Easy Agile Podcast Ep.31 The Release Train Engineer + SAFe Summit 23

TL;DR

Henrik Kniberg, the agile coach behind Spotify's model, discusses how AI is fundamentally transforming software development. Key takeaways: AI tools like Cursor and Claude are enabling 10x productivity gains; teams should give developers access to paid AI tools and encourage experimentation; coding will largely disappear as a manual task within 3–4 years; teams will shrink to 2 people plus AI; sprints will become obsolete in favour of continuous delivery; product owners can now write code via AI, creating pull requests instead of user stories; the key is treating AI like a brilliant intern – when it fails, the problem is usually your prompt or code structure, not the AI. Bottom line: Learn to use AI now, or risk being left behind in a rapidly changing landscape.

Introduction

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping how software teams work, collaborate, and deliver value. But with this transformation comes questions: How do we maintain team morale when people fear being replaced? What happens to code quality when AI writes most of the code? Do traditional agile practices like sprints still make sense?

In this episode, I sit down with Henrik Kniberg to tackle these questions head-on. Henrik is uniquely positioned to guide us through this transition – he's the agile coach and entrepreneur who pioneered the famous Spotify model and helped transform how Lego approached agile development. Now, as co-founder of Abundly AI, he's at the forefront of helping teams integrate AI into their product development workflows.

This conversation goes deep into the practical realities of AI-powered development: from maintaining code review processes when productivity increases 10x, to ethical considerations around AI usage, to what cross-functional teams will look like in just a few years. Henrik doesn't just theorise – he shares real examples from his own team, where their CEO (a non-coder) regularly submits pull requests, and where features that once took a sprint can now be built during a 7-minute subway ride.

Whether you're a developer wondering if AI will replace you, a product owner looking to leverage these tools, or a leader trying to navigate this transformation, this episode offers concrete, actionable insights for thriving in the AI era.

About Our Guest

Henrik Kniberg is an agile coach, author, and entrepreneur whose work has shaped how thousands of organisations approach software development. He's best known for creating the Spotify model – the squad-based organisational structure that revolutionised how large tech companies scale agile practices. His work at Spotify and later at Lego helped demonstrate how agile methodologies could work at enterprise scale whilst maintaining team autonomy and innovation.

Henrik's educational videos have become legendary in the agile community. His "Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell" video, created over a decade ago, remains one of the most-watched and shared resources for understanding product ownership, with millions of views. His ability to distil complex concepts into simple, visual explanations has made him one of the most accessible voices in agile education.

More recently, Henrik has turned his attention to the intersection of AI and product development. As co-founder of Abundly AI, he's moved from teaching about agile transformation to leading AI transformation – helping companies and teams understand how to effectively integrate generative AI tools into their development workflows. His approach combines his deep understanding of team dynamics and agile principles with hands-on experience using cutting-edge AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.

Henrik codes daily using AI and has been doing so for over two and a half years, giving him practical, lived experience with these tools that goes beyond theoretical understanding. He creates educational content about AI, trains teams on effective AI usage, and consults with organisations navigating their own AI transformations. His perspective is particularly valuable because he views AI through the lens of organisational change management – recognising that successful AI adoption isn't just about the technology, it's about people, culture, and process.

Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Henrik continues to push the boundaries of what's possible when human creativity and AI capabilities combine, whilst maintaining a pragmatic, human-centred approach to technological change.

Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Maintaining Team Morale and Motivation in the AI Era

Tenille Hoppo: Hi there, team, and welcome to this new episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Tenille Hoppo, and I'm feeling really quite lucky to have an opportunity to chat today with our guest, Henrik Kniberg.

Henrik is an agile coach, author, and entrepreneur known for pioneering agile practices at companies like Spotify and Lego, and more recently for his thought leadership in applying AI to product development. Henrik co-founded Abundly AI, and when he isn't making excellent videos to help us all understand AI, he is focused on the practical application of generative AI in product development and training teams to use these technologies effectively.

Drawing on his extensive experience in agile methodologies and team coaching, Henrik seems the perfect person to learn from when thinking about the intersection of AI, product development, and effective team dynamics. So a very warm welcome to you, Henrik.

Henrik Kniberg: Thank you very much. It's good to be here.

Tenille: I think most people would agree that motivated people do better work. So I'd like to start today by touching on the very human element of this discussion and helping people maintain momentum and motivation when they may be feeling some concern or uncertainty about the upheaval that AI might represent for them in their role.

What would you suggest that leaders do to encourage the use of AI in ways that increase team morale and creativity rather than risking people feeling quite concerned or even potentially replaced?

Henrik: There are kind of two sides to the coin. There's one side that says, "Oh, AI is gonna take my job, and I'm gonna get fired." And the other side says, "Oh, AI is going to give me superpowers and give us all superpowers, and thereby give us better job security than we had before."

I think it's important to press on the second point from a leader's perspective. Pitch it as this is a tool, and we are entering a world where this tool is a crucial tool to understand how to use – in a similar way that everyone uses the Internet. We consider it obvious that you need to know how to use the Internet. If you don't know how to use the Internet, it's going to be hard.

"I encourage people to experiment, give them access to the tools to do so, and encourage sharing. And don't start firing people because they get productive."

I also find that people tend to get a little bit less scared once they learn to use it. It becomes less scary. It's like if you're worried there's a monster under your bed, maybe look under your bed and turn on the lights. Maybe there wasn't a monster there, or maybe it was there but it was kind of cute and just wanted a hug.

Creating a Culture of Safe Experimentation

Tenille: I've read that you encourage experimentation with AI through learning – I agree it's the best way to learn. What would you encourage leaders and team leaders to do to create a strong culture where teams feel safe to experiment?

Henrik: There are some things. One is pretty basic: just give people access to good AI tools. And that's quite hard in some large organisations because there are all kinds of resistance – compliance issues, data security issues. Are we allowed to use ChatGPT or Claude? Where is our data going? There are all these scary things that make companies either hesitate or outright try to stop people.

Start at that hygiene level. Address those impediments and solve them. When the Internet came, it was really scary to connect your computer to the Internet. But now we all do it, and you kind of have to, or you don't get any work done. We're at this similar moment now.

"Ironically, when companies are too strict about restricting people, then what people tend to do is just use shadow AI – they use it on their own in private or in secret, and then you have no control at all."

Start there. Once people have access to really good AI tools, then it's just a matter of encouraging and creating forums. Encourage people to experiment, create knowledge-sharing forums, share your own experiments. Try to role-model this yourself. Say, "I tried using AI for these different things, and here's what I learned." Also provide paths for support, like training courses.

The Right Mindset for Working with AI

Tenille: What would you encourage in team members as far as their mindset or skills go? Certainly a nature of curiosity and a willingness to learn and experiment. Is there anything beyond that that you think would be really key?

Henrik: It is a bit of a weird technology that's never really existed before. We're used to humans and code. Humans are intelligent and kind of unpredictable. We hallucinate sometimes, but we can do amazing things. Code is dumb – it executes exactly what you told it to do, and it does so every time exactly the same way. But it can't reason, it can't think.

Now we have AI and AI agents which are somewhere in the middle. They're not quite as predictable as code, but they're a lot more predictable than humans typically. They're a lot smarter than code, but maybe not quite as smart as humans – except for some tasks when they're a million times smarter than humans. So it's weird.

You need a kind of humble attitude where you come at it with a mindset of curiosity. Part of it is also to realise that a lot of the limitation is in you as a user. If you try to use AI for coding and it wrote something that didn't work, it's probably not the model itself. It's probably your skills or lack of skills because you have to learn how to use these tools. You need to have this attitude of "Oh, it failed. What can I do differently next time?" until you really learn how to use it.

"There can be some aspect of pride with developers. Like, 'I've been coding for 30 years. Of course this machine can't code better than me.' But if you think of it like 'I want this thing to be good, I want to bring out the best in this tool' – not because it's going to replace me, but because it's going to save me a tonne of time by doing all the boring parts of the coding so I can do the more interesting parts – that kind of mindset really helps."

Maintaining Code Quality and Shared Understanding

Tenille: Our team at Easy Agile is taking our steps and trying to figure out how AI is gonna work best for us. I put the question out to some of our teams, and there were various questions around people taking their first steps in using AI as a co-pilot and producing code. There are question marks around consistency of code, maintaining code quality and clean architecture, and even things like maintaining that shared understanding of the code base. What advice do you have for people in that situation?

Henrik: My first piece of advice when it comes to coding – and this is something I do every day with AI, I've been doing for about two and a half years now – is that the models now, especially Claude, have gotten to the level where it's basically never the AI's fault anymore. If it does anything wrong, it's on you.

You need to think about: okay, am I using the wrong tool maybe? Or am I not using the tool correctly?

For example, the current market leader in terms of productivity tools with AI is Cursor. There are other tools that are getting close like GitHub Copilot, but Cursor is way ahead of anything else I've seen. With Cursor, it basically digs through your code base and looks for what it needs.

But if it fails to find what it needs, you need to think about why. It probably failed for the same reason a human might have failed. Maybe your code structure was very unstructured. Maybe you need to explain to the AI what the high-level structure of your code is.

"Think of it kind of like a really smart intern who just joined your team. They're brilliant at coding, but now they got confused about something, and it's probably your code – something in it that made it confused. And now you need to clarify that."

There are ways to do that. In Cursor, for example, you can create something called cursor rules, which are like standing documents that describe certain aspects of your system. In my team, we're always tweaking those rules. Whenever we find that the AI model did something wrong, we're always analysing why. Usually it's our prompt – I just phrased it badly – or I just need to add a cursor rule, or I need to break the problem down a little bit.

It's exactly the same thing as if you go to a team and give them this massive user story that includes all these assumptions – they'll probably get some things wrong. But if you take that big problem and sit down together and analyse it and split it into smaller steps where each step is verifiable and testable, now your team can do really good work. It's exactly the same thing with AI.

Addressing the Code Review Bottleneck

Tenille: One of our senior developers found that he was outputting code at a much greater volume and faster speed, but the handbrake he found was actually their code review processes. They were keeping the same processes they had previously, and that was a bit of a handbrake for them. What kind of advice would you have there?

