Transcript: Joe Krebs 0:00 Agile.FM radio for the Agile community www agile.fm.Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Agile FM today I'm here with Heidi Helfand. She is a director of product and technology excellence at Procore technologies. Heidi was on the original development team that invented GoTo Meeting and GoTo webinar. Heidi is based in Southern California. We're going to talk today about dynamic reteaming. Welcome to the podcast. Heidi Helfand 0:46 Hi, Joe. Thanks for having me here. Joe Krebs 0:48 It's awesome. Thank you for spending some time here with me and the listeners talking about dynamic reteaming. So you wrote the book, dynamic retaining. And this book is now published in the second edition. And so what I learned because I have only the second edition of the first edition, but what I learned about the change between the first and the second is you expanded on Team calibration, onboarding retrospectives. I'm always interested in talking about that. And it's also while I was reading through it a reference to COVID. So this is a relatively new edition.Heidi Helfand 1:27 Yeah, I believe it was published maybe around July 2020. Finished around then. And yeah, it was like COVID was among us, as it unfortunately is now. And and yeah, it was. Yeah, it was, it was something that definitely has impacted teams. At as I was going through the manuscript, it was definitely worthy of mentioning.Joe Krebs 1:57 Absolutely. So just like I mean, we're gonna go into more the definition of what reteaming is just in case somebody wonders, what is reteaming? And somebody might not ever heard that term before. Did reteaming increase as a fact of COVID? Or is that something that is irrelevant? Or is this more like from working from home kind of thing? I will assume the answer to that is yes, there's more reteaming going on, but I just want to hear from you. So does COVID have an impact on reteaming?Heidi Helfand 2:27 COVID definitely has an impact on reteaming. And I think the main thing that stood out definitely in 2020, I think it might be getting a little bit better now is a lot of people were leaving teams, and there were a lot of layoffs. That was very striking, due to everything that happened and the economic challenges that companies were going through. Yeah, so definitely challenging, challenging time. And when people join teams, it's reteaming, when people leave teams, it's reteaming. And sometimes it's just one person. But other times it's a lot of people to feel happier when it's a growth situation. But we experienced, definitely, in the world, there was a lot of people leaving teams in 2020.Joe Krebs 3:23 And so in your book you're you're describing, and I want to go back and bring all the listeners here into the road towards that book, The initial idea. So you're illustrating a couple of bumpy roads, with companies you had worked for way, way back. And some of those companies went through things that we now would define as something as reteaming, but I'm just curious when at what point was there like one moment that stood out was like, Okay, I see a pattern or is there I see, I noticed something in in my workplace or something I'm doing where you feel like, this is the moment I need to start writing about this topic. I'm just curious because your The road was bumpy, right? There was several things you went through with companies that hit the wall, purchased, acquired, if I'm not mistaken, and all these things. And then something really, really good came out of it.Heidi Helfand 4:20 Yeah, so back, if I look back in my career, and it spans about a little over 20 years, I was at three different startups. That grew bigger, and then I had us consulting stent in the middle of that first company, I was the 15th. employee. I left at 800. We invented GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar. At the early stages of that company, we were building different products. We were trying to change the world with screen sharing or tech support delivered via screen sharing. We were creating this marketplace of experts. The startup was called expert city. And I was on the web developer went team. At the time I was an interaction designer we were, we were working on these amazing features for our clients. But the problem was there weren't many clients, there weren't people didn't want to buy our software. And we had to pivot to save the company. And as I look back at that circumstance, I was invited to be part of a small team that was put off the side to work on a new product, we wound up building one called go to my PC, and in my view would save the company was that people were invited from existing teams to be a part of a small team off to the side, we weren't given process freedom, everyone else was told to leave us alone. We didn't have to follow the waterfall processes that we all were very much into for building the first product. And we were able to do something different. We were able to innovate. And I later many years later, I look back on that experience. And I've noticed other teams forming to solve a purpose like that off to the side, I call it the isolation pattern of reteaming. So I think after a number of years, I looked back and I had perspective. But so that was like one thing that led me to reteaming, but then there was another thing. And this was more of something that started to bother me. So I was at that company for eight years. The second startup I joined, I was the 10th employee, and I was there I think until 600 employees, so for 600. At that company, we wanted to do things different. There were several people from the first team at the first startup, and we shared a co-founder from both. And it was almost an opportunity to do things differently. And we deliberately reteamed in order to spread knowledge, we had roots in pairing, switching pairs. And it was a very kind of changeable, deliberate, dynamic environment in which we, we learned we had feedback loops, we didn't want to get the situation where someone would leave and knowledge would leave with them. So we deliberately did things for knowledge sharing. And I saw I was at that company for nine years. And I was coaching, I built a group of coaching group as well. And at one point, we were all very addicted to learning and getting better at what makes a successful team and how do we coach teams, and all of the stuff that I would read always had the theme of well, what you really want to do is have these long lived stable teams, you really want to do is keep your teams the same for predictability. That was some of the lines that I would read. Right? After a while I looked back at my career, and this second startup had already gone public, we were very successful company, many, many customers at folios, the company and I look back and I was like, wait a minute, if I believe all this stuff that I'm reading it, it kind of insists that we were doing it wrong. We had built an award winning company culture we had fair, just, you know, it was kind of like we did the market. We we did the market validation for the products, we had a lot of customers in all of this traditional wisdom about teams just to me, it was like it's, it's off to the change. And then I became obsessed with trying to prove the point that to your teams are going to change, it's inevitable, you might as well lean into it and get good at that. And then I thought well, was it just us was this just some southern California thing? I became curious. So you know, part of it is my experience and my stories from from these years and software development. But then I started interviewing my worldwide colleagues. So I'd interview people for an hour at a time, transcribe the data, code the data for themes, and what emerged was patterns of Team change. And there are five and I write about them in the book. So I really it really became like a quest to prove a point. But it's funny, right? Because in the Agile community we always talk about embracing change and and then you look at teams and like this, this this addiction sometimes in some companies we have worked for I have worked with where there's an addiction to of keeping teams stable. Right. And, and I always remind them just naturally this is not going to happen. There will be people leaving there will be people joining and products are changing. So why would the team's not be changing? Right? But it is refreshing to see that there is something out there where you did the research, right. And you found these patterns of of reteaming and I just want to just spell them out here, right? So it's one by one In a row and split, isolation, merging and switching, if somebody wanted to start with any kind of reading is that one of those five that would stand out for I guess, for the listener says, like, you know, like, give me one, what would be a good starting point? For me to start? Anything with reteaming? is one of those patterns more suitable than others? Well, it's interesting, because it's kind of like what have I would almost flip that question a little bit to be? What have you experienced so far? so many of us working in companies have experienced the one by one pattern, people are going to join our teams, and people are going to leave our teams. So what can we do to better support both of those situations, there's a wonderful, almost history of activities that we can do to support onboarding of new team members. And I think many of us have been doing this for so many years, it's just kind of normal, we might not even think about that as a team change. But really think about it, one person joined one person leaves, that team system is different. So maybe you have someone joins from another team or someone joins from outside the company. And suddenly you have maybe a new perspective that you haven't heard of before. So anyway, I would I would almost think of like, what have you experienced in the past? So one by one is, is is like, probably one of the most common patterns that we might not have really thought about, but it's there, and how can you get better at it? When someone leaves the team, we can acknowledge their contribution. There's a wonderful activity from organizational relationship systems coaching from ORSC, which is about inner roles and outer roles. So someone's outer role is like their job description. I am a product manager. Okay, well, what does that mean? And what do you do? You hire for that role. But when the person inhabits that role, they bring their personality, their differences, their experiences. And so when they leave team, maybe there's something that you want to carry on that they did. Maybe they were the ones that always told a joke, during your daily stand up meeting, maybe they were the ones that when you were in person, they baked cookies and brought them in, like, so what do you want to carry on now that this person has left maybe for another team? Or? Well, if they go on to another job? There's tactics that you can do? