Easy Agile Podcast Ep.6 Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach

"Rebecca is an absolute gold mine of knowledge when it comes to SAFe, can't wait to continue the conversation at SAFe Summit 2022!"" - Tenille Hoppo

In this episode, Rebecca and Jasmin are talking:

📌 The value of the Scaled Agile Framework, who it’s for & who would benefit

📌 The Importance of having a common language for organizations to scale effectively

📌 When to connect the Scaled Agile Framework with your agile transformation

📌 Is there ever really an end state?

+ more!

📲 Subscribe/Listen on your favourite podcasting app.

Thanks, Jasmin and Rebecca!

Transcript

Jasmin Iordandis:

Hello, and welcome to the Easy Agile podcast, where today we're chatting all things Scaled Agile with Rebecca Davis, SAFe Fellow, SPCT, principle consultant and member of the SAFe framework team. Rebecca is passionate about teamwork, integrity, communication, and dedication to quality. And she's coached organizations on building competitive market-changing products at scale while also bringing joy to the work, for what is work without joy. Today, we've chatted all things Scaled Agile implementations, challenges, opportunities, and also the idea around optimizing flow, which Rebecca is hosting a workshop at the SAFe Summit in Denver in August this year. Hope you enjoy the podcast.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Easy Agile podcast. I'm your host Jasmin Lordandis, product marketing manager here at Easy Agile. And today, we are delighted to welcome Rebecca Davis from the Scaled Agile framework. Welcome, Rebecca, and thanks for joining us.

Rebecca Davis:

Thanks. I appreciate being here. I'm excited.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Me too, especially because we are counting down the days before we get to meet you face to face, in person, at the SAFe Summit over in Denver, Colorado. And before we kick off our conversation, I just want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast our podcast today. The people of the Djadjawurrung speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders and First Nations' people joining us today. So before we kick off, Rebecca, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role within Scaled Agile?

Rebecca Davis:

Sure. I'm actually relatively new to working for Scaled Agile. So I've been there a little over 90 days now, and I'm a member of the framework team, which means I help actually create the Scaled Agile framework and future versions of it. Prior to that, I led LACE at a company called CVS Health, and I've worked at a bunch of different kind of healthcare organizations across my years implementing or organizing agile transformation and digital transformation. And I think one of the reasons that Scaled Agile was interested in me joining the team is just a lot of different experiences across business agility as a whole outside of technology, in addition to within technology. So marketing transformations and HR transformations, legal transformations. But I love being at Scaled Agile and being part of the framework team. It's really exciting to help more organizations, and just the one I'm at, really understand how to bring joy to their workplace and bring value out to the world.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah, cool. And you've given a little bit of information there around why Scaled Agile was interested in you. What attracted you to Scaled Agile, and did you use the Scaled Agile framework in these previous roles that you've just described?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. Those are great questions. I think I'm going to try to answer both of them together. But the reason I have always been drawn to the Scaled Agile framework is I ran a few different organizations, both as owning my own company and then also working in startups and working with larger organizations, where I knew that agility was important. But I was struggling as a change leader to find a way to really bring connectedness across large amounts of people. And to me, that's what Scaled Agile does for us, is after a certain size, it's a lot easier to create this common language and this common way to move forward and produce value with the framework. I also really enjoy it because there's a lot of thought that's already kind of done for you.

Rebecca Davis:

So if you're in an organization and you're trying to create change or change leadership, I'd much rather be leading the conversations and my context and making sure that I have a pulse on my particular cultural environment and pull from all these pieces, from the framework, where the thought's already been done about what are the right words and what do we do next, and what's the next step. So I've just found it an invaluable toolkit as a change leader.

Rebecca Davis:

I joined the framework team for a few reasons. One, I'd led so much change in so many different areas that, it's not that I wasn't challenged anymore, but I was really looking for something larger and different, and I've always had a belief that I really want to be the change that I want to see in the world. And I think being part of the framework team gives me access to things like this and all over the world to really help connect the humanness of people alongside with all the great techniques that we've learned, and hopefully expand it and just create a better place to be in.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. Cool. And you kind of touched on that in your response, but if we had to say, who is the Scaled Agile framework for and who would it most benefit, what would you say to that?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I guess my opinion on that is I believe the Scaled Agile framework is for people who believe that their organizations have it in them to be better, both internally inside of themselves, as well as have this gigantic potential to go help the customers they serve and may be struggling right now, to really realize that potential. So I don't really see the framework as it's for a specific role necessarily. I think it's for people who believe in betterness. And those people, I found, live across an organization and across multiple different roles, and the framework just really helps you align that.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. And I think one thing that's evident from SAFe, once you learn how all the different practices and ceremonies work together, is exactly as you've said around connectiveness. And you also touched on having a common language. How important is that, when we're talking really large organizations with multiple different functions who, let's be honest, it's quite common for different functions to fall into different silos and things to break down. So how important is that connectivity and that common language, so that an organization as a whole can scale together?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I don't even know how to state the amount of importance that is. I guess, specifically the organization I just came from, had over 400,000 people that worked there. And the last thing I want to is to debate what the word feature means, because that doesn't actually end up within a conversation where we have an understanding of why we want to feature or why we want this particular outcome, or how this outcome relates to this other outcome, if we're spending so much time just choosing word choice and having a conversation instead about what does the word even mean.

Rebecca Davis:

So I like it mostly because it gives us all this common framework to debate, and we need to be able to do that in really transparent and open ways across all of our different layers. So I don't even know how to quantify how much value it brings just to have this ability to bring stability, and the same language across the board, same word choice, same meaning behind those word choice, so that we can have all those debates that we need to have about what's the best possible thing we could be doing, since everything that we can do is valuable, but some things we have to decide are more valuable than others.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. And I think that really talks to what you were saying about helping an organization to reach its potential. It sounds like getting bogged down in what you call things or how you discuss things. And to be able to align on a common meaning in the end, you kind of need that common structure or that common language. And you're only going to get in your own way if you don't have it. So it makes total sense that the framework could really enable organizations on that journey. And in your experience, because it's implied in the name, it's about scaling agile. And I guess when we think of the Scaled Agile framework, we think of all those organizations of such a large size as the one you just mentioned, 400,000 employees. In your experience, what's a good time to introduce the Scaled Agile framework? Does it need to be right from the beginning? Does it need to be those organizations that are 400,000 people strong? Where is the right time to intersect the framework with an agile transformation?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I think that's a really fascinating question, and my answer has changed over the years. I originally started researching Scaled Agile, because it was my first big transformation alongside of a large organization, and I knew there had to be some solutions out there to the problems I was seeing, and I discovered SAFe. But thinking back, I started my own startup company right out of high school actually. And I really wish that I would've had something to pull from, that gave me information about lean business cases, and speaking with my customer and getting tests and getting feedback. So I feel like the principles and the practices and the values are something that could be used at any size.

Rebecca Davis:

I think the part about scaling, the part about deciding like, "Hey, I'm going to do PI planning," I don't personally feel like you need to do PI planning if you have four people at your organization, because the point is to get teams across different groups to talk. You should definitely plan things 100%. So I think part of the idea is like, "When do I implement a train," or, "When do I have a solution train," or, "When do I officially call something LPM," versus just having discussions because my company is so small that we can all have discussions about things. I think those are a different part of implementing the Scaled Agile framework than just living and believing in the principles and the values and the mindset from whatever size or get-go you're at. Does that make sense at all?

