organically grows, but you need to maintain the culture and adding a lot of people that didn't start from the beginning that yeah, that they don't know the culture from by heart. But in order to constantly iterate, and so and the agile mindset, maybe one thing that they're taught on Agile Kata, where you where you come from, as well, if you have your mission and your goal in mind, so if that's your your first thing, the second thing that you look at, that's our mission. So our mission will be in 2035, that the world will drive on solar energy a lightyear here in the distance. So a lightyear is 9.46 trillion kilometers. So if that's a mission that we will again, and we iterate towards, in order to bring that team up and running constantly, we introduced the lap, planning incremental. So the PI event we call the lap, and a lap is like a lap on the circuit. So you drive a lap in a formula one, or in a NASCAR, whatever that you that you'd like to look at. And we call it the lightyear and alignment planning event. So every three months, we had had these our company wide. And we ended last week, a company wide event where we where we get all departments, all the different projects together in order to align this this planning. And it comes with a with a cycle and that sense. And you mentioned just earlier about Joe Justice. So last year, October in 2021, we did the first event were supported by a company in the Netherlands. And he invited Joe, to our stage where we were in Utrecht in the Netherlands and Joe came to us and you did a keynote about wiki speed. It was really interesting to see how that would reflect on how he did wiki speed, but also the things that we are doing. So it was really good takeaway. For me, for my my colleagues, for the teams on how what can we learn from this? And how can we go forward? Because we work we are already we're already agile. And now we need to continue that. So that's a difficulty when getting a lot of people in that come from companies that work waterfall, how could we get them in on board constantly? Could we train and get people into the mindset of Lightyear? So to say, and we also have in our...Joe Krebs 17:39 in a short period of time, right? Because you're right, yeah,Willem van den Corput 17:42 yeah. Because monthly 30,40 People start freshly, and we kickstart them in the first day, in the last couple of months or last years, we have, we have developed also training programs in order to get people as fast as possible. And that's also constant development and trial and error, what works, what doesn't work, getting people together first and get them started from day one, have the tools ready, that they that they can start and also bring him into as fast as possible up to speed in the way how we work. And that's a, I think that I find it a challenge also, for now and for next year if we if we outgrow ourselves again, get get everybody but the nose in the right direction. If we say that?Joe Krebs 18:33 Well, you you're the VP of engineering. And the company is growing very fast. How important or how unimportant is hierarchy within your organization? Is this a flat company? Or how do you you know, this is why I'm highlighting your title here right? It's like how to how to envision an org chart at at an idea and what does that mean for innovation ideas and from employees, how does this all work?Unknown Speaker 19:04 Good one, we try to be as flat as possible. We as Dutch, we are quite direct and then I read quite open as a as communicative even everybody can talk to the CEO in our in our company. So we made the organization as flat as possible we have open door policy. So I'm direct in SVP engineering as part of the technology circle and we are organizing circles like technologies are like marketing and sales circle, people and process and circle and some others are not that the circles are as a different circles around the products. So how we say this is a flat organization. Yes, we are growing you will need some kind of hierarchy key to at least get people rolling but we tried to get to stay to the values and people first is one of the values be transparent, and be bold are someone of the same as every day, in order and also all the people are being promoted in the MBA school, that we will keep them together that we celebrate small successes. And at the also my doors open to anybody that is in the company. I always every month introduce myself to everybody personally, that joins the company in order to, to invite them as well to come to me if there's something that I can help them with or that they don't know. Open doors is one. But also the themes of products are they work together as autonomous teams that they get the boundaries to decide themselves, they get the budget, they have at least their boundaries to work in? And let them trial and fail fast? If a change? If they want to change something in that team? In my opinion, they are allowed to deal with if it's, if it's irreversible, then maybe you should think about it. But as if not. So if you can change back the change that you make fine, go for it. Yeah, it's even worked better. Yeah, it was a big investment needed than that I have a chassis of rebirth budget, and we go for it, as well. No.Joe Krebs 21:30 But it is important to keep that spirit of of innovation. And I wonder from a scrum from a Scrum or agile perspective, however, you want to see that or Agile Kata perspective, right. One thing that you did say was the term lap, right. And you did bring in your own language into this, which I really like white because it correlates to Formula One, you're doing the laps, right? How important is that for the Agile culture that you guys are tweaking these things over to the lightyear style of working? Maybe? Or was that something that was done in the beginning? Or is it something that was introduced? Do you have more of those examples?Willem van den Corput 22:13 Yep. So we started actually, just last year with a group at least we've gone come better together had to keep the flat organization so common with your planning incrementals. So at that point, we we hired some need some Agile transformation leads, some experts that would help us further to professionalize our organization, and professionalize the Agile mindset. So our full software team development, are running the show a software, from the from origin, already things definitely of No, not definitely, but works in more agile in that sense. So we're not, we're not trying to split up. We're also bringing this moment in mechanical development where you have in some areas to do with nature and laws of nature to get something done to make something. But still, you can have that mindset there as well, and learn and go faster, do more virtual reality, do more virtual simulation to fail fast as well. In that sense, and make less prototypes, any other thing that we'll be learning for for the future. Other things in that sense is trying to build prototypes, what I just mentioned, to start, just start driving on on a on a lap on a circuit somewhere closed off that without public Of course, in order to see if the car drives, we have made our own in wheel motors. Because efficiency is key, again, where we put the electric motors not inside the car, not on board, but inside the rims. So we made it Ultra efficient. We searched the markets for those kind of components. And we couldn't find them because all cars are made for performance and not for efficiency. So we did that trying ourselves. So after three generations, now, we came to the one that's going into the production that that is bringing the efficiency that we need. And that's also so firstly, we say okay, what can we do ourselves? Or what should we buy? Or buy in or outsource in that sense? But in some areas, it says we thought we would outsource a component. But we managed or we couldn't find actually a component that will work for us that doesn't fit our mission doesn't fit our goal. That's it. So we started ourselves making it everybody said to me, You shouldn't do that. We managed it. So we we nailed itJoe Krebs 24:48 That is awesome. I mean you may once you have that in your DNA as a cultural you in your company, you you will continue with this for all these other models as well. So this is a this is a wonderful story. I wanted to share with the listeners of Agile FM, because not only about the product, not only because of, you know, the sustainability aspect of it, it is so important or will be even more important in the coming years, you're addressing a very important problem for this planet. But also in the context of Agile FM. This is a great, great agile story here. You guys are growing a company from, you know, a small prototype winning a race to now putting cars on the road, and possibly even more in the near future. So this is this really amazing news. The bad news for everybody in Florida in the Sunshine State is that the courts are not available in the United States yet. That might take a little bit longer. But I think the great part is that if the cars are actually running in the Netherlands, where they're I heard there is the occasional rain and cloud in the Netherlands. If it works there, it will work everywhere. So that is that is the wonderful story here. So thank you for sharing your story with the listeners. And good luck with the launches and everything that's coming up. Thanks. Willem van den Corput 26:17 Thank you. Joe Krebs 26:20 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www.agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Work-Leadership-Transforming-Organization/dp/1953295495Transcript:Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM radio for the Agile community, www.agile.fm. Welcome to another episode of Agile FM. Today I have a guest with me that is going to talk about democracy at the workplace freedom at work. It's the founder of world blu. It's Traci Fenton, and welcome to the podcastTraci Fenton 0:37 great to be with you, Joe. Thanks for having me.Joe Krebs 0:40 Well, first and foremost, congratulations to a new book release that was released in spring 2022. That is freedom at work. And the subtitle is very interesting, the leadership strategy that transforms your life, your organization, and our world. These are some big big words, we're going very granular, the life we're going a little bit bigger the organization and then we go really, really big. The world?Traci Fenton 1:05 Absolutely. Well, when you're talking about a topic like freedom, and organizational democracy, it's really hard to think small with those topics, you have to think big. And freedom, of course, starts at such an individual level, as leaders can ripple out to our teams and organizations, and absolutely makes a powerful impact on our world.Joe Krebs 1:25 Absolutely. And these are the topics we want to talk a little bit about, I read the book, it's an awesome book, there are some really thought provoking things. In the book, the word agile pops up a few times, but it's not an agile book, per se. It's about freedom at work, democratic workplaces. And we want to explore the sections, the parts, a little bit of the book, because there are three parts to this book. It's the mindset, it's the leadership, and it's the design or the four parts, but those three are really going into the, into the depth and the meat of it. When did you start thinking about creating an organization like world blu, which is by the way, not with an E at the end? So it's just worldblu.com? When did you think or started thinking about creating a company? Or what was the trigger for that?Traci Fenton 2:14 Oh, absolutely. Well, I actually founded world blue back in 1997. So then at this work for over 25 years now. And it started for me, my senior year of college, I was asked by our student, our president of our college, if I would run our Student Affairs conference, and it was a big honor at my small liberal arts school. And I said, Sure, and I got my student team together, and I said, Alright, gang, let's come up with a topic for this public affairs conference. That's a consciousness raising outside the box forward thinking, they went off and did a bunch of research, everybody came back did a big presentation to me, drumroll and said, Traci, we think the topic should be democracy, to which my 21 year old mind said, democracy is voting and old white guys in politics in Washington, DC. That was my concept of democracy. And as I talked with them about it more and more and more, my thinking had to really expand. And I realized, and also what my team was telling me is, democracy is actually a style of leadership. It's a style of governance, and it's a style of government. But what I'm always been committed to in my life, was helping people realize their fullest potential. And you can only realize your full potential in an environment of freedom, rather than an environment of fear and control. And so my intuition, Joe, I didn't know where this is going to take me. But my intuition at the time was absolutely, let's do the conference on democracy, let's look at how a democratic style of leadership rather than, you know, it's the other end of the continuum, a more authoritarian or dictatorial style of leadership, we want to contrast those two, how that can be applied in really any industry, any area of life, any sector of society, from business, to education, to urban planning, to, of course, government politics. And that's what got me excited, that's what got me started, ended up starting World Blu, and we've now worked with companies all over the world in over 100 countries. We've worked with top brands like Zappos Group, Hulu, Pandora, DaVita, WD40. And we've helped so many of these companies transition from that command and control style of leadership to a much more democratic style of leadership that gives power to the people to produce amazing resultsJoe Krebs 4:46 Let's talk a little bit before we go into the program itself right so the there's there's a program at World Blu where companies could just go and just go but could go and and get self or get assessed against those democratic principles. But there's also like the topic of freedom at work that you're describing in the book. Right? So that's not the book. That's what the handbook for the assessment that is more like to talk a little bit about freedom. Now, you just mentioned that F word in, in your previous segment. Yeah. And that's about fear. Why is fear so harmful? I mean, that was an eye opening thing when I was reading, and I would like to hear the listeners to hear what you think about how does fear on an individual level impact, let's say performance, etc? That is just absolutely mind blowing?Traci Fenton 5:34 Yeah, it really is. And that that was a big revelation for me to Joe and doing all this is the contrast of freedom versus fear. Because as I was doing this work, I'm like, what is it that keeps stopping us really from being free? I mean, I mentioned in a moment ago, organizational democracy, we'll get into that that's a framework for freedom. But what is it at the core that slows us down, and it's fear. I mean, if you look at almost any problem we have in life or in our workplaces, whether it's stress, anxiety, all the isms, you know, that are going on in the workplace hierarchy, all you know, unnecessary hierarchy, bureaucracy, right. All of this at the core of it is actually fear. And the brain research tells us that the average person thinks 60,000 thoughts a day 95% of those thoughts are the exact same thoughts we had the day before. And a whopping 80% of those thoughts are actually negative and fear based. So when we are in a fear based mindset, that causes us to make bad short sighted reactionary decisions, it causes us to just be, you know, mean, angry, upset, people are engaged in other behaviors then that are, you know, destructive or toxic. And so often leaders in our workplaces, we are making decisions from fear, especially right now. I mean, everyone's in so much fear of what's going on with inflation, right? You know, you work all over the world. So I'm working with CEOs hearing from all angles, what's happening, and I keep encouraging them. All right, and I give, I give a five step method in the book for how to shift your mindset, literally in a minute, from fear to freedom and possibility. And when you do that, it lifts us out of the fog, it helps us see the full range of what's possible, so that we can make better business decisions that impact the bottom line. And that help continues to engage people.Joe Krebs 7:28 Right. Do you see any connection? I know, you mentioned in 2008/2009, during the financial crisis, right? You mentioned some behavioral changes. And that led to some some negative impact on the workplace and in companies. And I just mentioned 2022, we're facing a situation of inflation and uncertainty. Do you see already any kind of early indicators of a similar pattern that's going on in the world out there?Traci Fenton 7:54 There's absolutely. Now, I'm no economist. But obviously, I can speak from the angle of what I'm hearing with our clients around the world is, even those who, you know, I was just talking, let me give you an example. I just talked two days ago with a CEO of a world blu certified Freedom Center company. We've