Easy Agile Podcast Ep.13 Rethinking Agile ways of working with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the core
"The episode highlights that Interaction, collaboration, and helping every team member reach their potential is what makes agile work" - Terlya Hunt
In this episode join Terlya Hunt - Head of People & Culture at Easy Agile and Caitlin Mackie - Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile, as they chat with Jazmin Chamizo and Rakesh Singh.
Jazmin and Rakesh are principal contributors of the recently published report "Reimagining Agility with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion".
The report explores the intersection between agile, business agility, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), as well as the state of inclusivity and equity inside agile organizations.
“People are the beating heart of agile. If people are not empowered by inclusive and equitable environments, agile doesn't work. If agile doesn't work, agile organisations can't work."
📌 What led to writing the report
📌 Where the misalignments lie
📌 What we can be doing differently as individuals and business leaders
Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧
Transcript
Terlya Hunt:
Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Easy Agile podcast. I'm Terlya, People & Culture business partner in Easy Agile.
Caitlin Mackie:
And I'm Caitlin, marketing coordinator at Easy Agile. And we'll be your hosts for this episode.
Terlya Hunt:
Before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the Wodiwodi people of the Dharawal nation, and pay our respects to the elders past, present and emerging, and extend the same respect to any Aboriginal people listening with us today.
Caitlin Mackie:
Today, we'll be joined by Jazmin Chamizo and Rakesh Singh. Both Jazmin and Rakesh are principal contributors and researchers of Reimagining Agile for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, a report that explores the intersection between Agile business agility and diversity equity and inclusion published in May, 2021.
Terlya Hunt:
We're really excited to have Jazmin and Rakesh join us today. So let's jump in.
Caitlin Mackie:
So Jazmin and Rakesh, thank you so much for joining us today. We're so excited to be here with you both today, having the conversation. So I suppose today we'll be unpacking and asking you questions in relation to the report, which you were both principal contributors of, Reimagining Agility with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. So for our audience tuning in today who may be unfamiliar the report, Jazmin, could you please give us a summary of what it's all about?
Jazmin Chamizo:
Absolutely. And first of all, thank you so much for having us here today and for your interest in our report. Just to give you a little bit of background of our research and how everything started out, the founder and the owner of the Business Agility Institute, Evan Leybourn, he actually attended a talk given by Mark Green. And Mark who used to be, I mean, an Agile coach, he was referring to his not very positive experience with Agile. So this actually grabbed the attention of Evan, who was a big advocate of agility, as all of us are. And they decided to embark upon this adventure and do some research trying to probe on and investigate the potential relationship between diversity, equity and inclusion and Agile.
So we had, I mean, a couple of hypothesis at the beginning of the research. And the first of hypothesis was that despite the positive intent of agility and despite the positive mindset and the values of Agile, which we all share, Agile organizations may be at the risk of further excluding marginalized staff and customers. And the second hypothesis that we had was that organizations who actually embed diversity, equity and inclusion directly into their Agile transformation and then strategy may outperform those organizations who don't. So we actually spent more than a year interviewing different participants from many different countries. And we actually ended up seeing that those hypothesis are true. And today, we would like to share with you, I mean, part of this research and also need to encourage you to read the whole report and also contribute to this discussion.
Terlya Hunt:
Amazing. And Jazmin, you touched on this a little bit in your answer just then, but I guess, Rakesh, could you tell us a bit more about what was the inspiration and catalyst for writing this report?
Rakesh Singh:
Yeah. So thanks for inviting once again. And it's a great [inaudible 00:03:51] talk about this beautiful project. The BAI was actually into this activity for a long time, and I happened to hear one of the presentation from Evan and this presentation actually got me interested into business agility and associated with DEI. So that was one thing. And second thing when Evan talked about this particular project, invited all of us, I had been with transformation in my job with Siemens for about three decades for a very long time. And we found that there were always some people, whenever you do transformation, they were not interested or they were skeptical. "We are wasting our time." And okay, that was to be expected, but what was surprising that even though Agile came up in a big way and people thought, "Okay. This is a solution to all our miseries," even though there was a focus on culture, culture was still our biggest issue. So it appeared to me that we are not really addressing the problem.
And as Jazmin talk about our goal and our hypothesis, and that was attractive to me that maybe this project will help me to understand why some [inaudible 00:05:12] to get the people on board in some of the Agile transformation.
Terlya Hunt:
Thank you. That was awesome. I think it definitely comes through in the report that this is a topic that's near and dear to all of you. And in the report you mentioned, there's a lack of consensus and some misalignment in defining some of these key terms. So thought to frame the conversation today, Jazmin, could you walk us through some of these key definitions, agility, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Jazmin Chamizo:
That's a great question now, because over the last year, there's been a big boom on different topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion, I mean, especially with the Black Lives Matter movement and many different events that have affected our society in general. And with the rise of social movements, I mean, there's been a lot of talk in the area of diverse, equity and inclusion. And when we talk about agility, equality, equity and inclusion and diversity, I mean, it's very important to have a very clear understanding of what we mean with this terms. Agility is the mindset. I mean, it's really about having the customer, people, at the very center of the organization. So we're talking about agile ways of working. We're talking about more collaborative ways of working. So we can bring the best out of people and then innovate and put products into the market as fast as possible.
Now, when we were thinking about agility and this whole idea of putting people at the very core and customer at the very core of organization so we can respond in a very agile and nimble way to the challenges that our society presents at the moment, we found a lot of commonalities and a lot of similarities with diversity, equity and inclusion. However, when we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, there's some nuances in the concepts that we need to understand. Diversity really refers to the mix. It refers to numbers, to statistics, all the differences that we have. There's a very long list of types of diversity. Diversity of gender, sexual orientation, ways of our thinking, our socioeconomic status, education and you name it, several types of diversity.
Now, when we talk about equality, I mean, we're talking about applying the same resources and support structures, I mean, for all. However, equality does not actually imply the element of equity, which is so important when we talk about now creating inclusive environments. With equity, we're talking about the element of fair treatment, we're talking about social justice, we're talking about giving equal access to opportunities for all. So it's pretty much about leveling the filed, so all those voices can be part of the conversation and everybody can contribute to the decision making in organizations and in society. So it's that element of fair treatment, it's that element of social justice that the element of equity has to contribute and that we really need to pay attention to.
And inclusion is really about that act of welcoming people in the organization. It's about creating all the conditions so people, everybody, can thrive and everybody can succeed in an organization. So I think it's very important, I mean, to have those definitions very clear to get a better understanding of how they overlap and how there's actually, I mean, a symbiotic relationship between these concepts.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. Great. And I think just building on that, interaction, collaboration and helping every team member reach their potential is what makes Agile work. So your report discusses that there are lots of overlaps in those values with diversity, equity and inclusion. So I think, Rakesh, what are those key overlaps? It seems those qualities and traits go hand in hand. So how do we embrace them?
Rakesh Singh:
So if you see most of the organization which are big organization and being for about two decades or so, and you compare them with the startup organization, so in the traditional setup, normally people are working in their functional silos, so to say. And so the Agile transformation is taken care by one business function. It could be a quality team. It could be a transmission team. And DEI normally is a domain of an HR or people who enter the organization. And the issue is that sometime these initiatives, they are handled separately and the amount of collaboration that's required does not happen, whereas in a startup company, they don't have these kind of divisions.
So looking that as a basis, what we need to look at is that the organization should be sensitize that they work together on some of these projects and look at the underlying what is the commonality, and we can possibly either help each other or complement each other, because one example is, if I can give, it's very easy to justify an Agile transformation relating to a business outcome, okay, but any people related change is a very long-term change. So you cannot relate that to a business outcome in a shorter timeframe. So I call Agile and DEI as symbiotic. An Agile can be helped by a DEI process and DEI itself can be justified by having an Agile project. So they are symbiotic.
Now, what is the common thing between the two? So there are four items. I mean, there are many things which are common, but four things which I find are most important. Yeah? The first thing is respect for people, like Jazmin talked about being inclusive. So respect for people, both Agile and DEI, that's a basis for that. And make people feel welcomed. So no matter what diversity they come from, what background they come from, they're feeling welcome. Yeah? The second part is the work environment. So it's a big challenge to create some kind of a psychological safety. And I think people are now organizing, the management is now understanding that they think that they have provided a safe place, but people are still not feeling safe for whatever reason there. That's one thing.
The other thing is that whatever policies you write, documentation, policies or announcement, the basic things that people see, is it fair and is it transparent? Yeah? So I used to always see that if there are two people given bonus, if one person get 5% more, no matter how big is the amount, there's always felt that, "I have not got my due." Yeah? So be fair and be transparent. And the last one is that you have to invest in people. The organization need to invest in people. The organization need to invest in enabling them with opportunity to make use of new opportunity, and also grow and through learning. So these are four things that I can see, which actually can help both being an agile, and also having inclusive environment in the company.
Caitlin Mackie:
The report mentions that some of those opportunities to combine agile and diversity equity inclusion are being overlooked. Why do you think this is?
Rakesh Singh:
So I think that the reason why they're being overlooked is that, it's basically, educating the leaders. So it's just, if I'm in the agile world, I do not really realize that there are certain people related aspect. I think, if I just make an announcement, people will participate. Okay? So that's the understanding. On the other side, we got an input from quite a few responders saying that some of the DEI projects are basically words, are not really sincere about it. It's a waste of time. "I'm being forced to do certain training. I'm forced." So the sincerity part, sometime there's a lacking, so people have to be educated more at a leadership level and on at a employee level.
Caitlin Mackie:
I think a really interesting call out in your research is that many agile processes and rituals are built to suit the majority, which excludes team members with diverse attributes. Jazmin, what are some of those rituals?
Jazmin Chamizo:
Yeah, that's a great question. Now, if you think about agile and agile rituals and for example, I mean, daily standups, a lot of those rituals have not actually thought about diversity, or the design for diversity and inclusion. I mean, agile is a very on the spot and is a very, who can talk, type of rituals. But there's a lot of people, I mean, who might need more time to process information before they can provide inputs, so fast. So that requirement of processing information or giving input in a very fast manner, in daily standups, that might be overlooking the fact that a lot of people, with a different type of thought processing styles or preferences may need more time to carry out those processes.
So that would be, I mean, number one; the fact that it's very on the spot and sometimes only the loud voices can be heard. So we might be losing a lot of opportunities, trying to get feedback and input from people with different thinking styles.
Now, also, if you think about organizations in different countries, where English is not the native language of a lot of people, they may also feel a lot of disadvantage. This happens a lot in multinational organizations, where people whose, you know, first language is English, they feel more confident and they're the ones who practically may monopolize now the conversations. So, for people who's first language is not English, I mean, they might feel at a disadvantage.
If you think about older employees who sometimes may not be part of an agile transformation, they might also feel that are not being part of the team and they may not have the sense of belonging, which is so important in an agile transformation and for any organization. Another example, I mean, would be people, who because of their religious belief, I mean, they need maybe to pray five times in a day, and I mean maybe a morning stand up might mean very difficult to adapt to, or even people with disabilities or language differences, they feel a little intimidated by agile. So there's a lot of different examples. And Doug report actually collects several lived experiences, by the respondents that we interview that illustrate how agile has been designed for the majority and for a more dominant type of culture and that highlights the need to redesign many of these rituals and many of these practices.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah, I think just building on that in your recommendations, you mentioned consciously recreating and redesigning these agile ways of working. What are some of the ways we can rethink and consciously create these?
