Easy Agile Podcast Ep.25 The Agile Manifesto with Jon Kern
"Thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Jon, he shared some great perspectives on the impact of the Agile manifesto" - Amaar Iftikhar
Amaar Iftikhar, Product Manager at Easy Agile is joined by Jon Kern, Co-author of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development and a senior transformation consultant at Adaptavist.
Amaar and Jon took some time to speak about the Agile Manifesto. Covering everything from the early days, ideation, process, and first reactions, right through to what it means for the world of agile working today.
They touch on the ideal state of an agile team, and what the manifesto means for distributed, hybrid and co-located teams.
We hope you enjoy the episode!
Transcript
Amaar Iftikhar:
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Amaar Iftikhar. I'm a product manager here at Easy Agile. And before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. And extend that same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and First Nations peoples joining us today.
Today, we have on the podcast Jon Kern, who is the co-author of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development and an Agile consultant. If you're wondering, you're correct. I did mention the Agile Manifesto for Software Development. The Agile Manifesto. So Jon, welcome for being here and thank you for joining us.
Jon Kern:
Oh, my pleasure, Amaar. Thank you.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, very excited to have you on. Let's just get started with the absolute basic. Tell the audience about, what is the Agile manifesto?
Jon Kern:
Well, it's something that if you weren't around, and I know you're young, so you weren't around 21 years ago, I guess now, to maybe understand the landscape of what software development process and tooling and what most of us were facing back then, it might seem like a really obvious set of really simple values. Who could think that there's anything wrong with what we put into the manifesto? But back in the day, there were, what I practiced under as a... I'm an aerospace engineer, so I was in defense department work doing things like fighter simulation, F-14 flat spins and working with a centrifuge and cool stuff like that. And subject to a mill standard specification, which makes sense for probably weapons systems, and aircraft manufacturing, and all sorts of other things. But they had one, lo and behold, for software development. And so there was a very large, what I would call heavy handedness around software development process. We call it heavyweight process. Waterfall was the common term back then, and probably still used today.
And there were plenty of, I would say the marketing juggernaut of the day, IBM and Rational unified process, these large, very much like Safe. Where it's a really large body of work, awesome amount of information in it, but very heavy process even though everything would, say you tailor it, it could be whatever you wanted. I mapped my own lightweight process into REP for example. Sure. But the reality was we were facing kind of the marketplace leader being heavyweight process that was just soul crushing, and from my perspective, wasting taxpayers' money. That was kind of my angle was, well, I'm a taxpayer, I'm not going to just do this stupid process for process sake. That has to have some value, has to be pragmatic. So lo and behold, there were a handful of us, 17 that ended up there, but there are a handful of us that practiced more lightweight methods. So the manifesto was really an opportunity for coming together and discovering some of the, what you might think of as the commonality between many different lightweight practices. There was the XP contingent. I first learned about Scrum there, for example. Arie van Bennekum, a good friend, he taught us about DSDM. I don't even remember what it stands for anymore. It was a European thing.
Alistair and Jim Highsmith, they had, I forget, like crystal methodologies. So there was a fair amount of other processes that did not have the marketing arm that erupted, or didn't have the mill standard. So it was really all about what could we find amongst ourselves that was some sort of common theme about all these lightweight processes. So it was all about discovering that, really.
Amaar Iftikhar:
You all get together, the principles kind of come to fruition, and let's fast forward a little bit. What was the initial reaction to the original manifesto?
Jon Kern:
Yeah, it was even kind of funny that the four values, the four bullets is as simple as it was. The principles came a bit later. I want to say we collaborated over awards wiki, but the original... If you go to Agile uprising, you can see I uploaded some artifacts, because apparently I'm a pack rat. And I had the original documents that Alistair probably printed out, because he was the one... He and Jim lived there near Salt Lake City. So it was like, "Hey, let's come here." And we like to go skiing, so let's do it here. So he arranged the room and everything. And so there's some funny artifacts that you can find. And the way that it actually came about was an initial introduction of each of us about our methods. And really I think a key, we left our egos at the door. I mean I was a younger one. Uncle Bob, some of these, he was at Luminar, I know I have magazines still in the barn that he was either the editor of, or authors of for people who don't remember what magazines are. Small little booklets that came out. So Uncle Bob was like, Ooh, wow, this is pretty cool.
And I wasn't shy because I had a lot of experience with heavyweight methods. So I really wanted to weigh in on... Because I had published my own lightweight method a few years earlier. So I had a lot of opinions on how to avoid the challenges of big heavyweight process. So the culmination as we were going out the door and after we had come up with the four values was I think Ward said, "Sir, want me to put this on the web?" And again, this is 2001 so dot com and the web's still kind of new so to speak. And we're all like, yeah, sure, why not? What the hell, can't hurt. We got something, might as well publish it. I don't think to a person, anybody said, "Oh yeah, this is going to set the world on fire because we're so awesome." And we were going to anoint the world with all of this wonderful wisdom. So I don't think anybody was thinking that that much would happen.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah. So what were you thinking at that time? So how would the principles that you had come up with together, was that maybe just for the team to take away? Everyone who was there? What was the plan at that time?
Jon Kern:
I think it was a common practice. Like I said, there were other groups that would often meet and have little consortiums or little gatherings and then publish something. So I think it was just, oh yeah, that's a normal thing to do is you spent some time together and you wrote things down, you might as well publish it. So I think it wasn't any deeper than that other than Bob, I think Bob might say that he wanted to come up with some kind of a manifesto of sorts or some kind of a document because that's I think what those sort of... I was never at one of those gatherings, but you know, you could see that they did publish things. I have a feeling it was just something as innocent as, well we talked, wrote some things down, might as well share it.
And then the principles, there were a lot of different practices in the room. So some of what I would say the beauty of even the values page is the humility at the top is it's still active voice. We are uncovering not, hey all peasants, we figured it all out. No, we're still uncovering it. And the other thing is by doing it, because I'm still an active coder. And plus we value this more on the left, more than on the right. Some people might say it's a little ambiguous or a little fuzzy, but that's also a sign of humility and that it's not A or B. And it really is fuzzy, and you need to understand your context enough to apply these things. So from a defense department contracting point of view, certainly three of the four bullets were really important to me because I learned... Sure, we did defense department contracting. But it's way more important to develop a rapport with the customer than it is... Because by the time you get to the contract you've already lost, which goes along with developing a rapport with the customer, the individual.
And one of Peter Codes, when we worked with customers and whatnot, one of our mantras was frequent tangible working results, AKA working software. You can draw a lot and you can do use cases for nine months, but if you don't have anything running, it's pretty, I would guess risky that you don't have anything, no working software yet. So it really was I think an opportunity to share the fact that some people thought two weeks and other people thought a month. Even some of the print principles had a pretty good wide ranging flexibility so to speak. That I think is really important to note.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And it makes sense. Did you or anyone else in the room at that time ever imagine what the impact downstream would be of the work that was being done there?
Jon Kern:
Not that I'm aware of. I certainly did not. I remember a couple times in my career walking in and seeing some diagrams when I worked with the company Together Soft, and we'd build some cool stuff and I'd see people having some of the... Oh yeah, there's a diagram I remember making on their wall. That's kind of cool. But nothing near how humbling and sort of satisfying it is. Especially I would say when I'm in India or Columbia or Greece, it almost seems maybe they're more willing to be emotional about it. But people are, it's almost like they were freed by this document. And in some sense this is a really, really tiny saying it with the most humility possible. A little bit like the Declaration of Independence, and the fact that a handful of people... And the constitution of the United States. A handful of people met in a moment of time, never to be repeated again and created something that was dropped on the world so to speak, that unleashed, unleashed a tremendous amount of individual freedom and confidence to do things. And I think in a very small, similar fashion, that's what the manifesto did.
Amaar Iftikhar:
As you mentioned, there was a point in time when the manifesto was developed and that was almost over 20 years ago. So now the way of working, and the world of working has drastically changed. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you see another version coming? Do you think there are certain updates that need to be made? Do you think it's kind of a timeless document? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Jon Kern:
Yeah, that's a good question. I personally think it's timeless and I welcome other people to create different documents. And they have. Alistair has The Heart of Agile, Josh Kerievsky's got Modern Agile.
There's a few variations of a theme and different things to reflect upon, which I think is great. Because I do believe, unlike the US Constitution, which built in a mechanism to amend itself, we didn't need that. And I believe it captured the essence of how humans work together to produce something of value. Mostly software, because that's what we came to practice from, is the software experience. But it doesn't take a lot of imagination to replace the word software with product or something like that and still apply much of the values that are there with very, very minor maybe adjustments because frequent tangible working results.
There might have to be models, because you're not going to build a skyscraper and tear it down and say, "Oh, that wasn't quite right," and build it again. But nonetheless, there are variations of how you can show some frequent results. So I think by and large it's timeless. And I would challenge anybody. What's wrong with it? Point out something that's somehow not true 20 years later. And I think that's the genius behind it was we stumbled on... And probably because most of us were object modelers, that's one of the things we're really good at, is distilling the essence of a system into the most critical pieces. That's kind of what modeling is all about. And so I think somehow innately, we got down to the core bits that make up what it is to produce software with people, process and tools. And we wrote it down. That's why I think it's timeless.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, no absolutely. I think that was a really good explanation about why it's timeless. I think one of the principles that comes to mind in a kind of modern hybrid or flexible working arrangement is one of the principles talks about the importance of face to face conversations. And in a world now where a lot of conversations aren't happening physically face to face, they might be happening on Zoom. Do you think that still applies?
Jon Kern:
Yeah, I think what we're finding out with... Remote was literally remote, so to speak, back 20 years ago. I was working with a team of developers in Russia and we had established enough trust and physical... I would travel there every month. So kind of established enough of a team, and enough trust in the communication that we could do ultimately some asynchronous work because different time zones. And me being in the east coast. 7:00 AM in the US was maybe 3:00 PM in Russia if I recall. St. Petersburg. So we were able to overcome the distance, but it's hard to beat real life. And I would often sometimes even spar a little bit with Ron Jeffries that on the one hand you could say the best that you can do is in person. But on the other hand, I could argue a little bit of some of the remoteness makes things... You have to be a little more verbose, possibly a little more precise, but also a little more verbose. A little more relaxed with... You might take a couple of passes to get something just because, I mean there are two time zones passing in the night. But that was based off of some often initial face to face meetings, and then you could go remote and still be successful and highly effective.
So I think it's important that teams don't just say that they can still do everything. And zoom is way better than 20 years ago, admittedly. Zoom gets, at least you can see a face. But nothing replaces the human contact. And I think also for wellbeing, I think human contact is important. So I would still say that the interaction aspect in the manifesto is still best served with a healthy dose of in-person. And that's kind of the key about most things in Agile. It's to me it's about pragmatism, and not just being dogmatic but rather, what might work better for us? And even experimenting with try something a little bit and see how that works. So even how you treat the manifesto, you should treat it in an Agile manner so to speak.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, no absolutely. That's a great point. On that note, as an Agile consultant or the Agile guy, what have you seen are the best practices or what works, what doesn't work for distributed teams?
Jon Kern:
Well I think the things that are most challenging that I've run across big companies and even smaller ones is that... I don't know if it's natural, God forbid if it's natural, but tendencies that I've seen in some companies to set up silos where you're the quality control, you're the UX, you're the front end, you're the back end, makes my headwater explode. Because that's building in a lag and building in communication roadblocks and building in cooperation which is handed offs from silo to silo, versus collaboration. So I've seen more of that. And I get it, you might want to have a specialty, but customer doesn't care. Customer wants something out the door. If I showed up and I'm going to pull a feature off the stack, what do you mean I can only do part of it? I don't get that. And yeah, I know I'm not an expert in everything but we probably have an expert that we can figure out what the pattern is. So I find that sort of trend, I don't know if it's a trend, but I find that's a step backwards in my opinion. And it's better to try to be more cross-functional, collaborative, everybody trying to work to get the feature out the door, not just trying to do your little part.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think knocking on silos is a big part of being agile, or even being digital for that matter. And often the remedies for it too are there at hand, but it's a lot harder to actually be practical with it, to actually implement it in an organization, a living, breathing business where there's real people and there's dynamics to deal with, and there's policies and processes to follow. So I guess as generic as you can be, what is your thought as an Agile consultant to a business that's kind of facing that issue?
Jon Kern:
One of the things that... Adaptive is what my colleague John Turley has really opened my eyes to. I tend to call it the secret sauce, or the missing piece to my practice. And it has to do with individual's mindset and what we call vertical development. So it might sound like weird wishy-washy fluffy stuff, but it's actually super critical. And I've always said people, process, and tools for, I want to say since late nineties probably, I mean a long time. And the first I've been able to realize why sometimes I would have just spectacular super high performing teams and other times it'd be just really, really well performing but not always that spark and sometimes kind of like, eh, that was a little meh. And a lot of it comes down to where people lie on in terms of how they make their meaning and what their motivational orientation is, command and control versus autonomy.
So what we do is we've learned that we can help people first off recognize this exists, and help people with what we call developmental practices. Something that, even the phrase, you probably heard it, like safe experiments. Failure, or trying something and failing. Well if you chop someone's head off for it, guess what? They're just going to probably stay pretty still and only do what they're told, not try to... I have a super high dose of autonomy in me, so I've long lived by the, better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and always felt as long as I'm trying to do the right thing to succeed and do the best for the company, they probably won't fire me if I make a mistake. But not everybody has that amount of freedom in the way they work. So you have to help establish that as management, and that's a big thing that we work with, with teams.
And then we also start with the class. If you've ever watched office space, and if you haven't you should, but the, what is it that you do here? So there's a great, the consultants Bob and Bob coming in, the efficiency consultants, "So Amaar, what is it that you do here?" But literally that's something, whether we're helping teams build a new product, is okay, what's the purpose? What's the business purpose of this product? What is it that you do here? What do you want to do with this product? What value does it provide? Same thing with anything you're working with as a team. And that's why whether it's software, producing some feature that has an outcome that provides value to the customer, or some product. But the point is if you don't understand that, now it's making, the team is going to have a real hard time being able to make decisions which are helping us move forward.
So if you help everybody understand what it is we're here to do, and then try to get the folks that might reflect all the different silos if you're siloed, but all the different elements. How do we go from an idea to cash, so to speak, or idea to value in the customer's hand? And have a good look at that. Because there are so many things that just sort of... Technical data often creeps into software code bases. And the same thing, we sort of say the organizational debt, the same thing can happen. Your process debt. You can just end up with, all right, we want the development team to go faster, John and company, can you come in and help coach us? We want to go agile. Sure, okay yeah. All right. We roll up our sleeves, we look around and after an initial kind of value stream look, like, wait I'm sorry but there's a little tiny wedge, it's about 15%, that's the development. And then you spent the 85% thinking about it.
