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

"We spoke in detail about scaling agile, being a SAFe fellow, discipline, the traits of effective leaders and how to trust your people."

Transcript

Nick Muldoon:

Good day, folks. Thanks for joining us for another Easy Agile Podcast. This morning, I'm joined by Em Campbell-Pretty of Pretty Agile. Em is one of 22 SAFe fellows globally and she's been doing agile transformations at scale for over a decade now. She's also the author of two books, The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck and Tribal Unity. So, all about culture and psychological safety here, and all about obviously scaling agile release trains, tips and tricks.

Nick Muldoon:

My key takeaways that I was really jazzed about, the traits of effective leaders for scaling agile transformations and being an effective organization, trust, as in trusting their people, an openness to learning and a willingness to learn, the ability to experiment and treat things as failures if they are failures, and discipline. Em and I talked a bit about discipline today as a trait of leaders. It's a really great episode and I took a lot from it, and you'll hear my takeaways at the end and what I need to go and learn after some time with Em this morning. So, let's get started. How many weeks a year are you typically on the road?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

How many weeks a year am I typically on the road? A lot, most. It would be unusual for me to spend four weeks without going somewhere. That would be unusual. I don't travel every week, but I travel most weeks, and I travel in big blocks. Right? So, I'll go and do ... Like I said, just before the lockdown, we did three weeks in Auckland, so that was in February-March.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

We went to Auckland, we had a client in Auckland, we just stayed there. So, three weeks in Auckland, came back here, and did not return to Auckland. Returned to support that client virtually over Teams and Zoom was how that one went. But yeah. Normally between running around Australia, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, the US, New Zealand, yeah, not home that often, normally. This has been truly bizarre.

Nick Muldoon:

So, this is a very unusual year for someone like yourself that's flying around visiting clients all over the world.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a very strange year. It's an interesting difference on energy as well. Not flying all the time I think is good for my body. I feel the difference. I also feel the difference sitting in a chair all the time. So, I was traveling a lot, but I was on my feet most days when I was working. Now if I'm working, I'm sitting a lot.

Nick Muldoon:

You're sitting down. Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, that's interesting. But I don't miss the jet lag at all. I don't miss the amount of time the travel consumes at all. In fact, it's been nice. I've had a little bit of head space. I've probably blogged more this year than I have in a few years because I've just had some head space and being able to think. But I don't get to see the world either, and all my holidays got canceled. So, nevermind work. I had trips to Europe. Four weeks from now, I was supposed to be in Canada seeing polar bears.

Nick Muldoon:

Aw.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Tell me about it!

Nick Muldoon:

I would love to see polar bears. They look so cuddly on TV. I'm not sure that that would actually be the circumstance if I was to try to approach one and give one a cuddle.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. I don't think cuddling was involved. I was told I could bring a camera and a tripod, which means obviously I'm going to stand some distance away from this polar bear and take photos. But that will not be happening either. So, no holidays and no travel for work, and of course, being in Melbourne, not even any, let's just go to [crosstalk 00:04:15].

Nick Muldoon:

Coffee or anything like that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Just nothing.

Nick Muldoon:

Nothing.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Nothing.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, because you've been on legit lockdown.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

So, tell me then about the shift over the last 10 or 15 years in these scaled, agile transformations. Obviously today, like you described with this client in Auckland, everything's got to be remote. Presumably, not as effective. But I'd love to get a sense of what the evolution is from the transformations 10 years ago, banking, telcos, that sort of environment to the clients that you're working with today. Describe what it was like 10 years ago.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, 10 years ago, and it's so interesting to reflect on this now, I read Scaling Software Agility, which is a book that Dean published in 2007. Then I discovered that wasn't the latest book, so then I read Agile Software Requirements. This was 2011. I'm this crazy, angry business sponsor with this program of work I'd been sponsoring for five years that's never delivered anything, and in this cra-

Nick Muldoon:

You were the crazy, angry business sponsor?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was the crazy [inaudible 00:05:26]. I was very angry. You would be angry too if you were me. I refer to it now as the money fire. So, basically, here's my job. Right? Go to the CFO, ask for money. Give the money to IT. IT lights a match, sets it on fire. Comes back, asks me for money. I get to go back to the CFO and say I need more money. Five years. Five years. That's all I did. Ask for money and try to explain where the other money went.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Anyway, in the strangest restructure ever, I end up the technology GM for the same group I had been the business sponsor of for the past five years. Apparently, they couldn't find anybody appropriately qualified. So, you can do it, Em. Sure. So, I'm a bit of a geek, so I read books, and I'm reading these books by Leffingwell because I'd been doing some agile ... So, I'd been doing something I'd been calling agile. Let's just go with that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

It was interesting to me because I could see little rays of light. But it still wasn't really making anything happen, so hence the reading. These books talk about this agile release train [inaudible 00:06:46] that sounds cool. We should so do this thing. So, I set about launching this train at a Telstra in early 2012. It wasn't called SAFe, right? It was just the books and these things called an agile release train.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Now, to look back 10 years ago, it wasn't called SAFe. People weren't running around doing this. I was not actually really qualified for the job I was in. Well, I wasn't a technology leader by any stretch of the imagination, and I decide that I'm just going to launch an agile release train. So, there were rare and unusual beasts, and I'm not sure I really understood that when I went down the path of doing it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I'm big on the, I read it in a book, I read it in a blog, I heard it at a conference, I'll just try it. That's very much always been my mental model. So, I read it in a book and I just tried it. Then we discover that actually, literally nobody is doing this, so it becomes Australia's first agile release train and Australia's first SAFe implementation. Oh, boy, have I learned a lot since then.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, yeah. I was reflecting on that because I dug out The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck, right? This is one of the ones that you signed for Tegan. But obviously, you've learned a ton since then because you've managed to put together a tome of tips and tricks and things to avoid as you are pursuing these transformations. As an industry, though, well, as an industry, I guess this spans many industries, but as a practice these days, are we actually getting better at these transformations? Are there companies out there today, Em, that are still taking piles of money and setting it on fire?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I think I meet people every day who hear my story and go, "Oh, my god. You used to work here?" So, I think there's still many, many organizations that have an experience that is like the experience I had back in 2010 and what have you. So, it seems to be something that really resonates with people. I guess so many of the businesses we go into now either are not agile at all or, I guess like my world was, doing something they call agile. What we find is the something that they call agile, I wouldn't say it's not agile. But it leaves a lot to be desired.

Nick Muldoon:

They're on a journey, right?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess so because they end up having a conversation with us. So, they understand that what they're doing is not enough. They understand that what they're doing isn't getting them the results that they want. I don't know that they understand why. It's interesting to me sometimes that they look to SAFe because you asked me about how's the client base changed? One of the things that's really interesting in Australia is we get far more of the small to medium sized companies now than the big ones.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, they're companies that consider themselves agile. But what we're calling them, the startups that are no longer startups, right? These are organizations that they're generally old 10, 20 year old startups and they're scaling and they see their problem as a scaling problem. So, that's what leads them to a conversation around the scaled agile framework.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

When we look at them through a SAFe lens, we go, "Gee, you're tiny. But okay. I can see that you can have an agile release train and it won't do you any harm. In fact, it would probably help you a lot in terms of mid-range planning," because mid-range planning just seems to be nonexistent for a lot of these organizations. Prioritization. A lot of these small organizations, very knee-jerky in terms of how they prioritize, bouncing from one thing to the other.

Nick Muldoon:

Are they reacting to the market, or are they reacting to the leaders, maybe the lack of discipline in the leadership?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You know what? They would say they're reacting to the market. I would say they've got a discipline issue.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:11:23].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I read, obviously, big reader, last summer, obviously Australian summer, US winter, I read Melissa Perry's The Build Trap. Interesting book and your well respected thought leader in product management. Not a big fan of SAFe. Probably not a big fan of agile either was the takeaway I had from her book. But the thing that she does talk about that I really thought was valuable was the lunacy in chasing your competitors. So, building features because your competitors-

Nick Muldoon:

Your competitors [crosstalk 00:12:06].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... build them, or building features to land a contract or retain a customer. So, I thought she sees all of that as lunacy, and I tend to agree. So, that was my ... I think that's quite interesting. Her perspective is you don't know if the competitor's actually having any luck with that thing that they've built. So, if you build it because they built it, you don't know. You have no idea. So, don't just build it because they've built it. It might not be doing them any favors either.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Of course, once you start just doing random stuff for this big customer or this big client, you start to lose your way as an organization. People end up with completely different versions of their products, branches that they can't integrate anymore. It's interesting. So, when I look at that, I go, "I feel like there's a discipline issue in some of these organizations at the leadership level."

