S1E010: Tolu Fagbola on Applying Agile Effectively for Organisational Change

Bio  

Victor is a Lean/AGILE Strategy and Transformation Consultant, helping organisations in emergent environments navigate the path to a successful future via "Agile Ways Of Working". This usually involves developing and implementing Lean/Agile Strategies for these organisations, coaching & mentoring Senior Leaders, Managers and Teams in attaining the Agile Mindset that allows them to achieve high performance. Experiencing this evolutionary journey with clients from traditional ways of working to successfully achieving full Agility is his career passion. With a career path spanning over 30 years, starting as an accountant and Business Analyst, Scrum Master to being an Agile Coach today. His best skill amongst many is as a motivator and his work ethic is all around making work fun. Other passion outside work include helping Africa as a whole achieve Agility – Victor is the creator of the A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S Agile Culture Model and also an amateur chef, gastronome and suffering Chelsea FC fan. Victor lives in England with his family, 3 dogs and 12 fish.

Interview Highlights

01:40 & 08:00 Childhood bereavement

04:00 The importance of adapting

09:45 A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S model

14:50 Using local language

20:00 WakandAGILITY

22:25 Sustainable transformation

29:00 Transformation buzzword

32:15 The importance of timing

Social Media  

·         LinkedIn: Victor NWADU | LinkedIn

·         Email: victor@wakandagility.com

·         Medium: Victor Nwadu – Medium

·         Twitter: @wakandagility  

Books & Resources

·         The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement: Goldratt, Eliyahu M

·         Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet: Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders L. David Marquet

·         The Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations: James Surowiecki, Erik Singer

·         WakandAGILITY.com: Enabling Agility for Africa: Agile Training, Support and Networking | Wakandagility

·         The A.P.I.A.M. – R.A.T.S. MODEL | LinkedIn

Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

So I have with me here Victor Nwadu, who is an agility strategist, Agile coach, everything-in-between, maestro. Victor, it's an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you so much.

Victor Nwadu

Thank you, Ula, thank you for having me. Thank you.

Ula Ojiaku

So let, just tell us, Victor, about your background. What are the things that you've experienced, that have shaped you into who you are today and how you've ended up to where you are professionally?

Victor Nwadu

I mean, just cutting to the flow, I'm from Nigeria. I'm also, like all Nigerians, educated in Nigeria and then for some, you know, reason found myself here in the UK. If I wanted to pick on anything that has, you know, brought me to where I am and what has driven me to who I am today, I think it's just, it’s my childhood, right. I was born to working class parents that, you know, Catholic people that worked hard for everything they've got. And as a Nigerian, you are told, it's instilled in you from a very young age, what the benefit of hard work is. Unfortunately, I was traumatised at the age of 13 by the death of my mum. So, and yeah, left with five siblings and my dad was broken by the course of events, but, you know, at that young age getting to where I am, having to, you know, do what I had to do to get to school and all that and still have these five siblings with me as well.

Ula Ojiaku

Because you're the first.

Victor Nwadu

Yes, I'm the first. You know how it is, especially when you're Igbo, right, you're expected to be strong and do it.

Ula Ojiaku

Di-Okpara (First Born)

Victor Nwadu

Di-Okpara, you say, that kind of thing, you know, so, yeah. But thank God for today and I find myself here today talking to powerful people like yourself. And I mean, I think that that has made me stronger, and I miss my mum terribly, but if I look back, to be honest with you, the course of events in one's life really defines, helps one define one's destiny. And that's how, you know, so I believe that what I went through in life has made me stronger, you know? So, yeah. I came to the UK, became an accountant, funnily enough, I did what we need to do. Then I find myself being a BA then a, after systems accounting, because I loved computers and all that, you know, then find myself doing, I don't know if you know what SAP is, so I did that for a while. Met a chap, a BA guy that I was doing his invoice, I saw how much was earning and I said, what, Jesus, I mean, tell me what to do, man. I then became a BA from that, then became, at that time, luckily, Scrum was just coming into the industry and, you know, we, I found myself doing something called an Agile BA, that's how I got into Agile. Then became a Scrum Master, became an Agile coach, and the rest is history. So that’s basically it in a nutshell.

Ula Ojiaku

That's interesting, that you started off as an accountant and now you're an agile coach. I mean, I'm not throwing stones. I started off as an Electronic Engineer and I'm an agile coach, but yeah, it's all about, what I'm trying to also tell young people, including my children, that what you start off with doesn't necessarily mean that that's the career you're going to have for your whole life, you know, there is a whole lot of options, but it's just about starting somewhere.

Victor Nwadu

Especially now, I say the same thing to my kids, especially my son. You need to be in a state of mind where you need to adapt. A lot of paradigm shifts are happening underneath us and, you know, you need to be ready, and you need to be ready to go and adapt to the present circumstances. Otherwise, you know, and this is why we do what we do.

Ula Ojiaku

Yeah, and I think it starts with a mindset as well, you know, just having that Agile mindset, not to flog it, but agility starts first with the mind. What’s your take on it? Because things are changing to be able to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Victor Nwadu

Exactly. I mean, so we are living in exciting times, like you know already, agility was born out of the times that we're living in. It all started with the internet and outsourcing and all that, the world becoming a small village and all that. Then, we then have this digital thing going on and the information age and that brought yourselves all sorts of fantastic things. Things are, because we are utilising and leveraging the power of technology, we find out that we don't need to do certain things. Unfortunately, some jobs have to go, but then new ones are coming in. So all these things started happening, and again, it's affecting generations right now. If you were Generation X like me, you would've seen at least three more generations in your time when these changes are happening. It's crazy. So we now have, how do we survive? You know, you survive by adapting. If you don't adapt, you become obsolete, extinct, and that has tailored it to the industry, and the way we work. And even now talking to you, I'm working from home, I have a home office, you know, and that makes it even more fantastic because I can work anywhere in the world. Right. So what it does now is that it creates a bigger competition, right, where anybody can apply for any job anywhere in the world. It also helps the earth, and I don't want to go into that working from home debate, but that's all these things that are happening are as the consequences of the various paradigm shifts that are happening. So we need to adapt, like you said, in the mind, our mind needs to be open to change. And we need to put ourself in a place where we leverage all the advantages of those changes for our own benefits and so yeah.

Ula Ojiaku

Well said Victor. I mean, I completely associate with what you've said so far and the changes that are happening, especially with technology. For example, the recent one that's making waves is like AI, you know, so we're now in, someone said we’re in the knowledge, information age, but now it's something like augmented age. So it's not just about the information, but it's also about being able to leverage, you know, technology like AI to still do productive work. But it still ties back with being adaptable, being able to learn and unlearn, to remain creative because machines are not taking over anytime soon.

Victor Nwadu

They can't take over the creative aspect and we need to automate and become, the competitive edge now is about who does things quicker, who gets to the market quicker and who get to the customer quicker? Who satisfies the customer in terms of the value threshold. So yeah, that's what we are, you know, we’re creative, but we'll still be the same, but if you don't have creative guys in your design and engineering design, or software design, you're still going to fall back into that obsolete group of people that don't change or are not changing as quickly as it should. So yeah, I agree totally with that. Yeah.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you. I know we went off into a rabbit hole, but I did want to just take you a little bit back to what you said earlier when you were talking about the things that happened to you that shaped you into who you are. And you mentioned your mum's death at 13, you know, I'm really sorry about that, and I can't imagine how tough it would be because my son just turned 13 and I can't imagine the difficulty it must be, well, you did say it must have been for you. You said events in one's life defines one's destiny. Can I, so my twist would be, because the same thing could happen to two different people and you have two different outcomes. So could there be something about how they react to it as well?

Victor Nwadu

Yeah, obviously. I mean, the way people react is the key, right. Yeah. So one person could react, have reacted, okay, fine. You hit the ground, I mean, you fall and you cry, and you get traumatised. Then you kind of rebuild yourself and stand up and keep going. And some people, it's just like a tough man's thing, right? It's a storming it and all that. So people stay in that trough, they never, some teams just stay there, they never rise above, you know, so some people, not because it's their fault, maybe their environment, maybe because resources that are not there to guide them, to help them stand up, you know? Yeah. We're not the same. So, yeah, I just happened to be who I'm hopefully strong enough to have been able to lead myself from that trough.

Ula Ojiaku

Well, you inspire me and I know that you are an inspiration to many other people as well, so thank you for sharing your story. So you did put together this model, agile culture model A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Victor Nwadu

Actually, I have a little of pause on that. So it's something that, you know, that’s been on my mind, the pet project, purely because, you know, some people are saying, are you trying to create another agile, and no, it's not. It's just like a clarion call to people that are coming to Africa and the Middle East to engage in a transformation process. We're looking at the way Agile is, when the forefathers of agile went to Utah to dream up this fantastic thing. I'm sorry, they were not thinking about Africa, they were thinking from their own Western perspective, right. And then we Africans, Agilists and change leaders from Africa, we know that things we've learned from what the manifesto and the principles have taught us, are not that straightforward in from where we come from. So it manifests itself with many of my colleagues in the West that have gone to Africa and met these challenges and have complained. And I say, yes, it's because we are totally different, mindset is different, the Western mindset is totally different. So I've kind of modelled it more to Africa and the Middle East, and mainly to Nigeria and South Africa because that's where I got most of my data from. And it's A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S it's actually Agile Practice in Africa and the Middle East. Okay. And the R.A.T.S, I get lots of stick from my friends, the R.A.T.S is just when I kind of listed out the main things, main factors, some of them not that bad, some of them, the bad ones, it just, the best way I could figure it out to make, to create a soundbite was, it came out as R.A.T.S. So you have your religious intrusion, the R is religious intrusion, the A is an age respect paradox, and the T, obviously time. The other one is secrecy cults, and the fifth one, which I've added on later on was language, the leverage language and that kind of stuff, right? So the religious one is the effect of religion in the way we work. If you go to any African or if you go to Nigeria today now, you will see, say for example, people doing their standup. The standup, daily standup is, that's supposed to take an average of 15 minutes. They will give an average of five minutes for prayers and, you know, the way we pray, evangelistic sometimes things more than that. And imagine a Muslim guy in that scene. You know, imagine a Western guy, a Western agile coach and like woah, really? You know, so you have that aspect of it. You also have the age respect paradox. So it's a paradox because yes, while people in the West understand age and respect, in Africa and in the Middle East we take it up a notch or two. You know, where sometimes actually the negative aspect is that somebody that is older than you now thinks because he's older, you cannot allocate well as part of a member of the team, you feel, oh, it's an insult for you to tell them what to do, which is wrong and very crude, but it happens, it happens. So we have that and we also have the African Time, so it's not fair to call it African because the French do it. It’s not labelled an such connotative when the French do it…

Ula Ojiaku

I've been to different countries. They do it. I'm not going to name it, name them.

Victor Nwadu

Yeah. So, exactly. So the way it's been made to feel as if some kind of, like we, Nigerians and Africans started it. I don't really like it, but, you know, that has become something that of note and something that has kind of embedded itself in our culture and our behaviours. Yes, the French do it, but is in social circles, however, we've kind of brought it into professional, our professional lives, where we lack that discipline for some reason of keeping exactly to time. And that itself, obviously as you and I know, has an effect on cost of delay and all that kind of stuff.

Ula Ojiaku

And morale as well.

Victor Nwadu

The fourth one is secrecy cult. For some reason, we don't share knowledge. And I'm happy, agile is, has brought the fact that we need, when we bring transformation into an organisation, part of it is making the organisation at the end of the day, a learning organisation, where we collaborate and collaboration means we have to share knowledge, we have to share, you know, for us to win. Okay? So, yes, so for some reason in Africa, that doesn't take place as much as we would love to see that. The last I’ve put there is language, so this one is very important for me because, and Sophie Oluwole that's one of the, she's late now, but she's one of the people that have kind of been evangelising the need for us Africans to get rid of the Western language, like English or French. We should start teaching our kids chemistry, maths and everything, the academic learning journeys should start with our local language. It's easier on the brain, it's less stressful, and they learn. Then we can learn English later on, or however, we shouldn't waste time to learn a foreign language, then start learning the basics of academia, right. So if you look at it, it's timeframe itself is a waste in terms of agile thinking, right? So for me, I brought it into an agile space because you find out that, I have worked across global teams, right? And when, as an agile coach, you give teams freedom to please, create and design within yourself with your local language. Only come to me when you, you know, when you need to, when you need me. And then you'll normally find a language champion that will do the translation or whatever. And so you find out that it's easy, the engagement is easier, and they're loving you for giving them that freedom. So I've been bringing it to Africa to be the way we work in Africa so that we as teams are, we don't become too stressed or thinking of how we sound when we speak English. When we are designing, we are talking about, and when we are in an agile space, we are talking about and discussing with our local language, we are free, and you find out the mind is less stressed. So these ideas just keep flowing, the brainstorming session is fantastic, lively, because you don't have to, oh, let me think of how I'm going to put, structure this, my idea in English before I have to speak, it just comes out, like it's easier. So I think we have more benefits if we trace ourselves back into our local language, especially if the team is regional and everybody there is speaking the same language.

Ula Ojiaku

I was going to get there, so it seemed like you read my mind. I was going to say, but what if the team, because in Nigeria there are over 200 languages or 200 ethnic groups, since we've started off with Nigeria, you know, what happens? Because you might still have to go to a shared common language.

Victor Nwadu

That's a very good question. So, but the thing is, like most African, especially in India, places like India and even in the Middle East, we have a kind of broken English, we have a local slang anyway, that's a kind of, it's mixed with English, like in Africa, Pidgin, we call it Pidgin, it's a mixture of Creole and Hausa, Wazobia, that kind of thing going on there with English, everybody already speaks that language. Why don't we use that? So that's a tie breaker anyway, that, why don't we use that, you know? So yeah. So, but basically, when you go to places like Enugu or Kaduna, you tend to be of that particular region. But if we have a thought person there that’s from other place, let's use our local vernacular to break that ice in terms of the way we speak and communicate. So that's my answer to that.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay. And where you have someone, if there's only maybe one person who's not of the culture, not from that country, doesn't know it, where does inclusion come in here?

Victor Nwadu

It's highly unlikely, but however if it happens, because in the small village that we have now, the global village that we have, I normally would have a language champion, somebody that's, you know, you should be able to find some kind of, somebody within the, just like your Agile champion, the team. You find somebody that can translate, right? Otherwise, I've developed all sorts of apps right now, where you can use something as Google translates. So when you, when you want to give important meetings and you want to write, you just do the one in English, then translate it to their local language and just send it out. Everybody will understand and they'll come back to you. So, yeah. But it's very rare, very, very rare, to find a place where the English language and French has not touched on this planet, or Spanish. So when that happens, you just, we just use tools that, simple tools are available to us, Google translate, use an Agile champion to kind of leverage and that, kind of make that disability or handicap a non-existence or minimise the impact of it in the way we communicate.

Ula Ojiaku

On a slightly off tangent point in terms of languages, Mandarin is also like going up there,  you can't ignore that.  So what have you been working on lately as you've talked about the A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S model, why you came up with it and how, in a little way, how it could be used, but what else have you been working on lately that you'd like to share with the world?

Victor Nwadu

Apart from work and all that, I give a lot to my people. I have tried to empower a lot of people, so I've created this WakandAGILITY group where we, it's a global support thing where we kind of give masterclasses to people that are coming into the industries from masters and Agile coaches already there, but want to, you know, so I kind of hold these master classes for free actually, because, I am looking at the scope of how we can kind of create, make sure that as Africa develops and becomes more hungry, resource hungry, we have the resources on the ground to accommodate those requests, right?

Ula Ojiaku

So skilled manpower, you mean?

Victor Nwadu

Exactly. We don't have it. So, and now to train up, agile training is expensive. So that's my own way of giving back. But apart from that, I've been working with people, great people, great change analysts, internationally based people like, I don't know if you know her, Mary Laniyan, she's based in the UK and we have a lovely woman that did African something sometime ago that invited me to Lagos Abiodun Osoba. We also, in fact, I think we have somebody, her name is Anu Gopal, she’s even a powerhouse in agile affairs, I think one of those, yeah. I also have Etopa Suley from Canada. You know, all these guys who come together in the last Agile 20 something, we came off with the whole government manifesto for Nigeria. That was our presentation, it's fantastic, right? It is there on the internet right now, so yeah, so it's people like this I'm working with, we came up with the manifesto for good governance for Nigeria and many other projects like that. So yeah, that's what I spend my time doing behind the scenes, apart from work and spending time with my family.

Ula Ojiaku

That's really awesome, and I'm sure some of the listeners would want to know more about it. So we'll make sure the links are in the chat. Do you still do run these sessions?

Victor Nwadu

Yes, I do. It's keeping with the requests. I have a lot of requests, and you know.

Ula Ojiaku

So there is a question I have for you with respect to transformation, because as an Agile coach, I would expect that you've been involved in a number of transformation efforts with organisations in involving leaders and teams. Can there be a sustainable transformation without vision or strategy?

Victor Nwadu

So, it's possible for you to have a transformation, well a transformation, it's possible for that to just happen once, right? So it's like a rider, you know, you are told to ride through one end of the Serengeti to the other with dangerous animals and valleys and all that. With a horse, no compass. And you don't have a compass, you have a map or maybe don't have a map, you just know just face there, you get to the end, right? And you don't have a compass. You don't know the health of the horse and you just got on that horse. And yet, it is probable that you may be able to get to the end. But how sustainable is that? That is why the word sustainable that you use is very important. How sustainable is that for us to now create some kind of tourist pamphlet for other people to come behind us to use? It's exactly the same way. So it's probably, it's very, very probable for you to run this kind of transformation rather than just win with one team or whatever, then where's the playbook for those coming behind you, if you want to kind of multiply that, accelerate it within the organisation. So that's why sustainability is important. You know, how sustainable is that? How can we we create a model, or a playbook for us to use as an organisation for our own peculiar transformation, right? That's why it's important for us to have vision. I mean, you know, we need to have a strategy, you know, so the vision itself, first of all is the what and the why we are doing it, and all that kind of stuff. Then the strategy, the Agile strategy is very important. The Agile strategy itself is the vision plus how we're going to do it. Under it, in a timeframe, and how we’re going to fulfil the objective required to actualise that vision, right? And with regard to the scope, timeline, course and the organisational culture. So that's the strategy. We need to have all that. When you have that and you place it, and you can start to kind of base it under the kind of, your playbook of entry, the change itself and the exit, then you have something to go with, you know? So, yeah, that's basically how it works. You cannot have a sustainable transformation without a clear vision, without a realistic strategy that kind of makes sure that all these aspects of the scope itself, the objective, the goals, and then taking into consideration the culture I dealt with, you know, you cannot have a, what is known as transformation, a sustainable one without having a transformation strategy. So that's it.

Ula Ojiaku

You may have touched on this, but I'll say, just going back to your Serengeti Crossing analogy. I mean if you are crossing, or the person has been assigned a horse cross, that it's important to say why are we crossing the Serengeti? Because it might be that if you evaluate the why it might be better for you to stay where you are and don't put yourself and other people in danger and waste resources crossing, just for crossing's sake.

Victor Nwadu

Yeah. I mean, all these things will come in when we are laying out the strategy and, you know, we will have the vision, somebody comes, you know. I have to say transformation is sexy nowadays. So the metaphor is dealing with the, the Serengeti itself is the transformation, what we assume to be all the wahala inside the transformation.

Ula Ojiaku

What is wahala? Beause not everyone understands what wahala is?

Victor Nwadu

Wahala means all the troubles in life, all the challenges you meet in everything. So we need to first of all understand that nowadays transformation is sexy. Where many organisations, I heard a rumour that many leaders engaged in these big companies engaged transformation purely for the benefit of their PE ratio in the stock exchange. It's a rumour, I haven't confirmed it, but I don't know how to confirm it, but I do know that it's very sexy to say your organisation is carrying out its transformation. Everybody wants to be a saviour, that's what we're doing. So that is part of the big problem and the challenges that we face as change leaders in the transformation, because the success of the transformation depends on the leaders and the person at the top. How committed they are to it. So the commitment of that leader is tasked from the top. If they don't have the buy in, if they're not convinced about it, they're just doing it for show, when push comes to shove, and it will happen, the challenges will come and hit you. Cultural challenges, personality challenges, the ego of leaders or middle managers, and you'll hit them as you already know. How committed is the leader at the top to come down and say guys, and create that space for us to be able to make this transformation happen? Because as the ultimate impediment remover, that person should be able to have the time, to have the commitment to come down to the team level, to the whatever program level, whatever, and be able to remove that impediment for that to happen. So if this leader or sets of leaders or whoever is given the mandate to commission a transformation doesn't have total commitment or is not bought in, is not doing it for some show or for some reason, it's not going to work.

Ula Ojiaku

Very true. Do you have any anonymised stories of your experience in guiding organisations in enterprise agility or transformation journey. Because one thing you've said, you know, transformation is sexy, it's really a buzzword. And if you ask two people, and they could be in the same leadership team, you know, C-suite team, what is transformation? And they'll give you different answers. It's just a buzzword, which means different things to different people. But do you have any story underpinning, you know, what you have said about leadership being key?

Victor Nwadu

If I give you all the stories, you're not going to leave here, right. However, I want to make a few things very, very clear that just standing in most organisations, that starts their transformation journey with a few teams, as you would expect. When they succeed in that they then call it an enterprise wide transformation. Where you take a few teams to delivering some funky, sexy, innovative products, that is not enterprise wide transformation, that's not business transformation or business agility, right. It is you showing that, and delivering a particular product as quickly to the customer, whatever works using agile ways of working. So there's that misconception there, that's the number one misconception that people think, oh, when we succeed with a few teams, yeah, we have, no, we haven't, because you still need to scale it, you know, to the entire enterprise, to non-IT enterprise to both upstream and downstream and all that. It is when your organisation as a whole, no matter how tall it is, can have a transparent view of where everything is, when an organisation can adapt to news in the market very quickly, when an organisation can innovate, it has the people they have been enabled to, to have a different idea, different mindset towards failure and seeing failure as a learning bridge, all those kind of mindset things, but happening in very large scale so that the organisation becomes a learning organisation, everybody's learning, we have a lot of COPs (Community of Practices), you know, that's when you say a transformation has been successful, that’s when you can actually say the organisation has transisted from a traditional stoic, siloed set up to where we have open collaboration, and the cultures, mindsets and the culture have been changed in that the mindset of people that lead and those that make things happen is one, and they have this adaptive way of behaving. When something happens in the market, nothing shocks them. Even when it does, you have some, I understand some people even have an anti-disruptive, you know, when you come up with an idea in your organisation and you go back and you go out to the market and sell it, you become disruptive, you disrupt the market. However, some organisations as well are having anti-disruption strategies. If somebody else comes, how quickly can we respond? So those are the kind of things that shows that organisation has actually transisted from those traditional ways of working to an agile way of working. However, the other aspect I want to draw to our attention is about timing, when we are thinking of transformation. So for me, my advice is first of all, number one, to get the top person involved in it. Timing is very, very important. You need to have time for this transformation, to start this transformation. The time when you start transformation is very important. You don't want to start it when you have disruption in the market, things will not happen normal way, and it's better for you to do transformation in peace time, what I call peace time, before some major disruption, so that you can leverage what you've learned from that transformation in that, when that disruption happens. Timing is very important when you're carrying out a major transformation in your organisation, okay? You need to have committed leaders, leaders that are really committed to the cause, they're not just doing it for show and leaders should be able to come down and do Gemba walks, and see that what is actually happening in the kitchen is what their executive information system is relayed to them, right? There needs to be complete transparency from the top to bottom. So that we are sure that what the developers and the guys creating all our products are doing is exactly tied to the revision and objective of the executive. So that's part of it. And for me it's common sensical things that we already know. However, when we have transparency, this transparency increases trust. And it needs to start with the leader, he needs to show transparency by example, right? So it increases trust, and trust enables organisation-wide collaboration, right? So when teams start collaborating, teams that were locked in silos start collaborating, we start seeing silo breaking, and when you start breaking the silo, you start seeing aggregates, paradigm shifts happening. And that is when you now then see that almighty cultural change emerge. So it comes from, and transparency, it comes from transparency leading to trust, and trust leading to collaboration that breaks down silos. And when that thing happens, you start having all this shift because we now trust each other. There are no more silos, then the cultural shift that people say is hard to do, it is, however, if you follow this, if you allow this thing to flow the way I just listed, it'll flow in its normal cadence, right, without having to have unnecessary, you know It's not easy to have a cultural, don't get me wrong, when we are as change analysts and change agents, it's not easy for cultural change. No matter where we are in the world, people don't like change as a result. However, it starts with common sensical things like the leader taking the first step, the leader coming into, sometimes when you have a Gemba walk, you come into a meeting and you, like, for example, in some recent, not recent, about two years ago, where the leader came into a meeting or for an impediment that had been there, so kind of a Scrum of Scrum meeting, that had been a feature type impediment, and had been there for quite a while. And he came in and after they've had the conversation, he just raised his hand and everybody was surprised to see him and just said, what is it? And he kind of listed back to him, you know, this impediment that I've been there for roughly about almost a month was dealt with within two days. That is one of the major advantages where you have the leader there, and you need to ask yourself a question, what was causing the impediment delay? The verification of the impediments and the delay of the action of impediments before the leader came in. Middle management, also cultural things, bureaucracy, my space, your space, so the person at the top comes in and slashes through. If you have leaders that are prepared to do that, that have the time to do that, transformation will take its normal course without unfortunate circumstances happening.

Ula Ojiaku

You've said a lot of things in this time and space and they make sense to me, but is it possible, because you said transformation is ideal when done in peace time. How can you, it’s almost like saying you time the markets. Because there are other people, many organisations that have admitted, for example, the Covid, the pandemic accelerated their transformation per se.

Victor Nwadu

Accelerated, but many of them died. You know, yes we have unforeseen circumstances that you cannot help that, right? Aliens landing on the planet and disrupting the world, you cannot help that, right? But I was saying that if you are given a time to select, so it's better for you to do it now before any, covid is part of it, but you also have market disruptions as well, right? So the best time would be when you think just kind of stability, because it starts from a small team, then expand. So you want to make sure that team is not distracted by bigger factors that may be beyond the help, the beyond the reach of the remediating powers of the leaders in the organisations, right. So that's given, if you are given, you know, if you can help it. If you can't help it, start it as quickly as possible, but you know, it's better to have it started in peace time.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome, thanks Victor. I can see that you are quite passionate about what you are saying. So what books have you recommended to people about this topic or anything else and why?

Victor Nwadu

I have many books. The main book, that for me has kind of created powerful insights in the way I do my work, the way I even see life. One of them, the top one is The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Then the other one is Turn the…. Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet. We'll put it in the links. You know, I use that a lot. And it's just leadership should be, you know, it should be about enabling, self-managing, self-organising team. I mean, in the way we work nowadays, you can't know everything. And that was what the point he was trying to say that as a captain, yeah, he's supposed to know how they work, but the details, there are experts that is within his reach, there are the guys that are the experts, so enable them to do the thing and you just deal with it. And the third one will be this one. I just read this book, it's called The Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki. He was saying that data shows that if you take, if you ask people to solve a problem and a group of people from just non-experts, and you get the experts to predict that same problem, the crowd will be, the answer will be closer to the reality than the experts themselves. Why, I don't know, maybe it aggregates knowledge of the crowd coming together rather than experts, and the other point he was making also, is how the HiPPO opinion (HiPPO: Highest Paid Personality), like when you have a team of engineers and the manager comes in that meeting and you ask a question of how do you think we can do this and he gives his opinion first, his opinion is going to skew the answers of everybody else. So this is why it's important, where you have a meeting and some HiPPOs are there, let them be still, let us hear the opinions of the team, the ordinary members of the team before if they need to give their opinion, right? Otherwise we just have a skewed opinion and that opinion will not be the best for that particular question. So that is another very good book.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you. So there are three books. The Goal, Turn That Ship Around, The Wisdom of the Crowds. So how can the audience find you or contact you?

