Easy Agile Podcast Ep.1 Dominic Price, Work Futurist at Atlassian
"I had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with Dominic Price from Atlassian. It was so enjoyable to reflect on my time working at Atlassian and to hear Dom's perspective on what makes a great team, how to build an authentic culture and prioritising the things that matter."
- Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO Easy Agile
Transcript:
Nick Muldoon:
What I was keen to touch on and what I was keen to explore, Dom, was really this evolution of thinking at Atlassian. I remember when we first crossed paths, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall it was like late 2014, I think.
Dom Price:
Yeah, it was.
Nick Muldoon:
Scrum Australia was on at the time, and you're at the George Street offices above Westpac there, wherever, and we had Slady in the room, there was yourself. I think Mairead might have been there, I'm not too sure.
Dom Price:
No, probably not. I think it was JML's engineering meeting, engineering relationship meeting.
Nick Muldoon:
Right.
Dom Price:
Involved in the
Nick Muldoon:
Hall of Justice, right? Not Hall of Justice.
Dom Price:
Not Hall of Justice. Avengers.
Nick Muldoon:
Avengers. When was the last time you were in Avengers?
Dom Price:
A long, long time ago. A long, long time ago.
Nick Muldoon:
You've been working from home full-time since March, right?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Although, actually for me I can work from anywhere for three and a half years.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, fair enough. Okay.
Dom Price:
The shift for me was missing the work element. I'm missing the in-person work element because being on the road a lot, having that one day or two days week in the office, there's connective tissue, I didn't realize how valuable that was. Going five days work from home is not a great mix to me.
Nick Muldoon:
No, not a great mix for me either, Mate. I was the one that was coming into the office during lockdown. I was like, "Oh." It was basically an extension of my house, I guess, because I was the only one that was coming in. But I could turn up the music and I could get some work done without-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. All right. Back in late 2014 when we first crossed paths, we're at JML's engineering meeting, and that was before JML had gone to Shopify.
Dom Price:
Yes.
Nick Muldoon:
We were talking about all things. I remember talking about OKRs, which was the Objective Key Result framework that we were using at Twitter that I think Atlassian was looking at for the first time.
Dom Price:
Yeah, we'd been flirting with for a while.
Nick Muldoon:
Flirting with for a while. What was Atlassian using at the time? What was VTFM?
Dom Price:
There was two things we had at the time. VTFM which was Vision, Focus Areas, Themes, and Measures, which was our way of communicating our strategy, our rolling problem strategy. But then off the back of that we had what I would call old school KPIs. Right? We'd pick goals, right, we'd pick ways of measuring those goals, but very KPI-focused and very red, amber, green scoring focused. When we were small, it worked okay. It didn't scale particularly well because it became punitive. If you were green and you hit your score, you got ignored because you were always meant to, and if you were amber or red and you missed by anything, you got punished. Right? It's like, "Please explain." You got the invite to the head master's office.
Dom Price:
We wanted a way of getting stretched into there and also be more outcome-focused, because I think when we scaled KPIs, we got very output-focused like, "What did you do this week? What's the thing that you shipped?" Actually, the thing that we forgot about, and I think it was by accident, it wasn't bad intent, but we forgot about what's the outcome or impact we're trying to have on the customer, because that happens after the event. OKRs were a way of putting stretch in there and building the idea of moonshots and big ambition. But then also, refocusing us on, what is the impact we're trying to have on the end customer, not just what's happening in the sausage factory?
Nick Muldoon:
With that end customer perspective though, did you get that with the VTFM?
Dom Price:
No. Actually, the first year we rolled that OKR, that was part of the problem. We had the VTFM because that stayed, right? That was like the sacred cow for the first year. That stayed, and we just had OKRs underneath. Yeah, and we're like, "Well-
Nick Muldoon:
So you're mixing them together.
Dom Price:
... which ones do we report? The measures in the VTFM because that's our Atlassian level plan, or the OKRs, which is the things we're actually doing and the impact that we're having. You're like, "Well, both," and you're like, "Well, they don't meet. There's no cascade up or down, left or right, that had them aligned properly." The year after we actually phrased ... we got rid of the VTFM, and we now have our rolling 12-month strategy phrased as OKRs.
Nick Muldoon:
Right. Okay. At that time, Dom, back in 2014, when you were flirting with OKRs, as you said, was the VTFM that you were working to replace, was that company, department, team, individual, or did it just stop at the team?
Dom Price:
Yeah. That's where it didn't really scale, right? The organizational one made sense, and again, when you're smaller, it's a lot easier to draw the linkage between your team or your department and the company one. As we scaled, what happened was we'd have a company level VTFM, and then each department would go and build its own. The weird thing is, and again, this works for a phase, and then you realize it doesn't, is we don't create value up and down the org. We create value across the organization, and so building these VTFMs in departments was honing our craft. But it was doing it at the detriment of how you work across teams.
Dom Price:
I think that it's one of those things that at the time, we didn't realize. If I had a crystal ball, it would have been great. But it seemed like the right thing to do. Engineering had a VTFM. So did Design, so did Product Management, and you're like, "You know we only ship one experience, right?" I don't care if engineering's perfect and design's not because that's letting the customer down because this one experience that we shipped. There was this whole sort of arbitration where we'd build them vertically, and then try and glue them together horizontally, but they'd all been built in isolation.
Dom Price:
Then When it comes to trade offs, and every business has trade offs, whether you admit it or not, when you're like the best laid plans literally stay on paper, right? That's where they exist, then reality kicks in one day after you've built the plan. When reality kicks in, what trade off are you going to make? Are you going to do the trade off that delights the customer, maybe compromises you? Right? then how do you do that internally? Are you going to help Design and Product Management and load balance that way, or say, "Well, yeah, I'm an engineer and we're fine. It's Design's fault. How we'd adapt everyone is Design's fault." We quickly realized that a vertical model brought about some unintended consequences and some odd behaviors that weren't really the kind of behaviors we wanted as Atlassian.
Nick Muldoon:
Back in that time, Dom, in 2014, 2015, did you have the triad then with the product design and later for each of those groups?
Dom Price:
In physical people, yes.
Nick Muldoon:
But in-
Dom Price:
... modeling, no.
Nick Muldoon:
No. Okay. How did that come to fruition, that triad where they were working as one in harmony to deliver that customer experience?
Dom Price:
I think essentially, it's one of those brilliant mistakes when you look back. We're really good at reflecting, and you do a few reflections, and you suddenly see the pattern, and you like, "Hey, our teams that are nailing it are the ones where we've got cognitive diversity and the balance of skillsets." Not where we got one expert or one amazing anything, but actually, you're like, "Yeah, actually -
Nick Muldoon:
If look at some of these patterns-
Dom Price:
Yeah. You're like, "Hey, I just saw that design." They get the product manager in a headlock and have a valid argument at a whiteboard. You're like, "I actually like that. That's what I like, the meeting where there's consensus and violent agreement." Maybe that's the wrong signal, right, that the right signal is this cognitive diversity, this respectful dissent. You see that, and we're like, "Hang on, we have the realization that engineers build great usable products, and product managers are thinking about the whole sort of usability and along with the designers. Viability, you're like, "Oh, we need all three. All three of those need to be apparent for a great experience." You're like, "Cool. Let's double down on that." Right?
Dom Price:
We started to hone in a lot more on how do we get the balance across those? How do we understand the different roles? Because we didn't want to become homogenous. You don't want those three roles to get on so well they all agree. You also don't want to violently disagree all the time, right? A little bit of disagreeing commits great. If they're always in disagreement, then that comes out in the product. How do you find the things that they stand for, and how they bring their true and best selves to each phase? Right? If you think about any given product or project, there are natural phases where their skillsets are more honed, right? In the phases for us, part of managing design is often a lot better with the ambiguous and a whole lot of stuff. When it comes to building, I'm probably going to listen to the engineer more, right?
Nick Muldoon:
And you're handing it over to delivery.
Dom Price:
Yeah. But then also, it's like, well, it's not the ... If you think about delivery time, I think we'd sometimes think of it as the relay race. I think that's incorrect, because everyone's still going to see the relay race. Once I've run my lap, I'm done, right? But in product development, it's not because when I hand over the baton, I still have a role. Even if it's in build phase, the product manager and the designer still have a massive role. It's just that they're co-pilots and the engineer's the pilot, right? You don't disappear, your role changes. I think that was one of the nuances that we got as we started to bring in the right skills, the right level of leadership, the right level of reflection to go, "How do we balance this across those phases, and how do we be explicit on what role we're playing in those different phases?
Nick Muldoon:
Okay, that's interesting. I'm going to want to come back to that when we turn our attention to the customers in the Agile transformation landscape more broadly. But one thing that has got me thinking about with respect to this balance is the fact that Atlassian had the discipline to hire for a triad, right? If I think about, I think this was around 2013 at Twitter, and in one of our groups, we had pick a number, but there would have been 200 people, and there would have been less than 10 product managers. I think we actually had a ratio of like 20. It was something silly like 26 engineers to a product manager. It wasn't even a design counterpart necessarily for each of the product managers. The balance was way off, and it wasn't very effective. Was there a time at Atlassian where there was this reflection? Because I'm just trying to think, in my time at Atlassian, I don't think we had maybe a great balance. I think there was a much heavier in engineering than there was in design and product.
Dom Price:
Yeah, it's one of those things that if it's not there, you don't miss it. Right? It's weird, right? It was a lot of it before my time, but when I listened to the story, it's like even design as a discipline when I started in 2013 was a very small discipline. I think even then, it was kind of like a hack to the notion where it was like, "Oh, yeah, we got some designers. They do the pixels, right? They make stuff look pretty." .
Nick Muldoon:
They do T-shirts and they do like .
Dom Price:
Who knows, right? But it makes us look pretty, right? They drink craft beer, and they sit on milk crates. We had this archetype of a designer, and then you like, "Oh, actually, once you start to understand user experience, the integration points, design languages, design standards, and the experience, once you get your first few designers who say, "Here's how our products fit together," and this is the experience from a customer lens, you're like, "Oh, I'm not sure I'm a fan of that." It wasn't badly designed, but nor was it particularly well-designed. Once you start to make some improvements, then you start to measure customer satisfaction, and you make that experience more seamless, you suddenly see the value.
Dom Price:
I think for Atlassian, I think we started as an engineering company. We added product management, and then begrudgingly added design. Interestingly, in my time there, the most recent thing we've added is research.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay.
Dom Price:
Fascinating evolution for us again to go, "What do you mean, research? I'm a product manager. I know everything about the industry in the section of the competition." They're like, "But do you know anything about the customer, and the job to be done at the top tasks, or how they experience, and thinking about things like accessibility, thinking about how our products integrate with other products, thinking about not just from a competitive landscape, but what's the actual job to be done, and what are the ways people are trying to do that, and the drop off points.
Dom Price:
Research has become a new muscle that we had the exact same experience with. First time you roll it out, people are like, "Oh, we don't need that. It's overkill." You're like, "I see, it's really quite good." Hard to integrate because you're giving me findings I wasn't expecting, and then there was a shift both for designers, but also for the product managers to go, "Oh, I can use a resource now because you're this independent group that can help me understand, not just my product and iterating on my products, but a level up, what's the thing that my products trying to do? Who am I competing with, and what does that experience look like end to end?" It's a completely different lens.
Nick Muldoon:
Basically what you're describing there, Dom, is you've still got the triad of the product design and leads. But now you've got this. It's a centralized kind of research team?
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Do they drop in for particular projects in different areas?
Dom Price:
Yeah. If you think about it, if you strip it back to plain common sense, I think over time, we got really good at explore and build. But maybe we lost a little bit of the muscle around wonder. These researches are great. The blinkers are out and they wonder, right? I'm sure they physically do this as well, but mentally, they stroll, right? They go quite broad, and when they come back with their insights, you're like, "Wow, that's given me a really good broad perspective." I'll give you a quick example where we're working a lot, and we always are on accessibility. It's easy to look at your current products and start adding stuffing. Right? That's the logical way of doing it. Or you look at your competitor's products, and how do you become a pair or a peer? Easy.
Dom Price:
What our research team did was they actually got a whole lot of people with different sight and mobility issues, and said, "We're going to now get you to use our products and go through some key tasks." They're already using it, but it's like maybe they're on a screen reader, or maybe they can't use a mouse, they can only use keyboard shortcuts. You suddenly see the experience through their lens, and we record it, and it's tracking eye sight and line of sight using all the actions. You've got this level of detail there where you're like, "Well, I know we're trying to build empathy, but actually seeing that experience firsthand is completely different than trying to think about it."
Dom Price:
You just seeing it through the lens of this person. The research team did weeks and weeks and weeks of research with different users, different backgrounds, different disabilities, different products and different tasks to give all of our teams the sense of what is it like as the actual person. Here, you can actually walk in that person's shoes, or it feels like you are.
Nick Muldoon:
If you're a product manager and a designer, and you're ... Because it sounds to me, Dom, like that sort of investigation or exploration that you're describing there with respect to mobility-impaired or sight-impaired people, that's something that it might be hard for me to bring that into my OKRs for our product. For that triad, how do I have ... I'm trying to push forward and chase down monthly active users, or cross-flow, or whatever it happens to be, and that's much more long-running. It's like it's a long-running thread that's just going to stay open for 18 months while we think about this stuff and have these conversations. Does that research group, do they actually have their own OKRs, and are those OKRs annually?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Yes and no. We do mostly OKRs across design, research. We now have a ways of working team. They tend to be shared OKRs or more cross-functional, are cross-functional to shared. The cross-function as in we have the same objective, but different key results.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay.
Dom Price:
If you think about accessibility as an objective, the research team, their key result is about having the latest greatest research and insight so that we can learn and understand. You're like, "Cool, that's your task." Right? The design team, your OKR is to take that insight and turn it into some designs, usability, and then you can actually go along the value chain, and each different person in that value chain has a different OKR.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. Still today though, there's no OKRs at an individual level, right? It's all team, group-based?
Dom Price:
We have odds and sods. I've dabbled with it a little bit. Sometimes I think I've always got individual OKRs. The question is whether I share them or not. I think if you think about the majority of knowledge workers, they will have individual goals, "I want to learn a new skill, I want to acquire a new "
Nick Muldoon:
Honing the craft.
Dom Price:
Yeah, right? Whether you write that down and it benefits you or not is not up for debate. When it came to writing them down in a collective, having a single storage of them, any kind of laddering, I think the cost of that is higher than the benefit. Right?
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Dom Price:
We strayed away from saying everyone then must have individual OKRs, and then ladder, whatever, because it ends up getting very, very cumbersome, and actually very command and control. What we've done instead is really say to our leaders, and this is leadership by capability, not by title, but saying to our leaders, "This is part of a conversation you should be having on a regular basis with your people around growth, and how you're inspiring them, and how you're motivating them. How are they developing and evolving? What are the experiments they're running on themselves? Right? How are they with other people? What are their challenges, and how can you help them never get those challenges? What are their points of amplification that you should be calling out with them to turn the dial on that? Right? What are their superpowers that we should be really encompassing, right, and nailing?" That's part of a leadership conversation. Does that need to be written down and centralized? No. To me, it becomes a zero benefit to documenting that.
Nick Muldoon:
It's interesting hearing you describe that. That's very much learning and development-focus. If I think back to Andy Grove's High Output Management, my understanding of that at an individual ... of OKRs and an individual level was always with respect to your customers. What am I going to do for my customers? But you've actually framed it, what am I going to do for myself that's going to allow me to be in better service to my customers, maybe next financial year?
