Easy Agile Podcast Ep.2 John Turley, Digital Transformation Consultant, Adaptavist
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.
Related Episodes
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.18 Top qualities of an agile leader and team
"It was great to chat with Alana and learn from her experience" - Sean Blake
In this episode, I was joined by Alana Mai Mitchell. Alana is a results coach, author, podcast host, and Senior Product Development Manager at one of Australia's largest banks where she works with Agile teams every day.
She has over 13 years experience in digital financial services and coaching. She's spoken live on Channel 10 here in the Australian media and has had her mental health story featured in publications, like The Daily Mail and Mamma Mia. She's the author of a book, Being Brave, and she's the host of the Eastern Influenced Corporate Leader Podcast.
We covered a lot of ground in today's episode. We talked about:- The importance of putting your hand up and telling your manager when you want to be challenged more and to be exposed to new opportunities.
- Building trust with your team and disclosing some vulnerabilities about yourself.
- Alana's mental health journey over the course of six years, and that journey continues today. What she's learned and what we can learn from her experience to better look after our teams and people in our community.
- Servant leadership and being a generous leader.
- The importance of authenticity and direct communication.
I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did.
Transcript
Sean Blake:
Hello, welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name's Sean Blake and I'll be your host today. Today, we have a really interesting guest and a fantastic episode ahead for you. Our guest today is Alana Mai Mitchell. Alana is a results coach, author, podcast host, and Senior Product Development Manager at one of Australia's largest banks where she works with Agile teams every day. She has over 13 years experience in digital financial services and coaching. She's spoken live on Channel 10 here in the Australian media and has had her mental health story featured in publications, like The Daily Mail and Mamma Mia. She's the author of a book, Being Brave, and she's the host of the Eastern Influenced Corporate Leader Podcast.
Sean Blake:
We covered a lot of ground in today's episode. We talked about communication styles. We talked about the importance of putting your hand up and telling your manager when you want to be challenged more and to be exposed to new opportunities. We talked about the importance of building trust with your team and disclosing some vulnerabilities about yourself. We covered Alana's mental health journey over the course of six years, and that journey continues today. What she's learned and what we can learn from her experience to better look after our teams and people in our community. We talked about going first in servant leadership and being a generous leader. The importance of authenticity and direct communication. I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did. Let's get started. Alana, thanks so much for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast today. It's great to have you here.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Thanks so much, Sean.
Sean Blake:
Before we jump into our conversation, Alana, I'm just going to do an acknowledgement to country. We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we're recording today, the Watiwati people of the Tharawal speaking nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. We extend that same respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples who are tuning in today.
Sean Blake:
Well, Alana, there's so much to talk about today. The background is, we used to be colleagues in the financial services industry. We bumped into each other again out of the blue at Agile Australia '21 Conference, just at the end of last year, which was a great conference. We thought we'd have you on the podcast because you've got so many different stories to tell, but I thought maybe we could start this episode by talking about your career journey and how working with Agile Teams has weaved into your career trajectory.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Yeah, sure. Agile really came into the forefront right back in 2013. I always remember my first Agile training. We had a team day, where I was working at the time. We had an external facilitator come in because the Agile framework was something totally new to financial services at that time. We played Lego. We had each of our wider team was divided into smaller teams, like scrum teams, all this new terminology. Then we were building island and we had an island each and the product owner was feeding user stories in from the customer. Partway through we were building, I think, a rocket launcher and then no, we didn't want to rocket launcher anymore.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
We wanted to tweak it. We had to adapt to things on the fly. I always remember that experience because it was so transformative, just having such a direct and collaborative way of working with people on a project. To this day, of all the Agile trainings and experiences that I've gone through, it's always the ones that are really interactive that I've remembered the most and gained the most and taught them, like learnt them myself as a participant and then taught them to other people as well.
Sean Blake:
Along the way, do you think, you've been through all these training sessions and you've been working with teams on the ground. What have you found from Agile, which is a big topic, but what have you found to be the most transformative and the most helpful from the way that these teams used to do things to the way that they do them now?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I would say communication. What I found was, because I had the contrast with both, I've worked in Water Force style projects and Agile projects as well. I think the biggest part is the amount of effort and rigor that we would go through reviewing requirements and have those be delivered into technology. Then it go quiet and you not hear from technology until they come back with something and they're like, "I've got a baby." You're like, "What kind?" The difference with Agile is that you are able to co-create them.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
You're creating with your customer or your end user, if you're working with an internal user, and then you are also working with technology and finding out what kind of constraints technology has or what kind of ideas they have as well. You have that ability to communicate with the dev. Sometimes your devs are on-shore, often cases they're offshore. We're all remote now, so it doesn't make as much difference as it did when we were in the office. You can really just pull away a lot of the process that gets in between people and have conversations. That's what I really think is the most transformative part.
Sean Blake:
Great. Yeah, so that communication. Do you feel like the communication throughout COVID and working remotely has been more challenging? Are you one of those people that find those face-to-face communication skills, you really prefer the face-to-face or has remote been okay for you? Because I know some people have struggled. Some people have found it easier to be on Zoom all the time.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Well, I mean, when I go in the office and we have that brief time where we were back in the office, I had a smile on my face the whole time. Because I just love seeing people and I'd go around and walk over to my team and say, "Hey, how are you going?" Just catch up with them. I think the one piece that's missing for me in the remote working whilst there's greater flexibility, you can do multiple things at the same time. You focus a lot of your work. You can get a lot more done quicker. I do find that informal relationship building, you need to actually schedule in time or pick up the phone out of the blue and connect with someone.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Whereas in the office, I would just find that because people were there and I don't know, you might be having lunch at the same time or going downstairs for something at the same time or even the corridor conversations that happen after the meeting where you can just chase someone or ask someone a question or they chase you and you just get things done. It's just different. I'd say it's more, the catch ups are more scheduled and formal, I find in a remote work setting.
Sean Blake:
I feel the same way. I feel the small talk and the talk about the weekend on Zoom is much harder for me and much more tiring to try and sustain that than in person. It becomes more naturally. I really have to make a big effort, especially on one-to-ones with people in the team when I'm trying to check in on their health and wellbeing and how they're going at work. I just find that much more exhausting than what I do in person. I think it's just those nonverbal communication skills and you can see people's body language easier when you're in the office.
Sean Blake:
Someone's slumped at their chair for six hours out of a seven-hour work day. Then you're like, "Oh, something's wrong." If you know that you've got to get on Zoom and try and pretend to be happy and that everything's okay, then you can fake it a little bit easier. Of course, there's loads of benefits to remote work, as you say. That human element personally, I find it's much more challenging to replicate using digital tools. Maybe there'll be more innovation that comes, but the time will tell on that.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Yeah. On that, I wanted to add some of my friends in the technology space. Talking about the metaverse and how at the moment you and I are having this conversation through screens. I'm in my space, in my house, and you can see my painting in the background and I can see that you've got a podcast set up. One of my friends was talking about how, he's an architect, and so he was thinking about how we create digital spaces. When we meet digitally, if we were meeting as our avatar, what kind of space would facilitate better conversation? That blew my mind when he was talking about that. I was like, "Oh, I hadn't even thought of that." Absolutely, you could meet in a virtual space because we're doing what we've got with the tools that we have today, but the tools can change.