Victor Nwadu

You can get me at wakandagility.com, you can get me at victor@wakandagility.com. You can get me at LinkedIn, Victor Nwadu, you just type it there, you’ll see m there.

Ula Ojiaku

Any ask for the audience, or any final words, Victor?

Victor Nwadu

Final last words, yes, Agile is real. Agile is here. And so be inspired, be prepared, be Agile. First of all, you be inspired to change, to have that mindset to adapt to your present circumstances. You know, be prepared for future disruptions, for anything, and be Agile, right? That's it. Then you will definitely succeed. You will definitely live longer. You will definitely transcend all the challenges, all the Covid 19 time, even aliens coming to this world or whatnot.

Ula Ojiaku

So can we hold you to, to account for it? Can we take it to the bank and say Victor said if we're inspired, prepared, and agile…

Victor Nwadu

It will help. I mean, from my experience in life, it'll help if you're inspired, you have to be inspired. People that are not driven cannot achieve much. You need to be passionate about what you do. And then you need to be prepared. You need to be prepared by having the skillset, challenge yourself to learn, constantly learning. Then be agile, all those things that we do, your mindset, the way you think, you know, having agile ways of doing things, you know, having a different mindset towards failure. When you fail, it doesn't mean you have, you know, you’ve done anything bad or the end of the world, failure is a sign that that option is not going to work and you've learned something new, you pivot and try a new one. So if we have that kind of mindset, we'll be innovating every year, every six months, every three months. If we have a different attitude towards failure, so be inspired, be prepared, be Agile.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you so much, Victor. It's been a pleasure having this conversation

Victor Nwadu

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Ula.

Ula Ojiaku

The pleasure is mine. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Bio

Bryan is a seasoned Enterprise Transformation Strategist, Coach and Trainer specialising in the practical implementation of Business Agility practices within all types of organisations. He brings a balance of business, technical and leadership expertise to his clients with a focus on how to achieve immediate gains in productivity, efficiency, visibility and flow. Bryan is a key contributor in the development of the AgilityHealth platform, AgileVideos.com and the Enterprise Business Agility strategy model and continues to train, speak and write about leading Business Agility topics.

Interview Highlights

02:40 Driving strategy forwards

03:05 Aligning OKRs

06:00 Value-based prioritisation

07:25 An outcome-driven approach

09:30 Enterprise transformation

13:20 The ten elephants in the business agility room

14:10 Misaligned incentives

15:40 Top heavy management

18:50 Being open to change

19:40 Process for improving process

25:15 Being a learning organisation

26:45 Leaders drive cultural change

29:50 Capacity and employee burnout

Social Media

·         LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bryantew

·         Twitter: @B2Agile

·         Email: bryan@agilityhealthradar.com

·         Website: www.agilityhealthradar.com 

Books & Resources

·         The Compound Effect The Compound Effect: Amazon.co.uk: Perseus: 9781593157241: Books by Darren Hardy

·         The Trillion Dollar Coach Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell: Amazon.co.uk: Schmidt, Eric, Rosenberg, Jonathan, Eagle, Alan: 9781473675964: Books by Eric Schmidt and co

·         Project to Product Project to Product: How Value Stream Networks Will Transform IT and Business: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework: Amazon.co.uk: Mik Kersten: 9781942788393: Books by Mik Kirsten

·         EBA strategy model: https://agilityhealthradar.com/enterprise-business-agility-model/

Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

Hello again everyone, welcome back to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. My guest today is Bryan Tew, and this episode is going to be covering the second half of the conversation I had with Bryan on all things enterprise and business agility. So in part one, if you've listened to it already, or if you haven't, please go to that first, I'd really, really recommend, because Bryan talked about how to overcome failed deliveries, meeting teams where they're at, establishing and driving strategy forward. Now for this part two, we went into the topic of OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, and how to align these with strategy. He also talked about the ten elephants in the business agility room, and the importance of being open to change and being a learning organisation and how leaders are critical to driving culture change. Without further ado, part two of my conversation with Bryan Tew. There are some things you've said about what leaders need to do and some of them include, you know, looking at the lean portfolio management, taking an outcome-based approach to defining the strategy at all levels and making sure that, you know, it kind of flows, not in a cascaded manner, but in a way that each layer would know how it's feeding into delivering the ultimate strategy of the organisation. Now, how, from a practical perspective, I mean, yes, you use OKRs, or objectives and key results, you know, that's one way of doing that. But how, are you suggesting then that the leaders would have to write the OKRs for every layer? Or is it just about being clear on the intent and direction of travel and letting each area define it within their context, but with some input from them?

Bryan Tew

No, it's a great question and I'll try to visualise as much as I can, but when you think about it this way, when you start at the top, and let's say that we're coming up with some enterprise level three year OKRs. So where are we going for the next three years? And you know what, things can change, so that's why we check in on those, you know, at least every six months, if not every quarter, because we're learning a lot and we want to adjust. But the thing is, if we have that level of strategy clarified, and not only that, but we're aligned across our leadership group, that means that the priorities that we're focusing on should align as well, and that's the important thing here. So now as we start to move from the enterprise down to maybe a division or portfolio level, all of the OKRs at that level should in some way align up to our enterprise, right? Whether it's around certain objectives that we're trying to accomplish from a financial perspective, or customer goals, or people goals, whatever it is, but now there's something that we can connect to as a foundation. So those senior leaders, although they can provide support and help, typically now it's your portfolio leaders that are taking the lead on building their OKRs that are aligned, and then down to maybe your program or train or whatever level you'd call it, what those OKRs will look like, all the way down to where every single team, which in reality, every single person in the organisation, sees how they fit in driving strategy. Now, I might be in facilities, I might be in HR, I might be in marketing, but I know that what I do is making a difference in making our strategy move forward, even though it's my small part. And I love that, that's where everyone feels connected. Now, what I see more often, and this is really unfortunate, and some people try OKRs and have a bad experience because leaders will just say, okay, everyone go out and do your own OKRs, but they're not aligned to anything. They're aligned to the local priorities, which may or may not be the right things to be working on at all. And so that's where I would say senior leaders need to take the initiative, and they can have help, that's why coaches are there, that's why their directs are there, they can even pull in people that might have expertise in certain areas to craft the OKRs, but even internally, you're going to have great expertise, but the idea is that, let's craft an OKR, even if it's not the senior leaders writing it, but it's actually showing the right message. Here's what we believe we need to do, and these are the outcomes we need to achieve in order for us to actually accomplish a goal. Like, what does that look like for us? And then I love to just press on leaders and ask, how would you know that we're successful? What would you be looking for? And that's a great start to your key results. So we have a really great framework, a very simple framework to build out OKRs, without just putting it into a template to start out, because I just want those main thoughts, like, why are we doing this? What is it going to accomplish for us? Who's going to be involved and what customer is this going to impact? And what's the best way to measure progress, and measure success? Like, those are the things I would start with, which makes OKRs a lot easier. But then from there, I have to have leaders come together to actually look at the work, and which of those items that, maybe, there may be many, which of those are actually going to be the most valuable to move forward with your strategy? You do not want your lower-level people who don't understand the strategy like you do, making those decisions. What are the best things for us to do? And then from there, that's where we can actually bring in the prioritisation, the value-based prioritisation, which we recommend, and starting to build more of your outcome alignment across your organisation. So yeah, there's so many great things that can be done. It's not a ton of work if you start to build a cadence and just a nice process for, how would you do that every quarter?

Ula Ojiaku

And that's a great starting point, because that reduces the risk of, like you said earlier, you know, the teams working on the wrong thing, you know, executing perfectly, but it's the wrong thing. Now, in terms of the process, because you've talked about how the role leaders need to play, you've given examples of how, what they could do to encourage agility in the enterprise or in the business. Now, would it be the same for a functionary division in an organisation that's going through their, let's call it, for lack of a better term, you know, an agile transformation, quote unquote, would you expect the process and the practices to be the same for each division, say finance versus IT versus procurement?

Bryan Tew

Well, so that's a great question and I would say yes and no. So, the process is probably going to be similar. For instance, I would always suggest starting with an outcome driven approach where we have some transformation outcomes that we're trying to achieve. You know, without that, how do you know that you've actually made it or that you're actually getting there? So I would suggest that for any type of organisation, regardless of type of work, but the practices will probably look a little bit different. You know, what you start with might look a little bit different. In fact, maybe I'll share a specific example here for a transformation. In fact, this was more around what leaders need to own around business agility, but this was a large financial services organisation with nine different divisions, and they all recognised that there were gaps in how they were delivering and they needed help, you know, and many of them had tried Agile, but when it came to actually applying OKRs and customer seed and organisational design and all these different ideas, especially things around our culture and leadership, there's always going to be some level of resistance, you know, so we need to really clarify what are the benefits that this will provide for us, why is this going to help us, what specific problems will this solve? And I would suggest that's where you start every time, like what are the biggest challenges you as leaders are trying to solve for? Like, what's keeping you up at night? What are you thinking about? That's why the practices are going to be different. Maybe my biggest problem is I have capacity issues, or maybe my people are feeling burned out, or maybe we're just not getting enough done for our customers, or we have changing needs all the time, or we're getting disrupted, whatever it might be, that's where we want to start. And so, in some cases that might mean, well, we need some portfolio management practices and others it might be, well, we need more customer centricity practices. And others it might be, we need to really focus on our teams. So that's why it changed a little bit. So in this organisation, there was one group who had been pretty successful with Agile and they said, you know what, sign us up, we want to do this, you know, we're ready for this leadership level of agility, so sign us up. And it was a good idea, because it's not going to fail. When you have leaders that are super excited about it, they're willing to put in the effort, and that can at least prove that it can work. And so we believe in what we call quarterly Sprints, we're familiar with a Sprint cycle, two, three weeks, whatever it might be, when you're looking at enterprise transformation, we believe in quarterly Sprints, where you have specific goals you're trying to accomplish for the quarter, and a laid out process, a roadmap to get there. So, we built a quarterly process, kind of the first quarter for this group. We had specific milestones we were trying to meet and the reality is they did an excellent job. You know, there were some learnings along the way and there's always some growing pains, but they did an excellent job to the point where, after the quarter, we came back to the leadership group and they were able to describe, you know, some of the real successes and wins they'd had. Now at that point, we have eight other groups who are kind of on the fence or trying to, you know, is this really going to work for us? And this was a brilliant decision by the senior leader. They said, why don't we go next with our most problematic group, the biggest risk group, in fact, this was the biggest PnL. We basically said, if it can work with this group, first of all, it'll drive some excellent change for us, but it'll prove that it can work for anybody. If it can work for you, it can work for anybody. And that's what we did. And luckily we had some leaders that, you know, weren't necessarily super excited about it, but were at least willing to give it a try and willing to put it in the effort to make it a successful trial, or at least a real trial. And it was great, we had great conversations, we started to implement OKRs, we started to look at their strategy, we started to bring teams in to start to build out some of their agility practices. But the leadership would meet together regularly to talk about what's the next step in our process. We had learning sessions, but all of those were hands-on doing. So, for instance, let's build out our three-year OKRs, let's build out our one-year OKRs, let's bring the work in and let's prioritise on a big board to see where things fit and are aligned, let's start to think about our capacity constraints and all of those things. And yeah, we had a lot of lessons learned, a lot of things that we had to adjust, but overall it was pretty successful. And after that quarter of work, we went back to that same group of leaders and every single leader said, sign me up, I'm ready because if it can work for this group and we're seeing benefits there, then I want to try it here as well. And I love that, because ultimately we want to prove out some success that certain practices can work, or let's learn that they're not working and not be married to something that's just not going to help us. But then let's have leaders engaged from start to finish where they know what they're responsible for, and ultimately what I love to see is when a leader says, you know, at the beginning of this quarter or the beginning of the six months from now, we had these three main problems, and those aren't our biggest problems anymore. We've solved those to a point where we can manage, now we have other problems we need to solve for, and that's what you want, right? And the nice thing is if you've solved the biggest problem, or at least you have a good handle on it, now the next biggest problem maybe isn't as big as that first one was, and we can start to make more progress, and maybe new practices become more evident. So, and that's what we try to do with any transformation. If you're just going through the motions to transform your group because it's what everyone else is doing or it’s  what we were recommended to do or whatever other reason, it's not going to be nearly as impactful as if it's actually solving the things that you know need to be solved for. And that's where you get leaders' attention. Instead of it just being a side project while I focus on my real work, we're saying, this is solving your real work, and that's where they get really excited about, you know, being involved and seeing the day-to-day progress.

Ula Ojiaku

No, that's awesome. So in terms of, you've already mentioned some of it in terms of what leaders should watch out for, one of it is definitely not being passive, you know, go ye be agile whilst we do the real work. Anything else they should be watching out for?

Bryan Tew

Well, you know, that may be a good transition to something I like to share sometimes at conferences. This is what I call the 10 elephants in the business agility room, I mentioned one earlier, but these are things really geared towards leaders. So, I hope that our audience here, if you're struggling with any of these that I describe, gosh, there are real solutions, absolutely, but here's the biggest message. Don't ignore these, because they will eventually bite you and potentially even cause a derailment of your transformation efforts. So I'll just walk through these. Certainly, I'm available for more of a deep dive if anyone wants to reach out, but these are what I call the 10 elephants in the business agility room because no one wants to talk about them, right, they're hard topics, they're difficult topics, but you cannot be truly successful from a business agility perspective all around if you ignore these. So the first one, and this is probably one of the biggest ones that we see, is when we see misaligned incentives, so that's number one. And friends, the idea behind this is sometimes you have these transformation goals and you want these to work, but in reality you have incentives that are very much misaligned to those transformation goals, even some of your product level goals, I'll sometimes see, for instance, product managers who part of their compensation package has maybe an incentive goal around how many projects you start or how many products that we deliver. It's like, all about outputs. Nothing to say about how effective they are or what the actual outcomes from those products might be, it's just as long as we get a project started, well, that's very anti-Agile in reality, you know, especially when we're thinking about true value. So you need to really look at your incentives. Now, leadership incentives we could talk all day about, right, sometimes it's around specific financial goals, sometimes about people goals. What I would always suggest is rethink your incentives to become more outcome-oriented, not necessarily tied directly to an OKR or key result, but related, okay, aligned to those, because what your incentives should actually be around would be your business vision, and the business outcomes you're trying to accomplish, why would it make sense to have anything else? So that's one thing that we see oftentimes has to be discussed at some point, right?

Ula Ojiaku

Definitely, because incentives would determine the behaviour, which leads to the results we get.

Bryan Tew

So, the second one is kind of related and, and this is around sometimes we see a lot of, especially in large organisations, top heavy management, we see a lot of leaders, and not enough doers, and the reality is I get this, because in large organisations we want to reward people for a great job, and so we continue to promote, but we just add more leaders that are sometimes not necessary. And remember, those are highly paid people who now maybe don't have a lot of responsibility. I've seen, some directors, for instance, with like three direct reports and they don't really do a lot, and it's just unfortunate that we're trying to reward people in a way that actually hurts our business. So, I know it's a hard thing to talk about, but at a certain point I would always suggest that let's take a look at what leaders are necessary and what balance do we need between the leaders and the doers, the people in the trenches doing the work. And we've seen lots of, of managers and supervisors and directors and general managers and operations managers and VPs and senior VPs, and some of them are absolutely needed and they do incredible work, but sometimes there are others that just aren't needed, we just don't know how to handle that. So that's something that would be part of a true transformation, is to think about what's the right balance for us, okay, and make small steps to get there. Now, kind of related though is sometimes we see that they're just bad managers, and that's number three, okay, bad managers, where we are promoting people, let's say they were an excellent developer, as an example, okay, or QA leader, or it could be any type of role, and we promote them to be a manager. They don't have good management skills yet, they have never done this before, what they're still good at is what they were doing before. So they like to solve problems, they like to fight fires, they like to do all of the tactical things. And they, some of them, are just really bad with relationships, and so they become almost despised by their people because they're just very abrasive, sometimes they just don't treat their people well, and you have to watch for that. Now, I'll say this as well. Sometimes you have these great performers who don't even want to be managers, but it's the only opportunity they have in the organisation to progress or get a pay raise or promotion. And so, we find that in, especially large organisations, there are so many other needs that these people can move into, you know, for instance, we need, internally we need coaches, like technical coaches or DevOps coaches or architecture coaches, or even people coaches that these people could start to do some work in, we might have some technical roles, or project management roles or whatever it might be, that these people might move into, RTE roles, or continuous improvement champion roles, and sometimes that's a much better fit, or potentially even managing a process or service or operational area instead of managing people, that can sometimes be a great fit. So that's one thing to watch out for, because not everyone is well equipped to become a manager, and you might lose some of your most talented doers because they're sick of their manager, they're tired of being treated the way they have been, so watch for that. Which leads me to number four, and this is where it goes back to leaders. Sometimes we'll see leaders that say they want change, but they don't want change in my area. Change everywhere else, but don't change me, right, because I'm comfortable with what we're doing and I own it and it's my fiefdom. And friends, if you want true enterprise transformation, and really enterprise delivery that is aligned to your strategy, we all have to be open to what changes make sense. Now, we're not trying to force fit any change, I would never suggest that, and if you have vendors or coaches that are trying to just force fit change for the sake of change, then you need to ask questions about that. But how do we actually improve our process so we can deliver more effectively? And this is where I'll just, I hope that this will be a nugget of wisdom for people. But I would say this, the important thing is not your process. Okay, you can have an agile process, you could have a waterfall process, you could have any process. The important thing is your process for improving your process. How are you continually optimising? How are you looking at what's working or what's not working, more importantly, and really take action to fix those things that are not working to improve and optimise. That is a continual thing, and it never ends, especially with the way that technology advancements are taking place. We are always going to get disrupted in different ways, customer changing needs and so forth, that's always going to change the way we work. So let's continually optimise by improving the way that we improve our process. So, kind of with that, leaders need to really own that yes, we are open to change, but let's make sure it makes sense, let's look at what our needs are and how we can actually improve the way that we deliver. Now, the next one, number five, this is maybe the hardest one, and this is where sometimes we have rigid funding models that are just not allowing for agility and adaptability, and I think every organisation struggles with this. And I'll just tell you, I'll just give you one example of an organisation where we actually went through the work to build OKRs, you know, these really great OKRs that all the leadership team was aligned on, and when we actually went to, okay, what are we going to do about it? They said, well, all of our projects are funded for the year, so we can't do anything about it. And when that realisation came that the work that they were actually having their teams do day-to-day was not the work that would actually drive their most important outcomes, it was like this slap in the face, like, we've got to change this, we've got to do something different. And so, having the conversation, starting out with your finance folks, with your product folks, I find personally in my experience, that it is not hard to have a conversation with finance, bring in your CFO, bring in their staff, it's not hard to have the conversation because in reality, any good CFO would be looking at how can we, as a finance organisation, better support our delivery in product organisation. Like, that's what we should always be thinking about. So I find that they're usually open to ideas, they just don't know what they don't know. And so I'll sometimes talk to IT folks, IT leaders, and they'll say, well, you know, our finance group will never go for this. Have you brought it to them to really consider on, because I would be surprised if they would be that resistant, if this is the way the business is going, right? So I don't find that that's such a hard conversation. Now, making the actual changes needs to be a little incremental.

Ula Ojiaku

Can I ask a question about that though? And I do agree that, you know, most people, they come to work, wanting to do their best for the organisation and to move things forward, and that includes finance, legal, whatever, you know, division. Now what if it's a publicly traded organisation, you know, they have regulatory, you know, reporting needs, and so how do you navigate through that?

Bryan Tew

So, in reality, most of the regulatory aspects of your financials are not going to need to change all that much, it's how is the money being used? So for instance, instead of funding projects, which it's easy to see a start and an end date for a project, we're going to adjust this, and that's one of the reasons why using increments like program increments, PIs, is helpful, or even quarterly increments, and saying, we're going to fund teams within a structure, like a value stream potentially, and then we can leave it to the local leaders, the product folks, the product managers, to determine based on our outcomes, what should the teams focus on now. I mean, the reality is we're paying for those people whether they're part of a project or not, right? So if you move the money to fund a backlog of work, rather, that can change and be prioritised based on what we're learning, instead of just a project from start to finish, you'll see tremendous gains in how we can adapt and truly work on the right things in the moment. Now, I will say that maybe that doesn't work for everyone to start out for sure, and that usually is an incremental process to get there, but when you think about it that way, can we still have the same controls in place for how we check in on how the money is being spent? Absolutely. In fact, I would suggest that you're probably going to see a lot more physical evidence that you're providing value as you have Sprint demos and system demos and PI demos to actually see how the work is actually being delivered. And then getting feedback from customers much more effectively. Now it's just a matter of how do we actually look at where our people are, where is the time going? And sometimes that's not even that important when you realise that it's really about how the solutions, the products and solutions, are actually being accomplished. So that, to me, is not the big constraint here, and it's certainly not the problem that I would start with, but it is something that we need to be thinking about. Does that change, and do we have specific nuances based on our regulatory environment, our country, whatever it is, that we have to really consider. And I would say the same thing goes through for Agile capitalisation. So many groups are not capitalising to the maximum benefit that they should be because they're scared that maybe we're going to go off the rails. Friends, there is absolute integrity in doing capitalisation for agile projects or agile buckets of work that you are probably able to really benefit from, and you're probably not, there's a lot of work there that you can actually bring in then for some of your spending around transformation work because of the gains. The sixth one is more at a people level, but can be helped by your leaders. This is an unwillingness to share knowledge and do cross training. Now, sometimes people just don't want to learn new things, maybe we have a fixed mindset. More often, people don't want to share what they know because I feel like I'm the indispensable tiger and that makes me more valuable, or sometimes it's a bigger problem than that, that leadership can manage. It's, I don't have time to do this. I want to share, because I need help, or I want to learn, because this will help my team, but we have so many priorities day to day and deadlines that we're trying to meet, we're working the midnight oil anyway, I don't have time for cross training, I don't have time to teach someone a skill that will actually benefit us for years going forward. So leaders need to actually build time and space and capacity for knowledge sharing, cross training, learning. If you're not a learning organisation, friends, then you are falling behind. And this is the time where we believe that learning may be the only competitive advantage that you'll have, you know, the way that you can learn fast and implement your learning into your delivery system.

Ula Ojiaku

I came across this material, and well, basically it just said we're no longer in the information era, we’re now in the augmented era. So before it's like, you know, you're learning right now, it has to be embedded into how you are working, you are learning as you go, and that's the expected norm moving forward.

Bryan Tew

So seven is avoiding the cultural impacts of transformation, right, and I think we're kind of overcoming that hump, but the reality is that leaders drive culture change. It’s not just a grassroots culture that we're looking at, you know, teams can have their own culture, even a train can have their own culture, but when you're looking at an organisational culture, leaders drive the culture through example, through their behaviours, through the values that we articulate and share and reinforce, but it's also about how do we work and what are we trying to accomplish? And so that's why in our EBA model, we actually have a leadership and culture pillar specifically that leaders need to own, because in reality, culture is one of those top most important things that will actually establish lasting change.

Ula Ojiaku

And by EBA you mean Enterprise Business Agility. Awesome.

Bryan Tew

Yeah, which leads us to number eight. And this is where, kind of back to another one, leaders will say something but not really mean it. For instance, leaders will say that they need to prioritise better. Yes, we need better prioritisation. Yes, a value-based scoring system sounds amazing. But then in reality, they'll go and pull the trump cards and they'll escalate and they'll pull things out of the hat because we need this done now instead of actually looking at the value, the business value of the priorities that we should have in place. So it takes some discipline, and yes, we need some level of money to account for those rapid changes or rapid things that come in that we don't want to miss out on. That's why the ability to have adaptive funding is so important. You know, how often can you ask yourselves, have we had an opportunity where if we don't hit this right now, we're going to miss the window of opportunity? And it's shameful when an organisation says, well, we have to approve that in our budgeting process, so that's going to take months. Well, okay, I guess you don't want that opportunity, right? So all of that makes a difference. So how do we prioritise and how do we adjust and look at priorities constantly? We're always reprioritising based on value, and based on what we're seeing in our marketplace, in our industry, with our people. All that matters. But when I see leaders that, you know, they'll kind of say from a word perspective only, yes, I agree, these are the priorities, and then they'll do their very different own thing for their people, that's a problem, right, that's a problem.

Ula Ojiaku

And where I've seen this happen as well, it kind of ties in with your number one, which is misaligned incentives, but sometimes it's really, okay, yes, this is the right thing to do, but my target says X, so we're not going to do Y because I need to hit my targets and get my bonus. But anyway, so that's number eight. Sorry, go on.

Bryan Tew

And so Ula, maybe this sounds familiar, but sometimes I'll hear a leader that will be part of our kind of portfolio or enterprise strategy, and then they'll go back to the people and say, you know, don't worry, those are the priorities for the business, but I'll tell you your real priorities. Really? You mean you're not aligned with your business? Because that's a problem. So anyway, that leads us to number nine, which is putting a blind eye to capacity and employee burnout. Sometimes we just don't want to talk about it, right? We don't want to think about it, we know that our people are, you know, probably burning out. We're asking them to work weekends and late nights, but, you know, they'll figure it out. Or sometimes we'll have leaders that will push more work to the teams that are already over capacity, because in their minds they'll think, well, if they feel the pressure, they'll just start to do more, they'll somehow produce more and we'll force them to kind of get these deadlines made. Friends, you're going to lose people that way. You're going to lose quality. Lots of problems from that perspective. And I will tell you this, that there was one organisation where they wanted to bring in business agility and they said their number one problem was that their best people had been burned out and were all leaving. And when your best people leave, that puts you in a really terrible situation, doesn't it? So they realised they had to stop that, and this was year after year of, you know, it's going to get better, just get this project done, it's going to get better, and it never does. So, which leads us to our 10th elephant in the room. And this one I am, I give you kind of as a bonus because it's not really an elephant anymore. It's more of just something that should be part of our initial conversation. It's not having an outcome-oriented measurement strategy for your teams and transformation. So we kind of briefly touched on that earlier, but starting out any kind of change work or transformation work with specific outcomes that will actually help you to know that you're getting the business value or the needs met that you have in mind, that's so important, whether they're OKRs or other type of format, you know, that's not as important for me, but do you have a plan for how you're driving the right results? That's important. And one of the things that, that we do at AgilityHealth is we build a measurement strategy in place for your teams. You know, how healthy are they, how are they maturing, how are they performing? But also, I would say not just your teams, but your individuals. How do you know your individuals are doing well? But also, how about performance level, whether it's a train, a program, and as well as your portfolio and enterprise. If you don't know how you're doing in each of those areas, you know, that's actually what we try to help organisations with. So that's been really exciting for us to be able to work in. And those are the 10 elephants.

