Easy Agile Podcast Ep.4 Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO & Managing Director at Pretty Agile

"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.

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It's more important than ever to be customer-focused.

We talk about the danger of 'walk-up-work' and how to avoid this through proper sprint planning.

Melissa also gives an update on how agile is spreading to non-technical teams.

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Transcript

Sean Blake:

Hello everyone. And welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. We have a really interesting guest with us today. It's Melissa Reeve, the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile. We're really excited to have her on today. Melissa Reeve is the Vice President of Marketing at Scaled Agile, Inc. In this role Melissa guides the marketing team, helping people better understand Scaled Agile, the Scaled Agile Framework. In other words, SAFe and its mission. She also serves as the practice lead for integrating SAFe practices into marketing environments. Melissa received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and she currently resides in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, chickens, and dogs. Melissa, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Melissa Reeve:

It's such a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate it.

Sean Blake:

Great. That's great. I really like your enthusiasm straight off the bat. So what I'm really interested in hearing about, Melissa is a little bit about how you got to where you are today. What have been the highlights of your career so far and how as a marketer, did you find yourself in the Agile space?

Melissa Reeve:

Well, thanks for asking. And I have to tell you, but just before the podcast my husband knocked on the door and he was all proud because we just got a new set of chickens and one of the chickens had laid its first egg. So that's been the highlight of my day so far, not necessarily the highlight of my career.

Sean Blake:

So you'll be having scrambled eggs and eggs on toast probably for the next few weeks now.

Melissa Reeve:

I think so. So back to the career, I really fell into marketing. My background was in Japanese literature and language. And I had anticipated this great career and international business in Asia. And then I moved out to the Navajo Indian Reservation and just pivoted. Found my way into marketing and found my way into Agile right around 2013 when I discovered that there was an Agile marketing manifesto. And that really was a changing point in terms of how I thought about marketing. Because up until that point, it really considered marketing in what's termed waterfall. Of course, marketers generally don't use the term waterfall.

Melissa Reeve:

But then I started to think about marketing in a different way. And when I came across Scaled Agile, it brought together so many elements of my career. The lean thinking that I'd studied when I studied in Japan and the lean manufacturing, it was Agile marketing that I'd discovered in 2013 and just education and technology have always been part of my career. So I really consider myself fortunate to have found Scaled Agile and found myself in the midst of scaling Agile into both enterprises, as well as marketing parts of the enterprise.

Sean Blake:

Oh wow, okay. And I noticed from your LinkedIn profile, you worked at some universities and colleges in the past. And I assume some of the teams, the marketing teams you've worked in, in the past have been quite large. What were some of those structures that you used to work in, in those marketing teams? And what were some of the challenges you faced?

Melissa Reeve:

Yes, well, the largest company was Motorola. And that was pretty early on in my career. So I don't think I can recall exactly what that team structure is. But I think in terms of the impediments with marketing, approvals has always been an issue. No matter if you're talking about a smaller organization or a larger organization, it seems like things have to go up the chain, get signed off, and then they come back down for execution. And inherent in that are delays and wait states and basically waste in the system.

Sean Blake:

Right. So, what is Agile marketing then and how does it seek to try and solve some of those problems?

Melissa Reeve:

Well, I'm glad you asked because there's a lot of confusion in the market around Agile marketing. And I can't tell you how many news articles I've read that say marketing should be Agile. And they're really talking about lowercase Agile, meaning marketing should be more nimble or be more responsive. But they're not really talking about capital-A Agile marketing, which is a way of working that has principles and practices behind it. And so that's one aspect where there's confusion around Agile marketing.

Melissa Reeve:

And then another aspect is really how big of a circle you're talking about. In the software side when someone mentions Agile, they're really talking about a smaller team and depending on who you talk to, it could be anywhere from five to 11 people in that Agile team. And you're talking about a series of teams of that size. So when you're talking about Agile marketing, you could be talking about an individual team.

Melissa Reeve:

But some people, when they're talking about Agile marketing, they're talking about a transformation and transforming that entire marketing organization into an Agile way of working. And of course, in the SAFe world, we're really talking about those marketing teams that might be adjacent to a SAFe implementation. So, I think it's a good question to ask and a good question to ask up front when you're having a conversation about Agile marketing.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay. And for those people that don't know much about SAFe, can you just explain, what's the difference between just having a marketing team now working in a capital-A Agile way, and what's the difference between an organization that is starting to adopt Scaled Agile? What's the difference-

Melissa Reeve:

Sure.