Let's pretend we could double the speed of development. Which was initially the... Yeah, we need the developers to code faster or something. That's a classic. And no you don't, you need to stop doing all this bullshit up front that's just crazy ass big waterfall project-y stuff with multiple sign-offs. And matter of fact, one of the sign-offs, oh my gosh it only meets once a week, and then if you have a typo in it, you get rejected. You don't come back for another... Are you insane? You spent eight months deciding to do eight weeks worth of work. Sorry, it's not the eight weeks. So things like that, what I recommend anybody self inspect is try to... If you're worried about your team, how you can do better is just start trying to write down what does your process step look like and what is a typical time frame?
How much time are you putting value into the... Because a lot of times people batch things up in sprints. That's a batch, why are you putting things in a batch? Or they have giant issues. Well that's the big batch. So there's lots of often low hanging fruit. But to your point, it's often encrusted in, this is the way we work and nobody feels the ability to change or even to stop and look to see how are we working. So I think that's where we usually start is let's see how you actually work today. And then while we're doing that you can spill your guts, you can tell us all the things that hurt and that are painful and then we'll try to design a better way that we can move towards, in terms of working more effectively. Because our goal is to help teams be able to develop ways to do more meaningful and joyous work, really. Because it's a lot of fun when it's clicking and when you're on a good team and you're putting smiles on the customers' faces, it's hard to almost stay away from work because it's so much fun. But if it's not that, if it's drudgery and you're just a cog in the machine and stuff takes months to get out the door, it's a job. It's not that much fun.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah. A lot of the points that you mentioned there strongly resonated with me, and the common pain points. It sounds like you've kind of seen it all. And by the way if you haven't seen office space, definitely need to watch it. It's a really good one. You've mentioned now a lot about of the element of the challenges that a distributed team faces. Now I want to flip it over and ask you what does the perfect distributed team look like today that lives and breathes agile values?
Jon Kern:
Yeah. I don't know if you can ever have such a thing, a perfect of any kind of team. So I would say harking back to the types of distributed teams that I've worked with, and this goes back to the late nineties. So I've been doing this for a long, long time. Only really done remote, whether it was with developers in Russia or down in North Carolina, or places like that. And I think that the secret was having a combination of in-person... If you want to go somewhere as a group, there are things you can do to break the ice, to establish some, what you might call team building type activities.
And not just, hey let's go do a high ropes course and be scared out of our wits together. But rather also things that are regarding why are we here, what are we trying to achieve? And let's talk about whether it's the product we're trying to build, and take that as an opportunity to coalesce around something and get enough meat on the bone, enough skeletons of what it might look like. Because there's good ways to start up and have a good foundation. And that's part of what I've been practicing for decades. If you get things set up properly with understanding that just enough requirements, understanding... And I do a lot of domain modeling with UML and things like that, just understanding what the problem domain is that we're trying to solve to achieve the goals we're looking for, have a sense of the architecture that we want. So all those things are collaborative efforts.
And so if you have enough of a starting point where you've worked together, you come in and, let's say you even had to go rent someplace, because nobody lived near office, so you all flew somewhere. I mean that's money well spent in my opinion. Because that starts the foundation. If you've broken bread so to speak, or drank some beers, or coded together and did stuff, and then you go back to your remote offices to take the next steps and then realize when you might need to meet again. So that's really important to understand that the value of establishing those relationships early on so that you can talk bluntly. And I have some good folks that I run a production app for firefighters since like 2006.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, very cool.
Jon Kern:
And that friend that I've worked with, we are so tight that we can... It makes our conversations, we don't have to beat around the bush, we don't have to worry about offending any, we just, boom, cut to the chase. Because we know we're not calling each other's kids ugly. We're just trying to get something done fast.
And building that kind of rapport takes time and effort and working together. And that's what I think a good successful distributed team, you need to come together every so often and build those relationships and know when you might need to come together again if something is a problem. But that I think is a key to success is it shortens the time. Because you may have heard of things like the group forms, if this is performance on the Y axis they form and they're at some performance level, then they need to storm before they get back to normal, and before they start high performing. So it's this form, storm. You get worse when you're storming. And storming means really understanding where we're at. When we argue about, I don't think that should be inheritance, Amaar. And then you're like, "Oh bull crap, it really..."
And again, we're not personal, but we're learning each other's sort of perspectives and we're learning how to have respectful debates and have some arguments, so to speak, to get to the better place. And I've worked in some companies that are afraid to storm, and it feels like you're never high performing.
Everyone's too polite. It's like, come on. And I love when I worked with my Russian colleagues. They didn't give a crap if I was one of the founders. And I'm glad, because I don't want any privilege, I don't want anything like that. No let's duke it out. May the best ideas win. That's where you want to get to. And if you can't get there because you don't have enough of a relationship, and you tend not to say the things that needed to be said because you're being polite, well it's going to take you really long to succeed. And that's a lot of money, and that's a lot of success, and people might leave.
So I think the important thing is if you're remote, that's okay, but sheer remote is a real challenge. And you have to somehow figure out, if you can't get together to learn how to form and storm, and build those bonds face to face, then you need to figure out how to do it over Zoom. Because you need to do it, because if you don't, if you never have words, then trust me, you're still not high performing.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, I kind of feel like being fully remote now is being offered as almost a competitive advantage to candidates in the marketplace now, because it's a fight for talent. But if I'm understanding correctly, what you are saying is that in-person element is so important to truly be high performing and those ideas kind of contradict each other, I feel.
Jon Kern:
Yeah. And again, having been remote since the late nineties, I've been doing this a long time. And commuting to Russia is the longest commute I ever did, for three years. I mean that's a hell of a long flight to commute there over seven times, or whatever the hell it was. Anyway, I used to say that that being remote is not for everyone, because it really isn't. I mean you have to know how to work without anybody around, and work. I mean it has its own challenges. And yeah, it might be a perk, but I think what you need to do is look at potentially what the perks are and figure out too, can I fold them into... It doesn't have to be all or nothing. And I think that can be a easy mistake to make maybe is to, all right cool, we don't have to have office space. That's a lot of savings for the company. Yeah, but maybe that means you need to have some remote workspaces for occasional gatherings, or figure it out.
But yeah, I think even... And certain businesses might work differently. In the beginning of building a product, I want to have heavy collaboration and I want to get to a point where it's almost, I feel like the product goes like this where once you get things rolling and you kind of get up, get some momentum going, now the hardest thing to do is be in front of an agile team, whether they're in-person or remote. Once things are rolling and rocking and kicking and it's like everything's clicking, you can just bang out features left, like boom, boom, boom. Yeah, okay then we probably need to be...
Unless we've got ways that we're pairing or things like that. I will say when we're together, mobbing is easier. I'm sure there's ways to do it remote, but being in a room, I don't know, it's a lot easier than coordinating over Zoom. You just, hey there's this problem, let's all hang out here after standup because we're just going to mob on this. So it doesn't take a whole lot versus anything remote, there's a little extra, okay, we've got to coordinate, and even different times zones, gets even worse. So yeah, don't get carried away with remote being the end all be all. Because I have a feeling there's going to be a... I would wager there will be a backlash.
Amaar Iftikhar:
And I'll take that back coming from the Agile, the person who does this day to day who helps teams become agile, I'll definitely kind of take your word for it. Plus with my experience too, I've seen nothing really beats a good white-boarding session. That is really hard to replicate online. I mean we have these amazing tools, but nothing quite mimics the real life experience of just having a plain whiteboard and a marker in your hand. That communication is so powerful.
Jon Kern:
Great point. You're so, right, because I had just with the one company that I was with for five years, we were doing high level engineered to order pump manufacturing sales type tool for... So it was my favorite world because it blended my fluid dynamics as an aerospace engineer, plus my love for building SaaS products, and building new software and things like that. And even having a young, we would interview at Lehigh University and we'd have some young graduates that would be working with us, and being able to bring them into the fold, and there was a room behind where my treadmill was and we'd go in there, we'd have jam sessions on modeling and building out new features. And man, you're right. Just that visceral three dimensional experience. Yeah, Miro's great. Or any other kind of tool, but yeah, it's not the same. You're absolutely right. That's a great point. You're almost making me pine for the good old days. [inaudible 00:42:04]
Amaar Iftikhar:
I think the good old days very much still exist. I think even now, it's kind of been a refreshing time for me to be with Easy Agile. I've only been here for just under two months now. And there's a strong in-person dynamic. And again, it's optional, where if people are remote or they're hybrid or they need to commute once in a while, it's a very understanding environment. But once you're in the office or you're in person, you kind of feel the effect you were describing, you're motivated to deliver for the end customer. You just want to come back. It's an addictive feeling of, I want to be back in person and I want to collaborate in real time in person.
Jon Kern:
That's beautifully said, because that's... One of the companies that we're beginning to engage with in South Africa, they're at this very crossroad of struggling with, everybody's been remote, but boy, the couple times we were together, got so much done. And you're describing the flame of, the warmth of delivering and let the moths come to the flame. I mean nurture it and then fan the flames of the good and let people opt in and enjoy it. And still sometimes, yeah, I got to say home, I got the kids or the dog, that's okay too. But giving the option I think is where we're going to head. And I believe the companies that are able to build that hybrid culture of accepting both, and neither mandating one nor the other, but building such a high performing team that basically encourages people to opt into the things that make the most sense at that time. And I think that those companies will rule the day, so to speak.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, absolutely. It's been so nice to chat with you John, and I've really enjoyed this. I want to leave the audience off with one piece of advice for distributed agile teams from you. We've talked a lot about the importance of in-person collaboration. We've talked about the principles of the agile manifesto. Now, what would the one piece of advice be when you're thinking of both? When you want the agile manifestos to be something that's living and breathing in distributed agile teams, what one piece of advice can you give businesses today right now who are going through the common struggles? What can you tell them as that last piece of advice?
Jon Kern:
Well, I think kind of a one phrase that I like to use to capture the manifesto is, "Mind the gap." In my sort of play on words, what I mean is the gap in time between taking an action and getting a response. Whether it's what do we do about the office, what do we do about remote, what do we do about this feature, what do we do about this line of code? The gap in time is, it's sort of a metaphor about being humble enough to treat things as a hypothesis. So don't be so damn sure of yourself one way or the other about the office or remote or distributed. But instead, treat things as a hypothesis. Be curious and experiment safely with different ways and see what works. And don't be afraid of change. It's not a life sentence to, you got to run your business or your project or your team one way for the rest of your life. No. Don't tell the boss, but work is subsidized learning. I never understood people who just keep doing the same thing because they weren't given permission. Just try it. So that's what my departing phrase would be regarding making those decisions. Mind the gap and really be humble about making assumptions, and test your hypotheses, and shorten the gap in time between taking actions and seeing a reaction.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. I really wish we could let the tape roll and just keep talking about this for a couple more hours, but we'll end it right there on that really good piece of advice that you've left the audience off with. Jon, thank you again for being on the podcast. And we've really, really enjoyed hearing you and learning from your experiences.
Jon Kern:
Oh, my pleasure. Any time. Happy to talk another couple hours, but maybe after some beers.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah.
Jon Kern:
Except it's your morning, my evening. I'm going to have to work on that.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah.
Jon Kern:
My pleasure, Amaar.
Related Episodes
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.9 Kit Friend, Agile Coach & Atlassian Partnership Lead EMEA, Accenture.
"From beer analogies, to scrum in restaurants and neurodiverse teams, it's always a pleasure chatting with Kit"
Kit talks to agile methodology beyond the usual use case, like working with geologists & restaurant owners to apply scrum.
Kit also highlights the need to focus on a bottom-up approach, providing a safe space for leaders to learn & ask questions, and whether neurodiverse teams are key to effectiveness.
This was a really interesting conversation!Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧
Transcript
Nick Muldoon:
G'day folks. My name's Nick Muldoon. I'm the Co Founder and Co CEO of Easy Agile, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Kit Friend from Accenture. Kit is an agile coach at Accenture and he's also the Atlassian Practice Lead there. Kit, good morning.
Kit Friend:
Morning, Nick. Sadly only the Practice Lead for a bit of things, but I try my best. It's a pleasure to be with you, for the second time we've tried this week as well, in the lovely world of broadband dependent remote working and things. But here's hoping, eh?
Nick Muldoon:
It's beautiful, isn't it? Now, for those of you at home listening in just so you've got a bit of context, Kit is a father to two, he lives in London, and he's been at Accenture now for a little over 10 years, right?
Kit Friend:
Yeah, September, 2010. Fortunately I met my wife in pretty much the same summer, so I only have to remember one year, and I can remember one by the other. So it helps when I'm trying to remember dates, and sort things through because I'm not very good with my memory, to be honest with you.
Nick Muldoon:
Oh well. So for me, the reason to get you on today, I'm super excited to hear about the journey that you've been on in Accenture, and I guess the journey that you're on with your clients, and on these various engagements. Before we dive into that though, I wanted to know, can you just tell me what is one of your favorite bands from the '90s, from the early '90s?
Kit Friend:
Yeah, and I really enjoy that we had a delay between things, because it's like one of those questions, because I'm like, "Hmm." And I think I'm a victim of playlist culture, where it's like naming an entire band feels like a real commitment. It's all about tracks now with things, right? But I have narrowed it down to two for my favorite 90s band and I think I'm going to commit afterwards. So my undisputed favorite 90s track, Common People by Pulp, right? Hands down, yeah, it's right up there. For me, I studied at St Martins, the Art College, so for me Common People is the karaoke track of my university days with things there. So Common People by Pulp, favorite track.
Kit Friend:
For bands wise though, I was split between... Initially I went Britpop, I was like, "Cool, that feels like a happy place for me." Particularly at the moment in our weird dystopian society, I listen to Britpop and it's kind of happy. So Blur was right at the top for me for band commit of the 90s thing then. But then I remembered that Placebo is actually technically a 90s band, even though I did not listen to them as a 13 year old Kit and things. So I think Placebo edges it for me on favorite 90s band of things, just about. But I do have to admit, even though it's not my favorite 90s track, I do think Wonderwall is perhaps the best song ever written.
Nick Muldoon:
Oasis? Love it.Kit Friend:
Yeah, for track wise. But for me particularly I was at Oktoberfest with some colleagues a couple of years ago and I don't think any other track could get 600 drunken Germans up on benches together with everyone else, all the way around from the world, with a rock polka band singing at the top of your voices at 11 o'clock at night or something. So yeah, that smorgasbord, but I'll commit to Placebo for favorite band in that weird caveated sentence.
Nick Muldoon:
I love it, thanks for that, Kit. And so it's interesting because you touched on then that you went to St Martins, which was an art college. So I'm interested to know, what did you study? What are your formal qualifications and then what led you into this world of Agile delivery and continuous improvement?
Kit Friend:
Yeah. I mean to do the Twitter bio caveat that all the opinions are my own and not Accenture's before we go down the journey of things. Although it must be said I am trying to convert as many of my colleagues and clients to my way of thinking as possible. But so I studied St Martin or studied at St Martins College, so in the UK certainly, I don't know what it's like in Australia, but when you go and do an art and design degree they basically distrust your high school education. They're like, "Nah, everything you've done before is..."