Jasmin Iordandis:

That does make sense. And I guess then the question becomes, where do you begin and what would the first step be in implementing SAFe? And taking from your own experience, where do you start with this framework?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I love that you asked that, as I've honestly seen this happen to me as well as some other change agents, where Scaled Agile gives us this thing called the implementation roadmap, and it has all the steps that you can start with. And it's proven, and companies use it and it works. And what I've found in my own change leadership is when I skip a step or I don't follow that because I get pressure to launch a train, instead of starting with getting my leaders at the right tipping point or having that executive buy in, it causes me so much pain downstream.

Rebecca Davis:

So if I were to give advice to somebody, it's, "Look, pull that map down the implementation roadmap from the SAFe site and follow it. And keep following it. And if you find that you..." I think that, back when I look back and do my own retrospective, the moments where I've decided to launch a train without training my people or launch or start doing more product management practices without actually training my people, it causes me a world to hurt later on with coaching and with communication, with feedback. So it's there for that reason. Just follow it. It's proven.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. And that's really good advice. And I think when people look at the roadmap for SAFe, there's a lot on there. But when we are talking agile transformations, necessarily there is going to be a lot that could get you there. So it kind of makes sense when all the thinking is been done for you and all those steps have been done. Just trust the process, I guess, is the message there, and following through on all of that. And I think it's really interesting, because the first step with SAFe is, as you say, getting your leaders on board. And often, we might be attracted to doing the work better. So let's start with those ceremonies. Let's start with all those things that make the day to day work better. How important it starting with the leaders of an organization?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I've run the grassroots SAFe implementations where you start with the bottom and then you kind of move up. And personally, and this is a personal opinion, I'd much rather take the time and the efforts to get the communication right with the leaders and get the full leadership buy-in than be in that place again, where I'm trying to grassroot to move up and I hit the ceiling. The one thing I used to kind of tell the coaches that reported to me, and something I believe in deeply, is what we're trying to do with transformation is a journey. It's not a destination. So because we want to start that journey healthy and with a full pack of food and all those things, we need to take the time to really go and be bold and have conversations with our leaders, get their buy-in to go to Leading SAFe.

Rebecca Davis:

If they're not bought in to coming to a two-day course, then why would we believe that they're going to come to PI plannings and speak the way that we hope they will and create the change that they need to really lead? So I think that's one of the most important things, if not the most important thing from the very beginning, is be bold as that first change leader in your organization, go make those connections.

Rebecca Davis:

It may take a while. I've been in implementations or transformations where it started with just me discovering issues that senior leaders or executives were having, and going and solving some of those, so that there was trust built that I was a problem solver. So I could ask for the one hour executive workshop, which really should be a four to six-hour executive workshop, to get to the point where I could do the four to six-hour executive workshop, to get to the point where I could do PI Leading SAFe. And if that's what it takes to gain you that street cred to go do it, then, man, go do it, because that's where you get full business agility, I think, is getting that really senior buy-in and getting that excitement.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. That's really interesting. And I think building that level of understanding and building that foundation, we can't go past that. And I guess on that as well, from your experience, you've kind of hinted at one there, but what have been some of the challenges that you've experienced in implementing SAFe or even just in agile transformations more broadly, and as well as some of those opportunities that the framework has helped to unlock? So let's start with the challenges. What's some of the hard things you've experienced about an agile transformation and even implementing the framework?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah, I'll give some real examples, and this first thing is going to sound a little wishy washy, but I also believe it, is the biggest challenge to transformation is you. So what I've discovered over the years, is I needed to step up. I needed to change. I think it's really easy to be in an organization and say, "My leaders don't get it," or, "Some won't understand," or, "It's been this way and I can't change it." And I think that the first thing you have to decide is that that's not actually acceptable to you as a person. And so you as a person are going to go fight. Not you're going to go try to convince somebody else to fight, but you are going to go fight. So I think that personal accountability is probably the biggest challenge to wake up every single day and say, "I'm going to get back in there."

Rebecca Davis:

I think from an example point of view, I've definitely seen huge challenges when the executive team shifts. So when we've got a set of leaders that we did the tipping point, we've gone through Leading SAFe, we've launched our trains. And then the organization, because every organization is going through a lot of change right now, and people are finding new roles and retiring and all that, there's a whole new set of executive leaders. And I think one of the things to discover there is there are going to be moments where it sucks, but you have to go and restart that implementation roadmap again, and reach that tipping point again, because there are new leaders. And that's hard. It really is, and it drains you a little bit, but you've just got to do it.

Rebecca Davis:

I think other challenges I've run into is there's a point after you've launched the trains and after you have been running for a while, where if you don't pay attention, people will stop learning, because you're not actively saying like, "Here's the next thing to learn. Here's the next new thing to try." So I do think it's the responsibility of a change leader, no matter if you're a LACE leader or not, to pay attention to maintaining excitement, pay attention to the continuous learning culture and really motivate people to get excited about learning and trialing and trying.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. That's an interesting point. How have you done that?

Rebecca Davis:

Hmm. So I think a few things. One, I had big lessons learned that there's a point inside of a transformation where, as an SPBC or as a change leader, that transformation is not yours anymore. So I had kind of a painful realization at one point that I had in my head the best next thing for the organization, and I was losing pulse of the people who are actually doing the work. So I think what I've discovered after that is, to me, there's a point where your LACE members and your change leaders and your SPCs need to start coming from a lot more areas. And honestly start to be made up of people who are not, at the moment, excited about the SAFe implementation, so you can hear from the pulse of the people.

Rebecca Davis:

And then I think if you can get those people and invite in and say like, "I'm inviting you to share it with me what's frustrating, what's good, what's bad, what's great, as well as I'm inviting you to tell me all the things that you're discovering out there in webcasts or videos that seem you'd like to try them, but we're not trying yet, and start giving back the ability to try new things and try things that you feel are probably going to be anti-patterns, but they need to try them anyway." So kind of a scrum master would do with a team of like, "Yeah, go try and then we'll retrospect." I think you have to do that at scale and let people get excited about owning their own transformation.

Jasmin Iordandis:

And what's the balance there between implementing the framework and taking all the good stuff that the framework says is good to do, and then letting people experiment and try those things, as you say, that may be anti-patents? Where's that sweet spot to allow that autonomy and that flexibility and that experimentation with still maintaining the integrity of the framework?

Rebecca Davis:

So I think the interesting thing is they are not actually different. So in the framework, we say hypothesis first, test first. So what I found is a layered kind of brain path where there're the steps in the framework and make sure we have teams and balance trains and all the principles and the values, and if you can live those principles and values all the time, while you're testing new things. So you test first like, "Hey, I want to try having my train off cadence from the other trains. I think it would be helpful for us." "Cool. Test that." And what we have to test it against is are we still living our principles? Are we still applying our values? Are we still applying the core fundamentals of agility and lean throughout that test and also as proof points?

Rebecca Davis:

So do we have an outcome where," Hey, I just made my train into a silo," or do we have an outcome where, "Well, now we have two different PI plannings within the overall PI cadence that one of them we merge with all the other trains and the other one is shorter because our market cadence is faster." Well, that's a beautiful win. So I think the key is it's not different, but one of the test points is make sure to check in on those principles and values.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. Have you ever seen that work well? The example that you just provided with the PI cadence, that makes complete sense, and it doesn't seem like it's going against the grain with anything that SAFe is there to help you achieve.

