Easy Agile Podcast Ep.8 Gerald Cadden Strategic Advisor & SAFe Program Consultant at Scaled Agile Inc.

In this episode, we dive deep into the challenges of aligning teams with strategic goals across organisations of all sizes. From fast-growing startups to large enterprises, teams everywhere struggle with the same fundamental issue: translating high-level objectives into actionable work that drives real value.

Our guest Andreas Wengenmayer, Practice Lead for Enterprise Strategy and Planning at catworkx (the #2 Atlassian partner worldwide and #1 in EMEA), shares his 11 years of experience helping organisations bridge the gap between strategic vision and team execution.

Want to see these concepts in action? Andreas and Hayley hosted an interactive webinar where they demonstrated practical techniques for strategic goal alignment using Easy Agile Programs. Watch the recording here→

About Our Guest

Andreas Wengenmayer is the Practice Lead for Enterprise Strategy and Planning at catworkx, one of the leading Atlassian Platinum Solution Partners globally and the #1 in EMEA. With over a decade of hands-on experience helping enterprise teams scale agile effectively, Andreas specialises in bridging the gap between strategy and execution. His work focuses on guiding organisations through complex transformation programs, optimising portfolio planning practices, and helping teams adopt frameworks like SAFe with clarity and purpose. Known for blending pragmatic insight with systems thinking, Andreas brings stories from the field - ranging from fast-moving startups to complex, multinational enterprises.

Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity, readability, and flow while preserving the authentic conversation and insights shared.

Recognising the signs - when teams aren't aligned

Hayley Rodd: Awesome to have you here. So I'm going to start with a bit of a reality check. We've worked in organisations across the spectrum from really fast-growing startups to really big enterprises. From your experience, when you walk into a PI planning or quarterly planning session, and I'm sure they're pretty hectic, what are the telltale signs that teams aren't truly aligned on what success looks like?

Andreas Wengenmayer: That's a great question - one I hear frequently. You can imagine, especially post-COVID when teams returned to in-person planning sessions. Back in 2017, we'd have huge arenas with hundreds of people in one place. People are happy to see each other, excited to chat with colleagues from different locations. This became even more pronounced after COVID, when everyone was working from home more frequently. That's a good sign - the mood is positive.

But you also notice some teams under pressure. They'd rather be working on actual deliverables. They know they have to be there, and it takes two full days to complete all the planning. Meanwhile, they're carrying a mental backlog - technical debt, unfinished work from the previous PI, catching up on delayed items.

This is what I often observe: teams get bogged down discussing minor details. People debate specifics, and you can see they're frustrated about something deeper - but they're not addressing the root cause. This creates its own negative momentum and can derail otherwise solid planning sessions.

Teams get bogged down discussing minor details. People debate specifics, and you can see they're frustrated about something deeper - but they're not addressing the root cause. This creates its own negative momentum and can derail otherwise solid planning sessions.

Sometimes you have to step in and ask what's really underneath. What's the actual cause? People say, "Yeah, I have to be here because that's the format, but I'm not engaged." Maybe it didn't work well in the past and there's lingering skepticism.

The prevailing attitude then becomes: "This isn't really collaborative. Leadership plans from the top anyway. The outcomes are predetermined - here's the plan, just make it work and update your boards." When people feel they can't meaningfully contribute or influence direction, they simply go through the motions.

My favourite example happens at the end when teams must formulate their objectives. It becomes a box-checking exercise - create something that satisfies the coach or Release Train Engineer so everyone can "get back to real work."

What good alignment actually looks like

Hayley Rodd: You've touched on so many things there. I can imagine walking into that room and feeling the pressure. People getting caught up in minor details rather than talking about root causes, or not asking the five whys to get to that root cause. You also touched on getting buy-in across the organisation. When people are really nailing it, when alignment is really there, what does that room feel like?

Andreas Wengenmayer: Yes, I've fortunately experienced those environments, and they're actually more common than you might think. When companies genuinely commit to grassroots planning, truly investing the time it requires, and ensure teams aren't overwhelmed from the start with everything marked "priority zero," you create the foundation for successful planning.

When companies genuinely commit to grassroots planning, truly investing the time it requires, and ensure teams aren't overwhelmed from the start with everything marked "priority zero," you create the foundation for successful planning.

You can see it immediately in people's body language and interactions. The energy in the room is palpable. If people appear resigned or intimidated, afraid to speak up, that's typically a red flag. The opposite creates magic.

Think about high-performing teams, like being a Scrum Master with an exceptional group. The best teams aren't just collections of highly skilled individuals in specific roles.

The best teams are those who communicate openly, genuinely enjoy each other's company, maintain positive energy, and actively support one another. This dynamic enables remarkable achievements. Maybe someone knows a contact in another tribe, release train, or department who can provide crucial answers and facilitate communication. Communication is absolutely fundamental.

That collaborative spirit is the hallmark of truly effective teams.

Hayley Rodd: Absolutely. We would know it in our day-to-day work, right? If your teams aren't communicating, if they're too overburdened as you said, it's not a good place to start. But if you can get that starting point right, if you can get that communication right, so many things will flow after that.

Andreas Wengenmayer: Absolutely. Looking back at any planning cycle, the real test is: did you plan the right things? You only know at the quarter's end whether you estimated capacity accurately.

Here's the crucial question: How does your organisation respond when goals aren't met? Do stakeholders focus on finding solutions? Do team members feel safe asking probing questions and seeking answers? Or does the blame game begin, searching for scapegoats?

How does your organisation respond when goals aren't met? Do stakeholders focus on finding solutions? Do team members feel safe asking probing questions and seeking answers? Or does the blame game begin, searching for scapegoats?

When you're permitted, encouraged, even, to be genuinely open and honest, you become much better at assessing realistic capacity. What makes stakeholders universally happy is predictability. You want confidence that your plans will actually materialise, that your commitments will be fulfilled.

Success breeds success, creating a positive foundation for the next PI. It's a continuous cycle that can spiral upward toward excellence or downward toward dysfunction.

The startup vs. enterprise spectrum

Hayley Rodd: Let's talk about the two ends of the spectrum. You've got a lot of experience, so I love hearing about this. Small companies will often say, "We're agile, we can pivot quickly, we don't need formal goal setting." Then enterprises are going all out on OKRs, cascading objectives, saying they're aligned because they've got those things in place. Yet both struggle with the same core problem. What's really going on?

Andreas Wengenmayer: You're absolutely right. I've been in agile projects since 2014, 11 years now, and I've seen a lot of companies pre-COVID, post-COVID, different sizes.

Starting with the really small ones, startup companies - what's really astonishing is that some very small startup companies tend to become overly complex, which is amazing. Some want solutions that are way too overblown. Basically, they need a sailing boat, but they're thinking about ordering an aircraft carrier.

Some startups want solutions that are way too overblown. Basically, they need a sailing boat, but they're thinking about ordering an aircraft carrier.

Maybe that's part of startup CEO culture - where everyone's a CEO on LinkedIn, and they think, "We're corporate, we have to be like that." They mostly get to their senses in the end, but small companies tend to be overly complex and overblown when it comes to technology, tooling, and organisation.

On the other end, large corporations sometimes seem to try their best to become truly agile - living the values everywhere. Still, it's a challenge. In most cases, there's some kind of hybrid planning going on. There's still a roadmap, which is good, but at some level, some people still stick to classical approaches, have some waterfall going on in the back.

I personally have never seen, for example, a full SAFe organisation where it's done truly at every level. There's a good balance and it should be healthy, but it all comes down to execution.

I feel like mid-sized companies are often the healthiest when it comes to that.

There's a balance of method and tooling, but you still need a solid understanding of goal setting and tracking. This includes pivoting when goals aren't right and learning from how you did things in the past. The gap between management and teams isn't that huge, and it's easier to bridge.

Avoiding death by KPI

Hayley Rodd: You've touched on so many fundamental things around getting the method and tooling right, but also that cultural aspect. I love the insight around mid-size organisations often striking that balance well. When we're thinking about the enterprise risk - which could be "death by KPI" or OKR, do you agree? Can you paint a picture of what that looks like and how it actually makes teams less focused?

Andreas Wengenmayer: Absolutely. There is such a thing as "death by KPI." KPIs are important to get a clear picture - you do need metrics, and there's merit to it. But as always, it's about choosing the right KPIs, the right metrics.

My favourite example is comparing story points across teams or ARTs. You measure velocity, and I have to repeat again and again: it's only individual to one team. You shouldn't compare it to another team or across tribes or ARTs - that doesn't work because you're creating the wrong incentives.

You see what will happen: "Well, okay, my stakeholders want higher amounts of story points. Let's estimate the stories bigger." Of course, that's a continuous loop, but it doesn't give you anything. Story points as a metric are just guidance for a team to get a better feeling for estimations.

You see what will happen: "Well, okay, my stakeholders want higher amounts of story points. Let's estimate the stories bigger." Of course, that's a continuous loop, but it doesn't give you anything. Story points as a metric are just guidance for a team to get a better feeling for estimations.

You want predictability - you want to meet a certain range. So it's not a great KPI when it comes to monitoring progress across teams. They have better KPIs in place.

Other metrics tend to create what I call bureaucracy. If you spend too much time creating reports, you have less time to create anything of value.

Hayley Rodd: I think there's so much in what you're saying about people being realistic and honest, open to pivoting or changing a goal if it's not the right one. Admitting to that is really difficult because no one wants to admit that what they set out to do is failing. But understanding that failure can sometimes be a benefit - you can learn from that. There's so much in that cultural aspect, right?