Sean Blake:
I guess it's almost certain they will change. I can't see that Zoom will be the market leader forever. I'm sure there'll be things that come along very soon that will try and replicate some of those physical experiences that we miss so much of being in the office and having those social experiences together. Alana, I'm wondering about the teams that you work with now or in the past, those Agile teams, do you have any tips for people who are new to Agile teams or maybe they're coming in?
Sean Blake:
They want to improve their communication, whether they're remote or in office, and improve their organization's Agile maturity, but they're just finding it a bit of a struggle. Do you have any tips for people who are just, they're butting their heads up against the wall and they can't seem to make progress with some of those patterns and habits that you talked about, like taking requirements away and not knowing what's happening for so many months or years before you hear something back from technology? How do you actually start to influence that culture and behavior, if you're new to Agile?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I'm going to take a slightly different approach on that to answer your question. Because the thing that came to mind for me was when I in Outward Bound, which is a remote wilderness organization in 2012 in the US. I was instructing there. One of the frameworks that they use is William Glass' Choice Theory. Choice Theory talks about that we have five needs, and I'll put myself on the spot. Well, I'll mention some of them, because I can't remember all of them. There's like need for fun. Some people have a high fun need. Then there's like need for power, like feeling powerful. There's like, love and belonging, is another important need. There's two others, which I can't recall right now. I think when you are coming out of a situation, from a perspective, you've tried a couple of times when you're approaching it, and not getting anywhere, I would have a look at what needs am I, myself looking to get met out of this communication.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Then on the flip-side, what needs is my communication partner or the team that I'm working with? What is the most important need for them? As we were talking about remote working, like the fun need. People love to have fun and you can actually have fun at work. It doesn't need to be separate. Thinking about like, if you have a high fun need, and you also notice your team has that as well. How can you address that in your communication style or bring out some kind of activities that can bring that to life? I would always go back to what are my needs and what are the needs of other people that I'm working with? Because when you're working with different teams, they have different agendas, they have different goals. If you can figure out what you have in common, it's a lot easier to bring another team or people in those team on the journey, once you figured out what the common ground is.
Sean Blake:
That's great advice. Think about it from their point of view, rather than just what you need and your own agenda and try and adapt to your approach to them. That's really good. I saw this quote recently, Alana, which reminded me a little bit about your mental health journey, which we'll talk about more in a moment. The quote was about, when you're looking for a new role or a new job, you shouldn't just look for a great company to work for. You should look for a great manager to work for, because the influence and your experience as an employee, working for a manager, is often so much more important than and influential than just picking a great or a well-known company to work for. Have you found that to be true in your own career?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Oh, yeah. I have found that some really phenomenal leaders. In a previous organization that I was working in, I like to keep learning and growing all the time. In previous roles, sometimes I get bored. It happens. That's really valuable to organizations because I'm constantly looking at where to improve things. I had a time where my manager was focused on other things and learning and development wasn't as important. Then I had a lady named Christina come in and Christina was like fire. She was just, "This is what we got to do." Open to change, really clear communicator, she's from the US. She's really direct in a compassionate way and she's really progressive as well. I found because of her influence in the organization.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Also, through my willingness to put my hand up and say, "I'm willing to participate." Which is, for the people who are tuning in, it's not just about the leader creating the opportunities for you and saying, "Hey, present to this general manager forum or executive general manager forum." Or whatever it is. It's also about you saying, "Hey, I'm willing and I'd love to." And communicating what you are after. We met on that path and I had some of the most, stronger success working with Christina. I was fortunate at that the culture was also really great. The immediate team culture needed to shift as well, which is part of why Christina came on board, and the company culture is really good.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I would say on the point on like manager over culture is that when you are someone who is progressive and you're wanting to shape the culture for the better, you're going to find cultures that need a little attention or need a little work or things that aren't quite as performing as well as they are. With the sales perspective, opportunity plus. If you go to a culture and everything's amazing, you're sure you can make it a little bit more amazing. Really, when you have the support of your manager, who's, you see these initiatives and they're going to say, "Okay, go for it. I've got this GM forum coming up that you can present at, or let's find your sponsor. Let's find your mentor." That the two of you working as a team can be at the forefront of the new culture, which impacts the rest of the culture.
Sean Blake:
Interesting. I don't know if I've ever been in a culture that's perfect and overachieving and too good, but absolutely you can get too comfortable and complacent in roles and you can almost just be a little bit shy from putting your hand up for those opportunities. Do you think there's many cultures out there that are too good? How do you assess the quality of a culture before you accept the role and start working in that team?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Oh, good question. I always asked, what's the vision and how does it relate to this role? I want to hear it from the hiring manager before I join a company. What I'm looking for is I'm asking that question to multiple people. I'm looking for a congruence, about the hiring manager sees a similar story as to what their peer, who's maybe interviewing in the second interview or their leader in the third interview. I'm looking for those things to match up, because that's telling me there's consistency. It's just, I'm getting the same story. That they're also communicating well. That would be a sign to me. Yeah, that's about what I do.
Sean Blake:
That's good. Good tip. Alana, you have a quote on your website, which talks about your mental health journey. It says, "I have totally recovered from five mental health breakdowns across six years, where doctors once talk would me, I would be homeless." That sounds like a lot of hardship and a lot of sweat and tears and pain over many years. Do you want to walk us through a little bit of that journey and what you've learned about yourself through those experiences?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Oh, yeah. Thanks for pulling that out from the site, Sean. In 2013, I started to notice that things weren't right. I wasn't feeling myself. I sought help from a counselor, career counselor. Because I thought, "Is it my career?" I said, "Am I not in the right job?" I spoke to a psychiatrist and a psychologist and they did a little bit of an investigation, but no one really got to what was going on. Then I made some quick decisions in my career, which I look back on and I think, "Wow, I really was in the throes of it and not thinking clearly at all when I made those choices." I found myself, about November 2014, in between roles. As someone who was previously really ambitious, like high-achiever, chronic high-achiever without having a role and a career prospect at the moment back then was a big deal.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I had what was called a psychotic episode. Essentially, that was like me, believing deluded thoughts and not having a really strong grip on reality, having some story going on in my head that wasn't true at all. It ended up because I was taken by ambulance to hospital. Then still at that point, people didn't really know what was going on. I was a in mental health ward and came out from that, started on medication, which improved things. I thought, and this is part of why I had the multiple psychotic episodes, is that I thought that the stress of being in between jobs or stressful situations at work, I thought they were the triggers for the psychotic episodes.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I would take the medication for a while, get better temporarily, think everything was normal, stop the medication. Then six months later I would have another breakdown. Then that happened over six years and I realized towards the fifth and final, so that was when I was running a coaching business that had a few clients at the start and then we didn't have any clients at all. I essentially ran out of money and got into debt. Then when the doctor learned about my financial situation, he said, "You're going to be homeless." I was so offended. I was like, "How dare you." I was like, "No, I will not. I will not." I look back now and I'm so thankful for him sharing that with me, because he provided me with a choice. Something to push against and choose another way. He activated my will, from me going from being offended to being thankful, where I'm at today.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I charted my way out of that. Now, I have well-managed schizophrenia and I take medication. I'll be taking medication for the rest of my life. It's part of who I am. I don't experience like, some people have a lot of appreciation for, because I know that they're in their mental health journey. It's not all smooth sailing, even after they have an answer of a diagnosis. It still can be challenging in there's up days and down days. For me, I'm consistent. It's been now coming up to four years since the doctor and I had that conversation in the hospital. Life is just incredible since then.