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Joe Krebs 12:31 Well, I'm just saying like, maybe some of the listeners think that cookies in a daily scrum, what am I missing? You know, like, No, but you're absolutely right. There's, there's a need to fill something in when somebody leaves where somebody was, maybe, let's say, famous for doing. And that was obviously lifting the team spirit. Who, how could we compensate or change or, or anything like that? So that's a great point. I didn't want to walk you though. Heidi Helfand 12:59 Oh, please do I can tend to go on and on about this stuff. Joe Krebs 13:03 So yeah, it's good. So one of the subtitle of the book is The Art and wisdom of changing teams. Yeah, that that subtitle tells me that just changing teams, because of changing teams is not a good idea, either. Heidi Helfand 13:21 No, that's not. So I'm not saying bust up all your teams and switch them all around. I'm saying that changing teams or reteaming is something to have on the table as a lever while you're continuously improving. So let's say you have a retrospective, and you realize that it's hard for us to make decisions as our team. Our work is becoming unrelated. Why do our stand up meetings take twice as long or a planning meetings even worse, it seems that people don't really feel the need to listen to each other anymore because their work has diverged so much. When we have a retrospective and challenges like that come up, it's usually because the team has grown really big, and it leads to the grow and split pattern. So when I'm in so sometimes these teams will split because they've noticed and in the pursuit to become more effective. Team members will say, Well, maybe we would be more effective if we were actually two teams or three teams. That's kind of that's grow and split. So So what I'm saying is that I think a lot of the best teams that I've seen in the past concluded the ability to reteam when they're talking about how can we be more effective. And I think it's been such a taboo topic, because of all the dogma that says Keep your teams the same. You're going for long lived stable teams, where a shift in perspective might be useful.Joe Krebs 14:59 Yeah, so I'm Thinking about, you know, while I'm talking to you this is, this is super interesting here. Just one thing that came to mind and that is naming a team. Some I don't know, I don't know how often I heard it's a great idea. And a lot of organizations do this. But in the context of dynamic reteaming putting a boundary like a name on a team, isn't it so much harder to escape out of that team? Like to actually do? Reteaming like someone part of team? I don't know, not very creative right now. A, you know, it's like, I identify myself with A and, and with that particular team, and sometimes are very funny names and so on. But it's a name right? I don't know how you feel about that. And naming a team. Is that counterproductive to reteaming?Heidi Helfand 15:49 That's an interesting question. I definitely think teams form identities like we are this team. Maybe it ties to what they own, or what they build. Or maybe in an environment where there's a lot of collective code ownership, the names might not be so related to a feature that they're building, for example, right. So there's that. And what I've noticed is that sometimes when teams change dramatically, are they like, maybe there's only one person left in the team and all the other team members moved on to other teams. And then you have new people hired into that team, it's just different. The identity is has changed. So maybe the team renames itself, there's a story, I believe in my first version of the book about a team that they were, they were called the Foo Fighters. And it's F fu they at this company, they had like nerdy twists on bad names, see a diff, member fighters. They have they shared code. And so the names of the teams were just the collection of people. And they pulled from a backlog different features that they would work on, it was really cool. When the teams changed dramatically, sometimes the name didn't really fit, it's like that we are not that collective noun anymore, that proper noun we are different. And so they would have this identity shift at other times, if, if you have a team with an existing name, and then one person joins, it almost doesn't feel like enough to change the name of the team, right? Unless somebody takes away what you're doing. And you're suddenly working on something else.Joe Krebs 17:31 I agree here. We're going down is really fascinating here, right? So if you if you think what's what's going on with all the Scrum teams that say out there and organizations, and they have a Team name and stable and so on here, we're really talking about somewhat the opposite of that might not be a good setup in the first place. If I'm a team member on one of those teams, and I would be let's say, I'm spotting that reteaming would be a good idea, let's say, right? It's not necessarily easy to speak up. I mean, it takes courage to, to possibly in in a meeting to say like, I think we should abandon this team, or we should be merging with another team, or we should split and reorganize ourselves. I mean, what do you have to say to individuals who feel like there is a better way of, of organizing themselves in an organization because somehow I'm, let's say, I'm in a team of six. And I feel like this team should not call it continue to exist as it is right now. It is not easy to bring up to say like, I think we should dissolve as a team. I don't know if you've ever had a situation like that.Heidi Helfand 18:39 I think it's more like as we as teams go through time, we come up with challenges. So we were talking about when teams grow bigger. Oh, that example that I was giving before a team grows bigger. Maybe we keep hiring in people, because we think that might help us build more, let's say that's a common thing. You're gonna work in a higher end, because we're going to, we're going to build more software together as this big team. And the team will have a difficult time more difficult time making decisions, they will have longer meetings and their work will become unrelated. Those are very common challenges of big teams. So then it's kind of like, okay, we are facing this challenge. What are the possible options to address this challenge? Well, one option is, apply different modes of facilitation, have an experienced facilitator come in and it's, you know, stop having your meetings where it's one or two people talking and everybody else listening, maybe you need to facilitate that large group differently. So maybe one of the solutions is shift your facilitation, maybe apply some liberating structures or some patterns where you could have small group discussions you diverge And then you converge as the big group. And you apply facilitation as a solution to the challenge of the big team. That's possible. There are big, I'm not saying don't ever have a big team because some, some teams like to be larger, because that gives them more variety for collaboration, like pair programming, some teams work together to get a larger group. In fact, I happened to be I was just asked by one team last week one manager last week at my job, hey, can you come help our team, we're merging together with another team. And we want to start up again, that's like, something that I'm working on right now. I'm gonna reach out to them, see what's going on, and then suggest a few things. So So anyway, teams go through time they encounter challenges, what are the different options that you want to consider to solve them? One option for large team is facilitation. Another option is splitting the team up into two teams, there's probably a third option. So it's kind of like you encounter a challenge. You entertain different possible solutions, what are the pros and cons of each, and then you convince yourselves, you talk to each other, you talk to your leadership, and then you probably pursue something, right. And so it's kind of like that. I used to give talks on this topic, which were really based on like, here's a problem you might encounter. These are different reteaming patterns to consider as part of your solution. I think in the past, what happened was, reteaming was really never a valid option to consider because it was down so much by the dogma that says, Now you don't want to change your team, you have to keep that constant. And it's almost like it took away so many possibilities. And in some cases, it's it's kind of like, you might want to split. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there is evidence out there for sure that we have, you know, a better learning environment with reteaming, right and more knowledge sharing and you know, etc. I would like to take you big here and thinking now we were talking about the individuals, we talked about the team's re-org's. We all went through re-org's. So I think at one point in our lives, and we're participated or consulted on on reorg Sometimes organizations go through those on a yearly basis, sometimes even more often. So sometimes you speak with employees, and they basically they're just saying, like, not another reorg, you know, and they're getting, it's almost like this being tired of reorg. Does that mean does that mean, with reorg that these, these employees are not dynamic, if they're resisting reacts in the context of dynamic reteaming? Because everything is in turmoil. We're changing the organization up. We're reorganizing everything, and there might obviously be some resistance, right?Most definitely. And, you know, reteaming can rip your heart out. Yeah, he is not this panacea for the world's the team's problems in the world. It it's like the book has several different stories organized into patterns. It's almost like an anthropology just explaining the landscape, teams are gonna change, they change, here's how to cope with it. Sometimes we're going to want the teams to change so much that we're going to try to catalyze it for ourselves, maybe we want to switch to a team, maybe we want to catalyze it within our team, like we're too big we want to split. And other times, we're gonna encounter situations, especially as companies grow and mature, we're gonna encounter, somebody else is going to switch us from this team to another team, it's just gonna happen. I've been at companies that have doubled, tripled, quadrupled and more bold. Somebody, you know, at some point, sometimes it's the new leader effect, you get a new executive that comes in, they see things differently in order for us to succeed as a company we have to organize in this way. Not in my career. Yeah. Sometimes it's it's more sometimes we don't even know who determines the reteaming. There's some it can be more abstracted. So there's a wonderful article that I read recently, that you know, it's about it's about change. Sometimes change is done to us. Sometimes you just done by us for I'll send you the link if you have the show notes. Yeah. It's Cormac Russell, is that his name? And I found it to be like a wonderful, kind of succinct thing to look at. And yeah, just kind of a very nice frame. I mean, the fact is, we're gonna encounter a lot of different things, we get to choose how we respond once we're in the reteaming.Joe Krebs 25:05 Yeah. But it's, it's like sometimes the the reorg itself could be counterproductive, right to a retaining, let's say a team has just found its way of reorganizing themselves, you know, in a way that they're like, you know, more productive now as a team and more effective as a team to, to solve, let's say, a client problem, right? And then comes this reorg, especially in very large organizations on second wave through the organization like a tsunami of change. Right. And that might be counterproductive, right? It's almost like an adaptive organization or like an agile organization would have dynamic reteaming on an on a such an ongoing basis that re-org's would be just not, you know, not like part of the DNA anymore, right? Yeah. So I think people reorg for different reasons. In 2020, we saw a lot of reorg, stew to COVID, we saw companies going through financial challenges and letting staff go, yeah, that resulted in most likely some consolidation of ownership, and, and some, probably some shifting of work to account for all of the people that were gone. I mean, this is, this happened at many, many companies, if you look at just google COVID. Yeah, layoff you'll find many, many company different different examples from different companies. So that's like, kind of, there's, that's like one thing, people come in maybe companies, I've never been a part of these in my career, because I've always been in companies that evolved. But if people do Agile