Sean Blake:

...between those?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So what software organizations found is that Agile teams, so those groups of five to 11 people, that way of working works really well when you have a limited number of software developers when you started to get into the world's largest organizations. So I think of anybody on the Global 2000, they might have tens of thousands of software developers in their organization. And in order to leverage the benefits of Agile, you needed to have cadence and synchronization, not only within a team, but across multiple teams up into the program level and even the portfolio level.

Melissa Reeve:

And the same holds true with large marketing organizations. Imagine you're a CMO and you have 6,000 marketers underneath you. How are you supposed to get alignment to your vision, to your strategies that you're setting if you don't have a way of connecting strategy to execution. And so the Scaled Agile Framework is a way of taking those Agile practices across multiple teams and up into the highest levels of the organization so that we're all moving in a similar direction.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay, I think that makes sense. And from a software team's point of view, one of the benefits of Agile is that it helps teams become more customer focused. And many would argue, well, marketing has always been customer focused. But have you found in your experience that maybe that's not so true? And when marketing teams start to adopt Agile, they realize what it really means to become customer focused.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. I mean, you raised another great point because I think most marketers think that they're customer focused. Like many things in the world, the world is a relative place. So you can, in your mind, in theory, be thinking about the customer or you can be actually talking to the customer. So I just finished what I call the listening session. And it was during our hackathon, which is our version of an innovation, couple of days worth of innovation. So it was eight hours on a Zoom call with somebody South Africa. Just listening to her experience and listening to her go through one of our courses, slide by slide, by slide, explaining what her experience was at each step of the way.

Melissa Reeve:

So if you think about somebody who is sitting in a large enterprise, maybe has never met the customer, only knows the customer in theory, on one end of the spectrum. And you think about this listening session on the other end of the spectrum, you start to get an understanding of what we're talking about. Now, your question really pointed to the fact that in Agile practices, you're thinking about the customer every time. In theory, every time you write a story. So when you write a story, you write the story from the perspective of the customer. And I would just encourage all the marketers out there to know the customer personally. And I know that's not easy in these large organizations. It's sometimes hard to get face time with the customer, but if you aren't speaking directly to a customer, chances are you don't actually know the customer.

Melissa Reeve:

So find a way, talk to the sales folks, get on the phone with some of your customer service representatives. Go to a trade show, find a way to talk directly to the customer because you're going to uncover some nuances that'll pay dividends in your ability to satisfy the customer. And when you go to write that story again, it will be even more rich.

Sean Blake:

Oh, that's really good advice, Melissa. I remember from personal experience, some of these large companies that I've worked in, we would say, "Oh, this is what the customer wants." But we actually didn't know any customers by name. Some of us personally were customers, but it's not really the same thing as going out and listening to people and what did they find challenging about using that app or what do they actually want out of this product? So there's a huge difference, isn't there, between guessing what a customer might want or should want? And then what their day to day actually looks like, and what are the things that they struggle with? That's hugely important.

Sean Blake:

For someone who's in one of these big companies, they're in a marketing team, perhaps they don't have the power or the influence to say, "Okay, now we're going to do Agile marketing." What would your advice be for someone like that, who can see the upside of moving their teams in that direction, but they don't necessarily know where to start?

Melissa Reeve:

Well, there's a philosophy out there that says take what you can get. So if you are just one person who is advocating for Agile marketing, maybe that's what you can do is you can advocate. Maybe you can start building alliances within the organization, chatting casually to your coworkers, finding out if you have allies in other parts of the organization and start to build a groundswell type movement.

Melissa Reeve:

Maybe you can build your own personal Kanban board and start tracking your work through your own Kanban board. And through visualizing your work in that way, it's a little bit harder now that we're all remote, but should we get back into offices somebody could in theory, walk by your cubicle, see your Kanban board and ask about it. And now you might have two people using a Kanban board, three people. And really start to set the example through your mindset, through your behaviors, through your conversations in order to start getting some support.

Sean Blake:

Oh, that's really good. So be the change that you want to see in the organization.