Henrik: This reminds me of the general issue with any kind of productivity improvement. If you have a value stream, a process where you do different parts – you do some development, some testing, you have some design – whenever you take one part of the process and make it super optimised, the bottleneck moves to somewhere else.

If testing is no longer the bottleneck, maybe coding is. And when coding is instant, then maybe customer feedback – or lack of customer feedback – is the bottleneck. The bottleneck just keeps moving. In that particular case, the bottleneck became code review. So I would just start optimising that. That's not an AI problem. It's a process problem.

Look at it: what exactly are we trying to do when we review? Maybe we could think about changing the way we review things. For example, does all code need to be reviewed? Would it be enough that the human who wrote it and the AI, together with the human, agree that this is fine? Or maybe depending on the criticality of that change, in some cases you might just let it pass or use AI to help in the reviewing process also.

"I think there's value in code review in terms of knowledge sharing in a large organisation. But maybe the review doesn't necessarily need to be a blocking process either. It could be something you go back and look at – don't let it stop you from shipping, but maybe go back once per week and say, 'Let's look at some highlights of some changes we've made.'"

We produce 10 times more code than in the past, so reviewing every line is not feasible. But maybe we can at least identify which code is most interesting to look at.

Ethical Considerations: Balancing Innovation with Responsibility

Tenille: Agile emphasises people over process and delivering value to customers. Now with AI in the mix, there's potential for raising some ethical considerations. I'm interested in your thoughts on how teams should approach these ethical considerations that come along with AI – things like balancing rapid experimentation against concerns around bias, potential data privacy concerns.

Henrik: I would treat each ethical question on its own merits. Let me give you an example. When you use AI – let's say facial recognition technology that can process and recognise faces a lot better than any human – I kind of put that in the bucket of: any tool that is really useful can also be used for bad things. A hammer, fire, electricity.

That doesn't have so much to do with the tool itself. It has much more to do with the rules and regulations and processes around the tool. I can't really separate AI in that sense. Treat it like any other system. Whenever you install a camera somewhere, with or without AI, that camera is going to see stuff. What are you allowed to do with that information? That's an important question. But I don't think it's different for AI really, in that sense, other than that AI is extremely powerful. So you need to really take that seriously, especially when it comes to things like autonomous weapons and the risk of fraud and fake news.

"An important part of it is just to make it part of the agenda. Let's say you're a recruitment company and you're now going to add some AI help in screening. At least raise the question: we could do this. Do we want to do this? What is the responsible way to do it?"

It's not that hard to come up with reasonable guidelines. Obviously, we shouldn't let the AI decide who we're going to hire or not. That's a bad idea. But maybe it can look at the pile of candidates that we plan to reject and identify some that we should take a second look at. There's nothing to lose from that because that AI did some extra research and found that this person who had a pretty weak CV actually has done amazing things before.

We're actually working with a company now where we're helping them build some AI agents. Our AI agents help them classify CVs – not by "should we hire them or not," but more like which region in Sweden is this, which type of job are we talking about here. Just classifying to make it more likely that this job application reaches the right person. That's work that humans did before with pretty bad accuracy.

The conclusion was that AI, despite having biases like we humans do, seemed to have less biases than the human. Mainly things like it's never going to be in a bad mood because it hasn't had its coffee today. It'll process everybody on the same merits.

I think of it like a peer-to-peer thing. Imagine going to a doctor – ideally, I want to have both a human doctor and an AI doctor side by side, just because they both have biases, but now they can complement each other. It's like having a second opinion. If the AI says we should do this and the doctor says, "No, wait a second," or vice versa, having those two different opinions is super useful.

Parallels Between Agile and AI Transformations

Tenille: You're recognised as one of the leading voices in agile software development. I can see, and I'm interested if you do see, some parallels between the agile transformations that you led at Spotify and Lego with the AI transformations that many businesses are looking at now.

Henrik: I agree. I find that when we help companies transition towards becoming AI native, a lot of the thinking is similar to agile. But I think we can generalise that agile transformations are not really very special either – it's organisational change.

There are some patterns involved regardless of whether you're transitioning towards an agile way of working or towards AI. Some general patterns such as: you've got to get buy-in, it's useful to do the change in an incremental way, balance bottom-up with top-down. There are all these techniques that are useful regardless. But as an agilist, if you have some skills and competence in leading and supporting a change process, then that's going to be really useful also when helping companies understand how to use AI.

Tenille: Are you seeing more top-down or bottom-up when it comes to AI transformations?

Henrik: So far it's quite new still. The jury's not in yet. But so far it looks very familiar to me. I'm seeing both. I'm seeing situations where it's pure top-down where managers are like "we got to go full-out AI," and they push it out with mixed results. And sometimes just completely bottom-up, also with mixed results.

Sometimes something can start completely organically and then totally take hold, or it starts organically and then gets squashed because there was no buy-in higher up. I saw all of that with agile as well. My guess is in most cases the most successful will be when you have a bit of both – support and guidance from the top, but maybe driven from the bottom.

"I think the bottom-up is maybe more important than ever because this technology is so weird and so fast-moving. As a leader, you don't really have a chance if you try to control it – you're going to slow things down to an unacceptable level. People will be learning things that you can't keep up with yourself. So it's better to just enable people to experiment a lot, but then of course provide guidance."

AI for Product Owners: From Ideation to Pull Requests

Tenille: You're very well known for your guidance and for your ability to explain quite complex concepts very simply and clearly. I was looking at your video on YouTube today, the Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell video, which was uploaded about 12 years ago now. Thinking about product owners, there's a big opportunity now with AI for generating ideas, analysing data, and even suggesting new features. What's your advice for product owners and product managers in using AI most effectively?

Henrik: Use it for everything. Overuse it so you can find the limits. The second thing is: make sure you have access to a good AI model. Don't use the free ones. The difference is really large – like 10x, 100x difference – just in paying like $20 per month or something. At the moment, I can particularly strongly recommend Claude. It's in its own category of awesomeness right now. But that of course changes as they leapfrog each other. But mainly: pay up, use a paid model, and then experiment.

For product owners, typical things are what you already mentioned – ideation, creating good backlog items, splitting a story – but also writing code. I would say as a PO, there is this traditional view, for example in Scrum, that POs should not be coding. There's a reason for that: because coding takes time, and then as PO you get stuck in details and you lose the big picture.

Well, that's not true anymore. There are very many things that used to be time-consuming coding that is basically a five-minute job with a good prompt.

"Instead of wasting the team's time by trying to phrase that as a story, just phrase it as a pull request instead and go to the team and demonstrate your running feature."

That happened actually today. Just now, our CEO, who's not a coder, came to me with a pull request. In fact, quite often he just pushes directly to a branch because it's small changes. He wants to add some new visualisation for a graph or something in our platform – typically admin stuff that users won't see, so it's quite harmless if he gets it wrong.

He's vibe coding, just making little changes to the admin, which means he never goes to my team and says, "Hey, can you guys generate this report or this graph for how users use our product?" No, he just puts it in himself if it's simple.

Today we wanted to make a change with how we handle payments for enterprise customers. Getting that wrong is a little more serious, and the change wasn't that hard, but he just didn't feel completely comfortable pushing it himself. So he just made a PR instead, and then we spent 15 minutes reviewing it. I said it was fine, so we pushed it.

It's so refreshing that now anybody can code. You just need to learn the basic prompting and these tools. And then that saves time for the developers to do the more heavyweight coding.

Tenille: It's an interesting world where we can have things set up where anyone could just jump in and with the right guardrails create something. It makes Friday demos quite probably a lot more interesting than maybe they used to be in the past.

Henrik: I would like to challenge any development team to let their stakeholders push code, and then find out whatever's stopping you from doing that and fix that. Then you get to a very interesting space.

Closing the Gap Between Makers and Users

Tenille: A key insight from your work with agile teams in the past has been to really focus on minimising that gap between maker and user. Do you think that AI helps to close that gap, or do you think it potentially risks widening it if teams are focusing too much on AI predictions and stop talking to their customers effectively?

Henrik: I think that of course depends a lot on the team. But from what I've seen so far, it massively reduces the gap. Because if I don't have to spend a week getting a feature to work, I can spend an hour instead. Then I have so much more time to talk to my users and my customers.

If the time to make a clickable prototype or something is a few seconds, then I can do it live in real time with my customers, and we can co-create. There are all these opportunities.

I find that – myself, my teams, and the people I work with – we work a lot more closely with our users and customers because of this fast turnaround time.

"Just yesterday I was teaching a course, and I was going home sitting on the subway. It was a 15-minute subway ride. I finally got a seat, so I had only 7 minutes left. There's this feature that I wanted to build that involved both front-end and back-end and a database schema change. Well, 5 minutes later it was done and I got off the subway and just pushed it. That's crazy."

Of course, our system is set up optimised to enable it to be that fast. And of course not everything will work that well. But every time it does, I've been coding for 30 years, and I feel like I wake up in some weird fantasy every day, wondering, "Can I really be this productive?" I never would have thought that was possible.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Agile Teams

Tenille: I'd like you to put your futurist hat on for a moment. How do you see the future of agile teamwork in, say, 10 to 15 years time? If we would have this conversation again in 2035, given the exponential growth of AI and improvements over the last two to three years, what do you think would be the biggest change for software development teams in how they operate?

Henrik: I can't even imagine 10 years. Even 5 years is just beyond imagination. That's like asking someone in the 1920s to imagine smartphones and the Internet. I think that's the level of change we're looking at.

I would shorten the time a little bit and say maybe 3 or 4 years. My guess there – and I'm already seeing this transfer happen – is that coding will just go away. It just won't be stuff that we humans do because we're too slow and we hallucinate way too much.

But I think engineering and the developer role will still be there, just that we don't type lines of code – in the same way that we no longer make punch cards or we no longer write machine code and poke values into registers using assembly language. That used to be a big part of it, but no longer.

"In the future, as developers, a lot of the work will still be the same. You're still designing stuff, you're thinking about architecture, you're interacting with customers, and you're doing all the other stuff. But typing lines of code is something that we're gonna be telling our kids about, and they're not gonna believe that we used to do that."

