Easy Agile Podcast Ep.2 John Turley, Digital Transformation Consultant, Adaptavist

Published on

October 1, 2020

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Sean Blake

(Former) Head of Marketing

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Transcript:

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

Yeah, agreed.

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

I'll try and keep the answers brief.

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

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Easy Agile Podcast Ep.21 LIVE from Agile2022!
"That's a wrap on Agile2022! It was great to be able to catch up with so many of you in the agile community in-person!" - Tenille Hoppo
This bonus episode was recorded LIVE at Agile2022 in Nashville!
The Easy Agile team got to speak with so many amazing people in the agile community, reflecting on conference highlights, key learnings, agile ceremonies + more!
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to say G’Day and enjoyed a Tim Tam or two ;)
Huge thank you to all of our podcast guests for spending some time with us to create this episode!
Cody Wooten
Gil Broza
Maciek Saganowski
Lindy Quick
Carey Young
Leslie Morse
Dan Neumann
Joseph Falú
Kai Zander
Avi Schneier
Doug Page
Evan Leybourn
Jon Kerr
Joshua Seckel
Rob Duval
Andrew Thompson
Transcript
Caitlin:
Hi, everyone. Well, that's a wrap on Agile 2022 in Nashville. The Easy Agile team is back home in Australia, and we spent most of our journey home talking about all of the amazing conversations that we got to have with everyone in the Agile community. It was great catching up with customers, partners, seeing old friends, and making lots of new ones. We managed to record some snippets of those amazing conversations, and we're excited to share them with you, our Easy Agile Podcast audience. So enjoy.
Maciek:
[inaudible 00:00:26].
Tenille:
Maciek, thanks so much for taking time with us today.
Maciek:
No worries.
Tenille:
[inaudible 00:00:30], can you let us know what was the best thing you've learned this week?
Maciek:
Oh, that was definitely at Melissa Perri's talk. When she talked about... Like, to me, she was talking about slowing down. And what we do in Agile, it's not just delivery, delivery, delivery, but very much learning and changing on things that we already built, and finding out what value we can give to customers. Not just ship features, it's all about value. That's what I learned.
Tenille:
That's great. Thank you. So what do you think would be the secret ingredient to a great Agile team?
Maciek:
Humility. Somehow, the team culture should embrace humility and mistakes. And people should not be afraid of making mistakes, because without making mistakes, you don't learn. That's what I think.
Tenille:
So what would be, I guess, if there's one Agile ceremony that every team should do, what do you think that might be?
Maciek:
For sure, retro, and that comes back to the mistakes and learning part.
Tenille:
Yeah. Fantastic.

Maciek:
No worries.
Tenille:
That's great. Thanks so much for taking time.
Maciek:
Okay. Thank you.
Tenille:
Cheers.
Gil:
[inaudible 00:01:42].
Caitlin:
Gil:, thank you so much for chatting with us. So we're all at Agile 2022 in Nashville at the moment. There's lots of interesting conversations happening.
Gil:
Yes.
Caitlin:
If you could give one piece of advice to a new forming Agile team, what would it be?
Gil:
It would be to finish small, valuable work together. It has a terrible acronym, FSVWT. So it cannot be remembered that way. Finish small, valuable work together. There's a lot of talk about process, working agreements, tools. This is all important, but sometimes it's too much for a team that's starting out. And so if we just remember to finish small valuable work together, that's a great story.
Caitlin:
Yeah, I love that. And you were a speaker at conference?
Gil:
Yes.
Caitlin:
Can you give our audience a little bit of an insight into what your conversation was about?
Gil:

What happens in many situations is that engineering or development doesn't really work collaboratively with product/business. And instead, there is a handoff relationship. But what happens is that in the absence of a collaborative relationship, it's really hard to sustain agility. People make a lot of one-sided assumptions. And over time, how decisions get made causes the cost of change to grow, and the safety to make changes to decrease. And when that happens, everything becomes harder to do and slower to do, so the agility takes a hit. So the essence of the talk was how can we collaboratively, so both product and engineering, work in ways that make it possible for us to control the cost of change and to increase safety? So it's not just collaboration of any kind. There are very specific principles to follow. It's called technical agility, and when we do that, we can have agility long-term.
Caitlin:
Great. I love it. Well, thank you so much and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time at the conference.
Gil:
Thank you.
Caitlin:
Great. Thank you.
Tenille:
Hi, Tenille here from Easy Agile, with Josh from Deloitte, and we're going to have a good chat about team retrospectives. So Josh, thank you for taking the time to have a good chat. So you are a bit of an expert on team retrospectives. What are your top tips?
Josh:
So my top tips for retrospective is first, actually make a change. Don't do a lessons observed. I've seen lots of them actually make a change, even if it's just a small one at the end. The second, and part of that, is make your change and experiment. Something you can measure, something that you can actually say yes, we did this thing and it had an impact. May not be the impact you wanted, but it did have some kind of impact. The second tip is vary your retrospectives. Having a retrospective that's the same sprint after sprint after sprint will work for about two sprints, and then your productivity, your creativity out of the retrospective will significantly reduce.
Tenille:
That's an excellent point. So how do you create [inaudible 00:05:03]?
Josh:
Lots and lots of thinking about them and doing research and using websites like TastyCupcakes, but also developing my own retrospectives. I've done retrospective based on the Pixar pitch. There's six sentences that define every Pixar movie. Take the base sentences, apply them to your sprint or to your PI and do a retro, and allow the team that creativity to create an entire movie poster if they want to. Directed by [inaudible 00:05:34], because it happens. People get involved and engaged when you give them alternatives, different ways of doing retrospectives.

