Easy Agile Podcast Ep.8 Gerald Cadden Strategic Advisor & SAFe Program Consultant at Scaled Agile Inc.

"I had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with Dominic Price from Atlassian. It was so enjoyable to reflect on my time working at Atlassian and to hear Dom's perspective on what makes a great team, how to build an authentic culture and prioritising the things that matter."

- Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO Easy Agile

Transcript:

Nick Muldoon:

What I was keen to touch on and what I was keen to explore, Dom, was really this evolution of thinking at Atlassian. I remember when we first crossed paths, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall it was like late 2014, I think.

Dom Price:

Yeah, it was.

Nick Muldoon:

Scrum Australia was on at the time, and you're at the George Street offices above Westpac there, wherever, and we had Slady in the room, there was yourself. I think Mairead might have been there, I'm not too sure.

Dom Price:

No, probably not. I think it was JML's engineering meeting, engineering relationship meeting.

Nick Muldoon:

Right.

Dom Price:

Involved in the

Nick Muldoon:

Hall of Justice, right? Not Hall of Justice.

Dom Price:

Not Hall of Justice. Avengers.

Nick Muldoon:

Avengers. When was the last time you were in Avengers?

Dom Price:

A long, long time ago. A long, long time ago.

Nick Muldoon:

You've been working from home full-time since March, right?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Although, actually for me I can work from anywhere for three and a half years.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, fair enough. Okay.

Dom Price:

The shift for me was missing the work element. I'm missing the in-person work element because being on the road a lot, having that one day or two days week in the office, there's connective tissue, I didn't realize how valuable that was. Going five days work from home is not a great mix to me.

Nick Muldoon:

No, not a great mix for me either, Mate. I was the one that was coming into the office during lockdown. I was like, "Oh." It was basically an extension of my house, I guess, because I was the only one that was coming in. But I could turn up the music and I could get some work done without-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. All right. Back in late 2014 when we first crossed paths, we're at JML's engineering meeting, and that was before JML had gone to Shopify.

Dom Price:

Yes.

Nick Muldoon:

We were talking about all things. I remember talking about OKRs, which was the Objective Key Result framework that we were using at Twitter that I think Atlassian was looking at for the first time.

Dom Price:

Yeah, we'd been flirting with for a while.

Nick Muldoon:

Flirting with for a while. What was Atlassian using at the time? What was VTFM?

Dom Price:

There was two things we had at the time. VTFM which was Vision, Focus Areas, Themes, and Measures, which was our way of communicating our strategy, our rolling problem strategy. But then off the back of that we had what I would call old school KPIs. Right? We'd pick goals, right, we'd pick ways of measuring those goals, but very KPI-focused and very red, amber, green scoring focused. When we were small, it worked okay. It didn't scale particularly well because it became punitive. If you were green and you hit your score, you got ignored because you were always meant to, and if you were amber or red and you missed by anything, you got punished. Right? It's like, "Please explain." You got the invite to the head master's office.

Dom Price:

We wanted a way of getting stretched into there and also be more outcome-focused, because I think when we scaled KPIs, we got very output-focused like, "What did you do this week? What's the thing that you shipped?" Actually, the thing that we forgot about, and I think it was by accident, it wasn't bad intent, but we forgot about what's the outcome or impact we're trying to have on the customer, because that happens after the event. OKRs were a way of putting stretch in there and building the idea of moonshots and big ambition. But then also, refocusing us on, what is the impact we're trying to have on the end customer, not just what's happening in the sausage factory?

Nick Muldoon:

With that end customer perspective though, did you get that with the VTFM?

Dom Price:

No. Actually, the first year we rolled that OKR, that was part of the problem. We had the VTFM because that stayed, right? That was like the sacred cow for the first year. That stayed, and we just had OKRs underneath. Yeah, and we're like, "Well-

Nick Muldoon:

So you're mixing them together.

Dom Price:

... which ones do we report? The measures in the VTFM because that's our Atlassian level plan, or the OKRs, which is the things we're actually doing and the impact that we're having. You're like, "Well, both," and you're like, "Well, they don't meet. There's no cascade up or down, left or right, that had them aligned properly." The year after we actually phrased ... we got rid of the VTFM, and we now have our rolling 12-month strategy phrased as OKRs.

Nick Muldoon:

Right. Okay. At that time, Dom, back in 2014, when you were flirting with OKRs, as you said, was the VTFM that you were working to replace, was that company, department, team, individual, or did it just stop at the team?

Dom Price:

Yeah. That's where it didn't really scale, right? The organizational one made sense, and again, when you're smaller, it's a lot easier to draw the linkage between your team or your department and the company one. As we scaled, what happened was we'd have a company level VTFM, and then each department would go and build its own. The weird thing is, and again, this works for a phase, and then you realize it doesn't, is we don't create value up and down the org. We create value across the organization, and so building these VTFMs in departments was honing our craft. But it was doing it at the detriment of how you work across teams.

Dom Price:

I think that it's one of those things that at the time, we didn't realize. If I had a crystal ball, it would have been great. But it seemed like the right thing to do. Engineering had a VTFM. So did Design, so did Product Management, and you're like, "You know we only ship one experience, right?" I don't care if engineering's perfect and design's not because that's letting the customer down because this one experience that we shipped. There was this whole sort of arbitration where we'd build them vertically, and then try and glue them together horizontally, but they'd all been built in isolation.

Dom Price:

Then When it comes to trade offs, and every business has trade offs, whether you admit it or not, when you're like the best laid plans literally stay on paper, right? That's where they exist, then reality kicks in one day after you've built the plan. When reality kicks in, what trade off are you going to make? Are you going to do the trade off that delights the customer, maybe compromises you? Right? then how do you do that internally? Are you going to help Design and Product Management and load balance that way, or say, "Well, yeah, I'm an engineer and we're fine. It's Design's fault. How we'd adapt everyone is Design's fault." We quickly realized that a vertical model brought about some unintended consequences and some odd behaviors that weren't really the kind of behaviors we wanted as Atlassian.

Nick Muldoon:

Back in that time, Dom, in 2014, 2015, did you have the triad then with the product design and later for each of those groups?

Dom Price:

In physical people, yes.

Nick Muldoon:

But in-

Dom Price:

... modeling, no.

Nick Muldoon:

No. Okay. How did that come to fruition, that triad where they were working as one in harmony to deliver that customer experience?

Dom Price:

I think essentially, it's one of those brilliant mistakes when you look back. We're really good at reflecting, and you do a few reflections, and you suddenly see the pattern, and you like, "Hey, our teams that are nailing it are the ones where we've got cognitive diversity and the balance of skillsets." Not where we got one expert or one amazing anything, but actually, you're like, "Yeah, actually -

Nick Muldoon:

If look at some of these patterns-

Dom Price:

Yeah. You're like, "Hey, I just saw that design." They get the product manager in a headlock and have a valid argument at a whiteboard. You're like, "I actually like that. That's what I like, the meeting where there's consensus and violent agreement." Maybe that's the wrong signal, right, that the right signal is this cognitive diversity, this respectful dissent. You see that, and we're like, "Hang on, we have the realization that engineers build great usable products, and product managers are thinking about the whole sort of usability and along with the designers. Viability, you're like, "Oh, we need all three. All three of those need to be apparent for a great experience." You're like, "Cool. Let's double down on that." Right?

Dom Price:

We started to hone in a lot more on how do we get the balance across those? How do we understand the different roles? Because we didn't want to become homogenous. You don't want those three roles to get on so well they all agree. You also don't want to violently disagree all the time, right? A little bit of disagreeing commits great. If they're always in disagreement, then that comes out in the product. How do you find the things that they stand for, and how they bring their true and best selves to each phase? Right? If you think about any given product or project, there are natural phases where their skillsets are more honed, right? In the phases for us, part of managing design is often a lot better with the ambiguous and a whole lot of stuff. When it comes to building, I'm probably going to listen to the engineer more, right?

Nick Muldoon:

And you're handing it over to delivery.

Dom Price:

Yeah. But then also, it's like, well, it's not the ... If you think about delivery time, I think we'd sometimes think of it as the relay race. I think that's incorrect, because everyone's still going to see the relay race. Once I've run my lap, I'm done, right? But in product development, it's not because when I hand over the baton, I still have a role. Even if it's in build phase, the product manager and the designer still have a massive role. It's just that they're co-pilots and the engineer's the pilot, right? You don't disappear, your role changes. I think that was one of the nuances that we got as we started to bring in the right skills, the right level of leadership, the right level of reflection to go, "How do we balance this across those phases, and how do we be explicit on what role we're playing in those different phases?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay, that's interesting. I'm going to want to come back to that when we turn our attention to the customers in the Agile transformation landscape more broadly. But one thing that has got me thinking about with respect to this balance is the fact that Atlassian had the discipline to hire for a triad, right? If I think about, I think this was around 2013 at Twitter, and in one of our groups, we had pick a number, but there would have been 200 people, and there would have been less than 10 product managers. I think we actually had a ratio of like 20. It was something silly like 26 engineers to a product manager. It wasn't even a design counterpart necessarily for each of the product managers. The balance was way off, and it wasn't very effective. Was there a time at Atlassian where there was this reflection? Because I'm just trying to think, in my time at Atlassian, I don't think we had maybe a great balance. I think there was a much heavier in engineering than there was in design and product.

Dom Price:

Yeah, it's one of those things that if it's not there, you don't miss it. Right? It's weird, right? It was a lot of it before my time, but when I listened to the story, it's like even design as a discipline when I started in 2013 was a very small discipline. I think even then, it was kind of like a hack to the notion where it was like, "Oh, yeah, we got some designers. They do the pixels, right? They make stuff look pretty." .

Nick Muldoon:

They do T-shirts and they do like .

Dom Price:

Who knows, right? But it makes us look pretty, right? They drink craft beer, and they sit on milk crates. We had this archetype of a designer, and then you like, "Oh, actually, once you start to understand user experience, the integration points, design languages, design standards, and the experience, once you get your first few designers who say, "Here's how our products fit together," and this is the experience from a customer lens, you're like, "Oh, I'm not sure I'm a fan of that." It wasn't badly designed, but nor was it particularly well-designed. Once you start to make some improvements, then you start to measure customer satisfaction, and you make that experience more seamless, you suddenly see the value.

Dom Price:

I think for Atlassian, I think we started as an engineering company. We added product management, and then begrudgingly added design. Interestingly, in my time there, the most recent thing we've added is research.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Okay.

Dom Price:

Fascinating evolution for us again to go, "What do you mean, research? I'm a product manager. I know everything about the industry in the section of the competition." They're like, "But do you know anything about the customer, and the job to be done at the top tasks, or how they experience, and thinking about things like accessibility, thinking about how our products integrate with other products, thinking about not just from a competitive landscape, but what's the actual job to be done, and what are the ways people are trying to do that, and the drop off points.

Dom Price:

Research has become a new muscle that we had the exact same experience with. First time you roll it out, people are like, "Oh, we don't need that. It's overkill." You're like, "I see, it's really quite good." Hard to integrate because you're giving me findings I wasn't expecting, and then there was a shift both for designers, but also for the product managers to go, "Oh, I can use a resource now because you're this independent group that can help me understand, not just my product and iterating on my products, but a level up, what's the thing that my products trying to do? Who am I competing with, and what does that experience look like end to end?" It's a completely different lens.

Nick Muldoon:

Basically what you're describing there, Dom, is you've still got the triad of the product design and leads. But now you've got this. It's a centralized kind of research team?

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Do they drop in for particular projects in different areas?

Dom Price:

Yeah. If you think about it, if you strip it back to plain common sense, I think over time, we got really good at explore and build. But maybe we lost a little bit of the muscle around wonder. These researches are great. The blinkers are out and they wonder, right? I'm sure they physically do this as well, but mentally, they stroll, right? They go quite broad, and when they come back with their insights, you're like, "Wow, that's given me a really good broad perspective." I'll give you a quick example where we're working a lot, and we always are on accessibility. It's easy to look at your current products and start adding stuffing. Right? That's the logical way of doing it. Or you look at your competitor's products, and how do you become a pair or a peer? Easy.

Dom Price:

What our research team did was they actually got a whole lot of people with different sight and mobility issues, and said, "We're going to now get you to use our products and go through some key tasks." They're already using it, but it's like maybe they're on a screen reader, or maybe they can't use a mouse, they can only use keyboard shortcuts. You suddenly see the experience through their lens, and we record it, and it's tracking eye sight and line of sight using all the actions. You've got this level of detail there where you're like, "Well, I know we're trying to build empathy, but actually seeing that experience firsthand is completely different than trying to think about it."

Dom Price:

You just seeing it through the lens of this person. The research team did weeks and weeks and weeks of research with different users, different backgrounds, different disabilities, different products and different tasks to give all of our teams the sense of what is it like as the actual person. Here, you can actually walk in that person's shoes, or it feels like you are.