Dom Price:
Yeah. It's a secret. I'm guessing this is shared by Atlassian, but this is definitely my view of the world, and I've shared this with enough people now where they understand. You can't be a great teammate if you're not turning up your true best self. You got to take a step back. There's this whole weird narrative around the humility of being a teammate where you're like, "I'm a martyr, and I'll take one for the team." It's BS, because if you're not in the right zone for that team activity, you're not giving your best, right? You're actually the anchor that brings the team down. You step back from that and you say, "Well, how do you be the best?" Because not all work is teamwork. There's a lot of deep work and individual tasks and stuff that needs to be done. You're like, "Right, I need to be the best version of me. Well, what's that mean?"
Dom Price:
It means that before any meeting, I need to have done my tasks, or before any meeting, I need to have done my pre-meeting, right? If we're meeting as a team and we have this synchronous activity, what are the things I need to do to be best prepared for that synchronous activity to deliver the most value? How can I get the most out of that teamwork? How do I turn up and be present? How do I turn up with respectful dissent and challenge, right, and provocation? That requires me first to be an individual. Right? I think one of the dangers in a lot of work environments right now is people have lost the understanding of what it is to be an individual, what your key leadership style, your learning style, how do you turn up? Right? How do you critique? How do you take feedback? All these things that make you you, you need to know those and be aware of them before you can be great in a team environment.
Dom Price:
It's not just the tasks. You need to know you. If you're a great individual, and you've honed that, you can then be a great teammate, and if you're a great teammate, you can deliver great outcomes for your customers. Anything else is an accident, right? We've all been in accidental teams, which has delighting a customer, and we've sat there and gone, "Really not sure what I did to that guy. I'll take it. I'll take the pat on the back. I'll take the kudos, and the bottle of wine, and the congratulations. Not really sure I amplify that. I don't know. If you don't know, you probably didn't. Right? That's not humility. You're probably just a passenger. I think the danger in growth environments is there's lots of passengers who they're a passenger to lots of success, and after a while, they're like, "I'm amazing." You're like, "You're not. You've just been in the right place at the right time repeatedly."
Nick Muldoon:
I got to process that.
Dom Price:
Let me give you an example. Right? A couple years ago, I was in New York with a mate of mine, Sophie. She's unofficially mentored me and helped me a lot of the years, right? I'm talking to her about trying to scale me, and I was really angry about some stuff, and thankfully, it was late afternoon in New York. She bought me [inaudible 00:25:30]. We smashed a drink and we chatted away, and she's one of those people that just calls BS on you, right? I'm like, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge. She's like, "Oh, cool." She's English as well. She's like, "So I'm guessing you're just going to whinge about it and hope it goes away." I'm like, "All right, fair point. Little bit, my English came out. I actually hoped that maybe even if I did whinge long enough, it would actually disappear." She's like, "That never happens, does it? What are you going to do about it?"
Dom Price:
We chatted when she gave me this challenge, and she's like, "You're not evolving." She's like, "You're adding stuff in, but you're full." She's like, "Cognitively, Dom, you're full." My challenge was I was reading all these business books at the time, and I knew lots of stuff, but I didn't feel any smarter. I wasn't doing anything with it, and it's creating this frustration spiral. She gave me the exercise, and you've probably seen this, the four Ls. She got a bit of paper, and she's like, "All right, write the four Ls down. Reflect on you as a leader. This is selfishly purely about you as a leader. Last 90 days, what have you loved? What have you done personally?"
Dom Price:
I'm like, "Oh, no, no, no, no." She's like, "Not like, because we're not doing likes here, right? We're not being soft. Loved, and own it. Actually, superpower, do more of it." We did that, very uncomfortable few sips of wine. Then she's like, "What's your loathe and what's your longed for?" I had lots of long fors, long list of those, but no loathed. She's like, 'All right, here's the problem. The long for, you're sprinkling in in the 25th hour of every day. No wonder you're not doing well at it, because you never giving it the ... You're not giving yourself any space, or time, or freedom to actually experiment. You're not growing. You're not getting better. You're just adding stuff in." I'm like, "Fair point."
Dom Price:
We went through, found some loathe. She's like, "Right, you're going to remove those. Who are you going to tell those habits, or rituals, or whatever, who are you going to tell that you're removing those because they need to hold you accountable? Because they'll slip back in really easily." I found someone, pinged them. She's like, "Right, the longed." She's like, "I need to let you know that when you add them in, you're going to be crap at them." I was like, "I don't want to be rubbish at anything. I'm a leader. I need to be a superhero. I need a cape, and I need to fly in, and everything must be perfect first time." She's like, "No, the first time you added a longed for, the chances are you'll be rubbish at it. Find someone who has that muscle and let them help you practice it, and you'll get better at it over time."
Dom Price:
Then the fourth L was what have you learned? What experiment did you learn yourself last quarter? What did you learn about yourself?" She's like, "Right, go and tell as many people as you can. That'll build a place where you're learning and networking environment for you." I did it, and then I did it again 90 days later. There's a few times when the power of rationalization kicks in, and I just BSed myself because really easy to do. Then other times where I've got really deep and analyzed on it, and it's enabled me every 90 days to evolve, right? Now, the moral of the story, and this is where we tie individual to team, the number of leaders I know in big businesses driving transformations, but they're not changing themselves. What behavior are they rolling with? They're rolling with the behavior of, "I'm fine. You're not. You all need to change," which is-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, role modeling status quo.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. That's interesting. I've certainly heard of the love versus loathed exercise. I like that you, or that Sophie extended it to longed for and learned. I think that's really beautiful, and I'll take that. With the loathe in particular, were there things on that list that you had to delegate or you had to hire someone to do? Because there's things that I think about that I loathe with respect to the business, and typically, they're things about orchestrating, paying suppliers, or whatever it happens to be. How do I address that? I bring the bookkeeper into the business that-
Dom Price:
Yeah. The little game that we played is you're not allowed to outsource it until you drop it. Right? The idea is, you're going to find a way of dropping it first, because maybe it doesn't need to exist, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Dom Price:
Because you've worked at big companies, and you walk around a big company, and you're like, "That person there, they only exist to do a task that someone probably could have automated or got rid of," but they didn't have the time. Also, they put a warm body in the way. Then you add another warm body, another warm body, and you suddenly realize you've got thousands of warm bodies keeping this deck of cards stacked together, and if one card falls, the entire thing comes tumbling down. I removed stuff that I was really uncomfortable removing stuff. I was like, "This is so important." It wasn't. My blinkers were just off, right? Then she's like, "We'll stop doing." She's like, "It's not life or death." She's like, "No, thanks, Dom. Well, you're not a surgeon, so stop doing something, and listen, and see what happens when you stop doing it." I'm like, "Oh, no, but these are really important. People will be angry. I'm a very important person." You remove something and no one bloody notices. You're like, "Why have I been doing this?"
Nick Muldoon:
Why was I doing it? Yeah.
Dom Price:
Yeah. Then I-
Nick Muldoon:
Can you-
Dom Price:
One of the big examples for me was meetings. This wasn't a delegate or [inaudible 00:30:24]. This was me just being a control freak, and turning up in meetings where I wanted to be there just in case. We looked at my condo, just a sea, I use Gmail, right, the sea of blue of all these meetings, double booked, triple booked. She's like, "Right." She's like, "Imagine you've got to set yourself a goal of getting rid of 15 hours." I'm like, "What? It'd be easy to create a time machine that adds 15 hours a week. I can't remove 15 hours of meetings. I'm a very, very important person." Then we played this game called Boomerang or Stick. I declined every single meeting, and I sent a note saying, "This is either a boomerang," in which case it comes back, or if it's a stick. When you throw a stick, it doesn't come back. The boomerangs, I want to know what the purpose of the meeting is, what my role is in the meeting, and what you're going to hold me accountable for.
Dom Price:
Two thirds of the meetings didn't come back. Right? The ones that did, I honestly admit to you, I was playing the exact wrong role in virtually all of them. It was funny because I get these emails back and they're like, so one of this meeting I was in, they were like, "Your role is the decision maker." In the next meeting I was like, "I need to apologize. I thought I was the protagonist." Every time they were suggesting something, I'm like, "Well, you could do that, or these three things." I was sending them into a complete spiral, and they were like, "You're a terrible decision maker." I'm like, "No, I'm a good decision maker when I know that's my job because this isn't your title. Your title stays-
Nick Muldoon:
Ah, Dom.
Dom Price:
... the same, right? Your title stays the same, but your role's different in every environment, every engagement, your role is different. We don't call it out, we just assume. Once we clarified those assumptions and realized I've got them all wrong, the meetings I was in, I was way more effective in. Two thirds of them didn't come back. Either the meeting [inaudible 00:32:09], or it didn't need me in that. If you think about it, and me and you know this, our most precious resources are time.
Nick Muldoon:
Time. Yeah.
Dom Price:
Why are we giving it away for free or for negative cost? Right? I'm like, "No, I'm growing all that stuff back."
Nick Muldoon:
Liz and I have been having this conversation for a while now about statistically speaking, I've probably got 50 years left on earth, based on how long a Caucasian Australian male lives. But I've probably only got 40 good, usable years left, because then you kind of like atrophy and all that.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Liz and I have been going, "Well, if we've only got 40 summers left, what are we going to do with 40 summers?" It's a really good exercise to bring you think real quick, what do you want to be spending your time on?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's the same thing. You can do that at a meta, macro level for life, and I think you can do it on a annual quarterly basis. With work, there's so many things that we just presume we need to do, and both the four Ls and just my attitude has enabled me to challenge those and go, "Well, I just say why an awful lot right now." So it's like, "I'd like you to come to this meeting." I'm like, "Oh, cool. Why?" They're like, "I don't know. I'd like you there." I'm like, "But why? Because if you can't explain to me what you want me to do, then you probably don't need me there."
Nick Muldoon:
Five whys, right? Five whys.
Dom Price:
But also the reason I'm often asking them why is I'm like, "You do know I'm a pain in the ass when I do come to the meeting, so just I want to double check to you, you really want me there. Because if you converged on an idea and you want to ship it, don't invite me. All right, I'm the wrong person." Just challenging on that and getting that time back, and then using it for things that are way more valuable. I rebalanced my portfolio just like a financial advisor or a market trader rebalances a financial portfolio every quarter, I did the same thing with me. If I don't, then what I'm saying is when I don't do that, I'm saying the version of me last quarter is more than good enough for them for next quarter. What I'm saying is-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, which is never the case, is it?
Dom Price:
Yeah, I'm saying the world's not changed. The world stayed flat, right, and everything's going on a flat line. That's not the case. If I'm not evolving myself at the same pace as Atlassian or our customers, then I've become the anchor by default. I'm the anchor that slows us down.
Nick Muldoon:
Tell me, what portion of your time today are you spending with customers? Because I know over the years in our conversations, I think about a lunch we had at Pendolino, you, Dave, and I, probably two and a half, three years ago now, but we were talking a lot about Agile transformations at the large end of the spectrum. How much time are you spending with customers today, and what are those conversations like?
Dom Price:
Yeah. I'm probably over the 50, 60% mark right now, but mainly a rebalance again. When COVID hit, the conference scene disappeared, and so I'm like, "Cool, I get to reinvest that time. I could reinvest it internally at Atlassian, and I did do it where we're evolving our ways of working internally and driving some change there. I got involved in that, made sense. But I was like, "Hey, our customers are struggling." First of all, we need to understand how and why they're struggling, and then if we can help them, find a way of helping them. It's funny how the conversation really changed from quite tactical, yeah, 18-month plans and presumed levels of certainty, to going, "Hey, the world's changed. The table flip moments just happened. Our business model has been challenged, our employees are challenged. We're having these conversations about people, wellness, and actually, we've said for years we care about our people, but now we actually have to. What does that mean? All the leaders just trying to understand the shift from peacetime to wartime-
Nick Muldoon:
To wartime.
Dom Price:
... to time peacetime. I think that it's funny that the transition from peace to wartime, I think the shared burning platform, the shared sense of urgency, I think a lot of these transition, they're okay. I wouldn't say they're amazing, but they weren't awful given that mostly the Sydney in Australia haven't manage through wartime. Right? We've had an amazing economic success for a long time. The harder bit, the way more complex bit is going from war to new peace, because new doesn't look the same as old peace. Right? It's a very different mindset to go-
Nick Muldoon:
Who is-
Dom Price:
... about managing in wartime is I don't need approvals because it's a burning platform. We just drive change, just do it, just do it. New peace is different because we're like, "Well, how long's this going to last for? What are the principles I want to apply? How do I build almost from a blank piece of paper?" Very different mindset.
Nick Muldoon:
Was that Ben Horowitz with the hard thing about hard things where he talked about war versus peacetime leaders?
Dom Price:
I've read it in a few things. The most recent one I read-
Nick Muldoon:
Hear different places.
Dom Price:
... in was General Stanley McChrystal. He wrote Team of Teams.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Dom Price:
He did one on demystifying leaders and how we've often put the wrong leaders on a pedestal, and there's some great leaders out there that just didn't get the credit because they were way more balanced. But yeah, there's a few different narratives out there on it.
Nick Muldoon:
With the latest that you're meeting with, I guess, well, one, are they using something like the four Ls that Sophie shared with you?
Dom Price:
Yeah, that's become a lot more popular, I mean, certainly with C-suite and the level down, even board members, actually. When I share that, there's this kind of moment of reflection of going, "Yeah." It's because I get them with the irony of going, "Question one, are you driving a transformation?" They're like, "Yes." You're like, "Cool. Are you transforming yourself?" "No." By the way, reading a Harvard Business Review article on Agile doesn't mean you're evolving yourself. That means you're educating yourself. That's subtly different. We've all read the article. It doesn't make you an expert, so sit yourself down. That is the first moment of getting them bought in.
Dom Price:
Then the second one is just saying to them, "Just be honest right now, what are the things you're struggling with?" For a lot of leaders, it's this desire that they get the need for empathy, vulnerability and authenticity, they get it because they've read it. They understand it, they comprehend it, they find it really hard to do. Right? A lot of them are leaving as a superhero leading through power and control. They've led through success, but they're not led through a downturn and a challenging time, and they're just questioning their own abilities. There's a lot of, I don't even want to call it imposter syndrome, I think there's a lot of people just saying, "I think my role as a leader's just changed, and I don't know that I understand the new version." That's quite demoralizing for a lot of people. It's quite challenging.
Dom Price:
The irony being is that the minute they look to that and talk about it, they've done the empathy, vulnerability, and authenticity. They've done the thing they're grasping for. But instead, they're trying to put this brave face on it. In a lot of organizations, I've seen a lot of ruinous empathy. A lot of people buffering from their team, like, "Nick, I don't want to tell you that bad things are happening in the company, because I don't want you ... I think you're already worried, because I won't tell you that," without realizing that you fill in the gaps, and you think way worse things than I could ever tell you. The information flow's changed, and then for a lot of leaders, the mistake I've seen on mass is they have confused communication and broadcast. Right? Communication is what I hear and how I feel when you speak. Broadcast is the thing that you said. Because of this virtual world, there's lots of loom, and zoom, and videos, and yeah, we're going to broadcast out.
Nick Muldoon:
Broadcast a lot. Yeah.
Dom Price:
But we're getting to listen for the response.