transformations, they come into a company and they change the team. That's another kind of reorg that can happen, maybe a company reorganizes, because they have a new strategy. And in order to get to the future place that they need the company to be they shift from the company is organized, it could be that they were organized by component team, they change and now they're organized by product. I saw that a few companies ago, I think there's many different reasons for these large skill change events. And the ones that I think are the most successful are when people are included in some of the decision makers, right? That's, again, it's like changed on to us. And that article here, I'll put it in the Zoom chat is, is four modes of change to four with and by, and it's by Cormac Russell.Awesome. And I'll put that on the show page for everybody. To see. That is awesome. Thanks for Thanks for digging this up. Yeah, this is this is really interesting stuff. You I mean, everybody who listens to this here right now and things about me my team structure or things about possibly, or reorganizing departments doesn't have to be the whole organization. Right? And putting these things into effect. You absolutely right. Me included, I just think always very positively about a that company's in growth and so forth. It could be obviously other factors, too, as we see right now with the pandemic and etc. We're going back into the financial crisis 2009. I mean, there's just other forces that challenge this. What are you working on these days? In terms of the topic? Are you are you still possibly working on version three at some point? Or are you picking up another topic? What are you? What do you what keeps you up at night?Heidi Helfand 28:41 Yeah, it. Frankly, I'm not, I'm not quite sure I'm in that space, where I have a lot of different ideas. And I'm pursuing different things in parallel. And I'm not quite sure where to focus. I started writing some stories, like I was actually working this morning on on a story about my son is a cancer survivor. And I was writing he he's doing very well. And I was writing a story related to that. I have that kind of thread going. I have another thread going. We're in kind of writing about coaching engagements and how to have them internal in your company and how to structure them. Kind of thread that I have, right? Yeah. Yeah, just I think, you know, it's interesting after writing this book, and after doing a couple editions of two editions of this book, I had thought even last week, should I continue on this topic? And there's definitely more to say, there's more third edition. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. Part Part of me is kind of like, well keep that going another part of, like, explore other things. And yeah, well acted in torn?Joe Krebs 30:02 Absolutely. And you should celebrate the moment because this, the second edition just came out. But when you start writing and taking into this topic, you're all of a sudden realize, hey, there's more. And here's another one. And here's another handle on this. And so and sometimes things just evolve, but you have enough interesting topics on your end. Maybe we can talk about them in a later podcast at some point. Talk about coaching. Yeah, I would love to say that I love championing people that are doing interesting things in the reteaming space like Chris Smith, from Red Gate software. So another kind of reorg is more of an open reorg, where the people have a say, in the decision making on the teams. And have you heard of Red Gate? Have you met Chris? No, I've not done. So he's there over in Cambridge, in the UK. And at Red Gate, they have open reteaming events where they facilitate workshops where people choose the teams that they want to work on. And they've done this in person. And they've done this just virtually a month or two ago, and Chris blogs about it. I believe on medium. And so they're doing some really interesting things there, where it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from what we were talking about, right? So it's kind of like that change with someone else, like that article. So they have these. This is in the spirit of the book, creating great teams by Sandy Mamoli and David Mole, where they talk about having self selection events where people choose or have a say in the teams that they join in. So I love hearing these stories about what they're doing at Redgate. Because it's the it's a great example of how do we include people in the decisions about what really is a reorg? Just a special type of reorg. Right?And people could get in touch with you about this? Because it seems like you're very interested in finding out what is going on in the in the field of reteaming, right? Heidi Helfand 32:04 Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. When people have interesting stories to share about this, I'm definitely interested to hear about it or when people are coming upon challenges as well. It seemed to me,Joe Krebs 32:17 awesome. And maybe there's another pattern in the making. Who knows? Right? Through all the stories, maybe there is something so heidihelfand.com is the address. We're also going to put it on the on the Show page, I want to say thank you for spending some time here with me talking about this topic. And just the last reference you made to Sandy, she was also on the show. So that's a few, I think was a few years, maybe one or two years ago, I had her on Agile FM. So I crosslink that episode, if somebody is interested in learning about that, too. So thank you. And maybe we can talk about another topic or a deeper conversation about this topic here on Agile FM sometime in the near future.Heidi Helfand 33:00 Sounds great, Joe, thanks for having me.Joe Krebs 33:02 Thank you. 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. Welcome to another episode of Agile FM. I'm here today with Ari Van Bennekum, co author of the Agile Manifesto and thought leader at a company called Wemanity in the Netherlands he is Dutch. He has a background and I have to run through this super quickly. This is very, very impressive. He has a background in healthcare, some military in there and then he started developing software in 1987. If I'm not mistaken 1993 We're dating but don't fall back here. You started your last waterfall project, which was shortly after terminated in 94. When you moved to RAD and that was the opening thing, I also see some connections to the DSDM want to explore. But then came that one weekend. And that's what we want to talk about here on the anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. It's turning 20 years. We are recording this at that time. 20 years ago, the manifesto was written and that weekend in 2001. And obviously that was a massive changing weekend for you professionally, personally, everything just changed in 2001. First and foremost, welcome to the podcast and thanks for celebrating this with me 20 years agile manifesto Ari Van Bennekum. Ari Van Bennekum 1:34 Yeah. What what do you want to know? What do you want to know? If I go back if, if I listen to you, right, so when I listen to you about, you know, what would you tell him about me if I was young boy, 19 years old, left high school, went into the, into the healthcare. And two years later, I went into the Army was healthcare was not my thing. In the army, I became a platoon commander in the infantry. And that was at 85-86. And then I got into my I remember my, my company commands, hey, do you want to go to the academy? No, Military Academy? I said no, not my thing. He said, If you want to, I can write you a letter of recommendation, you did a good job. No. So then I entered the world of software development. And the reason the reason I emphasize this, I was 15. And convinced I wanted to work in the healthcare, then I did, obviously a good job afterwards in the military. And I always I'm convinced that people are the architect of their own life. Or you have to make your choices and don't let you be held hostage by other people or organizations. Right? SoJoe Krebs 2:53 but these are, these are very distinct, different kinds of things, healthcare, military software, I mean, we're talking about three different, very different pillars of life, which is somehow speaks to you, right? Because you, you made some drastic changes there, and you've gone from one to another to another. And obviously, it's not like that you, you know, especially on the software side, right. So it's not only that you started going into the software world in 1987, is also that you realize something was wrong in 1993 and before. With the industry itself, right? When you went towards the RAD piece. Fill me in a little bit on DSDM. That is a very British thing. I'm based out of the United States, but DSDM, it's a very European thing. Is that the connect your had for the folks with the Agile Manifesto?Unknown Speaker 3:40 Yeah, yeah, I did. So I am. When you go to healthcare, military software development, I think if you change you have to change really, because people tend to hang on to what they got, actually my oldest son was an Agile coach in Wemanity Netherlands, I work let's say on the international level, he worked on the on the Netherlands level. And he left two weeks ago to become a teacher at high school. He said, That's what I want to do. And I said to him, if that's what you want to do, you have to that's that's what you that if this is your belief, go architect if you don't live and that brought me to being a software developer, but I think also if you go into any kind of company what you start doing the first day you come in you listen to the old guys. Always the old guys, you know, I don't want to be offensive here. But if I look at the two of us guys, and and you do that for a while, and it took me four years and then because I started what's called Ernst and Young today, the Dutch the Dutch branch in 87. And then I switched to consultancy firm became an analyst Technical Designer. You go from one place to another then I got into the Dutch IRS did The Tax office, and there was a project that was completely up. And I thought, I will not be responsible anymore for public money. I don't want this. And I don't say I never did again. But the intention is to feel very responsible, how can I deliver value? So in 1994, I, the project was stopped. This was the last waterfall project that started in 1993, that you mentioned in my introduction. And it was really 10.15 in the morning, kicked out of the building standing next to my car, and I think, Okay, what am I going to do? So I took my car, I drove to the office, and before lunch, I spoke to five of the six managers we had, and I said, this is what I will never do again. And I thought, you know, if they fire me, they fire me, right. But I think it was two weeks later, one of the guys Willem, he gave me a call. And he said, Ari I got something I got for you a rapid application development project, he said, and I think it's really something for you. A rapid application development was time boxing, iterative development, user participation, prototyping. And I started doing this. And honestly speaking, you go to a two day session with people from James Martin associates. And then they expect you like today, you know, you get your scrum master certificate that people think that you're a magician or something. And of course, I was I always said, this is where the experimenting started. And it never stopped since. So in the rapid application development world, that little bubble that I was in, I had a couple of colleagues, we started working at the we had a pilot at the Dutch Navy, Royal Dutch Navy. And that was really going well, by the way. Very nice people good work very committed to Okay, let's try this one out. So I started doing rapid application development projects in a commercial way for the consultancy firm