Jazmin Chamizo:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, the good news is that, during our research, and during our field work and the conversations that we had with some organizations mean there's a lot of companies and organizations that have actively implementing them different types of practices, starting from the way they're managing their meetings, their rituals, their stand ups, giving people an opportunity to communicate in different ways. Maybe giving some room for silence, so people can process their information or providing alternative channels for people to communicate and comment either in writing or maybe the next day. So it doesn't have to be right there on the spot., and they don't feel under that type of pressure.
Now, another example would be allowing people, I mean, to also communicate in their native language. I mean, not necessarily using English, I mean, all the time as, I mean, the main language. I think it's also important for people to feel that it can contribute with their own language, and also starting to analyze, I mean, the employee experience. We're talking about maybe using non-binary options in recruitment processes or in payroll. So, I mean, starting to be more inclusive in the different practices and analyzing, I mean, the whole employee journey. I mean, those are some examples that we can start implementing to creating a more inclusive environments. And the one that is the most important for me is encouraging leadership to intentionally design inclusive work environments through the use of, like creating environments that are really where people feel safe, where they have this. Psychologically safe.
Terlya Hunt:
The whole section on exploring and challenging existing beliefs is so interesting. And I would definitely encourage everyone listening to go and read it. I could ask you so many questions on this section alone, because I think it was full of gold, and honestly, my copy is highlighted and scribbled and I read it and reread it, there was so much to absorb. The first thing that really stood out to me as a HR practitioner in an agile organization was this belief that focusing on one or two areas of diversity first is a good start. And from your research, what you actually found was that survey respondents found this method ineffective and actually harmful for DEI. And in your research, you also reference how important it is to be intentional and deliberate. So I guess, how do we balance this need for focus and creating change with these findings that being too narrow in our focus can actually be harmful? Might throw this one to you, Rakesh.
Rakesh Singh:
So actually, thanks to the reform data report, very interesting, in fact, we presented to quite a few groups. And one of the thing that I observed when we are talking about some of the beliefs and challenges, there were immediate to response say, "Hey, we do experience in our area." So, what we realized is that this whole aspect, as Jazmin talked about, many dimensions. So if you look at inclusiveness, and diversity and equity across organization, there are many streams, and many triggers. As diversity, we understand, okay, in very limited way, it may be gender, or it may be religion or country, but actually, it's much more in a working environment, there are many dynamics which are [inaudible 00:22:15]. So the challenges, what we saw was that if you pick up a project in a very sincere way and say, "I'll solve one problem, okay?" Let me say I solve problem of a region or language, yeah? Now the issue is that most of the time, we look at the most dominant and identify that problem.
So what happens is that you actually create an inequity right there, because there are other people they are suffering. They are, I won't say, "Suffering," but they're influenced by other factors of diversity and they felt, "Okay, nobody's really caring for me." Yeah? So you have to look at in a very holistic picture, and you have to look at in a way that everybody is on board, yeah? So you may not be able to find solution to every specific problem, but getting everybody on board, and let people work in some of the environment or either psychological safety or the policy level, so create an environment where everybody can participate, and issues can be different so they can bring up their own issues, and make sure they feel that they they're cared for. And that's what we actually observed.
Terlya Hunt:
And the second belief I thought was really interesting to call out was that this belief that we will adapt to somebody's beliefs if they ask. And your research found that not everyone is able to disclose their needs, no matter how safe the working environment, so that by relying on disclosure is the first step in the process,. Organizations will always be a step behind and, and also place the burden of change on marginalized groups. What are some things we can do, Rakesh, to remove this pressure and to be more proactive?
Rakesh Singh:
So there are a couple of things that we need to look at when we talk to people, actually, they discussed about the problem, and they also recommended what could be right, we are doing it. And we also discussed among ourselves. So one thing which was very clear that there was a little doubt about the sincerity of leadership. And so, we felt that any organization where leader was very proactive, like, for example, what is the basic reason, if I have a problem, if I talk about it, I am always worried what will happen when I disclose it? And is it the right issue to talk about it? So, these are the questions would inhibit a lot of people not to talk about it at all. So, that's where the proactive leadership can help people to overcome their inhibition and talk about it, and unless they discuss about it, you'll never know if there's a problem. So, that's the one thing. So, that's the approach.
So there are a couple things that we could also recommend, is proactive leadership to start with, and something which can be done is there are a lot of tools available for the managers, yeah? People leaders, I would call it. Things like coaching, so you have a grow model where you can coach an individual person, even as a manager or as an independent coach, then having a facilitation techniques. When I started my career, they were not a training on facilitation, just going to the room and conduct the meeting. But they're very nice tools, facilitation techniques, which can be brought out to get people to participate, and so things like that can be very useful for being proactive and drawing people out of their inhibition. That definitely is with the leader. That's why we call it servant leadership. It is their job to initiate and take the lead, and get people out of their shell.
Terlya Hunt:
It ties quite nicely into the next question I had in mind. You both actually today have mentioned a lot of challenging beliefs, and calling things out. We need to build this awareness, and create safe spaces, and create psychological safety in our teams. What are some examples of how we can create safe spaces for these conversations?
Rakesh Singh:
The examples of someone creating safe places is ... I would say that educating people and the leaders. What I have seen is that if the leadership team recognizes that and educates the managers and other people ... You need to actually train people at different level, and create an environment that everybody's participating in the decision making, and they're free to make choices within, of course, the constraint of the business.
The focus, where I would put it, is that there are many educational programs and people would like to educated, because I normally felt that I was never trained for being a good leader. There was never training available. But these days we find that a lot of educational programs highlighting a various issue, like microaggression, unconscious bias, psychological safety. People should understand it. Things like being empathetic. These terminologies are there, but I find that people don't really appreciate it and understand it to the extent that they need to do, even though they are in a leadership position.
Caitlin Mackie:
Thanks for sharing, Rakesh. I really love what you mentioned around proactive leadership, there. Your research found that 47% of respondents believed organizations who achieved this unity of Agile, and diversity, and equity, and inclusion will reap the benefits and exceed competitors. Jazmin, what did these organizations do differently?
Jazmin Chamizo:
Yes. That's a great question. Actually this ties very nicely with idea of servant leadership, inclusive leadership, and how leaders have this incredible challenge of creating workspaces that are psychologically safe, as Rakesh just mentioned. This is really everybody's responsibility, but it has a lot to do with a very strong leadership.
We found that several other organizations that we interviewed, they had a very strong leadership team, that they were really committed with diversity, equity, and inclusion in their agile transformation, and they were able to put DEI at the very core of the organization. That's number one, having a very strong leadership team that's actually committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that does not perceive DEI efforts as isolated actions or initiatives.
This is something that we're seeing a lot nowadays. As a DEI coach and consultant, sometimes you see, unfortunately, several organizations that only try very isolated and very ... They don't have long-term strategy. What we have seen that actually works is having this committed leadership team that has been able to put DEI at the very core of their strategy.
Also a team that has been able to serve as an advocate in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and agility, and they're able to have advocates throughout the organization. It's not just one person's job. This calls for the effort of the whole organization and individuals to commit to DEI and be actively part of the agile transformation.
Also, I would say, leaders that embrace mistakes and embrace errors throughout the process. This is something that came up a lot during our conversations with people in different organizations, that in many cultures and in many organizations, mistakes are punished. They're not perceived as a source of opportunity.
One of the tips or best practices would be having leaders who are able to show the rest of their organization that mistakes are actually learning opportunities, that you can try things out of the box, and you can be more innovative. That even if you fail, you're not going to be punished, or there won't be any consequences because of that, and, quite on the country, that this is actually a learning opportunity that we can all thrive on.
Caitlin Mackie:
Yeah. I completely agree. What benefits did they see?
Jazmin Chamizo:
They definitely saw a greater working environment. This is something that was quoted a lot during our interviews with respondents, that individuals saw that they had the chance to try new and innovative ideas. Definitely greater innovation, more creativity. Business morale actually ultimately went up, because they saw that the organization was actually embracing different perspectives, even if they fail. This definitely called for greater innovation.
I would say innovation, more creativity, and a better working environment. Absolutely new products, new ideas. That if you think about the current circumstances with COVID, this is what organizations have to aim at. New products, more innovation to face all the challenges that we have nowadays.
Terlya Hunt:
Powerful things for the listeners to think about. Here at Easy Agile, our mission is to help teams be agile. Because we believe for too long the focus has been on doing, when the reality is that Agile is a constant journey of becoming.
There's a specific part in the report that really stood out to me that I'd like to read. "Agility is a journey with no fixed endpoint. The road towards creating diverse, equitable, and inclusive environments is the same. Agility and DEI can be pursued, but never fully achieved. They are a process of ongoing learning, reflection, and improvement. A team cannot enter the process of improving business agility or DEI with a mindset towards completion, and any model that unites Agile and DEI will ultimately be ineffective if those taking part are not ready to embark on an ongoing quest for self improvement."
I absolutely love this quote. Rakesh, let's explore this a little bit further. What more can you tell me about this?
Rakesh Singh:
Actually there's an interesting thing that I would like to share to start with. We wanted to look for a organization who would help us interview their people and talk to their people. The way organizations responded ... Some responded, "Shall I allow my people to talk to somebody? It could be a problem." But then we got other organizations, they were actually chasing us. "We would like to be part of this, and we would like to get our people interviewed." They were very positive about the whole thing.
I happened to talk to the DEI corporate manager, a lady, and the way she was talking was ... She was so much, I would say, passionate about the whole thing, even though at least I felt that they were very high level of awareness of DEI. But the quest for learning and finding out what they could do better was quite astonishing and quite positive.
That's where my answer is, is that ... If you look at the current pandemic, and people realized that, "Okay. We have to work from home," initially some people found it great. It's a great thing. Work-life balance. "I can attend my home." But after some time they found it's a problem. There's other problem.
The point is that, in any organization, where it's a business or a social life, or people, it just keeps changing. There's no method or policy which is going to be forever valid. There's a continuous learning process that we have to get in.
What we need to do is focus on our goal that we want to achieve. Depending on the environment, that's what we call business agility. Now bring it to people as well, because it is a people ... We talk about customer centricity, and all that. But finding it's the people who are going to deliver whatever organization want to. You have to see how their lives are getting impacted.
We are discussing about getting people back to office. The problem is that, a city like Bangalore, it's a very costly city and very clouded city. People have gone to their hometown and they can work from there. Now, to bring them back, you have to approve them back again. To cut short the explanation, our life is changing, constantly changing, and technology and everything is putting ... People have to look at methods and approach of how they can be adapting themself on a continuous basis.
Learning is a continuous process. In fact, when I got into Agile and people ask me, "How many years of experience you have?" I generally say five years, because anything that I did before five years is actually the wrong practice. You have to be continuously learning, and DEI and Agile is no stranger to this situation.