The other thing is smaller teams, which I'm already seeing now. I think the idea of a cross-functional team of 5 to 7 people – traditionally that was considered quite necessary in order to have all the different skills needed to deliver a feature in a product. But that's not the case anymore. If you skip ahead 2 or 3 years when this knowledge has spread, I think most teams will be 2 people and an AI, because then you have all the domain knowledge you need, probably.

As a consequence of that, we'll just have more teams. More and smaller teams. Of course, then you need to collaborate between the teams, so cross-team synchronisation is still going to be an issue.

Also, I'm already seeing this now, but this concept of sprints – the whole point is to give a team some peace of mind to build something complex, because typically you would need a week or two to build something complex. But now, when it takes a day and some good prompting to do the same thing that would have taken a whole sprint, then the sprint is a day instead. If the sprint is a day, is there any difference between a sprint planning meeting and a daily standup? Not really.

I think sprints will just kind of shrink into oblivion. What's going to be left instead is something a little bit similar – some kind of synchronisation point or follow-up point. Instead of a sprint where every 2 weeks we sit down and try to make a plan, I think it'll be very much continuous delivery on a day-to-day basis. But then maybe every week or two we take a step back and just reflect a little bit and say, "Okay, what have we been delivering the past couple of weeks? What have we been learning? What's our high-level focus for the next couple of weeks?" A very, very lightweight equivalent of a sprint.

I feel pretty confident about that guess because personally, we are already there with my team, and I think it'll become a bit of a norm.

Final Thoughts: Preparing for the Future

Henrik: No one knows what's gonna happen in the future, and those who say they do are kidding themselves. But there's one fairly safe bet though: no matter what happens in the future with AI, if you understand how to use it, you'll be in a better position to deal with whatever that is. That's why I encourage people to get comfortable with it, get used to using it.

Tenille: I have a teenage daughter who I'm actually trying to encourage to learn how to use AI, because I feel like when I was her age, the Internet was the thing that was sort of coming mainstream. It completely changed the way we live. Everything is online now. And I feel like AI is that piece for her.

Henrik: Isn't it weird that the generation of small children growing up now are going to consider this to be normal and obvious? They'll be the AI natives. They'll be like, "Of course I have my AI agent buddy. There's nothing weird about that at all."

Tenille: I'll still keep being nice to my coffee machine.

Henrik: Yeah, that's good. Just in case, you know.

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Thank you to Henrik Kniberg for joining us on this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. To learn more about Henrik's work, visit Abundly AI or check out his educational videos on AI and agile practices.

Subscribe to the Easy Agile Podcast on your favourite platform, and join us for more conversations about agile, product development, and the future of work.

In this episode, I was joined by Leandro Barreto - Lead Software Engineer at Miro.

Leandro is responsible for helping engineering and product teams to be more productive through metrics and KPIs with a focus on increasing their operational efficiency. Before moving to Europe, Leandro worked for an Atlassian partner company in Brazil as Head of Technical Sales.

In this episode, we spoke about;

• Ikigai - what is it and how do you achieve it?
• The benefits of OKRs
• How can we combine agile, Ikigai and OKRs?
• How Ikigai can help agile teams achieve great results and stay motivated

I hope you enjoy today's episode as much as I did recording it.

Transcript

Robert O’Farrell:

Welcome, everyone, to the Easy Agile Podcast. We have an episode today with Leandro Barreto who is a lead software engineer at Miro. I'm your host for today, Robert O'Farrel. I'm the Growth tech lead at Easy Agile. Before we kick off this podcast, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Duruwa-speaking country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Islander, and First Nations people joining us today on the podcast.

Robert O’Farrell:

Leandro currently works as a lead software engineer at Miro where his responsibility is to help engineering and product teams to be more productive through metrics and KPIs with a focus on increasing their operational efficiency. Before moving to Europe, he worked for an Atlassian partner company in Brazil and acted as a head of technical sales with the mission to increase the service offers in Latin America. Welcome, Leandro. It's great to have you here today.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Thanks, Rob. Thanks also for the Easy Agile for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here today.

Robert O’Farrell:

Fantastic. You're here to talk about Ikigai, objectives and key results or OKRs in Agile, so let's kick it off. Ikigai, what is it? Can you give us a brief or a long explanation of what it is?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, of course, of course. So, Ikigai I use it to say is a philosophy of life that means like a reason for being or the meaning of life. So, the world Ikigai originates from a village in Southern Japan, where the average life expectancy of people is over 100 years old. So, Ikigai is basically divided in four components. The first, things you love. Second, something that you are good at, then something that pays you well. And finally, something that the worlds need. So, when you put it all together, then you have the Ikigai, but this is not easy. So, let me explain a little bit of each of these companies.

Leandro Barreto:

So, the first thing is something that you love, something that makes you be present, something that you must ask yourself what do you really enjoy in doing? What makes you happy? What holds your intention that makes you lose time and forget about time? So, for example, reading, dancing, singing, painting, learning, teaching, et cetera. So, maybe it's a little bit difficult to answer right now, but understanding and seeking what you love must is fundamental so that you can have a healthy balance between learning, putting it in practice, testing, failing, trying again, and keep the circle repeating itself.

Leandro Barreto:

So, an example that I can give you is, for example, I had a jujitsu teacher that no matter the day, he was always training. And one day, I remember I got my arm hurt. And in the next day, I had a message from him like 6:00 in the morning, he was asking if I was okay. And I was waking up and he was texting me like, "Hey, are you okay? Are you going to be able to train today?" And I was like, "Whoa, take it easy, man." This is very funny because our class is 6:00 p.m. And he was punctually at the tatami or dojo. I don't know the English word for that.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah, dojo. We have dojo. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Dojo. Awesome. Yeah. And he was always punctual. And after the classes, he always said that he wants to get home earlier after the classes because he has private classes. So, from morning to night, he always keeps training and you can see the passion in his eyes when he talks about jujitsu. "It's a passion for me". A little bit exaggerated.

Robert O’Farrell:

Something that definitely got him up in the morning and kept him going throughout the day to the late evening, by the sounds of it.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. Yes. And then, you have the second component, which is something that you are good at. Something that you can always improve with yourself. So, for example, what you are really good at. It's quite hard to answer, but what the people say is that I'm do... something correct or what they say something positive that what I do. So, for example, I remember the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that says that usually, you have to spend 10,000 hours in something practicing to be good at.

Leandro Barreto:

So, don't take it as an obstacle but as a motivation to keep going, and understand this part of what you are good at. It's a good way to improve. And the third part is what pays you well? So, money is what... Some people say that "Hey, money don't bring... It's not... how can I say that?

Robert O’Farrell:

Money doesn't bring happiness?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, exactly. But it puts a roof in your head. It makes you provide a good life for your family. It makes you travel. It makes you have a hobby. So, according to Maslow, for example, one of the bases of human beings is to start thinking about security. So, we have to have this security in order we can improve as a person. So, money helps you to achieve it. Yeah. So, find something that makes your life as comfortable as you desire to, as you wish to. So, otherwise, you'll always be looking for something that you never had. So, for example, time.

Leandro Barreto:

So, you will spend so much time thinking how can you have more money? And here's the glitch, you will never be paid because you will be stuck on your daily basis thinking on how to get money instead of how to improve your skills to get money. Right? And then, you have the what the world needs. So, here, the idea is to find a proposal for what do you do and what is value to the society, your proposal. And sometimes it's quite difficult to find precisely because of the plurality of positions and responsibilities that we have nowadays. And even more today with the full expansion of technology that every month we have new positions to be filled by companies that needs different type of skills, soft skills and hard skills.

Leandro Barreto:

And here, the keyword is to serve. So, I will give a personal example. For example, one of the things that I missed most when I was a young teenager was having someone who could help me to explore the technology so I can get a job. So, it was in the early 2000 and it was quite hard.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes, very much so.

Leandro Barreto:

The internet is starting, everything is new.

Robert O’Farrell:

People on dial-up, internet was slow.

Leandro Barreto:

Do you remember that sound like prshh?

Robert O’Farrell:

Oh, yeah. It comes to me in my dreams I think. I heard it so many times in that era.

Leandro Barreto:

My family and my friends, they wasn't in the IT field. So, there is no one to help me that. So, I had to learn it by myself. Seems impossible. But it took me time to learn it and enter in a company with a good position let's say that gives me money and the possibility to learn much more faster. So, since 2013, I dedicate part of my time to teach young people, acting as a mentor to help them enter in this market so they can learn new skills. I can open paths for them, put in contact with the right people, people which is going to be important for them, and all aiming to accelerate their dev development and giving them the opportunity.

Leandro Barreto:

And this for me is very meaningful because I'm helping those who don't have any references also, and sometimes don't have a chance. And the more I serve them, the more I earn and I grow with them. So, I came across like when I was introduced to Ikigai for example, another personal example.

Robert O’Farrell:

Sorry. Before we get to that, just reiterating. So, the four components, so there's something that you really lose time in doing, something that you get into the flow of doing very easily. And then, the second component is the thing that you are very confident in doing, something that you do quite well. The third one, being something that pays you well, and the fourth one, being something where there's a need for it. So, just reiterating that. That's correct?

Leandro Barreto:

Correct. Correct.

Robert O’Farrell:

So, I guess getting to that, our second question that like for yourself, you can apply obviously in a business sense, but in a personal sense, what's been your journey there, and do you believe you've achieved Ikigai, I guess, would be my next question?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Well, actually personally, I have some things that's very clear in my life. I'm still not there, but let's say that I'm in the process.

Robert O’Farrell:

Work in progress

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. Work in progress. So, I have clear goals and I have clear in my mind where I want to go in a few years, so I don't get disencouraged if the weather is cold or warm, if the stock market goes up or down. And the only thing that I focus is to be 1% better than I was yesterday. And this provides me a security that prevents me to wasting time and things that doesn't make any sense or simply doesn't matter for me in the future. So, I take my career very, and also my personal life very serious on that point. So, yeah, let's say that work in progress.