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah, I think that. This was kind of a little bit of what my summit talk was on last year, is during COVID, there were some trains. We had, I don't know, 30 trains. Two of them were having daily new requirements emerging from all the different states across the United States and emerging from the government and emerging from everything. Those trains were making sure everybody could get vaccinated across the United States. That's really darn important. And they needed to re-plan sometimes daily. It just didn't make sense to say, "Now we're just going to stop and go into PI planning for three days," when there wasn't any way that they could even think about what the next day's requirements could be. Since then, they still have a faster market rhythm. Then there are other trains that are working on, have a set unknown. There are trains that know that these holidays are when we need to release something or end of year is when we need to make sure that we've got something ready.

Rebecca Davis:

COVID is still in a reactive state. So what they've emerged into this year is those trains are still doing PI planning from my knowledge, I'm not there anymore, but from my knowledge. But they do eight a year instead of four a year. And four a year are on the same cadence and the other four are not, and it meets both needs. So I do think that key is test, and don't test just for the sake of it just because something feels dry or you get a new leader, and they haven't gone through Leading SAFe, but test because something actually doesn't feel right about, "We're not meeting our principles or values right now. We think that we could meet them better in this way. We think we could accelerate the flow of value in this way. Let's try it."

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah, cool. And on that, what are some of the red flags that you've seen in practice where those values aren't being met to be able to say, "Hang on a sec. This isn't working. We need to switch course"?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. Some of the things I've seen are the whole fun around when people are prioritizing their hierarchy or their piece of the organization over the enterprise value. So I've definitely seen people come to me and say, "Hey, I'd like to do his test." And when I ask the reasons why, a lot of the reasons are like a thinly veiled, "Because I would like more control."

Rebecca Davis:

So I think back to the values piece is that, "Okay, what's your why? Let's start with why. Why would you like to try something? What does that trial outcome achieve?" And, A, if it's really hard to articulate, probably there might be a bad thing going on, or if it is articulated and it actually goes against agility or lean practice and or diminishes flow or creates a silo, that's an initial gut. I think throughout testing, it's important to, the same way that we would do with iterations, have check-ins and demos, not just of what's the product being produced, but what is the change producing? So figuring out what those leading indicators would be and treat it the same way as we would treat a feature hypothesis or an epic hypothesis. We have some outcome we believe we could achieve. We're 100% open to being proven wrong. These are the things that we want to see as leading indicators as success and be really open with each other.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah, cool. And it sounds like what's key to that though is having some concept of what that intended outcome is as a result of that experiment. It's not just going in for, as you say, the sake of doing an experiment. You want to have an idea of where you want to end up, so you can see if we're actually getting there or not.

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

That's really fascinating. And I think experimentation and iterative improvement, it kind of goes together. It's not just blindly following something because that's what you are supposed to do. It's preserving the values. That's a really interesting concept. And I think in that, would also come enormous opportunity. So in your experience as well, going back to the times where you've brought SAFe to an organization, or you've been going through an agile transformation, what are some of those opportunities that you've seen the framework unlock for enterprises or organizations that you've been leading those transformations within?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I always was drawn to this idea of true value flow and business agility. So for me, what Scaled Agile helped unlock in a few of my organizations is, I always targeted that, like I'm not trying to make my thing better, I'm trying to make everything better. And with that mindset, really pushing for anybody should be able to take a class. Anybody should be able to take any of the classes. And these days, the enterprise subscription helps with that a lot. When I first started, we didn't have that. So it was also like anybody can take a class, and there should be creative ways of getting it paid for it.

Rebecca Davis:

But through that kind of invite model of really anybody, I had a nurse come take one of my SAFer teams classes, just because she was curious and she saw something about it on my blog, which ended up with her being more excited and getting to do agile team coaching for a set of nurses who were highly frustrated because their work on an individual basis was ebbing and flowing so much, and they felt like they weren't giving good patient care to coaching them on Kanban and having them all get really excited because they got to nurse as a team and whoever was available took the next patient case, and the patients were happier, and just being able to invite in and then say yes to coaching all of these roles that are so meaningful and they're so excited and they're something different.

Rebecca Davis:

And that same model ended up going from nothing to having a marketing person randomly take one of my Leading SAFe classes, which then turned into them talking to the VPs of marketing, which then turned into an 800-person marketing implementation. So I think the key is be open and spend time with the curious. And it doesn't matter if they're in your org. It's not like that's what I was paid to do, it's just really fun. So why not? If somebody wants to talk to you about agile, talk to them about agile. It's really cool.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah, cool. And I think what I love about that is often agile may be associated just as software development teams. But as someone who's in marketing myself, I love the benefit and the way of thinking that it can provide to very traditional challenges, but the way that it can unlock those challenges in ways that not have not been approached before. And I think that there's something to be said in that too, around what you were saying earlier around maintaining excitement. And I feel like this question's already been answered, because often it's discussed, "Okay, we are scaling agile, we're going through a transformation." And it implies that there's this end state where it's done. It's transformed or we've scaled agile, but it doesn't sound like that's the case at all.

Rebecca Davis:

No, I don't think at all. I think mostly the opposite of... If you look at even yourself as a human, your whole life, you're transforming in different ways. Everything's impacting you. The environment's impacting you, whatever happens in your life is just this whole backpack that you carry around and you're transforming all the time. And the exact same thing, I think, for an organization and company. Today's age is nuts. There're updates all the time, there's new technology all the time. You and I are doing a talk from completely different countries, and there's change literally everywhere.

Rebecca Davis:

So yeah, I think part of transformation is helping your organization feel comfortable or as comfortable as possible with the rate of change happening and all the people within it, and not see change as a bad word, but as a positive thing where we can make betterness out there. And it's forever. It's a journey. It's not done. I really like Simon Sinek when he talks about that infinite game. I just feel really close to that of, we're not in it to win this moment or this year, we're in it to make a better future for ourselves and our children, and that's going to take forever. The people are in it right now and they've got to be excited about that.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. And I think that's that balance of delayed gratification, but constant improvement. So you'll feel and experience the improvement along the way. It's not like it'll be way out in the future where you won't feel the benefit of what you're doing, but it's something that's going to be built up and happen over time.

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. And I think you reminded me just from saying that. I did that marketing transformation, and I just deeply remember a call with one of the marketing VPs who, after four or five iterations, I did a check in with her. And she's like, "My team is so happy. Is this because of agile? Is this what agile is, is happy with [inaudible 00:32:17]?" "Yes."

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah, joy at work, right?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Isn't that what it's all about? That is so cool. And yet the goal initially is never to go out and make people happy. It's just one of those bonus kind of side effects, a happy side effect.

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Awesome. And I think I really want to talk about this idea, because you've mentioned it a couple times, you've even just mentioned then marketing, nursing. But then when you're in these larger organizations, you've got all these different functions. And I think it raises this idea around organizing around value. So I want to make sure we talk a bit about that, because value doesn't just happen from one function, or it's not delivered from just one function or one team. It's something that many people across an organization may have a hand in delivering. But I really want to get your take around this concept of organizing around value. What does that mean and what does that look like?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. I think there's a base concept that is also in that implementation roadmap around what happens first. So how do we first organize around value, because organizations tend to be organized around hierarchy. I am a VP of marketing and I have marketing all the way down. And so there's that first step of identifying what the value is that you produce as an organization. So being able to articulate it to begin with, which is not always an easy conversation. Sometimes it takes a bit of time, and then organizing all the different types of roles around what that value is. So I think that's your first thing in what most organizations implementing scaled agile start with, is just identifying it, forming around it, which ends up being what your trains end up being.