that I worked for, at the time, quite successful. And that is not the what I it's the way of working that made the success. And not always easy. Don't get me wrong, I mean, but then it was 1997 I switched to another company. And there was in the old company there was a guy that I work with Kor he was on my on my LinkedIn yesterday sending me a congratulations. And cautioned me I wanted to Kor after the company. I said, Go join him. And he said, Okay, he said it if we do so let's let's get connected to the DSDM consortium. And I heard about them, you know, you read in the magazines about them. So let's do this, right. And when I first time really was reading something about DSDM, it was the nine principles of DSDM at the time. And I thought, of course, reading my notes, who copied my notes, because the DSDM consortium got the intellectual property from the rapid application development user groups in the UK. So you know, same approach, same gaps, same issues, same common sense solutions. And the funny thing is, I was, I don't know, maybe I think it was late last year, I was in in a talk with Allistar Coburn. And he said to me, you know, Adi, he said, I heard you talking about we wrote the manifesto. And then a month later or so I saw the nine principles of DSDM and he said, Why didn't we put those in and then we would have been okay already, right. So and that's and I got connected to the DSDM consortium, because I am a community man. If I have something to share, I will share I will make people have something to share as well. And then when closer to me, okay, let's, let's connect to the DSDM Consortium. We talked about it, you made a decision. And then I go completely in. And I know you got I got certified DSDM practitioner consultant. And they asked me do you want to be a DSDM assessor? So I got into the DSDM community. It was 2000 that I was in Manchester. I don't know if you're well, you're from Germany, right football. Manchester United Old Trafford, the annual DSDM conference. And we had to do we so we had the UK chapter, we had the Benelux chapter Denmark, Sweden, France. I think it was India, Australia as well. And I was part of a task force the internet task force or the DSDM consortium to make sure that when we had a new chapter that we could roll out within half a day we could out on the website, completely roll it out, including content. And then in Manchester, I met Dane Faulkner and Jean Tabaka. They were from the United States, and they were invited to start North American chapter of the DSDM Consortium. Jean Tabaka sadly passed away A not too long ago, Dane I see every now and then on my Facebook or Instagram. I don't know what one of those. But Dane is a friend of Alistair Cockurn. And then got ahold of Hold on. We're going to have this meeting in Snowbird. And he said, Well, I think you know, in terms of what you guys want to achieve, you need something from the DSDM Consortium. Sure. And then I got the call from the DSDM headquarters. Hey, Ari, do you want to represent us in some way? Yes. And that's, that's the story.Joe Krebs 10:34 That's the story. And you went there? Obviously, there's, there's a lot of interviews were given and everything. But I just want to ask you some questions about this, because this is the 20th anniversary of the manifesto. So we want to take a little bit of a data, I know there's much more going on in your life and everything. But and we're gonna go there to where it's the manifesto weekend? How did it feel? What was the mood? Like? How did you guys self organize? Like, how do people who are now this is 20 years, there's almost an entire generation now growing through the computer science degrees? Who have, you know, not seen this thing in the creation? Like what we did right? When it came out in 2001? So now, looking at history books at this, but what was the mood? Like? Were you guys in a room? Were you guys self organizing? Or were you guys on the ski slopes are a little bit of both?Unknown Speaker 11:27 It'll be the vault I guess, know what happened. And actually, I was talking to a to a James Grenning, and Steve Miller was there. And John Kern was also there this week. And what I said over the last couple of years, then you have a group in front of you, whether it's 1000 people, or 100, or something. And I always ask what happens if you put 17 guys in a room? And then the women will shout from the audience? Nothing, right? And I said, Well, maybe but most of the time, and this is seriously the case. Most of the time, the guys will tell the other 16 that their own ideas the best. And John Kern had a beautiful expression this week, he said, we came into the room, the Aspen room, we came into the room. And we all left our ego at the door. And I think that's the one. And the reason I say this is we all started working in a different way. I just told you my motivation , value, you know, wasting public money or not. I know from James Grenning, he's into completely into quality of the big one into efficiency or whatever, you know, we have different focuses. And so people are focusing on 1,2,3 people, some people on the small team, I had 20,30, up to 94 people was my largest team that I work with. And we all had our different angles. But what we did was explaining to each other okay, so you left the old school way, the waterfall. Why, and explain how you and so we started explaining to each other. And explaining to listen 90%, of course. And most people these days listen to criticize, and we listened to understand and I think what John said you're leaving your ego at the door. I love that expression. Yeah. That was just fun. And yes, we were on the ski slopes as well. Yep.Joe Krebs 13:36 Kind of a working agreement. Right to to leave the ego at the door. Right. And and the skiing tooUnknown Speaker 13:45 Snow, snow snow. Yeah, remember snowJoe Krebs 13:47 a lot. It's not, you know, for nothing called the Snowbird. Right. Ari Van Bennekum 13:51 Exactly. Yeah. Joe Krebs 13:52 Is there anything you would like to like in hindsight, obviously, we're reflecting on 20 years, and it's easier said, you know, like now and then possibly 20 years ago now with all the information together, but is there anything you would like to see have see have not developed this way or changed at that time? Or is there anything you regret about that weekend, we would say, Oh, I wish we had done this more or less this or et cetera. Just curious from your perspective.Unknown Speaker 14:21 Yeah. It's not about regret or criticism. But the one thing that I have shown should, what I should have done better, is if you if you look at the manifesto, the word software and I know that quite a few people of those 17 were and still are hardcore developers. But software itself doesn't do anything. And it's the way you handle it, the people that handle it, that makes it into success. And if you make a new software based product, it's the education and training of the market is It's the marketing and communication, it's appraised, right? So I would have focused more on the word, product or service. Or worse, I think that the word software has become too big. And it's not about software in the world. I'm so sorry for those who think. And for you to know, I work agile in HR teams, we do Agile recruitment campaigns, we do agile marketing campaigns. If you organize an event, you do it in an agile way. And you're all those kinds of things. And it really is like this. So for me, it's universal concept. I always because I from 1994, on, I always had those multiple teams on the different disciplines that you have to make a full delivery, as I call it. So that's the one thing and this, maybe regret is not the word, but I should have paid a little bit more attention, because now I know that it's become such a dogmatic focus.Joe Krebs 15:57 It's actually interesting, because me included, where there are lots of people who would point out that word software is it's the one thing that stands out, it's like, it's not all about software, there's a reason why software is being, you know, initiated in those, there's a waiting to reason to fill a gap. And what is that gap? It's business, right? So. But I think we can make that that change right in our heads and apply this, I think, as many of us do. How did I did the manifesto, like in those 20 years, how did it impact your life? Maybe in the beginning? How did it what's the I mean, at the beginning, I remember signing it in the very early days, I saw it on the website, or remember that it was hardly any signatures there. And I went up there and then signed it, but there was not much going on in the beginning. So that was a slow developing avalanche, as we know now too, but how did it change you and your life?Unknown Speaker 16:53 Yeah, it changed my career completely. A gentleman that I used to work with from the Netherlands in those days said to me once, because we had a DSDM consortium, Benelux and I was on the board. And we had a meeting. And I was just divorced. No, it was before my divorce, I guess. It was it was in the in the in the board meeting. And I don't know what it was. But it was, I think I returned on the Wednesday from Salt Lake. And on Thursday evening, we had a board meeting. And they say, Ari, you know, what have you done last week? And I said, Oh, no, I wrote the manifesto. And I sat down and I opened the meeting. I get these days, I get a lot of questions. Hey, it did you ever imagine the impact it took? No, of course not. That you go to a room? And you say no, I'm going to make something that will flabbergast the world in 20 years? No. But we wanted to make a statement. And we all had our own successes for your hard work. Not always easy. And I think that statement has come through. And I think also that Michael and Mike Beto and Jeff Sutherland Ken Schwaber. You know, they did an awesome job in promoting Scrum, which was easy access to agile and kickstarting a lot. I started No, I kept on doing what I did before the writing the manifesto. Until I think maybe eight, nine and then it became clear, okay, something is happening here. The the, before you take that down, that you see that you get traction in the market, based on what you did in the past, is something that's weird. I can tell you. I'm a country boy, right? I'm living here in Huddersfield, you don't even know what it is, even though you're from Germany, not that far away, you have no clue where it is country village, if I wake up in the morning is because the cows of the neighbors and make noise. And there you are. And it changed the world. You know, we created together a complete new professional domain, which is in hindsight that you think was this right. So we didn't foresee that impact. But what you need to know is that in 1997, I switched to a company in the Netherlands at the time called sufficient rebaptized shortly after in deficient web, and this was by far, the first completely agile organization. This is the late 90s. So before writing the manifesto, in at least at least in the Netherlands, but I think in Europe or the world, completely self organizing teams, we did everything in terms of hiring, firing, marketing, the delivery, of course, everything was there. We had seven on the people at the turn of the century, there were there were four founders of the company. You know, there was no no management. There was nothing in between it was just what we did. And when you read the manifesto, we talk about you know, trust people to get the job done and when you do Talk about things maximizing the work not done. Those were where my heart is, right? It's like, okay, this is because now I burn, steal money from my client. But I burn it in a very efficient way. And you get failure as fast as possible. So, for me that background, I was in hindsight already from 1997, when I joined supervision, I was on this jumping board and doing something different. And going, I remember going to Salt Lake, I remember that my wife said goodbye to me at the airport, you know, on your focus on I'm going to do this, that kind of commitment we all had. And that was helping me a lot. But did I foresee the impact? No. No,Joe Krebs 20:44 of course not. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's impossible to foresee. Right. But I think one thing you are pointing out is like, just like what we talked about, before we started this this podcast together as there were several trends even in my life, like, what was the Objectory and Jacobson and use case modeling? And then yeah, there were a lot of things that had led to 2001. Right. When you when you select this as a statement, I think you just said that very nicely was a statement in the industry. That was necessary, right. But there were the years leading up with the organization you worked on the things we did in those 1990s that were indicators for change.Ari Van Bennekum 21:27 You know, I? Because people asked me about your what do you think time? The timing was the thing? Yeah. I don't know. I think we have approximately the same age. Right. So we know, I have to explain to my boys that they're 28 and 24. How you dial a number, right? This? This video of young young guys like, yeah, 10-12 years old, an old cassette? Yeah. And they do like, Yeah, you don't know what to do with it, right. I mean, we ended, I think, from 1985 to 2005. The technology pace of innovation accelerated so it will never slow down. Don't get me wrong, but it accelerated so much. It needed something. It needed something. And also, this is why in 2001, it was a you know, the pecs was taking up. But in 2005, or 2010. It was already disrupting complete business models. So organizations had to do something. We are I think,Joe Krebs 22:37 yeah, so some of those other 16 on that agile manifesto that signed and co authored this manifesto with you. Many of them wrote books, you wrote a book, but you're the architect of your own life, right? Yeah, yeah. But you didn't write books with agile and you saw some you wrote some with forwards you contributed. Why is that? Why did you not find your path? You personally like, Hey, let's go into and write some, some books about agile, what path did you choose? And why?Ari Van Bennekum 23:07 two things I have always difficulty sitting sitting on a chair. So writing a book is very difficult for me. At the same time, the architect of your own life is out. And also, I am this moment in time, I working with an art publishing on publishing my second book, which is called reaching for business agility. And business agility is for me a no brainer. Because people always have to do Agile in the IT department first and then we go, I think we do Agile with a wedge for the business. We don't do Agile for the IT department gonna get lost. I have to do this together. So I am working on this book reaching for, for business agility at the moment. But I have to be honest, sitting down behind the keyboard is not my core competency. It's not Yeah.Joe Krebs 24:01 Now it's definitely something with the writing, right? It's you're spending hours and then by the evening, you just delete the page again and says like, let's start tomorrow from scratch again, this was not a good day. Yeah, if you don't like that, maybe you need a ghost writer or something for who you just,Ari Van Bennekum 24:17 that's my way of working. Yeah, yes, my, what I have, I have my PA and I make recordings, and sometimes the 10 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes. And what she does is just typing them out, sending them back and then I got through the text. That's how it works. Yeah.Joe Krebs 24:33 That's very cool. That's very creative. So you're currently a thought leader. Now let's look a little bit forward with a company called Wemanity in the Netherlands but more like interested in like, what kind of trends you're currently observing. I would assume business agility plays a role because you're writing a book and this is obviously a topic that engages you but what kind of trends do you see right now like for people who are like, okay, 20 years ago, the manifesto was written. Now we have seen 20 years of application of all of those things. Where we going with us, do you see anything? Any trends that would indicate we're going on path of XYZ?Ari Van Bennekum 25:11 Yeah, I see. I have to say that we met at the headquarters in Paris. And I started together with a business development in five years ago. What is it? 2016. I started with Wemanity Netherlands, but I do now the international level. Which means I do I do cross border international transformations. That's what I like. And what I found out is that I didn't find it out last weekend, right? It's, it's still the last 15 years that you see that if you want to work agile, there are a couple of things that you need. First, you need to have the leadership team, understanding what it's all about role modeling agile behavior, leading the organizational change, and sustaining the organizational change, not doing it themselves, but making sure it can happen. So the leadership part is one. And by the way, if you have an Agile transformation that goes wrong, 95 out of 100 is because of this, nothing else. So the trend is now focusing on leadership, which is completely justified because leaders, that's what they do, because leaders are gray guys with beards over 50. Right? Most of the time, guys. The other trend is, and that's one that i The point is when you're in it, you don't see it, right? When I was working with supervision in 1997. We were hiring firing people around marketing communication around delivery with either on feedback, we, we decided on our own salaries, I raise my today I could raise my salary if I want it. So that whole thing about how do you how do you facilitate the people in your organization, a lot of people call it HR, I don't like to call a human a resource. But if you want to HR, if you want to have that real lateral thinking where people say, Can I focus on the organization, but at the same time, you know, I have my own ambition, and I bring that together. And I serve to the best that means that you have to handle your people in a different way. So on one side, how do you lead an organization? The second one is how do you handle your people? Right? Those are the big trends. And if you do that, well, then you will get to business agility because people will do it together. That's the only way. And I remember that there was a quote from Richard Branson from Virgin. And he said, focusing on my clients, of course not. I focus on my people, they will focus on the clients. And that requires something and whether people can define their own salaries or not, but it's about giving people recognition in the expertise that they have, and give them the freedom to that's a self organizing part. Okay, this is where we are sailing as a company. And your your team is okay, if you're delivering this, maybe it's it is HR, it's marketing, whatever, right, and your team has to contribute to that purpose that we are. And you decide how you do that as a team, as long as you are on the outside on the output, sorry, the output, delivering that and that's, that means that on the inside of that same team, you need to help each other as much as possible. You need to create together the platform to make that happen and to have people excel. I think that's that's going to be and it's also the millennial thing, right? And I don't like the word millennial even because that makes it a pound that makes me Yeah, and also it makes me illegal because now I'm doing discrimination based on age. But I think from that perspective, I'm a millennial. And maybe you are too, but in the mindset of you, no, I do not perceive my career in the old fashioned way. I remember way lifework balance how do I do this? So I think next from leadership, it's the how do you handle your people and then get to business agility that will end that will be that will be more than just next year and the year after?Joe Krebs 29:29 Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's a there's a there's definitely the trend of that visible right already with consortiums and conferences and just topics just in general. So while I'm, I'm super thrilled I have a little bit time here in those busy days, I would assume and your calendar where you have a lot of self reflection on what just happened 20 years ago. Makes you feel older, right? 20 years ago when you were like I know exactly where I was 20 years ago. And but for many out there who have I've listened to this podcast, that different kinds of impression here on the Agile Manifesto and some personal viewpoints. So I want to thank you for that.Ari Van Bennekum 30:09 It's all my pleasure. And I hope that the people who are, have listened to it are all going to listen to it and enjoy it. And I always say to people, you know, I am in the situation that most of the time, when you connect to me on LinkedIn, and you just send me a question, I get it, how do I do this? You sent me the question and nine out of 10, you know, within a day you have an answer. And I think that's what we all should do. If people have a question, and you can help them forward, help them forward. That's good.Joe Krebs 30:37 Awesome. Here we go. He's a community person, you're asking for feedback, I'm pretty sure you're gonna get some and some questions and feedback, etc. So awesome. All the links, by the way, are on the Show page, for reaching out to you and getting in touch with you, if that's needed, but also to, you know, get a feeling on. You're the architect of your own life book, as well as the business leadership book. We're all looking forward to that. Thank you so much for joining. Maybe we have a chance to talk. Maybe not in 20 years, maybe it's a littleAri Van Bennekum 31:08 bit sooner than that. Yeah. And face to face with a nice German beer. That would be nice day. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Have a lovely day.Joe Krebs 31:19 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 Agile FM radio for the Agile community, www.agile.fm. Welcome to another episode of agile FM. Today I have an author, educator engineer, entrepreneur, product design on managerial professor and musician, author. All in one here in one episode, in one episode of agile FM, I'm talking to Adam Braus, who just goes by Braus, San Francisco based, you can reach him at Adam Braus, no dashes, no blanks or anything in between dot com. And we are here to talk about a few things. One of them is Nemawashi. We're going to explain that to him. We're going to talk about his two books, one of them is published, one of them is in the making leading change at work. That's the one that's published. And the other one, the upcoming book is called "motivate". We might touch on that. Let's see how it goes. Welcome to the podcast.Adam Braus 1:09 Hey, thanks, Joe. I really appreciate being here. Joe Krebs 1:11 Awesome. Yes. And congratulations to the to the book release of "leading change at work" out for a few months people can get there. The subtitle of that book is called The Secret structure. I'm always trying to say the secret sauce, but it's the secret structure of change and how everyone can make it happen. A new way to create bottom up change in any organization called piecemeal consensus. How do these two things fit together piecemeal consensus and Nemawashi? Why don't you give your our listeners here, right now? A little bit of context.Adam Braus 1:45 Sure. Sure. So Nimawashi, is a Japanese word. And it was invented about this actually wasn't invented. It's a it's an actual phrase in Japanese, I did some interviewing with some Japanese people and said What does Nemawashi really mean? And and what what it means in business is and to