worked with them for 10 years, we've helped them implement democratic systems and processes. This CEO absolutely understands how to lead with freedom rather than the fear. But in the course of our conversation, he was telling me that he's like, I have to lay people off, they just got bought, they're trying to figure out how to save a few million dollars. He says, I have to lay people off. And I said, Wait a second, you know, how to handle this in a more democratic way. And let me give you an example. Joe, and I talk about this in the book, right? During these times, the the first thing we often go to is just let lay people off, let people go. You know, we talk about Richard and our mutual friend and Menlo innovations, and I tell the story in the book of Menlo innovations, and what they did during the last great recession in 2008, when they were also faced with, you know, gosh, a contracting client base and contracting revenue. And so what Rich and the team had in place because they are a worldly certified freedoms that our company they operate democratically if they have a shared pain, shared reward system. So what Rich did was very transparently, they all sat down and said, Here's where we are financially. Here's where we here's what we have to do. How can we handle this? And some people said, You know what, I'm cool. I was thinking about retiring anyway, I can retire now. So they rolled off. Other people said, well, I could actually handle going part time. So I'm gonna go part time. Other people said, Nope, I've got to work. So they were able to flex people around. It wasn't perfect. And I share this in the book. They did have to let a couple people go, but what they did Joe was a did that and in treating everyone fairly and with dignity and they were transparent about that process. They give power to everyone Power to the people to help solve that decision. So that When things ramped up, you know, after they were through that recessionary time, their reputation was intact, morale stayed attacked, engagement came in stayed intact, and people who had left were able to come back and they were able to hit the ground running, you know, that's this approach that we're talking about is, is Power to the people giving power to the people, keeping them informed, treating them, like adults, so they can make decisions together to have extraordinary outcomes.Joe Krebs 10:26 I mean, this is a leadership thing, right? So and this is part of the focus a leadership thing is for us is to realize that this is the culture the executive team would be portraying. Now, you know, playing devil's advocate, the first approach of just laying off people would be the easier approach, right? It would be something that's like, very easy, I can write a press release, it's going out today, I'm laying off people 20%, or whatever that is, but easy decision. But you're absolutely right, we might be laying off somebody who would be, you know, is very connected, obviously, financially to a job. And we would be keeping somebody who might actually be going up, you know, voluntarily. So it's not the optimal situation. So self organization, right self management, styles that are being portrayed a leadership, super important.Traci Fenton 11:15 Absolutely, very important. Again, I use the terminology, self governance in the book, but it is definitely parlays everything I'm talking about here with, you know, self management and allowing people to be adults. And let me give you another example I talked about in the book. It's a large company called HCL technology, again, during the Great Recession, you know, because people say, oh, you know, democracy, but can this work in big companies? Absolutely. What Vinita and I are did at HCL Technologies, 120,000 employees, across multiple geographies. He came forward, he decided, again, transparency, openness, Power to the People, let's let them self govern, self manage. And he said, Look, we have to find a way to save $100 million, or we have to let people go during this recessionary time $100 million, or we have to let people go, what do you think we should do? Okay, like, wow, this is rocket science to actually ask people. Do you have any ideas? So he he went out and said, What do you think we should do? What ideas do you have, they were flooded with ideas back to their internal system, they had several under 100 ideas come in, they acted on 76 of those idea 76 of the ideas that the CEO and his team vetted, they said, we can make these work, they put them into operation, not only did they say they didn't just save $100 million, they saved $216 million, and no one was laid off. And they compare it to what was happening with our competitors, you know, their competitors were just took that short term slash and burn mentality, lay people off, got a negative reputation, you know, unfortunately, destroyed lives, hurt, hurt people's lives and livelihoods of their families, because there's a ripple effect from that. And then it's very hard to hire back and expand. And Dell was able to just keep going and had a huge ended up having I don't remember off top my head, the number but very large profits despite that recession.Joe Krebs 13:09 That's an interesting point about the profits. And I want to just go in there here for a second, because I think that's also important. So I'm teaching some courses around agile org design, right? And how agile organizations are structuring themselves in a way that they are responsive in terms of business agility, etc. Many, many of those topics are related to what you're talking about in your book, right? So there's a clear connect between these things. Now, sometimes I show very, very, you know, thought provoking videos out there, you know, about tomato producers, tomato product producers. Morningstar, for example. And, and sometimes I get reactions from people, that would never work in my organization. Right. And there is an organization is actually evidence is a company that does that. And there is evidence of that it's working right. And, and people are still saying this, I just can't see this working in my organization or anywhere else. How do you respond to that this is actually working. And we have some evidence because you have some companies that are certified?Traci Fenton 14:18 Well, absolutely, it works. I mean, we've been doing this for 25 years, my book I picked out 50 Of the hundreds of companies that we've worked with that are have gone through our rigorous certification process, and we've helped them transform. So we've worked with companies as small as five employees up to 120,000 employees, literally in 100 countries in almost every industry. So anyone who says this isn't gonna work in my company, it's only a crisis of creativity. They're just making excuses because a democratic style of leadership can work anywhere. Now, with that said, Joe, sometimes it won't work, and it won't work because it does come down to your leaders. So when someone says it won't work, it doesn't matter your industry, it doesn't matter, any of that doesn't matter what you do. I mean, GE Aviation makes jet engines, I mean, they're, you would think this has to be a command and control organization. They're in the book, they got world blu certified, phenomenal democratic model, I certainly am familiar with Morningstar, and many of the principles of agile correspond to the 10 principles of democracy I talked about in the book. But the time when it doesn't work, and this was a revelation to me, Joe, is, I'll tell you the story, we were working with a large, very large manufacturing company in the Midwest. And we were working mostly with their executive team, the CEO, who had inherited the business from his grandfather, father, now pass to him. He didn't, excuse me stop what we were doing, you know, he wasn't stopping his executive team, but he wasn't really engaged. So we were working with his executive team, helping to democratize the leadership style of this large manufacturing company. And eventually, the CEO got on board, he came to one of our trainings, I tell the story in the book. And one of the big revelations he had was how much his sense of low self worth we talk about his sense of, of insecurity as an individual was actually stopping him from giving more power to his people. Because, right, if you're insecure, and who you are, we talk in the book about and I teach this at world blu, low self worth, if you're not sure, and who you are, you don't want to give power to your people like your that's threatening to you, right? So this CEO had to have this revelation of like, wait a second, it's because I'm struggling with my sense of self worth, that I'm actually not fully embracing this. And, and he committed to working through that. We were there to help him. But once he got back, he really, he wasn't really interested in being coached and becoming better, and ended up just selling the company, the leaders he worked with were heartbroken. So it's not going to work Joe if the CEO is super insecure, isn't willing to take feedback, well, isn't willing to really work to give power to his or her people, then it won't work. But if the leader who says yes, it can, you know, I do believe in unleashing the full potential my people, because I realized that impact to the bottom line, to morale to engagement to agility I'm in, it can work anywhere,Joe Krebs 17:29 right? It can work anywhere. It works for companies, or five employees, or more,Traci Fenton 17:37 five or more, absolutely.Joe Krebs 17:39 So this is actually a very small group of people. And obviously, a lot of companies out there that would fulfill that requirement with five employees or more. Now, if somebody is listening to this right now and says like, I have six people, I have five people, and I'm interested in this. And I would like to see how something like that is structured. What does that entail in terms of you know, how much involvement of world blu would be in a company of five? And, you know, what, with the daily life change in terms of, you know, interacting with you in terms of profitability in terms of, you know, time spent on designing a program like this, you have any kind of data or run very small companiesthat work with itTraci Fenton 18:20 Oh, absolutely. It's really not that hard to make the transition. And we've found the way I've got so much experience with this. So the steps would be grabbed my book, read freedom at work, see, see if you feel it, you know, if you feel it, if you agree with it, if you find yourself nodding, you know, I've had so many people tell me, oh my gosh, like I'm dog earing every page I'm highlighting, you know, just received phenomenal feedback on the book, I think it's five stars on Amazon, you know, pick up the book. But at World blu, we have 150 courses that we guide, they don't have to do all 150 Joe, but at different pathways we move them through, that produces phenomenal results. You know, we were working with a company in California had 11 employees. Within three months of working with us, they'd already saved half a million dollars. The husband and wife who were who are co owners of the company, and we're basically on the verge of divorce are now like, oh my gosh, because we've taught them how to implement these democratic systems and processes. They're like we've fallen back in love. I've never been happier. The CEO just told me earlier this week, he's like, I will never go back to a hierarchical organization. Traci, everything you told us has come true. Like Yep, so there's ways to do this. We've got a whole course called freedom at work that complements the book. And then we've got all of our leadership training and of course, our culture design training based on those three pillars of freedom at work I talked about in the book, mindset leadership and design. And I'll also add Joe that one thing that's so great, this this is not Kumbaya, like this is solid business strategy. We had third party research done on companies that practice the freedom at work leadership model that we teach you And they found that on average companies that take this more freedom centered democratic approach, approach 700%, greater revenue growth, compared to the s&p 500 over a three year period. So anyone who's serious about major revenue growth, releasing the potential there people, you know, engaging people through hard times, this works, it works, and we've figured out how to do it,Joe Krebs 20:24 especially for so many knowledge workers out there. Creativity and innovation is needed democratic works. It's definitely something that can can help, obviously, something I would say get the book, I was super impressed. As I said, there is the reference to Agile here and there, throughout the book, but it's not necessarily an agile book, right? But it's a book about freedom at work. That's really what the title of the book is, right? But I think everybody who is in Agile teams, and agile organizations can make that link and see what the benefits are from what you're working on and what you're passionate since 1997, to implement certain things, even if it should you go through the entire assessment. That's a different story. Right. But it's there, it's at your fingertips to, to try it. So that's that was my goal today to speak a little bit and expose your ideas. So the Agile community. Joe Krebs 20:24 Oh, thank you so much. So you know, the whole idea of agile, which I absolutely love, it's so complimentary, with what we teach our world blu. It's why we've had so many great companies that we've worked with, all over the world, practice agile, and then they come to us and they say, Help us round it out a little bit more, help us get even more of those systems and processes in place. Help us teach our team help us teach our people how to lead this way. And that's where it's so complimentary. I absolutely love the Agile community I love working with companies are interested in Agile, and it's just an honor privilege to be on your show and speak with your amazing audience.Joe Krebs 21:57 Awesome. Traci. I think one of your stories was that when you correct me if I'm wrong here. I don't know the exact details. But you're connected somehow to one of the founding fathers of the United States?Traci Fenton 22:09 Oh, yes, yes, yes. Well, not the founding father. But um, yes, I do talk in the book that one of my relatives, I only learned this in the last two years because my aunt started doing genealogy work. But I'm Ruben Eaton Fenton was one of the founders, with Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party, which was started to, you know, nowadays, you never know where people are politically. But obviously, the Republican Party was founded to help end slavery. And it was founded with Abraham Lincoln. And so I think it's, it's kind of fun, because I only found out about that recently. And I ended up going online and ordering a bunch of his speeches, and found this phenomenal speech he gave on the floor of Congress, because he ended up becoming a congressman and senator and then the governor, Governor of New York and the congressman and senator from New York, and gave us phenomenal speech on ending human slavery on the floor of Congress, and I actually have a little excerpt from it in the book, and the speech ends with the words freedom now freedom forever, and actually end my book with those words, freedom now, Freedom forever, so it's kind of a fun little wink. To history, and you know, it's nowJoe Krebs 23:22 well, maybe that maybe that indirectly drove you for, like, maybe, maybe there is maybe there is a connect, and probably a very interesting piece to be aware of. And to know, right, it's,Traci Fenton 23:35 it was very interesting. So I've lived in Washington twice now. And so it's really fun to feel like oh my gosh, you know, not that many generations ago. And when I looked at this guy's picture on Wikipedia, he looks exactly like my grandpa, my dad this whole facial structure. So it's a fun little thing. You caught that! Put that little bit of luck, just as a fun little. Yeah.Joe Krebs 23:59 Thank you so much. What a great end to the to our podcast. And as I said, we're blu. It's not written with an E at the end for everybody googling worldblu.com Traci Fenton, freedom at work. Thank you so much.Traci Fenton 24:12 Thanks for having me, Joe. It was a joy.Joe Krebs 24:15 Thank you for listening to www.Agile.FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM radio for the Agile community. www.agile.fm. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Agile FM today. I have Kevin Callahan with me. He is an MSP OD you can figure out what that is. But also an ICE EC, and that is a topic I want to talk about clarify what those acronyms stand for. Kevin, I think you're dialing tuning in from Maine.Kevin Callahan 0:44 That is correct. Yep. Joe Krebs 0:46 Here we go. Welcome to the podcast. Kevin Callahan 0:47 Thanks. Thanks, Joe. Good to be here. Joe Krebs 0:50 Yeah, cool. So we're gonna talk about a little bit about ice. But first and foremost, what is MSc POD pod?Kevin Callahan 0:57 MSc POD is a master's of science and positive organization development, That's a degree granted by the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. And what it seeks to do is take sort of a traditional OD perspective and sort of manipulate it to have a complexity perspective around it. And to have, you know, much of traditional OD in this maybe starts getting right to the core of enterprise coaching. So much of traditional OD and change management is a predictive process control or predictive improvement control where we can know what sort of the whole path is going to be. And and what the degree program that I participated in is much more about an evolutionary process of becoming. And so we have lots of different strategies and tools and what not in our in our quiver. But it's it's starting with the the acknowledgement that human systems are complex things. And so you don't always know can't always know really what's going to happen. And so how do you how do you go undergo organizational change through that? Lens?Joe Krebs 2:12 Awesome. sounds super, super interesting. And the one thing that you are building a bridge to is the organizational capabilities, we'll talk a little about enterprise coaching, I know what that is from that is. That is a track that is a learning path. It's an expert Learning Path of ICAgile. So there is their certificates, they're more like on knowledge based certificates, training courses, etc. That is very, very different. You were instrumental in that enterprise coaching, obviously, agile enterprise coaching. Part of that. So I want to talk a little bit about that, can you just give like a quick overview of what that program is, and, and like, you know, what, you know, lead listeners out there. And so like, what is this is enterprise and why is an expert certificate and how does this all fit together? Kevin Callahan 3:04 Yeah, so. So maybe the the first thing is just to differentiate the E part versus the P part. So you know, ICAgile as a accrediting body. And a certifying body has two kind of classes of certification. One is a professional certification, which is a knowledge base cert, you go to the class, you participate in class, you pretty much get the cert, then there's the expert level, which is a competency based certification. So it's a fundamentally different shift. In the past, what that looked like, was sitting before a panel of fellow experts to demonstrate your competency across a series of sort of defined outcomes or learning objectives that you needed to be able to kind of speak to. So if you're going for agile team coaching, you had to be able to demonstrate to a panel of experts that you knew how to coach. Right. Rather than, you know, some of the other certifying bodies were like, heavily artifact based and if you know, I've had some bad experiences, like I didn't fill out the form, right? So because I didn't fill out the form, right? They didn't, you know, they rejected my application, right? And so you have to go redo it. So what we want to do what we wanted to do, starting back in 2018, or so when IC Agile, invited a group of us to build this new certified expert and enterprise coaching pathway or learning objective was to say, our kind of guiding paradigm was we want to create a cohort based experience. So you have to go through a cohort to earn this certification. Because the cohort leads need to understand who are you as a coach? And what are you capable of and where do you have gaps and where do you have strengths and how are you working with those things and through that, through that cohort experience, you're you are building an artifact to an experience His journey or you know, case study where there's lots of different ways we can call it. The difference for me is that it is not about the artifact, it is about becoming the coach who can create the artifact, right. And that's why we do the cohorts. That's why we have really skilled leads who, you know, are facilitating those cohorts, it's, you know, I've worked with adventures with an agile on their track. And we're really clear in ours that, you know, we're there with you. For me, it's a really intimidating thing to do, actually, because I'm working with my peers in this in this very high level senior practitioner space. Every cohort, we've just wrapped up our third one, there's people that know more than I do about some of the stuff like that's the reality of enterprise coaching, that it is a huge, wide, deep field. And when none of us can know all of it, like we're gonna run into people that know a lot more about certain things. So, you know, what's your relationship to that?Joe Krebs 5:56 Yeah. In a in a recent episode with Bob Galen, and I talked about agile coaching, I think more from a team's perspective and another episode, right? With you, I really want to explore a little bit enterprise coaching, how that differs. And one of the differences are like, let's say somebody is a scrum master, let's say, somebody is in an Agile Coach working with a single team within an organization, but maybe not with Scrum but something else. How, you know, how, what are the differences? Or if somebody says, I'm interested in intrigued, and I'm learning about expert enterprise coaching? And I would like to, you know, go on a journey in my career. What, what is, what does that entail? And is it for me?Kevin Callahan 6:41 So I think, I think first and foremost, you'll probably get different answers from different people. So the way that I answered that, and my good friend and colleague, Louria Lindauer, and I have put a talk together on this very question, sort of what's the difference between a team level coach and enterprise coach? And fundamentally, the short answer is, it's a question of scale, and have another level of complexity. What it is not is a linear progression of path of oh, you need to start as a team level coach, which is a stepping stone to enterprise coaching. It can be though, a skilled team level coach is its own discipline. It's a fully featured functional discipline, that to be really good as a practicing team level coach, like some people, that is really what they want to do. And I think it's important to honor that and and to say, yeah, there's things that you know how to do as a team level coach, that practicing enterprise coach won't necessarily know how to do, they might never have done it, or they might have forgotten how to do it. Apologies if there's a bunch of noise behind me or got pots being sorted through something. So there's, it's not a linear journey, it's to equally valid professional disciplines, that ought to have I believe, have the same kind of weight and respect. They are it is it is a fundamentally different kind of level of complexity. Because you know, as a team level coach, you might be working with one or two or three teams. And as an enterprise coach, you might be working with, you know, one or two or 300 people or more. And so there's that, it just, it's very, very different, like, you know, some of the patterns like hey, you should probably have some degree of alignment and agreement, you should probably have explicit policies, you should probably be taking any economic outlook, a lot of the stuff that we pull from Kanban is true, if both stages, you should be sensitive to your contexts from using like a cynefin perspective, and what kind of constraints are we putting in place? And what kind of practices are we deploying? And you know, what kind of probe sense respond feedback loops? Do we have running all of that stuff? Is is intact in both domains, both disciplines, it's just how it actually looks is really, really different.Joe Krebs 9:13 See them as parallel tracks., like going, you know, next to each other. You could go for the team, you could go for enterprise. But you could also do obviously a stepping stone to start with a team and then expand you meet maybe they're more insights that way, right? How do I teams because at some point you do even on an enterprise coaching level you you will interact with the teams?Kevin Callahan 9:37 Yeah, it definitely and you will definitely be interacting with some level of team coach whether it's a scrum master or team Agile coach. If we're talking about the scale of an engagement that are scale of an organization or scale of a change that requires an enterprise skill set, that by nature in the complexity is higher, we cannot attend to all have the sort of tactical day to day stuff, that doesn't mean it's not important or it's less important. That means it needs somebody else who is their job to focus on that. And that's their skill set. And that's where they're really diale and So and then we can we can collaborate together and make sure that they're, you know, again, that alignment is making sense. And then, you know, people are actually behaving as if they belong to the same organization instead of behaving as if they belong to lots of little organizations, which is really counterproductive. You know, there's, there's all kinds of stuff that that can happen with that. Joe Krebs 10:33 So what are the some of the stances or things that might change from a from a team level to an enterprise coaching level, right? So like, what is what makes enterprise coaching so unique? If you want to paint a picture for, I guess, one master out there, or somebody who is possibly starting that, yeah, the coaching field.Kevin Callahan 10:52 So one of one of the, there's a couple of things just off the top my head, one of them is, and let me just take couple of notes on this. One of them is who are you working with. And so as a team level coach, which I've filled that role, you know, my path along as an agilist, this is kind of interesting, because I've been around long enough that I was actually a scrum team developer. So I actually worked on a scrum team, as an engineer, I worked as a scrum master. And then I sort of grew into an Agile coach role, not because it was a intentional pathway, it's just sort of what happened is I've worked impediments that started reaching outside of my team, or teams to other parts of the organization. And so then I've started coaching other parts of the organization because they needed help. So they could not be an impediment to the developer effort, right. And then as that started getting improvements, and the narratives that the way people were talking about, their work started changing, and executives started taking notice that something was different. And they didn't know what except that I was involved. And so they kind of said, we don't know what you do, literally, I got called into the CFOs office, who was like, also our head of HR wasn't a good thing to get called into his office. And, and he sits me down and he closes the door. And I'm like, I don't know what I did to get fired, but I think I'm getting fired. And he goes, he just looks at me, and he says, we don't know what you do. And I go, I'm definitely gonna get in. So we don't know what you do. But we can tell it makes a big difference. And we can we know, we want more of it. So we want to create a position for you, we don't know what it will be called. So can you tell us what we should call your new role, and we don't know what you need from us support wise. So what if I give you an empty budget template, and you tell me how much money you need to be effective. And we'll start there. And so and that was back in, that's 10 years ago, the name you gave, for that I said, I said enterprise Agile coach, right? But that was, you know, cuz that's kind of what I was. But I also realized very quickly, like, oh, my gosh, like I got, I got a thin set of tools for this job, which is why I went back to graduate school to get my Master's in organizational development to try to kind of fill that sort of backfill a little bit so that I didn't feel totally without any any kind of skills and capabilities and knowledge as I was trying to operate at a higher level. So anyway, um, so that's one thing. So as a team, coach, sorry, totally went off. Off topic though. So as a team coach, you tend to work with, you know, a team or teams, you might work with their their managers, they're sort of mid level management, you might work with other agile coaches, you might be coaching Scrum Masters, you know, so that's sort of the scope as as an enterprise coach, the people that I'm working with tend to be very senior leaders, sometimes executive, sometimes, not quite, maybe like VP's, or director level. But I don't, for the most part, work day to day with teams and team members, you know, the people doing the delivery, I'm working with people like chief product owners, and portfolio managers and heads of PMO's. And, you know, program heads and people who are trying to strategically pivot their organizations to achieve better results or respond to pressures that they're not sure how to respond to. And so depending on what you're attracted to, one of those may be more attractive, more interesting, right? I really like being a trusted adviser. And I really like coaching leaders to become more effective leaders, especially senior leaders, because I think they have the best opportunity to change the whole systems. Right? Like if we're trying to get a value stream orientation, you're gonna have a hard time with a team, a software team convincing other participants in that value stream to reorganize with them, and they might not even have the authority to do so. Versus a program head, you know, we can They can talk to them about a value stream. And they can say, Wow, that actually makes a lot of sense. Now we can talk about how might you start making that transition in a safe and evolutionary way. So, again, like, Who are you working with? Right? Are you working with senior level people? It tends to be much less concrete for the most part, you know, a lot of conversations, a lot of coaching conversations, a lot of you know, leading from very far behind. And not a lot of credit for the work that that happens as a result, because, you know, that's what we want. We want people to feel like they've done the work themselves the improvement is there because of that. Maybe this not because of us.Joe Krebs 15:39 Yeah, but maybe the speed of change is also a little bit slow, I would assume. Right? It's very progress. Right.Kevin Callahan 15:46 So the place that I started as an enterprise coach, I was there as an agilist for five years, you know, and made a very lasting impact based on what other people tell me, right? That's not what I'm saying. That's what other that's the feedback. I've gotten from, you know, the executives and people that were on the teams that have changed a lot because I was there, but it took years. And one of my current engagements, we just flipped past year three, and it's starting to pop in some ways we've kind of slid backwards or regressed in other ways. We've made just amazing, amazing, you know, the sophistication for example of our multi level Kanban or portfolio intake processes, the way that we organize in response to work? It's it's pretty amazing stuff.Joe Krebs 16:33 Yeah, I mean, it's that's really fundamental change within anorganization, I guess, did you just say, three years? You were like, three years? Yeah, that is that is something I recently saw on a business agility report from the Agile Alliance as well. That was like the average time where somebody would see the benefits of, true, like, no doubt was more like around business agility, right. Yeah, things take timeKevin Callahan 16:58 They do. And so you know, another thing that that, as an enterprise coach, you ought to be pretty familiar with is negotiating contract. And negotiating customer engagements and negotiating sort of parameters and expectations. You know, we could call that a designed Alliance, if you want to use sort of coaching speak. Or you can call it a contract or kind of whatever. There's, there's different nuances, of course, but one of the questions I ask is, what do you expect, from a time perspective this to take? You're talking to me for a reason? How long do you think it's going to take? Because I want to know, what are they thinking. And I would much rather because they also have a set amount of money that they're going to spend, and I've been a 40 hour week button, see Agile coach on site Monday through Thursday, and then he fly home Thursday night, if you're lucky, you get to see your family for a couple of days before you go back. And, you know, most of the time, I was in a wait state, you know, we're waiting for engagement, or we're trying to, we're trying to make a difference. So I'd much rather from a, from an enterprise perspective, say, let's have me there a little bit every week, or have me available, and you call me you pull me in like it's on you, we're gonna You're gonna pay me some relatively modest amount, every every week or every month for a longer period. So that we are more likely to get that change, rather than, you know, go go really hard, fast for a quarter and pretend you know, then we try to do a bunch of teams, then you walk away and nothing changed. But they spent a lot of money and they checked the box, right? So anyway, so that's another that's another kind of angle on the Enterprise piece of that gets into the business agility piece of, you know, how do you how do you operate a business? How do you operate an organization? You know, there's governance, and there's budgeting, and there's finance and there's, you know, HR policies, and there's all of that