Kit Friend:
So they make you take what's called, or they advise you to take what's called a foundation year where you try a bunch of stuff. So you come in thinking you're going to be a painter or a product designer or something, and they're like, "No, no, no. You haven't experienced the breadth of the creative industries and things." So I did one of those, which was amazing, and I came in thinking I was going to be a product designer. Ended up specializing in jewelry and silversmithing and things, so I made like... Yeah, sort of wearing long black trench coats and things, I was making gothy spiky armor and all sorts of things, and [inaudible 00:04:24] work with silver. So I do have a Professional Development Award in Welding from that year, so that was my first formal qualification on that. I'm a really bad welder though.
Kit Friend:
Then at the end of it I was like, "I don't really know what I want to do still." As you do as you go through university, so my formal degree title, adding to my trend of very long unpronounceable things, is, Ba Hons Art And Design And The Environment, Artifact Pathway, and what it was was... Your face is-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, I'm trying to process that.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. I think the course only existed for three years, it felt like a bit of an experiment, or it only existed in that format. So we had architecture students doing the first part of their architectural qualification, we had what were called spatial design students who were, I think, designing spaces. They weren't interior designers, they were a bit more engineery and then we had this weird pathway called Artifact, which was the rest of us and we weren't quite as strict as product designers, we weren't artists. We were making objects and experiences and things.
Kit Friend:
Yeah, it was a really interesting experience. I mean towards the end of it I began specializing more and more in designing ways for communities to come and build things and do stuff together, and it's a bit weird when you look backwards on things. You're like, "I can directly trace the path of the things I've done since to that sort of tendency [crosstalk 00:05:54] liking bringing people together."
Nick Muldoon:
So yeah, do you think that community building aspect was kind of a genesis for what you've been trying, the community around Agile transformation you've been developing over the past decade, or?
Kit Friend:
I don't know. It's easy to trace back to these things, isn't it? But I guess I've always-
Nick Muldoon:
You don't see it at the time.
Kit Friend:
... liked bringing people together to do things. No. It's a theory anyway, isn't it? An origin story theory as we go. So I did that and then I complained lots about my course, I was like, "This is rubbish. This is all really random and things." So I got elected as a Student Union Officer, so I don't know how it works in Australia but in the UK you can be elected as a full time student politician effectively, and you can do it... You take sabbatical either during your course or at the end of your course where it's not really a sabbatical. So I was the Student Union, served full time for two years after I finished my degree, which is a bizarre but educational experience.
Kit Friend:
Again, it's about organizing people, like helping fix problems and having to be very nimble with... You don't know what's happening the next week, you're going to protest against unfair pay or you're going to have someone who's got their degree in trouble because of their personal circumstances and things, so it's a really interesting mix. So yeah, that's where I started my journey into things.
Nick Muldoon:
So it's interesting for me, because you talk about this, the early piece of that is, "We don't trust anything that you've learnt prior to this and we're going to give you a bit of a smorgasbord and a taste of many different aspects." How does that relate to an Agile transformation? Because I feel like we went through a decade there where an Agile transformation was literally, "Here's Scrum, do two weeks Scrum, story point estimates, no rollover. If you rollover we slap you on the wrists."
Nick Muldoon:
There probably, 10 years ago, there wasn't a lot of experimentation with different approaches to delivery. It was just, "We're going from this Waterfall approach to this Agile approach." Which back then was very commonly Scrum. Why don't we give people the smorgasbord and why don't we give them three month rotations where they can try a bit of Scrum and a bit of Kanban and different approaches?Kit Friend:
Well, I guess it's practicality, isn't it? These things. It's a challenge, and it's a challenge, it works within a contained place. I teach a lot of our product container courses for our clients and we always use the David Marquet video of Greatness Summary. What's great about the David Marquet situation, he's got this Petri dish, right? Literally a submarine, aint no one interfering with his submarine crew. So he can do that, he can go, "Well, let's try this thing." I vastly oversimplify because it's an amazing story, right?
Kit Friend:
But you've got that space to do something and try something out, and actually when we do talk to clients and colleagues alike about Agile transformations, I think one of the things that I say consistently in terms of the role of leadership is they do need to create a safe space, a little place where they protect and they're like, "In this space we're doing Agile, we can experiment, we can do these things. Leave my guys alone. Trust me within that."
Kit Friend:
I think where I see Agile going well, it is where there is a bit of that safe space protected to do things. I've got colleagues who work in companies where they go like, "Okay, we're going to try now and all we're going to ask you to do is forecast your next week's volume of stories. Everything else is up to you, you can choose to apply Scrum, you can use Crystal, DSDM, whatever it is. All you have to do for us as a company is give us a high level view of these metrics or something." So there's flexibility. I think when I think about your journey as an Agilist and trying to do things though, people saying try a bit of everything, it's lovely advice but it's a bit difficult to actually do because it's like we still need to make things, we still need to do stuff practically.
Kit Friend:
So when I talk to people who are starting off their journey or both clients and colleagues who are wanting to move through things like that, like what do they do first, I still say Scrum is a really good place to start because I think there's that quote from somewhere, it's probably in the Scrum Guide, about, "It's simple to understand but complex to get right." And you would think with complex and chaotic situations, right? But I think that-
Nick Muldoon:
And the discipline required is-
Kit Friend:
Yeah, yeah. But discipline's a good thing, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). But not everyone has it.
Kit Friend:No. But one of my colleagues, Nick Wheeler, he uses the phrase, "Too many beanbags, not enough work done to talk about Chaotic Agile." I think you've got to have that focus on getting things done, right? Value delivery has got to be there, as well as it being a pleasant working atmosphere and balance. So it's about somewhere between the two, and I like Scrum because it gives people something too... It's a framework, right? It gives people something to hang off to start their journey, otherwise I feel like you could spend months debating whether you have an Agile master and what do they do? Where do we go? Do we have a person who holds the vision and things?
Kit Friend:
I think when people are starting off I always say, like, "Why not try Scrum? Why not see? Try it for a couple of sprints and see what works for you and then see what comes out in the wash." I mean if they're in an area where there's some fundamental contradictions, like, "Yeah, I'm not going to force sprints on a call center, right? It doesn't make sense." I was talking to someone yesterday who works on a fraud team, and it's like I'm not going to ask her how much fraud is going to be committed in two weeks time, or as part of MPI, right? It's absurd.
Kit Friend:
So in those circumstances, yeah, you start with Kanban methods and processes and practices instead. But for people who are building products, building things, I think the Scrum is a pretty good fit at the beginning. So yeah, that's my answer, so both. Why not have both is the answer to that, I guess, on the way. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see what other frameworks rear their heads. I mean I found the other day a scaled Agile framework called Camelot that involved lots of castles and things in the YouTube video. I thought that was marvelous. But there's room for a lot of planning and thinking.
Nick Muldoon:
As soon as you saw Camelot, for some reason my mind goes to Monty Python. I don't know quite why. But what's this flavor of scaled Agile called Camelot? Can you tell me about it? Because I'm not familiar with it.
Kit Friend:
I've seen one YouTube video on it, Nick. For anyone Googling it, you can find it related to the X Scale Alliance. I think it's a picture of the Monty Python Camelot on the front page.
Nick Muldoon:
Is it actually?
Kit Friend:
Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure weird things. And you know what it's like with techy geeks, right? There's a lot of embedded Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy and Monty Python references in component names and things. So I'd be unsurprised. What I like about something like the Camelot model, other than me thinking Monty Python and castles and things, is it does evoke something in people. I think when we're talking to people about Agile we do need to evoke a feeling with them. We need to get people going, "Oh yeah, I kind of get where you're going."
Kit Friend:So I always like to do the cheesy uncapitalize the A, what does agile mean to you? Yeah, is it about being nimble? Is it about being flexible and that kind of thing?
Nick Muldoon:
I mean I'm conscious you've obviously done Lean Kanban in university, you've done Scrum Alliance Training and Certification, Prince2, Scaled Agile of course. Why do you do all these things? I mean is it curiosity? I mean is it there's an expectation from clients that you have these certifications? And would you go and get a certification in Camelot? Or even one that I was introduced to recently was Flight Level Agile, Flight Level Agility. Which is a different way of-
Kit Friend:
Ooh, another one?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, another one. A different way of describing. Actually I remember, bit of a sidebar sorry, but Craig Smith from... who was at the time I believe was working at Suncorp, an Australian bank. He did 46 Agile methods in 40 minutes or something like that, and he spent a minute and he introduced people to all of these different approaches.
Kit Friend:
Yeah, and methods versus frameworks and things is a fun one to draw the lines between. I mean I've been surprised actually how few times I've been asked for certifications around things. It's changing a bit more, and I've seen definitely more enthusiasm from our clients, and in fact I'm seeing new people within Accenture which is really nice, to require and encourage certification. I don't think it's necessary that the safe course then guarantees that you're going to scale Agile successfully, right? But it's a good way of demarking whether people have done their homework and have put some effort into [crosstalk 00:14:50] knowledge.
Nick Muldoon:
And they got the foundational baseline stuff.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. Now in terms of your question around Brett, so my view is that if we try and attach the word coach to ourselves... I think I've seen country by country different trends, so when I look at my colleagues in the States there's a bit more codifying on the term Agile Coach. There's an attachment to ICA Agile and Lisa Adkins work and all sorts of different things over there which is good. Certainly in the UK and Europe, I see it as a lot more varied at the moment and it's a term that's attached to a lot of people.
Kit Friend:
If you look at people, just anyone on LinkedIn with a CV title or little bio title Agile Coach, you can see a big variety of people who've been doing different Agile frameworks for like 20 years doing things, and you can see someone who's been a Scrum Master for three months and then switched jobs, and they'll have like Agile Enterprise Coach as their title. And you're like, "Hmm, how many people have you ever done Scrum with? And have you done anything but Scrum?" And my view is if 40-
Nick Muldoon:
But I mean Enterprise Agile Coach because I've done Scrum with my team of six people in a-
Kit Friend:
In an Enterprise, right?
Nick Muldoon:
In Enterprise.
Kit Friend:
But my feeling is if all you can do to a team that you're coaching is offer one way of thinking and one approach to doing stuff, how are you coaching them then? There's no breadth to what you're able to offer. But if all you've experienced is Scrum and then you get landed with a team doing fraud investigation, how are you going to guide them on a path which doesn't include sprints and those things? I mean you might do, because you're going to take things from Scrum that become sensible, but you need that spectrum.
Nick Muldoon:
Give us a sense, Kit, what is the most quirky, or unusual perhaps is a better way to frame it, what is the most unusual team that you have introduced to Agile practices and Lean principles?
Kit Friend:
So I've got to embarrass my colleague Giles, because mine is not the most interesting. So Giles was looking at introducing Scrum to geologists for site surveying and things, which I love as an example to talk about because it's so-
Nick Muldoon:
Wow. Yeah.
Kit Friend:
When you unpack it's so interesting to think about what that would mean, and I need to catch up with him to see how far through they got actually applying it. But because it's like, "Why would you do that?" And then it's like, "Ooh, actually, they probably have a really big area to survey. Wouldn't it better to introduce some feedback loops and look at how you slice down that problem to get some value and learning delivery out of things?"
Nick Muldoon:
That's interesting.
Kit Friend:
So I really, really like that. Yeah. Then I always reference when we're teaching, there's a restaurant called Ricardo's in London that I have to make sure it's not gone out of business. I think it's still in business, but-Nick Muldoon:
Well, I thought it-
Kit Friend:
Well, COVID, right? I think he's their owner, Ricardo. At least he's the person that's inspired their name. He applied Scrum and it's beautiful, looking at the exercises they went through when they put it in place. And on his website, which I'll ping you the URL for the show notes, but they do this cross functional teaming thing where they got all the staff at the restaurant to look at the role types that they needed, and then their availability and things. They were like, "Only this one guy can do the bar. Maybe we should up skill some other people to be able to work on the bar?" And I love that thinking of applying those elements of stuff.
Kit Friend:
So back to your question though of where have I applied unusual things to my teams, I haven't done any really quirky ones, to be honest with you. I mean I think having a background in art and design I find it... When I talk about iteration and all those areas, my mind immediately goes back to projects where we made things and did stuff and have it there, and particularly when people get panicked in a business situation I think back to... I used to freelance doing special effects with my dad whilst I was at university, because it's a great way to make cash for things. My dad worked for the BBC and freelance. I think about that immediacy and panic when I'm talking about Kanban and handling ops and incidents and things, and I'm like, "You guys don't need to panic, it's not like you're on live TV." And they have a countdown of three, two, one, right?
Kit Friend:
No one has that in our business. We panic sometimes when something falls over, but there's never that second by second delay. So I think the quirkiest places that I've applied Agile thinking are probably before my career in technology. They were in that kind of place where we're making creative things and doing stuff, and it's there where you're like, "You would never do a 400 line requirements document for a piece of product design or jewelry, right?" You would produce something rough and see what people think about it, and build things in so there's a balance there.
Kit Friend:
I mean when you're launching live products though, you do some strange things, right? And you have some fun memories from that. So I remember when we launched YouView in the UK, which is a public credential because it was for Accenture. Fine. But during launch day a colleague of mine, Ed Dannon and me, we became shop display people for the day so we were at the top of John Lewis in Oxford Street in London demonstrating the product, and that was a part of our Agile working for that week because that's what they needed. That was how we delivered value was physically being the people going like, "Hello, Mrs Goggins. Would you like to try this YouView box at the top of things?" So I remember those days fondly.
Nick Muldoon:And so was that capture on a backlog somewhere, or?
Kit Friend:
Do you know what? YouView is where I was introduced to my love of dura, so I suspect, yeah, I don't think we did formally add a backlog somewhere. It would've been nice too, wouldn't it? I'd like to claim that my entire Accenture career could be constructed out of Dura tickets if I piled them one on top of each other for 10 years. Certainly about a 60%-
Nick Muldoon:
How many Dura tickets do you reckon you've resolved over the years?
Kit Friend:
God. How many have I duplicated is probably the question, right? Which is like 8,000. There's always duplicate of things. It's got to be in the thousands, hasn't it?
Nick Muldoon:
Tell me, you've, okay, over thousands of duplicates resolved. But you've been doing this for a while in the Atlassian space, and obviously with the Agile transformations at scale. How have these engagements at scale evolved over the past seven or eight years? And what do they look like in 2021 with this completely remote mode of operation?
Kit Friend:
Yeah. Starting at the end of that, I see light, I see goodness in things. But I guess similar to how you expressed 15 years ago, 10 years ago everyone was like, "Do Scrum and have some story points and things." I think during that period, if we go back like 10 years ago, so we're like the early 2010s or whatever we call the teens in the decades, I think we see a lot of people experimenting with early versions of SAFE. They'll do wheel reinvention and people simultaneously going, "Let's have a big meeting where everyone plans together. How do we normalize story points? You shouldn't, maybe we should. How do we do metrics there?" And that kind of stuff.