Andreas Wengenmayer: Absolutely. Coming back to goals rather than KPIs - KPIs are like being on a boat in your control room. You see what the engine is doing, the temperature - those are KPIs. Goals, on the other hand, are the course that you set.

KPIs are like being on a boat in your control room. You see what the engine is doing, the temperature - those are KPIs. Goals, on the other hand, are the course that you set.

You could be a small company like a startup - you're in a canoe, you're rowing. Or you're a large company - you're like a big freighter. Still, if you don't set the right course, the right goal, you will never reach your destination. Your team can be as proficient and perfectly working as they could be. If the course isn't right, hopefully you have enough provisions on board to survive a long journey.

Where organisations get stuck in goal setting

Hayley Rodd: Where do organisations typically get stuck? Is it defining the goals, communicating the goals, or translating them into action - that execution point you made before?

Andreas Wengenmayer: It could be basically any one of those. If you have a smaller or mid-size company, it's easier to communicate - you don't have to bridge as huge a gap. But still, you have high-level goals that have to be translated into real work. Real value is created in the teams.

If you have a high-level goal that's highly abstract and sounds good on paper - "increase customer satisfaction," "create better products," "make the world a better place" - people still have to understand: What does that mean to my daily work? If I'm a developer, what's my stake in that? How can I contribute?

If you have a high-level goal that's highly abstract and sounds good on paper - "increase customer satisfaction," "create better products," "make the world a better place" - people still have to understand: What does that mean to my daily work? If I'm a developer, what's my stake in that? How can I contribute?

That's when communication and breaking down goals becomes really important. Breaking them down the right way, having them visible and transparent, and creating that feeling of contribution. You make it visible that you're not just working for yourself or your team, but you're really contributing. You understand what you're working on and why you're doing it. Purpose is critical.

Bridging the strategy-to-sprint gap

Hayley Rodd: That's a really good segue into the next question about translating strategic vision into team-level objectives that people can grab onto and execute. Leadership will often say something like "increase customer satisfaction," and teams are left going, "What does that mean for me in my sprint this week?" How does an organisation bridge that gap between the high-level leadership view and what we can do in our sprints as a team?

Andreas Wengenmayer: First of all, you as company management need to take the time. There have been, and still are, a lot of approaches with company values, putting posters on walls, creating marketing. Those are all values - that's what a company is like. Then you link it with your products, services - great services, customer satisfaction. Okay. Then comes the real challenge: we want to succeed and create the next service, software solution, or product.

The goal is clear on a high level, but how do we break it down? That's when the real work comes into play - breaking down the goals into smaller pieces.

It's like building a LEGO space station when I was a kid. You have the picture on the box in the beginning - 'Oh, that's what we're going to build.' Then you have to start putting together all the small pieces. You need a plan, you need the little pictures of the steps. You start with the big picture, then you're breaking it down one piece at a time. You create different parts, and they come together at the end. Same goes for goals.

It's like building a LEGO space station. You have the picture on the box in the beginning - 'Oh, that's what we're going to build.' Then you have to start putting together all the small pieces. You need a plan, you need the little pictures of the steps. You start with the big picture, then you're breaking it down one piece at a time. You create different parts, and they come together at the end. Same goes for goals.

Hayley Rodd: Nice. A colleague of mine often says you eat an elephant one bite at a time - similar thing, right? When you see that big goal, it's really overwhelming. But if you can break it down into those chunks and smaller pieces, it becomes so much more manageable and achievable. People can get behind that vision.

Managing moving targets

Hayley Rodd: In fast-moving environments, goals often shift. We're agile, we're always moving. How do you help teams stay connected to a moving target without either ignoring changes or constantly thrashing around?

Andreas Wengenmayer: Back in the nineties and early 2000s, there was a computer game that wasted a lot of time in offices where you were shooting at geese in Scottish Highlands. It was a big phenomenon because people were trying to get the next high score.

If you think of moving targets, it's a bit like that. Imagine you're doing your work - whether you're a hunter or developer doesn't matter - but you approach, you take aim, and the geese keep flying up. You miss the target. Same thing if you have moving goals.

It's harder to aim and approach them right. What you should avoid as a company or someone in charge is constant interference. Stick to your goals or objectives that were agreed upon during PI planning. Don't change them midterm during a PI.

What you should avoid as a company or someone in charge is constant interference. Stick to your goals or objectives that were agreed upon during PI planning. Don't change them midterm during a PI.

That doesn't mean you can't learn from mistakes or wrong goals. You can adjust them, but you have to adjust them in the right place and time, which is during planning. Of course, if something security-related comes up, you have to act, but it has to be agreed upon, and you still have to communicate it and create understanding.

Keeping goals visible and actionable

Hayley Rodd: Even when goals are well-defined, keeping them visible and actionable throughout a PI is tough. What practices or tools have you found most effective for maintaining connection between daily work and high-level strategic objectives?

Andreas Wengenmayer: Good question. Having the goals present at all times helps a lot. If you just meet for planning, have your goals set, and never look back during the PI, it doesn't do you any good.

That could be a piece of paper on the wall like we had back in the day - and still could be if you're working in the office. Also, choose the right tools to track the goals and create acceptance for tools. Really use them. Look into them - whether it's an OKR tool or some other solution, even PI objectives. Are we still on track?

What really helps is if it's not static but shows progress, and especially shows the link of what you're contributing - like what you achieved in your last sprint and how it plays into the objectives or goals, progress moving ahead. There's always a good feeling - everybody loves a green bar moving ahead or a checklist.

What really helps is if your tool is not static but shows progress, and especially shows the link of what you're contributing - like what you achieved in your last sprint and how it plays into the objectives or goals, progress moving ahead. There's always a good feeling - everybody loves a green bar moving ahead or a checklist.

It helps keep the vision and goals present.

Hayley Rodd: When I was a teenager in my final year of high school here in Australia, I wanted a specific score on my final exams. I had a big poster in front of my desk that I sat at for hours every day studying. Looking back, I didn't know what I was doing - I just wanted to visualise my goal, and I didn't know the psychology behind it. But I'm happy to report I got that mark and above.

I think it was as you were saying - that constant reminder, that piece of paper worked for me. In organisations, we're looking for something a bit more complex sometimes, but I like your "keep it simple" advice. It doesn't always have to be super complex. It can just be a checklist, progress bar, or piece of paper - something that helps you feel connected to the goal and reminds you of it often.

When good work doesn't align with goals

Hayley Rodd: Have you seen situations where teams were delivering lots of work - good work, but it wasn't clearly contributing to company goals? What tends to cause that disconnect?

Andreas Wengenmayer: Yeah, that happens quite a bit. I can think of one example with very technical teams, like in semiconductors. Very smart people - everyone has a PhD in physics, material science. Awesome, smart people who tend to love their job. They're awesome, but they're also perfectionists who can still improve things and want to make them even better.

If you're in the business of producing machines used to produce semiconductors, for example, it's a complex task with a complex supply chain or value chain. You're creating lithography machines to create wafers used by other companies, and in the end, you have a customer planning the release of a new phone.

Your customer waits, the end customer waits, and you have to deliver on time. Sometimes this creates a challenge because teams still want to improve and make it even better. That's when economics come into play - the view of the big picture. You still have to communicate it. You shouldn't discourage such a great team, but you need to get the bigger perspective back to the teams and create acceptance instead of saying, "Hey, stop what you're doing, it's good enough." You don't want that. It all comes back to transparency and communication.

On the other spectrum, what you sometimes have is just too much workload on teams. Time for planning gets cut short, and if you don't take enough time to plan well, no wonder the results don't work out. It's just a lot of busy work - a lot of things getting done, but not necessarily the right things at the right time.

On the other spectrum, what you sometimes have is just too much workload on teams. Time for planning gets cut short, and if you don't take enough time to plan well, no wonder the results don't work out. It's just a lot of busy work - a lot of things getting done, but not necessarily the right things at the right time.

Hayley Rodd: If you don't do that planning at the start, you're setting yourself up for misalignments. If you're not communicating that plan regularly, you're setting yourself up for that busy work and people getting distracted. It's just so common. That planning part is so fundamental to getting it right.

One piece of advice for frustrated leaders

Hayley Rodd: We're on the home stretch now. If you could give one piece of advice to an engineering or product leader who's been frustrated because their teams seem to be going through the motions of PI planning or quarterly planning without real buy-in, what would it be?

Andreas Wengenmayer: I can resonate with that so well, and many can. I'd say: take the time to find out what's really going on. Investigate the root cause. It's like if you have a house and you're trying to fix a crack in the wall - you can look at the crack and do some superficial fixing or use a thick layer of paint, but you still have to find out what's causing that issue. Maybe something deeper.

You mentioned the five whys - that can be one way, but you have to have some understanding of the right way to approach people. You don't want to put anyone on the spot. Looking for a scapegoat doesn't help anybody.

We need to look at what's behind it, what's causing it. It all comes back to investing enough time for planning, but doing it with purpose. Not doing the whole planning like theatre, where everybody acts their part - that doesn't do you any good.

It all comes back to investing enough time for planning, but doing it with purpose. Not doing the whole planning like theatre, where everybody acts their part - that doesn't do you any good.

People have to understand why they're doing it. There has to be purpose and understanding - enough time, no distractions, and a positive atmosphere where everybody can contribute and be open.

You don't want people saying nothing because they don't dare to criticise or say no.

