Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20 The importance of the Team Retrospective

In this episode, I was joined by Sherif Mansour - Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian.

We spoke about styles of product management and the traits that make a great product manager. Before exploring the idea of a shared brain and the role of a product engineer.

Sherif has been in software development for over 15 years. During his time at Atlassian, he was responsible for Confluence, a popular content collaboration tool for teams.

Most recently, Sherif spends most of his days trying to solve problems across all of Atlassian’s cloud products. Sherif also played a key role in developing new products at Atlassian such as Stride, Team Calendars and Confluence Questions. Sherif thinks building simple products is hard and so is writing a simple, short bio.

Hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did. Thanks for a great conversation Sherif.

"Great convo with Dave & Eric! Key takeaway: revamp Easy Agile's org structure representation. Exciting stuff!"

Nick Muldoon, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Easy Agile, is joined by Dave West, CEO, and Eric Naiburg, COO, from Scrum.org.

In this episode, Nick, Dave, and Eric unpack the current agile landscape, discussing the role of the agile native and emphasizing the importance of building connected teams by flipping the hierarchy and putting leaders in supporting roles.

They emphasise the importance of empowering the people closest to the problem to make the call, and ultimately creating an environment for success to happen.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Share your thoughts and questions on Twitter using the #easyagilepodcast and make sure to tag @EasyAgile.

Transcript:

Nick Muldoon:

Hi folks. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name's Nick Muldoon. I'm the co-founder and co CEO at Easy Agile, and today I'm joined with two wonderful guests, Eric Naiburg, the Chief operating officer at scrum.org, and Dave West, the chief executive officer at scrum.org. Before we begin, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people that are joining us today. So gentlemen, thank you so much for making some time. We really appreciate it.

Eric Naiburg:

Thank you.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess I'd love to just jump in and, Dave, I've got a question for you first and a follow on for you, Eric. I'd love to just get a quick assessment, Dave, of the Agile landscape today and I guess the shifts that you may have seen now that we're out of these COVID lockdowns, these back and forth, COVID lockdowns.

Dave West:

Yeah, it's interesting. So I've been the CEO almost eight years here at scrum.org, and it has changed a bit during those eight years. I think what we're seeing and is a, dare I say, the deployment phase, mass deployment of these Agile ways of working and this Agile mindset throughout industries and throughout all organizations. It's more than an IT software development thing. And I think that that was accelerated during COVID. What's interesting though is many of the characteristics of Agile that became so important during COVID, particularly around empowered teams, particularly around trust, particularly around the hierarchy and the reduction of hierarchy, some of those things are being challenged as we return to the new normal, which some people would rather was just the normal. So I am seeing some of that. However, generally Agile is here, it's here to stay. I think the reality is that most knowledge workers, particularly those knowledge workers dealing in complex work are going to be using some kind of Agile approach for the foreseeable future.

Nick Muldoon:

And last week you... Was it last week? I believe you were in Paris for the first face to face?

Dave West:

[foreign language 00:02:37] I was and it rained the entire time actually, Nick. So yeah, I spent a lot of time inside in Paris.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, what was the sentiment from the Scrum trainers there, from the conversations they're having?

Dave West:

Yeah, it was interesting. We talked a lot about at scale, enterprise adoption, the challenges. It is funny that the challenges are challenges that you expect, and most of them are about people, legacy systems, people status, power position. We talked a lot about the challenges that teams are getting in these large complicated organizations. That continues to be the conversation. There is, obviously, this is Europe, they're very close to Ukraine and the conflict there. So there's definitely some conversations about that. We have six Ukrainian trainers and also about the same number of Russian trainers as well. So that's always a conversation. And then there's a general downturn of the economy that was also being talked about.

Layoffs are happening throughout Europe, and particularly in the technology sector, but I think that's growing to some extent. Vodafone just announced today that they were laying off, it's about 6,000 employees, and they're one of the biggest telecommunication companies in Germany, for instance. So there was definitely some of that, but so if you add enterprise, you add conflict uncertainty, you add economic uncertainty, those three things will come together. But what was funny in it is that throughout all of this, they were incredibly upbeat and excited. And I think because they're talking to people that they've never spoken to before, they're talking to people about how Scrum is a natural way of working, talking about the challenges of empowered teams, empiricism, continuous improvement.

And I had some really exciting conversations with trainers who were like, Yeah, well we're doing this in this aerospace company or this electric car supplier in Germany or whatever, or this financial services startup that's using blockchain for the first time. And of course they're using Agile. And so it was funny. It was almost as though all of those things, though there were the backdrop, it was still incredibly positive.

Nick Muldoon:

So this is interesting, and I guess if I reflect on the background for both of you, Eric, I'm looking at, you two have worked together from rational days-

Eric Naiburg:

A few times.

Nick Muldoon:

... a few times, but the prevalence of the Agile... I would describe you two as Agile natives and it sounds like, Dave, you've got your tribe there in Paris last week that are Agile natives. And I guess Eric, for you, what's the sense around the people that you are interacting with from a leadership perspective in these companies? Can you identify the Agile natives? Yeah, I guess is it an easier conversation if you've got Agile natives in leadership levels?

Eric Naiburg:

It's definitely an easier conversation if they're there. Sometimes they're in hiding, sometimes they're not Agile natives masquerading as Agile natives as well, which always makes it a little bit difficult because you have to peel back that onion and peel through who are they and what's their real agenda. I was talking to a CIO last week, and he was talking about the typical CIO lasts two to three years. So what is their real agenda? What are they trying to achieve? And Dave mentioned the people part of this, and people often become the hardest part of any Agile transformation or working in an Agile way. People want to protect themselves, they want to protect their turf, they want to do the things that they need to do to be successful as well. So you see that as talking to leaders within organizations, and they want to do better, they want to improve, they want to deliver faster, but they've still got that pressure. Organizations, at least large organizations, haven't changed. They still have boards, and they still report to those boards, and those boards still have their agendas as well.

Nick Muldoon:

You're making me recall a conversation that I had, this is several years ago, but on a trip through Europe, and it was with the Agile native, that was the Agile practice lead and probably wasn't masking, probably was legitimately an Agile native, yet they were talking about the mixed incentives for their, maybe not their direct leader, but the VP further up. And it was actually a, I don't want to say a zero-sum game, but there was some kind of fiefdom thing going where the various VPs would fight for resources, people, whatever, because that would unlock further bonus. But at the end of the day, it was not optimizing the entire financial services company. Are we still seeing that today?

Dave West:

Oh, very much so. In fact, a colleague of ours says, "Science used to have a saying, science progresses one funeral at a time." And I think Agile definitely has some of that, not funerals hopefully, but retirements.

Nick Muldoon:

Retirements

Dave West:

Retirement.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

Yeah. The reality is that when you don't have incentives aligned, where you don't have teams aligned to those incentives and leadership aligned to those consistent incentives, then you're going to always be dealing with some challenges. What's so frustrating is we all know the industrial revolution, and particularly the recent revolution of mass production and oil, which just happened in the deployment phase just after the second World War, was enabled by changing working practices created by people like Ford and Deming and all of these people. We all know that. The digital revolution is happening around us. It may even pass us if you believe the AI buzz that's happening. We may be put to the side and computers may just take over, but this digital is happening, and you are in with leaders and they're like, "Yeah, totally respect that. We are going to be a hundred percent digital. We are an airline, but really we are a digital company with wings."

They describe themselves in this way, and then they don't want to challenge the fundamentals of how authority, how value is managed, how risk is made transparent, how governance is, it happens, how funding is made and planning, et cetera. They don't want to challenge any of those assumptions. They like that the way it is. But we are going digital. It is ironic that it still is happening. However, that isn't totally hundred percent. The organizations that get it, the organizations that have leaders that are either insightful, either motivated, or maybe they want to write a book or something. Maybe their reasons aren't always as clear, but those leaders are dragging these organizations into the 21st century.

Great example. Proctor and Gamble, Gillette. Gillette, the latest exfoliating razor. I can see you haven't used it, unfortunately, Nick, with your rather handsome beard. So yeah. Anyway, I use it a lot, as you can tell. The exfo... Was built using Scrum and Agile. This is Proctor and Gamble, an ancient, okay not ancient, an older organization, but really has got it. They realize that if they want to keep up with their customers, their partners, their suppliers, they need to work in quite different ways. And so it isn't roses, but there are roses in the garden as it were.