Caitlin Mackie:
I love that. I think fostering that continuous learning environment is really key. I suppose, on that, a few of the recommendations from the report are centered around getting deeper training and intentional expertise. Jazmin, what further recommendations, or courses, or practitioners are there that people can engage with after this episode?
Jazmin Chamizo:
Sure. An important part of our report was a series of recommendations to the entire agile community, and practitioners, to organizations, and agile coaches. You can see that. You could get more specific information in our reports. I would like to encourage all of you to read. Definitely when it comes to agile coaches and consultants, we're encouraging people to learn more about diversity, equity, and inclusion because one of the insights and the learnings we drew from this research is that diversity, equity, and inclusion is not specifically included in the agile world.
When we talked to the respondents in many different countries, they did not spontaneously made the connection between agility, Agile, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the more we talk about it, they discovered that, indeed, they were very closely overlapped. There was a symbiotic relationship between them, because you're putting the person and everything that relates to that individual on the very core of the organization, on the transformation.
Definitely we do encourage ... Leaders and agile coaches need to start learning more about our DEI, building that proficiency, learning more about unconscious bias and the impact of unconscious bias, and discrimination, and racism that we'll continue to see in organizations. They're more mindful of those voices that are not being heard at the moment in the present conversations. They can learn different techniques or different methods to be more engaging and more inclusive.
When it comes to the agile community in general and influencers, it is important to mention that Evan Leybourn, the founder of the Agility Institute, is having at the moment some conversations with important institutions in the agile community, such as the Agile Alliance, because we are looking for ... That's what Gen Z-ers are looking for. There's a big call out there for organizations to embrace this type of transformation, but putting DEI at the very core of the organization. That's what I would like to say.
Contribute to the discussion. This is a pilot project. That we are hoping to conduct more research on other DEI areas related to agility. We would like listeners to be part of the conversation, and to contribute with their experience, to improve the state of agility in the current moment.
Caitlin Mackie:
Thank you both so much for joining us today. Thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. I can't wait to see how Agile and diversity, and equity, and inclusion evolves in the future. Thank you.
Jazmin Chamizo:
Thank you so much for having us. It's been a pleasure.
Rakesh Singh:
Thanks a lot to both of you. It was nice to share our experience. Thank you very much.
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Hi, all, and welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Dave Elkan and I'm co-founder and co-CEO here at Easy Agile. Before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres State Islander and First Nations people joining us today. Today I am joined by Jean-Philippe Comeau or JP. JP is the principal customer success advocate at Adaptavist and is passionate about teamwork, meeting new people, presentations of all kinds, loves a microphone and a captive audience, this podcast definitely fits that mold, new technologies, and most of all, problem-solving. JP, thanks so much for being with us today.
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Hey, no worries. It's great to have you on. We want to take some time today just to talk through Atlassian Team '23. The ecosystem is gearing up for one of the biggest events of the calendar and the ultimate event for modern teamwork. You've been to a few Atlassian Team events before and last year being the first one back in a while. Quebec to Las Vegas is quiet a gear change. What are your tips for people attending Team for the first time?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Ooh, yeah, that's a good question. I mean, yeah, Teams to me is a massive event. It's a beautiful moment to actually take in everything that has happened in last year for Atlassian. What I mean by that is actually more and more what's happening with Atlassian is actually what's happening in the world of work. So I think it's just a great time to reassess where you're at. So for me, it's about planning out the main things you want to hit and don't overcrowd your schedule. That's a mistake I made the first time was just I wanted to see the most of everything and I was like, "Yeah, I can absolutely do back to back to back. It's going to be fine. I'll be walking from one thing to another." Truth is after talk, you'll have some questions. Some things will popped-up. "Oh, that's interesting. I could maybe explore that."
You're going to want to do maybe some floor hunting, which is like, hey, looking through the partners. Maybe you've heard about something like an app that you really want to go look at or something like that. So, that's always going to happen and then you're going to miss that next talk. So make sure that what you highlight is really things you want to see and plan according to that. That to me is the number one thing. Don't try to do it all. Do what you feel is really, really important than the rest. Try to make it work because it's going to be a lot of walking, a lot of listening, a lot of talking. The second thing which I remind everybody is to hydrate, get a bottle of water. There's going to be plenty over there, but everybody's going to have their own branded bottle of water, so don't worry about having one or not, but get one and just hydrate. I mean, we all get very busy during the day and we all know how the nights can go, so keep drinking some water. Yeah, those are my two tips.
Dave Elkan:
That's great advice. I think hydration is certainly something to consider. I remember particularly a wall of donuts at one point distracting me from good habits like that. So yeah, it's really important to make sure you've got the basics in line. What are you most looking forward to from the lineup at Team '23?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah. I mean, every year the keynotes are what's going to hit the most. Obviously, getting a chance to hear James Cameron talk is going to be very, very interesting. I think especially in the year of Avatar 2 is just great timing, obviously probably planned. He's probably on a tour, but it's going to be really great to hear some stories of how that movie came about. It's been a long time in the making, probably the closest thing we got to really long development on a film. It feels like a long software development cycle thing. That's a very long time. And then hearing Van talk about some of the things that he's seeing in today's world. Van Joseph, I believe, is the name of the second talker, and remember seeing him a lot on the CNN broadcast and stuff during the elections and the impact that he brought to the whole broadcast was quite something. It'd be very interesting to hear them talk.
And then as far as maybe not the big ticket items, really interested to... I think this is the year where the practices on the different tracks that Atlassian usually promotes, I think this is the year what they really start to hit. What I mean by that is I think before this year, so when you look at last year's Team and then before that, tracks were kind of like wishy-washy. Now, they actually have the products to back them. I think JSM's in a very, very good spot. I think their agile tooling is in a very good spot. I think their DevOps, which is what I expect, is going to be pushed the most, or DevOps tooling with the Jira product discovery and all their Point A stuff is got to be where it's at. So I think you're going to get really good talks on those practices. I think that's going to be the year where the tracks actually make a ton of sense and are very valuable to people.
Dave Elkan:
Absolutely. Thanks for sharing. It's really interesting. Yourself, you're a Canadian and James Cameron is a Canadian and he's talking about creating the impossible, and I think that's a theme that's coming through and what Atlassian is promoting and bringing that through. It's really interesting to see or hear you talk about the both building movies and media and CNN, the reference there, and how that can apply with a strongly software development-based audience. It's really interesting to see that building a movie is a very much a waterfall process in that you have this huge deliverable at the end, but I know that there are Pixar, for example, use this concept of Demo Trusts, we call them, or the Pixar Demo Trust. Yeah. So essentially you can test along the way as you go before you deliver this huge thing. It's really intriguing to think what we're going to hear from James in regards to how he builds these amazing projects.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah, I think you're spot on. So I'm actually a huge Marvel fan. I don't have my book with me, but the Creativity, Inc. is a book that I love by Ed Catmull and how they built Pixar as a business, as a delivery team, not just about the movie side of it, the creative side of it, but how do you bring creativity into a more structured world that is the corporate world kind of thing, which they're now a part of? So, very interesting that you bring that up because I'm very fascinated by their process as well. I think they were the pioneers in the movie-making business or industry into bringing the agile methodologies or thinking to movie-making.
Now, what would happen historically in movies? Okay. So you don't know this, but my background is actually enacting. So when I started, when I studied, when I was a young lad, young adult, let's put it that way, I wanted to be an actor and then things changed. Obviously, I am not a prolific actor. So I'm very, very passionate about the movie-making industry. Movies historically has always been about you shoot, you shoot, you shoot, to develop, develop, develop, and then at the end, you cut it. So you make mistakes. So like we said, very, very waterfally. I think now that technology is almost like 50 to 60% of a movie now more days... If you look at Marvel movies and all that, you could argue it's 50 to 60% is going to be computer-generated, which can be a bad or good thing. Now, that I'm not going to get into that debate.
The nature of previz and all the animation work that goes behind it makes the process more agile, meaning that what they're going to do is they're going to build for a week and then they're going to review the film that's been made and then they're going to correct and do it again, right? So already you got your feedback loop going. You got your process. You got your sprints going. I can map all that out to some agile processes and I wouldn't be surprised that you're looking at something that are looking to scale up. You could even argue what are you guys going to do for your scaling methodologies? There's a lot of things that are very interesting.
I think going back to our first point, sorry, I really went on a tangent here, but going back to Avatar, when you have such a long cycle and you have a movie that's built, that one is heavily computer-generated. I mean, every actor has stuff on their face and they're acting in a blank studio. Now you're talking about agile processes because if you're building hours and hours and hours of work and you're just building and building and building and never review, I can't... Maybe James will say that's how they did it, and I'll be like, "Well, you guys were... It's very difficult. You made your life very, very difficult." But it'd be very interesting to hear because I cannot imagine them not going into some type of an agile way of building this movie.
Dave Elkan:
Oh, of course. I think that if you imagine the cutting room floor, it's an old adage and literally they used to cut the film and they'd leave it on the floor as that's something we're not doing anymore. And so, I dare say that there's a vast amount of film which is thrown away and redone. I feel that if we could see past that to this beautiful thing that they're doing behind the scenes, which is testing and iterating on their shots, it's actually quite a simple concept to apply these agile processes to filmmaking. It's just at the end you have got this big bang, same in game production. When you produce a game, you cut back. People do early access, which is fantastic. You can't early access a movie.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
No, exactly. Yeah.
Dave Elkan:
Yeah. Going back to Pixar, that reference, I actually made the mistake. It's not actually the Demo Trust. So this is the Playbook by Atlassian. There's a play called Demo Trust, but it's the Brains Trust and it's bringing together the team to talk through does this fulfill the vision of Pixar? Does this make Pixar Pixar? And helping the team understand, so directors get that ingrained Pixarness through that process. So yeah, there's a whole team behind the scenes here. There's not one person who's just driving this at the director level. There's actually a whole team of people collaborating on this movie. So I'm really intrigued to hear that from James to hear how the teamwork comes out.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah. I think when you look at a movie like Avatar, again, another thing that we don't think about is the connecting remote teams, which is a big, big part of what we do in 2023 is connecting remote teams so that they feel they're working on one project. When you have a movie like Avatar, your VFX is going to be somewhere. Your actors are going to be another place. And then you're going to have music and sound's going to be somewhere else. Your editors are probably going to be somewhere else. And so, there's a lot of remote work that you do. How do you bring all that together?
I remember watching the old documentaries around the Lord of the Rings movies, and they were literally flying people in and out with the actual roll of films because they were so afraid that people would steal them and so that they wouldn't put it on the internet and they would actually carry them around. So they had to fly from London to New Zealand to... It's kind of nuts when you think about it in 2023. Really, you had to take a 10-hour flight just to get your film across? It's probably easier also with the data, just the bandwidth and everything. So I think that's also going to be an interesting part is how did you connect teams?
