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

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Sean Blake

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone: Future proof myself.

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

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

Chris Stone:

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

Sean Blake:

Merry Christmas.

Related Episodes

  • Podcast

    Easy Agile Podcast Ep.29 From Hierarchy to Empowerment: Agile Leadership Paradigms

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

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

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

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

    We hope you enjoy the episode!

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

    Transcript:

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

    Thank you.

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

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

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

    A few times.

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Retirements

    Dave West:

    Retirement.

    Nick Muldoon:

    Yeah.

    Dave West:

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

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

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

    Eric Naiburg:

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

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

    Dave West:

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

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


    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Are there are any numbers you can share with us?

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Differently.

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    No, I appreciate it.

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    I want to just rewind for a second, sorry.

    Eric Naiburg:

    Killing people.

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

    There is, yes.

    Nick Muldoon:

    Is that correct?

    Eric Naiburg:

    Yeah.


    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Yes.

    Dave West:

    We know-

    Nick Muldoon:

    It's great ROI.

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Books.

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Look busy.

    Dave West:

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


    Nick Muldoon:

    Get exposed to some new perspective, right?

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    A mental break.

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Yeah.

    Dave West:

    Who have you helped recently?

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Yeah.

    Dave West:

    And I think you need to balance that.

    Nick Muldoon:

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

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

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Dave West:

    Exactly.

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

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

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

    It's the leader.

    Eric Naiburg:

    Yes.

    Nick Muldoon:

    Yeah. Yes, both. Yeah.

    Dave West:

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

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

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

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Happy ears?

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Dave West:

    Do this.

    Eric Naiburg:

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

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    Eric, do this.

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Eric Naiburg:

    I've seen that a lot lately-

    Nick Muldoon:

    [inaudible 00:39:50] Inflection point.

    Eric Naiburg:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

    What's your perspective?

    Eric Naiburg:


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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

    Dave West:

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

    Nick Muldoon:

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

  • Podcast

    Easy Agile Podcast Ep.30 Aligned and thriving: The power of team alignment

    "Every time I meet with Tony, I'm always amazed by his energy and authenticity. In this conversation, that really shone through."

    In this episode Hayley Rodd - Head of Partnerships at Easy Agile, is joined by Tony Camacho - Technical Director Enterprise Agility at Adaptavist. They are delving into the highly discussed subject of team alignment, discussing what it means to have synchronized goals, cross-functional collaboration, and a shared agile mindset.

    They also cover the fundamental building blocks to get right on your journey to team alignment, like the power of listening and embracing mistakes as learning opportunities, stressing the importance of following through on retrospective action items + so much more.

    We hope you enjoy the episode!

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

    Transcript:

    Hayley Rodd:

    Here at Easy Agile, we would like to say an acknowledgement of country. This is part of our ongoing commitment to reconciliation. Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast and meet you today. The people of the Darova-speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres State Islander and First Nations people listening in today. Hi all and welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Hayley. Here's a little about us here at Easy Agile. So we make apps for Atlassian's Jira. Our applications are available on Atlassian's marketplace and are trusted by more than 160,000 users from leading companies worldwide. Our products help turn teams flat Jira backlog into something more visually meaningful and easy to understand.

    From sprint planning, retrospectives and PI planning our ups are great for team alignment. Speaking of team alignment, this is what this episode is all about. Today I'm joined by Tony Camacho. Tony is the technical director of Enterprise Agility for Aligned Agility, which is part of the Adaptiveness group. I've met Tony a few times during my time here at Easy Agile and have learned that he's one of the most generous people along with being funny and a clever human being who is incredibly knowledgeable about Jira and a bunch of other agile related topics. It's really wonderful to have Tony on the podcast today.

    Hey, everyone, we've got the wonderful Tony Camacho on the podcast today. This is our first time recording from our Easy Agile Sydney office, which is super cool. Tony, I'm not sure if you know, but Easy Agile is based out of a place called Wollongong, which is just south of Sydney. But we've got a Sydney office because we've hired a bunch of Sydney team members recently who wanted a place to come and hang out with each other. So we created this space, but it's 7:00 AM in the morning, so I'm all alone right now. That's how much I love you. So Tony, let's get started on the questions. Team alignment. What does it mean for a team to actually be aligned?

    Tony Camacho:

    So for us in an agile space that we're having, it's a collective understanding, a synchronization of your team members towards goals, principles, your practices that you're going in. Even more so I would even go down to the point of cadence, you would have those synchronizes. So it's a matter to be consistent with your agile principles and values, your mindset, your shared goals and vision, your synchronized work practices, DevOps, [inaudible 00:02:44], how we're going to put this out. Cross-functional collaboration between the teams, getting your tea shaped partners/teammates shining at that moment, learning from each other, roles, responsibilities things of that type. That's what it means to me. It really means.

    It's all about human beings and at that point, having everybody aligning and working to our common goal, that objective that we want to do for the business partner. There's the gold that we're all after as a team. Does that make sense for you guys? We have the same objectives for this initiative and our practices. And finally for me, which I know this is not typically is we're coming to an agreement on the tools we're going to use and how we're going to use them and have a system source record where we know where we can get our troops, our dependencies, find out which teams do have capacity and move forward from there. That would be my overall definition of an agile team.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Wow.

    Tony Camacho:

    And teams.

    Hayley Rodd:

    You've had lots of experience over the years. I guess where my mind goes when you say all those really wonderful things about team alignment is that in my experience when team alignment is when people get it right, it's super great. When people get it wrong, it's really hard. And I actually think it's pretty hard to get team alignment right. You got to really work at it. What's your experience in that?

    Tony Camacho:

    To me it's like it can be a bad marriage or a great marriage, but it needs work. As we know, all relationships need work. We're human beings, we're not the same. Each one of us brings something to the table of value. So let me give you one example that I've lived with on a team. I'm an extrovert by nature, and I'm a developer, an engineer and typically that is not two skill sets that you hear together. So I've had to learn that when I'm working with my teammates that happen to be sometimes introverts slow down, listen, wait. They've also had to try to learn to respond faster because as an extrovert, if I ask you a question, all of a sudden I'm looking at you, I'm not getting a response, I'm thinking you're not understanding the question. I rephrase the question and now you're in a deficit to two questions.

    And now I'm even worse because now I'm like, "Hayley isn't understanding me. What's happening here? Let me rephrase it again." And it can easily fall apart. What I have seen when teams aren't in alignment is that the team isn't a team any longer. It's miserable to go to the team. It's miserable to come into work, when the team is truly aligned, you're rocking and rolling. It's a feeling like you've never had. It's hard to explain to people that when you see the team, because you know it when it's working and you obviously know when it's not working, you're starting to miss deadlines. Integrations aren't happening on time. You don't have a single source of truth. You start having people explaining the same thing in two, three different matters, different priorities. We're not working from the same hymnal. The thing that I took from my... I'm an SPC, so as an instructor, the one thing I always try to explain to everybody, you may have the best of everything out there, but that's not necessarily mean it's going to work together.