Ula Ojiaku

They're all very thought provoking elephants, if I may say so myself. And this is really great in terms of, and I have attended one of your courses, you took us through the Enterprise Business Agility Strategist course. That was excellent, life changing, I'm saying it not just because you're here, but it's true, it did make me think, it opened my eyes and it gave me a more joined up perspective of, you know, what a true transformation should look like and what are the key principles and pillars that one needs to consider to ensure that their transformation effort is sustainable. And you also have, you know, the tool that you have, you know, the AgilityHealth Radars and the tools, they are quite useful as well. Yeah, so great.

Bryan Tew

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm glad to hear you say that because ultimately the Enterprise Business Agility Model is really for leaders. It's a strategy model for leaders, you know, leaders, coaches, transformation folks who are really leading transformations, that's the intention, so you can have everything in place so your teams can actually be successful and deliver most effectively. Agile only gets you part of the way, right, and Agile is part of the model for sure, but it's not what leaders focus most on, right? It's what teams will do. Leaders need to do the other things will actually allow your teams to be successful. If anyone's interested in looking at the model, you can actually go to agilityhealthradar.com and that's where you can see our radars, that's where you can also go to the EBA model, and all of that is there.

Ula Ojiaku

So what books have you recommended most to people, and why?

Bryan Tew

Yeah, great question. So, you know, one that I've recommended for years that I really have enjoyed, I mean this was lifechanging for me, is called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, and the reason for that is this will really help you as an individual, a leader, a coach, whatever role, to really build in excellent habits, and there are many self-help books around how to build good habits. This was by far the best one that I've read, and it really kind of goes through a step by step - here's how you start from your morning routine to how you start to build in the right practices day to day, you know, how you influence others, like it's been tremendous. I'll give two others as well. I really loved the Trillion Dollar Coach, and this was written by some of the Google guys talking about a coach that really helped Silicon Valley organisations think more strategically and become real excellent leaders. So it's called the Trillion Dollar Coach, Eric Schmidt is one of the co-authors there, and he happened to be my CEO at Novell back in the day, so that was kind of exciting, and I recommend that for any type of leadership role or coach role. And then another one that is more recent, but I've just really loved is called Project to Product by Mik Kersten, many of you have heard of this one. I see a lot of organisations right now trying to move from projects to more product-oriented organisations, and he has a great way of thinking about that through his flow model to talk about how do you practically do that, so I highly recommend that one as well.

Ula Ojiaku

So where can the audience find you?

Bryan Tew

Well, I am on LinkedIn. I am one of the only Bryan Tews, T-E-W, Bryan with a Y, but I'd be happy to take any emails at bryan@agilityhealthradar.com. I do use Twitter, I don't use it a lot, but you can find me there as well, at B2Agile. Okay. And you know what, I just love having these conversations. So if any of you are interested in whether it's our strategy model or our EBA Radar or our AgilityHealth Radars, we have actually an OKR or outcome dashboard that if you're getting into OKRs, that might be a great thing to try out and utilise, that’s been really helpful, we use it internally. And those are all things that we're real excited about. And sometimes I'll be at different conferences, speaking here and there, and I always love to do that, but to certainly reach out, I'd love to share any thoughts and ideas with you, and certainly help in what problems you're trying to solve.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you so much, Bryan, these would be in the show notes as well. Any final words for the audience?

Bryan Tew

You know, I'm just excited that this has been such a big part of our community now, thinking about business agility, enterprise agility, it's a different feel than when we were just talking about Scrum and Kanban and some of these more specific frameworks. Business agility truly is opening up organisations doors to a new level of possibility. So I would say if you're just starting out on your business agility, learning and journey, keep that up, look at the resources that will help you learn what's going to solve your biggest challenge, it's an exciting place to be and I love that there are so many getting into this space because it's kind of the next level of really organisational optimisation, regardless of what kind of organisation you are. And what I love about business agility is it applies to any type of team, any type of group, because there are always things that we can do to improve the way that we either support our business, work in the business, or provide services for our customers. So I'll kind of leave it at that.

Ula Ojiaku

Well, thank you so much, Bryan. It's been an absolute pleasure and I've also gained insights speaking with you, so thank you for making the time.

Bryan Tew

Absolutely my pleasure, Ula.

Ula Ojiaku

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Bio  

Bryan is a seasoned Enterprise Transformation Strategist, Coach and Trainer specialising in the practical implementation of Business Agility practices within all types of organisations. He brings a balance of business, technical and leadership expertise to his clients with a focus on how to achieve immediate gains in productivity, efficiency, visibility and flow. Bryan is a key contributor in the development of the AgilityHealth platform, AgileVideos.com and the Enterprise Business Agility strategy model and continues to train, speak and write about leading Business Agility topics.  

Interview Highlights   

04:15 Interrogating KGB agents

06:00 Now that I see it – overcoming failed deliveries

07:15 Agile ways of working

09:00 Meeting teams where they are at

11:50 AgilityHealth

14:10 Business Agility vs Enterprise Agility

17:30 Establishing a Strategy

 21:25 Driving Strategy forward  

Social Media  

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bryantew

Twitter: @B2Agile

Email: bryan@agilityhealthradar.com

Website: www.agilityhealthradar.com 

Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku 

Hi everyone, my guest for this episode, actually, we're going to have a two part episode, is Bryan Tew. Bryan is a seasoned Enterprise Transformation Strategist, a coach and a trainer that specialises in the practical implementation of business agility practices within all types of organisations. I first came across Bryan when I did the Agility Health Enterprise Business Agility Strategist Course. I was mind boggled, my mind opened to possibilities, and I thought this is someone I would really like to speak with. In this episode, Bryan and I, for part one anyway, we talk about overcoming failed deliveries, or overcoming failed transformations, the importance of meeting teams where they're at. We also looked at the term Business Agility versus Enterprise Agility and Bryan explained his view on what that is all about. We also talked about strategy and how to establish that and drive that forward. I hope you enjoy listening to Bryan Tew's episode, as much as I enjoyed having this conversation and recording it with him. So part one, Bryan Tew.

So I have with me Bryan Tew, who is a seasoned Business Agility Strategist, coach, trainer extraordinaire. He is just an all-round awesome expert in the Business Enterprise Agility space, and he works with AgilityHealth. Bryan, thank you so much for making time out of your busy schedule to have this conversation with me as my guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast.  

Bryan Tew  

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Ula.  

Ula Ojiaku  

Awesome. Thank you again. So, growing up, can you tell us a bit about your experience, your background, and how you wound up to where you are today?  

Bryan Tew

Sure, absolutely! So I grew up in the state of Utah, in the United States. It's a wonderful area, there’s lots of mountains, and many outdoor things to do, so I love the outdoors. I grew up skiing and snowboarding and playing outside, hiking, I do a lot of canyoneering and rock climbing and all kinds of outdoors, sometimes extreme sports, I just love those kinds of things, it helps me connect with nature. I had a great growing up, great schooling, but I'll tell you the thing that really changed my life, what's most influential for me is when I was 19 years old, I decided to serve a two year mission for my church, and I was called to St. Petersburg, Russia. You don't get to choose where to go, and that was actually a very interesting area for me. As you can imagine, this was in the early nineties, so a lot of different things changing in that area. And I had the most amazing experience, you know, two years where I wasn't focused on myself at all. It was all about serving others, and we would do things from helping kids in just these terrible orphanages, helping people on the streets, working with youth to try to help change their lives, teaching about God, helping families, it was just such an amazing experience and that really changed me and made me into a person that really was not so much about me, and kind of the selfish environment that we typically are in, but more about what can I do to maybe better myself so I can help others, and that was phenomenal. Now, as part of that, you know, obviously I was able to speak Russian every day, every day, all day, and so I became pretty fluent in the Russian language. And so following my mission, I came back, and as part of my schooling, I decided to use that, and I, just as a part-time National Guardsman, I joined the US Military Intelligence as an interrogator. So I actually was able to use my language to interrogate former KGB agents, Russian scientists, you know, different things to get information, and that was tremendous. And that just helped me through school. I didn't do a lot with that other than, you know, those six years where I was in the Guard. But that was a really influential time as well, and you know, as it came time for a real career, I actually started out in Washington DC, that's where my wife and I, after we were married, we moved there. She was working in congress, as a staffer, and so I started working for a lobbying firm, and that was really cool, you know, in fact, my interrogation skills helped a lot.

Ula Ojiaku

I can imagine.

Bryan Tew

Right? But you know, the reality is that it's a sleazy industry, and we saw some things, even just day to day, some things that I just didn't approve of. So I knew that that wasn't going to be a career for me. So, I actually decided to pursue an MBA, a Master's in Business (Administration), and we moved back to the state of Utah where I went to BYU for a Master's degree. And we thought, you know, while we're having our first child, it'd be nice to be close to grandparents. We just loved it back being home, so we've actually been there ever since. And from there, after my Master's degree, I actually started my technology career, that's where I became a Project Manager at Novell, which does infrastructure and networking software… Had a great experience there working waterfall projects. But the problem was we had many failed deliveries. And I remember hearing sometimes these five little words that I've come to dread, which is now that I see it, and maybe you've heard those words, maybe audience you've heard or maybe even said those words, right, usually something bad follows like, now that I see it, I don't think you understood my requirements. Or now that I see it, we have to go back and really fix a lot of things, or now that I see it, we completely missed the boat. And we had some of those experiences. And so it was multiple projects later where we were working on an enterprise service bus and my team had a real need for some expert consulting help. So we had this great gentleman from Australia, can't even remember his name, but he had some expertise in that area, but he also had some ideas on our broken process. So he would talk to our team and he said, you know, because this is such a large and complex project, I recommend that every day, let's just come together as a team, we can invite any of our key stakeholders who want to be part of it, but let's just stand up and talk about who's working on what and what our daily needs are, and how we can resolve some of these dependencies and just try to get on the same page as far as a daily plan. So we started doing that. He didn't call it a daily Standup or anything, it's just, this is something that can work. And so that was helping us for sure. He also said, you know, because we need to be on the same page as a team, I suggest that every couple of weeks or so, let's get together and let's talk about what's working and what's not working and what we can do to improve maybe the next couple of weeks. And again, that was just a really, just great idea to get us starting to think more collaboratively as a team. And he said, you know, because this is such a complex project with lots of moving parts and lots of different stakeholders, let's actually bring them all together. Let's try to help them understand and collectively build out a vision for where this is going. Let's think about how, what some of those customer needs are, and let's start to build a backlog of prioritised work that they can engage with us on. And let's start to deliver that maybe every couple of weeks to show our progress. I mean, as you can tell, just bringing in some of these Agile concepts without calling it a certain methodology. I mean, this was back in 2002, I didn't know anything about the Agile Manifesto at the time. He just said these are some practices that can work. Now having gone through that project, implementing some of those ideas, we just thought, wow, this is such a better way to work. And that's when I started to really start researching, what is this called? What is this all about? And so I got a little bit of agile experience there, and it just so happened that at the time in this area in Utah, we call this area the Silicon Slopes, because it's kind of like Silicon Valley in terms of technical experts here, lots of great developers and that understanding. So there were a lot of technical firms and there was one organisation that was actually looking for some Agile help, so this was about 2005 now, and I was one of the only ones that had Agile experience. And so I was hired on to help lead some of the effort there, and it was tremendous. In fact, I loved going from team to team, helping to introduce Agile concepts and kind of looking at a strategy. We had some software teams, and this was at ancestry.com, but we had software teams and operations teams and all kinds of different types of teams. And that's when I realised that, you know, there are so many different methods and what works for one team may not work for another. And so we have to be very particular about what kind of work do you do? What kind of customers do you have? What type of team are you? And then the methods will fit what you're trying to accomplish from an outcomes perspective. And that was super exciting to me, to implement Scrum for some teams and then others, you know, we had some Kanban methods and maybe a blend with Scrumban. That was exciting.

Ula Ojiaku

On that point in terms of, you know, what works for one team might not necessarily work exactly, and the fact that you're taking the time to understand their context, their work, what are outcomes they're trying to achieve, and then help them navigate, you know, find the best practice that would help them and processes that would help them get to where they're going to. Did you find out, I mean, that maybe some teams, they might start with a practice and then later on that practice doesn't necessarily work for them and they'll change?

Bryan Tew

Over the years I found that there are certain agility practices that can work for any kind of team. And at the time I didn't know that, and so we would start them on certain things, you know, let's try at least to prioritise your work or let's try to just put your work in some kind of visual place where you can see how it's moving. Like, just simple things like that. Let's try to think about what your vision is from your customer’s perspective and which later became more of an outcome-driven approach. But at the time we knew nothing about this, this was very new. And so we would try certain things, but one thing that I heard over and over was, for instance, like an infrastructure team. An operations team, a support team, like we're not software, so don't try to force fit what they're doing with us. And we still hear that today, don't we? And so just understanding, okay, let's learn about what you do day to day. How does your work flow? What do you focus on each day? And how much of your work is rapid response work? How much of your work is more around projects that you can plan out? And then based on that, that's where we can recommend certain practices. So that was super-exciting and we get a lot of success from that. And to this day I continue to recommend to leaders, if you have different types of teams that are unique or do different work than maybe your traditional Scrum teams, listen to them, don't force fit things that will potentially not work or potentially make them very cynical about the process. Listen first, and meet them where they are. And it just so happened that, you know, after a while, that kind of work was, is super exciting, but now that we were all agile and kind of moving that in that direction, like, well, now I need more, right? And that's when I started consulting. And so I was lucky to have joined Steve Davis with Davisbase. I was, in fact, it was just he and I for a while, and we did some training, we did a little bit of coaching and we started to build that business, and that's where I started traveling all around doing training classes, and it was just really fun, just such a fun time early on. This was about 2008, 2009, and very exciting. After a while I realised that, you know, our goals weren't exactly aligned and I was starting to look at, you know, maybe I just form my own company and start working through things. And it was right around Christmas time. In fact, it was like right after Christmas, and I just got this LinkedIn message out of the blue. And it was from Sally Elatta, who was just starting up a company herself called Agile Transformation, and she said, you know, you come recommended, I'm looking for a partner to start to build this business. And it just was such a perfect time for me as I was looking for, you know, how do we actually build transformations? How do we help organisations from start to finish instead of just doing quick hit training classes? And so she and I hit it off right away and I started working with her back in about 2011 and, you know, it's been just a match made in heaven, I've been working with her ever since. It was about, a few years later when we realised it's more than just transformation work, it's more than just training and coaching. We had a lot of organisations, especially leaders, asking us questions like, how do I know that this transformation is working? How do I know the ROI of the work that we're doing? How do I know how my teams are doing? How do I even know if they're better than when they were doing waterfall? We were trying to do some different flow charts to look at how teams were producing, but it was just not sustainable, it wasn't scalable, and it wasn't answering the right questions. And so that's where Sally's ingenuity to build the AgilityHealth platform came into play and really, we did it for our own clients, but what we found out is this is much bigger than us, so that's when we actually changed our name to AgilityHealth, and since then we've been more of an enablement company, really helping not only our clients, but partners and anyone who's interested in the enablement services that we provide, which include kind of the health and measurement platform and the outcomes dashboard and so forth. But also our Business Agility services.

Ula Ojiaku

Oh, wow! That's an inspiring story and it's just amazing how things seem to have aligned, hindsight is 20-20, isn't it? And you've nicely segued into, you know, one of the topics we were to discuss, which is Enterprise Agility versus Business Agility. Are they one and the same, or are there differences to the terms?

Bryan Tew

Well, although there are similarities, they're actually very different things and I'll try my best to describe this, but first of all, Business Agility is really the ability to adapt to change, to be able to learn and pivot as you see disruption. And that's really important to understand, because that can apply at any level in an organisation. I can have one division, or even a single release train, or even team that are adopting some of those practices, and so that would include things like customer centricity and your lean portfolio management and a focus on outcomes and how we prioritise, and our organisational design, and all those different practices, right, which are super important. But that can be done in a small scale, that can be done in a single group or division. When I think about enterprise agility, that's where we're actually applying those practices and those concepts and mindsets to the entire enterprise. That's where you get to see true flow from an outcomes perspective at a company level and where all different leaders are talking the same language. They're collaborating well together, they have the same outcomes, we know what we're trying to accomplish from a vision and purpose perspective. And you can't do that when you're just looking at many moving parts that are all doing their own thing. Now I will also say that when I talk to leaders, I like them to think of business agility as agile for leaders. I mean, we know a lot about Agile for teams, and certainly the support that is needed from leaders, but business agility is what leaders have to own, and their job is to provide the right environment so that teams can actually be successful and provide the most valuable work to customers.

Ula Ojiaku

And what are those sorts of things that leaders can do? Because what I'm getting from you is there are some things that they would need to influence or change in the environment, what sort of things?

Bryan Tew

Well I'll kind of frame it this way because you're familiar with our Enterprise Business Agility Strategy model, and I'll just kind of talk about a couple of points from there, because this is what we share with leaders, this is what you need to own. So for instance, how do we take a more customer-focused strategy? And that's where we build in a process for how we can validate that we're actually solving the right customer problems. So leaders, you need to engage your product people, your marketing people, your support people, those who are hearing customer problems and understanding how do we validate that we're solving the right ones? Not just guessing, not just hearing from those who think they know, but actually validating that. And that's where many of the practices around journey mapping and so forth can come in. But then the second part is, how do we validate then that we're actually solving those problems the right way? I mean, if you're solving the right problem, but you have a terrible solution or a solution that doesn't really fit the need, then you're still not winning. So that's where discovery work, and there's so many great approaches now on how to do discovery, which is part of that whole customer solution, okay. So, leaders can help drive that. But then of course there's the lean portfolio management side. How do we establish a strategy? And if there's one thing that I would have leaders start with, it's you need to define and get aligned with your fellow leaders on what your strategy is, and that's an enterprise strategy, but also a division, or portfolio strategy. We need to make sure that that is not only clear, but then the second part of that is how do you communicate that strategy to your people? Not just through a chain of command, but through specifically clarifying what the strategy means and how that applies to each of your groups that are working to move forward on your strategy. So that's really important. And I would say part of that is to build an outcome-based strategy. So we like to use OKRs to do that, and, you know, the way that we suggest building OKRs is a little bit different, where you actually have a hypothesis statement that ties together what you expect to do and the outcomes you expect achieve, and then the key results can help you really measure that. So that's the thing that we ask leaders to do, and not just, give that to your people to try to accomplish, or to try to do for you, but actually think about what are our enterprise and maybe longer term, like three year OKRs, and then from there, how do you align the work there? How do you align the outputs, the projects, the initiatives to your outcomes, and break that down into the prioritised items that you need your groups to own. Like that is something that the teams can't do for themselves, they can guess, but they'll probably get it wrong when it comes to actually looking at strategy. So those are all things that happen. And then one of the things we'll certainly get into is funding models. You've got to be thinking about how do you fund your work? And I know that that's what we call an elephant in the business agility room, because it's hard to talk about. And it's something that's not just a thing that you implement on your first day of moving to business agility, but it needs to be discussed early on, to start getting the balls rolling. So we'll talk through that. And then your org structure and your design of your teams, like that's something that leaders have to own, what is the optimal org structure? Do we look at value streams? What kind of value streams? Is it product focused? Is it journey focused? Is it more around your capabilities? Like, that matters because that's how you start to bring the right people to work together. And then of course, your leadership and culture, you know, you need to be thinking about the culture transformation along with any kind of agile or business agility transformation. So, all of those things are what leaders should be thinking about, including their technology agility, like, how are we potentially providing the right technical environment, and tools and systems, and everything else we need that might need to be modernised, or maybe looking at digital transformation work to support our teams actually providing the best products to our customers.

Ula Ojiaku

That's amazing. So there are some things you've said about what leaders need to do and some of them include, you know, looking at the lean portfolio management, taking an outcome-based approach to defining the strategy at all levels and making sure that, you know, it kind of flows, not in a cascaded manner, but in a way that each layer would know how it's feeding into delivering the ultimate strategy of the organisation. Now, how, from a practical perspective, I mean, yes, you use OKRs, or objectives and key results, you know, that's one way of doing that. But how, are you suggesting then that the leaders would have to write the OKRs for every layer? Or is it just about being clear on the intent and direction of travel and letting each area define it within their context, but with some input from them?

Bryan Tew

No, it's a great question and I'll try to visualise as much as I can, but when you think about it this way, when you start at the top, and let's say that we're coming up with some enterprise level three year OKRs. So where are we going for the next three years? And you know what, things can change, so that's why we check in on those, you know, at least every six months, if not every quarter, because we're learning a lot and we want to adjust. But the thing is, if we have that level of strategy clarified, and not only that, but we're aligned across our leadership group, that means that the priorities that we're focusing on should align as well, and that's the important thing here. So now as we start to move from the enterprise down to maybe a division or portfolio level, all of the OKRs at that level should in some way align up to our enterprise, right? Whether it's around certain objectives that we're trying to accomplish from a financial perspective, or customer goals, or people goals, whatever it is, but now there's something that we can connect to as a foundation. So those senior leaders, although they can provide support and help, typically now it's your portfolio leaders that are taking the lead on building their OKRs that are aligned, and then down to maybe your program or train or whatever level you'd call it, what those OKRs will look like, all the way down to where every single team, which in reality, every single person in the organisation, sees how they fit in driving strategy.

Ula Ojiaku

That was a very, very insightful conversation with Bryan, and this is only part one. In part two of my conversation, Bryan gets to talk about aligning OKRs, that's Objectives and Key Results, the ten elephants in the business agility room, what are those? And the importance for leaders to take the driver's seat in cultural changes and many other things as well. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless.

Bio

Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership   development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change.  She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. TeamCatapult is a partner to mid-size start-ups and global fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, healthcare, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Clients have included Microsoft, Riot Games, Epic Games, Capital One, Blizzard Entertainment, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, and Chef. Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha’s unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication  that  get  in  their  way  of  high  performance.  She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilist. She is the author of Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyse clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others. 

Interview Highlights

04:15 Having effective conversations

04:45 Move-follow-bystand-oppose

09:30 Functional self-awareness

15:50 Build Your Model for Leading Change

18:00 Articulating your own model for change

26:00 Collective alignment

27:20 Getting messy

30:00 Making space for open conversations

35:40 TeamCatapult

 Social Media 

·         LinkedIn: Marsha on LinkedIn

·         Website:  www.teamcatapult.com

·         Twitter: Marsha on Twitter   

Books & Resources

·         The World of Visual Facilitation

·         The Art & Science of Facilitation, Marsha Acker

·         Build Your Model for Leading Change, Marsha Acker

·         Reading the Room: Group Dynamics for Coaches and Leaders, David Kantor

·         Where Did You Learn To Behave Like That? (Second Edition), Sarah Hill

·         Coaching Agility From Within: Masterful Agile Team Coaching

·         Making Behavioral Change Happen - Team Catapult

·         Changing Behavior in High Stakes - Team Catapult

Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. In this episode, I have Marsha Acker, the CEO and founder of TeamCatapult. Marsha is a respected and sought after leadership development expert and her team, or her company organisation, TeamCatapult, focuses on equipping leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change. So this is the second part of my conversation, the second and the last part of my conversation with Marsha. And in this conversation, in this part of the episode, we talk about, or Marsha talks about having effective conversations, functional self awareness, what does that mean? She also talked about how one can articulate one's own model for change, and the need for getting collective alignments and the fact that it's not easy, sometimes it gets messy, but it's important to make space for open conversations. I found both the part one and this conversation, which is the final part of my conversation with Marsha, very insightful, and I hope you get something useful out of it as well. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Marsha Acker.

Marsha Acker

I’m very focused on behavioural-led change at the moment. And so in that behavioural-led change, what I place at the centre of any change is how are people communicating with one another? Are they able to actually have the real conversation? Is there enough awareness in the system that they can kind of catch sight of when the real conversation starts to go underground? And can they actually have the muscle, the range in their leadership to catch sight of it and then bring it back in the room? Change doesn’t happen until people feel heard and understood. I think one of the biggest questions that I think we help leadership teams look at is how do we work with difference, and actually welcome it rather than try to minimise it, because I think that’s the rub where, if we don’t have skills to work with it, we tend to minimise it or send it out of the room or suppress it. Like we say, you know, we don’t have enough time for that, or, gosh, we’ve got this deadline, so we’ve become super deadline driven, and I think sometimes at the expense of having a real conversation with one another. And I don't know that I could find you an example of any organisation that I've worked in, including my own TeamCatapult, where something that we're trying to do or accomplish or move forward doesn't meet a roadblock when some aspect of our conversation isn't fully online or we're not fully having the conversation that we need to have. So you asked how would I do so how, one of the ways that I would do that today is, first, whenever I'm engaging with a leadership team or any other team that's really trying to bring about change and just noticing like they're trying to level up or there's something that they're wanting that they feel like they're kind of capped at is I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation, because I think in the conversation there are lots of indicators about how that conversation plays out and are people really able to say what they're thinking or do we get stuck in some common dysfunctional patterns that can show up? So one example of that would be, we use a sort of a technology for looking at conversation and there are four actions that happen in all effective conversations, a move, a follow, an oppose, and a bystand. So a move sets direction, a follow supports it, an oppose offers really clear correction. It says, no, hang on, wait a minute. A bystand offers a morally neutral perspective, so one way is to help a team onboard that, but there are common patterns and one of the common patterns that will come out, particularly in tech teams where there's pace and we need to move things forward, is that they can get into this pattern of someone makes a move, and everyone else just sort of remains silent or, so something to the effect might voice ‘sure, you know, that sounds good.’ So they start to fall into this pattern of move and lots of follow. And what's missing often is the voice of bystand, which says, hey, I'm wondering what's going on, or I'm wondering what we're not saying. And then really clear opposition. So the ability to bring pushback, constraint into the conversation. So if you go back to that original leadership team that I was telling you about, you know, way back when, I think one of the things that was going on in that team is they weren't, no one was able to say, this is an incredibly difficult decision, and I don't think I can make it unless I have these things answered. So they kept making it about the process and it wasn't really about the process at all. It was really, it had a very personal component to it that wasn't being discussed, and so the inability to discuss that really created the drag. So the way that I think about helping any team work through any change is, helping them onboard the skills of being able to have, we call it bringing, it's a principle that we hold about bringing the real conversation in the room. Can you bring the conversation online versus offline? So the other flag that you might have for when your conversations are going offline is, if you feel, I often think about if I leave a conversation with you and I, for example, if I left this conversation and I went off and I felt the need, or I was compelled to one of vent or complain about it to someone else, that's my kind hazard flag. But, there was something that I was holding back from in this conversation that I didn't say, and that's my signal to actually circle back around. And so maybe, maybe I need to check in with myself, maybe there's something that I left unsaid.

Ula Ojiaku

That's so insightful. I've been making notes, but the question I have, one of the key ones I have right now is based on what you've said, you know, if one is to go out from a conversation and realise, oh, there's something I'm needing to vent, which I didn't say, you know, in front of the people or the person involved, as a facilitator or coach for that team, how can you help them to, because there could be several factors. It could be that they don't feel safe, they feel that they might be punished for actually saying what they have in mind. So what would be the process for addressing it, such that people can actually say what they actually feel without feeling that they would be punished or side-tracked or ostracised for it?