Eric Naiburg:

And it goes beyond, when you think of that organization, you think of what Gillette has done, is it goes beyond traditional Agile thinking. Traditional Agile thinking, we think software, and this is engineering, this is manufacturing, this is bringing together marketing because in those types of organizations, marketing drives what the product's going to be, and then engineering figures out how to deliver that product and so on. So it's really bringing together the whole organization into how do we deliver something, and deliver it together. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. And one of the big changes that Agile helps to drive is that team. So you talked about incentives and team incentives, that's a piece of it, but it's team ownership. It's team togetherness.

It is that ultimately they all feel accountable, and bringing that accountability together as a team versus, and I think even... So my wife's in manufacturing and it's always... She's on the R and D side of it, and complaining about the marketing people. You have those conversations of, "Well, they don't realize what it takes to actually build this thing. They just have the dream." And by bringing them together in that team, and really they're having their daily scrums, they're planning together and they're having those hard conversations respectfully, that starts to build that team and build them in a way that they're able to actually deliver faster and more what the customer wants.

Dave West:

Can I just lean in, I'm sorry, we just taken over here a little Nick, but I just want to lean into something that Eric said around it is all about the teams. One of the fundamental problems we see in many organizations is hierarchy. Because if you get these massive hierarchies, obviously there's, "I've got to be in control of something. I need to take ownership of things. I need to be off irresponsible for certain things." That's how hierarchies work. And so that often undermines the ability of a team to effectively function. We need to flip that so that these hierarchies become, instead of being on top of the teams, they need to be underneath the teams supporting them. Think of them as those support trusses on bridges or whatever. You have some fabulous bridges in Australia and in Melbourne and in places like that and in Sydney.

So think of it upside down, holding up the teams. But that means, going back all again to incentives again, that those leaders need to understand what they're responsible for in this new world. And they're doing it for very good reason. They're doing it because the teams need to be, they're closer to the problem, they need to be empowered to make the decisions in real time based on the data, the information they have, they need to have clean line of sight to the customer. All of those things are the reason why a hierarchy is just too slow to respond and too bureaucratic. So we need to flip it and enable those teams. And that's a huge challenge.

Nick Muldoon:

I Love this. You two have given me something to ponder. So for the first six years of the company's life, of Easy Agile's life, we did have a very simple team page, and Dave and I as co-CEOs were at the bottom of the page. And then you had the leaders of the pillars. So you had, at the time, Tegan was the head of product, the leader, and they sat on top of Dave and I, and then the team sat on top of that. And it's interesting, I'm actually trying to reflect now, it's probably only in the last 12 or 18 months as we went through 40 people, that that page or that visualization has flipped. I've got an action item obviously to come out of this, thank you gentlemen, to actually go and flip it back because it's a communications mechanism, but if we actually put ourselves at the foundation in this supporting role for supporting the folks, that sets the tone, I imagine, for the team members in how they think of themselves and maybe that accountability piece as well, Eric.

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting because sometimes it's those little things that change how people think and feel. I use a lot of sports analogies when I talk and meet with people, and especially with where Dave was talking of empowering the people closest to the problem. We have to do the same in sport. If we have to wait for the manager to tell us to pass the ball, it's never going to happen. We've got to allow the people to make decisions and make those decisions on the field. We need to apply that to business as well. Allow the people who are closest to the problem, closest to what's happening, make those decisions within the business as well.

Nick Muldoon:

So if we come back to Proctor and Gamble, and we don't have to rabbit hole on it, but they're one of the large, long-lived companies, and I don't know about their approach, in particular, but I think about GE, and GE had their internal training university program, and they were training their leaders, training their managers how to manage, training their leaders how to lead. How does a Proctor and Gamble go about shifting that conversation internally, and what's that timeframe? Because presumably you've start with someone that's on a team. Do you have to elevate them over time through the hierarchy of the company?

Dave West:

It is interesting. I'm fortunate to spend maybe because we're both British people living in Boston, I'm fortunate to spend quite a lot of time with, and there's videos on our site with this, by the way, interviews with Dave Ingram who runs R and D for male grooming, it's called, in the Gillette part of P and G. And the case study is out there. So I talked to him a lot about how you drive it in a huge organization where they've got everything to lose. They've got products that are amazing, they've innovated, those products are the products that you put into your shopping cart as you walk down the aisle. They don't want to muck that up. Let's be frank. If suddenly, because of some innovation, there's no razors on the shelves, then I, as a board man need a razor. So I will buy an alternate product, and it's possible that then I'll always buy that product.

So they've got to be very, very careful. They've got more to lose. So we talk a lot about how you manage change and it's all of the above. What he's done very smartly is he's empowered the product owner role or the person, the glue role, whether it's using Scrum or something else, and he's really invested in these change agents in his organization, and he's definitely led by doing, he's been very honest and open about that, and very clear that he doesn't have all the answers and he's looking for them to help him during this, which isn't perhaps what you'd expect from a traditional organization where-

Nick Muldoon:

The leader might need to feel that they have the answer to all of these questions.

Dave West:

Exactly. And he's done a really, really good job of doing that. And primarily because he says, "Well, my success is ultimately their success, so if I can make them be a little bit more successful, there's more of them than me, so let's make it work." Which I think is an unusually honest and very insightful view of it. So he's driven it predominantly through product management ownership areas. He's then provided a support environment around that. He's then definitely advertised the successes. He's spent a lot of time building cross-functional teams. The thing that Eric was talking about. And really been very careful working with their leadership. If you're material science, there's a whole department, if there's marketing, there's this whole channel thing that they have. Basically working with their leaders to create the environment for success to happen. And I don't think it's easy. I think there's many surprising roadblocks along the way, and I can't speak for him on this, but he's taken that divide and conquer approach, focusing on that catalyst role.

Nick Muldoon:

Because you, obviously, you're providing a lot of training for various, well, I guess people at various levels in these companies. And obviously it's a far cry from having a CST and a CSM and a CSPO certification going back a decade, decade and a half. What's the uptake around the leadership training? And what does that look like, Eric? Is there renewed interest in that at the moment or are people demanding more of that leadership training? Is it fit for purpose for today's leader?

Eric Naiburg:

So I think to a point it is. We're certainly seeing growth in the leadership training. Matter of fact, Dave and I were just looking at those numbers earlier this week or yesterday, I guess. Today's [inaudible 00:21:29]

Nick Muldoon:

Are there are any numbers you can share with us?

Eric Naiburg:

It's hard to share the exact numbers, but we're seeing double-digit growth in number of students taking our leadership classes. Both how do you measure, so our evidence-based management classes, as well as our leadership training, but that also only goes so far because a lot of those folks, depending on how high up, especially in the organization you go, aren't willing to take lots of time out to take such training. So a lot of it happens in that coaching. They're hiring the executive coaches or the Agile coaches that are in there. The scrum masters that are in there are actually working to help coach those folks. And a lot of it's less about the training and more about the mindset shifts. So if you look at our Agile leadership course, a large part of it is spent on getting people to think differently. And really some of it's hit you over the head type of activities, where it really helps to drive those points across of, "Wow, I need to think differently. I need to work differently. I need to treat people differently."

Nick Muldoon:

Differently.

Eric Naiburg:

It's that, and we're seeing good success with that because especially when that light bulb goes off for folks, and that light bulb that goes off saying, "Wow, this is different." We have some exercises in our classes that really get you thinking and get you... There's one, for example, where you're thinking you're doing the right thing for the customer, and you're thinking you're doing exactly right until it kills the customer, because you didn't necessarily think through the whole. It's, "Well, this is what the customer wanted, so we need to do it, but maybe I should have got together with the team and let the team make decisions." I'm going a little extreme, but-

Nick Muldoon:

No, I appreciate it.

Eric Naiburg:

... it's those sorts of things that we have to change. And a lot of what we do in the course is educate leaders on what those teams are going through, and what the individuals on those teams need, and the type of support that they need, not how do you manage those teams, not how do you manage those people. But how do you empower and enable those people to be successful?