    So you have to have that type of understanding, how we're going to work together, what is our priorities, what's the tool sets we're going to have and what is our values as a human beings to this team if that... I'm hoping that helps describe some of the things that I've seen that have gone really bad. I have seen it at, I can share a customer that I have seen it gone, but we started off with good intentions. It's a financial institution in the United States and they were trying to make the jump to mobile applications. And at first we were on the same page as a team, but they decided that they didn't believe that cadence was required to be the same across the board. They didn't believe that we could use the same one tool set, we could use multiple different tool sets.

    They had spreadsheets flowing all over the place. And what was happening was we lost trust. We were redoing work, there was ambiguity everywhere. We were misaligned and we started paying for it because our customers started complaining. They could see it in the quality of the work. One team had one schema, one background, one type of... You could see the difference when they integrated, it seemed like it was two applications being put out there mashed together. And when you're misaligned, that comes through very, very quickly in your work. There's a saying that we have here. There's a scrum master, I know her name was Sophia Chaley, one of the best I ever met. And what she will always tell people is what a team delivers is what the team is doing is learning. It's building knowledge, it's expressed as code. When we're misaligned, we're learning different things and we're expressing it differently in the code, if that makes sense.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Like thinking about the fundamental building blocks of team alignment, is there something that a team really needs to get right to be successful at alignment? And what is that in your mind?

    Tony Camacho:

    Oh, that is for sure. They had to get that right. First of all, the size of the team.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Yeah, okay.

    Tony Camacho:

    Human beings, and I'm not referring back... Going back to say for our scrum practices, I am a CSM. I do know they recommend 8 to 13 people. My best teams have been typically a little bit larger than that. But we had to have the same agreed to the size of the team where it didn't became, didn't become too large where we were over running each other and we weren't listening to each other. We had to understand our goals. We all had the same goals. We used to practice this by, when I worked at Microsoft, we used to have what we used to call our elevator speech. And we would stop somebody and I would go, we're working on this. Watch your elevator speech for this. And if your elevator speech wasn't... It wasn't meant that it had to be in sync with mines, but if I didn't understand it, we had a problem.

    Or if it was a different goal where I'm looking at you going, but we're building a Volkswagen, but you're describing to me a Lamborghini, we have a problem. And those were the type of things that we also had to have to make sure that we had the right... Same practices and the tools. That's where I find Easy Agile exceeds. I mean it just exceeds, it meets above the market. It's transparent and it shows everything in front of you right there for me. So when we had the same tool and we were having the same cadence and we could see our dependencies and we could see what I had to deliver for somebody else or somebody had to deliver it for me, that was the types of things we had. We had to have respect. Somebody seems to always forget that we always had to have respect for each other.

    We had to embrace the same values of collaboration, adaptability, transparency. The practices that we all know, but somehow we seem to forget when we get into a place where we are not aligned and if you respect my ideas and I respect yours and we're working together, we do not have to agree. But that respect will drive us a long way towards getting to that project vision that we want. And we're trying to meet the customer's needs. And those are the type of things that we needed. We needed leadership. Leadership, I can't say, and if you notice I'm not using the word management, leadership is where you're putting yourself out there in a situation where it can go bad for you as a person, as that leader, trying to make sure that we're making the right choices empowering the people and making them very clear what they can make decisions on and they can't. And it sounds so simple when I talk to you like this, but every time I've had to do some type of transformation, the baggage that sometimes we bring as human beings, the fears, the lack of trust that we have, that's where the scrum masters of product owners come in. And then you need something to make sure that you're having that vision to communicate that vision across. As I mentioned before, some of the tool sets that we have out there. Is that making sense for you at all?

    Hayley Rodd:

    Yeah, it really does. It's really resonating with me. I think when you talk about coming together as a team and putting together a set of values and a vision, it seems so much like a a "duh" moment. It's like, of course you would do that as a team, but I think at the end of the day as teams, we get in the daily business as usual and we think, I don't have time to get together as a team and set that vision because I've got to do X, Y, and Z, that's due next week. But I think it's one of those fundamental building blocks that really sets you up for success to do X, Y, Z quicker down the track. So that's what I've taken away from that.

    Tony Camacho:

    And I would agree with you. And you came up with a perfect example because a lot of people do that. I have ABC to do for next week, daily. I don't have time. And the problem is that if they would suddenly realize, and it does become apparent to your practices. So once you agree on your practices, your daily standups, if you're doing that, your retros at the end of your sprints and moving forward, once the person feels that they have that respect for you and they're not fearful, they can share that with you, "Hayley, I'm having a problem. I'm having way too much work. I don't know if I am going to be of value here. Or Do you really need me?" "Yes Tony, I do need you, we're going to discuss this and let's discuss your A, B, C and see how I can help you." And they suddenly realized they're not on an island alone. Developers by nature being introverted, we have to break that habit. We have to be able to share. And it's funny, I'm not saying share my lunch, fine, sure, let's share our lunch, but share the workload.

    The one thing that I always try to mention to teams, and again that's... I'm sorry, but I do believe in Easy Agile, using this tool. That's where easy Agile also to me makes it apparent. A story belongs to a team, not to a person. And once you know that you suddenly realize, I'm not alone. I'm here working as part of a bigger thing. And most human beings want to be part of a bigger thing. You suddenly realize that it's almost like the baseball metaphor that I use for teams. And I know the market is not baseball, but I think it would apply for other sports, be cricket or sports like that. When I'm batting, it's me against everybody. When I'm on the field, it's us against... I prefer being with the us. And generally that's where things like that, let's do that.

    Also, when you're working with more people as a team, there's things that happened there. You minimize the project risk, which I hate using the word project. It should be initiative. It's long living. You're usually a much more adaptable. I don't know all the answers. So when I worked with you, Hayley, and you showed with me some things there, you're one of the most humble people I've met, and I loved it. But when you walked through, you walked me through the tool, it became very apparent, you know it, you feel it, you love it, it's part of you. And that to me is invigorating. It's energy. Who wouldn't want to work with somebody like you? Why not? Let's do this. Right?

    Hayley Rodd:

    Thank you Tony. I guess one of the things that I wanted to touch on is when you're in a team and you're coming together as a team, you're working on something, how does an individual who seeks recognition for what they're doing, how do they get that? Or how do you leave that? How do you put that ego aside and say, "I'm doing something as a team to the better of the team?" Have you ever come across that or considered that? I'm interested in your thoughts.