Kit Friend:
So I think certainly what I've seen is a lot of people trying out those things as we go through, and then trying to weave together concepts like design thinking and customer centricity, and there are all these bits of stuff which feel good, but they weren't very connected in any way that was repeatable or methodical or codified. Then what I quite enjoy, and linking back to your last question, is then the branching of the approaches to things. You've got SAFE, which is laudably to everyone who works on that, right? They try and write down everything.
Kit Friend:
I always say this to everyone, you're like, "Thank goodness someone decided to go on that website and make everything clickable and everything." Because when you do need to reference one of those elements, it's a godsend being able to go and go, "Yes, here is the page that talks about Lean budgets. I might not agree with everything on it, but it's a really good starting point. It's a really good point of reference to have."
Kit Friend:
Then you've got the others, and I do use SAFE at one end of detail, and even if you're doing SAFE correctly you don't do it by the book and copy and paste, right? And that kind of thing. But there is a lot of detail and a lot of options there. At the other end of the scale you've got things like Less, where it's intentionally about descaling and it intentionally focused on simplicity. Look at the front pages of the website, and on the SAFE website you've got everything. On the Less website it looks like we've done it on a whiteboard, right? And that's intentional, both of them are intentional at the end of the scale. Then we've got Scrum on the scale, which seems to be the new, rising, kind of darling of things at the moment, and that was the other thing. So what I see now-
Nick Muldoon:
And they all have a place, don't they?
Kit Friend:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
It's interesting that there's a large enough audience and market for all of these to succeed, and there's a lot of overlap between them in the various ideals and practices that they suggest that you experiment with.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. I mean what I've seen in the past few years is that I think people often get laudably enthusiastic about the scaling bit. So they take a look at a word like Lean Portfolio Management or a business problem they have of how can I capacity manage? And they go straight to the scaling frameworks without stopping at the teams on the way, and that's definitely a tendency I hear more and more from friends, colleagues, geeky friends, colleagues, clients, right? They don't make that initial investment in getting the teams going well, whether it's Scrum or whether they're running in anything else.
Nick Muldoon:
Sorry. But hang on, are you saying then, Kit, that people are actually coming into a scaled Agile transformation and they haven't got the team maturity? Sorry, forgive me, but I felt I guess my belief and my understanding was that these scaled Agile transformations, for the most part, are building on top of existing successful team transformations.
Kit Friend:
I think that is how it should work right. We should be going bottom up, or at least to a certain extent. In the SAFE implementation roadmap it talks about reaching a tipping point and having... I mean you can start with Waterfall and the SAFE implementation roadmap, but it talks about ad hoc Agile and those things there. I think when people in large businesses and organizations come with a problem though, they're coming with a big problem and they want to fix that, and yeah, it's a difficult message to land, the, "Hi, you've got one to two to five years worth of getting your teams working before you can deploy the fancy portfolio management Kanban and see a flow of things right." Because people are nice. Most people are nice, most people are enthusiastic, most people want to fix things, and so they want to fix that big scaley thing.
Kit Friend:
But it's difficult to land, the, "No, you've got to fix these things at the bottom." I was describing to a colleague, Lucy, last week, and I said, "If you want an answer a question of how do I capacity manage and how do I balance demand across a large organization, you should imagine each of your..." Let's pretend they're Scrum teams without debasing it for a moment. Let's pretend your Scrum team is like a bar with a row of different glassware on it, and each time box is a different sized pint glass or a schooner or whatever you have. Now, my capacity management for a single team is me with a big jug of beer and I've got all the work that I want to do in that beer. My whole backlog of things. My capacity management for a team is pouring it in and hopefully I guess it right. I probably don't and I spill some beer in the first ones as we go through. But over time I'm trying to guess how much beer I can pour into each time box of things and we go through.
Kit Friend:
Now, the only way that I can know how much I can fit in in the future is if I see what I've got in the past, like how it went and can I predict the size of the glass, and over time I can, and we stabilize. So everything's a pint glass after a while, after we've experimented with everything there. Now, if we don't have that ability to forecast and measure, get the actual data back via some tooling at a team level, how can we manage across multiple teams? Right? You can't. You can't have a big top down roadmap where you're like, "Yeah, we want to launch the easy Agile bank across all these areas and go into the teams." Unless you have that team level maths that you can rely on.
Kit Friend:
It doesn't matter whether that's story points or whether you're doing no estimates stuff and you're just measuring flow or you're using Monte Carlo, whatever it is. You need some mathematical way of helping people understand the flow of work and what's happening there, and ideally tying it back to value with some data. Workout whether is your easy Agile bank actually a good idea or should we pivot and do something else? Yeah, is it delivering the thing that customers want when we've given them easy Agile bank beta at the beginning of things.
Nick Muldoon:
How good do you think clients are these days? So here's the thing, I guess, you talk about early transformations and it was, "Hey, we're going to go Scrum." But now there's the design thinking, I mean there's devops, there's DevSecOps, there's so many different aspects now that people are exploring and they're exploring at the same time. How do you help the client navigate this? Because they get it from every different angle from different aspects of the business, and in fact it's just got to be overwhelming, quite frankly.
Kit Friend:
Well, it's overwhelming for us trying to help right, right? People like yourselves, I mean you're like, "How do we cope with this weird specific configuration that they want to feed into easy Agile programs?" So I think that the light at the end of the tunnel that I referenced before is I see a lot more people coming with an ask of helping them get the bottom up things right, so they understand there's a pincer. We can't ignore-
Nick Muldoon:
Get the foundation.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. But we can't ignore that there's the big business, right? There's the people expecting big things and they've drunk the Agile Kool-Aid, they've read the article and they want to be there. So there is that top down pressure, but I am seeing more and more asking for advice and help to do things at the bottom. On a couple of areas recently, my current theory of the day, and I have a favorite theory every six months or so so this won't be the same later in the year, but I really, really like training the product owners first to help with that transformation. My current theory is that it's because they're like the battering ram to help the business understand what's happening with these delivery teams, and build the bridge and link between things and form that.
Kit Friend:
Because if you don't have the product owners being the conduit and the voice of the business and the customer and the voice of the team back to the business in doing things, I think the rest of it falls down. So my theory at the moment is that if you start by training the product owners that's the best way to begin things and it helps with the scaling body scaling, the focus on the team level to help do things.
Kit Friend:
To be honest, even if they're not doing Scrum, I think that the role of a product owner, relatively close to what the Scrum guy says, if we take out the sprint references and things, I think that's a sensible thing to have in every cross functional Agile team, regardless of what you're doing. And it's a distinct personality type, right?
Kit Friend:
I often talk when people are doing our Agile Foundations course, where we're like, "Here's everything. Find your place." I think that most people, or certainly most people I train, fall quite clearly into a product owner or a Scrum Master style personality type. I'd say about 80% you can tell, like, "You're a producty person. You're a Scrum Mastery type person. Or if you're not doing Scrum, a coach, a facilitator, a team builder." Maybe about 20% can flit between the two, and they're special people. The Unicorns as we have in every industry and type, but most people fit into one of those. I think it's good to think about how those personality types work in your business.
Kit Friend:
The other thing I love about training the product owners first, it really unveils upon them that, let's say, we're now at... "Hi, Nick. Yesterday you were the business owner for this process and doing things. You're now a product owner, go. And you can only have till Monday." If we train you, you're like, "Oh my God, I didn't realize I was now accountable for the value of this whole team delivering. It's my problem to make sure they're delivering good things? I didn't know that." So if we do that training right at the beginning I think it sets a baseline of expectations of what we're asking of those people, and the responsibility that's placed on them. Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
When you're doing this Agile Foundations course that you run for folks through, are you doing a DISK profile as part of that? Again to assess their personality type.
Kit Friend:
No, no. That would be really good. What a great suggestion. I can include that.
Nick Muldoon:
Well, I'm merely inquiring because I wonder. I'm just thinking about it now, I'm wondering, are there personality types that are more likely to be the product owner? Is a product owner more of a CS and is a... Yeah, I don't know.
Kit Friend:
I don't know. I mean it's one of those things, isn't it? I forget the number of personality types and roles I've been assigned in various bits of my career. I can't remember. Back when I was a Student Union Officer, I'll have to look up the name of it, but we had the ones where, "Are you a completer finisher or a shaper?" And all sorts of those things there, and then DISk was relatively popular. We've got a Gallup Strengths Test within the Accenture Performance Management Tool, which is actually really interesting.
Kit Friend:
The bit I like about the Accenture one is when you join a new team you can bunch yourself together in the tool and see what people's different strengths and personality traits are, so you can be like, "This team's very heavy on the woo. Or you're a team that's full of energy or ideas with things, and it's quite interesting too." I mean it's nice to see the strength, but it's also interesting to notice where you might have gaps and you're like, "I need to make sure that someone's keeping an eye on quality because we all get very excited and run fast."
Nick Muldoon:
Do you remember, this would have to be a decade ago now, I'm sure, but I think his name with Larry Macaroni or Larry Macayoni, and he was working for Rally Software at the time, and he did a very wide ranging study of the effectiveness of Agile teams? And I'm just thinking back on that now, because he was looking at things like defect rates, escaped bugs versus captured bugs and all sorts of other bits and pieces. But I don't think he touched on the personality traits of these teams and whether even Dave the Cofounder here at Easy Agile, my business partner, he was talking. He shared a blog article this morning about neurodiverse teams and I'm just trying to think, do we know is there a pattern of DISK profile distribution, neurodiversity distribution, that leads to a more effective team?
Kit Friend:
I don't know. I haven't read. Yeah, it's Larry Maccherone, but it's not spelt the way I suspected originally. I put in Macaroni, based on your pasta based pronunciation of things. So it looks like it's the quantifying the... What's it called? Quantifying the Impact of Agile on Teams, which is really interesting.
Nick Muldoon:But I don't know if that sort of study has been done since he did it back then.
Kit Friend:
Particularly the personality types is interesting, and neurodiversity is another interesting element. So I've got dyslexia and dyscalculia, and one of the bits I've found-
Nick Muldoon:
What's dyscalculia?
Kit Friend:
Well, just like dyslexia, there's quite a spectrum covered by one term of these, so it's large. But effectively my particular diagnosis, I have problems processing sequences of numbers. So you can read me out a sequence of numbers and if it's exactly that, I can cope with it normally because I can do visual processing, because that's my creative industries background, it's what we do, right? We visually process. But I can't repeat them back to you backwards, I can't reprocess them as units of stuff with things. My wife says-
Nick Muldoon:
How did you even come across that?
Kit Friend:
So a retrospective again, so my sister was diagnosed with dyslexia at school, and she's got a more traditional dyslexic diagnosis. So when you hear dyslexia, people normally associate it with not being able to read and spelling and grammar and that kind of stuff. Dyslexia, as you might know from [inaudible 00:35:00] is actually... I'm waiting for them to split it, to be honest with you, because it's so broad. But my diagnosis of dyslexia is more about my short term memory processing, so it's the ability to process. I can read and write fine.
Kit Friend:
My sister got diagnosed at school, had blue glasses, all the conventional grammar and spelling related elements of dyslexia. My dad got diagnosed then in his mid 50s, I think at the time. So he started working at the University Arts London, my art college, my dad still runs the woodwork shop in central St Martins in their beautiful new campus in King's Cross in London. He got diagnosed with things, and I was like, "Hmm. I know it's hereditary, I should probably get checked." So I think I was 25 or 26, and one of the lovely bit... I mean there's many lovely bits about working at Accenture, but a large corporation has really, really good support networks and things.
Kit Friend:
So I pinged the right people around, and they were like, "Yes, of course we can support you getting an assessment. We'd love to make sure that you're able to function." So I got an assessment done and they were like, "Yeah, you're dyslexic and dyscalculic on this kind of area." But the more interesting thing was that they were like, "Here's the coping mechanisms that you've developed." And the coping mechanisms was a list of my career and choices and education. It was like, "You will choose things where you can do abstract thinking and drawing." It was really funny because I never felt like it blocked me at school, I quite enjoyed exams and things.
Kit Friend:
But I was terrible at revising, right? I can't go through notes and do things there. Looking at my diagnosis I was like, "It's because I don't process things that way." I have to process things visually, I have to draw, I have to chunk things. Now I look at the way that I work with Agile teams and I coach teams, and I create abstract references to things, right? I'm teaching product owner and Scrum Master courses on Mural where we move things around and create objects.
Nick Muldoon:
Or the example that you used before, Kit, with the beer glasses at the bar.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. I can't deal with numbers in abstract, right? I have to deal with them in an analogy or I have to be able to visual them. I'm hopeless at coding, I can't store concepts like variables in my head. They just fall apart, it's like building with sand in front of me and it's all dry and crumbly. And I think in fact when I looked at that diagnosis and I was still, what? I'd be like three or four years into my career at Accenture. I looked at the way that I'd begun to get slowly addicted to tools like Atlassian and Dura, and I was like, "Ah, I'm compensating for the fact that I have basically no ability to memorize things in the short term." I'm helping visualize stuff in the way that I help teams and build tasks and things, in a way that means I'm outsourcing my short term memory to this lovely tool where we do things there.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. I've grown to love it, I think you have to work with it right. I speak to some of my colleagues, I teach at the moment with an Agile coach called Lucy Sudderby and another one called Charlotte Blake, and I'm like, "Thank you, guys, for compensating for my dyslexia. I appreciate that you kind of balance out my inability to memorize anything." Yeah, hopefully they feel they benefit from some of the quirky strengths of it when we go through, but it's a balancing act, right?
Nick Muldoon:
That's very cool. Thanks for sharing that.
Kit Friend:
No worries.
Nick Muldoon:
I'm just thinking about it now, as you mentioned coaching with Lucy and Charlotte, and going back to something that you said earlier, Kit, with respect to... I don't know if you said the leaders, but basically the folks at the top drinking the Kool-Aid. I'm interested to know, how do you create, going back to this other thought that you had, I'm trying to connect dots, going back to this other thought that you had right up at the top about the psychological safety, right? And that feeling safe. How do you provide a safe space for these leaders that could be CEOs of business units or execs, GMs, whatever they happen to be, provide a safe space for them to actually ask questions and do Q&A and learn without feeling?
Kit Friend:Yeah. Because we forget that they're people too, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah.
Kit Friend:
There's this idea that these leaders are somehow insurmountable, they have no fear. But we need to build a safe space for everyone around things, I think you're right. I think we get the same sort of question when people talk to me about how they can convert people to Agile or make the case for things in an organization but not sure about it. I think that the answer, relatively saying, in that we need to give them some data, some facts. So my view is that it's not good to come to people and talk about...