The connection between goal clarity and team motivation

Hayley Rodd: What's one thing you wish more organisations understood about the connection between goal clarity and team motivation?

Andreas Wengenmayer: We could get back to the boats we mentioned before. You want to arrive at your destination. If you're not clear about the destination, or maybe some people in your rowing boat don't want to go there, they might not join the rowing. If your crew is not invested, it will take you longer to reach a destination, or you won't get there as well.

It's the same thing. Motivation is key, and I don't talk about superficial motivation that just annoys everybody. Motivation is a positive environment where people rely on each other. They really like spending time with those people.

"Hey, I really like to go to lunch with you and talk to you" - not "I'd rather be home and not talk to anybody." You're not annoyed if your teammate asks you a question; you're happy to help. You're feeling safe that when you have a problem or question, you will get help.

That creates the right kind of motivation - that positive environment, and that can make a lot of things happen. It comes back to openness and transparency, not as buzzwords, but to get the clear picture. As a stakeholder, you get the correct current state because you get true answers.

I've seen strange situations in major corporations where people really didn't report what they were working on or show the right results. I've seen complete shadow Jira environments - one for internal use and one for external use with customers. There can be huge misalignments because people didn't dare to show real progress. In the long term, it will backfire. If you don't have trust in your environment, in your company, you will have a hard time.

I've seen strange situations in major corporations where people really didn't report what they were working on or show the right results. I've seen complete shadow Jira environments - one for internal use and one for external use with customers. There can be huge misalignments because people didn't dare to show real progress. In the long term, it will backfire. If you don't have trust in your environment, in your company, you will have a hard time.

Wrapping up

Hayley Rodd: There are so many key themes coming up throughout our conversation. You've talked about ongoing communication across teams, really planning with purpose, getting that context and buy-in to help with motivation, and allowing for radical candour - being really open if something's not working and being okay to call it out. So many cultural and communication elements are critical to the success of quarterly planning, PI planning, and organisations generally. Great takeaways.

We're going to end it there, but I want to end with a teaser for our interactive webinar that you and I are doing together on September 4th, which dives deeper and shows how to operationalise the ideas we've chatted about here using Easy Agile Programs and linking back to the fundamental services that catworkx provides organisations.

Andreas, it's been super wonderful to chat with you. I look forward to our webinar coming up on September 4th.

Andreas Wengenmayer: Thank you so much for having me. Looking forward to September 4th and seeing you again, talking more about tooling, boats, duck hunt, and anything in between.

Ready to transform your strategic planning?

The conversation doesn't end here. Andreas and Hayley hosted an interactive webinar where they showed how you can put these strategic alignment concepts into practice.

They spoke about:

• Practical techniques for breaking down strategic goals into actionable team objectives
• How to maintain goal visibility throughout your PI cycles
• Real-world examples of successful alignment transformations

Watch the webinar recording here →

"It was a pleasure speaking with Ray about empowering teams and helping people reach their full potential" - Mat Lawrence

Mat Lawrence, Chief Operating Officer at Easy Agile is joined by Ray Arell. Ray currently works as the Director of Agile Transformations at Dell Technologies, is the host of the ACN Podcast, and the President Of The Board Of Directors for the nonprofit Forest Grove Foundation Inc.

Ray is passionate about collaborative and inclusive leadership, and loves to inspire and motivate others to achieve their full potential. This is exactly what Mat and Ray dive into in this episode.

Ray and Mat explore the concepts such as inclusive and situational leadership and the connection to agile ways of working, empowering the organisational brain, and fostering authenticity within teams.

This is a fantastic episode for aspiring, emerging and existing leaders! Lots of great tips and advice to share with colleagues and friends and understand the ways we can be empowering and enabling one another.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Transcript:

Mat Lawrence:

Hi folks, it's Mat Lawrence here. I'm the COO at Easy Agile and I'm really excited today to be joined by Ray Arell. Before we jump into our podcast episode, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we're broadcasting today, the people of the Gadigal-speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people joining us today. Ray, thanks for joining us today. Ray is a collaborative and inclusive leader who loves to inspire and motivate others to achieve their full potential. Ray has 30 years of experience building and leading outstanding multinational teams in Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits, and startups. Also, he's recognized as a leading expert in large-scale agile adoptions, engineering practices, lean and complex adaptive systems. So Ray, welcome, really good to have you on the podcast today.

Ray Arell:

Thank you.

Mat Lawrence:

Love to get started by understanding what you enjoy most about being an inclusive leader and working with teams.

Ray Arell:

Yeah, so I've been in leadership probably for about 15 years, leading teams at different sizes. When you have the more intimate, smaller teams of maybe five or six people, upwards of teams that are upwards of several hundred people working within an organization that I might be the leader of. And what I enjoy the most about it is just connecting with the talented people that do the work. I mean, when you go into leadership, one of the things that you kind of transition from is not being the expert person in the room that's coding or doing hardware development or something else. You have these people who are now looking for direction or vision or other things in order for them to give them purpose in order to move forward with their day.

And I enjoy coaching. I enjoy mentoring. I mean, a lot of my technical side of me is more nostalgia now more than it is relevant with the latest technologies. There's something rewarding when you see somebody who can, if you think of Daniel Pink's work of autonomy, mastery and purpose, that they suddenly find that they are engaged with the purpose that we're doing as an organization and then the autonomy for them to just do their day and be able to work and collaborate with others. And that's always been exciting to me.

Mat Lawrence:

I can relate to that. Yeah. I think in our audience today we're going to have a mixture of emerging leaders, aspiring leaders, and experienced leaders. I'd love to tap into your experience and ideally rewind a little bit to earlier in your career when you were transitioning into being a leader. And I'd love to understand around that time, what were some of the successes that you saw in the approach that you take that you've been trying to repeat over the years?

Ray Arell:

Well, I think early on, I think, especially when you grow up through the technical ranks, and suddenly at least the company that I was with at the time, very expert-based culture, if you were the smartest person in the room, those are the people that they looked at and said, "Okay, we're going to promote you to lead, or we're going to promote you to manager or promote you into the leadership ranks." I think looking back on that, I think Ray 2.0 or Ray 3.0, whatever version I was at the time, that I very much led from that expert leadership stance, which is sort of I know what is the best way to go and approach the delivery of something, and everyone should be following my technical lead for however this product comes together.

And I don't think that was really a good approach. I think that constrained people because you ended up being more or less just telling people what to go do versus allowing them to experiment and learn and grow themselves in order to become what I had become as a senior technical person. And so I think lesson learned number one was that leading a team from an expert slant I think is probably not the best approach in order if you're going... especially if you think of agile and other more inclusive teamwork type of projects, you're going to want to give people more of a catalytic or a catalyst leader type of synergistic-based leadership style so that they can self-organize and they can move forward and learn and grow as an engineer.

Mat Lawrence:

Are there any times that stand out for you where you got it horribly wrong? I know I've got a few stories which I can happily share as well.

Ray Arell:

I'd love to hear some of yours. I think horribly wrong I think is... The question is is anything ever really not fixable, not recoverable? And in most cases, most of the issues that we've dealt with were recoverable. I think that looking at, and again, kind of back into that stance of well, am I creating a team or am I creating just a group of individuals that are just taking their work from the manager and I'm passing them out like cards type of thing... I think early on, probably the big mistake was just being too controlling, and the mistake of that control meant that I couldn't have a vacation. Others were dependent versus being interdependent on one another. And I think that made the organization run slower and not as efficient as it could be.

Mat Lawrence:

I've certainly been guilty of that same approach earlier in my leadership career where I became the bottleneck, absolutely.

Ray Arell:

Yeah. Exactly.

Mat Lawrence:

And to recognize that, it can be quite hard to undo, but it's definitely worth persevering with. Something else that I was fortunate to get some training in situational leadership, oh, probably nearly 10 years ago now. And that really opened my eyes to an approach, the way I was treating different people in my team. But I was treating them the way I first judged them. So if I saw [inaudible 00:07:01] an expert and a master, I would treat them as an expert and a master in all things. And [inaudible 00:07:05] if someone was less capable at that point in their career, I'd kind of assume the same thing. And so I would apply the same level of direction or lack of direction to those people for everything. And in situational leadership, the premise for those who don't know at home, is you change the level of direction that you give depending on the task at hand. Have you used that approach or something similar to guide how you include people in different ways?

Ray Arell:

Well, in order to include people, I think part of it is you need to... As you said, you were situationally looking at each person, and you were structuring it in a way that was from a way, an approach, of very individualized with somebody. I think the philosophy that I... Not everyone is very open or can communicate very well about their skills and their strengths, or in certain cases some people, they might be good at something but they don't exercise it because they themselves feel that that's not one of their strengths, but in reality is it is. So I think that when you're saying from a situational leadership perspective, when you hear somebody place doubt that they could be the one that could do something or to take up, say, even leadership of something, I think part of that just gets into that whole coaching and mentoring and really setting it up and helping them to be successful through that.

And I think from an inclusive perspective, I think there's a set of honesty that you have to bring into your work and humility about being humble about even what you've accomplished. Because in engineering in particular, you tend to see that when you put people into a room, the people who are newer will sit back, and they will yield to who they think has the more experience. And reality is that they came from, say, let's say they just got fresh out of college. They actually might have more skills in a particular area based upon what they just went through in their curriculum that we might not have. And so the question of how do we use the whole organizational brain in order to bring all of the ideas onto the table, I think at times it requires us to be able to be effective listeners and to sometimes just pause and allow people to have the floor and pick up the pen and not hog the space, if that makes sense.