    Tony Camacho:

    So the people that I felt that needed to have that typically how I... Yes, that's a great question because I'm thinking specifically. There was one, a scrum master that I thought that did it the most amazing way ever. Basically she would call out the ideas even if it wasn't that person's, yeah. I feel that Hayley is... You're not having a good day, Hayley. You're not having a good day. And I know you are not getting used to doing, working in the scrum team. It's new to you and everything else. And what she did typically was in front of everybody would be, and it wasn't even your idea sometimes. And she would just say, and Hayley came up with this wonderful idea that's going to save us something, move us forward. Hayley said this to me, it made us think as a team. And we went around it, we talked and we did it.

    And that person always usually would be like, "Wow, I got credit for something. Good scrum-masters will see that. Or good product owners will point that out." The other way that I've done it was using something like Easy Agile. It's a great tool to use, believe it or not. I would back off, I'm a developer, but I also played the role of Scrum masters for years. I would step back and I would let one of my teammates run it, hear their voice, feel empowered. It's amazing when you can have people feel empowered because what you're all talking about, there really is about a lack of trust, a lack of psychological safety. And it's for us to be an aligned team, you have to have trust there and you have to break down the fear of judgment. So the other thing that one time happened with a scrum master that I thought was wonderful was is that again against Sophia Chaley, chief stood in front of her room when there was this a bad sprint.

    The sprint didn't end well. And she stood up in front of everybody and she basically went, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. This was a learning sprint." She pulled up Easy Agile, she was using at a time, pulled it up, showed the things that didn't work out the way they thought they were going to work out. And she said, these are the actions we're going to take to improve this. And then when somebody who was in management, again not using the term leadership, now I'm using the term management on purpose, was looking to assign blame. Her response was, not screaming, not raising her voice. Her response was, if we need to get rid of somebody or blame somebody, blame me. But I'm here to solve the problem. Let's move forward.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Wow.

    Tony Camacho:

    She wouldn't tell. And that was to me was one of the most outstanding moments I've ever seen. And she was at that point actually using Easy Agile that wasn't a financial institution in the United States. I would let you know that teachers use it, figure it out. And she basically showed the board and just went through everything and did that. That was leadership. That was leadership. And generally your teams will follow leadership and they will suddenly step up and you'll see that that's what people who want to stand up. Now, not everybody wants to do that. Some people want to just be team members and that's okay. That is perfectly okay, but the thing that's not okay is that if they don't have trust, right? And to me, that's the biggest thing. When you have people who are resisting change or siloed in their world, they suddenly realize if you can get them to open up it's really, they're just telling you, I don't feel safe.

    I've been doing this all my life. I'm great at it and now you're asking me to do this. And you need to somehow get them to get the feel that they are bringing something of value. They are helping you move forward. And you're meeting them halfway if you have to. But yeah, that's the biggest problem I've ever seen that we've always, it always comes down to the human being in that. The rest of it, you can always come, you can always change that. But there's some of the things that you also have to do. I think that some people run into Hayley that I think me and you live in our world as we're moving up is sometimes we are, there's an ambiguity of the things that we have to do. And I've seen you do that, people in our roles will have suddenly, even if it isn't part of our role, will take it on and we have to learn. That's it. But yes.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's so true that the [inaudible 00:19:23] the psychological safety needs to be there. And I think back to so many teams that I've been a part of that it isn't there. So you have to feel like you got to lay your mark or put your mark on something and show your value. Because if you're not showing your value, then you get questioned. And so I think that that's such a common thing that I see in teams and it actually creates, not a camaraderie, but a competition between teammates and it breeds the wrong environment. So it's just really interesting. One thing that I did want to touch on that you spoke a lot about a couple of questions ago was respect and making sure that teams have respect for each other. How does a team member show respect for their teammates? What are some really good examples of respect and how can we display it or embody it or enact on it as team members?

    Tony Camacho:

    So let me show you a lack of respect right now. Yeah. Hayley, we're talking about this.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Looking off camera, avoiding me. Yeah.

    Tony Camacho:

    One of the main things was to really to learn to listen. Sit down, believe it or not, I found the best thing is sometimes taking a deep breath, listening, not responding, recognizing what that person may be feeling and going through at that moment because it's hard what we do. It's half art and it's half science. Let them learn that making a mistake is not a failure, it's a learning moment. Have that discussion there. Take their concerns real. So it's funny because you just made me think of something. That's one thing where I could show respect to my teammates would be as a scrum master, if I was a scrum master, hold effective retros. Really listen to what they're saying in the retros, report back on the things that you said you're going to improve in the retros. So we said these are the three things we're going to improve on or these are things that are assigned to me.

    Make it real. Make it a story. Show it on the board and say, "This is where we're going. This is what's happening. This is what I'm blocked by. Can somebody help me?" But I am working this for you. Get them, really be sincere. I don't mean buying pizza or bring a lot of scrum masters will bring pizza and donuts to the office. No, it's make their lives really better. Be that advocate up for them. And if you're a teammate, be an advocate for each other and be sincere. Have the bravery to stand up and say that's not a fair assessment. But the biggest thing is to really listen. Because a lot of times when somebody's saying something to me, I'll make it personal. Me, I have sometimes have, I know I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I cannot explain why. And just having you there, looking at me and talking and going through it, I suddenly realize it may have been something different and I want to hear your ideas.

    But I would have to, if I wanted to show myself to help that teammate, I also got to make myself vulnerable. If you're coming to me, I should share, but I should active listen, right? And really I respect your different perspective. It's okay. We all have different perspectives. Problem I find is that in ourworld, that we're moving so fast sometimes we don't stop to listen. We lack patience. We're moving too fast. So I'll share one for you that I'll be sincere. I had something medically came up and I was being a little abrasive with the team. So finally I called a meeting with our team and they saw me cry. I was okay with it. I was like, "I had no reason to be like this. You guys were showing me love, you were showing me respect, you're backing me up, helping me with my work. And I was still being utterly terrible."

    And it hurt me. It hurt that I was doing that, but I needed them to see me and I needed them to listen to me, give me that second to get it off my chest. And in the end I started crying. A 60-year-old man crying in a meeting going, "I shouldn't have done that to you. That was wrong." And it wasn't contrived. Some of the people there were 20 year old people on my team and they were in tears. And it was because they felt, they told me after this, they felt my pain that I was in, because I wanted to help. It's the most frustrating thing. To your point before, how do I feel? I wanted to help. I wanted to be there and I couldn't. Physically, I wasn't there. My mind was all over the place and I was being rude, being blunt, and I could use some other terms. Please don't. But that's really the main thing for me was it's really simple what we do. I just listen and just show respect for other people. And sometimes we forget.