Em Campbell-Pretty:

What is it we're trying to do? What is our vision? What is our mission? What is our market? What are we doing to test and learn in that market, as opposed to just get a gun, let's do everything, grab everything? Oh, my goodness. They were doing that over there. Stop this, start this, stop this. Of course, if you're stopping and starting all the time, you're not delivering anything, and that seems to be something that we see a lot with these organizations. They're not delivering.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I'm not saying their delivery mechanism is perfect. There's challenges there too. But some part of the problem is the inability to stay a course. Pick a course and stay a course. I'm not saying don't pivot, because that's stupid too. But being more deliberate in your choices to pivot, perhaps. Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you get a sense, Em, that there are leadership teams in various geographic regions that are more effective at this and more effective at that longterm planning and having that discipline and that methodical approach to delivery over an extended time period?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I think regions and cultures and nationalities certainly play a role in the leadership, I don't know, persona, personality. I don't know that I could say when I've worked in this country or this part of the world that their leaders are better at forethought. I think some cultures lend themselves to lean and agile more than others. Hierarchical cultures are really, really challenging.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That can be both a geographic thing, but it can also just be an industry thing, right? So, government can be very hierarchical. The banks can be very hierarchical. Some of the Asian cultures are very hierarchical. But some companies are just very hierarchical as well. So, who owns the company, who leads the company, all of that can play a big role in what's acceptable because so much of success in this scaled agile journey comes down to a leadership that is willing to trust the teams, a leadership that is willing to learn, a leadership that's willing to experiment, and a leadership that's prepared to be disciplined.

Nick Muldoon:

So, leadership with trusting the teams, willing to learn, willing to experiment, and with discipline. They're those four things that you-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. I'll make a note of those, Em. I'll come back to those. Trust, learn, experiment, and discipline. I'm interested, I guess, this year being a very interesting, a very unique year for doing remote transformation work and coaching and consulting, 10 years ago, what was the percentage of remote team members distributed teams? Now, you've basically, I think the big banks in Australia aren't even going back to the office until 2021. Atlassian is not going back to the office until 2021. Twitter, Jack Dorsey, my old CEO, said, "Work from home forever," sort of thing. What's the takeaway for this year and what do you expect for 2021 and beyond?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, look. This year has been eyeopening, and look, some things are, as I would have anticipated, some things have been different. So, obviously, we're seeing entire organizations going online. We're seeing the teams are online, the PI planning's online, everything's online. That's actually in some ways opened up opportunity. So, where we've had clients who have had the most odd setups in terms of distribution, and you can make a train work where you've got teams across two locations. But we're big fans of the entire team is in Sydney or the entire team is in India. We don't have half the team in Sydney and half the team in India.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

But organizations really struggle with that because perhaps all the testers are in India and then you want a tester on every team and now you've got a problem. How do you create a complete team and not cross the time zones? So, the opportunity becomes if I can find teams that are not physically co-located but time zone friendly, I have a little bit more option. So, I can have a train that operates between, I don't know, Sydney and India. Or I can find a four hour overlap in their day, and I can insist that that team works 100% online.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, the big thing that we'd advise against is I don't want that team hybrid. Right? I don't want three people sitting in the office in Sydney and three people sitting in their homes in India. I want everybody online. I want an even playing field, and I think we can do that now in a way that is more acceptable than before. Because the same advice I was giving, gee, back when I wrote Tribal Unity, same advice. Right?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, 2016, everybody, equal playing field. If you're going to be distributed, everyone has to be online, as opposed to some people online and some people in a room. So, that's a more acceptable answer now than it was prior to this year. So, that's good. I think that's good.

Nick Muldoon:

In 2021, then, Em, you mean this is just going to play forward. I guess there's going to be a reversion of some of these companies back to the office because they've got huge real estate and workplace infrastructure already.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. So, look. We're seeing clients closing offices the same way that you see some of the companies in the US doing that. We're also seeing parts of Australia and New Zealand with no particular COVID impact at this point actually going back into the office, and having created that example of teams that are crossing time zones, and then going back into the office and going back to that hybrid space. So, that's interesting and [crosstalk 00:20:08].