Sean Blake:
That's great. I'm so happy to hear that. Thank you for sharing your story with our audience. I think it's really important, isn't it? To be vulnerable and to share the truth about things that have happened in the past. Do you think that there's something that we can learn? With the people that you work with now, do you have a clearer understanding or are you looking for signs of people in your life who might be struggling with some of the similar issues and what can we do as people in our own communities and working with teams to look out for each other and to better support each other with some of these mental health issues front of mind so that we can be more supportive?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I always listen for and check in with how the team is doing and it's not just, you ask how are you, and you're listening for more than what they say. If they say they're good, how are they saying it? We had that conversation before about the remote working and it's different. To come to the, are you okay, and we have the, are you okay days. Someone asked me in the office where we were actually working together. They're like, "Are you okay, Alana?" I couldn't answer her. It's not always as simple as getting a no, sometimes it's, you don't get a response. Then the alarm does go off. I really think taking in all the points of interaction that you have with someone and aligning to, is that consistent with how do they were, is there something different, check in with them, how is it going? If you're having a conversation, great. If they're sharing with you, even better.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
If they're not, you can always just check in with yourself and being like, "Is it something you need?" As to, why are they not sharing or is that something that's going on with them as well? The other piece I wanted to tie it, bring it back to the Agile leadership piece and from the conference that Agile Australia that we were at. I really see that building trust with teams is so key. We're in this remote working environment or hybrid working environment, depending on what office you're in. It really is important to build trust with your team. One of the quickest ways you can do that is by sharing vulnerably with what you have to share. I don't mean going for exposure and putting yourself in vulnerable situations where you are uncomfortable with what you share.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
It's disclosure, so it's something that you're 100% comfortable within yourself, and you've accepted it within yourself and you share that with your team in openness. When you do that, you see that your team also, they hear it and they mirror it as well. You go first and they share. The mental health example, I shared that on LinkedIn. I've shared it in situations with my team. Then I've been invited to talks and I've had people approach me. It really builds without having to go through a lot of, I ask this thing of this person, do they deliver it above and beyond expectations when I ask for it? How many times do you need to go through that process before you trust someone versus you, coming out and creating an environment of trust through of vulnerability? I do caveat that it's like not oversharing, it's sharing what you're comfortable with at that point in time, and that might change as you go on.
Sean Blake:
Interesting. Does this apply to leaders as well? I know that you've spoken about being a generous leader in the past, and that reminds me of servant leadership, which is another kind of Agile phrase that you hear come up quite a lot. This idea of going first, disclosing what you're comfortable with to your team, even as a leader, showing vulnerability is really important. I know in my experience, if you can share some of the honest and harsh realities of what it's like to be in your position, then your team are more empathetic with the challenges that you have.
Sean Blake:Because a lot of people assume that when you are in a position of leadership and responsibility, then things are easier because you can just delegate or you've got budget to solve some of these problems, but it's not actually the reality of it. The reality of it is you struggle with things just like anyone else. By sharing and disclosing things with people at all levels of the organization, then that helps to build empathy and a bit more care and support no matter what level you're at. Are there other things or habits or qualities of a generous leader or a servant leader that you've seen or that you try and model or encourage?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
The big one that stands out for me is authenticity. Really knowing yourself, knowing what your leadership style is, knowing what your challenges are, what your strengths are, what you're working on and being authentic about that. When you feel something, sharing what you feel, not having to feel like you need to say it a different way or sugarcoat it, being able to speak your mind in a way that's direct and compassionate. We're not going for like arrogance, and we're not going for wishy washy. We're going for direct and compassionate, then share what's in your heart, so authenticity. Those are the leaders that you, I'm so glad you brought up empathy because when you're vulnerable, empathetic, and authentic, those are the leaders that really stand out for you and me.
Sean Blake:
That's great advice. Authenticity, direct communication, build empathy. All right, thanks for sharing that.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
You're welcome.
Sean Blake:
Alana, how did you decide that you wanted to write a book about some of your experiences and can you tell us about how your book, Being Brave, has changed your life and how you think about sharing your story?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I naturally have a lot of things going on. I love projects. I love it, that's why I'm in projects. Because I love setting a goal and reaching it. The company I was working at had done a number of workshops and I got to a point where I didn't have as many activities going on. I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. I don't have as much stuff going on." This was just at the start of the pandemic in 2020. A friend, a really dear friend of mine said, "Try meditation. Try meditation daily." I meditated each day and I had been surrounded, my network is very much of a coaching network. I know a lot of coaches and they had written their own books as well. I was on the radar and I was meditating and I got the idea to write a personal memoir about my story.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
It's really interesting that even in through that process of doing a lot of personal development work and going through the process of writing the story, there were still some things in that, that I wasn't quite comfortable owning yet. It's been, since I wrote the book that I've accepted that. In a book, if people read it, I talk about psychotic episodes. I don't talk about schizophrenia because it was all later when I was asked to do a media thing about schizophrenia, that I was like, "Okay, yep. Time to own that." I feel like the book at a point in time had me accept all that had happened with unconditional love and then to still, modeling that piece of going for disclosure and not exposure. Still, I had my fragility on what I wasn't ready to disclose yet. Since then, that had progressed further.
Sean Blake:
That's awesome. That therapy you're sitting down to write the story actually helped flesh out the story itself and you came to terms with some of those things that happened. What has been the reception to the book?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
Most people, when they pick up the book, it's a short book, so some people even call it a booklet, because it's 11,000 words. It's short. They say, "Wow, I read that in an hour and a half, in one sitting. I couldn't put it down." someone had said, "It's the story of the famous rising from the ashes." They can take a lot of inspiration from it. The point of the book and a lot of what we're talking about vulnerability is going first as the leader. You set an example that others can follow in, so that will flow into their lives as well. The book is set out with a story and a few questions at the end that people can go through for their own insight.