    Hayley Rodd:

    I think that so many of the messages that you are talking about are not just for developer teams, they're for every team, every team in every walk of life. I think that they're just so fundamental to successful human relationships, whether it be personal or professional, I think so. I think there's just so many good messages. One thing that I wanted to touch on was that you're talking about active listening and when you think back on your career, and maybe this is totally off script, but when you think back on your career, how have you become a better active listener over the years? How have you improved that skill? As you said, you're an extrovert, you want to get in there, you want to fix the problem. How do you get better at that?

    Tony Camacho:

    I had some very, very smart people that put up with me, listened to me, and then had the courage to approach me after and teach me and teach me and didn't embarrass me in front of anybody. Did it in a manner that they said, "Do you think maybe this could have been better Tony?" As I said, I'm 61 and still I'm an extrovert and I still have high energy and I still make mistakes. As I tell everybody, every day I wake up, I make a mistake, I just got up. But I could have stayed in bed longer. But also the thing that I've learned, and it's just by the nature of getting older, it's not the age part of it. It was watching people come up trying to do the same thing I did that I failed at and I was an instructor for Microsoft for a long time.

    And seeing how, because to me seeing how a person's minds works is amazing. So what happens is I'll just... You know what I tried that, it didn't work for me, but I will say after class with you to show it to me again because maybe you solved it. I'm not that arrogant. And the nature of our business is that I find this, that the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. That was the biggest thing that opened my eyes. Now it's like, oh my Lord. You meet somebody like John Kern, you meet somebody like Sophia Chaley who come from different perspectives, brilliant people, and you suddenly see that they happen to do things slightly different and you just watch them and you're like, "Wow." And the thing that I love about our job, which I guess you must love, everywhere we go, every team we work with, it's different. It's different.

    Everybody always asks me, how do you do that. And I'll tell them, "Look, I will share with you the ways I did it. I have a varied background. I've always been consulting." I've done the ATM space, I did for space enabled warfare, I've done for health industry, everyone's been different. Someone from government regulation, but most of the time different human beings. So I have a saying, I've earned every scar in my back, their minds. I've learned people, you have to give people the chance to have their scars. Yes, it may be pain, I'm not saying fail, I won't let them fail. But sometimes people want to do something. So that's the way I would do it. Let them do it. And I just watched and learned that what happened was as I went in and the more I learned and I suddenly realized how little I know, I was like, I started with FORTRAN, I used to work in the dead 28.

    And then you start working your way up and you start realizing, "Wow, I don't know as much as I thought I know." And I had the luck of running into working at Microsoft and having the pleasure of meeting Bill Gates. Now, no matter what you say about Bill Gates, because a lot of people do say some crazy things and some of them may be true or may not. But the one thing you can't take away from him is you go into a room with him and you suddenly see how he puts all these ideas together and comes up with a bigger picture. You suddenly realize, "Wow, people tell me I'm really smart, not that smart." And then you learn, humility is a good thing.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Yeah, I think humility is just such an important asset to have and to try and grow on because leaving your ego at the door and being open to learn from other people and not think that everything is definitely a life lesson that sometimes you need to go through. And some people go through it and still don't take away the life lesson. So yeah, I think it's so interesting. I guess we don't have too much longer left, but I wanted to touch on thinking about it from an ROI perspective. How important is team alignment from a return on investment? What do you gain from a business perspective when you have an aligned team?

    Tony Camacho:

    So I'm going to use a term that I dislike and Hayley, you can smack me the next time we meet. But I'm trying to use it as, I don't because it's effective resource utilization, right? But I'm not referring to human beings to that point because it may be human beings. The problem is that's a large market. But as Agile people I won't refer to you as a resource, I refer to you as a fellow human being, you are a partner on my team. You're my teammate. You're not a piece of wood. But that is unfortunately a term that is used. And we will have effective utilization, we'll have common goals across our organization. If you're using any of the message less, bad, safe, pick it, you start focusing on your value streams. You should have improved product quality because we have the same cadence. We're putting things out there and we're having the same views there.

    You'll have I think better customer satisfaction and loyalty. They start seeing your product quality going up, being consistent, look and feel and hopefully you are delivering what they want. When you have your teams aligned, you're much more adaptable. Hayley, your team's got capacity? I don't. We don't have capacity to do this. Do you have capacity? Yes I do. Or we find someone or we break it down together and we present an idea to our partners. That's the things I like and I think in the end you have reduced risks at that point.

    Also, I think that the thing that they have in is that it's indirect, but nobody knows about. Nobody really talks about it is that if I was upper management C-suite, when we start doing this and we're having the teams aligned, first of all, your teams become safer, your teams feel more comfortable, they're working with the same people. They start becoming very effective and they start producing ideas. They're the knowledge workers. They know this better than anybody else and then they feel empowered to share ideas. The places that I thought that I had the best teams was once they asked... Well, and I got it, I don't know how, I was running a train and they asked to talk to the CTO and all they wanted to do was to talk to the CTO and make that person human. They asked her what she did in a previous job. Amazing. She worked as a factory worker and she also worked in construction. She used to drive, one of the things, nobody would've believed this. And what happened was they started sharing ideas with her and she embraced them. You know what that did to the team, the teams all, they were like, now that's out there, that's ours. Look at that. That was ours. I mean ownership, it's unbelievable.

    And unfortunately we are working on a capitalist market, which is fine, that's who we are. I mean we're in IT, it's a return on investment. Return on investment in the end, you start seeing much more efficient use of your money, much more efficient use of your dollars. Also, I would also imagine for the people above who are in the C-suite, they suddenly realize that the organization is going in the same direction. I think psychologically they feel that we now I have this team behind me pushing towards the same goal where a lot of times, every time I do an agile transformation, the first thing we always hear is we know they're working. We don't know what they're working on. And that's where something like Easy Agile bridges that and then you can use that information to go further. And that's wonderful because then at that point, everybody's on the same page. So you're a team now all the way from top to bottom. As opposed to I'm going to my team at work and that's it. So it's just really about return on investment, making sure that we are hitting our customers with everything we got. And I don't mean in a bad way, but we're delivering for our customers with everything we got. It's now efficiency, right? And that's it. That's about it.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Yeah, that's so powerful. I think it sort of nicely ties everything together because we've talked about a lot of things in the last half hour or so. And I think that at the end of the day, if you can get team alignment, just as you said, there's this ROI that can really shine through and it's a powerful thing for the whole organization to get right and to see the fruits of that work. So one last thing. Can you share your perspective on PI planning? I know you just mentioned safe a little bit for being the initial launchpad for team alignment.

    Tony Camacho:

    I love it. You have everybody in the room, you get to meet the people, you start making those connections to people. You start seeing them as human beings, not as this email or this text that you're sending across that you're going through there. So could I share one real experience from that? That's a PI planning house.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Please

    Tony Camacho:

    Do. So when I was working at Microsoft, I work for product quality online, which I know right now, considering the problems Microsoft is having, you're pretty much going now, "You suck Tony."