Nick Muldoon:

If you're a product manager and a designer, and you're ... Because it sounds to me, Dom, like that sort of investigation or exploration that you're describing there with respect to mobility-impaired or sight-impaired people, that's something that it might be hard for me to bring that into my OKRs for our product. For that triad, how do I have ... I'm trying to push forward and chase down monthly active users, or cross-flow, or whatever it happens to be, and that's much more long-running. It's like it's a long-running thread that's just going to stay open for 18 months while we think about this stuff and have these conversations. Does that research group, do they actually have their own OKRs, and are those OKRs annually?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Yes and no. We do mostly OKRs across design, research. We now have a ways of working team. They tend to be shared OKRs or more cross-functional, are cross-functional to shared. The cross-function as in we have the same objective, but different key results.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay.

Dom Price:

If you think about accessibility as an objective, the research team, their key result is about having the latest greatest research and insight so that we can learn and understand. You're like, "Cool, that's your task." Right? The design team, your OKR is to take that insight and turn it into some designs, usability, and then you can actually go along the value chain, and each different person in that value chain has a different OKR.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. Still today though, there's no OKRs at an individual level, right? It's all team, group-based?

Dom Price:

We have odds and sods. I've dabbled with it a little bit. Sometimes I think I've always got individual OKRs. The question is whether I share them or not. I think if you think about the majority of knowledge workers, they will have individual goals, "I want to learn a new skill, I want to acquire a new "

Nick Muldoon:

Honing the craft.

Dom Price:

Yeah, right? Whether you write that down and it benefits you or not is not up for debate. When it came to writing them down in a collective, having a single storage of them, any kind of laddering, I think the cost of that is higher than the benefit. Right?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Dom Price:

We strayed away from saying everyone then must have individual OKRs, and then ladder, whatever, because it ends up getting very, very cumbersome, and actually very command and control. What we've done instead is really say to our leaders, and this is leadership by capability, not by title, but saying to our leaders, "This is part of a conversation you should be having on a regular basis with your people around growth, and how you're inspiring them, and how you're motivating them. How are they developing and evolving? What are the experiments they're running on themselves? Right? How are they with other people? What are their challenges, and how can you help them never get those challenges? What are their points of amplification that you should be calling out with them to turn the dial on that? Right? What are their superpowers that we should be really encompassing, right, and nailing?" That's part of a leadership conversation. Does that need to be written down and centralized? No. To me, it becomes a zero benefit to documenting that.

Nick Muldoon:

It's interesting hearing you describe that. That's very much learning and development-focus. If I think back to Andy Grove's High Output Management, my understanding of that at an individual ... of OKRs and an individual level was always with respect to your customers. What am I going to do for my customers? But you've actually framed it, what am I going to do for myself that's going to allow me to be in better service to my customers, maybe next financial year?

Dom Price:

Yeah. It's a secret. I'm guessing this is shared by Atlassian, but this is definitely my view of the world, and I've shared this with enough people now where they understand. You can't be a great teammate if you're not turning up your true best self. You got to take a step back. There's this whole weird narrative around the humility of being a teammate where you're like, "I'm a martyr, and I'll take one for the team." It's BS, because if you're not in the right zone for that team activity, you're not giving your best, right? You're actually the anchor that brings the team down. You step back from that and you say, "Well, how do you be the best?" Because not all work is teamwork. There's a lot of deep work and individual tasks and stuff that needs to be done. You're like, "Right, I need to be the best version of me. Well, what's that mean?"

Dom Price:

It means that before any meeting, I need to have done my tasks, or before any meeting, I need to have done my pre-meeting, right? If we're meeting as a team and we have this synchronous activity, what are the things I need to do to be best prepared for that synchronous activity to deliver the most value? How can I get the most out of that teamwork? How do I turn up and be present? How do I turn up with respectful dissent and challenge, right, and provocation? That requires me first to be an individual. Right? I think one of the dangers in a lot of work environments right now is people have lost the understanding of what it is to be an individual, what your key leadership style, your learning style, how do you turn up? Right? How do you critique? How do you take feedback? All these things that make you you, you need to know those and be aware of them before you can be great in a team environment.

Dom Price:

It's not just the tasks. You need to know you. If you're a great individual, and you've honed that, you can then be a great teammate, and if you're a great teammate, you can deliver great outcomes for your customers. Anything else is an accident, right? We've all been in accidental teams, which has delighting a customer, and we've sat there and gone, "Really not sure what I did to that guy. I'll take it. I'll take the pat on the back. I'll take the kudos, and the bottle of wine, and the congratulations. Not really sure I amplify that. I don't know. If you don't know, you probably didn't. Right? That's not humility. You're probably just a passenger. I think the danger in growth environments is there's lots of passengers who they're a passenger to lots of success, and after a while, they're like, "I'm amazing." You're like, "You're not. You've just been in the right place at the right time repeatedly."

Nick Muldoon:

I got to process that.

Dom Price:

Let me give you an example. Right? A couple years ago, I was in New York with a mate of mine, Sophie. She's unofficially mentored me and helped me a lot of the years, right? I'm talking to her about trying to scale me, and I was really angry about some stuff, and thankfully, it was late afternoon in New York. She bought me [inaudible 00:25:30]. We smashed a drink and we chatted away, and she's one of those people that just calls BS on you, right? I'm like, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge. She's like, "Oh, cool." She's English as well. She's like, "So I'm guessing you're just going to whinge about it and hope it goes away." I'm like, "All right, fair point. Little bit, my English came out. I actually hoped that maybe even if I did whinge long enough, it would actually disappear." She's like, "That never happens, does it? What are you going to do about it?"

Dom Price:

We chatted when she gave me this challenge, and she's like, "You're not evolving." She's like, "You're adding stuff in, but you're full." She's like, "Cognitively, Dom, you're full." My challenge was I was reading all these business books at the time, and I knew lots of stuff, but I didn't feel any smarter. I wasn't doing anything with it, and it's creating this frustration spiral. She gave me the exercise, and you've probably seen this, the four Ls. She got a bit of paper, and she's like, "All right, write the four Ls down. Reflect on you as a leader. This is selfishly purely about you as a leader. Last 90 days, what have you loved? What have you done personally?"

Dom Price:

I'm like, "Oh, no, no, no, no." She's like, "Not like, because we're not doing likes here, right? We're not being soft. Loved, and own it. Actually, superpower, do more of it." We did that, very uncomfortable few sips of wine. Then she's like, "What's your loathe and what's your longed for?" I had lots of long fors, long list of those, but no loathed. She's like, 'All right, here's the problem. The long for, you're sprinkling in in the 25th hour of every day. No wonder you're not doing well at it, because you never giving it the ... You're not giving yourself any space, or time, or freedom to actually experiment. You're not growing. You're not getting better. You're just adding stuff in." I'm like, "Fair point."

Dom Price:

We went through, found some loathe. She's like, "Right, you're going to remove those. Who are you going to tell those habits, or rituals, or whatever, who are you going to tell that you're removing those because they need to hold you accountable? Because they'll slip back in really easily." I found someone, pinged them. She's like, "Right, the longed." She's like, "I need to let you know that when you add them in, you're going to be crap at them." I was like, "I don't want to be rubbish at anything. I'm a leader. I need to be a superhero. I need a cape, and I need to fly in, and everything must be perfect first time." She's like, "No, the first time you added a longed for, the chances are you'll be rubbish at it. Find someone who has that muscle and let them help you practice it, and you'll get better at it over time."

Dom Price:

Then the fourth L was what have you learned? What experiment did you learn yourself last quarter? What did you learn about yourself?" She's like, "Right, go and tell as many people as you can. That'll build a place where you're learning and networking environment for you." I did it, and then I did it again 90 days later. There's a few times when the power of rationalization kicks in, and I just BSed myself because really easy to do. Then other times where I've got really deep and analyzed on it, and it's enabled me every 90 days to evolve, right? Now, the moral of the story, and this is where we tie individual to team, the number of leaders I know in big businesses driving transformations, but they're not changing themselves. What behavior are they rolling with? They're rolling with the behavior of, "I'm fine. You're not. You all need to change," which is-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, role modeling status quo.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. That's interesting. I've certainly heard of the love versus loathed exercise. I like that you, or that Sophie extended it to longed for and learned. I think that's really beautiful, and I'll take that. With the loathe in particular, were there things on that list that you had to delegate or you had to hire someone to do? Because there's things that I think about that I loathe with respect to the business, and typically, they're things about orchestrating, paying suppliers, or whatever it happens to be. How do I address that? I bring the bookkeeper into the business that-

Dom Price:

Yeah. The little game that we played is you're not allowed to outsource it until you drop it. Right? The idea is, you're going to find a way of dropping it first, because maybe it doesn't need to exist, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Dom Price:

Because you've worked at big companies, and you walk around a big company, and you're like, "That person there, they only exist to do a task that someone probably could have automated or got rid of," but they didn't have the time. Also, they put a warm body in the way. Then you add another warm body, another warm body, and you suddenly realize you've got thousands of warm bodies keeping this deck of cards stacked together, and if one card falls, the entire thing comes tumbling down. I removed stuff that I was really uncomfortable removing stuff. I was like, "This is so important." It wasn't. My blinkers were just off, right? Then she's like, "We'll stop doing." She's like, "It's not life or death." She's like, "No, thanks, Dom. Well, you're not a surgeon, so stop doing something, and listen, and see what happens when you stop doing it." I'm like, "Oh, no, but these are really important. People will be angry. I'm a very important person." You remove something and no one bloody notices. You're like, "Why have I been doing this?"

Nick Muldoon:

Why was I doing it? Yeah.

Dom Price:

Yeah. Then I-

Nick Muldoon:

Can you-

Dom Price:

One of the big examples for me was meetings. This wasn't a delegate or [inaudible 00:30:24]. This was me just being a control freak, and turning up in meetings where I wanted to be there just in case. We looked at my condo, just a sea, I use Gmail, right, the sea of blue of all these meetings, double booked, triple booked. She's like, "Right." She's like, "Imagine you've got to set yourself a goal of getting rid of 15 hours." I'm like, "What? It'd be easy to create a time machine that adds 15 hours a week. I can't remove 15 hours of meetings. I'm a very, very important person." Then we played this game called Boomerang or Stick. I declined every single meeting, and I sent a note saying, "This is either a boomerang," in which case it comes back, or if it's a stick. When you throw a stick, it doesn't come back. The boomerangs, I want to know what the purpose of the meeting is, what my role is in the meeting, and what you're going to hold me accountable for.

Dom Price:

Two thirds of the meetings didn't come back. Right? The ones that did, I honestly admit to you, I was playing the exact wrong role in virtually all of them. It was funny because I get these emails back and they're like, so one of this meeting I was in, they were like, "Your role is the decision maker." In the next meeting I was like, "I need to apologize. I thought I was the protagonist." Every time they were suggesting something, I'm like, "Well, you could do that, or these three things." I was sending them into a complete spiral, and they were like, "You're a terrible decision maker." I'm like, "No, I'm a good decision maker when I know that's my job because this isn't your title. Your title stays-

Nick Muldoon:

Ah, Dom.

Dom Price:

... the same, right? Your title stays the same, but your role's different in every environment, every engagement, your role is different. We don't call it out, we just assume. Once we clarified those assumptions and realized I've got them all wrong, the meetings I was in, I was way more effective in. Two thirds of them didn't come back. Either the meeting [inaudible 00:32:09], or it didn't need me in that. If you think about it, and me and you know this, our most precious resources are time.

Nick Muldoon:

Time. Yeah.

Dom Price:

Why are we giving it away for free or for negative cost? Right? I'm like, "No, I'm growing all that stuff back."

Nick Muldoon:

Liz and I have been having this conversation for a while now about statistically speaking, I've probably got 50 years left on earth, based on how long a Caucasian Australian male lives. But I've probably only got 40 good, usable years left, because then you kind of like atrophy and all that.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Liz and I have been going, "Well, if we've only got 40 summers left, what are we going to do with 40 summers?" It's a really good exercise to bring you think real quick, what do you want to be spending your time on?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Absolutely. It's the same thing. You can do that at a meta, macro level for life, and I think you can do it on a annual quarterly basis. With work, there's so many things that we just presume we need to do, and both the four Ls and just my attitude has enabled me to challenge those and go, "Well, I just say why an awful lot right now." So it's like, "I'd like you to come to this meeting." I'm like, "Oh, cool. Why?" They're like, "I don't know. I'd like you there." I'm like, "But why? Because if you can't explain to me what you want me to do, then you probably don't need me there."

Nick Muldoon:

Five whys, right? Five whys.