Mat Lawrence:

It really does, and I think I've seen that in every company I've worked in to some level. I'd be really interested to tap into how you go about addressing that scenario. For the people who are listening that would face that situation, it might be the first time they've been a leader and seeing that scenario and observing it. Is there any advice you would give them to help change that dynamic?

Ray Arell:

Well, one, just becoming aware of it. I frequently doodle when I'm in a group of people, and what I'll do is I'll sit there and I'll put dots on a paper of where people are at in the room, and then I start drawing lines between those individual dots if I see the communication happening between certain players. And what's interesting is if you watch that over about a 15-minute period of time, you start to see this emergent pattern that maybe someone's domineering the conversation or they're the focus point of the conversation, and it isn't going around the full room. So then that's when you get to be a gatekeeper and you invite others into the conversation. And then you politely help the ones who are being dominant in the conversation to pause, to just give space and allow those other people to talk and to get that out.

And then I think the question of whether or not what the person says may sometimes be coherent or not coherent to the conversation, or maybe they're still trying to learn about just dynamics of everything. You just have to help to get, sometimes, to get that out of people, and use open words to basically open sentence... I mean, some open questions to pull that out from them. And I think that works really well.

Mat Lawrence:

I love that. I'm a doodler as well. I'm an artist originally in my early career, and I've worked my way into solving problems through tech a long time ago now, but I still can't... I need that physical drawing to help my mind think as much as anything else [inaudible 00:12:30] than just doodling on a pad.

Ray Arell:

Same here.

Mat Lawrence:

Something that you said a little earlier, we touched a little bit on inclusivity. In your LinkedIn bio you talk about being an inclusive leader who loves to inspire and motivate others to achieve their full potential. Something I'm really passionate about is that last part in particular, is helping people achieve their full potential. It's why I love being a people leader and a COO. You get to do that across a whole company. I'd love to first touch on the idea of being an inclusive leader. How do you define what it means to be one?

Ray Arell:

Well, inclusive leadership, there was an old bag that I used to have, a little coaching bag that I used to carry around with me. And at the very top of it said, "Take it to the team," was the motto that was at the top of it. And at the bottom of the bag it basically said, "Treat people like adults." Were the two kind of core things that I think part of what being inclusive is is that I have to accept the fact that, yeah, I'm a smart person, but do we get a better decision if we socialize that around the team? Do we see what other ideas or possibility thinking? Sort of in the lean sense, make the decision as late as you can.

It's more towards the Eastern culture of, well, if I keep the decision open, maybe we're going to find something that's cheaper or better or even just more exciting for our customers. And so I think part of that is knowing that you don't have to be the one that has to make the decision. You can let the team make the decision. And we all embrace because we're empowering ourselves with this was what we all thought, not just what Ray thought, which I think is cool.

Mat Lawrence:

There's a second part to that piece you talked about in your bio around helping motivate others to achieve their full potential.

Ray Arell:

Yeah, yeah.

Mat Lawrence:

Yeah. Let's talk about where that came from for you, that passion, and what are some of the ways you look to help emerging leaders reach their full potential?

Ray Arell:

Yeah, I mean, I was lucky enough when I joined Intel Corporation that Andy Grove was still running the organization at the time. As a matter of fact, he taught my Welcome to Intel class. At the time when I joined Intel, there was only about 32,000 employees. And here's the CEO, founder of the company teaching the Welcome to Intel class, which I thought was incredibly cool, a great experience to have. He oozed this leadership, whatever mojo or whatever it is he is got going out into the environment as he's talking about the company. But he was really strong on the one-on-ones, the time that you can spend with your manager or others within the organization because you can have a one-on-one with anyone within the company. And he encouraged that. And I think that helps to... When somebody is trying to figure it out, they're brand new to the company, and you get a standing invitation from the CEO that says, "You can come and have a conversation with me," I think that sets the cultural norm right up front that this is a place that's going to assist and help me along my career.

And I could tell you that there's been a number of different times that those developed into full-blown, "I'm the mentee and they're the mentors." And in those relationships over time, it's sort of like then you say, "Well, I'm going to pay that forward." Today I have at least six or seven mentees that have all sorts of questions about how do they guide through their career or if they had some specific area that they wanted to go focus on. And it's their time to pick my brain. And in certain cases, if I don't have the full answer, I can guide them to other mentors that can help them to grow.

Mat Lawrence:

I love that approach of pay it forward that you touched on there. It's definitely something that I've been trying to do in the last couple of years myself, and I wish I'd started sooner mentoring. I've had the privilege of working with some amazing leaders in my career who I've learned a lot from. And once I started mentoring, I realized how much I learned by being a mentor because you have to think. You really think about what these people are going through and not just project yourself onto them. And it validates the rationale about why you do things yourself, why you think that way. And it forces me to challenge myself.

And I think if there's anything... I talk to some of the younger people at work who are emerging leaders, and they're exceptional in their own way. They've all got very different backgrounds, but a lot of them don't feel like they're ready to be a mentor. They really are. They're amazing people. And I wonder, have you seen people earlier in their careers try and pass it forwards kind of early on or do people feel they have to wait until [inaudible 00:18:22]?

Ray Arell:

I think it depends. One, I think the education system, at least in the United States, has shifted a bit. When people go for their undergraduate degree, it used to be just they were by themselves, they did their book studies. Very little interaction or teamwork was created for this study. I mean, back when I got my electrical engineering degree, it was just me by myself. There might be occasional lab work and lab projects, but it wasn't something that was very much inclusive, nor did they have people step up into leadership roles that early. I look at now my daughter who's right now going to the university, and everything is a cohort group. There's cohorts that are getting together. The studying that they do, they each have to pick up leadership in some regards for some aspect of a project that they're working on. So I think some of the newer people coming into the workforce are sort of built in with the skills to, if they need to take up leadership with something, run a little program, run a project, they've been equipped to do it. At least that's what I've seen.

Mat Lawrence:

I love that concept. Something that I've been observing and I talk it about a lot with our leadership team and our mentor exec teams for the [inaudible 00:19:56] as well. A lot of the conversation that comes up is around team dynamics, team trust, agility within teams, and to generally try and empower teams, set them up so they can be autonomous, they are truly empowered and they're trusted to make great decisions and drive work forwards. You've got a lot of experience in agile and agile [inaudible 00:20:21] agile leader. In your experience leading agile teams, those adoptions and those transformations, I'd love to understand if you see there's a connection between being agile as a team and those traits that an inclusive leader will have. Is there a connection there in your mind between what it means to be agile and be an inclusive leader?

Ray Arell:

I think so. Because if you think of early on, they established that servant leadership was a better leadership style for agile teams. And so I think when we talk about transformation, some of the biggest failures that occur tend to be more based upon not agile, but on issues of trust and other sort of organizational impediments that had already existed there before they got started. And if they don't address those, their agile journey is painful.

I've heard people say that they've gotten Scrummed before, using it in a really kind of derogatory way of thinking that, well, instead of getting a team of empowered people to go do work within the Scrum framework, they end up being put under a micromanagement lens because the culture of the manager didn't shift, and the manager is using it as a daily way to making sure that everyone is working at 120% versus what we should be seeing in the pattern is that the team understands their flow. They're pulling work into the team. It's not being pushed. And those dynamics I think are something that if leadership doesn't shift and change the way that they work, then it just doesn't work in organizations.

Mat Lawrence:

In the many places that you've worked and coached and guided people on, you've started to come across... There's a term that we've started to use of agile natives where people who've really not known any different because so many companies in world are going through agile transformations, and that'll continue for a long time. But as some companies are born with agility at the forefront, have you experienced many people coming through into leadership roles that don't know anything but true agility and really authentic agility as you've just described?

Ray Arell:

Well, I think it's kind of interesting because as you talked about that phrase, I was thinking about it, about, well, if you knew nothing else... But I can also say that you could become native after you've been in the culture for a period of time as well. So you can eventually... That becomes your first reaction, your first habit is pulling more from the agile principles than you would be pulling from something else. Yeah, there are those people, but it's been interesting watching companies like Spotify or watching Salesforce or watching Pivotal, and I can just go down the list of companies that have started as an agile organization, they got large, and then suddenly the anti-patterns of a large company start to emerge within those companies. So even though the people within the smaller tribe are working in an agile way, the company slowly doesn't start to work in an agile way any longer. It falls underneath a larger context of what we see happening with the older companies.

And I think some of that could be the executive culture might be just coming in where they bring somebody from the outside who wasn't a native, and they have a hard time dealing with the notion that, well, we're committing to a delivery date sometime over here, and we think we're going to hit it. But no, we don't have what would be affectionately known as a 90% confident plan that says that we've cleared all risk out of the way. And yeah, it's going to absolutely happen on that day. And some of those companies get really... They feel that they have to commit everything to the street, and if they don't meet it, they've already glued those in to some executive bonus program, ends up driving bad behaviors, unfortunately,

Mat Lawrence:

Yes, I have been there. I'm assuming that in our audience, we're going to have people who are transitioning into more senior leadership roles. They're not emerging leaders, they've been doing it for a while, and they've probably run some successful agile teams at the smaller level as you've described. For those people who are moving into the more senior roles, maybe into exec positions, is there any guidance that you'd give them for navigating that change and trying to maintain, through agile principles and what it means to be agile, in those more senior roles?