    Hayley Rodd:

    Never.

    Tony Camacho:

    No, we had our people distributed all over the world. And what was happening was that when I would talk to my short teams, I would ask them, and I was being facetious at a point because I just couldn't get the true answer was I would ask him, can you build the Twin Towers by tomorrow? And the answer would inadvertently be yes. Next day would come. Obviously you can't do the twin towers overnight. Ask them again, will you get it by next week? The answer would be yes. And they were feel for all of that. So when we had the PI planning, we did.

    Microsoft went, got a hotel room in Seattle, a hotel room, a hotel in Seattle, rang our offshore teams. And then when they got to see me in person, they suddenly realized that I wasn't telling them I need the twin towers by tomorrow. I really wanted them to tell me when they could get me the twin towers. And I would defend it because they saw me right there in PI planning, defending, saying, "No, this is not possible." And when they saw me doing that, suddenly it was like the sky's open, sun's came through and now I was getting true answers. And what happened was it gave him an opportunity. And I realized that guys, you keep hearing me as sermon. It's always about the human beings, it's about those connections. It's about seeing the people. It's hard. It's two days of a lot of work. But once you get that work done, you come out of there a line, sharp direction. We know what our north is, now, do we know exactly where our true north is? As an agile team, we shouldn't, right? We should be refining it as we get there.

    Find out exactly. But we know more or less where the direction is. We more or less know we're all on the same page. We all know that what we have to deliver to make this work out what other people have to deliver for us or we have to deliver for other people. So we suddenly feel part of something bigger. Bigger, right? We are now talking to the, if you're a developer or an engineer, software engineer, you're starting to see the power brokers and why they're doing this. You get the chance to ask them questions. What more could you ask for, right? I finally get to see the people who are making the decisions and I can ask them why. And they can tell me what the business value is and I can make the argument to them that maybe I don't think that's as much business value or we need to fix these things first before we can get that right and move our way on. What more could I ask for? I have an opportunity to make my case and I get to see the other people I'm working with. It becomes, when you're dealing with 125 people and you're on a train, you will become family.

    We spend more hours sometimes with these people than we do with our family members at times. And it also gives you a sense of... Besides trust, a sense of a safety. You know it's not just you, it's all of us. So the saying that usually I see that the better executive say, I heard that in one PI planning, you fail, I fail. I fail, you fail. My job is to keep you employed. Your job is to keep me employed and to keep this company together. It's synergy, right? So it's amazing.

    Hayley Rodd:

    Beautiful.

    Tony Camacho:

    Yeah, I know. I'm all about the human. Sorry.

    Hayley Rodd:

    No, I am right there with you. I'm so glad that we got to have this conversation. We've talked a lot over the little while and every time we meet, I'm flabbergasted by your energy and your authenticity. And I think that this conversation that really shown true, so thank you Tony for taking the time to be with us. I'm going to say goodbye to all our listeners. I'm going to say another big thank you to Tony. So Tony is part of aligned agility and that is part of The Adaptivist Group. And yeah, thanks Tony for being here with us and thank you for everyone who has tuned in and listened to this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. Thank you.

  • Podcast

    Easy Agile Podcast Ep.21 LIVE from Agile2022!

    "That's a wrap on Agile2022! It was great to be able to catch up with so many of you in the agile community in-person!" - Tenille Hoppo

    This bonus episode was recorded LIVE at Agile2022 in Nashville!

    The Easy Agile team got to speak with so many amazing people in the agile community, reflecting on conference highlights, key learnings, agile ceremonies + more!

    Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to say G’Day and enjoyed a Tim Tam or two ;)

    Huge thank you to all of our podcast guests for spending some time with us to create this episode!

    • Cody Wooten
    • Gil Broza
    • Maciek Saganowski
    • Lindy Quick
    • Carey Young
    • Leslie Morse
    • Dan Neumann
    • Joseph Falú
    • Kai Zander
    • Avi Schneier
    • Doug Page
    • Evan Leybourn
    • Jon Kerr
    • Joshua Seckel
    • Rob Duval
    • Andrew Thompson

    Transcript

    Caitlin:

    Hi, everyone. Well, that's a wrap on Agile 2022 in Nashville. The Easy Agile team is back home in Australia, and we spent most of our journey home talking about all of the amazing conversations that we got to have with everyone in the Agile community. It was great catching up with customers, partners, seeing old friends, and making lots of new ones. We managed to record some snippets of those amazing conversations, and we're excited to share them with you, our Easy Agile Podcast audience. So enjoy.

    Maciek:

    [inaudible 00:00:26].

    Tenille:

    Maciek, thanks so much for taking time with us today.

    Maciek:

    No worries.

    Tenille:

    [inaudible 00:00:30], can you let us know what was the best thing you've learned this week?

    Maciek:

    Oh, that was definitely at Melissa Perri's talk. When she talked about... Like, to me, she was talking about slowing down. And what we do in Agile, it's not just delivery, delivery, delivery, but very much learning and changing on things that we already built, and finding out what value we can give to customers. Not just ship features, it's all about value. That's what I learned.

    Tenille:

    That's great. Thank you. So what do you think would be the secret ingredient to a great Agile team?

    Maciek:

    Humility. Somehow, the team culture should embrace humility and mistakes. And people should not be afraid of making mistakes, because without making mistakes, you don't learn. That's what I think.

    Tenille:

    So what would be, I guess, if there's one Agile ceremony that every team should do, what do you think that might be?

    Maciek:

    For sure, retro, and that comes back to the mistakes and learning part.

    Tenille:

    Yeah. Fantastic.


    Maciek:

    No worries.

    Tenille:

    That's great. Thanks so much for taking time.

    Maciek:

    Okay. Thank you.

    Tenille:

    Cheers.

    Gil:

    [inaudible 00:01:42].

    Caitlin:

    Gil:, thank you so much for chatting with us. So we're all at Agile 2022 in Nashville at the moment. There's lots of interesting conversations happening.

    Gil:

    Yes.

    Caitlin:

    If you could give one piece of advice to a new forming Agile team, what would it be?

    Gil:

    It would be to finish small, valuable work together. It has a terrible acronym, FSVWT. So it cannot be remembered that way. Finish small, valuable work together. There's a lot of talk about process, working agreements, tools. This is all important, but sometimes it's too much for a team that's starting out. And so if we just remember to finish small valuable work together, that's a great story.

    Caitlin:

    Yeah, I love that. And you were a speaker at conference?

    Gil:

    Yes.

    Caitlin:

    Can you give our audience a little bit of an insight into what your conversation was about?