Nick Muldoon:
This has to be a very challenging time for a number of leaders today, but 2018 or 2008, there were a lot of leaders back then that probably, I presume, picked up a lot of scar tissue around GFC. How many of the leaders that you're chatting with today would have picked up scar tissue through the GFC, and they're still finding this kind of a feeling, at least, like it's uncharted territory?
Dom Price:
Well, and that's, I think, the byproduct. I was going to say problem. The byproduct of the Australian system is we've dodged the bullet in 2008. Economically, we did not get the same hit that the rest. The stock markets got a little hit, and a whole lot of other things took a little bit of a dip, but nowhere near that the size or magnitude of the rest of the world. Both through the mining boom, yeah, the banking sector, a whole of other tertiary markets around tourism doing well at that time, you're like it was a blip, but it wasn't a scar. I think that's where there's a lot of countries have got that recent experience to draw upon, like, "Here's how we do this. Right? Here's how we bunker down. Here's how we get more conservative. Here's the playbook for it." I think a lot of countries haven't got that playbook, so they're getting at it, right? They're doing it on the fly. I think there's that.
Dom Price:
But also I think this one's just different. The global financial crisis was a financial and market-caused issue, right? This is a health pandemic-caused market downturn. I don't think we've got a playbook for that, because we don't know the longevity of it. -
Nick Muldoon:
If you-
Dom Price:
Go on.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. No, sorry, Dom, I was just going to ask, if you cast your mind back to GFC, were you anxious going through GFC? Have you been anxious this year?
Dom Price:
No. I wasn't anxious at all through GFC because it felt like ... I did a recession in the UK a long, long time ago, and so I've been through that downturn. I've worked in companies that had downturns, even if the general economy was fine, and industries that had shrunk, where at the end of each quarter you're like, "Right, we talk about the books. Who are we letting go? What projects are stopping?" It was always the taking away, not the adding. I've been through that. The thing that made me anxious about 2020 was, this is the first time I think we've had this level of uncertainty. It's funny because a lot of people talk about change fatigue. I actually think humans are quite good at change. I think we actually do that quite well. But uncertainty, we are terrible with.
Dom Price:
It's weird how when we get uncertainty, how different people respond in different ways. Some like to create a blanket of certainty and wrap it around them like, "Now, here's what I know, and this will come true." You're like, "Maybe [inaudible 00:42:16]." I like your blanket, it's comfortable. But it's not necessarily real, right? It's not going to shelter you from the things that we genuinely don't know about. This is where agility has become key, or nimbleness has become key because if I look at the leaders in the companies that are listening, they're actually attentive to their customers and listening, they're the ones that are evolving really quickly, because they've got ... not only have they got the nimbleness as the muscle, but they're listening to cause correct. The ones that have ... think they've rolled out agility in the last few years, but never added the customer bit, they've got small, fast, nimble teams just running around in circles.
Nick Muldoon:
They're not heading in a particular direction. Yeah.
Dom Price:
Yeah. They are clueless, right, because without that overarching like, "Why are we doing this? And that customer that we care for, we still care for, how's that customer's world changed? Right? Because if that customer has changed, how can we change with them?" A lot of companies haven't done that yet, and I think it's some are holding the breath and hoping for the best. Some are just too fixated on, "But we have a plan, and if we stick to that plan," I read a book somewhere that said, "If you stick to a plan, you'll be fine." You're like, yeah, the world just shifted around you. Your plan might not be as relevant.
Nick Muldoon:
It's making me think, Dom, about the Salesforce transformation, Agile transformation in 2006. That was one of the big bang, I think it was one of the early big bang Agile transformations that took place. I don't know if it was Parker Harris or how it actually played out, but the leaders of Salesforce basically said, "You're going to change to Agile. You're going to give this thing a go. Otherwise, all is lost." There's been other examples. I think shortly after, LinkedIn did their IPO. They pulled the end on call, they stopped everything to rework how they work. Is 2020 one of those years? Are the best companies going to take advantage of this as an opportunity to retool how they work? Then the other companies are just going to kind of atrophy and slowly decline over the next five?
Dom Price:
I think the best ones probably built some of the muscle already, the ones that are now reacting, right? I think if you are aware of the market, all COVID's done is put an accelerant on the stuff that was changing anyway. Right? Yes, it's not ideal, but it's stuff that was happening regardless, right? I think we really had five or 10 years to equip ourselves, and we got given three months instead. I think a whole lot of companies that saw those patterns emerging, changing people habits, technology, practices, ways of working, customer demand, experience demands, you put all those together, that's why Agile transformation has been a massive hit for the last three, four, five years, right? The ones that were prepared for that are awesome. The ones that responded quickly, that are like, "Brilliant, don't let a crisis go to waste. What can we do?" They'll do well. The ones that have dug their heels in and are being stubborn ,saying the world will return to normal and it's just a matter of time, they're the ones that I fear for, because that atrophy that may have been a slow decline, I think that becomes a cliff. Right? Because in a consumer-
Nick Muldoon:
Slow decline, and then they just fall off the edge at some point.
Dom Price:
consumer world, consumers spending goes down, sentiment goes down, and relevance suddenly becomes really important. Is your product relevant to your customers? The people that understand that, and then have agility in how they deliver it, that's a winning combination. I think the interesting, I was talking to a friend about this on the weekend because they were like, "What's the difference between the successful ones and the not successful ones?" It's hard to pinpoint a single reason. But the one that stands out for me is the Agile transformations that have been people-centric are the best. A whole load of them were tool-centric or process-centric. I will send all my people on a training course. I'm going to make you agile, I'm going to give you some agile tools. Go. You're like, "Did you change their mindset? Did you change their heart? Did you change the things that they're recognized for, their intrinsic motivations? Did you change those things?" Because if you didn't, their inner workings are still the same, right? You've just giving them some new terminology.
Nick Muldoon:
I think that's a really, really, really good point. I go back to if I cast my mind back to the first Agile conference that I went to over a decade ago, the conversation back then was very much around training the practices, teaching the practices to your people, and then it evolved into a tooling conversation. But again, teaching the practices and software are just tools, and it was probably 2013, 2014, I guess, when the modern Agile movement came out, and they were talking a lot about psychological safety. Go back to where we started the conversation, right?
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Psychological safety, bring your whole self to work, and that will free you and enable you to do something tremendous for your customers. Give me a sense of the customer conversations that you've had throughout 2020. What percentage do you think have psychological safety, truly have that psychological safety?
Dom Price:
Yeah. I have to remind myself that psychological safety isn't an all or one, right? It's a sliding scale. I would say it's improved, where it's done with authenticity. The danger is, it becomes a topic where people are like, "I was working from home. There's an increased chance of stress, it's a whole of a change. Things are going wrong. Oh, I know what, let's just talk about psychological safety a lot." You're like-
Nick Muldoon:
That's not it.
Dom Price:
... "There's no correlation between talking about and doing." Right? It becomes the topic, right, the fashion, right? Just like wellness and mindfulness have become fashionable to talk about, doesn't mean we've got any better at it. And so that-
Nick Muldoon:
But isn't that the thing, Dom? Agile was the fashionable thing to talk about, and so we talked about it, but nothing really changed in a lot of these organizations.
Dom Price:
Yeah. It's not dissimilar with psychological safety. What has happened though is over time, the leaders that are truly authentic, vulnerable, build that environment where you can bring your best self, and they appreciate the respectful dissent, but they will still, at the right time, disagree and commit. They're like, "Nick, I heard your view. Thank you for sharing. Our only decision at this point, we're going down Path A. I know that you're in Path B. We're going down Path A. When we leave this room, we commit to A." I hear you. You want me when we're coming to A, and here's the signals we'll assess to make sure it's the right path. If it's not, we'll course-correct. Those people are thriving in this environment, and more people want to work with them. What this environment has done is it's shone a massive light on the difference between managers and leaders. Managers manage process and they like control. Right? Leaders are about influence and people.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you think, so the fact that people are working remote and working from home, that's made it easier to see who the leaders are.
Dom Price:
Yeah, it's shone a light on-
Nick Muldoon:
Because the managers are just trying to count time.
Dom Price:
Yeah, count time, but they're also thrashing around busy work, because they're like, "I'm the manager. I need to show that I'm doing something. I would manage tasks in and around the office, and what I meant some people to do. If we're autonomous, and they just do it, then what's my role?" You suddenly start seeing business. This noise comes out of them, which isn't, "Here's an outcome I achieved, or here's how the team's doing on team cohesion or bonding." They're not talking about about big meta level things. They're sharing these transactions with you, and you're like, "I assumed you're always doing the transactions. Now, you're showing me them all. It's a bit weird." Right? It's just a behavior, right? We must have a process for that. Well, what's the process? You're like, "Actually, what about the process of common sense?" Right?
Dom Price:
If you think about pre-COVID, most organizations that would allow people to work from home once or twice a week had a giant process and policy about how you apply to work from home that one day a week and everything, and then suddenly they're like, "Well, actually, we can do that. Everyone's going to go work from home." But now things have settled down a bit, the process police and the policy police are coming back again going, "But what about, what about? We pay Nick to do 40 hours a week, and what if he didn't do 40 hours?"
Nick Muldoon:
40 hours a week.
Dom Price:
Who cares? Nick delivered his outcomes and his customers are over the moon. As long as he's not doing 80 hours and he's not burning out, doesn't matter? Right? The idea of 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday as a construct is being challenged. The idea of you needing to sit at a physical desk for eight hours a day to do your work, when actually at least half of your tasks you can do asynchronously, that's been challenged. But for the managers who want manage process and control, they're like, "But if Nick can work from anywhere, and we trust him to do the right work, what do I do? I'm his manager. You're like, "You could inspire him. You could coach him, mentor him. You can lead him, you can help him grow, you can do a whole lot of stuff. Just don't manage his tasks for him. He's quite capable of managing a to-do list." It's challenging that construct again. For a lot of people, that's uncomfortable because that's a concept that we've just stuck with for years.
Nick Muldoon:
This is going to lead to a lot of change. I guess I've been thinking with respect to remote, Dom, I've been thinking much more about the mechanics of remote work and logistics around pay scales, and geographic location, and pay, and all this sort of stuff. But you're really opening my eyes to a whole different aspect. There are, in many large organizations, there are a lot of middle managers, and if these roles are no longer valuable, what do all these people do, and how do we help them find something that they love and that they long for? Because presumably they've not longing for-
Dom Price:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Nick Muldoon:
... task management.
Dom Price:
Yeah, yeah. They're probably not deeply entrenched in that as being something they're passionate about, right? It's just like they found themselves in this role. This is the interesting thing. If you look at rescaling, I've been looking at rescaling for a few years as a trend, right? How do we look at the rate of change in both technology, people practice, whatever else? That means that we're all going to have to rescale, right? The idea of education being up until the age of 21, and then you're working 45 years doesn't exist, right? So lifelong learning. You look at that, and you go ... Amazon did a great example last year. Bezos and Amazon put aside a billion dollars to retrench a thousand people that they were going to dispose. Right?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
From their warehouses, right?
Dom Price:
Yeah, yeah. They're on automation to displace those people. What was came out recently and said, there's I think, it's like 1,500 people who will be displaced because they're going for fully autonomous distribution centers. They're looking to retrain those people and redeploy them elsewhere. You're like, "Cool, how are we doing that?" The reason I mentioned it is I think we assume it for low skilled, high volume tasks, because that's associate what we've associated with technology disruption in the past. But if you think about it, there was I think about a year and a half ago, McKinsey had a report called The Frozen Middle Layer. It was about how this frozen middle layer was going to thaw and be exposed, right, as these middle managers. There's thousands of them. That phrase, the middle layer, COVID just poured the icing on that. Right? [inaudible 00:53:26]. They're all going, "What? Me? No, no, I've only got 10 years left in my career. Let me sit here, manage a few tasks. I'll take inflationary pay rise every year. I won't cause any trouble." You're like, "I don't know. You can retrain here."
Dom Price:
These people haven't been engineered to think about retraining before. They've been engineered to think about comfort and conservatism and safety. I think we need to appreciate that they still have value in the workplace. I just don't think it's the old value. For them, the four Ls-
Nick Muldoon:
This is going to be a huge shock to this frozen middle layer, as McKinsey called it. I think about so we're Wollongong, Port Kembla. We're in a working class, steel town, and over the course of, pick a number, over the course of 25, 30 years, 20,000, 22,000 people have been let go from the steelworks and they're been told to retrain. I'm sure a portion of them do, but a lot of them that are older, like you're talking about someone that's in their 50s that's got 10 years on their career, right, they probably just took early retirement, and maybe they found something else to do in the community, whatever it happens to be. What are the structures that we provide for this huge crew of people to get them re-skilled in our businesses so that we don't lose the tacit knowledge and get on to the next thing? How's Atlassian thinking about this?
Dom Price:
It's also about front-loading it, right? We have to hold our head in shame as a general society, how light we leave it. When I hear stories about those steelworks closing down, and you're like, "Why are we surprised by that? Why are we surprised when Holden stopped developing cars in Australia? Really? But really, you're surprised?
Nick Muldoon:
We saw it coming.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
We propped up the car industry in Australia for 35 years.
Dom Price:
Yeah. You put tariffs on anyone importing to make your own industry look good, and then those tariffs go away, people are looking for cheaper. Unfortunately, we signed up for a global economy, right? It's a borderless business model that we're in, and whether you like that or not, it's what we signed up for. The reality is instead of reacting each time this happens when it's normally too late, how can we respond? How can we use these brilliant algorithms and data managing to go, "Here are world economic forum future skills, here are large employers, here are other skillsets about people." You try and give that out, and you're like, "These are the ones most at risk, and they're at risk over the next 18 months." Cool. Start retraining them now, but not when they're out of the job when they go, "Well, now, I'm out of my job. Now, what do we do?" You're like, "I don't know. Buddings? I don't know."
Dom Price:
We've got way more data and insights than we probably give ourselves credit for. I think one element is front-loading it, and the next one is saying, "How do we not recreate this problem again?" If you look in the US right now, the largest employer, not by company, but by job type is driver.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. Yeah, by role. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dom Price:
By role, right? So Uber driver, truck drivers, manual drivers, people behind the wheel driving a vehicle. Where's billions of dollars worth of investment going in, Google, Amazon and every other? Right? Autonomous vehicles. You're like, "Cool."
Nick Muldoon:
Autonomous vehicles. Get rid of all those people?
Dom Price:
If I-
Nick Muldoon:
What are we doing to reskill those people?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Or even better, what are we doing in our education system to say, "How do we help people coming through the education system be more resilient with their future skills? I don't like the idea of being able to future-proof people. I don't think we've got a crystal ball, so let's part that. But how do we make people more resilient in their skills, well, all the skills we think will be required? World Economic Forum do great research every few years and publish it, and then I look at the education system, and I'm like, "That was built in 1960. We're tuning kids out that if you talk to.
Nick Muldoon:
Hey, hey, hey, Dom, okay, okay. I'm getting anxious at the moment. Let's end on a high note. What are things that make you optimistic for the next decade? All right? In 10 years time, how old are you going to be in 10 years time? Like 45 or something?"
Dom Price:
52.
Nick Muldoon:
52?
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. Oh, yes.
Dom Price:
Getting old.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Okay, so when you're 52, what are you looking forward to over the next decade? What's exciting?