Sean Blake:
Great, awesome. Alana, is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we start wrapping up the episode today?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
I did, because I know this is about Agile more so, and that's a really important topic to your audience. I did write and have a think about after that conference we went to, Agile Australia, about what is beyond the Spotify model? Because the Spotify model is very, word is spoken about it at the moment with the crews and the tribes and squads of course, and the chapter lead models and all that they have, which I'm sure everyone tuned in would be really familiar with. I started to think about, what are the things that are relevant beyond the Spotify model? What's next? If your organization is at a point where you've already at your job at some of that, and you're looking for what's next. I did write an article about that. It's on LinkedIn, and I'll give it to you. If you want to, you can put it in the show notes.
Sean Blake:
That's awesome. We will definitely do that. Where can people go to find out more about you? Where can they buy your book or visit your website?
Alana Mai Mitchell:
My site is www.alanamaimitchell.com. On there is more about my story. There's a few things about coaching, which may be relevant. I'm not coaching at the moment, I'm more focused on my career in financial services. Then the book is on Amazon and it's in English and also in Spanish. There's the audio book and also the print book and the eBook.
Sean Blake:Awesome. Well, Alana, thanks for disclosing what you've disclosed today and sharing your story with us. I've learned a lot about your experiences, and I've got a lot to think about, to reflect on, how to be a more generous leader. Thanks for spending time with us and being part of the Easy Agile Podcast.
Alana Mai Mitchell:
You're so welcome. Thanks for having me on the show, Sean.
Sean Blake:
Thanks, Alana.
PodcastEasy 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.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.4 Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO & Managing Director at Pretty Agile
"We spoke in detail about scaling agile, being a SAFe fellow, discipline, the traits of effective leaders and how to trust your people."
Transcript
Nick Muldoon:
Good day, folks. Thanks for joining us for another Easy Agile Podcast. This morning, I'm joined by Em Campbell-Pretty of Pretty Agile. Em is one of 22 SAFe fellows globally and she's been doing agile transformations at scale for over a decade now. She's also the author of two books, The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck and Tribal Unity. So, all about culture and psychological safety here, and all about obviously scaling agile release trains, tips and tricks.
Nick Muldoon:
My key takeaways that I was really jazzed about, the traits of effective leaders for scaling agile transformations and being an effective organization, trust, as in trusting their people, an openness to learning and a willingness to learn, the ability to experiment and treat things as failures if they are failures, and discipline. Em and I talked a bit about discipline today as a trait of leaders. It's a really great episode and I took a lot from it, and you'll hear my takeaways at the end and what I need to go and learn after some time with Em this morning. So, let's get started. How many weeks a year are you typically on the road?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
How many weeks a year am I typically on the road? A lot, most. It would be unusual for me to spend four weeks without going somewhere. That would be unusual. I don't travel every week, but I travel most weeks, and I travel in big blocks. Right? So, I'll go and do ... Like I said, just before the lockdown, we did three weeks in Auckland, so that was in February-March.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We went to Auckland, we had a client in Auckland, we just stayed there. So, three weeks in Auckland, came back here, and did not return to Auckland. Returned to support that client virtually over Teams and Zoom was how that one went. But yeah. Normally between running around Australia, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, the US, New Zealand, yeah, not home that often, normally. This has been truly bizarre.
Nick Muldoon:
So, this is a very unusual year for someone like yourself that's flying around visiting clients all over the world.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a very strange year. It's an interesting difference on energy as well. Not flying all the time I think is good for my body. I feel the difference. I also feel the difference sitting in a chair all the time. So, I was traveling a lot, but I was on my feet most days when I was working. Now if I'm working, I'm sitting a lot.
Nick Muldoon:
You're sitting down. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, that's interesting. But I don't miss the jet lag at all. I don't miss the amount of time the travel consumes at all. In fact, it's been nice. I've had a little bit of head space. I've probably blogged more this year than I have in a few years because I've just had some head space and being able to think. But I don't get to see the world either, and all my holidays got canceled. So, nevermind work. I had trips to Europe. Four weeks from now, I was supposed to be in Canada seeing polar bears.
Nick Muldoon:
Aw.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Tell me about it!
Nick Muldoon:
I would love to see polar bears. They look so cuddly on TV. I'm not sure that that would actually be the circumstance if I was to try to approach one and give one a cuddle.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. I don't think cuddling was involved. I was told I could bring a camera and a tripod, which means obviously I'm going to stand some distance away from this polar bear and take photos. But that will not be happening either. So, no holidays and no travel for work, and of course, being in Melbourne, not even any, let's just go to [crosstalk 00:04:15].
Nick Muldoon:
Coffee or anything like that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Just nothing.
Nick Muldoon:
Nothing.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Nothing.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, because you've been on legit lockdown.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
So, tell me then about the shift over the last 10 or 15 years in these scaled, agile transformations. Obviously today, like you described with this client in Auckland, everything's got to be remote. Presumably, not as effective. But I'd love to get a sense of what the evolution is from the transformations 10 years ago, banking, telcos, that sort of environment to the clients that you're working with today. Describe what it was like 10 years ago.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, 10 years ago, and it's so interesting to reflect on this now, I read Scaling Software Agility, which is a book that Dean published in 2007. Then I discovered that wasn't the latest book, so then I read Agile Software Requirements. This was 2011. I'm this crazy, angry business sponsor with this program of work I'd been sponsoring for five years that's never delivered anything, and in this cra-
Nick Muldoon:
You were the crazy, angry business sponsor?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was the crazy [inaudible 00:05:26]. I was very angry. You would be angry too if you were me. I refer to it now as the money fire. So, basically, here's my job. Right? Go to the CFO, ask for money. Give the money to IT. IT lights a match, sets it on fire. Comes back, asks me for money. I get to go back to the CFO and say I need more money. Five years. Five years. That's all I did. Ask for money and try to explain where the other money went.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Anyway, in the strangest restructure ever, I end up the technology GM for the same group I had been the business sponsor of for the past five years. Apparently, they couldn't find anybody appropriately qualified. So, you can do it, Em. Sure. So, I'm a bit of a geek, so I read books, and I'm reading these books by Leffingwell because I'd been doing some agile ... So, I'd been doing something I'd been calling agile. Let's just go with that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
It was interesting to me because I could see little rays of light. But it still wasn't really making anything happen, so hence the reading. These books talk about this agile release train [inaudible 00:06:46] that sounds cool. We should so do this thing. So, I set about launching this train at a Telstra in early 2012. It wasn't called SAFe, right? It was just the books and these things called an agile release train.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Now, to look back 10 years ago, it wasn't called SAFe. People weren't running around doing this. I was not actually really qualified for the job I was in. Well, I wasn't a technology leader by any stretch of the imagination, and I decide that I'm just going to launch an agile release train. So, there were rare and unusual beasts, and I'm not sure I really understood that when I went down the path of doing it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I'm big on the, I read it in a book, I read it in a blog, I heard it at a conference, I'll just try it. That's very much always been my mental model. So, I read it in a book and I just tried it. Then we discover that actually, literally nobody is doing this, so it becomes Australia's first agile release train and Australia's first SAFe implementation. Oh, boy, have I learned a lot since then.