    Gil:


    What happens in many situations is that engineering or development doesn't really work collaboratively with product/business. And instead, there is a handoff relationship. But what happens is that in the absence of a collaborative relationship, it's really hard to sustain agility. People make a lot of one-sided assumptions. And over time, how decisions get made causes the cost of change to grow, and the safety to make changes to decrease. And when that happens, everything becomes harder to do and slower to do, so the agility takes a hit. So the essence of the talk was how can we collaboratively, so both product and engineering, work in ways that make it possible for us to control the cost of change and to increase safety? So it's not just collaboration of any kind. There are very specific principles to follow. It's called technical agility, and when we do that, we can have agility long-term.

    Caitlin:

    Great. I love it. Well, thank you so much and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time at the conference.

    Gil:

    Thank you.

    Caitlin:

    Great. Thank you.

    Tenille:

    Hi, Tenille here from Easy Agile, with Josh from Deloitte, and we're going to have a good chat about team retrospectives. So Josh, thank you for taking the time to have a good chat. So you are a bit of an expert on team retrospectives. What are your top tips?

    Josh:

    So my top tips for retrospective is first, actually make a change. Don't do a lessons observed. I've seen lots of them actually make a change, even if it's just a small one at the end. The second, and part of that, is make your change and experiment. Something you can measure, something that you can actually say yes, we did this thing and it had an impact. May not be the impact you wanted, but it did have some kind of impact. The second tip is vary your retrospectives. Having a retrospective that's the same sprint after sprint after sprint will work for about two sprints, and then your productivity, your creativity out of the retrospective will significantly reduce.

    Tenille:

    That's an excellent point. So how do you create [inaudible 00:05:03]?

    Josh:

    Lots and lots of thinking about them and doing research and using websites like TastyCupcakes, but also developing my own retrospectives. I've done retrospective based on the Pixar pitch. There's six sentences that define every Pixar movie. Take the base sentences, apply them to your sprint or to your PI and do a retro, and allow the team that creativity to create an entire movie poster if they want to. Directed by [inaudible 00:05:34], because it happens. People get involved and engaged when you give them alternatives, different ways of doing retrospectives.


    Tenille:

    That's right. So for those teams that aren't doing retrospectives at the moment, what's the one key thing they need to think about that you... What's the one key thing you could tell them to encourage them to start?

    Josh:

    If you're not doing retrospectives, you're not doing [inaudible 00:05:54]. So I shouldn't say that. But if you're not doing retrospectives, if you truly believe that you have absolutely nothing to improve and you are 100% of the best of the best, meaning you're probably working at Google or Amazon or Netflix, although they do retrospectives. So if you truly believe that you are the equivalent of those companies, then maybe you don't need to do them, but I'm pretty sure that every team has something they can improve on. And acknowledging that and then saying, how are we going to do that? Retrospective's a very fast, easy way to start actually making those improvements and making them real.

    Tenille:

    Fantastic. Great. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat to us briefly about retrospectives.

    Josh:

    Thank you.

    Caitlin:

    We're here with Leslie, who is the president of women in Agile. Leslie, there was an amazing event on Sunday.

    Leslie:

    Yes.

    Caitlin:

    Just talk to us a little bit about it. What went into the planning? How was it to all be back together again?

    Leslie:

    It was amazing to have the women in Agile community back together, right? Our first time since 2019, when everyone was together in Washington DC for that event. The better part of six or seven months of planning, we had about almost 200 people in the room. Fortunately, we know the [inaudible 00:07:10] of what these women in Agile sessions that we do, part of the Agile Alliance conferences every year, right? We've got a general opening. We've got a great keynote who is always someone that is adjacent to the Agile space. We don't want to just like... We want to infuse our wisdom and knowledge with people that aren't already one of us, because we get all of the Agile stuff at the big conference when we're there.

    Leslie:

    So that part, we always have launching new voices, which is really probably one of my most favorite women in Agile programs. Three mentees that have been paired with seasoned speakers, taking stage for the first time to share their talent and their perspective. So that's really great. And then some sort of interacting networking event. So that pattern has served us really well since we've been doing this since 2016, which is a little scary to think it's been happening that long. And it's become a flagship opportunity for community to come together in a more global fashion, because the Agile Alliance does draw so many people for their annual event.

    Caitlin:

    Yeah, for sure. Well, it was a great event. I know that we all had a lot of fun being there. What was your one key takeaway from the event?

    Leslie:

    I'm going to go to [inaudible 00:08:14] interactive networking that she did with us, and really challenging us to lean into our courage around boundaries and ending conversations. We don't have to give a reason. If some conversation's not serving us or is not the place that we need to be for whatever reason, you absolutely have that agency within yourself to end that conversation and just move on. I love the tips and tricks she gave us for doing that well.

    Caitlin:

    Yes, yes, I love that too. That's great. Well, thank you so much. Appreciate it.

    Leslie:

    Yeah. Thanks for having me.

    Tenille:

    Hi, Evan. How are you?

    Evan:

    Very good.

    Tenille:

    That's good. Can you please tell me what's the best thing you learned today?

    Evan:

    The best quote I've got, "Politics is the currency of human systems." Right?

    Tenille:

    Wow.

    Evan:

    So if you want to change a human system, you got to play the politics.

    Tenille:


    Fantastic.

    Evan:

    Which feels crappy, but-

    Tenille:

    It's the way it is.

    Evan:

    ... that's the way it is.

    Tenille:

    [inaudible 00:09:07]. Okay, next question. What is the Agile ceremony that you and your team can't live without?

    Evan:

    Retrospective. With the retrospective, you can like create everything else.

    Tenille:

    Fantastic. That's really good. And what do you think is probably the key ingredient to a good retrospective?

    Evan:

    Oh, trust. Trust requires respect. It requires credibility. It requires empathy. So trust is like that underpinning human capability.

    Tenille:

    Yeah. Fantastic. Thanks very much.

    Evan:

    Thank you.

    Tenille:

    Yes.

    Caitlin:

    Right. We're here with Cody from Adfire. So Cody, how you enjoyed the conference so far?

    Cody:

    I'm really loving the conference. It's been awesome. To be honest, when we first got here, it seemed maybe a little bit smaller than we thought, but the people here's been incredible, highly engaged, which was always great. And plus, a lot of people are using Jira and Atlassian. So lot of big points.


    Caitlin:

    Win-win for both, huh?

    Cody:

    Yeah. Always, always, always.

    Caitlin:

    Very good.

    Cody:

    Yeah.

    Caitlin:

    Lots of interesting talks happening. Have you attended any that have really sparked an interest in you? What's [inaudible 00:10:15]-

    Cody:

    Yeah. I can't remember any of the talk names right off the top, but they've all been incredibly insightful. Tons of information. It seems like there's been a topic for everything, which is always a great sign and stuff like that. So my notes, I have pages and pages and pages of notes, which is always a good sign.