Nick Muldoon:

I want to just rewind for a second, sorry.

Eric Naiburg:

Killing people.

Nick Muldoon:

It sounded like there's a friction point in actually getting these leaders to take the time out of the office to go and get some education.

Eric Naiburg:

There is, yes.

Nick Muldoon:

Is that correct?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah.

Dave West:

It's incredibly hard if you're at a large organization, in particular, when your schedule is overlapping meetings continuously eight to nine hours a day for them to take that moment to step back. Everybody, I believe very strongly, Nick, that everybody needs to take time to invest in their own personal and professional development. And that time is not a waste. Ultimately it is an incredibly good investment.

Nick Muldoon:

Yes.

Dave West:

We know-

Nick Muldoon:

It's great ROI.

Dave West:

Totally. Even if it just resets you, even if you have that moment of clarity because of it. it's not a surprise that people like Bill Gates go on retreat every three to six months and he takes his big bag of books-

Nick Muldoon:

Books.

Dave West:

And he goes off grid for a few days just to reset. I think that that time is incredibly effective. But what's interesting is, we are under, in America in particular, and I'm sure it's true in Australia, it's certainly true in England, where I'm from, motion is more important than outcomes. It's all about the motions. If you look busy, you're not going to get fired. And I think to some extent we learned that in school. I don't know if your parents said to you or maybe you got your first job. I was working on a delicatessen counter at the co-op supermarket, and I remember there was an old worker there, turned to me, he goes, "Whatever you do, when the manager walks by," Mr. Short-

Nick Muldoon:

Look busy.

Dave West:

... was his name. And he was everything that name implies. "Mr. Short walks by, look like you're doing something, start cleaning something, otherwise he'll take you off and make you do provisions, and you don't want to dealing with that milk, it's rancid." And I remember that. Look busy. And I think we've got a lot in our culture. I try to take time every week. I book, for instance, my lunch hour, I book it and I always try to do something in it. I try to watch a TED talk, read something, just to clear your mind to think about something different. I think that time is incredibly important. However-

Nick Muldoon:

Get exposed to some new perspective, right?

Dave West:

Exactly. Even if it means, even if the stuff you're watching or whatever isn't that relevant necessarily. Sometimes that lack of relevance is exactly what you need because your mind does something.

Nick Muldoon:

A mental break.

Dave West:

Exactly. And however in corporate America, and I think that's corporate in general, that doesn't happen. People are overly leveraged, they're incredibly busy. They have to attend these meetings, otherwise their profile is diminished. And I think that's at the detriment of the organization and the company. Here's a question, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

Who have you helped recently?

Nick Muldoon:

Who have I helped recently? I spend most of my time, and I get most of my energy out of coaching conversations with individuals. So on my [inaudible 00:27:35] profile, I've got futurist very high up, and so I love exploring what is your life and your career going to look like in five years time? They're the conversations that I really get jazzed by.

Dave West:

And that's what everybody... Who have you helped is more important than what have you done.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

And I think you need to balance that.

Nick Muldoon:

I pulled up these stats because I thought you might find them interesting. We did a survey last year of a subset of our customers. And we had 423 teams. So it's not a huge sample size, but 423 teams. And the reason I think about it is because there's a lot of, what was the statistic here? So just to give you a sense, most common sprint duration is 14 or two week sprints. Most teams have six people that are involved. Fibonacci for story pointing, an estimation. 10% of these teams achieved what they set out to achieve at the start of the sprint. And so the teams, this 10% of teams, the subset, they did add work into their sprints, but teams that were unsuccessful, rolled work from sprint to sprint.

And so perhaps what it indicated to us is that there are teams that over commit and under deliver, and in fact 90% of them, 90% of the survey teams, it would appear that they over commit and under deliver. And then there are teams that are, maybe, leaving time, Dave, maybe for some education or some spare time in their two-week sprint. And they actually happen to pull on more work and they achieve that. And I'm just thinking about that from a sense of, are 90% of these teams trying to be busy or are they trying to be perceived to be busy? Even if it's at the expense of actually delivering?

Eric Naiburg:

Or are they even pushed into it? It's interesting, there's a question on our professional scrum master one, our PSM one test that often people get wrong. And I think it's a great question, which is, I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly, but it's essentially how much of the sprint backlog needs to be filled coming out of sprint planning. And a significant number of people say it needs to be complete coming out of sprint planning. Which goes in the face of Agile and Scrum.

Dave West:

Exactly.

Eric Naiburg:

Because we don't know there. There's that uncertainty. All we need is enough to get started, and once we get started, but I think people are fearful of, "Well, we've got two weeks, we need to be able to plan those two weeks and we better be able," and this is some of that top-down pressure that we talked about. "Well, we need to show that we've got two weeks worth of work here and that we're not sitting around, so let's fill it up." And those are some of the misnomers about Agile and Scrum. "Well, it's a two-week sprint, we need to plan two weeks." Well, no, we don't. We need to have a goal. Where are we going to get to? How we achieve it is going to take time because we're going to learn as we go. As a matter of fact, the scrum team that I'm on right now, we were running a three-week sprint, and two weeks in we've actually achieved our goal. And now we're able to build upon that goal. And we already delivered on that goal a week early, which is great.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you think, Eric, that there's a fear from leadership that if people haven't got two weeks worth of work teed up, that they're just going to be twiddling their thumbs?

Eric Naiburg:

I don't know that it's a fear from leadership. I think it's a perception that the workers have of what leadership is thinking. I think it's more that. And I think it's the, "Well, we said we've got two weeks," and they are going to ask us, management's going to say, "When will you deliver?" I don't know that we'll ever get away from that when will we deliver question, even though we continually try to get away from that answer. But they're going to ask it. So if they're going to ask it, I better be prepared, which means I better have a whole bunch of work laid out. And that just breaks everything that we teach. It breaks everything that we think in Agile.

And all I need in planning is I need a goal, and some idea of how I'm going to get there. And over time let's revisit it and let's continue to revisit it and go to it. But it amazes me how often that some of the answers to that question are, you have a full sprint backlog go coming out of sprint planning, you have enough to get started. I forget what some of the others are. But it amazes me how many times when I review tests people put the full back sprint backlog where it even says, right in the scrum guide, "You're going to inspect and adapt throughout the sprint." Well, how do I inspect and adapt if I've already decided what I'm going to do?

Nick Muldoon:

Who's the onus on? If it's not actually the leadership's wish that you fill up all your time and you operate at a hundred percent capacity, then is the onus on the leader to make it known or is the onus on the team to engage in the conversation?

Dave West:

It's the leader.

Eric Naiburg:

Yes.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Yes, both. Yeah.

Dave West:

I think it's more the leader because I think they have to create the environment where the team actually can challenge it, and actually have that very clear conversation. What worries me about your stan is the fact that I don't... The first few sprints. Yes, maybe you get overly excited, maybe you fill the sprint, which you don't need to. Maybe you're just keen. That's okay. The thing is, what happens on sprint three or four or five, when the same pattern is manifesting itself over and over again. That's worrying. And I think that speaks really clearly to the lack of help the team's having. Whether you call it an Agile coach, and in Australia, I think the Agile manager is a phrase that's used, or whether it's an Agile, or whether it's a scrum master, whatever. Scrum.org has a scrum master.

And the reason why we have a scrum master isn't because we don't know scrum, though there's some days it might be questionable. But cobbler's children, all that stuff. But the reality is, we do know Scrum, we talk it, we breathe it, we love it. But having somebody that steps back and says, "Hang on, Westy, what have you done there? Have you forced encouraged the team to fill the sprint? Have you set them an unrealistic goal? Have you listened to them and asked them the questions? Or have you told them what you want? And what do you think that's going to do?" I know that I have, because Eric and I fund the sprints, as it were. When we go to a sprint review and we say stuff, because a sprint review is ultimately there to provide feedback to the team, to allow them to inspect and adapt for the next sprint.

You can't change the past, but you can change the future based on feedback. If I go in with, "Oh, well that's rubbish and you should do this, and what about that?" Yeah, it's going to have an impact. So ultimately we have to think about, as leaders, what we bring, and also have somebody often helping us to be the leader that we need to be because we get excited and we get enthusiastic and we get, "Oh, you can do this and that? Let's do it. That sounds awesome." And sometimes that can...

