Agile.FM

Proft Streams Book

Transcript:

Agile FM radio for the agile community.

Today I'm thrilled to have Luke Holman with me in the podcast here of Agile FM and I can't believe After all these episodes I had so far I haven't had you on the show, which is a big miss. You are a renowned expert in agile methodologies an author. And I think a lot of people know you from the innovation games which is a framework for collaborative decision making problem solving.

You have experience that dates back way, way back into the 1990s, pre Agile, but also I heard recently that you were involved in the 2003 Agile conference. So yeah, a while back. Welcome to the show, Luke.

[00:00:46] Luke Hohmann: Joe, I am so happy to be here. I've known you through the community. We've seen each other at conferences.

And so it's a, it's quite an honor to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to participate. Thanks

[00:00:58] Joe Krebs: Yeah, no, absolutely. We could talk about the innovation games and fill an entire show, but today we could, but today we want to talk a little bit about value profit stream, the agile community as often. This is the recordings taking place on the 25th of June, 2024 is a little bit in a turmoil. The Agile community as a whole, there seems to be some different kind of directions people are going, looking at the roles. It's maybe a good time to talk about what value is, how we can present value because at the end of the day is, it's like, how do we sell agility within an organization or for organizations?

[00:01:44] Luke Hohmann: I think it'd be a good thing to talk about. There, there's so many aspects of this that are interesting, but let's try a few. And I'll also talk about the rule of self interest in the Agile community. When we talk about value we think about it in terms of our Profit Streams book and our Profit Streams work as What are the set of tangible and intangible benefits that a product or service we use solution as the single term for product and service or any blend thereof.

So it's just a little easier because we're here to solve problems for our customers. So we think of both the tangible and intangible benefits. And for the tangible benefits, we help companies create mathematical equations that capture the benefits. And we often work with our clients because technical people are good at being efficient in terms of doing things like saving time.

But the reality is most companies don't need to save time. They need to have the time converted into a metric that they can understand for their business purposes. One of the examples we use in our book, and it's been proven in many of our client engagements, Is we were working with a trucking company, and they were going to be buying software that saved their drivers time.

So drivers in the trucking industry have to keep detailed logs of their hours of service to make sure they're taking breaks, etc. And this solution enabled the data to be acquired automatically by connecting into the engine bus. And they knew if the truck was on and if it was moving and all that kind of technological internet of things capability that we love.

And there's so many things that we can do. So the company that we were working for, and this was Qualcomm had the solution. They went to the trucking organizations and said, Hey, we can save you 20 to 30 minutes a day in driver time. And Joe, we were able to prove this. Absolutely through, the data, like the data was very clear.

And the trucking company's executive said we don't really care about that. Because our drivers are union and they are paid for eight hours. So saving me 30 minutes of a driver's time doesn't actually save me money. It doesn't do anything for me. So we had to go back to the drawing board with Qualcomm and find out how to reroute drivers using the new systems so the trucking companies could deliver another package or two in a day because that's how they made money through package delivery.

Or the other part of this would be the intangible side and intangible benefits can be quantified on the intangible side for challenging deliveries. We were able to allocate more time in the driver's schedule so that customer satisfaction improved. And as customer satisfaction improved, we would see less churn among customers.

Oh, my package was delivered well. I want to use this company again. My, my package was delivered without any breakage. I want to use this company again. So the first step of value is to actually take a step back and try to quantify the tangible and intangible aspects of value. And then I'll just real quickly, I'll finish that off.

The second of the determination of value is what we call direct and indirect benefits. A direct benefit is something that you will recognize as a benefit and it materially affects your purchase or use decision. An indirect benefit is something that you recognize, you'll say, yes, the benefit exists, but it doesn't influence you.

And I'll give you a kind of a standard example. My wife and I were out shopping for a new car. I cared a lot more about the styling and color. She just doesn't care about that. And and she would readily agree yeah, that's a good looking car, but it doesn't affect my purchase decision.

Whereas I was, hey, that's a really good looking car. I think I bought it. And so now let's take it into the business context. The solutions that we're creating, which are often very sophisticated, there's a collection of benefit. It's not a single benefit. And collection of benefits, you create a network of how the customer perceives those benefits.

So let's go back to a trucking company that is focused on customer satisfaction is not going to really care about the not care as much. I shouldn't say they care. They don't care at all, but they're not going to care as much about like driver satisfaction. But let's say you're a trucking company and a part of.

The world where it's hard to attract drivers. Now your network of benefits might emphasize driver satisfaction. So understanding not just what benefits are, but how a given market segment is going to perceive the collection of benefits is really the foundation of our approach, and then from there, what we do is from the benefits, We can derive the customer return on investment model.

We can derive your pricing and packaging model. We can help you develop your solution so that you know that you're building a sustainable offering. And I'll close with this Joe. The foundation of profit streams is sustainability. If you're running a business, Or frankly, if you're running a household, you have to have a positive flow of cash coming into your business or your house, right?

We can't, other than the government who prints money, right? Like a business has to have a profit to survive, to sustain itself. Now, in some cases, profits can be misused or we can have unsustainable business practices. But if you look at true sustainability involves.

Three related areas. One is your solution itself has to be sustainable over time as your customers evolve as their needs evolve Your solution has to evolve to be relevant and to meet their needs So with the first part of this is solution sustainability The second part of this is economic sustainability Are you charging a price that will keep your company in business?

But are you also factoring in your customers total cost of ownership? So that your customer perceives what you're selling to them as a good value something they want to keep The relation going right? We want to have economic sustainability and then the third kind of sustainability is relationship sustainability when we Sell software.

We're not actually selling software. We're selling a license to use the software So the distinction is that i'm holding in my hand a pen You If I sell you my pen, I've transferred rights to you. You now own the pen. You can do what you want with it. I don't sell you software. I license software for you to use.

So there's a license agreement and that license agreement determines our relationship as the provider to the customer. There's other relationships that matter. Every software package that is created has technology and licenses associated with it. So the provider is in licensing work, and there's relationships that they need to maintain.

And of course, the kind of the capstone of all of these things is our relationship to society and to other parts of the world. Of the global infrastructure in which we live. And what I mean by that is if you're in Europe, you need to honor GDPR. If you're in the United States, you have to honor California CCPA.

If you're selling certain kinds of fintech software, you might have to be PCI or SOX two compliant. If you're in the healthcare industry, you'll have to be HIPAA compliant. If you're in the education industry, you have to be. FERPA and COPA compliant. So the idea of compliance to us is part of that relationship.

What is the relationship your company wants to have with various regulatory agencies? Are you going to try and be an organization that honors those relationships and fulfills your compliance requirements? Or are you going to be an organization that's going to try and skirt those requirements? And perhaps engage in questionable or provably unethical behavior, and so all of that is what comprises profit streams.

[00:10:42] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is it's very interesting. And as you were elaborating on this, especially on the economics, sustainability It's interesting, right? Because I think we all have seen situations as a consumer before where we felt like I need a certain service or a product, but I felt like this was too, too expensive.

I've felt abused based on a very specific situation I'm in and I'm requiring a service or a product. I feel like everybody can relate to that. So finding that kind of fair spot, yeah. In terms of sustainability, I can totally see that as well as the other ones as well. So I think that's a great example.

Now, if somebody hears the word profit stream, at least the first thing that came to mind for me said, what's the difference to value stream, right?

[00:11:24] Luke Hohmann: That's a great question. And we should know the distinction between a profit stream and as a value stream. I credit this to my friend Avi Schneider who is well known in the scrum community.

Avi, after reading the book, he said, Luke, I've come to learn and realize that all profit streams are value streams, like all squares are rectangles. But not all rectangles are squares. So the distinction that I like to talk about Joe is that typically a profit stream is going to be more aligned to what SAFe calls an operational value stream and the development value stream of SAFe would be a cost center.

So now let's look at value streams and let's look at specifically operational value streams. We think of profit streams as those operational value streams that are generating revenue for a company. And so not all value streams generate revenue. For example, there are value streams provided by. Government entities that don't provide revenue, but provide services that maintain our society, which we need, and those are fantastic.

But not all not all value streams are profit streams. And that's a good distinction. When the other thing that's interesting, and I give a talk on this. Is when we look at value streams, especially the operational value stream, you start to find that. We have a starting condition and we go through a sequence of steps and we get an ending benefit.

Actually map in your operational value stream. When revenue occurs, you'll find that many things are costs until the very end. It's like value streams are rainbows, right? The pot of gold is at the end. And so you really have to make sure that you're understanding the steps in that operational value stream.

And what we work on with our clients is that we try to help them understand the economic sustainability of looking at that sequence of flow to make sure that you are generating enough revenue at the end to support the whole flow and looking at ways you might be able to pull revenue sooner so that you can sustain yourself.

[00:13:45] Joe Krebs: All right. How do you respond to somebody who is like possibly interested? Here's the word profit stream. Obviously I see dollar signs and signals and cha-ching and all of those kinds of things. For an agile audience out there who might say, Hey, but what about the team spirit? And what about sustainability of a team's, fun and learning environment?

Aren't they contradictory to this? I guess the answer to that is no, right? But it's the,

[00:14:14] Luke Hohmann: of course, all of those, Joe and for the listeners, Joe and I were chatting before the podcast we often do. And one of the things that I really find disappointing in the agile community is a lot of agile people seem to have this kind of disdain for management or this disdain for leadership.

[00:14:32] Joe Krebs: And I think of it exactly the opposite. Business leaders over the last 20, 25 years have shoveled hundreds of millions of dollars into agile practices and transformations between the training and the tooling and the infrastructure. And they've gotten benefit from agile. I'm very proud of all the things that software people do.

Earlier today I was getting a blood test. And I walked in and there was a kiosk and you just typed in your phone number scanned your driver's license and you were checked in. Software people did that. And I think what we do as software people is really cool. Yeah. Hardware and software. We designed a solution that was amazing.

And of course, Joe, we want to have sustainable practices, not just in our business relationships with our customers, but true sustainability means sustainability with our employees, with our practices. With what Kent Beck wrote about very early in the community with XP, like XP is about sustainability.

So to say that profit is antagonistic to sustainability is to have a very flawed understanding of what sustainability is and or what profit is. I've been a serial entrepreneur. I've started and run and sold a couple of companies. And it's really a lot of fun when you're an entrepreneur and you can give out bonus checks because you had a great year Yeah, it's not so fun when you had a bad year and you're cutting salaries or you're doing other You know doing a layoff or whatever.

And so for the people in the agile community who talk about humanness of our developers my response is Yes, heck yes, we, those are things that promote sustainability. Those practices, the training the better tooling, the better computers, they require money, they require a profit.

And most of us work for a for profit company. It is, I think it's pretty above average that people would be working for profit rather than for the non profit sector. Should we go a little concrete about some data points, metrics, because I don't want to I'm just going to say the word.

We really don't have to go down that path at all in this kind of conversation. I think we have debunked the word velocity as a metric or something like that. I don't think we have to talk about that. But what are. Measurements, like if somebody would say, Hey, this sounds very interesting. Definitely trucking sounds good, but I'm in a totally different domain.

In terms of this, I would what's a good starting point for people to say, like, how do I measure these profit streams from an IT perspective or, Yeah.

[00:17:18] Luke Hohmann: And Joe if I'm not answering the question in the way that you're intending the question that's okay.

I started as an engineer and for everyone listening, Joe and I had a really, a geeky out moment when I, when we started, but I started as an engineer. And then I became a manager of engineer and then I became, vice president and all that kind of stuff. And I was always trying to create the best solution for my customers.

And along and in that journey, I found product management. I thought, Oh, wait a minute. Product managers are the people who are designing the solution and working with designers on the user experience side. And they're in the center of the world of this thing called creating a great solution for customers.

And through that. conversation, I started to realize, Hey, I'm responsible for creating a return on the investment of the company I'm working for. And from there, I started to learn the basics of finance. And I started to, understand how to read a balance sheet, how to read what is EBITDA what's the difference between CapEx and OpEx.

What is the terms of the license agreement? What is, what can go wrong in a license agreement? If it's not crafted correctly for a company, how do I know if I'm making enough money, has my economic, let's go back to the engineers has my economic model factored in a pay raise for my team next year, because there's inflation and if there's inflation and I want to pay my developers more money, How do I manage that with my margins?

Either my costs are going down, which might happen. And, maybe my software part of the solution is the same price, but my hardware margins are improving because I have cost of scale manufacturing. Maybe I don't, I'm a pure SAAS company and I'm picking up some lower costs because of hosting costs are dropping.

How do I economically think about these elements? So the, what I would say is this is one of those areas where Agile has to do nothing more than embrace what has been existing for a long time, which is economic models Don Reinerson's work on flow. Looking at possibly throughput accounting, but educating ourselves, educate product managers, educate themselves on what's in our book, which is not just how do I economically model, but how do I actually. Set the price point. How do I determine the packaging of what features go in? What edition of my offering and do I charge? So those kinds of things are to me they're not taught as much as they should be in the agile community, but that's why we wrote the book.

[00:20:10] Joe Krebs: Oh, absolutely. I agree with you.

And I think indirectly you are answering the question, at least for me, right? Because I do see certain data points being captured within agile teams that are contradictory to what you're saying right now. These are like the velocity discussions and that are happening within teams. And then all of a sudden they happen on the leadership level, whereas you're saying, actually, some of those conversations are still existent as they were before agile, but they're still applying it.

Just they have to be maps. I feel like you're having a much more adult mature kind of conversation about this. And I think we're actually experiencing within teams on the ground.

[00:20:48] Luke Hohmann: Yeah I think the Agile community has gotten a little wrapped up around the Axel about, I helped form the first conference in the Agile Alliance series in 2003 with Alistair Coburn and Ken Schwaber and Rebecca Wirfs Brock and a few other people.

And Todd Little, and let me tell you, no one at that conference was walking around arguing about the fine distinctions between output and outcome metrics and things like that. We both have a friend, Kenny Rubin, and he's written very beautifully about this. But trust me, in the very early days, we weren't arguing about those.

It's like people drink fine wine and argue, Oh, are you getting black current or dark cherry flavors in the wine? No, just have a glass of wine and enjoy it. Um, and what's happening is we're forgetting that sometimes you do need to track certain basic metrics just as a mechanism Of I think consistency and let's say you're an athlete.

Let's say you wanted to run a marathon. The number of miles you run in a week or the total miles that you've run in training for American a marathon could be a vanity metric. Oh, but at the end of the day, it's also the truth that you're not going to go run 26 miles if you didn't train And a training program is going to tell you how many miles you need to run Per week and if you're not tracking how many your miles you're running per week You're not going to hit your end goal of running the actual marathon So I think that so many other aspects of what we do, there's a very healthy way to look at velocity and velocity metrics and looking at flow metrics and unhealthy ways of looking at it and rather than throwing everything into a bucket of healthy and unhealthy, we should use the agile principles of retrospection.

This metric and the way that we're using us, helping us advance towards our goals. Yeah. And it is, we should probably keep doing it. And if it's not, we should look at what we need to change.

[00:22:52] Joe Krebs: Yeah. It's very interesting. I also, while we were talking about the marathon, I was also thinking yes, there's definitely mileage.

This is an important piece, if part of your training program, but it's sometimes, and I don't know if that makes sense, I think sometimes we're measuring how many minutes we also have used for stretching, and yes, it is. a great technique to become a marathon runner, but I don't think from purely stretching, you're becoming a good marathon runner.

I think it's together. And I think it's also for metrics like these things have to balance each other out. If you're having 90 percent stretching and 10 percent running, maybe that's the wrong

[00:23:25] Luke Hohmann: that's where wisdom comes in. And that's where not always trying to invent everything from scratch, right?

If you were, if you really were going to go run a marathon, you'd probably go talk with other runners. You'd probably go to some running websites that like runner's world that has reputable training plans. You'd get a sense of the balance of the metrics. So it's. It's very rare that one metric on a development organization is going to be the only metric that you needed.

And again, this is where people start to it's good to have these discussions to calibrate. But it's like the definition of done, right? At the definition of done, you might say our definition of done is no stop ship bugs where stop ship is defined as P one and sev zero, like separate priority severity.

Then you get into people who are like if I have no stop ship bugs, but I have a bunch of small bugs, can I still ship? And I'm like, I don't know like maybe no, maybe yes. What's the, we should have a conversation about that. And the metrics are designed to use to guide us into the conversations that are most beneficial, just like.

So if I looked at a team that had velocity metrics, and they were reasonably consistent. And I saw an anomaly, like a dip. I, as a manager, if I didn't already know, I would go to the team and say, Hey, I noticed that your velocity dip, everything. Okay. And if the team says actually, no Joe went on a ski trip and broke his arm and our velocity dip, cause he was in the hospital.

And we're all really worried about Joe. Wow, that stinks. Maybe we should send Joe some flowers or some get well, but now I know why velocity dipped. Yeah, and it was a special cause and it'll resolve itself. Um, now the other element could be our velocity dipped because we completely misunderstood the requirement and I'd be like, okay maybe we should toss that into a retrospective.

There's so many good retrospective techniques. Maybe we should toss that into one of our retrospective techniques and see if that's a special cause or if there's some other potential issue that the team might be facing. And then the team goes, Oh yeah, no, we think we're okay. It was just this one time.

We didn't really understand the requirements are no, we're actually in a new area of our solution and all of us are experiencing this new thing and we need more training or we need X to really get ahead of the issue. So metrics are important, right? We keep score, right? We keep track of things.

[00:26:03] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So it's interesting, right? Because we, you mentioned before that there is this general amount of metrics. Don't want to repeat them necessarily, but these are like the business metrics. And these are the things that our businesses are already using on an enterprise level with or without agile.

Why are we having such a hard time in the agile community to translate that? Obviously, your book will help in the translation of all of those things. But what do you think of the pitfalls?

[00:26:29] Luke Hohmann: I actually think one of the pitfalls is how some of the agile methods have defined what a product owner is.

You'll see agile methods say a product owner is responsible for value. Which is great, but then they don't define it. And so we've got a generation and I spent most of my formative business careers here in silicon valley, not all of it, but a lot of it So i'm used to a silicon valley style of a product manager Knowing how to run a spreadsheet knowing how to do pricing and being trained And what we're finding, I think, Joe, is that there's this tremendously large number of people who are associated with products, but don't have this training and pricing.

They don't have this training and licensing. I'll, one of the things I do with my clients is I'll walk into a situation where they're, they need to, make an improvement economically. And I'll just go to the product managers and I'll say, when was the last time you read your own license agreement, your own terms of service on your website?

And they'll be like, Oh yeah. never! Like, okay we should read it. And I'll give you an example of kind of the weird things that can happen in license agreements. We were working with a smaller company. And their license agreement with, so they served larger companies and it was a conversion company.

I don't want to go much further than that. Yeah. They had a contract with a larger company that said every time the larger company made a request to the smaller company and the smaller company agreed to that request, their maintenance agreement would automatically extend for one more year. So every nine months, the big company would make a request to the small company.

On a very small change, the small company would make a very small change. And then now they're saddled with a responsibility for another year of support. And I said, okay this two sentence clause in your license agreement is now costing you almost 300, 000 a year. Now for a big company, you may not notice it, but this was a company with less than 8 million in revenue.

That's a noticeable number for a company with eight million right now. It's still a nice company. Don't it's not it's a very good business but i'm like this two line sentence in your license and the product manager was like wow I didn't know how to interpret that. I think we're seeing this challenge in the agile community because too many Organizations have allowed this skills of pricing and economic sustainability modeling to activity.

Yeah, let's say you're, let's say you're agile. I don't care what flavor of agile you're using, pick one. I don't, there's so many, it's like going to the ice cream store. So you pick one and you're putting out more value at what point. Should you raise your prices because you've added so much value?

At what point should you adjust your packaging? We work with a client who they kept on shoving features into their solution Which sounds great, right? But then their sales started to slow down and that the head of Product contacted me and said it's really weird luke Every time we're adding more features our sales team is telling us it's harder to sell that's a packaging problem because what's happening is people are saying Your solution now includes Features that are not relevant to me Therefore I want a lower price because i'm not using them.

That's right And the right solution is to say okay now that our product has grown in sophistication We're gonna go take this market that wasn't segmented And we're going to make it a finer grain segmentation, and we're going to really understand the needs of these customers and take this wonderful platform we've built and offered these solutions or these features to this market segment, these features to this market segment.

And after we did that work with that client. Their sales returned to a healthy growing number because people bought what was relevant for them.

[00:30:49] Joe Krebs: This is awesome. Luke, we started off with also with a side comment or I might have started with this agile community being in some form of transition.

Yes. And I want to end with this for our podcast as well. Now we talked a little bit more from the company's perspective, from the leadership level what I have noticed, and I don't know if you would share that thought is there's a lot of agile coaches in the transformation space and organizations, and they don't really know for sure if their work actually had an economic impact for the organization.

Like they say like it feels better or it feels, we feel more profitable, but do we have evidence of what we had before to what we have now? How could profit streams help future coaching and coaches out there on, not from a product perspective, but more from a transformations perspective, how can profit streams help them to make a case for themselves to actually say, Hey, the agile community is alive and kicking.

Why? Why? Because we are. Increasing the economic side of organizations by X, Y, Z, what kind of parameters would, what coaches need to tweak to say okay, these are like the parts of our puzzle where we can actually make a case for ourselves and say Hey, agile coaching is important. Agile teams are important.

You call them the ice cream flavors. The agile processes out there are important for you to be successful for whatever is hitting your organization in the future. How would they use that kind of profit stream?

[00:32:20] Luke Hohmann: I'm inspired by there's a gentleman that if you haven't had him on your podcast, you really need to get him.

His name is Peter Green and he runs a company called Humanizing Work. He's a known in the Scrum community and he used to be one of the leaders at Adobe and Adobe's transition to more agile practices. And I remember that one of the metrics that Peter really tracked was just one thing, defects found in production.

And remember I said that there was only, development teams need multiple metrics, but in this case, he was using the one metric that really resonated with his leaders and he showed his leaders how when defects in productions were reduced, customer satisfaction increased when customer satisfaction increased, renewals increased.

The cost of customer care went down because there's fewer defects. And fewer upset customers, developer satisfaction went up because instead of fixing bugs, you're building new features. And so what he did was. He took the time to translate something that was just a number of defects found in production into how it expressed itself in a relevant profit oriented way.

So my advice to the agile coaches out there is if you believe that you're creating a more effective, more efficient, more effective, doing the right things, more efficient, doing them effective, doing them well. If you think you're creating and contributing to this organization and, for example, I'm an agile coach and my team is quote unquote happier.

What does that actually mean? What, we know that stable teams, like we have data on stable teams, that stable teams produce fewer bugs. That's an argument for stable teams. So what is the data that shows that coach is creating an economic impact that is relevant to the organization? And I am said this for decades.

I am always concerned that people focus on trying to achieve the happiness of developers. When I think that the happiness of developers is an outcome of other elements, meaning if I'm a developer and I have Dan Pink, if I have reasonable autonomy, I have reasonable mastery, I, I have a purpose, right?

Then I'm happy. But focusing on happiness doesn't mean I'm getting autonomy. Giving me autonomy, making sure I'm trained, making sure I have a purpose. Those and I definitely think that the many of the coaches I've seen, um, they don't always understand what the deeper opportunities might be.

[00:35:08] Joe Krebs: Yeah. This is some awesome advice here. And I did not have Peter on the podcast and Peter, if you're listening to this, expect a call from me. Thank you, Luke. This was really insightful. And obviously I will share the book information for all the material on the show page of Agile FM, I just want to say thank you for sharing a very different view on things from what I had in the past in terms of guests and just chat a little bit about profit streams and make this really tangible for people of what they need to, establish within the organization to be successful and ready for the future.

[00:35:42] Luke Hohmann: Yeah. And Joe, thank you. I'm going to leave just two more things for the listeners. I think they're important right now. We do think the agile community, many of us who've been there a while. And many of the leaders, we think the agile community is in some form of transition or some form of change, which means.

It's up to you as a listener to decide what you think that future is and then work towards that future. A few years ago, my colleague Jason Tanner and I, we sat down and we were at an offsite and we said to ourselves, where do we really believe a future or part of the future of Agile has to be? And we decided that a part of the future of Agile has to be a return to the economics. of understanding profit and sustainability, and we acted accordingly, right? We wrote a book. We've got a partner program. We're doing consulting work. We're seeing our consulting business and profit streams is skyrocketing in terms of growth because we're finding that companies are going, wait a minute, You guys are right.

You're We've invested in agile. How do we measure the return and how do we make sure that we're creating a profit? So and i'm not arguing that people have to buy into our perspective What I am saying is if you assert that the agile community is changing You can't just sit there and complain about it You have to decide what part of that future you want to create And what part of that future you want to be a part of and from there?

You Your life will have purpose. Your life will have direction. And I think that's part of what's happening in the agile community right now. We're seeing this kind of Oh, what are what is our future? And where are we going to be? And how is it going to work as people are trying to decide? And I would invite people to reflect on their own and make a decision on their own about what they think that future is going to be, right?

[00:37:40] Joe Krebs: Look, there's something very similar to what my kids are hearing in school every day. Make it a great day or not, the choice is yours.

[00:37:47] Luke Hohmann: Oh, I love it. That's a great way to close. Luke, thank you so much.

Transcript:

Agile FM radio for the agile community.

[00:00:04] Joe Krebs: In today's episode of Agile FM, I have Lisa Crispin with me. She can be reached at very easy to remember lisacrispin. com. Lisa is an author of a total of five books. There's three I want to highlight here or four actually is Obviously, a lot of people have talked in 2009, when the book Agile Testing came out, a practical guide for testers and Agile teams.

Then following that more Agile Testing, right? Then I thought it would be most Agile Testing, but it turned into Agile Testing Condensed in 2019 and just very recently a downloadable book, Holistic Testing, a mini book. Welcome to the podcast, Lisa.

[00:00:47] Lisa Crispin: Thank you for inviting me. I'm honored to be part of the podcast.

You've had so many amazing people on so many episodes. So it's great.

[00:00:54] Joe Krebs: Thank you. And now it's one more with you. So thank you for joining. And we will be talking a little bit about a totally different topic than maybe the last 20 episodes I had maybe way back. I did some testing topics, but I cannot recall maybe the last 20 episodes.

So we're not about testing a super important topic. I would not consider myself an expert in that. And I don't know of the audience who has been listening to maybe the last 20 episodes are very familiar with agile testing. Maybe everybody has a feeling about, when they hear the word testing, but there is a huge difference between agile testing.