Robert O’Farrell:

I love that word security that you use there. It draws a parallel, I think, to a word that we also use when it comes to that plan that we have, which is that focus element, making sure that we do the things that matter. Do you think that it's also given you a sense of focus too on what you take on and what you say yes to and what you say no to with regards to your personal and professional development?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When you know where you want to go, it's more easy to say yes or no to something that came up to you. Another personal example that I remember was something like 12 years ago, 12 to 13 years ago, my focus was to learn Java, for example, Java programming. Because I know in the midterm, I would like to be a Java architect. So, I have to improve my skills on that programming language.

Leandro Barreto:

So, during that time, the company that I was working was making some changes and then they asked me, "Hey, I know you are good at Java. You are learning, but we need you to start learning this another language, Ruby on Rails during that time. But you have to at least for the moment, forget Java." And then, I was like, "Mm-mm. No, no."

Robert O’Farrell:

It's not what I want to do.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. I totally understand that was a company's decision. But during that point, it begins to separate my focus on what I want to achieve from the company's purpose. So, it doesn't make any sense to continue on that company. I asked to leave. And again, best decision ever, because then I entered in another company that I learned so much. And then, in three years I became a Java architect.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. That's a fantastic example of that focus. I'm quite curious out of those four components that you mentioned before, what have you found quite easy, I guess, to achieve or to at least get clarity around personally? And what have you found more challenging?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Good question. Yeah. So, learning something that you don't know, it's always a challenge but when you have a desire or a clear focus where you want to go in a few years, things start to be clarified for you. For example, in 2014, I did extension of my MBA in United States to learn about entrepreneurship and things that for me was really, really important. But totally new field, I have no idea what to expect but it provides me the vision to... I always had the idea to have my own company in other words. So, I know that in short term, not in short term, but in midterm at least five years to four years, during that period of time, I would like to have my company.

Leandro Barreto:

So, after I did this MBA, I came back to Brazil, and then I started to put myself in situations that makes me learn these new things. And in 2016, I open up our restaurant in Brazil. So, when you have an objective, things, and it's quite funny because the universe starts to help you.

Robert O’Farrell:

You make your own luck in a lot of regards too, I think.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

So, if you had somebody who was looking to learn about Ikigai and came to you for some, for your experience and your advice in how to apply it to their lives, what do you think your advice to someone would be who doesn't know much about it?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Great question. So, one tip that I, or advice that I can give is, and I think that this is fantastic and I apply it in my daily basis. Don't waste time in small decisions on a daily basis because every day we have thousands of decisions to make and our brain capacity is limited daily, at least daily. So, there are some times that we feel like mentally exhausted after, for example, you have six meetings in a row in a day. In the end of the day, you were totally tired. Right? And I once read that the greatest minds don't waste time thinking on small things, for example, Steve Jobs always wore the same jeans and t-shirt every day. And he didn't need to think to use it. He just took it and reuse it.

Leandro Barreto:

So, during that time, what I did in 2018, more or less when I was presented to Ikigai. So, what I did, I lived alone in an apartment in Brazil. So, I decided to change it, my life. What I did, I donated my entire wardrobe of clothes with things that I almost never used. And I was only wear eight t-shirts and two jeans.

Robert O’Farrell:

Quite a collection.

Leandro Barreto:

So, I avoid making those small decisions, especially in the morning, because in the morning, you have a clear mind and you don't have to spend those in small things, because if you think on small things, probably it'll grow during the day. So, for example, another thing that helped me a lot is plan the week. So, Google Calendar exists to be used, right?

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Yes.

Leandro Barreto:

So, everything that is very important for you, events or plans that need to be done, put on the calendar. And also, talking about the clothes, separate your clothes a day earlier before you go into bed. So, you wake up more calmly, you drink your coffee calmly, and you focus your efforts on what really matters. And once you have freed your mind from thinking about these small things, you can focus your time and energy on learning new things or getting things done the way it should be. And whether it's learning a new language or a new skill, or you can also read a book in the morning because you have free time, let's say. You can focus on what matters to you exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I'm quite curious about this aspect of finding something that you really get consumed by. And I think in this digital age, we have so many things that distract us. Our phone has a lot of notifications where we have a lot of information at our beck and call and sometimes it can be overwhelming to know what we should focus on, and I guess what we can really get passionate about. I'm curious, do you have any insight into that as to how people can find that thing that they just lose themselves in and that they're super passionate about?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Another thing that worked very well for me is to turn off all the notifications.

Robert O’Farrell:

Get a dumb phone just so you don't have that level of notifications coming through. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Because I read... I don't remember where exactly, but your brain took something like 15 minutes to focus on something. So, if you don't spend 15 minutes of your time, focus on what needs to be done. You cannot focus at all. So, what I usually do, I turn off all of the notifications from my phone. So, the principal one, I just took it off and I don't care about notifications. Also, one thing that I noticed is that when I, for example, when I had Apple Watch. In the Apple Watch, even if you turn the notifications on or off, the iPhone, it keeps doing on the phone. Oh, my God. So, this is one simple device that I can say, because otherwise, you will enter in a black hole in a community and social media and news, and then you'll lose yourself.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I found that personally with the Apple Watch, having something on your wrist that vibrates is incredibly distracting. And I was always very big champion of technology, but that was one area where I just moved away from it, went back to a mechanical watch, just didn't want that level of interruption when I was trying to focus on things. So, I think it's a really key insight to focus.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. In addition to that, when you, for example, when you are in a meeting with someone and you are actually expecting a message for, I don't know, maybe your family, and then it pops up on your phone and you are in a meeting, and then you take a look into the watch and the people notice that you are not paying attention because you are looking into watch. No matter why you are looking, if it's a message or et cetera, you do provide a psychology... How can I say that in English? Oh, my God. Psychology interference. Let's say it.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yep. Psychological interference.

Leandro Barreto:

Interference. Yeah. Thank you. That will provide a negative influence to other people. So, yeah, that's why you made the right choice to move into the-

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I've heard some people that will actually ask people to leave their phones outside when they go into meetings or leave their laptop outside so that you're present and that you are engaged in the conversation. Because I think even the mere fact that you have your phone near you is a distraction. Even if there's no notifications, its presence is enough to ensure that you're not 100% present in the conversation, which I think is quite interesting from how we focus and our dependency on that rush that we get or that endorphin rush of getting that ping on the phone or that notification.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

I thought we could move on to talk about objective and key results. Or for those people that may not have come across this term before, OKRs are collaborative goal-setting methodology and used by teams and individuals to set challenging and ambitious goals with measurable results. So, to break that down further, the objective part of the OKR is simply what is to be achieved and the KR part of it, which is key results, benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective. So, getting to the heart of setting successful OKR is establishing it clear and compelling why. Is there a secret formula to creating a powerful why to get everyone on board?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Great question. So, OKRs, it's all about action and execution. And I think the secret formula, let's say it's having a well-defined proposal and also everyone engaged in seeking the result as the main objective. So, companies in my opinion are made of living ecosystem called human beings. And every human being has its own desires, proposals, goals. And en suite, unite all of the objectives of both the companies and all the people together. That's when we can achieve best results. And that's why some companies are focused on the cultural fit.

Leandro Barreto:

And this is one thing that I see growing a lot in the HR area, companies and persons that must, which the cultural fit must match. It basically means that the person has the same values and desires to achieve results as most of the people in the company or what the company understand as their force that they need to keep growing as a company. And I have seen many technically good people failing in selection, in process selection, simply because they don't adhere to cultural fit. And this is much more than a psychological issue because you don't know how to say like people that cannot work as a group.

Leandro Barreto:

So, it's better for the company to hire someone who can play as a team instead of someone who is like the lonely wolf that keeps working alone. And the results is for only him and not for the entire company. So, yeah, this is the classic example that I can see. And also, one thing that is good for that is nowadays, our fault tolerance is quite good because today at least serious companies don't punish failures. So, they even encourage you to learn.

Leandro Barreto:

And the Spotify models, I remember they say like, "Fail fast and learn fast." So, that was the fail wall was born. So, where everyone shared their failures and they can learn as a team, as a clan, guild. And this is quite beautiful because you can create such an environment where everyone can learn and grow together because humans can fail. And this is normal.

Robert O’Farrell:

Do you think that-

Leandro Barreto:

And-

Robert O’Farrell:

Sorry, I'm just curious. Do you think that companies are more focused around the why these days, or that why has become more important in their measure of success? And you mentioned cultural fit and I love this idea that more companies are much more sensitive to what is their company culture and how does this person work within, or are they going to fit into this company culture? Because the existing people in that company are aligned around their why. And if someone is coming in and doesn't align with that, they understand the impact on their success. So, do you think that company's becoming more and more aware of this and more sensitive to this?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. I think they are. So, as far as they have the right people in the right environment with the right proposal, no matter the why they will find it blindly, let's say. I think it's like a sense of behavior for the people. Because if you see someone from, as your peer, let's say, that's running to an objective that was defined by the company. And you are aligned with your values and goals. You will follow it.

Leandro Barreto:

So, this is good for both persons as human beings and also for the company because they show the proposal, they show what is the why we must be, for example, the first selling company for our product in the market, why, and then people who is working on it, they will take it as a personal objective. And this is when you make the connection between the company's objective and the people's objective because when the company grows with this why, with this north star, the people will grow together with you.

Robert O’Farrell:

I completely agree. I'm quite curious too from the opposite point of view. Do you think that employees are becoming more aware of understanding the company's why before they join the company? Because we've seen with the pandemic that a lot of companies are now moving to this remote recruitment. And so, the possibilities for employees to work for a much broader range of companies now have increased. And do you think that employees are now finding better wire alignment when they're looking for new jobs because they do have a broader pool to play in per se?

Leandro Barreto:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's why Glassdoor is so popular. So, when you are invited for a meeting or for an interview, you can see everything from the company. Like from salary to feedbacks from the people who works there or is not working anymore. And then, you can see if there's a match. And this is quite funny because like 10 years ago, which is not so popular, we are blindly thinking to work, let's say, in a position like software development. So, I have to be a software developer. I have to be a...

Leandro Barreto:

So, it was more focused on the position instead of the purpose. And now we are seeing the opposite. Now, the people are looking for the purpose, what the company can help me achieve. And it's more like a win-win-

Robert O’Farrell:

Situation.