Nick Muldoon:
Well, yeah. I was reflecting on that because I dug out The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck, right? This is one of the ones that you signed for Tegan. But obviously, you've learned a ton since then because you've managed to put together a tome of tips and tricks and things to avoid as you are pursuing these transformations. As an industry, though, well, as an industry, I guess this spans many industries, but as a practice these days, are we actually getting better at these transformations? Are there companies out there today, Em, that are still taking piles of money and setting it on fire?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I think I meet people every day who hear my story and go, "Oh, my god. You used to work here?" So, I think there's still many, many organizations that have an experience that is like the experience I had back in 2010 and what have you. So, it seems to be something that really resonates with people. I guess so many of the businesses we go into now either are not agile at all or, I guess like my world was, doing something they call agile. What we find is the something that they call agile, I wouldn't say it's not agile. But it leaves a lot to be desired.
Nick Muldoon:
They're on a journey, right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess so because they end up having a conversation with us. So, they understand that what they're doing is not enough. They understand that what they're doing isn't getting them the results that they want. I don't know that they understand why. It's interesting to me sometimes that they look to SAFe because you asked me about how's the client base changed? One of the things that's really interesting in Australia is we get far more of the small to medium sized companies now than the big ones.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, they're companies that consider themselves agile. But what we're calling them, the startups that are no longer startups, right? These are organizations that they're generally old 10, 20 year old startups and they're scaling and they see their problem as a scaling problem. So, that's what leads them to a conversation around the scaled agile framework.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
When we look at them through a SAFe lens, we go, "Gee, you're tiny. But okay. I can see that you can have an agile release train and it won't do you any harm. In fact, it would probably help you a lot in terms of mid-range planning," because mid-range planning just seems to be nonexistent for a lot of these organizations. Prioritization. A lot of these small organizations, very knee-jerky in terms of how they prioritize, bouncing from one thing to the other.
Nick Muldoon:
Are they reacting to the market, or are they reacting to the leaders, maybe the lack of discipline in the leadership?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You know what? They would say they're reacting to the market. I would say they've got a discipline issue.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:11:23].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I read, obviously, big reader, last summer, obviously Australian summer, US winter, I read Melissa Perry's The Build Trap. Interesting book and your well respected thought leader in product management. Not a big fan of SAFe. Probably not a big fan of agile either was the takeaway I had from her book. But the thing that she does talk about that I really thought was valuable was the lunacy in chasing your competitors. So, building features because your competitors-
Nick Muldoon:
Your competitors [crosstalk 00:12:06].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... build them, or building features to land a contract or retain a customer. So, I thought she sees all of that as lunacy, and I tend to agree. So, that was my ... I think that's quite interesting. Her perspective is you don't know if the competitor's actually having any luck with that thing that they've built. So, if you build it because they built it, you don't know. You have no idea. So, don't just build it because they've built it. It might not be doing them any favors either.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Of course, once you start just doing random stuff for this big customer or this big client, you start to lose your way as an organization. People end up with completely different versions of their products, branches that they can't integrate anymore. It's interesting. So, when I look at that, I go, "I feel like there's a discipline issue in some of these organizations at the leadership level."
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What is it we're trying to do? What is our vision? What is our mission? What is our market? What are we doing to test and learn in that market, as opposed to just get a gun, let's do everything, grab everything? Oh, my goodness. They were doing that over there. Stop this, start this, stop this. Of course, if you're stopping and starting all the time, you're not delivering anything, and that seems to be something that we see a lot with these organizations. They're not delivering.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I'm not saying their delivery mechanism is perfect. There's challenges there too. But some part of the problem is the inability to stay a course. Pick a course and stay a course. I'm not saying don't pivot, because that's stupid too. But being more deliberate in your choices to pivot, perhaps. Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you get a sense, Em, that there are leadership teams in various geographic regions that are more effective at this and more effective at that longterm planning and having that discipline and that methodical approach to delivery over an extended time period?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I think regions and cultures and nationalities certainly play a role in the leadership, I don't know, persona, personality. I don't know that I could say when I've worked in this country or this part of the world that their leaders are better at forethought. I think some cultures lend themselves to lean and agile more than others. Hierarchical cultures are really, really challenging.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That can be both a geographic thing, but it can also just be an industry thing, right? So, government can be very hierarchical. The banks can be very hierarchical. Some of the Asian cultures are very hierarchical. But some companies are just very hierarchical as well. So, who owns the company, who leads the company, all of that can play a big role in what's acceptable because so much of success in this scaled agile journey comes down to a leadership that is willing to trust the teams, a leadership that is willing to learn, a leadership that's willing to experiment, and a leadership that's prepared to be disciplined.
Nick Muldoon:
So, leadership with trusting the teams, willing to learn, willing to experiment, and with discipline. They're those four things that you-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. I'll make a note of those, Em. I'll come back to those. Trust, learn, experiment, and discipline. I'm interested, I guess, this year being a very interesting, a very unique year for doing remote transformation work and coaching and consulting, 10 years ago, what was the percentage of remote team members distributed teams? Now, you've basically, I think the big banks in Australia aren't even going back to the office until 2021. Atlassian is not going back to the office until 2021. Twitter, Jack Dorsey, my old CEO, said, "Work from home forever," sort of thing. What's the takeaway for this year and what do you expect for 2021 and beyond?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, look. This year has been eyeopening, and look, some things are, as I would have anticipated, some things have been different. So, obviously, we're seeing entire organizations going online. We're seeing the teams are online, the PI planning's online, everything's online. That's actually in some ways opened up opportunity. So, where we've had clients who have had the most odd setups in terms of distribution, and you can make a train work where you've got teams across two locations. But we're big fans of the entire team is in Sydney or the entire team is in India. We don't have half the team in Sydney and half the team in India.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But organizations really struggle with that because perhaps all the testers are in India and then you want a tester on every team and now you've got a problem. How do you create a complete team and not cross the time zones? So, the opportunity becomes if I can find teams that are not physically co-located but time zone friendly, I have a little bit more option. So, I can have a train that operates between, I don't know, Sydney and India. Or I can find a four hour overlap in their day, and I can insist that that team works 100% online.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, the big thing that we'd advise against is I don't want that team hybrid. Right? I don't want three people sitting in the office in Sydney and three people sitting in their homes in India. I want everybody online. I want an even playing field, and I think we can do that now in a way that is more acceptable than before. Because the same advice I was giving, gee, back when I wrote Tribal Unity, same advice. Right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, 2016, everybody, equal playing field. If you're going to be distributed, everyone has to be online, as opposed to some people online and some people in a room. So, that's a more acceptable answer now than it was prior to this year. So, that's good. I think that's good.