Melissa Reeve:

Exactly.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay, that's really good. And when these companies are moving towards this way of working, and then they're looking to take the next level, let's say it starts in the software development teams and then say marketing is the next team to come on board. How does it then spread throughout the whole organization? Because I know from personal experience, if there's still that part of the organization that's working anti-Agile it actually still makes it really difficult for the Agile teams to get anything done. Because there's still the blockers and the processes and the approvals that you need to go through with those other teams. And I guess SAFe is the answer, right? But how do you start to scale up Agile throughout the whole organization?

Melissa Reeve:

Sure. And what you're talking about is really business agility, is taking the whole business and making the business Agile. And you pointed out something that's key to that, which is once you solve the bottleneck and the impediments in one area of the business, then it'll shift to another area of the business. So the advantage of business agility is that you're trying to keep those bottlenecks from forming or shifting. But what a bottleneck essentially does is it creates what we call a burning platform. So it creates a need for change. And that's actually what we're seeing in the marketing side is we've got these IT organizations, they're operating much more efficiently with the use of Agile and with the use of SAFe. And what's happening is the software teams are able to release things more quickly than the teams that are surrounding them, one of which could be marketing.

Melissa Reeve:

And so now marketing is incentivized to look at ways of changing. They're incentivized to take a look and say, "Well, maybe Agile is the answer for us." So let's just say that marketing jumps on board and all of a sudden they're cranking along, and except for that everything's getting stuck in legal. And so now legal has a case for change and the pressures on legal to adopt it. So there is a way to let it spread organically. Most transformation coaches will understand this phenomenon and probably encourage the organization to just go Agile all in, obviously not in a big bang kind of way, but gradually move in that direction so that we're not just constantly shifting bottlenecks.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Okay, that makes sense. And when these companies are trying to build business agility across the different functions, are there some mistakes that you see say pop up over and over again? And how can we avoid those when we are on this journey of business agility?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So I feel like the most common mistake, at least the one that I see the most often in marketing, although I've seen it in software as well, is people thinking that the transformation is about processes or tools. So for example, in marketing, they might adopt a tool to "become more Agile." Maybe it's a Kanban visualization tool, or maybe they're being suggested to adopt another common ALM type tool. And so they adopt this tool and they learn how to use it, and they wonder why they're not seeing big improvements.

Melissa Reeve:

And it's because Agile at its heart is a human transformation. So we're really taking a look at in trying to change the way people think. One of the topics I speak on is the history of management theory. And while it sounds pretty dry, in reality, it's eye opening. Because you realize that a lot of the habits that we have today are rooted back in the 20th and 19th centuries. So they're rooted in assembly lines. They're rooted in French management theory, which advocated command and control.

Melissa Reeve:

They're rooted in classism. There was a management class and a laboring, and the management class knew the one best way of doing things. So more than a process, more than a tool, we're talking about transforming this legacy of management thinking into a way that's appropriate for today's workers. And I feel like that's the number one mistake that I see organizations making as they're moving into transforming to Agile, an Agile way of working.

Sean Blake:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. Yeah, that's really interesting. And it really is eye opening, is it? When you look at how the nine to five workday came about, because that's the time when the factories were open and all the history around how organizations are structured. And it's really important, I think, to challenge some of those things that we've done in the past that worked back in the industrial age. But now we're moving into the information age and into these times of digital transformation. It probably doesn't work for us anymore, does it, some of those things? Or do you think some of those things are still valuable now that we have distributed teams, a lot of people are working remotely? Are there any things that come to mind that you think actually we shouldn't get rid of that just yet?

Melissa Reeve:

Oh, I'm sure there are. John Kotter has presented in his book, Accelerate, this notion of a dual operating system. So that you have the network part of the organization, which moves fast and nimble like a startup and then you have the hierarchical part of the organization. And the hierarchy is very, very good at scaling things. It's a well oiled machine. You do need somebody to approve your expense report. You do need some policies and some guidelines, some guard rails. And so we're not actually saying abolish the hierarchy. And I do feel like that's part of this legacy system. But what we are saying is abolish some of the command and control, this notion that the management knows the one best way, because the knowledge worker oftentimes knows more than his or her manager.

Melissa Reeve:

It's just too hard for a manager to keep up with everything that is in the heads of the people who report to him or her. So that's a really big change and it was a change for me. And I think why I got so fascinated in this history of management theory is because I came across some notes from my college days. And I realized that I had been taught these historic management theories. I'd been taught Taylorism, which stems from 1911. And I realized, wow, there's a lot of undoing that I've had to do in order to adopt this Agile way of working.