Dom Price:
There's a couple of things we need to realize, right? Very first thing we need to accept is our future is not predetermined, it's not written, and it's not waiting for us. Right? We design it and define it every single day with our actions and inactions. As soon as we have that acknowledgement, we don't sit here as a victim anymore and wait for it to happen to us. We go, "Oh, oh, yeah." Then like, "We have to decide on the future. No one else does. We collectively do." That's the first step. You're like, "Oh, I've got way more say in this than I ever realized." The second one is, we need to drop a whole load of stuff around productivity, and GDP, and all these things that we've been taught are great measures of success, and just be happy and content in life. If you've got four years left, I've probably got 30 something years left, I want to enjoy those 30 years. I have no vision of being buried in a gravestone somewhere with, "Dom was productive."
Nick Muldoon:
Dom, this is great. What we've got to do for society over the next 10 years is get society out of KPIs and into OKRs.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Right?
Dom Price:
And get a balance out of going, "How ... This is what I've learned from COVID, right? You know this, I did 100 flights last year. I did a few at the start of the year and trip to the UK in the middle of COVID. But I've not traveled since June. Now, admittedly, the whole work from home thing, I'm going insane a little bit, but the balance of life, like sleeping in my bed every night, hanging out with friends, meaningful connections, right, actual community. I've lived in the same apartment for three years, and it took COVID for me to meet any of my neighbors, and it took COVID for me to meet the lovely ladies in the coffee shop downstairs. I'm like, "I've lived above you for three years, and it's only now you've become a person." Right?
Dom Price:
There's so much community and society aspects we can get out of this. The blank piece of paper, if you imagine this as a disruption that's happened to us, and there's no choice, and we can fight against it, that the options we have to actually make life better afterwards. Whether it be four-day working week experiments, or actually working from anywhere means that a whole other disabled, or working parents can get access to the workforce. Funny, if you get more done. Unemployment in the disabled community is 50% above that of the able-bodied community, not because of any mental ability, just because it's hard for them to fit .
Nick Muldoon:
Logistically. Yeah.
Dom Price:
You've just changed that, right, with this crazy experiment called COVID. If we start to tap into these pockets of goodness, and actually, we sees this as an opportunity to innovate, right, and I hate the P word of pivot, but forget pivoting, to genuinely innovate, what might the world look like, and how can we lean into that? How do we get balance between profit, and planet, and people, and climate, and all those things? If we do that, we've got a chance to build this now and build a future we want that we're actually proud of. I think the time is now for us to all stand up because it's not going to happen to us ... Or it will happen to us. If we choose to do nothing, it'll happen to us. It doesn't need to. I'm really excited because I think we're going to make some fundamental changes and challenges to old ways of working and old ways of living, and we'll end up happier because of it.
Nick Muldoon:
Don, I'm super jazzed, man. Thank you. I really appreciate your time today. That's a great place to finish it up.
Dom Price:
I hope some of those things come true.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. I hope some of those things come true, right? I feel like the things that are in our power, the things that we can directly affect, takeaways for me, I've got extending the love and loathe into the love, loathe, long for and learned. I think that's great. I also like the boomerang versus the stick with respect to your time and what's on the calendar, and just jettison the stuff that is, well, it's not helping you, or the teams, or anyone else. Yeah.
Dom Price:
You could do it like [inaudible 01:01:33]. If it ends up being important, you can add it back.
Nick Muldoon:
Sure.
Dom Price:
[inaudible 01:01:38].
Nick Muldoon:
The big takeaway from this conversation for me is that it's in our hands. The choice, we make the decisions. It's in our hands. I think about, was Mark Twain, whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right.
Dom Price:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
You might as well think you can and get on with it.
Dom Price:
Yeah, yeah, give it a red-hot stab and see what happens.
Nick Muldoon:
All right, cool. Don, thanks so much for your time this morning. Really appreciate it.
Dom Price:
It was great chatting.
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"Lieschen's wealth of experience is absolutely incredible! Not only did she provide invaluable advice, but I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation."
In this episode Caitlin Mackie is joined by Lieschen Gargano Sr, Release Train Engineer at Scaled Agile. They delve into the role of the Release Train Engineer, sharing tips and tricks, FLOW activities, lessons learned and how to get started in the role. With SAFe Summit 2023 just around the corner, Lieschen also takes some time to talk about what she’s most excited about for the event and shared some advice for first time attendees.
If Lieschen's expertise and passion have piqued your interest, be sure to explore the Scaled Agile RTE course. It provides comprehensive training, equipping you with the necessary skills and knowledge to excel as an RTE.
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Transcript:
Caitlin Mackie:
Hi there. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Caitlin, your host for today's episode. At Easy Agile we specialize in developing apps for Atlassian Jira that help your team move from simply doing agile to truly being agile. Our apps have gained recognition and trust from over 160,000 users across top companies worldwide. With our products, teams can transform their flat Jira backlogs into something visually meaningful and easy to understand. Whether it's sprint planning, retrospectives, or PI planning, our apps are designed to foster seamless team alignment.
Before we begin the episode, we would like to say an acknowledgement of country. This is part of our ongoing commitment towards reconciliation. Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today. 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. Let's jump into today's episode. So today I'm joined by Lieschen Gargano, a senior release train engineer at Scaled Agile. Lieschen is a highly experienced professional when it comes to change management, system design and stakeholder engagement, and has a passion for developing teams and connecting strategy to execution. Lieschen welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast.
Lieschen Gargano:
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
Caitlin Mackie:
So Lieschen, you are a release train engineer. For our listeners, can you explain a little bit about the role? For anyone that's not familiar, how would you describe a Release Train Engineer?
Lieschen Gargano:
Yeah. I think one of the easiest ways for people to think of a Release Train Engineer is kind of like a coach or scrum master for the art, for the Agile release train. A servant leader facilitating all of those art events, facilitating the processes and process improvements. And really measured in value delivery, and using flow metrics to measure those improvements and support of the arts.
Caitlin Mackie:
So you mentioned flow metrics there. I've heard a lot about this recently and optimizing flow. What are some of those flow activities that a RT is responsible for?
Lieschen Gargano:
I like to look at feature flow and cycle time. So really looking like are we bringing all of our features in progress at once or are we managing our WIP, not just at the team level but at the art level. Are we taking the whole PI to get a feature through the system, or are we able to finish something before we start the next thing? So I look at that a lot and also just are we making and meeting commitments. Those PI objectives that we set, are we in that 80-100% range? A lot of people want full credit, extra credit and to be in the 120, but for us, predictability really means you tried really hard and you stretched, but you also still made and met commitments. So I look at that really closely too.
Caitlin Mackie:
I love that. You mentioned just then quite a lot of different responsibilities that a RTE has. Do you think that there is one in particular that you really need to get right from the start?
Lieschen Gargano:
Oh, as an RTE, I think the biggest thing is building the relationships and intention. As a servant leader, we really are there to help make the art better, to make being on the art enjoyable and productive and flow. So building that trust and those relationships as a servant leader is the first thing. If you get that wrong, no one will help you do the rest.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah-
Lieschen Gargano:
And you need a lot of help. You're not doing anything alone as an RTE.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yes. Yeah, for sure. I can definitely imagine that. Let's go a little bit deeper on that servant leadership that you just mentioned. Can you share your approach and what servant leadership means to you?
Lieschen Gargano:
Servant leadership to me is helping people understand the direction, communicating early and often so that they know where you're going. And then not just saying, "how can I help you get there? What can I do?" But saying, "how can we go together?" A lot of coaching and understanding the problem to solve and connecting it to how it benefits the people. Just like we ask them to connect their work to how it benefits the customer. As the RT, they're my customer. How does what I'm asking you to change benefit you? Not changing is always easier than changing even if we don't like our current state. So why is it worth it?
Caitlin Mackie:
I love that. Yeah, always asking the why and being really clear on it. Yeah, I think that's great. I've done some LinkedIn digging of your profile, as you do, had a little bit of a stalk and noticed that you hosted a webinar recently on tips and tricks and lessons learned as an RTE. Can we start with maybe some tips and tricks? What can you share?
Lieschen Gargano:
The first thing I will say is lean on the Scrum master team, and if you're lucky enough to have an Agile coach or another RTE, lean on that team. Your lean Agile Center of Excellence, those people have the expertise. They're also building the relationships. They're there to help you. Don't try to just prove yourself or go it alone, it's not possible. That team is your team for success. So 100% go to them. They're a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of relationships, and the best support.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, I know it's so important to have that support network around you. You just mentioned the Agile Center of Excellence. Maybe for some of our listeners aren't familiar, could you explain what that is?
Lieschen Gargano:
Yeah, so the Lean Agile Center of Excellence can look a few different ways depending on your organization. At our organization, it is the coach, release managers, RTEs and Scrum masters or team coaches. And some larger organizations than ours might have that hub and spoke model of a centralized change leader. And then RTEs and Scrum masters that are in different arts and around the org. And some even have separate laces in different parts of the organization if it's really big. But really they are that community of practice that holds your lean Agile practices and the standards of those practices and talks to each other and debates and evolves them to make sure that it's consistent throughout the org. That the org is getting consistent coaching, consistent guidance, and they're not being told five different things about how to transform. Because again, change and being lean is so hard. If you add too many voices into that coaching, it gets really overwhelming for folks.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yes, 100%. And an Agile transformation is already overwhelming as it is, so you can imagine that laid on top. I suppose speaking, if we explore a little bit around those on an agile transformation journey, at what point would you say it's important that that lean Agile Center of Excellence is formed?
Lieschen Gargano:
Oh, I think it should be in place pretty quick. I mean, we talk about training your leaders, training your experts and then doing safer teams and launching trains. You need that Center of Excellence there from the start so that they can go out to the rest of the org that they can do all that training and they can be there to support people through title changes, role changes. Launching an art can feel very scary to folks. If you don't have that in place beforehand, you're going to have a lot to reel in after the fact.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, I really like that. It's almost having this really solid foundation and unified voice to sort of go forward and support the rest of the org.
Lieschen Gargano:
And it's so great to have consultants support, to have partners come in and help you and to have the right tools, but they need the help of people inside. They need that lean Agile Center of Excellence of employees inside the company to help you be successful. As an RTE, you need your team. Anybody, any tool, any people trying to do a change, a transformation are going to need that Center of Excellence because all those parts, that's what makes the whole.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So you mentioned as an RTE, a big tip or trick is to rely on that lean Agile Center of Excellence. What do you think has been your biggest lesson learned as an RT?
Lieschen Gargano:
There are a few things that have been particularly difficult for me. One of them is that I don't like to say no and not in that I take on too much or whatever, but more in that if someone has passion for something, I want them to be able to take it on. I want them to be able to move forward with it. And there are times where we really have to say it's too much change. It's too much for this group to manage. In particular, the Scrum Masters and RTEs people come to us for a lot of things and they need that consistency from us, and they need predictability in a change to feel like we know where they're going and if we introduce too many things or if we try to hold too many things at once, it's easy for us to forget about it later or drop something else. So learning when and how to say no, again not necessarily in that capacity way, but just in the width of change, if that makes sense.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, definitely. I think that what you just said there, learning how and when to say no. I think that's not even exclusive to the RTE role as well. I think that's an amazing piece of advice for anyone listening and to share across our audiences, because I know it's definitely something I struggle with as well. So that's my takeaway from this is to, okay, I'm going to constantly imagine like 'no Lieschen told me to when and how to say no', and just focus on that. So yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice. What was your journey like to an RTE? I know we caught up last week and I got a little sneak preview into this, and I know it wasn't straightforward, so if you can share a little bit about that, that would be great.
Lieschen Gargano:
Yeah. I actually started in conflict resolution. I worked in public private reconciliation doing a lot of natural resources facilitation, so hundreds of people, governments, companies, private landowners, residents, trying to bring all those people together to get to consensus or at least to build relationships that allow them to move forward. So really strong foundation and facilitation in particular, and just day-to-day conflict. When we say conflict, we get so worried, 'oh, I don't do conflict', well conflict's everything all the time. It's all the disagreements we need to succeed in life. So that gave me a great foundation when I became a scrum master, and I did that for a few years working with development teams. One of my favorite teams was our infrastructure team, 10 foot pole because no one wanted to touch their work or the 10 foot pole, and I learned so much there and eventually became a coach and started doing more strategic planning and coaching parts of the organization that weren't used to being on arts. Marketing and other groups, which helped me transition to Scaled Agile, where I started working with our CMO and as he grew the marketing team, helping coach that marketing group into an agile way of working, a safe way of working, before actually becoming a product owner, because I loved organizing around value, and I loved those different topics that we were working on internally.
And one of the people I work with at Scale Agile said, "well, help us develop the product then for everybody else". So I did that for a little while, which gave me so much power in that learning how to say no and prioritize and coaching people to decisions is one thing, but as the product owner, I had to practice being where the buck stopped. There are five right decisions, just make one so that people are unblocked, and that prepared me really well for transitioning into RT.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. You have such a wealth of experience there across so many different roles, and you can really see that each of those key roles have taught you something valuable that you can take into this RTE role. So I think that's amazing. It's so cool to see that even though it's not this straightforward linear journey, there's all these parts that there's traits within each that ladder up to helping you succeed as an RT. So I think that's really cool.
Lieschen Gargano:
And I know people are afraid to make some of those lateral moves sometimes, but the skills that you can build might just be that thing that gets you other open doors that you didn't even think about.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely love that. Yeah, just embrace every opportunity for what it may be, what it may not be. You don't know until you give it a shot. So I think, yeah, I love that. I think that's really great advice. So everything we've spoken about in regards to being a Release Train Engineer may have really hit the spot for some of our listeners. How does someone get there? Were there certifications, courses? What's the process that way?
Lieschen Gargano:
Another thing I probably did backwards. I started with a scrum master cert and then actually ended up getting a SPC certification through Scaled Agile when I was a coach. Because I was a coach before I was an RTE, and I learned about so many other parts of the business that way. But then to become an actual RTE, taking the safe RTE course, but then actually there's a community of RTEs... Which we didn't really talk about this, but being an RTE is a lonely thing. I said earlier, if you're lucky to have another RTE, this is a lonely role. You're really kind of on your own. So not just getting that cert, but being part of that community and being able to send people messages and ask them crazy questions was part of my certification process, but also just community building to where I could feel like I had the connections and competence. So yeah, I found all of them similar to holding each of the roles, also getting that certification, just another tool in the tool belt.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, for sure. I don't want to touch on something you said there about an RTE being sometimes quite a lonely role. What do you think makes it lonely?
Lieschen Gargano:
It's a role that a lot of people have strong opinions about what they need and what success looks like based on where they are in the organization. And there are usually few of you, and even if you're in a large organization with many, you're with your art, you're very focused on your section, and so having all of those pulls and expectations and not having anyone who understands what that feels like just makes it kind of lonely. Now that we have two RTEs and a coach at Scaled Agile, it makes a big difference for me because they are right there in it with me and it's very helpful.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. You can see in that scenario why that community of RTEs is like you said, so important to lean on them as well. Yeah.
Lieschen Gargano:
I find even just connecting to RT's outside our organization too. I grabbed beers with one a couple weeks ago. Those little things, even if you can find that person, meet them at a summit, meet them out in the wild, find them on LinkedIn and just say, "Hey, we live in the same area. We have the same role". It can go a long way because it may seem weird to reach out like that, but they probably are looking for that connection too.
Caitlin Mackie:
Thank you so much for sharing. And for any of our listeners, I might pop some links to any certifications and some scout Agile courses. I'll pop that in our episode notes, so feel free to check those out. You mentioned about connecting with other RTs and meeting at summits, which is a really nice segue to the next part of our conversation. Just around the corner is the 2023 Safe Summit and we're heading to Nashville Music City. What can we expect from Safe Summit? What are you looking forward to?