Tenille:
That's right. So for those teams that aren't doing retrospectives at the moment, what's the one key thing they need to think about that you... What's the one key thing you could tell them to encourage them to start?
Josh:
If you're not doing retrospectives, you're not doing [inaudible 00:05:54]. So I shouldn't say that. But if you're not doing retrospectives, if you truly believe that you have absolutely nothing to improve and you are 100% of the best of the best, meaning you're probably working at Google or Amazon or Netflix, although they do retrospectives. So if you truly believe that you are the equivalent of those companies, then maybe you don't need to do them, but I'm pretty sure that every team has something they can improve on. And acknowledging that and then saying, how are we going to do that? Retrospective's a very fast, easy way to start actually making those improvements and making them real.
Tenille:
Fantastic. Great. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat to us briefly about retrospectives.
Josh:
Thank you.
Caitlin:
We're here with Leslie, who is the president of women in Agile. Leslie, there was an amazing event on Sunday.
Leslie:
Yes.
Caitlin:
Just talk to us a little bit about it. What went into the planning? How was it to all be back together again?
Leslie:
It was amazing to have the women in Agile community back together, right? Our first time since 2019, when everyone was together in Washington DC for that event. The better part of six or seven months of planning, we had about almost 200 people in the room. Fortunately, we know the [inaudible 00:07:10] of what these women in Agile sessions that we do, part of the Agile Alliance conferences every year, right? We've got a general opening. We've got a great keynote who is always someone that is adjacent to the Agile space. We don't want to just like... We want to infuse our wisdom and knowledge with people that aren't already one of us, because we get all of the Agile stuff at the big conference when we're there.
Leslie:
So that part, we always have launching new voices, which is really probably one of my most favorite women in Agile programs. Three mentees that have been paired with seasoned speakers, taking stage for the first time to share their talent and their perspective. So that's really great. And then some sort of interacting networking event. So that pattern has served us really well since we've been doing this since 2016, which is a little scary to think it's been happening that long. And it's become a flagship opportunity for community to come together in a more global fashion, because the Agile Alliance does draw so many people for their annual event.
Caitlin:
Yeah, for sure. Well, it was a great event. I know that we all had a lot of fun being there. What was your one key takeaway from the event?
Leslie:
I'm going to go to [inaudible 00:08:14] interactive networking that she did with us, and really challenging us to lean into our courage around boundaries and ending conversations. We don't have to give a reason. If some conversation's not serving us or is not the place that we need to be for whatever reason, you absolutely have that agency within yourself to end that conversation and just move on. I love the tips and tricks she gave us for doing that well.
Caitlin:
Yes, yes, I love that too. That's great. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Leslie:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Tenille:
Hi, Evan. How are you?
Evan:
Very good.
Tenille:
That's good. Can you please tell me what's the best thing you learned today?
Evan:
The best quote I've got, "Politics is the currency of human systems." Right?
Tenille:
Wow.
Evan:
So if you want to change a human system, you got to play the politics.
Tenille:

Fantastic.
Evan:
Which feels crappy, but-
Tenille:
It's the way it is.
Evan:
... that's the way it is.
Tenille:
[inaudible 00:09:07]. Okay, next question. What is the Agile ceremony that you and your team can't live without?
Evan:
Retrospective. With the retrospective, you can like create everything else.
Tenille:
Fantastic. That's really good. And what do you think is probably the key ingredient to a good retrospective?
Evan:
Oh, trust. Trust requires respect. It requires credibility. It requires empathy. So trust is like that underpinning human capability.
Tenille:
Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks very much.
Evan:
Thank you.
Tenille:
Yes.
Caitlin:
Right. We're here with Cody from Adfire. So Cody, how you enjoyed the conference so far?
Cody:
I'm really loving the conference. It's been awesome. To be honest, when we first got here, it seemed maybe a little bit smaller than we thought, but the people here's been incredible, highly engaged, which was always great. And plus, a lot of people are using Jira and Atlassian. So lot of big points.

Caitlin:
Win-win for both, huh?
Cody:
Yeah. Always, always, always.
Caitlin:
Very good.
Cody:
Yeah.
Caitlin:
Lots of interesting talks happening. Have you attended any that have really sparked an interest in you? What's [inaudible 00:10:15]-
Cody:
Yeah. I can't remember any of the talk names right off the top, but they've all been incredibly insightful. Tons of information. It seems like there's been a topic for everything, which is always a great sign and stuff like that. So my notes, I have pages and pages and pages of notes, which is always a good sign.
Caitlin:
Yeah, that's [inaudible 00:10:34].
Cody:
So I'm I have to go back and [inaudible 00:10:35] again.
Caitlin:
Yes.
Cody:
But it's been incredible and the talks have been very plentiful, so yeah.
Caitlin:
Good. Good. And what is the one key takeaway that you are looking forward to bringing back and sharing with the team?
Cody:
Well, I think one of the key takeaways for us was that... I talked about the engagement that everybody has, but one thing that's been incredible is to hear everybody's stories, to hear everybody's problems, their processes, all of that stuff. So all of that information's going to be a great aggregate for us to take back and create a better experience with our product and all that good stuff. So yeah.

Caitlin:
For sure. I love it. Now, I have one last question for you. It's just a fun one. It's a true or false. We're doing Aussie trivia. Are you ready for this one?
Cody:
Okay.
Caitlin:
Okay.
Cody:
Hopefully.
Caitlin:
So my true or false is, are Budgy Smugglers a type of bird?
Cody:
Are buggy smugglers-
Caitlin:
Budgy Smugglers.
Cody:
Budgy Smugglers.
Caitlin:
A type of bird.
Cody:
True.
Caitlin:
False. No.
Cody:
What are they?
Caitlin:
Speedos.
Cody:

Yeah. Well, I've got some of those up there in my luggage. So I'll bring the budgys out now.
Caitlin:
With your Daisy Dukes.
Cody:
Exactly. Exactly.
Caitlin:
Yeah. And cowboy boots, right?
Cody:
Yeah.
Caitlin:
Well, thank you so much.
Cody:
Thank you.
Caitlin:
Very appreciate it.
Cody:
Yeah. Thank you.
Tenille:
Doug, how are you?
Doug:
I'm great. Thank you.
Tenille:
Awesome. Well, tell me about, what's the best thing you've learned today?
Doug:
I think learning how our customers are using our products that we didn't even know about is really interesting.
Tenille:
That's amazing. Have you had a chance to get out to many of the sessions at all?