Dom Price:

But also the reason I'm often asking them why is I'm like, "You do know I'm a pain in the ass when I do come to the meeting, so just I want to double check to you, you really want me there. Because if you converged on an idea and you want to ship it, don't invite me. All right, I'm the wrong person." Just challenging on that and getting that time back, and then using it for things that are way more valuable. I rebalanced my portfolio just like a financial advisor or a market trader rebalances a financial portfolio every quarter, I did the same thing with me. If I don't, then what I'm saying is when I don't do that, I'm saying the version of me last quarter is more than good enough for them for next quarter. What I'm saying is-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, which is never the case, is it?

Dom Price:

Yeah, I'm saying the world's not changed. The world stayed flat, right, and everything's going on a flat line. That's not the case. If I'm not evolving myself at the same pace as Atlassian or our customers, then I've become the anchor by default. I'm the anchor that slows us down.

Nick Muldoon:

Tell me, what portion of your time today are you spending with customers? Because I know over the years in our conversations, I think about a lunch we had at Pendolino, you, Dave, and I, probably two and a half, three years ago now, but we were talking a lot about Agile transformations at the large end of the spectrum. How much time are you spending with customers today, and what are those conversations like?

Dom Price:

Yeah. I'm probably over the 50, 60% mark right now, but mainly a rebalance again. When COVID hit, the conference scene disappeared, and so I'm like, "Cool, I get to reinvest that time. I could reinvest it internally at Atlassian, and I did do it where we're evolving our ways of working internally and driving some change there. I got involved in that, made sense. But I was like, "Hey, our customers are struggling." First of all, we need to understand how and why they're struggling, and then if we can help them, find a way of helping them. It's funny how the conversation really changed from quite tactical, yeah, 18-month plans and presumed levels of certainty, to going, "Hey, the world's changed. The table flip moments just happened. Our business model has been challenged, our employees are challenged. We're having these conversations about people, wellness, and actually, we've said for years we care about our people, but now we actually have to. What does that mean? All the leaders just trying to understand the shift from peacetime to wartime-

Nick Muldoon:

To wartime.

Dom Price:

... to time peacetime. I think that it's funny that the transition from peace to wartime, I think the shared burning platform, the shared sense of urgency, I think a lot of these transition, they're okay. I wouldn't say they're amazing, but they weren't awful given that mostly the Sydney in Australia haven't manage through wartime. Right? We've had an amazing economic success for a long time. The harder bit, the way more complex bit is going from war to new peace, because new doesn't look the same as old peace. Right? It's a very different mindset to go-

Nick Muldoon:

Who is-

Dom Price:

... about managing in wartime is I don't need approvals because it's a burning platform. We just drive change, just do it, just do it. New peace is different because we're like, "Well, how long's this going to last for? What are the principles I want to apply? How do I build almost from a blank piece of paper?" Very different mindset.

Nick Muldoon:

Was that Ben Horowitz with the hard thing about hard things where he talked about war versus peacetime leaders?

Dom Price:

I've read it in a few things. The most recent one I read-

Nick Muldoon:

Hear different places.

Dom Price:

... in was General Stanley McChrystal. He wrote Team of Teams.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Dom Price:

He did one on demystifying leaders and how we've often put the wrong leaders on a pedestal, and there's some great leaders out there that just didn't get the credit because they were way more balanced. But yeah, there's a few different narratives out there on it.

Nick Muldoon:

With the latest that you're meeting with, I guess, well, one, are they using something like the four Ls that Sophie shared with you?

Dom Price:

Yeah, that's become a lot more popular, I mean, certainly with C-suite and the level down, even board members, actually. When I share that, there's this kind of moment of reflection of going, "Yeah." It's because I get them with the irony of going, "Question one, are you driving a transformation?" They're like, "Yes." You're like, "Cool. Are you transforming yourself?" "No." By the way, reading a Harvard Business Review article on Agile doesn't mean you're evolving yourself. That means you're educating yourself. That's subtly different. We've all read the article. It doesn't make you an expert, so sit yourself down. That is the first moment of getting them bought in.

Dom Price:

Then the second one is just saying to them, "Just be honest right now, what are the things you're struggling with?" For a lot of leaders, it's this desire that they get the need for empathy, vulnerability and authenticity, they get it because they've read it. They understand it, they comprehend it, they find it really hard to do. Right? A lot of them are leaving as a superhero leading through power and control. They've led through success, but they're not led through a downturn and a challenging time, and they're just questioning their own abilities. There's a lot of, I don't even want to call it imposter syndrome, I think there's a lot of people just saying, "I think my role as a leader's just changed, and I don't know that I understand the new version." That's quite demoralizing for a lot of people. It's quite challenging.

Dom Price:

The irony being is that the minute they look to that and talk about it, they've done the empathy, vulnerability, and authenticity. They've done the thing they're grasping for. But instead, they're trying to put this brave face on it. In a lot of organizations, I've seen a lot of ruinous empathy. A lot of people buffering from their team, like, "Nick, I don't want to tell you that bad things are happening in the company, because I don't want you ... I think you're already worried, because I won't tell you that," without realizing that you fill in the gaps, and you think way worse things than I could ever tell you. The information flow's changed, and then for a lot of leaders, the mistake I've seen on mass is they have confused communication and broadcast. Right? Communication is what I hear and how I feel when you speak. Broadcast is the thing that you said. Because of this virtual world, there's lots of loom, and zoom, and videos, and yeah, we're going to broadcast out.

Nick Muldoon:

Broadcast a lot. Yeah.

Dom Price:

But we're getting to listen for the response.

Nick Muldoon:

This has to be a very challenging time for a number of leaders today, but 2018 or 2008, there were a lot of leaders back then that probably, I presume, picked up a lot of scar tissue around GFC. How many of the leaders that you're chatting with today would have picked up scar tissue through the GFC, and they're still finding this kind of a feeling, at least, like it's uncharted territory?

Dom Price:

Well, and that's, I think, the byproduct. I was going to say problem. The byproduct of the Australian system is we've dodged the bullet in 2008. Economically, we did not get the same hit that the rest. The stock markets got a little hit, and a whole lot of other things took a little bit of a dip, but nowhere near that the size or magnitude of the rest of the world. Both through the mining boom, yeah, the banking sector, a whole of other tertiary markets around tourism doing well at that time, you're like it was a blip, but it wasn't a scar. I think that's where there's a lot of countries have got that recent experience to draw upon, like, "Here's how we do this. Right? Here's how we bunker down. Here's how we get more conservative. Here's the playbook for it." I think a lot of countries haven't got that playbook, so they're getting at it, right? They're doing it on the fly. I think there's that.

Dom Price:

But also I think this one's just different. The global financial crisis was a financial and market-caused issue, right? This is a health pandemic-caused market downturn. I don't think we've got a playbook for that, because we don't know the longevity of it. -

Nick Muldoon:

If you-

Dom Price:

Go on.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. No, sorry, Dom, I was just going to ask, if you cast your mind back to GFC, were you anxious going through GFC? Have you been anxious this year?

Dom Price:

No. I wasn't anxious at all through GFC because it felt like ... I did a recession in the UK a long, long time ago, and so I've been through that downturn. I've worked in companies that had downturns, even if the general economy was fine, and industries that had shrunk, where at the end of each quarter you're like, "Right, we talk about the books. Who are we letting go? What projects are stopping?" It was always the taking away, not the adding. I've been through that. The thing that made me anxious about 2020 was, this is the first time I think we've had this level of uncertainty. It's funny because a lot of people talk about change fatigue. I actually think humans are quite good at change. I think we actually do that quite well. But uncertainty, we are terrible with.

Dom Price:

It's weird how when we get uncertainty, how different people respond in different ways. Some like to create a blanket of certainty and wrap it around them like, "Now, here's what I know, and this will come true." You're like, "Maybe [inaudible 00:42:16]." I like your blanket, it's comfortable. But it's not necessarily real, right? It's not going to shelter you from the things that we genuinely don't know about. This is where agility has become key, or nimbleness has become key because if I look at the leaders in the companies that are listening, they're actually attentive to their customers and listening, they're the ones that are evolving really quickly, because they've got ... not only have they got the nimbleness as the muscle, but they're listening to cause correct. The ones that have ... think they've rolled out agility in the last few years, but never added the customer bit, they've got small, fast, nimble teams just running around in circles.

Nick Muldoon:

They're not heading in a particular direction. Yeah.

Dom Price:

Yeah. They are clueless, right, because without that overarching like, "Why are we doing this? And that customer that we care for, we still care for, how's that customer's world changed? Right? Because if that customer has changed, how can we change with them?" A lot of companies haven't done that yet, and I think it's some are holding the breath and hoping for the best. Some are just too fixated on, "But we have a plan, and if we stick to that plan," I read a book somewhere that said, "If you stick to a plan, you'll be fine." You're like, yeah, the world just shifted around you. Your plan might not be as relevant.

Nick Muldoon:

It's making me think, Dom, about the Salesforce transformation, Agile transformation in 2006. That was one of the big bang, I think it was one of the early big bang Agile transformations that took place. I don't know if it was Parker Harris or how it actually played out, but the leaders of Salesforce basically said, "You're going to change to Agile. You're going to give this thing a go. Otherwise, all is lost." There's been other examples. I think shortly after, LinkedIn did their IPO. They pulled the end on call, they stopped everything to rework how they work. Is 2020 one of those years? Are the best companies going to take advantage of this as an opportunity to retool how they work? Then the other companies are just going to kind of atrophy and slowly decline over the next five?

Dom Price:

I think the best ones probably built some of the muscle already, the ones that are now reacting, right? I think if you are aware of the market, all COVID's done is put an accelerant on the stuff that was changing anyway. Right? Yes, it's not ideal, but it's stuff that was happening regardless, right? I think we really had five or 10 years to equip ourselves, and we got given three months instead. I think a whole lot of companies that saw those patterns emerging, changing people habits, technology, practices, ways of working, customer demand, experience demands, you put all those together, that's why Agile transformation has been a massive hit for the last three, four, five years, right? The ones that were prepared for that are awesome. The ones that responded quickly, that are like, "Brilliant, don't let a crisis go to waste. What can we do?" They'll do well. The ones that have dug their heels in and are being stubborn ,saying the world will return to normal and it's just a matter of time, they're the ones that I fear for, because that atrophy that may have been a slow decline, I think that becomes a cliff. Right? Because in a consumer-

Nick Muldoon:

Slow decline, and then they just fall off the edge at some point.

Dom Price:

consumer world, consumers spending goes down, sentiment goes down, and relevance suddenly becomes really important. Is your product relevant to your customers? The people that understand that, and then have agility in how they deliver it, that's a winning combination. I think the interesting, I was talking to a friend about this on the weekend because they were like, "What's the difference between the successful ones and the not successful ones?" It's hard to pinpoint a single reason. But the one that stands out for me is the Agile transformations that have been people-centric are the best. A whole load of them were tool-centric or process-centric. I will send all my people on a training course. I'm going to make you agile, I'm going to give you some agile tools. Go. You're like, "Did you change their mindset? Did you change their heart? Did you change the things that they're recognized for, their intrinsic motivations? Did you change those things?" Because if you didn't, their inner workings are still the same, right? You've just giving them some new terminology.

Nick Muldoon:

I think that's a really, really, really good point. I go back to if I cast my mind back to the first Agile conference that I went to over a decade ago, the conversation back then was very much around training the practices, teaching the practices to your people, and then it evolved into a tooling conversation. But again, teaching the practices and software are just tools, and it was probably 2013, 2014, I guess, when the modern Agile movement came out, and they were talking a lot about psychological safety. Go back to where we started the conversation, right?

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Psychological safety, bring your whole self to work, and that will free you and enable you to do something tremendous for your customers. Give me a sense of the customer conversations that you've had throughout 2020. What percentage do you think have psychological safety, truly have that psychological safety?

Dom Price:

Yeah. I have to remind myself that psychological safety isn't an all or one, right? It's a sliding scale. I would say it's improved, where it's done with authenticity. The danger is, it becomes a topic where people are like, "I was working from home. There's an increased chance of stress, it's a whole of a change. Things are going wrong. Oh, I know what, let's just talk about psychological safety a lot." You're like-

Nick Muldoon:

That's not it.

Dom Price:

... "There's no correlation between talking about and doing." Right? It becomes the topic, right, the fashion, right? Just like wellness and mindfulness have become fashionable to talk about, doesn't mean we've got any better at it. And so that-

Nick Muldoon:

But isn't that the thing, Dom? Agile was the fashionable thing to talk about, and so we talked about it, but nothing really changed in a lot of these organizations.

Dom Price:

Yeah. It's not dissimilar with psychological safety. What has happened though is over time, the leaders that are truly authentic, vulnerable, build that environment where you can bring your best self, and they appreciate the respectful dissent, but they will still, at the right time, disagree and commit. They're like, "Nick, I heard your view. Thank you for sharing. Our only decision at this point, we're going down Path A. I know that you're in Path B. We're going down Path A. When we leave this room, we commit to A." I hear you. You want me when we're coming to A, and here's the signals we'll assess to make sure it's the right path. If it's not, we'll course-correct. Those people are thriving in this environment, and more people want to work with them. What this environment has done is it's shone a massive light on the difference between managers and leaders. Managers manage process and they like control. Right? Leaders are about influence and people.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you think, so the fact that people are working remote and working from home, that's made it easier to see who the leaders are.