Kit Friend:
I somewhat cynically criticize when people talk about Agile ways of working, and they'll often abbreviate it to WAW or something as well. I think when we talk about agility too abstractedly, and I say the phrase wavy hands too much, but when we talk about it within specifics too much, it encourages a sense of anxiety and it's a nebulous, wishy washy kind of thing so I like to bring some data to people. My favorite ones to use, and I need to get updated stats, but the Sandish Chaos Reports are an amazing project management journal, where they talk about success and failure of Waterfall versus Agile projects.
Kit Friend:
Now, there's a bunch of questions it leads you to about how do they classify Agile and all sorts of things. But indisputably, what it tells you is that the traditional way of doing things that we are told is secure and safe, if I go to a procurement team or a finance team and I go, "I'd like to build this thing, guys." They're like, "Great, give me the milestones, give me the plan." And there's this inbuilt assumption that that's a safe and responsible and proven way to do things.
Kit Friend:
The Sandish Chaos Reports tell you it's a terrible way to do things, right? They're like, "Statistically, doesn't matter what you're building, what industry, what you're doing, it's a terrible idea to fix scope at the beginning, trust your plan and have a system which fails when you have any change." And when you unpack it, like when we talk about agility overall, what are we saying? We're saying it's not a good idea to begin something and for it only to be able to succeed within fairly tight boundaries, where no one changes their mind for the duration of the thing, everything goes exactly as you plan and when does that ever happen with technology? And the world doesn't change for the duration of your thing.
Kit Friend:
Most of the time when we're talking about these project things, like how long are they? Three months to three years is the window I usually give. Three months, I see rarely in any industry these days, right? These big efforts where people are trying to do these things at scale, you're talking multiyear. What are the chances that the scope can be frozen for that period? Pretty low, and also what's the chance that the people that you asked for the requirements at the beginning really knew them all? Everyone's normally really nice, they try their best.
Nick Muldoon:The chance that the people you ask at the beginning are going to be there when you actually get to the next-
Kit Friend:
Yeah. There's a whole set of fundamental problems with that. So I like to bring that kind of data to our leaders when they're asking about the case for agility, so it's not about, "Do you want to sign up to use a framework?"
Nick Muldoon:
But let's say, Kit, that they've made the case for agility, they're there, they're doing it. What's the space that you provide for them? Do you have a CEO round table where they can go and they've got a shoulder to cry on and go, "This Agile transformation is going harder than I thought it was going to be"?
Kit Friend:
Agilists Anonymous, [crosstalk 00:42:19] company. Yeah. I think it is a good idea to pair them up, so I get a lot of requests at the moment for us to provide coaches directly to support leaders. I've also seen a trend in reverse mentoring, separately big companies. But that kind of idea of, okay, you've got these people who are really experienced, and their experience is relevant, right? We're not saying that the CEO's 30, 40, 50 year career in something is invalid now and we know better than them. But they're trying to match that up with these, not even emerging, right? Because the Agile Manifest is 20 years old now. But they're trying to match these up with these foreign, new practices and things they've got, and that requires a bit of hand holding. So yes, there's a personal angle there. I don't think necessarily a round table is the way to do it per se, but giving them someone that they can chat too and, yeah, an ability to relate and go like, "What is this thing?" And decode the jog, I think is really useful.
Kit Friend:
So data about success rates is important, right? But the other data that's really important I think to help provide that sense of safety is about value delivery, and this is where I think most people are still having trouble. We've just about got to the point where people can start to attach a concept of benefits and value at the start of things. Now, often that's still too big. We talk about the value of the entire project, can you assign a notion of value to every epic and story in your backlog or whatever units of stuff you're doing?" Probably not, right? Can you do it in a pound or dollar or euro or whatever your local currency is figure? Probably not. But can you even rank them one to 10? Maybe with things.
Kit Friend:
So I think the evolution of OKRs and KPIs coming in, and people starting to internalize that more, offers some hope. It's still relatively immature in most organizations and you're still kind of getting there. I feel like every sort of practice and things, it's probably going to have some misinterpretation, enthusiastic and well meaning interpretation, but you're going to get some people using it somehow to Waterfall things probably in some areas. But bringing that data that gives them some sort of feedback loop that makes sense to those people in those senior positions I think is really powerful. The opposite of this is where they expect to see RAG statuses and milestones and that's the only data they get from their teams, right?
Kit Friend:I sat down with an executive of an organization a few years ago and I was like, "Please invest in your tooling. Please do it." And he's like, "Why would I need to? I have these slides where they tell me green and the dates are there." And I was like, "I love that you're trusting, and I like to trust." The trust in the teams was really, really good. But I knew the teams and I knew they didn't have any tools. It was project managers getting stressed and running around, and then I knew that all the RAG statuses were going to go, "Green, green, green, green. Red." It was the Watermelon Effect that was going to happen, right?
Kit Friend:
So when I see conversations like that happening, I want to empower them. I want to empower them with data and bring those things together. I think that data about why doing Agile is really important, the data about how it's really going on your teams, and the ability to make decisions based on it is really important. There's the Scrumming case study on the Saab Gripen is lovely because they, in one of the articulations, they do the sequence of morning standups and allegedly, according to the case study, I'm pretty sure it's true, they do 7:30 in the morning, which is insane. I don't know why they start at 7:30 in the morning in Sweden, but apparently they start at 7:30 in the morning. But they do a sequence of standups and the idea is by the end of the hour the cascade of standups means that any impediment can reach the executives within the hour and they can fix it.
Kit Friend:
That feeling of connection, that trust in teams and that show of progress, real working things being the way that we communicate that we're making progress, I think that's how we build some safety in and help our leaders do things. Not RAG statuses and milestones and Gantt Charts. They have to have that realness with things, hopefully.
Nick Muldoon:
It's interesting. It makes me think, we did a factory tour recently and it's a factory that makes air conditioning manifolds for commercial buildings, and they actually-
Kit Friend:
What? Why were you touring an air conditioning factory? Were you buying some air conditioning?
Nick Muldoon:
No, no, no. Lean principles, right? You want to see the application of the principle.
Kit Friend:
Wow, you're living it, you're living it. It's wonderful.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. So they do breakfast from 6:15 to 6:45 or 6:30, something like that, and then they get going. I think they do their standup at 7:45 after they're actually in the flow, they come together, "Okay, where are we at for today? What are we working on?" Then that rolls up to the ops team and then that rolls up to the leadership team, and then at the end of the day they do their closing huddle for the day, "Hey, have we got all of our tools? Are we back? What are we going on with tomorrow morning?" So it was like the start and the finish of the day and it's really interesting.
Nick Muldoon:
Just thinking about, we introduced an end of day huddle in COVID, when we were all on Zoom all the time, and I think it was very useful. But then of course as we get back into the office, it drops away. It's interesting how things evolved, right?
Kit Friend:
Yeah. And you're the big Head Honcho, right, Nick? I have a worry niggle with end of day meetings, about whether they're for the team they're for people to feel they're across stuff, and I find it interesting because I'm having to take people through practicing for Scrum Master exams and things, lots at the moment, and I really like talking about how standups are for the team. They're for the developers, they're not for the product owner even, they're certainly not for the stakeholders. Now, I consistently see with a lot of these Agile ceremonies, I'm like, "Who's getting the benefit from that meeting? Is it someone getting a status check in or is the team getting it?"
Kit Friend:
And if the team enjoys it, if the team gets something from the end of day huddle and things, I'm cool with it. But sometimes I see things, and the two anti patterns I see with leaders joining, of any level, joining the meeting, so the first is that they use it as like their aeration platform. The team's ready to go with their standup and then the leader of whatever level pops in and he's like, "Team, I've got this update for you." And then it's like 10 minutes of their amazing update and mini vision for the day, and then at the end it's like people are going, "Yeah, now do your standup. Now do the Scrum kind of thing." And then the other thing is that where it becomes like a status check in for stuff, and I'm like, "It's not what it's for, guys. We should be focused on [crosstalk 00:48:57]-"
Nick Muldoon:
We do. So we can get done with 22 people in six to eight minutes.
Kit Friend:
That's slick.
Nick Muldoon:
It's taken time to get here, but what we actually started out asking for was one good thing, and that's typically a family, community thing, what are you going on with today, do you have any blockers? And it's interesting now that we're having this chat, Kit, I do not see blockers come up very often, so I wonder why that is.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, anyway. Hey, Kit, I'm conscious of time. I've got one last question for you.
Kit Friend:
Yeah, go for it.Nick Muldoon:
What are you reading at the moment? What books are you reading or have read recently that you'd recommend for the audience to read?
Kit Friend:
Yeah, I'm between businessy books. I need to find a next one. One attribute, and it's probably not my dyslexia, I think it's just because I'm lazy, I'm really bad at reading business books, like serious books with things. So I rely on audiobooks lots to consume meaningful data. I really, really enjoyed listening to Lisa Adkins Coaching Agile Teams audiobook when she released it, because I knew I wasn't going to get through the book and so-
Nick Muldoon:
Did she narrate it?
Kit Friend:
Yeah, which is even better, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Cool, yeah.
Kit Friend:
So lovely to hear from the authors' voices when they're doing things. So I'd really recommend that, and then accompanying it after... I mean either way round, listen to the Women In Agile podcast series on coaching Agile teams, because they talk about each other and there's a whole episode on language, and she talks about how between writing the book and narrating the book, reading it, there was bits of language where she just cringed and she was like, "I can't believe I wrote that." And it really resonates it with me, thinking about my Agile journey and how I would cringe at what I did with teams five, six years ago. As we all do, right? You look back with hindsight.
Kit Friend:
So Coaching Agile Teams is really, really good, and I'd recommend. When [crosstalk 00:50:54]-
Nick Muldoon:
Isn't that beautiful, right? Because if you look back and you cringe, it shows that you've evolved and adapted and you've learned, and you've improved?
Kit Friend:
Oh yeah, if you look back and don't cringe, either you were perfect which is unlikely, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Unlikely. Unlikely.
Kit Friend:[crosstalk 00:51:07] things, or you're oblivious which is more likely. I don't mean you personally, Nick. So Coaching Agile Teams is really good, I still recommend the Whole Time if people are trying to get their head round what it's like to work in Agile, what's there. I used to recommend The Phoenix Project, and then I really enjoyed The Unicorn Project more for filling in a team. Your talking about the air conditioning factory just reminded me because of all the Lean kind of things. I really like that, and I struggle when I explain to people because I'm like, "It's not dry, it's a novel about an Agile transformation, but it's not [crosstalk 00:51:42]
Nick Muldoon:
It's not. I love it. I get up and I read the newspaper, right?
Kit Friend:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
That's my thing in the morning, and I would never read a business book at night. But The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, I've read them several times as bedtime books.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. To your kids, Nick? Do you sit there [crosstalk 00:52:01]
Nick Muldoon:
I will. I'll get there. I'm starting to teach them about Lean principles, build quality in. Yeah.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. If you haven't done it already, getting your kids to story point Lego is really amusing and I've enjoyed a lot. I know it's just like time gym, but I enjoy doing it with my son, Ethan, because you know how difficult it is to get adults to get relative sizing in units, and kids just get it. It's wonderful how they just don't get distracted by the fact that you've got an abstract unit, and they're like, "I get that idea." I got Ethan story pointing in five minutes, I've struggled to get some adults story pointing in like five days and they argue about, "Do you mean it's days, ideal days, hours?" Things.
Kit Friend:
So yeah, Unicorn Project I think are really good. I haven't actually read it all yet, but I do want to read and I recommend the whole time because of a really good podcast, 99 [inaudible 00:52:51] Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. So when we talk about being customer centric and about really knowing who we're providing our products for, I think there's a really powerful story around making sure we understand the data and when we're going through, and Invisible Women has some amazing, horrifying, but amazing stories and bits of data and narrative around it. So I think those would be my three at the moment, three's a good number to ask people to start with, isn't it?
Nick Muldoon:
Okay, cool. Kit, this has been wonderful. My takeaway is I've got to read The Invisible Woman, because I haven't heard that book.Kit Friend:
Invisible Women, there's lots of them is the problem, Nick.
Nick Muldoon:
Invisible Women, okay. Thank you. That's my takeaway that I've got to read. Kit, this has been beautiful, I really enjoyed our chat this morning.
Kit Friend:
It was a pleasure as well. Thank you so much for having me, Nick.
Nick Muldoon:
I hope you have a wonderful day, and I look forward to talking about this journey again. I want to come back and revisit this.
Kit Friend:
Yeah. Let's do a check in. We should do our DISK profiles for the next one maybe, and we can find out maybe I'm meant to be a product owner and you should be, I don't know, you'll be like test lead or something it'll say. I don't know. We'll find out.
Nick Muldoon:
It's beautiful. All right, thanks so much, Kit. Have a wonderful day.
Kit Friend:
And you. Bye now.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.6 Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach
What a great conversation this was with Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach!
Chris shared some insights into the importance of sharing and de-stigmatising failures, looking after your own mental health, and why work shouldn't be stale.
Some other areas we discussed were, why you should spend time in self reflection - consider a solospective? and asking "how did that feel?" when working as a team.
"I really enjoyed our chat. Plenty to ponder over the silly season, and set yourself up with a fresh perspective for 2021. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!"
Transcript
Sean Blake:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. It's Sean Blake here, your host today, and we're joined by Chris stone. Chris is going to be a really interesting guest. I really enjoyed recording this episode. Chris is the Virtual Agile Coach. He's an agility lead. People First champion blogger, speaker and trainer, who always seeks to gamify content and create immersive Agile experiences. An Agile convert all the way from back in 2012, Chris has since sought to broaden his experiences, escape his echo chamber and to fearlessly challenge dysfunction and ask the difficult questions. My key takeaways from this episode were; it's okay to share your failures, the importance of recognizing our mental health, why it's important that work doesn't become stale, how to de-stigmatize failure, the importance of selfreflection and holding many self retrospectives, and the origins of the word deadline. You'll be really interested to find out where that word came from and why it's a little bit troubling. So here we go. We're about to jump in. Here's the episode with Chris stone on the Easy Agile Podcast. Chris, thanks so much for joining us and spending some time with us.
Chris Stone:
Hey there Sean, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Sean Blake:
I have to mention you've got a really funky Christmas sweater on today. And for those people listening on the audio, they might have to jump over to YouTube just for a section to check out this sweater. Can you tell us a bit about where that came from?
Chris Stone:
So this sweater was a gift. It's a Green Bay Packers, Chris, Ugly Christmas Jumpers, what they call it. And I'm a fan of the Green Bay Packers, I've been out there a few times to Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's so cold out there in fact. When you're holding a beer and minus 13 degrees, the beer starts turning to slush just from being outside in the cold air. It's a great place, very friendly, and the jumper was just a gift one Christmas from someone.