Leandro Barreto:

... situation let's say, situation. Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think also a lot of people are really focused on how the company takes care of them as a person. They're very sensitive to the fact that they are committing their time to that company. So, there has to be that alignment around professional goals and personal goals. And I think that it's a great shift to see, to come back to the OKR side of things. I'm curious about what benefits do setting OKRs within an organization give or provide?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I think OKRs, they are very, very simple. They do not require a specific knowledge to implement it. So, when you have the people committed and engaged to the goal and the why they want to achieve, then the implementation and using of OKRs became naturally. So, company can benefit because he's straight to the point. He's like, "Objective, it's the direction. And the key results are yes or no." So, keep it simple. That's the main benefit of the companies.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I love that. The fact that there's no gray area. You either succeed or you don't, and there's a lot of clarity around that as well.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

I think that with that aspect of OKRs, in your experience, have you seen OKRs set that tend to stretch the team further than they normally would be stretched in terms of what they attempt to achieve than companies that don't set OKRs from your experience?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes, but I think it matters on what the company, what's the culture of the company, because I have seen companies that is setting OKRS in the good way, but I have seen companies that is setting OKRS because it's fancy. When it's fancy, you don't have a clear objective. You don't have a clear vision. You don't have the right people. And then, it's very tricky and you will never achieve what you are proposing.

Robert O’Farrell:

I'm curious to dig into that a bit more to get your insight on that. Because as somebody who would come into a company that might be setting OKRs, how would you determine that the OKRs are probably not as clearly defined or that they're implementing a process that don't necessarily have the depth or the belief in doing? So, how would somebody come in and determine that?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Good question. So, the idea to have a objective is like to have something that can be... How can I say that, can provide you like a, not a fear, but it's going to be like, provides you a direction for, but the people who sees it, they think like, "Hey, this is quite hard to achieve I think." So, one example for Google, for example. So, Google in 2008, they tend to launch the Google Chrome. And as I remember, the first year was like, "Hey, this is the objective." Like, "Hey, we want to launch the best browser in the world." And the key result is the number of users because the users will tell you if the browser is good or not.

Leandro Barreto:

In the first year, they didn't achieve the key result. But the second year, they rise at the bar again, like, "Hey, now we are much than double the objective." And the second year, they still didn't achieve it. But it was very, very close to it. And the third year, they pass it. So, keep in mind that the objectives must be something that seems like a challenge, a huge challenge, but at the same time, it's very inspirational.

Robert O’Farrell:

Inspirational.

Leandro Barreto:

Inspirational. Thank you so much. For those who are working on it. So, I think this is most of the point.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes. And what do you see as some of the pitfalls when setting OKRs for an organization?

Leandro Barreto:

Awesome. Awesome. So, the pitfalls from my perspective, there are some common mistakes when implementing OKR. So, for example, as I said, not having a clear vision of the goal, so people cannot engage. And especially when you have senior engineers because they don't want to work in something that don't bring purpose for them. Right? So, this is the first one, for example. The second one could be like a system that supports the monitoring of the results. So, you cannot follow up, which is quite important to keep following it if you are, we are close to achieve it. Yes or no? So, a good point.

Leandro Barreto:

And one thing that seems quite strange, but it's very, very common in the market is that your product is not finished yet. One personal example that I faced not quite recently, but do you play video games?

Robert O’Farrell:

When I get the time. I have two young boys, so I get very little time to do that these days. But yeah, I do.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I love doing, I don't have also time, but when I have a litle bit of time, I can spend. So, this little time I try to spend in the best game that I found in the market. And here is the point because some years ago, there was a game that was released and before released, there was several gaming platforms, new sites, and et cetera, that was telling us that, "Here is the game challen... no, the game changing for the gaming market, because it's going to be very good. The marketing for this game was really, really good. And the game was like highest expectations for that. It was always in the top. "Hey, you have to play this because it's going to be very great. You are going to be having a great experience on that."

Leandro Barreto:

And the funny thing is that after they launch it, a few hours later, I notice some YouTubers who start testing the game. They began to post videos about so much bugs that they are facing. And within a week, the game had to stop selling because that was a disaster.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

And... Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

I was just going to say, I can think of a few games that come to mind that fit that criteria.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Probably we are thinking the same, but I can say it, so.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Yeah. Do you find that people get OKRs and KPIs confused within an organization? Or have you ever come across any examples of that, where people misunderstand the purpose of between the two of them?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. One thing that came up to my mind is the key result is a simple measure to understand if you are going in the right direction to your objective or not, but KPIs is it's more a performance index for performing for your team. For example, if they are performing in a good way, if we have the right resources for delivering something. And so, I think this is mainly the difference is the KPI, it's a measure for you to, maybe to bonus, to create a bonus for your team or et cetera. And the KR must be not linked to bonus or salary, et cetera. Must be like a direction. Something that, yes, we are achieving it or not. Or if not, what we have to do to correct the direction.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Fantastic. So, coming around to Agile, I'm curious about this marrying of the two, of OKRs and Agile together. How can we combine Agile and OKRs in your experience and your understanding to achieve results that drive high performance?

Leandro Barreto:

Awesome. So, as the Agile manifesto says, "People over process," so I believe whenever you maintain a fail-safe environment along with a good leadership, you can get the most of your team. So, connecting what I said earlier regarding the Ikigai and when you have a good leader, for example, in a safe environment and colleagues or peers who shares the same values and goals as you, then you can extract maximum efficiency because high-efficiency teams are teams that are focused and committed with the company results, and that will achieve great business results. Sorry.

Robert O’Farrell:

I also love that aspect with the OKRs, with that clear definition, too, that Agile, that processes is that sprint by sprint activity where you're going back and you're looping around and looking at the results of that sprint and going back to the customer and getting customer feedback and that real alignment around what you're trying to achieve as well, to give you that clarity of focus that when you are going through that sprint process, you're coming back and saying, "Okay, are we acting on the initiatives that have come out of these key results that contribute to that OKR?"

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. And also, adding to that, that's why we have the goal for the sprint, right? So, we have the direction for the sprint. So, every sprint you can measure if you are achieving this goal or not.

Robert O’Farrell:

And I love it as a mechanism, too, to link back to that, that why piece to really give a clarity around why, which I think a lot of software development sometimes doesn't focus as much as they can on. So, I'm curious, so how can Ikigai mix into this? So, we've talked about that at the start and we talked about the components of it and it was a great framework about understanding a purpose, but how can we use that to achieve better results and stay motivated as a team?

Leandro Barreto:

Great question and also quite difficult. But yeah, I believe there are two thin lines that eventually met in the future. For example, the first one is like the individual as a person. So, how he seems himself in, within the organization and how can benefit, how this relationship can benefit from this win-win relationship. And also, the second one is like the individual as a professional. So, based on the skills that he already has. How can he help the company achieve the results more efficiently?

Leandro Barreto:

So, in a given timeline, these two lines will cross and then you will be able to extract excellent results because you will have a person with excellent internal knowledge, internal as a person, and also engaged with the companies is seeking as a greater objective, as a north star, and also helping your peers to grow all together.

Leandro Barreto:

And I think this is quite like a smile. When you smile at someone unconsciously, you make the other people smile too. So, when you have someone who is genuinely working with a proposal, that person will contaminate other in a good way. And then, you have a continuous string of people delivering consistent results. And I think this is the most important.

Robert O’Farrell:

Have you experienced that yourself where you see someone working with purpose and contaminate or infect how you... infect is again, not a great word, but inspired is probably the best word there, inspired the people around them to work in a similar fashion. Has that something that you've witnessed yourself?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes, yes. I remember back in the company that I was working in Brazil, that was my first day. I was like, "Hmm, there's something strange here," because everyone is so passionate on delivering their best results for their customer, that this thought influenced me in a positive way to start being like hungry for good results, not only for the company but for me as an individual, as someone who have to learn and teach others. And nowadays, I see these companies, it's achieving a great results with a great leader because even if we have a good team, we have to get someone who is a servant leader, who you can follow and maybe follow blindly in a good way. But yeah, I experience it.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. But I'm interested, is there anything that you wanted to talk about personally with regards to either of those three topics or even outside of that, that has been inspirational, I think, in your professional development, in your personal life?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think Leandro five years ago was totally different person. And when I started looking, not only by myself inside me, but also outside and the opportunities that the world can give me and how can I serve back this, or how can I provide this back to the world? This is very funny because good things start to happen. For example, I never imagined to be working here in Amsterdam. And now, I'm here in Amsterdam, working in a great company with great people, delivering such great results, which is giving me a lot of knowledge to keep learning and keep the wheel turning on, keep the cycle.

Leandro Barreto:

And I think today, like performing the best Leandro's version ever, maybe tomorrow, a little bit more, and I can provide this knowledge to other person and I can also learn from other persons, from other people. And that's very exciting. I think that's what motivates me to wake up in the morning, do my sport things like running and jujitsu, and then let's do the work.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. I love that, that reflection on the past five years, how far you've come. It sounds like you've had a lot of inspiration from a number of different sources, but is there something in there that you think was key to that? Or was it just a general progression over that time?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I tried to focus on people who have positive influence on others. So, I try to be more not equal because if you are equal, so you are the same person, so it doesn't provide value to the others, but try to be quite different in your own way. So, yeah, basically, that's what motivates me to get different sources of references and trying to be the best version of myself.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. I love this mix of the philosophical, which is for me, the Ikigai, and the concrete, well, not concrete, but the workflow aspect of the Agile side of things coming together. Have you traditionally worked in Agile methodologies or did you transition between that may be starting, because if you're from the 2000s, so you probably touched on Waterfall at some point in the past and then came into Agile. Was that your professional progression over that time?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I worked a lot with the Waterfall methodology in 2008, when I was introduced to the Agile methodology with Scrum... no, actually 2009, then I saw. "Hey, this is very, very interesting." Let's learn more about it. And then, during this time, I keep working both with the Waterfall methodology and the Agile methodology. And the more I work it with the Waterfall, the more value I saw in the [inaudible 00:54:24]-

Robert O’Farrell:

In Agile. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. And that was quite fantastic because then I also learn about SAFe and how to scale it, and yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

I'm quite curious, like because we had a similar path in that regard and I reflect on where we are with OKRs and Agile, and it's interesting that Agile brought us closer to our customer and we speak to our customer on a more regular basis, which I thought was a massive win over Waterfall where you might have months and months of development, and you've got a requirement that you're trying to put into code, and then suddenly, you have this big delivery and that's when you talk to the customer. And usually, the customer comes back and says, "We want all these things changed." And it's a real pain.