Dom Price:

Yeah, it's shone a light on-

Nick Muldoon:

Because the managers are just trying to count time.

Dom Price:

Yeah, count time, but they're also thrashing around busy work, because they're like, "I'm the manager. I need to show that I'm doing something. I would manage tasks in and around the office, and what I meant some people to do. If we're autonomous, and they just do it, then what's my role?" You suddenly start seeing business. This noise comes out of them, which isn't, "Here's an outcome I achieved, or here's how the team's doing on team cohesion or bonding." They're not talking about about big meta level things. They're sharing these transactions with you, and you're like, "I assumed you're always doing the transactions. Now, you're showing me them all. It's a bit weird." Right? It's just a behavior, right? We must have a process for that. Well, what's the process? You're like, "Actually, what about the process of common sense?" Right?

Dom Price:

If you think about pre-COVID, most organizations that would allow people to work from home once or twice a week had a giant process and policy about how you apply to work from home that one day a week and everything, and then suddenly they're like, "Well, actually, we can do that. Everyone's going to go work from home." But now things have settled down a bit, the process police and the policy police are coming back again going, "But what about, what about? We pay Nick to do 40 hours a week, and what if he didn't do 40 hours?"

Nick Muldoon:

40 hours a week.

Dom Price:

Who cares? Nick delivered his outcomes and his customers are over the moon. As long as he's not doing 80 hours and he's not burning out, doesn't matter? Right? The idea of 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday as a construct is being challenged. The idea of you needing to sit at a physical desk for eight hours a day to do your work, when actually at least half of your tasks you can do asynchronously, that's been challenged. But for the managers who want manage process and control, they're like, "But if Nick can work from anywhere, and we trust him to do the right work, what do I do? I'm his manager. You're like, "You could inspire him. You could coach him, mentor him. You can lead him, you can help him grow, you can do a whole lot of stuff. Just don't manage his tasks for him. He's quite capable of managing a to-do list." It's challenging that construct again. For a lot of people, that's uncomfortable because that's a concept that we've just stuck with for years.

Nick Muldoon:

This is going to lead to a lot of change. I guess I've been thinking with respect to remote, Dom, I've been thinking much more about the mechanics of remote work and logistics around pay scales, and geographic location, and pay, and all this sort of stuff. But you're really opening my eyes to a whole different aspect. There are, in many large organizations, there are a lot of middle managers, and if these roles are no longer valuable, what do all these people do, and how do we help them find something that they love and that they long for? Because presumably they've not longing for-

Dom Price:

Yeah, that's the thing.

Nick Muldoon:

... task management.

Dom Price:

Yeah, yeah. They're probably not deeply entrenched in that as being something they're passionate about, right? It's just like they found themselves in this role. This is the interesting thing. If you look at rescaling, I've been looking at rescaling for a few years as a trend, right? How do we look at the rate of change in both technology, people practice, whatever else? That means that we're all going to have to rescale, right? The idea of education being up until the age of 21, and then you're working 45 years doesn't exist, right? So lifelong learning. You look at that, and you go ... Amazon did a great example last year. Bezos and Amazon put aside a billion dollars to retrench a thousand people that they were going to dispose. Right?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

From their warehouses, right?

Dom Price:

Yeah, yeah. They're on automation to displace those people. What was came out recently and said, there's I think, it's like 1,500 people who will be displaced because they're going for fully autonomous distribution centers. They're looking to retrain those people and redeploy them elsewhere. You're like, "Cool, how are we doing that?" The reason I mentioned it is I think we assume it for low skilled, high volume tasks, because that's associate what we've associated with technology disruption in the past. But if you think about it, there was I think about a year and a half ago, McKinsey had a report called The Frozen Middle Layer. It was about how this frozen middle layer was going to thaw and be exposed, right, as these middle managers. There's thousands of them. That phrase, the middle layer, COVID just poured the icing on that. Right? [inaudible 00:53:26]. They're all going, "What? Me? No, no, I've only got 10 years left in my career. Let me sit here, manage a few tasks. I'll take inflationary pay rise every year. I won't cause any trouble." You're like, "I don't know. You can retrain here."

Dom Price:

These people haven't been engineered to think about retraining before. They've been engineered to think about comfort and conservatism and safety. I think we need to appreciate that they still have value in the workplace. I just don't think it's the old value. For them, the four Ls-

Nick Muldoon:

This is going to be a huge shock to this frozen middle layer, as McKinsey called it. I think about so we're Wollongong, Port Kembla. We're in a working class, steel town, and over the course of, pick a number, over the course of 25, 30 years, 20,000, 22,000 people have been let go from the steelworks and they're been told to retrain. I'm sure a portion of them do, but a lot of them that are older, like you're talking about someone that's in their 50s that's got 10 years on their career, right, they probably just took early retirement, and maybe they found something else to do in the community, whatever it happens to be. What are the structures that we provide for this huge crew of people to get them re-skilled in our businesses so that we don't lose the tacit knowledge and get on to the next thing? How's Atlassian thinking about this?

Dom Price:

It's also about front-loading it, right? We have to hold our head in shame as a general society, how light we leave it. When I hear stories about those steelworks closing down, and you're like, "Why are we surprised by that? Why are we surprised when Holden stopped developing cars in Australia? Really? But really, you're surprised?

Nick Muldoon:

We saw it coming.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

We propped up the car industry in Australia for 35 years.

Dom Price:

Yeah. You put tariffs on anyone importing to make your own industry look good, and then those tariffs go away, people are looking for cheaper. Unfortunately, we signed up for a global economy, right? It's a borderless business model that we're in, and whether you like that or not, it's what we signed up for. The reality is instead of reacting each time this happens when it's normally too late, how can we respond? How can we use these brilliant algorithms and data managing to go, "Here are world economic forum future skills, here are large employers, here are other skillsets about people." You try and give that out, and you're like, "These are the ones most at risk, and they're at risk over the next 18 months." Cool. Start retraining them now, but not when they're out of the job when they go, "Well, now, I'm out of my job. Now, what do we do?" You're like, "I don't know. Buddings? I don't know."

Dom Price:

We've got way more data and insights than we probably give ourselves credit for. I think one element is front-loading it, and the next one is saying, "How do we not recreate this problem again?" If you look in the US right now, the largest employer, not by company, but by job type is driver.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. Yeah, by role. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dom Price:

By role, right? So Uber driver, truck drivers, manual drivers, people behind the wheel driving a vehicle. Where's billions of dollars worth of investment going in, Google, Amazon and every other? Right? Autonomous vehicles. You're like, "Cool."

Nick Muldoon:

Autonomous vehicles. Get rid of all those people?

Dom Price:

If I-

Nick Muldoon:

What are we doing to reskill those people?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Or even better, what are we doing in our education system to say, "How do we help people coming through the education system be more resilient with their future skills? I don't like the idea of being able to future-proof people. I don't think we've got a crystal ball, so let's part that. But how do we make people more resilient in their skills, well, all the skills we think will be required? World Economic Forum do great research every few years and publish it, and then I look at the education system, and I'm like, "That was built in 1960. We're tuning kids out that if you talk to.

Nick Muldoon:

Hey, hey, hey, Dom, okay, okay. I'm getting anxious at the moment. Let's end on a high note. What are things that make you optimistic for the next decade? All right? In 10 years time, how old are you going to be in 10 years time? Like 45 or something?"

Dom Price:

52.

Nick Muldoon:

52?

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. Oh, yes.

Dom Price:

Getting old.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Okay, so when you're 52, what are you looking forward to over the next decade? What's exciting?

Dom Price:

There's a couple of things we need to realize, right? Very first thing we need to accept is our future is not predetermined, it's not written, and it's not waiting for us. Right? We design it and define it every single day with our actions and inactions. As soon as we have that acknowledgement, we don't sit here as a victim anymore and wait for it to happen to us. We go, "Oh, oh, yeah." Then like, "We have to decide on the future. No one else does. We collectively do." That's the first step. You're like, "Oh, I've got way more say in this than I ever realized." The second one is, we need to drop a whole load of stuff around productivity, and GDP, and all these things that we've been taught are great measures of success, and just be happy and content in life. If you've got four years left, I've probably got 30 something years left, I want to enjoy those 30 years. I have no vision of being buried in a gravestone somewhere with, "Dom was productive."

Nick Muldoon:

Dom, this is great. What we've got to do for society over the next 10 years is get society out of KPIs and into OKRs.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Right?

Dom Price:

And get a balance out of going, "How ... This is what I've learned from COVID, right? You know this, I did 100 flights last year. I did a few at the start of the year and trip to the UK in the middle of COVID. But I've not traveled since June. Now, admittedly, the whole work from home thing, I'm going insane a little bit, but the balance of life, like sleeping in my bed every night, hanging out with friends, meaningful connections, right, actual community. I've lived in the same apartment for three years, and it took COVID for me to meet any of my neighbors, and it took COVID for me to meet the lovely ladies in the coffee shop downstairs. I'm like, "I've lived above you for three years, and it's only now you've become a person." Right?

Dom Price:

There's so much community and society aspects we can get out of this. The blank piece of paper, if you imagine this as a disruption that's happened to us, and there's no choice, and we can fight against it, that the options we have to actually make life better afterwards. Whether it be four-day working week experiments, or actually working from anywhere means that a whole other disabled, or working parents can get access to the workforce. Funny, if you get more done. Unemployment in the disabled community is 50% above that of the able-bodied community, not because of any mental ability, just because it's hard for them to fit .

Nick Muldoon:

Logistically. Yeah.

Dom Price:

You've just changed that, right, with this crazy experiment called COVID. If we start to tap into these pockets of goodness, and actually, we sees this as an opportunity to innovate, right, and I hate the P word of pivot, but forget pivoting, to genuinely innovate, what might the world look like, and how can we lean into that? How do we get balance between profit, and planet, and people, and climate, and all those things? If we do that, we've got a chance to build this now and build a future we want that we're actually proud of. I think the time is now for us to all stand up because it's not going to happen to us ... Or it will happen to us. If we choose to do nothing, it'll happen to us. It doesn't need to. I'm really excited because I think we're going to make some fundamental changes and challenges to old ways of working and old ways of living, and we'll end up happier because of it.

Nick Muldoon:

Don, I'm super jazzed, man. Thank you. I really appreciate your time today. That's a great place to finish it up.

Dom Price:

I hope some of those things come true.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. I hope some of those things come true, right? I feel like the things that are in our power, the things that we can directly affect, takeaways for me, I've got extending the love and loathe into the love, loathe, long for and learned. I think that's great. I also like the boomerang versus the stick with respect to your time and what's on the calendar, and just jettison the stuff that is, well, it's not helping you, or the teams, or anyone else. Yeah.

Dom Price:

You could do it like [inaudible 01:01:33]. If it ends up being important, you can add it back.

Nick Muldoon:

Sure.

Dom Price:

[inaudible 01:01:38].

Nick Muldoon:

The big takeaway from this conversation for me is that it's in our hands. The choice, we make the decisions. It's in our hands. I think about, was Mark Twain, whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right.

Dom Price:

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

You might as well think you can and get on with it.

Dom Price:

Yeah, yeah, give it a red-hot stab and see what happens.

Nick Muldoon:

All right, cool. Don, thanks so much for your time this morning. Really appreciate it.

Dom Price:

It was great chatting.

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Transcript

Teagan Harbridge:

Welcome to another episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Teagan, head of product here at Easy Agile. And we've got a really exciting guest on the show today, Andrew Malak from Spaceship. He's the chief product officer. Andrew is a true believer in creating products and experiences that solve customer problems. He believes that the customer trusts your business by joining, and you have an obligation to repay that trust by helping them achieve their outcomes. In his current role, Andrew aims to help people take control of their wealth from a young age, educating good money habits and helping people invest where the world is going. Andrew is a family man who loves his time with his wife and children. And believe it or not, he uses agile techniques in his personal and professional life. Andrew is an economics geek. He plays and coaches soccer, football. He's a big Liverpool supporter, loves to travel, loves amazing architecture, and loves working with children.