Rebecca Davis:

My experience is, because of that same rapid market change, the world changing so far, it's really important to re-evaluate how you've organized around value over time. So in my experience, one of the really healthy things that we used to do is, at the end of each year, give a chance to look at the different train structures and look at how we've organized and say, "Is this still right? And what's our strategy for next year? Where are we trying to head for our consumers and our users? And is there a different way to organize, that helps us with that?" And I say give a chance because in some years, we'd be like, "No. 80% of our portfolio is actually good to go. Things are flowing. We're doing okay." 20% of it has an entirely new strategic shift that's going to hit them, or, "Last year felt not good. We had too many dependencies. We didn't have the right people on the right trains," all those things.

Rebecca Davis:

And so at least take a pause and look at it, and see if our value still mean the same thing as it did a year ago or two years ago. Do we need to reorganize? What does that mean? What does the change leadership around it if we do need to, so that we're always focused on value, and it's not a definition that we gave ourselves five years ago and just stopped realizing that the world has changed.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. A living definition because it changes depending on what's going on in the world, but also what's going on within the organization and coming back to that idea of experimenting as well, like if you've tried out a new way of working, and that's gotten in the way. But even something that you said there really stood out is, "Okay, it didn't feel good. We might have had too many dependencies." And that brings up the idea of, "Well, how does that flow of value happen?" Oh, that sounds like there's a stifle to the delivery of value. So how do you optimize that flow particularly when there may be multiple people delivering that value?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. And I think Scaled Agile gives us some tools for that. So I think one of them is that first session I talked about, value stream and down vacation, so that you can really do a process for talking and discussing with the right blend of people. What is the value and how can we organize around that? I think past that point, there's another tool that I see used far less than I would think it would be, which is value stream mapping. So after we've identified it, now can we actually map what's happening? From concept to cash, which teams are doing pass offs? How long does it take to get an answer on an email? How long is it taking from testing to all the way to release?

Rebecca Davis:

So doing a lot of intentional measurement. Not measurement because we're judging people, but intentional measurement of, we organize this way, this is where all the pieces are connecting, and how long things are taking, as well as how people feel inside of their steps, like does it feel silo? Does it have an outcome? Did we put all of the designers and HR people and engineers on a train, but we made them separate teams, and so it still doesn't feel connected? That's what mapping's for. And those maps and also the program boards that actually visualize like, "Here's the dependencies," versus, "At the end of the PI, this is what those dependencies actually ended up being."

Rebecca Davis:

It's not that dependencies are bad, but they should be adding value, not restricting flow. So I think those connected stories as well as things like employee survey scores and just employee happiness are really good inputs, to, are we delivering flow. And it is a blended view. Some of it's qualitative and some of it's quantitative. But are our own internal things showing us good, bad and different, as well as how are our customers. So do they feel like they're receiving value or that they're receiving bits and pieces and they're unsure about the connected value? I think all of those are indicators.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. And would you say you'd need to have an idea of what those indicators are beforehand, so you can keep an eye on them as the PI progresses? So for example, you've done your value stream mapping, you've built your art. At that point, do you identify what those measurements of flow ought to be and keep an eye on them, or is it more retrospectively where you see these kind of things getting a little bit stuck?

Rebecca Davis:

I think there's both. So definitely those metrics that we indicate inside of the framework are healthy, good for teams and trains and solution trains and portfolio. So I think there is a set of metrics that you should and can utilize. Retrospectives are key, because retrospectives create action. So while we measure, then what's the conversation we have about them? Because what we don't want is vanity metrics. And my personal way of defining vanity metrics is any metric that you do nothing with.

Rebecca Davis:

So I think a key is use them to hold conversations and create outcomes, and create actions and make sure that you're prioritizing those actions. I think there's another piece of just understanding that this is not just about team and train. So teams and trains definitely do need to improve and measure themselves, but so does the portfolio, so does the enterprise, so do the pieces that connect to each other across different trains. So I do think if you over focus on, "Let's just make our teams go faster," you may be missing the whole point of how do we make our organization flow better, which may or may not equate to moving faster right away.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. Yeah. And team and train don't exist in a vacuuming within that organization like whole bunch of-

Rebecca Davis:

No, [inaudible 00:40:43].

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. Well, I think we've touched on some really, really interesting concepts, and just I can't wait to hit the SAFe Summit, which is a really good segue to the fact that the next time we meet, Rebecca, it will be in person. And you're hosting a workshop at SAFe. Can you give us any sneak peek of what we can expect to be excited about at the summit?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. First of all, when we meet each other in person, I'm very short. So I think I'm maybe five foot. So that'll be exciting. So Harry, on the framework team and I, are running a workshop about flow. So we'll be doing a flow workshop. I can't talk about all of it yet, because some of it we're going to announce inside the summit, but I'm really excited. So I think if you do sign up for our workshop, you're going to get active advice, and be able to work also alongside other organizations and other people, really understanding flow, and how to apply improvements to flow and how to identify blockers to flow and what to do about it. So we're really focusing on why do certain things matter and what can you specifically do about it, whether you're at the team level or the train level or solution level or the portfolio level.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Cool. That sounds exciting.

Rebecca Davis:

And we [inaudible 00:42:08] a lot of other workshops, but definitely come to ours.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Well, we've just spoken about the importance of flow, so it makes sense. Right?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Awesome. Well, I personally am really looking forward to coming to SAFe and coming to Colorado and to get to chat with you a little bit more. But thank you so much for your time and joining us and sharing your expertise and experience on agile transformations, scaling agile and the SAFe framework itself. Thank you so much for your time, Rebecca.

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah, I appreciate it. And I look forward to maybe one day being able to do this in person with you in your own country. So that'll be really awesome.

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah. Cool. That would definitely be awesome. Thanks a lot.

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. Thanks.

TL;DR

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

About Our Guest

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

Maintaining Team Morale and Motivation in the AI Era

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating a Culture of Safe Experimentation

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

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

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

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

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

The Right Mindset for Working with AI

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

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

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

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

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

Maintaining Code Quality and Shared Understanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addressing the Code Review Bottleneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethical Considerations: Balancing Innovation with Responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parallels Between Agile and AI Transformations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI for Product Owners: From Ideation to Pull Requests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing the Gap Between Makers and Users

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking Ahead: The Future of Agile Teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts: Preparing for the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What a great conversation this was with Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach!

Chris shared some insights into the importance of sharing and de-stigmatising failures, looking after your own mental health, and why work shouldn't be stale.

Some other areas we discussed were, why you should spend time in self reflection - consider a solospective? and asking "how did that feel?" when working as a team.

"I really enjoyed our chat. Plenty to ponder over the silly season, and set yourself up with a fresh perspective for 2021. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!"

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Transcript

Sean Blake:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. It's Sean Blake here, your host today, and we're joined by Chris stone. Chris is going to be a really interesting guest. I really enjoyed recording this episode. Chris is the Virtual Agile Coach. He's an agility lead. People First champion blogger, speaker and trainer, who always seeks to gamify content and create immersive Agile experiences. An Agile convert all the way from back in 2012, Chris has since sought to broaden his experiences, escape his echo chamber and to fearlessly challenge dysfunction and ask the difficult questions. My key takeaways from this episode were; it's okay to share your failures, the importance of recognizing our mental health, why it's important that work doesn't become stale, how to de-stigmatize failure, the importance of selfreflection and holding many self retrospectives, and the origins of the word deadline. You'll be really interested to find out where that word came from and why it's a little bit troubling. So here we go. We're about to jump in. Here's the episode with Chris stone on the Easy Agile Podcast. Chris, thanks so much for joining us and spending some time with us.