Nick Muldoon:

So, where you're back into that environment where you might have some people working together in an office that can get a cup of coffee together and then some that are stuck still at home. I guess there's not just even regional differences, right? If you've got a team member that's got a particular health situation, they're not going to feel comfortable necessarily coming back into the office, regardless of the situation, until there's a vaccine or something.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, yeah. Look, I think it's going to be interesting. I would strongly advocate that organizations have teams that are either in person teams or online teams, and the team just either operates 100% online or the team operates 100%-

Nick Muldoon:

In the office.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... in person and in the office, and if you have a train that has both in any train level ceremony, everybody goes to a desk and-

Nick Muldoon:

And do it online.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... a video camera and we do it that way. I think the thing that seems to be most sticky about the physical environment and SAFe is PI planning. Nobody needs to beat. Right? That was cool. Nobody needs to beat, no one's PI planning slipped, everybody just went. They were all online. So, we'll just PI plan online. It'll be fine. We saw people use whatever infrastructure they had available to them.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. [crosstalk 00:21:30].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I'm sure a number of people called you folks and said, "We need a tool." But some just went, "We have Google Suite, we have Microsoft whatever it is, we have this, we have that. We're just going to make it work," and no matter what they used, they made it work and they ran the events and their events were effective and they got the outcomes. The big thing that is missing is that energy. You can't get the energy of 100, 200 people in a room from an online event. But mechanically-

Nick Muldoon:

We can achieve it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... we can achieve it. So, we hear everybody wants to go back to PI planning in person because of the social, because of the energy, which I think is awesome. I absolutely think that is awesome, and I can see this world in which people do a lot more work from home, work remote, whatever that looks like, and then the PI planning events are the things that we do to bring ourselves together and reconnect on that eight, 10, 12 week basis. That's my feeling. Could be wrong.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess I'll be really interested to see how it plays out, and I think we should return to this conversation in 12 months, Em.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Oh, no.

Nick Muldoon:

I'm just thinking, what's going through my mind is one of our customers in New York, financial services company, and for one of their arts, it was 150,000 US exercised to bring their people together once a quarter.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Wow.

Nick Muldoon:

I'm now going, I'm like, "Okay, yes, they're doing it digitally now." That's fine. They're going to miss out on things. But if they lose the budget, do they have to fight to get the budget back? Or does the budget sit there? There's these other unknown ramifications of this shift over the course of 2020 that we're yet to see play out, I guess.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I think you're right, and I think it would be particularly interesting for the trains that have been launched remotely. So, if the train has been launched remotely, do you ev-

Nick Muldoon:

So, not existing trains that have been working together for six to 12, 18 months. But you want to get a brand new train started. Have you done that remotely this year with some of your clients?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Oh, we're in the process of doing it now.

Nick Muldoon:

Cool. Tell me.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

We had one, though, literally just before the lockdown. So, they did their first PI planning face to face and then immediately moved to remote working and, yeah, now working on remotely launching a train. For us, we have a playbook. It's a bunch of workshops. It's a bunch of classes. We just use online collaboration tools. We've found things that replicate the sort of tools that we would have in a physical room, and the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes, right? This has been the absolute highlight for me, the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes.

Nick Muldoon:

No more hieroglyphics.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Nick Muldoon:

What is that that you wrote, Sally? Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Everyone can say everything at once, right? So, you think about the classroom and the workshop where there's a group of people huddled around Post-its and a flip chart paper and they're still huddled in a way in their virtual huddle, but everybody can read, right? It's not that I'm not close enough, I can't read, I can't read your handwriting. There's this great equalizer is the online world. So, I think that's great. I think the challenge for the trains launched remotely is going to be do you ever get the face to face experience?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Because if I go back over the years, one of the things we know is your first PI planning event sets the standard. So, people get this imprint in their heads of what is possible. For example, if you skip something in your first PI planning event, you just decide to, I don't know, skip the confidence vote or something weird like that, you don't do the roam of the risks or you just skip something, you never do it because you're successful without it.