Teagan Harbridge:

There were so many takeaways from my chat with Andrew that I really struggled to pair it down to three. But if you say tuned, here are some of the things that you're going to learn from our chat with Andrew. Why we should stop using the term agile transformation and start calling it an agile evolution. Why it's important to be open-minded to our own limitations so to break the old mindset of protecting original scope. And tips on how to achieve a culture of accountability. So I hope you enjoy. Andrew, can you tell me a little bit about Spaceship?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, fantastic. Well, thank you very much for, first of all, having me, Teagan. Spaceship is a business that's on a journey to make good money habits and investing accessible to all people. So what we look for is trends to do with industries or companies who are building the future of both industry or economies. We invest in them for the longterm, we break down barriers of entry for people, we give them a fee-free product under $5,000, no minimum investments. It's really easy to sign up. You simply download an app and you sign up and make one product selection decision, and you're done. You can start investing on autopilot. We allow you to also invest your superannuation in a not too dissimilar way.

Teagan Harbridge:

So tell me a little bit about who your target customer is, then. Because it seems like you're trying to make something quite complicated accessible for maybe first time investors.

Andrew Malak:

Well, you're absolutely right. There's a niche segment of people out there at the moment, millennials or even gen Zs, that we just don't think have been well serviced by the incumbents. And what we're trying to do is resonate with these young people as much as possible. We're trying to reduce industry jargon and really make things simple to them, because investing doesn't have to be complex. It's really about a lot of discipline around, if I can manage my personal P&L, or money in, money out, then I can create a cash buffer that can go into my assets column on my balance sheet. That's really what we're trying to do. And that kind of language, if we can get it right, can really simplify things that have typically been in the hands of financial advisors and accountants and give it back to everyday Australians who are starting out in their investment journey.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, awesome. And you've been on quite a journey before landing in the FinTech space as the Spaceship CPO. So can you tell me and our audience a little bit about what that journey has looked like?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, where do I start? If you asked a graduate Andrew Malak what he'd be doing now, I don't think I would've been speaking about this because at that point in time in my career I didn't know this space would actually be around, if that makes sense. So I'll go back to my younger years, and I always thought I was going to be an architect. I had this fascination with bridges and I wanted to design things and see them come to life. And let's just say that I do that in different ways right now, but I started out working in CommSec on the trading floor. I moved on to work as a business analyst, and that's where I started my critical thinking into how businesses work and how things can be made more efficient.

Andrew Malak:

I dabbled in teaching for a little bit, I taught high school economics and religion for a little bit. And then I eventually landed in a product role at St. George Bank prior to the merger with Westpac. At that point in time, the light bulb really came on. I realized, "Hey, I like creating things. I like to change things. I don't like to just do things," if that makes sense. And that wondering mind that doesn't like the conform was finally let loose, if that makes sense. And I haven't stopped enjoying it. I loved my time at Westpac, made lots of friends, worked on really cool, successful projects, and implemented lots of things that had great results. Worked on lots of things that have failed miserably and learnt a lot out of that. And when the opportunity at Spaceship started to surface late last year, it was just too good an opportunity to not really come in and have a go. So yeah, it's been quite the journey.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, wow. And I love a good failure story. And you said you've had lots. Can you think, just off the top of your head, what one of those big failures has been?

Andrew Malak:

Where do I start? I think our first attempt at taking a digital experience to allow customers to acquire a product online was quite a failure that taught us a lot. We basically took the systems that our back office staff used and just made it available to customers. And the real good learning out of that is there was a lot of traffic and a lot of demand, but not enough completion ever. And the best learning that came out of that... This is back in 2006, so internet speeds were just starting to pick up. Broadband was starting to go mainstream and customers' trust around doing more transactions that used personally identifiable data was starting to normalize at that point in time. Up until then, people quite reserved thinking, "I'm going to lose my personal data," et cetera. So when we decided to do that, we saw that there was a lot of demand but we quickly came to the realization that we used to train staff for four to six weeks on how to use the systems before they knew how to service customers using them.

Andrew Malak:

But then we've deployed it into production for customers to self-service and realized quite quickly that the experience for customers had to be much more guided than the experience for a staff member. This is where the evolution of usability or design thinking started to come in. We started thinking of, "Well, how do we make these things so easy that a first-time user can go end to end and not encounter friction?" And this is where our understanding of design principles, customer testing using verbatim and anguage that can resonate with a first-time user becomes critical to the execution. It's not just good systems but it's good user experience sitting on top of systems.

Andrew Malak:

That's probably the one that resonates with me the most because I've held that to a very high regard throughout my whole career. Now everything I do I think of, "Where's the friction? How do we make sure there's no friction? What's the customer going to feel throughout this experience? How are we creating unnecessary anxiety in that experience for the customer, and how do we move that away? How do we become more transparent but still be simple?" And yeah, that's probably the one that resonates the most.

Teagan Harbridge:

Seems like a tremendous learning opportunity early enough in that project and something that's stuck with you since, so great learning opportunity.

Andrew Malak:

Absolutely.

Teagan Harbridge:

We've got a ton of customers who are at all stages of their agile transformations, and I know that this is something that you've had experience with if we go back to your St. George, Westpac days. Can you give our audience any tips or stories that you encountered when you were going through those agile transformations? What lessons can you share with our audience?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, I have lots of lessons to share, actually.

Teagan Harbridge:

This is what I love.

Andrew Malak:

Look, I like to position it more as agile evolution more than agile transformation because no matter what you try to do, you're not just going to drop waterfall and become agile next morning. Honestly, I've seen so many attempts and every single time I see that the graduality of the change is a better predictability of the final outcome that you're going to land. So ultimately the Holy Grail that everyone's aspiring to is that, as a leader, you can rock up to a team stand up unexpected and then, without being told who is in what role, who the product owner is, who the engineer is, who the QC is, who the designer is, it becomes hard for you as the leader to work out who's who because at that point in time the team is so well converged on customer outcomes that they will self-organize themselves around what each person needs to do.

Andrew Malak:

And most of the language being used is really around, what are we trying to define the customer? What's the best thing to do within the capacity that we have to deliver this feature to market as quickly as possible, capture value for the customer and the business as much as possible? This takes a long time to get to, where you can start normalizing to a standardized, common set of goals, common cadence, and common ways of working. And I think it's ultimately about how much empowerment you can give people and how much as a leader you can relegate yourself in the background to allow them to work it out themselves as long as you're coming in and nudging things along the way and helping people course correct along the way. So the good news is that I actually think at Spaceship, we're pretty close to getting there.

Andrew Malak:

We have been running scrum and we have been running sprints for a long time, but it has been largely ceremonials. But over the last quarter, we've done a really good job at embedding more cross-functional people into these teams. But the goal for us is that now we feel like our throughput has actually increased and that the constant flow of information between the teams is becoming more natural and there is actually less ambiguity between the teams around, "All right, we built it this way. The API is no longer consumable. It doesn't fit what we're trying to do from our front-end and there's less back and forth." So we can really see that the amount of friction between persons in the team is really starting to reduce dramatically and we're starting to see that throughput really increase. Having said that, the best way to go about an agile transformation is just get started.

Andrew Malak:

You can sit and plan out things and plan towards utopia as much as you want or you can actually just get going. So when I say by get going, I say you have to start by getting buy-in from all the leaders of the different cross-functional teams, because if you don't have that buy-in at the leadership level, it's just not going to work because there's going to be blockers, there's going to be escalations. And if all these things result in conversations around, "Should we keep doing this?" Or, "Hey, maybe this is not the right thing to do." That needs to be off the table really early on and it needs to be a total commitment at the leadership level that we're going to make this work and whatever we encounter we're just going to fix forward. Once you have that commitment at the leadership level, you need to very clearly define the values that the team is going to be handed to work with, because agile itself, it's not a process, it's a set of values that the team needs to just take and start working with.

Andrew Malak:

So we could go and rattle individuals and interactions over processes and tools or working software over comprehensive documentation. Well, give these to the team and they're going to say to you at day one, "We can't go to all of that straight away." So they might actually say that day one, "We're still going to need some documentation because we're not comfortable yet. We don't understand the language of the other people in the scrum team well enough to be able to go and actually code off the back of a conversation." But by the 10th sprint, the 20th sprint, that misunderstanding of what the product owner wants or what the designer is trying to achieve in an experience starts to become embedded in the mind of the engineer.

Andrew Malak:

The engineer understands the customer a lot more, and then you can make do with less process and less documentation and less negotiated outcomes and more commonality across the team. The other thing that then starts to kick in at that stage is that ability of the team to pivot in response to a change and not see that as a threat to what they're trying to achieve. The old ways of working was, define that scope, protect that scope, and not let things disturb that scope, whereas if you're halfway through a project and you get some really good information that tells you that maybe you are not on track to achieve a good outcome, you should be welcoming that. And the team itself in the beginning is going to find that an irritation, but over time they'll become more comfortable with pivoting off the back of new information.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah. It's a big mindset shift. I was just having a discussion today about, where does being agile and being reactive, where's that line in the middle. And when does taking information and pivoting because you think something will be better, when can we break that mindset of, "Oh, we're just being reactive?" No, we're being responsive.

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, yeah. And look, I think the word reactive itself naturally has a negative connotation to it, but agility in mindset allows you to flip that on its head and say that no one can work things out in totality to 100% of what's possible, so being open-minded to our own limitations first and foremost allows us to acknowledge that when new information comes in, it is because we didn't think through the solution 100%, but let's also be okay with that because no one can. So I think it's flipping on its head and acknowledging it upfront and saying that this is going to happen, but when it comes we will assess the information we have with the capacity we have with how far progressive we are and make a decision that's right for us, for the customer, and for what's possible.

Andrew Malak:

So I take it as the more information you get along the way, the more reinforcement of, are you doing what's right or should you pivot and change at that point in time? The other thing that happens really early on is that if you as a leader can create a really clear vision around customer outcomes and establish your first cross-functional team and hand over that vision to the team, it becomes theirs. Don't hand over the backlog to the team. Don't give them a ready backlog, just give them the vision and then tell them, "You guys work out what your backlog looks like." When they come up with their own backlog, as long as you as a leader don't see that it's just a list of Hail Marys in it and there is a fair bit in there that is well spread out between hygiene things, strategic things, and a few moonshots and the balance is right, if the team has come up with their own backlog, the motivation they have to build their own ideas just goes through the roof.

Andrew Malak:

And that's what you want to achieve. You want to achieve clarity that the work fits with the vision and the motivation that you get out of the backlog being created by the team itself gets you that throughput enhancement. The other thing that you're going to struggle with really early on is chunking things down to fitting within the sprint cadence. I think that's one that's often been my biggest challenge when moving towards agile practices early on. Typically in the first few sprints, you always have overruns and things don't complete in the sprint because we end up thinking we can do more than we can and it takes us a while to work out, in wrapping up something that becomes shippable in a sprint, you probably take a little bit less in that sprint because you've got to test it or you've got to do a release in that sprint, or you're going to do a PIR in that sprint, or you're going to do a lot of retros in that sprint. Start to sort of formulate what you're going to take through the next planning cycle.

Andrew Malak:

So you've got to budget to that capacity, and I'll find that teams underestimate the magnitude of that work. So be okay with that. Overruns in the first few sprints don't mean you've failed, it means you're learning how to plan better. And then make sure your retros and your pivot off the back of that into your next planning sessions is taking information that is now new to you, and making sure you're working with it. I think as the leader, though, you have to set the expectations that teams can make mistakes and that it's a safe environment.

Andrew Malak:

And I've seen many agile... I was about to use the word transformation, even though I've just said I don't believe in transformation. Any teams that are adopting agile principles expecting that in their first few sprints they don't have any hiccups, and that if throughput falls in the first few sprints, then there's a bit of a, "Oh, well you told me this thing was going to increase our throughput." Yeah, but not straight away. So I think just being realistic with yourself and what's possible, and that shift in itself, until it normalizes, takes a bit of getting used to. The teams need to know it's a safe environment, that if their productivity suffers, if they make mistakes or if they break things, it's going to be okay. We'll fix forward.

Andrew Malak:

But then also there comes a point in time where we have to be very clear about the culture of accountability around using that capacity really well. So what I've found, that the best use of that is the showcase. And what we've done at Spaceship, because we're trying to reduce the amount of ceremonies, we've combined both the planning playback in a sprint as well as the showcase into the same ceremony. So what we do is we play back what we built last session using a demonstration of working software and comparing the amount of work we've executed versus what was planned in the previous sprint. We're saying we've got 80%, 90% through the work and this is what it looks and feels like, and this is what we're deploying to the customer. Then we actually showcase what we plan to do in the next sprint.

Andrew Malak:

And that's part of the showcase, is our hand on heart commitment to, "This is what we as a team are committed to doing in the next sprint." And then that accountability to the organization becomes something that keeps us on track throughout the sprint. As distractors or things that are not committed in the sprint come our way, we quickly think about, all right, can we accommodate these things? Do they need to be done? Are they going to take us off track with what is planned? Are they important enough? Is it a major defect of production, and can customers no longer access our app? Well, drop what you're doing and attend to that. Otherwise, if it's not material, keep focused on the work that you've committed to in front of the organization.