Eric Naiburg:

And that's part of why I say it's both. That's why I said the yes. It's on the leader, but the leader needs to be reminded of that. The leader needs to be supported by that, especially by the product owner and the scrum master. The product owner has to be able to say no. The product owner has to... I talk about happy ears and most CEOs and senior leaders are-

Nick Muldoon:

Happy ears?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeas. Most CEOs and senior leaders I've worked with have what I call happy ears. They come from one customer or they talk to one person and heard something that-

Dave West:

Do this.

Eric Naiburg:

... that one person might have thought was great. And next thing you know, they're putting all these new requirements on the team. And I've worked in many startups and big companies where, even at IBM, that happened. And the product owner needs to be able to say, "Whoa, hold on. That's a great idea. Let's think about it. And we'll put it on the backlog, we'll think about it later. But let's not distract the team right now from what we're trying to do and what we're trying to achieve." And that's why I say it's both. It's not just on the leader. You're not going to fully change the leader. You're not going to fully change them to not have those exciting moments. And that's what makes them entrepreneurs. That's what makes them who they are.

But the team needs to be able to push back. The leader needs to be accepting of that pushback and the scrum master and the product owner, as well as others on the team, need to be able to have that pushback. I remember very, very early in my career, I worked for a company called Logicworks. We had a data model, a little data modeling tool called Irwin. And I remember sitting in my cube, and the CEO had just come back from a meeting with one client, and comes over, and I was a product manager-

Nick Muldoon:

Eric, do this.

Eric Naiburg:

And starts talking about, we need to go do this now, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, hold on. It's like, but blah, blah, blah said they'd buy it. Well one, did you actually talk to the people using it? Or did you talk to somebody way up here who has no idea how they're actually using the tool? Which the answer was talking to CEO to CEO conversation. And just because they'll buy it, will anybody? But you have to be able to have those conversations. You have to build that trust with the leader from the team, and from the team to the leader, to be able to have those pushbacks and be able to say, "That's an interesting idea. We'll take it under consideration for the future, but right now we have a focus. We've got a sprint goal and we're not going to destroy our sprint goal because you got excited about something."

Dave West:

As you can see, Nick, I have a really hard time getting any of my ideas into our organization because they ask things like this. So annoying, Nick. They say, "Okay, that's great. Is that more important than these five things that are currently driving our product goal?" I'm like, "Ugh, what do you mean? I can't have dessert and main course and an appetizer? I have to pick one that's just so not fair." And they said, "Well, we could spin up another team and then that requires investment. It's going to take time." And I'm like, "Oh gosh, don't you hate it when you have intelligent, smart teammates?" It's just hard.

Nick Muldoon:

Dave and I have definitely, so Dave Elkin, my co-founder, he comes from an engineering background and I come from a product background. And we've definitely noticed in the last, again, probably in this timeframe, in the last 18 months, as the team's grown or through a certain inflection point, in the past, we would quite come comfortably have conversations about what about this idea and how about that? And we'd try and tease things out, and we'd tease them out with the team, but there was no expectation that that stuff would get picked up. And then we had few examples where teams would go and take on and think that they needed to look at this stuff and we're like, "Oh, no, no, no, sorry, we should clarify that we just wanted to get a brainstorm or we wanted to get a thought out of our head, and we wanted some perspective on it, but this should absolutely not mean that you should chase it down." And so the language and how we've had to approach things like that, or activities like that, has certainly changed.

Eric Naiburg:

I've seen that a lot lately-

Nick Muldoon:

[inaudible 00:39:50] Inflection point.

Eric Naiburg:

... probably in the last two or so years. And I think maybe because of remote, it's made it even worse, because you don't get all the emotion and things. But I've definitely seen a lot more of that, of, "Well, I'm just," I've been told this doesn't translate, "but I'm just spit balling and I'm just throwing an idea out there just to have a conversation." And because the leader said it, people think it's fact and that they want to do it. And all they were doing is, "Hey, I heard this thing. What do you think?"

Nick Muldoon:

What's your perspective?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah, exactly. And I think as leaders, we have to be very careful to understand the impact of what we're saying, because we may be thinking of it as, "I'm just throwing it out there for some conversation." Somebody sitting at the desk just heard, "Oh, they want us to go do that." And I've seen that a lot in companies recently, including in ours, where the way something's said or what is said is taken on as we must do this versus, "Hey, here's an idea, something to noodle on it." So you're not alone, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it. Hey, Eric, Oregon, that's a great place to call it. That is, and you have given me, you've both given me a lot to noodle on, so I'd like to say thank you so much from our listeners and from the crew at Easy Agile for joining us today. I really appreciate it. It's been wonderful having you on the podcast.

Dave West:

Well, thank you for inviting us. We're really grateful to be here, and hopefully some of this has made sense, and yeah, let's continue to grow as a community and as a world working in this way, because I think we've got a lot of problems to solve. I think the way we do that is people working effectively in empowered ways. So let's change the world, man.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it. Okay, that's great. Thank you.

Transcript:

Sean Blake:

Hello, everybody. I'm Sean Blake, the host of this episode of the Easy Agile podcast. I'm also Head of Marketing at Easy Agile, where our mission is to help teams around the world work better together. We have a fascinating guest with us today. It's John Turley from Adaptavist. John is a pragmatic Agile leader with 25 years experience working in companies at all levels, from teams to C suite, always bringing real value, adding change to the way organizations work. Dissatisfied with the standard discourse around transformation and agility, he is passionate about applying cutting edge knowledge from fields as diverse as sociology and psychology. We're really excited to have John on the podcast today. So John, thanks so much for being on the Easy Agile podcast.

John Turley:

You're welcome, Sean. Pleasure to be here.

Sean Blake:

Thank you so much. So John, you've got a lot of experience in the Agile space, in the tech space. And I'm not trying to call you old. But I'd love to get a sense of what's changed over 25 years. It must just be night and day from where you started to what you see now.

John Turley:

There's a lot of change. And I'm pretty comfortable with old. I'm 48 now, and it's closest to 30 years now. That tells you when I first wrote that bit in the bio. So the technology has changed. That's mind blowing. I started off in ops, and then infrastructure and project management and stuff and 1999, 2000, it would take us three months and 50,000 quid to build a couple of web servers with a pair of load balancers and firewalls and a database at the back. And now we spin them up in seconds.

John Turley:

This is profound. Platform technology is profound slack or I mean platform technologies, that makes a massive difference to the way we interact. Scale is a massive issue. I would say that the world is sort of dichotomized into very large and quite small organizations. There seem to be less in the middle. It's just a gut feeling. We see, I think trust is collapsed. We see that in Edelman Trust Barometer. We see the complexity has increased. That's deeply problematic for us. [inaudible 00:02:23] has been measuring that one.

John Turley:

And we see that workforce engagement is at all time lows through the Gallup World Poll. Those things are big, big changes. What's the same though is the people, the way the people think, the way we construct our reality, our mindset, if you like, the way we make sense of the world around us is very, very similar. So although we now talk a lot more about Agile, the waterfall and waterfall for many is a bit of a dirty word, not for me and same with command and control. People are taking the same mindsets. This is measurable and provable. People are taking the same mindset that they had around waterfall and command and control using different language of Agile and behaving in the same way. That hasn't changed.

Sean Blake:

Very interesting. So you touched on trust, and how basically we've seen this breakdown of trust across the board. And I've just watched a documentary that's come out on Netflix around the Social Dilemma, and how the trust that we have in these big social media platforms is eroding. And we're getting a little bit skeptical around what these big companies are doing to us as the customer. Do you find that that's a hard balance with the people that you work with around being customer focused, but still building a profitable and growing business?

John Turley:

Yeah, I do. Yes, and the way I think it manifests itself, which again maybe we'll get into the sort of the psychology and the sociology as well as the complexity science, I'm into it later. But there's a very clear way that that lack of trust manifests itself. I'm not sure it's the lack of trust that manifests itself. But there's a very clear thing that's happening is people, there's repeated patterns of behavior I see all over the place in a lot of the work I do, which is one on one and with groups, that people hold on to this idea that their view is right and anything that doesn't comply with that is wrong.