agile and to lean is a it's a strategy for making change. So it's essentially the the Lean strategy of making change. And I translate it as piecemeal consensus. So that's kind of my translation of it in the past, it's been translated as consensus or kind of seeing eye to eye or it can even have a sense of kind of backroom deals. That's actually kind of the the, if you say it in Japanese, it kind of means like back almost like back channeling, but it's but it's very common. It's not it has it has a sort of nefarious sound, but it actually is very, very common and acceptable to do.Joe Krebs 2:41 It's part of the Toyota Production System, right? It's an integral. Adam Braus 2:46 That's right. That's right. So I was really fascinated to find, well, maybe I can tell the story of how I, I kind of came up with this idea in this sort of book. And then I was encouraged by my peers to, to write it out. They said, that's such an interesting story. And like, that's such a great theory, you should, you should, you should write about this, this should really be something you focus on. And so I took it upon myself to write it, I was working at a at a company called Epic, which is the leading software for healthcare records, electronic medical records company, and it's based in Madison, Wisconsin, shout out to Madison, that's my hometown. And so I was living and working there for Epic. And it's a large company, it's, it's always listed as one of the best companies to work for, because it's kind of got these quirky office buildings. And it's got these sort of fun perks for the employees. So I was working in the dungeons and dragons themed building. So I was I was living in an elven forest. And working in my office there and an elven forest. It was quite, quite fun. And my friend and I, who were kind of little intrapreneurs, right, we were kind of entrepreneurs inside the company. And we were always thinking of new ideas. He was working in HR. And he actually used the EPIC system as a new HR system. So instead of he took the patient records, and he turned them into candidate records, and they were doing all their their HR through the EPIC system, which was like this fantastic, just brilliant thing. And he got that launched. And, and I was I, we would have these little idea jams like I think a lot of people have or they're, if you're kind of an intrapreneur, you might have your pal that you're kind of saying, hey, what can we do to make this company better? And I had this idea that it would be great to launch a question and answer platform much like I was becoming a software engineer at that point, while I was working full time as a consultant. And there's a website called stackoverflow.com that all engineers and probably all PM's know. And I was like, Well, why don't we have this for the questions about the electronic medical record every day? Clients asked me these questions and I've heard them 100 times what if they could just find the answers on this, then I could focus on other things or you know, it could be better for the company better for healthcare, which is ultimately better for patients. Since right because efficient and cheaper and better for everybody. So I said, Let's launch this thing. So we made every mistake in the book in retrospect. And we did exactly what I think a lot of people do, which is we went and tried to ask permission. Yeah. Can we get permission? So we went to managers, we went to different sort of bossy sort of type higher up people than us. And we say, Can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this? And of course, we got all kinds of different answers, most of which were very encouraging, but then gave us a bit of the runaround, right? So I named these things in the book. So one, we basically encountered what's called permission paralysis. Yes, we kept on asking permission, and we didn't move forward at all, because we kept asking for permission. And then the bosses they did what we called yes to death, the yes does to death. So they just kept saying, yes, you're great. This is great. You're so smart, you're so great, please, you know, do this. But you've got to do this, and this and this, and you've got to talk to them. And you've got to get their sign off in their sign off. Anyways, long story short, eventually, we just did it. We just created it. And we launched it, we didn't ask it, we just stopped asking permission. And we just made it. And then we had to, but then it was just sitting on a server and we needed to get a get people onto it. So we actually started to have to do almost like an internal marketing kind of growth, word of mouth kind of viral campaign inside the company. It was quite it was quite a a kind of exciting ride. And to this day, it's one of the proudest things I've ever done was I launched and it successfully grew to being used by everyone in the company. And it was never sanctioned or announced by any kind of higher up person, it just organically grew inside the company. And to this day, I can say to Epic employees. Oh, yeah, I built I built Beetlejuice. And they go like what I thought an engineer built that, right like the mythology of who actually built it has kind of been forgotten to the Sands of Time. But but but in when I started to tell the story, more and more, I realized what we had done was really different from what a lot of people try to do when they're trying to make a change. Because we stopped going and asking for permission. And we started to just take action. It really created this, this different strategy. So I started to write that up. I started to teach that in my courses. And and then and then I started to research more seriously, what is this? And well, you know, who else has done it this way. And that's when I came across the Toyota way in the Toyota Production System, and especially a tiny, tiny chapter in that system, which is this Nemawashi. And I said, Oh my gosh, this, this tiny kind of forgotten sort of sideline thing. That's actually critical for doing Lean and Agile properly. And it's been kind of ignored and forgotten. This is what I did. This is what me and my friend Nico did. And so that was really an exciting moment to kind of realize a kind of kinship across 1000s of miles, you know, and decades of years and across industries, from software back to kind of a lean manufacturing. That was a really cool moment to do that research and find that, butJoe Krebs 8:09 it's also like, isn't that a great moment? If you read something and then you hit that section? It's like, this is exactly what we did. So the confidence in the book at that point must be going through the roof, right? You're like, this is exactly what we did. And it also tells you that you're on to something like very similar to the patterns movement, we have like in Agile, etc, where we it's like, this is a proven thing I can I can talk from my own experience that this is what we did. And and it works. It's not a theoretical concept. But why do you think Nemawashi or as you call it, like a piecemeal consensus is so unlock so much potential in organizations out there, the ones that we're using? Why do you why do they see once they do it like what you did, right? In a in a similar fashion? And why do they hold on to it? A lot of Silicon Valley companies are using it.Adam Braus 8:59 They are and actually what's interesting and kind of funny is they're using it without knowing what it is. And so there's this there's this weird kind of spectrum of people and companies using it and not using it and none of them no, no, that it exists really. Yeah, there's very few people who know Nemaashi. And then if they do know it, they know it as a kind of weird Japanese thing. They don't know it as actually something you can use today to make change very rapidly and very peaceably inside your company. So it's a very, very sort of peaceful, kind of, it's not like a, like a kind of conflict conflict, not a conflict based change system. It's a very harmonious based change system. And partly you might say, Well, it's because it was invented by Japanese people and their culture values, you know, harmony, and and and there is a hierarchy to their, to their companies and to their to their to their work, but they're able to change within the hierarchy, which is kind of the exciting thing. So I wasn't I was isn't really satisfied to just say, hey, this works, believe me, I promise you. So in the book, I go into the actual mechanics of why Nemawashi works, why? Why does it work to build a piecemeal consensus out of one on one conversations with a lot of different people. That's kind of the way Nemawashi works. One on one conversations, instead of a big meeting where you present what we're going to do, right, instead of going off to your off site for three days, deciding what would it be strategically best, and then coming back triumphantly, and telling everyone what we're going to do, which is kind of the main way that change happens in a company. Instead of that, instead, you stay in the office, you don't go into your off site, you stay in the office, and you talk one on one with a lot of people. And you say well, what's our biggest challenge? What do you think we could do? What do you think of this idea? What do you think of that idea to one on one little one on one conversations, they don't be long, they can be 15 minutes long, you get a lot of information. And as you're doing that you're getting information and building consensus at the same time. So you're actually building the solution. I mean, you might already have a pretty good idea what the solution is already, but you're coming in open minded to those conversations, you're, you're getting more information, you have the ability to still change the idea as you go, because you haven't announced it to 1000 people to say what you're going to do, as soon as you do that, you can't really change it, or you don't look very good, right? Like I came up with this thing. And now I have to change it. So as you have these one on one conversations, you're you're you're you're you're tweaking or changing, maybe even totally changing completely 180 degrees, changing your idea, but it doesn't really matter, you're kind of moving along getting better and better. And every time you have a conversation with someone, that person becomes an ally to your idea. They go like, wow, I have to really give my my buy in or my input, therefore I have a lot of buy in. Yeah, so it's this, this kind of one by one. And people might say, well, how can you do one by one that's too much time, that's too expensive in terms of my time or in terms of the time of the company? Well, it's not actually true. Because if you have an hour long presentation, to present your new idea to 100 people, right, then that takes an hour times 100 plus you that's 101 hours. But if you only but if you build this Nemawashi consensus by having 1015 minute conversations with 100 people, and it's just you and one other person, that's 30 minutes times 100. That's only that's only 330. Right?Joe Krebs 12:27 On you on the way and not necessarily on all the other participants, right?Adam Braus 12:30 The whole company, right? And you can you can delegate Nima washy to someone else. So you can say, hey, we're a team and I'm the executive, your job is to go these numerosity conversations, your doesn't even have to take if you're a leader, if you're a real executive level, the cool thing about this is it works for anybody, you can be the guy in the mailroom, or you can be the CEO and you can use Nemawashi to the advantage of yourself and to the advantage of the company and to the profit margin. It's a really quite a tremendous gains of, of time and money. And, and you see it in Toyota, I think Toyota is probably the best place to see this ability to change if using Nemawashi.Joe Krebs 13:12 So this would be an example of how much you would