Ray Arell:

Yeah, I think part of it is the work that you did as a smaller team, everything still can scale up. And I hate to use the word scale because I think scale is kind of... People kind of use it... What would be the right word? It's misused in our industry. I think values and principles are scale-free. You can still walk each day walking into your team and still embracing those 12 principles, and you're going to do good work. The question is though, is if you're doing that at the lower level, say with a Kanban board, the question is, what does it look like when you're at your executive desk? What is the method that you go pool? If you look at most of the scaled frameworks that are out today, there's very little guidance that's given to what should be in the day in the life of an agile executive. What should that look like?

And for me, if I think about the business team, the management team is working with the delivery teams daily. They should be doing that. So what are you going to put in place for that to facilitate and occur? What are you going to do about... stop doing these big annual budget processes. Embrace things like the beyond budgeting or other things where you're funding the organization strategically, and you're not trying to lock everything in on an annual cadence, but yet your organization beneath is working every two weeks. So you should be able to re-move your bets with any organization based upon the performance of each sprint. Can you do that?

The last one is probably the most important one, is impediments. And that is how fast does it take information to go from the lowest part of the organization to the highest point of the organization? And if that takes three weeks, two weeks, or even sometimes later for certain organizations, optimize that. How do you optimize an impediment that you can personally help to go remove for people so that they're not slowed down by it any longer, whatever that might be?

Mat Lawrence:

You're touching on something there, which I think is a fundamental part of being agile, which is that ability to learn and adapt, and you can only learn when you are aware of what's happening around you, you can observe [inaudible 00:28:39] to it.

Ray Arell:

Well, I said something a couple months ago, and everyone just went, "Why did you say... I can't believe you said that out loud." It's the quiet stuff out loud sometimes. [inaudible 00:28:53]. We were trying to get a meeting together to go fix one of these impediments, and all the senior leaderships was busy. They were busy. And my question was is if this isn't the most important thing right now for us, what do you do? Really, are you doing in your day if this one isn't the highest priority that you walk into? And the questioning senior leaders that maybe they're not paying attention to the right things, and sometimes speaking that truth to power is something we have to do every once in a while.

Mat Lawrence:

I agree. That level of candor is definitely required at all levels and being able to receive that feedback so you can learn and adapt as an individual, as we were talking about earlier, about being adaptive as a leader, but also as a team. There's a point that I'd like to touch on before we wrap up, which is as you climb up the career ladder and you get into a more senior position, and then you become responsible for a broader range of things, particularly as you start reaching that executive level, I've witnessed people struggle with the transition from being the person, as you talked about right at the start of this discussion, being that person who knows everything and who can direct and have all the answers into someone where I see your job changes to being the person who can identify what we know least about, what we as an exec team know least, where we're... have the least confidence, where we see the impediments and we don't know what to do with them.

How do you go about guiding people to embrace that? Because I think what I see is the fear that comes with that, almost a fear of exposure of, "Oh, I'm admitting to people I don't know what I'm doing." And I've been rewarded through my entire career by becoming more of an expert, and suddenly my job is to be the person who's confident enough to call out, this is what we don't understand yet. Let's get together and try and resolve it. When the risk is greater, the impact is greater, and you're responsible for more things, how do you help people transition into that higher-level role?

Ray Arell:

Well, I think part of it is can they let go of that technical side, having to have their hands dirty all the time? And I've seen certain leaders that, really, somebody needs to go back and say, "Are you really sure that this is the career that you're wanting to go to? You seem to be more into wanting to be into the nuts and bolts of things, and maybe that's the best place for you because you feel more comfortable in that space." The other aspect though, as they transition, I think is again, trust becomes critical. Trust the people that are working for you, that they're not coming in and being lazy and you have to go look over their shoulders all the time because you feel that they might not be being productive or other things. You have to have the ability to say that, look, that the people that you hired are talented, and they are moving us towards our goals.

I think what becomes more critical for the health of the organization is that you have to do a much better job at actually saying, "Okay, well, here is our vision," whether it be a product vision, whether it be the company's vision, whatever that might be, helping people to understand what that North Star is, and then reinforcing that not from a perspective of yourself, but a perspective from the customer. And I think this is where a lot of companies start to drift because they start to optimize some internal metric that, yeah, that'll build efficiency within your organization. But what does the customer think? And constantly being able to represent as, if you think of from an agile perspective, the chief product owner of the organization, to be able to represent this is what the customers need and want and to be able to voice that in the vision and the ambitious missions that are set up for the organization. Make it real for people.

And then the last part of that is not everything is going to happen and come true. If you read most executives' bios, there's lots and lots and lots and lots of mistakes. And I remember this of one leader, he was retiring. And I thought this wasn't most awkward time that he actually did this. He actually went up on the stage and he talked about his biggest failure. Now, throughout my career working with this person, I always wondered whether or not they were human. And then on the day of this person's exit, they finally decided to give you a few stories about mistakes that they made. And I think that he really needed to share those stories much, much earlier because I think people would've probably found... They would've been a little stressed working around him. And it would also show some vulnerability for you as a leader to say that you don't have everything figured out, and sometimes it's just a guess. We think that this is where the product needs to go.

And then as soon as you put it in front of the customers, they're going to tell you whether or not... If you take the Cano model and suddenly you're going to hit this is the most exciting thing since sliced bread, are they going to love it or are they going to go, [inaudible 00:35:12]. I'll take it if it's free. You get into this situation where it's like, well, we can't charge as much. But I think those stories become important and anchor organizations. One other aspect of this is I think that by having somebody who's approachable and can relay those stories effectively into the organization and talk about these things, I think then that opens the door for everyone else to do it as well. Because like it or not, humans are hierarchical in the way that we think about things. A lot of people manage up, so they mimic leaders. So be that leader that somebody would want to mimic.

Mat Lawrence:

I think that's great advice, Ray. The connection for me that's run through this whole conversation is around engaging with your work authentically, whether it's the team that you're trying to lead, whether it's the agile practices at whatever scale and level that you're operating at. And to build that trust to enable that to work requires that level of authenticity.

Ray Arell:

Yeah, exactly.

Mat Lawrence:

I would love, as we wrap up, for you to leave any final tips or advice for both current and emerging leaders on that topic. If there's a way beyond just sharing your own personal stories, how would you advise people? What would you leave them with to build some trust in their teams?

Ray Arell:

Well, a couple of things. Number one, you have to be mindful about who you are as a person. Again, like I was saying, that people manage up. And if you send out an email at three o'clock in the morning, and five minutes later your people were responding to you, then you're not being a really good role model of a good work-life balance. So a lot of your tendencies will bleed off into the organization. So regardless how you assess yourself, do an assessment of your leadership, where you think it is. Harvard Business Review, a long time ago, put off the levels of what they saw as leadership models. And the lowest level is the expert and the achiever-based leaders. And if you're one of those, those are not very conducive to a good agile or collaborative culture. So if you're currently setting in that slant, then you should look ways of being able to move yourself more to a catalytic or a synergistic-based leader.

And that journey's not an easy one because I went through that myself. It took years in order to pull away from some of those tendencies that you had as an expert leader. And as an example, an expert-based leader tends to only talk to other experts. If they perceive somebody not to be an expert of something, they tend to discount those individuals and not engage with them. And so again, the full organizational brain is what's going to solve the problem. So how do you engage the entire organization and pull those ideas together?

The other one is that as you go into, from an emergent leader perspective, I think you said it yourself earlier, and that's not just the bias of you're not an expert, I'm not going to talk to you, but any bias that you might have can affect the way that you lead and judge an individual, and really could limit or grow their career based upon maybe a snap judgment that you might have had. So I think you have to be mindful of your decisions that you're taking within the organization and especially the ones you're making of people. And so you got to be careful of those.

The last one is probably just... And this gets into the complex adaptive systems space. Not everything is cut and dry, black and white, or mechanistic, meaning that we can take the same product, redo it again and again and again, and we're going to get different answers. We're going to get different requirements. We're going to get different things. It's okay for that stuff to be there. And it's okay for the stuff that's coming out of our products to be different every once in a while, and specifically because everything, it's a very complex environment. Cause and effect relationships and complexity is, customer can change their mind, and we have to be comfortable with a customer changing their mind. Our customer might have new needs that come up.

And likewise, our employees, they sometimes will have change of thought or change of what they are excited about. How do you encourage that? How do you grow those individuals to retain them in the company, not to use them for the skill they have right now, but how do you play the long game there? And I know I'm getting a little long-winded here, but the thing that I see most, even with all the layoff notices that are going on right now, is that that company's not playing the long game. I think that's a bad move because all you're doing by letting an employee go is enabling your competitor with a whole bunch of knowledge that you should be retaining. So anyway, I'll cut it short there.

Mat Lawrence:

Right. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today. It's been an absolute pleasure. I've really enjoyed the chat. So yes, thank you for joining me on the Easy Agile Podcast.

Ray Arell:

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

"Great convo with Dave & Eric! Key takeaway: revamp Easy Agile's org structure representation. Exciting stuff!"

Nick Muldoon, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Easy Agile, is joined by Dave West, CEO, and Eric Naiburg, COO, from Scrum.org.

In this episode, Nick, Dave, and Eric unpack the current agile landscape, discussing the role of the agile native and emphasizing the importance of building connected teams by flipping the hierarchy and putting leaders in supporting roles.

They emphasise the importance of empowering the people closest to the problem to make the call, and ultimately creating an environment for success to happen.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Share your thoughts and questions on Twitter using the #easyagilepodcast and make sure to tag @EasyAgile.