stuff that a team level coach is probably not going to be interacting with at all?Joe Krebs 18:58 Well, these are the fundamental changes that on business issues, how would you define the difference? I just don't want to I don't want to just jump over them. If somebody listens to this and says, like, Are you a business that should be allowed? We're talking about enterprise agility? Yeah. What are the Are there any different?Kevin Callahan 19:14 All the buzzwords. So I'm a very pragmatic practitioner. And so I've been trying to distill down this kind of concept of agility for years. And what I've come to believe it is the best definition of it is, do you retain choice? As an organization, do you have choice to respond rather than react? Do you understand when you've made commitments and why is the decision making process by which you make those commitments coherence and transparent and sensitive to the context you might be in? And that sometimes you you know, again, I'm a big proponent of the cynefin framework and Dave Snowdens work, Nevin center. And so because of things look so different depending on what context you're operating in, and context isn't like homogenous, right, they're all it's all swirling together anyway. Are we bringing the right kind of thinking to the, to the kind of problem that we're trying to work with? And oh, by the way, if it's a complex problem, those changes you work on. You do something to it, and it's going to morph and turn into something else. And so your whole plan just went out the window. Sometimes it's in your favor, and sometimes it's not. But again, do you have choice? Do you have the ability to pivot with that thing? Or let it go? Or are you locked into something? Because you have an annual budgeting process? For example? It's like, Well, we already know we that's not what we decided to do this year. So we're gonna wait, well, it's that opportunity is gonna be gone. it's here now. So right,Joe Krebs 20:55 right. And that makes things slower, right? Because you might have missed an opportunity to change that you might need a year, obviously, how many years as an organization to have to build this kind of system to work effectively and respond to their customers in an effective way?Kevin Callahan 21:12 Well, yeah, and you know, the world doesn't owe any organization an existence. And so that's fact number one. The world owes your company or your organization, whatever it is, nothing. Yeah. And so your job, if you would like to survive, is to kind of interact with the world as the world is not as you want it to be. And, and most places say that the rates of change have gone up, the rates of interdependence have gone up, the sensitivity to disruption have gone up, whether it's COVID, whether its workforce, whether it's whatever, supply chain, customer expectations, social media, whatever, we need to be able to respond not just chasing reactions. And so that, that need to be able to preserve choice, I think is really, really critical. If you do that you you have achieved agility as a as an adjective, not a noun. Right. And, and whether you're talking about enterprise agility, or business agility, I don't really know that the terminology is that important. It's are you Yeah, are you? Are you pivoting? Right? Are you working with the world as the world invites you and changes? Or are you risking making horrible decisions that are catching up to you, and a lot of organizations have made horrible decisions that caught up to them? That's right. And, again, the world doesn't owe them an existence, some, some have some protections, like insurance companies have a lot of regulatory support. You know, certain manufacturing sectors have a lot of, you know, governmental support, or, you know, industry support. So,Joe Krebs 22:57 things change, even though maybe on a slower pace, but it will change. I just wanted to clarify a little bit. Those, those topics usually very often come up, I myself, as you know, work in similar space on a coaching site. However, what I would like to know from you is because that's something I encounter quite a bit is when I do work on enterprise engagements. That's at the team level. A, what's very interesting is that organizations, I have a tool that, but what I'm noticing is that organizations come up with their own definition of Agile. Kevin Callahan 23:34 Oh, yeah. Joe Krebs 23:35 So like the military, and I get, you know, agile enterprise coaching, you know, on a team level, I think we have very good definitions because of certain process frameworks in place, etc, and implementing those on on a team and working and obviously refining. But on an enterprise level that is very different, because organizations are very different. Do you see out there and how do you level set? It's a because the Agile Manifesto, born with this should be the driving force of what we think as a common understanding of what Agile is, right?Kevin Callahan 24:09 Yeah. I think it's, it doesn't hurt. I think it might. It might be, it might be a little, I think that we've learned a tremendous amount, right. The first line is we're learning better ways of building software by doing it. And so I think that it, it has, you know, I'm going to use a gesture here. Joe said, you can't gesture because audio only, but if you think of sort of like a center of a set of concentric circles, you know, like maybe the Agile Manifesto is sort of one of these sort of fundamentals centers, but it has grown a lot like our knowledge base has grown like, you know, certainly maybe scrum was pretty well baked in 2001 and Kanban. You know, David Anderson's blue book came out in 2006. Like we've learned about that since then, you know, Value Stream orientation was pretty well known in manufacturing, but it hadn't yet really made the leap over to knowledge work yet. Um, same thing with Theory of Constraints, like it hadn't yet made the leap out of, you know, really highly predictable, repeatable process management into how do you apply this towards knowledge work with its inherent variability and randomness? Now, we know, right, like, now we have access to these things it has been created. We just have to be curious and humble enough to go out there and find it.Joe Krebs 25:31 You're adding, we're adding to that knowledge base. Putting upon that, right. So yeah, all right.Kevin Callahan 25:37 Yeah, so I think, again, like I'm a pragmatic practitioner, I'm an empirical practitioner. So I don't know like, I'm not a fan of highly prescriptive frameworks, like, I don't want to get into, you know, SAFe, good or SAFe bad. I think safe has some very big assumptions about the predictability of what you need. Maybe that's, you know, whatever, I choose not to pursue that. That particular framework. I think there's a lot of amazing stuff in it, like multi level Kanban, I think that's usually a pretty good idea for your intake management. You know, and so, so again, there's good practices in there.Joe Krebs 26:19 We all coming down to the practices, right? Yeah. So it is a little buffet style. Yeah. What you're describing, and there are some times and I don't know, I just want to see if you share that, experience that organization sometimes or it's like, yes, we do want to go Agile, but the question is, what what does it actually mean in the first place? Right? So like, what's the direction where we go on with this? And sometimes, especially on the leadership side, we or I encounter situations where it's not necessarily clear what Agile actually means, and some eye opening conversation, sometimes even the beginning. Thank God, it's right, right, before we go down a path like this, but it is a crucial thing to work with an organization to, you know, introduce agility in a way that it's a it's it's a common understanding and like, not necessarily creating a customs illusion for, for for a specific organization. Right.Kevin Callahan 27:17 Yeah, you know, and I think one of the things that I, again, I think a lot of the effectiveness is an in an engagement as an enterprise coach comes down to what did what did we agree to together? .Right, and who was a party to that agreement. So So who's sort of the the key stakeholder, the sponsor in this client organization, and who's you know, as an enterprise coach, it ought to be you like, you ought to be able to meet with someone who is a program or higher lead, and has some pretty substantial business problems that they can articulate to you and pressures that they can articulate to you. And if they can't, that you can probe and draw them out? To say, Well, why are we really talking? Right, that's one of the questions I'll ask in early conversations with prospect prospective clients, like why are we talking like, what are you? What do you want to do that's different than what you're doing today? Or what are you trying to become that you're not today? Or what what's your pain point? You know, and usually they'll say things like, Oh, we're too slow, or we're not aligned, or whatever. And unrelated dataJoe Krebs 28:25 organizations, right?Kevin Callahan 28:26 Yeah. You know, they don't, they don't know how to what they don't know how to start work. They don't know how to do intake. So again, if if, if agility is fundamentally about choice and preserving choice, I think one of the most important questions out of kind of a Theory of Constraints world is what's your signal to start work. And if you don't know what that is, you're probably starting too much. And if you're starting too much, like it's been well studied, what happens if you take a flow based system and you overload it, it slows down, it bogs down, everything takes longer, it incurs rework, your quality goes down, you know, people get really dissatisfied, because that's not kicks off. Sort of, you know, if self reinforcing loops of not enough is getting done. So people are kind of leaned on to do more. And if they're not at the constraint or constraints, then they're actually degrading the system further and becoming demoted. You know, it's just like, oh, my gosh, like, we can just see this play out just time and time and time again. And so yeah, as an enterprise coach, like you got to be familiar with that stuff, to be able to go have those conversations and, and understand, you know, what is your signal to start work? Do you know? What, what is your ability to preserve choice and to be very careful about what you actually commit to? Because that matters. And then by the way, if it's all a complex, adaptive response, you'd never really know anyway, because as soon as you think, you know, the risk is a change. Isn't it something else? Or you missed? A key quiet signal of what was actually really, really important. And you did the wrong thing?Joe Krebs 30:07 Yeah. I mean, Crucial Conversations, right? Because you know if even for for the coach itself, right? It's like if you're coming in as an outsider or as an external, let's say agile coach, trusted advisor, things like that, just mentioned. Right, super important for level setting the the engagement. I wanted to bring you on your Kevin, exactly what we just talked about and to create awareness around this topic, introducing the topic of enterprise coaching. Awesome, right. I really think it is important. I know also, what you said about these parallel tracks, that there is coexistence, that the knowledge, the body of knowledge became so big that there is space for several things. Way back. 20 years back, things were different. Like introducing it to a team enterprise agility, as far as I know, did not exist. That topic that concern? Yeah, yeah, the awareness and everything. And I think what you just did was really level setting this a very, very nice for, for the listeners. And before we depart, I want to ask you, yeah, just like, I don't know, I just put this out there. What would you like to see change? I mean, you're so involved in this discipline? What is it you like? Just if there was one thing you would like to see changed? In terms of agile enterprise coaching, business agility, that causes pain to you? Where you would say, I wish I could change that or turn back time or create awareness? When would it be putting a big one out here,Kevin Callahan 31:49 if I could be king for a day with my magic wand? I think honestly, the the thing that I would, I would invite is a higher level of critical thinking. And in a more serious empirical mindset of, of really being able to admit, look, we don't know right now. And thus, we need to get some information. And it's not about getting all the information. It's about getting enough of the information to make an informed decision that we can take the next step. And, and it's really unsexy. To do so. And, and there's no certificates to sell. And there's no frameworks to sell. It's just really hard pragmatic work is kind of like, you know, just getting back to the fundamentals of you want to get stronger, like go lift, heavy stuff, like it's really unsexy. It's really on glorious, it's really hard work. And it's hard every single time you do it. But that's how you get the results. And if we want to change the way our organizations are functioning, I think attending to the the less flashy, less sexy stuff. That is where the actual next step change is to evolve together towards a better outcome is that's where I would like to see us go as a sort of an industry of practitionersJoe Krebs 33:14 What a nice outlook. Thank you, Kevin. And, you know, obviously, we'll both in this field and keep monitoring the events of how things are going. But it was really nice talking to you. I want to say thanks.Kevin Callahan 33:27 Thanks, Joe.Joe Krebs 33:29 good luck with all your work. Thank you. We're gonna speak again. And maybe we bumped into each other at Agile conferences again.Kevin Callahan 33:36 I hope so. Yeah. Or, or agile New York or wherever. And who knows, come up to Maine and let me know. Yeah, and definitely, I just extend an invitation if people want to learn more, find me on LinkedIn, about launching a new website. So LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. Kevin Callahan, MSc POD and reach out, connect. Send me a note. I'd love to hop on calls and just chat with folks or, you know, another conferences are happening again, if you see me like, I love to just talk to people I love to learn together. SoJoe Krebs 34:10 yeah, we'll add that to the show page. Perfect. So people can just click on it andKevin Callahan 34:15 awesome. Even better, Kevin.Joe Krebs 34:17 Thank you. Thanks, Joe.Kevin Callahan 34:19 Take care. Bye.Joe Krebs 34:23 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www.agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Bob Galen, an Agile coaching guru, discusses his new book on agile coaching in a lively conversation. Topics include distinctions between Scrum Master and agile coach roles, the importance of different coaching approaches, the benefits of pair coaching, and the depth of competencies in agile coaching.