You brought up a great point around the Pixar way or that's how they call it, the Pixar way. When you think about that, there's some really, really cool ideas behind bringing a team together and rallying them around one project. I think as teams get more remote and distanced from products and things that they're working on, and I do it myself at work. Things become generic. At some point, you're just doing the same thing over and over again. You lose touch a little bit with the work that you do. I think it's a beautiful thing to be able to rally a team around a project and say like, "Do you believe in this project? I believe in this project. Do you believe in this project?" And making sure the team does and if they don't, why don't you? What's preventing you from that? I think there's a lot of good conversations, sorry, that can come from that. Yeah.
Dave Elkan:
Absolutely. So yeah, you talk about going more remote. Is that a trend you're seeing, that we're continuing to see more and more teams go remote, or are we seeing a reversal of that to some extent?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
It depends on what sphere you're working with, or in my position, I get to touch everything. I tend to gravitate towards the more creative teams of gaming and software development and stuff. I do work with banks. I do work with, well, corporate America, the classic suit and tie kind of places, everything. I see everything. There is absolutely out right now a battle of old versus new, old ways of working, new ways of working. There's a huge clash happening. I to this day do not know who's going to win, because even the big Silicon Valleys, I mean, we are all seeing what's happening with Apple and them putting mandatory office dates and stuff like that. You see that from an executive that is leading maybe one of the more bleeding edge companies in the world, but he's still an old school vibe of creativity.
I hate bringing it back to Pixar. I'm going to bring it back to Pixar. They have such a great office. So like I said, I'm very fascinated about what they do. They call it unplanned creativity. They truly believe that unplanned creativity happens in the office, and when you have unplanned meetings, unplanned interactions. So one of the things that they did, it's now very common, but when I was 14 years old and I was reading about them, I was like, "Oh my God, these are such cool things to do," they were doing those ping-pong places and activities and games to get people to play together and start talking about what they were doing.
And then all of a sudden you got an engineer talking to a VFX artist that's talking to a 3D or conceptual artist, that's like they would never meet in a meeting or anything like that. But because they're playing ping-pong and throwing ideas around and all of a sudden they're like, "Hey, maybe we could build this thing. That'd be amazing." Because the artist saying, "Well, now I could do clouds this way. Yeah. Nuts, I could create clouds that look like this." Then the engineer goes, "Well, you can just tweak a little bit of things."
Anyways, so I think there's this old school mentality at this. It's a question I've asked myself in our Slacks and where we talk about work. I don't know what the future is for unplanned creativity. I don't know how you recreate that in a virtual world. I think it's a big problem that some software companies have tackled with some tools. I don't know how you force someone to sit behind a computer and do something that's unplanned. How do I stumble across some... I don't know. But yeah, I think there's a bit of that in the old school mentality. I need people in an office so that they can meet and they can interact together. I still struggle to find where they're wrong, let's put it that way. I don't know where they're wrong about that theory of when you're with someone, when you're with people things happen in a different way.
Dave Elkan:
I can't agree more. I think that if I have any perspective on this, it's that there is not... Often, it's not a black and white or a zero sum kind of game. It's a combination of things that will occur and that will move forward for better or for worse. You can look back in history to Bell Labs and the creation of the semiconductor and the way that the building was designed essentially to allow people to walk past and have cross-collaboration and cross-functional conversations. Have you ever considered that the unplanned creativity that Pixar was talking about was actually planned-unplanned creativity, so they made these spaces on purpose? How can we make things on purpose to have things unknown to us happen?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, you're absolutely right. I mean, yeah, they built the Pixar offices this way because of that. To me, that is the secret. If someone finds it, it's like the caramel milk or whatever, just bottle it up and sell it to people, I guess. I don't know. I have no idea what the answer is. I've looked and it's... There's an app out there. I can't remember the name of the app, but you're like a 2D sprite and it looks like an NES game and you're moving around from places to places. You can decorate your office. It's got this vibe of Animal Crossing, which is a game by Nintendo where you can just create stuff and people can visit your island and all that.
You can do that with your office space and then you can create a common area where people walking. When you look at it in a video, it's brilliant. Great, I can actually be in the office without being in the office. It has this whole technology of proximity. So if you're having a conversation with someone in an open area, people could walk by and hear what you're saying and join in. Beautiful technology, doesn't work with the humans when you really think about it. Why would I go online to walk around an office to go talk? I'll ping you on Slack, it'll be easier. All right. I don't need to walk through your office. So it's like I don't know what the secret is.
Yeah, you're right, it is planned in a way. I think we do that. I don't know for you guys at Easy Agile, how you do it. In Adaptavist, we do like to travel with teams. So whenever we do things, even if it's customer work or if we're going for an event or something, we try to make it a point to make it about also us and what we do. So we rarely traveled alone. If I'm going to a customer, we're trying to get two consultants in there, or what I'm trying to say is bring more people. It's a point, I think, Adaptavist is trying to make and I think that's what Simon, our CEO, is trying to make is use these opportunities to be with people. I think it's a beautiful thing, but it's one of the myriad of solutions. I don't know. I really don't know. What do you think? What are your thoughts on this?
Dave Elkan:
Oh, I can share how we work at Easy Agile. So here I am today in the office. This is a great place for me to do this recording. We have a room for about 50 people here in the office in Wollongong, south of Sydney. We have about 10 to 15 who usually arrive on a daily basis, and that's great. We don't mind. We love people working from home and working away, which is more convenient and relaxing for them. At the same time, we do have quarterly plan, like planning sessions that we go to. We have Advanced Easy Agile every quarter. We come together in person. We've strategically ensured that we hire in a way so that's possible, so people aren't flying across vast sways of ocean to get to this conversation. In a way, it's planned-unplanned. So we do our planning ahead of time.
When we come for Advanced Easy Agile, we'll have something that we want to either upskill the team with or whatever, and then we'll have some team bonding where people can choose from a range of different activities they want to do together. And so, for us, it's more about getting together in person because we know that's really valuable to both build an understanding of each other as a team and to build that rapport. It can't be done over Zoom to an extent. So, absolutely, our business runs entirely in a remote-friendly way and we don't rely on people to be in person, in sync in person to move forward. However, we do see there's a great value there. So we try to live in both worlds and we get the benefit from both of them. Yeah. And so, that's one thing that can work. It's not for everybody. If you have a truly distributed global business, it's not exactly easy or affordable to bring everybody together on a quarterly basis.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah. I think it's beautiful though. So I've been in Adaptavist for close to six... I'm on my sixth year now and we used to be able to do... We didn't do quarterly. We did a yearly thing at the end of the year where everybody would get together. We called it Winter Con for the last two years, which I actually loved the idea, which was very much we could pitch ideas of what we wanted to talk about. It could be about work, could be about customers, could be about last year, whatever you wanted to talk about, could be about yourself, could be about a cool thing you did this year, whatever. We had a voting system, but really pretty much anyone that said any, you could get in.
You could just walk around and it was literally a conference center. We'd set up some rooms and you could walk in, look at a presentation, literally like Teams or whatever. It was the best experience every time that we did that. I love these because there's value. There's an ROI in having everybody learning and upskilling and breaking down these silos of, "Hey, I never worked with marketing, but here's an hour talk around something we did in marketing. I really want to join," and all these things. That's great. There was also the unplanned ROI, where you were coming out of there with multiple ideas of like, "Oh, I could explore this. We could explore that. I got this meeting set in Jan now that whenever I come back in January, we're going to be talking about this thing that we talked about for cloud migrations." All that was happening at Winter Con.
Now, we grew exponentially post-COVID, well, during and post. So while COVID was happening and all of a sudden everybody wanted work. And then as companies that were remote, I think a lot of the companies that were remote grew during COVID versus because companies that were local or anything, they slowly diluted down a little bit, let's put it that way. As we grew, we can't support that anymore as a one-time thing where you'd have... We're close to a thousand now. There's a lot of people to move and a lot of conferences, a lot of conference rooms and presentations and stuff that we just can't accommodate. So, I miss it a lot. We've been doing it remotely, but like you said, it's not the same to go on a Zoom call.
I remember sitting down in these presentations and you're sitting down next to people that someone from Arkansas, someone from Cambridge, and you start talking. Yeah, you're listening to conference, but we all know what happens when you're listening to a presentation. You start talking like, "Yeah, that's an interesting idea. What did you do last weekend?" You start talking. Those are things you can't do on Zoom. You can't really reproduce that on Zoom. It's not going to happen really and I miss that dearly. I don't know what the solution is when you have these kind of global distribution. I mean, I guess you do in a smaller way, maybe all of North America meet up or things like that, but it's just not the same, not the same at all. I think it's beautiful that you guys can still do these because everybody's close by. I think it's really nice.
Dave Elkan:
Oh, thanks. Yeah, it's something we're hoping to hold onto as long as we can. We understand that these things don't scale. At one point, we'll have to break it into different events so that people can have, I think, a higher level of involvement in that. If you have too many people at the same time, it can be just a bit read only, the way I see it. It's as if to seek participant.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
That's nice. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.
Dave Elkan:
So I'd love to just quickly touch back on Atlassian Team '23.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
I'm sorry.
Dave Elkan:
You did mention at the beginning... That's all right. We'll get there. There's these new apps, especially in the DevOps tooling space that Atlassian's working on, so Discovery. Can you just talk to me a little bit more about what you see there and why that's coming to fruition now?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah, I think it's all about cloud. I'll be the first to say that big fan of data center, big fan of on-prem. That's how I learned the Atlassian tool set. So, a little skeptical when cloud came about. As it grew and it got better, it got better, that was great. I think it's now at a mature spot where the Point A program, which is where all of these tools are coming out of, so the product Discovery, Atlas and all that, those are the fruits of cloud. That's because now that we have cloud, they can churn out products and try things and see if they stick or not. I think that's why I think this year is the year where I think the program is mature enough. Migration's ready. I mean, we're one year out of server end-of-life. I think we're finally in a place where we can actually talk about all these opportunities. Most of the people at the conference will be able to get value from it.
I remember last year where talks were heavily around JSM and all the cool things it would do, but you still had a lot of people on server, still had a lot of people on data center. So it fell a little bit on deaf ears. A lot of people in the crowd were just like, "Yeah, it's not for me." Both keynotes were about that. So anyways, I think this year it's going to be better because of that, because everybody's bought in. I think it's right now because yeah, it's cloud. You can ship easier, faster. You can ship better. You can iterate better. You can get a product ready much, much quicker than if you're on-prem, and I think that's why you're seeing this blow up. I also think they're great ideas. Big fan of Atlas specifically. Big, big fan of Atlas.
Dave Elkan:
Yeah. Fantastic. So, how are your customers seeing the migration to cloud? On the larger end, is that something that they're open to? Is that something that they support?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Everybody is intrigued, I'll start there. Everybody's intrigued. Now, the level of interest depends on the industry and the size. When you have a massive... I'll use banks because to me, banks are kind of like countries. So if you look at a massive bank where you have 30, 40,000 users, usually they have solid infrastructures. They have solid administrators. They have teams that are kind of living off this. It's built its own economy, basically. It runs itself. When you go in there and you try to teach them about cloud and all the great things it'll do, they start asking questions that are very technical and they're very good. There's not really an answer in cloud for yet, and so it gets skittish. Whereas if I go to a 500,000 people organization and they start asking questions about cloud, and usually we have more answers for that. It's just easy, an easier conversation. They don't have the same worries or the same thing troubles on their mind than the admin of 40,000 people. It's just not the same reality that they're seeing.