Chris Stone:

Hey there Sean, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Sean Blake:

I have to mention you've got a really funky Christmas sweater on today. And for those people listening on the audio, they might have to jump over to YouTube just for a section to check out this sweater. Can you tell us a bit about where that came from?

Chris Stone:

So this sweater was a gift. It's a Green Bay Packers, Chris, Ugly Christmas Jumpers, what they call it. And I'm a fan of the Green Bay Packers, I've been out there a few times to Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's so cold out there in fact. When you're holding a beer and minus 13 degrees, the beer starts turning to slush just from being outside in the cold air. It's a great place, very friendly, and the jumper was just a gift one Christmas from someone.

Sean Blake:

Love it. There's nothing better than warm beer is there? Okay. So Chris, I first came across you because of the content that you put out on LinkedIn. And the way that you go about it, it's so much fun and so different to really anything else I've seen in the corporate space, in the enterprise space, in the Agile space even, why have you decided to go down this track of calling yourself the virtual Agile coach, building a personal brand and really putting yourself out there?

Chris Stone:

Well, for me, it was an interesting one because COVID, this year has forced a lot of people to convert to being virtual workers, remote workers, virtual coaches themselves. Now, what I realized this year is that, the aspiration for many is those co-located teams, it's always what people desired. They say, "Oh, you have to work harder, Katie, that's the best way." And I realized that in my whole Agile working life, I'd never really had that co-located team. There was always some element of distributed working and the past two years prior to where I'm currently, my current company, I was doing distributed scaled Agile with time zones, including Trinidad and Tobago, Alaska, Houston, the UK, India, and it was all remote.

Chris Stone:

And I thought, all right, this is an opportunity to recognize the fact that I was a virtual Agile coach already, but to share with others, my learnings, my experiences, the challenges I've faced, the failures I've had with the wider community so they can benefit from it because obviously, everyone, or more many have had to make that transition very quickly. And there's lots of learnings there that I'm sure people would benefit from. And this year in particular, I guess the honest answer, the reason for me being, I guess out there and working more on that side of things, being creative is because it's an outlet for my mental health.

Chris Stone:

I suffer from depression and one of my ways of coping with that is being creative and creating new content and sharing it. So I guess it's a reason of... it's linked to that also, but also the stories that people tell me afterwards, they motivate me to keep doing it. So when someone comes to me and says, "Hey, I did the Queen retrospective, the Queen Rock Band retrospective, and this program manager who never smiles connected to the content and admitted he liked Queen and smiled." And this was a first and when people come to me and say, "Hey, we did the Home Alone retrospective, the one of your Christmas themed ones and people loved it. It was great." It was the most engaging retrospective we've had so far because the problem is work can become stale if you let it be so.

Chris Stone:

Retrospectives can become this, what did we do last time? What are we going to do next time? What actions can we do? Et cetera, et cetera. And unless you refresh it and try new things, people will get bored and they'll disconnect and they'll disengage, and you're less likely to get a good outcome that way. So for me, there's no reason you can't make work a little bit fun, with a little bit of creativity and a little bit of energy and passionate about it.

Sean Blake:

I love that. And do you think a lot of people come to work even when they're working in Agile co-located teams and it's just not fun, I mean what do you think the key reasons are that work isn't fun?

Chris Stone:

I think because it can become stale. All right. So let's reflect on where we are today. Today, we're in a situation where we're not face-to-face with one another. We don't have time for those water cooler chats. We don't connect over a coffee or a lunch. We don't have a chat about idle banter and things of that on the way to a meeting room, we didn't have any of that. And that forces people to look at each other and see themselves as an avatar behind a screen, just a name. Often in particular, people aren't even on video camera.

Chris Stone:

It forces them to think of people as a name on a screen, rather than a beating heart on a laptop. And it can abstract people into just these entities, these names you talk to each day and day out, and that can force it to be this professional non-personal interaction. And I'm a firm believer that we need to change that. We need to make things more fun because it can, and in my experience, does result in much better outcomes. I'm very, very people first. We need to focus on people being people. People aren't resources. This is a common phrase I like to refer to you.

Sean Blake:

I love that, people aren't resources. You spoke a little bit about mental health and your struggle with depression. Something that I hear come up time and time again, is people that talk about imposter syndrome. And I wonder, firstly, if you think that might be exasperated through working remotely now. People are not so sure how they fit in, where their role is still the same role that it was 12 months ago. And do you have any tips for people when they're dealing with imposter syndrome, especially in a virtual environment?

Chris Stone:

Well, yeah I think this current environment, this virtual environment, the pandemic in particular, has led to a number of unhelpful behaviors. That there's a lot more challenges with people's mental health and negativity, and that can only lead to, I guess, less desire, less confidence in doing things, maybe doubting yourself. There's some great visuals I've shared on this recently, and it's all about reframing those imposter thoughts you have, the unhelpful thinking, that thing that goes through your mind that says, Oh, they're all going to think I'm a total fraud because maybe I don't have enough years of experience, or I should already know this. I must get more training. There's lots of “shoulding” and “musting” in that. There's lots of jumping to conclusions in this.

Chris Stone:

And a couple of ways of getting around that is, so if you're thinking of the scenario where I'm a fraud think, "Oh, well I'm doing my best, but I can't predict what they might think." When you're trying to think about the scenario of do I need to get more training? Well, understand and acknowledge the reality that you can't possibly know everything. You continue to learn every single day and that's great, but it's unrealistic to know it all. There's a great quote I often refer to and it's, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I believe it's a quote from Socrates.

Chris Stone:

And it's something that very much resonates with me. Over the years I've gone through this learning journey where, when I first finished university, for example, I thought I knew everything. I thought I've got it all. And I'd go out to clients and speak and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I know this. I've got this guys." And then the more involved I've become and the more deeper I've gone into the topic, the more I realized, actually there's so much that I don't know. And to me, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing tells me there's so much out there that I must continuously learn, I must continuously seek to challenge myself each and every day.

Chris Stone:

Other people who approach me and say, "How do you, or you produce a lot of content. How would you put yourself out there?" And I say, "Well, I just do it." Let's de-stigmatize failure. If you put a post out there and it bombs, it doesn't matter, put another one out there. It's as simple as that, learn from failure, Chuck something out there, try it, if it doesn't work, try something else. We coach Agile teams to do this all the time, to experiment. Have a hypothesis to test against that. Verify the outcomes and do retrospectives. I do weekly solospectives. I reflect on my week, what works, what hasn't worked, what I'm going to try differently. And there's no reason you can't do that also.

Sean Blake:

Okay. So weekly solospectives. What does that look like? And how do you be honest with yourself about what's working, what's not working and areas for yourself to improve? How do you actually start to have that time for self-reflection?

Chris Stone:

Unfortunately you got to make time for some reflection. One thing I've learned with mental health is you have to make time for your health before you have to make time for your illness or before you're forced to make time for your illness. And it can become all too easy in this busy working world to not make time for your health, to not make time and focus on you. So you do just have to carve out that time, whether that's blocking some time in the diary on a Friday afternoon, just to sit down and reflect, whether that's making time to go out for a walk, setting up a time on your Alexa to have a five minute stretching break, whatever it is, there's things you can do, and you have things you have to do to make time for yourself.