Andrew Malak:

After this you're going to start to experience some growing pain, and the growing pain is good because it means that agile is working and more teams or more feature opportunities become possible for the business. There's going to be a lot more hype around moving to agile. Other teams are going to come across and say, "Oh, how do we piggyback off what you're doing?" Et cetera. This is good. This is good, but what it means now is that some new risks are going to actually start to be introduced. Working with common code, common dependencies, or even common people being needed to be doing multiple things just means that you now need more coordination. I'd say to anyone who reaches this point in time, this is where people feel compelled to start introducing some new roles, coordination roles. And I'd just say, be careful because that can start add to your overhead really quickly.

Andrew Malak:

I find the best way to ensure that teams continue to be in sync is with the right dialogue at the right level with the right rhythm. And this is where I think keeping it simple to just the scrum of scrums works really well. I like the scrum of scrums to be balanced between both product owner and tech lead from each team being present, and a cadence of one to two times per week works really well. And as long as the product owners across the teams and the tech leads across the teams know what the other teams are working on, know what could impact their own work from a release perspective or scheduling perspective or an environment perspective, I think that tends to work really well as well.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, wow. Lots of nuggets in there and certainly things that resonate with our experience here at Easy Agile, being a small company that's grown really quickly. So I can definitely relate. We've had conversations about, do we introduce new roles into this company? We've introduced a new cadence of meeting rhythms only the last couple of months, so we're going through these things too.

Andrew Malak:

Absolutely. Absolutely. What have been your biggest learnings so far?

Teagan Harbridge:

I think that you cannot underestimate communication, and it really does come back to that cadence and that rhythm with the team. And we're experimenting at the moment with a daily huddle where we're talking about, how do we embed showcases more regularly in our cycles? We've got a big demo at the end of the cycle. How can we make that a more ingrained part of our culture? And it really does come back to that culture of accountability as well. So yep, it's all resonating.

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, absolutely. Look, you can go to whatever industry you want but the problems are usually similar. And the great thing is that having these conversations is very important to fast-tracking your way forward, because your problem is not unique to you. Someone else has seen it in someone else has figured out a way. And I think what I like about the FinTech industry is that we compete on products and services, but there's a lot to learn from each other. And even if you just go outside of FinTech, there's a lot to learn from other industries who have adopted agile practices.

Teagan Harbridge:

If we take a bit of a flip, we've gone from your professional career and your experience into a more personal level. You mentioned that you use agile techniques outside of work. So I'm not sure if many others are in the same boat, but can you elaborate on this? What does that mean? What does that look like?

Andrew Malak:

Okay, I hope you don't think I'm extremely weird. We actually have a family campaign. So I guess if I go back to how we've come to actually doing this. Becoming parents, we would look at our children and see so many things that we want them to be better at. And in trying to give them constant feedback, which felt like the feedback was so much that it's all being drowned out because there's so much of it. In fact, my oldest son actually gave me that feedback. He goes, "Dad, why don't we focus on one thing at a time?"

Andrew Malak:

And I was like, "Wow, okay." For a ten-year-old to tell me that, that was amazing. So we came to realize that we needed to narrow and focus on one improvement area at a time, and we don't move on to the next one until we've actually closed out the first one. For example, my oldest son, very clever boy. We're trying to focus with him on the discipline of process over just getting the answer right, because he is clever and nine times out of 10, ask him a question, he's got the answer and he just wants to say it.

Andrew Malak:

But we've started to try to break down the question and work more on the process with him so that in following the process, coupled with his natural ability, we will get more answers right more often. And that's what we're working through at the moment. So our family's scrum wall at the moment has a mix of things on it. Everyone has their own swim lane, and in each swim lane there are a few tasks, some related work or study, some relating to household chores, some related to health or exercise, and some related to acts of kindness. And what we aim to do is make sure that we're moving things across in all four categories every single day. So yeah, you can use agility wherever you'd like but I think that mindset in general, that if I wake up every day and do things that make me better than I was yesterday, then I'll get to keep moving forward in my personal life as well as my professional life.

Teagan Harbridge:

And do you have WIP limits?

Andrew Malak:

We don't at the moment, and we're not doing showcases at the moment. We'll see how we can introduce them in the future.

Teagan Harbridge:

And how was the introduction of a Kanban board at home? How was that received by the family? Have they enjoyed it, has there been any feedback?

Andrew Malak:

Well, it wasn't actually planned. It started by just sticking some Post-its up on the fridge to remind us of stuff. And then one day I said to my wife, "You know what? This reminds me of what we do at work. Why don't we formalize it?" She had a bit of a chuckle but then one day she came back and then she found it there. So yeah, it wasn't really planned.

Teagan Harbridge:

Awesome. And you've already been super generous with your time so I'll close it out with one final question. What advice do you wish someone would have given you when you took the leap from product management into product leadership?

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think first and foremost, that you've got to make sure that you drop your need for perfectionism, because first and foremost, you might have been the best product manager yourself. You might have been amazing. And I'm not saying I was, but if you were and you step up in leadership role, you're going to have people of different abilities working for you. And what you need to understand is that they're going to need some time learning their role and learning their trade. And just don't get in the way of them learn. So for example, you might see someone doing something that may not be the best or most optimal use of that capacity in that sprint. You might feel the urge to jump in and course correct. But if you let them go and just hear their feedback post the retro, they might've had that learning themselves, and a learning that they get for themselves rather than being told by their leader is going to be much more useful for them.

Andrew Malak:

You have to drop your need to make decisions and be in control because, again, the more you can relegate yourself to a servant leadership role and let the team make decisions, when they make decisions and now have to go back up that decision with execution, they're more likely to put their heart and soul into it. The more they feel like you are going to make the decisions, the less inclined they are to think through problems themselves, and then they'll keep bringing the problems back to you. So every time someone asks you a question that has a black and white answer, throw it back to them and ask them what they think, because that way you're coaching them to work it out themselves. And then the last thing that's really important is, I feel like it's really important to think through how your organization allows you to be different and take advantage of that differentiation.

Andrew Malak:

So for example, at Spaceship here, because we're small, we're not a large corporate, our customers are a little bit more forgiving. So you have a limited capacity to build experiences and you can't do all things at the same time. Understand that and take advantage of it, and get your team to also learn that. Because if you're trying to how the all edge cases, it will take a lot longer to get something to market and you might use a lot of the team's capacity to build edge cases. And you can't really afford that when you're in a start-up.

Andrew Malak:

So for example, we launched a new investment portfolio yesterday. We launched the Spaceship Earth portfolio, our first sustainable investment portfolio and it's a sign of more things to come hopefully in the sustainability space. But in launching that, we knew that we have a limitation in our experience or our product set today where each customer can only have one portfolio. We knew that existing customers would want to invest in sustainable investing, but our commitment to them is that it's in our backlog and it's actually the next feature that we're actually going to take to market.

Andrew Malak:

And in explaining that to our customers, they've been very understanding, that they know our throughput is limited but they also know that their voice is being heard and we are building the things that they're telling us about. So I would say that the best piece of advice to tell my young self is to make sure that you get the balance right between the voice of the customer. That's going to tell you all the hygiene things that your product lacks in terms of experience or gaps. And then get the balance between new strategic things that you can go after and new things that you can take to market, as well as a few Hail Marys every now and again. We call them moonshots. They may or may not work, but it's exciting, and if it works, can 10X your volume. And they are the things that are likely to go viral. So getting the balance right is very important.

Teagan Harbridge:

It's been wonderful, Andrew. I've definitely taken a lot away from our chat today, and I'm sure our audience will too. So thank you again so much for your time, and good luck.

Andrew Malak:

No Teagan, look, thank you very much. And it's been a pleasure speaking to yourself and Easy Agile, and I wish you guys all the best too.

Teagan Harbridge:

Awesome. Thanks Andrew.

Andrew Malak:

Have a good afternoon.

What a great conversation this was with Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach!

Chris shared some insights into the importance of sharing and de-stigmatising failures, looking after your own mental health, and why work shouldn't be stale.

Some other areas we discussed were, why you should spend time in self reflection - consider a solospective? and asking "how did that feel?" when working as a team.

"I really enjoyed our chat. Plenty to ponder over the silly season, and set yourself up with a fresh perspective for 2021. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!"

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Transcript

Sean Blake:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. It's Sean Blake here, your host today, and we're joined by Chris stone. Chris is going to be a really interesting guest. I really enjoyed recording this episode. Chris is the Virtual Agile Coach. He's an agility lead. People First champion blogger, speaker and trainer, who always seeks to gamify content and create immersive Agile experiences. An Agile convert all the way from back in 2012, Chris has since sought to broaden his experiences, escape his echo chamber and to fearlessly challenge dysfunction and ask the difficult questions. My key takeaways from this episode were; it's okay to share your failures, the importance of recognizing our mental health, why it's important that work doesn't become stale, how to de-stigmatize failure, the importance of selfreflection and holding many self retrospectives, and the origins of the word deadline. You'll be really interested to find out where that word came from and why it's a little bit troubling. So here we go. We're about to jump in. Here's the episode with Chris stone on the Easy Agile Podcast. Chris, thanks so much for joining us and spending some time with us.

Chris Stone:

Hey there Sean, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Sean Blake:

I have to mention you've got a really funky Christmas sweater on today. And for those people listening on the audio, they might have to jump over to YouTube just for a section to check out this sweater. Can you tell us a bit about where that came from?

Chris Stone:

So this sweater was a gift. It's a Green Bay Packers, Chris, Ugly Christmas Jumpers, what they call it. And I'm a fan of the Green Bay Packers, I've been out there a few times to Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's so cold out there in fact. When you're holding a beer and minus 13 degrees, the beer starts turning to slush just from being outside in the cold air. It's a great place, very friendly, and the jumper was just a gift one Christmas from someone.

Sean Blake:

Love it. There's nothing better than warm beer is there? Okay. So Chris, I first came across you because of the content that you put out on LinkedIn. And the way that you go about it, it's so much fun and so different to really anything else I've seen in the corporate space, in the enterprise space, in the Agile space even, why have you decided to go down this track of calling yourself the virtual Agile coach, building a personal brand and really putting yourself out there?

Chris Stone:

Well, for me, it was an interesting one because COVID, this year has forced a lot of people to convert to being virtual workers, remote workers, virtual coaches themselves. Now, what I realized this year is that, the aspiration for many is those co-located teams, it's always what people desired. They say, "Oh, you have to work harder, Katie, that's the best way." And I realized that in my whole Agile working life, I'd never really had that co-located team. There was always some element of distributed working and the past two years prior to where I'm currently, my current company, I was doing distributed scaled Agile with time zones, including Trinidad and Tobago, Alaska, Houston, the UK, India, and it was all remote.

Chris Stone:

And I thought, all right, this is an opportunity to recognize the fact that I was a virtual Agile coach already, but to share with others, my learnings, my experiences, the challenges I've faced, the failures I've had with the wider community so they can benefit from it because obviously, everyone, or more many have had to make that transition very quickly. And there's lots of learnings there that I'm sure people would benefit from. And this year in particular, I guess the honest answer, the reason for me being, I guess out there and working more on that side of things, being creative is because it's an outlet for my mental health.

Chris Stone:

I suffer from depression and one of my ways of coping with that is being creative and creating new content and sharing it. So I guess it's a reason of... it's linked to that also, but also the stories that people tell me afterwards, they motivate me to keep doing it. So when someone comes to me and says, "Hey, I did the Queen retrospective, the Queen Rock Band retrospective, and this program manager who never smiles connected to the content and admitted he liked Queen and smiled." And this was a first and when people come to me and say, "Hey, we did the Home Alone retrospective, the one of your Christmas themed ones and people loved it. It was great." It was the most engaging retrospective we've had so far because the problem is work can become stale if you let it be so.

Chris Stone:

Retrospectives can become this, what did we do last time? What are we going to do next time? What actions can we do? Et cetera, et cetera. And unless you refresh it and try new things, people will get bored and they'll disconnect and they'll disengage, and you're less likely to get a good outcome that way. So for me, there's no reason you can't make work a little bit fun, with a little bit of creativity and a little bit of energy and passionate about it.

Sean Blake:

I love that. And do you think a lot of people come to work even when they're working in Agile co-located teams and it's just not fun, I mean what do you think the key reasons are that work isn't fun?

Chris Stone:

I think because it can become stale. All right. So let's reflect on where we are today. Today, we're in a situation where we're not face-to-face with one another. We don't have time for those water cooler chats. We don't connect over a coffee or a lunch. We don't have a chat about idle banter and things of that on the way to a meeting room, we didn't have any of that. And that forces people to look at each other and see themselves as an avatar behind a screen, just a name. Often in particular, people aren't even on video camera.

Chris Stone:

It forces them to think of people as a name on a screen, rather than a beating heart on a laptop. And it can abstract people into just these entities, these names you talk to each day and day out, and that can force it to be this professional non-personal interaction. And I'm a firm believer that we need to change that. We need to make things more fun because it can, and in my experience, does result in much better outcomes. I'm very, very people first. We need to focus on people being people. People aren't resources. This is a common phrase I like to refer to you.