Diagnostic Tool Mentioned by Bob Gower in the Podcast: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1otbJqjaK1IWh6TocimUTlrdJaL5X1i6SxuP4X6SPG7I/editTranscript:Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM radio for the Agile community. www.agile.fm.Welcome to another episode of agile FM today I Bob Gower here with me. Second time on on agile.fm the spoken very long time ago, on this long running podcast. And today's topic is really when talking about great teams, were talking a little bit about the psychology behind these great teams. And if you don't know yet, the association between great teams and bad apples and love bombing, then this episode is for you. We're gonna explore this a little bit and see what this is all about. But first and foremost, welcome to the podcast. Bob. Bob Gower 0:57 Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Joe Krebs 0:59 Awesome. Yeah. So Bob, you you speak you keynote at conferences, on different continents, you. You wrote books, you wrote two books. And one of those books is called agile business. And the other one is radical alignment. And but today, we want to talk a little about great teams. I already said love bombing, possibly some listeners by now are intrigued. What does love bombing have to do with with great teams? Let's go there. Let's talk a little bit about the principles of positive teaming. We'll talk about love bombing, what makes great teams great, Bob, yeah.Bob Gower 1:39 Yeah, so I'm glad you went right there. The love bombing. And this, it's been very interesting for me. So I teach a class on you know, it's for usually for new managers, I get Scrum Masters in the class, I get product owners, I get people who have been just recently promoted to management positions. And then sometimes I get older people who have been in those positions for a long time, who just want to kind of, like, update their toolset to be a little more collaborative. And so I've been I, I'm an agilist, you know, like, or at least, that's my roots. And so I go back to, you know, like, let's have good team charters, let's have good team measurements, there's, you know, a lot of very, very nuts and bolts kinds of things. But I've also, I'm also a student of psychology, student of philosophy, a student of sociology, and I, and I began to find that these things began to come together. And I realized that, you know, personality really matters on teams, and that sometimes we find ourselves working with people that are just not ready to work in a collaborative way. And not enough gets said about that, I think so I developed a module for the class, which I just actually just shared with, with some people, you know, at one of your meetups recently, that, because I didn't know it was going to be so popular, I thought it was just gonna be this topic, it was just gonna be the past and distant passing. And then people are like, wait a minute, no one's talking about this. And I really, you know, and I really appreciate it. I guess that's enough preamble. Maybe I should just talk about it a little bit. If that?Joe Krebs 3:05 Well, what I do think is, and what's intriguing about the topic is that when you start talking about the individuals, and how this is all gonna work together as a as a team, are the challenges I remember, the Stacy chart, for example, right? Or the complexities of systems, and there's always requirements and technology as part of it. And people, and I always say, even just people makes it complex. Right? So it's like, there are two, two other parts to this. But if you have a team of 12 people or 8 people, if you have a group of people, there is a possibility of already having a high complex situation here. So yeah, so it is important. Yeah.Bob Gower 3:46 Yeah. I mean, one of my a book that I read a couple years ago that really moved me a lot was by neuroscientists named Antonio Damasio. And the book is called de cartes. Error. And in it, there's this quote, I put up I throw it up on slides when I speak sometimes. And he says that we are not thinking machines that feel we are feeling machines that think, right, that feeling as the way the human brain works, feelings take precedence over thinking almost always right. And that we have to be really, it's something we have to be careful of. And of course, there's the rationalist movement, you know, like people who we like to think we're logical, but I find often that people who think they're the most logical are the most illogical and the people who embrace their emotional nature and say, Hey, maybe I'm having a bias here, maybe something is kicking in. And I should check for it. I should watch for people who are kind of humble in that way, are often the most rational, the the easiest people to kind of like work with, whereas sometimes people would be like, no, no, I'm being purely rational. I'm very angry about this. And I'm like, Well, wait a minute. You're very angry about this, but you're purely rational. That doesn't make it you know, those two things don't go together because Anger is an emotion, the way I image it. So when I think about teams, when I think about organizations, I use the iceberg as a metaphor often. And I say, Look above the waterline are the operations. And I use operations as kind of a catch all term to mean, it's the tools, we use the information, we have the strategic frameworks. And we use the roles and accountabilities the team membership, all of the things that we can kind of see and act on relatively easily, which we can think of are sort of the rational parts. The frame, you know, whether we use Scrum, or whether we use XP or whether we use Kanban. Right, like even like the frameworks that we're using, right, all of that I would consider above the waterline. below the waterline is the culture and the rate. And the way I think about culture is really the emotional landscape of the team. It's whether we have certain things that are hard to measure, and hard to act on. That's why they're below the waterline, why they're present, right? Whether or not they're present things like psychological safety, things like cognitive diversity, things like trust. And we and we And so what's interesting about those, this this sort of dichotomy is that the bigger mass is below the waterline, right? Like, that's why I use the the iceberg as a metaphor, and it often moves the upper mass. So I would much rather work with a team that didn't have very good tools that didn't have very good, we didn't have very clear instruction that didn't have a good, you know, necessarily clear membership or roles. And accountabilities didn't know what process it was using, but yet trusted each other, was willing to share and kept conflict with each other, felt safe to bring forward all of their crazy ideas. And then but also could disagree and commit and move forward. Like all of those things that are sort of ineffable and hard to understand. I'd much rather have a team that had those things and had poor, poor above the waterline and rrich below the waterline, right. But the problem is below the waterline is very hard to act on, it becomes much more art like and much less science like. And so when I think of teen development, like, I want to be a scientist, but I'm also an artist at the time, right? I'm also like, often, like just trying to figure out who trust who, you know, like, who, who thinks of me is dad or something, you know, like all these kinds of like, weird questions start becoming a minor, anyway?Joe Krebs 7:08 Well, it's obvious that the complexities are on the water right types, found out that the bigger piece of the iceberg is underneath your waterline, right? That's a great metaphor thank you,thanks for that. And I think everybody has this picture right now in front of them. But let's go a little bit into your tools. Let's talk a little bit about the principles of positive teaming. I like that term. So do you want to do you want to give like, a little an example of what these principles are? Maybe we take a deeper dive into one? Bob Gower 7:43 Yeah, of course. Yeah. So yeah, I'm gonna want to give me a little of the history of them. And this is a little bit new for me, maybe by the time this podcast is out. And, you know, obviously, people might listen to this years later. So a little bit out for a while. I'm working on a white paper about this, this may be the seat of my next book, I haven't really decided yet Writing a book is very difficult. And I don't know if I want to do it again. But, but because I've been teaching this course for a few years. And the end, the seed of the course was, again, what do new managers need to know as they come in to a team leadership position, and I'm talking to a kind of a specific type of person, a person who wants to lead more collaboratively more humanistically, who kind of believes that teams can be self more self managing, less command and control, less ego driven and less narcissistic, like, those are the kinds of people that I tend to tend to, I think those are the better leaders. And I also think those are the leaders that I want to support. And so I you know, I have a 25-30 year career, I've been at this for a long time. And I've played a lot of different roles in a lot of different environments. And so this work is really the these principles are really my attempt to distill everything that I've learned from some amazingly smart people in some amazingly painful circumstances myself, at times, all this stuff I've learned into, I call them descriptive, but not normative, meaning I don't think you can you need to consider this area. But I'm not going to tell you exactly what you need to do in this area. I'm not going to tell you the like, you know what I mean? So like, the first one is, you know, teams are made up of people, right, like, we seems, and you kind of mentioned this before, right? Like, people are complex people are, you know, and people don't aren't logical, right? And so we have to embrace that I'm not gonna tell you how to embrace that. There's lots of different ways we can deal with this lack with this, the sort of like emotional nature of humans, but we have to consider if we don't consider it, we're not we're not going to get there. One of my favorite principles, and the one that I was surprised we've, you know, that you've sort of hinted at already, is that you can't is my principles, you can't team with everyone, right? And this was a painful, painful lesson that I had that I learned many, many times, or I didn't, I didn't learn many times. So I kept repeating, and then finally did learn and that is that I have to have better boundaries in terms of who I decided to be on a team with if I would if I had the authority in the power and the ability and the choice. So often sometimes we don't have that economically or just whatever, you know, circumstantially, we don't have that. But to the extent that I have the power, I need to be really careful about the people that I work with. Because there are people out there who are, you know, there's this thing called the Dark triad that psychologists will talk about. And so it's, it's very ominous, and I guess it is, it can be kind of ominous. But these are sort of like personality traits, that let's call it bad people exists for the first would be narcissism, that people are grandiose, they're superior, they have a sense of entitlement. The second is Machiavellian, which is more cynical, willing to deceive and get what they want. And the last is Psycho is psychopathy, which is more about they they're cold, they don't have empathy. And they might take big risks, they might try to take big swings, these often co-present, they often come together. And often they're sort of debt, but they're sort of separate. But the idea here is that we often find ourselves working with people like this, without knowing it, right. And this is the lesson that I've had to learn many times, because they can look really nice on the surface, or they can be really charming, they can be really attractive, often people who are the more manipulative they are, they've learned how to act in ways they've learned how to push our buttons, they're very good at reading us, they're very good at reading what we want, and they're very good at, like, poking at us and sort of like, you know, kind of telling us what we want. So so I've had to learn how to avoid those people in my in on my teams, and to get rid of them when they're on the team because it's unfair to the nice people around them. Because their their their their energy sucks on those teams. Right? So I don't mean to be cruel, but that's my Yeah, that's what I'm trying.Joe Krebs 11:38 That will be like a hidden agenda, or somebody would be nice, but has a hidden agenda hack into this territory is like this would be the bad apple, right?Bob Gower 11:47 Exactly. Well, yeah, so like a case in point, like I was director of marketing, I've worn many hats in my career. At one point, I'm not a good director of marketing, but I did wear this, this organization. But I kept struggling because I liked the technology guy who was working with, and I thought we were friends, you know, like, we would go out to have drinks, we would talk. But I became really aware that he had lied to me at different times, and often about things that were inconsequential. And I don't know, you know, like, it was just very weird. And I ended up having a talk with with my coach about this. And he's like, this guy doesn't sound trustworthy. Like, you may think he is, because he's charming. And he is. He was charming, and he would tell me great thing, you know, he would make, he would compliment me and tell me good things about myself. And I just started realizing that no, he was lying. And then I started to realize that, like, his motivations for doing the job, were very different than mine, I wanted the organization to succeed, I had my own ego involvement, but I think he just wanted power. You know, like, he didn't really care whether we hit our numbers or not, he just kind of wanted to be in charge of this organization for a while, he wasn't very committed to it. So I did sit him down at one point, and I was like, I don't trust you. And it was the most difficult conversatuon, one of the most difficult conversations in my life. And the end result was we stopped being friends, we stopped working together, you know, like, and I count myself very lucky, right? Like that I got out of that organization. And I didn't spend any more time in it. Joe Krebs 13:13 Now, I myself if I would assess myself, I have a very sarcastic kind of humor. You know, I don't know if that's already cynical. If that is already something, you know, even self assessing yourself. Is that something you will be working on? But is what's what's the line here? Like if somebody says, Hey, I like sarcasm or I like, ironic statement. .Bob Gower 13:38 Yeah, I mean, it's a great point. Like, I mean, there's a difference between like style of humor, I can have a kind of dark sense of humor myself, like I don't I, you know, like I, I and I've told off color jokes at times as well. But it's more the people who are cynical about the task at hand or the job at hand. So I usually give people a little bit of a checklist. There's lots of checklists out there. If you look up dark triad checklist, you can find it you can find it in there's there's many, many points, but the ones that really mean something to me, or that I've noticed, as most indicative to me, is one somebody lying or exaggerating. That can be a real sign and often about something inconsequential. They're just lying. Like I went to this concert over the weekend, it was great. And you wait, you find out the concert was canceled, you're like that was a weird thing to lie about. Like that's something to pay attention to. The other is if they're very charming, and they're telling you great and they're complimenting you a lot especially with very little information and we call this love bombing right that cults use this manipulative people use this all the time. They'll say, Oh my God, you're the greatest person ever. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so I want to work with you forever, right? If they're, if they're kind of trying to like move the relationship along very, very quickly. Whether it's a work relationship or a personal relationship, we call that love bombing. It's a really, really big warning sign and then the other one, sort of the third one that I really pay a lot of attention to is, I try to watch how people treat people treat other people who have nothing to offer them lower status people. So if I'm out to dinner with them, I want to watch how do they treat the waiter or waitress, I want to watch how they treat the parking attendant, I want to watch how they talk about people who report to them on their team, they're, you know, not their colleagues, but people who are, you know, who are kind of lower status than them. Those kinds of things. So people, because because people like this tend to manage up, they'll, you know, like, if they think you have more power than them, or at least equal, they can be very nice to you. But if you have less power than you then done, and then they'll start building and you and you have to be really like you. So you have to like watch these folks carefully. So I find those three traits are the ones that I watch for behaviors are the ones that I watch for quite a bit. Joe Krebs 15:46 It's really interesting, why because there will be like scenes, for some people, again, alarming signal, somebody might say, like this person is just walking off, it's a loss of time to work with other people, they have nothing to give or nothing, nothing that adds to possibly status or power within an organization. It's true. And I think in all by just listening to what you say, like I think everybody knows somebody word with one of them. Not necessarily love bombing only right. But any of those things you're talking about. I think we see these these, these warning signs, giving and receiving feedback.Bob Gower 16:22 Yeah. You mean you see them when they're giving receiving feedback? Or yeah,Joe Krebs 16:26 we're like, just like that. It's another area of concern, right. But if somebody gets extremely, you know, negative feedback or something, how do they react? You know,Bob Gower 16:35 oh, yeah, yeah, if someone gets really aggressive when they get negative feedback, that can be a real sign, too. I mean, we all get wounded when we get negative feedback, you know, at least I do. You know, I'm part of a writing group right now. And when it's, it's great. One of the rules is that we can't say negative things about other people's writing. So and it creates this wonderful space where I feel much more creative and much more free in this space, because it's wonderful, because negative feedback can have this impact. But in a work environment, look, we got to look at numbers, sometimes we sometimes have to say, hey, look, when you did that, it had this impact for me, when you fail to make that decision, the downstream impact of that was I had to, you know, I had to push work and I ended up late, I ended up overwhelmed, I had to work at nights. And you have to kind of give that feedback to people sometimes. And it's really important. It's important not to give the feedback about the person, right? You know, like, it's not, it's not to say you're an inconsiderate person is more to be like, hey, when you did that I had this right? We no ad hominem, no personal attacks, right. But if we do give someone feedback about their work, and they become extremely