Robert O’Farrell:

Agile was instrumental in that, but then going up from there and putting that layer of why on top of that, which I think is, again, one of those big fundamental shifts on how we focus on what we are doing. Do you see anything emerging from your experience, your professional experience that is tackling another key challenge with regards to, I guess, how we work and how we deliver value?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. And for example, the customer, they want to see value on what is going to be delivered. They don't want to spend six months to wait something to be delivered. So, I think that's why cloud start being so popular, like SaaS companies, because when you are working on something that is on cloud, for example, you always have the last version. And no matter the day or the hour of the day, there will come new features. And usually, it's transparent for you. And internally from the engineering perspective, the more you deliver, the more quickly you can correct and the more you can understand the market.

Leandro Barreto:

And also, that's why some strategies, some release strategies came up so popular like Canary release. So, you deliver a few things to a particular person, and then you can test it. And if they provides you good or bad feedback, you have time to correct it. So, that's why it became so popular. So, I think during this time from now on, we must see a lot of SaaS companies starting to growing because things are in real life now, real time now, so I think it's natural.

Leandro Barreto:

By the way, there's a good strategy that was implemented by Spot 5 if I'm not mistaken that was like, but this is more for engineering perspective. They have some robots that keeps doing bad things to the servers.

Robert O’Farrell:

Oh, that's the Chaos Monkey.

Leandro Barreto:

The Chaos Monkey.

Robert O’Farrell:

That was Netflix. Yeah. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Netflix, yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

Netflix. And it would take down bits of their infrastructure and break things. Yeah, yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. It's quite hard to see in some companies, but I think this has become to be more popular during the next couple of months or years, because it will teach the engineers how to deal with that because no one wants to stay working in the weekend. You stay with your family.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I completely agree. I remember when I first heard about the idea of the Chaos Monkey, that it shocked me that someone would inflict that upon their business and upon, I guess, their systems, but then it only takes a production incident to realize that if you had something like that, that you would've built in some provision should that eventuate. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom to it. And so, I absolutely love the idea. I love this, what you were saying about real-time delivery of value to customers.

Robert O’Farrell:

And I think back to how Agile has really been fundamental in pioneering that, well, not pioneering it per se, but with the release cadence that you get from one to two-week sprints, you're putting yourself in a position where you are delivering more often. And you mentioned Canary deploys, I think within that. Is there any other deployment strategies that you've come across that also support, I guess, that immediate delivery of value to customers?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. There is another strategy which is called the Blue-Green release, but the difference between it is like the Canary release, you deliver something in the small portions, but the Blue-Green, you, like a switch that you turn on and off.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes. Yes. Right.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, you can test it. You can deliver new version of your environment or your tool, and then everyone can use it. And if something goes failed, then you have the plan B, where you can just turn on and off, and then you can rearrange the traffic to your tool. But this is very technical.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Very interesting to me, but we might lose a few of our podcast listeners. One last question from me, just within your current professional engagement, were they implementing OKRs before you joined the company? Or was that something that you've seen introduced over that period of time?

Leandro Barreto:

From my current company, they are currently working with OKRs, so I didn't participate and implemented it. So, I'm just more focused on helping the teams in implementing the KRs. There were some companies that I worked in the PEs that I helped to build it, and also to build not only the objective but also the KRs. And the objective, it's you spend so much time because you have to understand where the company wants to be in the future.

Leandro Barreto:

So, you have to know inside what we have, what we can improve, where we can improve, and then we can base it on that, base it on the objective. We can build up to four key results to be more precise in achieving this. Yeah. But it's quite challenging, but at the same time, very exciting.

Robert O’Farrell:

I think that was going to be my question in your experience in seeing a company go from not doing that to then implementing it, what were the real challenges in doing that? And how long did you see that process take before they really got good at doing that? Because it is not only setting the meaningful objectives and obviously measurable key results but also then getting the alignment from the teams around that. What were the big challenges there and how long did you see that process take?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I think it depends from company to company. I remember back in Brazil, I had to work with companies that spent months on deciding, but at the same time, I remember my own company took three months to start implementing it. So, I think it depends on the commitment of the people who is responsible for this objective. So, yeah, depends on the maturity also of the company, the people who is working, and yeah. Because the OKRs are quite old, but at the same time are quite new for people, for the companies. Right? So, this is like very challenging. And how do you balance it?

Leandro Barreto:

There are some people who doesn't know how to set the correct objective. And then, we came up with the same thing that we are discussing earlier. Like if you don't know where you're going to go, if the objective is not clear enough, no matter if you have good people or bad people, the people will not see value on that.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. And you won't get your alignment because people don't either understand or don't believe in the objective.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic insight, Leandro. And I really appreciate your time today. Again, is there anything that you'd like to chat about before we wrap it up? I'm just conscious that we have been chatting for about an hour now and gone off script a little bit too.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, actually I'd like to thank you, Rob. Thank you, Agile team, everyone. I don't want to spend much time talking also. It was a pleasure and thanks for invite again. And I hope we can think good things in the future. Like, "Hey, I hope I can provide good insights on this."

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. You certainly have. I've learned a fair bit today as well. So, I'll be going back to revisit some of the talking points from this chat. So, thank you very much again for your time, Leandro. I really appreciate it. And, yes, have a great day. It's kicking off for you and it's ending for us. So, yeah, really appreciate it, mate.

Leandro Barreto:

Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it too. Thanks again. See you. Have a great day.

Robert O’Farrell:

You too. Cheers.

Leandro Barreto:

Cheers.

‍

‍

"I had an inspiring conversation with Renae around the benefits of leaping out of your comfort zone and aligning team behaviour " - Chloe Hall

Chloe Hall- Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile is joined by Renae Craven - Agile Coach, Agile Trainer, Scrum Master Coach and QLD Chapter Local Leader at Women in Agile.

Join Renae Craven and Chloe Hall as they discuss:

• Renae’s journey to becoming an Agile Coach and Agile Trainer
• Taking a leap out of your comfort zone
• The importance of taking time to gather feedback and reflect
• Building a team environment where everyone feels safe to contribute
• Aligning team behaviour and how prioritising learning impacts team delivery
• Why sitting all day is bad for you and how to bring movement into your work routine
• + more

Transcript

Chloe Hall:

Hello and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Chloe, Marketing coordinator at Easy Agile, and I'll be your host for today's episode. Before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dhuwal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders and First Nations people joining us today. Today we have a very exciting episode for you. We will be speaking to Renae Craven. Renae is an Agile coach, Agile trainer, scrum master coach, BASI Pilates instructor, and runs her own Pilate Studio.

Renee is also a chapter local leader at Women in Agile Brisbane and is the host of the podcast The Leader's Playlist alongside David Clifford. Renae's passion in life is to help people to be a better version of themselves by raising your awareness of areas they wish or need to improve them and to support them in their learning and growth through these areas. According to Renae, coaching is not about telling people what to do. It is about questions to allow them to dig deeper, uncovering realizations and their desire for change. Welcome to the podcast, Renae. Thank you so much for coming today. Really appreciate it and very excited to unpack your story, your journey, and all the success you have achieved, which is amazing. How are you today anyways?

Renae Craven:

I'm all, I'm good. Thank you, Chloe. It's Friday, so I'm always a bit wrecked on a Friday. Looking forward to sleeping in on the weekends and things like that. So yeah, Friday I'm already, always a little bit dreary, but other than that I'm fine.

Chloe Hall:

Well, that's good. Friday afternoon definitely can always do that to you. I'm very pumped for a sleep in as well. I think let's just get straight into it. So some of that I wanted to start was I just want to unpack you as a person, Renae, and kind of your story, who is Renae and the journey you've taken to become so successful today. So if you wanted to provide a little bit of background about yourself.

Renae Craven:

How far back do I go? So I did IT at uni, Information Technology at uni. So I started my career out as a graduate developer, software developer, pretty crap one at that.

Chloe Hall:

Surely not, I don't agree with that. I can't see it.

Renae Craven:

I knew enough to get by, but it was definitely not going to be something that I was going to do for the rest of my life. But back then I was 20 and kind of just was doing things that you were supposed to do when you grow up. You're supposed to go to school and you're supposed to do well in grade 12 and go to uni and get a degree and then get a job.

Chloe Hall:

Definitely.

Renae Craven:

So yeah, I ticked all those boxes and found myself with a degree in a job in a good organization. And I was in that development job for a couple of years and then I kind of moved more into team leadership and I was a team leader for a while and then I became a scrum master back in 2010. So that was when I discovered Agile.

Chloe Hall:

Okay. Yup.

Renae Craven:

And I think the rest is kind of history. So when I discovered Agile, things started to make more sense to me. Talking to people, having teams, working together, collaborating together, solving problems together, getting multiple brains onto a problem. That kind of thing was one thing that I never made sense to me when I was a grad straight out of uni. And I'm like, "What do you mean?" Because even during my university, I was a little bit different and I was remote. I did university remotely years ago and with a group of four others, there were four others, it was a group of five. We did everything together, we did all our group assignments, we studied together, we ate lunch together, we just kind of did.

Chloe Hall:

So with the exact same group?

Renae Craven:

Yeah. All the way through uni. I went from that kind of group setting to working and more of an individual on my own like if I've sat in a cubicle with walls that were higher than me, I didn't have to speak to anyone else if I didn't want to. And that never really sat well with me. It was never kind of who I was. So when Agile was, Scrum specifically was here's all these people we're going to throw together in a team and here's all of the problems and you work out together how you're going to solve it.

Someone's not going to tell you what to do or how to solve it, you've got to figure it out as a team, it was a much more, cool this is what makes sense, this works better. Why wasn't it always like this? So yeah, that's kind of where my Agile journey started and it kind of progressed as I did scrum mastering for quite a few years in different organizations, different scenarios, different contexts. And then I guess I was able to comfortably call myself an Agile coach I would say maybe 5, 6 years ago. I mean, there's nothing really that you can do that you go tick, Oh, I'm an Agile coach now.