Chris Stone:

With regards to a solospective, the way I tend to do things is I tend to journal on a daily basis. That's almost like my own daily standard with myself, it's like, what have I observed? What have I... what challenges do I face in the past day? And then that sums up in the weekly solospective, which is basically a retro for one, where I reflect on, what did I try it? What do I want to achieve this week? What's gone well? What hasn't gone well. It's the same as a retrospective just one and allows me to aggregate my thoughts across the week, rather than them being single events. So that I'm focusing more on the trajectory as opposed to any single outlier. Does that make sense?

Sean Blake:

It does. It does. So you've got this trajectory with your career. You're checking in each week to see whether you're heading in the right direction. I assume that you set personal goals as well along the way. I also noticed that you have personal values that you've published and you've actually published those publicly for other people to look at and to see. How important are those personal values in informing your life and personal and career goals?

Chris Stone:

So I'd say that are hugely important, for me, what I thought was we see companies sharing their values all the time. You look on company websites and you can see their values quite prominently. And you could probably think do they often live up to their values? You have so many companies have customer centricity as their value, but how many of them actually focus on engaging with their customers regularly? How many have a metric where they track, how often they engage with customers? Most of them are focusing on velocity and lead time. So I always challenge, are you really customer centric or is that lip service? But moving aside, I digress. I thought companies have values, and obviously we do as well, but why don't we share them? So I created this visual, showing what mine were and challenged a few others to share it also. And I had some good feedback from others which was great.

Chris Stone:

But they hugely influence who I am and how I interact on a day-to-day basis. And I'll give you an example, one of my values is being open source always. And what that means is nothing I create, no content I create, nothing I produce would ever be behind a payroll. And that's me being community driven. That's me sharing what I've learned with others. And how that's come to fruition, how I've lived that is I've had lots of people come to me say, "Hey, we love the things you do. You gave me flying things. Would you mind, or would you like to collaborate and create this course that people would pay for?" So often I've said, "If it's free, yes. But if it's going to be monetized, then no."

Chris Stone:

And I've had multiple people reach out to me for that purpose. And I've had to decline respectfully and say, "Look, I think what you're doing is great. You've got a great app and I can see how having this Agile coaching gamification course on that would be of great value. But if it's behind the payroll, then I'm not interested because it's in direct conflict with my own values, and therefore, I wouldn't be interested in proceeding with it. But keep doing what you're doing, being people first, #people first." This is about me embodying the focus on people being beating hearts behind a laptop, rather than just this avatar on a screen. And I have this little... the audio listeners, won't be able to see this, but I'm holding up a baby Groot here. And he's like my people first totem.

Chris Stone:

And the reason for that is I have a group called the Guardians of Agility, and we are people first. That's our emblem. And these are my transformation champions in my current company. I like to have Guardians of Agility, and I've got this totem reminding me to be people first in every interaction I have. So when, for example, I hear the term resources and I'm saying, well... As soon as I hear it, it almost triggers me. I almost hear like, "Oh, what do they mean by that?" And I'll wait a little moment and I'll say, "Hey, can you tell me what you mean by that?" And you tease it out a little bit. And often they meant, "Oh, it's people, isn't it?" If you're talking about people, can we refer to them as people?

Chris Stone:

Because people aren't resources. They're not objects or things you mine out the ground. They're not pens, paper or desks. They're not chairs in an office. They are people. And every time you refer to them as a resource, you abstract them. You make it easier to dehumanize them and think of them as lesser, you make it easier to make those decisions like, oh, we can just get rid of those resources or we can just move that resource from here to there and to this team and that team, whether they want to or not. So I don't personally like the language.

Chris Stone:

And the problem is it goes all the way back to how it's trained. You go to university and you take a business degree and you learn about human resources. You take a course, Agile HR, Agile human resources, right, and it's so prevalent out there. And unless we challenge it, it won't change. So I will happily sit there and a meeting with a CTO and he'll start talking about resource and I'll say, "Hey, what do you mean by that?" And I'll challenge it and he'll go, "Yeah, I've done it again, have I not?" "Yes. Yes, you have." And it's gotten to the point now where I'll be on this big group call for example, and someone will say it, and I'll just start doing this on a screen waving, and they'll go, "Did it again, didn't I?" "Yes, you did."

Sean Blake:

So some of these habits are so ingrained from our past experiences our education, and when you're working with teams for the first time, who's never worked in Agile before, they're using phrases like resources, they're doing things that sometimes we call anti-patents, how do you start to even have that conversation and introduce them to some of these concepts that are totally foreign to people who've never thought the way that you or I might think about our teams and our work?

Chris Stone:

Sure. So I guess that the first response to that is with empathy. I'm not going to blame someone or make out that they're a bad person for using words that are ingrained, that are normal. And this is part of the problem that that term, resource is so ingrained in that working language nowadays, same as deadlines. Deadlines is so ingrained, even though deadlines came from a civil war scenario where it referred to, if you went past the line, you were shot. How did that land in the business language? I don't know. But resources, it's so ingrained, it's so entrenched into this language, so people do it without intending to. They often do it without meaning it in a negative way. And to be honest, the word itself isn't the issue, it's how people actually behave and how they treat people.

Chris Stone:

I said my first approach is empathy. Let's talk about this. Let's understand, "Hey, why did you use term?" "Oh, I use it to mean this." "Okay. Well." Yeah, and not to do it or call them out publicly or things like that. It's doing things with empathy. Now, I also often use obviously gamification and training approaches, and Agile games to introduce concepts. If someone's unfamiliar to a certain way of working, I'll often gamify. I'll create something, a virtual Agile game to demonstrate. The way I do say, is I'm always looking to help people understand how it feels, not just to talk theory. And I'll give you an example. I'm a big fan of a game called the Virtual Name Game. It's a game about multitasking and context switching.

Chris Stone:

And I always begin, I'll ask group of people, "Hey guys, can you multitask?" And often they go, "Yeah, we can do that." And there'll be those stereotypical things like, "Oh yeah, I'm a woman. I can do that." It happens. Trust me. But one of the first things I do, if I'm face-to-face with them, I'll say, "Hey, hold your hands out like this. And in your left hand..." And people on the audio can't see me, I'm holding out like my hands in front of me. In my left hand, we're going to play an endless game of rock, paper, scissors. And in my right hand, we're going to play a game of, we have a thumb war with each other. And you can try, you can challenge them, can they do those concurrently? No, they can't. They will fail because you just can't focus on both at the same time.

Chris Stone:

Now the Virtual Name Game, the way it works is you divide a group of people up into primarily customers and one developer. And I love to make the most senior person in the room, that developer. I want them to see how it feels to be constantly context switching. So if you were the developer, you're the senior person to review the hippo in this scenario, the highest paid person. I would say Sean, in this game, these customers, they are trying to get their name written first on this virtual whiteboard. And we're going to time how long it takes for you to write everyone's name in totality. The problem is that they're all going to shouting at you continuously, endlessly trying to get your attention. So it's going to be Sean, Sean, write my name, write my...

Chris Stone:

And it's just going to be wow, wow, wow, who do I focus on? You won't know. And this replicates a scenario that I'm sure many people have experienced. He who shouts loudest gets what they want. Prioritization is often done by he who's... or the person who shouts loudest not necessarily he. We then go into another rounds where you say, I'm this round, Sean, people are to be shouting their name at you. But in this round, you're going to pay a little bit attention to everyone. So the way you're going to do that is you're going to read the first letter of one person's name, then you move on to the first letter of the next person's name, and you're going to keep going around. The consequence of that is everyone gets a little bit of attention, but the result is it's really slow.