defensive, or we get really angry, that can also be a sign of this kind of these kinds of cluster of personality traits as well. So it's just, it's something to consider. And again, none of these by themselves are definitive, these are patterns of behavior, be very careful, we don't want to like ostracize people for you know, for the wrong reasons. And you know, sometimes people are having bad days, or people suffer from depression, you know, like, I know, in different times of my life when I've been overwhelmed or having or, or suffering from depression, having a new baby at home, and those kinds of things. Like, I don't show up at my best. And so we do want to cut people slack. But at the same time, we want to be really careful that we're not you know, when we cut people when we cut too much slack, I you know, we've talked about this, that when we cut too much slack, it's can be really, really unfair to other people. Like let's say, I'm a team leader. So I frequently speak to people who can hire and fire people. Those are my kind of core audience right now. And so if you can hire and fire people, and you have a team member who you think is a bad guy, or a bad person, bad woman, equal opportunity, right, like, they're bad, they're not great. And you keep that person around because you yourself are conflict avoidant, you don't want to go through the hiring process of finding somebody new or, you know, like, well, they're not that bad to me. I've seen them be bad to other people, but they're not that bad to me and I can put up with it. You are now being a bad leader, because you're subjecting your people to abuse essentially, you aren't, you know, just it's not you're not maybe not be doing it yourself. But you're condoning it, you're tolerating it. And I've seen some very, very well intentioned leaders create some very toxic cultural team cultures, because they have been unwilling to be they've been sort of conflict avoidant. You don't always have to fire the person, by the way, right. Like sometimes, you know, like, if the person is just if it's mild. You know, you just need to like, make sure that we keep that keep that opinion, keep that behavior out of work, like, you know, don't like you can hold a terrible opinion in your head. Just don't say it. Maybe that's maybe that works. But if you know, or maybe this unintentional, you know, we just need to point it out and they'll try to correct but if someone's a bully, man, I just don't I have no patience for bullies anymore. I just have zero you know, from on my team. There's just you know, like, it was a Reed Hastings who had talked about the the No, I'm not going to swear by the No, the no eight something rule, right? Yeah, yeah.Joe Krebs 19:59 So, what's interesting about this, what you're saying is right, there are certainly some character traits people, that might be impossible and maybe very, very hard to change. But what you're describing is that is something that can be changed, right? So you can actually go into an organization and say, we can work on other things, we can improve a possibly toxic environment and change that into something a little bit more positive. So there is this is not something that is fixed with a with a DNA of a person, right? Where you would say, like, there is there's no room for improvement. I think all of those principles, are there. Is there room for improvement?Bob Gower 20:37 Yeah, and people, but people also have to be, you know, willing and interested in change, right, you know, like, and so, yeah, there's a, there's a, I'm gonna recommend another podcast on your podcast, but there's a podcast, I listened to his guide. It's called psychology in Seattle, I really enjoy him. He's, uh, he in he's a, an expert in something called borderline personality disorder, which is, which is one of these really challenging things to deal with? I got interested, because I've had people in my personal life who exhibit these traits. And I've been, you know, at a loss of how to deal with them. So I wanted to do a deep dive. And one of the things he says is like, look, it is like, there's a lot of stigma around these things. Like, if someone gets labeled as this and they get labeled as a as borderline, then there can be a lot of stigma on that person. And that's really unfair, because that person is suffering themselves often, but at the same time, in order to change that that person needs to be an active participant in the therapy. Right. So, so one of the things I tried to ask myself is like, is the person do they have self awareness of their behavior and its impact on others? And if they have self awareness? Do they seem to have a willingness to take a look at that? And are they actively looking at that? You know, so, I, you know, borderlines are very, it's kind of an edge case is sort of a special case. But like, I, you know, I, I've worked with some, some leaders who are who are very, very open, you know, one question I like to ask, during the sales process, actually, is, because people often hire me to fix their teams just like this a classic, like, hey, my team is is struggling, can you come in and help my team? I'm like, okay, sure I can, I can do this. But you're the leader. Right? So what do you want me to do? When I find out? Some of you are part of the problem, you know, like, how do you want me to address that to you. And that, and by asking that in front of those two things, one is it is it lets them know that they probably are part of the problem, you know, and so it, it sort of sets that up that expectation, it's almost like a hypnotic suggestion, you know, like, I'm going to talk about this at some point. And to it allows them to, like, reflect to me about how they like to receive feedback, because as the person I'm, you know, they're paying me and often they're paying me a lot of money to do this work. So I don't want to, you know, I don't wanna get fired myself, you know, like, I want to do the, you know, and sometimes I have to, you know, I sometimes I find myself like, oh, I can't work with this person, I actually have to like, fire a client, I've done that. But mostly, I have to like work, I have to believe in the person and work with them and as long as they're willing to, but, but I'm often testing for that I'm often testing for like, Is this somebody that I feel like I can work with and somebody that I or somebody that I don't feel like,Joe Krebs 23:13 this is actually very general, good coaching practice as well. Right. So everybody should be putting this out there as an as an Agile Coach, what is it we're finding in our work and equity, going into this direction? I heard you make us make a statement, not on this podcast, which is very interesting, I would love to have you elaborate a little bit on that is bad manager, a bad manager is incredibly expensive.Bob Gower 23:38 Yeah, that's actually a direct quote from a longtime client of mine, and who has become a dear friend, and she was sort of, it just sort of popped up in a meeting that I was facilitating a few months ago. And I and I was like, Yeah, that's exactly it. That, you know, and we were talking at the time about burnout on her team. And we were also talking about the great resignation. So she had a technology team having a hard time hiring, losing key people losing tribal knowledge, you know, like, a lot of stuff was going on. And, you know, like, and I just, I was like, Yes, this is exactly what I've been trying to say, in so many different ways that, that people don't tend to quit their company, right. I don't quit my CEO, I quit my manager, right. Like, and so many organizations that have I've been in this many times, and probably your listeners have as well. I've been in many organizations that have toxic cultures in general, but they have pockets of like really great leaders who are doing really great work who have really great teams, or the inverse can be true. In general, it's a great culture, it's a it's a happy company, they get high marks, you know, when their pecan reports or whatever it is they're doing, and, but specifically, you're like, oh, wait a minute, this this person is a problem like I got one or two managers. And so I always try to like remind people that the way that the saying goes is not Uh oh, he's just a bad apple, you can ignore him. It's one bad apple can spoil the entire bunch and or the entire bushel or whatever, right. And so the and so a couple of things happen with bad managers. One is that bad managers tend to create dysfunction around them on their team, people don't they'll have more attrition. As long as people have options, people will quit. And also, they're the work the out of the workout purchase. Isn't that great, right? So if you have jerks in management positions, but the other thing they do, which I think is more insidious is that they set the tone for what leadership looks like at the organization. So and I've seen this with CEOs, especially unfortunately, where you'll have a very, you know, how to put it emotional or changeable or mercurial CEO, not to name any names, but somebody who's like, tweeting things at people and calling them names and trying to buy companies they can't afford. Anyway, I'm not naming names, but like they're setting the tone about this is what leadership is like. So if I'm going to be a leader in this organization, I'm this is who I'm going to emulate. This is who I'm going to become this is who I am, you know, and that that then creates, I think, a real concrete a real downward spiral, you might do fine for a while, like, I'm not saying it's not terminal immediately. But if you want to create an organization that has a sort of an efficient operating budget that works, you know, that doesn't have a lot of overhead, that makes good use of its resources and is able to focus on work and do good work. You know, bad managers, especially jerks, you know, like, it's, you may do okay for a while, but it's but but it's just not going to do not do well, long term.Joe Krebs 26:41 So this is obviously not about the salary of the manager. This is about the ripple effect that comes from the behavior. Exactly, right?Bob Gower 26:47 100%Joe Krebs 26:49 Cool. Bob, there is one topic I want to touch on, before we talk a little about the tool you're providing, right is one thing, I believe 99.999% on this, the listeners on this podcast would have an immediate response to that about the transparency on salaries, classes, around salaries, nobody talks about salaries, and there is this statement that salaries are, you know, like knowing about salaries, talking gossiping about salaries is really for the not doing that, obviously, is in benefits of the organization? Not the employees? Yeah, I think everybody can relate to that. Right. And so, but why why did this make into your work? Like, why is that so important? Yeah.Bob Gower 27:39 Yeah, well, I mean, I go back to like, you know, Dan Pink's, you know, drive, right, that the goal of money is to remove money from the calculation, right? Like, if someone's working just for money, that's not great. But you have to, like, pay them enough. So they're not job hunting, and they're not, and they're not looking around. And I also think, as we, you know, when we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, which is something that I care about a great deal, there is, you know, pay symmetry between various populations, you know, traditionally excluded population. So, you know, women and people of color tend to tend to earn less for the same job. And we can say that that's due to a lack of negotiation, skill, or behavior, or prowess, or whatever. And that may or may not be true, but it also is doesn't mean that it's fair, it's still unfair, no matter what the source of that is, it's still it's still deeply unfair. And when people find out about it, it can really send, you know, the way trust is very fragile, right. So like, if, and so like, you can, you can have a lot of trust, built up over a long period of time, and then one small thing can erode it very, very quickly. And so, you know, for myself, I found out at one point because of glass door that I was earning 40%, less than somebody else doing a similar role to me, I managed to negotiate, I actually thought My manager was behaving in good faith, I didn't, you know, like, I still actually have a good relationship with that person, and still work for them occasionally. But at the same time, and and I also had, you know, like, when, as soon as I approached them, they were like, okay, yeah, we're gonna have you, you know, I guess he knows now, right? He's gonna have this. And so but it was, but it was really, but it was really shocking. And I think had I had a few other data points about that. Unfortunately, that was for organizations that I really liked, and with people that I really liked, and people that I respected and still respect, but had it been for an organization that had a couple of strikes against them that could have caused me to immediately quit and it could have been unrecoverable. And of course, training a new person is more expensive than paying the salary for an old person. So Netflix not to keep talking about Hastings But Netflix had a policy for a while I don't know if they still do which was to proactively up people salary to market at least a market competitive rate without them asking like to do regular reviews and to sort of make sure that people were being paid competitively, but, but a lot of organizations and this is especially in america I think I don't know, in Europe, is it more common for people to talk about money? Joe Krebs 30:03 No. Bob Gower 30:04 Yeah, I think it's a worldwide thing. Got it? Yeah, I just feel like, you know, like, we're, we're sort of trained to that. It's that it's, it's gossip. It's how to put it. It's like,Joe Krebs 30:18 I don't people talk more about politics and religion at work, then.Bob Gower 30:21 Why No. Which is crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and, yeah. And so and it does, it's it basically is just information asymmetry, right, like, so if I go into something, if I go into a car dealership, and I don't know what the manufacturing cost, or the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price is on a car or something like that, then I you know, the dealer has more information than I do. And so the Internet has actually kind of like, reduced that information asymmetry, because people go to read it, and they figure things out, and then they go in armed and so they can negotiate more effectively. And but at work, like it's very hard to negotiate for a salary, especially because I think a lot of us, myself included, sometimes we question our own value, like we're humble, or we're even worse, you know, at times, like, we lack confidence at times. And we're waiting for somebody to tell us that we're valuable. And so and then it's, it's like me negotiating against this giant company is what it feels like, they have all the information, I'm a dime a dozen, they can hire somebody else. And and so but when we have the salary information, we we at least have a little bit more power. Yeah. Which is why I'm a big fan of unions as well doing collective bargaining. I know, there's problems with it at times, but like, I think, I think workers we need we need to organize, and we need people kind of speaking for us. So I'm letting my sort of socialist roots out here, I guess. Joe Krebs 31:40 Well, there's also something to be said, like, if you don't have to worry, let's say about the salaries, right, you can put all your energy into the work, right. It's like I don't have to self promote myself, within the company. And I'm using the time at work for, you know, putting the best into the products and the teams you're working with. But I think there's different kinds of models out there, right. But one of the things is when you let's say we have some someone listening to this conversation, your right answers, this is all awesome, which I personally think is awesome. But what can I do about it? Like what is what's out there for me to do? Obviously, there's BobGower.com, where you can go to and and start the process. But on the other side there is there's a tool and maybe give like a little brief connection to the tool because we when when I just want to talk about bad apples, let's say we also want to say hey, what are we going to do about it? How do we learn how to what can I do within my organization? Maybe I was a little self help first. Before I risked a big step right afterwards when so let's just let's just talk a little bit about the tool.Bob Gower 32:44 Yeah, so I have a I think by tool me, my the class that I teach is that.Joe Krebs 32:50 Yeah, we're like interests, like in terms of, you know, questionnaires and things. How do you assess Oh, yeah. So that how do you how do I find out that say, who falls into the category into the spectrum? A and B, and C? And how do I determine if this if there's a toxic behavior within the team, like things like that?Bob Gower 33:10 Yeah, so I have a diagnostic tool that I share. It's actually a workbook that I use in my class, which is called leading great teams, I also provide it sometimes for free. I'll tell you what, I'll actually we'll we'll put it in your show notes here, and people can