Sean Blake:

I love that, people aren't resources. You spoke a little bit about mental health and your struggle with depression. Something that I hear come up time and time again, is people that talk about imposter syndrome. And I wonder, firstly, if you think that might be exasperated through working remotely now. People are not so sure how they fit in, where their role is still the same role that it was 12 months ago. And do you have any tips for people when they're dealing with imposter syndrome, especially in a virtual environment?

Chris Stone:

Well, yeah I think this current environment, this virtual environment, the pandemic in particular, has led to a number of unhelpful behaviors. That there's a lot more challenges with people's mental health and negativity, and that can only lead to, I guess, less desire, less confidence in doing things, maybe doubting yourself. There's some great visuals I've shared on this recently, and it's all about reframing those imposter thoughts you have, the unhelpful thinking, that thing that goes through your mind that says, Oh, they're all going to think I'm a total fraud because maybe I don't have enough years of experience, or I should already know this. I must get more training. There's lots of “shoulding” and “musting” in that. There's lots of jumping to conclusions in this.

Chris Stone:

And a couple of ways of getting around that is, so if you're thinking of the scenario where I'm a fraud think, "Oh, well I'm doing my best, but I can't predict what they might think." When you're trying to think about the scenario of do I need to get more training? Well, understand and acknowledge the reality that you can't possibly know everything. You continue to learn every single day and that's great, but it's unrealistic to know it all. There's a great quote I often refer to and it's, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I believe it's a quote from Socrates.

Chris Stone:

And it's something that very much resonates with me. Over the years I've gone through this learning journey where, when I first finished university, for example, I thought I knew everything. I thought I've got it all. And I'd go out to clients and speak and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I know this. I've got this guys." And then the more involved I've become and the more deeper I've gone into the topic, the more I realized, actually there's so much that I don't know. And to me, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing tells me there's so much out there that I must continuously learn, I must continuously seek to challenge myself each and every day.

Chris Stone:

Other people who approach me and say, "How do you, or you produce a lot of content. How would you put yourself out there?" And I say, "Well, I just do it." Let's de-stigmatize failure. If you put a post out there and it bombs, it doesn't matter, put another one out there. It's as simple as that, learn from failure, Chuck something out there, try it, if it doesn't work, try something else. We coach Agile teams to do this all the time, to experiment. Have a hypothesis to test against that. Verify the outcomes and do retrospectives. I do weekly solospectives. I reflect on my week, what works, what hasn't worked, what I'm going to try differently. And there's no reason you can't do that also.

Sean Blake:

Okay. So weekly solospectives. What does that look like? And how do you be honest with yourself about what's working, what's not working and areas for yourself to improve? How do you actually start to have that time for self-reflection?

Chris Stone:

Unfortunately you got to make time for some reflection. One thing I've learned with mental health is you have to make time for your health before you have to make time for your illness or before you're forced to make time for your illness. And it can become all too easy in this busy working world to not make time for your health, to not make time and focus on you. So you do just have to carve out that time, whether that's blocking some time in the diary on a Friday afternoon, just to sit down and reflect, whether that's making time to go out for a walk, setting up a time on your Alexa to have a five minute stretching break, whatever it is, there's things you can do, and you have things you have to do to make time for yourself.

Chris Stone:

With regards to a solospective, the way I tend to do things is I tend to journal on a daily basis. That's almost like my own daily standard with myself, it's like, what have I observed? What have I... what challenges do I face in the past day? And then that sums up in the weekly solospective, which is basically a retro for one, where I reflect on, what did I try it? What do I want to achieve this week? What's gone well? What hasn't gone well. It's the same as a retrospective just one and allows me to aggregate my thoughts across the week, rather than them being single events. So that I'm focusing more on the trajectory as opposed to any single outlier. Does that make sense?

Sean Blake:

It does. It does. So you've got this trajectory with your career. You're checking in each week to see whether you're heading in the right direction. I assume that you set personal goals as well along the way. I also noticed that you have personal values that you've published and you've actually published those publicly for other people to look at and to see. How important are those personal values in informing your life and personal and career goals?

Chris Stone:

So I'd say that are hugely important, for me, what I thought was we see companies sharing their values all the time. You look on company websites and you can see their values quite prominently. And you could probably think do they often live up to their values? You have so many companies have customer centricity as their value, but how many of them actually focus on engaging with their customers regularly? How many have a metric where they track, how often they engage with customers? Most of them are focusing on velocity and lead time. So I always challenge, are you really customer centric or is that lip service? But moving aside, I digress. I thought companies have values, and obviously we do as well, but why don't we share them? So I created this visual, showing what mine were and challenged a few others to share it also. And I had some good feedback from others which was great.

Chris Stone:

But they hugely influence who I am and how I interact on a day-to-day basis. And I'll give you an example, one of my values is being open source always. And what that means is nothing I create, no content I create, nothing I produce would ever be behind a payroll. And that's me being community driven. That's me sharing what I've learned with others. And how that's come to fruition, how I've lived that is I've had lots of people come to me say, "Hey, we love the things you do. You gave me flying things. Would you mind, or would you like to collaborate and create this course that people would pay for?" So often I've said, "If it's free, yes. But if it's going to be monetized, then no."

Chris Stone:

And I've had multiple people reach out to me for that purpose. And I've had to decline respectfully and say, "Look, I think what you're doing is great. You've got a great app and I can see how having this Agile coaching gamification course on that would be of great value. But if it's behind the payroll, then I'm not interested because it's in direct conflict with my own values, and therefore, I wouldn't be interested in proceeding with it. But keep doing what you're doing, being people first, #people first." This is about me embodying the focus on people being beating hearts behind a laptop, rather than just this avatar on a screen. And I have this little... the audio listeners, won't be able to see this, but I'm holding up a baby Groot here. And he's like my people first totem.

Chris Stone:

And the reason for that is I have a group called the Guardians of Agility, and we are people first. That's our emblem. And these are my transformation champions in my current company. I like to have Guardians of Agility, and I've got this totem reminding me to be people first in every interaction I have. So when, for example, I hear the term resources and I'm saying, well... As soon as I hear it, it almost triggers me. I almost hear like, "Oh, what do they mean by that?" And I'll wait a little moment and I'll say, "Hey, can you tell me what you mean by that?" And you tease it out a little bit. And often they meant, "Oh, it's people, isn't it?" If you're talking about people, can we refer to them as people?

Chris Stone:

Because people aren't resources. They're not objects or things you mine out the ground. They're not pens, paper or desks. They're not chairs in an office. They are people. And every time you refer to them as a resource, you abstract them. You make it easier to dehumanize them and think of them as lesser, you make it easier to make those decisions like, oh, we can just get rid of those resources or we can just move that resource from here to there and to this team and that team, whether they want to or not. So I don't personally like the language.

Chris Stone:

And the problem is it goes all the way back to how it's trained. You go to university and you take a business degree and you learn about human resources. You take a course, Agile HR, Agile human resources, right, and it's so prevalent out there. And unless we challenge it, it won't change. So I will happily sit there and a meeting with a CTO and he'll start talking about resource and I'll say, "Hey, what do you mean by that?" And I'll challenge it and he'll go, "Yeah, I've done it again, have I not?" "Yes. Yes, you have." And it's gotten to the point now where I'll be on this big group call for example, and someone will say it, and I'll just start doing this on a screen waving, and they'll go, "Did it again, didn't I?" "Yes, you did."

Sean Blake:

So some of these habits are so ingrained from our past experiences our education, and when you're working with teams for the first time, who's never worked in Agile before, they're using phrases like resources, they're doing things that sometimes we call anti-patents, how do you start to even have that conversation and introduce them to some of these concepts that are totally foreign to people who've never thought the way that you or I might think about our teams and our work?

Chris Stone:

Sure. So I guess that the first response to that is with empathy. I'm not going to blame someone or make out that they're a bad person for using words that are ingrained, that are normal. And this is part of the problem that that term, resource is so ingrained in that working language nowadays, same as deadlines. Deadlines is so ingrained, even though deadlines came from a civil war scenario where it referred to, if you went past the line, you were shot. How did that land in the business language? I don't know. But resources, it's so ingrained, it's so entrenched into this language, so people do it without intending to. They often do it without meaning it in a negative way. And to be honest, the word itself isn't the issue, it's how people actually behave and how they treat people.

Chris Stone:

I said my first approach is empathy. Let's talk about this. Let's understand, "Hey, why did you use term?" "Oh, I use it to mean this." "Okay. Well." Yeah, and not to do it or call them out publicly or things like that. It's doing things with empathy. Now, I also often use obviously gamification and training approaches, and Agile games to introduce concepts. If someone's unfamiliar to a certain way of working, I'll often gamify. I'll create something, a virtual Agile game to demonstrate. The way I do say, is I'm always looking to help people understand how it feels, not just to talk theory. And I'll give you an example. I'm a big fan of a game called the Virtual Name Game. It's a game about multitasking and context switching.

Chris Stone:

And I always begin, I'll ask group of people, "Hey guys, can you multitask?" And often they go, "Yeah, we can do that." And there'll be those stereotypical things like, "Oh yeah, I'm a woman. I can do that." It happens. Trust me. But one of the first things I do, if I'm face-to-face with them, I'll say, "Hey, hold your hands out like this. And in your left hand..." And people on the audio can't see me, I'm holding out like my hands in front of me. In my left hand, we're going to play an endless game of rock, paper, scissors. And in my right hand, we're going to play a game of, we have a thumb war with each other. And you can try, you can challenge them, can they do those concurrently? No, they can't. They will fail because you just can't focus on both at the same time.

Chris Stone:

Now the Virtual Name Game, the way it works is you divide a group of people up into primarily customers and one developer. And I love to make the most senior person in the room, that developer. I want them to see how it feels to be constantly context switching. So if you were the developer, you're the senior person to review the hippo in this scenario, the highest paid person. I would say Sean, in this game, these customers, they are trying to get their name written first on this virtual whiteboard. And we're going to time how long it takes for you to write everyone's name in totality. The problem is that they're all going to shouting at you continuously, endlessly trying to get your attention. So it's going to be Sean, Sean, write my name, write my...

Chris Stone:

And it's just going to be wow, wow, wow, who do I focus on? You won't know. And this replicates a scenario that I'm sure many people have experienced. He who shouts loudest gets what they want. Prioritization is often done by he who's... or the person who shouts loudest not necessarily he. We then go into another rounds where you say, I'm this round, Sean, people are to be shouting their name at you. But in this round, you're going to pay a little bit attention to everyone. So the way you're going to do that is you're going to read the first letter of one person's name, then you move on to the first letter of the next person's name, and you're going to keep going around. The consequence of that is everyone gets a little bit of attention, but the result is it's really slow.

Chris Stone:

You're starting lots of things but not finishing them. And again, in each round, we're exploring how it feels. How did it feel to be in that round? Sean, you were being shouted at, how did that feel? Everyone else, you were shouting to get your attention. You had to shout louder than other people, how did that feel? And it's frustrating, it's demotivating, it's not enjoyable. In the final around, I would say, "Hey, Sean, in this round, I'm going to empower you to decide whose name you write first. And you can write the whole thing in order. And the guys actually they're going to help you this time, there are no shouts over each other, they are going to help you." And in this scenario, as I'm sure you can imagine, it feels far better. The result is people finish things, and you can measure the output, the number of brand names written on a timeframe.

Chris Stone:

It's a very quick and easy way of demonstrating how it feels to be constantly context switching and the damage you can have, if, for example, you've prioritized things into a sprint and you got lots of trying to reorder things and so on and so forth, and lots of pressure from external people that ideally should be shielded from influencing this and that, and how that feels and what the result is, because you may start something, get changed into something else. You got to take your mindset of this, back into something else, and then the person who picks up the original thing might not have even been the same person, they've got to learn that over again. There's just lots of waste and efficiency costs through that. And that's just an example of a game I use, to bring that sort of things to life.

Sean Blake:

That's great. That's fantastic. I love that. And I think we need to, at Easy Agile, start playing some of those games because there's a lot of lessons to be learned from going through those exercises. And then when you see it play out in real life, in the work that you're doing, it's easier to recognize it then. If you've done the training, you've done the exercise, that all seems like fun and games at the time, but when it actually rears its head in the work that you're doing, it's much easier to call it out and say, "Oh wait, we're doing that thing that we had fun playing, but now we realize it's occurring in real life and let's go a different direction." So I can see how that would be really powerful for teams to go through that so Chris [crosstalk 00:22:26].