Nick Muldoon:
In 2021, then, Em, you mean this is just going to play forward. I guess there's going to be a reversion of some of these companies back to the office because they've got huge real estate and workplace infrastructure already.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. So, look. We're seeing clients closing offices the same way that you see some of the companies in the US doing that. We're also seeing parts of Australia and New Zealand with no particular COVID impact at this point actually going back into the office, and having created that example of teams that are crossing time zones, and then going back into the office and going back to that hybrid space. So, that's interesting and [crosstalk 00:20:08].
Nick Muldoon:
So, where you're back into that environment where you might have some people working together in an office that can get a cup of coffee together and then some that are stuck still at home. I guess there's not just even regional differences, right? If you've got a team member that's got a particular health situation, they're not going to feel comfortable necessarily coming back into the office, regardless of the situation, until there's a vaccine or something.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, yeah. Look, I think it's going to be interesting. I would strongly advocate that organizations have teams that are either in person teams or online teams, and the team just either operates 100% online or the team operates 100%-
Nick Muldoon:
In the office.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... in person and in the office, and if you have a train that has both in any train level ceremony, everybody goes to a desk and-
Nick Muldoon:
And do it online.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... a video camera and we do it that way. I think the thing that seems to be most sticky about the physical environment and SAFe is PI planning. Nobody needs to beat. Right? That was cool. Nobody needs to beat, no one's PI planning slipped, everybody just went. They were all online. So, we'll just PI plan online. It'll be fine. We saw people use whatever infrastructure they had available to them.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:21:30].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I'm sure a number of people called you folks and said, "We need a tool." But some just went, "We have Google Suite, we have Microsoft whatever it is, we have this, we have that. We're just going to make it work," and no matter what they used, they made it work and they ran the events and their events were effective and they got the outcomes. The big thing that is missing is that energy. You can't get the energy of 100, 200 people in a room from an online event. But mechanically-
Nick Muldoon:
We can achieve it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... we can achieve it. So, we hear everybody wants to go back to PI planning in person because of the social, because of the energy, which I think is awesome. I absolutely think that is awesome, and I can see this world in which people do a lot more work from home, work remote, whatever that looks like, and then the PI planning events are the things that we do to bring ourselves together and reconnect on that eight, 10, 12 week basis. That's my feeling. Could be wrong.
Nick Muldoon:
I guess I'll be really interested to see how it plays out, and I think we should return to this conversation in 12 months, Em.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Oh, no.
Nick Muldoon:
I'm just thinking, what's going through my mind is one of our customers in New York, financial services company, and for one of their arts, it was 150,000 US exercised to bring their people together once a quarter.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Wow.
Nick Muldoon:
I'm now going, I'm like, "Okay, yes, they're doing it digitally now." That's fine. They're going to miss out on things. But if they lose the budget, do they have to fight to get the budget back? Or does the budget sit there? There's these other unknown ramifications of this shift over the course of 2020 that we're yet to see play out, I guess.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I think you're right, and I think it would be particularly interesting for the trains that have been launched remotely. So, if the train has been launched remotely, do you ev-
Nick Muldoon:
So, not existing trains that have been working together for six to 12, 18 months. But you want to get a brand new train started. Have you done that remotely this year with some of your clients?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, we're in the process of doing it now.
Nick Muldoon:
Cool. Tell me.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We had one, though, literally just before the lockdown. So, they did their first PI planning face to face and then immediately moved to remote working and, yeah, now working on remotely launching a train. For us, we have a playbook. It's a bunch of workshops. It's a bunch of classes. We just use online collaboration tools. We've found things that replicate the sort of tools that we would have in a physical room, and the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes, right? This has been the absolute highlight for me, the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes.
Nick Muldoon:
No more hieroglyphics.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
What is that that you wrote, Sally? Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Everyone can say everything at once, right? So, you think about the classroom and the workshop where there's a group of people huddled around Post-its and a flip chart paper and they're still huddled in a way in their virtual huddle, but everybody can read, right? It's not that I'm not close enough, I can't read, I can't read your handwriting. There's this great equalizer is the online world. So, I think that's great. I think the challenge for the trains launched remotely is going to be do you ever get the face to face experience?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Because if I go back over the years, one of the things we know is your first PI planning event sets the standard. So, people get this imprint in their heads of what is possible. For example, if you skip something in your first PI planning event, you just decide to, I don't know, skip the confidence vote or something weird like that, you don't do the roam of the risks or you just skip something, you never do it because you're successful without it.
Nick Muldoon:
It never gets picked up. Yeah, okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You're successful without it. So, every compromise you make, and you make a series of compromises, and then you're successful despite those compromises, and that becomes a false positive feasibility. It tells you, yes, I was right. I was right.
Nick Muldoon:
I don't need to do that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I didn't need to do those things because I was awesomely successful and I didn't do these things. So, it's the learning [crosstalk 00:26:15]-
Nick Muldoon:
That's confirmation bias, is it?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Confirmation bias. That's exactly it. Yep. Yeah, and I think there's going to be a bunch of confirmation bias in these remotely launched trains, and unless they're inside organizations where there's enough knowledge of SAFe and the physical PI planning to know that there's going to be value in bringing them together, but I can see that being a real challenge. I think trains that are launched online may never go into a physical PI planning event because of that confirmation bias.
Nick Muldoon:
All right.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That makes me really sad.
Nick Muldoon:
I want to come back to something you said before about the leaders, and you mentioned the trust, the openness to learning and experimentation, and the discipline. I was going back over your SAFe Global 2018 talk about the seven traits of highly effective servant leaders.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
I guess I had some questions about this, and obviously, these are four of the traits. What are the other three traits that I'm missing? Then I've got a followup question about some of the actual things that you talked about that you picked up in your trip.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
[inaudible 00:27:29] one of those four on the list I had in 2018.
Nick Muldoon:
I'll quiz you on it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
How awkward. So, in 2018, the answer was people first, a respect for people, that sort of lens, lean thinking, manager, teacher, learner. So, we had that one. Yeah. Learner. [inaudible 00:28:00] crazy. What else did I have? [inaudible 00:28:10].
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay. I wanted to talk about that one, actually. I made a note about that. What is that, and are there examples of that in the West?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
A lot of people talk about true north.
Nick Muldoon:
[inaudible 00:28:28]. True north.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. True north. The translation I got, which I got from Mr. [inaudible 00:28:39], who partnered with Katie Anderson for the lean study tour I did in, I don't know, '18, '17, '18, 2018, I think, so the translation he gave was direction and management sort of things. So, it's mission, right? It's strategic mission. It's that sort of thing.
Nick Muldoon:
So, just a sidebar here for anyone that hasn't seen Em's talk on this, there's a woman by the name of Katie Anderson. She runs an annual, I think, I guess not this year, but she runs an annual-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No, not this year. She did not go this year.