Marsha Acker

Yeah. I think there's two things that will be happening, and so when we are working with leadership teams, we're often helping them onboard these skills collectively. And that does take a process, right? So I think there's a piece around helping them build a container. So when I say container, I mean we're talking about the four actions, we're talking about the value of the four actions, we're talking about kind of normalising that oppose can feel really scary or difficult, but that'll very much be based on the individual. So we're working at both that whole team or system level, but also at the individual level, because for me, you know, in my own behavioural profile, oppose can be low, and there are really good reasons for that. Like I grew up in a household where it was rude to oppose an adult, so I've got that, you know, childhood story about why I would not want to oppose. I've got other stories that have happened along the way that sort of started to build this kind of old internal narrative for me about, ooh, it can be dangerous to oppose. So I think there's some individual work that all of us, you know, when we're ready to engage in, can do around noticing when I might hesitate to do that, what's the story? What's sort of the old narrative that I'm telling myself about that action, and what has me hold back in the current space today. So there's that individual component of growing what David Kantor calls functional self-awareness, so the ability to sort of catch sight of my own behaviour to also be able to grow my own behavioural range. But then Ula, you've, like, you very much are naming, there's also a system level component to that. So if I'm on that team and if I'm sort of in a positional leadership role where I might hold some kind of authority over people get paid and I'm responsible for those performance reviews that we seem to do only once a year, like I need to be really aware of where I might be, even unintentionally, really closing off those conversations. So how willing am I to put out an idea and have someone offer an oppose? Or am I not comfortable with that? Like, I don't like it when someone opposes, and so how might I be consciously or unconsciously kind of squelching that? So there will be that role and then there will also be the role of the team. Teams that have this, I call it sort of the foot tapping, like we need to get things moving or rolling or we only have a 30 minute time box for this meeting. It's not that you'd never have 30 minute meetings, but if 30 minute meetings are all you ever use to meet, you are really missing an opportunity, like there are places where I think we have to slow conversations down in order to create the space for people to really be able to think together and to take risk. But if there's never any space for me to take risk, I'm just not, you know, it can be scary enough to do it, so I think there are multiple things that you have to attend to at multiple levels. I think there's an individual level, I think there's a whole team level, a system, I think there's the positional leader or whoever's in authority or sort of whose voice carries a lot of weight in that team. All those things will be playing a part in whether that conversation can fully come online, and I do think it takes work. So I'm just a big advocate of work on how we communicate, because if we can equip everyone in a team to be paying attention to how we're communicating and we sort of have that range in our behavioural ability and our communicative competence to kind of bring all those things online, then I would hold that there aren't many things that we can't work through. But when we just attend to the process first, without having some of the skills about how to engage in the conversation, I think that's where we get really stuck and then we just start searching for other process, right. It becomes hard to have a conversation and I know I need to have a conversation, so I go looking for the new facilitation tool or I go get my, you know, bag of stickies and markers and I'm like, we're going to, and I just, I think sometimes we can become sort of over-reliant on facilitation processes and look, I'm the first proponent of facilitation processes, but sometimes I think they actually, we lean so heavily on them that they actually might be hindering the real conversation coming in the room.

Ula Ojiaku

What you've said so far, Marsha reminds me of, you know, the values in the Agile Manifesto sets people and individuals over the processes and tools. It doesn't mean the process and the tools aren't important, but we're dealing with human beings first and foremost. And my philosophy as well is about winning hearts and minds, because that way you can go further with people once they, like to use your words earlier on, they feel heard and listened to, rather than imposing something on them and what you've said so far as well, reminds me of in your book, The Art and Science of Facilitation, this is gold dust. Yes, I refer to it almost every quarter since I got it. I refer to it in, you know, to just sharpen my myself. And you said something on page four, in other words, facilitation is not just about what tool or technique you're applying, it just as much, if not more, it's about what you believe. So you did mention something about the self-awareness and functional self-awareness and proposed by David Kantor. So it's not just about what you, you know, it's about what you believe, who you are being in the moment, and what you see and sense in the group. We could go into this, but I am also mindful of time and I'd really like to dive into this book, your latest book, Build Your Model for Leading Change. I thought, like you may have mentioned before we started recording, it's not something you'd read over a weekend. I opened the first page and I was like, no, I have to slow down and think about it. So what got you on the journey to writing this book? What was the intention?

Marsha Acker

You know, so I was mentioning earlier, I did several coach trainings, individual coach training, systems coach training, and then I got introduced to David Kantor's work. So he wrote a book called Reading the Room, and it was through my introduction to his work and meeting Sarah Hill and Tony Melville, who run an organisation in the UK called Dialogix. But it was through meeting them and David and really starting to understand structural dynamics that I got introduced to the concept of model building. And that does come from David's research around face-to-face communication and what it looks like for leaders to be able to bring clarity to their work. And I remember along the way, one of my first conversations with Sarah Hill, you know, I had, so I had a whole background in facilitation, what it looked like to facilitate groups, and at that moment I was really kind of struggling with what's the difference between team coaching and facilitating, and I was having this kind of personal, what I realise now, I was deep in building my own model for what team coaching would look like for me. But at the time it felt like a bit of an existential crisis or a midlife crisis, or something that I, because I saw difference between the two, but I was really confused as I onboarded all of the different tools and models for how to coach about the difference between the two. And I remember one day Sarah looked at me and I had shared with her a perspective that someone else had shared with me about what happens in team coaching, and I was really confused because it really conflicted with what she was saying to me, and so I went up to her after we'd done a session and I just said, so I really want to talk about this. You said this, and then someone else said this and it just makes no sense to me, and she just looked at me and she said, well, they have a different model. And I thought, okay, well, which one is right? And she was like, neither. You know, neither right nor wrong, just different. And boy, I walked away and I just couldn't, I don't know how many years, it's probably been at least 10 years since we had that conversation, but it really stuck with me and I think in my own journey I've gotten so clear about the value of being able to articulate your model for leading change, your model for looking at behaviour, your model for leadership. And boy, you know, one of the things that I value the most about that is David's stance that we all have our own, and that is some of our work to do, is to define our model and that there will likely be a phase where I am taking in other people's models and I'm learning how they talk about it and I'm learning the language and so there is a version of that where I'm kind of imitating others like, you do it and I'm going to do it just like you did it and I'm going to follow the language. It's one of the reasons that I published the first book around facilitation, like, that is how I think about facilitation and the facilitation stance, but I also hold that at some point, it's intended as a guide, and, you know, there are a couple of ways of thinking about just getting started and then developing and then mastering, but it's when we get to mastery that essentially the job becomes to build your own model. So there will be parts about even that facilitation book where you might find along the way, Ula, you're going yes, that's my, like, that's totally in my model too. And then, hey Marsha, you know, this thing where you talk about this, like, I don’t know, it's just, it's not for me. So, I'm going to discard that, it's not here. And then there's this new place, like I do this really differently, so I'm going to start to invent, you know, this is a place where I'm going to do some model building of my own, where this is going to look like a new part that very specifically becomes mine. And David would've said that models are our picture of the world, and our map of how we intend to go about working in the world, and so much of what I see when it comes to change is that I just think we're not really uber intentional and thoughtful about how we want to go about change. And if you go on LinkedIn at any given day and just search on Agile and you can find all kinds of social media debates about, this is the way it needs to be done, and someone else will chime in, and I think that's baloney, this is the way I think it should be done. And what I would love to say to all those people is it just means there's difference, right? And I think the work to do is to be really, really clear about what is it that you are trying to change. So you've heard me say like I'm about changing behaviour first, like really focused in on using conversation as a way for that behaviour change to happen. And then I hold and trust and I've seen years of evidence of once that gets ironed out, once we're able to have more of that communicative competence in a team, that the other things become less of an issue and we're able to navigate that, but that's me, and that's my model. That doesn't mean, that doesn't make me right or wrong. It doesn't make me the only way to go about change. I think there's so many other different ways. So others listening to this podcast might have a place where they put process in the centre, and that is their focus, and that gets to be okay. So I'm just a real advocate of being clear about what is it that you're trying to change and how do you go about making that change happen in the world.

Ula Ojiaku

What struck me is you're saying the need to be clear about what you're trying to change, what you're trying to, if I may use the word, achieve as a result of the transformation. Would there be a place for the why? Because you might, and if so, how does that weave into the whole picture?

Marsha Acker

Well, I think in the process of building a model, you get clear first about how do I believe change happens? And then it becomes, okay, so what would I do to bring about change? So even if you think about leadership, what do I think about how leadership should, in my world, you know, should behave or act? How would I grow leadership? How would I grow leadership in others? And then what are some of the things that I would do? Where might I take action? And then why would I take action in those places? The same thing with change. I’m really clear about conversation and behaviour and helping people look at that. And so there are certain things that I would do in the room with a leadership team, and there's certain things that I would not do. And I'm really clear about why, like, because I hold, like what you'll hear is that phrase, because change doesn't happen until people feel seen and heard. And that's a real key, becomes a guiding North Star and I think it helps me navigate difference. So when I run across someone else who has a really different model than me, there's a version of myself years ago who, you know, it's kind of like the example that I gave of saying to Sarah, well, let's, you know, let's debate this out about which one of us is, you know, right or wrong. I don't actually think that's our work to do, but I do think our work to do is to just be really clear. So can you name what's in your model? Can you name what it is that you're trying to change? And then you and I could engage in a, what we would call, kind of a cross model conversation where it's not about beating the other down or making either of us wrong, but we can be really clear about, oh, well I would do this because this is why, this is what I believe about how change happens and this is how I'm helping the team change. And you could say, actually, I see, you know, my focus is a little bit different and here's why, and here's what I would do. And now, gosh, that's a learning conversation to have, that's not a debate. In leadership teams as leaders are trying to lead change in an organisation, I think this is the conversation that doesn't get had almost ever is how do we believe change will happen, and what are we going to do to bring about change? And even if there are ten people in that team and we each might have a slightly different personal view about how change happens, we have got to come to some alignment around how we are collectively going to look to bring about change, because if we don't, it's going to feel really dispersed and really challenging as we try to move forward in a large scale change, if we've all got ten different versions, we've got ten different models on how change happens.

Ula Ojiaku

What I think I'm hearing you say, Marsha, is, as a leadership team, it's really about taking the time to be aligned on what you're trying to do and also, presenting a united front, because the whole organisation will be looking up to you, so you need to be saying the same thing. But this is now me extending, extrapolating, not that you said this, but within, you should also be able, within yourself as a team to have those difficult conversations. You know, you could make your move, or follow, or oppose yourselves, but come to a conclusion which you present as a united front to the organisation in charging it forward. And there's something else you said in your, well, it's a quote in your book, Build Your Model for Leading Change, which said that leadership is being in the mess and being comfortable with being uncomfortable. Do you want to expand on that please?

Marsha Acker

I think it's so true. There's, it's in the space between us that I think gets messy and having, we were just wrapping up a cohort program for a group of internal leaders, just recently and I watched sort of the thinking and the shift in mindset happen over time. Like I said, I have a lot of compassion for leaders that there's a ton of pressure and expectations, you know, from bottom side, up, across and I think in those moments, some days it can be just really challenging to navigate which end is up. How do I manage through that? And I'm responsible for all of this out in front of me, and yet the propensity, like the compelling, I think, reaction is to just keep moving things forward, like the go faster. Just go faster, get through the meeting faster, get the things done, delegate it more, and that, it's not that that's wrong, and it's really helpful, but there just sometimes needs to be space where they slow it down and they actually create space, and I think that's the messy part. Like if I were to, you know, if I were to even channel what I would describe if things get tense or if I feel like somebody's possibly going to be disagreeing or not cooperate in the way that I want them to, I sometimes think the propensity to just keep moving forward and step over it or go past it is what often plagues us and the path of like, let me just slow down, I think it feels messy, I think it feels uncertain. It lacks a little bit of clarity about how, okay, so if I open this up, if I give voice, or I allow someone to give voice to a different point of view or a different perspective, am I going to be able to clean it up and move us forward? And for me, that's part of what I mean by the messy part. Like, it's unpredictable and yet I watch, I've been in a room to watch it, I've experienced it myself, there's such a gift when you do just slow down a little bit. Like, there's misunderstandings get cleared up, assumptions that are not correct, get corrected. They, people who are just really charged up and have a, they're making up all kinds of stories about why things are happening, like the pressure valve gets released off of that and then, and the anxiety comes down, like I've just watched it happen over and over again. So I just, I think there is the things that we tend to want to stay away from because they're not comfortable, I think, are the things to find a way to make space for. So it's messy, it's uncomfortable, it's feels like it's going to take more time. It all the kind of negative talk that I hear leaders say or navel gazing, that's my favourite one, it's going to feel like navel gazing, but yeah, I think we have to create space for some of it.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, Marsha. And there might be some listeners who, like me, are saying, okay, so in practice, how do we create the space? How do we go slow? Because in my area, in my field, I'm just quoting, you know, things seem to be going at break neck speed and there's never, things are never going to slow down for me. So how do I intentionally slow down or create the space to be able to do this? What are the practices, should we go on a retreat?

Marsha Acker

Yeah, well, I'll give you an example of at TeamCatapult. So, while we recommend this to all leadership teams that we work with, back during the pandemic, we, early on in the pandemic, I started to notice that we had grown, things had changed even for us internally. And so I made the decision to actually, even though we're all coaches, we brought coaches in to help us for about a year. And one of the things that we started to do for ourselves that we often recommend to others is carving out time once a month to create space where we would work on how we worked together. So, I don't, I'm not a huge, I think offsites and retreats are great, we do them, we have one coming up, we're all ridiculously excited to go to it, but we can't accomplish everything that we need to accomplish once or twice a year. And so we started to, given our size and our pace and kind of how we work together, the once a month really made sense for us. So we carve it out, it's the first Thursday of every month, it's for three and a half hours. We worked with a coach in that time night, right now we're not working with a coach and it's agenda-less. It's really an open space. It's not open space, the technology of open space, it's just an open conversation without an agenda. It's an invitation into dialogue and it is the place that we, I know that it's on my calendar, it's reserved, I don't have to, we can go at a pace in other meetings, but I know that we have that space and it's the place where we just show up, we all show up differently, we give time to actually surface the, sometimes maybe the things that did get stepped over intentionally or unintentionally across, you know, the last couple of weeks. And we have some of the most difficult, challenging, real, honest conversations in that space that I've ever experienced in my professional career, so it definitely also I've learned to try to block my calendar off after those calls to, you know, just to create a bit of processing time. So that's how we do it. I just recently, a couple months ago, interviewed someone on my podcast and he talked about, I loved this idea, of two week sprints and a one week retro. And so that was his way of really, intentionally carving out reflection time and really placing the value on catching sight of things, slowing down. So I think we need places where we're creating variability in the kind of meeting we're having, and I think when we're working at a really fast pace, just having, for me, I love knowing that it's on my calendar. I preserve the time, there's very little that will take precedence over it other than, you know, being on vacation or something, but, yeah, I really value it. So I think it will look different for every team, depending on the frequency and how often you meet and how much work is being done.

Ula Ojiaku

And would you say, because you know the one about blocking out the time in people's calendars as a team. What about as individuals, people as individuals also taking the time to do that for themselves?

Marsha Acker

Yeah. We are, you know, so in TeamCatapult, I think most people also work with individual coaches, so I think we all have a practice of doing that. When we're working with leadership teams, we often recommend both so that there's a carved out space on a monthly basis to come together collectively, and that they're each getting individual coaching as a way to help work through those things. Like I was saying, I notice when I show up in that space, my oppose goes silent, or I don't always bring my voice in, working one-on-one sometimes to help become more aware of why we're doing those things really helps us show up differently in the collective space. So yes, whether you're working with a coach or whether you're just carving out the time to do it yourself. And you asked me, you know, why I wrote the book, the Build Your Model book. It's partly that just wanting, it's a guided reflection workbook, and I really wanted to find a way to help people do this work on their own, with some handholds or some guidance around what it might look like.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you. And is there, on TeamCatapult, is there any program that could be, for example, I want someone to guide me through the process, is that available?

Marsha Acker

Yeah. We have two public programs, where we lay down kind of the technology that I've been describing and help you think about your own model for how, so there's two versions of that, there's one path that will lead you to thinking about your model as an agile coach. And there's a second path that will lead you to thinking about your model as a leader, as an interventionist. So, kind of two different programs. So the Path for Agile Coaching falls under a program we call Coaching Agility From Within, and that's a cohort program. It's about building your own model for agile coaching. And then, if that's not of interest, we have two other programs. One's called Making Behavioural Change Happen, which is part one where you sort of onboard the technology of structural dynamics. And then the second part is called Changing Behaviour in High Stakes, and that's where we go a bit deeper into helping you think about how you would intervene in behaviour and in conversation, both at an individual level, but also at a system level, so how you might map the system. So two different paths, and very complimentary in our Coaching Agility From Within program. There's also a thread of structural dynamics, it's underneath of that and how to coach a team using structure. So yes, a couple of different ways.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you. And what, I mean in addition to your fantastic books, and I'm not saying it just because you're here, what other books do you find yourself recommending to leaders?

Marsha Acker

Yeah. Well, I referenced one a little while ago Reading The Room by David Kantor. So all of our work really is informed greatly by that book. And my book Build Your Model for Leading Change, is based off of a lot of some of the concepts that David introduced and his book captures kind of in a narrative format, the story around it. And I would say mine is much more the workbook of how to onboard the technology of looking at behaviour and then the guided reflection of creating your model. The other thing that I am super excited, so my colleague Sarah, just re-released version two of her book. She has a book called, Where Did You Learn to Behave Like that? And I am deep into reading the new version. So it's top of mind for me. It further takes you down the path, like if you're hearing me talk about my childhood story and why I hesitate to oppose, Sarah's sort of the expert in that space around childhood story work and doing it with leaders. So her book is all about some stories around leaders who have done the work on childhood story, how it's really impacted their leadership, how they make space for difference and where they notice some of the kind of high stakes behaviours they may have as leaders. So yeah, if that's of interest, that's a really great resource to check out.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for that. It'll be in the show notes and so that the audience can get it. And any ask of the audience before we wrap up.

Marsha Acker

Yeah. You know, we've covered a lot of topics today and I think what I would just say in summary is an invitation to anybody to kind of be on a really intentional journey about what do you think about leadership? How do you go about leading in the world? How do you believe change happens? You've heard me share some examples today, but I think there's a calling for all of us to do some of the work because I think in the doing the work, and getting clear for ourselves, I do think that's the place of clarity and competence. I think that's where we learn to kind of find our feet when the pull, the gravitational pull of the real world kind of gets in our way. And we're all dealing with that in many ways. So that's what I want people to think about and whatever shape or form that looks like for folks, that's the big thing.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for that, Marsha. And if one wants to get in touch with you, how can they reach out to you?

Marsha Acker

A couple of ways. The best way to just connect with me will be on LinkedIn, so you can find me at Marsha Acker, and just, you know, when you send me them, I get tons and I don't say yes to everybody, so it's just really helpful if when people connect, they just tell me a little bit about how they're connecting. How they managed to get there, so that helps me do the sort and sift that I know we're all doing these days. The other place would be buildyourmodel.com so you can find kind of a free download there about model building, so if you're curious about that. And then our programs, you can find at teamcatapult.com. So the Making Behavioural Change Happen starts this fall and there's a Changing Behaviour in High Stakes program that starts in February, and the Coaching Agility From Within program starts in January next year.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you. So the programs you mentioned that can be found on TeamCatapult, the one starting this Autumn is Autumn 2023 and the February and March dates are in 2024, just for the audience clarity. Thank you so much, Marsha. I wish we had more time, but I do respect your time and for me it's been really enriching and enlightening. And I do want to say thank you again for making the time to share and impart your knowledge, your wisdom, your experience with us.

Marsha Acker

Yeah, thanks a lot. I really appreciate being here.

Ula Ojiaku

Likewise. Thank you again. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Bio

Marsha is the founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, a respected and sought-after leadership   development firm that equips leaders, at all levels, to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change.  She partners with leaders and leadership teams to clarify their desired change, develop communicative competence and think together - accessing their collective intelligence to bring about change. TeamCatapult is a partner to mid-size start-ups and global fortune 500 companies across sectors like entertainment, game development, banking, insurance, healthcare, communications, government, information technology, consumer goods, and retail. Clients have included Microsoft, Riot Games, Epic Games, Capital One, Blizzard Entertainment, Starbucks, Liberty Mutual, Fidelity, and Chef. Marsha Acker is an executive & leadership team coach, author, speaker, facilitator, and the host of Defining Moments of Leadership Podcast. Marsha’s unparalleled at helping leaders identify and break through stuck patterns of communication  that  get  in  their  way  of  high  performance.  She is known internationally as a facilitator of meaningful conversations, a host of dialogue and a passionate agilist. She is the author of Build Your Model for Leading Change: A guided workbook to catalyse clarity and confidence in leading yourself and others.

Interview Highlights

02:30 Background and beginnings

03:35 Reaching a cap

08:50 Working with difference

10:45 Process-centred focus vs people-centred focus

15:50 Behavioural-led change

17:25 Having effective conversations

Social Media

• LinkedIn: Marsha on LinkedIn
• Website:  www.teamcatapult.com
• Twitter: Marsha on Twitter 

Books & Resources

• Making Behavioral Change Happen - Team Catapult
• Changing Behavior in High Stakes - Team Catapult

Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

Hi everyone. My guest for this episode is Marsha Acker. Marsha is the Founder and CEO of TeamCatapult, and she is a respected and sought after leadership development expert, and her firm works to equip leaders at all levels to facilitate and lead sustainable behavioural change. This episode is the first of a two part series, because there were just a lot of nuggets to get from Marsha and in part one, we talked about Marsha's background and beginning, how she got to a cap and she knew that she needed to break through a certain ceiling to get to more, to achieve her potential. She also talked about process-centred versus people-centred transformation and the differences and where each one might be considered. Of course, there is a bias for, and I am biased as well towards the people-centred focus, but there is a place for process and how you might go about implementing a behavioural led change. Without further ado, Part One of my conversation with Marsha Acker. I hope you find this as insightful as I did.

I have with me the very one and only Marsha Acker, who is the founder of TeamCatapult and a coach, facilitator, much, much known in the Agile coaching discipline and beyond. Marsha, it is a big pleasure and an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you.

Marsha Acker

Thanks a lot. I'm super excited to be here with you today, so thanks for inviting me.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome. So, Marsha, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Marsha Acker

Yeah, well, I often say my first career was, you know, two degrees in software engineering and I spent some time working with developers, sort of bridging the gap between end users and developers. And so that was my first start, it's actually where I learned about facilitation, was trying to bring whole groups of users together to align on what they wanted in terms of requirements. So it was back before we talked about Agile, it was back before any of those methods and processes had made their way. But that's really where I got my start in facilitation. And then, yes, towards what I call my own retooling around my career, was when I, I actually went to look for professional coaching as a way to up my leadership. I didn't have a desire originally to become a coach. I wanted to do and learn coaching because I wanted to up my leadership, I just, I had reached a point where I was really challenged in my own leadership and so the very short version of that much longer circuitous path was, I found that I did go through coactive coaching. So I started in that space. CTI (Coach Training Institute) had a huge impact on me personally, it's responsible for many life decisions that I made coming out of that program. But that was where I got my certification in professional coaching with individuals, and then I went on to do ORSC from CRR Global, and then I went on to do structural dynamics and that's where I met the work of David Kantor, where I met David Kantor. And we can talk more about that, but that's certainly changed my whole view of how we enter interpersonal relationships, how we have conversations with one another, it gave me a lens for sort of looking at even some of the previous coach training that I did. So yes, I have, I often say I sort of have two backgrounds that I think the tech side helps me just stay connected to a, you know, I have a soft spot in my heart for techies and people who have a lot of technical and scientific knowledge. And then I often say I learned a lot about process improvement and automation and making things effective and efficient, but I think one of the things that I really lacked in the first part of my career was the human skills, like how to work with other human beings. And I would say the second half of my professional career has been, yeah, how to work with others. It's a big thing.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for sharing that, Marsha. Something you said about the second part of your career has been focused on working with humans. Well, I have a technical background in Electronic Engineering, Bachelor's degree, a Master's in Computer Science. And at the beginning of my career, it was more of, okay, what could you do? You know, what's your technical understanding? But as you move on, it's really more about how, you know, work well with people and get people to do the best work together. Would you say that's a general trend that you've also observed apart from your own personal experience?

Marsha Acker

Yeah. I don't know if it's, sometimes I wonder, you know, it's maybe just the lens that I look through or it's the organisations and the kinds of leaders that I somehow attract into my sphere. But I do find myself working a lot with technical leaders and I think one of the things that happens, technical and scientific tracks, you know, we move forward in our careers, we get rewarded for knowledge, for having the answer, for being able to connect and do things quickly. And I think in that career progression, we get really good at knowing the answer, having the answer, you know, we're working with things that we feel like are discreet, you know, we can own them in some way, but as we move up, and I think many, you know, I've talked to many a developer, engineer who, you know, sometimes reached that cap, and then the next step is to lead people, to lead others, and to, you know, to be the senior architect, to be the senior engineer, the Vice President or the Director. And you know, it's that famous saying, what got us here won't get us to the next level, and so I think there are those moments, I certainly experienced that, that was one of the reasons I went off to coach training was I just, the metaphor I use often is that I was out over my skis. I knew something was, like I was trying to make something happen or I was trying to get things to happen, and my only model for that was because I said, so, like, please do this, because, I think this is the way. And I just, I really, I started to realise, I felt like I was running on a hamster wheel some days, and I'm like, this isn't working and I feel like I'm missing something. So I often do find myself working with leaders or leadership teams who are, it's not that they're underperforming, it's just that they've reached a cap. The place where all that they know and all that they have, have served them really well, up until this point, and then like what's required to go to that next level or to be effective and efficient in a different kind of way. It's sort of when our focus starts to come off of the very discreet task and it becomes more about how do we create an environment, a space, a container for others to be their best, so it's no longer going to be, you know, me making all the decisions or me moving something forward, it's that we need to work together. And boy that we space is tricky. Yeah, we are going to see things differently and there's going to be conflict and there's going to be difference of opinion. And then, you know, ooh, how do I work with that in a way that's, I just, you know, I think one of the biggest questions that I think we help leadership teams look at is how do we work with difference, and actually welcome it rather than try to minimise it, because I think that's the rub where if we don't have skills to work with it, we tend to minimise it or send it out of the room or suppress it. Like we say, you know, we don't have enough time for that, or, gosh, we've got this deadline. So we've become super deadline driven, and I think sometimes at the expense of having a real conversation with one another.

Ula Ojiaku

Gosh, I have so many questions. I don’t know which one to ask, but I'll just go with the last, based on what you've said, the last few sentences in terms of not having time, you suppress the conflict or the differences or the disagreements, because we're always like on a deadline or we don't have the time for this. So how would you get these leadership teams to step back and say, you know what, we have to deal with this elephant in the room, otherwise it's going to get bigger, fester, if we were to use an analogy of the wound on it, you know, if you just cover it up with a band-aid, it's not going to get better, sometimes you have to treat the wound, get the scab off so that it can heal wholesomely and you move forward. So what's your approach for this, please?