Transcript:

Nick Muldoon:

Hi folks. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name's Nick Muldoon. I'm the co-founder and co CEO at Easy Agile, and today I'm joined with two wonderful guests, Eric Naiburg, the Chief operating officer at scrum.org, and Dave West, the chief executive officer at scrum.org. Before we begin, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people that are joining us today. So gentlemen, thank you so much for making some time. We really appreciate it.

Eric Naiburg:

Thank you.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess I'd love to just jump in and, Dave, I've got a question for you first and a follow on for you, Eric. I'd love to just get a quick assessment, Dave, of the Agile landscape today and I guess the shifts that you may have seen now that we're out of these COVID lockdowns, these back and forth, COVID lockdowns.

Dave West:

Yeah, it's interesting. So I've been the CEO almost eight years here at scrum.org, and it has changed a bit during those eight years. I think what we're seeing and is a, dare I say, the deployment phase, mass deployment of these Agile ways of working and this Agile mindset throughout industries and throughout all organizations. It's more than an IT software development thing. And I think that that was accelerated during COVID. What's interesting though is many of the characteristics of Agile that became so important during COVID, particularly around empowered teams, particularly around trust, particularly around the hierarchy and the reduction of hierarchy, some of those things are being challenged as we return to the new normal, which some people would rather was just the normal. So I am seeing some of that. However, generally Agile is here, it's here to stay. I think the reality is that most knowledge workers, particularly those knowledge workers dealing in complex work are going to be using some kind of Agile approach for the foreseeable future.

Nick Muldoon:

And last week you... Was it last week? I believe you were in Paris for the first face to face?

Dave West:

[foreign language 00:02:37] I was and it rained the entire time actually, Nick. So yeah, I spent a lot of time inside in Paris.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, what was the sentiment from the Scrum trainers there, from the conversations they're having?

Dave West:

Yeah, it was interesting. We talked a lot about at scale, enterprise adoption, the challenges. It is funny that the challenges are challenges that you expect, and most of them are about people, legacy systems, people status, power position. We talked a lot about the challenges that teams are getting in these large complicated organizations. That continues to be the conversation. There is, obviously, this is Europe, they're very close to Ukraine and the conflict there. So there's definitely some conversations about that. We have six Ukrainian trainers and also about the same number of Russian trainers as well. So that's always a conversation. And then there's a general downturn of the economy that was also being talked about.

Layoffs are happening throughout Europe, and particularly in the technology sector, but I think that's growing to some extent. Vodafone just announced today that they were laying off, it's about 6,000 employees, and they're one of the biggest telecommunication companies in Germany, for instance. So there was definitely some of that, but so if you add enterprise, you add conflict uncertainty, you add economic uncertainty, those three things will come together. But what was funny in it is that throughout all of this, they were incredibly upbeat and excited. And I think because they're talking to people that they've never spoken to before, they're talking to people about how Scrum is a natural way of working, talking about the challenges of empowered teams, empiricism, continuous improvement.

And I had some really exciting conversations with trainers who were like, Yeah, well we're doing this in this aerospace company or this electric car supplier in Germany or whatever, or this financial services startup that's using blockchain for the first time. And of course they're using Agile. And so it was funny. It was almost as though all of those things, though there were the backdrop, it was still incredibly positive.

Nick Muldoon:

So this is interesting, and I guess if I reflect on the background for both of you, Eric, I'm looking at, you two have worked together from rational days-

Eric Naiburg:

A few times.

Nick Muldoon:

... a few times, but the prevalence of the Agile... I would describe you two as Agile natives and it sounds like, Dave, you've got your tribe there in Paris last week that are Agile natives. And I guess Eric, for you, what's the sense around the people that you are interacting with from a leadership perspective in these companies? Can you identify the Agile natives? Yeah, I guess is it an easier conversation if you've got Agile natives in leadership levels?

Eric Naiburg:

It's definitely an easier conversation if they're there. Sometimes they're in hiding, sometimes they're not Agile natives masquerading as Agile natives as well, which always makes it a little bit difficult because you have to peel back that onion and peel through who are they and what's their real agenda. I was talking to a CIO last week, and he was talking about the typical CIO lasts two to three years. So what is their real agenda? What are they trying to achieve? And Dave mentioned the people part of this, and people often become the hardest part of any Agile transformation or working in an Agile way. People want to protect themselves, they want to protect their turf, they want to do the things that they need to do to be successful as well. So you see that as talking to leaders within organizations, and they want to do better, they want to improve, they want to deliver faster, but they've still got that pressure. Organizations, at least large organizations, haven't changed. They still have boards, and they still report to those boards, and those boards still have their agendas as well.

Nick Muldoon:

You're making me recall a conversation that I had, this is several years ago, but on a trip through Europe, and it was with the Agile native, that was the Agile practice lead and probably wasn't masking, probably was legitimately an Agile native, yet they were talking about the mixed incentives for their, maybe not their direct leader, but the VP further up. And it was actually a, I don't want to say a zero-sum game, but there was some kind of fiefdom thing going where the various VPs would fight for resources, people, whatever, because that would unlock further bonus. But at the end of the day, it was not optimizing the entire financial services company. Are we still seeing that today?

Dave West:

Oh, very much so. In fact, a colleague of ours says, "Science used to have a saying, science progresses one funeral at a time." And I think Agile definitely has some of that, not funerals hopefully, but retirements.

Nick Muldoon:

Retirements

Dave West:

Retirement.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

Yeah. The reality is that when you don't have incentives aligned, where you don't have teams aligned to those incentives and leadership aligned to those consistent incentives, then you're going to always be dealing with some challenges. What's so frustrating is we all know the industrial revolution, and particularly the recent revolution of mass production and oil, which just happened in the deployment phase just after the second World War, was enabled by changing working practices created by people like Ford and Deming and all of these people. We all know that. The digital revolution is happening around us. It may even pass us if you believe the AI buzz that's happening. We may be put to the side and computers may just take over, but this digital is happening, and you are in with leaders and they're like, "Yeah, totally respect that. We are going to be a hundred percent digital. We are an airline, but really we are a digital company with wings."

They describe themselves in this way, and then they don't want to challenge the fundamentals of how authority, how value is managed, how risk is made transparent, how governance is, it happens, how funding is made and planning, et cetera. They don't want to challenge any of those assumptions. They like that the way it is. But we are going digital. It is ironic that it still is happening. However, that isn't totally hundred percent. The organizations that get it, the organizations that have leaders that are either insightful, either motivated, or maybe they want to write a book or something. Maybe their reasons aren't always as clear, but those leaders are dragging these organizations into the 21st century.

Great example. Proctor and Gamble, Gillette. Gillette, the latest exfoliating razor. I can see you haven't used it, unfortunately, Nick, with your rather handsome beard. So yeah. Anyway, I use it a lot, as you can tell. The exfo... Was built using Scrum and Agile. This is Proctor and Gamble, an ancient, okay not ancient, an older organization, but really has got it. They realize that if they want to keep up with their customers, their partners, their suppliers, they need to work in quite different ways. And so it isn't roses, but there are roses in the garden as it were.

Eric Naiburg:

And it goes beyond, when you think of that organization, you think of what Gillette has done, is it goes beyond traditional Agile thinking. Traditional Agile thinking, we think software, and this is engineering, this is manufacturing, this is bringing together marketing because in those types of organizations, marketing drives what the product's going to be, and then engineering figures out how to deliver that product and so on. So it's really bringing together the whole organization into how do we deliver something, and deliver it together. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. And one of the big changes that Agile helps to drive is that team. So you talked about incentives and team incentives, that's a piece of it, but it's team ownership. It's team togetherness.

It is that ultimately they all feel accountable, and bringing that accountability together as a team versus, and I think even... So my wife's in manufacturing and it's always... She's on the R and D side of it, and complaining about the marketing people. You have those conversations of, "Well, they don't realize what it takes to actually build this thing. They just have the dream." And by bringing them together in that team, and really they're having their daily scrums, they're planning together and they're having those hard conversations respectfully, that starts to build that team and build them in a way that they're able to actually deliver faster and more what the customer wants.

Dave West:

Can I just lean in, I'm sorry, we just taken over here a little Nick, but I just want to lean into something that Eric said around it is all about the teams. One of the fundamental problems we see in many organizations is hierarchy. Because if you get these massive hierarchies, obviously there's, "I've got to be in control of something. I need to take ownership of things. I need to be off irresponsible for certain things." That's how hierarchies work. And so that often undermines the ability of a team to effectively function. We need to flip that so that these hierarchies become, instead of being on top of the teams, they need to be underneath the teams supporting them. Think of them as those support trusses on bridges or whatever. You have some fabulous bridges in Australia and in Melbourne and in places like that and in Sydney.

So think of it upside down, holding up the teams. But that means, going back all again to incentives again, that those leaders need to understand what they're responsible for in this new world. And they're doing it for very good reason. They're doing it because the teams need to be, they're closer to the problem, they need to be empowered to make the decisions in real time based on the data, the information they have, they need to have clean line of sight to the customer. All of those things are the reason why a hierarchy is just too slow to respond and too bureaucratic. So we need to flip it and enable those teams. And that's a huge challenge.