Nick Muldoon:
... not this year, runs an annual lean, Kanban, kaizen study tour to Japan and visits ... Who did you visit, Em? You visited with Katie. How many were in the crew that you went over there with?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I think it was a group of about 20 from memory. Katie lived in Japan for two years and then went back to the US. She lives in San Francisco, I think. While she was there, she really liked the idea of putting together these lean study tours. She was already a lean practitioner more in the healthcare side of things. So, she got the opportunity to ... We actually were on a test run tour.
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, cool.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, this was her experiment. She had a relationship with Ohio State University and they brought some people to the table and she brought some people to the table and they made it happen. She also had an existing relationship with Mr. [inaudible 00:30:24], who was John [inaudible 00:30:26] first manager at Toyota. So, he's a 40 year Toyota veteran.
Nick Muldoon:
Veteran.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
He came with us for the week. So, we of course went to Toyota, but we went to a bunch of Toyota suppliers as well. Isuzu, [inaudible 00:30:43]. Then we also went to Japan Post, which was fascinating. We went to a city which name escapes me right now, but they called it 5S City because all the companies in that city practice the 5S, the manufacturing 5S.
Nick Muldoon:
Tell me about it. It's not coming to mind. I don't feel comfortable or familiar.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You don't feel good about 5S?
Nick Muldoon:
No.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No. That's not good. So, how would I ... The 5S is five Japanese words, which I'm going to go ... Yeah. My Japanese, nothing. But it's about standardized work. So, for example, when you go into the 5S factories, you'll see the floors marked up where you need to stand to do a particular job.
Nick Muldoon:
[crosstalk 00:31:41] This is what Paul Aikas picked up for his-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, no.
Nick Muldoon:
I feel like I've seen Paul Aikas' videos of their manufacturing in the US that everything's marked up.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Probably. That would be my guess. We should ask Teddy.
Nick Muldoon:
We can ask Paul, and we can ask all these people. There's time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Well, yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Okay.
Nick Muldoon:
So, that lean tour, the Japan study tour, that was a super effective and motivating thing for you?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. For me, it was very reinforcing. So, I had I guess my own lens on what lean leadership meant, and I found that particular tour to be very reinforcing around the value set that I believe is part of that. Katie [inaudible 00:32:43] created [inaudible 00:32:44] that is designed to show you that. So, she's often very clear that says this is not Japan, right? This is not a reorganization into Japan. This is not every leader in Japan.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
This is, I've hand picked a series of lean leaders to show you it being practiced. But it was certainly very reinforcing for me. So, very similar messages I picked up in terms of how I like to head, how I coach others to lead was built into the messages that she delivered. So, it was very cool. It was very cool. Some of those leaders, just so inspiring, particular kaizen. I think the thing that just really hits you in the face as you're talking to these folks is kaizen, this drive to get better.
Nick Muldoon:
All the time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
All the time. Absolutely. It's these folks looking for, they're looking for the one second, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
The one second improvements. There's a video that floats around. Have you seen the Formula 1 video-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... where they do, yeah, the changeover in 63 and it takes them over a minute and they do the changeover in 90-something in Melbourne and it takes them six seconds or whatever it is. It's like that, right? It's that how do I find one more second, half a second? They're just so driven. If I can remove a step that someone has to take, can I move something closer to somebody?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. There was some comment in the presentation that you gave. There was some comment about if I have to take another five steps, that's an extra 10 seconds. Then that's an extra 10 seconds every time I do this activity every day, and that all adds up. So, how do we shave these seconds off and be more effective and deliberate about how we do this?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That was just huge, right? I called it kaizen crazy in the presentation. I'm just so, so driven to improve, and just tiny, small improvements every day.
Nick Muldoon:
So, one of the other practices that I didn't grok out of that talk was about the Bus Stop. What was the Bus Stop about?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Was that in that talk? Really?
Nick Muldoon:
I'm forcing you to stretch your mind [crosstalk 00:34:57].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You are. You are. You are. You are quite right. It really was [inaudible 00:35:01]. Okay. Oh, you're awful.
Nick Muldoon:
Yes.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yes. Yes, you are. Okay. So, effective leaders are human was the tagline on that one. It was really about leaders being down to Earth and being one with the teams. So, things I saw in Japan, this factory run by a woman, [inaudible 00:35:42], I think it was, so very unusual. Not a lot of women leaders in Japan. Her husband took her name because [inaudible 00:35:52]. It's a really interesting character.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But her company has a bunch of morning rituals. You always say good morning and thank you and how they talk every day and everybody talks and everyone interacts. Then one of the other places we went to, they all had their uniforms they wore in the factory. But everybody wore the uniform, right? The CEO, the office workers, and everybody wore the uniform. Everyone was one.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Then I was thinking about my experience leading teams, and a lifetime ago, I was working with a team that decided to enter a corporate competition. This competition was about showing your colors and showing the corporate values, which were things like better together and courage, and then [inaudible 00:36:49] a rainbow thing. So, this team decides what they're going to do, is it an address up in the rainbow colors, and they're going to be better together and show their courage and they're going to do the Macarena and they're going to video it and that's going to be how they're going to win this competition.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I did not participate in this Macarena because someone has to take photos and stuff, right? How else are they going to enter the competition? So, had to do my bit. Anyway, we also had this ritual, which was about teams bringing challenges to leadership to resolve, and they did at the end of every spring. So, they do this Macarena and they film it and they enter the competition and at the end of the spring, they bring their challenges to leadership.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Their challenge is Em did not do the Macarena. You are our leader, you did not do the Macarena. We are feeling very challenged by that, and we're bringing this to you to resolve. So, I went and spoke to the team that raised and said, "Look. I got to tell you. I don't know the Macarena. So, sorry." I still remember this so clearly. One of the guys said to me, "I read this blog about the importance of leaders being vulnerable." You know who wrote that blog post, don't you?
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, Em. Oh. You have it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, we negotiated. I said, "Look. I think I can manage the Bus Stop." For those not from Australia, we grow up doing this in high school dances. In my part of the world, anyway. So, I grabbed my leadership team and we did do the Bus Stop and it was part of proving that we too were the same as everybody else and doing our bit and responding to the team's feedback. So, yes. That is where the Bus Stop fits in. Thanks so much for that, Nick.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. No, I appreciate that. Now, I'm glad that I got that context. I try and do similar things. Typically, it's a karaoke or something, or that we haven't done that in a while. Yeah, okay. So, I guess the thrust of that talk was really about to leaders to serve, and it was all about being in service of. It sounds like what you took from the Japan study tour was these leaders there were very much in service of their people.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you see that as a trait that is prevalent in the best performing companies that you deal with, and how likely are they over a five, 10 year horizon, whatever that happens to be, to outperform their competitors or to be more successful in their market? Or I guess however they define success?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I certainly see a correlation between leaders that like to serve and/or choose to serve and success with scaled agile, and business, because I guess we have seen over, it's close to 10 years, is those who practice together, your framework with discipline get results, and they get significant results. They improve their ability to deliver products and services, their cost base goes down, their quality goes up, their people are happier, their attrition goes down. We see it every single time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What we also see is when the leaders don't walk the talk, when the leaders are paying lip service to the transformation, it doesn't stick. They don't get the results. People don't find it a better place to work. People aren't bought into the change. So, there is definitely a correlation there. You can get pockets of wonderfulness inside an organization.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We often observe that the organization that's transformation is as successful is the most bought in leader. Most senior bought in leader. So, if you're the leader of a train and you show the right behaviors, your train will be really great.