grab it and use it. So it's a diagnostic tool that I developed. Actually, there's enough context in the tool because there's an article that I wrote, I use in the beginning, it says, just open Google Doc that you can kind of make a make a copy of and use, but it gives you a series of questions to sort of just ask, you can either ask it to your team members, or you can ask it to yourself about your team member. So you can use it one, you know, either way. And it's almost as like a journaling exercise. Or sometimes I'll plug the questions into a tool like, easy retro or parable, or we know one of these sort of like, you know, kind of like or was it Mural and Miro? And those kinds of things, right? So I'll plug it into that, and then we'll and or just or send out a survey. And it's just a way of figuring out like, where is the team aligned, because what I found is that teams can kind of get misaligned, in sort of a variety of places, either they're lacking a sense of purpose, like a shared, like, we're all working for the same sense of of meaning and purpose and vision and values in the world. It can be around how those things now get applied into sort of strategic pillars, which is much more concrete, like what are we actually doing in service of that purpose. And then the other is our sort of operational framework, like how we are, how efficient we are at sharing information and doing the work and getting access to tools, all of the things that kind of like are internal inside the organization or the team. And then the final is the is the culture like how do we do we trust each other? Are we able to disagree and commit meaningfully? Are we like the emotional landscape that I mentioned before? So this tool is just a way that we can, that we can that we can sort of analyze analyze our teams. So I call that this is part of one of my principles, which is about, essentially that you that you can't, you can't move too many steps ahead, the way I described in the principle is that the adjacent possible is your only move adjacent possible is a phrase from evolutionary biology, like that you can't, an organism can't evolve an eye overnight, it has to evolve like photosensitive cells first, and then you know, other structures have to come in. And then the eye becomes possible in the eyes of all of what three or four times in terms of sort of the biological evolution of the earth in different ways, you know, flies eyes being different from humans eyes being different from cat's eye, you know, like, all these certain things, right? So, but the idea is that is that we can't move to a big complex organizational change structure. And I know that you've, I think, you know, in your, you know, some of your frameworks, right? That we need to be a little more evolutionary in the way we think in your Agile Kata, right, that we need to be a little more evolutionary in the way we adopt processes, rather than adopting all of them all at once that, you know, the way we might do in, you know, some frameworks that I'm not going to name here that I've been trained in. And when I found out right, that there's, there's sometimes this idea of the big bang approach to change. Sometimes it's necessary, but usually, it's just destructive. And I don't think I don't think it's valuable, that we need to be much more evolutionary. So this tool is designed to at least begin to give us some context about where we are. So we can then begin to determine about where we're going to go. And so I use it as a diagnostic tool. And I begin to work with organizations and just trying to get a sense of where we are now. So we know what's possible.Joe Krebs 36:33 Oh, this is awesome. Bob, just in case listeners want to find you, they don't know how to spell your last name, that is BonGower.com. So people can find you, they can also find you via your books, agile business and radical alignment. That's also another way of finding you, we will put a link in into the show notes, as he said, to find access to the tool. And I'm going to invite all of the listeners right now to go on to what's your LinkedIn page and give you a thumbs up and encouraging words, to write a third book, you know, so maybe maybe the group can put some words out there and convinces you to write another book, I know what it means to publish a book, lots of work. But you know what, thank you for sharing all your great ideas. There's obviously many, many more principles out there, we only had time for one, one and a half,Bob Gower 37:28 one and a half, we got to go to and we and very cursory, much deeper, we go much deeper. And I also do want to just plug my my classes were so I do a lot of consulting work, I always remain an independent consultant, I don't work as part of organizations anymore. It's just, it's just not me, I've done it enough. And so I remain independent. But we're the thing I do try to big get big groups together for is for this class, it's a much lower price point than having to like hire me as a consultant. And you'll and the I and if you do join my class, I also have a community that you end up joining us. So anybody who's ever taken the class as part of the same sort of we do office hours once a month, we do. And we also do, you know, kind of regular, you know, regular meetups and those kinds of things as well. So please go check it, you can find it on my website, bobgower.com. Go check out the class, depending upon when you're listening to this. I do have a cohort starting in September, late September 2022. But I do it about three or four times a year. So please, please do come to that you're most interested. Joe Krebs 38:25 Absolutely. Bob.Bob Gower 38:27 All right. Thank you, Jim.Joe Krebs 38:29 Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host show greps. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.

Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:10 Agile FM radio for the Agile community, www agile.fm. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of agile FM today I have, you know, I've been waiting for Joshua Kerievsky for a long, long time, because your name came across in conference, manuals and content and everywhere since 1996, or something like that when industrial logic was founded. I have Joshua here on the podcast, he is the CEO and founder of that company. And there are two things we want to talk about that both related to the joy of agility today, because that is the title of his brand new book, that is to be released very soon, as well as his keynote for the Agile 2022 conference in Nashville. Before we go all into this, welcome to the podcast, Joshua.Joshua Kerievsky 1:07 Joe, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here, obviously. And we just appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.Joe Krebs 1:15 That is fantastic, Joshua. Well, as I said, you have been in the Agile community for a long, long time you even have released the book. We're not gonna talk about this book. It's an award winning book, it's refactoring to patterns that was released in 2004. Now, the next book is on the shelf joy of agility that took 18 years as an 18 year break was the release and the writing of the first book such a pain that it took 18 years.Joshua Kerievsky 1:43 Oh, gosh, well, writing books is hard, hard work. I mean, you know, it's if you want to write a book that has any kind of enduring value, then yeah, you have to really dig deep. But yeah, I did. I mean, a lot of elearning in between those periods. elearning is very challenging in its own right, and multimedia elearning content that really helps people learn skills and spend a lot of time doing that in between. But yeah, agile is also a complicated topic. So I really was learning and learning and learning and not wanting to encode stuff in a book before I felt like I had something that I thought could be very valuable to share.Joe Krebs 2:18 Yeah, your LinkedIn profile reads extremely humble, you know, lifelong learner. Since 1996, you have been in the Agile community, you will call yourself a global citizen. But you know, if I read this profile, correct, you have definitely a little bit of an affiliation with Italy and everything related to Italy. So you're global citizen, but you are biased, right?Joshua Kerievsky 2:45 Well, yeah, I mean, I grew up in New York City, which I you know, is a true melting pot. So I'm so so thankful that I that happened because you know, in New York City, you have every race and gender and just every kind of imaginable person under the sun and so you just developed an incredible appreciation for different kinds of people and different kinds of food. And then luckily in my in my business travels I've gotten to you know, travel to many parts of the globe and I really just love that I love appreciating how things are different elsewhere and it's it's a it's a pleasure to meet people I you know, a lot of times I get mistaken for the natives when I go to a particular countries like France they start speaking to me in French I don't know why or you know, in Brazil they think they can speak to me in Portuguese it doesn't happen in Japan but I'm working on that.Joe Krebs 3:50 That is awesome. What does it look like? Is it the food is it the fashion and lifestyle or?Joshua Kerievsky 3:56 I don't know I guess I don't look to America or something.Joe Krebs 4:01 You also you also describe yourself as a tennis player as far as I you know what I what I think I can tell is like you're pretty good in in the sport of tennis. Do you see any connection between tennis and agility?Joshua Kerievsky 4:14 Well, to be quite honest, I mean if we were not recording this podcast I'd my eyes would be glued to Wimbledon right now because Emma Raducanu is an up and coming British star and she's she's she was down to set so she's an amazing athletes but yeah, I love to watch tennis I love I love the tennis is a very mental, emotional and physical game. It really and it's a deeply mental game at a certain point with the pros. They know that a lot of times they all have the same skill level, but it's the mental game that becomes so important and some of the top players even have, you know, therapists or, you know, these psychologists that travel with them. You and help help them because you know, how you think out there on the court makes a huge difference to your performance. I love to watch, watch tennis and play tennis. It's a it's a lifelong love of mine. And I see a lot of analogies between sports and business.Joe Krebs 5:21 Absolutely. I mean, you're definitely right mentally, right, I most likely did not play on a level as you do. But I used to play some tennis and it's not easy to serve on a match point against you. Right, and, and how to deal with a situation like that. So definitely, there's a there's definitely a mental challenge if especially if it's closed game.Joshua Kerievsky 5:42 Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, being able to relax, I've discovered is so utterly important, if you can, if you can just not get tense. And so again, that comes back to emotions comes back to the mental game. So I'm not that good. I injured myself too much lately, as I'm getting older, and I'm trying to learn how to play injury free.Joe Krebs 6:03 Yeah. And we need you injury free in Nashville, because you're going to do the the keynotes, we need you on stage for that. So move all the tennis past that also it's the book is called The Joy of agility, not the joy of tennis. So let's talk a little bit about that. Right? You have a website out, it's called The Joy of agility.com. It's obviously linked to the, to the book, which is currently still on pre-order. So you people can pre-order it, you have anything, just before we go a little bit into depth of what's going on in the book is that when it's going to be published, and for sale, it willJoshua Kerievsky 6:39 be you know, in print, it will be in print February 7 2023. So you can pre-order it now. And yeah, I'm, you know, I'm really excited about this book, I'm, it took a lot of work, it took it in went in directions that I didn't expect as I wrote it. So it definitely follow a very agile approach to writing. And that means that there's a lot of emergence and evolutionary design, like, you know, I don't pre plan every chapter or every, the structure of the book was not pre planned. Okay, yeah, kind of emerged. And what emerged kind of surprised me, it took me took me completely by surprise. But what eventually emerged, and yeah, we can get into that, but I'm super excited about this book. It's very, very different from most agile books.Joe Krebs 7:33 Okay. All right. So let's, let's organize this a little bit. I'm curious to hear what kind of detours you had, I think every author out there their property dealt with some corrections in the writing process. But I expect you in particular, to deal with those kinds of changes in a very interesting way, you know, just based on your background, in the Agile community. So what came out as a as a finding where you felt like the book took a turn?Joshua Kerievsky 8:00 Well, I mean, what I what I started to do, before I ever conceived, the book was simply to to note that first of all, I love stories, I find that stories are the stickiest things around in terms of sticking to your brain, a good story can stick really well, much better. So then like a hypothesis, or some kind of Maxim, or whatever a story or story can be sticky. So I love stories. I've been telling stories for years. And I started a small collection of stories to explain to people what does agility really look like? So I started writing these stories. And whenever I write anything, you know, I put it in front of people as soon as possible. early draft, hey, what do you think? Yeah, this makes sense to you. Anything you'd suggest to improve so I do continuous integration with other humans? Continuous refinement of the language. And so my, my writings go through tremendous amount of refinement over time. But anyway, I started collecting some stories about what is real agility look like? And I'm, you know, part of me is what's driving me is that Agile is not sprinting. Agile is not doing stand up meetings, we've come to some people have come to think that Agile is just these rituals, you know, for the roles. So if you put the roles and the rituals together, you're agile, well, we're not really I mean, there's, there's people that are agile, who never even use the word agile. We don't sprint and do stand up meetings, right? A lawyer could be agile, a surgeon you could be agile, a dancer could be agile. A team of accountants could actually be really agile when it comes to some challenge. Agility is existed for centuries, and I wanted to have highlight what does that look like? I also wanted to deal with a, you know, ongoing question that people have for me, which is, I created these four modern Agile principles. And people say, great, that's awesome. But what did we do? What do we do? You're not telling us what to do. You're just given us principles. So the book also is trying to say, Okay, if you want to know what to do, here's some things that people do when they're really, really agile. And so it's looking at all kinds of aspects of what people do when they're agile. However, it's not specific to any given profession, or any given human endeavor. I covered live stories about biking, I have stories about entrepreneurship. I have stories about you know, psychological safety, or one fellow who created a bunch of balloons, water balloons that could be created in seconds. I mean, there's all kinds of stories that ultimately point back to different aspects of agility.Joe Krebs 11:04 So how do these six mantras that you outline in in your book, so the whole book is organized around 6 mantras? How do they connect to what you just said?Joshua Kerievsky 11:15 Alright, so first of all, I didn't know I'd be writing about mantras, identity at all that was, that was where the emergence came in. So what happened was, I started writing stories of agility. My favorite stories, and that grew, and grew, that pile of stories grew. And I started to realize, oh, you know, this could be a book. So at some point, I had, I don't know, 60 stories, 70 stories, maybe, maybe more, and I showed them to a book agent. And he said, Well, this is great. But that's not organized. I mean, it's, it's got to be organized, which I knew I just hadn't done that yet. So I was like, alright, alright, alright, it's time to start organizing them. How am I gonna do this? And I'd have to read the read the stories very closely again, and think well, what, what is this really trying to say? And of all the stories I wrote, some of them are personal stories. Some of them are stories of others that I admire. But there's a coach from UCLA. He's he's passed away, but his name was the coach John Wooden. And he's considered one of the greatest coaches of all time. And he's written books, many books have been written about him. There was some stuff that I encountered in writing my book that I did, I did a lot of research on what and I'm continuing to research wouldn't I'm actually reading a book, written by Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the famous, I think seven foot two basketball player from Harlem, not too far from where I grew