John Turley:

This is a view that comes from the predominant mindset from what [inaudible 00:04:33] call the sort of expert or the achiever mindset, and it becomes a barrier to us collaborating and learning together and innovating. If somebody with a different point of view is dismissed as wrong, then there's no common ground to start to build trust. Trust is eroded from the outset, and that means that we can't collaborate, and in a complex world where we need to collaborate ever more closely and learn together and innovate, that's a deep, deep problem.

John Turley:

And the response seems to be that people actually withdraw, they withdraw into groups, we might call them cliques or echo chambers. The sociologists call this process homophily. This is a function like many say of platforms like Twitter, we retreat into groups that echo the opinions that we already hold that then reinforce those opinions, and separate us from the opinions of others and reinforce the opinions we have. So the gaps between the cliques grow wider, and particularly in times of COVID and the lockdown that we've had here, and that we seem to be maybe heading back into the isolation perhaps adds to that, and we see it more and more. So at a time where we need to be getting our act cliques and talking with understanding with others with different views, we're actually psychologically in a difficult position to be able to do that. And so that's what we might generically call the lack of trust manifests itself in the work that I'm doing. And that's how I see it with almost everybody that I work with, including myself, by the way. It's not an easy thing to conquer.

Sean Blake:

So what does your day to day look like, John? I think your official job title is Digital Transformation Consultant. You work for Adaptivist as one of the most well known Agile consulting practices in the world, I would say. What does that mean for you day to day? What does your nine to five look like?

John Turley:

So we're really involved in three things. I'm really involved in three things. And it's all about learning, collective learning, organization learning. So we're involved in a lot of original research. We do that original research with a number of academic partners in a program that we're putting together. We've been doing a lot of the research on our own. But as it gets bigger and more credible, other partners are coming to join us and they're very credible partners.

John Turley:

And the research is uncovering new learning. And that new learning points us to new consulting practices where we can take that learning and embed it into a workshop, say or how we might use the research instruments that we've borrowed from academia in the real world to measure social networks or psychological complexity or the amount of autonomy in the environment. So we can then use that to work with teams to help them shift from a sort of functionally oriented way of working to a cross functional way of working, which whether we're talking about safe and Agile release chains, or whether we're talking about Lean software management and value streams, whether we're talking at a team level or an organizational level, the challenge is essentially the same. We need to orientate ourselves around the creation of customer value in cross functional teams that are focused on delivering that value, not just delivering on their function. And that switch brings with it some deep, complex, deep psychological challenges that we're just not really equipped to meet. So we bring sort of the people and culture element, the tools and the Agile methodology simultaneously to bear in teams to help them make that shift. So that's really what my day to day work looks like, so the research and the practice.

Sean Blake:

Okay, research and practice. And when it comes to the practice side and encouraging that cross functional collaboration, how hard is it for people to get on board with that recommendation or get on board with what the company is trying to do?

John Turley:

For most people, it's really hard. So my experience before doing the research that I guess we started a couple of years ago I was just referring to, was something like this recently. We'd often get, so I've worked in the Agile space for a long time, I don't quite know when I started working in that space, in other words, full space, but a decade or two, let's say, and now bumped into a repeated problem, we get our, let's say, thinking of a specific example with a specific client about three years ago, very functionally orientated, trying to make that shift into cross functional teams. So we got a group of five people together from different functions, so designers, testers, developers, a couple of ops people, and between them, they should be able to obviously, launch some working code within 10 days or whatever. We were probably trying to spring into the real world.

John Turley:

And they were all great people. I knew them all personally. I spent time working with them all. They were very sort of Agile in the way they approached the development of the software that they did, and we put them in a room virtually to begin with and we asked them to produce a piece of code that works across functions, produce a piece of code and release it at the end of the week. And they didn't. And we thought what on earth happened there? We didn't really understand this, so we tried it again. But we assumed that the problem is because we'd done it virtually.

John Turley:

So this time, we got everybody together in Poland, as it happened in a room, we set it all up, we talked to them at the beginning, then people like me sort of left the room and let them get on with it, got to the end of the week, same outcome, nothing has happened. And if you talk to them, while they say, "Yeah, my phone pinged and there was a support incident, and you just couldn't.", and they had lots of very plausible reasons why they couldn't come together as a cross functional team. But the fact remains twice in a row, the most capable people haven't done it.

John Turley:

So we had a really long think about it, one of the senior leader in the business and myself. And we realized that the only thing that could be happening, the only thing that could be going wrong here is that there must be some sort of breakdown in the dialogue between the group in the room. So we ran it, we ran the workshop, let's call it for a third time. And this time, we had somebody else in the room just watching what was going on.

John Turley:

And they spotted something happened really early on. One of the people from the UK said to one of the Polish developers, they said, "Look, think of us like consultants. We're here to help you, to transfer knowledge to you so that you develop a capability so that you can do this on your own." And at that moment, the person who was in the room said that the dynamic in the room seemed to change. People glazed over. And I think what it was is that that word consultant that the English person had used had a different meaning for a colleague in Krakow. I think that meaning, the meaning of consultant meant, we're just here to tell you what to do and not actually do anything and put ourselves on the hook for any work, just kind of watch you do it.

John Turley:

And I think at that point, they kind of went, "Okay, well, all right, I get it, same old, same old. We'll do the work you English guys talk about it, because it's an English company.", and that breakdown started to occur. So the question we started is, I've seen that all over the place. So the question we started to wrestle with in our research is what's happening in those moments when that dialogue breaks down what's happening?

John Turley:

And what we've discovered is that there is a number of research studies, the biggest is about 10,000 people, that shows that around about 50% of people are at a level, and this is 50% of leaders in a study of 10,000, so for middle management, senior management, so it's a skewed number. So in reality, in software teams, it's probably more than 50% of people have reached a level of psychological complexity that suits the environment as it was, but has some limitations in cross functional working.

John Turley:

So they have a mindset, a way of making their reality that works well in a functional environment, but it's challenged in a cross functional environment. And that mindset, this way of thinking, which is very prevalent, is a way of thinking where individuals draw their self esteem from their expertise, just to put it very short, simple as an oversimplification. And the thing is, if you're drawing your self esteem from your expertise, when your expertise is challenged, it feels personal.

John Turley:

If it feels personal, people are likely to get defensive. And it's not because they're stupid, or they're not interested or they don't want to, the psychologists can show it's a level of psychological complexity, where that's just how our minds work. That's just how our meaning making works. Now, if that's the stage you're at, if we imagine me as a developer sitting down with a tester, and the tester's saying to me, "Look, the way you've written the code isn't the best way to do it for me, because I can't test it."

John Turley:

If I'm drawing my self esteem from my expertise as a developer, I'm likely to reject that, and might even start to think thoughts like, "Well, I think what really needs to happen here is that you need to be a better tester." I think that's the problem. And then we get this separation. Now at the next stage is psychological complexity. And these stages are in a framework that we do move through these stages. Again, it's an oversimplification, but it's observable and measurable. At slightly later stage of psychological complexity, things start to change. People start to recognize that the world is much more complex, that it's not black and white. And actually, there are multiple ways of doing things.

John Turley:

So to go back to my example as a developer, the tester might say to me, "This isn't the best way to write the code as far as I'm concerned." And what I'll hear is the, "Oh, as far as I'm concerned." It might be as far as I'm concerned, it's not fair enough. How can we change the way I'm writing the code to make it easier to test? But I can't do that if I respond like it's a personal criticism, you know what I mean? So what we started to uncover in the research is a correlation between how successful cross functional teams can be, and the level of psychological complexity in the leaders and the individuals in that team.

Sean Blake:

Interesting. So there's a book that we've been reading at Easy Agile recently called Radical Candor. And really, it comes down to giving constructive feedback to each other, not in a way where you're attacking them personally but you're trying to be honest around how we can work more collaboratively. And like you said with that example, how can a developer write code in a way that the QA tester can actually perform the tests on it? For someone who's new to cross functional ways of working, what advice does the research have around preparing that mindset to receive some of that radical candor, to receive that feedback in a way that you don't take it personally?