Doug:
I actually have not. I've been tied to this booth, or I've been in meetings that were already planned before I even came down here.
Tenille:
[inaudible 00:12:01].
Doug:
Yeah.
Tenille:
That's good. So when you're back at work, what do you think is probably the best Agile ceremony that you and your team can't live without?
Doug:
I think what I'm bringing back to the office is not so much ceremony. It's really from a product perspective. I work in product management. So for us, it's how we can explain how our product brings value to our customers. So many lessons learned from here that we're really anxious to bring back and kind of build into our value messaging.
Tenille:
Fantastic.
Doug:
Yeah.
Tenille:
Thanks. That's great. Thanks very much.
Caitlin:
He was one of the co-authors of the Agile Manifesto. Firstly, how are you doing in conference so far?
John:
Well, working hard.
Caitlin:
Yeah, good stuff.
John:
Enjoying Nashville.
Caitlin:

Yeah. It's cool, isn't it? It's so different from the [inaudible 00:12:46] what's happening.
John:
Yeah. It's good. Yes. It's nice to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while.
Caitlin:
Yeah. Yeah.
John:
And seeing three dimensional.
Caitlin:
Yes. Yeah, I know. It's interesting-
John:
It's there-
Caitlin:
... [inaudible 00:12:54] and stuff happening.
John:
Yeah, IRL.
Caitlin:
Lots of interesting [inaudible 00:13:01] that's happening. Any key takeaways for you? What are you going to take after to share with the team?
John:
Oh, well, that's a good question. I'm mostly been talking with a lot of friends that I haven't seen in a while. [inaudible 00:13:14].
Caitlin:
Yes.
John:
And since I've only been here a couple days, I haven't actually gone for much, if anything. To be frank.
Caitlin:
I know. Well, we're pretty busy on the boots, aren't we?
John:

Yeah. Yeah. But certainly, the kinds of conversations that are going on are... I was a little bit worried about Agile. Like, I don't want to say... Yeah, I don't want to say it. But I don't want to say, Agile's becoming a jump turf.
Caitlin:
Yes.
John:
But I think there's a lot of people here that are actually really still embracing the ideals and really want to learn, do and practice [inaudible 00:14:00].
Caitlin:
Yeah.
John:
So I'm frankly surprised and impressed and happy. There's a lot. If you just embrace more of the manifesto, and maybe not all of the prescriptive stuff sometimes, and you get back to basics. [inaudible 00:14:22]-
Caitlin:
Yeah. So let's talk about that, the Agile Manifesto that you mentioned. Embracing that. What does embracing mean? Can you elaborate on that a bit more? So we know we've got the principles there. Is there one that really stands out more than another to you?
John:
Well, my world of what I was doing at the time, and I'd done a lot of defense department, water haul, and built my own sort of lightweight process, as we call it before Agile. So to me, the real key... This doesn't have the full-
Caitlin:
Full manifesto, yeah.
John:
But if you go to the website and read at the top, it talks about like we are uncovering ways by doing, and I'm still learning, still uncovering. And I think it's important for people to realize we really did leave our ego at the door. Being humble in our business is super important. So that might not be written anywhere in the principles, but if the whole thing at the preamble at the top, and the fact that we talk about how we value those things on the blog versus the whole... There's a pendulum that you could see both of those things collide. That, in my opinion, one the most important trait that we should exercise is being humble, treating things as a hypothesis. Like, don't just build features [inaudible 00:15:58] bottom up, how do you seek up on the answers, that's what I want people to takeaway.
Caitlin:

That's great. That's great advice. Well, thank you so much, John. Appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.
John:
You're welcome, Caitlin.
Caitlin:
Yeah. Enjoy what's [inaudible 00:16:11].
John:
Thank you.
Caitlin:
Thank you.
John:
[inaudible 00:16:13] tomorrow.
Caitlin:
All right.
Tenille:
Abukar, thanks for joining us today. Can I ask you both, what do you think is the best thing you've learned today?
Avi:
Best thing I've learned?
Tenille:
Yeah.
Avi:
That's a really interesting one. Because I'm here at the booth a lot, so I'll get to attend a lot of things. So there were two things I learned that were really important. One, which is that the Easy Agile logo is an upside down A, because it means you're from Australia. So it's down under. And then the second most important thing I learned about today was we were in a session talking about sociocracy, and about how to make experiments better with experiments, which sounded a little weird at first, but it was really all about going through like a mini A3 process. For those of you listening, that's something that was done to Toyota. It's a structured problem solving method, but instead of going [inaudible 00:17:02] around it and going through the experiment, going around two or three times and then deciding that's the right experiment you're going forward.
Tenille:

Thank you. How about your time?
Kai:
I've been at the booth most of the time, but from that you meet a lot of people all over the world. And we really have like one thing in common, which is wanting to help people. And it's really been nice to be in a room of people if they're at the beginning of their journey or their really seasoned, that their motivation is just to really empower others. So it's been really nice to be around that kind of energy.
Avi:
We've really learned that our friends from Australia are just as friendly up here as you are on the other side. I feel when you come on this side, you get mean, but it turns out you're just as nice up here too.
Tenille:
Well, it depends how long you've been on flight.
Avi:
Oh, exactly.
Tenille:
[inaudible 00:17:44], we're okay.
Kai:
Yeah.
Avi:Abukar:
Exactly. Good.
Tenille:
All right. One more question here.
Avi:
Sure.
Tenille:
What do you think is the secret ingredient for a successful team?
Avi:
What do I think the secret? Oh, that's a really good question. That's a-
Kai:
He's the best one to answer that question.

Avi:
That's a little longer than a two-second podcast, but I'll tell you this. It may not be psychological safety,-
Tenille:
Okay.
Avi:
... just because Google said that and Project Aristotle show that. I think to have a really, really successful team, you need a really skilled scrum master. Because to say that the team has psychological safety is one ingredient, it's not the only ingredient. A strong scrum master is someone who's really skilled to create that psychological safety, but also help with all the other aspects of getting ready to collaborate and coordinate in the most positive way possible. Plus, searching for... Her name is Cassandra. On Slack, she calls herself Kaizen. You get it? It's a joke. But that's the whole thing is that a really skilled scrum master helps the teams find the kaizens that they need to really get to become high performing. So psychological safety is an enabler of it, but that doesn't mean it creates the performance. It's an ingredient to make it happen.
Tenille:
Fantastic.
Kai:
There's no better answer than that one. Let's do exclamation.
Tenille:
Excellent. Thanks very much for taking the time.
Avi:
Thank you so much.
Kai:
Of course.
Hayley:
We're here with Carey from Path to Agility. Carey, what have you been really loving about this conference?
Carey:
I think I've loved the most about this conference so far is the interaction with all the people that are here. It's really nice to get together, meet different folks, network around, have the opportunity to see what else is out there in the marketplace. And then, of course, talk about the product that we have with Path to Agility. It's a wonderful experience to get out here and to see everybody. And it's so nice to be back out in person instead of being in front of a screen all the time.