up. And he wrote a book about it's called, you know, Coach John Wooden and me. And it's an incredible detailed account of their relationship and 50 years. What I learned there was that Coach Wooden use mantras to help his team to help his players become champions, and that there are certain mantras that are repeated every day, many times per day. So I started to really love this concept of mantras. And one of John wooden's most important mantra was, be quick, but don't hurry. Right. And that was something on top of my mind, so I started looking again at the categories of these stories, where does each story fit and it's a lot of them started to clearly fit into that category. Be quick, but don't hurry. For example, Tom DeMarco, is well known for many, many boxes, an industry icon and Guru. And one of his books that I love the most is called slack. It's not about the tool. Slack was written long before that, but it's about having time. Having slack in your schedule, having time spaces in your schedule, to just think to just learn to slow down a little bit maybe to improve to get faster ultimately, and that's that's a story it's like, well, this clearly belongs in that area. Don't be quick, but don't hurry. So you know, basically the stories started to coalesce into different sections, which I started to see as mantras be quick but don't I didn't make these up right. A lot of these are mantras that others said so be quick but don't hurry to John Wooden-ism. Another mantra in the book is drive out fear. And that's, you know, W Edwards Deming, very, very, very famous for saying that that the leaders job is to drive out fear. But a lot of the stories I have were about you How do you drive out fear? How do you do that? What do people do to make that possible? So, over time, you know, the mantras evolved, you know, a few times I'd be like, Okay, that's the mantra. And then a couple months later, I'm like, nope, I gotta revise it. It's slightly different. And there's more to it than that.Joe Krebs 15:18 So, six members, you have like these grouping categories where you organize your stories in? Joshua Kerievsky 15:24 That's correct. That is correct. Yeah. So now that all of that exists, I look at that. And I say, wow, you know, that's like the DNA of agility right there. If you can practice these mantras, you will get closer and closer and closer to being genuinely agile. And I'm not talking about following the framework, following a manifesto, following someone's process. This is about actual genuine agility, which is being quick, easy and graceful, and your movement or your bearing, or being quick, resourceful, and adaptable in life and challenges and how you approach things. And those words, I all of those words, I think of it this way. It's like this is like a wave just came over you I just set a definition or two. I don't think I think any given definition has to be explored. You have to get deeper into it. What does that really mean? What does what do we mean by quick? And what do we not mean? We don't mean hurrying. We don't mean rushing, we also don't mean going slow, in a bad way, like, add slow, or you're just like, oh, my gosh, this is taking forever. You know, imagine ordering something at a store where you're like this should have come out by now. You know, you don't go to a drive thru and wait an hour for the for the food to be delivered. Good, slow, there's bad slow. So there's what's the difference between good and bad? Slow? Sometimes you got to slow down.Joe Krebs 16:50 Yeah, what was interesting, what you said, I think is something along the lines of this is not about you know, sprinting at agility, right, or the daily standup. The word sprinting, in particular, how does that relate for you in terms of quick and hurrying?Joshua Kerievsky 17:06 Well, I think it's, I mean, you know, it's, you're trying to get to a point where the John would would call it quickness under control. So he would have a freshman from various high schools around America, who are champion freshman champion players in their high schools. Now they get to university now they're at UCLA, a premier school. Well, guess what, they're not going to get to play much. The veterans would play the the the upperclassmen would play the most, even Kareem Abdul Jabbar sat on the bench as a freshman. But the thing that they learned was not to hurry, and most of them hurried. And most of them would just do things in an uncontrolled way. Wouldn't wanted quickness under control. So he first had to slow them down to the point where they can understand the wooden style of playing, then they could practice doing it faster and faster and faster and faster. Right. So both elements, were there slowing good slowing down to learn, and then speeding up speeding up speeding up through tons of practice.Joe Krebs 18:15 It's very interesting. In the reason I'm asking for that is because I myself, like recently I've been working on on and things like that, where we'll be like, removed the time box and just like work on something, see the results. And, you know, I refer to that as the, as the Kata, but it's very similar to what you're describing it. That's why I'm so intrigued by this, right, because there's a certain speed to work, but you know, it doesn't mean necessarily or cutting corners, or, you know, cutting quality obviously, that is also an important factor. Another mantra that is goes along the line, and I'm intrigued to hear what you say about that one is grow a solution by starting minimal and in walk and evolving. Why is tha a mantra? I think that resonates very well with somebody who has read the Agile Manifesto, for example, I think that just goes into spirit with that. But what did you find in your research on that? And why did it become a mantra?Joshua Kerievsky 19:17 It's, it's one of those mantras that I struggled the most with in the book because I thought is this is this too specific? Is this not really the level of a mantra, but ultimately kept it in because the stories in that section are so powerful, and so helpful, I think, to to understand, you know, the doing of agility. So, let's just let's just go back to tennis for a second. Let's say you're brand new to tennis, love to. A good instructor is going to teach you the minimum necessary to just do a forehand or backhand a minimum. They're not going to get into all the nuances of bending your legs. This for bad or, you know, they're just going to try to get you initially to do the the basic strokes start minimal and evolve from there, right? So you could look at it from the point of view of like learning a sport, or let's say learning an instrument, right or I, before I moved in my old house, we built a shed in the back. And, you know, basically made a big mistake, it was a costly mistake. What we should have done was great, we're gonna build this shed in the back, not sure where to position it, but we kind of think over there would be a good place to put it. And it would have been great to then say, Great, let's go buy some cardboard. And let's erect the shed the shed with some cardboard and see what it feels like. Because that's a cheap, quick stock minimal solution to feeling out and we didn't do that. Because I make mistakes all the time. Right? I'm I'm not a pillar of agility, I make plenty of mistakes. So yeah, they went ahead and poured concrete, and then started to erect some of the wood siding. And then I realized, wow, this is blocking one of my daughter's views. No, and I knew it would, but I didn't realize how bad it would look. And as soon as we saw that, we're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this is not going to work, we have got to move the shed over so that it's in between these two windows. And $3,000 later, they moved the shed and we could have, we could have failed faster. And we could have learned faster with just a quick and dirty cardboard version of this right? To get a feel. And then you know, if you go back to like famous architects like Christopher Alexander, who wrote thw books, the pattern language and a timeless way of building. That's what they would do. They would put cheap, quick stuff up to see what does it feel like? How is this going to work for you and and then evolve, it evolves. So evolutionary design is at the heart and soul of that mantra, start minimal and evolve. It applies to all kinds of things.Joe Krebs 22:14 Yeah. Once you pour cement, right.Joshua Kerievsky 22:18 Yeah, that's.Joe Krebs 22:21 foundational. And then that's, that's where the headaches begin. But, you know, as you said, like some architects might even keep the structure up for a while and just live with it and feel over time. Right. So because your perception might change.Joshua Kerievsky 22:36 Yeah, exactly. The same same applies to an article. Here's the quick, early, rough draft, or even the idea for the article, what do you think, give me feedback? Yeah. You know, just being able to learn faster, cheaply, right, cheap, quick experiments. That's a key. That's a key to agility. And it's a key in all sorts of endeavors. So, you know, that that ended up in the book,Joe Krebs 23:02 if I will take you back to Tennis, as an example. So it's also motivational right to start with a forehand , backhand, simple routine of some sort, and then build on top of that, but you have the feeling of success as a player or as a learner, which is obviously very important in that step, rather than getting frustrated with an information overload.Joshua Kerievsky 23:24 Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I now on the counter side of this, though, I will say that a lot of times, some of the biggest successes we've had with teams in the software field has been where we bring them into, and I think they, these are willing co conspirators people that want to actually try this. We've talked to them, like do you want to do you want to try like real full on agility and software development? No, yes, no, if they want to do it, and they're willing to try it for, let's say, three, four or five months, they say, Great. Here's the experiment. We're going to be doing all of these awesome practices we've learned from continuous flow, to story mapping to continuous integration and continuous deployment or continuous refactoring. All the good stuff, right? We're going to do it all at once. We're not going to be like, Hey, you're so immature, that the only thing you could do right now is learn this one practice. And then maybe six months later, we'll have another practice. That's very slow. That's right. So there's all kinds of approaches to being agile. I don't I don't claim to say there's one way. I don't think any framework would never want you to do that, too. Frameworks are meant to be adaptable. That's right. But ultimately, you're trying to get to your outcome. You're trying to have success, and there's many ways to achieve success. And it's not just like one way. SoJoe Krebs 24:51 it's the art of coaching, right? That's why it's the art of coaching.Joshua Kerievsky 24:56 The art of coaching. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I got some inspiration. from Charles Duhigg, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning author. And he wrote The Power of Habit, he wrote, I think it's smarter, better faster. And I think it was in smarter, better, faster, he talks about the Japanese railway system, the bullet trains. And that was a situation where, you know, they, they didn't take their trains and go from like, let's say 50 miles per hour to 60 miles per hour, or 60 miles per hour. And they said, Listen, we want the trains to go 120 miles per hour. And this is the 1950s we're talking about, which seemed crazy, but they said, You have carte blanche, you can do whatever you want to make this happen. Right. So they put this big, hairy, audacious goal into the lab. So the railroad engineers and said, you know, do what you want, but please make this happen. Now, that's, to me that that was defined in the new new product development game in the Harvard Business Review back in the 80s. The article by the two Japanese gentleman, I forget their names at the moment. Because they, they would say, Give a big, audacious goal to the team. And then let them let them manage that give them the freedom to manage that.Joe Krebs 26:18 And there was all examples like this in the worldwide going to the moon, you know, like the railroad, people can come together and, and group and build a team and, and achieve something outstanding. If there is a definition of that goal. That is really cool. Joshua, I also want to connect a little bit your book in the title of your book and the joy of agility.com. With your talk in Nashville, right? So we kind of do a keynote in Nashville. So first and foremost, I can't even believe I'm saying this after two years of COVID. We're back in person, there is a conference in Nashville.Joshua Kerievsky 27:01 I'm excited. I'm also a little apprehensive because I don't want to catch COVID. But, you know, I think I'm there to I'm really there to deliver this important message to the community. I feel like again, I mean, I worked so hard on this book, I can't begin to tell you how hard I worked on it. And I feel like this is a message that the the Agile community desperately needs. There are tons of people that have abandoned agile, because they view it now as this horrible project management, rigid thing that basically hurts them more than helps them. There's a lot of, there's a lot of there's a lack of joy, let's just say in a great deal of agile implementations. And I could easily have focused on that, you know, I mean, I could have easily spent the day in a row wrote a book about how bad things are. But that, to me wasn't very helpful. I wanted to focus on what excites me so much about agility. What brings me joy, from agility. And that, that's, that's the focus, of the book.Joe Krebs 28:06 Great, and we're going to be there in Nashville, I think there's going to be a good gathering. For me, personally, I'll be there as well. It's like the starting point of agile conferences, again, being in person. I know, there have been other conferences in person. But just personally, for me, this is like the starting point again, and I hope and I gonna fall deep in fall, again, with more cases and cancellations of conferences. So I hope there is this is the beginning of something good. Again, so we can, especially in the Agile community can regroup again, see each other meet, collaborate and do all the great stuff. So maybe that's the starting point.Joshua Kerievsky 28:45 That'd be wonderful. It's going to be wonderful. And I'm really looking forward to it. I think, you know, the, the chance to get together with like minded folks is just there's nothing like it. The the the Zoom has been great, and the other video platforms, but there's just nothing like getting together with like minded people and having productive conversations and, you know, so forth. So I'm super excited. I've been working extremely hard on the keynote as well. We're doing a lot of work on sort of a way of assessing agility, then we'll be having some fun with that during the keynote. So I'm excited about that. And yeah, it's for me, it's gonna be the second time I've given a keynote. So for anyone who has not given a keynote at the Agile conference, you might be hating me right now. Why is he getting a second shot at this thing? Well, I put myself forward and said, I've got something really important to say and I have this new book and I really feel like this is a key the key thing for for our community to hear. And, you know, of course I'd love to sell some books, but you know, I really love agility so much that it's not about Money for me. It's never been about money I could have been certifying people. For years we don't, we haven't certified a single soul. We are big into training, but not into certifications that don't have any merit. So, to me, it's not about money. It's about the joy of agility, sharing that joy. And that's free. There's no payments involved in that learning, you know, to to succeed over your obstacles and challenges by being more agile. That is a wonderful thing.Joe Krebs 30:32 Right. And that is the subtitle of your book, how to solve problems and succeed sooner. And that goes right along. What you just say. Now, just at the end, Josh, what is this? This has been great, a great conversation. Thank you. I know you pointed out that this was hard work to put this book together. I hope it was not too hard and too painful so that the next book will wait for another 18 years. So anyway, I do want to thank you for spending your time and sharing your thoughts around and as some people got already two, three stories out from you. There's plenty of stories in your book. Some folks will probably get some other stories in the keynote in Nashville. I just want to say thank you and point everybody one more time to joy of agility.com. That's the website for the book, and actually much, much more.Joshua Kerievsky 31:26 Thank you so much, Joe. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. And I look forward to seeing you in Nashville.Joe Krebs 31:33 Great. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host show Gramps. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.