John Turley:

Well, so it's a great question, you put it really well, because radical candor is fine. We have, I work in a team that is very candid. We have some difficult conversations, and we don't even really dress our words up. And nobody gets offended. We just know that it's a shortcut. We might get our words wrong, but it's a shortcut to unlocking value to finding out how to work together. But it's not about the words that each of us picks to express. It's about how the other chooses to react to the words landing, as much as now that's a dialogue, it's a two way thing, it takes two to tango.

John Turley:

And the way we can develop a mindset that's more suitable to cross functional work is interesting. First of all, we've got to get out of comfort zone. We've got to be prepared to get out of our comfort zone, not far necessarily, and not for very long necessarily, and not without support and understanding from the colleagues around us. But we do need to get out our comfort zone. Otherwise, psychological growth can't occur. This is what I'm talking to about now is the work really of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, who do a lot of work in dialogue on radical candor.

John Turley:

So we've got to get out of our comfort zone. But we've also got to be addressing a complex problem with a group of people when we're outside of our comfort zone. And that complex problem has to be meaningful, and it has to be salient, it has to be something that we care about, it has to be something relevant to our day to day work. And if we've got those characteristics in the environment that we working in, then there is an opportunity for individuals to choose to develop their own psychological complexity.

John Turley:

So that environment that has those characteristics, we would call in Kegan's word a deliberately developmental environment, because we can't separate the development of individual mindsets from the environment that that mindset functions in. The reason most of us have got the mindset that draws self esteem from expertise is because that's actually what most environments that we work in or not. That works in a functional environment. It's where you get promoted, it's where you get hired. It's where you get your Scrum Master badge and all that other stuff that gives you status and makes you feel good.

John Turley:

The world that we work in for many of us honors that expert way of making meaning. It doesn't honor learning and admission that yours might not be the best way to do things in the same way. So we have to shift the environment to support the individual to choose to take that developmental step because it can't be something that's done to them. You can't make people develop a more complex psychology. You can't train them to do it. You can only give them an environment that supports that step if they want to take it and if they don't, fair enough, that's okay. But maybe cross functional teams for them, if they don't want to because the hard place is to work.

Sean Blake:

Is it a problem that people find their expertise or find their self esteem from expertise? Is part of it encouraging men to find their confidence in things outside of their work or is expertise an honorable pursuit?

John Turley:

I wouldn't say it's a problem at all. Expertise, and the development of expertise is an honorable pursuit. Drawing your self esteem from your expertise is a very necessary part of our psychological development is a stage that can't be skipped really. I said to you before that I don't like to say things like that without the research base, but the psychology certainly imply that it's a stage that can't be skipped. So we've got to do it. We've got to go through this stage. The stage before we're drawing our self esteem from our expertise is where we draw our self esteem from our membership of the group.

John Turley:

And that's very important too, if you think of us as children or being part of a group is essential for our survival, so ingratiating yourself into that group, not rocking the boat, so we don't jeopardize our group membership is critical. But at some point, people start to realize, well, actually, I have to rock the boat a little bit if we want some direction. So separating your meaning making from drawing your self esteem from the group to drawing your self esteem from your expertise is a development in that sense. Drawing your self esteem from your expertise means the best way to write this code is let me train somebody to do it.

John Turley:

It's critical. But like all developmental stages, it has its limitations. So it's not problematic in any way, unless the individual is in a complex environment in which that expert way of making meaning isn't well suited. And then you got a mismatch between psychological complexity and environmental complexity. And when you've got a mismatch like that, the individual's anxiety will go up probably, employee engagement goes down, certainly wellbeing goes down, people revert to an earlier way of making their meaning that's more embedded in their expertise or the group, just to the point, they need to get more sophisticated.

John Turley:

So the problem is the mismatch between psychological complexity and environmental complexity. That's why we need to support, as the world gets more complex, that's why we need to get all get better at supporting the development of individuals into a level of psychological complexity that suits the more complex environment. That's kind of the nub of the problem. Nothing wrong with being an expert in drawing your self esteem from your expertise. People have done it forever, and will continue to do so. Every time you get in a flash car and you feel good, because you're in a car, you're drawing your self esteem from the status symbol, which is very similar to your expertise. As a young man, I put on my sharp suit and I feel a million dollars. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it's limited. That's the problem.

Sean Blake:

Understood, understood. So you've spoken about research and measurement and having an evidence based way of making decisions. When it comes to this cross functional way of working or digital transformation or teams moving from the old way of working to an Agile way of working, do we have evidence to say one way of working is superior to another way of working? And when you're talking to these clients or these customers, can you guarantee that if they work in this way, it's going to lead to better outcomes for the business? How do you approach that conversation?

John Turley:

No, I can't do either of those things. So I would never go anywhere near nor would I research saying that one way of working is better than another way of working or we can say like the mindset and the environment that there are ways of working that will work better depending on the problem that you're trying to solve. But it's very unlikely that one could be considered right and the other wrong in all sorts of circumstances, but more than that, I would say that doesn't matter what your way of working is or a team's way of working is. If the mindset is the way of making sense, if the reality doesn't also shift, then you're just following a new process, a new way of working with the old way of thinking, and you're going to get the same results just with different words.

John Turley:

So for me, that isn't entirely true, I'm quite biased. I guess in the work I do, I've got quite a perspective. If you shift mindset, then everything else will drop into place. If you change everything else, but don't shift mindset, nothing else will drop into place. What we can say however, is that there are three things, let's call them the three elements of a cross functional team that are hidden to people in organizations at the moment.

John Turley:

So generally, we think if we've got people with the right experience and skills working suitably hard, then they're going to work as a successful cross functional team. And if they're not, they're either not working hard, they're not the right type of person, or they haven't got the right set of skills, so fire them and hire somebody else or give them or put them on a training course, and that solves the problem, which of course it doesn't.

John Turley:

We would say that there are three other elements that remain hidden parts of the cross functional team that are more critical than that, and we're beginning to be able to demonstrate that there is a correlation between these three things that I'm going to tell you about on both employee engagement and team performance.

John Turley:

And these three hidden elements are the structure of the social networks that underpin the way people work. So if we think about how we as groups of human beings organize ourselves, we might think about hierarchies and hierarchy diagrams and old charts and bosses and stuff. That's not really very important for a cross functional team. What's much more important is the social network that develops across that team, who works with whom and when and how, right? Do the developers and the testers and the testers and the ops guys and the designers and the technical architects, do they all work together in a cross functional team?

John Turley:

Now that's a social network. That's a network that's formed through individual autonomy because they want to get the job done not because the boss says you've got to go and do it. In fact, it can't be done because the boss says go and do it. So we have worked with some friends in academia with actually an Australian company called Polinode to measure their various ways we can get the data, what those social networks look like. And the structure of those social networks is key.

John Turley:

As we look at the structure of social networks, we can see whether those teams look like their function, sorry, organized hierarchically, or were they organized for cross functional working because of the network structure. So network structure is one element. The other is psychological complexity. So we've worked with a gentleman called David Rook, who did the original research and developed a psychometric instrument that can measure an individual's stage of psychological complexity, both the structure and the substructure. And that mindset complexity is also linked along with network structure to where the teams can function cross functionally.

John Turley:

The third thing that was the hardest bit, the last bit of the jigsaw that we sort of put into our hypothesis is we need to have adequate degrees of autonomy. We needed to develop a much better understanding of what it means for teams to be autonomous than we had, and how that autonomy relates to control and how control undermines autonomy and how we all tend to be orientated, to taking the cues in the environment either as instructions, which we must comply with or invitations to be autonomous. And we now have another psychometric instrument. So the third instrument that we use, we call the motivation orientation scale, excuse me, that can measure an individual's likelihood to interpret inbound information as an instruction or an invitation to be autonomous.

John Turley:

And once we know that, we can start to challenge this common perception within product teams, software teams that the team is autonomous, because everybody thinks they are autonomous. And in fact, everybody is, research shows mostly autonomous, but we might be almost entirely autonomous, or we might be 60% autonomous. We can measure this. And then we can say to teams, "Look, you are autonomous as a bunch of individuals. But you also have this control thing going on where you're responding to inbound requests."