Tenille:
Yeah, absolutely. Have you had a chance to get to many of the sessions?
Joseph:
I've tried to as much as I can, but it's also important to take that time to decompress and let everything sink in. So here we are having fun.
Tenille:
Yeah, absolutely. So thinking back to work, what do you think is the one Agile ceremony that you take that helps you and your team the most?
Joseph:
I think that finding different ways to collaborate, effective ways to collaborate. And in terms of work management, how are we solving some of the problems that we have? There's so many tools that are here to make that easier, which is made pretty special. Speaking to people and finding out how they go about solving problems.
Tenille:
And what do you think makes a really great Agile team?
Joseph:
Well, you could say something very cliche, like being very adaptive and change and so on and so forth. But I think it really comes down to the interaction between people. Understanding one another, encouraging one another, and just the way you work together.
Tenille:
Fantastic. Great. Well, thanks very much for taking the time to chat.
Joseph:
Thank you. It was nice chatting with you guys all week long.
Tenille:
Cheers.
Tenille:
Dan, thanks for taking the time to chat.
Dan:
You're welcome.
Tenille:
[inaudible 00:22:54] questions. What do you think is the best thing you learned today?

Dan:
Oh, the best thing I learned today, the morning products keynote was excellent. Got a couple tips on how to do product management, different strategies, how you have folks about seeing their focus on the tactical and the strategic. So just some nice little nuggets, how to [inaudible 00:23:12].
Tenille:
[inaudible 00:23:13], thanks for joining us today. Can I start by asking, what do you think is the best thing you've learned this week?
Speaker 17:
The best thing I've learned this week is there's no right way to do Agile. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. And so it's really about figuring out what the right process is for the organization you're in, and then leveraging those success patterns.
Tenille:
Well, I guess on that, is there one kind of Agile ceremony that you think your team can't do without?
Speaker 17:
The daily standup being daily. I think a lot of our teams, they talk all day long. They don't necessarily need to sync up that frequently. I've had a few teams already, they go down like three days a week and it seems to work for them. The other maybe key takeaway that I've seen folks do is time boxes. So no meetings from 10:00 to 2:00 or whatever it may be, and really driving that from a successful perspective.
Tenille:
I guess on that note, what do you think makes a really successful Agile team?
Speaker 17:
The ability to talk to each other, that ability to communicate. And so with all of our teams being either hybrid or remote, making sure that we have the tools that let them feel like they can just pick up and talk to somebody anytime they want, I think is key. And a lot of folks still don't have cameras, right, which is baffling to me. But that ability to see facial expressions, being face to face has been so nice because we're able to get that. So that's the other key is just that ability to talk to each other as though I could reach out and touch you.
Tenille:
Okay. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much.
Speaker 17:
You're welcome. Thank you.
Tenille:
Okay. Rob and Andrew, thanks so much for taking a few minutes with us. Can I start by asking you, what do you think is the best thing you learned this week?

Rob:
For me, it's definitely fast scaling Agile, we learned about this morning. We're going to try it.
Andrew:
For me, I really enjoyed the math programming session and learning kind of different ways to connect engineers and collaborate.
Tenille:
Great. Next up, I guess, what do you think makes a great Agile team?
Rob:
First and foremost, that they're in control of how they work and what they work on, more than anything else.
Andrew:
Yeah. For me, it's a obviously psychological safety and just having a good team dynamic where they can disagree, but still be respectful and come up with great ideas.
Tenille:
And is there one Agile ceremony that you think a great team can't live without?
Rob:
Probably retrospective. I think the teams need to always be improving, and that's a good way to do it.
Andrew:
Agreed. Yeah. Agreed.
Tenille:
Okay. That's great. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Andrew:
Thank so much. Appreciate it.
Listen now

Podcast
Easy Agile Podcast Ep.12 Observations on Observability
On this episode of The Easy Agile Podcast, tune in to hear developers Angad, Jared, Jess and Jordan, as they share their thoughts on observability.

Wollongong has a thriving and supportive tech community and in this episode we have brought together some of our locally based Developers from Siligong Valley for a round table chat on all things observability.