Nick Muldoon:
Successful.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But that means nothing for the broader organization, solution train, the business unit, what have you. You see this thing that goes from the leader. If the leader's showing the right behaviors, you get within that space, you get the behaviors, you get the change, you get the results. But leaders who say one thing and do another, people don't buy it, right?
Nick Muldoon:
I guess this is true of any organizational change, isn't it?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
You hit the boundaries of your pocket, as you said, within the organization and then you meet the real world, the rest of the organization. People, maybe they don't have enough energy or they don't feel that they can influence and change that, and so they just live within their bubble because they don't feel that they can exert the pressure outside of that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Look. I've certainly, I've seen successful bubble influence organizations. Successful bubbles can become interesting. Chip and Dan Heath's book, which one was it, Switch.
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, yeah. Switch. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
[inaudible 00:42:02]. Shine a light on bright spot or something like that. So, bright spots inspire, and if you can create a bubble in an organization that outperforms the rest of the organization, or even if it performs better than it has previously, then everybody looks. Right? How did the organization that goes from poor delivery to great deliveries is what is going on here? That inspires others to get interested. One of the really interesting things we've seen in Australia, we can trace pretty much every SAFe implementation in Australia back to the one at Telstra.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, right. They all spun off from that, from the people that were part of it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Well, no. People who came and saw it. People who were inspired by it.
Nick Muldoon:
They're not necessarily directly involved in it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No. People came and got inspired by it, and then they went, did their thing, and then they inspired someone else. I haven't tried to do it recently, but there was a point in time we just could web together all of them because we could count them when we could see them. But we can web together most of them still. It says you saw someone who saw someone who saw someone who actually was someone who went to visit us at Telstra back in 2012, 2013 and got inspired.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, that bright spot can be really, really powerful, and that's what it takes, right? You get to add a little bit of noise, a little bit of difference, and people start to ask what's going on. I wouldn't say it's foolproof. I think it still requires, so someone's got to come, they've got to see, and then they've got to have the courage to do it for their part of the organization.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That's the hard bit, right? I can come, I can see, I can get inspired. But am I prepared to put myself out there? There's a lot to be said for leaders who are prepared to take risks. That was one of the-
Nick Muldoon:
This was your lesson about the Bus Stop, right? You have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. This was actually, I was thinking, was the thing I was talking about at last year's SAFe Summit was be safe or be SAFe.
Nick Muldoon:
Be safe or be SAFe. Tell me about that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, be safe, don't take a risk, or be SAFe, as in the scaled agile framework, and take that leap of faith. It comes back to, we started talking today about when I did this at Telstra, I didn't really understand that this wasn't a normal everyday, this is what everybody did sort of thing. It was a very new thing. So, I took a risk from a perspective that I was a business leader in a technology space and I really felt I had nothing to lose.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I look back and that and go, "What on Earth possessed me?" And I go, "Well, I'm this business person leading this technology team. I wasn't supposed to succeed anyway."
Nick Muldoon:
Put it all on the line, right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I found out later they actually had a plan for when I did not succeed. I was supposed to fail.
Nick Muldoon:
Wait. How much waste is that? Why did they plan for something before it was ... Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Organizational policies. What can I tell you? Anyway, I did not fail. I did succeed, and because I took some crazy, calculated risks, and I've seen it time and time again, right? So many of these leaders in these companies that make this change are taking a leap of faith. I'm always saying I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen. I don't know whether you're going to get 10% cost out or 50% cost out. I don't know if your people are going to be 10% happier or 50% happier. I don't know that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What I do know is if you listen to what we're telling you and you follow the guidance and you behave in line with those lean and agile values, you will get results. You'll get results every single time. But you've got to be brave enough to buy in and take it on holistically and not do this thing where you manage to customize your way out of actually doing the thing-
Nick Muldoon:
Doing anything.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... that you wanted to do.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay. Em, this was awesome. Before we finish up, I want to take two minutes. You've mentioned books a lot today and you reminded me of this quote, Verne Harnish, "Those who read and don't are only marginally better off than those who can't." So, today so far, you've mentioned Chip and Dan Heath with Switch, you've mentioned the Leffingwell series from the late noughties. There might have been a few others. But tell me, what are you reading today? You've been in lockdown. What are the two or three top books that you've read since you've been in lockdown in Melbourne?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, my goodness. It's very awkward. Every time someone asks me, "What did you just read?" I go, "I don't know."
Nick Muldoon:
I don't think I remember.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Can't remember. It's terrible. What am I reading? I need to open my Kindle. I don't know what I'm reading. Geoffrey Moore, Zone to Win.
Nick Muldoon:
Zone to Win.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Zone to Win. I think that's what it's called. It's a newer book. I know this year, because obviously, I've read The Build Trap this year-
Nick Muldoon:
Yep. Melissa Perry. You mentioned that one. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep. I've read the Project to Product, Mik Kersten.
Nick Muldoon:
What was that one, Project to Product?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Project to Product, Mik Kersten. One of the IT Revolution press books. So, released just over a year ago. Very tied up in the SAFe 5.0 [crosstalk 00:48:21]. The other book tied up in the SAFe 5.0 release is John Kotter's Accelerate. So, I picked that back up. I read it a number of years ago when it first came out. But I like to revisit stuff when SAFe puts it front and center. Seems to make some sense to do that at that point in time.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. It's interesting that, thinking about Verne Harnish, the scaling up framework, no relation to-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No.
Nick Muldoon:
... scaled agile, for anyone that's not familiar. But so much of the scaling up framework about scaling businesses, they draw on so much content from existing offers, existing tomes, points of reference and experience, and it's super valuable, and I guess SAFe is no different, right? It draws on this wisdom of the collective wisdom.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely. Absolutely. [inaudible 00:49:14] It was very fun to say in the early days, we stand on the shoulders of giants, a quote from somebody else whose name escapes me.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. Well, Em, look. I wanted to thank you so much for your time this morning. This has been fantastic.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No worries. It's great to catch up with you.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. I guess my takeaways from this, I like the be safe or be SAFe, like either be safe and don't take any risks, or be SAFe and actually put yourself out there and step into scaled agile. I definitely have to go and do a bit of research on the five S's as well and learn a bit more about that. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No worries, Nick. Great to see you.