So I think for now, and I know Atlassian's making a big push into that enterprise space, I think for now you're going to see that growth. But as long as we don't have full autonomy of where our data is and how accessible that data is, it's going to be a problem, as long as FedRAMP isn't available to all, as long as all these different SOCs and compliances aren't available to all. These are very difficult because you've built an ecosystem around a lot of integrations and Easy Agile being to me, one of those integrations because their third-party app, however you want to look at it. Adaptavist has their own third-party app. So you have script runner and all that. We all have third-party apps. So Atlassian can't be like, "Oh, yeah, I'll make a blanket statement. We can do all these things." It's not really true. I'm like, "Hold up, you got to take into account all these different app partners out there that are doing their things and you can't put us all into one roof."I think they're victims of their success. What still making Atlassian great is the partner ecosystem, apps, solutions, sorry, everything, but it's also what's causing the adoption and the speed to which adoption of cloud is happening. It's making it slower than they would want to. I think that was maybe the misstep a little bit when everything got announced was like, "Oh, you guys do rely on these apps a lot." Yeah. A lot of our customers actually would say that the apps are even more important to them than the core. It's just a thing that you're seeing. So to go back to your question, depends on the complexity of the instance. The bigger the instance, usually the more complex it is. So if I go to over 10,000 users, it's going to be a very long conversation. Very, very long conversation.
Dave Elkan:
Yes, it is. It's funny that Atlassian did ship this and say, "Hey." Well, actually, there was a presumption that the apps were covered by SOC 2 or the like as well, and that was a missing... But it was this misunderstanding. But I say as a business owner going through SOC 2, it's a very rewarding and good process to go through. It's hard. We are doing it far earlier than Atlassian did in their own journey, but the sooner you do it, the easier it is. Ideally that as a smaller company, you have less things to worry about and the processes you put in place will be easier to maintain and monitor. So we're excited to really go down the SOC 2 path and to provide that peace of mind to our enterprise customers. So yeah, very good process to go through.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah, you guys are going through it right now. Have you acquired it yet? Did you get your compliance yet or you're on your way to getting that?
Dave Elkan:
No, we're on the way to SOC 2 type 1 at the moment.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Wow. Nice.
Dave Elkan:
Yeah.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah. Yeah. We got security group now in and they're handling all that. I'm not good with the compliances. I'll say it right now, right off the bat, I don't know them very well. I know they're like letters I would like to see next to every apps. That's what I know. I don't know how in depth the processes, but I know it's very involved to the point where you need to have a team dedicated to making that happen. So what have you guys seen so far? It's coming along great. What are some of the challenges that you've seen maybe? I'm just intrigued.
Dave Elkan:
Yeah. Oh, look, so our cloud apps are all architected in the same way, so they all use the same code base to an extent, like the deployment methodology. We haven't done any acquisitions which have bolted on to make that more complicated, so we're making the most of that situation. We've done a fair bit of work over the last quarter or so to put in all the checks and the controls around that deployment. The next thing is to really put in place the processes to ensure that our team understands how to deal with different situations and the like. So, that's something we're going to tackle in the next quarter. I'm excited to go through that and do a bit of a sprint with Nick, my co-founder and co-CEO, to really see how much we can get done in a period of time and really focus on that. I think that the benefit will be that we have a much more understood and clear way of running our business, which is obvious to our customers as well, which is a very good thing. I'm all in favor of it. Yeah.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I think we're seeing some of the similar things, but we did acquire a bunch of stuff and so that is making everything a bit more difficult, for sure.
Dave Elkan:
I can understand. That would be very tricky to try and bridge those gaps and to homogenize enough to be able to have a really clear statement going forward. Yeah. Okay. So we touched quickly on the Atlassian apps that they're bringing. Are there any apps in the marketplace that you have got an eye on that you'd love to go and talk to, of course, Easy Agile aside?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
I mean, of course. Yeah. A big need that I'm noticing now in the market... I don't know if it's a secret or something, I should wait because I know Team '23, they're going to be doing some stuff and I'm really excited for them. So one of the things that we're noticing is... So backups, so enterprise support, basically. Right now, when you're on the cloud, most companies, again, in the 40,000 and plus have strong backup needs and they actually have requirements, laws, things that they need to abide by as far as how long they maintain data, how long they have backups of data and all that. Right now, the way that it's done in cloud isn't nice at all. You actually have to go into the UI. You get a backup. If your backup is large, it's going to take multiple days to process and you got to remember to... It's all manual. There's nothing that really automated.
So, there is a growing market for these kinds of apps. I've been talking all that to these people at Revyz, R-E-V-Y-Z. What they do is they basically automate that process for you and they host your data. Right now, they only do it for a year, but it's still much better than what we're seeing out there. There's a lot of need for services like that, where they... Because I mean, part of the appeal of cloud is obviously hands off, don't have to worry about things anymore and Atlassian only guarantees backups for 21 days. So if you're an enterprise and you're looking for six months at least of data recovery, at least you're not going to get that. So by having a partner like Revyz or all these, there are other apps out there, I'm talking about Revyz specifically because I talk to them a bunch, but a lot of interesting things are happening.
Also, what's amazing about these apps, what these developers have found, and once they've have that process, they now get access to the structure of the data and they've started building tools around that structure. So for instance, that app can actually restore projects and issues and custom fields and configurations. So you don't need to do a full restore. You can actually pick what you want to restore, which is brilliant. It's something that even in data center wasn't easy to do. You couldn't just say like, "Hey, give me that issue." You'd have to restore the snapshot, go into the system, find your stuff. Now being able to go into my UI and Jira, go into my backup app, go and look the issued I deleted by mistake, find it, restore it the same day, it has comments saying, "This was restored by revisits, so make sure blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada." It's just brilliant and I'm really excited to see that grow this year.
Dave Elkan:
That's amazing. Yeah, it's a really intriguing part of this piece that I've never really thought through that that's actually a really important part of running an enterprise, that you have those continuous backups. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's a great insight.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah, it's going to be an interesting market to dive into because we've been asked, even as a service partner, "Can you deliver on this?" The truth is without an app, you can't. There's no real way for me to get a backup. I'd have to go into your instance every day. I don't think you want a consultant going into every day your instance, downloading a backup and throwing it. I'd rather spend my money elsewhere. So these apps are going to be very... I think they're going to be big and I'm really interested to see what happens with all these different ventures.
Dave Elkan:
Well, certainly, a booth I'll be popping by to see if we can include the Easy Agile data in that backup as well.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yes, exactly. So they are looking at other app partners and seeing what they can do. So I think, yeah, absolutely, if you want to have a chat, they're great people.
Dave Elkan:
Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today, JP. That's a wrap. Hey, is there anything else you wanted to touch on before we wrap up? Is there anything you are hoping to get away from the event, to take away from the event? Anything on the sidelines you're going to see when you're there?
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
I mean, obviously, App Day is going to be a big thing. Really excited to meet y'all in person, see everybody. So App Day is the time where I get really technical, get my hands dirty. I don't do that a lot these days. I miss it sometimes just sitting down and doing some good old admin work. So anyway, the App Days are usually when I really get back to the nitty-gritty of let's talk about script runner, where we're at now, and let's meet with Easy Agile, with Temple, with all these different app vendors and talk about what's coming up and what they're seeing. So really looking forward to that. But other than that, no, just looking to have a good time. I'll hopefully get some good social time as well at the evening. Like I said, we won't get ourselves half the fun is also after the events every day, so really looking forward to that, for sure, and meeting all my fellow ecosystem partners and talking to everybody and seeing what they've seen in the past year.
Dave Elkan:
Likewise. I'm at least 1,000% more excited now having talked to you about it. So thank you so much for taking the time today, JP, to talk through that and I can't wait to see you there.
Jean-Philippe Comeau:
Yeah, I can't wait to see you. Thanks for having me.
Dave Elkan:
No probs. Thanks, mate.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.2 John Turley, Digital Transformation Consultant, Adaptavist
Transcript:
Sean Blake:
Hello, everybody. I'm Sean Blake, the host of this episode of the Easy Agile podcast. I'm also Head of Marketing at Easy Agile, where our mission is to help teams around the world work better together. We have a fascinating guest with us today. It's John Turley from Adaptavist. John is a pragmatic Agile leader with 25 years experience working in companies at all levels, from teams to C suite, always bringing real value, adding change to the way organizations work. Dissatisfied with the standard discourse around transformation and agility, he is passionate about applying cutting edge knowledge from fields as diverse as sociology and psychology. We're really excited to have John on the podcast today. So John, thanks so much for being on the Easy Agile podcast.
John Turley:
You're welcome, Sean. Pleasure to be here.
Sean Blake:
Thank you so much. So John, you've got a lot of experience in the Agile space, in the tech space. And I'm not trying to call you old. But I'd love to get a sense of what's changed over 25 years. It must just be night and day from where you started to what you see now.
John Turley:
There's a lot of change. And I'm pretty comfortable with old. I'm 48 now, and it's closest to 30 years now. That tells you when I first wrote that bit in the bio. So the technology has changed. That's mind blowing. I started off in ops, and then infrastructure and project management and stuff and 1999, 2000, it would take us three months and 50,000 quid to build a couple of web servers with a pair of load balancers and firewalls and a database at the back. And now we spin them up in seconds.
John Turley:
This is profound. Platform technology is profound slack or I mean platform technologies, that makes a massive difference to the way we interact. Scale is a massive issue. I would say that the world is sort of dichotomized into very large and quite small organizations. There seem to be less in the middle. It's just a gut feeling. We see, I think trust is collapsed. We see that in Edelman Trust Barometer. We see the complexity has increased. That's deeply problematic for us. [inaudible 00:02:23] has been measuring that one.
John Turley:
And we see that workforce engagement is at all time lows through the Gallup World Poll. Those things are big, big changes. What's the same though is the people, the way the people think, the way we construct our reality, our mindset, if you like, the way we make sense of the world around us is very, very similar. So although we now talk a lot more about Agile, the waterfall and waterfall for many is a bit of a dirty word, not for me and same with command and control. People are taking the same mindsets. This is measurable and provable. People are taking the same mindset that they had around waterfall and command and control using different language of Agile and behaving in the same way. That hasn't changed.
Sean Blake:
Very interesting. So you touched on trust, and how basically we've seen this breakdown of trust across the board. And I've just watched a documentary that's come out on Netflix around the Social Dilemma, and how the trust that we have in these big social media platforms is eroding. And we're getting a little bit skeptical around what these big companies are doing to us as the customer. Do you find that that's a hard balance with the people that you work with around being customer focused, but still building a profitable and growing business?
John Turley:
Yeah, I do. Yes, and the way I think it manifests itself, which again maybe we'll get into the sort of the psychology and the sociology as well as the complexity science, I'm into it later. But there's a very clear way that that lack of trust manifests itself. I'm not sure it's the lack of trust that manifests itself. But there's a very clear thing that's happening is people, there's repeated patterns of behavior I see all over the place in a lot of the work I do, which is one on one and with groups, that people hold on to this idea that their view is right and anything that doesn't comply with that is wrong.