Nick Muldoon:

It never gets picked up. Yeah, okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You're successful without it. So, every compromise you make, and you make a series of compromises, and then you're successful despite those compromises, and that becomes a false positive feasibility. It tells you, yes, I was right. I was right.

Nick Muldoon:

I don't need to do that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I didn't need to do those things because I was awesomely successful and I didn't do these things. So, it's the learning [crosstalk 00:26:15]-

Nick Muldoon:

That's confirmation bias, is it?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Confirmation bias. That's exactly it. Yep. Yeah, and I think there's going to be a bunch of confirmation bias in these remotely launched trains, and unless they're inside organizations where there's enough knowledge of SAFe and the physical PI planning to know that there's going to be value in bringing them together, but I can see that being a real challenge. I think trains that are launched online may never go into a physical PI planning event because of that confirmation bias.

Nick Muldoon:

All right.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That makes me really sad.

Nick Muldoon:

I want to come back to something you said before about the leaders, and you mentioned the trust, the openness to learning and experimentation, and the discipline. I was going back over your SAFe Global 2018 talk about the seven traits of highly effective servant leaders.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep.

Nick Muldoon:

I guess I had some questions about this, and obviously, these are four of the traits. What are the other three traits that I'm missing? Then I've got a followup question about some of the actual things that you talked about that you picked up in your trip.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

[inaudible 00:27:29] one of those four on the list I had in 2018.

Nick Muldoon:

I'll quiz you on it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

How awkward. So, in 2018, the answer was people first, a respect for people, that sort of lens, lean thinking, manager, teacher, learner. So, we had that one. Yeah. Learner. [inaudible 00:28:00] crazy. What else did I have? [inaudible 00:28:10].

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Okay. I wanted to talk about that one, actually. I made a note about that. What is that, and are there examples of that in the West?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

A lot of people talk about true north.

Nick Muldoon:

[inaudible 00:28:28]. True north.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. True north. The translation I got, which I got from Mr. [inaudible 00:28:39], who partnered with Katie Anderson for the lean study tour I did in, I don't know, '18, '17, '18, 2018, I think, so the translation he gave was direction and management sort of things. So, it's mission, right? It's strategic mission. It's that sort of thing.

Nick Muldoon:

So, just a sidebar here for anyone that hasn't seen Em's talk on this, there's a woman by the name of Katie Anderson. She runs an annual, I think, I guess not this year, but she runs an annual-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No, not this year. She did not go this year.

Nick Muldoon:

... not this year, runs an annual lean, Kanban, kaizen study tour to Japan and visits ... Who did you visit, Em? You visited with Katie. How many were in the crew that you went over there with?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I think it was a group of about 20 from memory. Katie lived in Japan for two years and then went back to the US. She lives in San Francisco, I think. While she was there, she really liked the idea of putting together these lean study tours. She was already a lean practitioner more in the healthcare side of things. So, she got the opportunity to ... We actually were on a test run tour.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, cool.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, this was her experiment. She had a relationship with Ohio State University and they brought some people to the table and she brought some people to the table and they made it happen. She also had an existing relationship with Mr. [inaudible 00:30:24], who was John [inaudible 00:30:26] first manager at Toyota. So, he's a 40 year Toyota veteran.

Nick Muldoon:

Veteran.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

He came with us for the week. So, we of course went to Toyota, but we went to a bunch of Toyota suppliers as well. Isuzu, [inaudible 00:30:43]. Then we also went to Japan Post, which was fascinating. We went to a city which name escapes me right now, but they called it 5S City because all the companies in that city practice the 5S, the manufacturing 5S.

Nick Muldoon:

Tell me about it. It's not coming to mind. I don't feel comfortable or familiar.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You don't feel good about 5S?

Nick Muldoon:

No.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No. That's not good. So, how would I ... The 5S is five Japanese words, which I'm going to go ... Yeah. My Japanese, nothing. But it's about standardized work. So, for example, when you go into the 5S factories, you'll see the floors marked up where you need to stand to do a particular job.

Nick Muldoon:

[crosstalk 00:31:41] This is what Paul Aikas picked up for his-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Oh, no.

Nick Muldoon:

I feel like I've seen Paul Aikas' videos of their manufacturing in the US that everything's marked up.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Probably. That would be my guess. We should ask Teddy.