And let's say traditional testing methods. If you just want to summarize like very brief, I know a lot of people are familiar with some of those things, but what it is, if somebody says what is agile testing, why was this different to traditional testing methods?

[00:01:47] Lisa Crispin: Yeah. I think that there are a couple of big differences.

One is that testing this is just a truth and not necessarily something to do with agile, but testing is really just part of software development. So many people think of it as a phase that happens after you write code, but in modern software development we're testing all the time, all the way around that whole DevOps loop, really.

And and so the whole team's getting engaged in it through the whole lifecycle and the focus. Is on bug prevention rather than bug detection. Of course, we want to detect the bugs that make it out to production so we can fix them quickly. But really what we want to do is prevent those bugs from happening in the first place.

So there are all these great practices that were popularized by that extreme programming and agile, things like test driven development, continuous integration, test automation all the things that go into, the planning. Workshops and things where we talk about our new features and break them into stories and what's going to be valuable to customers, having those early conversations, getting that shared understanding, things like behavior driven development, where we think about what we're going to code before we code it.

That's all really different from, I guess I would say a more traditional software development approach where, Oh, we focus on these requirements. The requirements and a lot of people think about testing is just make sure it met the requirements. But there's so much more to that. We've got all these quality attributes, like security and performance and all the things that we also need to test.

So it's a huge area, but it's woven into software development, just like coding, just like design, just like architecture, just like monitoring and observability. It's all part of the process.

[00:03:31] Joe Krebs: Yeah. It's like a QA baked in, if you want to see it this way. And then also the automation of all that, right?

So automating everything you just said is probably also a concern. Not that's necessarily new to agile, but that's a focus as well now I don't know if I don't have necessarily data points around that but I have worked with a lot of Scrum teams and Agile teams in my career.

And it seems, if somebody would say what are the challenges within these teams? And one of them is, you can almost always highlight that, and I say almost purposely because there are good exceptions, is to build an increment of work once per sprint. A lot of teams do not accomplish that, and it's often related to testing activities.

Why is that, in your opinion, like when we're seeing these teams struggle to put an increment of work out or a piece of the product or whatever you want to call it if you don't use Scrum necessarily, but to build something that could potentially go out. It's the quality standards of going out. What are the struggles out there for teams, especially on the testing side?

I see that as you just said, like it's always happening or often happens at the end, rather than in the front.

[00:04:46] Lisa Crispin: Yes. Unfortunately, I see, still see a whole lot of scrum teams and other agile teams doing a mini waterfall where they have testers on the cross functional team. But. The testers are not being involved in the whole process, and the developers aren't taking up practices like tester development, because those things are hard to learn and a lot of places don't enable.

The non testers to learn testing skills because they don't put those skills into the skills matrix that those people need to advance their careers. And the places I've worked where we succeeded with this sort of whole team holistic approach, everybody had testing skills in their skills matrix.

And we all had to learn from each other and, testers had other skills in their taste, matrix, like database skills and at least the ability to read code and be able to pair or ensemble with somebody. So that's part of it. And I just think. It's people don't focus enough on that, on the early process of the business stakeholder has brought us a new feature.

We need to test that idea before we do anything. Is this really giving, what value, what's the purpose of the feature? What value is it going to give to the customer and to the business? And a lot of times we don't ask those questions up front. And the stakeholders don't ask themselves and then they get, you deliver the feature and it's something the customers didn't even want.

[00:06:11] Joe Krebs: Lisa, we need to code. We need to get software. Why would we talk about that? Why would we not just code? I'm kidding.

[00:06:18] Lisa Crispin: Yeah. Yeah. And that's also required, that's why the whole concept of self organizing team works really well. When you really let the teams be autonomous, because then they can think how best, how can we best accomplish this than they can do?

Let's do some risk storing before we try to slice this into stories and let's do good practices to slice that feature into small, consistently sized stories that give us a reliable cadence predictable cadence of the business can plan and. Take those risks that we identified, get concrete examples for the business stakeholders of how this should behave and turn those into tests that guide development.

Then we can automate those tests. And now we have regression tests to provide a safety net. So that all fits together. And of course, these days, we also need to put the effort into kind of the right side of the DevOps loop. We're not going to prevent all the bugs. We're not going to know about all the unknown unknowns, no matter how hard we try.

And. These cloud architectures are very complex. Our test environments never look like production, so there's always something unexpected that happens. And so we have to really do a good job of the telemetry for our code, gathering all the data, all the events, all the logging data for monitoring. For alerting and also for observability, if something happens that we didn't anticipate, so it wasn't on our dashboard.

We didn't have an alert for it. We need to be able to quickly diagnose that problem and know what to do. And if we didn't have. Enough telemetry for diagnosing that problem without having to, Oh, we've got to go back and add more logging and redeploy to production so we could figure it out. Oh, how many times has my team done that?

That's all part of it. And then learning from production using those. And we've got fantastic analytics tools these days. Learning from those and what are the customers do? What was most valuable to them? What did they do when they, especially I mostly have worked on web applications.

What did they do again? We released this new feature in the UI. How did they use it? And it's, we can learn, we know that stuff now. So that feeds back into what changes should we make next?

[00:08:29] Joe Krebs: All right. So it's, it comes full circle, right? What's interesting is there's this company, it's all over the news.

It's Boeing, right? We're recording this in 2024 quality related issues. Now, that is an extreme example, obviously, but. We do have these kind of aha and wake up moments in software development too, right? So that we're shipping products and I remember times where testing, I purposely call it testing and not QA, testing personnel was outsourced.

That was like many years ago. We actually felt oh, this activity can be outsourced somewhere else. And you just made a point of if we have self organizing teams, And we're starting with it and we're feeding in at the end of a loop back into the development efforts, how important that is and how we treated these activities in the past and how, what we thought of it is, it's shocking now looking back in 24, isn't it?

[00:09:23] Lisa Crispin: Yeah, it's just, it just became so much part of our lives to run into that. And the inevitable happened, it generally didn't work very well. I've actually known somebody who led an outsourcing test team in India and was working with companies in the UK and Europe.

They actually were able to take an agile approach and keep the testers involved through the whole loop. They had to work really hard to do that. And there were a lot of good practices they embraced to make that work. But you have to be very conscious. And and both sides have to be willing to do that extra work.

[00:09:56] Joe Krebs: You just mentioned that there were some really cool analytics tools. I don't know if you want to share any of those because you seem very excited about this,

[00:10:05] Lisa Crispin: the most, the one that I found the most useful and I, a couple of different places I worked at used it.

It's called full story. And it actually. It captures all the events that are happening in the user interface and plays it back for you as a screencast. Now, it does block anything they type in. It keeps it anonymized. But you can see the cursor. And I can remember one time a team I was on, it's we put a whole new page in our UI, a new feature.

We thought people would really love it. And we worked really hard on it and we, we tried to do a minimum viable version of it, but we still put some effort in it and we put it out there. And then we looked at the analytics and full story and we could see that people got to the page. Their cursor moved around and then they navigated off the page.

So either it wasn't clear what that page was for, or they just couldn't figure it out. So that was really valuable. I was like, okay, can we come up with a new design for this page? If we think that's what the problem is, or should we just, okay, that was a good. Good learning opportunity. But as a tester, especially there, because we can't reproduce problems, we know there's a problem in production, can't reproduce it.

But if we go and watch a session where somebody had the problem, and there are other things, mixed panel, won't play it back for you, but you can see every step that the person did. And even observability tools Honeycomb and LightStep can show you like the whole, they can trace the whole path of what did the user do.

And that really helps us not only understand the production problem, but, Oh, there's a whole scenario. We didn't even think about testing that. And so there's so much we can learn because we're so bound by our cognitive bias, our unconscious biases that we know how we wanted it to work.

[00:11:54] Joe Krebs: Yeah.

[00:11:55] Lisa Crispin: And it's really hard to think outside the box and get away from your biases and really approach it like a customer who never saw it before would do.

[00:12:03] Joe Krebs: Yeah. It's this is the typical thing, right? If a software engineer demonstrates their own software they produce and was like eight books on my machine, I'm sure you have heard that.

And it's it's obvious that you would do this, right? And it's just not necessarily obvious for somebody else. But if you're like sitting in front of a screen developing something for a long time, it just becomes natural that you would be working like this. I myself have engineered software and and fell into that trap, right?

It's oh my God, eye opening event. If somebody else looks at you or. Yeah,

[00:12:33] Lisa Crispin: Even when you sometimes have different people, like I can remember an occasion that Timo was on with a, again, a web application and I was just changed in the UI, just adding something in the UI and I tested it. My, my manager tested it.

One of the product owner tested it. And we all thought it looked great and it did look great. We didn't notice the other thing we had broken on the screen until we put it in the production and customers were like, Hey, I really do think things like pair programming, pair testing, ensemble, working in ensembles for both programming and testing, doing all the work together.

Getting those diversity points does help hugely with that. My theory is we all have different unconscious biases. So maybe if we're all together, somebody will notice a problem. I don't have any science to back that up, but But that's why those kind of practices are especially important.

[00:13:28] Joe Krebs: Yeah.

[00:13:28] Lisa Crispin: To catch as many things as we can.

[00:13:30] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So we both didn't have any kind of science to back this up, but let's talk a little bit about science. Okay. Because metrics, data points, evidence. What are some of the KPIs if somebody listens to this and says Oh, that sounds interesting. And we definitely have shortcomings on testing activities within Agile teams.

Obviously there's the traditional way of testing. They're using very different data points. I have used some in the past, and I just want to verify those with you too. It's that's even useful and still up to date. What would be some good KPIs when somebody approaches you and says that's got to have that on your dashboard?

[00:14:08] Lisa Crispin: I think you, I actually think one of my favorite metrics to use is cycle time, although that encompasses so many things, but just watching trends and cycle time. And if you're, if you've got, for example, if you've got good test coverage with your automated regression tests, you're going to be able to make changes really quickly and confidently.

And if you have, a good deployment pipeline, you're going to Again, there's a lot of testing that goes into making sure your infrastructure is good and your pipeline is performing as it should, because it's all code to that reflects a whole lot of things. It's hard to isolate one thing in your cycle time but what counts is, how consistent are we at being able to frequently deliver small changes?

So I think that's an important one. And in terms of. Did we catch all the problems? I think it gets really dangerous to do things like, Oh, let's count how many bugs got in production because all measures can be gained, but that's a really easy one to gain. But things like how many times did we have to roll back or revert a change in product in production?

Because there was something we didn't catch and hopefully we detected that ourselves with an alert or with monitoring before the customers saw it. And now that we have so many release strategies where we can do, Canary releases or blue green deploy so that we can do testing and production safely.

But still how many times did we have to roll back? How many times did we get to that point and realize we didn't catch everything? That can be a good, that can be a good thing to track. And depending on what caused it. If we had to, if we had a production failure because, somebody pulled the plug of the server out of the wall.

That's not, that's just something that happened, but if it is something that the team's process failed in some way, we want to know about that. We want to improve it. And, just how frequently can we deploy I think, the thing with continuous delivery, so many teams are practicing that are trying to practice that you're not going to succeed at that if you're.

If you're not preventing defects , and if you don't have good test automation, good automation the whole way through.

[00:16:08] Joe Krebs: Yeah.

[00:16:08] Lisa Crispin: And I think, deployment frequency, that's another one of the Dora key metrics. Yeah. That's a real that we know that correlates with high performing teams.

And of course we shouldn't ignore, how do people feel are people burned out or do they feel happy about their jobs? That's a little harder metric to get. I was on a team, my last full time job, we really focused on cycle time as a metric and we didn't really have that many problems in production.

So we didn't really bother to track how many times we had to revert because we were doing a good job, but. But but, how frequently were we going? What was our cycle time? But also we did a little developer joy survey. So once a week, we sent out a little 5 question survey based on Amy Edmondson's work.

And now I would base it on I would also use Nicole Forsgren's space survey. Model, but that was just a little before that came out, but just asking just a few questions and multiple, from one to five, how did you feel about this? And it was really interesting because over time, if cycle time was longer, developer joy was down.

So there's something happening here that people are not happy. And. Something's going wrong. That's affecting our cycle time. And then the reverse is true. When our cycle time was shorter, joy went up. So I think it's I think it's important and, you don't have to get real fancy with your measurements, just start just, I think you should first focus on what are we trying to improve and then find a metric to guide, to measure that.

[00:17:41] Joe Krebs: I'm glad you said or mentioned code coverage. That's one of one of those I mentioned earlier. I've been working with it quite a bit and cycle time. Um, very powerful stuff. Now, with you, such, somebody who has written published about agile testing extensively we are in 2024. There was the years ahead.

There are agile conferences. There is a lot going on. What are the trends you currently see in the testing world? What is what's happening right now? What do you think is influencing maybe tomorrow? The days coming, I know you have holistic testing yourself. So maybe that is one but I just want to see, what do you see happening in the agile testing?

[00:18:24] Lisa Crispin: Oh, just all of software development, definitely evolving. I think one of the things is that we're starting to be more realistic and realize that executives don't care about testing. They care about how well does their product sell?

How much money is the company making? We know that. Product quality and process product quality obviously affects that. And that's from a customer point of view. It's the customer who defines quality. And, back in the nineties, we testers thought we were defining quality. So that's a thing, a change that's occurred over time and really thinking about that and also knowing that our process quality has a huge impact on product quality and what are our, are the, What are practices?

What are the most important practices we can be doing? Janet Gregory and who is my coauthor on four of those books and Selena Delesie they've been consultants for years and helped so many huge, even big companies through an agile transformation. And they've distilled their magic into their, what they call a quality practices assessment model.

And they identified 10 quality practices that they feel are the most important and things like feedback loops. Things like communication, right? And the model helps you ask questions and see where is the team in these different different aspects of practices that would make them have a quality process, which would help them have a quality product.

And it gives teams a kind of a roadmap. It's here's where we are now. What do we need to improve? Oh, we really need to get the continuous delivery and these things are on our way, things like that. So I think that's one realization that it ties back to the idea that testing is just part of software development and we've had for years.

So like, how can I make the, president of this company understand that we testers are so important. We're not, but it's important that the team build that quality.

[00:20:29] Joe Krebs: But you could also argue that maybe a CEO of a company or the leadership team would say, we also don't care if this is being expressed in one line of code or two lines of code.

So it's not necessarily to testing. I think they're just saying we have, here's our product. But I think what has changed is that your competition is just one mouse click away. Yeah. Quality is a determining factor. Now, let's take this hypothetical CEO out there right now listening to our conversation and saying I do want to start to embrace agile testing and agile in general, but more of those things you just mentioned, what would be a good starting point for them?

Obviously there's a lot of information right now keywords and buzzwords we just shared today. What would be a good starting point for them to start that journey, because that is obviously not something that's coming overnight.

[00:21:20] Lisa Crispin: I think one of the most important things that leadership can do is to make, to enable the whole team to learn testing skills that will help them build quality.

And that means making it part of their job description, making it part of their skills matrix for career advancement, because that gives them time. If developers are paid to write lines of code, that's what they're going to do. But if they're, it's okay, you're an autonomous team.

You decide what practice you think will work for you. We're going to support you. It's going to, it's going to slow things down at first. Okay, like I was on a team in 2003 that was given this mission. Okay. Do what you think you need to do first. We decided what level of quality we wanted, of course.

We wanted to write code that we would take home and show our moms and put it on our refrigerators, and and we all commit to that level of quality. How can we achieve that? We're seeing that test driven development has worked really well for a lot of teams. So let's do test driven development, which is really.

Not that easy to learn, but when you have a leadership that lets you have that time to learn and support you, it pays off in the long run because eventually you're a lot more confident. You've got all these regression tests. You can go faster and things like continuous integration, refactoring, all these practices that we know are good.

And we were empowered to adopt those. It was all part of all of our job descriptions. And that's, so we became a high performing team, not overnight. Yeah, within a few years and a part of our, part of what we did was spend a lot of time learning the business domain. It's a very complicated business domain.

And so when the stakeholders came and said we want this feature and we asked them what, why do they want it? What was it supposed to do? What was the value? We could usually cut out half of what they thought they wanted. We can say, okay, if we did all of this, we think it's going to be this much effort, but we could do 80 percent of it for half the cost.

How's that? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Nobody ever turned us down on that one. So that's another way where you go fast, we eliminate things that customers don't want or need.

And so yeah, it's the unicorn magic of a self true self organizing team.

[00:23:30] Joe Krebs: Yeah. But I do think what you said is, , this one thing that just stood out to me It is an investment, it is an investment into the future.

It's a really good feeling to have later on the capability of releasing software whenever you want. If that is not becoming a massive burden and the whole company needs to come together for all nighters to get a piece of software out of the door. Now you're not only an author here you're also a practitioner.

You also work with teams and I just want to come back to that business case of agile testing. One more time. Do you have an example from a client recent or further back where you would say that stands out or that's an easy one? You remember where agile testing made a huge difference for an organization.

I'm sure there are tons you have where you would say there was a significant impact for them based on introducing agile testing practices.

[00:24:29] Lisa Crispin: I certainly, especially early on in the extreme programming and Agile adoption there was a few occasions where I joined a team that never had testers.

They were doing the extreme programming practices and you may recall that the original extreme programming publications did not mention testers. They were all about testing and quality, but they didn't mention testers. And. So these teams were doing test driven development, continuous integration. They were writing really good code and then they were doing, they were doing their two week sprints and maybe, maybe it took them three sprints to develop what the customer wanted and then they give it to the customer and the customer is but that's not what I wanted.

So they like, maybe we need a tester. So then they hired me. And I was like, oh okay, let's let's have some of the, some, okay, we're gonna do a new, some new features. Let's have some brainstorming sessions. How are we gonna, what is this new feature for? How are we gonna implement it?

What are the risks? And start doing risk assessments. And how are we gonna mitigate those risks? Are we gonna do it through testing? Are we gonna do it through monitoring? And just asking those what if questions? What's the worst thing that could happen? That's my favorite question when we release this.

And could we deploy this feature to production and have it not solve the customer problem? And just add, anyone could ask those questions. It doesn't have to be a tester, but I find the teams that don't have professional testers, specialists, they, nobody else thinks of those questions. They could. But they just, testing is a big area.

It is a big set of skills. And anybody on that team, I know lots of developers who have those skills, but not every team has a developer like that, other specialists, like business analysts could also help, but there were even fewer business analysts back in the day than there were testers.

And as soon, so as soon as the tester, and when I, one team I joined early on, okay, they're like, okay, Lisa you can be our tester. But you can't come to the planning meetings and you can't come to the standups.

That's a little weird. I did as best I could without being involved in any of the planning.

And so that's the end of the two weeks. They weren't finished. Nothing was really working. And I said, Oh, Hey, can we try it my way? Let me be involved in those early planning discussions. Let me be part of the standup and Oh, amazing. Next time we met our target. And and I was I couldn't support all the, there were 30 developers and one tester, but we agreed that one other person or two other people would wear the testing hat along with me every sprint or at least on a daily basis.

And so they all started to get those testing skills. Yeah, they just test, like I say, testing is a big area and you don't know what you don't know. I see teams even today. That they don't have any testers because years ago they were told they didn't need them if they did these extreme programming practices and they're doing testers involvement, they're doing continuous integration.

They're maybe even doing a little exploratory testing. They're doing pair programming, even some ensemble or mob programming. They're doing great stuff, but they're missing out all that stuff at the beginning to get the shared understanding with the stakeholders of what to build.

[00:27:43] Joe Krebs: All those lines of code that were needed. Wouldn't need to be tested.

[00:27:48] Lisa Crispin: And so they release the feature and bugs come in. And they're really, they're missing features. It's not what the customer needed. Too many gaps. .

And of course, I want to say those aren't really bugs. But they're bad. Yeah. And if you'd had a risk storming session, if you had planning sessions where you got.

Example mapping sessions, for example, where you got the business rules for the story, concrete examples for his business role, and then you turn those into tests to guide your development with behavior driven development. This would have solved your problem, but they didn't know to do that. Anybody could have learned those things, but we can't all know everything.

[00:28:25] Joe Krebs: Yeah. We're almost out of time.

But there's one question I wanted to ask you and it might be a short answer. I hope you condense it a little bit. But when somebody gets on your LinkedIn page Lisa Crispin there is you in a picture plus a donkey. And you have donkeys yourself.

And how does this relate to, does it relate to your work? What do you find inspirational about donkeys? And what, why is, why did you even make your LinkedIn profile? It has to be, it has to be a story around it.

[00:28:55] Lisa Crispin: It's interesting. A few years ago at European testing conference, we had an open space and somebody said, Oh, let's have an open space session on Lisa's donkeys.

And then we got to talking about this and I actually have learned a lot. About Agile for my donkeys. And I think the biggest thing is trust. So donkeys are work on trust. So with horses, I've ridden horses all my life and had horses all my life as well. You can bribe or bully a horse into doing something, they're just, they're different.

If you reward them enough, okay they'll go along with you. If you kick them hard enough, maybe they'll go. Donkeys are not that way. They're looking out for number one. They're looking out for their own safety. And if they think you might be getting them into a situation that's bad for them, they just flat won't do it.

So that's how they get the reputation of being stubborn. You could beat a bloody, you could offer them any bribe you want. They're not doing it. And so I learned I had to earn my donkey's trust. That's so true of teams. We all have to trust each other. And when we don't trust each other. We can't make progress and the teams I've been on that have been high performing teams We had that trust so we could have discussions where we had different opinions We could express our opinions without anyone taking it personally Because we knew that we were all in it together and it was okay Anybody could feel safe To ask a question, anybody can feel safe to fail, but you have that trust that there's nothing bad is going to happen.

And so I could bring my donkey right in that door in the house. I've taken them in schools. I've taken them to senior centers because they trust me. And if I did anything, if they came to harm while in my care, if I, let's say I was driving the cart and the collar rubbed a big sore on them, that would destroy the trust.

And it would be really hard to build it back. And so we always need to be conscious of how we're treating each other in our software teams.

[00:30:55] Joe Krebs: Yeah, wonderful. I did hear about the rumor of being stubborn. But I also always knew that donkeys are hardworking animals.

[00:31:02] Lisa Crispin: They love to work hard.

Yeah.

[00:31:05] Joe Krebs: Awesome. Lisa, what a great ending. I'm glad we had time to even touch on that. That was a great insight. Thank you so much for all your insights around testing, but also at the end about donkeys. Thank you so much, Lisa.

[00:31:17] Lisa Crispin: Oh, it's my pleasure.

Transcript:

Agile F M radio for the agile community.

[00:00:04] Joe Krebs: Thank you for tuning into another episode here of Agile FM. Today I have two guests with me. We are a trio today that is Maureen McCarthy and Zelle Nelson are with me. They both are we're going to go really deep on this the creators of the method that's called the Blueprint of We and they can be reached at collaborativeawareness. com. Welcome to the podcast, Maureen and Zelle.

[00:00:28] Maureen McCarthy: I am so thrilled for this conversation, Joe, because. The weaving between Agile and the work we do in the world is brilliant. And I love having the conversation about how that goes on. So

[00:00:39] Zelle Nelson: really happy to be here.

[00:00:40] Maureen McCarthy: Yeah. Thanks.

[00:00:41] Joe Krebs: Awesome. Yeah, we will be talking a little bit about that blueprint of we, but before we do that just to set the stage a little bit with everyone, why the blueprint of we exist, why your work exists.

There is a very sad history to this, and that is that Maureen, you found out that you have a rare genetic lung disease, and you are. Operating on 10% lung capacity. Is that correct?

[00:01:11] Maureen McCarthy: That is true. I've been on oxygen for 20 years, but nobody lives as long as I have. So it's a, it's very rare. Most people are dead.

Within 10 years I've had it 35

.

[00:01:21] Maureen McCarthy: So I've had since I was very young. But it's not a sad story. It's actually a very creative story.

It's not, I don't, there's lots of crazy stuff that goes on with it, but I don't feel sad about it. We've done so many, we've made the stress of what.

A health challenge can be into a creative process of How do you thrive even when stuff is going on that's nuts.

[00:01:43] Joe Krebs: Yeah the reason why we connect a little bit the blueprint of we the work you guys are doing and facilitation collaboration is directly tied to this to the lung disease. Can you guys elaborate a little bit on.

How this all started for you guys and how you are, obviously your behavior changed as a result of that diagnosis

[00:02:08] Maureen McCarthy: we actually met the year my doctors told me that I would die. So it was my 10 year mark of when most people are dead and meeting somebody. We both had our own individual businesses at that point, but meeting somebody the year you're supposed to die, you don't measure anything up against forever.

You have to look at what's here right now and decide what you want to do with it. And we realized like the normal path when you meet someone is, do you want to date and get engaged and get married and have a white picket fence? Like you actually have those things that just project in your mind, because that's expected, to at least ask those questions.

[00:02:44] Zelle Nelson: There was nothing for us to pull off the shelf to say, this is how you do it.

[00:02:48] Maureen McCarthy: Yeah.

[00:02:49] Zelle Nelson: So we had to design it for ourselves

[00:02:51] Maureen McCarthy: and we created this. Document this relationship design document. We realize we've got to design something that's so specific to us and there's things that we want to No one understand about ourselves, about each other, but most specifically about who we are together.

If this isn't what doing what you normally do when you become a couple, what the heck is it? So that design process we wrote down, we're like, let's do a design process, a design document, let's make it iterative and changeable and. Upgraded over time to, to show us who we are when we learn more about ourselves, about another, when we go through the chaos of in and out of the hospital and losing more lung capacity and massive levels of pain and just crazy things.

You've got to be agile. You literally have to be agile. And without the design document, I think we could have gotten lost. In a path that can be very chaotic, especially because lots of people around us got worried. It made me understand the difference between worry and care. Like when people worry for me, all my pain gets worse.

It's harder to breathe when people care about me. It's two different ways we're using our neurocircuitry, right? And care is a way to support other people. Worry is a way to add more stress and fear and the weightiness of all that. And when you've got 10 percent lung capacity. You feel weightiness unlike other people.

Yeah, this is, I'm like a little like a little experiment of my own body of what it means to be like collaborative and connected, because everything that's going on in my body, we use as a way to be part of the design. Like this, there's chaos going on in here. How does that mirror the chaos of the world and how do we design healthy relationships and healthy interactions based on, what could be considered chaos?