John Turley:

And we need to be more autonomous. So once we can start to measure it, we can start to challenge their ideas of how autonomous they are. And we can start to examine where the teams are choosing to respond from that control orientation or their autonomy. So they're the three things, autonomy and control, complexity of mindset and network structure, equal employee engagement and team performance. That's what our research says. So what we can say is, to your question in the beginning, there is a network structure, a level of psychological complexity and the amount of autonomy that correlates to successfully working as a cross functional team. And in that sense, we might think that those levels are right, in some sense.

Sean Blake:

Okay. So what does a 100% autonomous team look like? And do they still have interaction with, say the executive team on a day to day basis? Or are they at odds, those two concepts?

John Turley:

No, they're not at odds. They do have, they might have day to day, I suppose they would, they will have either directly or indirectly interactions with the executive team. So the first thing we need to bear in mind here is that the research that we're leaning on is something called self determination theory, which is a theory of motivation. And it has quite a specific definition of autonomy, which is not what we might normally think. Often autonomy is taken to mean as sort of the general use of independence. So if we buy a company, we might leave it to run autonomously, which would mean we just left it alone for a while. And autonomy in this context doesn't mean that. It means individuals acting of their own volition, individuals deciding how to act towards a common purpose. So the team has to have the vision which they can self organize around. You can't self organize without autonomy. If you don't got autonomy, you have to wait to be told what to do. And then it's not self organization.

John Turley:

So autonomy leads to self organization, and self organization can be around a common vision or a set of goals or an OKR is quite a sophisticated way to do instead of management by objective, then we can self organize in a way that sort of honors the need to be part of an organization, doing some coordinated work, but that doesn't rely on a manager telling the individual what to do.

John Turley:

That's what an autonomous team looks like. An autonomous team, you need the autonomy is really a self organizing team. And the self organizing team is deciding what the team ought to do in order to achieve a wider objective, which could be integrating with other self organizing teams. And obviously, the direction is set often by the executive. So all these things sort of come into play. It's not a question of control on the one hand or autonomy on the other or Agile on one hand or waterfall on the other.

John Turley:

So we're going to blend the two. We're going to balance them. And that balance needs to shift not only across teams, but also depending on the level that the organization is, that the team is working in the organization. And what I mean by that is the need for control and measurement increases in many ways as you go higher up the organization. So we want high degrees of autonomy at a team level where we're creating customer value. But we need to recognize that that self organizing team has a legitimate requirement to integrate with some elements of controlling the organization, because if we have some elements of control, then we can't do the accounting and be accountable for where we spend investors' or shareholders' money, you know what I mean? So it's much more complex in the sort of the dichotomized world that people tend to look at, which is very black and white. Is it Agile or is it waterfall? Are we autonomous or are we control orientated where you're both and the blend of which needs to shift depending on the environment here.

Sean Blake:

Okay, okay. So there's always a need for a bit of control on top of the autonomy.

John Turley:

It's a balance, right? We're all comfortable with control, aren't we? We all comply with speed limits, for example. We're perfectly okay with that. Control is not a dirty word. Some will do things that we're told to do sometimes, and we're happy to do it. Sometimes we do it begrudgingly. We're not happy to do it. Sometimes we reject it. There's nothing wrong with control in itself. It's the overuse of control to coerce people to do things that they don't want to do. That's when it becomes problematic because it undermines an individual's autonomy, which is a basic, universal psychological need. We all need to have a sufficient degree of autonomy to feel well.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay. So we know that Agile's had a good run, it's been decades now. So do you still find that you come across the same objections when you're speaking to these executive teams or these companies perhaps from more traditional industries? Do they still have the same objections to change as they did in the past? And how do you try and overcome them?

John Turley:

Yes, they do. So one of my strange experiences as a young project or program manager, whatever I was, is that when I would end up in a room full of software developers who were Agile, probably the language they would have used at the time and a bunch of infrastructure engineers who followed waterfall, and the distaste for one group for the other, it was almost visceral, and you could see it in them. There would be a bunch in, I don't know, Linux t-shirts and jeans, and then the infrastructure waterfall people would probably be wearing suits.

John Turley:

I mean, it was really obvious, and it was hard to bring these groups together. That was my experience in let's say, around about 2000, I sat with a client yesterday, who said exactly the same thing. They said that in their organization, which is going through a very large, Agile transformation at the moment, they said, "These are their ways. We kind of got people at the two extremes. We can sort of bookend it. We've got the waterfall people who think their way is best and we got the Agile people who are totally on board with Agile transformation."

John Turley:

And what I heard when the individual said that is quite senior leaders, the Agile people are on board with the Agile transformation brackets because they think their way of working is best. And what I tried to point out to that senior manager was that that was one group, there were perceptions anyway, that one group was into Agile and got cross functional working, all that got cross functional working and the other group didn't, actually the two groups were operating in the same way.

John Turley:

They both thought their way of working was right, and one was espousing the virtues of waterfall and the other Agile, but the fact was they both thought that they were right, and the other was wrong. And they were both wrong in that. Waterfall works really, really well in a lot of scenarios. And full on Agile works really, really well in some environments. In some environments, it's quite limited by the way, in my opinion.

John Turley:

My friend and colleague, John Kern, who was a co author of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 or 2004, whatever it was, I can't remember. He says, "I love waterfall. I do loads of waterfall, I just do it in very small chunks." And because the fact is we've got to do work sequentially in some manner. I can't work on an infinite number of things in parallel. There has to be a sequence.

John Turley:

And that really, when I heard him say that, it sort of filled my heart with joy in a way because for somebody with a waterfall background, I used to say, "Look, I don't get this. In waterfall project management, we're talking about stages. And in Agile, we're talking about sprints." And they've both got an end. One's got a definition of done. And one's got some acceptance criteria, and they both got a beginning. The only difference is the language and the duration.

John Turley:

So what if we make sprints, sorry, stages 10 days long? What's the difference now? And yet people would say, "Well, we're Agile, and we do sprints, and that would still be a stage." Come on, we've got to find some common ground right to build a common meaning making between large groups of people. Otherwise, only the Agile listeners amongst us can work for Agile organizations, and everybody else is doomed. And that's not true, is it? That's nonsense, right? So we've got to come together and find these ways of working as my friend John Kern points out so eloquently.

Sean Blake:

Okay, that's good advice. So for these, some people that you meet, there's still this resistance that has been around for many years. How do you go about encouraging people to get out of their comfort zone to try this cross functional way of working and be more transparent, I guess with contributing to the team and not necessarily pushing towards being just an individual contributor?

John Turley:

Another great question, Sean. So there are a couple of ways we can do it. The psychometric instrument that I mentioned earlier, that can sort of measure I kind of always put that in inverted commas, because it doesn't really measure anything, it assesses, I suppose, is a really, really powerful tool. Off the back of that measurement, the psychologists that we work with can create a report that explains lots of this sort of meaning making stuff, adult developmental psychology to the individual. And it tends to be mind blowing. It really shifts people's perspective about what they are and how they're operating in the world.

John Turley:

Once people start to understand that there are these developmental stages, and we all move through them potentially to the last days of our life, we can start to see the disagreements. They just start to fall away. Disagreements start to fall away, because they cease to be seen as opposing views that can't be reconciled, because I'm this type of person and they're that type of person.

John Turley:

And they start to be seen as incompatibilities in meaning making. So people start to go, "Okay, well, I think this and you think that. How are we both making our meaning around this, that means we can see other's perspective?" And immediately, then you've started to find a mechanism to find some common ground.

John Turley:

So the leadership development profile report, which is the report that comes from the psychometric instrument really sheds a lot of light on for the individual, both on how they're working and what development looks like, what psychological development looks like for them. So that's a powerful tool. We have another service that we call dialogue partnering, which we're piloting, which is sort of what over an eight or 10 week program, it's a one on one collaborative inquiry into how an individual is making their meaning, and what the strengths of their meaning making and the limitations of their meaning making are.

John Turley:

And once people start to realize that the way, the reason they feel defensive because the way they code has just been criticized is because they're drawing their meaning from being the best coder on the planet. But there is a development path that leaves that behind, which is where many, many people get to. It's kind of like an a-ha moment, people just realize that reality is different to what they thought and it can be adjusted.