Marsha Acker

So I can tell you how I would've approached it early in my career, in a version of myself that really led with process. So at that time, I had a model for change that was very focused on ‘know the process’, like document the process, define the new process, get people to follow the process. And I definitely, I kind of laugh about it now, but I, you know, it's not wrong, I mean, it worked, but this is very early in my career, early 2000, because I just began to work with agility. I had left one space where I was a part of a small startup and I was heading up all of our programs and we had really started to use extreme programming. So I'm sort of fresh on this, on this thinking of, okay, so there's different ways we can begin to work. And I'd gone into a smaller organisation, it was a consulting firm. We were leading process led change, and we were working with a leadership team who was really charged with a huge internal transformation effort. And at that time, working directly with that leadership team, I would've said we took a very process-centred focus to that, we documented the current process, we helped them. It was  over a year of working with this one leadership team, and then we started to help them craft, okay, so what's your desired change and what would the process under that look like? And as we got towards the end of that transformation, one of the things that I started to notice is that the process-led decisions that the leadership team was being asked to really make some decisions about, had a huge impact on people, both them and the staff and the people that they were managing, they cared greatly about their culture and the people, and they reached a place where they just, to describe it, they just dug in their heels and progress wasn't moving forward. And I remember thinking, we'd been on retreats with them multiple times, and it was in that moment, that was the moment where I learned and had the insight, that there was way more to change than just the process. And what I can tell you now that I couldn't quite articulate back then was that we were missing the people part of this equation. And what was starting to happen is that as the pressure increased and the leadership team was being asked to make decisions that were truly going to impact not only them personally, like where they lived, where their children went to school, you know, family impacts, but that was also going to have an impact across all the folks that they managed. And so they were reaching a place where they just couldn't make that decision kind of collectively. I think one of the biggest mistakes in that particular process was that we were so process led. And what was missing from it was a coaching perspective and a way to help them have the real conversation because the real conversation actually started to go out of the room. And I was certainly playing a part in, potentially a little unaware at the moment that in favour of wanting to push things forward and get things done in my process-led change model, they were really needing to have a different kind of conversation that wasn't about the process at all, but that had since become the undiscussable topic and it didn't get brought into the room. So we sort of, we left it out. So that's an example of an earlier model for change that I had, and I didn't have a way of bringing that conversation on mind or really even paying attention to it. Now you asked for how would I do it today?

Ula Ojiaku

Yes, because you've said the process-led model for change, I'm excited to know what the next one is.

Marsha Acker

Well I want to be really clear, I don't think that that's a wrong model. But I think for me, I learned that it was missing something, and I can reflect back now and tell you that, but I don't want your listeners to draw any wrong conclusions. That wasn't an overnight insight, that definitely took a little bit of time. But what I would say now is I have, you know, in my model for leading change, I think process is important, but it's really not at the core of how I think about change at all. I think in my model, it's definitely a sub-task, but I would say I'm very focused on behavioural-led change at the moment. And so in that behavioural-led change, what I place at the centre of any change is, how are people communicating with one another? Are they able to actually have the real conversation? Is there enough awareness in the system that they can kind of catch sight of when the real conversation starts to go underground? And can they actually have the muscle, the range in their leadership to catch sight of it and then bring it back in the room? And so, I place conversations and behaviour kind of at the core of change, and I hold a perspective that change, that no one will change, change doesn't happen until people feel heard and understood.  And I don't know that I could find you an example of any organisation that I've worked in, including my own TeamCatapult, where something that we're trying to do or accomplish or move forward doesn't meet a roadblock when some aspect of our conversation isn't fully online or we're not fully having the conversation that we need to have. So one of the ways that I would do that today is, first, whenever I'm engaging with a leadership team or any other team that's really trying to bring about change and just noticing like they're trying to level up or there's something that they're wanting that they feel like they're kind of capped at is I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation, because I think in the conversation there are lots of indicators about how that conversation plays out and are people really able to say what they're thinking or do we get stuck in some common dysfunctional patterns that can show up? So one example of that would be, we use a sort of a technology for looking at conversation and there are four actions that happen in all effective conversations, a move, a follow, an oppose, and a bystand. So a move sets direction, a follow supports it, an oppose offers really clear correction. It says, no, hang on, wait a minute. A bystand offers a morally neutral perspective, so one way is to help a team onboard that, but there are common patterns and one of the common patterns that will come out, particularly in tech teams where there's pace and we need to move things forward, is that they can get into this pattern of someone makes a move, and everyone else just sort of remains silent or, says something to the effect might voice ‘sure, you know, that sounds good.’ So they start to fall into this pattern of move and lots of follow. And what's missing often is the voice of bystand, which says, hey, I'm wondering what's going on, or I'm wondering what we're not saying. And then really clear opposition. So the ability to bring pushback, constraint into the conversation. So if you go back to that original leadership team that I was telling you about, you know, way back when, I think one of the things that was going on in that team is they weren't, no one was able to say, this is an incredibly difficult decision, and I don't think I can make it unless I have these things answered. So they kept making it about the process and it wasn't really about the process at all. It was really, it had a very personal component to it that wasn't being discussed, and so the inability to discuss that really created the drag. So the way that I think about helping any team work through any change is, helping them onboard the skills of being able to have, we call it bringing, it's a principle that we hold about bringing the real conversation in the room. Can you bring the conversation online versus offline? So the other flag that you might have for when your conversations are going offline is, if you feel, I often think about if I leave a conversation with you and I, for example, if I left this conversation and I went off and I felt the need, or I was compelled to one of vent or complain about it to someone else, that's my kind hazard flag. But, there was something that I was holding back from in this conversation that I didn't say, and that's my signal to actually circle back around. And so maybe, maybe I need to check in with myself, maybe there's something that I left unsaid.  

Ula Ojiaku

So there we are, this is the end of part one of the conversation with Marsha. In part two of this conversation, which is the final one where we are going to talk about having effective conversations, what functional self awareness means, why it is important to slow down conversations in order to get results, as counter-intuitive as this might be, and many other things, so stay tuned and watch out for part two of my conversation with Marsha. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

We are thrilled to announce that Season 4 of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast with Ula Ojiaku is almost here! 

With a line up of expert guests including Marsha Acker, Bryan Tew, Victor Nwadu, Fabiola Eyholzer, David Bland, Brant Cooper, Luke Hohmann, Myles Ogilvie and many others, each episode is packed with insightful discussions and actionable takeaways on topics touching on leadership, business agility, innovation and much more.

Trailer Transcript

Marsha Acker:

“Whenever I’m engaging with a leadership team or any other team that’s really trying to bring about change, like they’re trying to level up, I just start to help them look at the way they engage in conversation.”

Ula Ojiaku:

Get ready for Season 4 of the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast.

Bryan Tew:

“If you’re solving the right problem but you have a terrible solution or a solution that doesn’t really fit the need, then you’re still not winning.”

Ula Ojiaku:

Join us every episode as we embark on a journey with thought leaders, industry experts, entrepreneurs, and seasoned professionals.

Victor Nwadu:

“The success of the transformation depends on the leader, the leaders and the person at the top, how committed they are to it.”

Ula Ojiaku:

Who will be sharing with me strategies, insights and stories that would empower you to lead with agility, drive innovation, and thrive in the digital augmented age.

Subscribe now to be the first to know when the first Season 4 episode drops.

Ula’s Social Media/Websites:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uloakuojiaku/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/uloakuojiaku

Website: www.agileinnovationleaders.com  

Episode Transcript

Ula Ojiaku: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Hello wonderful listeners, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, if there are any of them, which will be very impressive. But I'm recording this special episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast to one, announce that we've come to the end of Season 3, and two, there is a special milestone that we hit yesterday, which I'd love to share with you and a huge kudos and thank you to all of you out there who helped us reach the incredible milestone of having a hundred, no, 1-0-0 subscribers on our YouTube channel, me doing the Happy Dance. It is a milestone for me. It's hard to believe that it's been about two and a half years since the first episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast was released. From the very first episode we've been on a mission to explore the world of agile innovation, you know, lean, and the practices, the principles, and these disciplines. And in the process, I've had wonderful guests who have brought us inspiring stories and invaluable insights and practical advice around these topics. So right now, today, as I'm sitting here, I am filled with gratitude as we celebrate this incredible achievement.

And actually, I'd like to give the tributes and a shout out to my children, Ife and Kiki, they were the ones who suggested that I start a YouTube video, I mean a YouTube channel, so that there could be a video version of the podcast, and this was when they were ages 8 and 10 respectively. So it's never, one big lesson here is that you can always learn from anyone, people younger than you included. And as I mentioned earlier, today marks also the end of an amazing season, Season 3 of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I hope each episode has left you inspired, informed, and empowered, just like they have left me, each and every one of them. It's been a transformative journey and it continues to be so. So before we move on, I just again, want to say a huge thank you to you, my audience, my wonderful guests, past, present, future, and last, but not the least, my wonderful team. Thank you. We wouldn't have made it to this point without you.

I'm also thrilled to announce that we have lots of exciting announcements that will be coming up in future, sometime in future. We are also, my team and I, are also planning, working right behind the scenes, working hard on an interesting and inspiring line-up for Season 4. So stay tuned, because big things are coming your way. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our future episodes and announcements, and also share with friends. Let's continue pushing boundaries, embracing change, leading the way, and demonstrating the change that we wish to see. And of course, fostering that culture of innovation and creativity.

So, my amazing agile innovation leaders, thank you again for being a part of this great occasion. We've come so far, we’re not where we started, even though we're not where we are meant to be yet, our adventure is just beginning. Until we meet again in Season 4, stay agile, stay innovative, and keep leading the way. I believe in you. Thank you.

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Bio

Mahesh Jade is an esteemed agile evangelist and thought leader dedicated to the noble cause of fostering winning teams and products. His expertise lies in coaching teams, companies, and departments to implement Scrum and Agile methodologies, instigating profound improvements and transformative changes in their work processes and value delivery. Beyond coaching, Mahesh frequently conducts enlightening workshops and sessions on various topics including Scrum, agile leadership, facilitation, team dynamics, and experimentation, providing firsthand experiences in the realm of agility. Notably, Mahesh serves as the esteemed organizer of the India Community of 'The Liberators', further showcasing his dedication to fostering a vibrant and thriving agile community.

With a multifaceted background encompassing roles as a developer, project manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach, Mahesh possesses a comprehensive understanding of both technical and organizational challenges. Leveraging strong visual acuity and an unwaveringly innovative outlook, he continuously discovers ways to infuse agility tailored to the unique shape and structures of teams, products, and practices.

Mahesh's outstanding achievements have garnered recognition and widespread acclaim. His work has been featured in renowned platforms such as the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, research papers in the International Journal of Trend in Research and Development, and their YouTube channel, which hosts captivating recordings from a series of their talks at conferences, agile festivals, and workshops.

Interview Highlights

• 04:25 The Agile Manifesto and Choosing
• 07:35 Research Paper Findings
• 08:25 Facilitation over “Facipulation”
• 09:40 Done over Doing
• 13:35 Now over Then
• 17:30 Visual Scrum
• 28:16 A, B, c, d way of managing Self
• 30:00 A.R.B Formula to Stay Present
• 33:15 Business Glossary of Agility for Presenting a Change

Social Media

•          LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/iammaheshjade/
•          Medium https://medium.com/@maheshjade/about
•          YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/MaheshJade
•         Medium Article on Visual Scrum Experiment https://medium.com/@maheshjade/visual-scrum-reach-goals-every-iteration-fefb86c1aa35

 Books

•           Mahesh’s paper Title: The Weakest Link: Towards Making An Organisation More Agile Link: http://www.ijtrd.com/ViewFullText.aspx?Id=25113
•           Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy Eat That Frog!: Get More Of The Important Things Done Today: Amazon.co.uk: Tracy, Brian: 9781444765427: Books
•           Fixing Your Scrum by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fixing-Your-Scrum-Ryan-Ripley/dp/1680506978
•          Evolvagility by Michael Hamman Evolvagility Explorer Series — MichaelHamman
•           The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Thinking-Clearly-Better-Decisions/dp/1444759566
•           Movie - 3 Idiots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots

 Episode Transcript

Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku

Hi Mahesh. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast.

Mahesh Jade

Thank you Ula, thank you so much. I'm completely excited.

Ula Ojiaku

I'm excited as well and I'm looking forward to our conversation. So you currently work for PwC, and we understand that everything you say is your own opinion, you're not representing your employer. So we acknowledge that. So on that note, can you share with us your journey so far and how you've gotten to where you are right now?

Mahesh Jade

Mm-hmm, yeah I follow metaphors pretty much in my life, so today I have really this metaphor in my mind of a story, of a book of short stories where we have got plenty of short stories, and at the end of each story there is some wisdom, some cool things, some good thing to remember. I mean, if I try to summarise my growing up and becoming what I am today, it was a journey of trying to be meaningful, because of the simple reason that when I started off as a software developer, I was doing development, pretty well, but then internally within me, I don't think I enjoyed that completely. Then I thought, okay, I find a lot of passion towards creativity, so let's do UI and UX. I did that, did it pretty well, and again, noticed that, okay, again, this is not something that I completely like that I, where I completely find my character, and then I got introduced to Scrum and Agility, and it was around 2016 end, and I know that there have been no moments after that where I have looked back. It's like I have found my passion, found my energy, found my character. And then there are a couple of small instances into my journey which really map to what we do in Scrum and Agility. So I can share them. So, it's like, I was third day of my career when I was in office, a small office where we used to sit just together, my CEO will be just next to me, and it was just third day in my office and I went into his cabin telling him that, you know, we have a potential to build this feature. It is very much there, but we do not see that on our website, and people just thought, okay, you are just doing crazy, it's your third day in office and you are directly getting into conversation with your leader and suggesting something, which is a change into the product. So I think my career, and my journey have been, on a very similar note, it has been fearless. It has been about making some change happen. It has been about trying out something different, that excites me. So, while I was working into softwares, I'll just connect these dots together. So, at one point of time, because I was not enjoying things completely, I thought, okay, I'll try filmmaking and I will get into the field of creative copywriting. So I tried that at a certain moment, but I could not go further into that. And then there was this moment when I decided that, okay, whatever I do in my career now, whichever field I get into, I'll make sure that I put my creative into my field. And Scrum was that point, I found Scrum to be the perfect ground to apply creativity, to work with people, to really circle around changes and improvements. I really enjoy that and I find it to be the perfect ground to apply creativity at work.

Ula Ojiaku

That's interesting you saying something like a journey, you want it to be meaningful and you tried different things until you hit on what seemed to be, you know, the thing for you that taps into your creativity, your enthusiasm, your passion. And so you said something before I hit the record button to me, you know, in terms of what, a parallel you've made between the Agile Manifesto and for the listeners, if you're not aware of the Agile Manifesto, it's more of a, you know, a set of values and principles that govern the ways of working that have come to be termed as Agile, which originated in software development. But back to you, Mahesh, you know, something in the power in the Agile Manifesto and the power of choosing. Can you tell us about this?

Mahesh Jade

Absolutely, Ula. I think I'm really fascinated by this word ‘over’, which is used into Agile Manifesto. As an example, when we say individuals and interactions over processes and tools, I find power into it because, it gives us a choice to make. It is not a directive, a sentence that you do this and you do not do that, because I feel we, as humans, are wired to given choices and act into the zone of freedom. And there we come into our character more, more often  than not. So if we tell a small kid that don't look at the red pen or just don't do something, they are, they're prone to do the same thing again and again. And as we grow up, I think that that innate behaviour stays within us, where if we are told to not do something, we might actually do that, and we may not enjoy that. So this notion of something over the other, like more valuable over less valuable, I feel that to be very powerful. When I wrote my research paper, probably my second research paper on IJTRD, which is the International Journal of Trend in Research and Development, I was reading through materials and then I found everything that was getting discovered, landing into a theme that was around something over the other. So I would like to talk about that as well, the research paper ended into six different themes, about something over the other. And this paper is for leaders to really have the right goals into their minds. And when they are getting into a new ways of working where things are not straightforward, things are complex, and we have to be adaptive. So how do we set up the right goals? Like a highly valuable goal over a less valuable goal.

Ula Ojiaku

That’s interesting, the power of choosing, you know, what’s more valuable, and it also aligns with, you know, Agile, the heartbeat of Agile, you can't do everything at once, so you prioritise. And as human beings, the way we work is we thrive in environments where we feel like we have a say instead of being compelled to do something. So you are pulling or drawing out that motivation that's already inside people when they feel like they have a choice and they can, you know, have that say in terms of the direction of things. So tell me more about the findings of your paper.

Mahesh Jade

Yeah. So the first chapter in this paper was about unleashing the voices, and it was because, it is based on the premise that the organisational structures, they have got(ten) upended. When we say upended, I mean to say, the people who used to be vertically downwards in hierarchy somewhere, now they are actually customer facing. So if we take example of a Scrum team, the members of the team, they get a chance to meet the stakeholders or the customers, or the representative of customers, every two weeks. And that's really different than what it used to be earlier in a traditional way of operating. So at that point of time, I believe that leaders stepping into the new agile leadership journey, they should really choose facilitation over ‘facipulation’. So ‘facipulation’ is a mix of manipulated facilitation where the outcome is already conceived into someone's mind and they're trying to just get to that point. Now that does not work into the new ways of working where people are facing customers, they should be empowered, they should be given a chance to be just facilitated, to make the right decisions themself. Like again, getting into a metaphorical way of looking at things, that I'm holding a torch as a leader, as a facilitator, and I throw the light on the right people, or I throw the light on the people who are not speaking up in the moment, or I throw the light on the right problem and I just ask them, okay, what is your opinion about that? So that kind of leadership is really expected in the new ways of working, at the end of the day it's about empowering the people. So that's about it. In a new upended organisational structure, a leader should choose facilitation over facipulation.

Ula Ojiaku

And what's the next one?

Mahesh Jade

The next one is probably, it was about performance. But the second finding of my paper was about done over doing, so choose done over doing. It means to say, rather than putting a lot of focus on what are we doing back to back and just getting into a loop of doing, focus on what is getting done by certain period and really have that mindset of creating value on a periodic basis. Now that value could mean a product, a finished product, or an outcome, or it could even mean a good feedback. It is again, good to have an outcome, good to have a win. And I propose that, looking at done is more important than looking at doing all the work again and again and again.

Ula Ojiaku

Yeah. It reminds me of the saying ‘stop starting, start finishing’. Just looking at what can we push to the finishing, start finishing instead of having so many things open and in progress you've talked about, you know, giving people a voice, and I’m paraphrasing that first one, facilitation over ‘facipulation’, I love that new word. Anything else from your research in terms of the themes?

Mahesh Jade

Absolutely. So it was discovery of six themes and I would take maybe couple of more into them. So the next one it was about taking a leap of faith and it came about when I was doing a Scrum.org class about professional agile leadership. And we were talking about the different maturity levels in the teams, both in terms of the leadership in the team and the people in the team. And there was an interesting insight I got during the class where we get into the system not only to interact at the current maturity level, but we actually want to go to the next maturity level, both as any person in the team, be it the Scrum Master or be it the product owner, or be it your team members, everyone. It's a journey to go to the next level of maturity. And then I propose this theme to be, I call it as elevate over delegate. So, choose elevation, elevate over delegation, I’ll give an example. So I'm big fan of Ron Eringa’s works where he puts a label of maturity and he names it such as Scrum Master gets started as a clerk probably, and then he becomes an organiser. Slowly, he becomes a coach to the team, and then he becomes advisor. When it comes to the team, they are more likely to follow the, probably directed ideas and slowly people will influence them to do something. The next level could be they're just advised and then they're doing something and the highest possible level can be they're just self organising around, around the world. So the idea in this chapter or in this finding, is really to, if we are thinking that this is a moment to direct a team member, go for influencing probably, like, take the next step, take the next step of delegation if possible. So, operate at your current level of maturity, but also do try to go to the next level. So again, if you think there is a need to influence somebody, just try to advise them and see if they can still do it. If, if you feel that right now, this team needs advice, let's just allow them to self-organise. Probably they'll be able to do it because I feel, we do not only want to address the current maturity of the team members and the leadership, but we also want to go to the next level. So I propose this as a theme that whenever you have a chance, elevate over delegation. So elevate over delegate is the next theme.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome. Elevate over delegate. Yes well here’s for the next theme on your research from your research.

Mahesh Jade

Yeah, we'll cover one more and I guess it is about dependencies and creating focus and I have got a small story to share about that as well. So I'll first maybe share the story and then we come to the outcomes of this chapter and what is it? If I have to go to a doctor and just get a medicine and let's say it takes me eight days, I called up the hospital and they gave me the appointment after three days and I went ahead and then, so it took some time. So we never say that it took me eight days to get a medicine. We always say that, okay, I went to the doctor, I took the medicine. When it comes to work, people just put it all together and they get an impression that even if it is moving, or even if it is waiting, they think that we are doing something, which is not true. We should just separate where, when we are doing and when the item is in to wait. So it is very important to create that notion where people focus on now, that what is now and what is really afterwards. So a lot of times people get an impression that because we are waiting, we are doing something, and as a leader, we should develop that focus where people stay in the moment, people stay in now, people don't think too much of the next part in the future, but really focus on what is possible to do right now? And if something is not possible, how do we really park that and get started with another valuable thing if we have into our queue? Can we really work on that? So I think a lot of teams face this challenge where it has got developed as a belief that, probably, and I will talk more about it in the into the next part where people just feel that everything starts on the day one of the Sprint and everything finishes on the last day of the Sprint, which is not true. There are a lot of waits in between, and if we really manage them well, if we stay into the moment, chances are that we will do pretty much well. So this actually, this finding ends up into, again, another couple, of words, into the same notion now over then creating focus and looking at dependency in a different way. Staying into the moment and doing what is possible. So now over then is the next theme that I found it to be, while discovering and working around dependencies and creating focus.

Ula Ojiaku

So what I'm hearing you say is this, it's about the teams, because there are always going to be things outside our control, whether it's as individuals, as teams, when we're, you know, working towards something. So it's about saying, okay, we plan to do one thing, but something beyond our control is keeping us, let's reassess and know, okay, what is within our control that, at this point in time, that we can still do to help us work towards the original goal?

Mahesh Jade

Absolutely, absolutely Ula.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay. Please go on then with your next point, Mahesh.

Mahesh Jade

Yeah. So I'm done with the finding, sharing findings from the paper. I'll probably touch upon the experiment part. So, I call it a big derail in any of the Scrum teams, or for that matter, agile team, when people have the feeling or the notion that everything starts on the first day of the iteration and it ends on the last day of the iteration, which is completely not true. So, because of this, people just end up splitting the work at the last day of the iteration, or probably they will not call out a need for, probably just stopping some work and choosing something else. Those decisions do not happen in real time. So we started off with a small experiment and we named it as Visual Scrum. So I think I learned about it somewhere in one of the forum where people were sharing experiments and I do not exactly recall that, but then we built on that and we created a Mural visual board, which I have got a few stickers with me where  it's a small printout of how that went. So those who are just listening to the podcast, I can make it easy for them it’s just a simple way to represent when work starts and when it is supposed to finish in a iteration. So it's like a long strip of sticky note, which represents that, okay, this work starts on Monday and it finishes on Thursday, something like that. So the experiment was simple. We wanted to make sure that people get the understanding that not everything starts on the first day and not everything finishes on the last day, and as soon as we started this, we started concluding our Sprint planning where people visually said that, okay, we have our eight stories. Three of them start on day one. Five of them are actually dependent, we'll just look at them after three to four days, and then people started changing the size of that rectangle about when it starts and when it finishes. And that itself was very powerful for people where they felt that, okay, we are not engaged full-time, we have a good buffer right now. Only two stories are important and the whole team can support that work. It is not that only the primary owner of the story will work on that. Slowly, what we started discovering was that, at a particular point in the second week, people are noticing that, OK, half of the stories are somehow done because we have developed a habit that let's keep the batch size or the sides of the story to be lesser than a week or so. So there are larger chances of completing that, and slowly we started discovering in this experiment, which was very visual to understand that we got started with eight stories or nine stories, but right now half of them are partially completed. Now we have a focus of only this left over part and then if the pin on that story, on that visual board is not moving for a particular story for a couple of days, that was getting highlighted very quickly, where people thought, okay, this story is blocked from last three days, something is wrong. Either we have to stop it completely and take it into the next Sprint, or we can just split it and probably look at a new acceptance criteria. So I know I'm covering it in pretty fast detail, but I can share a blog post that I'm intending to write on this experiment so people can get deeper into it and just look at it in a step by step way. But the point I'm trying to make here is that this derail can be avoided if people make the system visual. People should look at a notion where, as I said, not everything starts on the day one, not everything finishes on the last day, making sure that people understand that what is currently in progress and what is now, what is then, and then really focusing on the current stories, finishing them probably, and then making sure that if something is not moving into the system, call it out at the right time, rather than waiting until the end of the iteration. I think people found it very good and they improved their, I mean, velocity is not really a good measure to measure agility, but this team was completely, this set of teams were completely at a different level of operating when they felt that, okay, we used to take, earlier, we used to take some eight to nine stories into the Sprint. Now we can take even more than that, or even if we do not take too many of them currently, we have a very good control over completing these stories and achieving the Sprint goals. So visual, making the system visual, has a lot of potential to make sure that we achieve goals iteration after iteration, and I think that was valuable when we understood this.

Ula Ojiaku

So in Lean you would have the concept of the flow of the work and the throughputs you are getting things, you know, from started to done within that time box. And when would you typically, as you mentioned, you know, if the team is not moving, then the team can note, okay, or have a conversation around do we continue with this story? Do we split it? Do we put it back in the backlog? What sort of instances would they have to, or opportunities would they have to actually make this assessment?

Mahesh Jade

Yeah, so we have just made this complete experience , a creative experience for people where if the pin is not moving for two days, whenever the pin is stuck, we will make sure we will add a black sticky note at the end of that rectangle, calling out the dependency, that what needs to happen in order to move this pin from this day to the next day. And if that pin is not moving for a couple of days, that black sticker keeps on getting highlighted in every check-in event that we have in every daily Scrum. And probably after two days or so, we'll decide, okay, this is not moving. Let's take some decision, let's not wait until the end of the Sprint, let's take a decision right now that either we park it and we pick up something from our buffer, from the top of the backlog or we just split it and look at a different acceptance criteria, and it was pretty good.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay. So thanks for clarifying. So just to, you know, delve a bit more, especially on, with respect to the audience so that it's clearer, more explicit, assuming this is a Scrum team, would the Daily Standup be a good opportunity for them to actually make these evaluations, or would there be something or maybe the meet after?

Mahesh Jade

I would say, I mean, we intend to make the right decisions about splitting a story or probably making them, breaking them into parts, or sometimes we just want to make sure that we look at the top of the backlog if we do not have enough work in our hands. And by making the system visual, if I got your question correctly, I think making the system as visual as possible and putting some creative majors around it, if team can take the right decision at the right point, rather than waiting until the end of the Sprint, we are more likely to achieve the Sprint goals, is what we achieved through this experience, and we named it as Visual Scrum, and it was just simple. Whatever we are doing, just let's just represent it on a whiteboard in a very clear cut way, okay? Where we are currently, what is in progress, and what is already done, and what is remaining. So creating that complete bifurcation, that was powerful for people because otherwise everyone always felt that we are in an iteration. We have got, let's say eight to ten stories and all of them are in progress, that was an unconscious understanding that we were able to break by making the system visual.