[00:04:40] Joe Krebs: Yeah, so this blueprint you guys, we're going to go a little bit deeper here. It's really something you build, it's a process. It's a relationship design process used to build resilient, collaborative relationships in startups, communities, and organizations worldwide.

And I think what's, so I just read that out. That's, I saw that, but what's important about that is that you'll have a very personal story. This process is something that was created between you guys to find out how you guys going to transition.

And now you're taking this process and bringing it back to the world.

So there's these things live every day to the fullest, and make the best out of every day. You are making the best out of every day. Is that part of your blueprint? Can you give like listeners to Agile FM? So what's the difference between you as a couple, right? Different to or not necessarily different, but maybe similar to how teams should be operating or when they're working in pairs, let's say.

[00:05:44] Maureen McCarthy: This was an interesting evolution of the document. So the blueprint of, we began because of this design conversation, we thought it was just going to be for us. Then we did it with their kids. Their first blueprint they wrote was when they were four and six years old. We did one as a family. Then we started realizing, so we both had our separate consulting businesses.

And we woke up one day and said, traditional legal contracts felt like they didn't have the spirit of what we were designing in our life. And so we made what we thought was the scariest choice imaginable. We said, you know what, we're going to stop using traditional legal contracts. And only use the blueprint in our contracting process because it takes both everything you're agreeing to and who the people are and how you're going to do it together into consideration.

And so we made a list of colleagues, we could send any of our clients. Our clients are, governments and universities and international corporations like they're, they live and die by their contracts, right? And we were really nervous to say, yes, thank you for wanting us to do your contract and we're going to do a blueprint instead, if that doesn't work for you, here's a list of colleagues that you can contact and we thought we'd lose most of our clients and we never lost one in all these years.

And so it moved into the situation there where now companies, people we were, doing work with started to understand that because we did a blueprint with them. That's how we created a contract. And then they turned around and said, can you come in and teach us to our organization? Can you bring this whole concept for the groups and people and teams and things that are working together?

So it was really the organizations telling us. Oh my god, we're missing this piece of how we work together.

[00:07:22] Joe Krebs: Yeah.

[00:07:22] Maureen McCarthy: And then it just spread. We were asked to speak at an international peace conference in Russia. And that you had to either speak English, Russian, or bring an interpreter. I think there were 39 countries represented.

And suddenly it spread like wildfire. So it took on a life of its own.

[00:07:38] Zelle Nelson: Yes, it's really about having clarity in each individual having getting as much clarity as they can, and then having a conversation where you can ask questions and get curious and actually. Have a artifact that holds what is our conversation and how are we going to be together in any relationship?

There's at least three entities. There's you, there's me, and there's this third entity of we, and we need to give energy and understanding to how these all will work together and how we're going to come together to Do what we want to do.

[00:08:14] Maureen McCarthy: We have this term we call the WECO system. It's the ecosystem of the we, and the notion is that in any work situation you're in, there's an entire ecosystem of all the different pieces and who's working on what and what our roles and responsibilities and who's the customer.

All of that, but it often doesn't take the relationship of the people and who we are together into consideration. So when you get a team to start looking at okay, you've got even like the working agreements that happen in agile, right? Those are agreements on all the different pieces of the ecosystem, but the people are not built around that because.

I know agile is all about people first, right? So if you think about that, we need to have those as part of our agreements. Who are you? How do you work best? What do you look like when you're stressed out? What can I do for you to help you get you out of it? You tell me what your stress looks like.

You tell me what the best inflow day you've ever had looks like. And then we can exchange some information. You could know that about me. And then when Zelle talks about the artifact. I can be self aware myself, you can be self aware yourself but together there is no artifact. I hold me inside of me and my brain.

There isn't anything for this we, for who we are together. So we coined the term collaborative awareness because that is like the design and understanding of who we are together. And you can build that. The blueprint becomes a document, an artifact, a process that you're actually, but it's like open space.

It's simple, it's elegant. It doesn't have a lot of. There's not a lot that you have to do to really make it sing like we'll, we can do an open space. We use open space, world cafe, different large group dialogue tools to actually have people do their blueprint in a really short amount of time, like fast paced process.

So it's not some but you, it's iterative. So you're constantly upgrading it as you grow is all the different elements change. Because you need to be adaptable.

[00:10:11] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Do you have an example for that? Like for the iteration piece of your process of where you do like certain loops and refinements of some sort?

Because we assume it's not static, right?

[00:10:23] Maureen McCarthy: It's oh my God. No, the document that Zelle and I first did years ago, we've been together 25 years now. So that document was actually. Looks nothing like our document today. It has changed drastically over time because we've changed. The reasons why we're in have changed.

What matters to us has changed. And so that keeping track of that means it's a little more mindful of why are you here? Why do you want to be part of this? Keep that lit up. I want to know how you've been evolving because of all the stuff that's gone on in your life. So part of it is a group will come together.

They first write something called the blueprint of me. Each individual is a set of questions in the five components that make up the blueprint of we and me. And those five components are first is the story of me. This is in the blueprint of me version where you're writing about yourself. So what is the story of me?

What got me here to this work, this team, what I'm about in the world. The second is called interaction styles and stress messages. So this is where I share Hey, this is what I look like when I'm having an inflow day. This is what can help me stay in that space. This is what's important to me.

Sometimes it seems like here's how I want to be contacted. Don't call me before this time of day, or make sure that we write it all in an email as well as talking about it, because I need documentation. Whatever those things that make me do my job best to make me feel like my whole self can be here. I want you to know those because otherwise we end up going into these modes where I think everybody's a little bit like me, so of course, you're only just going to want it like I want it.

[00:11:55] Joe Krebs: Yeah.

[00:11:55] Maureen McCarthy: And we all know that's not actually true and our brains are operating. So we call this the filing system of the mind. If you think about how we engage the world, we basically take in all the bits of data and information that goes on around us. And it's like filling a metaphorical filing system in our mind.

Everything someone said as we were a child, what our co worker said yesterday, a book, a movie, whatever it is. We file things away. Okay. And that's why our brain is basically a meaning making machine.

[00:12:27] Zelle Nelson: All these files filter what we see, what we perceive, what we interpret as what other people do. So in the blueprint, why not exchange and give you my files of me?

You don't have to make assumptions about who I am, how I show up. What makes you,

[00:12:42] Maureen McCarthy: you're using your filing system in order to make sense of him.

Don't do that because you might be mistaken. Let him give you the files of who he is.

[00:12:51] Zelle Nelson: So again, we start with a blueprint of me where each person shares their files of me.

This is who I am. So I show up the third component is custom design, where we look at. What are our values? What are the principles that we want to design from? And what are, we start with some, maybe some opening design questions of this is what I think we're doing. And this is, my suggestions,

[00:13:16] Maureen McCarthy: but it can also be roles and responsibilities

[00:13:19] Zelle Nelson: it evolves.

[00:13:19] Maureen McCarthy: You add that over time, but this is the section where you're saying, this is what matters to us. So it's, what are the what are your values, but what do you want to feel? Every time we're working together. What kind of energy do you want to bring into this? Because that's a great lens to say, Hey, we're at the end of this meeting.

Did that feel energizing? That's one of your words. We can check in right then and say, Yeah, it did or no, it didn't. Okay. How do we iterate the design? So we have more of that energy next time. But it also includes what traditional legal contracts can include. So anything, in fact, there are lawyers, mediators, judges that are huge fans of the blueprint around the world.

There's a couple of law schools that are teaching it. You can use the blueprint process as a traditional contracting process, and it will hold up in a court of law, the same as any other contract.

But it has the people involved, which I think if a judge had to see it, it would feel quite different.

[00:14:16] Joe Krebs: This is very interesting because you just mingled a few things together in your design process, but also in the team agreements and the me and the we, right? It would be a much easier and easier to understand world if everybody would be thinking exactly like me. Wouldn't it? I wish. You wish, right?

But it would be easier, right? So we do need tools like this, but just to give listeners a, an example what I came across, which is fascinating is that the two of you guys don't really have a working agreement. I don't want to call it a working agreement. That sounds too business-y for this. But I learned that Zelle is actually asking you every single day if he if you still want to marry him.

[00:14:53] Zelle Nelson: Yes,

[00:14:53] Joe Krebs: that is a daily

[00:14:55] Maureen McCarthy: literally for 25 years. I'm not kidding you every single day or

[00:14:58] Zelle Nelson: she will ask me.

[00:14:59] Maureen McCarthy: Yeah, 1 of us just said

[00:15:01] Zelle Nelson: it doesn't need to be 1 or the other, but 1 of us will ask the other.

[00:15:05] Maureen McCarthy: He asked me this morning. I said, yes, but I am that in. Every day, because we chose to be together for a day.

And then we choose again every day. That is, there is something really different about that because I have to ask myself every day, why am I in this? Why is this where I want to be? It could be, it could have been a crazy day. We could have gotten in a big fight. But I still have to sit back and go, do I want to be here?

And you do, because every day you're building up the trust, the respect. We define what trust and respect looks like. I know what that looks like for him. He knows what it looks like for me. And so the in, Now, granted, tomorrow, one of us could say no, but shockingly, we have a healthy, insanely live, like a live relationship.

And I could never have predicted that, especially with the chaos that living in this body is.

[00:15:59] Zelle Nelson: And then there was so much we didn't know at the beginning, and that's what made it so iterative. And such a learning process, not only learning about what the other person needs, but learning about what I need.

Like I would come up and, show up in a certain way. And, she'd be like why are you doing that like that? And I might say, I don't know.

[00:16:18] Maureen McCarthy: But it's not, you move from judgment to curiosity.

[00:16:21] Zelle Nelson: Yes.

[00:16:22] Maureen McCarthy: It's not a judgmental question. It's just it's just I'm so curious. Like you've told me about all these different things and Hey, I noticed this.

Tell me more about what that is. Like we're endlessly curious. Because our minds are open. We're not, we're, we don't live in a judgmental space anymore like we did when we first met. I couldn't have predicted that either. It's fascinating.

[00:16:42] Joe Krebs: Yeah. That's, it's very interesting, right? Because if somebody listens to this and again, like living day by day that was just a reminder when I heard that you guys are asking each other every single day that really emphasizes how you live in the moment.

And I think. If you're taking this to the to teamwork, also interesting. I learned something about the you tell me if it's the blueprint or just collaboration in general is that you're really promoting a switch within your brain from defensive stances to proactive connectivity.

What do I have to picture when I study defensive stance, proactive connectivity? How does that shift look like with your method? It sounds great and totally defensive.

What would be the ideal scenario?

[00:17:30] Maureen McCarthy: So what's interesting when you think about the filing system of the mind and how you take in all this data, we have two basic. Neural networks that happen in our brain that are, and they're the two ways that our brain is evolved to keep us alive.

[00:17:43] Zelle Nelson: That's why we thrive as a species.

[00:17:44] Maureen McCarthy: Yeah. So we're either protecting or we're connecting and it's a whole set of neural circuitry that can look different in different people's minds. It's not just one certain path, right? So you take things in someone in front of me saying this, doing this, showing up like this. And I'm either using my, I'm really, it's more of a continuum of safety brain to connect to brain neural circuitry.

I can either take in what you're doing and feel that protection, the stress, the judgment, all those things that happen when we feel like we're at risk. And we have a world that has been built in problem solution thinking of scanning our landscape constantly for problems, and we get a dopamine hit with a solution.

But what we found over the years is with people. Problem solution thinking is not robust enough to hold us in fast paced environments. So we started thinking about the fact that if I've got these two levels of neural circuitry, I can wake up and doom scroll the news and add more files to the safety brain version of my system.

Or I can do something to actually add more files to our connected brain neural circuitry. And it means that when I stand in front of the person who's saying this and doing this, I can make meaning in two different ways. I need my safety brain. I want it on when it is necessary, but we've made it our main mode of operation.

We are so enthralled with protection, and victim mentality too, of like being afraid of whatever somebody else is doing, that we literally cut off. Here's one of the things that's so interesting. When it's very, it's more recent neuroscience research in social neural neuroscience that says when we're focused on a problem, our brain literally becomes tunnel vision.

Because initially it was like, if the bear is coming at me, I need to tunnel down. I can't be creative. I can't be empathic. I can't be connected. I have to zero down. But what happens when we're in that space. Is we have to beat out, weed out every single thing that doesn't say, I know you, I know what you're going to do, you look like me, you act like me, you're going to talk like me, I can't see those things anymore.

So then the person I'm working with, who works very differently than me, if I'm using my safety brain neurocircuitry, I can't let them in. They're not exactly like me. So that now I begin to create other and push people away. That's the protection part of it. If on the other hand, I'm moving from judgment to curiosity.

I want to know and understand what somebody's about. I'm doing a blueprint with them. So they give me a chance to get their own files from them. Now I have the space to be able to show up. And, be in good feedback loops and listen to other people's ideas and feel engaged by the fact that someone doesn't think like me because I'm going to learn something more about how we're going to do this project.

[00:20:28] Zelle Nelson: You're going to bring something else that I don't have.

[00:20:30] Maureen McCarthy: Yeah.

[00:20:31] Zelle Nelson: That I want to invite.

And I think there's a really kind of simple explanation or example might be. Take the behavior of someone closing their door in the middle of the day. To their office. That can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

If I had a boss who anytime they closed their door, it meant they were talking about secret things and someone was gonna get fired. I would be really freaked out if someone closed the door in their office. But if I,

[00:20:57] Maureen McCarthy: not even the boss, just anyone else, anyone, my neural circuitry might say, that means there's a problem.

[00:21:02] Zelle Nelson: Yes, in if I were in, in the connected brain space. Someone closes their door. I might get curious about what's happening or why they might be closing their door. Maybe they need to focus. Maybe there's something going on with them that, they need a little privacy or maybe we've had a conversation in our blueprint.

Earlier that said, here's the times when I closed my door, I have a project. I really need to get finished. I need to focus. If you need to talk to me feel free to knock on the door.

There's you talk to, you start to have conversations about how do we set up? What do these things mean? I don't have to be upset about them.

I can actually be. Excited or curious about them and that engages my connected brain. When I get curious about who you are and how you show up and you do the same with me, it grows our trust. It grows our connection as grows our adaptability as well. And I can, if you have a closed door policy and that's really hard for me, we can have a conversation about, Hey, how are we going to make this work?

I need to have access to you and be able to talk with you and

[00:22:05] Maureen McCarthy: you start building bridges because there are differences. There will be more and more differences. Yeah. Because things are changing so fast. Yeah. So how do you, in calm moments, build the bridge instead of getting in stressful situations about it?

[00:22:17] Joe Krebs: It's also interesting when you say that with the door, I also saw the opposite, right? There were environments where there was no door. Yes. And then people felt, this obviously, like here and there, a situation where people felt uncomfortable because, They had to talk to a doctor or something like that, personal phone call and a very important one.

And they couldn't find privacy. Yeah. And it just felt like, where can I take this call? So they were not really focused on something. So it could, it could go either way, right? Where's this person trying to find a phone call, right? And it's not always that easy.

[00:22:51] Maureen McCarthy: Yeah.

[00:22:51] Joe Krebs: You just mentioned problems a little bit our companies are there.

Yeah. They're thriving on problems. We often look at problems. But in scrum, for example, when I work with agile teams, myself, I always remind people that people are not problems. The relationships could be a problem. How does your blueprint address something like this? That it's really like problem management and how you work with organizations that are Like, hyper focused on fixing problems and like seeing everything as a problem whereas the human side or people are not necessarily the problem.

[00:23:27] Maureen McCarthy: Yeah. It's, you are so spot on when it's helping people recognize that people aren't the problem, but actually even the relationship itself is not a problem. It's an opportunity to redesign. We call it stress as a messenger. So instead of stress being a warning sign, if you think about it as a message, it's like a text on your phone that just dings and you're like, Oh, this is.

Pinging me because this matters to me. I care about meeting deadlines on time and this person's not handing me something they need to hand me. So that feels Oh, there's a problem in our relationship. But it just means that the way the relationship is being created needs a little more mindful design.

But when you start talking about there's something up with the design, let's upgrade our design is a very different conversation. Then there's a problem here.

Why are you doing this?

[00:24:22] Zelle Nelson: Oh, Zelle, you're a problem. How much energy do I have to comment? Be better to be curious. It moves me into my safety brain.

[00:24:29] Maureen McCarthy: Yes.

[00:24:30] Zelle Nelson: I want to be in a design conversation where we find clarity around what's important. And that stress message, that ping, that ding on my phone is saying, Hey, something's important. Something could be more fluid here.

[00:24:42] Maureen McCarthy: How do we design for that?

[00:24:43] Zelle Nelson: Let's get curious. Let's find out what that is. And let's design something that works.

[00:24:48] Maureen McCarthy: And we've been using these tools with groups around the world. We have facilitators around the world and it's the same everywhere. Humans show up and need those design conversations because we're not taught that in a problem solution world. When you're focusing on the problem, nobody's actually taught how to design.

In fact, even, so there's a whole set of what we call our clear mind tools. Where both individually and collectively you upgrade your brains to be running more connected brain neural circuitry than safety brain. And in that space you begin to realize that this is not a this is not a world of problems and it's actually easy to start upgrading the filing system of your mind.

One of the great sort of visuals I created a while back. Was what we call pick up the sled and it's the notion that if you're standing at the top of a snowy hill with a sled in your hands, if you sled down the left side of the hill, just a couple of times, you creates a rut in the snow. You don't need to steer anymore.

It just goes down. That's an analogy for how neural circuitry is made in the brain. Okay. But what you need to do, so if the left side of the hill is my stressful thinking around that person I'm working with, the only thing I can do to change that, because that's stress on me, they do what they do. And I get to pick whether I'm stressed or not, but what I want to have is a path down the right side of the hill as another option more curious, relaxed open perspective on the same person, same topic, and then I want to create just like I could create a positive perspective on the right side of the hill, go down a couple of times and that can become a rut as well.

But what we do is we fill the filing system with things that are down the left side of the hill, right?

So what you first need to do is actually pick up the sled in an awareness phase. I can't drag the sled from one side of the hill to the other. It's too hard. But I can't stop for a moment and say, let me pick up that sled.

I just going to notice for a while. Oh, there's me thinking that way again, there's me feeling all that stress about what he did.

I want to notice first. I don't want to change it. I don't want to say it's bad and wrong. It's just what's happening. Okay. And what happens when you begin this awareness that you're doing these things, our brain, like the rut in the snow.

We don't wake up and choose to be stressed out. It's like it comes and grabs us and drags us down the hill. So when I pick up the sled or even just notice I'm stressed and go, Oh my God, I want to pick up the sled. I can't tell you the number of times I've said those words. Now I begin to move that storm of the stress two miles away.

I can start to see it and how I can handle something when I'm in the eye of the storm and how I handle something when it's two miles off the coast is different. And then once you do an awareness phase for a bit, could be a week, a month, however long it takes, you'll know when you feel like you've moved that storm and then you can start making a new path down the right side of the hill that feels more life giving and positive because what ultimately we're doing with our work is helping to give people options.

I don't ever want to not think negative things or not be stressed or whatever. There's nothing out there that we're against or demonizing or anything. They're all just opportunities for design. So how can I have as many options as possible? When that person shows up doing that thing, I want more options and how to react.

[00:28:03] Zelle Nelson: Again, it allows us to be more agile and adaptable to any situation when I have a broader scope of ways I can engage.

[00:28:11] Maureen McCarthy: And then everything outside of you can be fluctuating all the time and be chaotic. But when you can keep doing that, then you can feel more of the calm consistently. Or you can get out of it faster.

We still get stressed out. We'll still have an argument. We get out of it so fast. I'd be dead if I didn't get out of it fast.

[00:28:29] Joe Krebs: I just wanted to say that for you, it's a very important, personally, a very important decision on what side you're going,

[00:28:35] Maureen McCarthy: exactly. It is literally a life giving.

[00:28:39] Zelle Nelson: I've learned the nuances as well in my own self, because I got had Maureen as an example of, wow, this is stress. I can't run that. ,

[00:28:48] Maureen McCarthy: like the princess and the pea. I feel stress earlier than other people, but it happens to everybody.

[00:28:54] Joe Krebs: But I think we can agree to that. It's you have an immediate, obviously, essential reaction to that. But it doesn't mean that it's not helpful for everybody else. Now if people want to get in touch with you, Maureen and Zell e both of you guys are working on a book. You guys are speaking, you guys are facilitating, you guys are obviously working in the blueprint of we, and I just learned the me and we in this podcast.

I just want to thank you guys for carving out some time, especially, and I do want to say this for somebody who's Who you guys designed something for a day by day experience that you shared for 30 minutes of your day today with the Agile FM listeners. I'm extremely thankful for that. And you made them part of your day and vice versa.

And just want to guys for stopping by and sharing a story here on Agile FM.

[00:29:49] Zelle Nelson: Oh, you're so welcome. Thanks so much. Great to be here. And you can find us at collaborativeawareness. com.

[00:29:55] Joe Krebs: That's correct. Thank you guys.

Book “Uncertain - The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure”:

Transcript:

Agile FM radio for the agile community.

[00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you for tuning into another episode of Agile FM. Today I have Maggie Jackson with me. She wrote a book called Uncertain the Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. She also has published a book Distracted you might be very familiar with because it has been published a few years ago. Maggie is an award winning author, journalist.

She writes about social events. In particular about technology. She's a contributor to the Boston Globe. She wrote for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and she has been featured on media around the world, including MSNBC, Wire. com, and the Sunday Times. And now she is on Agile FM. So thank you so much for being here and sharing some thoughts on the latest release, Uncertain, with the Agile FM listeners.

[00:00:54] Maggie Jackson: My pleasure. Great to be with you.

[00:00:56] Joe Krebs: Yeah, that's awesome. You have some really good endorsements and praise here from people like Daniel Pink, Gretchen Rubin and Sherry Turkle on your book. This is it's really amazing. You you have written this book. This was recently released in 2024. So this is a new publication.

What drove you to writing this book? Uncertain. What was your motivation of approaching this project, this book?

[00:01:24] Maggie Jackson: Yes, sure. Especially because uncertainty seems so foggy and monolithic and negative. And I, after I wrote the book Distracted, which is about, the gains and costs that we have in a split focus world wanting to write a book about thinking, so if you have a moment somewhere, focus, or you have the skill to focus, what do you do with it?

And of course, thinking well is our challenge as we move forward in this world, in this day and age. And so the first chapter of the new book was about uncertainty, and it became in a classic way, the whole book, because first of all, because I discovered, veins of or explosions of new research in so many different fields from medicine to business to psychology, a lot of new research about uncertainty.

And it hadn't been a very well studied topic, believe it or not before. And by that, Epistemic or psychological uncertainty, which is the human response to the unknown. So I'm really writing about our human response to the unknown and the basically the idea that when you meet something new and unexpected, Your response is to understand that you've reached the limits of your knowledge that you don't know that it could be this way.

It could be that way. So that's how I fell into writing the book and I discovered as well that uncertainty is highly misunderstood. It's maligned and yet it's far. It's not weakness. It's not inertia. It's not the negative that we all assume it to be today in this efficiency oriented society.

[00:03:03] Joe Krebs: Yeah that's true. We probably have some listeners here at Agile FM that are maybe in the corporate world and they are building products and or executing projects of some sort. And and we see the desire of being certain. We see the desire of running and having a plan, even if the plan is very short and maybe only a few weeks long.

Uncertainty is always present, isn't it?

[00:03:29] Maggie Jackson: Exactly. And again there are these two kinds of uncertainty. There will always be unpredictability there. Life will always take twists and turns. And we might have the data and the models and the plan. And yet, there's so much we can't know.

Despite this incredible probabilistic weather models that we have, you don't know if the snowstorm will dump one or two inches on your backyard next week. So there's so much we can't know. We don't know, but what we can do is control our response to the unknown. We can get skillful at understanding how to manage not knowing or what we don't know and what we want, what we're not sure about.

And that's where the, that's where the news is fantastic. There's so much now that relates to how uncertainty basically is very highly connected to. Cognitive skills like curiosity and agility and resilience, which are exactly the kind of cognitive skills we need now on. So I think you're right.

And another point I'd make is that we always will need resolution. We always know we'll need an answer. And of course, we want a plan and a kind of security. And yet. By, over predicting or clinging to a plan when it's out of date. That's where we lose the agility. So what I'm talking about is opening up the space between question and answer.

Uncertainty is really that middle ground. It's basically. The brain's way of telling itself that there's something to be learned here when you're meeting something new, you have a kind of stress response, which is really, that's where the unease and the discomfort of uncertainty comes from. It's a stress response.

But now we're beginning to find out scientifically that unease is actually highly beneficial because, as I mentioned, the brain is, more receptive to new data when you're unsure. Your working memory actually improves when you're don't know when you meet something new and your focus expands.

Scientists call this curious eyes. So this is the human response to the unknown. That's really the good stress and wakefulness of uncertainty. And in fact, one study, which I really found very illuminating. is a longitudinal study of executives in Europe. This was around 2009, when the European Union was doubling in size, basically, the markets were expanding, it was the opposite of Brexit, basically, but very controversial.

And executives were, really had many different reactions to this proposed change. Two business school professors interviewed 100 CEOs in Europe at the time, and quite a number of them were quite sure of what was going to happen, they airtight kind of predictions. It'll be good for my company.

Many said. Oh, it'll be terrible for my company, this new market explosion. But then actually the business school professors were surprised that there was a third group in the mix. They were actually surprised that there were ambivalent CEOs. And a year later, after the expansion, it occurred. Low and behold, it was the ambivalent CEOs who had actually were more resourceful, inventive, and inclusive.

They listened to multiple perspectives, and they actually went out and did innovative things, whereas the sure CEOs tended to do, stick to the status quo and basically almost do nothing at all. And that tells you so much about what unsureness does. It opens up the space of possibilities. Very important.

[00:07:19] Joe Krebs: Very important. You just mentioned in these stress moments, right? Positive kind of things are happening. How did you, did your research, did you find anything interesting about. Creativity, innovation in the, in those moments of stress, I would be curious because there's focus, right?

And, but maybe there's also innovation coming out of those moments of Uncertainty.

[00:07:42] Maggie Jackson: Yes. I think that the the uncertainty mindset the good stress of uncertainty first of all helps us attune to our environment. So many studies about learning in dynamic environments find that the people who have this positive.

response and positive attitude toward the unknown are the ones that are more accurate, better performers. So it's really helping you pick up on what's going on. If you walk into a meeting thinking, ah, more of the same, blah, blah, blah, then you're not, you, it makes sense. You're not going to be picking up on the mood in the room or in seeing the facial expression.