Nick Muldoon:

I Love this. You two have given me something to ponder. So for the first six years of the company's life, of Easy Agile's life, we did have a very simple team page, and Dave and I as co-CEOs were at the bottom of the page. And then you had the leaders of the pillars. So you had, at the time, Tegan was the head of product, the leader, and they sat on top of Dave and I, and then the team sat on top of that. And it's interesting, I'm actually trying to reflect now, it's probably only in the last 12 or 18 months as we went through 40 people, that that page or that visualization has flipped. I've got an action item obviously to come out of this, thank you gentlemen, to actually go and flip it back because it's a communications mechanism, but if we actually put ourselves at the foundation in this supporting role for supporting the folks, that sets the tone, I imagine, for the team members in how they think of themselves and maybe that accountability piece as well, Eric.

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting because sometimes it's those little things that change how people think and feel. I use a lot of sports analogies when I talk and meet with people, and especially with where Dave was talking of empowering the people closest to the problem. We have to do the same in sport. If we have to wait for the manager to tell us to pass the ball, it's never going to happen. We've got to allow the people to make decisions and make those decisions on the field. We need to apply that to business as well. Allow the people who are closest to the problem, closest to what's happening, make those decisions within the business as well.

Nick Muldoon:

So if we come back to Proctor and Gamble, and we don't have to rabbit hole on it, but they're one of the large, long-lived companies, and I don't know about their approach, in particular, but I think about GE, and GE had their internal training university program, and they were training their leaders, training their managers how to manage, training their leaders how to lead. How does a Proctor and Gamble go about shifting that conversation internally, and what's that timeframe? Because presumably you've start with someone that's on a team. Do you have to elevate them over time through the hierarchy of the company?

Dave West:

It is interesting. I'm fortunate to spend maybe because we're both British people living in Boston, I'm fortunate to spend quite a lot of time with, and there's videos on our site with this, by the way, interviews with Dave Ingram who runs R and D for male grooming, it's called, in the Gillette part of P and G. And the case study is out there. So I talked to him a lot about how you drive it in a huge organization where they've got everything to lose. They've got products that are amazing, they've innovated, those products are the products that you put into your shopping cart as you walk down the aisle. They don't want to muck that up. Let's be frank. If suddenly, because of some innovation, there's no razors on the shelves, then I, as a board man need a razor. So I will buy an alternate product, and it's possible that then I'll always buy that product.

So they've got to be very, very careful. They've got more to lose. So we talk a lot about how you manage change and it's all of the above. What he's done very smartly is he's empowered the product owner role or the person, the glue role, whether it's using Scrum or something else, and he's really invested in these change agents in his organization, and he's definitely led by doing, he's been very honest and open about that, and very clear that he doesn't have all the answers and he's looking for them to help him during this, which isn't perhaps what you'd expect from a traditional organization where-

Nick Muldoon:

The leader might need to feel that they have the answer to all of these questions.

Dave West:

Exactly. And he's done a really, really good job of doing that. And primarily because he says, "Well, my success is ultimately their success, so if I can make them be a little bit more successful, there's more of them than me, so let's make it work." Which I think is an unusually honest and very insightful view of it. So he's driven it predominantly through product management ownership areas. He's then provided a support environment around that. He's then definitely advertised the successes. He's spent a lot of time building cross-functional teams. The thing that Eric was talking about. And really been very careful working with their leadership. If you're material science, there's a whole department, if there's marketing, there's this whole channel thing that they have. Basically working with their leaders to create the environment for success to happen. And I don't think it's easy. I think there's many surprising roadblocks along the way, and I can't speak for him on this, but he's taken that divide and conquer approach, focusing on that catalyst role.

Nick Muldoon:

Because you, obviously, you're providing a lot of training for various, well, I guess people at various levels in these companies. And obviously it's a far cry from having a CST and a CSM and a CSPO certification going back a decade, decade and a half. What's the uptake around the leadership training? And what does that look like, Eric? Is there renewed interest in that at the moment or are people demanding more of that leadership training? Is it fit for purpose for today's leader?

Eric Naiburg:

So I think to a point it is. We're certainly seeing growth in the leadership training. Matter of fact, Dave and I were just looking at those numbers earlier this week or yesterday, I guess. Today's [inaudible 00:21:29]

Nick Muldoon:

Are there are any numbers you can share with us?

Eric Naiburg:

It's hard to share the exact numbers, but we're seeing double-digit growth in number of students taking our leadership classes. Both how do you measure, so our evidence-based management classes, as well as our leadership training, but that also only goes so far because a lot of those folks, depending on how high up, especially in the organization you go, aren't willing to take lots of time out to take such training. So a lot of it happens in that coaching. They're hiring the executive coaches or the Agile coaches that are in there. The scrum masters that are in there are actually working to help coach those folks. And a lot of it's less about the training and more about the mindset shifts. So if you look at our Agile leadership course, a large part of it is spent on getting people to think differently. And really some of it's hit you over the head type of activities, where it really helps to drive those points across of, "Wow, I need to think differently. I need to work differently. I need to treat people differently."

Nick Muldoon:

Differently.

Eric Naiburg:

It's that, and we're seeing good success with that because especially when that light bulb goes off for folks, and that light bulb that goes off saying, "Wow, this is different." We have some exercises in our classes that really get you thinking and get you... There's one, for example, where you're thinking you're doing the right thing for the customer, and you're thinking you're doing exactly right until it kills the customer, because you didn't necessarily think through the whole. It's, "Well, this is what the customer wanted, so we need to do it, but maybe I should have got together with the team and let the team make decisions." I'm going a little extreme, but-

Nick Muldoon:

No, I appreciate it.

Eric Naiburg:

... it's those sorts of things that we have to change. And a lot of what we do in the course is educate leaders on what those teams are going through, and what the individuals on those teams need, and the type of support that they need, not how do you manage those teams, not how do you manage those people. But how do you empower and enable those people to be successful?

Nick Muldoon:

I want to just rewind for a second, sorry.

Eric Naiburg:

Killing people.

Nick Muldoon:

It sounded like there's a friction point in actually getting these leaders to take the time out of the office to go and get some education.

Eric Naiburg:

There is, yes.

Nick Muldoon:

Is that correct?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah.

Dave West:

It's incredibly hard if you're at a large organization, in particular, when your schedule is overlapping meetings continuously eight to nine hours a day for them to take that moment to step back. Everybody, I believe very strongly, Nick, that everybody needs to take time to invest in their own personal and professional development. And that time is not a waste. Ultimately it is an incredibly good investment.

Nick Muldoon:

Yes.

Dave West:

We know-

Nick Muldoon:

It's great ROI.

Dave West:

Totally. Even if it just resets you, even if you have that moment of clarity because of it. it's not a surprise that people like Bill Gates go on retreat every three to six months and he takes his big bag of books-

Nick Muldoon:

Books.

Dave West:

And he goes off grid for a few days just to reset. I think that that time is incredibly effective. But what's interesting is, we are under, in America in particular, and I'm sure it's true in Australia, it's certainly true in England, where I'm from, motion is more important than outcomes. It's all about the motions. If you look busy, you're not going to get fired. And I think to some extent we learned that in school. I don't know if your parents said to you or maybe you got your first job. I was working on a delicatessen counter at the co-op supermarket, and I remember there was an old worker there, turned to me, he goes, "Whatever you do, when the manager walks by," Mr. Short-

Nick Muldoon:

Look busy.

Dave West:

... was his name. And he was everything that name implies. "Mr. Short walks by, look like you're doing something, start cleaning something, otherwise he'll take you off and make you do provisions, and you don't want to dealing with that milk, it's rancid." And I remember that. Look busy. And I think we've got a lot in our culture. I try to take time every week. I book, for instance, my lunch hour, I book it and I always try to do something in it. I try to watch a TED talk, read something, just to clear your mind to think about something different. I think that time is incredibly important. However-

Nick Muldoon:

Get exposed to some new perspective, right?

Dave West:

Exactly. Even if it means, even if the stuff you're watching or whatever isn't that relevant necessarily. Sometimes that lack of relevance is exactly what you need because your mind does something.

Nick Muldoon:

A mental break.

Dave West:

Exactly. And however in corporate America, and I think that's corporate in general, that doesn't happen. People are overly leveraged, they're incredibly busy. They have to attend these meetings, otherwise their profile is diminished. And I think that's at the detriment of the organization and the company. Here's a question, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

Who have you helped recently?

Nick Muldoon:

Who have I helped recently? I spend most of my time, and I get most of my energy out of coaching conversations with individuals. So on my [inaudible 00:27:35] profile, I've got futurist very high up, and so I love exploring what is your life and your career going to look like in five years time? They're the conversations that I really get jazzed by.

Dave West:

And that's what everybody... Who have you helped is more important than what have you done.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave West:

And I think you need to balance that.

Nick Muldoon:

I pulled up these stats because I thought you might find them interesting. We did a survey last year of a subset of our customers. And we had 423 teams. So it's not a huge sample size, but 423 teams. And the reason I think about it is because there's a lot of, what was the statistic here? So just to give you a sense, most common sprint duration is 14 or two week sprints. Most teams have six people that are involved. Fibonacci for story pointing, an estimation. 10% of these teams achieved what they set out to achieve at the start of the sprint. And so the teams, this 10% of teams, the subset, they did add work into their sprints, but teams that were unsuccessful, rolled work from sprint to sprint.

And so perhaps what it indicated to us is that there are teams that over commit and under deliver, and in fact 90% of them, 90% of the survey teams, it would appear that they over commit and under deliver. And then there are teams that are, maybe, leaving time, Dave, maybe for some education or some spare time in their two-week sprint. And they actually happen to pull on more work and they achieve that. And I'm just thinking about that from a sense of, are 90% of these teams trying to be busy or are they trying to be perceived to be busy? Even if it's at the expense of actually delivering?