💥 What is observability?
💥 How can you improve observability?
💥 What's the end goal?
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"This was a great episode to be a part of! Jess and Jordan shared some really interesting points on the newest tech buzzword - observability""
Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧
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Transcript
Jared Kells:
Welcome everybody to the Easy Agile podcast. My name's Jared Kells, and I'm a developer here at Easy Agile. Before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the Wodiwodi people of the Dharawal nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, and extend that same respect to any aboriginal people listening with us today.
Jared Kells:
So today's podcast is a bit of a technical one. It says on my run sheet here that we're here to talk about some hot topics for engineers in the IT sector. How exciting that we've got a couple of primarily front end engineers and Angad and I are going to share some front end technical stuff and Jess and Jordan are going to be talking a bit about observability. So we'll start by introductions. So I'll pass it over to Jess.
Jess Belliveau:
Cool. Thanks Jared. Thanks for having me one as well. So yeah, my name's Jess Belliveau. I work for Apptio as an infrastructure engineer. Yeah, Jordan?
Jordan Simonovski:
I'm Jordan Simonovski. I work as a systems engineer in the observability team at Atlassian. I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, tech wise. But yeah, working on building out some pretty beefy systems to handle all of our data at Atlassian at the moment. So, that's fun.
Angad Sethi:
Hello everyone. I'm Angad. I'm working for Easy Agile as a software dev. Nothing fancy like you guys.
Jared Kells:
Nothing fancy!
Jess Belliveau:
Don't sell yourself short.
Jared Kells:
Yeah, I'll say. Yeah, so my name's Jared, and yeah, senior developer at Easy Agile, working on our apps. So mainly, I work on programs and road maps. And yeah, they're front end JavaScript heavy apps. So that's where our experience is. I've heard about this thing called observability, which I think is just logs and stuff, right?
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah, yeah. That's it, we'll wrap up!
Jared Kells:
Podcast over! Tell us about observability.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah okay, I'll, yeah. Well, I thought first I'd do a little thing of why observability, why we talk about this and sort of for people listening, how we got here. We had a little chat before we started recording to try and feel out something that might interest a broader audience that maybe people don't know a lot about. And there's a lot of movements in the broad IT scope, I guess, that you could talk about. There's so many different things now that are just blowing up. Observability is something that's been a hot topic for a couple of years now. And it's something that's a core part of my job and Jordan's job as well. So it's something easy for us to talk about and it's something that you can give an introduction to without getting too technical. So we don't want to get down. This is something that you can go really deep into the weeds, so we picked it as something that hopefully we can explain to you both at a level that might interest the people at home listening as well.
Jess Belliveau:
Jordan and I figured out these four bullet points that we wanted to cover, and maybe I can do the little overview of that, and then I can make Jordan cover the first bullet point, just throw him straight under the bus.
Jordan Simonovski:
Okay!
Jess Belliveau:
So we thought we'd try and describe to you, first of all, what is observability. Because that's a pretty, the term doesn't give you much of what it is. It gives you a little hint, but it'll be good to base line set what are we talking about when we say what is observability. And then why would a development team want observability? Why would a company want observability? Sort of high level, what sort of benefits you get out of it and who may need it, which is a big thing. You can get caught up in these industry hot buzz words and commit to stuff that you might not need, or that sort of stuff.
Jared Kells:
Yep.
Jordan Simonovski:
Yep.
Jess Belliveau:
We thought we'd talk about some easy wins that you get with observability. So some of the real basic stuff you can try and get, and what advantages you get from it. And then we just thought because we're no going to try and get too deep, we could just give a few pointers to some websites and some YouTube talks for further reading that people want to do, and go from there. So yeah, Jordan you want to-
Jared Kells:
Sounds good.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah. I hopefully, hopefully. We'll see how this goes! And I guess if you guys have questions as well, that's something we should, if there's stuff that you think we don't cover or that you want to know more, ask away.
Jordan Simonovski:
I guess to start with observability, it's a topic I get really excited about, because as someone that's been involved in the dev ops and SRE space for so long, observability's come along and promises to close the loop or close a feedback loop on software delivery. And it feels like it's something we don't really have at the moment. And I get that observability maybe sounds new and shiny, but I think the term itself exists to maybe differentiate itself from what's currently out there. A lot of us working in tech know about monitoring and the loading and things like that. And I think they serve their own purpose and they're not in any way obsolete either. Things like traditional monitoring tools. But observability's come along as a way to understand, I think, the overwhelmingly complex systems that we're building at the moment. A lot of companies are probably moving towards some kind of complicated distributed systems architecture, microservices, other buzz words.
Jordan Simonovski:
But even for things like a traditional kind of monolith. Observability really serves to help us ask new questions from our systems. So the way it tends to get explained is monitoring exits for our known unknowns. With seniority comes the ability to predict, almost, in what way your systems will fail. So you'll know. The longer you're in the industry, you know this, like a Java server fails in x, y, z amount of ways, so we should probably monitor our JVM heap, or whatever it is.
Jared Kells:
I was going to say that!
Jordan Simonovski:
I'll try not to get too much into-
Jared Kells:
Runs out of memory!
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah. So that's something that you're expecting to fail at some point. And that's something that you can consider a known unknown. But then, the promise of observability is that we should be shipping enough data to be able to ask new questions. So the way it tends to get talked about, you see, it's an unknown unknown of our system, that we want to find out about and ask new questions from. And that's where I think observability gets introduced, to answer these questions. Is that a good enough answer? You want me to go any further into detail about this stuff? I can talk all day about this.
Jared Kells:
Is it like a [crosstalk 00:08:05]. So just to repeat it back to you, see if I've understood. Is it kind of like if I've got a, traditionally with a Java app, I might log memories. It's because I know JVM's run out of memory and that's a thing that I monitor, but observability is more broad, like going almost over the top with what you monitor and log so that you can-
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah. And I wouldn't necessarily say it's going over the top. I think it's maybe adding a bit more context to your data. So if any of you have worked with traces before, observability is very similar to the way traces work and just builds on top of the premise of traces, I guess. So you're creating these events, and these events are different transactions that could be happening in your applications, usually submitting some kind of request. And with that request, you can add a whole bunch of context to it. You can add which server this might be running on, which time zone. All of these additional and all the exciters. You can throw in user agency into there if you want to. The idea of observability is that you're not necessarily constrained by high cardinality data. High cardinality data being data sets that can change quite largely, in terms of the kinds of data they represent, or the combinations of data sets that you could have.
Jordan Simonovski:
So if you want shipping metrics on something, on a per user basis and you want to look at how different users are affected by things, that would be considered a high cardinality metric. And a lot of the time it's not something that traditional monitoring companies or metric providers can really give you as a service. That's where you'll start paying insanely huge bills on things like Datadog or whatever it is, because they're now being considered new metrics. Whereas observability, we try and store our data and query it in a way that we can store pretty vast data sets and say, "Cool. We have errors coming from these kinds of users." And you can start to build up correlations on certain things there. You can find out that users from a particular time zone or a particular device would only be experiencing that error. And from there, you can start building up, I think, better ways of understanding how a particular change might have broken things. Or some particular edge cases that you otherwise couldn't pick up on with something like CPU or memory monitoring.