So I think this good stress of uncertainty, Does help us be attuned to what's to the change. And that's the starting point. But as I mentioned, the CEOs in this in the European market expansion, we're highly resourceful. So how does this agility or this uncertainty, this good stress of uncertainty help us be creative?

There are many different ways in which first of all, in order to be creative, We have to set step away from the known. So very often the human loves the familiar and the routine. And we actually operate in life using something called predictive processing, which is using your mental models and the heuristics that you've built up based on your experience in the past to expect and assume, the doctor hears chest pains and then thinks heart attacks or, a certain kind of client will evoke an assumption or expectation when they walk into the meeting about what their demands are going to be. We expect so much, but we operate so much into the routine That it's really important that we break from this routine in order to be creative.

That's what innovation is. It's working at the edge. And so that's also what uncertainty helps you do. It makes, it helps you. Studies of divergent thinkers are highly creative with idea generation. Show that they have a kind of cognitive flexibility that they're more able to remain, make unusual connections in their life.

These are the type of people who are, again, more able to operate within the space of uncertainty. And in fact, divergent thinking is actually highly related. It's based on the same brain networks as daydreaming which is a form of, daydreams. What if questionings that they actually remove us from the here and now and they allow us to operate in what one scientist called transcendent thinking mode.

That's basically just asking what if questions and daydreams are actually 50 percent of daydreams are future oriented. So I'd say one of the ways in which we can Manage uncertainty. Is to step back from that need to be productive in a very narrow way and allow ourselves time to muse just for a minute or two.

I interviewed one phenomenal genius scientist who's He's extremely innovative. A MacArthur winner. He's, he's been done. He's, he just, his laboratory just found the first new antibiotic in 35 years. He's, and he spends at least an hour a day daydreaming and it a coherent thought experiment.

But this is not what we. usually consider successful behavior.

[00:11:14] Joe Krebs: Yeah. In the Agile Kata series which I had in the first 10 weeks of 2024 year on Agile FM, we explored the pattern of discovering or dealing with uncertainty as a pattern. So this has been interesting for everybody.

Listening to this here right now to say okay, first and foremost, it's a positive thing. It's a thing we have to deal with. It's uncertainty. Now you're adding even daydreaming as a positive thing to the mix. If somebody in a corporate world listens to this right now, it's we'll book very different.

We work very efficient. And now we're saying like these kind of evidences we see out there of working in different ways could be very productive and creative. And innovative. What's your recommendation on around cultural change? That obviously goes along with this trust, for example, like between employees and the organization to work with an uncertainty mindset.

[00:12:11] Maggie Jackson: Yes, it's really important. And I think, as you mentioned, we live in a society that, whether or not it's in schools, but also particularly in the workplace, operates from an outcome orientation. We don't really pay much attention to process and uncertainty is process. It literally is, as I mentioned, the space between question and answer.

We think of efficiency and it being the, being a one. We think of ourselves as being successful if we're operating at one tempo, speedy. And we think, and also we our ways of knowing, our very definition of what it means to know is being changed by technology, which is constantly offering us a steady diet of neat, pat, instant answers.

That's not how the world works. The mind works. That's not how the flourishing human works. So what can we do to push back on that? I think one of the things that leaders can do in the Agile Kata world is to change their vocabulary in and around words like maybe for instance, expressing, we can actually express.

Express and operate in uncertainty without appearing weak if we're willing to accept its benefits. So words like maybe and sometimes are called hedge words. Now they're often assumed to be signs of weakness, but actually linguistics shows that they do two things. If you say, maybe you're actually signaling that you're receiving.

And then secondly, you're also signaling that there's something more to know, which is very important because most group discussions literally focus on what everyone already knows, And what gets left off the table is something called a hidden profile of individual diverse information. And that's how groups progress.

That's how groups are literally more creative. And so studies out of Harvard show that the use of these words may be sometimes, instead of you're wrong or therefore, which closed down the discussion. These hedge words are actually seen by others during difficult conversations as making a person look more professional and is if they're a better teammate.

That flies in the face of our assumptions. We think of certainty as being successful when the science shows that it, that's not right. And I don't mean that we can never be sure. We, I don't mean that we're not striving for answers. That we need to. Inject more uncertainty into our lives in, and we will as an investment in getting the better answer, not just the first answer.

[00:14:46] Joe Krebs: It could be a second valid answer, right? It could be one, but it could be a second or a third. And so that could lead us to that. Now, I do want to ask you a question. This is really fascinating stuff here. Did you, while writing this book and doing your research everybody's talking about uncertain times and everything.

Did you find anything that we are actually living in times that are more uncertain? Then let's say a hundred years ago. Or is this just a perception of the, in the media we're receiving or anything like that? I'm just trying to find out, I'll be actually living in more uncertain times.

[00:15:25] Maggie Jackson: I think I'd offer a qualified yes.

It's very difficult to compare across vast time periods. 100 years ago was the advent of the industrial age. And I studied that quite a bit for distracted and I'd say it's really hard to make these cross epic comparison. But what I will say is that many studies show in various fields. That yes, unpredictability is rising.

For instance, work hours on average for more people are more volatile. With a 24 7 economy, more people are having, just in time scheduling, which throws their household and their work and etc., leads to stress and frustration. Weather patterns are obviously, due to climate change, becoming more volatile and more erratic.

And so that adds more uncertainty into our days. Geopolitics are, happen to be in a time right now when, with between war and the rise of authoritarian regimes, et cetera. You can see this as not, I think part is, this is not just a perception, there is a reality that the unknowns are rising.

And part of this culturally, I will say is because I think that. Humans are become better at not hiding behind as much as our we expect certainty there. There's a lot of evidence now that old certainties are rumbling. It used to be that the constellations were seen as set in stone. Even just 10 years, the brain was seen as set in stone by adulthood.

And now we know neurogenesis occurs throughout. From cradle to grave. And so now we're faced with the unveiling or the revealing of the fact that we don't know. And that's why I call this a crossroads in human history. I think we're actually at the cusp or the tipping point where the human approach to not knowing Is changing and I think we have to seize this opportunity to understand first to understand and then to actually live lives in which we're more honest about our uncertainty and we gain skill in being right.

[00:17:45] Joe Krebs: You hit on some topics here in terms of changes and that your study found that we are. Living in, in times that are more uncertain, we are recording this here in March, 2024. And there was one topic that is all over the business world and that is currently AI.

And there's probably a lot of uncertainty about this topic right now. What kind of I, just while you were talking, I was like there was the uncertainty about what is going to happen about AI, right? We don't know, right? I think we can say that, but then also saying, I don't know, which is, I think is a positive thing, right?

Based on your explanation. Isn't it also the danger that AI did that answer might even be less acceptable because we should know now, right? Because there is AI, we can ask AI. And I do say that obviously in a more provocative way here. What's your, do you have any advice for people that are possibly thinking that the uncertain times ahead of them because of AI, how to deal with a situation like that based on your research a profession that might, everybody might be talking about, AI is going to replace that or reduce that or have an impact on them, makes them, makes people a learner again Give any advice.

[00:19:07] Maggie Jackson: Yeah, I think that it's a really important front and center. It's it. This AI has gone from a back burner issue, a kind of specialist niche issue to something that's in every workplace. And it's in our lives, whether or not we're. Getting a a mammogram as a woman, or we're driving down the road in a semi autonomous car that isn't even self driving yet.

We, AI is infused, woven into our days, and we should wake up to its implications. I think there are two levels to your question. One is the individual response to technology that's becoming more infused with data. With AI and it's really important, I believe, to become better thinkers in a world in which we will be working more alongside and maybe under the thumb of or, AI.

So AI generated responses will be very tempting to accept, but we have to remain extraordinarily vigilant. And when we can way we can do so is through allowing ourselves to be better thinkers. Uncertainty strengthens thinking, whether it's the surgeon deliberating the operium. Operating room, or the creative product designer who wants to use a little and then gain access to a world of not knowing in so many ways.

Uncertainty strengthens our thinking, and that's couldn't be more crucial today. So that's our individual response. And I would say as well that. Putting down, putting away, gaining distance, gaining perspectives on our devices is also important to this goal of being humans because one of the most on an, again, as an, on a personal individual basis, we as humans have fallen into the trap of continuing to use outdated language revolving around The brain, the mind, no neuroscientist would agree with the language that the public uses about uploading, downloading memories or programming ourselves.

The brain is not a deficient computer and that's really important to teach our children and to keep in mind. Actually, the mind is everything. It's an organic, networked, constantly evolving and highly, a process in itself. And that's why AI is actually trying to emulate this work. We do ourselves a huge disservice by thinking of the mind as the machine, but then on the actual, to finally answer your point about AI in our society.

I did a deep dive into uncertainty in AI, and I'm really heartened by a new movement by some of AI's top top leaders. The world class leaders in AI are actually working feverishly to inject uncertainty in robots and models. Now, what does that mean in a nutshell? Basically, all of AI has been created since the 1950s with one.

definition of intelligence, that in an intelligent being achieves its goals, no matter the cost. That's a very rational view of intelligence. What we have now, to put it really briefly, our AI it models and robots that achieve a goal with less and less human input now by allowing using the same sort of probabilistic reasoning to have AI that can be unsure in its aims, not just unsure about what to do if a human's in its path or unsure as in how does it deal with the noise and its data?

That's how AI operates in the world. But now to have it unsure in its aims. So the robot, AI housekeeper will, instead of just being programmed or designed to fetch you a coffee based on the cheapest way or the fastest way or whoever that, whatever the designer originated that it w it's now teachable.

It's stoppable. I beta tested a AI robot arm that could be used for people with handicaps or in manufacturing. This robot arm. Would actually really, inflate these armbands as it was drawing a line, a welding sort of thing across a table. It would ask me where I wanted the line to be, how close, etc.

It was working with me in a way that traditional classic AI. Cannot do. And the second most important thing about uncertain AI, I call it the rise of the I don't know robot is that it's more transparent. So when people are working with medical models to find the new protein to deal with the new antigen or antibody, they can actually see AI that will take multiple paths toward a solution.

Rather than one path as in the classic rationalist view, and they also can the robots behavior is more transparent. So it's actually more intelligent to users, studies show. So I find this incredibly heartening and, when and if this comes to a store near you we should be. We should be, as humans, really interested in the idea that, it's very ironic, uncertainty in AI can actually allow us controllability, to be control, to control the robot, to work with the robot through AI.

And the last point I'll make about that is that a rise of uncertainty as a way of re imagining AI It proves to me how just as I mentioned at the beginning uncertainty is being seen as a strength of mind in medicine. It's now being now there are efforts to have doctors trained in tolerating uncertainty, admitting it, expressing it in order to avoid burnout and over testing in education.

Uncertainty is being seen as a really important skill to equip children and young adults so that they are more resilient. There are actually interventions going on with this. It, in the business world, uncertain people are waking up to uncertainty. The ambivalent CEO that I mentioned, and now in AI, this is a yet another way in which we are finally understanding that an island of unbending knowledge is a very. weak place to be when it comes to an unpredictable world, if you and I,

[00:25:51] Joe Krebs: There's a lot to digest. Maggie there is so much, there's so much wealth of information. And I feel like listeners will get an idea of what kind of wealth of information is in the book, Uncertain that is available now.

To the end of our conversation sorry, I put you here on the spot in terms of self reflection on your book. Was there anything you approached while writing the book where you learned something about uncertainty, the book writing itself, yourself? as the author. Is there anything, maybe you have a story where you was like, I use, you learn something in the writing process.

I don't know. I haven't asked you how long was the writing process or overall, when did you start? And when did it?

[00:26:33] Maggie Jackson: Oh, it took a number of years. I was a little, it was a little bit of an off and on process, but it took a number of years as you can see from the many footnotes and the adventures I had in I was out in the field.

It wasn't just, book research in the operating rooms, in the AI labs, in the homeless shelters, activist campaigns. I really had a lot of adventures and there were also a lot of surprises. I learned so much about other ways of knowledge and how expecting the world to be predictable, which is a little bit how, people operate, we really do sometimes live our lives as if we hope, pray, think, assume that life will be predictable. And the more you can dismantle that assumption. The more you're actually liberated because you are again, agile, you are able to be open to life's changes. So I find that uncertainty, the more I let it in, the more I operate that way, the more I'm not indecisive of the point of inaction, but I am harnessing uncertainty to go forward in a better way.

The more I can do that, the more I feel stronger and more able. And in fact, studies show that to be the case, that when we can dismantle the fear, it's the fear of the unknown that holds us back, not the unknown itself. So I find that this has helped me not only in relationships with other people.

It's helped me in my writing where the frustration of a long process of figuring something out is not to me now a weakness or a deficiency. But actually a strength and just part of a natural part of the process of going deep and understanding the change. So I feel as though I'm having more fun in life.

[00:28:26] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And there are some people and you can see those are the fun people, right? It's who are naturally navigating that way through life and versus the alternative. Yeah. Maggie, I want to thank you so much for coming on Agile FM. I have the book link. I have references how people can get in touch with your work with your books in touch with you on the show page on agile. fm. I want to thank you for spending some time here with the Agile FM listeners and good luck to you with the book launch and everything that is associated with all of those things in the coming months.

[00:29:02] Maggie Jackson: Oh, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Great conversation.

You can grab Coco’s book:

The Full Potential Relationship - The Soccer Field Method®

Transcript:

Agile F M Radio for the Agile Community.

[00:00:07] Joe Krebs: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Agile FM. Today, I'm here with Coco Decrouppé, um, and she is an author, a team trainer, a top 15 leadership coach. She's a blogger, she is, and this is what we want to talk about here today, the creator of the Soccer Field Method, where she also wrote a book about.

The book is full title is The Full Potential Relationship and the Soccer Field Method. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:36] Coco Decrouppé: Thank you, Joe. I'm very excited to be here. I'm looking forward to the conversation and I'm honored that you asked me.

[00:00:43] Joe Krebs: Wonderful. And this book which we, I just mentioned the full potential relationship, the soccer field method.

I was immediately drawn to it as I'm a huge soccer fan myself, but soccer is not, or knowledge about soccer is really not important when reading or approaching the book or the method itself. And I think that's a correct statement, right?

[00:01:03] Coco Decrouppé: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not needed.

[00:01:06] Joe Krebs: Awesome.

Yeah. So the book actually is a grouped into three areas and I want to touch on those if possible with you. Today, the first one is the relationship with yourself because it is about the full potential relationship, the book. The second one is the relationship with another. And the third one is the relationship with the team.

And that relates to listeners on the Agile FM podcast. Now I do have to say your background is not in Agile, but I believe there is. A lot of things the agile community can take away from from your writing. If that's okay with you, I would just start diving into the first part.

[00:01:43] Coco Decrouppé: Yes, please. .

[00:01:44] Joe Krebs: , the first thing I noticed when I read the book was like the biggest chunk, just in terms of material of your book is actually in the first part about yourself, like just in terms of pages really focusing on. On the first one. So we often work in agile teams. But when we're looking at individuals within the team, how could this the soccer field method in particular be relevant for an individual team member, for example, like a software engineer or a leader or a coach that you do.

You do coach to coaches, right? And in this case, it would be an agile coach. How would this technique and what's so special about your soccer field method? In looking at a soccer field itself how is this important for an individual on a team? How could this be helpful?

[00:02:32] Coco Decrouppé: Yeah, very good question.

Very important question I feel. So the soccer field really is an analogy for a relationship, and we all have relationships. in private and business life. So it doesn't matter what your role is. It's not important what you're in, what industry you're in. We all have relationships. And we really need only two lines of the field.

It's the middle line that separates us and the outer line that connects us again. And one challenge for leaders is the question, when do I need to be with my team? And when do I, when is it okay to set boundaries for myself? And that is a solution. approach to deal with this question on a daily basis in difficult situations.

And the first step is the self leadership. So we have the two lines, the middle line, the outer line, and we have the two spaces. You have your side of the field. I have my side of the field. And this is where we can show up a hundred percent authentically with our skills, with everything we are. And our world is fast.

There are lots of expectations, no matter what your role is. And we tend to think a lot outside of us. instead of thinking for ourselves, what can I actually control? And this is what the self leadership stands for. How do I step back, calm myself down and reflect on what is actually needed? What are my responsibilities actually?

What are my values? What are my thoughts? What are my emotions? Even this goes deep here. So a lot about emotional intelligence, but it's a lot about stepping back. And we need this in every role, especially when we talk about transformation, change, all these things that cause Lots of confusion and stress for people.

[00:04:34] Joe Krebs: This is also like related to how I show up in the morning for work. What I take away from work, like very, like, selfishly speaking, right? It sounds like it's all about me at this point, right? So this is the part of your method is all about me. Is that a fair statement?

[00:04:51] Coco Decrouppé: Yes. It has a lot to do with the mindset and how you show up because every team Or every team member leads the team with their mindset.

So it's very important to be aware of how we show up and this is also the power that we have. I don't like calling it selfish. Like, yeah, it's a very important word actually and how we phrase that. I call it more self determined. to really pay attention that we do need oxygen. First, we need to step back, we need to calm ourselves down and pay attention to our needs.

First, before we then go and help other people and strengthen the team and support each other.

[00:05:35] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So from a methods perspective, let's say I'm a software engineer. Is that you just mentioned like the emotions, right. How I would show up, but also from a self determined in terms of learning, right? So I come to work, possibly want to improve how I want to be as a professional within my team.

Right. But what do I want? How do I grow? Does that also fall into my side of the soccer field.

[00:06:03] Coco Decrouppé: Absolutely, that we understand what do I need also in working together, what is important to me. Sometimes I need more details from a person. Sometimes I need less details for a person, for example, and we need to communicate our needs in order to work together.

And then there is what comes natural to us, right? Some are more technical oriented and others have an easier time in creating and building relationships, building trust.

[00:06:34] Joe Krebs: Yeah.

[00:06:35] Coco Decrouppé: And whatever comes natural to us, we always have to outbalance the other side. We also have to focus on the other thing.

So when the technical side comes easy, we also need to pay attention. How do we actually connect? How do we communicate? So like we stayed in the beginning, we have the midline that separates us and the outer line that connects us. For some people, it's easier to set the boundary and be more intro, they're more introverts possibly.

And for others, it's easy to connect. So we need both lines and both skills. In order to really work together.

[00:07:10] Joe Krebs: So even within my own field of the soccer field, I still have different segments, right, in terms of learning, how I possibly open up to other people, communication, collaboration what are my skills and capabilities?

So we can look also inside the team a little bit of an agile team, but if we're looking a little bit more on the The outside of the team that could be leaders stakeholders, people that are interacting with the team. And I know you do work a lot with leaders and provide leadership workshops with your method.

What's, what could, do you have an example for a leader, like in that own segment within your own part of the soccer field and that individual said, like, and what kind of things would a leader be watching out for interacting with others?

[00:08:01] Coco Decrouppé: . So this, whoever's looking at the field gets. Their side of the field, so everybody has , the self leadership. Right. That is step one. Step two is the conversational part of it, and it's not important really. Who's on the other side? That could be a client.

Could be a customer. Customer, it could be a team member, it could be a family member even.

This is a space in the middle that we haven't talked about now, but this is a space in the middle where we communicate. And connect again and have simple methods to help us structure our conversations and get our point across, but also listen to what the other person needs. It's a dialogue.

It's a dialogue. Right?

[00:08:45] Joe Krebs: Yeah.

[00:08:46] Coco Decrouppé: And learning how to do that is, is simple, but it does take a little bit of time and effort to do that. Since this method always starts with the self leadership, I want to first of all, calm myself down and understand what do I actually want from the other side without crossing that boundary, respecting that boundary.

And once I have identified on the self leadership, what I actually want and what my expectations are from the other side, it's much easier to communicate. But often I hear leaders who Find themselves in a challenge where they don't know why their team doesn't react.

That they themselves are not. clear on what they actually expect on the self leadership level from the other person. Yeah. So we need to be clear first what we want also from the other side and then communicate it in a solution oriented way.

[00:09:41] Joe Krebs: Interesting. So there's, so what's,

what I think is interesting about this method is a few pieces to it is obviously is it's universally applicable, right, to leaders, as you said.

The interaction with clients or even family. This is not limited, obviously, to anything in the agile space, but it also applies very well to the agile space. I found myself while going through the material. You just mentioned that there is. The other side of the field. So far, we have just spoken about the one side of the field, our own, and what goes into that.

Let's explore the other side a little bit. What I like about the soccer field method, not only that I am interested in the sport myself, is that I do like metaphors of learning, right? So I feel like the technique, the method you're introducing is very easy for everyone to capture, and I'm pretty sure everybody has seen the soccer field.

And how it works. Now, what's interesting in your technique is when you look at a soccer field, there's usually a circle in the center of the field. For you, it's a heart. Why? What does the heart represent? It's wonderful visual there.

[00:10:51] Coco Decrouppé: Yeah,

[00:10:51] Joe Krebs: do these two sides of the field connect and why is there a heart?

[00:10:55] Coco Decrouppé: Yeah, I wanted to make it cheesy. So for the yeah, so it all starts, like you said, with the self leadership, your side of the field and the goal where we have our calm place, so we know how to calm ourselves down. And then we step forward to communicate in the middle of the field where I call it the heart of communication, which is the heart of communication.

It stands for a human way of communicating on an eye to eye level, which is a very human need. And we understand, we communicate directly and transparently. It doesn't matter if the other person knows the method or not, we are responsible and at the same time, it's our power that we come in a certain mindset and communicate whatever we think is needed in combination with the listening skills.

So this is the glue of the method, the heart of communication and communication itself. It's the glue to relationships and teams and organizations. We need communication to connect.

[00:12:04] Joe Krebs: Right. And that is particularly like the one to one kind of communication, right, between two individuals. And something like that I could easily foresee in an agile team being very important, not only as a team level, but one on one in something we often do.

It's called pair programming. Why is that so important? Like in pair programming, there would be two individuals. Sharing a keyboard, but sitting next to each other in a space and communicating a lot about what they're seeing in front of them and working collaboratively together. Why is that so important in your method that it gets its own space?

Not only the individual, not only the team, but there's this one on one.

[00:12:45] Coco Decrouppé: Yeah. I actually think it's both really important right there on an individual level one on one, but also on a team level, there's a lot of impact that we can have when we look at team meetings, and you're in a leadership position.

And the one on one is so important because we need to talk about how we can work together. what you need from the other person. We feel like it's logical to me. So it should be logical to the other person. That's not the case.

And I feel like I've said it already once, but the other person for some reason did not hear it.

So we need to repeat and really sit down, not only what we were, but also how we work together. And it's always easier to start and, play the ball to the other side first and say, okay, what do you need for us? In order for us to work better together, what do you need? And may I share what I feel will be best, what I need from my perspective. So we really share both sides.

[00:13:44] Joe Krebs: Right. And that is in software engineering, super important. There's so much ambiguity, so many misunderstandings, somebody explains it in a certain way, and I might still be listening to it. But I might just totally understand it in a very different way than the sender has sent me.

The message might come across very different, like the telephone game very typical. Yeah. So why the heart beside cheesy, like it is the heart of communication?

[00:14:14] Coco Decrouppé: Yeah, it is the heart because it stands for the human conversation. It's really, I feel like it needs more heart in business.

We need to have that heart to heart conversations.

There are conversations we need to have as a leader when you need to let somebody go. There are difficult conversations all the time. And we might really like the person and want to keep the person on the team, but we don't see the performance. So we can have a transparent conversation or see, I really value our relationship.

And for this position, I need a certain kind of skill set that I don't see right now. So we can be more transparent, a lot more transparent, actually, to build trust, even in these kind of conversations. And it has a lot to do with a respectful frame to really approach each other. No matter what our backgrounds are, our experiences are, our culture is, right, really and

[00:15:12] Joe Krebs: even the spoken languages might be different.

Right. So absolutely.

[00:15:15] Coco Decrouppé: Yeah.

[00:15:15] Joe Krebs: So much to consider. Now, taking this to the next level in our conversation just notice that it is already complex. Two people to communicate and, having a shared understanding. Now, if you're taking this to a team level, the complexity increases even more.

So that would be the relationship with the team. So we're still having our own side. We're still having the one on one we're still having the heart, but now there's an additional complexity coming in when. When we have a relationship with the team what's in your method that, where you address this kind of complexity when you're working in teams and how does that look like?

[00:15:57] Coco Decrouppé: Yeah. So it basically multiplies by the number of. people on the team, right? Because everybody comes with their backpack, emotional backpack. And it's like when you think of a hurricane, some transformation, sometimes transformation or change can feel like very confusing. And we want to help people, or this is what I do too, in teams or individual, with individuals, I help them go to that eye of the hurricane, basically, to be in the calm, while there's a lot happening on the outside.

And you can Make big decisions and do a lot, but on the inside, I invite you to feel calm and know how to step back. That's the same thing for the team, like, because it becomes just more intense with more people, whoever looks at the model and method always gets the one side of the field. And with the team, we have like in the image, we have more people on the other side, not one individual, but more people.

So it becomes more a 3D like skyscrapers, but that everybody comes with 100 percent field and with their emotions and expectations. And there is crucial to really respect the boundary in the middle, because we tend to either go on the other side and want to do. Work for others because they don't get it done or we allow them to come on our side and we are completely exhausted at the end of the day or end of the week because we let basically everybody in so it's important to. understand that in order to have that balance, it's okay to set the boundary in the middle. It's okay to say no sometimes. That's a difficult one for people. It will help us to not take things too personal. We respect that boundary and we leave whatever they say or do or not to on the other side where they are.

And then we come to the conversational part in the middle where we do need to talk about things and about our goal.

So the balance again between the self leadership, staying calm on your side, knowing what is yours, what is it not. And the balance to holding the outer line for the team. So reminding them like a soccer coach or any team coach, we, we come together and you remind them, this is our goal, this is our strategy.

They are the experts, but still we need to be reminded that we are playing on the same field. So the leader needs to know, and everybody on the team really, how to step back, calm down, but also connect through communication in the middle to strengthen the outer line and the team and the organization.

[00:18:50] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is awesome. So boundary management is important. The lines are there for a reason. In a field, I think like in every sport, right? We we see now there is just one example for everybody listening to this. Why this is not, you don't need necessarily soccer skills to participate in any of your workshops.