    Caitlin:

    Yeah, that's [inaudible 00:10:34].

    Cody:

    So I'm I have to go back and [inaudible 00:10:35] again.

    Caitlin:

    Yes.

    Cody:

    But it's been incredible and the talks have been very plentiful, so yeah.

    Caitlin:

    Good. Good. And what is the one key takeaway that you are looking forward to bringing back and sharing with the team?

    Cody:

    Well, I think one of the key takeaways for us was that... I talked about the engagement that everybody has, but one thing that's been incredible is to hear everybody's stories, to hear everybody's problems, their processes, all of that stuff. So all of that information's going to be a great aggregate for us to take back and create a better experience with our product and all that good stuff. So yeah.


    Caitlin:

    For sure. I love it. Now, I have one last question for you. It's just a fun one. It's a true or false. We're doing Aussie trivia. Are you ready for this one?

    Cody:

    Okay.

    Caitlin:

    Okay.

    Cody:

    Hopefully.

    Caitlin:

    So my true or false is, are Budgy Smugglers a type of bird?

    Cody:

    Are buggy smugglers-

    Caitlin:

    Budgy Smugglers.

    Cody:

    Budgy Smugglers.

    Caitlin:

    A type of bird.

    Cody:

    True.

    Caitlin:

    False. No.

    Cody:

    What are they?

    Caitlin:

    Speedos.

    Cody:


    Yeah. Well, I've got some of those up there in my luggage. So I'll bring the budgys out now.

    Caitlin:

    With your Daisy Dukes.

    Cody:

    Exactly. Exactly.

    Caitlin:

    Yeah. And cowboy boots, right?

    Cody:

    Yeah.

    Caitlin:

    Well, thank you so much.

    Cody:

    Thank you.

    Caitlin:

    Very appreciate it.

    Cody:

    Yeah. Thank you.

    Tenille:

    Doug, how are you?

    Doug:

    I'm great. Thank you.

    Tenille:

    Awesome. Well, tell me about, what's the best thing you've learned today?

    Doug:

    I think learning how our customers are using our products that we didn't even know about is really interesting.

    Tenille:

    That's amazing. Have you had a chance to get out to many of the sessions at all?


    Doug:

    I actually have not. I've been tied to this booth, or I've been in meetings that were already planned before I even came down here.

    Tenille:

    [inaudible 00:12:01].

    Doug:

    Yeah.

    Tenille:

    That's good. So when you're back at work, what do you think is probably the best Agile ceremony that you and your team can't live without?

    Doug:

    I think what I'm bringing back to the office is not so much ceremony. It's really from a product perspective. I work in product management. So for us, it's how we can explain how our product brings value to our customers. So many lessons learned from here that we're really anxious to bring back and kind of build into our value messaging.

    Tenille:

    Fantastic.

    Doug:

    Yeah.

    Tenille:

    Thanks. That's great. Thanks very much.

    Caitlin:

    He was one of the co-authors of the Agile Manifesto. Firstly, how are you doing in conference so far?

    John:

    Well, working hard.

    Caitlin:

    Yeah, good stuff.

    John:

    Enjoying Nashville.

    Caitlin:


    Yeah. It's cool, isn't it? It's so different from the [inaudible 00:12:46] what's happening.

    John:

    Yeah. It's good. Yes. It's nice to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while.

    Caitlin:

    Yeah. Yeah.

    John:

    And seeing three dimensional.

    Caitlin:

    Yes. Yeah, I know. It's interesting-

    John:

    It's there-

    Caitlin:

    ... [inaudible 00:12:54] and stuff happening.

    John:

    Yeah, IRL.

    Caitlin:

    Lots of interesting [inaudible 00:13:01] that's happening. Any key takeaways for you? What are you going to take after to share with the team?

    John:

    Oh, well, that's a good question. I'm mostly been talking with a lot of friends that I haven't seen in a while. [inaudible 00:13:14].

    Caitlin:

    Yes.

    John:

    And since I've only been here a couple days, I haven't actually gone for much, if anything. To be frank.

    Caitlin:

    I know. Well, we're pretty busy on the boots, aren't we?

    John:


    Yeah. Yeah. But certainly, the kinds of conversations that are going on are... I was a little bit worried about Agile. Like, I don't want to say... Yeah, I don't want to say it. But I don't want to say, Agile's becoming a jump turf.

    Caitlin:

    Yes.

    John:

    But I think there's a lot of people here that are actually really still embracing the ideals and really want to learn, do and practice [inaudible 00:14:00].

    Caitlin:

    Yeah.

    John:

    So I'm frankly surprised and impressed and happy. There's a lot. If you just embrace more of the manifesto, and maybe not all of the prescriptive stuff sometimes, and you get back to basics. [inaudible 00:14:22]-

    Caitlin:

    Yeah. So let's talk about that, the Agile Manifesto that you mentioned. Embracing that. What does embracing mean? Can you elaborate on that a bit more? So we know we've got the principles there. Is there one that really stands out more than another to you?

    John:

    Well, my world of what I was doing at the time, and I'd done a lot of defense department, water haul, and built my own sort of lightweight process, as we call it before Agile. So to me, the real key... This doesn't have the full-

    Caitlin:

    Full manifesto, yeah.

    John:

    But if you go to the website and read at the top, it talks about like we are uncovering ways by doing, and I'm still learning, still uncovering. And I think it's important for people to realize we really did leave our ego at the door. Being humble in our business is super important. So that might not be written anywhere in the principles, but if the whole thing at the preamble at the top, and the fact that we talk about how we value those things on the blog versus the whole... There's a pendulum that you could see both of those things collide. That, in my opinion, one the most important trait that we should exercise is being humble, treating things as a hypothesis. Like, don't just build features [inaudible 00:15:58] bottom up, how do you seek up on the answers, that's what I want people to takeaway.

    Caitlin:


    That's great. That's great advice. Well, thank you so much, John. Appreciate you taking the time to chat with us.

    John:

    You're welcome, Caitlin.

    Caitlin:

    Yeah. Enjoy what's [inaudible 00:16:11].

    John:

    Thank you.

    Caitlin:

    Thank you.

    John:

    [inaudible 00:16:13] tomorrow.

    Caitlin:

    All right.

    Tenille:

    Abukar, thanks for joining us today. Can I ask you both, what do you think is the best thing you've learned today?

    Avi:

    Best thing I've learned?

    Tenille:

    Yeah.