John Turley:

So the LDP, the Leadership Development Profile reports, dialogue partnering, and working with senior management to create a deliberately developmental environment, which does those things I mentioned before, they're the critical tools that we use to help individuals unlock their own psychological development. And the question is, of course, why would they be motivated to do this? Why would they care? And they care, because 80% of people have got a very low level of engagement in their work. Most people are treading water, killing time. It's not a joyous place to be. Once people start to work in cross functional teams and get involved in joyous work with their colleagues to create things they couldn't, which is a basic human instinct, that's a buzz, then you come into work and enjoying yourself.

John Turley:

That's what I said to you at the beginning of that call, right? I'm having a great time, I'm working with some brilliant people unlocking new knowledge that we believe humankind doesn't have. That's a buzz. I'm not treading water in my role, you know what I mean? And this isn't unique to me. In my view, the whole world could be like that. We could all work in roles like that, maybe that's got a bit far. But certainly, many more of this could then currently do to get on board with the psychological development and enjoy your role more, enjoy your work. There's a lot of time.

Sean Blake:

Yeah, I really resonate with what you said about the buzz. And I've seen that happen when the light bulb comes on in people, and it's no longer this factory line of work getting passed down to you. But you realize you're now part of a team, everyone's there to support you, you're working towards a common goal. And it's transparent, you can see what other people are working on, and you're helping each other build something together. It's actually fun. For the first time in a lot of people's careers, it's a fun and enjoyable experience to come to work. So that must make you feel really good about doing what you do.

John Turley:

Yeah, it does. It's why I get out of bed, and it's what I've been about for 20 years trying to unlock this, really help other people unlock this. I got a phone call from a colleague the other day who said they were doing some exercise, and they were thinking about their new role. And they thought to themselves, this is what it feels like to do joyous work.

John Turley:

I mean, that [inaudible 00:42:51] job done, because this is a very capable individual. Once they're feeling like that, you know that they're going to do great things. When they're feeling like they're other people feeling, that people are clot watching, or there's this culture of busyness, where we can't admit that we don't know things. And then we've got to be in a meeting doing something, in the transparent world that you're just talking about, if I've got any work to do, I can just sit and say, "I'm going to work today, I'm waiting for more stuff to write." And it's not a bad thing. It's like, great, you're working at a sustainable pace. That's a good thing. I worked for a Swiss bank for years and years, working at a sustainable pace but nobody was interested, you need to work at a full on flat out unsustainable pace. And when you're burned out, you can go and we'll get somebody else to come in and do it. That's how it works. That's miserable.

Sean Blake:

It's not what we want, Sean, is it? It's not what we want. And unfortunately, a lot of people have been there before and they've experienced it. And once they see the light, they never want to go back to it, which I guess is a good thing once you recognize that there's a better way.

John Turley:

Yeah, agreed.

Sean Blake:

Yeah. Okay, well, I think we're going to wrap up shortly. I do have two more questions for you before we call an end.

John Turley:

I'll try and keep the answers brief.

Sean Blake:

No, that's fine. I'm really enjoying it. I could probably go for another hour but I know we've got other things to do. So in the research, I've read some of your blog posts, and I watched some of the talks that you've done and events in the past, and you speak about this concept of hidden commitments. And I just like to learn a bit more, what is a hidden commitment? And what's the implication?

John Turley:

Great question. So Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, developmental psychologists, wrote a book called Immunity to Change. This is a book that I read here a few years ago. And in there, Bob and Lisa talk about hidden commitments. And so they start by pointing out that we all make New Year's resolutions and they all fail. We really mean them when we make them. And when I was in my late teens, maybe I really did mean them when I made them. But I could never keep them.

John Turley:

In another book, Kegan points out, I think it's in the book called The Evolving Self. He points out that a large majority of men, after they've had heart attacks, I think it's a study in America. But it's been a while since I read it, I think it's six out of seven, don't change either their diet or their exercise regime after they've had a heart attack. And the reason he uses that as a case study in the book, because he's pointing out that it's not that these people don't know what to do, you need less calories in, more out. And it's not that they're not motivated to do it. They've had a near death experience. They'd like to stay alive, we presume.

John Turley:

Yet still, they don't make any meaningful change to their diet, their exercise regime, why not? And what Bob and Lisa say in the book from their research is that it's down to hidden commitments. We all have our way of making meaning. We have our values and our assumptions that we absorb from society as if by osmosis. And we don't question them. We can't question all of the assumptions that we absorb as we grow up. It's just not possible. So we have these hidden assumptions that we're committed to hidden commitments. And sometimes, these hidden commitments conflict with our stated objectives. And when the hidden commitment conflicts with our stated objective, the result is that we get very confused about the fact that the stated objective sort of falls by the wayside, and we don't really understand why. We might think, I would think a common out, because I just need to try harder, I just need more willpower. I just need to stay the course. And it's not true very often. There is something else in your meaning making this conflicted with our stated objective. And once you can surface it, then you can start to examine that hidden commitment, and you can play around with it.

John Turley:

And when you can play around with it, then you're adjusting your meaning making. And the technique that we use in dialogue partnering comes from Bob and Lisa's book, where we're essentially uncovering those hidden commitments and seeing how they conflict with commitment. So that's sort of, and then once you can see it, and you can experiment with it, you can start to unlock change in yourself. Peter Senge, I think he's director of innovation. He's very famous, director of innovation for MIT. And he has a beautiful little quote, something like, "What folly it is to think of transforming our organizations without transforming ourselves?"

John Turley:

We need to change our relationship with power in order to change the way power is distributed across our organizations. And that's an example of a hidden commitment that we don't normally think about. We just think we can empower people magically, whilst retaining all the power for the senior manager. And that just doesn't work. There's a hidden commitment, conflicting with the idea that we want to empower our teams, which is a quite flawed idea.

Sean Blake:

Wow. Okay. Well, I really like the approach to work and looking at the social structure, the social networks, and the psychology behind it all. It's really fascinating and it's not something I've really come across before, especially in the Agile space. So that's really unique. Thanks for sharing that, John. Last question for you. 2020 has been interesting to say the least. We've talked about some things that have stayed the same over your career, some things that have change. What do you think is going to come next, looking forward to the next five, 10 years? What are some of those trends that you think are really going to stand out and maybe change the way that your work, it changes the way that that your nine to five looks or changes the way that you interact with your clients?

John Turley:

I think that this won't just change the way my nine to five looks. It will change like everybody's nine to five looks. I think that the world is in a difficult place. A lot of us are upset, and it looks like a bit of a mess, and we're all anxious, I think. A lot of us are anxious. But as a friend said to me, he was quoting somebody else, never let a good crisis go to waste. The amount of changes, a lot of energy in the system, the amount of changes in the system is palpably changing things.

John Turley:

Many of us recognize there must be a better way of doing things because our ways of organizing ourselves as society, including our organizations is collapsing. It doesn't work anymore. People are realizing through work that people like the names I've mentioned, and through our original research, I hope will sort of contribute in an original way to this, that there is a better way of organizing ourselves that humankind does have the knowledge and the experience to do what we need to do.

John Turley:

It just isn't in IT. We need to look outside of it to what the psychologists say about mindset, not what the Agile people say about mindset. That's a radical idea. And as we import this learning and this knowledge, we have a framework that helps us understand to a much greater degree what's really going on, and how we can unlock real change. So everything that I talked about today, very little of it is original. We have some original work I can't really talk about. Does it matter? The knowledge is out there. If we do the people and culture bit and the tools and the methodology together, then it scales, then we change the way organizations work, which is going to change everybody's nine to five.

Sean Blake:

That's great. It's bringing it back to basics, isn't it? What we know about human beings, and now let's apply that to what we know about work. So that's really eye opening. And I've learned a lot from our conversation, John. I've got a few books and a few research papers to go and look at after this. So thank you so much for appearing on the Easy Agile podcast, and we really appreciate your time.

John Turley:

Sure, my pleasure. I mean, I love and we love at Adaptavist to sharing what we're doing. So we can all engage in more joyous work, man. So thanks for helping us get the message out there.

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