And here's one there is a situation I just want to take that as an example here with you. It's never really happening in, in the actual game. But there is a chance that somebody might swap shoes or switch shoes, with another and that's just like an interesting metaphor as well. I think we often use walk in my shoes kind of concept.

That is where we're actually swapping the shoes I would assume. Can you just give a little detail on what that means just for listeners to see that? This is not fully soccer. This is obviously

[00:19:37] Coco Decrouppé: yeah, it is a metaphor and like, it's not about playing against each other. The soccer field method is all about playing with each other and becoming a stronger team.

So swapping the shoes is I think that's a tricky one for people because We tend, and it's a beautiful thing too. We tend to think for other people and feel for other people. , some of us Right. Others have a more difficult time. And it's great to understand what is happening on the other side and what a person feels on the other side, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I have to feel the same thing.

. So I can be at the calm place in the goal and still create the space for the other person to express how they feel. or what their challenges are. And because I'm not confused with them, I'm not overwhelmed with them, but I'm there holding the space, I'm able to guide them and accompany them through the process of reaching a goal and moving forward.

So I think stepping in each other's shoes can be helpful as long as I stay on my side emotionally. It's, I mean, very important to listen what the other person is going through. And that way.

[00:20:57] Joe Krebs: Yes, it's an awesome technique. Now, this is audio recording only, so people can't really see that.

A lot of smiling faces. There's a lot of cards there is, as you can imagine is lots of tools that are being shared within the classroom. Lots of in person kind of delivery and you're taking this metaphor, obviously into the workshop itself. What is the like the common feedback from people that exit your course?

So what is it you often hear, like, just like a quick like maybe what's a common theme, like just in terms of self reflection when they give you an evaluation or if they follow up with you? What do you hear? I know it's positive because I see smiling faces everywhere.

[00:21:41] Coco Decrouppé: So yeah, the workshops are very interactive. I believe in a light atmosphere and spirits because we're talking about serious deep complex topics. And yes, of course, there's soccer field is a big part of it. But it's also one card of a 26 cards toolbox for leaders that are created. And it's a fun way and gives us just topics to discuss that are very practical for people.

So the methods they use in the workshop is like, are like Lego serious play, very interactive, colorful, playful approaches to talk about this serious topics. And we do start with clarifying what is impactful leadership? What is it not? And I invite everybody to share their experiences.

And by doing that, people find themselves. Hearing about other situations that they didn't even think of. And they're very personal stories. So we connect right away and that makes, creates a very trusting mindset and atmosphere right from the beginning. And therefore I believe, because it's a very human approach people come with their personalities and we invite everyone to be authentic, obviously, and the combination with my tools, in the end people leave.

Thankfully, very fired and what I hear a lot is that they knew about self leadership, but now they understand why it is so important in order to lead an impactful team. And this is really also my main motivation because I feel that we don't talk enough about the self leadership and in the end we are by slowing down, we are quicker at our goals.

[00:23:32] Joe Krebs: Yeah Coco, this is this is awesome. And I want to thank you for spending some time here with the listeners of Agile FM. You do more than soccer field method training courses. Obviously I wanted to connect the technique to the agile community. Also doing a lot of training and coaching.

In other areas. I wanted to use the soccer field method as a way to connecting the agile community to maybe a new tool in the toolkit to explore. And yeah, and then for everybody who is interested in your workshops, they can also find us on the show page obviously, but also at cocodecrouppe.com.

Everything will be there. So I want to say thank you and good luck with the soccer field method.

[00:24:14] Coco Decrouppé: Thank you very much, Joe. Thank you for having me.

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.

Transcript:

Agile F M radio for the agile community.

Thank you for joining me again for another podcast episode of Agile FM in the Agile Kata series. Today I have Oscar Roche with me, who is based out in Australia. That's where we're recording from. And he is with the training within industry TWI and the visual workplace. He was actually told by a person called Mike Esposito from the historic construction That he makes philosophy and principles consumable.

And we got to talk about Kata. I hope I got that quote we're going to talk about Kata in this episode. We're going to talk a little bit about some scientific thinking. We'll talk about where Oscar is coming from. He is a well known figure in the Kata community. And but before we do that, I want to welcome you to the podcast.

[00:00:56] Oscar Roche: Thank you. Thanks, Joe. Happy to be here. Even at this time of day, 7 a. m.

[00:01:02] Joe Krebs: So the voice needs to be oiled a little bit in the morning hours to get into into the podcast feel. Thanks for joining. And obviously you're in the Kata series here a few things you're very obviously with that statement we just heard about you You make this consumable.

You are, you're thinking about, how could you take these practices that are surrounding Kata and turning them into something that is useful for your clients, for the people you work with, obviously. But you're also a little concerned about Kata community and, there is an article you we were exchanging ideas about by I forgot his Stephen Spears and Bowen in the Harvard Business Review from 1999.

And and that puts a little light spotlight on, on Kata indirectly through the, how Kata influences the world of Toyota, but people out there in the community see Kata and scientific thinking and the way of how. Toyota Works is very different, right? .

[00:02:00] Oscar Roche: Yeah, they do. I don't think that connection has been, I don't think we, we as in our world has made that connection very strong.

I think one of the problems we run into is that people say we don't make cars or we're not Toyota. We're not a big corporation and all we don't make cars. So I think that's one of the problems, but I guess. In terms of that Spear and Bowen article, it was, I read that probably in 2018 or 2019 And I was introduced to Kata in 2011, and it was only when I read that article, I thought, ah, this is what. This is what we're getting at. This is what we're trying to get at with Kata. And what that article said was the Spear and Bowen article, one of the things it said was that Toyota aims It said two things that made the penny drop with me.

One was it says Toyota aims to develop a community of scientists, and I thought, ah, that's interesting. And the second thing it says was that Toyota views every standard as a hypothesis. In other words, even their production standards are hypothetical. If we do this, we expect that. But we need to run it and see what happens.

So every, in essence, every production run is an experiment. And I thought, wow, that is a very interesting way of looking at the world. And that's what Mike Rother's getting at. That's where he wants us to be. He doesn't want us, he doesn't want us to be at Kata. Kata is, the Kata patterns are just a means of getting to this utopian world.

Every standard is a hypothesis and we're a community of scientists. Yeah. And that was when the penny dropped. I thought, ah, it took seven years, or whatever that was, six years.

[00:03:57] Joe Krebs: But I got there. Yeah,

[00:03:59] Oscar Roche: what's interesting is actually, I think I got there. I think I got there. I'll find out.

[00:04:05] Joe Krebs: Yeah, exactly. What's interesting is when you look at Toyota, I don't have any insights into hands on employee experience or anything, but if you look at Toyota, yeah, but if you look at the production facilities of Any kind of carmaker let's not even say Toyota, right?

Any carmaker, let's see some like some construction belt and the products are moving by, but the company, what and how they think, especially about Toyota is very different.

[00:04:34] Oscar Roche: Very different. And I think it, the other thing that attracted me to that thought in the Spear and Barron article was how liberating that is.

Yeah. If you could adopt that philosophy of every time we run production, it's an experiment, then I think you started to, you start to move away from right versus wrong, blame versus not blame and all those sort of things that go with, we are going to run this and we are going to get it right because this is the way we do things.

I think you start to move away. I think you would change. You would completely. With that philosophy, that thinking, I think there's a very good chance you completely change the the work environment, if you like, it becomes, we're going to try this and see what happens. And if it doesn't work out as we expect, then we know how we're going to think when that happens.

[00:05:26] Joe Krebs: Yeah. But in that article, they also talking a lot about that there is an absolute detail and emphasis on, let's say documentation in general, it's like about the core production process where. Seats go. And so there's a lot of detail, but the detail is actually evolving over time. So there's absolutely constantly being challenged.

And I think some

[00:05:47] Oscar Roche: because it's a hypothesis because the data is a hypothesis. That's why it's being challenged.

[00:05:53] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And what we see in organization is when an organization is that these handbooks and these processes are, they're just staying

[00:06:00] Oscar Roche: and they get stuck

[00:06:01] Joe Krebs: and they get stuck and they don't challenge those

procedures.

[00:06:06] Oscar Roche: No. And the worst thing is they end up on the shelf.

[00:06:08] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Yeah. So what also is in this article, I want to hear your take on this is there's also a mention on that what you would be observing, obviously, they have studied this for several years. There's no command and control. So if you would look at the production facilities and you look at it.

It feels, it might look like command and control, somebody's being told what to do, but it's not, right? It's not. There's a different system in place. What's your take on that and especially this style of leadership compared or in contrast to scientific thinking and possibly Kata?

Good

[00:06:47] Oscar Roche: question.

So my take on this on that is it would be something that's extremely hard to develop. No, I don't know that it's hard to develop, but it's going to take time. And one of the point, if you got everyone thinking this way, everyone thinking as a, we've developed this community of scientists. So we're all thinking that way.

And every standard is hypothesis. Then you're in it. You're in a point. And management is thinking that way, then you're at a point where it can work, but getting to there, there's going to be, I think one of the troubles we run into is, we recognize that's what Toyota started is doing now or in 1999, but when did they start trying to do this?

About 1952. Yeah. So we, about in 2019, with the Institute, a group of us went to Japan and we spent time with Mr. Isao Kato, who was Ono's HR advisor, and he gave us a timeline of when they started to when they started to, On this journey, and I hate that word when they started on their journey to where they are now, and it was not, it was, I'm pretty sure, if I remember rightly, it was 1952, it was 51, 52, 53.

We've got to also remember that's for, when Speer and Bowen did that article in 1999, let's say there's 47 years of this stuff evolving when they, for them to be able to get to that point. The problem we run into is, and it's a very valid point, that no other organization has 47 years to get to that point.

But, so therefore, I think we've got to, we've got to look at how they might have got there, or what we think we can do to accelerate. Exercise of that process for one of a better word of getting there and one of the things we can do is practice is use things like the Kata patterns to help develop these behaviors and these way of thinking.

So get back to your question. If everyone's thinking that way, then it just happens. Yeah, but how, but when some are and some aren't. Then it's difficult. And if management aren't forget it. Yeah.

[00:09:04] Joe Krebs: That's obviously the challenges with many transformations out there now you're very you're making a strong comment when you when we were exchanging ideas, a little bit of what we could talk about and you have a very strong comment.

Yeah. Opinion about Kata being seen as nowadays with the gaining popularity people started talking more about, about it. Maybe more and more people are trying it. My goal with this podcast is obviously to bring Kata closer to the agile community. But what's interesting is that you see the Kata is wrongly seen as really frustrating for you as the goal rather than the start.

Of that journey. I think we're talking about why. What's your warning to people out there? I agree with you. Obviously, Kata is the starting point. But what's your recommendation for people out there that are trying to experiment with Kata in terms of the mindset, how to approach this?

[00:10:03] Oscar Roche: Yeah, sure. So I think, and it's evolved in the conversation we had before this podcast started, I think one of the we try and explain the, we try and explain the world that Kata can take you to, to people but how can you explain something that can't be seen?

It's a little bit of a problem. So perhaps what we need to understand is what are we moving away from? Because we can see that now. So what we're moving away from is random actions, pulling things out of the air, acting on whim, illogical actions, if you like. So I guess an approach might be, to what extent are we randomly thinking now?

To what extent are we heading here, heading there, depending on what manager walks in the room or, what person of authority or what person with a strong personality? To what extent are we doing that? Because if we would go down this track of practicing or using Dakata patterns, we're going to be moving away from that, and that's not fun.

Random thinking creates waste, random thinking creates frustration, random thinking creates a lot of things that aren't good for engagement at a workplace. Yeah. So perhaps rather than try and describe Where we want to get to, let's try and describe where we want to, what we want to get away from.

That might be more because we can feel where we are now. It's hard to sense, it's hard to sense something that's a year away. Yeah. Perhaps that might be a worthwhile thing to

consider.

[00:11:37] Joe Krebs: And that target out there, like 12 months from now, that's a moving target even more right?

[00:11:43] Oscar Roche: Correct. It is. But where we want to be is not thinking randomly, not acting on whims. Not being pressured into doing something because someone forceful has walked in the room or a senior manager has said, do this. We want to get away from that. Yeah. But that does, the, you mentioned Mike Esposito before he's a he works with, or he's a part owner in Story Construction in Iowa, in Ames, Iowa.

And he, I do, they're my favorite client, and I'll tell a lot of people that, and the reason for that is because he and a fellow owner who's the chief operating officer, Pat Geary, they have a very clear vision of where they want to be, and it's not that far off that 99, that 1999 article by Spear and Bowen but they have that long term view.

And they know there's going to be setbacks and they know there's going to be frustrations and they know they're going to make mistakes. Yeah. And they do. But they, when they do, mistakes are only mistakes in hindsight. They're not mistakes beforehand, they're mistakes in hindsight. So when it happens they learn from those and they adjust so they've got the mindset.

They've got the, those two guys have, and Pat in particular, has the mindset that will get that organization to where they want it to be. Yeah. Unfortunately. That mindset in that level of leadership, I find to be extremely rare. Yeah because you need to have a long term view, not a one year view, or even a two or three year view.

a bit longer than that.

It's very interesting, right? In the agile community, I often hear the separation between agile ways of working and an agile mindset. And I think what you are, what you're describing here is the Kata is the. Not even the ways of working, it's the ways of getting started, right?

It's the ways of getting started, whereas the scientific thinking or the non random thinking is the mindset if you want to establish over time. And that is obviously something the Kharak can kick start us with, but eventually our own Habits are taking over, still in the scientific thinking mode, but it's like it will change, it will move, it will transform into something else that doesn't look like the Kata and necessarily anymore that we started with.

So we want to leave that behind, but it's the starting point for that journey. And I think that's

what you're pointing out wrong.

No, you are right. So as I was thinking as you were speaking, so Kata is the way we start to develop a way of thinking. If we think that way enough, that'll become our way of working.

And I think, I suspect, I'll never know, I suspect that's what's happened to Toyota. Yes. The problem is that people who work at Toyota now can never explain that. There's no chance they're ever going to be explaining it because they just, it just is the way we are. But we have a Toyota guy who works for us and does mentoring in Melbourne.

He left Toyota in 2011 and he poohoos Kata. Yeah. Directly poohoos it. But I've watched the way he works and he works exactly the way that Kata is intended for him to work down the track. So I watch the way he works, I watch the way he think, I watch, I listen to what he says and he acts and works that way.

Yeah. Because he, naturally, because he can't recognize how he's got there because he's, he just, it's just the

way they are. Yeah. Interesting. That's truly.

Yeah. Why would you need Kata to do this? You just do it. Yeah.

[00:15:23] Joe Krebs: Says you. Who has been doing this for a while.

[00:15:27] Oscar Roche: Exactly. Says you. But what about everyone else who is the majority of us?

How are we going to get there? Yeah.

[00:15:34] Joe Krebs: Toyota also has a commitment to learning continuously. There are various aspects of learning going on. How do you manage those expectations when you do work with leaders?

[00:15:46] Oscar Roche: How that fits is that scientific thinking itself is learning. So I'm looking at a definition of scientific thinking I have on my screen here and it says it's a continuous, this has come from Mike, it's a continuous comparison between what we predict will happen next, seeing what actually happens, and adjusting our understanding and actions based on what we learn from any difference.

So if we're thinking this way, We can't help but learn, because we're going to adjust our understanding and actions based on what we learn from a difference. Learning, we don't have to. Learning is not the goal. Adjusting our understanding and actions based on what we see from a difference will mean that we learn.

[00:16:31] Joe Krebs: That's the verification I wanted to hear from you. Exactly. It's an ongoing, it's an ongoing process. It's built in. It's part of, PDCA.

[00:16:41] Oscar Roche: Exactly. Yeah. It will, it just is. If we think this way, we will learn. We can't help but learn. Yeah,

[00:16:49] Joe Krebs: but it's on the job learning, right?

It's not a, it's not a theoretical kind of classroom experience or program that extensive program people are going through and learning about these things. This is very hands on. It starts on day one.

[00:17:03] Oscar Roche: Exactly. And I think also it almost requires two views or two mindsets at the same time.

One is I'm doing this work. The other is, I'm looking at this work from the outside, so I think that's difficult. I'm going to do two things. I'm going to do the work as per the standard, the way we do it today, but I'm also going to look at the way I do the work to see if I can, to see if what we predict is going to happen happens, and if it doesn't, then we've got to work on the difference and learn from that and make adjustments.

So that's where, I think that gets a bit hard too, to do two things. One is do the work. In other words, we're inside it and the other is look at the work from the outside as I do it and question it. That takes time and energy and all the rest of it. That's not easy.

It's not hard if you practice a pattern, yes but that energy of to practice that pattern takes a bit, it takes a little bit of amount. It's, it's a tough one to climb.

[00:18:01] Joe Krebs: So I just want to map this to some folks that are listening, maybe from an agile angle that learning would be some learning that we in, in, in processes such as scrum or extreme programming and so on, have experience in retrospectives where internal learning that's taking place.

I want to ask you a last question here while I have you. Is somebody is listening to this podcast right now, likes what you're saying wants to get started with Kata. Like it's a very practical I want to use the Kata to get started with that kind of thinking Like very practical.

What would be like a very first step? Just a realistic step. We know it's a longer journey for people with longer term vision, right? Of where to take a company or a product or a team. But what would be for you, like something to start with? What would you suggest to somebody listening to this and says, I want to experiment with the approach maybe even,

[00:18:56] Oscar Roche: it's a fine line between reading too many books and just having a crack. Yeah. I think and different people are different. Some people need to read a book or two before they're going to before they're going to jump in. And the original, the original 2009 Toyota Kata book is not a bad place to start.

I think there's been some that have evolved since that have made it more complex than perhaps it need to be, I've spoke to Mike about the practice guide and the practice guide is written from an engineer's perspective with an engineering view and it goes in quite deep. I would imagine that to be a lot of people, non engineers, non manufacturing people would be quite frightened about that.

It's, the reason I'm stalling a little bit on the answer is it just depends. It depends on the person how they best get started. Do they just need to know enough about the improvement model to be able and some guidelines to get it started? Is that a 10 minute conversation? Some yes, some they need to read a book.

I'm happy to be contacted. I think actually, I think. The way I always approach this is I need to understand the individual and the organization before we say, do this, because this might help. Yeah,

[00:20:10] Joe Krebs: Makes total sense. And, there's also conferences out there, they can attend.

Training courses they can attend. There is a hands on workshops they can attend. There's a variety of learning tools available et cetera, just to start with their journey and obviously practicing kata and picking up a book might be another option to just get started.

[00:20:32] Oscar Roche: I don't want to give people the impression of do this and it'll work for you.

[00:20:37] Joe Krebs: Absolutely not. Yes. But what I'm trying to say is there's a bunch of resources.

Oscar. Thank you so much for joining this podcast and sharing your thoughts.

[00:20:45] Oscar Roche:

I hope it's a value to the people who listen.

​

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.

Transcript:

Agile F M radio for the agile community.

[00:00:09] Joe Krebs: All right, thank you for tuning into another episode of Agile FM in the Agile Kata series. Today I have two guests with me, actually three guests with me. I have Dan Roman and Richard Sheridan from Menlo Innovations. We have Dexter with us in the background. He might or might not. Contribute to this recording as he's a dog, Dan is a frontline worker at Menlo.

He's a a lead, but he's also primarily a software developer. We're going to talk a little bit about Kata in development and obviously Richard Sheridan, author of the books, The Chief Joy Officer and Joy Inc. Is it fair to say you're the Chief Joy Officer of Menlo.

[00:00:54] Rich Sheridan: A chief storyteller is the more typical title they give me here.

[00:00:59] Joe Krebs: Awesome. All right. The chief storyteller, Richard and Dan, welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:04] Dan Roman: Thank you for having

[00:01:05] Rich Sheridan: us. Thanks Joe.

Good to see you.

[00:01:08] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Good to connect. And this episode we're going to focus a little bit on development. We want to talk about how do teams build agile teams? How do they build a product?

Here in particular software development products. Now, Dan you are, as far as I know from a website, your keynoting together with Richard there is, you have a focus on software for manufacturers of medical instruments and software for space researchers. So this is. This is I would say complicated, complex stuff you're working on and as far as I can tell and we talked about that during our visit in in Ann Arbor, where you guys are located, that there is no formal process like Scrum or Kanban or like to the book extreme programming deployed at Menlo Innovation.

Is that correct?

[00:02:01] Dan Roman: 100%. We have plenty of people who come and visit and we'll see what we're doing and find that what we're doing matches with one of their models. So we didn't set out to be agile, but agilists who come in say, Oh, Menlo is agile, or we have lean practitioners come in and they say, Oh, Menlo is lean.

But our processes, we never started from a place of. We want to be agile. Let's do it this way or we want to be lean. Let's do it that way.

[00:02:27] Joe Krebs: As you're obviously working with different kinds of companies and clients. And obviously also with different kinds of products you guys are creating. Now, I would be interesting because.

There is a term that's being used, I was told, on the floor at Menlo, this is run the experiment. That seems to be a frequent term. Can you just specify, either one of you, what that means, or maybe both, right? And how that comes into play, working in agile ways.

[00:02:55] Rich Sheridan: I would say, Joe, that phrase is born out of a background philosophy at Menlo that says, let probably pump fear out of the room.

We think that fear is a culture killer. Filler fear is a mind killer. I think there's a line in doom that says something like that. And so if someone has a new idea here, rather than. Hey, let's form a committee to write a policy on that. I do. Let's take a meeting. Our inclination is to take action with that simple phrase.

If somebody has an idea, somebody else might see. Great. Let's run the experiment. See what happens. And that can typically the things we try are on fairly small scale. We don't upend the whole place every week to try some new, crazy new way of working. But usually it is some small incremental change to an existing process or an enhancement to the way we do things here.

Because somebody believed that there was a problem to solve and this experiment may help us address that problem. Again, trying it and see how it works. And the experiments that succeed are the ones that last a long time and others might just thritter away because they didn't actually solve an actual problem.

Probably more often than not an experiment. Morphs over time. We had the original idea, we tried it, it didn't work the way we hoped. We try something a little different.

[00:04:23] Joe Krebs: So it could go into either direction. So when we talked about this a little bit about the experimental part and obviously I'm very public about my my work and my interest in Kata and scientific thinking through Michael Rother and Jeffrey Liker.

We, we met in Ann Arbor. And obviously when you hear the word experiment in connection with Kata , then it becomes, obviously the question is, how does this whole setup look like in Menlo? How do you guys operate? How does this all work? Do you guys have a product owner within Menlo? Do you guys have scrum masters?

Do you guys have project managers, agile coaches? What do people listening to us right now have to imagine when they just picture Menlo and cannot visit you guys in person?

[00:05:10] Rich Sheridan: It's probably valuable to know, just for your listeners, a little bit of background on what Menlo does for a living, where we make our money.

We are doing custom software development on behalf of our clients. So Dan has done a lot of projects for us over the years that he's been here. He will work in with manufacturing companies who are trying to enhance their ERP systems. He'll work with furniture retailers who are trying to improve how things happen on the sales floor.

So all these companies are coming to us because as Joe, everybody in the world needs software to run their businesses these days. And so we are bringing in clients from every industry imaginable to come in and work with us. We have a fairly simple structure to our team. The teams that Dan is a part of that are working on those various projects will consist of a project manager who is typically paired with we'll call it a product owner on the customer side of the equation.

And for us, the customers are the people who are paying us to do this work. They aren't necessarily be going to be the end users, almost never the end users. Software building. We have a set of people on our team that have a very fun and unusual title and a great role called high tech anthropologists, and their job is to understand the humans that will one day use the software, the end users in software.

Then we have our software development team, which comprises the biggest part of our company. And then Formal quality assurance role that works alongside the software development team. So every project at Menlo has some component of each of those four pieces. And and we work on a weekly iterative basis here.

essentially right sizing every project for exactly the workload, right sizing it with the types of people it needs. We're more in the discovery phase. There'll be more high tech anthropology. If we're more in the software development phase, there will be more people like Dan on the project. The project manager and the QA teams are shared amongst variety projects, and they are they are constant throughout the course of each of the projects.

In any given moment in time, we're a team of about 50 people. We have, probably right now, I'm going to guess about 15 different projects. at various stages. Some of the projects are large. They'll have 8 to 10 people on them. Some of the projects are small. They only have a couple. And it's probably worth noting that we pair.

That pairing is a big construct here. That was an early experiment that took hold in the 23 years ago when we founded Menlo. And it has never let up since.

[00:07:44] Joe Krebs: So running the experiment seems to be something like a, for testing and verifying the process in place, like programming, right? Is this an interesting, is this you have read about it, you, the teams might try it and find Found it useful, like many teams found their programming useful, right?

So it's an interesting thing. So you're using that kind of experimentation approach for the process you're using, but you're also using experimentation for building the products for your clients. And that's where I want to go a little closer here. So you have your how do you protect your end user, your users?

Your clients or your customers that are the product owner or acting out that role. If you want to say it this way. But then how do these requests come in? There's a ton of teams that are there that are using user stories product backlogs, ordering activities, refinement activities planning, sprint planning activities, and so on.

How does this all look like at Menlo? How do you guys incorporate that if you work in different ways? I would be curious to hear.

[00:08:42] Rich Sheridan: Yeah, the biggest starting point and starting is always hard for every project is starts with our high tech anthropology team and really attempt to answer three questions and use a lot of experiments to get to the answers to these questions.

What problem are we actually trying to solve different than perhaps the one even the customer presented to us? Who exactly are we trying to solve this problem for? What types of people? And we'll use personas and persona maps for that exercise. But a lot of that discovery work is done out in the field.

And so a lot of the early experiments are to be able to find these typical end users of the products we're working on out in the world. And that is often where some of the key experiments start early on. I'll give you a fun example, way back in our earliest days, long before anybody had iPhones or any kind of GPS devices, we were working with a company that wanted to create lanyard type devices that people who were on cruise ships would use to navigate the cities they would arrive in as the cruise ships pulled into port.

And so imagine they had around their necks, they had these GPS driven devices with moving map displays and that sort of thing. So we had to figure out simple questions like do people know how to read maps? Because, if you ask a group of people, do you know how to read maps? Everybody would say, absolutely, I know how to read a map.

If you ask people to read maps, you find that hardly 50 percent of people know how to read maps. And so it would be very expensive to try and do this on a cruise ship. We did get one cruise ship ride throughout the course of this project. But before that, we went to a local theme park here, locally here, just to watch people try and use maps.