Angad Sethi:
Would it be fair to say-
Jared Kells:
Yeah. It's [crosstalk 00:11:02].
Angad Sethi:
Oh, sorry Jared.
Jared Kells:
No you can-
Angad Sethi:
Would it be fair to say that, so, observability is basically a set of principles or a way to find the unknown unknowns?
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah.
Angad Sethi:
Oh.
Jess Belliveau:
And better equip you to find, one of the things I find is a lot of people think, you get caught up in thinking observability is a thing that you can deploy and have and tick a box, but I like your choice of word of it being a set of principles or best practices. It's sort of giving you some guidance around these, having good logging coming out of your application. So structured logs. So you're always getting the same log format that you can look at. Tracing, which Jordan talked a little bit about. So giving you that ability to follow how a user is interacting with all the different microservices and possibly seeing where things are going wrong, and metrics as well. So the good thing with metrics is we're turning things a bit around and trying to make an application, instead of doing, and I don't want to get too technical, black box monitoring, where we're on the outside, trying to peer in with probes and checks like that. But the idea with metrics is the application is actually emitting these metrics to inform us what state it is in, thereby making it more observable.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah, I like your choice of words there, Angad, that it's like these practices, this sort of guide of where to go, which probably leads into this next point of why would a team want to implement it. If you want to start again, Jordan?
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah, I can start. And I'll give you a bit more time to speak as well, Jess in this one. I won't rant as much.
Jess Belliveau:
Oh, I didn't sign up for that!
Jordan Simonovski:
I think why teams would want it is because, it really depends on your organization and, I guess, the size of the teams you're working in. Most of the time, I would probably say you don't want to build observability yourself in house. It is something that you can, observability capabilities themselves, you won't achieve it just by buying a thing, like you can't buy dev ops, you can't buy Agile, you can't buy observability either.
Jared Kells:
Hang on, hang on. It says on my run sheet to promote Easy Agile, so that sounds like a good segue-
Jess Belliveau:
Unless you want to buy it. If you do want to buy Agile, the [crosstalk 00:13:55] in the marketplace.
Jared Kells:
Yeah, sorry, sorry, yeah! Go on.
Jordan Simonovski:
You can buy tools that make your life a lot easier, and there are a lot of things out there already which do stuff for people and do surface really interesting data that people might want to look at. I think there are a couple of start ups like LightStep and Honeycomb, which give you a really intuitive way of understanding your data in production. But why you would need this kind of stuff is that you want to know the state of your systems at any given point in time, and to build, I guess, good operational hygiene and good production excellence, I guess as Liz Fong-Jones would put it, is you need to be able to close that feedback loop. We have a whole bunch of tools already. So we have CICD systems in place. We have feature flags now, which help us, I guess, decouple deployments from releases. You can deploy code without actually releasing code, and you can actually give that power to your PM's now if you want to, with feature flags, which is great.
Jordan Simonovski:
But what you can also do now is completely close this loop, and as you're deploying an application, you can say, "I want to canary this deployment. I want to deploy this to 10% of my users, maybe users who are opted in for Beta releases or something of our application, and you can actually look at how that's performing before you release it to a wider audience. So it does make deployments a lot safer. It does give you a better understanding of how you're affecting users as well. And there are a whole bunch of tools that you can use to determine this stuff as well. So if you're looking at how a lot of companies are doing SRE at the moment, or understanding what reliable looks like for their applications, you have things like SLO's in place as well. And SLO's-
Jared Kells:
What's an SLO?
Jordan Simonovski:
They're all tied to user experiences. So you're saying, "Can my user perform this particular interaction?" And if you can effectively measure that and know how users are being affected by the changes you're making, you can easily make decisions around whether or not you continue shipping features or if you drop everything and work on reliability to make sure your users aren't affected. So it's this very user centric approach to doing things. I think in terms of closing the loop, observability gives us that data to say, "Yes, this is how users are being affected. This is how, I guess the 99th percentile of our users are fine, but we have 1% who are having adverse issues with our application." And you can really pinpoint stuff from there and say, "Cool. Users with this particular browser or this particular, or where we've deployed this app to," let's say if you have a global deployment of some kind, you've deployed to an island first, because you don't really care what happens to them. You can say, "Oh, we've actually broken stuff for them." And you can roll it back before you impact 100% of your users.
Jared Kells:
Yeah. I liked what you said about the test. I forgot the acronym, but actually testing the end user behavior. That's kind of exciting to me, because we have all these metrics that are a bit useless. They're cool, "Oh, it's using 1% CPU like it always is, now I don't really care," but can a user open up the app and drag an issue around? It's like-
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah, that's a really great example, right?
Jared Kells:
That's what I really care about.
Jess Belliveau:
The 1% CPU thing, you could look at a CPU usage graph and see a deployment, and the CPU usage doesn't change. Is everything healthy or not? You don't know, whereas if you're getting that deeper level info of the user interactions, you could be using 1% CPU to serve HTTP500 errors to the 80% of the customer base, sort of thing.
Angad Sethi:
How do you do that? The SLO's bit, how do you know a user can log in and drag an issue?
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah. I think that would come with good instrumenting-
Angad Sethi:
Good question?
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah, it comes down to actually keeping observability in mind when you are developing new features, the same way you would think about logging a particular thing in your code as you're writing, or writing test for your code, as you're writing code as well. You want to think about how you can instrument something and how you can understand how this particular feature is working in production. Because I think as a lot of Agile and dev ops principles are telling us now is that we do want our applications in production. And as developers, our responsibilities don't end when we deploy something. Our responsibility as a developer ends when we've provided value to the business. And you need a way of understanding that you're actually doing that. And that's where, I guess, you do nee do think about observability with a lot of this stuff, and actually measuring your success metrics. So if you do know that your application is successful if your user can log in and drag stuff around, then that's exactly what you want to measure.
Jared Kells:
I think that we have to build-
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah?
Jared Kells:
Oh, sorry Jordan.
Jordan Simonovski:
No, you go.
Jared Kells:
I was just going to say we have to build our apps with integration testing in mind already. So doing browser based tests around new features. So it would be about building features with that and the same thing in mind but for testing and production.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah and the actual how, the actual writing code part, there's this really great project, the open telemetry project, which provides all these sort of API's and SDK's that developers can consume, and it's vendor agnostic. So when you talk about the how, like, "How do I do this? How do I instrument things?" Or, "How do I emit metrics?" They provide all these helpful libraries and includes that you can have, because the last thing you want to do is have to roll this custom solution, because you're then just adding to your technical debt. You're trying to make things easier, but you're then relying on, "Well I need to keep Jared Kells employed, because he wrote our log in engine and no one else knows how it works.