Eric Naiburg:

Or are they even pushed into it? It's interesting, there's a question on our professional scrum master one, our PSM one test that often people get wrong. And I think it's a great question, which is, I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember it exactly, but it's essentially how much of the sprint backlog needs to be filled coming out of sprint planning. And a significant number of people say it needs to be complete coming out of sprint planning. Which goes in the face of Agile and Scrum.

Dave West:

Exactly.

Eric Naiburg:

Because we don't know there. There's that uncertainty. All we need is enough to get started, and once we get started, but I think people are fearful of, "Well, we've got two weeks, we need to be able to plan those two weeks and we better be able," and this is some of that top-down pressure that we talked about. "Well, we need to show that we've got two weeks worth of work here and that we're not sitting around, so let's fill it up." And those are some of the misnomers about Agile and Scrum. "Well, it's a two-week sprint, we need to plan two weeks." Well, no, we don't. We need to have a goal. Where are we going to get to? How we achieve it is going to take time because we're going to learn as we go. As a matter of fact, the scrum team that I'm on right now, we were running a three-week sprint, and two weeks in we've actually achieved our goal. And now we're able to build upon that goal. And we already delivered on that goal a week early, which is great.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you think, Eric, that there's a fear from leadership that if people haven't got two weeks worth of work teed up, that they're just going to be twiddling their thumbs?

Eric Naiburg:

I don't know that it's a fear from leadership. I think it's a perception that the workers have of what leadership is thinking. I think it's more that. And I think it's the, "Well, we said we've got two weeks," and they are going to ask us, management's going to say, "When will you deliver?" I don't know that we'll ever get away from that when will we deliver question, even though we continually try to get away from that answer. But they're going to ask it. So if they're going to ask it, I better be prepared, which means I better have a whole bunch of work laid out. And that just breaks everything that we teach. It breaks everything that we think in Agile.

And all I need in planning is I need a goal, and some idea of how I'm going to get there. And over time let's revisit it and let's continue to revisit it and go to it. But it amazes me how often that some of the answers to that question are, you have a full sprint backlog go coming out of sprint planning, you have enough to get started. I forget what some of the others are. But it amazes me how many times when I review tests people put the full back sprint backlog where it even says, right in the scrum guide, "You're going to inspect and adapt throughout the sprint." Well, how do I inspect and adapt if I've already decided what I'm going to do?

Nick Muldoon:

Who's the onus on? If it's not actually the leadership's wish that you fill up all your time and you operate at a hundred percent capacity, then is the onus on the leader to make it known or is the onus on the team to engage in the conversation?

Dave West:

It's the leader.

Eric Naiburg:

Yes.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Yes, both. Yeah.

Dave West:

I think it's more the leader because I think they have to create the environment where the team actually can challenge it, and actually have that very clear conversation. What worries me about your stan is the fact that I don't... The first few sprints. Yes, maybe you get overly excited, maybe you fill the sprint, which you don't need to. Maybe you're just keen. That's okay. The thing is, what happens on sprint three or four or five, when the same pattern is manifesting itself over and over again. That's worrying. And I think that speaks really clearly to the lack of help the team's having. Whether you call it an Agile coach, and in Australia, I think the Agile manager is a phrase that's used, or whether it's an Agile, or whether it's a scrum master, whatever. Scrum.org has a scrum master.

And the reason why we have a scrum master isn't because we don't know scrum, though there's some days it might be questionable. But cobbler's children, all that stuff. But the reality is, we do know Scrum, we talk it, we breathe it, we love it. But having somebody that steps back and says, "Hang on, Westy, what have you done there? Have you forced encouraged the team to fill the sprint? Have you set them an unrealistic goal? Have you listened to them and asked them the questions? Or have you told them what you want? And what do you think that's going to do?" I know that I have, because Eric and I fund the sprints, as it were. When we go to a sprint review and we say stuff, because a sprint review is ultimately there to provide feedback to the team, to allow them to inspect and adapt for the next sprint.

You can't change the past, but you can change the future based on feedback. If I go in with, "Oh, well that's rubbish and you should do this, and what about that?" Yeah, it's going to have an impact. So ultimately we have to think about, as leaders, what we bring, and also have somebody often helping us to be the leader that we need to be because we get excited and we get enthusiastic and we get, "Oh, you can do this and that? Let's do it. That sounds awesome." And sometimes that can...

Eric Naiburg:

And that's part of why I say it's both. That's why I said the yes. It's on the leader, but the leader needs to be reminded of that. The leader needs to be supported by that, especially by the product owner and the scrum master. The product owner has to be able to say no. The product owner has to... I talk about happy ears and most CEOs and senior leaders are-

Nick Muldoon:

Happy ears?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeas. Most CEOs and senior leaders I've worked with have what I call happy ears. They come from one customer or they talk to one person and heard something that-

Dave West:

Do this.

Eric Naiburg:

... that one person might have thought was great. And next thing you know, they're putting all these new requirements on the team. And I've worked in many startups and big companies where, even at IBM, that happened. And the product owner needs to be able to say, "Whoa, hold on. That's a great idea. Let's think about it. And we'll put it on the backlog, we'll think about it later. But let's not distract the team right now from what we're trying to do and what we're trying to achieve." And that's why I say it's both. It's not just on the leader. You're not going to fully change the leader. You're not going to fully change them to not have those exciting moments. And that's what makes them entrepreneurs. That's what makes them who they are.

But the team needs to be able to push back. The leader needs to be accepting of that pushback and the scrum master and the product owner, as well as others on the team, need to be able to have that pushback. I remember very, very early in my career, I worked for a company called Logicworks. We had a data model, a little data modeling tool called Irwin. And I remember sitting in my cube, and the CEO had just come back from a meeting with one client, and comes over, and I was a product manager-

Nick Muldoon:

Eric, do this.

Eric Naiburg:

And starts talking about, we need to go do this now, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, well, hold on. It's like, but blah, blah, blah said they'd buy it. Well one, did you actually talk to the people using it? Or did you talk to somebody way up here who has no idea how they're actually using the tool? Which the answer was talking to CEO to CEO conversation. And just because they'll buy it, will anybody? But you have to be able to have those conversations. You have to build that trust with the leader from the team, and from the team to the leader, to be able to have those pushbacks and be able to say, "That's an interesting idea. We'll take it under consideration for the future, but right now we have a focus. We've got a sprint goal and we're not going to destroy our sprint goal because you got excited about something."

Dave West:

As you can see, Nick, I have a really hard time getting any of my ideas into our organization because they ask things like this. So annoying, Nick. They say, "Okay, that's great. Is that more important than these five things that are currently driving our product goal?" I'm like, "Ugh, what do you mean? I can't have dessert and main course and an appetizer? I have to pick one that's just so not fair." And they said, "Well, we could spin up another team and then that requires investment. It's going to take time." And I'm like, "Oh gosh, don't you hate it when you have intelligent, smart teammates?" It's just hard.

Nick Muldoon:

Dave and I have definitely, so Dave Elkin, my co-founder, he comes from an engineering background and I come from a product background. And we've definitely noticed in the last, again, probably in this timeframe, in the last 18 months, as the team's grown or through a certain inflection point, in the past, we would quite come comfortably have conversations about what about this idea and how about that? And we'd try and tease things out, and we'd tease them out with the team, but there was no expectation that that stuff would get picked up. And then we had few examples where teams would go and take on and think that they needed to look at this stuff and we're like, "Oh, no, no, no, sorry, we should clarify that we just wanted to get a brainstorm or we wanted to get a thought out of our head, and we wanted some perspective on it, but this should absolutely not mean that you should chase it down." And so the language and how we've had to approach things like that, or activities like that, has certainly changed.

Eric Naiburg:

I've seen that a lot lately-

Nick Muldoon:

[inaudible 00:39:50] Inflection point.

Eric Naiburg:

... probably in the last two or so years. And I think maybe because of remote, it's made it even worse, because you don't get all the emotion and things. But I've definitely seen a lot more of that, of, "Well, I'm just," I've been told this doesn't translate, "but I'm just spit balling and I'm just throwing an idea out there just to have a conversation." And because the leader said it, people think it's fact and that they want to do it. And all they were doing is, "Hey, I heard this thing. What do you think?"

Nick Muldoon:

What's your perspective?

Eric Naiburg:

Yeah, exactly. And I think as leaders, we have to be very careful to understand the impact of what we're saying, because we may be thinking of it as, "I'm just throwing it out there for some conversation." Somebody sitting at the desk just heard, "Oh, they want us to go do that." And I've seen that a lot in companies recently, including in ours, where the way something's said or what is said is taken on as we must do this versus, "Hey, here's an idea, something to noodle on it." So you're not alone, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it. Hey, Eric, Oregon, that's a great place to call it. That is, and you have given me, you've both given me a lot to noodle on, so I'd like to say thank you so much from our listeners and from the crew at Easy Agile for joining us today. I really appreciate it. It's been wonderful having you on the podcast.

Dave West:

Well, thank you for inviting us. We're really grateful to be here, and hopefully some of this has made sense, and yeah, let's continue to grow as a community and as a world working in this way, because I think we've got a lot of problems to solve. I think the way we do that is people working effectively in empowered ways. So let's change the world, man.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it. Okay, that's great. Thank you.