Lieschen Gargano:
Well, what I'm most looking forward to is that I am putting together an RTE breakfast. So all RTEs are welcome, or even if you're a solution train engineer or you do the role of an RTE with a different title. I'm really excited to meet with those folks over breakfast and just chat it out. And my goal with that really is to have people to connect with so that as we go through the rest of the summit, listening to the talks that we have people enroll, that we can check back in with over drinks and stuff on the later days and say, 'oh, what do you think? How might that work?' So that's what I'm most looking forward to.
Caitlin Mackie:
Amazing.
Lieschen Gargano:
But obviously there are going to be some great talks and the product labs are always really fun. We get to play with the product together.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, cool. Tell me a little bit about the product labs, what's involved in that?
Lieschen Gargano:
The product team puts it together and they have computers set up and you can bring your own and they talk through some of the new releases or things they're working on and help you log into it and use it in your context, but also try to get some feedback on how it works or how you might use it in your organization. So it's a nice two-way street. It's sort of, 'I need this, how might I do it?' And then them saying, 'well, why don't you try and let me see how it works and how we should change it based on how you interact with it'. So it's just really fun. It feels really practical because it's so hands on.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, amazing. I love that. I'm definitely going to have to try and come along and suss that out. It sounds really great. Where do you hope or where do you think we'll see a lot of conversations focused at this year's Safe Summit?
Lieschen Gargano:
At Safe Summit I think the conversations will be really focused on just the day-to-day of Safe. We have new topics that come up. We obviously have new ideas that are going to be presented. But every time I go to one of these, it really is the connecting one-on-one to say, here's where I'm stuck, here's what I'm trying to learn. So we'll hear a lot about Flow, we'll hear about Team Topologies, but we'll also hear those 'I'm just getting started and we're stuck, we have change fatigue. We don't know if our arts are set up correctly'. A lot of those classic conversations that are just really impactful and why people come together.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I love that. Creating these spaces for people to bond over shared experiences and problems they're facing or wins they're seeing and sharing them. I think that's where these events are amazing for creating that kind of environment. Lieschen, this is my very first Safe Summit. I haven't been to one before and I'm really excited. What advice would you have for first time attendees, returning attendees, what's the way to get the most out of Safe Summit?
Lieschen Gargano:
If you're attending with other people from your organization, the best thing is to split up so you can cover more ground and then come back together and share. The second advice is find people with a similar role as you, because again, you can do that same thing with those folks and split up and then meet up again and try to talk about it in your context. It's great to do that at the parties too, because we throw great parties, but that's the best because no matter what room you end up in, what talk you end up at, you're going to get a great nugget. But where it really sinks in for me is talking with someone else about what I heard and then thinking about, 'okay what does that mean?', when I go home.
Caitlin Mackie:
Amazing, great advice Lieschen. If anyone listening happens to also be attending Safe Summit and they see Lieschen on the floor or myself, make sure you say hello, and if you've got any questions for Lieschen about the podcast episode, I'm sure she'll be more than happy to answer and engage in a great conversation. And anyone looking to get advice around the RTE role, make sure you find her and have a chat. Lieschen I'm really excited to meet in person. We've done this podcast with yourself in the States, myself in Australia, so I'm excited to connect over in your world. And yeah, really thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I know, I sure did.
Lieschen Gargano:
I did. Thank you.
Caitlin Mackie:
Thanks, Lieschen.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.25 The Agile Manifesto with Jon Kern
"Thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Jon, he shared some great perspectives on the impact of the Agile manifesto" - Amaar Iftikhar
Amaar Iftikhar, Product Manager at Easy Agile is joined by Jon Kern, Co-author of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development and a senior transformation consultant at Adaptavist.
Amaar and Jon took some time to speak about the Agile Manifesto. Covering everything from the early days, ideation, process, and first reactions, right through to what it means for the world of agile working today.
They touch on the ideal state of an agile team, and what the manifesto means for distributed, hybrid and co-located teams.
We hope you enjoy the episode!
Transcript
Amaar Iftikhar:
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Amaar Iftikhar. I'm a product manager here at Easy Agile. And before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. And extend that same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and First Nations peoples joining us today.
Today, we have on the podcast Jon Kern, who is the co-author of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development and an Agile consultant. If you're wondering, you're correct. I did mention the Agile Manifesto for Software Development. The Agile Manifesto. So Jon, welcome for being here and thank you for joining us.
Jon Kern:
Oh, my pleasure, Amaar. Thank you.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, very excited to have you on. Let's just get started with the absolute basic. Tell the audience about, what is the Agile manifesto?
Jon Kern:
Well, it's something that if you weren't around, and I know you're young, so you weren't around 21 years ago, I guess now, to maybe understand the landscape of what software development process and tooling and what most of us were facing back then, it might seem like a really obvious set of really simple values. Who could think that there's anything wrong with what we put into the manifesto? But back in the day, there were, what I practiced under as a... I'm an aerospace engineer, so I was in defense department work doing things like fighter simulation, F-14 flat spins and working with a centrifuge and cool stuff like that. And subject to a mill standard specification, which makes sense for probably weapons systems, and aircraft manufacturing, and all sorts of other things. But they had one, lo and behold, for software development. And so there was a very large, what I would call heavy handedness around software development process. We call it heavyweight process. Waterfall was the common term back then, and probably still used today.
And there were plenty of, I would say the marketing juggernaut of the day, IBM and Rational unified process, these large, very much like Safe. Where it's a really large body of work, awesome amount of information in it, but very heavy process even though everything would, say you tailor it, it could be whatever you wanted. I mapped my own lightweight process into REP for example. Sure. But the reality was we were facing kind of the marketplace leader being heavyweight process that was just soul crushing, and from my perspective, wasting taxpayers' money. That was kind of my angle was, well, I'm a taxpayer, I'm not going to just do this stupid process for process sake. That has to have some value, has to be pragmatic. So lo and behold, there were a handful of us, 17 that ended up there, but there are a handful of us that practiced more lightweight methods. So the manifesto was really an opportunity for coming together and discovering some of the, what you might think of as the commonality between many different lightweight practices. There was the XP contingent. I first learned about Scrum there, for example. Arie van Bennekum, a good friend, he taught us about DSDM. I don't even remember what it stands for anymore. It was a European thing.
Alistair and Jim Highsmith, they had, I forget, like crystal methodologies. So there was a fair amount of other processes that did not have the marketing arm that erupted, or didn't have the mill standard. So it was really all about what could we find amongst ourselves that was some sort of common theme about all these lightweight processes. So it was all about discovering that, really.
Amaar Iftikhar:
You all get together, the principles kind of come to fruition, and let's fast forward a little bit. What was the initial reaction to the original manifesto?
Jon Kern:
Yeah, it was even kind of funny that the four values, the four bullets is as simple as it was. The principles came a bit later. I want to say we collaborated over awards wiki, but the original... If you go to Agile uprising, you can see I uploaded some artifacts, because apparently I'm a pack rat. And I had the original documents that Alistair probably printed out, because he was the one... He and Jim lived there near Salt Lake City. So it was like, "Hey, let's come here." And we like to go skiing, so let's do it here. So he arranged the room and everything. And so there's some funny artifacts that you can find. And the way that it actually came about was an initial introduction of each of us about our methods. And really I think a key, we left our egos at the door. I mean I was a younger one. Uncle Bob, some of these, he was at Luminar, I know I have magazines still in the barn that he was either the editor of, or authors of for people who don't remember what magazines are. Small little booklets that came out. So Uncle Bob was like, Ooh, wow, this is pretty cool.
And I wasn't shy because I had a lot of experience with heavyweight methods. So I really wanted to weigh in on... Because I had published my own lightweight method a few years earlier. So I had a lot of opinions on how to avoid the challenges of big heavyweight process. So the culmination as we were going out the door and after we had come up with the four values was I think Ward said, "Sir, want me to put this on the web?" And again, this is 2001 so dot com and the web's still kind of new so to speak. And we're all like, yeah, sure, why not? What the hell, can't hurt. We got something, might as well publish it. I don't think to a person, anybody said, "Oh yeah, this is going to set the world on fire because we're so awesome." And we were going to anoint the world with all of this wonderful wisdom. So I don't think anybody was thinking that that much would happen.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah. So what were you thinking at that time? So how would the principles that you had come up with together, was that maybe just for the team to take away? Everyone who was there? What was the plan at that time?
Jon Kern:
I think it was a common practice. Like I said, there were other groups that would often meet and have little consortiums or little gatherings and then publish something. So I think it was just, oh yeah, that's a normal thing to do is you spent some time together and you wrote things down, you might as well publish it. So I think it wasn't any deeper than that other than Bob, I think Bob might say that he wanted to come up with some kind of a manifesto of sorts or some kind of a document because that's I think what those sort of... I was never at one of those gatherings, but you know, you could see that they did publish things. I have a feeling it was just something as innocent as, well we talked, wrote some things down, might as well share it.
And then the principles, there were a lot of different practices in the room. So some of what I would say the beauty of even the values page is the humility at the top is it's still active voice. We are uncovering not, hey all peasants, we figured it all out. No, we're still uncovering it. And the other thing is by doing it, because I'm still an active coder. And plus we value this more on the left, more than on the right. Some people might say it's a little ambiguous or a little fuzzy, but that's also a sign of humility and that it's not A or B. And it really is fuzzy, and you need to understand your context enough to apply these things. So from a defense department contracting point of view, certainly three of the four bullets were really important to me because I learned... Sure, we did defense department contracting. But it's way more important to develop a rapport with the customer than it is... Because by the time you get to the contract you've already lost, which goes along with developing a rapport with the customer, the individual.
And one of Peter Codes, when we worked with customers and whatnot, one of our mantras was frequent tangible working results, AKA working software. You can draw a lot and you can do use cases for nine months, but if you don't have anything running, it's pretty, I would guess risky that you don't have anything, no working software yet. So it really was I think an opportunity to share the fact that some people thought two weeks and other people thought a month. Even some of the print principles had a pretty good wide ranging flexibility so to speak. That I think is really important to note.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And it makes sense. Did you or anyone else in the room at that time ever imagine what the impact downstream would be of the work that was being done there?
Jon Kern:
Not that I'm aware of. I certainly did not. I remember a couple times in my career walking in and seeing some diagrams when I worked with the company Together Soft, and we'd build some cool stuff and I'd see people having some of the... Oh yeah, there's a diagram I remember making on their wall. That's kind of cool. But nothing near how humbling and sort of satisfying it is. Especially I would say when I'm in India or Columbia or Greece, it almost seems maybe they're more willing to be emotional about it. But people are, it's almost like they were freed by this document. And in some sense this is a really, really tiny saying it with the most humility possible. A little bit like the Declaration of Independence, and the fact that a handful of people... And the constitution of the United States. A handful of people met in a moment of time, never to be repeated again and created something that was dropped on the world so to speak, that unleashed, unleashed a tremendous amount of individual freedom and confidence to do things. And I think in a very small, similar fashion, that's what the manifesto did.
Amaar Iftikhar:
As you mentioned, there was a point in time when the manifesto was developed and that was almost over 20 years ago. So now the way of working, and the world of working has drastically changed. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you see another version coming? Do you think there are certain updates that need to be made? Do you think it's kind of a timeless document? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Jon Kern:
Yeah, that's a good question. I personally think it's timeless and I welcome other people to create different documents. And they have. Alistair has The Heart of Agile, Josh Kerievsky's got Modern Agile.
There's a few variations of a theme and different things to reflect upon, which I think is great. Because I do believe, unlike the US Constitution, which built in a mechanism to amend itself, we didn't need that. And I believe it captured the essence of how humans work together to produce something of value. Mostly software, because that's what we came to practice from, is the software experience. But it doesn't take a lot of imagination to replace the word software with product or something like that and still apply much of the values that are there with very, very minor maybe adjustments because frequent tangible working results.
There might have to be models, because you're not going to build a skyscraper and tear it down and say, "Oh, that wasn't quite right," and build it again. But nonetheless, there are variations of how you can show some frequent results. So I think by and large it's timeless. And I would challenge anybody. What's wrong with it? Point out something that's somehow not true 20 years later. And I think that's the genius behind it was we stumbled on... And probably because most of us were object modelers, that's one of the things we're really good at, is distilling the essence of a system into the most critical pieces. That's kind of what modeling is all about. And so I think somehow innately, we got down to the core bits that make up what it is to produce software with people, process and tools. And we wrote it down. That's why I think it's timeless.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, no absolutely. I think that was a really good explanation about why it's timeless. I think one of the principles that comes to mind in a kind of modern hybrid or flexible working arrangement is one of the principles talks about the importance of face to face conversations. And in a world now where a lot of conversations aren't happening physically face to face, they might be happening on Zoom. Do you think that still applies?
Jon Kern:
Yeah, I think what we're finding out with... Remote was literally remote, so to speak, back 20 years ago. I was working with a team of developers in Russia and we had established enough trust and physical... I would travel there every month. So kind of established enough of a team, and enough trust in the communication that we could do ultimately some asynchronous work because different time zones. And me being in the east coast. 7:00 AM in the US was maybe 3:00 PM in Russia if I recall. St. Petersburg. So we were able to overcome the distance, but it's hard to beat real life. And I would often sometimes even spar a little bit with Ron Jeffries that on the one hand you could say the best that you can do is in person. But on the other hand, I could argue a little bit of some of the remoteness makes things... You have to be a little more verbose, possibly a little more precise, but also a little more verbose. A little more relaxed with... You might take a couple of passes to get something just because, I mean there are two time zones passing in the night. But that was based off of some often initial face to face meetings, and then you could go remote and still be successful and highly effective.
So I think it's important that teams don't just say that they can still do everything. And zoom is way better than 20 years ago, admittedly. Zoom gets, at least you can see a face. But nothing replaces the human contact. And I think also for wellbeing, I think human contact is important. So I would still say that the interaction aspect in the manifesto is still best served with a healthy dose of in-person. And that's kind of the key about most things in Agile. It's to me it's about pragmatism, and not just being dogmatic but rather, what might work better for us? And even experimenting with try something a little bit and see how that works. So even how you treat the manifesto, you should treat it in an Agile manner so to speak.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, no absolutely. That's a great point. On that note, as an Agile consultant or the Agile guy, what have you seen are the best practices or what works, what doesn't work for distributed teams?
Jon Kern:
Well I think the things that are most challenging that I've run across big companies and even smaller ones is that... I don't know if it's natural, God forbid if it's natural, but tendencies that I've seen in some companies to set up silos where you're the quality control, you're the UX, you're the front end, you're the back end, makes my headwater explode. Because that's building in a lag and building in communication roadblocks and building in cooperation which is handed offs from silo to silo, versus collaboration. So I've seen more of that. And I get it, you might want to have a specialty, but customer doesn't care. Customer wants something out the door. If I showed up and I'm going to pull a feature off the stack, what do you mean I can only do part of it? I don't get that. And yeah, I know I'm not an expert in everything but we probably have an expert that we can figure out what the pattern is. So I find that sort of trend, I don't know if it's a trend, but I find that's a step backwards in my opinion. And it's better to try to be more cross-functional, collaborative, everybody trying to work to get the feature out the door, not just trying to do your little part.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I think knocking on silos is a big part of being agile, or even being digital for that matter. And often the remedies for it too are there at hand, but it's a lot harder to actually be practical with it, to actually implement it in an organization, a living, breathing business where there's real people and there's dynamics to deal with, and there's policies and processes to follow. So I guess as generic as you can be, what is your thought as an Agile consultant to a business that's kind of facing that issue?