Sean Blake:
Love it. There's nothing better than warm beer is there? Okay. So Chris, I first came across you because of the content that you put out on LinkedIn. And the way that you go about it, it's so much fun and so different to really anything else I've seen in the corporate space, in the enterprise space, in the Agile space even, why have you decided to go down this track of calling yourself the virtual Agile coach, building a personal brand and really putting yourself out there?
Chris Stone:
Well, for me, it was an interesting one because COVID, this year has forced a lot of people to convert to being virtual workers, remote workers, virtual coaches themselves. Now, what I realized this year is that, the aspiration for many is those co-located teams, it's always what people desired. They say, "Oh, you have to work harder, Katie, that's the best way." And I realized that in my whole Agile working life, I'd never really had that co-located team. There was always some element of distributed working and the past two years prior to where I'm currently, my current company, I was doing distributed scaled Agile with time zones, including Trinidad and Tobago, Alaska, Houston, the UK, India, and it was all remote.
Chris Stone:
And I thought, all right, this is an opportunity to recognize the fact that I was a virtual Agile coach already, but to share with others, my learnings, my experiences, the challenges I've faced, the failures I've had with the wider community so they can benefit from it because obviously, everyone, or more many have had to make that transition very quickly. And there's lots of learnings there that I'm sure people would benefit from. And this year in particular, I guess the honest answer, the reason for me being, I guess out there and working more on that side of things, being creative is because it's an outlet for my mental health.
Chris Stone:
I suffer from depression and one of my ways of coping with that is being creative and creating new content and sharing it. So I guess it's a reason of... it's linked to that also, but also the stories that people tell me afterwards, they motivate me to keep doing it. So when someone comes to me and says, "Hey, I did the Queen retrospective, the Queen Rock Band retrospective, and this program manager who never smiles connected to the content and admitted he liked Queen and smiled." And this was a first and when people come to me and say, "Hey, we did the Home Alone retrospective, the one of your Christmas themed ones and people loved it. It was great." It was the most engaging retrospective we've had so far because the problem is work can become stale if you let it be so.
Chris Stone:
Retrospectives can become this, what did we do last time? What are we going to do next time? What actions can we do? Et cetera, et cetera. And unless you refresh it and try new things, people will get bored and they'll disconnect and they'll disengage, and you're less likely to get a good outcome that way. So for me, there's no reason you can't make work a little bit fun, with a little bit of creativity and a little bit of energy and passionate about it.
Sean Blake:
I love that. And do you think a lot of people come to work even when they're working in Agile co-located teams and it's just not fun, I mean what do you think the key reasons are that work isn't fun?
Chris Stone:
I think because it can become stale. All right. So let's reflect on where we are today. Today, we're in a situation where we're not face-to-face with one another. We don't have time for those water cooler chats. We don't connect over a coffee or a lunch. We don't have a chat about idle banter and things of that on the way to a meeting room, we didn't have any of that. And that forces people to look at each other and see themselves as an avatar behind a screen, just a name. Often in particular, people aren't even on video camera.
Chris Stone:
It forces them to think of people as a name on a screen, rather than a beating heart on a laptop. And it can abstract people into just these entities, these names you talk to each day and day out, and that can force it to be this professional non-personal interaction. And I'm a firm believer that we need to change that. We need to make things more fun because it can, and in my experience, does result in much better outcomes. I'm very, very people first. We need to focus on people being people. People aren't resources. This is a common phrase I like to refer to you.
Sean Blake:
I love that, people aren't resources. You spoke a little bit about mental health and your struggle with depression. Something that I hear come up time and time again, is people that talk about imposter syndrome. And I wonder, firstly, if you think that might be exasperated through working remotely now. People are not so sure how they fit in, where their role is still the same role that it was 12 months ago. And do you have any tips for people when they're dealing with imposter syndrome, especially in a virtual environment?
Chris Stone:
Well, yeah I think this current environment, this virtual environment, the pandemic in particular, has led to a number of unhelpful behaviors. That there's a lot more challenges with people's mental health and negativity, and that can only lead to, I guess, less desire, less confidence in doing things, maybe doubting yourself. There's some great visuals I've shared on this recently, and it's all about reframing those imposter thoughts you have, the unhelpful thinking, that thing that goes through your mind that says, Oh, they're all going to think I'm a total fraud because maybe I don't have enough years of experience, or I should already know this. I must get more training. There's lots of “shoulding” and “musting” in that. There's lots of jumping to conclusions in this.
Chris Stone:
And a couple of ways of getting around that is, so if you're thinking of the scenario where I'm a fraud think, "Oh, well I'm doing my best, but I can't predict what they might think." When you're trying to think about the scenario of do I need to get more training? Well, understand and acknowledge the reality that you can't possibly know everything. You continue to learn every single day and that's great, but it's unrealistic to know it all. There's a great quote I often refer to and it's, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I believe it's a quote from Socrates.
Chris Stone:
And it's something that very much resonates with me. Over the years I've gone through this learning journey where, when I first finished university, for example, I thought I knew everything. I thought I've got it all. And I'd go out to clients and speak and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I know this. I've got this guys." And then the more involved I've become and the more deeper I've gone into the topic, the more I realized, actually there's so much that I don't know. And to me, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing tells me there's so much out there that I must continuously learn, I must continuously seek to challenge myself each and every day.
Chris Stone:
Other people who approach me and say, "How do you, or you produce a lot of content. How would you put yourself out there?" And I say, "Well, I just do it." Let's de-stigmatize failure. If you put a post out there and it bombs, it doesn't matter, put another one out there. It's as simple as that, learn from failure, Chuck something out there, try it, if it doesn't work, try something else. We coach Agile teams to do this all the time, to experiment. Have a hypothesis to test against that. Verify the outcomes and do retrospectives. I do weekly solospectives. I reflect on my week, what works, what hasn't worked, what I'm going to try differently. And there's no reason you can't do that also.
Sean Blake:
Okay. So weekly solospectives. What does that look like? And how do you be honest with yourself about what's working, what's not working and areas for yourself to improve? How do you actually start to have that time for self-reflection?
Chris Stone:
Unfortunately you got to make time for some reflection. One thing I've learned with mental health is you have to make time for your health before you have to make time for your illness or before you're forced to make time for your illness. And it can become all too easy in this busy working world to not make time for your health, to not make time and focus on you. So you do just have to carve out that time, whether that's blocking some time in the diary on a Friday afternoon, just to sit down and reflect, whether that's making time to go out for a walk, setting up a time on your Alexa to have a five minute stretching break, whatever it is, there's things you can do, and you have things you have to do to make time for yourself.
Chris Stone:
With regards to a solospective, the way I tend to do things is I tend to journal on a daily basis. That's almost like my own daily standard with myself, it's like, what have I observed? What have I... what challenges do I face in the past day? And then that sums up in the weekly solospective, which is basically a retro for one, where I reflect on, what did I try it? What do I want to achieve this week? What's gone well? What hasn't gone well. It's the same as a retrospective just one and allows me to aggregate my thoughts across the week, rather than them being single events. So that I'm focusing more on the trajectory as opposed to any single outlier. Does that make sense?
Sean Blake:
It does. It does. So you've got this trajectory with your career. You're checking in each week to see whether you're heading in the right direction. I assume that you set personal goals as well along the way. I also noticed that you have personal values that you've published and you've actually published those publicly for other people to look at and to see. How important are those personal values in informing your life and personal and career goals?
Chris Stone:
So I'd say that are hugely important, for me, what I thought was we see companies sharing their values all the time. You look on company websites and you can see their values quite prominently. And you could probably think do they often live up to their values? You have so many companies have customer centricity as their value, but how many of them actually focus on engaging with their customers regularly? How many have a metric where they track, how often they engage with customers? Most of them are focusing on velocity and lead time. So I always challenge, are you really customer centric or is that lip service? But moving aside, I digress. I thought companies have values, and obviously we do as well, but why don't we share them? So I created this visual, showing what mine were and challenged a few others to share it also. And I had some good feedback from others which was great.
Chris Stone:
But they hugely influence who I am and how I interact on a day-to-day basis. And I'll give you an example, one of my values is being open source always. And what that means is nothing I create, no content I create, nothing I produce would ever be behind a payroll. And that's me being community driven. That's me sharing what I've learned with others. And how that's come to fruition, how I've lived that is I've had lots of people come to me say, "Hey, we love the things you do. You gave me flying things. Would you mind, or would you like to collaborate and create this course that people would pay for?" So often I've said, "If it's free, yes. But if it's going to be monetized, then no."
Chris Stone:
And I've had multiple people reach out to me for that purpose. And I've had to decline respectfully and say, "Look, I think what you're doing is great. You've got a great app and I can see how having this Agile coaching gamification course on that would be of great value. But if it's behind the payroll, then I'm not interested because it's in direct conflict with my own values, and therefore, I wouldn't be interested in proceeding with it. But keep doing what you're doing, being people first, #people first." This is about me embodying the focus on people being beating hearts behind a laptop, rather than just this avatar on a screen. And I have this little... the audio listeners, won't be able to see this, but I'm holding up a baby Groot here. And he's like my people first totem.
Chris Stone:
And the reason for that is I have a group called the Guardians of Agility, and we are people first. That's our emblem. And these are my transformation champions in my current company. I like to have Guardians of Agility, and I've got this totem reminding me to be people first in every interaction I have. So when, for example, I hear the term resources and I'm saying, well... As soon as I hear it, it almost triggers me. I almost hear like, "Oh, what do they mean by that?" And I'll wait a little moment and I'll say, "Hey, can you tell me what you mean by that?" And you tease it out a little bit. And often they meant, "Oh, it's people, isn't it?" If you're talking about people, can we refer to them as people?
Chris Stone:
Because people aren't resources. They're not objects or things you mine out the ground. They're not pens, paper or desks. They're not chairs in an office. They are people. And every time you refer to them as a resource, you abstract them. You make it easier to dehumanize them and think of them as lesser, you make it easier to make those decisions like, oh, we can just get rid of those resources or we can just move that resource from here to there and to this team and that team, whether they want to or not. So I don't personally like the language.
Chris Stone:
And the problem is it goes all the way back to how it's trained. You go to university and you take a business degree and you learn about human resources. You take a course, Agile HR, Agile human resources, right, and it's so prevalent out there. And unless we challenge it, it won't change. So I will happily sit there and a meeting with a CTO and he'll start talking about resource and I'll say, "Hey, what do you mean by that?" And I'll challenge it and he'll go, "Yeah, I've done it again, have I not?" "Yes. Yes, you have." And it's gotten to the point now where I'll be on this big group call for example, and someone will say it, and I'll just start doing this on a screen waving, and they'll go, "Did it again, didn't I?" "Yes, you did."
Sean Blake:
So some of these habits are so ingrained from our past experiences our education, and when you're working with teams for the first time, who's never worked in Agile before, they're using phrases like resources, they're doing things that sometimes we call anti-patents, how do you start to even have that conversation and introduce them to some of these concepts that are totally foreign to people who've never thought the way that you or I might think about our teams and our work?
Chris Stone:
Sure. So I guess that the first response to that is with empathy. I'm not going to blame someone or make out that they're a bad person for using words that are ingrained, that are normal. And this is part of the problem that that term, resource is so ingrained in that working language nowadays, same as deadlines. Deadlines is so ingrained, even though deadlines came from a civil war scenario where it referred to, if you went past the line, you were shot. How did that land in the business language? I don't know. But resources, it's so ingrained, it's so entrenched into this language, so people do it without intending to. They often do it without meaning it in a negative way. And to be honest, the word itself isn't the issue, it's how people actually behave and how they treat people.
Chris Stone:
I said my first approach is empathy. Let's talk about this. Let's understand, "Hey, why did you use term?" "Oh, I use it to mean this." "Okay. Well." Yeah, and not to do it or call them out publicly or things like that. It's doing things with empathy. Now, I also often use obviously gamification and training approaches, and Agile games to introduce concepts. If someone's unfamiliar to a certain way of working, I'll often gamify. I'll create something, a virtual Agile game to demonstrate. The way I do say, is I'm always looking to help people understand how it feels, not just to talk theory. And I'll give you an example. I'm a big fan of a game called the Virtual Name Game. It's a game about multitasking and context switching.
Chris Stone:
And I always begin, I'll ask group of people, "Hey guys, can you multitask?" And often they go, "Yeah, we can do that." And there'll be those stereotypical things like, "Oh yeah, I'm a woman. I can do that." It happens. Trust me. But one of the first things I do, if I'm face-to-face with them, I'll say, "Hey, hold your hands out like this. And in your left hand..." And people on the audio can't see me, I'm holding out like my hands in front of me. In my left hand, we're going to play an endless game of rock, paper, scissors. And in my right hand, we're going to play a game of, we have a thumb war with each other. And you can try, you can challenge them, can they do those concurrently? No, they can't. They will fail because you just can't focus on both at the same time.
Chris Stone:
Now the Virtual Name Game, the way it works is you divide a group of people up into primarily customers and one developer. And I love to make the most senior person in the room, that developer. I want them to see how it feels to be constantly context switching. So if you were the developer, you're the senior person to review the hippo in this scenario, the highest paid person. I would say Sean, in this game, these customers, they are trying to get their name written first on this virtual whiteboard. And we're going to time how long it takes for you to write everyone's name in totality. The problem is that they're all going to shouting at you continuously, endlessly trying to get your attention. So it's going to be Sean, Sean, write my name, write my...
Chris Stone:
And it's just going to be wow, wow, wow, who do I focus on? You won't know. And this replicates a scenario that I'm sure many people have experienced. He who shouts loudest gets what they want. Prioritization is often done by he who's... or the person who shouts loudest not necessarily he. We then go into another rounds where you say, I'm this round, Sean, people are to be shouting their name at you. But in this round, you're going to pay a little bit attention to everyone. So the way you're going to do that is you're going to read the first letter of one person's name, then you move on to the first letter of the next person's name, and you're going to keep going around. The consequence of that is everyone gets a little bit of attention, but the result is it's really slow.
Chris Stone:
You're starting lots of things but not finishing them. And again, in each round, we're exploring how it feels. How did it feel to be in that round? Sean, you were being shouted at, how did that feel? Everyone else, you were shouting to get your attention. You had to shout louder than other people, how did that feel? And it's frustrating, it's demotivating, it's not enjoyable. In the final around, I would say, "Hey, Sean, in this round, I'm going to empower you to decide whose name you write first. And you can write the whole thing in order. And the guys actually they're going to help you this time, there are no shouts over each other, they are going to help you." And in this scenario, as I'm sure you can imagine, it feels far better. The result is people finish things, and you can measure the output, the number of brand names written on a timeframe.
Chris Stone:
It's a very quick and easy way of demonstrating how it feels to be constantly context switching and the damage you can have, if, for example, you've prioritized things into a sprint and you got lots of trying to reorder things and so on and so forth, and lots of pressure from external people that ideally should be shielded from influencing this and that, and how that feels and what the result is, because you may start something, get changed into something else. You got to take your mindset of this, back into something else, and then the person who picks up the original thing might not have even been the same person, they've got to learn that over again. There's just lots of waste and efficiency costs through that. And that's just an example of a game I use, to bring that sort of things to life.