Ula Ojiaku

And how is it different from a Kanban board because you know, a Kanban board you, again, that's borrowing from, has its origins in the Toyota production system, but as we use it nowadays, we know about, you know, you have columns to do, in progress, done, in the simplest form. So your visual representation, how is it different from, or how does it build on the normal timeline?

Mahesh Jade

Absolutely. So we did not do away with the current boards that we had into JIRA at that instance, but I'll put this on screen. But if you look at this closely, this gives a lot of information in a very quick way. Right now, what I see is that I'm into the middle of the Sprint, half of the stories are already finished. The story that is remaining, that is also, there is just a partial part, which is remaining. And I also have a story parked into my backlog at the top of the backlog. So the team comes to know that okay, a lot of work has already finished one work that is in progress, it is not much, it is trivial. So now I have power to pick up what is at the top of the backlog. So we did not do away with the Kanban board, they were still helping us, but we wanted to create a visual representation of what is done and what is in progress. So yeah, I think that was about the experiment.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay. And one more question because, again, it's really about wrapping my head around how one would apply it. So would it be the Scrum Master that would be checking this and then congregating the team to have a conversation, or anybody in on the team can do this?

Mahesh Jade

Yeah. So, the Scrum Masters of these teams, when we introduce them to this experiment, they started managing this board completely in the beginning. And slowly when the team matured, they were like, so there was somebody who would nominate to move the pins on the board. It could be the Scrum Master and sometime later some team members started facilitating that. But yeah, in the beginning it was the Scrum Master who tried to become a custodian of this visual presentation. Later, they just hand it over to the people.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for clarifying. Is there anything else about your experiments, any key learnings then?

Mahesh Jade

I think there was a moment of resistance when people were like, okay, why are we doing this? Should we do it? And I recall we were just adding it as a visual, creative visualisation of our system. And we said, you know, folks, there are two parts to this experiment, and let's just give it a try for the first part. If that works, we'll get into the second, but let's just try, make a nimble start. And I know in my mind that there was never a second part to the experiment. It was only this small experiment that we wanted to do. So I think that is a learning from that experiment that sometimes people want to be nimble into the experiment, people want to make a small start. So we can sometimes just look at the change as if it's really small and we can actually keep the size of the change very small so that it is easy for people to consume. And even if there are no second part to the change, it is okay. Simple changes are always good changes, no big deal.

Ula Ojiaku

So keeping it simple and just, because we as human beings would cope better when, you know, things are changed in an incremental manner, in small increments rather than big, massive changes. Now, in your experience and in your practice, what tips would you have for the audience?

Mahesh Jade

This is interesting. I think I have got a very small set of tips. They look very simple at times, but because they have worked for me again and again, I am really inspired to share them with the people so that probably it'll also work for them. So the first tip is like organising around your day in following the notion of A, B, c, d, where the A and B are capital, c and d are really small. And what I really mean by that is that, throughout the day, whatever work that we have, the coaching interventions or the items from our coaching backlog, if you really pick up two high priority item that are going to take some time and two trivial items, small items, which are really like smaller in nature, but they will create some way for next day, they could be like small activities focusing on two big things and two small things in a particular day, in a way limiting the work in progress for us, is really powerful. And we all know that limiting work in progress is powerful, I just put it in my cover of A, B and c d. So, A and B are really two important big things, and c and d are really trivial and it looks pretty simple, but it works again and again. Whenever we, I try to organise my day around, okay, what is this least possible thing I can do to go to the next part that I want to achieve or to help this team to go to the next level of maturity.

Ula Ojiaku

A and B and c and d, it reminds me of Brian Tracy's book, Eat That Frog and he said, if you know you had to do something that you're dreading, you know, and what could be more horrible than eating a frog, it's better to do that thing first, especially if it's the most valuable thing. So your A and B, you know, big A and B, and c and d reminds me of that. And was there any other tip?

Mahesh Jade

I think, since I started as a Scrum Master and then I started working with more teams and started getting into a mode where we are trying to bring a change at a larger scale, something which was very internal, not really related to agility, probably as a human, but it still worked, it still gave me some essence to hold onto, and I call it as ARB, A for attitude, R for Routine, and B for Blessing. And what I mean by that, where I have seen sometimes, things can really overwhelm us, sometimes some things are into our hands, sometimes it is just not into our hands, and sometimes the challenges are really very tricky to address. So in those times, I try to make sure that sometimes I try to focus on really the attitude part of the self, where even if things are going in the direction where we don't want them to be, we really keep track on the attitude, okay, are we in the right attitude? But it is not always easy to keep, to stay in the top possible way and, stay at the top of the attitude sometimes. So I discovered that when that does not happen, getting into the right routine, getting into the movement or doing something really helps. So I think there is a point when we are moving and suddenly something happens and then we get into a point when, okay, we can really, we are into back into the shape and we can again get into that situation where we are, we are seeing some light ahead. And the third part is really blessing, which I feel that sometimes we should keep some buffer for blessings to happen, for surprises to take place, because not everything that we do will have the desired result. And if we really keep a very tight boundary around the definition of our success, or a very tight boundary around what I am doing and what I will achieve, that really does not work, keeping a safe buffer for blessings to come and surprises to happen, it really works. And that is why I try to keep shuffling between A, R and B, sometimes focusing on attitude, sometimes focusing on the routine that I have in general, and sometimes, if nothing else, waiting for surprise to happen, and they do happen, and that is how I think I look at a flow of creating value over and over again by probably following a simple formula that is, that works for me from my experience, attitude, routine and blessing.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow. Attitude, Routine and Blessing, it sounds like a formula that would help with, you know, being less stressed and more, at peace and mindful, for me, having gone through, you know, near death experiences, I know that life is fragile and nothing is, you know, you can't take anything for granted. You can plan, but the only thing you can control, you know, when things are happening around you is your attitude, so how you tune it. And it's also good to, like you said, make space for surprises or things that can change and that's why we need to have some margin instead of always being on the go, go, go, go. So thanks for those tips, Mahesh. So, Mahesh, you started off as a Scrum Master as you mentioned earlier, and now you are working with multiple teams, you know, coaching. Can you share a bit of your experience coaching multiple teams?

Mahesh Jade

Yeah, you know, it's very interesting Ula that I found out that while working in a Scrum team as a Scrum Master, it sometimes helps to use the glossary of Scrum and working around that and building around the practices and making sure that ceremonies are taking place in a good way. So, a lot of Scrum glossary words. When I got into an environment when it was about multiple teams and working with leadership, I noticed that using the language of Scrum directly, that does not help, but we have to really tie the things that we can do with the problems that will get solved. So that, I think that was an important learning and I noticed that every time I used a second set of words to explain them something about, okay, we are doing this, but it is going to solve this problem, we had an immediate buy-in and I tell it, I always tell it to my colleagues as well, that getting a buy-in on what you can try and what you can introduce, tying up that with the problem that we'll solve is very important. So the way I approach this process with the leadership is sometimes I will tell them that, no matter if you are doing adapting to Scrum or you are taking practices from Kanban, I'm going to give you some goals where you will be able to exhibit agility and they would solve your problems where you consider that you start to visualise the work more powerfully, or probably you just become better at mitigating the dependencies, or, as example, you will become better at prioritising the work, or you'll become better at prioritising the kind of improvements that you want to have. And there could be more. It's like, I'll help you reduce your context switching, I'll help you do the planning in a more adaptive way, and I have seen that it really works, it really works for people because people really don't want to do, and adapt to a framework or a methodology for the sake of it, people do want to solve the problems, people do want to achieve value and really approaching the process, looking at the outcome that they want to have and then joining the dots is really a helpful practice. And it really helps. So it's kind of like developing a secondary dictionary for your Scrum and Kanban words and be able to talk about the changes that you can bring to the team in a way that, how it is going to solve the end problem. I think that secondary dictionary really helps.

Ula Ojiaku

That's a fantastic point, Mahesh, and I completely agree based on, you know, some recent work that I'm doing as well. The key thing is these teams aren't necessarily software development teams and for leaders, they're not developing software and there's no need to expect them to adhere to the framework, to the letter. It's really about speaking to their problems, what is it going to do for them, and putting it in the language that they understand instead of expecting them to learn a new language before solving the problem. So that's a fantastic point.

Mahesh Jade

Absolutely. Yes. One more thing, as I could relate, in this conversation is where I noticed that these assessments that we use for assessing the teams on their agile maturity could not be perfect at times. And people just think that, okay, I have done this assessment and I'm scored at somewhere. In my experience, I have always seen teams to be doing much, much lesser than what the assessment would tell. So I have started looking at it in a different way where I do not propose doing an assessment at the beginning of the quarter and the end of the quarter or something. But I give them small goals to attain, and I probably call it as a plus five activity that, forget about the assessment that you would do, so we do it, and we get some inputs from them, but then we just do not wait until the end of, let's say, quarter or half year to do that again. But we try to purposefully put small objectives in the middle, and we tell people that this is the objective and this is the quick start that you can get started with. You just do it. And then on top of it, we'll just provide you, we'll fill up the training gaps, and then you discover your own ideas of how you want to go ahead about it. So it's like creating iterative improvements by adding a small plus five into the process rather than starting with an assessment and doing the assessment at the end of the year or middle of the year. I think that does not help, but putting small quick starters activities that will actually make some change happen and celebrating that change on the go, I think that that really works with the people.

Ula Ojiaku

Oh yeah. So the small incremental changes they add up over time instead of waiting for that big bang end of, you know, a certain time box. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Great points, Mahesh, thanks again for sharing those. Can you share with us any books that have greatly shaped your thinking or impacted you that you find yourself recommending to others?

Mahesh Jade

I see Fixing your Scrum to be one of the book that I got a signed copy from Ryan Ripley, that's my all time favourite. I have another favourite would be a book called Evolvagility, where I'm a proud student of Michael Hamman, and he has written this book where we really get deeper into our meaning making abilities, in a way that, so we have grown into certain ways from our beliefs system and probably our way of living, and then how do we look at them again and challenge our own thinking and remove, or probably hold that belief outside of us and objectively look at things and pick up the path. So I think that's another favourite book of mine, but like apart from the books about Agility or the Agile leadership, or how do we fix the processes into Scrum and Kanban, I think there is this one book called The Art of Thinking Clearly and it is really a very powerful book that has changed my way of thinking. It just lists down small chapters with a lot of fallacies and biases that we have developed into our mind. It has got historical examples that how things have unfolded, and then it just tells us that how are we really bound by a lot of biases and fallacies and it just helps us to come out of them and look at things in a very clean and clear way. So that's probably a book that is not really about Agility, but it cleans up the mind in a very clear way, and I think it again leads to become more agile into our thinking. So that's my favourite book, I think the author's name is Rolf Dobelli.

Ula Ojiaku

So any final words for the audience?

Mahesh Jade

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to share this during my introduction as well, but my journey, it has got empowered by this app called Meetup, and what I mean by that is, ever since I got started into Agility and Scrum and works around that I found that, when compared to other,  mediums of works and stream of work, this place of Scrum and Agility has got a very powerful community where the meetups are happening weeks after weeks, and a lot of prominent members of this community just come and join these communities and they're sharing the knowledge really at free. So, there is this famous Indian movie called Three Idiots, and there is, if somebody have not watched it, they should really watch it, it's a beautiful movie. And, one of the thing into that movie is where the character in the movie, he would say the knowledge, when the knowledge is getting distributed freely, just go and attend and seek it, don't wait for permission to get into the room to get the knowledge. And these Meetups into the space of Agile and Scrum and related frameworks are really powerfully, equipped to share that knowledge at free. And it's just happening, all over the place. So my advice would be to the people that the community into Agile and Scrum is so strong that we should really leverage it. I have been into some of the Meetup groups where prominent speakers and authors were talking, and the group was just about 15 or 16. So that's something where I feel that people, maybe they do not know that it is happening, or probably they do not think that it'll be so much valuable. But I assert that if we start building real conversations and start getting to meet a lot of people week after week, and every possible opportunity we can just imagine the kind of difference that we can create by learning from those real conversations. As a matter of fact, when I started, I would generally attend a Meetup on every week, and I did it for around more than one year, and that was super, super cool. So right now as well, I try to attend every possible Meetup that I can attend, but then I have seen a lot of people really do not show up. So if you look at a number, 50 to 60 people, if they sign up for a particular Meetup, probably five to six or close to 10 people will show up. And I feel that people should really leverage this free knowledge that is getting distributed all over the places and people are really eager in this particular community to share the knowledge and people should really leverage that. There's no dirth of opportunity to learn from the real conversations. And they're just mostly free all over the places.

Ula Ojiaku

So are you on social media, Mahesh?

Mahesh Jade

I make use of LinkedIn quite prominently, I keep sharing over LinkedIn. So that is one area where I’m active. Twitter is another medium that I make good use of. I’m intending to start writing more regularly. So last two years I was writing more from a research paper point of view. Now I’m trying to get into a part where I’m writing short articles and publish them. So probably I’ll start writing more on Medium as well very soon.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome. So LinkedIn and Medium, which was to be resumed soon. So thank you so much. This has been an insightful conversation. Thank you for again, being my guest, Mahesh.

Mahesh Jade

Thank you so much. It has been a great experience that I will remember throughout my journey to Agility.

Ula Ojiaku

My pleasure. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Guest Bio : Michael Hamman

Michael Hamman is dedicated to the possibility that the workplace be a site for personal, professional and social transformation. Trained in the 1980s in coaching and large group facilitation, Michael went on to train in systems thinking and methods, group dynamics and facilitation, professional and executive coaching, and in human and organization development. He is a decades-long student of the nature of human transformation, in himself, in others, and in organizations. 

Over the course of the last 20 years, Michael has brought together these various strands into a unique approach to coaching, consulting, and teaching Agility within large organizational settings. Along the way, he has coached dozens of Fortune 500 companies and teams, and hundreds of leaders and coaches toward greater holistic team and enterprise-level agility. 

He is recognized as a highly effective workshop leader, and for his skill in creating deep learning environments which leave participants feeling inspired by the insights and inner shifts they experience.

His book, Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out provides a blueprint for what it means to be an agile leader in today’s complex world, and offers a practical roadmap for getting there.

Guest Bio: Lyssa Adkins 

Lyssa Adkins is an internationally-recognized thought leader in the Agile community. She is deeply trained and experienced  in human systems coaching and facilitation and she is a frequent keynote speaker. Her content expertise is agile coaching, adult human development, and working with change and complexity.

She is the author of Coaching Agile Teams which is still a Top 10 book a dozen years after publication. Her current focus is improving the performance of top leadership teams through insightful facilitation and organization systems coaching to help leaders take up the individual and collective transformation that is theirs to do.

Episode Highlights

05:15 Vertical Learning

09:40 Upgrading our Operating System

12:20 Inner versus Outer Agility

16:30 Three Types of Learning

19:20 Disorienting Dilemmas

21:15 Vertical Facilitation

30:00 Heat Experiences

38:45 Building Trust

42:00 Stretch Practices

Websites

·         https://www.theverticalfacilitator.com

Social media

·         LinkedIn: Michael Hamman

·         Twitter: Michael Hamman  @docHamman

·         LinkedIn: Lyssa Adkins

·         Twitter: Lyssa Adkins @lyssaadkins

Guest Intro (Ula Ojiaku)

Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. This episode is a special one to me. I am humbled and honoured to be in the virtual presence of giants and pioneers who have shaped the Agile Coaching discipline into what we know it as today. I have with me Lyssa Adkins and Michael Hamman. Not just one, but two, so this is like, I won the lottery today, and I'm so excited to have you both on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast for this episode. Welcome. Now Lyssa, I had the honour of interviewing just you for an earlier episode and for the benefit of the audience, who, you know, some, I mean, for most people, Michael wouldn't be a stranger. They would be well acquainted with him, but for some of my audience who may not be familiar with, you know, your background. Michael, would you mind telling us about yourself?

Michael Hamman

Hmm, where do I even start?

Ula Ojiaku

I understand you used to be a music composer, software engineer, or developer, you know, how did that trajectory lead you to here?

Michael Hamman

Well actually it, you know, for those years when I was a composer and a scholar, I had a dual life. One life was this sort of creative life of the artist and the writer. But the other life was that I actually was working with people, and I got exposed to transformational learning in 1985 when I took a course. In fact, even before then, I got exposed to it because other people had taken this course. It was called the Est training, and so I got trained to lead seminars back in the eighties and the early nineties, and I brought all of that into my work with software teams. And at first I was a technical, you know, advisor. And then I got into like, well, you know, how do we make these teams work better? And that just, you know, one thing led to the next, and you know, I studied human systems and systems thinking and coaching, I was trained in professional coaching. I brought all that into the agile world when I started consulting in 2004, specifically in Corporate Enterprise, Agile Coaching, probably one of the earlier people to be doing that, and, but I was really known for bringing this sort of transformative angle to it, you know, so there was always a, some people thought it was a bit odd, like I was kind of like the weird uncle in the room, but people really liked it because they found something shifting in themselves while they were learning to do this thing called Agile and Scrum and XP and all that kind of stuff. And so it sort of has just grown, you know, my work has really grown from there. And maybe just to add one last piece that I regard my own personal transformation as part of the work that I do with other people and with the organisations, for me, they're inseparable and, to the degree that I myself am evolving and developing, then I can become an authentic conduit for others to do the same.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow, that's very inspirational. Thank you, Michael, for that great overview. Lyssa, I'd love to hear your crack at it.

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah. What I want to say about Michael is that you brought in a word Ula, that I want to just reprise here, which is pioneer. So Michael's talked about his trajectory with transformational learning, and he is indeed a pioneer in that and sort of making the implicit explicit, you know, and that's exactly what he was doing with computer music as a composer, and it was at the very early dawn of computers making sounds. That's where Michael Hamman composed his works, right, and so it's the confluence of a couple of different worlds coming together that he was able to bring forth into a new composition. And that's exactly what's happening here now with bringing these different worlds and experiences and lived experiences together in this new composition called Vertical Facilitation.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow, well, thank you Lyssa. That brings us nicely, segues nicely into, in terms of what you've been working on lately. So you mentioned Vertical Facilitation, but before we get to Vertical Facilitation, so Michael, I was looking at your website earlier on, michaelhamman.com and you said something about vertical learning being a process by which we evolve the psychological and emotional structuring process that determine how we think, understand and emotionally grasp our work. Do you want to expand on that, please? Vertical learning before we get to Vertical Facilitation…

Michael Hamman

Yeah, I think what I would say about that is that, at any given moment, there are the things that we're doing. So at any given moment, we are in action and we have a sense of where we're going in our action. So we have a sense of maybe a sense of direction, maybe even a goal, we might even have a vision, right? And so there's this, the world of our action. And at the same time, there's that world, there's that which informs our action at any given moment, there's a sort of sense making that's going on that informs our action, that informs what action we'll take. What's the appropriate action? How might we act? And it also determines the competency with which we act. So there's this sense making that's going on. And you could say that it's an individual sense making, a kind of a psychological layer, but it's also something that happens with us collectively. And so it's this realm that's happening, of which we are for the most part, unaware. And so what vertical learning is about, is to bring awareness to that realm, that dimension, which informs our capacity for effective action, and to the degree we become aware of that realm, we become better able at crafting action that is truly effective, that is action, that is truly congruent with what it is that we are committed to, what it is that we intend.

Ula Ojiaku

What comes out to me is, you know, that vertical learning is about bringing awareness to the realm that informs how we, you know, act when we've made sense of our environment. That's powerful. Lyssa, do you want to add anything to that?

Lyssa Adkins

Well, I think I'll add the dimension of why this is even important right now. I mean, there's, you know, for a long time sort of just getting more and more skills, more and more competencies sort of, as a collection, as a basket of things we were now capable of doing. For a long time, that was really sufficient for the context that most of us were in. And, you know, you probably know Ula, and maybe everyone listening that we're in this age of acceleration where everything is speeding up, almost every graph looks like a hockey stick. And, you know, and things are not straightforward anymore. In fact, the complexity of the situations that get served up to us, and especially those ones we don't want to have on our plates, you know, that complexity is beyond most of our meaning making right now. So that's what this is about. It's about closing that gap between the complexity of the situations we're in and the complexity of our own meaning making so that we can be more of a match for the confounding, you know, ever-changing, constantly anxiety-producing situations that we find ourselves in, in our whole life, and especially in business these days. So there's a really important thing pulling us forward to help to, and wanting us to be more capable for the environment we're actually in. And so I think that's why it's up for us and up for other people.

Ula Ojiaku

Michael, do you have any more, anything else to add to that?

Michael Hamman

Well, no, what you're saying, Lyssa, just it makes me think of this metaphor that I often use that it's that meaning making, that Lyssa was just referring to, that, which we need to bring to a higher level of complexity to meet the complexity of the world. It's a bit like, you could think of it analogically as a kind of operating system, like an operating system metaphor that, you know, I noticed on my phone, you know, that there are a lot of apps that won't install on my phone because I have to upgrade the operating system. And similarly, in the world of the complex world, the world, I love what you just said, the hockey stick, all the graphs are hockey sticks. Now in the world in which all the graphs are hockey sticks, right, we need, we need new apps. Apps are our behaviours, the actions that we take, and in order to take the kinds of actions that we need to take in this world of hockey stick graphs, we need to upgrade the operating system that informs those actions, and that's what vertical learning is all about.

Ula Ojiaku

Hmm. And to just explore that metaphor of the operating system, would it have any relationship with, you know, our mindset, our attitudes, or worldview?

Michael Hamman

I would say absolutely. In fact, oftentimes we use the word mindset as a kind of shortcut term to point to this realm. But unfortunately, for the most part we don't, you know, we're pretty good at, in the agile world at eliciting ways of understanding things that have to do with engineering and basic management and you know, product management and so we've gotten very good, like business agility has taught us a lot about how to bring a kind of agile competency, agile capacity for action, I guess you could say. The thing we haven't gotten very good at, and that's what the work we're up to here is to, what's the nature of mindset? What's the science and the research behind mindset, which has a comparable depth, a comparable legacy to the various engineering and complexity science lineage that informs other aspects of Agile, and so this is really about bringing those sort of human technology, the lineage of human technology to bear, to help us grow that inner operating system. So this is, in many ways, it's a research-based and science-based sort of set of practices as much as an art.

Ula Ojiaku

That's great. So based on what you've said, that would bring me to the concept of inner versus outer agility. You know, because you said business, we've learned a lot, agile, you know, business agility. But to an extent, and this is me summarising what I think I've heard from you, Michael, you know, it's kind of, we've kind of focused on the engineering of products and services, but there is the inner work we need to do to be able to operate more effectively in a world of hockey stick graphs or some other people will call it VUCA in a volatile, uncertain, complex… I forgot what the A means…

Lyssa Adkins

Ambiguous.

Ula Ojiaku

Ambiguous, thank you so much, Lyssa. So can you, how would this tie in with the concept of outer versus inner agility?

Michael Hamman

It brings to mind, you know, young children learn programming, you know, like young nine year olds and ten year olds. But it's unlikely that they'll ever be able to build huge, the kinds of huge software systems that professional software engineers are able to build. And it's, and it's partly due to skill, but at some point that young child, you could teach them more and more advanced programming skills, but they're, at some point they're not going to be able to absorb it. And that points to their inner meaning making. And it's similar in organisations that we could teach them, you know, agile frameworks, but they may get better and better at it at first, you know, but then at some point they hit a ceiling, and that ceiling is defined by their capacity for inner agility. And so when we hit the ceiling, we could see that as a signal, wow, we need to start to do some work on both our individual and our collectively held sense making frames if we're going to actually get past that ceiling. We will not get past that ceiling, I think we all know that by now, unless something shifts in the area of inner agility, or you could say mindset. But I use the word mindset somewhat reluctantly because it's become a buzzword and we really, for the most part, we really don't know what it means.

Ula Ojiaku

I didn't mean to impose that word on you, that was me trying to make sense (of the concepts)...

Michael Hamman

The word is so out there and so I kind of want to, whenever I have an opportunity to do a little bit of violence to that word, I would rather talk to it.

Ula Ojiaku

No worries at all. And something you said about, you know, individuals and teams hitting the ceiling, getting to a limit with applying the Agile frameworks, due to their operating systems needing an upgrade. It reminds me of, I believe it's the writing of John Maxwell. He's a known leadership expert and he has something called, you know, the Leadership Law of the Lid. You can only lead effectively to a certain extent, and it kind of ties in with what you're saying about you'd have to do the work, because once you’ve hit that limit, you have a choice either to remain at that level or you upgrade yourself, you expand your capacity by learning, by being coached by, you know, being willing to learn, or, I mean, unlearn and relearn or, you know, learn new things, but change the way you do things to get to the next level. Now, how can one upgrade their operating system?

Michael Hamman

Well, that's what vertical learning really ultimately points to, and it's a different kind of learning. So you could say that there are three different kinds of learning. The first is informational learning, where we, you know, basically teach concepts and we give information. And the idea is, is that then people take that information or those concepts and apply it, you know, into their life and, you know, into their work, and so that's one form of learning perfectly valid and legitimate for certain kinds of learning needs, I guess you could say. The second kind of learning or the second sort of method of learning is behavioural, where we teach skills and competencies to people, with the idea that they will then take those skills and competencies out into their world and exercise those skills and competencies. The problem is, is that what we often find is that both with, in terms of informational learning and behavioural learning, is that there's a missing ingredient. Oftentimes, for instance, people don't know when it's appropriate to bring a certain information to bear in a given moment, or, for people who have learned particular skills, they find themselves unable to exercise those skills when it really matters, when the heat gets high. And this is where the third quality of learning comes in, which is called transformational learning. And transformational learning doesn't happen in the same realm as informational and behavioural learning. It can't, it's not taught by telling people. It's not even taught, you know, through behavioural practice, although that can be part of it. It has to be taught in a very different way, and this is where Vertical Facilitation builds because you can only bring about transformational learning through the design of a learning environment. And it can only be done by creating situations in which people experience a kind of inner dilemma between what, how the categories with which they already make sense and the category that is likely to be necessary to make sense of the current situation being presented to them.

Ula Ojiaku

Lyssa, do you have anything to add to that?

Lyssa Adkins

Well, just that it is so much fun to present a group of people with a disorienting dilemma, and to watch them reach the edge of their known meaning making, and to find out that it's actually not the edge of the world, they're not going to fall off the world. They can say, oh, wow, now I see that that frame of reference I was holding, it's just a frame of reference, it's actually not how the world is. You know, now I can look at it, I can take it off of me and look at it as an object and say, okay, well how has this frame of reference served me in the past? And do I still need it now? What pieces am I bringing forward as I expand into other frames of reference that can inform me more completely about the situation I'm in? And so it's just, you know, for about a decade, I suppose. Michael Hamman and I were involved, this guy right here, with others, were involved in conducting these transformational learning environments in our agile coaching work. And it is such a joy, it is such a joy to see people break through this concrete, calcified way that they were viewing the world and to realise, ah, there's like a field out here with flowers and butterflies and there's all kinds of other options now available to me, and you know, we have a lot of lived experience in those kinds of transformational education environments. And that builds on training that we've all had, but also on Michael's really long history with transformational education environments and I think the modern need for us to help others increase their vertical capabilities.