Chris Stone:

I'd also add that every game that I do, I construct it using the four Cs approach. So I'm looking to connect people... firstly, connect people to each other, and then to the subject matter. So in this game is about multitasking. To contextualize why that matters, why does context switching and multitasking matter in the world of work? Because it causes inefficiencies, because it causes frustration, de-motivation, et cetera. Then we do some concrete practice. We play a game that emphasizes how it feels. And at the end we draw conclusions, and the idea is that with the conclusion side of things, it's almost like a retrospective on the game. We say, "Hey, what did we learn? What challenges we face? And what can we do differently in our working world?" And that hopefully leaves people with actionable takeaways. A lot of the content I share is aiming to leave it with actionable takeaways, not just talking about something, but reflecting on what you could do differently, what you could try, what experiment you might like to employ with your working life, your team that might help improve a situation you're facing.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Yeah, that's really helpful. And you've spoken about this concept of Agile sins, and we know that a lot of companies have these values, they might've committed to an Agile transformation. They might've even gone and trained hundreds or thousands of people at accompany using similar tactics and coaching and educational experiences that you provide. But we still see sometimes things go terribly wrong. And I wonder, what's this concept of Agile sins that you talk about and how can we start to identify some of these sins that pop up in our day-to-day work with each other?

Chris Stone:

I guess, so the first thing I would emphasize about this is that using sin, it's a very dogmatic religious language and it's more being used satirically than with any real intent. So I just like to get that across. I'm not a dogmatic person, I don't believe there is any utopian solution. I certainly don't believe there's any one size fit to all situation for anyone. So the idea that there's really any actual sins is... yeah, take that with a pinch of salt. The reason the Agile sins came up is because I was part of... I'd done a podcast recently with a guy called Charles Lindsey, and he does this Agile confessional. And it's about one coach confessing to another, their mistakes, their sins, the things they've done wrong.

Chris Stone:

And I loved it because I'm all about de-stigmatizing failure. I'm all about sharing with one another, these war stories from one coach to another, because I've been a proponent of this in the past. I've shouted, "Hey there, I failed on this. I made this mistake. I learned from it." And I challenge others to do so as well and there's still this reluctance by many to share what went wrong. And it's because failure is this dirty word. It's got this stigma attached to it. No one wants to fail, leaders in particular. So the podcast was a great experience.

Chris Stone:

And it was interesting for me because that was the first time I'd given a confession, because I'll be honest with you, I'm someone who is used to taking confession myself. I go to this hockey festival every year and I got given years ago, this Archbishop outfit, and I kind of made that role my own way. I was drunk, and I said, "You're going to confess your sins to me." And if they haven't sinned enough, I tell them to go and do more. And I give them penicillin with alcohol shots and things like that. And I've actually baptized people in this paddling pool whilst drunk. Anyway, again, I digress, but I wasn't used to confessing myself, usually, I was taking confession, but I did so and it was a good experience to share some of my failures and my patterns was to create... and it was my own idea, to create my videos, seven videos of my seven Agile sins. And again, this was just me sharing my mistakes, what I've learned from that, with the intent of benefiting others to avoid those similar sins.

Sean Blake:

So you've spoken to a lot of other Agile coaches, you've heard about their failures, you confessed your own failures, is it possible for you to summarize down what are those ingredients that make someone a great coach?

Chris Stone: And that is a question, what makes someone a great coach? I think it's going to be entirely subjective, to be honest. And my personal view is that a great coach listens more than they speak. I guess that would be a huge starting point. When they listen more than they speak, because I've... and this is one of the things I've been guilty of in the past, is I've allowed my own biases to influence the team's direction. An approach I'd taken in the past was, "Hey, I'm working with this team and this has worked well in the past. We're going to do that." Rather than, "So guys, what have you done so far? What have you tried? What's worked well? What hasn't worked well? What can we create or what can we try next? That works for you guys. Let's have you make that decision and I'm here to guide you through that process to facilitate it, rather than to direct it myself."

Chris Stone:

Again, I find ... it's an approach that resonates more with people. They like feel that they own that decision as opposed to it being forced upon them. And there's far less, I guess, cognitive dissonance as a consequence. So listening more than speaking is a huge for me, a point an Agile coach should do. Another thing I think for me nowadays, is that there's too much copying and pasting. And what I mean by that is, the Spotify, the Spotify model came out years ago and everyone went, "Oh, this is amazing. We're going to adopt it. We're going to have tribes and chapters and guilds and squads, and it's going to work for us. That's that's our culture now."

Chris Stone:

I was like, "Well, let's just take a moment here. Spotify never intended for that to happen. They don't even follow that model themselves anymore. What you've done there is you've just tried to copy and paste another model." And people do it with SAFe as well. They just say, "Hey, we're going to take the whole SAFe framework and Chuck it into our system in this blueprint style cookie cutter." And the problem is that it doesn't take into account for me, the most important variable in any sort of transformation initiative, the people, what they want, and the culture there. So this is where another one of my values is, innovate, don't replicate. Work with people to experiment and find that Agile, what works for them rather than just copying and pasting things.

Chris Stone:

So tailor it to their needs rather than just coming in with some or seen dancing framework, and then the way I do it is I say, "Hey, well, SAFe is great. Well, it's got lots of values, and lots of great things about it. Lots of benefits to it, but maybe not all of it works for us. Let's borrow a few tenent of that." Same with LeSS, same with Scrum At Scale, same with Scrum, similar to Kanban. There's lots of little things you can borrow from various frameworks, but there's also lots of things you can inject yourself, lot's of things you can try that work for you guys, and ultimately come up with your own tailor-made solutions. So innovate, don't replicate would be another one for me.

Chris Stone:

Learning, learning fast and learning often, and living and breathing that yourself. Another mistake I and other coaches I think have made is not making time for your own personal development to allowing, day in, day out to just be busy, busy, busy, but at the same time you're going out there, coaching teams, "Hey, you've got to learn all the time. You got to try new things." But not making that time for yourself. So I always carve out time to do that, to attend conferences, to read books, to challenge myself and escape my echo chamber. Not just to speak to the same people I do all the time, but perhaps to go on a podcast with people I've never spoken to. To a different audience, maybe to connect with people that actually disagree with me, because I want that.

Chris Stone:

I don't want that homophilous thinking where everyone thinks exactly like I do, because then I don't get exposed to the perspectives that make me think differently. So I'm often doing that. How can I tend to conference that I know nothing about, maybe it's a project management focus one. Project management and waterfall isn't a dirty word either. There is no utopian system, project management and... sure traditional project management and waterfall has its benefits in certain environments. Environments with less footing, less flexible scope or less frequently changing requirements works very well.

Chris Stone:

I always say GDPR, which is an EU legislation around data protection, that was a two year thing in the making and everyone knew exactly what was happening and when they had to do it by. That was a great example of something that can be done very well with a waterfall style, because the requirements weren't changing. But if you are trying to develop something for a customer base that changes all the time, and you've got lots of new things and lots of competitors and things like that, then it varies, and probably the ability to iterate frequently and learn from it is going to be more beneficial and this is where Agile comes in. So I guess to sum up there, there's a few things, learning fast learning often. I can't even remember the ones I've mentioned now, I've gone off on many tangents and this is what I do.

Sean Blake:

I love it. It's great advice, Chris. It's really important and timely. And you mentioned, earlier on that the customer base that's always changing and we know that technology is always changing and things are only going to change more quickly, and disruptions are only going to be more severe going forward. Can you look into the future, or do you ever look into the future and say, what are those trends that are emerging in the Agile space or even in work places that are going to disrupt us in the way that we do our work? What does Agile look like in five or 10 years?

Chris Stone:

Now that again is a very big question. I can sit here and postulate and talk about what it might look like. I'm going to draw upon what I think is a great example of what will shape the next five or 10 years. In February, 2021, there's a festival called Agile 20 Reflect, I'm not sure if you've heard of it, and it's built as a festival, not conference, it's really important. So it's modeled on the Edinburgh festival and what it intends to be is a celebration of the past, the present and the future of Agile. Now what it is, it's a month long series of events on Agile, and anyone can create an event and speak and share, and it will create this huge community driven load of content that will be freely accessible and available.

Chris Stone:

Now, there are three of the original Agile manifestor signatories that are involved in this. Lisa Adkins is involved in this as is lots of big name speakers that are attached to this festival. And I myself, I'm running a series of retrospectives on the Agile manifesto. I've interviewed Arie van Bennekum, one of the original Agile manifesto signatories. They're going to be lots of events out there. And I think that festival will begin to shape in some way, what Agile might look like because there's lots of events, lots of speakers, lots of panel discussions that are coming up, coming together with lots of professionals out there, lots of practitioners out there that will begin to shape what that looks like. So whilst I could sit here and postulate on it, I'm not the expert to be honest, and there are far greater minds than I. And actually I'd rather leverage the power of the wider community and come into that than suggesting mine at this time.

Sean Blake:

Nice. I like it. And what you've done there, you've made it impossible for us to click this video and prove you wrong in the future when you predict something that doesn't end up happening. So that's very wise if you.

Chris Stone: Future proof myself.

Sean Blake: Exactly. Chris, I think we're coming almost to the end now, but I wanted to ask, given the quality of your Christmas sweater, do you have any tips for teams who are working over the holiday period, they're most likely burnt out after a really difficult 2020? What are some of the things you'd say to coaches on Agile teams as they come into this time where hopefully people are able to take some time off, spend some time with their family. Do you have any tips or recommendations for how people can look after their mental health look after their peers and spend that time in self-reflection?

Chris Stone:

Sure. So a number of things that I definitely would recommend. I'm currently producing and sharing this Agile advent calendar. And the idea is that every day you get a new bite-size piece of Agile knowledge or a template or something working in zany or a video, whatever it may be. There's lots of little things getting in there. And there's been retro templates, Christmas and festive themes. So there's a Home Alone one, a Diehard one, an elf movie one, there's all sorts. Perhaps try one of those as a fun immersive way with your team to just reflect on the recent times as a squad and perhaps come up with some things in the next year.

Chris Stone:

And there's for example, the Diehard one, it's based on the quotes from the movie Diehard so it's what you'd be doing in there, celebrate your... to send them to your team. Or there's one in there about, if this is how you celebrate Christmas, I can't wait for new year. And that question was saying, what do we want to try next year? Like this year has been great, what do we want to try differently next year? So there's opportunities through those templates to reflect in a fun way so give one of those a go. I shared some Christmas eve festive Zoom backgrounds, or Team backgrounds, give those a go and make a bit fun, make it a bit immersive. There's Christmas or festive icebreakers that you can use. What I tend to do is any meeting I facilitate, the first five minutes is just unadulterated chat about non-work things, and I often use icebreakers to do so. And whether that's a question, like if you could have the legs of any animal, what would you have and why, Sean, what would that be?

Sean Blake:

Probably a giraffe, because just thought the height advantage, it's got to be something that's useful in everyday life.

Chris Stone: Hard to take you on the ground maybe.

Sean Blake:

Yes. Yes, you would definitely need that. Although, I don't think I would fit in the lift on the way to work, so that would be a problem.

Chris Stone:

Yeah. That's just how I start. But yeah, that's just a question, because it's interesting to see what could people come up with, but there's some festive ones too, what's your favorite Christmas flick? What would put you on the naughty list this year? Yeah, does your family have any weird or quirky Christmas traditions? Because I love hearing about this. Everyone's got their own little thing, whether it's we have one Christmas present on Christmas Eve or every Christmas day we get a pizza together. There's some really random ones that come out. I love hearing about those and making time for that person interaction, but in a festive way can help as well.

Chris Stone:

And then on the mental health side of things, I very much subscribed to the Pomodoro effect from a productivity side of things. So I will use that. I'll set myself a timer, I'll focus without distractions, do something. And then in that five minute break, I'll just get up and move away from my desk and stretch and get a coffee or whatever it may be. But then I'll also block out time, and I know some companies in this remote working world at the moment are saying, "Hey, every one to 2:00 PM is blocked out time for you guys to go and have a walk." Some companies are doing that. I always make time to get out and away from my desk because that... and a little bit more productive and it breaks up my day a little bit. So I definitely recommend that. Getting some fresh air can do wonders for your mental health.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. Well, Chris, I've learnt so much from this episode and I really appreciate you spending some time with us today. We've talked about a lot of things from around the importance of sharing your failures, the importance of looking after your mental health, checking in on yourself and your own development, but also how you tracking, how you feeling. I love that quote that you shared from, we think it Socrates, that true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I think that's really important, every day is starting from day one, isn't it? De-stigmatizing failure. The origins of the word deadline. I did not know that. That's really interesting. And just asking that simple question, how did that feel? How did that feel working in this way? People were screaming your name, walk up work, when work's too busy, how does that feel? And is that a healthy feeling that everyone should have? So that's really important questions for me to reflect on and I know our audience will really appreciate those questions as well. So thanks so much Chris, for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast.

Chris Stone:

Not a problem. Thank you for listening and a Merry Christmas, everyone.

Sean Blake:

Merry Christmas.