Chloe Hall:

There's no kind of straightforward degree or certification.

Renae Craven:

No, it's really just experience. And I had experience around and people were telling me, "You can call yourself a coach, an Agile coach now, you've got plenty of experience". I'm like, "Yeah, but I feel like there's so much more that I need to know or that I could learn". So I don't really feel comfortable. But I was working for a consultancy, so that was just how I was being marketed anyway. So that was kind of 5, 6, 7 years ago that that started to happen. And then I do other things as well, like Agile training. I love training people, I run training courses, do the coaching as well. And then I've got my Pilates as well.

Chloe Hall:

Just an all rounder, a lot going on, that's for sure. I think as well, I just want to unpack, you had that transition when you were a graduate developer and you found it quite isolating. And then you came into this concept of Agile when you are working in teams. Was it when you started doing that Agile, did that kind of spike like a passion, a purpose of yours and that's what led you down that Agile training, Agile coaching road?

Renae Craven:

I think, I mean purpose, I still don't know if I know what my purpose is in life. Passion. I think what it helped me understand about myself is where some of my strengths were. And my strengths aligned with what was needed to be a scrum master and a coach later on. So the ability to facilitate, that's a big part of being a scrum master, a big part of being one of the key things about being a coach. And that was just something that I was kind of naturally able to do, but I didn't know until I started doing it, if that kind of makes sense.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. I feel like, isn't that always the way, It's like you don't know something or you don't really know your strengths until you just step into it. You've really got to get out of your comfort zone and just try new things, experience new things. Otherwise, you're never going to know.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, can't trying to create that equal participation in a room or in a workshop from a facilitation and facilitating a group of people from different walks of life to an outcome and just letting it kind of flow and let the conversations flow. But still, you've got to get to this outcome by the end of the day or end of the workshop. That was something that I was naturally able to do. And I mean, my first workshop, how I facilitated that, I don't even remember what it was, but I'm sure how I facilitate now is very, very different. But it was still something that I loved doing, that I enjoyed doing. And the training part of it, it's funny because at school I used to hate public speaking. I used to hate.

Chloe Hall:

You sound like me.

Renae Craven:

Yeah. All of that, how I used to get up in English and do an oral exam and things like that. I hated all of that stuff. I was very happy to just hide in the background and never answer a question or never cause any trouble or be disruptive or whatever. Except in maths class I was a little bit disruptive in math class.

Chloe Hall:

I am resonating so much with you right now because I was literally the exact same. And I've always had a bit of a passion for math. So in maths I was super outgoing, would ask so many questions. But in English my biggest fear was public speaking. I just could not stand up for the life of me. It was the worst. I was always so nervous, everything about it. And I think that's really interesting to see how far you've come today from what you thought back then. Was there any type of practices, lots of work that you had to do on yourself to get to this point today?

Renae Craven:

I think similar to what you said before, you got to get out of your comfort zone. And I think, especially early on in my career, that being pushed out of my comfort zone. There's a few leaders that I was working for at the time that, well a handful of people that over the years have pushed me out of my comfort zone. And in the earlier days where I wouldn't have done that for myself. So doing that for me or I didn't really have a choice because I was a good girl and I followed orders back then. It was just something that I went, "Oh okay, well that's cool". I'm glad in hindsight, I'm glad he did that because I wouldn't be where I am right now if I wasn't thrown into the pilot team, the pilot agile team. So yeah, there's things like that where I've been pushed into my comfort zone and just had a go and found out that, oh, it wasn't so bad after all.

Maybe I could do that again. And then you start to build your own kind of resilience, you go, well I've did this before so that's not much harder. I reckon I could do that. Or it's kind of thinking about it like that, but it's also changing. It was shifting my mindset to be you've got to get out of your comfort zone, you've got to screw up to learn. The way that it was at school where you got rewarded for being correct, you got rewarded for doing the right thing. And that's not how I learn. That's not how a lot of people learn. You have to screw up to then go.

Chloe Hall:

Definitely.

Renae Craven:

Okay, well next time I do that I'll do this instead.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely.

Renae Craven:

Or getting that feedback of how you did this, well next time maybe you could do this or whatever it is. Just getting that feedback. Whereas, I never got any of that at school. It was always Renae's perfect angel child, whatever it was.

Chloe Hall:

Still, nice though, but yeah.

Renae Craven:

Nice for the parents. Can we have more of Renae's in our class, nice for mom and dad. But in hindsight, it didn't really do much for setting me up for how.

Chloe Hall:

For reality.

Renae Craven:

Yeah

Chloe Hall:

Really.

Renae Craven:

Exactly.

Chloe Hall:

Especially because I've recently gone through that transition from graduating uni into a full time job and working for Easy Agile, I'm always being pushed out of my comfort zone in a good way. Everyone's so supportive, they're always like, "Oh Chloe, try this, try that". And I'm just like, "okay, yep, I can do it". And if it doesn't go amazingly well that's okay. I've learned something and I can do it better next time.

Renae Craven:

Yeah.

Chloe Hall:

You can't just sit in your comfort zone forever, you don't get that feeling of when you do something outside of your comfort zone, you just feel so good after and you're like, oh, prove to myself I can do this.

Renae Craven:

Yep. And I think the big part of that is acknowledging the learning is sitting down. So one of the things we do, I do as a coach is one of the key times for a team or an individual to learn is to actually sit down and reflect back and then what was good, what was bad, and what am I going to do differently the next time. And I coach teams to do that, but I have to do that myself as well. So kind of realizing that as a practice, that's something that I have to do is sit down and when I do these things I would need to gather feedback and then I have to sit down and reflect on how it went. What I think I can do better or do differently the next time around I do something like this so that I am also myself improving in the things that I do. So it's really having that time and that practice to learn to sit down and what did I learn?

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, I do. And I agree with that. You need to take the time to understand, reflect, realize what you have learnt. Otherwise, life is so busy and you just keep going and going and going and you can just completely forget and it's good to take that moment. I really like how that's something that you do in your Agile coaching as well. What else do you do when you're coaching teams? What other elements are there?

Renae Craven:

Some of the stuff I've already spoken about, having that equal, trying to get that equal participation, equal voice. Trying to, the buzzword is psychological safety, but trying to make, trying to build an environment for a team where everyone feels safe to ask a question or to voice their opinion or whatever it is. And when we've come from, as a coach, what we're doing is usually coaching teams, people, organizations, through a shift from a certain way of working to an Agile way of working. And that means that the whole telling people what to do and when to do it and how to do it is gone. That's gone. And now you want to build that capability within the team itself. So creating that safe space so that the

team can ask questions and understand what they have to do so that they can collectively deliver something as opposed to someone just telling them what to do.

So it's using your brain, using the collective group brain as well, instead of just having, not using your brain really, just waiting to be told what to do and then you'll know what to do, you just do it. But collectively solving a problem together as a team and then figuring out as a team how we're going to solve that or how are we going to deliver that is something that is quite, that's the bit I love as a coach, working with teams, building that kind of environment where they do feel safe to ask the dumb questions and things like that.

Chloe Hall:

And not have to be like, I think this is a silly question, but you definitely want to remove that.

Renae Craven:

And I think the other part is the learning still, it's exactly the same. It's taking the focus, trying to get the focus off, we must deliver and then we'll do some learning stuff if we get time trying to flip that around so that your, "No, no, no, you need to learn in order to get better at delivery". So take that focus, because a lot of teams will just say, we've got all these deadlines, all of this delivery pressure, we have to get this stuff done. We don't have time to sit down and think about what we've learned or how we can get better as a team. They're never going to get better as a team if they just keep in this endless delivery cycle. Making the same kind of time wasting things over and over and over again. So it's kind of flipping the mindsets of the teams as well to go, "No, hang on, we need to do this otherwise we're not going to get better as a team".

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely. And I think that's where the Agile retrospective fits in perfectly. And I know I actually just came out of my retrospective with my team and we do that weekly and it's so good to come out of that with action items too. And it's like, okay, next week this is how we're going to get better. This is how we're going to advance, this is our focus and there's also no hidden problems because it comes up every Friday, we talk about it. So you're not going into Monday the next week with a grudge or you're annoyed about something with the workflow of the team. You've addressed it, you've left it in the last week, you've brought the action with you obviously, and hopefully it's going to get better from there.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the key. It's the whatever we've decided in our retrospective of what we're going to do differently, we're doing that differently the next day or Monday in your case. It's not something we talk about and then we just kind of ignore it and we just talk about it again in two weeks time or whatever it is. It's the putting into practice the decisions you make as a team and those retrospectives all of the time. They're not massive actions either. They're just little tweaks here and there.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, there's small things.

Renae Craven:

They just kind of build up over time.

Chloe Hall:

And that's the thing, it's like if you do it on a regular occurrence, they are small things, but if you are not doing it regularly, then that's when they build up and they become big things, big problems and massive blockers within the team as well.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, absolutely.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. So I'm wondering too, Renae, when you do your Agile coaching and your Agile training, so you do that on an individual basis as well as teams. Do you think there's an aspect of the mindset, the agile mindset there, and does each individual need to come to work with that agile mindset for the team to be able to flow better?

Renae Craven:

Mindsets. If everyone had the same mindset then it would be robots or.

Chloe Hall:

True.

Renae Craven:

The world would be very boring.

Chloe Hall:

Very good point.

Renae Craven:

I think that's a bit, for me when I think about a team, an agile team, as long as there's some alignment on how the team behaves, why they exist, what their purpose is and how they treat each other and how they solve problems together, then the mindsets of the individuals within that team, they can be different. And that's fine as long as there's that agreement amongst everyone of this is how we are going to behave. I come up against people all the time who have been forced to work in this agile way. So their mindset's definitely not in the mindset that you need for an agile team, but if they're in an agile team and there's people in that team that have got the mindset or the behaviors that you need to have in order to deliver in an agile way, over time it kind of balances out.