Sean Blake:
That's great. That's fantastic. I love that. And I think we need to, at Easy Agile, start playing some of those games because there's a lot of lessons to be learned from going through those exercises. And then when you see it play out in real life, in the work that you're doing, it's easier to recognize it then. If you've done the training, you've done the exercise, that all seems like fun and games at the time, but when it actually rears its head in the work that you're doing, it's much easier to call it out and say, "Oh wait, we're doing that thing that we had fun playing, but now we realize it's occurring in real life and let's go a different direction." So I can see how that would be really powerful for teams to go through that so Chris [crosstalk 00:22:26].
Chris Stone:
I'd also add that every game that I do, I construct it using the four Cs approach. So I'm looking to connect people... firstly, connect people to each other, and then to the subject matter. So in this game is about multitasking. To contextualize why that matters, why does context switching and multitasking matter in the world of work? Because it causes inefficiencies, because it causes frustration, de-motivation, et cetera. Then we do some concrete practice. We play a game that emphasizes how it feels. And at the end we draw conclusions, and the idea is that with the conclusion side of things, it's almost like a retrospective on the game. We say, "Hey, what did we learn? What challenges we face? And what can we do differently in our working world?" And that hopefully leaves people with actionable takeaways. A lot of the content I share is aiming to leave it with actionable takeaways, not just talking about something, but reflecting on what you could do differently, what you could try, what experiment you might like to employ with your working life, your team that might help improve a situation you're facing.
Sean Blake:
Okay. Yeah, that's really helpful. And you've spoken about this concept of Agile sins, and we know that a lot of companies have these values, they might've committed to an Agile transformation. They might've even gone and trained hundreds or thousands of people at accompany using similar tactics and coaching and educational experiences that you provide. But we still see sometimes things go terribly wrong. And I wonder, what's this concept of Agile sins that you talk about and how can we start to identify some of these sins that pop up in our day-to-day work with each other?
Chris Stone:
I guess, so the first thing I would emphasize about this is that using sin, it's a very dogmatic religious language and it's more being used satirically than with any real intent. So I just like to get that across. I'm not a dogmatic person, I don't believe there is any utopian solution. I certainly don't believe there's any one size fit to all situation for anyone. So the idea that there's really any actual sins is... yeah, take that with a pinch of salt. The reason the Agile sins came up is because I was part of... I'd done a podcast recently with a guy called Charles Lindsey, and he does this Agile confessional. And it's about one coach confessing to another, their mistakes, their sins, the things they've done wrong.
Chris Stone:
And I loved it because I'm all about de-stigmatizing failure. I'm all about sharing with one another, these war stories from one coach to another, because I've been a proponent of this in the past. I've shouted, "Hey there, I failed on this. I made this mistake. I learned from it." And I challenge others to do so as well and there's still this reluctance by many to share what went wrong. And it's because failure is this dirty word. It's got this stigma attached to it. No one wants to fail, leaders in particular. So the podcast was a great experience.
Chris Stone:
And it was interesting for me because that was the first time I'd given a confession, because I'll be honest with you, I'm someone who is used to taking confession myself. I go to this hockey festival every year and I got given years ago, this Archbishop outfit, and I kind of made that role my own way. I was drunk, and I said, "You're going to confess your sins to me." And if they haven't sinned enough, I tell them to go and do more. And I give them penicillin with alcohol shots and things like that. And I've actually baptized people in this paddling pool whilst drunk. Anyway, again, I digress, but I wasn't used to confessing myself, usually, I was taking confession, but I did so and it was a good experience to share some of my failures and my patterns was to create... and it was my own idea, to create my videos, seven videos of my seven Agile sins. And again, this was just me sharing my mistakes, what I've learned from that, with the intent of benefiting others to avoid those similar sins.
Sean Blake:
So you've spoken to a lot of other Agile coaches, you've heard about their failures, you confessed your own failures, is it possible for you to summarize down what are those ingredients that make someone a great coach?
Chris Stone: And that is a question, what makes someone a great coach? I think it's going to be entirely subjective, to be honest. And my personal view is that a great coach listens more than they speak. I guess that would be a huge starting point. When they listen more than they speak, because I've... and this is one of the things I've been guilty of in the past, is I've allowed my own biases to influence the team's direction. An approach I'd taken in the past was, "Hey, I'm working with this team and this has worked well in the past. We're going to do that." Rather than, "So guys, what have you done so far? What have you tried? What's worked well? What hasn't worked well? What can we create or what can we try next? That works for you guys. Let's have you make that decision and I'm here to guide you through that process to facilitate it, rather than to direct it myself."
Chris Stone:
Again, I find ... it's an approach that resonates more with people. They like feel that they own that decision as opposed to it being forced upon them. And there's far less, I guess, cognitive dissonance as a consequence. So listening more than speaking is a huge for me, a point an Agile coach should do. Another thing I think for me nowadays, is that there's too much copying and pasting. And what I mean by that is, the Spotify, the Spotify model came out years ago and everyone went, "Oh, this is amazing. We're going to adopt it. We're going to have tribes and chapters and guilds and squads, and it's going to work for us. That's that's our culture now."
Chris Stone:
I was like, "Well, let's just take a moment here. Spotify never intended for that to happen. They don't even follow that model themselves anymore. What you've done there is you've just tried to copy and paste another model." And people do it with SAFe as well. They just say, "Hey, we're going to take the whole SAFe framework and Chuck it into our system in this blueprint style cookie cutter." And the problem is that it doesn't take into account for me, the most important variable in any sort of transformation initiative, the people, what they want, and the culture there. So this is where another one of my values is, innovate, don't replicate. Work with people to experiment and find that Agile, what works for them rather than just copying and pasting things.
Chris Stone:
So tailor it to their needs rather than just coming in with some or seen dancing framework, and then the way I do it is I say, "Hey, well, SAFe is great. Well, it's got lots of values, and lots of great things about it. Lots of benefits to it, but maybe not all of it works for us. Let's borrow a few tenent of that." Same with LeSS, same with Scrum At Scale, same with Scrum, similar to Kanban. There's lots of little things you can borrow from various frameworks, but there's also lots of things you can inject yourself, lot's of things you can try that work for you guys, and ultimately come up with your own tailor-made solutions. So innovate, don't replicate would be another one for me.
Chris Stone:
Learning, learning fast and learning often, and living and breathing that yourself. Another mistake I and other coaches I think have made is not making time for your own personal development to allowing, day in, day out to just be busy, busy, busy, but at the same time you're going out there, coaching teams, "Hey, you've got to learn all the time. You got to try new things." But not making that time for yourself. So I always carve out time to do that, to attend conferences, to read books, to challenge myself and escape my echo chamber. Not just to speak to the same people I do all the time, but perhaps to go on a podcast with people I've never spoken to. To a different audience, maybe to connect with people that actually disagree with me, because I want that.
Chris Stone:
I don't want that homophilous thinking where everyone thinks exactly like I do, because then I don't get exposed to the perspectives that make me think differently. So I'm often doing that. How can I tend to conference that I know nothing about, maybe it's a project management focus one. Project management and waterfall isn't a dirty word either. There is no utopian system, project management and... sure traditional project management and waterfall has its benefits in certain environments. Environments with less footing, less flexible scope or less frequently changing requirements works very well.
Chris Stone:
I always say GDPR, which is an EU legislation around data protection, that was a two year thing in the making and everyone knew exactly what was happening and when they had to do it by. That was a great example of something that can be done very well with a waterfall style, because the requirements weren't changing. But if you are trying to develop something for a customer base that changes all the time, and you've got lots of new things and lots of competitors and things like that, then it varies, and probably the ability to iterate frequently and learn from it is going to be more beneficial and this is where Agile comes in. So I guess to sum up there, there's a few things, learning fast learning often. I can't even remember the ones I've mentioned now, I've gone off on many tangents and this is what I do.
Sean Blake:
I love it. It's great advice, Chris. It's really important and timely. And you mentioned, earlier on that the customer base that's always changing and we know that technology is always changing and things are only going to change more quickly, and disruptions are only going to be more severe going forward. Can you look into the future, or do you ever look into the future and say, what are those trends that are emerging in the Agile space or even in work places that are going to disrupt us in the way that we do our work? What does Agile look like in five or 10 years?
Chris Stone:
Now that again is a very big question. I can sit here and postulate and talk about what it might look like. I'm going to draw upon what I think is a great example of what will shape the next five or 10 years. In February, 2021, there's a festival called Agile 20 Reflect, I'm not sure if you've heard of it, and it's built as a festival, not conference, it's really important. So it's modeled on the Edinburgh festival and what it intends to be is a celebration of the past, the present and the future of Agile. Now what it is, it's a month long series of events on Agile, and anyone can create an event and speak and share, and it will create this huge community driven load of content that will be freely accessible and available.
Chris Stone:
Now, there are three of the original Agile manifestor signatories that are involved in this. Lisa Adkins is involved in this as is lots of big name speakers that are attached to this festival. And I myself, I'm running a series of retrospectives on the Agile manifesto. I've interviewed Arie van Bennekum, one of the original Agile manifesto signatories. They're going to be lots of events out there. And I think that festival will begin to shape in some way, what Agile might look like because there's lots of events, lots of speakers, lots of panel discussions that are coming up, coming together with lots of professionals out there, lots of practitioners out there that will begin to shape what that looks like. So whilst I could sit here and postulate on it, I'm not the expert to be honest, and there are far greater minds than I. And actually I'd rather leverage the power of the wider community and come into that than suggesting mine at this time.
Sean Blake:
Nice. I like it. And what you've done there, you've made it impossible for us to click this video and prove you wrong in the future when you predict something that doesn't end up happening. So that's very wise if you.
Chris Stone: Future proof myself.
Sean Blake: Exactly. Chris, I think we're coming almost to the end now, but I wanted to ask, given the quality of your Christmas sweater, do you have any tips for teams who are working over the holiday period, they're most likely burnt out after a really difficult 2020? What are some of the things you'd say to coaches on Agile teams as they come into this time where hopefully people are able to take some time off, spend some time with their family. Do you have any tips or recommendations for how people can look after their mental health look after their peers and spend that time in self-reflection?
Chris Stone:
Sure. So a number of things that I definitely would recommend. I'm currently producing and sharing this Agile advent calendar. And the idea is that every day you get a new bite-size piece of Agile knowledge or a template or something working in zany or a video, whatever it may be. There's lots of little things getting in there. And there's been retro templates, Christmas and festive themes. So there's a Home Alone one, a Diehard one, an elf movie one, there's all sorts. Perhaps try one of those as a fun immersive way with your team to just reflect on the recent times as a squad and perhaps come up with some things in the next year.
Chris Stone:
And there's for example, the Diehard one, it's based on the quotes from the movie Diehard so it's what you'd be doing in there, celebrate your... to send them to your team. Or there's one in there about, if this is how you celebrate Christmas, I can't wait for new year. And that question was saying, what do we want to try next year? Like this year has been great, what do we want to try differently next year? So there's opportunities through those templates to reflect in a fun way so give one of those a go. I shared some Christmas eve festive Zoom backgrounds, or Team backgrounds, give those a go and make a bit fun, make it a bit immersive. There's Christmas or festive icebreakers that you can use. What I tend to do is any meeting I facilitate, the first five minutes is just unadulterated chat about non-work things, and I often use icebreakers to do so. And whether that's a question, like if you could have the legs of any animal, what would you have and why, Sean, what would that be?
Sean Blake:
Probably a giraffe, because just thought the height advantage, it's got to be something that's useful in everyday life.
Chris Stone: Hard to take you on the ground maybe.
Sean Blake:
Yes. Yes, you would definitely need that. Although, I don't think I would fit in the lift on the way to work, so that would be a problem.
Chris Stone:
Yeah. That's just how I start. But yeah, that's just a question, because it's interesting to see what could people come up with, but there's some festive ones too, what's your favorite Christmas flick? What would put you on the naughty list this year? Yeah, does your family have any weird or quirky Christmas traditions? Because I love hearing about this. Everyone's got their own little thing, whether it's we have one Christmas present on Christmas Eve or every Christmas day we get a pizza together. There's some really random ones that come out. I love hearing about those and making time for that person interaction, but in a festive way can help as well.
Chris Stone:
And then on the mental health side of things, I very much subscribed to the Pomodoro effect from a productivity side of things. So I will use that. I'll set myself a timer, I'll focus without distractions, do something. And then in that five minute break, I'll just get up and move away from my desk and stretch and get a coffee or whatever it may be. But then I'll also block out time, and I know some companies in this remote working world at the moment are saying, "Hey, every one to 2:00 PM is blocked out time for you guys to go and have a walk." Some companies are doing that. I always make time to get out and away from my desk because that... and a little bit more productive and it breaks up my day a little bit. So I definitely recommend that. Getting some fresh air can do wonders for your mental health.
Sean Blake:
Awesome. Well, Chris, I've learnt so much from this episode and I really appreciate you spending some time with us today. We've talked about a lot of things from around the importance of sharing your failures, the importance of looking after your mental health, checking in on yourself and your own development, but also how you tracking, how you feeling. I love that quote that you shared from, we think it Socrates, that true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I think that's really important, every day is starting from day one, isn't it? De-stigmatizing failure. The origins of the word deadline. I did not know that. That's really interesting. And just asking that simple question, how did that feel? How did that feel working in this way? People were screaming your name, walk up work, when work's too busy, how does that feel? And is that a healthy feeling that everyone should have? So that's really important questions for me to reflect on and I know our audience will really appreciate those questions as well. So thanks so much Chris, for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast.
Chris Stone:
Not a problem. Thank you for listening and a Merry Christmas, everyone.
Sean Blake:
Merry Christmas.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.7 Sarah Hajipour, Agile Coach
"I absolutely loved my conversation with Sarah, she shared some amazing advice that I can't wait to put into practice!"
We spoke about the agile mindset beyond IT & development teams, how teams such as marketing and finance are starting to adopt the methodology and the benefits of doing so.
In celebration of international women's day, we discussed the future of women in agile, and steps we should be taking to support one another towards an inclusive and enabling environment.
Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧
Transcript
Caitlin Mackie:
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast for 2021. Each episode, we talk with some of the most interesting people in tech, in agile, and in leading businesses around the world to share fresh perspectives and learn from the wealth of knowledge each guest has to share. I'm Caitlin and I'm the Graduate Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile and your host for this episode. We are thrilled to be back and have some amazing guests lined up this season. So to kick us off, I'm really excited to be talking with Sarah Hajipour.