Sean Blake:

Well, that's great. Yeah, that's really important, isn't it? I've heard you speak before about this concept of walk-up work, especially in the realm of marketing. But I suppose, well, firstly, I'd like to know what is walk-up work. Why is it so dangerous, not just for marketers, but for all teams? And how do we start to fight back against walk-up work?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So, marketers in particular get bombarded with what I like to call walk-up work. And that's when an executive or even a peer literally walks up, so think again about the cubicle farm, and makes a request. So how that looks in the virtual world is the slack or the instant message, "Hey, would you mind?" One is that it results in a lot of context switching and there's time lost in that context switching. And then the other part is rarely do these requests come in well-defined or even with any sort of deadline detach. In marketing, it might look like, "Hey, can you create this graphic for this email I'm sending out?" So now you've left your poor graphic designer with this knowledge that here she has to make a graphic, but they don't really have any of the specs.

Melissa Reeve:

So it's very, very helpful to put these things into stories, to follow the Agile process, where you're taking that walk-up work to the product owner, where the product owner can work with you to define that story, keep the person who's doing the work on task, not making them context switch or do that. Get that story in that acceptance criteria very well defined and prioritized before that work then comes into the queue for the graphic designer. And this is an anti-pattern, whether you're talking about an organization of 50 or 5,000.

Melissa Reeve:

And what I've found is the hardest behavior to change is that of the executives. Because not only do they have walk-up work, but they have positional authority too. And it's implied that, that person will stop working on whatever they're working on and immediately jump to the walk-up work being defined by the executive. So I feel like it's really dangerous to the whole Agile ecosystem because it's context switching, it interrupts flow and introduces waste into the system. And your highest priority items might not being worked on.

Sean Blake:

Okay. So how many people do you have on your marketing team at Scaled Agile?

Melissa Reeve:

We're pretty small, still. We've got about somewhere in the 20s, 23, 25, give or take or few.

Sean Blake:

So how do you-

Melissa Reeve:

I think right now we're three Agile teams.

Sean Blake:

Three. Okay. So those 20 something is split into three Agile teams. And do they each have a product owner or how does the prioritization of marketing work in your teams?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, it's a good question. So we do have individual product owners for those three product teams. And what's fascinating is the product owners then also have to meet very regularly to make sure that the priorities stay aligned. Because like many marketing teams, we don't have specialized skill sets on each of those teams. So for the group of 23, we only have one copywriter. For the group of 23, we have two graphic designers. So it's not like each team has its own graphic designer or its own copywriter.

Sean Blake:

Yes.

Melissa Reeve:

So that means the three POs have to get together and decide the priorities, the joint priorities for the copywriter, the joint priorities for those graphic designers. And I think it's working. I mean, it's not without its hiccups, but I think it's the role of the PO and it's an important role.

Sean Blake:

So how do you avoid the temptation to come to these teams and say, "Drop what you're doing, there's something new that we all need to work on?" Do you find that challenging as an executive yourself to really let the teams be autonomous and self-organizing?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, I think the biggest favor we've done to the teams is really, I don't want to say banned walk-up work, but the first thing we did is we defined it. And we said, "Walk-up work is anything that's going to take you more than two hours and that was not part of iteration planning." And iteration is only two weeks. And so, in theory, you've done it within the past 10 days. So if it wasn't part of that and you can't push it off to the next iteration planning, and there's a sense of urgency, then it's walk-up work.

Melissa Reeve:

And we've got the teams to a point where they are in the habit of then calling in the PO and saying, "Hey, would you mind going talking to so and so, and getting this defined and helping me understand where this fits in the priority order." And really that was the biggest hurdle because as marketers, I think a lot of us want to say yes if somebody approaches us with work. But what's happened is people have, myself included, stopped approaching the copywriters, stopped approaching the graphic designer with work. I just know, go to the PO.

Sean Blake:

That's good. So it's an extra line of defense for the team so they can continue to focus on their priorities and what they were already working on without being distracted by these new ideas and new priorities.

Melissa Reeve:

Yes. And in fact, I think we, in this last PI reduced walk-up work from 23% down to 11%. So we're not a 100%. And I don't know if we'll ever get to be a 100%, but we're certainly seeing progress in that direction.