Chris Stone:

You're starting lots of things but not finishing them. And again, in each round, we're exploring how it feels. How did it feel to be in that round? Sean, you were being shouted at, how did that feel? Everyone else, you were shouting to get your attention. You had to shout louder than other people, how did that feel? And it's frustrating, it's demotivating, it's not enjoyable. In the final around, I would say, "Hey, Sean, in this round, I'm going to empower you to decide whose name you write first. And you can write the whole thing in order. And the guys actually they're going to help you this time, there are no shouts over each other, they are going to help you." And in this scenario, as I'm sure you can imagine, it feels far better. The result is people finish things, and you can measure the output, the number of brand names written on a timeframe.

Chris Stone:

It's a very quick and easy way of demonstrating how it feels to be constantly context switching and the damage you can have, if, for example, you've prioritized things into a sprint and you got lots of trying to reorder things and so on and so forth, and lots of pressure from external people that ideally should be shielded from influencing this and that, and how that feels and what the result is, because you may start something, get changed into something else. You got to take your mindset of this, back into something else, and then the person who picks up the original thing might not have even been the same person, they've got to learn that over again. There's just lots of waste and efficiency costs through that. And that's just an example of a game I use, to bring that sort of things to life.

Sean Blake:

That's great. That's fantastic. I love that. And I think we need to, at Easy Agile, start playing some of those games because there's a lot of lessons to be learned from going through those exercises. And then when you see it play out in real life, in the work that you're doing, it's easier to recognize it then. If you've done the training, you've done the exercise, that all seems like fun and games at the time, but when it actually rears its head in the work that you're doing, it's much easier to call it out and say, "Oh wait, we're doing that thing that we had fun playing, but now we realize it's occurring in real life and let's go a different direction." So I can see how that would be really powerful for teams to go through that so Chris [crosstalk 00:22:26].

Chris Stone:

I'd also add that every game that I do, I construct it using the four Cs approach. So I'm looking to connect people... firstly, connect people to each other, and then to the subject matter. So in this game is about multitasking. To contextualize why that matters, why does context switching and multitasking matter in the world of work? Because it causes inefficiencies, because it causes frustration, de-motivation, et cetera. Then we do some concrete practice. We play a game that emphasizes how it feels. And at the end we draw conclusions, and the idea is that with the conclusion side of things, it's almost like a retrospective on the game. We say, "Hey, what did we learn? What challenges we face? And what can we do differently in our working world?" And that hopefully leaves people with actionable takeaways. A lot of the content I share is aiming to leave it with actionable takeaways, not just talking about something, but reflecting on what you could do differently, what you could try, what experiment you might like to employ with your working life, your team that might help improve a situation you're facing.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Yeah, that's really helpful. And you've spoken about this concept of Agile sins, and we know that a lot of companies have these values, they might've committed to an Agile transformation. They might've even gone and trained hundreds or thousands of people at accompany using similar tactics and coaching and educational experiences that you provide. But we still see sometimes things go terribly wrong. And I wonder, what's this concept of Agile sins that you talk about and how can we start to identify some of these sins that pop up in our day-to-day work with each other?

Chris Stone:

I guess, so the first thing I would emphasize about this is that using sin, it's a very dogmatic religious language and it's more being used satirically than with any real intent. So I just like to get that across. I'm not a dogmatic person, I don't believe there is any utopian solution. I certainly don't believe there's any one size fit to all situation for anyone. So the idea that there's really any actual sins is... yeah, take that with a pinch of salt. The reason the Agile sins came up is because I was part of... I'd done a podcast recently with a guy called Charles Lindsey, and he does this Agile confessional. And it's about one coach confessing to another, their mistakes, their sins, the things they've done wrong.

Chris Stone:

And I loved it because I'm all about de-stigmatizing failure. I'm all about sharing with one another, these war stories from one coach to another, because I've been a proponent of this in the past. I've shouted, "Hey there, I failed on this. I made this mistake. I learned from it." And I challenge others to do so as well and there's still this reluctance by many to share what went wrong. And it's because failure is this dirty word. It's got this stigma attached to it. No one wants to fail, leaders in particular. So the podcast was a great experience.

Chris Stone:

And it was interesting for me because that was the first time I'd given a confession, because I'll be honest with you, I'm someone who is used to taking confession myself. I go to this hockey festival every year and I got given years ago, this Archbishop outfit, and I kind of made that role my own way. I was drunk, and I said, "You're going to confess your sins to me." And if they haven't sinned enough, I tell them to go and do more. And I give them penicillin with alcohol shots and things like that. And I've actually baptized people in this paddling pool whilst drunk. Anyway, again, I digress, but I wasn't used to confessing myself, usually, I was taking confession, but I did so and it was a good experience to share some of my failures and my patterns was to create... and it was my own idea, to create my videos, seven videos of my seven Agile sins. And again, this was just me sharing my mistakes, what I've learned from that, with the intent of benefiting others to avoid those similar sins.

Sean Blake:

So you've spoken to a lot of other Agile coaches, you've heard about their failures, you confessed your own failures, is it possible for you to summarize down what are those ingredients that make someone a great coach?

Chris Stone: And that is a question, what makes someone a great coach? I think it's going to be entirely subjective, to be honest. And my personal view is that a great coach listens more than they speak. I guess that would be a huge starting point. When they listen more than they speak, because I've... and this is one of the things I've been guilty of in the past, is I've allowed my own biases to influence the team's direction. An approach I'd taken in the past was, "Hey, I'm working with this team and this has worked well in the past. We're going to do that." Rather than, "So guys, what have you done so far? What have you tried? What's worked well? What hasn't worked well? What can we create or what can we try next? That works for you guys. Let's have you make that decision and I'm here to guide you through that process to facilitate it, rather than to direct it myself."

Chris Stone:

Again, I find ... it's an approach that resonates more with people. They like feel that they own that decision as opposed to it being forced upon them. And there's far less, I guess, cognitive dissonance as a consequence. So listening more than speaking is a huge for me, a point an Agile coach should do. Another thing I think for me nowadays, is that there's too much copying and pasting. And what I mean by that is, the Spotify, the Spotify model came out years ago and everyone went, "Oh, this is amazing. We're going to adopt it. We're going to have tribes and chapters and guilds and squads, and it's going to work for us. That's that's our culture now."

Chris Stone:

I was like, "Well, let's just take a moment here. Spotify never intended for that to happen. They don't even follow that model themselves anymore. What you've done there is you've just tried to copy and paste another model." And people do it with SAFe as well. They just say, "Hey, we're going to take the whole SAFe framework and Chuck it into our system in this blueprint style cookie cutter." And the problem is that it doesn't take into account for me, the most important variable in any sort of transformation initiative, the people, what they want, and the culture there. So this is where another one of my values is, innovate, don't replicate. Work with people to experiment and find that Agile, what works for them rather than just copying and pasting things.

Chris Stone:

So tailor it to their needs rather than just coming in with some or seen dancing framework, and then the way I do it is I say, "Hey, well, SAFe is great. Well, it's got lots of values, and lots of great things about it. Lots of benefits to it, but maybe not all of it works for us. Let's borrow a few tenent of that." Same with LeSS, same with Scrum At Scale, same with Scrum, similar to Kanban. There's lots of little things you can borrow from various frameworks, but there's also lots of things you can inject yourself, lot's of things you can try that work for you guys, and ultimately come up with your own tailor-made solutions. So innovate, don't replicate would be another one for me.