So we would run into that. with them. We would walk up to them with a map in our hand and say, Hey, can you show me where the Edison exhibit is? And we obviously have the map in our hand and we would see if that people would grab the map and what they would do with it and how they would orient it. And 50 percent of the people said, Oh, I can never read these things.

See that circle I over there, the information booth, you should go ask them. So we found out right away that about 50 percent of people self report they don't know how to read maps. But this was really early experimental data that we could collect very inexpensively around what kind of challenges would people get to if they don't know how to read maps and we're creating a device that's supposed to allow them to navigate a city.

And we get very creative. We try and do things inexpensively. And then ultimately we experiment with the potential designs, often with paper based prototypes to see what will actually work for people. Once we get into the actual software development, once we've secured that we understand what design and work for them, then there's a lot of other experiments that Dan and his fellow developers here at Memo will use.

Sometimes those experiments are technical ones, technological ones. Sometimes it's most of the time, I would say they're often human ones because we were often working with developers. And our client sites, we have to figure out how to work with them, given the way we work.

[00:11:55] Joe Krebs: Dan I'm curious, like just to take it to the software development side and take advantage of you being here on on this podcast as well, right?

So it's a great insight to see business and the leadership of the organization, but also to see the actual implementation of these products, right? So let's say we're doing these visioning techniques and obviously as a. As Richard pointed out, there's a lot of cost savings finding out early on that people can read a map, right?

Could you imagine you were building something assuming they can read a map? That would be a very costly detour later on. But I want to go a little bit deeper because there's so many teams, agile teams out there that are preparing for sprint planning activities or iteration planning. And they're using user stories or and then they're basically have planned everything and laid it out and implemented.

You guys have through that experimental process, a different thing in place. I think it's much more lightweight, if I'm not mistaken. Can you walk the listeners maybe through once these requests come in and you're actually in the software development part of how you're still using experiments

for that?

[00:13:00] Dan Roman: Sure. So to as Rich was telling us about those experiments, it reminded me a little bit that every development iteration at Menlo, I would argue, is itself an experiment. So the beginning of the iteration happens after a show and tell, where the software development team will actually have the client or customer demo back to the development team the work that was accomplished for the previous iteration.

And then based on that demo we'll authorize the next week's worth of work which comes out to some 40 planned hours worth of work. And when I think about Kata, I think about declaring a desired future state. And that's ultimately what we're doing. When we set out a plan for the iteration, we're saying the plan is we will end up in a state where these cards have been completed and there'll be completed in this effort.

And then the rest of the iteration is the steps that we as a development team take to try and realize that. Future state. And then by the time we get to the end we'll basically start the cycle over again, which will again reminds me a little bit of Kata where we'll compare. All right, we started with a plan to get to this future state.

We've run the iteration for a week. Let's compare where we are compared to where we want to be. And ultimately, all of that happens through obviously the software developers doing the work, but that all happens through . The story cards, which are our fundamental unit of work and these are three by five index cards on which are written the work items that the developers will go and implement and our quality advocates will go and test.

And typically our high tech anthropologists are part of writing in the first place.

.

[00:14:28] Joe Krebs: Is there still like, are you pulling from an organized formal product backlog as so many scrum teams? are doing, or is this process a little bit more ad hoc and fluid based on the work you did in previous iterations where you're getting instant feedback from your customers and how does that all look like?

The show and tell, that's where this comes together, I would assume.

[00:14:50] Dan Roman: Yep.

That's a very good question. So it's a little bit of all of the above. So what Rich was alluding to at the beginning of our engagements, the high tech anthropologists will do a lot of the Upfront work of describing here's based on our research and our observational data, what we believe the application needs to do.

And that sets as a starting off point for the engagement itself. But over the course of every engagement, we are also discovering new work. So over the course of a given iteration, as the developers are doing work, they might write. They may write other story cards or the quality advocates may write some story cards or even at show and tell the client might may say, Oh, we didn't think about the fact that the user might need to do this certain thing.

One of the fundamental rules that Menlo is that everyone can write a story card. Now just because you've written a story card doesn't mean that it'll get authorized or that'll get put on a weekly iteration. But we are certainly collecting the scope that's being executed nonstop over the course of the engagement.

[00:15:49] Joe Krebs: How does maybe I love this story cards, right? Obviously, there is a story to be told and collaborated on as a team. How detailed are you? As teams now within Menlo, how detailed are you with the planning activities? Are you planning very ad hoc? Is this like in subgroups or pairs or how let's say, this, these requests are coming in.

You have these stories and you're experimenting, I would assume also on those. How detailed are those or all the questions?

[00:16:22] Rich Sheridan: Yeah. The important element of our planning that I think probably differs from many development teams is how collaborative it is with our customers. Number one, we're putting together at a high level a story mapped version that might map out a year or two worth of key milestones for this client broken down into achievable goals that might run.

Okay. A month, two, three, four months. And then we start laying out the story cards for that very first goal. And the customer is standing alongside of us choosing these story cards that should go into that plan. Obviously we're giving them some advice from a technical standpoint as to if there's a more appropriate sequence of things that makes more sense, but we really want the business feeling like they're driving this we often find it When we hear of other teams challenges in planning and estimating and that sort of thing, you often find that it's an adversarial relationship with the business sponsors, where somebody is I can't believe it's going to take that long, or you need to get this done in a shorter amount of time.

Our approach isn't to try and argue against the importance of a date or features within that date, but to simply argue with the data of here's what fits, given your budget, given your burn rate, given the team size we have. And then it's a question of, can we make responsible trade off decisions with our client to get to that particular goal?

And then, as Dan said, on a weekly iterative basis, we're going to review the progress against our original plan. Because, no plan actually holds up once it hits reality. So we're going to get, sometimes we get more done than we expected, sometimes we get less done. But that weekly visit into what exactly do we get done in the weekly opportunity to now look ahead in that longer plan and say, okay, what we've learned now, should we make adjustments to the plan?

Have we discovered new things that need to be done? Should we write story cards and estimate those story cards? Should we take some things off that we originally thought should be part of the plan in favor of newer, more important things? Collaborative planning happens on a week by week basis on all of our projects.

I think the most fun thing I see happen is that often we use paper based planning techniques, which is again, unusual for software teams to use paper. Typically in the earliest part of our planning, all of our story cards are on white paper. But as time goes on, and as customers start to get nervous that we don't seem to be making as much progress, we often switch to, say, hot pink paper for things that were newly discovered or that somebody raised their hand in a meeting and said, hey we didn't think of this when we talked to you about it originally.

And so we'll write that story card up, we'll estimate it, but when we put it in the paper based planning process, we make it hot pink. And over time, what you can see is The actual physical real estate of our planning sheets being taken up by more and more hot pink work Which essentially says hey, there was a lot of stuff for some reason we didn't discover early on Yes wrong with that, but let's at least acknowledge With this, these colorful pieces of paper that we are now three months into this project and 25 percent of the things we're working on are things neither one of us thought of at the beginning of the project.

That can be really helpful to maintaining executive sponsorship of a project because. Now we can have explicit discussions about new things that came in. It isn't some theoretical wave your hands in the air. There were a few new things that came along. No, it is clear what the new things are that came along because it's on this different color.

[00:20:18] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Creating truly a partnership, right? With with the business the clients in this case do to showcase this, right? And obviously as a client, I would assume they're all very happy with us to see that. They are late changes are being incorporated some way or the other, and

[00:20:34] Rich Sheridan: happiness is an interesting word in this.

So it would be fun to believe that the people on the other side of the planning table at Menlo have all of the power and all of the authority to make these changes. But typically they're reporting up to an executive somewhere that has some other budgetary constraints. . We're not so much trying to make happy customers out of this process.

We're trying to make informed customers so they can have intelligent conversations when they go back to their offices to say, Hey, I thought you were going to have all of this. What happened? And what you really want to do is give them the physical artifacts they need to be able to create a story. scale all the way up, perhaps to the CEO of the company to figure out why is this project where it's at right now.

[00:21:27] Joe Krebs: .

That's a good point. And thanks for clarifying. I think makes makes perfect sense. Dan Richard's mentioned the word a few times. I want to go a little bit deeper. That's the word estimates. Are you guys estimating there's a lot of different kind of estimation techniques out there.

Agile teams are using, I'm just curious with this approach where you're going into more experimental activities, if estimation is actually still a thing here, or if it's an, if so, how lightweight it is.

[00:21:58] Dan Roman: Sure.

So to start right off the bat, yes, we do estimate it's part of that weekly iteration cycle.

So every development team is sitting down and looking at the cards in play, as well as cards likely to be played in the future and estimating those story cards. That takes about an hour of time for regardless of the size of the dev team and we estimate in hours and in powers of two. So a given story card at Menlo would sit between two hours and 32 hours again on that power of two spectrum which can feel pretty radical for some organizations where things like velocity.

I know that's a very popular way to, Fibonacci numbers as a means of calculating velocity or t shirt sizes, another sort of abstraction. I think that there are a couple of things that necessitate, or at least why we as Menlonians prefer that method. One is because estimating in hours is a universal language that when we get to that planning game after the show and tell with our stakeholders.

There's no need to do any translation between 13 Fibonacci points or a medium t shirt size. We can say we've got 40 hours of effort for a given pair to plan for. And this card is 16, and that's 16 hours worth of work. And that's something that is instantly understandable by our stakeholders.

I think part of the reason that we as a team are able to do that and Not in all cases, but in some cases, why other teams choose those kinds of abstractions at Menlo. We have a very healthy relationship between the technical folks who are doing the work and the project managers and stakeholders who are authorizing and planning the work.

And that's manifest in this sort of contract. That's very explicit and part of, as I understand it, our project management training. There's a dual responsibility for maintaining our estimates. So any software developer pair that's doing work on a card. As soon as they know they're going to miss the estimate.

So if Rich and I were pairing on a story card and we were on an eight hour card and we started to realize, Oh, wait, this is bigger. This is going to be at least double that. This is a 16 hour card. Now we have a obligation to go out to our project manager, for example, Lisa, she's one of our PMs and telling her, Hey, Lisa, we are working on this card.

It was originally estimated as an 8, but because of these reasons, we see it as a 16. That's our half of the sort of contract. The other half of that is the one that lives on Lisa's side, or the PM's side, which is to say, Thank you for your estimate, and smile. And that sounds like a really simple little strategy, but it's That kind of strategy that sucks the fear out of the room that would otherwise inhibit Rich and I from volunteering that information or giving an honest, updated estimate on the card.

And that's why a lot of other teams can run into those abstractions is because it's scary or painful when you let some set of stakeholders know, oh, this thing we originally estimated will take a day is now going to take more than that. Yeah,

[00:24:59] Joe Krebs: well, there's definitely a lot of controversy out there about.

Estimation and the techniques and in communicated and sometimes they're so like inflated to o just to be safe, depending on what organization and teams you work for. So that's, does not seem to be the approach at Menlo and obviously you guys. I've taken an expert estimate on the work at that time and see what, what comes out of it.

Once you start working on it very interesting thing. Now you just mentioned that I want to follow up on that word too, because I think the listeners out there who are. Used to agile coaches scrum masters, et cetera, et cetera. They are probably not saying did he just say the word project manager?

Did he just use that term? And because that sometimes that is a term that has been removed and replaced and you guys are using it actively, as far as I understand what's the role of a project manager at? Menlo, if you're working so in so agile ways and in experiments and et cetera what would be the role of a project manager other than nodding and saying, thanks for your estimate and smiling.

[00:26:09] Rich Sheridan: So the primary role of a project manager at Menlo is to be the voice of the customer, people who pay us to do the work when the customer isn't in the room. And so their job is to answer questions from the development team about the general direction of the project, where it's going, how we're going to get there, what what the overall overarching goals for the project are if the cause, if the project manager doesn't know they will reach out to the client who isn't imminently available every time we want to reach out to them.

That's why we need somebody who's advocating on their behalf when the client isn't around or not available by phone and that sort of thing. The the other role important role project manager does is to help the team remove obstacles. Dan and his pair partner will be rolling along and a card gets stuck.

Have a question, need to reach out to somebody, you can just let Lisa know and say, Hey, Lisa, I just want to let you know we're stuck here. We wrote to the client. We're waiting for an answer. We're going to red dot that card, which means they're going to stop it. We're going to move on to the next card in the lane.

And if there's anything you can do to help remove that obstacle, that would be awesome. Project managers also keeping close track. Our customers are spending a lot of money with us, so keeping close track on the budget relative to the total budget relative to the burndown for that budget, all those kinds of things.

I guess there's a tremendous amount of, financial oversight that comes with every one of our projects, we're often working on projects that run into the millions of dollars. And so project managers are helping manage that part of the process with us. And you're also making a lot of decisions alongside people like Dan is to what should the composition of the team be this week.

So it's a very collaborative role for the people doing the work I mentioned before we pair, we switch the pairs every five business days and. over time, systematically rotate people in and out of the projects to avoid burnout, to avoid towers of knowledge issues, all that kind of stuff. And the project managers will work very closely with the team to figure out what would be the best composition of people who should pair with whom who who would be good candidates for these story cards, that sort of thing.

[00:28:27] Dan Roman: I think there's one element that's important too for Menlo, but I would also argue this is true of other organizations. But the roles and the titles that we have for the work that each of us as Menlonians do does describe a primary role. But that is not to say that the team is not responsible for also doing some of the other responsibilities of the other roles.

For example, I am primarily a software developer at Menlo. But on a day to day basis, I am contributing to the conversations Rich is talking about where it's planning the resources for the project, making sure that the customer is appraised of any changes to the plan or keeping in mind the decisions that we're making today and what impact that has on the end user, the way that our high tech anthropologists might be considering.

So I think it's one of those things where it's like we, we have those titles and those roles to an easy heuristic to generally describe what we do within Menlo, but at the end of the day, there's actually a lot of blending or blurring of the lines that exist between our individual roles.

[00:29:30] Joe Krebs: Yeah. I think that's also it speaks to the self managing aspect of agility in general. Now I'm so thrilled to have you both on this podcast episode, because we had in this Kata series so far, we had different topics. We talked about transformational cultural things. I, this is a and I think that's a really great, wonderful episode.

I believe it's a wonderful episode that really focused on Developing in agile ways, but in a non prescriptive or existing frameworks. That are out there and you can almost say like, when I listen to your conversation. It's almost it's almost sounds like cherry picking, right? Of how we're using this concept, or we are estimating, but a little bit different, or we have paper, but some of them are pink.

And and so what I and working in pairs and we're shifting pairs and the way of how you operate with clients rather than the product owner being in house, the product owner is the actual client. So there's a lot of things. So there are some terminologies or project manager, just to name another one versus a scrum master.

And what's really fascinating, I think, is for one of the goals of this episode is to show existing Agile teams if something's not working with an existing framework or with the process they have chosen, as you guys said, run the experiment, right? Try something new. Adjust your process. That's one element.

And maybe you find ways of changing the way of how you currently work with breaking something. Obviously, that is recommended, but you're saying it's not working for us. That's not us. And that would be whatever you shared about. Menlo and the culture, but there's also the way of using this way of working to build the product itself, right?

So there's two aspects to it, shape the process, how you want to work, but also the way of how you build a product for your clients. So I want to thank you guys for that. That is really nice. Thank you.

[00:31:22] Rich Sheridan: You bet. Yeah. I think our general philosophy is all of these tools, methodologies, ways of thinking have value to offer and why would we constrain ourselves to simply one of them?

Why don't we borrow pieces and parts? And put, I think for us, we do refer to our general system of work here as the Menlo way of working. . And but if you probed, you would see we borrowed all these pieces from this so we don't find ourselves resisting any of them. We find ourselves embracing them, looking at them deciding, oh, that might work here.

And every project has its own unique, qualities to it as well. I

[00:32:02] Dan Roman: think one of the pieces that reminds me of is the notion that when we're designing our process, we're setting out to solve a problem and our problem isn't that we're not doing agile. It's not that we're not doing scrum and we need to start doing scrum.

We're trying to provide value to a customer on a frequent and consistent basis such that they can respond to feedback and make planning decisions. There are times when that desire or attempt to solve that problem will line up pretty closely with what Agile might seem like or Lean. But at the end of the day, it all starts from let's solve a problem and the absence of some predetermined process is not itself a problem.

.

[00:32:42] Joe Krebs: Yeah. This is, that's wonderful. And then maybe a good word to end the the podcast episode here together. And obviously there is. An opportunity to take a tour with Menlo and see that all in action. So I invite the listeners to go and reach out to you. There's a, there's tons of tours you guys are doing on a yearly basis.

Ann Arbor is the place to visit in Michigan. And and then they can see all what we just talked about in

action.

[00:33:08] Rich Sheridan: And one of our experiments during the pandemic were virtual tours that we continue to this day, even though. The in person tours have resumed. ,

[00:33:17] Joe Krebs: even cooler. So this could be done just from your couch.

Thank you so much.

[00:33:22] Dan Roman: Thank you.

​

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.

Transcript:

Agile.FM radio for the agile community.

[00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you again for tuning into another episode of Agile FM. This is the Agile Kata series. And today we're going to explore Kata from a leadership's perspective. And I have here with me Mark Rosenthal who is with Novayama that is his company. He's out of the West coast, United States, and we're going to explore a little bit together, leadership in conjunction with Kata, which is Series all about.

We're gonna explore that angle a little bit. Welcome to the show, mark.

[00:00:40] Mark Rosenthal: Thank you very much. It's looking forward to the opportunity.

[00:00:43] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is awesome. I wanna go back in time with you and talk a little bit about an employment you had where you worked from home.

[00:00:52] Mark Rosenthal: Oh, yeah. .

[00:00:53] Joe Krebs: You didn't get a lot of phone calls until you got one.

[00:00:56] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah.

[00:00:57] Joe Krebs: And that was the one you got terminated.

[00:01:00] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah.

Bu Yeah.

[00:01:01] Joe Krebs: But the interesting thing is you in your reflection, you had a, let's say a moment of realizing a lack of leadership skills.

[00:01:14] Mark Rosenthal: Yes. And yeah, and really that was, and this is even better because this is really the kind of leadership that most conduct practitioners have to engage in, which is influence.

You don't have formal authority you rather, you've got to, you have to find a way to influence the lead, the line leaders in the organization to be effective. And this is true for lots of cases. It's true whenever I'm bringing groups of people together that I can't tell what to do. And actually it's more true that you think even in the military, which is where I learned leadership.

And it really was that. We tend to do, we practitioners tend to engage with the technical artifacts, and we put in the tools, we put in the mechanics, and we don't, and then we complain when the line leadership doesn't embrace the changes. And that is on us because if you look at a traditional Kaizen event approach, for example, in the world of, you know, of CI, but this would be equally true for somebody trying to get scrum in place or somebody trying to cause any change in the way the organization does business.

I can describe the mechanics of the daily standup perfectly. I can describe, I can get all the scheduling. I can get the artifacts into place.

If there isn't a engagement of the conversation about how we do it on a daily basis too, then it's going to fall apart as soon as that that, that goes away in the situation you're describing. I mean, it was even worse in a way, just because of the nature. It was an international organization and it didn't really matter where I worked, so I didn't work anywhere.

Although I got a lot of frequent flyer miles. You know, going to Europe once a month, going all kinds of places. But what I was doing was making technical recommendations. And then, you know, they weren't getting picked up. And frankly, I wasn't earning my money. Yeah. And the key here for a change agent.

Is it's not about the tools you're putting into place, the tools are there to create the kinds of conversations that need to happen in the organization between the leaders and between people, between groups of people. And once I understood that, then the paradigm changes completely because the experiments I run are testing whether or not I'm effective at moving the needle.

About how these conversations are taking place. And that's kind of what I was talking about in the, you know, in the story that you're alluding to.

[00:04:20] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So this is a life changing event for you, but also in your career, right? You had a lot of learnings coming out of this.

[00:04:27] Mark Rosenthal: A lot of them, and they came later on.

You know, I had, I was familiar with Toyota Kata at the time. But I was still in the position of trying to make people do it, and I can't do that. What I have to do is look at the dynamics in the organization and think in terms of it's not the mechanics of standing up a storyboard and getting them to go through the starter kata of grasping the current condition and all of that.

It's about what actions what small experiment can I run? That I think that I hypothesize will nudge the conversation into, for example, talking about something a little more concrete than we had a good day or a bad day, which moves them toward measuring how they're doing, you know, in that example, that particular organization really had disdain for numbers because they made people look bad.

So they didn't talk about them. I mean, they had them on displays, but nobody ever talked about them and the numbers they had on displays were lagging indicators. Yeah. It's

interesting because you said like the words, if I remember correctly, like you said, like moving the needle, and I think that's also important from a leadership perspective, are we just in the operations mode of tools and features and keeping those alive or are we disrupting them?

Yeah. Absolutely. Certain ways of working within the organization as a

leader.

Yeah, and you're going to be disrupting, you know, that's the whole point in a way. So when I want to begin to shift things I want to do is engage in the smallest change I can that's going to move things. And I'm going to try to do is to incorporate that change into something they're already doing.

So in this example, there was already a daily production meeting. So rather than saying, we're going to have another meeting about improvement, rather than saying, you got to stop doing that way and start doing it this way, I can hook part of my agenda into the existing structure. So as a change agent, I want to look at what are they already doing?

And can I grab any of that and just modify it in a way? That moves the conversation in the direction it needs to go.

[00:06:58] Joe Krebs: Yeah,

This is interesting, right? There's two things I would like to talk about, and I'm not sure which one should be first or not. I'll just take one and get started.

Maybe it's the wrong order, but. We just went through a, or just two years ago, we somewhat ended the pandemic and we started going back to work. And your experience obviously from work from home was prior to to the pandemic. Now you had some learnings in terms of leadership and we see a lot of companies that are bringing the people back to work sometimes mandatory.

And sometimes it's the leadership team that just feels like very strongly about that. So I want to just include that in terms of, it's very impressive right now. There's a lot of companies still work in that kind of dual mode or came back full time back on premises. What advice do you have based on your learning for leaders when you work this way?

I don't know if you'd have any, but I'll just put

you on the spot.

[00:07:58] Mark Rosenthal: You know, that's a good one. You know, you're going to encounter resistance, but you know, this is a quote from Ron Heifetz out of Harvard, who Talks about this thing called adaptive leadership, which really is applying PDCA to leadership. And that's why I like it so much, because it follows the Kata pattern of grasp the current condition, make a, you know, make a judgment where you want to go next and run experiments to try to get there.

And he said, and I love this, people don't resist change. People resist loss. Nobody gives back a winning lottery ticket. And so the people who are. are used to working with the cat on their lap and having be able to respond to their kids and all the awesome things that come from the ability to work from home are losing that connection that they have developed with their family.

So that's what they're resisting. Typically, you know, I can't speak for everybody, but what's, you know, the flip side is what's the boss, what did the company lose when the people didn't come to the office? And that was the informal interaction that drives the actual conversation that gets stuff done.

Yeah. And so that's what I didn't have, right? You know, we didn't have, I don't even think we didn't have video. We didn't, you know, I mean, this was a while ago. I think, you know, Skype was cutting edge stuff, right?

[00:09:31] Joe Krebs: Hard to imagine, right?

[00:09:32] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah yeah. You know, if I were to go back to the same situation, I would be having a lot more scheduled online sessions.

With not just individuals, but with groups of people sharing their experiences with, in my case, with continuous improvement and what they're doing so that I didn't need to be there all the time, but I could work on keeping the conversation and the buzz going and get a better read for the organization.

[00:10:09] Joe Krebs: Yeah. You mentioned that I've heard you say things like that leadership is a typical leadership. Yeah. What is authority. And then sometimes you do see that when you go back to, to work in, you know, in work environments where you're being asked and forced to come back to work versus adaptive leaderships, taking a different approach to something like that.

But another quote you said, and maybe that's the other angle I wanted to ask you. . Is I heard you say a phrase that leadership is an activity, not a role.

[00:10:40] Mark Rosenthal: And that's again, I want to make credit where credit is due. That's right out of, you know, Ron Heifetz work and a lot of it is taught at a place called the Kansas Leadership Center in Wichita.

And so I want to make sure I'm giving credit where credit is due. . So in, there are, you know, there are cases where authority is a good thing. There are cases where you have to get something done fast. The building is on fire, evacuate immediately, not, hey, what do you think we should do?

But even when there is formal authority, it's far more effective to use leadership as a role with the goal of developing other leaders. And, you know, this is if you know, are familiar with the work of David Marquet and his book, Turn the Ship Around on the submarine, you know, he, as the captain of the submarine had absolute authority.

Yeah. And. And I read that book. I'm a former military officer. I was in the Army. Okay. We didn't get it. I did not go on a boat that was designed to sink. But you know, at the end of the story, he tells a story of, he. interprets a situation incorrectly, and he gives an order that was incorrect at the end of the story, and he is countermanded on the bridge with no captain, you're wrong, from the lowest ranking sailor on the bridge.

Who countermanded an order from the captain of the ship. Yeah. And all it did was cause him to look back, reassess, and realize that this 22 year old kid was right. And that's what we want, right? Yeah. We want people to tell us if we're making a mistake.

[00:12:29] Joe Krebs: Yeah, that's a key lesson. I remember this by listening, I listened to that particular book, which is also very eyeopening.

Now, seeing a leadership like this, we see adaptive leadership. But it's obviously something you are embracing. There's a lot of books out there about leadership. That's a massive amount of books. And people could go wild, but you know, many of those are personal stories about what that person has embraced and you might find something very useful here now in certain areas of those books, but you might not 100 percent apply to your own.

Yeah. That might leave the reader with, how would I approach this problem with all that wisdom that is out there and how do you combine and this is where I want to go with you here now in terms of leadership is how can the Agile Kata, the Kata, the improvement Kata, coaching Kata, how can the Kata ways of working scientific thinking.

Help support leaders who are like, I want to create an environment like that. I want to have adaptive leadership. How can Kata help me

with this?

[00:13:37] Mark Rosenthal: Great point, because you know, all those books are those, as you pointed out, those people's personal stories. And it's interesting because all the, all of the stories about success have survivor bias.

Built in and we don't, you know, they're in, in, in lean world, there's a commonly bandied about number that 85, 90 percent of all attempts to put it in the place fail. We read about the ones that are successful, but what we don't know is that the ones that failed probably followed the same formula.