Sean Blake:

Oh, that's really good. Really good. And so your marketing teams are working in an Agile way. Do you feel that across the board, not only within your organization, but also just more generally, are you seeing that Agile is being adopted by non-technical teams, so marketing, legal, finance? Are these sort of non-technical teams adopting Agile at a faster rate, or do you feel like it's still going to take some years to get the message out there?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. And I guess my question to you would be, a faster rate than what?

Sean Blake:

Good question. I suppose what I'm asking is, do you feel like this is a trend that non-technical teams are adopting Agile or is it something that really is in its infancy and hasn't really caught on yet, especially amongst Scaled Agile customers or people that you're connected to in the Agile industry?

Melissa Reeve:

I would say yes. Yes, it's a trend. And yes, people are doing it. And yes, it's in its infancy.

Sean Blake:

So, yes?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah. So all of those combined, and I'm not going to kid you, I mean, this is new stuff. In fact, as part of that listening session I mentioned and we were talking about all these different parts of the business. And there was mentioned that the Scaled Agile Framework is the guidance to these teams, to HR, to legal, to marketing could be more robust. And the answer is absolutely. And the reason is because we're still learning ourselves. This is brand new territory that we're cutting our teeth on. My guess is that it'll take us several years, I don't know how many several is, to start learning, figuring out how this looks and really implementing it.

Melissa Reeve:

Now, my hope is that we'll get to a point where Agile is across the organization, that it's been adapted to the different environments. When I've seen it and when I've thought through things like Agile HR, Agile Legal, Agile procurement, the underpinnings seem to be solid. We can even things like the continuous delivery pipeline of DevOps. When I think about marketing and I think about automation. And I think about artificial intelligence, yeah, I can see that in marketing and I can see the need for this to unfold, but will it take us a while to figure out that nuance? Absolutely.

Sean Blake:

Okay. And can you see any other trends more broadly happening in the Agile space? You know, if we're to look forward, say 10 years, a decade into the future, what does the way of working look like? Are we all still remote or how are team's going to approach digital transformations in 10 years time? What's your perspective on the future?

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, I mean, sometimes to look to the future I like to look to the past. And in this case I might look 10 or 12 years to the past. And 12 years ago, I was getting my very first iPhone. I remember that it was 2007, 2008. And you think about what a seismic shift that was in terms of our behavior and social media and connecting and having this computer in our hand. So I ask myself, what seismic shift lies ahead? And certainly COVID has been an accelerant to some of these shifts. I ask myself, will I be on airplanes as frequently as I was in the past? Or have we all become so accustomed to Zoom meetings that we realized there's power there. And we don't necessarily need to get on an airplane to get the value.

Melissa Reeve:

Now, as it pertains to Agile, I feel like in 10 years we won't be calling it Agile. I feel like it will look something more like a continuous learning organization or responsive organization. Agile refers to a very specific set of practices. And as that new mindset, well, the practices and the principles and the mindset, and as that new mindset takes hold and becomes the norm, then will we be calling it Agile? Or will it just be the way that people are working? My guess is it'll start to be moving toward the latter.

Sean Blake:

Well, let's hope that it becomes the normal, right? I mean that it would be great to have more transparency, more cross functional work, less walk-up work and more business agility across the board, wouldn't it? I think it would be great if that becomes the new normal.

Melissa Reeve:

Yeah, me too. Yeah. And I think, we don't call the way we manage people. We don't say, "Oh, that's Taylorism. Are you going to be practicing Taylorism? It's just the way we've either learned through school or learned from our bosses how to manage people. And that's my hope for Agile, is that we won't be calling it this thing. It's just the way we do things around here.

Sean Blake:

Great. Well, Melissa, I think we'll leave it there. I really enjoyed our conversation, especially as a marketer myself. It's great to hear your insight into the industry. And everything we've discussed today has been really, really eyeopening for me. So thank you so much for sharing that with me and with our audience. And we hope to have you on the podcast again, in the future.

Melissa Reeve:

Sean, it's been such a pleasure and I'd be happy to come back anytime.

Sean Blake:

Great. Thanks so much.

Melissa Reeve:

Thank you.

Transcript:

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

Yeah, agreed.

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

I'll try and keep the answers brief.

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

John Turley:

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

Sean Blake:

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

John Turley:

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

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