scale because that would have been my next question to you, right? So I can see that on a small scale, I could get involved. I might learn a lot in these Nemawashi's myself about my solution, I might actually shape the solutions while I'm going through those 15 minute conversations. But how does it scale?Adam Braus 13:33 It's actually it's actually built for scale. So it's actually it's actually was invented in a huge car company, right? I mean, it was invented in Toyota. And it's actually built for big companies in a small company, it still works, it still works. And it's still worthwhile doing. But it actually is built for scale. So if you're if you're listening to this, and you're thinking maybe I can use Nemawashi, you work at Philips, or you know, Pfizer or something you can like it's built for that size. The way that it scales, to understand it, the way that it scales. The I guess the way that it works mechanically, just to understand it is it works because of social networks. And there's been there's been growing research ever since the 90s. About the power of social networks, in companies, right. And you know, you have the kind of hierarchical org-chart of your company, which is great. I talk a lot about in the book, how hierarchies are fine. A lot of people kind of want to especially creative guys like me, generally want to kind of say, oh, hierarchies are bad and don't have hierarchies. These are great. Yeah, yeah, people always want to be doing that. I don't really think that's necessary hierarchies are good because they do a different job hierarchies are execution. Okay. The creativity aspect or the intrapreneurship or the change aspect actually happens inside the hierarchy. So Through the social networks between the individuals in the hierarchy. Yeah, that's so that's how Nemawashi works is instead of trying to operate your innovation inside the hierarchy, which is what most people do, they say, Oh, well, you if you have a new idea, go talk to your manager, like, well, managers jobs, it's kind of hard to ask managers to both be the gatekeepers of innovation or the promoters of innovation and be the executors of the kind of the goals and wheel of the company. That's I think that's kind of unfair to managers, I have a soft spot in my heart, especially for frontline managers, because their jobs are very difficult, probably some of the most difficult in the company, and to ask them to then do both those jobs is like, you know, it's like having two masters this Yeah, it's nuts. It's, I say, don't go to your manager. Yeah. Don't go to your manager, do Nemawashi, start talking to other people in the company, start talking to your peers, start talking about to your peers in other division departments. Right, you know, it's, and then and then build up through the social networks of the company.Joe Krebs 16:01 Right? It's interesting, right? Because I've never met people in organizations. And I looked at the org chart, and that was exactly how they ran their business where the org-chart is, like, more like a general guidance, and like how we talk and then when you start to like groups that made and they have like this innovation group where they do this, and they do this, and none of them is depicted in an org-chart, right. So it's organic, that there is a different one, a lot of dotted lines, a lot of you know, sometimes they call them tribes and things like that. So there's a lot of things going on that is not even remotely represented in the org chart. And I think both of those things are very, very important in this, but why do you think these top down companies out there, right, obviously, all of them would be interested in your book right. Now listening to you, because it is intriguing, and there is a lot of there's a lot of it makes just makes sense. Because it's not a formality. It's organic. It's the whole process of piecemeal consensus here is why do Why do many organizations struggle, especially the ones with the top down to open up to these techniques? Why is that? I mean, why? Well, IAdam Braus 17:09 think I think I think I think the reason why is because they're presented with a choice, that is a false choice. They're told, you can either be a extremely efficient hierarchical, top down organization, which I will not for one second tried to deny the efficiency of that system, right. That's why the military's run that way. That's why business businesses that have very, very clear goals like like an insurance business, like you just take the actuarial tables, you charge the customers, you, you filed the claims, I mean, it's just, there's not really that much. I mean, you might be able to adopt IT or something. But the business model is not going to really innovate, you really just need efficiency. So the hierarchy and the top down makes a lot of sense. Those people are then told, Oh, if you want to innovate, you have to throw out the efficiency of that hierarchy. That that's wrong. I think, in my opinion, that's wrong. I think it's, it's important to understand that there's a third way, there's a third way you don't have to go be what's called a holacracy, right, where there's no hierarchy, and everyone's just kind of like floating around like amoebas. And in a petri dish, you can still have the hierarchy, and you can have all the efficiencies of the hierarchy. If you add Nemawashi, and you train people in Nemawashi, you will also be able to have extremely rapid on a dime change that isn't rash and isn't done without without checking with everyone. Because through Nemawashi, you check with everyone, you get a lot of information, and you are rapidly able to build buy in and do a change in a moment, even in a large company. Great examples Toyota itself. I put in the book The story of the development of the Lexus engine. So when the Lexus Lexus, as you know, is a brand of Toyota, it's just a separate still Toyota, but it's their luxury brand. And we all think of Lexus has probably been around forever. But actually, there was a time when Lexus didn't exist. Toyota was just the kind of Volkswagen for the it was a kind of car for the people. And it didn't have a luxury high end brand. And there was a there was a what Yeah, and then yeah, in the 90s, I think, yeah, there was a there was a young there was a man who said in Toyota who said, You know what, we can build an engine to the specifications of a BMW or Mercedes engine. And everyone said, You're crazy. And he literally was crazy in a sentence because the machine the level of precision that he that would need to be in the engine was greater than the tools they were currently using in the factory. So he was suggesting building an engine with a higher degree of fit, reference, refined tuning, then the machines themselves that they were using the machines that you use to build the machines. And he said, You know what, give me the Give me, the top engineers from each department to come and work do a working group with me for a little while and we'll hand build an engine. So we'll sit and we'll hand grind each valve and we'll hand you know. And by doing this hand build engine, all the engineers figured out solutions to all the problems of building an engine to this specification in mass and in production, a production line, and they were able to build it and so that they were able to do something that that, you know, Toyota is not we think of Toyota is an innovative kind of agile company, because they came up with the hybrid, and they can they and they, they're able to change and do things fast. But actually, Toyota in Japan is known as an extremely hierarchical conservative, extremely strictly delineated kind of, you're the lower down, I'm the higher up, I'm the manager, you're the suit, the you know, the, the lower, you know, worker. And even with that extraordinarily strict hierarchy and conservatism, I mean, the top leaders of Toyota are not, you, they're not wearing like, you know, pink sweaters to their, their daughter's graduations, you know, they're like wearing black suits and black ties, and, you know, even then that company is able to, it was able to turn on a dime, and continues to be able to make extremely innovative moves, right, because they use Nemawashi. And they say, let's use Nemnawashi. To get this across the line. Let's use Nemawashi. Let's do that.Joe Krebs 21:22 Yeah, so that is super interesting. We're gonna see obviously, now the automobile industry is in turmoil again, right? So we're going to see what kind of company is going to turn on a dime again, why? Because there are certain changes that disrupt the industry right now. So we're going to monitor those things as well. Now, I want to take you a little bit into your neck of the woods in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, you probably have better insights on, you know, these kinds of things, how they're being applied in that region. And we do know that out of the Silicon Valley, there is a lot of innovation coming out innovation that is influencing the world, not only the United States. So do you see a relationship between these techniques, as well as the rate of innovation, the rate of change?Adam Braus 22:08 I do I do. And I think it's, we have to be kind of careful when we talk about there being like a lot of innovation, quote, unquote, yeah, I always like to think of 1910 as actually when there was 1910, the year 1910, as when there was actually a lot of innovation, right? Because we went from having no planes to having planes. And we went from having no telephones to having telephones, right. So these are, you know, these were monumental, total revolutions in people's lives. Today, innovation is you know, phone plus one, right? iPhone eight, iPhone nine iPhone 10, it's just phone plus one cheer. And, you know, we have this kind of, there's this promise of the internet of things, but it really, it hasn't really materialized to be something super. Anyway, super. And I would love to see massive innovation, like the completely transformed the way we do healthcare completely transformed the way we do transportation complete, but we actually are not seeing that really so much. We're really just seeing a kind of, you know, and maybe that'll come with AI or it'll come with other other things. But anyways, there is a relationship between the rate of change though, so for example, Amazon, is I put it as a poster child for Nemawashi in the book. So Amazon uses a, a system that is it's sort of it uses the same processes, Nemawashi, where it pulls the best ideas up from the bottom of the company, all the way up to the top. And it's the six page reports, you maybe you know about this, each so each year is at your at each yearly report, all everyone writes the six page reports and then managers summarize their reports, reports, and then they push those up. And then those managers summarize those reports and then push those up. And it ends up at the at the top, you know, with Jeff Bezos is in his in his, you know, crew at the top, looking at, you know, something like 40 reports and trying to pick where the company's going to move in the next year. And then by doing that, it kind of pulls all the best ideas up through the hierarchy. And that makes it be able to have the best ideas acted upon. That's why they beat Google to the Alexa they beat Google to the home assistant and Siri, they they beat both Apple and Google to the punch with that. They also, you know, developed Amazon Web Services before, it was cool to have web services they took over. I don't know how much something like 30% or 60% of the internet is is Amazon Web Services. And they did the same thing with on same day delivery. And, you know, now Google's running to catch up with Google Express. And so So I think Amazon is is I think a great example of this. They don't necessarily do pure what would be called like a pure Nemawashi where people