And it only works five or 10 percent of the time. That's really the story here. So what you, there isn't a cookbook and what you got to do is first understand the culture you're trying to build. Because if you don't have that in your mind deliberately, you're going to end up going wherever. But then.

You've got to grasp your own situation in your own organization and then set that next target condition using Kata terms of, okay, I'm not going to try to get there all at once, but what's the one major thing I'm going to try to get in if I'm trying to change the change away and organization runs probably on a 90 day window.

You know, if we're in industry or Kata, we set a target condition of a couple of weeks and no more than that. But, you know, these are bigger things. So where do I want to be at the end of the quarter? Where do I want to be, you know, in three months? And then that narrows my focus. And then I can just start working on that.

And maybe it's just I'm going to, I'm going to get the staff meeting working. more effectively so that we're not trying to solve problems in the meeting. We're just talking about the status of problem solving. That's just a hypothetical example, but that was one place I try to take people for example.

Yeah. And I was work on that.

[00:15:45] Joe Krebs: So you work with leaders through. Coaching cycles. You coach them going through the four steps of the improvement Kata. And you help them to, as you say, move the needle. Towards more adaptive

leadership.

[00:16:04] Mark Rosenthal: And this is using adaptive leadership really to do it, right?

So it's a meta thing in a way. And when I'm, you know, I'm really talking to the change agents out there, you know, the, and in, in the agile world, you know, the scrum master is a staff person who's the holder of the torch of what this is supposed to look like. So this is what. They can do us to work, you know, to say, okay, I know it's not perfect right now.

What's the one thing I'm going to emphasize over the next 90 days to get it better? And maybe it's, you know, I'm just going to get the stand up to be less than 15 minutes. Okay. I just got to get people to just, you know, this is what they talk about. And then they pass the torch to the next person, for example, or the next pair in that case.

[00:17:01] Joe Krebs: You are, I think by looking through your material a little bit and seeing where you're coming from, you're using a tremendous amount of powerful questions. Can you, again, I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but can you give possibly some like a, like an outline of how. What kind of questions you would be throwing so to make it a little bit more concrete.

. We weren't listening to this like a leader or somebody who's receiving some form of coaching from you. And then what kind of questions it's

powerful stuff.

[00:17:38] Mark Rosenthal: . So the coaching Kata just to some background here and what Toyota Kata is just so that we got on topic is.

What Mike Rother essentially did, and this isn't 100 percent accurate, but this is the effect, is he parsed a lot of the coaching conversations that were happening, you know, with leaders and learners at Toyota. And those conversations often are around A3, for example, which is just a piece of paper. And often it's just sounds like a conversation.

But there were elements of the questioning that was, that were always present. And the way I describe it is he boiled all that down and was left at the bottom of the pot was the structure of questions that he published as the Improvement Kata. So I'm going to ask first, I'm going to go off the script first.

What is your target condition? So I want to hear is where you're trying to go in the short term. And what will be in place when you get there? What is the actual condition now in between the two I'm really looking for is what's the gap you're trying to close between where things are now and where you're trying to go in that short term.

Then we're going to reflect on the last step you took because you committed to take that step the last time we talked. So what did you plan as your last step? What did you expect? Because there was a hypothesis that if I do this, then I'll learn that, or this will happen. And what actually happened, And what did you learn?

Then I'm going to ask, okay, what obstacles are now, do you think are now preventing you from reaching your target condition? And so really that's Mike chose the word obstacle because the word problem in the West is really loaded. Okay. Because a problem to a lot of people in industry is something I don't want the boss to find out.

You know, another company I work for, I called them barriers, but it was before Kata was written. But if I go back and look at my stuff, this is basically the same structure. And that's just an enumeration of what person, the problem solver, the learner thinks are the problems. And as a coach, that's kind of telling me what they think right there, right?

I'm beginning to see what they see because they're telling me, which one are we addressing now? It's important to address one problem at a time. And then based on that, and in being informed by the last step you took. What are you planning as your next step and what do you expect? So that's kind of the script going off script often just means asking calibrated follow on questions to get the information that I didn't get from the primary question.

This is where, you know, if you're talking to Tilo Schwartz, he's got a lot of structure around that, which is really a contribution to the community.

[00:20:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah, but your questions are not yes, no answers or status related, even the follow ups are investigative, kind of like bringing things to surface for the learner, not for you to receive a status.

[00:21:07] Mark Rosenthal: What I'm looking for is, again, Toyota Kata jargon, their threshold of knowledge, the point at which, okay, the next step is probably learn about that. And there are times when, you know, even before we get to all the questions, if we encounter that threshold of knowledge, okay, great. We need to learn that.

What's the next step in order to learn more about that?

[00:21:32] Joe Krebs: Mark, this is this is really good. I was just like listening to Katie Anderson's book, and it was funny that you say problem in the Western world, not a very popular word and she makes tons of references in her book about. No problem. is a problem.

[00:21:50] Mark Rosenthal: That's, yeah. That's the

Toyota mantra. That's the Toyota mantra.

[00:21:54] Joe Krebs: And yeah. So whatever you want to call it, you want to overcome it. If it's an obstacle, an impediment, or if it's a problem you want

to overcome.

[00:22:02] Mark Rosenthal: And that's a really good point about the culture. And I'm going to quote my friend, Rich Sheridan here, you know, fear does not make problems go away.

Fear drives problems into hiding. Yeah. And we encounter that a lot where I go into a culture where everybody has to have the answers or everything needs to look good. And so asking them, what problems are you trying to solve here can be problematic. And so that's where the adaptive leadership part comes in, okay, I'm going to have to overcome the obstacle of that cultural hesitancy and find a way to help them get a shared sense of the truth.

That they can talk to rather than talking to each other. And again, if I go into, you know, the, like the extreme programming world where I've got the cards on the wall, for example that is that shared sense of the truth. I can walk in and I can tell which pairs are working on which things and whether they're a hit or behind very quickly without having to ask anyone and there's nothing concealed is fully transparent.

We go into industry, the purpose of the visual controls, the purpose of the status boards, the purpose of the Andon lights, the purpose of all of the lean tools, all of them is to put the truth of what's actually happening out there as compared to what should be happening so that we have an invitation to deal with it.

[00:23:43] Joe Krebs: But

they're tools.

[00:23:45] Mark Rosenthal: But they're, but that's all the tools are, that's what they're for. Yeah.

[00:23:50] Joe Krebs: That is great. Mark, I want to thank you for spending some time here talking from a leadership's perspective to the Agile FM audience and in particular in the Kata series to explore Kata and how Kata can influence.

leadership and what you can do to embrace adaptive leadership while performing scientific thinking as a leader. And obviously your personal stories as well. So thank you, Mark.

[00:24:14] Mark Rosenthal: Sure thing. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

​

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.

Transcript:

​

Agile.FM radio for the agile community.

[00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Welcome to another episode of Agile FM in the Agile Kata Series here. Today I have two authors. I have an author on the call and I have a character. I have two characters from a book and a comic illustration, which is called Engaging the Team at Zingerman's Mail Order. That is Betty Gratopp and Jeffrey Liker.

Thank you for joining me here today.

[00:00:34] Betty Gratopp: Thank you for having me.

[00:00:37] Joe Krebs: All right. So this is a book, the it's a comic. And this book was published in 2023. And it's really a book that illustrates the journey from, in, in terms of Kata up at Zingerman's mail order. And before we talk a little bit about the lean journey, What is Zingerman?

Zingerman, I have visited Zingerman in Ann Arbor myself. It's a mail order business of a a company that is shipping the most wonderful cheeses and breads. I can smell it in the in the warehouse. And but there's much, much more to it. Betty, what is the size? What's the scope of Zingerman's?

What do listeners have to picture? Not familiar necessarily with the service? What do you guys do and how big is the operation?

[00:01:20] Betty Gratopp: Oh, excellent. That's a great question. We are a warehouse and a call center. The warehouse employs approximately 55 people year round, and then we grow to a peak of about 400.

Warehouse staff people during our Christmas holiday at the service center. I would say is about 20,25 people and they have, they experienced the same growth during that peak season.

[00:01:45] Joe Krebs: Yeah, excellent. In the comic, you are a warehouse manager.

[00:01:49] Betty Gratopp: Yes, I am one of three warehouse managers that manage the warehouse and have been the three warehouse managers that have taken us through our lean journey and our transformation to trying to be better scientific thinkers.

[00:02:05] Joe Krebs: And as a character, you were visualized by the illustrator, Jasmine Morales, who is visualized this entire comic, the book, and she did a really good job knowing you obviously listeners cannot see you right now, but this picture is really nice. So is. Jeffrey as a character also drawn in the in the comic

[00:02:24] Jeffrey Liker: and Skinnier and better looking in the comic.

[00:02:28] Joe Krebs: And Jeffrey, I do have to mention the other two authors on the book. That's Eduardo Lander and Tom Root, which are not on the podcast today. But we are talking about this book, the three of us. More importantly than the book itself, obviously describes a story that describes a bumpy story of introducing lean and Kata within a Zingerman

when did your journey start? What was the situation like that led to it? And obviously the origin of the book, that's where everything started,

basically.

[00:03:03] Betty Gratopp: Yes. I think back to 2003 when our business was growing in double digits. So we were a bunch of. Intended foodies who started this business and then had to get better at process because we weren't doing very well.

We were not schooled or learned in anything that had to do with process. That was the environment. So we didn't know how many people to hire. We didn't know how much space we needed. We didn't know how many sales we could take. Really basic things about our business were not clear to us.

[00:03:40] Joe Krebs: Sounds like a startup kind of environment.

Like everybody who has worked or seen startups, it sounds very typical. Doesn't

it?

[00:03:47] Betty Gratopp: Oh yeah. Everybody did everything. Yeah.

[00:03:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah. And you guys had some form of a warehouse. Is it the same warehouse as it is, or did you guys relocate it over the years? Was there also like growth or.

[00:04:00] Betty Gratopp: One of the major motivations to moving to a more, more scientific thinking and lean lean process was the fact that we were moving our operation every two years.

So I was hired in 97. I think we moved twice in four years. And then that fifth year or so is about when we started to think about, we had to find a different way. It was too costly. Ten months of the year, our building was way too large for what we needed it to be. Two months of the year, it was way too small for what we wanted it to be.

And so we had to make a commitment to stay in the building that we were, and we had to figure out how that was going to happen. At that time. My boss, one of the managing partners here was going to the University of Michigan and met a gentleman who you already mentioned, Eduardo Landers, one of the authors of the book, and they were going to U of M together, and that's how that connection was made.

I don't remember actually whether we met Jeff first or Eduardo.

[00:04:57] Jeffrey Liker: I don't remember either, but I did get contacted by Tom Root, and he explained that there were Kept on growing out of their quarters and they understood that lean would help you save space and use space more efficiently. And he said, you know, do you think that it might help us in our journey?

And at the same time, Eduardo was my doctoral student and he was trying to define a dissertation topic. And his interest was in lean and a high variability business, but he couldn't find any that. I had implemented lean as a case study. So this came along and I said Eduardo Maybe you're not gonna be able to find a case study to study and maybe you're gonna have to create your own and become like a consultant and advisor to Zingerman's mail order.

And that's what ended up happening. It was just kind of a coincidence marriage his need and their need. And I was watching the whole thing unfold. And when he first came, and I visited the warehouse and he visited, it was clear to both of us that we talk in the Toyota production system about the seven wastes.

And there was seven ways every place you looked, it was just a complete disaster from our point of view. So in other words, it would be a target rich environment for improvement. You could practically, you could probably throw a lean tool any place and. something. But his, he had been, I've been teaching them that in the Toyota Way of leading, which is asking questions and guiding them step by step, taking the whole enchilada, the whole big problem and boiling it down to small pieces.

And then starting with a first step and then guiding them and getting them to do the thinking and the work. And that's the approach he took, which turns out to be very consistent with Kata. We didn't know about Kata at the time, but it was very consistent with that approach. ,

[00:06:54] Joe Krebs: I just want to go back to that quick is I think this is an important comment you just made is the initial approach was more focused on lean rather than Kata because it was quite a while ago, like, when did this all start?

[00:07:07] Jeffrey Liker: 2003

so 2003 he walked through and then he started going there like several times every week.

And again, what he did was what he could have done is he could have said, here's the Toyota production system. I'm going to lecture you about standard work. I'm going to lecture about Kanban. I'm going to lecture. He didn't do any of that. He just went with them to the floor and say, what's your biggest problem.

Let's start there. And then he would ask questions and, you know, example, why do you have to build up a whole, why do you have to build all your gift boxes overnight? So that they're ready when the shift starts. Why can't you build them as the customers are ordering them? And they said things like, because this is a Star Trek and we can't just beam stuff to where we want to instantly.

[00:07:57] Betty Gratopp: I think my exact words were, because we're going to fail.

[00:08:01] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah, exactly. So they didn't believe, you know, what he was suggesting was possible. So he would say, I understand. Is there something we can try right now? And they would say I guess, you know, and then pretty soon they were generating ideas instead of pushing back and they were trying it.

And then they also found their own analogies, like in the book, the original book, lean and high variability of business. We have a case where one of the, one of Betty's colleagues said, I guess it's kind of like subway. Where they make the sandwiches to order, but they have a certain number of sandwiches in a case in a cooled case that you could pull off the shelf and maybe we could develop both kinds of situations.

And so that's the way it got started. Again, there was no lectures about except for very brief introductions. There was not. Here's 15 tools. I'll teach you all the tools go apply them. It was here's a problem. Let's test some ideas and let's do it right now. And then what do we learn from this?

And then most of the ideas came from the group, like Betty, not from Eduardo. Is that true? Betty.

[00:09:16] Betty Gratopp: Yeah,

what I remember when he was first teaching us, he was very he didn't give us a whole lot of, he didn't give us a whole set of tools at one time. The first thing we learned was pull, the second thing we learned was kanban, the third thing we learned was timed routes, because now you have kanban, so it's At the time, I had no idea that these skills or tools were layered and connected and making a whole system.

Had he come at us with all of that. I mean, even just coming with us with one thing and saying, Hey, we're going to make gift boxes just in time. What do you guys think? That was enough to make our brains explode and us want to stick our feet in the mud. But once we got over that, once we tried it, once we said, yes, we'll at least give it a shot and we saw the value of that, that set the stage for the rest of our growth because we had a problem that we thought we couldn't do.

We learned that we could do it, we did it, and it made us stronger for the next problem that was coming down the way. Yeah. And none of that was like, I had no idea any of that was happening as the person that was being taught and led. Yeah. It's really remarkable

and . Cool.

[00:10:26] Jeffrey Liker: So they were being, they were the students, but, and the, they're, they were the top management.

So in a sense this was a top down approach, only teaching the top managements. On the other hand, if you only have 40 people and three of the managers are leading this, that's a large percentage of the workforce. Yeah. Getting deep exposure to the way of thinking of linear. So that went on to for about 10, 10 years till 2013 when Kata was first introduced.

[00:10:57] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So that's an interesting thing. Why? So there was a transition towards Kata and I just want to. Check in with you. Like, how did, what was the trigger for that? And obviously, why did you adopt this approach? Kata most specifically,

[00:11:10] Betty Gratopp: I remember, I can still remember Eduardo.

I remember when he brought the book. I remember the day he brought the book and I remember it actually happening because we had been through three or four different programs iterations trials of things to get the frontline crew involved. So programs or ways of now that the managers were bought into this work and saw the value in it.

And we wanted to bring more of the frontline crew along. But we weren't having much success with that. So we tried out. There was a. I forget the names of the initiatives, but there were two or three or four programs that we tried.

[00:11:48] Jeffrey Liker: This was one practices one.

[00:11:50] Betty Gratopp: Another one was was something Tom came up with where we were going to have extra.

I forget the name of it. Sorry.

[00:11:56] Jeffrey Liker: They're incentivizing

with money. Yeah. You got some percentage of the savings. Yeah.

[00:12:02] Betty Gratopp: So we tried a couple different things to get frontline engaged with the managers. So, and it didn't work. So the next thing that we were going to try was Kata. And I remember actually saying I was willing to try anything at that point that was different than what we'd been trying.

And this stuck. So Yeah. Yeah. I can, I remember asking the crew one time to come along with us on a Toyota business practice thing. And they were like, literally, I'd rather go to the dentist. I'd rather go anywhere right now than come with you on this little project that you have laid out of when Kata came.

And I don't know if it's because it's four steps and five questions, or if it was the time in the business or what the case was. But people gravitated toward it. And if I had to guess it's because it defaults to action, like we are not a team that likes to sit around in a room and strategize about what a word means.

It would make us crazy with the like perfect problem statement and things like that. We're just not geared for that. We're warehouse folks who want to be out on the floor doing things. And I think that's part of it. So it looks simple. I look at the recipe, I'm looking at it on the wall right now, and I go, wow, 1,2,3,4, really cool, really simple.

Then you get into it and you find out what, how challenging and engaging it is, and it's enough to keep you going, right?

[00:13:30] Joe Krebs: Yeah, and that was 2012 2013, somewhere in that time frame, right?

[00:13:34] Betty Gratopp: Yeah, right around 2013.

[00:13:35] Jeffrey Liker: At the same time as Betty was adopting this, because Eduardo has suggested it. Yeah. I was being kind of indoctrinated by Mike Rother, and we live in the same town.

He was one of my students, and I decided to change my graduate course. I taught a graduate course for about 30 years and on organizational theory. And I decided to change it to lean think lean thinking and use kata as the framework for the whole course and have the students do projects and local companies.

So I approached Betty to ask if our students could do kata projects. And I was like, how do I say this to Betty, like, how do I explain Kata? She's going to think I'm from Mars. And I mentioned Kata and she said, that's what we're doing. On my list of things for the year is to introduce Kata. I think we need to talk.

So then I went and visited her that same afternoon and it was again, a perfect meeting, coincidence of goals. And it was really my students. Working with her people on the floor on kata that really started driving it as well as her at some point. They asked if her student if her people who are warehouse workers, a lot of them didn't have a college degree, but she asked if they could sit in on my graduate course.

And that's what happened. So I had about 15 of these Zingerman's Warehouse met people in my graduate course, and then we're having breakout discussions there with my students and we, and it was the discussions were really rich, and the students are working with them in the warehouse and they're the experts in the warehouse.

So the course turned out great. And what we did is in that first semester turned out great.

[00:15:31] Joe Krebs: I can only imagine how rich the conversation conversations were between, you know, people at a university, but also bringing the real life and real world touch into the conversation

[00:15:41] Jeffrey Liker: And they brought food. We would have, of

[00:15:44] Betty Gratopp: Of course, we brought food.

I take food wherever I go.

[00:15:48] Joe Krebs: That is fantastic.

[00:15:49] Betty Gratopp: The relationship between the students and our frontline coaches or between the managers and the, our frontline coaches and the students is really where a really nice piece of the benefits of working kata come in. When you're first learning this thing together, everybody's new.

I didn't know what I was doing and in order for me to help teach others, I had to be willing to kind of step in it a lot. Over and over again and do it wrong. That's an amazing example for anybody else who's trying to learn something. I think one of the biggest things that we've had to get over here and it still comes up.

It's not something that we ever stopped working on is. Is the environment safe so that people feel like they can test, try, fail, learn, whatever word you want to put on it. This gave us something to point to that said, we want to do this and we're going to not do it right all the time. And that is to be expected.

In fact, it's desirous. That's a really different mind frame than most or mindset than most people walk into a workplace with each day. It really does put us into a laboratory where, you know, we love our food. We love that we pack boxes, but it's so much more. What we do out there is so much more in the relationships that we build and the way that we learn to interact and work on challenging goals together.

It's super cool.

[00:17:18] Jeffrey Liker: The we needed challenges. They needed the first step is to find the challenge. So they had to find projects based on challenges. And at one point we had eight student groups in there. So they had to have eight projects, eight challenges going on simultaneously. But so they would find, and I said, it has to be something where they can make a dent on it.

And run through several target conditions over a semester, you can continue working on it after that, but it can't be too big and it can't be too small so small that they have the solution immediately. So they would pick not redesign the whole warehouse problems, but more like there are errors that are made when people take things off the shelf and put them in the boxes, and you don't get exactly what you ordered.

They call it mis picks. So that was a recurring project is reducing mis picks. And another one was that was in the book was that it takes too long to take bread off the shelf and bag it. And get it to the production line and just in time and sometimes we are too late and also we're going to have to scale up and we expect the busiest season Christmas season ever.

And we're going to have to scale up to work to a fast, much faster tack time. So, that was in that book, so that there was significant problems. They tend to be within a process rather than across the whole warehouse. And they would have a bunch of these going on at one time, and there are problems that they haven't been able to solve easily.

On their own.

[00:18:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah. Betty, you have touched a little bit on that already from a Kata and cultural perspective, but I want to go a little bit deeper on that. And I was just looking at the timeframe you guys mentioned before, and it's kind of, it's interesting because like your, the original start 2003, Kata came 2012, 13.

And if you want to look at this timeline right now, we're recording this in January 2024, somewhat in the middle. So you have been going like 10 years there and 10 years after. I want to talk a little bit about the culture, like the culture of the company, the teams, the crews what the culture was like that enabled Kata in 2013.

Like what were the signals and the signs there that you would say Oh, these were like, you know, setting the stage for us to be successful. Because you are successful with this. And then also I would love to see from both of you obviously to what has Kata done to the culture and positively impacted the culture at a Zingerman's mail order.

Can you explore a little bit both of you on this because I feel like that's an it's an important piece and from it's unique if you're thinking about a company being trying to do it, not trying to do this, being successful with this Kata approach, being in this journey for such a long period

of time.

[00:20:05] Jeffrey Liker: Maybe you should go back to the kind of unique people oriented culture of Zingerman's.

[00:20:10] Betty Gratopp: Yes. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, when I hired on here, I hired on in Zingerman's, I'm not going to give you a year, a long time ago, because otherwise, I'm really old. That was 1997. And I worked in catering. So I hired on as a frontline employee at Zingerman's Deli, one of our sister businesses.

And I was immediately taken by the culture and the people from day one, I felt valued. It was really apparent that they wanted more from me than just putting meat on trays or making nice catering trays, which is also a really great thing. But They wanted to know what I wanted to do. They wanted to know what I thought about things that we were doing at the time.

I felt heard and I felt valued. There's not a lot of places when you walk in the door into a new job, I don't in my experience anyway, where I felt that valued from the get go. And I stuck around and as a result, I've been able to grow into the position that I have now. Mostly because I've been willing to learn and I've been given a really safe place and a really great learning environment to do that.

So my, what I want to do is provide that for everybody else that I work with, and that's the culture I think that Jeff was describing, our unique people based culture, I think is how you said it, is that it's a cycle of everybody trying to help everybody else have a more engaging job. You know, we're all striving for that success

[00:21:44] Jeffrey Liker: and they have profit sharing, very active profit sharing and they have, they call it open book management where everybody could see all the numbers and how much

[00:21:52] Betty Gratopp: servant leadership

[00:21:53] Jeffrey Liker: It is a very open culture.

And they provide somebody who was standing behind a counter. That's who's making a sandwich for you. That person has benefits and they're making a living wage.

[00:22:03] Betty Gratopp: So it is really is about respect for people and, you know, providing an opportunity for growth.

[00:22:10] Joe Krebs: But if I understand that that was already prior to the arrival of Kata.

[00:22:13] Betty Gratopp: Yes.

So what's really fun about that story though, is even with that culture. Adopting Kata was not like one, two, three, four, go. Everybody was energized by it. Everybody wanted to learn to do it. It doesn't mean that it's easy. And that was true with even all the Lean tools as well. So Kata wasn't unique in that way.

And when you're trying to learn new things, we expect that it's going to be fun. I always expect things to be fun or try to make it fun. And we want it to be easy, but that's not when we learn. And we're not advancing our knowledge as a warehouse team if we are not struggling in some fashion towards something.

So there's a little bit of a disconnect between how America or whatever thinks that we want work to be like, we kind of want to come to work and check out if you're practicing kata. That's not what you're able to do. You have to be completely engaged. In your in whatever it is that you're doing.

[00:23:11] Jeffrey Liker: Yeah.

The Toyota Way. There's respect for people and continuous improvement and a lot of companies I've worked with get the continuous improvement part and the tools pretty quickly. But they're weak on respect for people. And Zingerman's was the opposite. It was very strong in respect for people and very weak on the tools and the concepts of continuous improvement.

And we thought from the beginning that it was easier to teach the tools. Within a favorable culture, then to teach the tools and then try to change the culture. So we thought it was a very nice fit and it turned out that way. That the fit was very strong. Yeah.

[00:23:54] Joe Krebs: Thanks for pointing that out, Jeff. I think that's a that's an important takeaway also to see that there was a specific culture there that actually enabled what was.

About to happen with the introduction of Kata, but then once scientific thinking took over 2013 and following, how did Kata positively impact the culture? How did it drive forward? What happened to it? I would assume it did not

[00:24:23] Betty Gratopp: stay the same. I was thinking of the years from 2000. We started in 2013, 2018 was our best year ever best year.

When I say that, I think of in terms of capacity the quality of our work, internal mistakes, things of that nature. Those were the years that we were, we had an engaged warehouse team. That was working on Kata, we went to school every year that kept us accountable to Dr. Liker's class. We're still doing that.

Actually, we were inviting people in for tours and things like that as a way of elevating our work, because when our crew on the floor sees people come and they're curious about what it is that we're doing, that's kind of new and different for a warehouse staff person to have that sort of experience.

I just lost my train of thought, but I was going somewhere

really good.

[00:25:14] Jeffrey Liker: So you were talking about the peak. So what was different?

13 to 18. We're learning. We're driving down the stakes. We're engaged. What happened in 2019 is we took our the eye, our eye off the ball a bit because of the COVID epidemic.

And we started ticking back up, but you can look at our year over year, both in our capacity and our quality. And you can see when we started Kata. Actively practicing it and then you can see, so you can see mistakes going down. You can see revenue, things like that going up and you can see when the pandemic stopped our practice and what the impact of that was on our business.

Mistakes went up. We weren't paying a lot of attention. There was a lot of other things going on. So it wasn't that we weren't paying attention. It was that our attention was on other things, like keeping people safe. And that's when our scientific thinking kicked in again, only in a different fashion.

So it wasn't that we had storyboards everywhere. But every day that we came to work, the three managers were very active in thinking, what is it I can do today to keep people safe? What is it today? I can do now that people are safe to increase capacity. What is our next goal? How are we going to get there?