Nick Muldoon:

We can ask Paul, and we can ask all these people. There's time.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Well, yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Okay.

Nick Muldoon:

So, that lean tour, the Japan study tour, that was a super effective and motivating thing for you?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. For me, it was very reinforcing. So, I had I guess my own lens on what lean leadership meant, and I found that particular tour to be very reinforcing around the value set that I believe is part of that. Katie [inaudible 00:32:43] created [inaudible 00:32:44] that is designed to show you that. So, she's often very clear that says this is not Japan, right? This is not a reorganization into Japan. This is not every leader in Japan.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

This is, I've hand picked a series of lean leaders to show you it being practiced. But it was certainly very reinforcing for me. So, very similar messages I picked up in terms of how I like to head, how I coach others to lead was built into the messages that she delivered. So, it was very cool. It was very cool. Some of those leaders, just so inspiring, particular kaizen. I think the thing that just really hits you in the face as you're talking to these folks is kaizen, this drive to get better.

Nick Muldoon:

All the time.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

All the time. Absolutely. It's these folks looking for, they're looking for the one second, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

The one second improvements. There's a video that floats around. Have you seen the Formula 1 video-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... where they do, yeah, the changeover in 63 and it takes them over a minute and they do the changeover in 90-something in Melbourne and it takes them six seconds or whatever it is. It's like that, right? It's that how do I find one more second, half a second? They're just so driven. If I can remove a step that someone has to take, can I move something closer to somebody?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. There was some comment in the presentation that you gave. There was some comment about if I have to take another five steps, that's an extra 10 seconds. Then that's an extra 10 seconds every time I do this activity every day, and that all adds up. So, how do we shave these seconds off and be more effective and deliberate about how we do this?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That was just huge, right? I called it kaizen crazy in the presentation. I'm just so, so driven to improve, and just tiny, small improvements every day.

Nick Muldoon:

So, one of the other practices that I didn't grok out of that talk was about the Bus Stop. What was the Bus Stop about?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Was that in that talk? Really?

Nick Muldoon:

I'm forcing you to stretch your mind [crosstalk 00:34:57].

Em Campbell-Pretty:

You are. You are. You are. You are quite right. It really was [inaudible 00:35:01]. Okay. Oh, you're awful.

Nick Muldoon:

Yes.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yes. Yes, you are. Okay. So, effective leaders are human was the tagline on that one. It was really about leaders being down to Earth and being one with the teams. So, things I saw in Japan, this factory run by a woman, [inaudible 00:35:42], I think it was, so very unusual. Not a lot of women leaders in Japan. Her husband took her name because [inaudible 00:35:52]. It's a really interesting character.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

But her company has a bunch of morning rituals. You always say good morning and thank you and how they talk every day and everybody talks and everyone interacts. Then one of the other places we went to, they all had their uniforms they wore in the factory. But everybody wore the uniform, right? The CEO, the office workers, and everybody wore the uniform. Everyone was one.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Then I was thinking about my experience leading teams, and a lifetime ago, I was working with a team that decided to enter a corporate competition. This competition was about showing your colors and showing the corporate values, which were things like better together and courage, and then [inaudible 00:36:49] a rainbow thing. So, this team decides what they're going to do, is it an address up in the rainbow colors, and they're going to be better together and show their courage and they're going to do the Macarena and they're going to video it and that's going to be how they're going to win this competition.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I did not participate in this Macarena because someone has to take photos and stuff, right? How else are they going to enter the competition? So, had to do my bit. Anyway, we also had this ritual, which was about teams bringing challenges to leadership to resolve, and they did at the end of every spring. So, they do this Macarena and they film it and they enter the competition and at the end of the spring, they bring their challenges to leadership.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Their challenge is Em did not do the Macarena. You are our leader, you did not do the Macarena. We are feeling very challenged by that, and we're bringing this to you to resolve. So, I went and spoke to the team that raised and said, "Look. I got to tell you. I don't know the Macarena. So, sorry." I still remember this so clearly. One of the guys said to me, "I read this blog about the importance of leaders being vulnerable." You know who wrote that blog post, don't you?