are really doing these kind of one on one conversations and but their system of decision making is based on bottom up, change which which was a kind of Nemawashi-esque style, they could I think they could be even better if they adopted like a full, decentralized Nemawashi where they really told people, Hey, start having these conversations, start building consensus piecemeal around your ideas, I think new things would come even faster for them. Google, I think is unfortunately a sort of example of kind of a down a downward spiral of innovation. You know, we remember Google back in the day. And, you know, back, maybe when it launched in the first probably, you know, five or eight years sent when it launched, being extraordinarily innovative. And if you read if you read about the and it is in the book, actually, if you read about the policies that were put in place, they were without knowing it, because they didn't know the word Nemawashi. They didn't know about piecemeal consensus, but just by Larry Page's and Sergey Brin's intuition, they put policies in place that supported Nemawashi that instigated one on one conversations and people building little cadre's that then would, you know, would emerge into products or emerge into changes. And now Google ever since essentially, ever since Google Plus, they stopped having, they kind of got rid of 20% time in practice, and it's still on the books, but they kind of got rid of 20% time, at least people I work there that I know, say that's not really a thing, really. And then ever since really, Google X emerged, you know, Google X became, oh, that's where all the innovation happens, which kind of meant, hey, don't do innovation at your desk anymore. Because Google X is doing it. You know, that's where the weather balloons and the self jet, which is all cool stuff. But when you go for those moonshots like that, I think you when you separate that's called a skunkworks. When you separate out innovation from your company, and you say there's a skunkworks over here, that kind of gives frontline managers this way to brush off new ideas that people are having, because they're like, well, this isn't Google X, like go do your, you know, go keep making the Google ads better or go keep making the search better. Don't tell me about your like crazy idea. Because this isn't Google X, that's Google, like you'd have to apply to change over to Google X, right? So it kind of separates innovation out of your company. And that's a bad, that's bad, I wouldn't recommend anyone make a skunkworks, I would say leave everything happening inside the company and create space inside the company through people's 20% time, well create space for people to be doing that workJoe Krebs 27:30 to your point, right? So that would be not organic anymore. But do you want to be organic in one element of the company? It's just a piece of it. Right? So how would you get change into other parts of the organization? Exactly. This is really fascinating. Listening to you about some of those ideas and how you make the connects to the book, people can obviously pick up that book leading change at work. There is another book and just by the end of our podcasts, we're recording this in December 2020. There was another book on the horizon is called motivate. Just just to maybe cliffhanger here for people on the listening to this podcast. What is this all about? It's it's a book the science of yeah, great and success. It's going to come out soon. What can you tell about the book? Before we close out?Adam Braus 28:17 Yeah. Well, it's a book about essentially, I came to education. late to the game, I didn't get an education degree. I wasn't the grade school teacher outside of college, you know, I became a software engineer first, I became a product manager. First, I became an entrepreneur first and then I came to education. And when I arrived in education, I said to myself, I had the intuition that well, obviously the best way to educate people would just get to get them as motivated as possible, and then get the hell out of their way. I just thought that that seemed like the best way to run a school to make a school to make you know, my classrooms. And so I started to research around all the theories of education, you know, John Dewey and Montessori and, and and and you know, Waldorf, and all the different kinds of you know, Piaget all the different theories of education and nobody said that nobody said, how just motivate people to the roof, just through the roof. And then you won't be able to stop them from learning a lot. Anyway, so I realized well, this is not this is like something that needs to be said this is something that needs to be sort of described how to do this and so I so I decided to write this book and and explain how I do it because I was able to be the lead of a small college called make school which is open for admissions. Please, if anyone wants to go to college and learn how to be a software engineer come to make school, go to makeschool.com and sign up. But I still am an instructor it make school but I was the program lead and I got to design the whole school and so I designed a school based on this idea of motivating people, just to the to the just to the roof and and We've had great success, we have 90% placement rate within six months of graduation with an average salary of $100,000 a year, which is I think, better than probably any college. That's like a pretty absurd level of success that we've had. And we don't, by the way, take the the creme de la creme, I mean, our students are great. But a lot of our students are saying I, you know, I want to go to this alternative school because I'm not, I'm not going to go to a more traditional school that might say, Oh, you need to have a high SATs, or you need to have a high GPA, a lot of our students are saying, Oh, I don't actually have that high of grades, I don't have that high SAT, I'll go to this kind of alternative school and even then we're able to turn them into total rock, just total rockstars and total slam dunk successes. And I think a lot of that goes back to the structures that I put into the, into the school. So yeah, it's an exciting book, it's coming out probably by, you know, February, March. If you're interested in education, or if you're interested in motivating people at a in a work environment, I think it'll still have a lot to say about that. And especially if you're running a kind of corporate training, or a kind of educational thing for for your workers. This is a really, really, one of this is a new book, like you will not read what I put into the book anywhere else. It's really, really a stunner. It's kind of one of it's kind of a magnum opus, I've been writing it for a number of years. And it's quite good, fun to read toJoe Krebs 31:24 Adam, I really think this is the it's the key link you just made to corporate learning. Like if you're thinking about change, change to something new, at least for the people involved in the change. And that was the aspect we just talked about and Nemawashy and etc. Right? But what I really think and just want to build that bridge, and maybe we can talk about this once the book is out. One more round on on agile FM, I think the real thing is, you know, with change comes education, and how do you motivate through education. And I think there's a great link to corporate learnings. So even if your book is about schools, if somebody puts the glasses on and read through those things in terms of corporate learning. Fantastic. So I can't wait to see thatAdam Braus 32:06 even even more. Yeah, especially in a knowledge based work environment. I mean, even most of the work I think a lot of knowledge workers do is learning. You know, like you have to learn about your employee, you have to learn about your customers, you have to learn about different industries, you have to learn. And so and so creating a company that is a highly motivational learning environment is exactly what knowledge based companies should do. And so yeah, it does have connections to that as well. But you will have to put it put on the lenses a little bit. Because unfortunately, I'm not. I feel like I read about how to be a good author. And they say write three books about the same genre, you know, and I go, Oh, but I have so many. I want to talk about all these different things. SoJoe Krebs 32:48 that's not your job. That's the job of the reader to put on and read through that. So awesome. Yeah.Adam Braus 32:56 Yeah. If you become a fan of my writing, it'll always be something different. I hardly ever go back to the same thing, you know. So it's kind of a fun, kind of keep things fresh. Right.Joe Krebs 33:07 Adam, this was a was a pleasure to speaking with you about all these things can't wait for the next book. And again, AdamBraus.com If you want to see learn more about him. Thank you, and maybe we can follow and continue the conversation about motivate coming up soon. Sure.Adam Braus 33:27 Sure. Thanks so much, Joe. This has been really great and I love the podcast. Keep it real.Joe Krebs 33:32 Thank you. 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 speaks with Lee Henson about Scrum and the Scrum Community. Lee had a difficult childhood but he had the willpower to escape the spiral he was in. Years ago, just when he was about to start a 5-day PMP boot camp someone ate his breakfast off his plate and convinced him to join his training. His name: Ken Schwaber. Lee was intrigued and has been infected with empiricism ever since.

Joe Krebs speaks with Gil Broza about challenges non-software teams are facing when they are interested in increasing their agility. We talk about boards, stories, automated testing, an agile mindset, and the role of a product owner. Gil helps organizations increase their agility and team performance with minimal risk and thrashing. Close to 100 companies seeking Agile transformations, makeovers, or improvements have relied on his pragmatic, modern, and respectful support for customizing Agile in their contexts. He is the author of three acclaimed books, “The Agile Mind-Set”, “The Human Side of Agile”, and most recently “Agile for Non-Software Teams”.

Joe Krebs speaks with Dr.Jill Greenbaum about the Bikablo technique and the various use cases for more visual support for agile coaches. She shares tools and techniques and how visual content can be produced on paper or digital. Jill helps leaders across the globe to create responsive environments in corporate, government, nonprofit, and educational settings, by accessing the strengths of their communication styles. She utilizes her expertise in instructional design, training, facilitation, and coaching to deliver stellar offerings that transform participants, their relationships, and their work. She leverages her strengths as a graphic facilitator to support clients in gaining greater clarity, perspective, and depth, about the issues and challenges they are facing, enabling accelerated, richer, and long-lasting results.

Joe Krebs speaks with Daniel Vacanti about the Scrum and Kanban communities and the importance of predictability and what this means in terms of empirical process control. Back in 2007, he helped to develop the Kanban method for knowledge work. He is the author of “When Will It Be Done?” and “Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability”.

Joe Krebs introduces the Scrummer Quiz 2020

Joe Krebs speaks with Richard Kasperowski about virtual Open Space and how to adjust this liberating structure to make it work in a remote environment.

Hear Harrison Owen’s talk from 2012 where he talks about organizational agility. Although the audio quality is low, it is a re-release of this timeless piece that should be remembered. Open Space is an integral part of many companies and Harrison Owen, who created Open Space, shows how Open Space enables organizational agility.