John Turley:
This is a view that comes from the predominant mindset from what [inaudible 00:04:33] call the sort of expert or the achiever mindset, and it becomes a barrier to us collaborating and learning together and innovating. If somebody with a different point of view is dismissed as wrong, then there's no common ground to start to build trust. Trust is eroded from the outset, and that means that we can't collaborate, and in a complex world where we need to collaborate ever more closely and learn together and innovate, that's a deep, deep problem.
John Turley:
And the response seems to be that people actually withdraw, they withdraw into groups, we might call them cliques or echo chambers. The sociologists call this process homophily. This is a function like many say of platforms like Twitter, we retreat into groups that echo the opinions that we already hold that then reinforce those opinions, and separate us from the opinions of others and reinforce the opinions we have. So the gaps between the cliques grow wider, and particularly in times of COVID and the lockdown that we've had here, and that we seem to be maybe heading back into the isolation perhaps adds to that, and we see it more and more. So at a time where we need to be getting our act cliques and talking with understanding with others with different views, we're actually psychologically in a difficult position to be able to do that. And so that's what we might generically call the lack of trust manifests itself in the work that I'm doing. And that's how I see it with almost everybody that I work with, including myself, by the way. It's not an easy thing to conquer.
Sean Blake:
So what does your day to day look like, John? I think your official job title is Digital Transformation Consultant. You work for Adaptivist as one of the most well known Agile consulting practices in the world, I would say. What does that mean for you day to day? What does your nine to five look like?
John Turley:
So we're really involved in three things. I'm really involved in three things. And it's all about learning, collective learning, organization learning. So we're involved in a lot of original research. We do that original research with a number of academic partners in a program that we're putting together. We've been doing a lot of the research on our own. But as it gets bigger and more credible, other partners are coming to join us and they're very credible partners.
John Turley:
And the research is uncovering new learning. And that new learning points us to new consulting practices where we can take that learning and embed it into a workshop, say or how we might use the research instruments that we've borrowed from academia in the real world to measure social networks or psychological complexity or the amount of autonomy in the environment. So we can then use that to work with teams to help them shift from a sort of functionally oriented way of working to a cross functional way of working, which whether we're talking about safe and Agile release chains, or whether we're talking about Lean software management and value streams, whether we're talking at a team level or an organizational level, the challenge is essentially the same. We need to orientate ourselves around the creation of customer value in cross functional teams that are focused on delivering that value, not just delivering on their function. And that switch brings with it some deep, complex, deep psychological challenges that we're just not really equipped to meet. So we bring sort of the people and culture element, the tools and the Agile methodology simultaneously to bear in teams to help them make that shift. So that's really what my day to day work looks like, so the research and the practice.
Sean Blake:
Okay, research and practice. And when it comes to the practice side and encouraging that cross functional collaboration, how hard is it for people to get on board with that recommendation or get on board with what the company is trying to do?
John Turley:
For most people, it's really hard. So my experience before doing the research that I guess we started a couple of years ago I was just referring to, was something like this recently. We'd often get, so I've worked in the Agile space for a long time, I don't quite know when I started working in that space, in other words, full space, but a decade or two, let's say, and now bumped into a repeated problem, we get our, let's say, thinking of a specific example with a specific client about three years ago, very functionally orientated, trying to make that shift into cross functional teams. So we got a group of five people together from different functions, so designers, testers, developers, a couple of ops people, and between them, they should be able to obviously, launch some working code within 10 days or whatever. We were probably trying to spring into the real world.
John Turley:
And they were all great people. I knew them all personally. I spent time working with them all. They were very sort of Agile in the way they approached the development of the software that they did, and we put them in a room virtually to begin with and we asked them to produce a piece of code that works across functions, produce a piece of code and release it at the end of the week. And they didn't. And we thought what on earth happened there? We didn't really understand this, so we tried it again. But we assumed that the problem is because we'd done it virtually.
John Turley:
So this time, we got everybody together in Poland, as it happened in a room, we set it all up, we talked to them at the beginning, then people like me sort of left the room and let them get on with it, got to the end of the week, same outcome, nothing has happened. And if you talk to them, while they say, "Yeah, my phone pinged and there was a support incident, and you just couldn't.", and they had lots of very plausible reasons why they couldn't come together as a cross functional team. But the fact remains twice in a row, the most capable people haven't done it.
John Turley:
So we had a really long think about it, one of the senior leader in the business and myself. And we realized that the only thing that could be happening, the only thing that could be going wrong here is that there must be some sort of breakdown in the dialogue between the group in the room. So we ran it, we ran the workshop, let's call it for a third time. And this time, we had somebody else in the room just watching what was going on.
John Turley:
And they spotted something happened really early on. One of the people from the UK said to one of the Polish developers, they said, "Look, think of us like consultants. We're here to help you, to transfer knowledge to you so that you develop a capability so that you can do this on your own." And at that moment, the person who was in the room said that the dynamic in the room seemed to change. People glazed over. And I think what it was is that that word consultant that the English person had used had a different meaning for a colleague in Krakow. I think that meaning, the meaning of consultant meant, we're just here to tell you what to do and not actually do anything and put ourselves on the hook for any work, just kind of watch you do it.
John Turley:
And I think at that point, they kind of went, "Okay, well, all right, I get it, same old, same old. We'll do the work you English guys talk about it, because it's an English company.", and that breakdown started to occur. So the question we started is, I've seen that all over the place. So the question we started to wrestle with in our research is what's happening in those moments when that dialogue breaks down what's happening?
John Turley:
And what we've discovered is that there is a number of research studies, the biggest is about 10,000 people, that shows that around about 50% of people are at a level, and this is 50% of leaders in a study of 10,000, so for middle management, senior management, so it's a skewed number. So in reality, in software teams, it's probably more than 50% of people have reached a level of psychological complexity that suits the environment as it was, but has some limitations in cross functional working.
John Turley:
So they have a mindset, a way of making their reality that works well in a functional environment, but it's challenged in a cross functional environment. And that mindset, this way of thinking, which is very prevalent, is a way of thinking where individuals draw their self esteem from their expertise, just to put it very short, simple as an oversimplification. And the thing is, if you're drawing your self esteem from your expertise, when your expertise is challenged, it feels personal.
John Turley:
If it feels personal, people are likely to get defensive. And it's not because they're stupid, or they're not interested or they don't want to, the psychologists can show it's a level of psychological complexity, where that's just how our minds work. That's just how our meaning making works. Now, if that's the stage you're at, if we imagine me as a developer sitting down with a tester, and the tester's saying to me, "Look, the way you've written the code isn't the best way to do it for me, because I can't test it."
John Turley:
If I'm drawing my self esteem from my expertise as a developer, I'm likely to reject that, and might even start to think thoughts like, "Well, I think what really needs to happen here is that you need to be a better tester." I think that's the problem. And then we get this separation. Now at the next stage is psychological complexity. And these stages are in a framework that we do move through these stages. Again, it's an oversimplification, but it's observable and measurable. At slightly later stage of psychological complexity, things start to change. People start to recognize that the world is much more complex, that it's not black and white. And actually, there are multiple ways of doing things.
John Turley:
So to go back to my example as a developer, the tester might say to me, "This isn't the best way to write the code as far as I'm concerned." And what I'll hear is the, "Oh, as far as I'm concerned." It might be as far as I'm concerned, it's not fair enough. How can we change the way I'm writing the code to make it easier to test? But I can't do that if I respond like it's a personal criticism, you know what I mean? So what we started to uncover in the research is a correlation between how successful cross functional teams can be, and the level of psychological complexity in the leaders and the individuals in that team.
Sean Blake:
Interesting. So there's a book that we've been reading at Easy Agile recently called Radical Candor. And really, it comes down to giving constructive feedback to each other, not in a way where you're attacking them personally but you're trying to be honest around how we can work more collaboratively. And like you said with that example, how can a developer write code in a way that the QA tester can actually perform the tests on it? For someone who's new to cross functional ways of working, what advice does the research have around preparing that mindset to receive some of that radical candor, to receive that feedback in a way that you don't take it personally?
John Turley:
Well, so it's a great question, you put it really well, because radical candor is fine. We have, I work in a team that is very candid. We have some difficult conversations, and we don't even really dress our words up. And nobody gets offended. We just know that it's a shortcut. We might get our words wrong, but it's a shortcut to unlocking value to finding out how to work together. But it's not about the words that each of us picks to express. It's about how the other chooses to react to the words landing, as much as now that's a dialogue, it's a two way thing, it takes two to tango.
John Turley:
And the way we can develop a mindset that's more suitable to cross functional work is interesting. First of all, we've got to get out of comfort zone. We've got to be prepared to get out of our comfort zone, not far necessarily, and not for very long necessarily, and not without support and understanding from the colleagues around us. But we do need to get out our comfort zone. Otherwise, psychological growth can't occur. This is what I'm talking to about now is the work really of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, who do a lot of work in dialogue on radical candor.
John Turley:
So we've got to get out of our comfort zone. But we've also got to be addressing a complex problem with a group of people when we're outside of our comfort zone. And that complex problem has to be meaningful, and it has to be salient, it has to be something that we care about, it has to be something relevant to our day to day work. And if we've got those characteristics in the environment that we working in, then there is an opportunity for individuals to choose to develop their own psychological complexity.
John Turley:
So that environment that has those characteristics, we would call in Kegan's word a deliberately developmental environment, because we can't separate the development of individual mindsets from the environment that that mindset functions in. The reason most of us have got the mindset that draws self esteem from expertise is because that's actually what most environments that we work in or not. That works in a functional environment. It's where you get promoted, it's where you get hired. It's where you get your Scrum Master badge and all that other stuff that gives you status and makes you feel good.
John Turley:
The world that we work in for many of us honors that expert way of making meaning. It doesn't honor learning and admission that yours might not be the best way to do things in the same way. So we have to shift the environment to support the individual to choose to take that developmental step because it can't be something that's done to them. You can't make people develop a more complex psychology. You can't train them to do it. You can only give them an environment that supports that step if they want to take it and if they don't, fair enough, that's okay. But maybe cross functional teams for them, if they don't want to because the hard place is to work.
Sean Blake:
Is it a problem that people find their expertise or find their self esteem from expertise? Is part of it encouraging men to find their confidence in things outside of their work or is expertise an honorable pursuit?
John Turley:
I wouldn't say it's a problem at all. Expertise, and the development of expertise is an honorable pursuit. Drawing your self esteem from your expertise is a very necessary part of our psychological development is a stage that can't be skipped really. I said to you before that I don't like to say things like that without the research base, but the psychology certainly imply that it's a stage that can't be skipped. So we've got to do it. We've got to go through this stage. The stage before we're drawing our self esteem from our expertise is where we draw our self esteem from our membership of the group.