Ula Ojiaku

I know that some of my audience, or people who are listening or watching, would be wondering, what Vertical Facilitation is, and they also would be wondering if you have any stories. And of course, I'm here as your student, maybe there would be a demonstration, but before we all, you know, go to the stories and all that, what's Vertical Facilitation? Because you've already defined for us what vertical learning is.

Lyssa Adkins

I want to set the stage for Michael to say what it is because this is where Michael's thought leadership is really coming to bear in the world. He's creating a new composition for us to live in because he's taking what was once implicit about Vertical Facilitation, learning environments, and making it explicit. And so many people have components of this in their leadership development programs, in their agile coach training in their, whatever they're doing, but to make it more explicit and usable for them would really amp up the results they're getting from whatever program they're in. And so that's, those are the people who we're trying to reach and I just want to say this is a new composition.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you, Lyssa. Michael, please.

Michael Hamman

I feel incredibly humbled by what you've been saying, Lyssa. Thank you. Yeah, I would say that Vertical Facilitation is a way of working with groups leaderfully. So it's a leaderful way of working with groups. So it's not, you know, the typical sort of neutrality of facilitation that we ordinarily think of it. So there's a leaderful intention, but the leaderful intention has to do with being able to be attentive to what's the quality of the sense making that's going on in this moment with this individual, in the interactions between these two  individuals or the interactions among the individuals within a group, and the group energy. So it's a, so Vertical Facilitation is about paying attention to all of these things with an ear for what's going on here developmentally and developmentally is just another word for vertically. What is the sense making that's going on? And Vertical Facilitation is about creating moments, creating situational moments in which people experience what Lyssa just termed a moment ago, a disorienting dilemma, and it could be a, and a disorienting dilemma, again, is the recognition that something about the way that I'm making sense of this situation is insufficient to be able to successfully manage myself in that situation. So it's a kind of an ‘aha’ and sometimes it's a moment of fear or anxiety, right? And so Vertical Facilitation includes having this sort of loving manner that allows for people to come face to face with whatever emotional emotions they're experiencing as they encounter a particular disorienting dilemma. And just to say one more thing about that, the disorienting dilemma can be experienced within an individual or within a group, and Vertical Facilitation is simply about surfacing moments in which that disorienting dilemma becomes present for people, whether individuals or the whole group, such that they can make a choice. So the important thing here is awareness and choice, and I called it an existential choice because it's a choice in how to exist in relation to this situation. And when people can make that choice toward a more complex way of making sense, not only does it alter the way they relate to this particular situation, but in that very alteration, it alters the sort of neural connections by which they make sense of other similar situations. And so that's what we mean by transformation. A transformation occurs when there's the, an alteration through the exercise of this existential choice of those that the kind of neural network by which we've come to make sense of a given situation or set of situations. So that's about the shortest way I could say it was.

Lyssa Adkins

Well, and let me just highlight how incredibly powerful this fulcrum is, because once we can get up underneath the unexamined lenses that people are looking at the world through, and once we can help them encounter this thing that used to be like perfectly fine and it's somehow limiting now, then it's not only the situation that they're presented with right now that has different outcomes and maybe more success, but it's everything like this and everything in the future that is related that gets a lift. I mean, so like the leverage capability is really, really high with this kind of development and this kind of transformational experience.

Michael Hamman

Yeah, and at the expense of elongating this, this part, but I just want to build on something that Lyssa said here that part of what happens when vertical learning happens, or when transformational learning happens, is that people have a state, have state experiences, and so a state experience, we've all had them, it's a moment, it's a kind of an ‘aha’ moment, so it's a sort of cognitive insight, which is combined with an emotion. It's a certain emotion. And you could say that at those moments, something in us gets connected to something much deeper. It's like we have a moment where we're drilling down into some deeper part of ourselves and being able to pull up a kind of wisdom. Now we've all had these, you know, these moments of, we call them state experiences and oftentimes we pooh-pooh state experiences because, well, you know, that was so, you know, last week because quote unquote state experiences fade. Now part of what happens with deliberate Vertical Facilitation is that we stage sequences of moments in which people experience state experiences. And what the research shows is that when people can repeat state experiences, it tightens up the new neural connections that get created during any given state experience. And so there are many pieces to the art of Vertical Facilitation, and one of them is this kind of engineering of situations that bring about these state experiences where people have an ‘aha’ by virtue of having gotten to the other side of some sort of disorienting dilemma.

Ula Ojiaku

Right. Wow. Are there any stories that you could share highlighting, you know, like where you facilitated or you implemented Vertical Facilitation, created a situation or scenario where people were put into, you know, where they experienced dilemmas and then you were able to facilitate them to get to that state experience, are there any stories that you could share just to give some of, myself included, you know, a kind of example that we could identify with?

Michael Hamman

Yeah, I think I would like for us to offer a couple of examples, maybe one that's, maybe from when we were doing the Coaching Agile Teams classes. And then I'd like to offer an example from something that's a little bit more personal in tone. So, I don't know, do you want to speak to the first one, Lyssa?

Lyssa Adkins

Well, what I'd love us to do is for you to offer the example and then let me help you make it clear how that example created heat experiences, connected to the bigger game, like the different aspects of Vertical Facilitation that you are now exposing for the world. Does that sound good?

Michael Hamman

Yeah, that sounds good. So, the first example used to happen a lot when we were teaching this class Coaching Agile Teams. And a lot of our listeners probably took it years ago. And there's a moment in that class, this is just one example of many such moments, but there's a moment in this class where we teach a skill that we called Level Two Listening, and the distinction between Level One and Level Two Listening and Level One, just to say something about that distinction to get the example across, Level One Listening is listening to my own thoughts and paying attention to my own thoughts, I'm with this other person, but I'm really not with them, whereas Level Two Listening is as I'm really with them, and I'm not only hearing what they're saying, but I'm actually,  I'm not only listening to what they're saying, but I'm listening for who this person is. So there's a quality of genuine relationship in this moment. And I'm not trying to take this person anywhere, I'm not trying to get them, you know, I'm not trying to figure anything out with them. And so then we invite people to practice this and what happens invariably is that people have this, first of all, it's very uncomfortable initially, that they have this disorienting dilemma because they're so used to like having to figure out, okay, well how can I help this person, or what can I say, or, you know, I'm not really understanding what this person's saying, or, you know, all the stuff that goes on when we're in that Level One Listening. So there's a disorienting dilemma. But then there's the ‘aha’ that happens when something shifts in the way that the other person is expressing themselves. You know, like they suddenly become more, maybe coherent or they become more self-expressive, or maybe authentic. And so they have the experience of that connection and it becomes possible for them to make that existential choice. Wow. That was really amazing. You know, typically we have those kinds of experiences when we're falling in love, but not when I'm talking with somebody that I just met earlier today. So that would be one example.

Ula Ojiaku

Would you say Level Two Listening again, and this is me trying to make sense of the terminology, would that equate to what, well, I know as active listening, because that is really about just listening, not just for the words that are being said, but what's the, you know, are there any emotions being conveyed with it? What’s the body language, can you read in between the lines, but just focusing on what they're saying without thinking about what your response is going to be or what your counter-argument is going to be.

Michael Hamman

Yeah I would say that Level Two Listening, how I would really clearly differentiate is that it's me being silent, you know? So I'm not trying to establish camaraderie with this other person, quote unquote, camaraderie. I'm simply being present and hearing what they're saying and listening to what they're saying and being attentive to who they're being. And what I understand about active listening is that sometimes you want to say things to indicate to the person that you're following them, that you're with them. And, you know, we find that to be actually, counterintuitively perhaps, a bit distracting, whereas Level Two Listening is just, it's actually more uncomfortable, because we're not really saying and to clarify Level Two Listening there.

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah. And for people who are more interested in that language level of listening comes from the Coactive Coaching School, it's often also called focused listening or listening for, those are and active listening is an adjacent and related topic, but has been, has the history that Michael just talked about that sometimes is counterproductive. Okay, so Michael, for that situation that you just talked about, which used to happen every single time and every single Coaching Agile Team's class, we could rely on this being a disorienting dilemma for people, right. So, just to be clear about the four perspectives, heat experiences, stretch practices, social container, and bigger game. So how does that situation, how is it an example of heat experience?

Michael Hamman

So a disorienting dilemma is a heat experience. And by a heat experience we mean it's an experience in which something in us gets challenged, some known category gets challenged, and we often feel it at first as anxiety. Sometimes we feel it as a sense of excitement, oftentimes it's a mix of feelings. But it's always this sense that something is getting challenged, some category. I don't mean us as a person's getting challenged, but the way in which we are making sense of something is getting challenged in the moment in which that sense making is occurring. So it can't happen, you know, retroactively, it can't happen with respect to something that I did or said yesterday. It has to be elicited in this moment and that's the key to creating a heat experience. And there are lots of different ways to create heat experiences. But that's one of them, that's the most classic way.

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah. And I would say that people did experience that heat experience as very confronting. We would often ask, so what was that like? And they'd be like, I hated it, oh my God, I felt so weird. You know, it was like this whole mix, and then there would also be the person who would say like, oh, I found it so relieving, right. Like, so there's a whole mix of how people are dealing with it. And I think that moves to the second of the four that we could talk about now, which is social container. So like how in that situation was there a social container, Michael, that helped make this a Vertical Facilitation moment?

Michael Hamman

Yeah, great. So this was toward the end of the first day of Coaching Agile Teams. And by that point we had, there's a way in which, Lyssa, Michael Spayd and myself, the three of us who led these courses, there was a way in which we held the space, we use that term holding the space, which is paying attention to not only what's happening with individuals, so we might be interacting with an individual, but also scanning, we're constantly scanning the space to see what's happening. How is this landing? You know, does the space feel stuck, and from time to time, giving feedback to the group or to the class, you know, wow, the space, the energy feels stuck, what's happening. And so inviting people to get involved, to elicit their own awareness of the space or the group, or the emotional energy, which oftentimes, you know, we don't pay attention, as human beings we are aware of these things, but we have so long ago lost our ability to have our awareness of that awareness. And so part of what happens is we elicit this awareness of group energy and what that does in combined with, you know, the fact that we're bringing people to these disorienting dilemmas is a certain kind of bondedness happens. There's a unique quality of bondedness and this is something that people always remarked about these courses and in other courses that both Lyssa and I do, the quality of social bondedness creates an environment of safety, right? So we talk about, you know, emotional safety, right? But it makes it possible for us then to challenge each other, it makes it possible for the environment to be challenging. So it's both safe and challenging. So in that moment, it was, that environment was really starting to come alive.

Ula Ojiaku

On that point about the social container and, you know, saying you create a state where, well not state, but you create a situation where there's a social bond with the group. Would you say that what something that would help with that bonding is trust, an element of trust that I can be vulnerable is there?

Lyssa Adkins

So trust is a tricky one, because everyone's got a different definition of it. And so one of the things that we would do, and that I would suggest everyone do in a transformational learning environment is to just consciously and explicitly design the alliance of how this is going to go between all of us together. And the purpose for doing that is to put the participants in the driver's seat in terms of being responsible for their own experience, but also to empower the course leaders to lead people through these experiences. And so when someone would say, well, we would say something like, so what do we need in this environment for you to really get the most out of it? Oh, I need it to be, I need to trust it. Okay, great. What do you mean by trust? So once we get below sort of the easy word, then we get to what people really need in the container. And the most important thing then, as the chorus or as the program or as the leadership development longitudinal thing goes on, whatever thing you're doing, as it goes on, what the most important thing is, is for the leaders to constantly be affirming of, bringing in Vertical Facilitation to whatever program you're doing, and the other two are stretch practices and bigger game.

Michael Hamman

So stretch practice is a practice that requires that somebody stretch some known category. So it's very much related to, by the way, all four of these qualities, we call them design elements, overlap, and they, you know, they synchronistically, you know, interact with one another, so they're not really to be seen in isolation. So stretch practice is one that, the practice of which requires that something in my way of understanding things has to shift. So for instance, in this case, you know, inviting people to practice Level Two Listening, which by the time they did it for the third time, they were starting to get it. You know, there was that shift from awareness of the disorienting dilemma to an existential choice, wow, this is really a profound way to work with other people. And so the stretch practice here was a very simple one, which is this thing of Level Two Listening. So, you know, oftentimes, in fact, almost always transformational learning happens through the introduction of some sort of stretch practice, that the stretch practice is a kind of vehicle, a kind of catalyst for creating a situational moment in which transformational learning becomes possible, because I want us to keep in mind that this is not about reflecting on things that happened yesterday or last week. This is about bringing situations present in the moment,  and there's a whole psychological research called memory reconsolidation that's in the background of all of this. We're not going to get into that right now, but it's an important technology and this is why it's important to make these situations that are happening in the now. And so that would be an example of a stretch practice, the practice of which something has to shift in the way that somebody makes sense of something.

Lyssa Adkins

And to just be really clear about what the stretch practice was, like the first stretch practice was so simple on its face. It was basically this. Now that you have heard about Level One Listening, which is all about you, your ideas, how you want to be valuable, how you want to be smart, how you want to show this person you're listening. Shift to Level Two, which is you being focused on what they're saying, what's behind the words, and as you said earlier, Ula, what's the emotional content that's going on there? So here's the instruction. You're going to listen to this person talk about something real and something that is on their mind for three minutes, and you're not going to say anything. And the reason you're not going to say anything is because you want some space in your mind to notice, ah, when am I with them at Level Two? And when do I fall back to Level One? No big deal, just come back to Level Two. So it created a new, on the face of it, very simple practice, but it confronted people's as yet unexamined beliefs about how they bring value.

Ula Ojiaku

That's powerful, powerful.

Michael Hamman

And again, keep in mind that this is a synergy. So we need all four of these, right? So we've just related our thinking to three of these design elements: heat experiences, social container best practices, and so now there's a fourth one. You can kind of think of this as, you know, the legs of a table. You know, the table will stand up with, may stand up with three legs, but it's going to be very wobbly, you need all four of these to create a solidly transformative learning environment, and the fourth of these is what we call a bigger game and a bigger game is that we relate to what we're doing with a commitment to our own growth. So for instance, in this example, many people came into this course with a commitment to growing themselves as an natural coach, and because of the way we open and start the class, people start to confront what does it really mean to be an agile coach? And people realise that the commitment is ultimately to their own inner growth,  they don't necessarily know exactly what that means, and it's a shared commitment, there's a quality, so this is, the bigger game has to be a shared commitment, it can't just be, you know, I've got this commitment, and maybe you do, but we're clear we're kind of in the same boat together, and what holds us together is this shared commitment. It's what gets us through those moments, say, of conflict, you know, when it's hard, or when, you know, I'm having kind of a really tough moment, right here, and what gets me through it is this commitment to, maybe even to other people, but certainly for myself.

Ula Ojiaku

It's a bigger game, shared commitment to a common goal. Lyssa, what do you want to add anything?

Lyssa Adkins

I would say so common goal makes it sound like we all want exactly the same thing, and that's not necessarily, so I like what Michael says, like, we're all in the same boat together. This boat is going in one direction, right? There's a lot of variability between people's bigger games and how they think about those and how that pulls them forward to get them through these heat experiences and all of that. And so that's, I think, another function of the bigger game that is really important is oftentimes people will come to a transformational learning experience thinking, I'm going to get some more tools and techniques, and fair enough, certainly they will along the way, but those tools and techniques, that sort of content, that knowledge that's getting transferred to people is happening in the context of those people confronting the lenses, the glasses they had on, they didn't know they had on, confronting the fact that they're just sort of maybe bobbing through life and they're not connected to a bigger game. You know, so all of that is happening at the same time. And so I would say that the, in a Vertical Facilitation, from a Vertical Facilitation perspective, the content that you are trying to convey as a leader of, let's say it's a leadership development program, or a five day transformational learning experience, whatever it is, that content is a peer to the transformational learning experience itself. They go together, and that's what makes it transformational. Otherwise, we could just, you know, record a video and say, download this information to your brain, operate here, and that would work fine as long as the world weren't getting more complex, but it is.

Michael Hamman

You know, so for people to get a real genuine taste for this, we are starting what we call a learning journey, a Vertical Facilitation Learning Journey. And the journey actually has two parts: the first part is a free series of webinars, emails, us providing resources so that people can get a strong foundational orientation around what Vertical Facilitation is, both conceptually, but also they will get an experience of it because it's very, very hard to demo it unless you're actually doing something with a group, so people who would like to see this at work, we invite you to go to https://www.theverticalfacilitator.com and sign up and join the learning journey. The first part is free, the first three months is free, and then if it's something that is truly compelling, the second part, which is the paid part, takes you on a very deep dive into developing yourself in terms of skills and leadership stances as a vertical facilitator. So I think that's what I would invite people to do.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay. You said that if there's a learning journey, three part experience, there's the webinar, and the part one is on, you know, the intro to Vertical Facilitation per se, and the second one is paid. I don’t know if I got the third part, what would be part three?

Michael Hamman

The third part is for people who do the deep dive, the paid deep dive portion, and it's a set of follow up emails and other resources that help people to integrate what they learn, because what happens during the deep dive, among other things is that people actually design and hopefully facilitate a small either workshop or intervention of some sort where they actually practice the skills and distinctions that they have learned, both in that free orientation part, but also in the deep dive. So that's the third part. The name of the course is the Vertical Facilitator.

Ula Ojiaku

And there is something on, you know, the latest post you made on LinkedIn, about something starting in August. Is this related to that course or is it different?

Lyssa Adkins

It is, that's the deep dive portion. So between now and August are going to be the webinars, the free resources, but basically getting us into this new composition together.

Ula Ojiaku

And would it be in person, or virtual, the August dive?

Michael Hamman

It will be virtual.

Lyssa Adkins

Because that's the hardest, so virtual's the hardest, we figure we might as well go ahead and go there since that's going to be people's context, not all the time, but more of the time.

Michael Hamman

Yeah. So at a future time, probably the second time we do it, we will do the deep dive portion or part of the deep dive portion as a live event.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay, and then one last thing, any final words for the audience in terms of what we've covered so far?

Michael Hamman

The only thing that comes to mind is that join us on this learning journey so you can get a taste of this. So, you know, we've, the best we've been able to do is sort of maybe elicit a little bit of the quality that's present when Vertical Facilitation is happening and, people may have noticed perhaps the way of being a way of Lyssa and I working together, and Lyssa and I are both very skilled vertical facilitators and so we would invite you to come and join us.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you, Lyssa, anything?

Lyssa Adkins

No, I think we have said so much and I've so appreciated the richness of this and also that Ula, I'm so appreciative that this podcast gets to be part of the kick-off of what's truly a new thing.

Michael Hamman

Yeah, I also want to express my appreciation for you, because this is, you know, you have a certain grace in your manner, and I felt like this has just been a really wonderful podcast experience for me, thank you.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks, both of you are very kind and very gracious, and the honour is mine and (it’s been) a great experience for me. That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless! 

Bio

Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX (now in it’s 3rd edition) and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond.

Starting off as a software designer, Jeff now works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centred design.

His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020.

Social Media

·         LinkedIn

·         Jeff Gothelf - coaching, consulting, training & keynotes

·         OKR-book.com

·         Twitter

·         Instagram

·         Jeff Gothelf - YouTube 

Interview Highlights

04:50 Early career

16:00 Thought leadership

19:10 Outsource the work you hate, it shows

23:00 Defining a product

24:35 Product Managers as navigators of uncertainty

28:15 Succeeding as a Product Manager

37:25 Strategy, vision and mission

42:00 OKRs

48:00 Leading and lagging indicators

54:10 Do less, more often 

Books and resources

·         Forever Employable - how to stop looking for work - Jeff Gothelf     

·         Best product management books - Lean UX, Sense & Respond... (jeffgothelf.com)

·         Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking: What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams: Gothelf, Jeff

·         Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously: Gothelf, Jeff, Seiden, Josh

·         The role of a Product Manager: Product Managers are Navigators of Uncertainty https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/product-managers-navigate-uncertainty/

·         Information Architecture, Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango

·         The Lean Startup | The Movement That Is Transforming How New Products Are Built And Launched

·         Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, Tony Fadell

·         The Creative Act: A Way of Being: Rubin, Rick

Episode Transcript

Ula Ojiaku

Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. So I have with me the legend, Jeff Gothelf, who is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, highly sought after keynote speaker I must add, coach and much more. So Jeff, really honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast, thank you.

Jeff Gothelf

It's my pleasure, Ula, thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Ula Ojiaku

Oh, good. Well, I usually start with a question for my guests to find out more about themselves as individuals. And during our pre-recording session, you mentioned something that was intriguing to me, that you actually played piano and you were part of a touring musical band, could you tell us about that?

Jeff Gothelf

Absolutely. I've played piano my whole life, my dad plays piano, there was always a piano in the house, and I had pretty big rockstar dreams as I was a kid growing up. It's really all I wanted to do. I can remember in high school everybody's like, what are you going to go to college for? I was like, I'm going to be a rockstar, figure that out. And, you know, I played in bands in high school, I played in bands in college, and towards the end of college I started playing in a couple of relatively serious bands, serious in the sense that they were decent bands, in my opinion. They were touring bands and they, you know, they made enough money to sustain themselves. They weren't jobs, they didn't sustain us as individuals, but they sustained the band system. And it's fascinating because, you know, at the time I was 19 and 20, I did this really until just about the time I met my wife, which, I was 25. And so I did it until about, I was about 25, and, you know, in hindsight you don't see it when you're in it, especially if you've never really done anything else. I'd always had jobs, but the jobs were always, you know, I delivered newspapers and I made sandwiches and I was a, you know, worked for a moving company, whatever, right? But in hindsight now it's clear to me that I was being entrepreneurial. In those days, the bands, each of them, especially the touring bands, were startups, you know, it's a bunch of folks getting together with a crazy idea, thinking that everyone in the world will love it, it's going to change the world, and doing everything they can and putting everything into helping folks realise that, and building that vision and, and executing on it. And, you know, scraping by and hacking things together and hustling and doing what you can to build a successful, in this case it was a musical group, but it was essentially a startup. And these days, not only do I look back fondly on those days and all those, all those guys that I played music with are my best friends to this day, we still talk almost every day, but I learned so many skills about being entrepreneurial, about experimenting, about learning, about failure, about iteration, about, you know, what's good, what's good enough, when do you call it quits, that's a really tough thing to do, you know, letting something go that you love is really difficult. And I know now, you know, 20 years later, that so much of that experience figures into my day-to-day work today. You know, even to this day, like if I get a new speech to give, if I get, a new client or a new, you know, assignment, I call them gigs. You know, I got a new speaking gig, I got a new consulting gig, I got a new coaching gig, that type of thing. It's impossible to remove that. And it's, it's amazing to me really, because at the time, you know, I could not have told you what I just said to you and, but in hindsight it's super clear to me what I was doing and what I was learning because I've put it to use over and over and over again in my life.

Ula Ojiaku

That's fascinating. It reminds me of what one of my mentors said to me, and he said, whenever you are given an opportunity to learn versus, you know, get more money doing what you already know, always choose to learn because there's no wasted knowledge. So it's more of tying it back to your days that, you know, as a musician, as a part of a touring band, you were learning and you're now using those transferrable skills, right?

Jeff Gothelf

Yes.

Ula Ojiaku

And would you, well, I don't play any instruments, but I used to be part of, you know, different choirs and my daughter also now does that, you know, kind of sings. But there are times when, you know, things would go wrong and you're finding yourself having to improvise so that the audience wouldn't know, okay, this isn't part of the script. Would you say that has also played a part in your experience as a band member did such?

Jeff Gothelf

I mean, the thing that comes immediately to mind is just comfort on a stage, right? Comfort in front of people and being able, you know, being comfortable in front of a room and performing to some extent or another. I think that that's, that came from that, the ability to, you know, hide or improvise, mistakes that happened. You know, I remember I was, we did this as a band all the time, and nobody ever knew really, unless they knew a particular song of ours very, very well. And you know, some things like that happen all the time when you're, giving a speech or teaching a class or whatever it is. I mean, I remember giving a speech in Budapest one time at Craft Conference in front of 2000 people, and the screen kept going out, my slides are up there in front of, and they kept flickering and, and going out. And it was just a question of, you know, what do you do? Do you just sort of collapse and be like, well, the slides are gone, I can't do anything, or do you keep going? And I think a lot of that drive and that ability to land on my feet in those situations came from being in that band and putting on so many shows.

Ula Ojiaku

And I'll say it helps that you knew your content as well, because if you had just read it 10 minutes before and you got on the stage, then it would be a different thing.

Jeff Gothelf

It would not have gone well.

Ula Ojiaku

Yes.

Okay, now I understand you have a BA in Mass Communication and you also went on to do a Masters in Human Factors in Information Design, and in your previous life you used to be a software designer.

Jeff Gothelf

Correct.

Ula Ojiaku

How did the winding road go from band member, you know, through the academics, to Jeff we know today, I mean from software designer to now.

Jeff Gothelf

Yeah, it's interesting, it's a great question. The, look, the rockstar thing didn't work out, you know, there's a thousand reasons, but I think the bottom line is we just weren't good enough, that's, that's probably where it netted out, but…

Ula Ojiaku

 And you were getting married, you said you met your wife.

Jeff Gothelf

I was getting married, yeah. You know, and having no money doesn't, those two things don't really play well together, you know, and so the band thing was ending and, you know, the web was starting, so we're looking at the late nineties at this point, just to kind of date myself a little bit, we're looking at the late nineties and in the late nineties as the band was, the last band that I was in, was winding down, the internet was coming up and I'd always been prone, you know, to computers and a little bit of computer programming, just very basic stuff, you know, and I started building websites, basic, you know, brochure websites for my band and for other bands, and I taught myself HTML to be able to do that. And then as the band was winding down, web 1.0 was happening and, you know, back in 1999, if you could spell HTML, you could get a job, you know, and I could do a little bit more than that, I did a little bit of graphic design, a little bit of, of HTML, and so I got a job, I got a job because it was easy to get a job back then, they took a lot of risks on people, and we learned on the job and that's what kicked things off, that got me doing web design and shortly thereafter I moved into Information Architecture, which was a brand new term and a brand new field as defined in a book by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville called Information Architecture for the Worldwide Web. And that book really changed my life because it gave me a sense that I, instead of just doing kind of the last step in the process, which was the markup and the design portion, I could move further up the waterfall, if you will, in the website creation process and do a lot of the Information Architecture, and that was great, and that was really, that really spoke to me and having sort of landed in that position, as the web evolved and became more interactive and Information Architecture expanded into, well, more fields showed up in interaction design, UI design, UX design, I expanded my skillset into that world. And then that really began the trajectory of starting to build design teams and then going into product management, eventually launching our own studio, our own firm, and then finally after selling that studio, going out on my own and teaching all this stuff. But that's, that's sort of like how I went from band, to the web and everything, and there's, you know, there's a lot, I skipped a lot of steps there, but that's the story in general.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, Jeff, and I think you also told part of your story in your book Forever Employable, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let your Next Job Find You. Since we're already on this topic, could we just delve into that? So you said something in that book about, you know, in your job as a software designer, you know, Information Architect, I can't remember the exact role you had, but you had an aha moment where you felt you, quoting this in my own words, I'm not quoting your book exactly, but you felt like you could always be replaced in that role and you wanted to carve out a niche where you are always in demand. Do you want to tell that story in your words so that I stop butchering it.