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, Em. Oh. You have it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, we negotiated. I said, "Look. I think I can manage the Bus Stop." For those not from Australia, we grow up doing this in high school dances. In my part of the world, anyway. So, I grabbed my leadership team and we did do the Bus Stop and it was part of proving that we too were the same as everybody else and doing our bit and responding to the team's feedback. So, yes. That is where the Bus Stop fits in. Thanks so much for that, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. No, I appreciate that. Now, I'm glad that I got that context. I try and do similar things. Typically, it's a karaoke or something, or that we haven't done that in a while. Yeah, okay. So, I guess the thrust of that talk was really about to leaders to serve, and it was all about being in service of. It sounds like what you took from the Japan study tour was these leaders there were very much in service of their people.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you see that as a trait that is prevalent in the best performing companies that you deal with, and how likely are they over a five, 10 year horizon, whatever that happens to be, to outperform their competitors or to be more successful in their market? Or I guess however they define success?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I certainly see a correlation between leaders that like to serve and/or choose to serve and success with scaled agile, and business, because I guess we have seen over, it's close to 10 years, is those who practice together, your framework with discipline get results, and they get significant results. They improve their ability to deliver products and services, their cost base goes down, their quality goes up, their people are happier, their attrition goes down. We see it every single time.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

What we also see is when the leaders don't walk the talk, when the leaders are paying lip service to the transformation, it doesn't stick. They don't get the results. People don't find it a better place to work. People aren't bought into the change. So, there is definitely a correlation there. You can get pockets of wonderfulness inside an organization.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

We often observe that the organization that's transformation is as successful is the most bought in leader. Most senior bought in leader. So, if you're the leader of a train and you show the right behaviors, your train will be really great.

Nick Muldoon:

Successful.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

But that means nothing for the broader organization, solution train, the business unit, what have you. You see this thing that goes from the leader. If the leader's showing the right behaviors, you get within that space, you get the behaviors, you get the change, you get the results. But leaders who say one thing and do another, people don't buy it, right?

Nick Muldoon:

I guess this is true of any organizational change, isn't it?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

You hit the boundaries of your pocket, as you said, within the organization and then you meet the real world, the rest of the organization. People, maybe they don't have enough energy or they don't feel that they can influence and change that, and so they just live within their bubble because they don't feel that they can exert the pressure outside of that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Look. I've certainly, I've seen successful bubble influence organizations. Successful bubbles can become interesting. Chip and Dan Heath's book, which one was it, Switch.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, yeah. Switch. Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

[inaudible 00:42:02]. Shine a light on bright spot or something like that. So, bright spots inspire, and if you can create a bubble in an organization that outperforms the rest of the organization, or even if it performs better than it has previously, then everybody looks. Right? How did the organization that goes from poor delivery to great deliveries is what is going on here? That inspires others to get interested. One of the really interesting things we've seen in Australia, we can trace pretty much every SAFe implementation in Australia back to the one at Telstra.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, right. They all spun off from that, from the people that were part of it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Well, no. People who came and saw it. People who were inspired by it.

Nick Muldoon:

They're not necessarily directly involved in it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No. People came and got inspired by it, and then they went, did their thing, and then they inspired someone else. I haven't tried to do it recently, but there was a point in time we just could web together all of them because we could count them when we could see them. But we can web together most of them still. It says you saw someone who saw someone who saw someone who actually was someone who went to visit us at Telstra back in 2012, 2013 and got inspired.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, that bright spot can be really, really powerful, and that's what it takes, right? You get to add a little bit of noise, a little bit of difference, and people start to ask what's going on. I wouldn't say it's foolproof. I think it still requires, so someone's got to come, they've got to see, and then they've got to have the courage to do it for their part of the organization.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

That's the hard bit, right? I can come, I can see, I can get inspired. But am I prepared to put myself out there? There's a lot to be said for leaders who are prepared to take risks. That was one of the-

Nick Muldoon:

This was your lesson about the Bus Stop, right? You have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. This was actually, I was thinking, was the thing I was talking about at last year's SAFe Summit was be safe or be SAFe.