John Turley:
And that's very important too, if you think of us as children or being part of a group is essential for our survival, so ingratiating yourself into that group, not rocking the boat, so we don't jeopardize our group membership is critical. But at some point, people start to realize, well, actually, I have to rock the boat a little bit if we want some direction. So separating your meaning making from drawing your self esteem from the group to drawing your self esteem from your expertise is a development in that sense. Drawing your self esteem from your expertise means the best way to write this code is let me train somebody to do it.
John Turley:
It's critical. But like all developmental stages, it has its limitations. So it's not problematic in any way, unless the individual is in a complex environment in which that expert way of making meaning isn't well suited. And then you got a mismatch between psychological complexity and environmental complexity. And when you've got a mismatch like that, the individual's anxiety will go up probably, employee engagement goes down, certainly wellbeing goes down, people revert to an earlier way of making their meaning that's more embedded in their expertise or the group, just to the point, they need to get more sophisticated.
John Turley:
So the problem is the mismatch between psychological complexity and environmental complexity. That's why we need to support, as the world gets more complex, that's why we need to get all get better at supporting the development of individuals into a level of psychological complexity that suits the more complex environment. That's kind of the nub of the problem. Nothing wrong with being an expert in drawing your self esteem from your expertise. People have done it forever, and will continue to do so. Every time you get in a flash car and you feel good, because you're in a car, you're drawing your self esteem from the status symbol, which is very similar to your expertise. As a young man, I put on my sharp suit and I feel a million dollars. Nothing wrong with that at all, but it's limited. That's the problem.
Sean Blake:
Understood, understood. So you've spoken about research and measurement and having an evidence based way of making decisions. When it comes to this cross functional way of working or digital transformation or teams moving from the old way of working to an Agile way of working, do we have evidence to say one way of working is superior to another way of working? And when you're talking to these clients or these customers, can you guarantee that if they work in this way, it's going to lead to better outcomes for the business? How do you approach that conversation?
John Turley:
No, I can't do either of those things. So I would never go anywhere near nor would I research saying that one way of working is better than another way of working or we can say like the mindset and the environment that there are ways of working that will work better depending on the problem that you're trying to solve. But it's very unlikely that one could be considered right and the other wrong in all sorts of circumstances, but more than that, I would say that doesn't matter what your way of working is or a team's way of working is. If the mindset is the way of making sense, if the reality doesn't also shift, then you're just following a new process, a new way of working with the old way of thinking, and you're going to get the same results just with different words.
John Turley:
So for me, that isn't entirely true, I'm quite biased. I guess in the work I do, I've got quite a perspective. If you shift mindset, then everything else will drop into place. If you change everything else, but don't shift mindset, nothing else will drop into place. What we can say however, is that there are three things, let's call them the three elements of a cross functional team that are hidden to people in organizations at the moment.
John Turley:
So generally, we think if we've got people with the right experience and skills working suitably hard, then they're going to work as a successful cross functional team. And if they're not, they're either not working hard, they're not the right type of person, or they haven't got the right set of skills, so fire them and hire somebody else or give them or put them on a training course, and that solves the problem, which of course it doesn't.
John Turley:
We would say that there are three other elements that remain hidden parts of the cross functional team that are more critical than that, and we're beginning to be able to demonstrate that there is a correlation between these three things that I'm going to tell you about on both employee engagement and team performance.
John Turley:
And these three hidden elements are the structure of the social networks that underpin the way people work. So if we think about how we as groups of human beings organize ourselves, we might think about hierarchies and hierarchy diagrams and old charts and bosses and stuff. That's not really very important for a cross functional team. What's much more important is the social network that develops across that team, who works with whom and when and how, right? Do the developers and the testers and the testers and the ops guys and the designers and the technical architects, do they all work together in a cross functional team?
John Turley:
Now that's a social network. That's a network that's formed through individual autonomy because they want to get the job done not because the boss says you've got to go and do it. In fact, it can't be done because the boss says go and do it. So we have worked with some friends in academia with actually an Australian company called Polinode to measure their various ways we can get the data, what those social networks look like. And the structure of those social networks is key.
John Turley:
As we look at the structure of social networks, we can see whether those teams look like their function, sorry, organized hierarchically, or were they organized for cross functional working because of the network structure. So network structure is one element. The other is psychological complexity. So we've worked with a gentleman called David Rook, who did the original research and developed a psychometric instrument that can measure an individual's stage of psychological complexity, both the structure and the substructure. And that mindset complexity is also linked along with network structure to where the teams can function cross functionally.
John Turley:
The third thing that was the hardest bit, the last bit of the jigsaw that we sort of put into our hypothesis is we need to have adequate degrees of autonomy. We needed to develop a much better understanding of what it means for teams to be autonomous than we had, and how that autonomy relates to control and how control undermines autonomy and how we all tend to be orientated, to taking the cues in the environment either as instructions, which we must comply with or invitations to be autonomous. And we now have another psychometric instrument. So the third instrument that we use, we call the motivation orientation scale, excuse me, that can measure an individual's likelihood to interpret inbound information as an instruction or an invitation to be autonomous.
John Turley:
And once we know that, we can start to challenge this common perception within product teams, software teams that the team is autonomous, because everybody thinks they are autonomous. And in fact, everybody is, research shows mostly autonomous, but we might be almost entirely autonomous, or we might be 60% autonomous. We can measure this. And then we can say to teams, "Look, you are autonomous as a bunch of individuals. But you also have this control thing going on where you're responding to inbound requests."
John Turley:
And we need to be more autonomous. So once we can start to measure it, we can start to challenge their ideas of how autonomous they are. And we can start to examine where the teams are choosing to respond from that control orientation or their autonomy. So they're the three things, autonomy and control, complexity of mindset and network structure, equal employee engagement and team performance. That's what our research says. So what we can say is, to your question in the beginning, there is a network structure, a level of psychological complexity and the amount of autonomy that correlates to successfully working as a cross functional team. And in that sense, we might think that those levels are right, in some sense.
Sean Blake:
Okay. So what does a 100% autonomous team look like? And do they still have interaction with, say the executive team on a day to day basis? Or are they at odds, those two concepts?
John Turley:
No, they're not at odds. They do have, they might have day to day, I suppose they would, they will have either directly or indirectly interactions with the executive team. So the first thing we need to bear in mind here is that the research that we're leaning on is something called self determination theory, which is a theory of motivation. And it has quite a specific definition of autonomy, which is not what we might normally think. Often autonomy is taken to mean as sort of the general use of independence. So if we buy a company, we might leave it to run autonomously, which would mean we just left it alone for a while. And autonomy in this context doesn't mean that. It means individuals acting of their own volition, individuals deciding how to act towards a common purpose. So the team has to have the vision which they can self organize around. You can't self organize without autonomy. If you don't got autonomy, you have to wait to be told what to do. And then it's not self organization.
John Turley:
So autonomy leads to self organization, and self organization can be around a common vision or a set of goals or an OKR is quite a sophisticated way to do instead of management by objective, then we can self organize in a way that sort of honors the need to be part of an organization, doing some coordinated work, but that doesn't rely on a manager telling the individual what to do.
John Turley:
That's what an autonomous team looks like. An autonomous team, you need the autonomy is really a self organizing team. And the self organizing team is deciding what the team ought to do in order to achieve a wider objective, which could be integrating with other self organizing teams. And obviously, the direction is set often by the executive. So all these things sort of come into play. It's not a question of control on the one hand or autonomy on the other or Agile on one hand or waterfall on the other.
John Turley:
So we're going to blend the two. We're going to balance them. And that balance needs to shift not only across teams, but also depending on the level that the organization is, that the team is working in the organization. And what I mean by that is the need for control and measurement increases in many ways as you go higher up the organization. So we want high degrees of autonomy at a team level where we're creating customer value. But we need to recognize that that self organizing team has a legitimate requirement to integrate with some elements of controlling the organization, because if we have some elements of control, then we can't do the accounting and be accountable for where we spend investors' or shareholders' money, you know what I mean? So it's much more complex in the sort of the dichotomized world that people tend to look at, which is very black and white. Is it Agile or is it waterfall? Are we autonomous or are we control orientated where you're both and the blend of which needs to shift depending on the environment here.
Sean Blake:
Okay, okay. So there's always a need for a bit of control on top of the autonomy.
John Turley:
It's a balance, right? We're all comfortable with control, aren't we? We all comply with speed limits, for example. We're perfectly okay with that. Control is not a dirty word. Some will do things that we're told to do sometimes, and we're happy to do it. Sometimes we do it begrudgingly. We're not happy to do it. Sometimes we reject it. There's nothing wrong with control in itself. It's the overuse of control to coerce people to do things that they don't want to do. That's when it becomes problematic because it undermines an individual's autonomy, which is a basic, universal psychological need. We all need to have a sufficient degree of autonomy to feel well.
Sean Blake:
Okay. Okay. So we know that Agile's had a good run, it's been decades now. So do you still find that you come across the same objections when you're speaking to these executive teams or these companies perhaps from more traditional industries? Do they still have the same objections to change as they did in the past? And how do you try and overcome them?
John Turley:
Yes, they do. So one of my strange experiences as a young project or program manager, whatever I was, is that when I would end up in a room full of software developers who were Agile, probably the language they would have used at the time and a bunch of infrastructure engineers who followed waterfall, and the distaste for one group for the other, it was almost visceral, and you could see it in them. There would be a bunch in, I don't know, Linux t-shirts and jeans, and then the infrastructure waterfall people would probably be wearing suits.
John Turley:
I mean, it was really obvious, and it was hard to bring these groups together. That was my experience in let's say, around about 2000, I sat with a client yesterday, who said exactly the same thing. They said that in their organization, which is going through a very large, Agile transformation at the moment, they said, "These are their ways. We kind of got people at the two extremes. We can sort of bookend it. We've got the waterfall people who think their way is best and we got the Agile people who are totally on board with Agile transformation."
John Turley:
And what I heard when the individual said that is quite senior leaders, the Agile people are on board with the Agile transformation brackets because they think their way of working is best. And what I tried to point out to that senior manager was that that was one group, there were perceptions anyway, that one group was into Agile and got cross functional working, all that got cross functional working and the other group didn't, actually the two groups were operating in the same way.
John Turley:
They both thought their way of working was right, and one was espousing the virtues of waterfall and the other Agile, but the fact was they both thought that they were right, and the other was wrong. And they were both wrong in that. Waterfall works really, really well in a lot of scenarios. And full on Agile works really, really well in some environments. In some environments, it's quite limited by the way, in my opinion.
John Turley:
My friend and colleague, John Kern, who was a co author of the Agile Manifesto in 2001 or 2004, whatever it was, I can't remember. He says, "I love waterfall. I do loads of waterfall, I just do it in very small chunks." And because the fact is we've got to do work sequentially in some manner. I can't work on an infinite number of things in parallel. There has to be a sequence.
John Turley:
And that really, when I heard him say that, it sort of filled my heart with joy in a way because for somebody with a waterfall background, I used to say, "Look, I don't get this. In waterfall project management, we're talking about stages. And in Agile, we're talking about sprints." And they've both got an end. One's got a definition of done. And one's got some acceptance criteria, and they both got a beginning. The only difference is the language and the duration.