    Avi:

    That's a really interesting one. Because I'm here at the booth a lot, so I'll get to attend a lot of things. So there were two things I learned that were really important. One, which is that the Easy Agile logo is an upside down A, because it means you're from Australia. So it's down under. And then the second most important thing I learned about today was we were in a session talking about sociocracy, and about how to make experiments better with experiments, which sounded a little weird at first, but it was really all about going through like a mini A3 process. For those of you listening, that's something that was done to Toyota. It's a structured problem solving method, but instead of going [inaudible 00:17:02] around it and going through the experiment, going around two or three times and then deciding that's the right experiment you're going forward.

    Tenille:


    Thank you. How about your time?

    Kai:

    I've been at the booth most of the time, but from that you meet a lot of people all over the world. And we really have like one thing in common, which is wanting to help people. And it's really been nice to be in a room of people if they're at the beginning of their journey or their really seasoned, that their motivation is just to really empower others. So it's been really nice to be around that kind of energy.

    Avi:

    We've really learned that our friends from Australia are just as friendly up here as you are on the other side. I feel when you come on this side, you get mean, but it turns out you're just as nice up here too.

    Tenille:

    Well, it depends how long you've been on flight.

    Avi:

    Oh, exactly.

    Tenille:

    [inaudible 00:17:44], we're okay.

    Kai:

    Yeah.

    Avi:Abukar:

    Exactly. Good.

    Tenille:

    All right. One more question here.

    Avi:

    Sure.

    Tenille:

    What do you think is the secret ingredient for a successful team?

    Avi:

    What do I think the secret? Oh, that's a really good question. That's a-

    Kai:

    He's the best one to answer that question.


    Avi:

    That's a little longer than a two-second podcast, but I'll tell you this. It may not be psychological safety,-

    Tenille:

    Okay.

    Avi:

    ... just because Google said that and Project Aristotle show that. I think to have a really, really successful team, you need a really skilled scrum master. Because to say that the team has psychological safety is one ingredient, it's not the only ingredient. A strong scrum master is someone who's really skilled to create that psychological safety, but also help with all the other aspects of getting ready to collaborate and coordinate in the most positive way possible. Plus, searching for... Her name is Cassandra. On Slack, she calls herself Kaizen. You get it? It's a joke. But that's the whole thing is that a really skilled scrum master helps the teams find the kaizens that they need to really get to become high performing. So psychological safety is an enabler of it, but that doesn't mean it creates the performance. It's an ingredient to make it happen.

    Tenille:

    Fantastic.

    Kai:

    There's no better answer than that one. Let's do exclamation.

    Tenille:

    Excellent. Thanks very much for taking the time.

    Avi:

    Thank you so much.

    Kai:

    Of course.

    Hayley:

    We're here with Carey from Path to Agility. Carey, what have you been really loving about this conference?

    Carey:

    I think I've loved the most about this conference so far is the interaction with all the people that are here. It's really nice to get together, meet different folks, network around, have the opportunity to see what else is out there in the marketplace. And then, of course, talk about the product that we have with Path to Agility. It's a wonderful experience to get out here and to see everybody. And it's so nice to be back out in person instead of being in front of a screen all the time.


    Tenille:

    Yeah, absolutely. Have you had a chance to get to many of the sessions?

    Joseph:

    I've tried to as much as I can, but it's also important to take that time to decompress and let everything sink in. So here we are having fun.

    Tenille:

    Yeah, absolutely. So thinking back to work, what do you think is the one Agile ceremony that you take that helps you and your team the most?

    Joseph:

    I think that finding different ways to collaborate, effective ways to collaborate. And in terms of work management, how are we solving some of the problems that we have? There's so many tools that are here to make that easier, which is made pretty special. Speaking to people and finding out how they go about solving problems.

    Tenille:

    And what do you think makes a really great Agile team?

    Joseph:

    Well, you could say something very cliche, like being very adaptive and change and so on and so forth. But I think it really comes down to the interaction between people. Understanding one another, encouraging one another, and just the way you work together.

    Tenille:

    Fantastic. Great. Well, thanks very much for taking the time to chat.

    Joseph:

    Thank you. It was nice chatting with you guys all week long.

    Tenille:

    Cheers.

    Tenille:

    Dan, thanks for taking the time to chat.

    Dan:

    You're welcome.

    Tenille:

    [inaudible 00:22:54] questions. What do you think is the best thing you learned today?


    Dan:

    Oh, the best thing I learned today, the morning products keynote was excellent. Got a couple tips on how to do product management, different strategies, how you have folks about seeing their focus on the tactical and the strategic. So just some nice little nuggets, how to [inaudible 00:23:12].

    Tenille:

    [inaudible 00:23:13], thanks for joining us today. Can I start by asking, what do you think is the best thing you've learned this week?

    Speaker 17:

    The best thing I've learned this week is there's no right way to do Agile. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. And so it's really about figuring out what the right process is for the organization you're in, and then leveraging those success patterns.

    Tenille:

    Well, I guess on that, is there one kind of Agile ceremony that you think your team can't do without?

    Speaker 17:

    The daily standup being daily. I think a lot of our teams, they talk all day long. They don't necessarily need to sync up that frequently. I've had a few teams already, they go down like three days a week and it seems to work for them. The other maybe key takeaway that I've seen folks do is time boxes. So no meetings from 10:00 to 2:00 or whatever it may be, and really driving that from a successful perspective.

    Tenille:

    I guess on that note, what do you think makes a really successful Agile team?

    Speaker 17:

    The ability to talk to each other, that ability to communicate. And so with all of our teams being either hybrid or remote, making sure that we have the tools that let them feel like they can just pick up and talk to somebody anytime they want, I think is key. And a lot of folks still don't have cameras, right, which is baffling to me. But that ability to see facial expressions, being face to face has been so nice because we're able to get that. So that's the other key is just that ability to talk to each other as though I could reach out and touch you.

    Tenille:

    Okay. Fantastic. Well, thanks so much.

    Speaker 17:

    You're welcome. Thank you.

    Tenille:

    Okay. Rob and Andrew, thanks so much for taking a few minutes with us. Can I start by asking you, what do you think is the best thing you learned this week?


    Rob:

    For me, it's definitely fast scaling Agile, we learned about this morning. We're going to try it.

    Andrew:

    For me, I really enjoyed the math programming session and learning kind of different ways to connect engineers and collaborate.

    Tenille:

    Great. Next up, I guess, what do you think makes a great Agile team?

    Rob:

    First and foremost, that they're in control of how they work and what they work on, more than anything else.

    Andrew:

    Yeah. For me, it's a obviously psychological safety and just having a good team dynamic where they can disagree, but still be respectful and come up with great ideas.

    Tenille:

    And is there one Agile ceremony that you think a great team can't live without?

    Rob:

    Probably retrospective. I think the teams need to always be improving, and that's a good way to do it.

    Andrew:

    Agreed. Yeah. Agreed.

    Tenille:

    Okay. That's great. Thanks so much for taking the time.

    Andrew:

    Thank so much. Appreciate it.