Jon Kern:
One of the things that... Adaptive is what my colleague John Turley has really opened my eyes to. I tend to call it the secret sauce, or the missing piece to my practice. And it has to do with individual's mindset and what we call vertical development. So it might sound like weird wishy-washy fluffy stuff, but it's actually super critical. And I've always said people, process, and tools for, I want to say since late nineties probably, I mean a long time. And the first I've been able to realize why sometimes I would have just spectacular super high performing teams and other times it'd be just really, really well performing but not always that spark and sometimes kind of like, eh, that was a little meh. And a lot of it comes down to where people lie on in terms of how they make their meaning and what their motivational orientation is, command and control versus autonomy.
So what we do is we've learned that we can help people first off recognize this exists, and help people with what we call developmental practices. Something that, even the phrase, you probably heard it, like safe experiments. Failure, or trying something and failing. Well if you chop someone's head off for it, guess what? They're just going to probably stay pretty still and only do what they're told, not try to... I have a super high dose of autonomy in me, so I've long lived by the, better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and always felt as long as I'm trying to do the right thing to succeed and do the best for the company, they probably won't fire me if I make a mistake. But not everybody has that amount of freedom in the way they work. So you have to help establish that as management, and that's a big thing that we work with, with teams.
And then we also start with the class. If you've ever watched office space, and if you haven't you should, but the, what is it that you do here? So there's a great, the consultants Bob and Bob coming in, the efficiency consultants, "So Amaar, what is it that you do here?" But literally that's something, whether we're helping teams build a new product, is okay, what's the purpose? What's the business purpose of this product? What is it that you do here? What do you want to do with this product? What value does it provide? Same thing with anything you're working with as a team. And that's why whether it's software, producing some feature that has an outcome that provides value to the customer, or some product. But the point is if you don't understand that, now it's making, the team is going to have a real hard time being able to make decisions which are helping us move forward.
So if you help everybody understand what it is we're here to do, and then try to get the folks that might reflect all the different silos if you're siloed, but all the different elements. How do we go from an idea to cash, so to speak, or idea to value in the customer's hand? And have a good look at that. Because there are so many things that just sort of... Technical data often creeps into software code bases. And the same thing, we sort of say the organizational debt, the same thing can happen. Your process debt. You can just end up with, all right, we want the development team to go faster, John and company, can you come in and help coach us? We want to go agile. Sure, okay yeah. All right. We roll up our sleeves, we look around and after an initial kind of value stream look, like, wait I'm sorry but there's a little tiny wedge, it's about 15%, that's the development. And then you spent the 85% thinking about it.
Let's pretend we could double the speed of development. Which was initially the... Yeah, we need the developers to code faster or something. That's a classic. And no you don't, you need to stop doing all this bullshit up front that's just crazy ass big waterfall project-y stuff with multiple sign-offs. And matter of fact, one of the sign-offs, oh my gosh it only meets once a week, and then if you have a typo in it, you get rejected. You don't come back for another... Are you insane? You spent eight months deciding to do eight weeks worth of work. Sorry, it's not the eight weeks. So things like that, what I recommend anybody self inspect is try to... If you're worried about your team, how you can do better is just start trying to write down what does your process step look like and what is a typical time frame?
How much time are you putting value into the... Because a lot of times people batch things up in sprints. That's a batch, why are you putting things in a batch? Or they have giant issues. Well that's the big batch. So there's lots of often low hanging fruit. But to your point, it's often encrusted in, this is the way we work and nobody feels the ability to change or even to stop and look to see how are we working. So I think that's where we usually start is let's see how you actually work today. And then while we're doing that you can spill your guts, you can tell us all the things that hurt and that are painful and then we'll try to design a better way that we can move towards, in terms of working more effectively. Because our goal is to help teams be able to develop ways to do more meaningful and joyous work, really. Because it's a lot of fun when it's clicking and when you're on a good team and you're putting smiles on the customers' faces, it's hard to almost stay away from work because it's so much fun. But if it's not that, if it's drudgery and you're just a cog in the machine and stuff takes months to get out the door, it's a job. It's not that much fun.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah. A lot of the points that you mentioned there strongly resonated with me, and the common pain points. It sounds like you've kind of seen it all. And by the way if you haven't seen office space, definitely need to watch it. It's a really good one. You've mentioned now a lot about of the element of the challenges that a distributed team faces. Now I want to flip it over and ask you what does the perfect distributed team look like today that lives and breathes agile values?
Jon Kern:
Yeah. I don't know if you can ever have such a thing, a perfect of any kind of team. So I would say harking back to the types of distributed teams that I've worked with, and this goes back to the late nineties. So I've been doing this for a long, long time. Only really done remote, whether it was with developers in Russia or down in North Carolina, or places like that. And I think that the secret was having a combination of in-person... If you want to go somewhere as a group, there are things you can do to break the ice, to establish some, what you might call team building type activities.
And not just, hey let's go do a high ropes course and be scared out of our wits together. But rather also things that are regarding why are we here, what are we trying to achieve? And let's talk about whether it's the product we're trying to build, and take that as an opportunity to coalesce around something and get enough meat on the bone, enough skeletons of what it might look like. Because there's good ways to start up and have a good foundation. And that's part of what I've been practicing for decades. If you get things set up properly with understanding that just enough requirements, understanding... And I do a lot of domain modeling with UML and things like that, just understanding what the problem domain is that we're trying to solve to achieve the goals we're looking for, have a sense of the architecture that we want. So all those things are collaborative efforts.
And so if you have enough of a starting point where you've worked together, you come in and, let's say you even had to go rent someplace, because nobody lived near office, so you all flew somewhere. I mean that's money well spent in my opinion. Because that starts the foundation. If you've broken bread so to speak, or drank some beers, or coded together and did stuff, and then you go back to your remote offices to take the next steps and then realize when you might need to meet again. So that's really important to understand that the value of establishing those relationships early on so that you can talk bluntly. And I have some good folks that I run a production app for firefighters since like 2006.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, very cool.
Jon Kern:
And that friend that I've worked with, we are so tight that we can... It makes our conversations, we don't have to beat around the bush, we don't have to worry about offending any, we just, boom, cut to the chase. Because we know we're not calling each other's kids ugly. We're just trying to get something done fast.
And building that kind of rapport takes time and effort and working together. And that's what I think a good successful distributed team, you need to come together every so often and build those relationships and know when you might need to come together again if something is a problem. But that I think is a key to success is it shortens the time. Because you may have heard of things like the group forms, if this is performance on the Y axis they form and they're at some performance level, then they need to storm before they get back to normal, and before they start high performing. So it's this form, storm. You get worse when you're storming. And storming means really understanding where we're at. When we argue about, I don't think that should be inheritance, Amaar. And then you're like, "Oh bull crap, it really..."
And again, we're not personal, but we're learning each other's sort of perspectives and we're learning how to have respectful debates and have some arguments, so to speak, to get to the better place. And I've worked in some companies that are afraid to storm, and it feels like you're never high performing.
Everyone's too polite. It's like, come on. And I love when I worked with my Russian colleagues. They didn't give a crap if I was one of the founders. And I'm glad, because I don't want any privilege, I don't want anything like that. No let's duke it out. May the best ideas win. That's where you want to get to. And if you can't get there because you don't have enough of a relationship, and you tend not to say the things that needed to be said because you're being polite, well it's going to take you really long to succeed. And that's a lot of money, and that's a lot of success, and people might leave.
So I think the important thing is if you're remote, that's okay, but sheer remote is a real challenge. And you have to somehow figure out, if you can't get together to learn how to form and storm, and build those bonds face to face, then you need to figure out how to do it over Zoom. Because you need to do it, because if you don't, if you never have words, then trust me, you're still not high performing.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, I kind of feel like being fully remote now is being offered as almost a competitive advantage to candidates in the marketplace now, because it's a fight for talent. But if I'm understanding correctly, what you are saying is that in-person element is so important to truly be high performing and those ideas kind of contradict each other, I feel.
Jon Kern:
Yeah. And again, having been remote since the late nineties, I've been doing this a long time. And commuting to Russia is the longest commute I ever did, for three years. I mean that's a hell of a long flight to commute there over seven times, or whatever the hell it was. Anyway, I used to say that that being remote is not for everyone, because it really isn't. I mean you have to know how to work without anybody around, and work. I mean it has its own challenges. And yeah, it might be a perk, but I think what you need to do is look at potentially what the perks are and figure out too, can I fold them into... It doesn't have to be all or nothing. And I think that can be a easy mistake to make maybe is to, all right cool, we don't have to have office space. That's a lot of savings for the company. Yeah, but maybe that means you need to have some remote workspaces for occasional gatherings, or figure it out.
But yeah, I think even... And certain businesses might work differently. In the beginning of building a product, I want to have heavy collaboration and I want to get to a point where it's almost, I feel like the product goes like this where once you get things rolling and you kind of get up, get some momentum going, now the hardest thing to do is be in front of an agile team, whether they're in-person or remote. Once things are rolling and rocking and kicking and it's like everything's clicking, you can just bang out features left, like boom, boom, boom. Yeah, okay then we probably need to be...
Unless we've got ways that we're pairing or things like that. I will say when we're together, mobbing is easier. I'm sure there's ways to do it remote, but being in a room, I don't know, it's a lot easier than coordinating over Zoom. You just, hey there's this problem, let's all hang out here after standup because we're just going to mob on this. So it doesn't take a whole lot versus anything remote, there's a little extra, okay, we've got to coordinate, and even different times zones, gets even worse. So yeah, don't get carried away with remote being the end all be all. Because I have a feeling there's going to be a... I would wager there will be a backlash.
Amaar Iftikhar:
And I'll take that back coming from the Agile, the person who does this day to day who helps teams become agile, I'll definitely kind of take your word for it. Plus with my experience too, I've seen nothing really beats a good white-boarding session. That is really hard to replicate online. I mean we have these amazing tools, but nothing quite mimics the real life experience of just having a plain whiteboard and a marker in your hand. That communication is so powerful.
Jon Kern:
Great point. You're so, right, because I had just with the one company that I was with for five years, we were doing high level engineered to order pump manufacturing sales type tool for... So it was my favorite world because it blended my fluid dynamics as an aerospace engineer, plus my love for building SaaS products, and building new software and things like that. And even having a young, we would interview at Lehigh University and we'd have some young graduates that would be working with us, and being able to bring them into the fold, and there was a room behind where my treadmill was and we'd go in there, we'd have jam sessions on modeling and building out new features. And man, you're right. Just that visceral three dimensional experience. Yeah, Miro's great. Or any other kind of tool, but yeah, it's not the same. You're absolutely right. That's a great point. You're almost making me pine for the good old days. [inaudible 00:42:04]
Amaar Iftikhar:
I think the good old days very much still exist. I think even now, it's kind of been a refreshing time for me to be with Easy Agile. I've only been here for just under two months now. And there's a strong in-person dynamic. And again, it's optional, where if people are remote or they're hybrid or they need to commute once in a while, it's a very understanding environment. But once you're in the office or you're in person, you kind of feel the effect you were describing, you're motivated to deliver for the end customer. You just want to come back. It's an addictive feeling of, I want to be back in person and I want to collaborate in real time in person.
Jon Kern:
That's beautifully said, because that's... One of the companies that we're beginning to engage with in South Africa, they're at this very crossroad of struggling with, everybody's been remote, but boy, the couple times we were together, got so much done. And you're describing the flame of, the warmth of delivering and let the moths come to the flame. I mean nurture it and then fan the flames of the good and let people opt in and enjoy it. And still sometimes, yeah, I got to say home, I got the kids or the dog, that's okay too. But giving the option I think is where we're going to head. And I believe the companies that are able to build that hybrid culture of accepting both, and neither mandating one nor the other, but building such a high performing team that basically encourages people to opt into the things that make the most sense at that time. And I think that those companies will rule the day, so to speak.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah, absolutely. It's been so nice to chat with you John, and I've really enjoyed this. I want to leave the audience off with one piece of advice for distributed agile teams from you. We've talked a lot about the importance of in-person collaboration. We've talked about the principles of the agile manifesto. Now, what would the one piece of advice be when you're thinking of both? When you want the agile manifestos to be something that's living and breathing in distributed agile teams, what one piece of advice can you give businesses today right now who are going through the common struggles? What can you tell them as that last piece of advice?
Jon Kern:
Well, I think kind of a one phrase that I like to use to capture the manifesto is, "Mind the gap." In my sort of play on words, what I mean is the gap in time between taking an action and getting a response. Whether it's what do we do about the office, what do we do about remote, what do we do about this feature, what do we do about this line of code? The gap in time is, it's sort of a metaphor about being humble enough to treat things as a hypothesis. So don't be so damn sure of yourself one way or the other about the office or remote or distributed. But instead, treat things as a hypothesis. Be curious and experiment safely with different ways and see what works. And don't be afraid of change. It's not a life sentence to, you got to run your business or your project or your team one way for the rest of your life. No. Don't tell the boss, but work is subsidized learning. I never understood people who just keep doing the same thing because they weren't given permission. Just try it. So that's what my departing phrase would be regarding making those decisions. Mind the gap and really be humble about making assumptions, and test your hypotheses, and shorten the gap in time between taking actions and seeing a reaction.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. I really wish we could let the tape roll and just keep talking about this for a couple more hours, but we'll end it right there on that really good piece of advice that you've left the audience off with. Jon, thank you again for being on the podcast. And we've really, really enjoyed hearing you and learning from your experiences.
Jon Kern:
Oh, my pleasure. Any time. Happy to talk another couple hours, but maybe after some beers.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah.
Jon Kern:
Except it's your morning, my evening. I'm going to have to work on that.
Amaar Iftikhar:
Yeah.
Jon Kern:
My pleasure, Amaar.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.4 Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO & Managing Director at Pretty Agile
"We spoke in detail about scaling agile, being a SAFe fellow, discipline, the traits of effective leaders and how to trust your people."
Transcript
Nick Muldoon:
Good day, folks. Thanks for joining us for another Easy Agile Podcast. This morning, I'm joined by Em Campbell-Pretty of Pretty Agile. Em is one of 22 SAFe fellows globally and she's been doing agile transformations at scale for over a decade now. She's also the author of two books, The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck and Tribal Unity. So, all about culture and psychological safety here, and all about obviously scaling agile release trains, tips and tricks.
Nick Muldoon:
My key takeaways that I was really jazzed about, the traits of effective leaders for scaling agile transformations and being an effective organization, trust, as in trusting their people, an openness to learning and a willingness to learn, the ability to experiment and treat things as failures if they are failures, and discipline. Em and I talked a bit about discipline today as a trait of leaders. It's a really great episode and I took a lot from it, and you'll hear my takeaways at the end and what I need to go and learn after some time with Em this morning. So, let's get started. How many weeks a year are you typically on the road?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
How many weeks a year am I typically on the road? A lot, most. It would be unusual for me to spend four weeks without going somewhere. That would be unusual. I don't travel every week, but I travel most weeks, and I travel in big blocks. Right? So, I'll go and do ... Like I said, just before the lockdown, we did three weeks in Auckland, so that was in February-March.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We went to Auckland, we had a client in Auckland, we just stayed there. So, three weeks in Auckland, came back here, and did not return to Auckland. Returned to support that client virtually over Teams and Zoom was how that one went. But yeah. Normally between running around Australia, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, the US, New Zealand, yeah, not home that often, normally. This has been truly bizarre.