John Turley:
So what if we make sprints, sorry, stages 10 days long? What's the difference now? And yet people would say, "Well, we're Agile, and we do sprints, and that would still be a stage." Come on, we've got to find some common ground right to build a common meaning making between large groups of people. Otherwise, only the Agile listeners amongst us can work for Agile organizations, and everybody else is doomed. And that's not true, is it? That's nonsense, right? So we've got to come together and find these ways of working as my friend John Kern points out so eloquently.
Sean Blake:
Okay, that's good advice. So for these, some people that you meet, there's still this resistance that has been around for many years. How do you go about encouraging people to get out of their comfort zone to try this cross functional way of working and be more transparent, I guess with contributing to the team and not necessarily pushing towards being just an individual contributor?
John Turley:
Another great question, Sean. So there are a couple of ways we can do it. The psychometric instrument that I mentioned earlier, that can sort of measure I kind of always put that in inverted commas, because it doesn't really measure anything, it assesses, I suppose, is a really, really powerful tool. Off the back of that measurement, the psychologists that we work with can create a report that explains lots of this sort of meaning making stuff, adult developmental psychology to the individual. And it tends to be mind blowing. It really shifts people's perspective about what they are and how they're operating in the world.
John Turley:
Once people start to understand that there are these developmental stages, and we all move through them potentially to the last days of our life, we can start to see the disagreements. They just start to fall away. Disagreements start to fall away, because they cease to be seen as opposing views that can't be reconciled, because I'm this type of person and they're that type of person.
John Turley:
And they start to be seen as incompatibilities in meaning making. So people start to go, "Okay, well, I think this and you think that. How are we both making our meaning around this, that means we can see other's perspective?" And immediately, then you've started to find a mechanism to find some common ground.
John Turley:
So the leadership development profile report, which is the report that comes from the psychometric instrument really sheds a lot of light on for the individual, both on how they're working and what development looks like, what psychological development looks like for them. So that's a powerful tool. We have another service that we call dialogue partnering, which we're piloting, which is sort of what over an eight or 10 week program, it's a one on one collaborative inquiry into how an individual is making their meaning, and what the strengths of their meaning making and the limitations of their meaning making are.
John Turley:
And once people start to realize that the way, the reason they feel defensive because the way they code has just been criticized is because they're drawing their meaning from being the best coder on the planet. But there is a development path that leaves that behind, which is where many, many people get to. It's kind of like an a-ha moment, people just realize that reality is different to what they thought and it can be adjusted.
John Turley:
So the LDP, the Leadership Development Profile reports, dialogue partnering, and working with senior management to create a deliberately developmental environment, which does those things I mentioned before, they're the critical tools that we use to help individuals unlock their own psychological development. And the question is, of course, why would they be motivated to do this? Why would they care? And they care, because 80% of people have got a very low level of engagement in their work. Most people are treading water, killing time. It's not a joyous place to be. Once people start to work in cross functional teams and get involved in joyous work with their colleagues to create things they couldn't, which is a basic human instinct, that's a buzz, then you come into work and enjoying yourself.
John Turley:
That's what I said to you at the beginning of that call, right? I'm having a great time, I'm working with some brilliant people unlocking new knowledge that we believe humankind doesn't have. That's a buzz. I'm not treading water in my role, you know what I mean? And this isn't unique to me. In my view, the whole world could be like that. We could all work in roles like that, maybe that's got a bit far. But certainly, many more of this could then currently do to get on board with the psychological development and enjoy your role more, enjoy your work. There's a lot of time.
Sean Blake:
Yeah, I really resonate with what you said about the buzz. And I've seen that happen when the light bulb comes on in people, and it's no longer this factory line of work getting passed down to you. But you realize you're now part of a team, everyone's there to support you, you're working towards a common goal. And it's transparent, you can see what other people are working on, and you're helping each other build something together. It's actually fun. For the first time in a lot of people's careers, it's a fun and enjoyable experience to come to work. So that must make you feel really good about doing what you do.
John Turley:
Yeah, it does. It's why I get out of bed, and it's what I've been about for 20 years trying to unlock this, really help other people unlock this. I got a phone call from a colleague the other day who said they were doing some exercise, and they were thinking about their new role. And they thought to themselves, this is what it feels like to do joyous work.
John Turley:
I mean, that [inaudible 00:42:51] job done, because this is a very capable individual. Once they're feeling like that, you know that they're going to do great things. When they're feeling like they're other people feeling, that people are clot watching, or there's this culture of busyness, where we can't admit that we don't know things. And then we've got to be in a meeting doing something, in the transparent world that you're just talking about, if I've got any work to do, I can just sit and say, "I'm going to work today, I'm waiting for more stuff to write." And it's not a bad thing. It's like, great, you're working at a sustainable pace. That's a good thing. I worked for a Swiss bank for years and years, working at a sustainable pace but nobody was interested, you need to work at a full on flat out unsustainable pace. And when you're burned out, you can go and we'll get somebody else to come in and do it. That's how it works. That's miserable.
Sean Blake:
It's not what we want, Sean, is it? It's not what we want. And unfortunately, a lot of people have been there before and they've experienced it. And once they see the light, they never want to go back to it, which I guess is a good thing once you recognize that there's a better way.
John Turley:
Yeah, agreed.
Sean Blake:
Yeah. Okay, well, I think we're going to wrap up shortly. I do have two more questions for you before we call an end.
John Turley:
I'll try and keep the answers brief.
Sean Blake:
No, that's fine. I'm really enjoying it. I could probably go for another hour but I know we've got other things to do. So in the research, I've read some of your blog posts, and I watched some of the talks that you've done and events in the past, and you speak about this concept of hidden commitments. And I just like to learn a bit more, what is a hidden commitment? And what's the implication?
John Turley:
Great question. So Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, developmental psychologists, wrote a book called Immunity to Change. This is a book that I read here a few years ago. And in there, Bob and Lisa talk about hidden commitments. And so they start by pointing out that we all make New Year's resolutions and they all fail. We really mean them when we make them. And when I was in my late teens, maybe I really did mean them when I made them. But I could never keep them.
John Turley:
In another book, Kegan points out, I think it's in the book called The Evolving Self. He points out that a large majority of men, after they've had heart attacks, I think it's a study in America. But it's been a while since I read it, I think it's six out of seven, don't change either their diet or their exercise regime after they've had a heart attack. And the reason he uses that as a case study in the book, because he's pointing out that it's not that these people don't know what to do, you need less calories in, more out. And it's not that they're not motivated to do it. They've had a near death experience. They'd like to stay alive, we presume.
John Turley:
Yet still, they don't make any meaningful change to their diet, their exercise regime, why not? And what Bob and Lisa say in the book from their research is that it's down to hidden commitments. We all have our way of making meaning. We have our values and our assumptions that we absorb from society as if by osmosis. And we don't question them. We can't question all of the assumptions that we absorb as we grow up. It's just not possible. So we have these hidden assumptions that we're committed to hidden commitments. And sometimes, these hidden commitments conflict with our stated objectives. And when the hidden commitment conflicts with our stated objective, the result is that we get very confused about the fact that the stated objective sort of falls by the wayside, and we don't really understand why. We might think, I would think a common out, because I just need to try harder, I just need more willpower. I just need to stay the course. And it's not true very often. There is something else in your meaning making this conflicted with our stated objective. And once you can surface it, then you can start to examine that hidden commitment, and you can play around with it.
John Turley:
And when you can play around with it, then you're adjusting your meaning making. And the technique that we use in dialogue partnering comes from Bob and Lisa's book, where we're essentially uncovering those hidden commitments and seeing how they conflict with commitment. So that's sort of, and then once you can see it, and you can experiment with it, you can start to unlock change in yourself. Peter Senge, I think he's director of innovation. He's very famous, director of innovation for MIT. And he has a beautiful little quote, something like, "What folly it is to think of transforming our organizations without transforming ourselves?"
John Turley:
We need to change our relationship with power in order to change the way power is distributed across our organizations. And that's an example of a hidden commitment that we don't normally think about. We just think we can empower people magically, whilst retaining all the power for the senior manager. And that just doesn't work. There's a hidden commitment, conflicting with the idea that we want to empower our teams, which is a quite flawed idea.
Sean Blake:
Wow. Okay. Well, I really like the approach to work and looking at the social structure, the social networks, and the psychology behind it all. It's really fascinating and it's not something I've really come across before, especially in the Agile space. So that's really unique. Thanks for sharing that, John. Last question for you. 2020 has been interesting to say the least. We've talked about some things that have stayed the same over your career, some things that have change. What do you think is going to come next, looking forward to the next five, 10 years? What are some of those trends that you think are really going to stand out and maybe change the way that your work, it changes the way that that your nine to five looks or changes the way that you interact with your clients?
John Turley:
I think that this won't just change the way my nine to five looks. It will change like everybody's nine to five looks. I think that the world is in a difficult place. A lot of us are upset, and it looks like a bit of a mess, and we're all anxious, I think. A lot of us are anxious. But as a friend said to me, he was quoting somebody else, never let a good crisis go to waste. The amount of changes, a lot of energy in the system, the amount of changes in the system is palpably changing things.
John Turley:
Many of us recognize there must be a better way of doing things because our ways of organizing ourselves as society, including our organizations is collapsing. It doesn't work anymore. People are realizing through work that people like the names I've mentioned, and through our original research, I hope will sort of contribute in an original way to this, that there is a better way of organizing ourselves that humankind does have the knowledge and the experience to do what we need to do.
John Turley:
It just isn't in IT. We need to look outside of it to what the psychologists say about mindset, not what the Agile people say about mindset. That's a radical idea. And as we import this learning and this knowledge, we have a framework that helps us understand to a much greater degree what's really going on, and how we can unlock real change. So everything that I talked about today, very little of it is original. We have some original work I can't really talk about. Does it matter? The knowledge is out there. If we do the people and culture bit and the tools and the methodology together, then it scales, then we change the way organizations work, which is going to change everybody's nine to five.
Sean Blake:
That's great. It's bringing it back to basics, isn't it? What we know about human beings, and now let's apply that to what we know about work. So that's really eye opening. And I've learned a lot from our conversation, John. I've got a few books and a few research papers to go and look at after this. So thank you so much for appearing on the Easy Agile podcast, and we really appreciate your time.
John Turley:
Sure, my pleasure. I mean, I love and we love at Adaptavist to sharing what we're doing. So we can all engage in more joyous work, man. So thanks for helping us get the message out there.
PodcastEasy Agile Podcast Ep.17 Defining a product manager: The idea of a shared brain
In this episode, I was joined by Sherif Mansour - Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian.
We spoke about styles of product management and the traits that make a great product manager. Before exploring the idea of a shared brain and the role of a product engineer.
Sherif has been in software development for over 15 years. During his time at Atlassian, he was responsible for Confluence, a popular content collaboration tool for teams.
Most recently, Sherif spends most of his days trying to solve problems across all of Atlassian’s cloud products. Sherif also played a key role in developing new products at Atlassian such as Stride, Team Calendars and Confluence Questions. Sherif thinks building simple products is hard and so is writing a simple, short bio.
Hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did. Thanks for a great conversation Sherif.