Chris Stone:

Learning, learning fast and learning often, and living and breathing that yourself. Another mistake I and other coaches I think have made is not making time for your own personal development to allowing, day in, day out to just be busy, busy, busy, but at the same time you're going out there, coaching teams, "Hey, you've got to learn all the time. You got to try new things." But not making that time for yourself. So I always carve out time to do that, to attend conferences, to read books, to challenge myself and escape my echo chamber. Not just to speak to the same people I do all the time, but perhaps to go on a podcast with people I've never spoken to. To a different audience, maybe to connect with people that actually disagree with me, because I want that.

Chris Stone:

I don't want that homophilous thinking where everyone thinks exactly like I do, because then I don't get exposed to the perspectives that make me think differently. So I'm often doing that. How can I tend to conference that I know nothing about, maybe it's a project management focus one. Project management and waterfall isn't a dirty word either. There is no utopian system, project management and... sure traditional project management and waterfall has its benefits in certain environments. Environments with less footing, less flexible scope or less frequently changing requirements works very well.

Chris Stone:

I always say GDPR, which is an EU legislation around data protection, that was a two year thing in the making and everyone knew exactly what was happening and when they had to do it by. That was a great example of something that can be done very well with a waterfall style, because the requirements weren't changing. But if you are trying to develop something for a customer base that changes all the time, and you've got lots of new things and lots of competitors and things like that, then it varies, and probably the ability to iterate frequently and learn from it is going to be more beneficial and this is where Agile comes in. So I guess to sum up there, there's a few things, learning fast learning often. I can't even remember the ones I've mentioned now, I've gone off on many tangents and this is what I do.

Sean Blake:

I love it. It's great advice, Chris. It's really important and timely. And you mentioned, earlier on that the customer base that's always changing and we know that technology is always changing and things are only going to change more quickly, and disruptions are only going to be more severe going forward. Can you look into the future, or do you ever look into the future and say, what are those trends that are emerging in the Agile space or even in work places that are going to disrupt us in the way that we do our work? What does Agile look like in five or 10 years?

Chris Stone:

Now that again is a very big question. I can sit here and postulate and talk about what it might look like. I'm going to draw upon what I think is a great example of what will shape the next five or 10 years. In February, 2021, there's a festival called Agile 20 Reflect, I'm not sure if you've heard of it, and it's built as a festival, not conference, it's really important. So it's modeled on the Edinburgh festival and what it intends to be is a celebration of the past, the present and the future of Agile. Now what it is, it's a month long series of events on Agile, and anyone can create an event and speak and share, and it will create this huge community driven load of content that will be freely accessible and available.

Chris Stone:

Now, there are three of the original Agile manifestor signatories that are involved in this. Lisa Adkins is involved in this as is lots of big name speakers that are attached to this festival. And I myself, I'm running a series of retrospectives on the Agile manifesto. I've interviewed Arie van Bennekum, one of the original Agile manifesto signatories. They're going to be lots of events out there. And I think that festival will begin to shape in some way, what Agile might look like because there's lots of events, lots of speakers, lots of panel discussions that are coming up, coming together with lots of professionals out there, lots of practitioners out there that will begin to shape what that looks like. So whilst I could sit here and postulate on it, I'm not the expert to be honest, and there are far greater minds than I. And actually I'd rather leverage the power of the wider community and come into that than suggesting mine at this time.

Sean Blake:

Nice. I like it. And what you've done there, you've made it impossible for us to click this video and prove you wrong in the future when you predict something that doesn't end up happening. So that's very wise if you.

Chris Stone: Future proof myself.

Sean Blake: Exactly. Chris, I think we're coming almost to the end now, but I wanted to ask, given the quality of your Christmas sweater, do you have any tips for teams who are working over the holiday period, they're most likely burnt out after a really difficult 2020? What are some of the things you'd say to coaches on Agile teams as they come into this time where hopefully people are able to take some time off, spend some time with their family. Do you have any tips or recommendations for how people can look after their mental health look after their peers and spend that time in self-reflection?

Chris Stone:

Sure. So a number of things that I definitely would recommend. I'm currently producing and sharing this Agile advent calendar. And the idea is that every day you get a new bite-size piece of Agile knowledge or a template or something working in zany or a video, whatever it may be. There's lots of little things getting in there. And there's been retro templates, Christmas and festive themes. So there's a Home Alone one, a Diehard one, an elf movie one, there's all sorts. Perhaps try one of those as a fun immersive way with your team to just reflect on the recent times as a squad and perhaps come up with some things in the next year.

Chris Stone:

And there's for example, the Diehard one, it's based on the quotes from the movie Diehard so it's what you'd be doing in there, celebrate your... to send them to your team. Or there's one in there about, if this is how you celebrate Christmas, I can't wait for new year. And that question was saying, what do we want to try next year? Like this year has been great, what do we want to try differently next year? So there's opportunities through those templates to reflect in a fun way so give one of those a go. I shared some Christmas eve festive Zoom backgrounds, or Team backgrounds, give those a go and make a bit fun, make it a bit immersive. There's Christmas or festive icebreakers that you can use. What I tend to do is any meeting I facilitate, the first five minutes is just unadulterated chat about non-work things, and I often use icebreakers to do so. And whether that's a question, like if you could have the legs of any animal, what would you have and why, Sean, what would that be?

Sean Blake:

Probably a giraffe, because just thought the height advantage, it's got to be something that's useful in everyday life.

Chris Stone: Hard to take you on the ground maybe.

Sean Blake:

Yes. Yes, you would definitely need that. Although, I don't think I would fit in the lift on the way to work, so that would be a problem.

Chris Stone:

Yeah. That's just how I start. But yeah, that's just a question, because it's interesting to see what could people come up with, but there's some festive ones too, what's your favorite Christmas flick? What would put you on the naughty list this year? Yeah, does your family have any weird or quirky Christmas traditions? Because I love hearing about this. Everyone's got their own little thing, whether it's we have one Christmas present on Christmas Eve or every Christmas day we get a pizza together. There's some really random ones that come out. I love hearing about those and making time for that person interaction, but in a festive way can help as well.

Chris Stone:

And then on the mental health side of things, I very much subscribed to the Pomodoro effect from a productivity side of things. So I will use that. I'll set myself a timer, I'll focus without distractions, do something. And then in that five minute break, I'll just get up and move away from my desk and stretch and get a coffee or whatever it may be. But then I'll also block out time, and I know some companies in this remote working world at the moment are saying, "Hey, every one to 2:00 PM is blocked out time for you guys to go and have a walk." Some companies are doing that. I always make time to get out and away from my desk because that... and a little bit more productive and it breaks up my day a little bit. So I definitely recommend that. Getting some fresh air can do wonders for your mental health.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. Well, Chris, I've learnt so much from this episode and I really appreciate you spending some time with us today. We've talked about a lot of things from around the importance of sharing your failures, the importance of looking after your mental health, checking in on yourself and your own development, but also how you tracking, how you feeling. I love that quote that you shared from, we think it Socrates, that true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I think that's really important, every day is starting from day one, isn't it? De-stigmatizing failure. The origins of the word deadline. I did not know that. That's really interesting. And just asking that simple question, how did that feel? How did that feel working in this way? People were screaming your name, walk up work, when work's too busy, how does that feel? And is that a healthy feeling that everyone should have? So that's really important questions for me to reflect on and I know our audience will really appreciate those questions as well. So thanks so much Chris, for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast.

Chris Stone:

Not a problem. Thank you for listening and a Merry Christmas, everyone.

Sean Blake:

Merry Christmas.