Jeff Gothelf

Yeah, I mean, look, it was interesting, you know, I progressed in my career in the same way that, you know, most people progress in their career, the way that my parents told me the world works, you know, you go to college, you get a job. It took me, and there was a little, you know, band break in there for me, but, you know, I got my first job, and then you work hard for a few years and you get a promotion, and then you, maybe you move to another company and you get a raise and, you know, you just kind of move your way, you climb your way up the corporate ladder. And that's what I did, I did that for a decade and I, you know, I clawed my way up into middle management like everybody does, or like most folks do. And when I turned 35, on the morning, in fact, of my 35th birthday is how the story goes in the book, I kind of woke up in a panic. I was concerned, like you said, that this wasn't going to last. I was going to become more expensive, the number of opportunities available to me as you climb, available to anyone, as you climb the corporate ladder gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Right? Exactly. Right. That's by design, right? You want fewer managers and more people doing the work. And I was genuinely concerned that I was going to run out of, I was going to get fired, I was, there's, I was hiring people at the time and the people that we were hiring were younger than me, they were smarter than me, faster than me, they were better than me, and they cost a lot less than me. And so I was really worried, and I saw this with my friends too, I had friends who were maybe five years older than me who were struggling with this very thing. They were struggling to find a job or stay employed, and stay relevant. And I was terrified. I was terrified I wasn't going to be able to feed my kids, you know, that was the big thing for me. And so I made an explicit decision when I turned 35 that I was going to stop chasing jobs. Like, as the subtitle of the book says, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You, I was going to stop looking for work, and I was going to create a situation where jobs were constantly finding me, where opportunities were finding me, because that way if something happens to my current job, well there's a stream of inbound opportunities available to me. And to kind of cut to the chase here, the way that I decided to do that, and the way that I write about it in the book, is through thought leadership. That's it. Like, that's the, you know, recognised expertise, personal branding, right, becoming somebody who people know and somebody who can help solve specific problems, and that's what I did. And look, it took me years, a lot of years, to really build up my reputation and my profile, and I've done it to an extent, and it's impressive to me today to see how many people are doing it so much faster than me. Now, you can credit it to the tools that's available to them, the nature of conversation online these days that's fundamentally different than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and these folks have just kind of nailed, nailed the system here. But it's thought leadership is what's worked for me to do that.

Ula Ojiaku

And I'll say, I mean, yes, there are people who might have done it faster than you did, but there is this saying that people are able, if I'm able to see as far as I did, it’s because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I'm just saying it's credit to you for sharing your experience because it's helping us to know what to do moving forward.

Jeff Gothelf

Look, and that's, I think that that's the benefit here, right? I think I talk about this in the book, right? About sharing generously, giving back to the community, helping people avoid the mistakes that you made, helping them skip a step. And to me that's, you know, a lot of folks would see that as, well, aren't you enabling the competition? No, I'm helping the community get collectively better. And eventually I hope that if I get to a position of need, the community will help me, that's what I hope. I don't expect it, but that's what I hope happens.

Ula Ojiaku

So how, how did you go about setting up the systems then? Because you, you got this realisation, oh my gosh, I am going to be, I may be obsolete in my current role faster than I'd rather admit, so you said you now went, you said, okay, you're going to be a thought leader. How did you decide on what area to start from and how did you then go about setting up the systems and the structure you have right now that are helping you?

Jeff Gothelf

The first thing was really to decide what I wanted to be known for. You know, in the book we call it planting your flag, but it's a question of what is, if I'm going to be a thought leader, if I'm going to build a personal brand of some kind, if I'm going to be known for something, what is that thing? And, and you know, our natural tendency is to go for professional things. What do I know best at work? What do I do best? I'm a Project Manager, a Product Manager, I'm an agile coach, I'm a software developer, I'm a designer, but doesn't have to be professional. Could be personal, right? I told you I play piano and I happen to really love old vintage electric pianos. And I used to have a fairly large collection of vintage electric pianos.

I could have built my thought leadership around vintage electric pianos, right, and it's viable to an extent, but the target audience here, so this is where kind of the product management hat comes on, right? The target audience is tiny. It's tiny. Like, even if you took all the keyboard players in the world, right? And, and then all those keyboard players who play vintage electric pianos, which is a subset, and all the people who care about this kind of stuff. I mean, it's still an infinitely smaller audience than say, web design, or product management, or even agile software development or things like that where I ultimately ended up. And so I chose that I wanted to be known for User Experience Design, and more importantly, UX design with Agile, because that's the problem that I was solving at the time, or solving for at the time, and nobody had a really good answer for it when we started solving for it, and that to me felt like an opportunity. And then that was what I, so then I started doubling down on that. And what that meant was starting to write, starting to share generously, speaking at conferences, getting on podcasts, things like that. And really starting to, at the very least, tell the story of the work that we were doing at the time, as I was the Director of UX at TheLadders in New York City at the time, and we were working on a daily basis, on a Sprintly basis, to tackle the challenge of good user experience design and agile together. So that's what I was writing about. And that eventually led to Lean UX, the book. But that's how it all started and that's where the focus was.

Ula Ojiaku

Okay. And how have you then set up the structure? Do you have a team currently or do you work in a lean manner?

Jeff Gothelf

So these days there is a system and there is a team. It's interesting, years ago I did a gig in the UK, see I said gig, comes out naturally like I told you. I did a gig in the UK for rentalcars.com in Manchester. And at the time, their Head of Product or Chief Product Officer, was this fascinating woman named Supriya Uchil. And she was a fantastic client. I really enjoyed working with her. And when the gig was over, she emailed me, she said, hey, would you like to hear some feedback about what it's like to work with you? No client has ever done that, by the way, not before, and not since. And I said, absolutely. I would love to get some feedback about what it was like to work with me. And she gave me a bunch of feedback, a lot of the work. And I took a lot of notes and I took a lot of post-it notes. One of those post-it notes has stuck with me for years now. It still sits here on my whiteboard, I still have it here, and it says outsource the work you hate, it shows. Right. And that's what she said to me. And she said, look, it's obvious to me that you hate doing sales. She goes, every time we had to have a sales conversation, you were clearly uncomfortable and not really into it. Right. She was right. I hate doing sales, I really do, and so over the years, as I've built this business, as it's grown, as it's become a, you know, a viable, successful business, you know, business of one per se. I have built a team of outsourced professionals to support a lot of the work that I do today. So, for example, I have a content marketing team. Now that team takes content that I create and they repurpose it across multiple channels, and they help me build, you know, my email newsletter and they help me build my LinkedIn presence and other things like that. It's my content, but they do all of that work. In addition to that, I've outsourced all my accounting. I have a fantastic accountant who works with businesses, only with businesses like mine, and so they understand my business and my way of working, everything's online, everything's digital, and that's super helpful. There is a woman that works for me part-time who basically handles the entire logistics of my business, scheduling, calendaring, travel. And then on top of that, she also handles BusDev and sales for me. And so that, to me, all that does is it removes all the things out of my way that I hate doing, and it leaves me with a tremendous amount of free time to do the things that I love doing, which is content creation and delivery. And that has made the ability to generate that content and distribute that content far more efficient and successful. And I'm super grateful to be able to, you know, to be in a position to be able to do that. And it supports the lifestyle that I'm trying to create and it allows me to, again, to focus on the things that I truly enjoy doing.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for sharing that, that's really insightful. Now, going back to something you said earlier about putting on your Product Management hat, there are some people in the audience who might be wondering, okay, what would you define a product as? Is it always something tangible or could we expand that word to mean anything that someone consumes, which might also be intangible, for example, going to a show, would a show be called a product?

Jeff Gothelf

That's a great question. The simplest definition that I've used and that I like for product is the way an organisation delivers and captures value. To me, that's a product. Now, that product could be a service, right? And I don't want to open up that can of worms. So if you're a band and you deliver a show, you cap you. that's how you deliver value. And if you capture value, like you sell tickets to that show, and merchandise, and maybe streaming revenue, then your product is the music and the show. So, yeah, absolutely, right, that's the way that you capture value. And so to me that's the simplest definition, the way an organisation delivers and captures value.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that definition, and this leads me to my next question, which is, so how does it relate to the discipline of product management? What does a Product Manager do then?

Jeff Gothelf

I believe that Product Managers are navigators of uncertainty. So a Product Manager's job is to take an idea, right, or, you know, the way an organisation delivers value, and to take it from concept, to market, to successful business. Now, the challenge with that is that we live in a continuously changing world. The pace of that change is increasingly faster, and this idea that you can confidently predict exactly what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and be right all the time is false. There's just too much change in the world. I mean, think back three years ago, right? The world was radically different three years ago than it is today. Radically different from 10 years ago, we could, we could not have predicted the things. I mean, I started my job at TheLadders in New York City, I talk about this, in October of 2008. Everything was going great in October, in the early part of October 2008. Right, we had a roadmap, we had plans, you know, in three weeks after I started my brand new job as Director of User Experience, Lehman Brothers melts down, and the financial crisis ensues, right, and we, you know, we're a job market site and all of a sudden the whole ecosystem's upside down. And so, and so I believe that the Product Manager is a navigator of uncertainty. They take a specific set of skills, a specific set of qualities, like curiosity and humility, and they build a process for de-risking the product idea and maximizing its chances for success. That's what I believe Product Managers do at a very high level. How that manifests will vary from Google, to Bank of America, to Boeing, to whatever, to, you know, I'm thinking, I'm trying to think of something like Cisco, the food service people or whatever, right? Like every organisation is going to do Product Management differently for a variety of reasons. You know, domain, industry context, corporate politics, blah, blah, blah, you know, technology stack, whatever. But at the end of the day, I think if you're looking at sort of fundamentally what a Product Manager does is they help a team navigate the uncertainty of product development. That's their job.

Ula Ojiaku

I dare say that even within a sector, even an industry, the way it's carried out could also vary from company to company, would you?

Jeff Gothelf

A hundred percent, yeah, I mean, a hundred percent. I mean, it's absolutely true. And so I think to say like, oh, I did Product Management at Google, so I'm a great Product Manager. Well, you might have been a great Product Manager at Google, congratulations, right? Does that mean that you're going to be a great Product Manager at, you know, Barclays, I don't know. You're going to bring that skillset to bear in a completely different environment, in a completely different industry. So I think if you've got the fundamentals in place, you'll do great. But trying to sort of copy and paste what you did at Google very tactically into a different environment, I don't think it's going to work. I mean, happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think it's going to work.

Ula Ojiaku

So what are the fundamentals then that a Product Manager would have that would give them a higher chance of success? You know, transferrable success from one area to one another.

Jeff Gothelf

I'm going talk about two qualities that are, I believe are fundamental to the success of a Product Manager, and then kind of four things to keep in mind. And I think those are, I think that to me, those are the fundamentals. I think that the two qualities that a Product Manager needs to have is humility and curiosity. I think all successful Product Managers are humble and curious. And those are really two sides of the same coin, let's be honest, okay. There's really, there are two different ways to describe a very similar quality in a person. Now, humility simply means, people misunderstand humility. People think humility is a lack of vision or a lack of conviction or a lack of ideas. Or being a doormat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not, humility simply says that, look, I have, uh, I'm going to use my expertise and my experience to come up with a strong opinion about what we should do. However, in the face of evidence that contradicts my strong opinion, I'm willing to change course. That's humility. That's saying, you know what? I was wrong about this. The evidence proves that I was wrong, so we're going to change course. The curiosity side of the story is the excitement in finding out if you were right or wrong, and to me, those two fundamental qualities of a person make for excellent Product Managers. Somebody who's willing to admit that they were wrong about their strong opinion, and somebody who's excited to find out if they're right or wrong about their strong opinion, and curious to see if maybe there's a better way, right? I think this is a good idea, but there's got to be a better way, no, let's go find it. To me, that makes for excellent Product Managers. So those are the fundamental sort of personality qualities. I think those are really hard to teach. I think you can train people to some extent but, you know, ego's tough and humility challenges the ego a lot. And so do the facts for that matter, facts challenge the ego a lot, the evidence you collect from the market. So then there's that. And I think the four sort of things to keep in mind for excellent sort of transferrable product management are customer centricity, agility, evidence-based decision making, and continuous learning and improvement. So a lot of agile concepts in there, you'll hear sort of a lot of agile concepts. You can argue all of them are agile concepts, although not exactly how all agile is implemented these days, but nevertheless, so customer centricity first and foremost, right? As a curious and humble Product Manager, your primary focus is making the customer successful, not shipping features, making the customer successful. That means understanding the customer, understanding the problem that you're solving for them, understanding what's getting in their way, understanding what they're doing today, understanding how the competition is solving this problem for people, understanding technology and how you might apply it to better solve this problem, understanding where the market is going so that you get ahead of it, you don't get caught behind, right? But it's all about understanding the customer. What are customers looking for? What are they trying to achieve? What's getting in their way? And really knowing them, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively, meeting them, talking to them, having regular conversations. To me, that's the first sort of key quality of a successful Product Manager. The second is agility, and that stems directly from those qualities of humility and curiosity. Agility is the ability to change course, it's the willingness to change course. It's the flexibility to say, you know, we started going down this path and I know we've spent a couple of Sprints heading down this path, but it doesn't make sense anymore, and so we're going to change course. And yeah, we burned two Sprints on this and that sucks, and I'm sorry, but we didn't burn two months on it, we didn't burn six months on it, right. And so we're going to shift to something more successful because of what we've learned in the past. And that brings me to the third point, which is evidence-based decision making. So those course corrections are being made based on data that you're gathering from the market, qualitative data, quantitative data that lets you know that, yeah, this is a good path to go down. Or, you know what, we really need to pivot here or to completely change course into something else, but you're making decisions based on data and not just opinion. And then finally, this continuous learning and improvement. This, again, this is that curiosity that says, we did a good job, we solved the problem, the product's successful, great. How do we make it better? How do we keep learning whether or not this still makes sense? Right? To me, that's what makes for successful Product Managers, right? Those multiple focus areas and two core qualities of humility and curiosity. I think that's what makes for good Product Managers.

Ula Ojiaku

That's awesome, thank you for that. And would you have, I mean you do, in your books, you've shared lots of war stories where you know, you had experience with product management or product leadership and to the audience, I'll say read the books, but is there any example maybe that comes to mind of someone who was a Product Manager that, you don't have to name names, you don't have to share like details, but that kind of brought to life all these personal qualities and focus areas and how that affected the work?

Jeff Gothelf

I mean, look, I've worked with a ton of remarkable folks over the years. I think I started really meeting folks who were working this way when I met folks like Janice Fraser who, in fact came up with the phrase ‘strong opinions, loosely held’, which is exactly what I was just describing a few minutes ago. Janice has built multiple businesses and has really helped pioneer these ideas into sort of the mainstream. And I've seen her repeatedly do this. Eric Ries, you know, with The Lean Startup, really brought a lot of these ideas to light in a very easy to digest way, hence the success of his work in the past, and he lived this stuff in the businesses that he's built over the years. I had a colleague and co-worker and co-founder in a business named Giff Constable. Most recently, Giff was the Chief Product Officer at Meetup, but he's been a serial entrepreneur his whole life. Giff really embodied these ideas, like he's a smart guy, tons of experience, really great ideas, but he would test them all, and if he didn't get evidence that convinced him that they were right, he was willing to change course. And I learned a ton from working with him and building businesses with him. And it was inspirational because in many ways, you know, I appreciated his ruthlessness. You know, we all, it's hard, you know, this is personal stuff, this is my idea, all my ideas are great, I love my ideas, right. And he loved his ideas, but he was very, very good at separating emotion and evidence. And I really learned a ton from him as well. So those are three folks that kind of come to mind immediately.

Ula Ojiaku

Thanks for that, it reminds me in terms of what you said about Giff being ruthless, I think is a term in journalism to “kill your darlings” because you could write an article or, you know, write your first draft and you're so in love with it, but by the time the editor brings out their red pen or something and starts striking it out, you have to separate emotion from the love.

Jeff Gothelf

That's exactly right, kill your darlings is the reality of this, of good product management. It's, you know, if the data doesn't prove it, and the data we're looking for is changes, meaningful, positive changes in the behaviour of the customers that we're serving. And if the data doesn't show it, then no matter how brilliant this idea was, how much you love it or how much you thought it was just revolutionary, it doesn't make sense to continue to invest in it, we’ve got to find, figure out a different way.

Ula Ojiaku

That's awesome. I'd love to get to your take on the terms, you know, vision and strategy. How would you define these terms would be my first question, and my second question, and I'm happy to, you know, share this again, is how would you then tie this to, you know, for example, product development? How would they, how should they influence product development?

Jeff Gothelf

Yeah, so look, a couple things. There are, I'm not going to lie to you, you know, I struggle a little bit with, you know, vision and mission. Strategy is clear to me, but differentiating between vision and mission, some will say a vision is like what will the world look like in five years or something like that? Or if you're successful, what changes will you see in the world? That type of thing. Whereas a vision is sort of like the big motivational, like what was it for Google? Cataloguing all the world's data, that was their vision. Right?

Ula Ojiaku

Can I give you my own take? So my understanding mission is more like, okay, what do we stand for? We're going to save the world? And vision is like, okay, in this amount of time, you know, this is how we're saving the world. So it's kind of a picture from the future, say if we travel five years into the future and we see our customers, what are, how are they behaving? You know, what exactly does the world look like for us? While mission tends to remain constant. That's my understanding anyway.

Jeff Gothelf

Okay. Yeah. And so to me, look, it's directional, right? In the sense of like, we are, you know, we're going to make sure everyone is clean drinking water, like clean drinking water for everybody, right? That's our, is that our mission or our vision? I don't know. But like, or maybe that, maybe that's the mission and the vision is, you know, a world where no one's thirsty. To me, those are like you, I think you need that in the sense that like, you need to know sort of at a high level what problem is the company solving for in the world? I think that's important, right? Because I think that inevitably there are going to be initiatives that seem to stray from that. At the very least, you can point and say, look, is it our mission to bring clean drinking water to everybody in the world? And why are we like investing in a sports website? Right, doesn't make any sense. So at the very least, it gives us that perspective. Strategy, however, and I think strategy is really, really, really important. Strategy is super important for aligning the organisation so that everybody is pulling in the same direction, so that everybody is clear on what the short term goals are for the organisation and it gives people, if done correctly, it gives people the freedom to experiment and learn to figure out the best ways to achieve the strategy, because I do believe that strategy is a hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that we want to expand into the North American market in 2024. Okay, great, let's figure out all kinds of ways where we might start to build some market share in North America in 2024. Right. And to me, I think that that is the true benefit of strategy. I think that it can also be misused, at least, for alignment, that's very specific. Our strategy is, you know, North American market share and we're going to do it this way. And you can get very prescriptive with that. Now everybody's aligned, everybody knows what we're doing, but it doesn't allow for the flexibility and that push and pull that ultimately reveals a better way to do something or is more creative or more innovative. And so I think strategy is key. It's key to articulate it clearly and simply, it's key to disseminate it clearly and simply across the organisation. And I think no team in the organisation should have their project approved if they can't clearly state how they believe this might help achieve the strategy. That's what I believe.

Ula Ojiaku

And on that note, so you said no project or team should have their initiative approved unless they can show how it helps move the needle towards the desired strategy, the direction of travel, the organisation, I suppose that's what you mean, the organisation’s direction of travel or what they want to achieve. Now how, because one of the shiny new objects, or, well, not an object per se, but more like a buzzword is OKRs, objectives and key results. So how can we use that? Or, let's say, can it be used to help with tying strategy with the work that, you know, the lower levels of the organisation might be doing?

Jeff Gothelf

I think it's critical to be able to tie the pieces together. Now, I don't expect an individual contributor necessarily to be able to do that, but certainly their manager can say, hey team, we're working on this very tactical thing because it's a component of these five other tactical things that when you put them together, they roll up and they achieve this much more meaningful thing together. Right, and so I, again, I think that there needs to be a clear, and it's rare, look, let's be honest, right? Everyone in the organisation needs to understand what the strategic focus is for the next six months, six to 12 months. Okay. And again, if you can't speak directly to why you're working on the thing that you're working on, then your boss should be able to answer that question for you.

Ula Ojiaku

So it's really about, what I'm hearing you say is that there needs to be a strategic focus for an organisation at least that looks ahead six to 12 months into the future to say, okay, this is what we're going to be doing. And for teams, they have to find a way of articulating how they are contributing to that strategic focus, to the fulfilment of that strategic focus. Now, how can OKRs be used? I know you said, okay, individual contributors may not necessarily use that, but in the situations where you feel they apply, how could they be, and by they, I mean OKRs, objectives and key results, how could this format help?

Jeff Gothelf

OKRs to me, are the key to bringing this alignment. So if there's a clear strategy. Without a clear strategy, the OKRs don't help, okay. But if there's a clear strategy and we've set success criteria for that strategy, for that strategic hypothesis, then, or we can start to say, okay, great. We are, our strategic focus for 2024 is North American expansion, we'll know we've achieved it when, you know, we've got 10% market share, this much revenue and a, you know, new customer referral rate of 20%, something like that. Right. All of a sudden, the organisation knows what it's targeting, not only what the strategic focus is, but the actual behaviour change that we're looking for. So fundamentally, every team in the organisation can then start to say, okay, we work on X, and X is a leading indicator of Y and Y is a leading indicator of market share. Okay. So the objective, while it should be local to the team, as well as the key results, they function as leading indicators for the strategic goal, right? So let's try to make an example on the fly, right? So we're talking about North American expansion in 2024. Let's assume that we are in the, you know, online furniture business, something along those lines, right? And so if, maybe you work on a merchandising team, right? And so there, in order to do proper merchandising, you need access to specific suppliers, right? And so there is a team that does supplier and vendor relations. Right. That team understands that for the merchandising team to be successful, they've got to build these relationships with these vendors. So their OKR is going to be about building those relationships, right? Those relationships in turn allow the proper merchandising to take place, which then allows for the proper, you know, for market share to grow in the North American market, for example. So, but that connection can be, you can literally draw it on a board because people understand the strategy. And so objectives and key results become the, sort of the tactical strategic beacons for each of the teams. Each team knows exactly what they're targeting and why, and they understand, in theory, how it might help achieve the overall strategy, which again is a hypothesis, it might be wrong, but at the very least, they've got a shared direction.

Ula Ojiaku

Thank you for that example. There's something you said about the leading indicators. So I assume that would fall under the key results part, because we'd have the objective which is like the, you know, ambitious statements and then the key results are like, this is what success looks like in terms of achieving that broad statement, the objective. Now, would you, I've read articles from respected thought leaders who say, okay, yes, leading indicators are good, but there also needs to be, you know, the lagging indicators, kind of a balance of, will I say measures, you know, leading, lagging and quality indicators. I don’t know if you have any, I mean, I'd love to hear what your view would be on this, because if we're only looking at leading indicators, there might be a temptation to just be short term in our thinking and not also try to measure the lagging indicators, like okay, the actual revenue of the profit that you get versus our likelihood of getting that revenue.

Jeff Gothelf

Yeah. So look, so short answer is both are important, I think, obviously, and I think both are required. Slightly longer answer is the lagging indicators in an organisation often tend to be the, what we call the impact metrics for the organisation, the high level measures of the health of the business, like you said, revenue, sales, you know, customer satisfaction, etcetera. Right. So yeah, those things need to exist. Typically, they exist at the leadership level, and so then whatever's happening within the teams, tends to function as a leading indicator ultimately to those sort of high level lagging indicators. Right? So we're going to, you know, I've got a team working on email marketing, and they're working on email market opening click rates, right? Those are leading indicators of eventual sales, and those sales are leading indicators of revenue, which is a lagging indicator of the health of the business. And so those, that's,to me, both are needed. Typically the lagging indicators tend to be at the strategic and the leadership level.

Ula Ojiaku

I read on your blog post that you have another book coming up, whilst we're on the subject of OKRs, and you're going to be, or you are in the process of co-authoring yet another book with your co-author Josh Seiden. Could you tell us about that?

Jeff Gothelf

Absolutely. So, yeah, so Josh and I have been working and writing together for a long time. We have been talking about outcomes and OKRs together for a long time, and we feel there's an opportunity in the marketplace to build, to write a tactical how-to implementation guide for all, organisations of all size. And that's what we're doing. It doesn't have a title yet, we do have a website at okr-book.com where you can sign up and learn a bit more about it and then kind of be on the mailing list when we do have more info about it. We're writing it right now. To be honest, I've been writing it in public for the last two years on my blog every week at 500 to 700 words at a time. All those just kind of getting those ideas out there and experimenting to see what works and what doesn't and what gets feedback and what doesn't, and that's been super helpful and I expect this to be a popular book, and I expect this to be a very helpful and tactical book for organisations who are going through the process of implementing OKRs and are trying to make them work both as a goal setting framework, but also truly understanding the kinds of changes to ways of working that come after you've implemented OKRs. Agility, or agile ways of working, product discovery, Lean UX, right? Those types of activities as well, to help teams build that evidence-based decision making that we talked about earlier.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome. Is there any timeframe or do we just go to your, to the website you mentioned and sign up to get more updates on the book as they unfold?

Jeff Gothelf

okr-book.com - that's the website?

Ula Ojiaku

Yes. And when do we expect it to be released?

Jeff Gothelf

October.

Ula Ojiaku

This October, awesome. So that would also be in the show notes. Are there any books or materials that you have found yourself gifting or recommending to people that have impacted or shaped the way you think right now? I mean, that is in addition to your, you know, Sense and Respond book, Lean UX. Unfortunately, I don't have the physical copy of the Forever Employable ones and, but yeah, are there other books that you could recommend to us?

Jeff Gothelf

Yeah, I think so recently I've read Tony Fadell, his book Build, the Tony Fadell of Apple and Nest and various other fame, Build is a really good book and really interesting insight as to how he works and builds products, and most recently I just finished the new book by Rick Rubin, legendary music producer Rick Rubin, it's called The Creative Act, and I found that book to be fascinating and really inspiring. I mean, it's, you know, he is very like, listen to this, you know, get into the zone and just the flow and, you know, there's a lot of that fluffy guru kind of stuff in there too. But I agreed with 90% of what I read in there about creativity, about, you know, working with an idea, about developing an idea, about getting feedback on an idea, about letting an idea go, about changing context and constraints to create more creativity and innovation. And I really enjoyed it. So it's called The Creative Act, it's by Rick Rubin, and it's an easy read and I would recommend that if you're looking for that kind of motivation, I think it was really smart.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome. Is there anything else you'd like to ask of the audience?

Jeff Gothelf

I just hope that if you've got anything you'd like to ask me, don't hesitate to get in touch via Twitter or LinkedIn or my website. If you're interested in OKRs, do sign up for my newsletter, and go to okr-book.com and sign up there. And beyond that, I hope to see you online or in person sometime in the future, because it's nice to meet people in person again these days.

Ula Ojiaku

Great. Thank you very much, Jeff, for these. Any final words of wisdom for the audience before we go?

Jeff Gothelf

The pithy phrase I'll close with is this, do less, more often. That's the phrase that I would recommend for you.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow. Do less, more often. I am going to be pondering on that statement. Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been an honour speaking with you, learning from you, and I hope we would get the opportunity to do this again, hopefully.

Jeff Gothelf

Thank you, Ula. This was amazing. Thanks for having me on the show.

Ula Ojiaku

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!