Caitlin Mackie:
Sarah has so much rich and diverse experience in the agile space. She's an agile coach, a business transformation leader, a project and program manager, and more recently a podcast host and author. She's the jack of all trades and has been in the business agility space for over 10 years. In this episode, Sarah and I chat about the significance of goal setting and in particular goal setting in unpredictable times. We chat about her most recent projects, the Agility Podcast with Sarah Hajipour and her book on Agile Case Studies.
Caitlin Mackie:
And of course with International Women's Day coming up, Sarah shared some amazing advice and her thoughts on the way forward for women in agile. She highlighted the importance of raising your hand and asking for help when you need it, as well as embracing qualities that aren't always traditionally thought of in leaders. It was such a thoughtful and insightful discussion. I got a lot of value out of our conversation and received some great advice, and I'm really looking forward to putting into practice. I know those listening will feel the same. Let's jump in.
Caitlin Mackie:
Sarah, thank you so much for joining us and spending some time with me today.
Sarah Hajipour:
Sure. Thanks for having me.
Caitlin Mackie:
So being our first guest for the year, I wanted to ask you about any new year's resolutions. Are you on track? Are you a believer in them or do you have a different type of goal setting process?
Sarah Hajipour:
That's a great question because we discussed this with a couple of friends and we realized new year's resolution is always going to be some kind of like a huge goal that we don't know if we're going to meet it or not. And thinking agile business agility and as an agile coach, I believe in the fact that let's have smaller goals and review them every three months, every six months and see where we at. Instead of looking into huge goals that we don't know what's going to happen because there's always a lot of uncertainties, even in our personal lives regarding the goals that we set up for ourselves. So yeah, that's how I look at it. Quarterly, quarterly personal goals. Let's say that.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I think if the last year has taught us anything, I think we can all agree how unpredictable things can become. So those original goals.
Sarah Hajipour:
That's true.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. The original goals might have to take a couple of detours. So what would be your advice for setting career goals in uncertain times?
Sarah Hajipour:
That's a great question. For career goals I believe it really matters that you do something that you're interested in at least. If you still haven't found your passion, that's fine especially people like young professionals. It's okay if you haven't found your passion yet, but you can still follow a basically career path starting with things that you like to do, kind of you enjoy and you learn through the way.
Sarah Hajipour:
I was listening to one of the fashion icons on YouTube a couple of days ago and the interviewer was asking her, "What was your career path? How did you get to this place you are now?" And I loved what she told everybody, the students, and that was go and find a career, find a job and learn. You first need to learn a lot of skills before you decide what you're actually good at. You decide, you understand what's your weaknesses and your strengths, right? Because not all of us have these amazing ideas all the time and that's fine.
Sarah Hajipour:
I'm not very much pro-everybody has to be a visionary and everybody has to have like big, shiny goals and ideas. I think that's perfectly fine to just find the kind of job that or the kind of career path that you're comfortable with and then sometimes get out of your comfort zone and then discover as you go. Life is to explore, not to just push yourself on the corner all the time and just compare yourself with everybody else.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. I love that. That's great advice. So you've recently added podcast host and author to your resume. Were they always career goals of yours?
Sarah Hajipour:
No, absolutely not. Well, I'm a little bit of an introverted person. So kind of sit in front of a camera even talking and having people hear me was always like, "Oh my God, I know I need to talk about this even with my teams and stuff," but I will do it only if it's necessary. What got me into podcasting was that I figured there's a lot of questions that I'm finding answers when I'm having conversations and meetups and in different groups, professional groups that I'm in. And I wanted other people to hear those as well. I talked to people who have great insights and have been way longer than me in the career. So I'm learning at the same time. And I wanted to share that learning with everybody else. That's the reason I'm doing the podcast.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I love that. And I think you kind of touched on this earlier, but I think being in the agile space, sometimes it can be a nice reminder for you to have a bit of a focus, but then reflect and understand sort of where to be more effective and adjust accordingly. I know you mentioned that with your career goals, do you think that those agile principles can be applied beyond the usual use case?
Sarah Hajipour:
I do. I believe that it's a very intuitive like agile is a very intuitive way of working and a way of thinking. That's why now it's expanded to other industries. They didn't stay with DevOps and IT and development. It is now a lot of different industries adopting this because it's a mindset change. And just not just using scrum. It's not just using Kanban. It is about understanding how to be able to reflect on and adapt to the faster changes that are happening in the world. And that also applies to our personal lives as well.
Sarah Hajipour:
I mean, I used to have set goals when I was 18-years-old, I'm going to be this at 30, but did they happen? No. In some aspects I achieved much, much more. And in some aspects I just changed my goal. I think the changes that are happening in the world that are more rapid, it demands us to change as well. Yeah.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. Awesome. So just to circle back a little bit there for your podcast just for our audience listening, what platforms can they access your podcast on?
Sarah Hajipour:
I'm on all of the main platforms. I'm in Apple podcasts. I'm in Spotify, I'm in Amazon. Most of the prominent podcast platforms.
Caitlin Mackie:
Awesome. And then just again, for our audience, your podcast is called the Agility Podcast with Sarah Hajipour.
Sarah Hajipour:
That's correct. Yes.
Caitlin Mackie:
Awesome. That's great. What do you think has been the most valuable lesson you've learned from your podcast so far? Is it something a guest has shared or something you've learned along the way?
Sarah Hajipour:
What I have learned, I have learned a lot from the people that I interview because I make sure that I talk to people who know more than me and have been in this field more than me, and in different industries. The main thing I would say is that agile business agility is about mindset rather than the tools and processes. And the fact that the world overall is moving towards a more human-centric way of working.So basically that's why I say agile is more intuitive rather than just following ABCD. Yeah. This is the core, the main thing that that I have learned from my interviewees.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, amazing. You've also started writing a book at the moment. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? How did that project begin?
Sarah Hajipour:
I actually love this project. In this book, the way I actually started writing the book was the book came first and then the podcast happened. I attend a lot of meetups. So for young professionals and even for professionals who are very much skilled in what they do, meetups are great place to meet and expand your network and learn from your peers. So I was attending all of these and I was learning from people. And then I decided I really want to have one-on-one conversations with them. And eventually I figured that a lot of the agile coaches, a lot of executive levels and a lot of consultants, they have a lot to share, but I didn't see any platform that kind of unifies that.
Sarah Hajipour:
I said, "Okay what are the learnings that we can share?" A lot of the mistakes because of the meetups groups, people feel safe to share and be vulnerable. And I was in multiple meetups so I heard very similar stories from people, the mistakes that have been repeated by a coach somewhere else. So I thought that'd be a great idea to put these in agile cases. So it's going to be Agile Case Studies and share it with everyone so. Especially the young coaches or stepping into the business, there's a lot of unknowns. I don't want them to be afraid. I don't want them to think, "Okay, this is a huge task." There's always going to be a lot of unknowns.
Sarah Hajipour:
Yes, I just see that. I kind of want to give that visibility that everybody else is experiencing the same, even if they have 25 years of experience, which is amazing, right?
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah.
Sarah Hajipour:
And that's the reason I started writing the book. So I interview with agile coaches and agile consultants that have been around at least five to 10 years and led agile transformation projects. And then from there, one of my interviewers once said, "You should do a podcast. I like to talk about this too." I'm like, "This is great" and that was like the week after I was like running around looking for tools to start my podcast.
Caitlin Mackie:
Oh, amazing. Sounds so good. What's the process been like? How have you found from ideation to where you are now, and then eventually when you're publishing it?
Sarah Hajipour:
For the podcast?
Caitlin Mackie:
For the book.
Sarah Hajipour:
For the book, so I go to these meetups and I listen to what's the coaches and the executives are sharing. The ones that are exciting for me are kind of a new for me, I will ask them, I connect with them over in LinkedIn and people are so open to sharing their experience with you. I've never had even one person said to tell me, "No, I don't want to talk about this or anything." People want to share. So I approach and I say, "Hey, I have a book outline or guideline. It's a two pager." I send it to them and I asked them if they are interested to talk to me about this and they let me know and then I'll select a time.
Sarah Hajipour:
And first session, it's like a half an hour. It's a kind of a brainstorming session. What are the key cases that they feel they want to share? Then we pick one and the session after that, they'll actually go through the case with me. I record it, draft it and then share it on Google Drive back and forth until we're happy with the outcome.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. Awesome. Do you have a timeline at the moment? When can we expect to be able to read it?
Sarah Hajipour:
I'm looking forward to around the end of 2021, because it's 100 cases and I think that I'll have that.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. Awesome. It's so exciting. Lots to look forward too.
Sarah Hajipour:
Thank you.
Caitlin Mackie:
Now, I also wanted to touch on International Women's Day is coming up and you've been in the agile space for a few years now. I assume you've probably witnessed a bit of change in this space. Have there been any pivotal moments that have sort of led to where you are today?
Sarah Hajipour:
Well, I think that a lot of women are being attracted to the agile practice, the different agile roles. And I have seen a lot more women as scrum masters, as product owners and as agile managers or agile project managers. A lot of different roles are being kind of flourishing in this area. And I've seen a lot of women contribute. One my goals actually in my book and on my podcast is to be able to find these women and talk to them regardless of where they are in the world. Yeah, I just feel that women can grow really in this area in the agile mindset, because women are more the collaboration piece.
Sarah Hajipour:
I can't tell we're less competitive. I haven't done research on that, but I have discussed it with people. Do you think that women are more collaborative rather than competitive? Because competition is great, but you need a lot of collaboration in agile and a lot of nurturing. You need to have that nurturing feeling, the nurturing mindset, that's what a scrum master does. One of the key characteristics of a scrum master has to be they have to have this nurturing perspective to bring it to the team.
Caitlin Mackie:
It's funny you mentioned because I actually have read some stuff myself about women typically possessing more of that open leadership style and that open leadership seems to complement the agile space really nicely so.
Sarah Hajipour:
That's exactly, yeah.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. Yeah. That's great and I think there's lots that we can take from that, open leadership and the direct leadership. So men and women coming forward and finding that middle ground and yeah, I feel like agile is a great space to do that in?
Sarah Hajipour:
Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, yeah. So what drove your passion? I guess what made you want to pursue a career in this space?
Sarah Hajipour:
I love the collaboration piece and I love the vulnerability because like people are allowed to be vulnerable and in the teams that they work in. And it is a culture that is more human rather than super strict. We're not allowed to make mistakes. We're not allowed to be wrong. Leaders are supposed to know everything right off the bat. But in reality, that's not the case. Leaders have to feel comfortable not knowing a lot of things that are not even known. But a lot of times I always say we're in the unknown unknown zone. And in that zone, even leaders are not supposed to know everything.
Sarah Hajipour:
So a lot of it starts with what are the other things that I learned from my interviewees is that it all starts with the leadership. So the agile transformations, the leaders have to first create that atmosphere of collaboration and of trust and psychological safety among themselves. And then only then they can help with teams to be able to thrive in those kinds of atmospheres as well.
Sarah Hajipour:
Women in agile and women in leadership. I like to say and what I see is a lot of men and women both that are changing their perspective from process of tool-centric to people-centric because it works better for everyone. And I see change really happening in all industries. I see it in retail. I see it in construction, obviously in IT, in finance system. And there's men and women like hand-in-hand trying to kind of embrace this way of thinking and this way of working.
Sarah Hajipour:
And women are being more comfortable to grow and kind of raise their hand and say, "Hey, I can make each page. I can take this role" because they understand because they bring that psychological safety that women for ages, it has been a workplace has been something that was mostly men and we're gradually getting into the workforce or the business world as females. So that psychological safety has allowed women to raise their hand and grow in different roles and leadership roles obviously.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more. Has there been any resources or networks, things like that that have helped you along your journey?
Sarah Hajipour:
Learning from everybody else like creating a network, expanding my network to kind of coming in and saying, "Hey, I don't know. I want to know." There is all of these amazing things that are happening. I like to understand how this works and I remember it was one of these founders. Who's the founder of Apple? Oh my God. Don't tell me.
Caitlin Mackie:
Steve Jobs.
Sarah Hajipour:
I love this quote from Steve Jobs that says, "There has never been a time where I asked for help and people didn't help me." So just raise your hand and say, "I need help." And what does that help that I need? I need to know about this. What does it mean? What does scrum mean to you? How does it work in your industry? How does it work? And really I think that was the key for me up until now to connect with people and just be vulnerable and let them teach me.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. I think my next question would be about how do we amplify that diverse and empowered community of women and our job in increasing the representation of women in agile? And yeah, what do you think is key to achieve a supportive and enabling environment?
Sarah Hajipour:
What I have seen and realized is that women really need to be and are being more supportive of each other. There was a study in HBR, Harvard Business Review in 2016 that said, "If there is only one woman in the pool of the interviewees, there's a zero chance for that woman to get the job, even if she's the best." So this calls for not which women are actually working great on that. Not being the queen bee, but also engaging and including other women. Because the more women in different roles, the more we are going to be receptive in those communities. That I think is a key that we understand that and support each other, help each other, build the communities around it.
Sarah Hajipour:
There is a community Women in Agile that is in different cities and different parts of the world that I'm a member of as well doing a great job. It's not just women actually in those groups. I see men participating as well, but it's predominantly women are trying to give each other insights from all aspects of the agile practices, the agile ways of working and stuff. Yeah.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. So I think what's the way forward? I guess what's your prediction for women in agile? What do we need to do to continue that momentum?
Sarah Hajipour:
I think women will do great in anything and everything they put their minds in, regardless. We're human bottom line and we all have this potential to be able to grow in whatever we put our mind and heart on, regardless of our gender. So I would love for women to kind of be able to get that holistic perspective that regardless of their gender, they can do anything and they are, we are.
Sarah Hajipour:
We read about other women who have been successful in the fields of business that you felt that probably women can't do like women astronauts. There are women physicists. Women engineering leads and all of these that have been less common. The world is changing for the better and that's great.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, yeah. I absolutely love that
Sarah Hajipour:
It's a great time to be alive.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. That's exciting. Yeah, exactly.
Sarah Hajipour:
Yes.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. I definitely think that we are beginning to see a huge increase and the visibility of female role models across so many industries. So it's great to have that. But Sarah, this has been such a great conversation. I wanted to finish with a final question for you and that was if you could give one piece of advice to women just starting their career in their industry, what would it be?
Sarah Hajipour:
I would say maybe the best advice that I can give is that we do have the power. And we need to look, number one, beyond gender and kind of have that belief that we can do anything that we want. And second is don't be shy to open up and build your community like build a community, join a community of agile practitioners of agile coaches, even people, specifically people who know more than you.
Sarah Hajipour:
And don't be afraid to ask help. Don't be afraid to say, "Hey, I'm new to this and I love to learn from you guys." Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and you're going to learn a lot that you wouldn't even expect. Just like you're going to get the result so you're going to hear things beyond what you've expected. There's a lot to human potential that could be unleashed when you just put yourself out there and let others contribute to your growth.
Caitlin Mackie:
That's amazing. That's great advice, Sarah. Loved every minute of our conversation. So thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.
Sarah Hajipour:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.