And over time those the mindsets will start to shift as well as they see how other people in their team are behaving, how their leaders are behaving, things like that. So I kind of always think of it as more of a behavioral thing than a mindset thing. How do we make decisions, like I said, how do we treat each other, how do we approach problems, who are our customers, all of that sort of stuff. It's more that behavior that I like to, instead of me thinking, oh, they don't have the mindset, they don't have the mindset, I just kind of look at how they behave. Because at the end of the day, you can't force that

mindset. But as a team, when they start humming to working together as a team, they're going to be delivering what they need to deliver. And they all just, that's the whole cross-functional part of it. You're bringing together different minds, different backgrounds, different experiences, different skills, all of that stuff.

Chloe Hall:

Definitely.

Renae Craven:

You're putting them in a team together so that they can use their skills. They're all those different pieces to solve these problems.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, no, definitely. I think the way people behave, it has a lot to do with it as well. And I think on that too, you can be in the right type of mindset, you can behave in the right way. And that has a lot to do with the way you're showing up at work as well. It's the way you come to work. If you're had a bad morning, then that's going to impact how you are that day. Or if you've waking up that morning and you have kind of a set morning routine that gets you into that good routine for the day, that good mindset and behavior, then it can help a lot. And I think as well, this is something I'd love to chat to you about too, because you've got the background of Pilates, you're in your own studio and you've been a instructor for how many years now?

Renae Craven:

It'll be a year and a half since I qualified.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. Nice. Yeah, so I'm also an instructor. I've been teaching I think for about six months now. But I'm just wondering too, so you've got your two passions, Pilates studio owner and then also an Agile coach. Is there that element of setting yourself up for the day in the morning, do you think if someone, they meditate have the type of morning routine they exercise, can they behave better at work essentially? What are your thoughts on that?

Renae Craven:

Yeah, I think definitely the better you feel in yourself or the way feel within yourself, definitely has a direct correlation to how you come across how you behave at work. So yeah, if you've had a rushed morning or a traffic was crap on the way to work or whatever it is, then definitely you're going to be quite wound up by the time you get to work.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely.

Renae Craven:

It's going to impact the way that you respond to questions or respond to people or respond to your team or whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely. But myself, I don't really have a set routine in the morning. I go to gym but I don't go to gym every day. But the mornings that I do go to gym, I never feel like going because no, I just want to sleep.

Chloe Hall:

It's early. Yeah.

Renae Craven:

Yeah. But I have to go in the morning or I won't go to gym. Gym's something that, it's a bit of a love hate relationship. I know I have to do it, but I don't like doing it.

Chloe Hall:

Not even after? That feeling after?

Renae Craven:

Afterwards is good. It was like, but from, oh thank God that's done.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah.

Renae Craven:

Tick I'm done for the day.

Chloe Hall:

Out of the way.

Renae Craven:

If it was in the afternoon, if I went to gym in the afternoon I wouldn't go. It would just be, "Nah, it's too hard or I can't be bothered, I'm too tired". So getting up first thing in the morning, I set my alarm 15 minutes before my gym class starts.

Chloe Hall:

Wow. That is effort.

Renae Craven:

I know.

Chloe Hall:

That is good.

Renae Craven:

I race to get there but I have all my clothes set out the night before so I don't even have to think. I just get out of bed, I put my clothes on and I get in the car and I drive to the gym and.

Chloe Hall:

I do the same thing.

Renae Craven:

I do my class, I haven't had time to talk myself out of it just yet. But afterwards it's like, oh yes, excellent. That's done for the day. And yeah, it is nice to know that you have done that for the day as you start your work day as well. So on my gym days, that's probably my routine to get myself ready for work. But other days they're a little bit more relaxed I guess. I think if anything having a coffee is my, I cannot deal with the world without coffee. So whether I'm at home or I'm in the office, the first thing I'll do is if I get to the office I'll get a coffee on the way in. So I'm drinking coffee as I walk into the office. So yeah, I guess that you could call that my routine.

Chloe Hall:

No, I think a lot of people, a lot of listeners as well will be able to resonate with that. And I used to be like that and then it just, coffee wasn't sitting well with me. I found it was just really triggering my nerves for the day and everything. So it was so hard. I went from drinking two to three coffees a day to getting off it and now I'll drink like a matcha instead. But that was such a big part of my morning routine as well and getting off it was one of the hardest things I've had to do.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, I did that once. I detoxed for one of those health retreat things years and years ago and I had to detox off coffee and everything actually.

Chloe Hall:

Oh really?

Renae Craven:

Before two weeks leading up to it and yeah, coffee was hard.

Chloe Hall:

Yes.

Renae Craven:

Very, very hard. Because I love the taste of my coffee. I just have it straight, I don't have any milk so I love the taste of my coffee.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, wow. Okay.

Renae Craven:

But maybe it's also the other benefits of not wanting to kill people that coffee does to me as well. I can deal with the world now. I've had my coffee.

Chloe Hall:

You're like okay, all right. Who needs coaching now? Who needs training? And I'm ready to rock and roll.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, I'm good now.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well the reason as well why I wanted to talk about the whole exercise correlation with work was because I did read your article on LinkedIn about what sitting all day is doing to your body and you're saying how Pilates can help with that. The section that I think resonated really well with me was when you said, when COVID-19 shut down the world and confined everyone working from home, those people who were working in the office environments, you found yourself sitting bent over a PC at home all day and it's back to back virtual meetings, you don't really have that chance to get up, have a break, go for a walk around and everything. And I think, I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be in that reality and even after COVID it is still the case. So I think just for the sake of everyone listening, is there any tips or anything to get you up, get you moving so you're not experiencing that on the daily.

Renae Craven:

I think the other difference is before COVID, sure you were sitting at your desk all day at work but you are also walking to the office and walking to meetings and walking to the kitchen and walking to go and buy your lunch and things like that. And you weren't kind of back to back meetings either. So you had that chance and if you were walking from room to room so you were getting up. Whereas at home it's just back to back meetings and I don't know about you but I run to go to the bathroom in between meetings.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. I do. I actually do. Yesterday actually bit triggered by that.

Renae Craven:

I did that too yesterday actually. And even at the height of COVID, the back to back meetings were so bad. I didn't even have a lunch break. I was working, I was making my lunch in meetings and daylight saving as well. It always throws things because Queensland stays where they are and it throws everything out so. So in my article actually, it was more of a paper that I had to submit as part of my instructor course.

Chloe Hall:

Oh cool. Yeah.

Renae Craven:

And as well as my 600 hours of practice and.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. I can relate, I didn't have to do the article though.

Renae Craven:

So I kind of just pulled bits out of that and because I thought this is still relevant and maybe it will resonate with people and especially the people that I'm linked, LinkedIn is the audience, right? So that just things that happen from sitting, sitting down's bad for you, full stop. Where you're working or sitting on a couch all day, whatever it is, sitting down's bad for you. And the longer you sit, the more kind of slouched you get. The more your spine is always kind of in the rounded state, the less you are using your back muscles, your back extensors, the more you're sitting down your pelvis, your hip flexes are shortening because you're always sitting down and that kind of tightens your lower back. And then you've got your, even just using your mouse, you've got that shoulder that's doing extra stuff or backwards and forward stuff constantly. And then your neck as well and your traps, everything gets kind of tight.

So things that you can do. I wrote a, my article's got an example class plan to undo the effects of sitting down all day in an office job. But that class plan uses all of the apparatus. So there's things you can do on the mat or the reformer or the Cadillac or under chair. But I run a few online classes after work and they started during COVID and they're still going. And I designed those specifically to undo, I know those people have been sitting down all day. So my classes are very much unraveling everything that they've done the all day.

Chloe Hall:

The body.

Renae Craven:

I mean my classes, my math classes anyway, they're usually focused around, I mean tips for people not actually coming to a class but undoing, you're doing the opposite of what you've been doing all day. So if you sit all day, stand up, walk around, at least listen to your smart watch when it tells you take a break. Stand up and take a break. And walk out to the letter box and get some sunshine at the same time, if you're lucky there's not much suns around these days.

Chloe Hall:

If it's out, make a run for it.

Renae Craven:

Doing kind of shoulder rolls and neck stretches and hip flexors stretches so that you, like I said, just undoing, doing the opposite of what you do when you're sitting. So think about the muscles or the tendons or whatever they're, even if you're not familiar with what they are, you know there's some at the front of your hip. And when you're sitting you can imagine that they're not being used, they're just being stuck there. So straighten them. Stretch them. If you're rounded all the time in your spine, then press roll your shoulders back, press your chest for and use your back muscles. And I don't even know if people are that familiar with back extensors. I don't know if people understand that. Because you've got your spine and then you've got these muscles that they're twisted that run either side of your spine. I can't remember the scientific name for them right now.

Chloe Hall:

No. Me neither.

Renae Craven:

We just call them back extensors. And when you straighten in your spine, they're working and you're switching them on. It's just working your bicep, strengthening that muscle when you straighten your spine and you can even go past straight and go kind of backwards. You are using those back muscles and you're strengthening those back muscles and it'll stop you being like a rounded.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, just bent over in the computer all day.

Renae Craven:

Hunched over.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. That's it. You don't want that.

Renae Craven:

So it's really just doing the opposite or yeah. Joining online classes. I can put you through some exercises.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, well we'll definitely share that article as well with this podcast so people can see that program or might be something that helps. For me at work we're very fortunate that we have a standing desk and I think that that is just so amazing. Because if I work from home, I don't have a standing desk and I can feel the difference. My body just feels, you just don't feel right and I feel more fatigued and yeah, I just need to get up and move more often.

Renae Craven:

Yeah. If you stand all day, it's the same thing. You've got to sit as well. You've still got to do the opposite. Standing is like, because you can get slouch when you stand as well, so you can still over time get tired and kind of slouch over or you're still kind of tense in your shoulders and things like that. So you can kind of need to still be aware of your posture when you're standing and just self-correct or still go for walks, still give everything a chance to move the way it's supposed to move not stand still all day.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely. On that, Renae. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Really enjoyed this chat with you. I think there's a lot that our listers will get out of it and I definitely want to continue more of this Pilates conversation too.

Renae Craven:

Thank you Chloe. Thanks for having me.

Chloe Hall:

No worries, thank you.