Nick Muldoon:
So, this is a very unusual year for someone like yourself that's flying around visiting clients all over the world.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a very strange year. It's an interesting difference on energy as well. Not flying all the time I think is good for my body. I feel the difference. I also feel the difference sitting in a chair all the time. So, I was traveling a lot, but I was on my feet most days when I was working. Now if I'm working, I'm sitting a lot.
Nick Muldoon:
You're sitting down. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, that's interesting. But I don't miss the jet lag at all. I don't miss the amount of time the travel consumes at all. In fact, it's been nice. I've had a little bit of head space. I've probably blogged more this year than I have in a few years because I've just had some head space and being able to think. But I don't get to see the world either, and all my holidays got canceled. So, nevermind work. I had trips to Europe. Four weeks from now, I was supposed to be in Canada seeing polar bears.
Nick Muldoon:
Aw.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Tell me about it!
Nick Muldoon:
I would love to see polar bears. They look so cuddly on TV. I'm not sure that that would actually be the circumstance if I was to try to approach one and give one a cuddle.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. I don't think cuddling was involved. I was told I could bring a camera and a tripod, which means obviously I'm going to stand some distance away from this polar bear and take photos. But that will not be happening either. So, no holidays and no travel for work, and of course, being in Melbourne, not even any, let's just go to [crosstalk 00:04:15].
Nick Muldoon:
Coffee or anything like that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Just nothing.
Nick Muldoon:
Nothing.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Nothing.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, because you've been on legit lockdown.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
So, tell me then about the shift over the last 10 or 15 years in these scaled, agile transformations. Obviously today, like you described with this client in Auckland, everything's got to be remote. Presumably, not as effective. But I'd love to get a sense of what the evolution is from the transformations 10 years ago, banking, telcos, that sort of environment to the clients that you're working with today. Describe what it was like 10 years ago.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, 10 years ago, and it's so interesting to reflect on this now, I read Scaling Software Agility, which is a book that Dean published in 2007. Then I discovered that wasn't the latest book, so then I read Agile Software Requirements. This was 2011. I'm this crazy, angry business sponsor with this program of work I'd been sponsoring for five years that's never delivered anything, and in this cra-
Nick Muldoon:
You were the crazy, angry business sponsor?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was the crazy [inaudible 00:05:26]. I was very angry. You would be angry too if you were me. I refer to it now as the money fire. So, basically, here's my job. Right? Go to the CFO, ask for money. Give the money to IT. IT lights a match, sets it on fire. Comes back, asks me for money. I get to go back to the CFO and say I need more money. Five years. Five years. That's all I did. Ask for money and try to explain where the other money went.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Anyway, in the strangest restructure ever, I end up the technology GM for the same group I had been the business sponsor of for the past five years. Apparently, they couldn't find anybody appropriately qualified. So, you can do it, Em. Sure. So, I'm a bit of a geek, so I read books, and I'm reading these books by Leffingwell because I'd been doing some agile ... So, I'd been doing something I'd been calling agile. Let's just go with that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
It was interesting to me because I could see little rays of light. But it still wasn't really making anything happen, so hence the reading. These books talk about this agile release train [inaudible 00:06:46] that sounds cool. We should so do this thing. So, I set about launching this train at a Telstra in early 2012. It wasn't called SAFe, right? It was just the books and these things called an agile release train.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Now, to look back 10 years ago, it wasn't called SAFe. People weren't running around doing this. I was not actually really qualified for the job I was in. Well, I wasn't a technology leader by any stretch of the imagination, and I decide that I'm just going to launch an agile release train. So, there were rare and unusual beasts, and I'm not sure I really understood that when I went down the path of doing it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I'm big on the, I read it in a book, I read it in a blog, I heard it at a conference, I'll just try it. That's very much always been my mental model. So, I read it in a book and I just tried it. Then we discover that actually, literally nobody is doing this, so it becomes Australia's first agile release train and Australia's first SAFe implementation. Oh, boy, have I learned a lot since then.
Nick Muldoon:
Well, yeah. I was reflecting on that because I dug out The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck, right? This is one of the ones that you signed for Tegan. But obviously, you've learned a ton since then because you've managed to put together a tome of tips and tricks and things to avoid as you are pursuing these transformations. As an industry, though, well, as an industry, I guess this spans many industries, but as a practice these days, are we actually getting better at these transformations? Are there companies out there today, Em, that are still taking piles of money and setting it on fire?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I think I meet people every day who hear my story and go, "Oh, my god. You used to work here?" So, I think there's still many, many organizations that have an experience that is like the experience I had back in 2010 and what have you. So, it seems to be something that really resonates with people. I guess so many of the businesses we go into now either are not agile at all or, I guess like my world was, doing something they call agile. What we find is the something that they call agile, I wouldn't say it's not agile. But it leaves a lot to be desired.
Nick Muldoon:
They're on a journey, right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess so because they end up having a conversation with us. So, they understand that what they're doing is not enough. They understand that what they're doing isn't getting them the results that they want. I don't know that they understand why. It's interesting to me sometimes that they look to SAFe because you asked me about how's the client base changed? One of the things that's really interesting in Australia is we get far more of the small to medium sized companies now than the big ones.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, they're companies that consider themselves agile. But what we're calling them, the startups that are no longer startups, right? These are organizations that they're generally old 10, 20 year old startups and they're scaling and they see their problem as a scaling problem. So, that's what leads them to a conversation around the scaled agile framework.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
When we look at them through a SAFe lens, we go, "Gee, you're tiny. But okay. I can see that you can have an agile release train and it won't do you any harm. In fact, it would probably help you a lot in terms of mid-range planning," because mid-range planning just seems to be nonexistent for a lot of these organizations. Prioritization. A lot of these small organizations, very knee-jerky in terms of how they prioritize, bouncing from one thing to the other.
Nick Muldoon:
Are they reacting to the market, or are they reacting to the leaders, maybe the lack of discipline in the leadership?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You know what? They would say they're reacting to the market. I would say they've got a discipline issue.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:11:23].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I read, obviously, big reader, last summer, obviously Australian summer, US winter, I read Melissa Perry's The Build Trap. Interesting book and your well respected thought leader in product management. Not a big fan of SAFe. Probably not a big fan of agile either was the takeaway I had from her book. But the thing that she does talk about that I really thought was valuable was the lunacy in chasing your competitors. So, building features because your competitors-
Nick Muldoon:
Your competitors [crosstalk 00:12:06].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... build them, or building features to land a contract or retain a customer. So, I thought she sees all of that as lunacy, and I tend to agree. So, that was my ... I think that's quite interesting. Her perspective is you don't know if the competitor's actually having any luck with that thing that they've built. So, if you build it because they built it, you don't know. You have no idea. So, don't just build it because they've built it. It might not be doing them any favors either.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Of course, once you start just doing random stuff for this big customer or this big client, you start to lose your way as an organization. People end up with completely different versions of their products, branches that they can't integrate anymore. It's interesting. So, when I look at that, I go, "I feel like there's a discipline issue in some of these organizations at the leadership level."
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What is it we're trying to do? What is our vision? What is our mission? What is our market? What are we doing to test and learn in that market, as opposed to just get a gun, let's do everything, grab everything? Oh, my goodness. They were doing that over there. Stop this, start this, stop this. Of course, if you're stopping and starting all the time, you're not delivering anything, and that seems to be something that we see a lot with these organizations. They're not delivering.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I'm not saying their delivery mechanism is perfect. There's challenges there too. But some part of the problem is the inability to stay a course. Pick a course and stay a course. I'm not saying don't pivot, because that's stupid too. But being more deliberate in your choices to pivot, perhaps. Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you get a sense, Em, that there are leadership teams in various geographic regions that are more effective at this and more effective at that longterm planning and having that discipline and that methodical approach to delivery over an extended time period?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I think regions and cultures and nationalities certainly play a role in the leadership, I don't know, persona, personality. I don't know that I could say when I've worked in this country or this part of the world that their leaders are better at forethought. I think some cultures lend themselves to lean and agile more than others. Hierarchical cultures are really, really challenging.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That can be both a geographic thing, but it can also just be an industry thing, right? So, government can be very hierarchical. The banks can be very hierarchical. Some of the Asian cultures are very hierarchical. But some companies are just very hierarchical as well. So, who owns the company, who leads the company, all of that can play a big role in what's acceptable because so much of success in this scaled agile journey comes down to a leadership that is willing to trust the teams, a leadership that is willing to learn, a leadership that's willing to experiment, and a leadership that's prepared to be disciplined.
Nick Muldoon:
So, leadership with trusting the teams, willing to learn, willing to experiment, and with discipline. They're those four things that you-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. I'll make a note of those, Em. I'll come back to those. Trust, learn, experiment, and discipline. I'm interested, I guess, this year being a very interesting, a very unique year for doing remote transformation work and coaching and consulting, 10 years ago, what was the percentage of remote team members distributed teams? Now, you've basically, I think the big banks in Australia aren't even going back to the office until 2021. Atlassian is not going back to the office until 2021. Twitter, Jack Dorsey, my old CEO, said, "Work from home forever," sort of thing. What's the takeaway for this year and what do you expect for 2021 and beyond?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, look. This year has been eyeopening, and look, some things are, as I would have anticipated, some things have been different. So, obviously, we're seeing entire organizations going online. We're seeing the teams are online, the PI planning's online, everything's online. That's actually in some ways opened up opportunity. So, where we've had clients who have had the most odd setups in terms of distribution, and you can make a train work where you've got teams across two locations. But we're big fans of the entire team is in Sydney or the entire team is in India. We don't have half the team in Sydney and half the team in India.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But organizations really struggle with that because perhaps all the testers are in India and then you want a tester on every team and now you've got a problem. How do you create a complete team and not cross the time zones? So, the opportunity becomes if I can find teams that are not physically co-located but time zone friendly, I have a little bit more option. So, I can have a train that operates between, I don't know, Sydney and India. Or I can find a four hour overlap in their day, and I can insist that that team works 100% online.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, the big thing that we'd advise against is I don't want that team hybrid. Right? I don't want three people sitting in the office in Sydney and three people sitting in their homes in India. I want everybody online. I want an even playing field, and I think we can do that now in a way that is more acceptable than before. Because the same advice I was giving, gee, back when I wrote Tribal Unity, same advice. Right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, 2016, everybody, equal playing field. If you're going to be distributed, everyone has to be online, as opposed to some people online and some people in a room. So, that's a more acceptable answer now than it was prior to this year. So, that's good. I think that's good.
Nick Muldoon:
In 2021, then, Em, you mean this is just going to play forward. I guess there's going to be a reversion of some of these companies back to the office because they've got huge real estate and workplace infrastructure already.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. So, look. We're seeing clients closing offices the same way that you see some of the companies in the US doing that. We're also seeing parts of Australia and New Zealand with no particular COVID impact at this point actually going back into the office, and having created that example of teams that are crossing time zones, and then going back into the office and going back to that hybrid space. So, that's interesting and [crosstalk 00:20:08].
Nick Muldoon:
So, where you're back into that environment where you might have some people working together in an office that can get a cup of coffee together and then some that are stuck still at home. I guess there's not just even regional differences, right? If you've got a team member that's got a particular health situation, they're not going to feel comfortable necessarily coming back into the office, regardless of the situation, until there's a vaccine or something.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, yeah. Look, I think it's going to be interesting. I would strongly advocate that organizations have teams that are either in person teams or online teams, and the team just either operates 100% online or the team operates 100%-
Nick Muldoon:
In the office.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... in person and in the office, and if you have a train that has both in any train level ceremony, everybody goes to a desk and-
Nick Muldoon:
And do it online.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... a video camera and we do it that way. I think the thing that seems to be most sticky about the physical environment and SAFe is PI planning. Nobody needs to beat. Right? That was cool. Nobody needs to beat, no one's PI planning slipped, everybody just went. They were all online. So, we'll just PI plan online. It'll be fine. We saw people use whatever infrastructure they had available to them.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:21:30].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I'm sure a number of people called you folks and said, "We need a tool." But some just went, "We have Google Suite, we have Microsoft whatever it is, we have this, we have that. We're just going to make it work," and no matter what they used, they made it work and they ran the events and their events were effective and they got the outcomes. The big thing that is missing is that energy. You can't get the energy of 100, 200 people in a room from an online event. But mechanically-
Nick Muldoon:
We can achieve it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... we can achieve it. So, we hear everybody wants to go back to PI planning in person because of the social, because of the energy, which I think is awesome. I absolutely think that is awesome, and I can see this world in which people do a lot more work from home, work remote, whatever that looks like, and then the PI planning events are the things that we do to bring ourselves together and reconnect on that eight, 10, 12 week basis. That's my feeling. Could be wrong.
Nick Muldoon:
I guess I'll be really interested to see how it plays out, and I think we should return to this conversation in 12 months, Em.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Oh, no.
Nick Muldoon:
I'm just thinking, what's going through my mind is one of our customers in New York, financial services company, and for one of their arts, it was 150,000 US exercised to bring their people together once a quarter.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Wow.
Nick Muldoon:
I'm now going, I'm like, "Okay, yes, they're doing it digitally now." That's fine. They're going to miss out on things. But if they lose the budget, do they have to fight to get the budget back? Or does the budget sit there? There's these other unknown ramifications of this shift over the course of 2020 that we're yet to see play out, I guess.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I think you're right, and I think it would be particularly interesting for the trains that have been launched remotely. So, if the train has been launched remotely, do you ev-
Nick Muldoon:
So, not existing trains that have been working together for six to 12, 18 months. But you want to get a brand new train started. Have you done that remotely this year with some of your clients?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, we're in the process of doing it now.
Nick Muldoon:
Cool. Tell me.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We had one, though, literally just before the lockdown. So, they did their first PI planning face to face and then immediately moved to remote working and, yeah, now working on remotely launching a train. For us, we have a playbook. It's a bunch of workshops. It's a bunch of classes. We just use online collaboration tools. We've found things that replicate the sort of tools that we would have in a physical room, and the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes, right? This has been the absolute highlight for me, the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes.
Nick Muldoon:
No more hieroglyphics.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
What is that that you wrote, Sally? Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Everyone can say everything at once, right? So, you think about the classroom and the workshop where there's a group of people huddled around Post-its and a flip chart paper and they're still huddled in a way in their virtual huddle, but everybody can read, right? It's not that I'm not close enough, I can't read, I can't read your handwriting. There's this great equalizer is the online world. So, I think that's great. I think the challenge for the trains launched remotely is going to be do you ever get the face to face experience?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Because if I go back over the years, one of the things we know is your first PI planning event sets the standard. So, people get this imprint in their heads of what is possible. For example, if you skip something in your first PI planning event, you just decide to, I don't know, skip the confidence vote or something weird like that, you don't do the roam of the risks or you just skip something, you never do it because you're successful without it.
Nick Muldoon:
It never gets picked up. Yeah, okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You're successful without it. So, every compromise you make, and you make a series of compromises, and then you're successful despite those compromises, and that becomes a false positive feasibility. It tells you, yes, I was right. I was right.