Jess Belliveau:
And then the other thing that comes to mind with something like open telemetry as well, and we talked a bit about Datadog. So Datadog is a SaaS vendor that specializes in observability. And you would push your metrics and your logs and your traces to them and they give you a UI to display. If you choose something that's vendor agnostic, let's just use the example of Easy Agile. Let's say they start Datadog and then in six months time, we don't want to use Datadog anymore, we want to use SignalFx or whatever the Splunk one is now.
Jordan Simonovski:
I think NorthX.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah. You can change your end point, push your same metrics and all that sort of stuff, maybe with a few little tweaks, but the idea is you don't want to tie in to a single thing.
Jordan Simonovski:
Your data structures remain the same.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah. So that you could almost do it seamlessly without the developers knowing. There's even companies in the past that I think have pushed to multiple vendors. So you could be consuming vendor A and then you want to do a proof of concept with vendor B to see what the experience is like and you just push your data there as well.
Jared Kells:
Yeah. I think our coupling to Datadog will be I all the dashboards and stuff that we've made. It's not so much the data.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah. That's sort of the big up sell, right. It's how you interact. That's where they want to get their hooks in, is making it easier for you to interpret that data and manipulate it to meet your needs and that sort of stuff.
Jordan Simonovski:
Observability suggests dashboards, right?
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah, perhaps. You used this term as well, Jordan, "production excellence." And when we talk about who needs observability, I was thinking a bit about that while you were talking. And for me, production excellence, or in Apptio we call it production readiness, operational readiness and that sort of stuff is like we want to deploy something to production like what sort of best practices do we want to have in place before we do that? And I think observability is a real great idea, because it's helping you in the future. You don't know what problems you're going to have down the line, but you're equipping your teams to be able to respond to those problems easily. Whereas, we've all probably been there, we've deployed code of production and we have no observability, we have a huge outage. What went wrong? Well, no one knows, but we know this is the fix, and it's hard to learn from that, or you have to learn from that I guess, and protect the user against future stuff, yeah.
Jess Belliveau:
When I think easy wins for observability, the first thing that really comes to mind is this whole idea of structured logging, which is really this idea that your application is you're logging, first of all. Quite important as a baseline starting point, but then you have a structured log format which lets you programmatically pass the logs as well. If you go back in time, maybe logging just looked like plain text with a line, with a timestamp, an error message. Whatever the developer decided to write to the standard out, or to the error file or something like that. Now I think there's a general move to having JSON, an actual formatted blob with that known structure so you can look into it. Tracing's probably not an easy win. That's a little bit harder. You can implement it with open telemetry and libraries and stuff. Requires a bit more understanding of your code base, I guess, and where you want tracing to fire, and that sort of stuff, parsing context through, things like that.
Jordan Simonovski:
I think Atlassian, when you probably just want to know that everything is okay. At a fairly superficial level. Maybe you just want to do some kind of up time on a trend. And then as, I guess, your code might get more complex or your product gets a bit more complex, you can start adding things in there. But I think actually knowing or surfacing the things you know might break. Those would probably be your quickest wins.
Jess Belliveau:
Well, let's mention some things for further reading. If you want to go get the whole picture of the whole, real observability started to get a lot of movement out of the Google SRE book from a few years ago. The Google SRE stuff covers the whole gamut of their soak reliability engineering practice, and observability is a portion of that, there's some great chapters on that. O'Reilly has an observability book, I think, just dedicated to observability now.
Jordan Simonovski:
I think that's still in early release, if people want to google chapters.
Jess Belliveau:
The open telemetry stuff, we'll drop a link to that I think that's really handy to know.
Angad Sethi:
From [inaudible 00:26:12], which is my perspective, as a developer, say I wanted to introduce cornflake use Datadog at Easy Agile. Not very familiar, I'm not very comfortable with it. I know how to navigate, but what's a quick way for me to get started on introducing observability? Sorry to lock my direct job or at my workplace.
Jordan Simonovski:
I would lean, I could be biased here. Jess correct me or give your opinion on this, I would lean heavily towards SLO's for this. And you can have a quick read in the SRE-
Jess Belliveau:
What does SLO stand for, Jordan?
Jordan Simonovski:
Okay, sorry. Buzz words! SLO is a service level objective, not to be confused with service level agreement. An agreement itself is contractual and you can pay people money if you do breach those. An SLO is something you set in your team and you have a target of reliability, because we are getting to the point where we understand that all systems at any point in time are in some kind of degraded state. And yeah, reliability isn't necessarily binary, it's not unreliable or reliable. Most of the time, it's mostly reliable and this gives us a better shared language, I guess. And you can have a read in the SRE handbook by Google, which is free online, which gives you a pretty good understanding of Datadog.
Jordan Simonovski:
I think the last time I used it had a SLO offering. But I think like I was mentioning earlier, you set an SLO on particular functionalities or features of your application. You're saying, "My user can do this 99% of the time," or whatever other reliability target you might want to set. I wouldn't recommend five nines of reliability. You'll probably burn yourself out trying to get there. And you have this target set for yourself. And you know exactly what you're measuring, you're measuring particular types of functionality. And you know when you do breach these, users are being affected. And that's where you can actually start thinking about observability. You can think about, "What other features are we implementing that we can start to measure?" Or, "What user facing things are we implementing that we can start to measure?"
Jordan Simonovski:
Other things you could probably look at are, I think they're all covered in the book anyway, data freshness in a way. You want to make sure the data users are being displayed is relatively fresh. You don't want them looking at stale data, so you can look at measuring things like that as well. But you can pretty much break it down into most functionalities of a website. It's no longer like a ping check, that you're just saying, "Yes, HTTP, okay. My application is fine." You're saying, "My users are actually being affected by things not working." And you can start measuring things from there. And that should give you a better understanding, or a better idea, at least, of where to start with what you want to measure and ow you want to measure it. That would be my opinion on where to get started with this if you do want to introduce it.
Jared Kells:
We're going to talk a little bit about state and how with some of these, like our very front end heavy applications that we're building, so the applications we build just basically run inside the browser and the traditional state as you would think about it, is just pulling a very simple API that writes some things into the database with some authentication, and that sort of stuff. So in terms of reliability of the services, it's really reliable. Those tiny API's just never have problems, because it's just so simple. And well, they've got plenty of monitoring around it. But all our state is actually, when you say, "Observe the state of the system," for the most part, that's state in a browser. And how do we get observability into that?
Jess Belliveau:
A big thing is really, there's not one thing fits all as well. When we talk about the SLO stuff as well, it's understanding what is important to not so much maybe your company but your team as well. If you're delivering this product, what's important to you specifically? So one SLO that might work for me at Apptio probably isn't going to work for Easy Agile. This is really pushing my knowledge, as well, of front end stuff, but when we say we want to observe the state as well, we don't necessarily mean specifically just the state. You could want to understand with each one of those API's when it's firing, what the request response time is for that API firing. So that might be an important metric. So you can start to see if one of those APIs is introducing latency, and so your user experience is degraded. Like, "Hey when we were on release three, when users were interacting with our service here, it would respond in this percentile latency. We've done a release and since then, now we're seeing it's now in this percentile. Have we degraded performance performance?" Users might not be complaining, but that could be something that the team then can look into, add to a sprint. Hey, I'm using Agile terms now. Watch out!
Jared Kells:
That's a really good example, Jess. Performance issues for us are typically not an API that's performing poorly. It's something in this very complicated front end application is not running in the same order as it used to, or there's some complex interaction we didn't think of, so it's requesting more data than expected. The APIs are returning. They're never slow, for the most part, but we have performance regressions that we may not know about without seeing them or investigating them. The observability is really at the individual user's browser level. That makes sense? I want to know how long did it take for this particular interaction to happen.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah. I've never done that sort of side of things. As well, the other thing I guess, you could potentially be impacted in as well as then, you're dealing with end user manifestations as well. You could perceive-
Jared Kells:
Yeah sure.
Jess Belliveau:
... Greater performance on their laptop or something, or their ISP or that sort of stuff. It'd be really hard to make sure you're not getting noise from that sort of thing as well.
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah. There are tools like Sentry, I guess, which do exist to give you a bit more of an understanding what's happening on your front end. The way Sentry tends to work with JavaScript, is you'll upload a minified map of your JS to Sentry, deploy your code and then if something does break or work in a fairly unexpected way, that tends to get surfaced with Sentry will tell you exactly which line this kind of stuff is happening on, and it's a really cool tool for that company stuff. I don't know if it'd give you the right type of insights, I think, in terms of performance or-
Jared Kells:
Yeah, we use a similar tool and it does work for crashes and that sort of thing. And on the observability front, we log actions like state mutations in side the front end, not the actual state change, but just labels that represent that you updated an issue summary or you clicked this button, that sort of thing, and we send those with our crash reports. And it's super helpful having that sort of observability. So I think I know what you guys are talking about. But I'm just [crosstalk 00:35:25], yeah.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah, that's almost like, I guess, a form of tracing. For me and Jordan, when we talk about tracing, we might be thinking about 12 different microservices sitting in AWS that are all interacting, whereas you're more shifting that. That's sort of all stuff in the browser interacting and just having that history of this is what the user did and how they've ended up-
Jared Kells:
In that state.
Jess Belliveau:
In that state, yeah.
Jordan Simonovski:
I guess even if you don't have a lot of microservices, if you're talking about particular, like you're saying for the most part your API requests are fine but sometimes you have particularly large payloads-
Jared Kells:
We actually have to monitor, I don't know, maybe you can help with this, we actually should be monitoring maybe who we're integrating with. It's actually much more likely that we'll have a performance issue on a Xero API rather than... We don't see it, the browser sees it as well, which is-
Jordan Simonovski:
Yeah, and tracing does solve all of those regressions for you. Most tracing libraries, like if you're running Node apps or whatever on your backend. I can just tell you about Node, because I probably have the most experience writing Node stuff. You pretty much just drop in Didi trace, which is a Datadog library for tracing into your backend and your hook itself into all of, I think, the common libraries that you'll tend to work with, I think. Like if you're working for express or for a lot of just HADP libraries, as well as a few AWS services, it will kind of hook itself into that. And you can actually pinpoint. It will kind of show you on this pretty cool service map exactly which services you're interacting with and where you might be experiencing a regression. And I think traces do serve to surface that information, which is cool. So that could be something worth investigating.
Jess Belliveau:
It's funny. This is a little bit unrelated to observability, but you've just made me think a bit more about how you're saying you're reliant on third party providers as well. And something I think that's really important that sometimes gets missed is so many of us today are relying on third party providers, like AWS is a huge thing. A lot of people writing apps that require AWS services. And I think a lot of the time, people just assume AWS or Jira or whatever, is 100% up time, always available. And they don't write their code in such a way that deals with failures. And I think it's super important. So many times now I've seen people using the AWS API and they don't implement exponential back off. And so they're basically trying to hit the AWS API, it fails or they might get throttled, for example, and then they just go into a fail state and throw an error to the user. But you could potentially improve that user experience, have a retry mechanism automatically built in and that sort of stuff. It doesn't really tie into the observability thing, but it's something.
Jared Kells:
And the users don't care, right? No one cares if it's an AWS problem. It's your problem, right, your app is too slow.
Jess Belliveau:
Well, they're using your app. Exactly right. It reflects on you sort of thing, so it's in your interest to guard against an upstream failure, or at least inform the user when it's that case. Yeah.
Jared Kells:
Well, I think we're going to have to call it, this podcast, because it was an hour ago. We had instructed max 45 minutes.
Jess Belliveau:
We could just keep going. We might need a part two! Maybe we can request [cross talk 00:39:21].
Jared Kells:
Maybe! Yeah.
Jess Belliveau:
Or we'll just start our own podcast! Yeah.
Angad Sethi:
So what were your biggest learnings today, given it's been Angad and I are just learning about observability, Angad what was your biggest learning today about observability? My biggest learning was that observability does not equal Datadog. No, sorry! It was just very fascinating to learn about quantifying the known unknowns. I don't know if that's a good takeaway, but...
Jess Belliveau:
Any takeaway is a good takeaway! What about you, Jared?
Jared Kells:
I think, because I we were going to talk about state management, and part of it was how we have this ability, at the moment to, the way our front ends are architected, we can capture the state of the app and get a customer to send us their state, basically. And we can load it into our app and just see exactly how it was, just the way our state's designed. But what might be even cooler is to build maybe some observability into that front end for support. I'm thinking instead of just having, we have this button to send us out your support information that sends us a bunch of the state, but instead of console logging to the browser log, we could be console logging, logging in our front end somewhere that when they click, "send support information," our customers should be sending us the actions that they performed.
Jared Kells:
Like, "Hey there's a bug, send us your support information." It doesn't have to be a third party service collecting this observability stuff. We could just build into our... So that's what I'm thinking about.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah, for sure. It'll probably be a lot less intrusive, as well, as some of the third party stuff that I've seen around.
Jared Kells:
Yeah. It's pretty hard with some of these integrations, especially if you're developing apps that get run behind a firewall.
Jess Belliveau:
Yeah
Jared Kells:
You can't just talk to some of these third parties. So yeah, it's cool though. It's really interesting.
Jess Belliveau:
Well, I hope someone out there listening has learned something, and Jordan and I will send some links through, and we can add them, hopefully, to the show notes or something so people can do some more reading and...
Jared Kells:
All thanks!
Jess Belliveau:
Thanks for having us, yeah.
Jared Kells:
Thanks all for your time, and thanks everybody for listening.
Jordan Simonovski:
Thanks everyone.
Angad Sethi:
That was [inaudible 00:41:55].
Jess Belliveau:
Tune in next week!
Listen now

Podcast
Easy Agile Podcast Ep.6 Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach
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.
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