Nick Muldoon:

Be safe or be SAFe. Tell me about that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, be safe, don't take a risk, or be SAFe, as in the scaled agile framework, and take that leap of faith. It comes back to, we started talking today about when I did this at Telstra, I didn't really understand that this wasn't a normal everyday, this is what everybody did sort of thing. It was a very new thing. So, I took a risk from a perspective that I was a business leader in a technology space and I really felt I had nothing to lose.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

So, I look back and that and go, "What on Earth possessed me?" And I go, "Well, I'm this business person leading this technology team. I wasn't supposed to succeed anyway."

Nick Muldoon:

Put it all on the line, right?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

I found out later they actually had a plan for when I did not succeed. I was supposed to fail.

Nick Muldoon:

Wait. How much waste is that? Why did they plan for something before it was ... Okay.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Organizational policies. What can I tell you? Anyway, I did not fail. I did succeed, and because I took some crazy, calculated risks, and I've seen it time and time again, right? So many of these leaders in these companies that make this change are taking a leap of faith. I'm always saying I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen. I don't know whether you're going to get 10% cost out or 50% cost out. I don't know if your people are going to be 10% happier or 50% happier. I don't know that.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

What I do know is if you listen to what we're telling you and you follow the guidance and you behave in line with those lean and agile values, you will get results. You'll get results every single time. But you've got to be brave enough to buy in and take it on holistically and not do this thing where you manage to customize your way out of actually doing the thing-

Nick Muldoon:

Doing anything.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

... that you wanted to do.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Okay. Em, this was awesome. Before we finish up, I want to take two minutes. You've mentioned books a lot today and you reminded me of this quote, Verne Harnish, "Those who read and don't are only marginally better off than those who can't." So, today so far, you've mentioned Chip and Dan Heath with Switch, you've mentioned the Leffingwell series from the late noughties. There might have been a few others. But tell me, what are you reading today? You've been in lockdown. What are the two or three top books that you've read since you've been in lockdown in Melbourne?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Oh, my goodness. It's very awkward. Every time someone asks me, "What did you just read?" I go, "I don't know."

Nick Muldoon:

I don't think I remember.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Can't remember. It's terrible. What am I reading? I need to open my Kindle. I don't know what I'm reading. Geoffrey Moore, Zone to Win.

Nick Muldoon:

Zone to Win.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Zone to Win. I think that's what it's called. It's a newer book. I know this year, because obviously, I've read The Build Trap this year-

Nick Muldoon:

Yep. Melissa Perry. You mentioned that one. Yeah.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yep. I've read the Project to Product, Mik Kersten.

Nick Muldoon:

What was that one, Project to Product?

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Yeah. Project to Product, Mik Kersten. One of the IT Revolution press books. So, released just over a year ago. Very tied up in the SAFe 5.0 [crosstalk 00:48:21]. The other book tied up in the SAFe 5.0 release is John Kotter's Accelerate. So, I picked that back up. I read it a number of years ago when it first came out. But I like to revisit stuff when SAFe puts it front and center. Seems to make some sense to do that at that point in time.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. It's interesting that, thinking about Verne Harnish, the scaling up framework, no relation to-

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No.

Nick Muldoon:

... scaled agile, for anyone that's not familiar. But so much of the scaling up framework about scaling businesses, they draw on so much content from existing offers, existing tomes, points of reference and experience, and it's super valuable, and I guess SAFe is no different, right? It draws on this wisdom of the collective wisdom.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

Absolutely. Absolutely. [inaudible 00:49:14] It was very fun to say in the early days, we stand on the shoulders of giants, a quote from somebody else whose name escapes me.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. Well, Em, look. I wanted to thank you so much for your time this morning. This has been fantastic.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No worries. It's great to catch up with you.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. I guess my takeaways from this, I like the be safe or be SAFe, like either be safe and don't take any risks, or be SAFe and actually put yourself out there and step into scaled agile. I definitely have to go and do a bit of research on the five S's as well and learn a bit more about that. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Em Campbell-Pretty:

No worries, Nick. Great to see you.

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.

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

In this episode, Rebecca and Jasmin are talking:

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

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

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

📌 Is there ever really an end state?

+ more!

📲 Subscribe/Listen on your favourite podcasting app.

Thanks, Jasmin and Rebecca!

Transcript

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

Yeah, joy at work, right?

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

No, [inaudible 00:40:43].

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

Cool. That sounds exciting.

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah.

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

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

Jasmin Iordandis:

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

Rebecca Davis:

Yeah. Thanks.