Nick Muldoon:
I don't need to do that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I didn't need to do those things because I was awesomely successful and I didn't do these things. So, it's the learning [crosstalk 00:26:15]-
Nick Muldoon:
That's confirmation bias, is it?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Confirmation bias. That's exactly it. Yep. Yeah, and I think there's going to be a bunch of confirmation bias in these remotely launched trains, and unless they're inside organizations where there's enough knowledge of SAFe and the physical PI planning to know that there's going to be value in bringing them together, but I can see that being a real challenge. I think trains that are launched online may never go into a physical PI planning event because of that confirmation bias.
Nick Muldoon:
All right.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That makes me really sad.
Nick Muldoon:
I want to come back to something you said before about the leaders, and you mentioned the trust, the openness to learning and experimentation, and the discipline. I was going back over your SAFe Global 2018 talk about the seven traits of highly effective servant leaders.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
I guess I had some questions about this, and obviously, these are four of the traits. What are the other three traits that I'm missing? Then I've got a followup question about some of the actual things that you talked about that you picked up in your trip.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
[inaudible 00:27:29] one of those four on the list I had in 2018.
Nick Muldoon:
I'll quiz you on it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
How awkward. So, in 2018, the answer was people first, a respect for people, that sort of lens, lean thinking, manager, teacher, learner. So, we had that one. Yeah. Learner. [inaudible 00:28:00] crazy. What else did I have? [inaudible 00:28:10].
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay. I wanted to talk about that one, actually. I made a note about that. What is that, and are there examples of that in the West?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
A lot of people talk about true north.
Nick Muldoon:
[inaudible 00:28:28]. True north.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. True north. The translation I got, which I got from Mr. [inaudible 00:28:39], who partnered with Katie Anderson for the lean study tour I did in, I don't know, '18, '17, '18, 2018, I think, so the translation he gave was direction and management sort of things. So, it's mission, right? It's strategic mission. It's that sort of thing.
Nick Muldoon:
So, just a sidebar here for anyone that hasn't seen Em's talk on this, there's a woman by the name of Katie Anderson. She runs an annual, I think, I guess not this year, but she runs an annual-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No, not this year. She did not go this year.
Nick Muldoon:
... not this year, runs an annual lean, Kanban, kaizen study tour to Japan and visits ... Who did you visit, Em? You visited with Katie. How many were in the crew that you went over there with?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I think it was a group of about 20 from memory. Katie lived in Japan for two years and then went back to the US. She lives in San Francisco, I think. While she was there, she really liked the idea of putting together these lean study tours. She was already a lean practitioner more in the healthcare side of things. So, she got the opportunity to ... We actually were on a test run tour.
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, cool.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, this was her experiment. She had a relationship with Ohio State University and they brought some people to the table and she brought some people to the table and they made it happen. She also had an existing relationship with Mr. [inaudible 00:30:24], who was John [inaudible 00:30:26] first manager at Toyota. So, he's a 40 year Toyota veteran.
Nick Muldoon:
Veteran.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
He came with us for the week. So, we of course went to Toyota, but we went to a bunch of Toyota suppliers as well. Isuzu, [inaudible 00:30:43]. Then we also went to Japan Post, which was fascinating. We went to a city which name escapes me right now, but they called it 5S City because all the companies in that city practice the 5S, the manufacturing 5S.
Nick Muldoon:
Tell me about it. It's not coming to mind. I don't feel comfortable or familiar.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You don't feel good about 5S?
Nick Muldoon:
No.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No. That's not good. So, how would I ... The 5S is five Japanese words, which I'm going to go ... Yeah. My Japanese, nothing. But it's about standardized work. So, for example, when you go into the 5S factories, you'll see the floors marked up where you need to stand to do a particular job.
Nick Muldoon:
[crosstalk 00:31:41] This is what Paul Aikas picked up for his-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, no.
Nick Muldoon:
I feel like I've seen Paul Aikas' videos of their manufacturing in the US that everything's marked up.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Probably. That would be my guess. We should ask Teddy.
Nick Muldoon:
We can ask Paul, and we can ask all these people. There's time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Well, yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Okay.
Nick Muldoon:
So, that lean tour, the Japan study tour, that was a super effective and motivating thing for you?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. For me, it was very reinforcing. So, I had I guess my own lens on what lean leadership meant, and I found that particular tour to be very reinforcing around the value set that I believe is part of that. Katie [inaudible 00:32:43] created [inaudible 00:32:44] that is designed to show you that. So, she's often very clear that says this is not Japan, right? This is not a reorganization into Japan. This is not every leader in Japan.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
This is, I've hand picked a series of lean leaders to show you it being practiced. But it was certainly very reinforcing for me. So, very similar messages I picked up in terms of how I like to head, how I coach others to lead was built into the messages that she delivered. So, it was very cool. It was very cool. Some of those leaders, just so inspiring, particular kaizen. I think the thing that just really hits you in the face as you're talking to these folks is kaizen, this drive to get better.
Nick Muldoon:
All the time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
All the time. Absolutely. It's these folks looking for, they're looking for the one second, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
The one second improvements. There's a video that floats around. Have you seen the Formula 1 video-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... where they do, yeah, the changeover in 63 and it takes them over a minute and they do the changeover in 90-something in Melbourne and it takes them six seconds or whatever it is. It's like that, right? It's that how do I find one more second, half a second? They're just so driven. If I can remove a step that someone has to take, can I move something closer to somebody?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. There was some comment in the presentation that you gave. There was some comment about if I have to take another five steps, that's an extra 10 seconds. Then that's an extra 10 seconds every time I do this activity every day, and that all adds up. So, how do we shave these seconds off and be more effective and deliberate about how we do this?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That was just huge, right? I called it kaizen crazy in the presentation. I'm just so, so driven to improve, and just tiny, small improvements every day.
Nick Muldoon:
So, one of the other practices that I didn't grok out of that talk was about the Bus Stop. What was the Bus Stop about?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Was that in that talk? Really?
Nick Muldoon:
I'm forcing you to stretch your mind [crosstalk 00:34:57].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You are. You are. You are. You are quite right. It really was [inaudible 00:35:01]. Okay. Oh, you're awful.
Nick Muldoon:
Yes.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yes. Yes, you are. Okay. So, effective leaders are human was the tagline on that one. It was really about leaders being down to Earth and being one with the teams. So, things I saw in Japan, this factory run by a woman, [inaudible 00:35:42], I think it was, so very unusual. Not a lot of women leaders in Japan. Her husband took her name because [inaudible 00:35:52]. It's a really interesting character.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But her company has a bunch of morning rituals. You always say good morning and thank you and how they talk every day and everybody talks and everyone interacts. Then one of the other places we went to, they all had their uniforms they wore in the factory. But everybody wore the uniform, right? The CEO, the office workers, and everybody wore the uniform. Everyone was one.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Then I was thinking about my experience leading teams, and a lifetime ago, I was working with a team that decided to enter a corporate competition. This competition was about showing your colors and showing the corporate values, which were things like better together and courage, and then [inaudible 00:36:49] a rainbow thing. So, this team decides what they're going to do, is it an address up in the rainbow colors, and they're going to be better together and show their courage and they're going to do the Macarena and they're going to video it and that's going to be how they're going to win this competition.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I did not participate in this Macarena because someone has to take photos and stuff, right? How else are they going to enter the competition? So, had to do my bit. Anyway, we also had this ritual, which was about teams bringing challenges to leadership to resolve, and they did at the end of every spring. So, they do this Macarena and they film it and they enter the competition and at the end of the spring, they bring their challenges to leadership.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Their challenge is Em did not do the Macarena. You are our leader, you did not do the Macarena. We are feeling very challenged by that, and we're bringing this to you to resolve. So, I went and spoke to the team that raised and said, "Look. I got to tell you. I don't know the Macarena. So, sorry." I still remember this so clearly. One of the guys said to me, "I read this blog about the importance of leaders being vulnerable." You know who wrote that blog post, don't you?
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, Em. Oh. You have it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, we negotiated. I said, "Look. I think I can manage the Bus Stop." For those not from Australia, we grow up doing this in high school dances. In my part of the world, anyway. So, I grabbed my leadership team and we did do the Bus Stop and it was part of proving that we too were the same as everybody else and doing our bit and responding to the team's feedback. So, yes. That is where the Bus Stop fits in. Thanks so much for that, Nick.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. No, I appreciate that. Now, I'm glad that I got that context. I try and do similar things. Typically, it's a karaoke or something, or that we haven't done that in a while. Yeah, okay. So, I guess the thrust of that talk was really about to leaders to serve, and it was all about being in service of. It sounds like what you took from the Japan study tour was these leaders there were very much in service of their people.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you see that as a trait that is prevalent in the best performing companies that you deal with, and how likely are they over a five, 10 year horizon, whatever that happens to be, to outperform their competitors or to be more successful in their market? Or I guess however they define success?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I certainly see a correlation between leaders that like to serve and/or choose to serve and success with scaled agile, and business, because I guess we have seen over, it's close to 10 years, is those who practice together, your framework with discipline get results, and they get significant results. They improve their ability to deliver products and services, their cost base goes down, their quality goes up, their people are happier, their attrition goes down. We see it every single time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What we also see is when the leaders don't walk the talk, when the leaders are paying lip service to the transformation, it doesn't stick. They don't get the results. People don't find it a better place to work. People aren't bought into the change. So, there is definitely a correlation there. You can get pockets of wonderfulness inside an organization.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We often observe that the organization that's transformation is as successful is the most bought in leader. Most senior bought in leader. So, if you're the leader of a train and you show the right behaviors, your train will be really great.
Nick Muldoon:
Successful.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But that means nothing for the broader organization, solution train, the business unit, what have you. You see this thing that goes from the leader. If the leader's showing the right behaviors, you get within that space, you get the behaviors, you get the change, you get the results. But leaders who say one thing and do another, people don't buy it, right?
Nick Muldoon:
I guess this is true of any organizational change, isn't it?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
You hit the boundaries of your pocket, as you said, within the organization and then you meet the real world, the rest of the organization. People, maybe they don't have enough energy or they don't feel that they can influence and change that, and so they just live within their bubble because they don't feel that they can exert the pressure outside of that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Look. I've certainly, I've seen successful bubble influence organizations. Successful bubbles can become interesting. Chip and Dan Heath's book, which one was it, Switch.
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, yeah. Switch. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
[inaudible 00:42:02]. Shine a light on bright spot or something like that. So, bright spots inspire, and if you can create a bubble in an organization that outperforms the rest of the organization, or even if it performs better than it has previously, then everybody looks. Right? How did the organization that goes from poor delivery to great deliveries is what is going on here? That inspires others to get interested. One of the really interesting things we've seen in Australia, we can trace pretty much every SAFe implementation in Australia back to the one at Telstra.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, right. They all spun off from that, from the people that were part of it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Well, no. People who came and saw it. People who were inspired by it.
Nick Muldoon:
They're not necessarily directly involved in it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No. People came and got inspired by it, and then they went, did their thing, and then they inspired someone else. I haven't tried to do it recently, but there was a point in time we just could web together all of them because we could count them when we could see them. But we can web together most of them still. It says you saw someone who saw someone who saw someone who actually was someone who went to visit us at Telstra back in 2012, 2013 and got inspired.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, that bright spot can be really, really powerful, and that's what it takes, right? You get to add a little bit of noise, a little bit of difference, and people start to ask what's going on. I wouldn't say it's foolproof. I think it still requires, so someone's got to come, they've got to see, and then they've got to have the courage to do it for their part of the organization.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That's the hard bit, right? I can come, I can see, I can get inspired. But am I prepared to put myself out there? There's a lot to be said for leaders who are prepared to take risks. That was one of the-
Nick Muldoon:
This was your lesson about the Bus Stop, right? You have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. This was actually, I was thinking, was the thing I was talking about at last year's SAFe Summit was be safe or be SAFe.
Nick Muldoon:
Be safe or be SAFe. Tell me about that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, be safe, don't take a risk, or be SAFe, as in the scaled agile framework, and take that leap of faith. It comes back to, we started talking today about when I did this at Telstra, I didn't really understand that this wasn't a normal everyday, this is what everybody did sort of thing. It was a very new thing. So, I took a risk from a perspective that I was a business leader in a technology space and I really felt I had nothing to lose.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I look back and that and go, "What on Earth possessed me?" And I go, "Well, I'm this business person leading this technology team. I wasn't supposed to succeed anyway."
Nick Muldoon:
Put it all on the line, right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I found out later they actually had a plan for when I did not succeed. I was supposed to fail.
Nick Muldoon:
Wait. How much waste is that? Why did they plan for something before it was ... Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Organizational policies. What can I tell you? Anyway, I did not fail. I did succeed, and because I took some crazy, calculated risks, and I've seen it time and time again, right? So many of these leaders in these companies that make this change are taking a leap of faith. I'm always saying I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen. I don't know whether you're going to get 10% cost out or 50% cost out. I don't know if your people are going to be 10% happier or 50% happier. I don't know that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What I do know is if you listen to what we're telling you and you follow the guidance and you behave in line with those lean and agile values, you will get results. You'll get results every single time. But you've got to be brave enough to buy in and take it on holistically and not do this thing where you manage to customize your way out of actually doing the thing-
Nick Muldoon:
Doing anything.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... that you wanted to do.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay. Em, this was awesome. Before we finish up, I want to take two minutes. You've mentioned books a lot today and you reminded me of this quote, Verne Harnish, "Those who read and don't are only marginally better off than those who can't." So, today so far, you've mentioned Chip and Dan Heath with Switch, you've mentioned the Leffingwell series from the late noughties. There might have been a few others. But tell me, what are you reading today? You've been in lockdown. What are the two or three top books that you've read since you've been in lockdown in Melbourne?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, my goodness. It's very awkward. Every time someone asks me, "What did you just read?" I go, "I don't know."
Nick Muldoon:
I don't think I remember.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Can't remember. It's terrible. What am I reading? I need to open my Kindle. I don't know what I'm reading. Geoffrey Moore, Zone to Win.
Nick Muldoon:
Zone to Win.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Zone to Win. I think that's what it's called. It's a newer book. I know this year, because obviously, I've read The Build Trap this year-
Nick Muldoon:
Yep. Melissa Perry. You mentioned that one. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep. I've read the Project to Product, Mik Kersten.
Nick Muldoon:
What was that one, Project to Product?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Project to Product, Mik Kersten. One of the IT Revolution press books. So, released just over a year ago. Very tied up in the SAFe 5.0 [crosstalk 00:48:21]. The other book tied up in the SAFe 5.0 release is John Kotter's Accelerate. So, I picked that back up. I read it a number of years ago when it first came out. But I like to revisit stuff when SAFe puts it front and center. Seems to make some sense to do that at that point in time.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. It's interesting that, thinking about Verne Harnish, the scaling up framework, no relation to-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No.
Nick Muldoon:
... scaled agile, for anyone that's not familiar. But so much of the scaling up framework about scaling businesses, they draw on so much content from existing offers, existing tomes, points of reference and experience, and it's super valuable, and I guess SAFe is no different, right? It draws on this wisdom of the collective wisdom.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely. Absolutely. [inaudible 00:49:14] It was very fun to say in the early days, we stand on the shoulders of giants, a quote from somebody else whose name escapes me.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. Well, Em, look. I wanted to thank you so much for your time this morning. This has been fantastic.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No worries. It's great to catch up with you.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. I guess my takeaways from this, I like the be safe or be SAFe, like either be safe and don't take any risks, or be SAFe and actually put yourself out there and step into scaled agile. I definitely have to go and do a bit of research on the five S's as well and learn a bit more about that. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No worries, Nick. Great to see you.