It was pretty fascinating.

Yeah. One of the things that impressed me because I bet he was kind of reporting to me at the time what's happened with COVID. And one thing is that people had to think about their jobs and what they touched and using sanitizer. And. What I would see in companies is that somebody say in human resources, which is responsible for safety, would come up with policies and then they would spread the policies every place.

But in Zingerman's, they had the group leaders who had a small group and each group leader had to study the job and find out where their touch points and find out how they should use sanitizer. And. They tailored the solution to the standardized work of that particular job, and it was much deeper than the kind of more superficial thinking of everybody has to use sanitizer, you know, and yeah, so I could see the thinking way, even though they weren't formally using the method or storyboard.

[00:27:32] Joe Krebs: Yeah, just to that point you're making, right? So sanitizing people, keeping people safe, respecting people, right? As a cultural anchor, as well as having a scientific thinking pattern for continuous improvement. Those two things might be really good attributes for navigating through the COVID crisis.

[00:27:58] Betty Gratopp: What was yes, and what was surprising to me is I remember thinking that I might have misstepped by not having a storyboard. And then I think it was Jeff that said, no, actually, it was like the thinking in action. Like you were doing it the workout. I knew that the work was outpacing the storyboard and I knew I couldn't keep it up to date.

It was good. That's good.

[00:28:18] Jeffrey Liker: But I have the I think often what happens if you have a company that's good to its workers and is strong in respect for people. Is they may lack discipline in executing in a sort of systematic way and also improving in a systematic way. And I think that's what lean and then Kata introduced was a lot more rigor and discipline in how they structured their daily work and how they structured their approach to improvement and reaching their goals.

.

[00:28:53] Betty Gratopp: It's interesting that you say that because It is true and when, you know, when coven did happen and we were, we had an amazing amount of demand and growth and we tried to, we were hiring during COVID. But so there was like, 3 years there where. I think we did what other companies may experience where the demand hides perhaps some of your missteps internal mistakes were creeping up.

We weren't quite aware of that. Standard work wasn't getting used as much as it used to get used. And we weren't really aware of that. And I say all these things just, Because in 2022, when we came, when we started to come out of the pandemic and look at our situation, because of our Kata training and our scientific thinking and.

Having advanced to where we had, we were able to look at those years with a different set of eyes, not to say that it didn't hurt to think that we didn't we weren't paying attention to internal mistakes and we weren't auditing our standard work and we weren't focused on growing our.

Staff during that time, but we knew that it was just a break. We think of it as a, we had a critical break in 2022 and we had the observation also that we had been here before in 2013, ironically, 10 years ago, as Joe pointed out, and we knew how to do the work. So it wasn't so much it wasn't a self defeat moment.

It was a moment of, oh gosh, it's kind of not great that we're here, but we knew how to do the work, and we knew the next step forward, and we knew what we needed to do. And that makes it okay. It makes it. It actually makes it inspiring. You're not inspired at first. At first, you're just okay. But by the time you walk through it and you're like, Oh yeah, we've been here before.

And you start getting some traction and the crew starts coming along again. Then it starts being inspired.

[00:30:49] Jeffrey Liker: Busy season. Betty was another, it was another pretty successful season, right?

[00:30:54] Betty Gratopp: It was better than 2022 markedly. Yes, we had we saw good results of the work that we did last summer. So coming out of holiday 2022, we had our work cut out for us.

We spent the summer or I'm sorry, 23. we spent the summer working on that. Yeah. And we had a better year because of it. And when I say by working on it, we were using our scientific thinking to reach our

goals.

[00:31:20] Jeffrey Liker: I think that one, yeah, one of the things that I think Betty's saying is that the Mike calls the kata starter kata.

So the starter kata includes here's the four steps, your challenge, your current state, your target condition, and then experiment and put it on a storyboard. And there's a coach and the coach has a question card and every day ask these questions. And that's the, those are the kata to the tools to help you get started.

But the goal of kata is actually to eliminate the kata, is to get to the point where it's just the way you naturally think. And you don't need to say, wait a second, I better write that down on a storyboard. Yeah.

[00:32:03] Joe Krebs: What's the fourth question?

[00:32:05] Jeffrey Liker: People like Betty had gotten to that point. Not everybody in the warehouse did, but the leaders, all the leaders really of the warehouse had gotten to that point where they're thinking scientifically not necessarily grabbing the tools.

[00:32:20] Joe Krebs: That's right. Absolutely. It wouldn't be continuous improvement without continuation. The comic you guys have published is a snapshot in time. It had to end somewhere. It had to go to the printer and has to be shipped. But the journey is going to continue. I would assume that the Kata journey will continue.

I don't know how much you can share. You're very open and public with tours and everything on the floor. What are some things you, I don't know if you can share of anything or Jeff by working with Zingerman's, it's just like, where's the Kata journey gonna go? Are there, what are the goals?

What are you, what's on your mind if you're thinking about Kata and the next steps? There's another year ahead of us. 24. You just mentioned 20 coming out of 22 busy season. There were some changes. What's happening now for you guys in Kata,.

[00:33:14] Jeffrey Liker: We started to address that at the end of the book, and I think it's pretty accurate still, but there's a concept in Toyota hoshin kanri.

It's also called strategy deployment where you start top down and you say, these are our biggest challenges. And, you know, there's four big challenges and then for each of those this year, we're going to have a big challenging audacious target for the year. And then that cascades down. So everybody has a piece of that problem of that goal, and they have their own goals that are aligned with those goals at the top of the company.

So far, mostly what you saw mail order was individual projects. And it wasn't guided by a strategic vision. So getting to that point where it becomes natural to have an annual plan. And to execute the plan through the year with people involved at all levels. That's one thing. I know that Zingerman's working toward.

It would be a huge step forward.

[00:34:23] Betty Gratopp: Yeah, that's interesting. You mentioned that we just rolled out a, I call it the big goal instead of challenge your vision. We've called it the big goal. So now we have a, it's written as a Zingerman mail order wide, and then we'll take it and it'll be more specific to the warehouse, but it has to do with capacity, quality, and cost.

So it has a I could read it to you if you want.

[00:34:45] Jeffrey Liker: Go ahead.

[00:34:45] Betty Gratopp: It's not, it's just a challenge. The beginning of a challenge statement, it's two days old, so you have to cut us some slack too. . It says literally two days old. ZMO is a dynamic team able to meet demand defined as 9, 000 boxes in a single ship day.

While maintaining an internal quality percentage of 93 percent and offering a Zing org experience. This is to be done by December 2023. So it's a one year challenge for the warehouse and mail order as a larger business. It's not perfect. It'll probably change.

[00:35:26] Joe Krebs: It will probably change,

[00:35:27] Betty Gratopp: It'll probably change.

[00:35:28] Joe Krebs: The journey continues.

[00:35:30] Betty Gratopp: Yes. But yes.

[00:35:32] Joe Krebs: And I do want to thank you guys for sharing that story a little bit making it really real and building that connect from a mail order business, a floor, very actionable to everybody listening out there. Some of my guests on agile FM, we're talking about sometimes about organizational culture.

This is real. This is the culture in, in action. So I want to thank you for spending that time here with me and with the listeners. Thank you, Betty. Thank you, Jeff.

[00:36:01] Jeffrey Liker: Thank you.

[00:36:02] Betty Gratopp: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.

Transcript:

Agile F M radio for the agile community.

[00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you for tuning in to another episode here of Agile.FM. Today I have Tilo Schwarz with me, and we will be exploring in the Agile Kata series, which we are in, and Tilo is joining. We're going to explore the topic of Coaching, Kata coaching, to be more specific, before we get started, everybody should know that Tilo is the author of two books, the Toyota Kata Memory Jogger, released in 2018 and recently is in summer 2023, giving wings to her team that was in 2023.

And that is a novel about coaching and Kata, welcome to the show, Tilo.

[00:00:49] Tilo Schwarz: Joe, it's a pleasure to be here with you again. Awesome.

[00:00:52] Joe Krebs: Awesome. Yeah. We want to talk and emphasize and focus a little bit on, on coaching and Kata in this episode, the other elements of the Kata series here on my podcast, they go into different kinds of corners, but for everybody listening today is all about coaching.

All about Kata and coaching. So my first question is really there are two Kata. If somebody is reading about Toyota Kata, that's the improvement and coaching Kata. Can you do improvement without a coach and without a coaching kata?

[00:01:25] Tilo Schwarz: Good question, Joe. Sure you can. I mean, many of us probably do, like at least once in a while, I mean, you know, something annoys you like your cable on your desk when you're moving the mouse.

And so we push the cable out of the way fix it with some sticky tape to hold in place. And of course, also you could hire an expert, you know, like consultant coming in to implement some improvements for you for both. You don't need a coach. You know? I mean, the issue here of course is that these kind of improvements starting with bumping into some waste.

And not necessarily return relevant improvement, right? I mean, for the investment, we're making time, ingenuity, budget, and so on. So basically that's why maybe waste walks, 5S audits, postmortems, that kind of thing might not be such a good starting point for improvement because the improvement just tends to be for improvement's sake, you know, where we bring up some ideas, they turn into long task lists and then array of projects.

And at the end it might be very arbitrary and effects are random, right? So in a way you could say, back to your question, I mean, before coaching improvement should start with setting goals, right? So where are we what is it we want to achieve?

Yeah but the cutter, they are separated from each other, right?

So we can do improvement without the coaching cutter and that would be something a lot of people experience, let's say at the beginning of a year when they have their New Year's resolution. So I'm just going to work on this by myself. The track record is very known. for that. So why do we need coaching to get improvement?

So building on that now, so imagining that we have set, you know, what do you say your new year's resolutions or in a business context striving for a challenging goal. Now at some point. And we'll enter the unknown zone. So I mean, that's the point where we've kind of, you know, all the quick wins, all the low hanging fruits done.

Yeah. But we've done everything we had in mind the kind of the ideas we had up our sleeve but actually our desired condition is still way out. Time's ticking. So we're kind of running low on chips, as they say in poker. So not only will this happen inevitably over time in a business context, I even think we should look for that.

So we should make sure we run out of solutions. Because you know, competitiveness comes from solving things that others haven't solved yet or solving them in a completely different way. Right. So now while you might still wonder, why do we need coaching? Now reaching that threshold of knowledge is kind of create stress.

Okay. So we're out of solutions. We're out of chips. And that's when our biases kick in. So first and foremost if you're, I guess you're familiar with thinking fast and slow we start making assumptions based on our experience. So we reach for what has worked in the past, and it's quite likely that we ignore that circumstances might have changed or we conclude.

It's impossible, right? So now besides these biases there's also some in a business context, there's often some group dynamics at play. So when we run out of solutions and you can imagine your team starting to discuss if the group has similar experiences, made similar experiences something like groupthink might kick in and we're even more convinced that this is the way to go.

Or if, you know, everybody has different opinions this might get a heated discussion and then in the end, you know, it's all about opinion. We're actually not discussing facts anymore. And then the most senior person or whoever's most convincing wins. So that is kind of. is at stake? What's happening?

We will run out of solutions and then biases, noise, group dynamics will kick in. Hope is not lost. Changing that is not as difficult as we might think because there's actually a powerful countermeasure available and that is practice of scientific thinking skills. So scientific thinking is a meta skill.

And it helps us counter these effects. And that is actually the purpose of Toyota Kata, develop the meta skill of scientific thinking as a group and ultimately make it part of our culture. So the way we do things on a side note, that's actually the second meaning of the suffix Kata, a way of doing things now.

So when we talk about all this, I think it's becoming clear, this is about habit change. This is about changing thinking patterns. Now our brain has this natural tendency to follow existing paths. So a new path. So whenever you try something new, we'll, by default. Be uncomfortable or make you feel uncomfortable.

And it also will suck a lot of energy. And that is why we need a coach. So basically we need a coach to help us stay on track until this new neural pathway is strong enough and becomes a habit. And I mean, then you could say but then coaching ends. It doesn't end because in sports. a pro always has a coach, right?

So to take the game to the next level. And that is why having managers as a coach is so important. Because a habit needs a trigger and you want to take it to the next level. So basically this is all about develop scientific thinking skills. Make them a habit and then trigger them, trigger their use on a daily basis on all levels.

[00:07:26] Joe Krebs: Tilo, this is it sounds interesting. You just mentioned in the intro you were talking a little bit about experts in this. What you just described, it might sound for somebody out there like a severe undertaking, right? Why don't just hire an expert for that improvement we need?

[00:07:43] Tilo Schwarz: Sure. I mean, that certainly could be an option in, in, in some situations.

Now what I like to kind of remind myself of is hiring an expert is outsourcing, right? So we're outsourcing the knowledge work. And then besides that, an expert. I mean, we're all experts on a certain topic. You are, I am an expert is an expert because of the experience the expert has made with solving similar problems.

So now If there's more and more new problems to be solved in the world there will be less and less experts, right? Or in other words in, in a changing world, volatile conditions, learning, speed of learning beats having experience and knowledge. And that's why we talk about the learning organization a lot.

Now, a learning organization has the ability to evolve the business, to improve the products, develop new products, improve the processes, and do that over and over. So developing that kind of organization, a system, an organism, you could say, that evolves itself, if that is our goal, then, I mean, we cannot hire experts from the outside, right?

So we have to develop this ability within the organization. And I think that is, that's very crucial.

[00:09:10] Joe Krebs: So we already touched on that there are two Kata, the improvement and the coaching Kata. Early on we talked a little bit about the improvement Kata, but what makes the coaching Kata approach so special or so different in this context, if we're just isolating and focusing on

that.

[00:09:27] Tilo Schwarz: Yeah. So for me, it's the dual purpose. So there's different coaching approaches. And the idea of coaching in a business context is of course not completely new. So just to be clear here this is not about you know, being right or wrong or, you know, coaching is the only approach and no, this is not the point.

Coaching is situational. And it's all about what is your purpose for using a coaching approach in this situation that is at hand. So it's about what is it we want to achieve? Now the first purpose of coaching, and I think that is true for any kind of coaching approach is helping an individual or a team to reach a specific goal or solve a problem.

So I mean, if you think of business coaching, personal coaching, sports coaching even marriage counseling, right? It's always about reach a goal, solve a problem. So of course this purpose the coaching kata has that purpose too help the person you coach achieve a goal, remove an obstacle.

Now, in addition, and that's that dual purpose thing. In addition, the coaching kata has a second purpose. And that is what, in my opinion, makes it very unique. Because the second purpose is that while we work towards reaching a specific goal. In addition, we want to become better or make the person that we coach better at a meta skill.

So becoming better at scientific thinking. So to make that maybe I'll try an example. So maybe it's best compared to a sports coach where you say, so the sports coach is coaching a to win this specific game. And at the same time, learn how to play the game even better. So that is what for me makes the coaching kind of special.

This dual purpose..

[00:11:30] Joe Krebs: This is awesome. We just touched a little bit on the coach itself, on the role of the coach. And the and the coaching Kata and the improvement Kata, but let's go back to that coach for a second, that individual what are the skills and characteristics you will be looking at by looking at what what's that coach in terms of characteristics and skills, responsibilities.

[00:11:50] Tilo Schwarz: I'm a bit hesitant with the question here, you know, because this sounds like a checklist. It's kind of, you know, what criteria do I need to fulfill to be a coach? And I sometimes feel at least around coaching Kata, we've, we think too much of the coach being a job or a title. Connected with a certificate maybe?

So a sports coach, that's a distinct job, okay? Or a personal coach, that's a job too. A systemic coach, that's the title. You have to earn it and then you get a certificate. That's why there maybe is a list of skills and you need to learn them. And then if you match them, you get the certificate, right?

Now, as far as the coaching Kata of is concerned the coach is maybe more a momentary role, a role you take in a conversation, like, you know, when we talk about my project, you're coaching me. So you're the coach. When we're talking about your project. I might be coaching you, so then I'm the coach, right?

So now let's take that in a business context where we're talking about managers should be coaching, managers as coaches. Rather than making this list of criteria, I prefer to talk about why should we be coaching? And then if we say like, okay so this is why then, Hey, how can we learn this?

Yeah. And I don't know if we have time but just digging into that a little bit. So why should we be coaching? I think first adding an increasing amount of coaching to our daily management work might be the only option, viable option forward. I mean, given the unpredictability we have.

Right. Because telling people what to do basically requires to have the answer, which is probably more and more unlikely to happen even inhumane to expect that from managers. You always have to have the answer. Then again, only setting targets defining projects and then say, okay, get out.

I'll get out of the way. You figure it out. Might not work either. Because our team doesn't have the answer, or at least it raises the question if this is kind of manager's task, set the target, then get out of the way, what do we need managers for in the future? I mean, JetGPT can probably produce a, you know, scan our strategic target list analyze the running projects for impediments, and then create a list.

That's what to work on today. So basically in a way you could say why do we need more coaching? Because I believe we'll be more and more operating in that area where neither we as the manager nor our team has the answer. And then we need to start coaching. How can we help our team to find the answer?

Another reason, I mean, we're talking about people development. And and that's kind of a second aspect. So helping people to reach their potential, I think that is one of our main tasks in a leadership role. And I mean, I see it this way, very personally. I mean, when I watch this over, everything is said, everything's done, you look back on your life, you don't want to end up, you know, kind of thinking of people you've been working with, you've worked with, you've lived with and go like.

Oh, they didn't reach their full potential because of me. And not just because I didn't help them because maybe I even was in their way. You don't want that. Right. If we, the need for coaching, I think is growing and I think it's also that what makes the role of good leadership. So if we want to learn this and that maybe gets closer to your question of a skill list.

I'll go high level here. So number one, I think coaching, learning to coach starts with a posture, the underlying mindset we have. And basically it's like this. It's not about you. It's about the people developing the people you're responsible for. It's not about you putting in your ideas and solutions.

And then. And if that is you then you can start your learning journey. And I think that's the second aspect, understanding that becoming a better coach is a learning journey because coaching is a skill. There's no hack. It's not like you can read a book, you can sit in the classroom and that's knowledge.

That's not skill. And that is really what I love about the coaching kata. Right from the start, I realized, Hey the coaching kata provides a set of questions. I can get started with, and it's not 100 questions. It's a set of questions. It's structured in five phases. And I felt like back when I was a plant manager yeah, I stand a chance.

I can do that. I can do that even in the whirlwind of my daily management. Yeah. Okay. Start with the posture is not about you and coaching is a learning journey. Right. And I think that, that's a good starting

point.

[00:17:08] Joe Krebs: Very good starting point and thanks for clarifying a little bit.

It's not so much of a list or something like that, or of skills. It's more like a. The thing, and as you said, in sports, sometimes ex athletes who are trying to become coaches are not good coaches. It turns out that they're departing from that profession. So it is a skill that needs to be added on.

So just being a good athlete, it's just a good piece, but it's just not the full person. So you just mentioned a little bit, the questions you would be asking there is a coaching cycle where the coach and the coachee is going to meet. And there are some questions that are being asked.

What's the purpose of these coaching questions in an, in a coaching cycle like this?

[00:17:53] Tilo Schwarz: As I said first the questions of the coaching kata provide a starting point for practicing, for getting our practice started. And then over time, of course, it's not about, you know, talking like a robot forever.

So over time, as our coaching skills develop our brain will turn these questions into question phases. Like a five phase coaching model. And then using this five phase model intuitively like a scaffold is what enables us to coach in actually nearly any kind of situation, like in a one on one, in a meeting, and even when there's just pressure, yeah.

And once we have this underlying model as a scaffold in our mind for, You know, running our conversations, running our meetings, it really releases this pressure of having to have all the answers. And at the same time, it's not just saying, okay, you do it. It's, it also provides a way, you know, we can have our team to move forward.

So when that is when kind of the coaching kind of questions show their second purpose, because you asked about purpose or what do they do they become you could say like a measurement instrument. So here's what I mean. So I don't know, Joe have you ever done downhill skiing? Are you a skier?

I'm not sure.

A

[00:19:12] Joe Krebs: little bit downhill. A little bit. Okay. Okay.

[00:19:14] Tilo Schwarz: That's good. Okay. So let's quickly run this mental experiment, or not experiment, just this, you can imagine so you can ski and now you want to up your game. So for the weekend, you take a ski instructor. Now, when you meet and after saying, hi what is.

What's the first thing this ski instructor is going to, what she's going to do?

[00:19:37] Joe Krebs: Probably assessing my,

State.

[00:19:38] Tilo Schwarz: Current condition. Yes, exactly. And so basically developing skills starts with assessing current condition. So how does she do that? She tells you, Hey, Joe, go down this part of the slope, right?

And then, exactly. So she wants to see you, she wants to see you ski, yeah. And that helps her to understand. where you're at. And then she can take it from there. Okay. So developing skills starts with understanding current condition. Where's the person at? And that is what the questions do.

Okay. So when you ask the question, the coaching Kata question, one of them, they are like a measurement instrument. So it's not so much about the question. It's about listening to the answer. And then this answer will give you a glimpse in how the other person is thinking. So I'll make an example. So imagine you ask a question from phase three, like, which one obstacle or impediment are you addressing now?

And then your counterpart says we have to update the software on the controller. So you probably right away hear, this is not an obstacle, it's a countermeasure. Update software on controller. So mentally you realize your counterpart is already moving towards taking action. Now depending on the situation, that might be okay.

But imagine maybe the past three days, we've been throwing all kinds of things, you know, action at some arbitrary attempts to get this solved. Then maybe you don't want to move with that and say wait. So a good follow up question might be, so what obstacle or impediment are you addressing by updating the software?

So in a way, this coaching kata question you started with, which one helps you addressing, and then listening to the answer helps you understand where the person's at. That's like the ski coach saying, Hey, Joe, go down the slope here. Yeah. Right. So basically the, back to your question, coaching kata questions at the beginning, they provide a starting point.

Then they turn into this five phase model, a scaffold, and the questions themselves become your measurement instrument.

[00:21:53] Joe Krebs: Right. Cool. So when I got exposed to Kata and several years ago one thing that really, you know, brought me, I guess something extremely powerful was the concept of a second coach. And this is really a cool concept because there is not only one coach, there is a possibly a second coach that is part of that, that coaching cycle.

What's the power of that? You want to explore this a little

bit together.

[00:22:19] Tilo Schwarz: Yeah, so let's talk about why is it helpful to have a second coach? We said coaching is a skill and develops through practice. In the longer run, we want to add coaching to our leadership portfolio. And.

You know, this is not a knowledge problem. I mean, managers, no, I can tell you from my own experience as a manager we know we should be coaching. We've read books. We've had some two day coaching training or whatever, a course. Yeah. We know the issue is any given day, somebody steps into your office and says, we have a problem.

And you have like 21, 22, 23. to make a decision, right? Do you tell? Do you delegate? Do you coach? Okay. So that's the issue. It's like in the moment, in the heat. Yeah. Pull the coaching card. And skill development of course is best done with a coach, right? Because we can't observe ourselves. And that is where this power of this having a second coach comes in, helping me.

If coaching is a learning journey, helping me to move forward on this learning journey.

[00:23:36] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is really cool. As we said in the beginning, you are the author of Giving Wings to Her Team, a novel you wrote together with Dr. Jeffrey Liker. And There is a character called Denise in your book and I just want to bring listeners to the book.

Obviously, there's an awareness that there is a book, it's a novel, and there's some form of Kata, obviously, and coaching involved. Can you name one struggle from Denise, which is one of the characters in the book that is very common when somebody is starting with

[00:24:08] Tilo Schwarz: Sure. Sure. Just a bit of context here for your listeners.

So Denise is the main character. She's a young manager, has taken her first managerial role has a background as a consultant and because yeah she just wants to lead her team in a, you know, timely manner a modern way of working together. So she has this aspiration of coaching her team and she runs some experiments.

And because of her background as a consultant and having some coaching training, she said, okay, I can do this. Okay. So I'll just read a part from the book if that's okay. So Wednesday, February 2nd, 6. 35 PM. What a long day at work. Denise parked her

car at the fitness studio, grabbed her duffel bag and made her way to the changing room. She had met with Joan Mark, her team leaders, twice today to discuss the target conditions they were working on this week. It seemed that after an initial burst of energy early in the week, Denise had tried to coach them using approaches she had learned during a training program at the consultancy she worked for.

What are you trying to achieve? Getting that damn quality issue solved, Joe had said in frustration at one point. What options do you have? Was another question Denise had lobbed at him. At first, Joe and Mark had come up with suggestions. Denise had encouraged them to try them out right away.

Unfortunately, they did not work. They were further disillusioned. What other options can you think of? was the question Denise had tried next. Mark had just stared at her. Nothing, he said. I've tried everything. It's just impossible. Oh no, back to where we started, Denise had thought. She had tried to encourage them and also awaken their ambitions by asking, So how would it feel to be successful?

How would it feel? Mark had replied. I'd say relieved, because then we could stop these stupid interviews. Then she had tried yet another approach. What is the real challenge here for you? The real challenge is that I don't know how to solve the quality issue. Joe had snapped back at her. So what options do you see?

Denise had asked him. I don't know, Joe had said. I've tried everything. It just doesn't work. Okay, what else could we do? I don't know, Joe had replied, even more annoyed than before. These interrogations you call coaching are driving me crazy. Please just tell me what you want me to do. Denise had been just as frustrated as Joe.

This had been exactly where she didn't want to go, but she knew she was running out of alternatives and had started making suggestions. Joe and Mark quickly shot each idea down. That doesn't work. We tried that. That doesn't work either. I need to talk to Maggie, desperately, Denise thought as she grabbed her towel and left the changing room.

She entered the gym hall, walked over to the stationary bicycles, looking around for Maggie, but Denise couldn't see her anywhere. She started her workout. So Maggie is her second coach. That's the person she's looking for. And yeah, this is not a few, this is another Joe, by the way, Joe, just for clarity.

[00:27:58] Joe Krebs: I know why you picked this example.

[00:27:59] Tilo Schwarz: So let's kind of, Think about that passage for a second. So what we see happening here is a very common struggle for coaches or when we try to coach. Happened to me too, yeah. Basically checking in and asking a few questions is not coaching, right?

Because this is unlikely to help the other person when they're stuck. So we're having a situation here where the team is stuck. And then a second struggle is because then when Denise realized we're getting nowhere, she started to enter in her ideas. So that's kind of a second thing that is a big issue when coaching.

So sometimes people ask me what do you mean I should stay away from my own ideas? But then, I mean, how can I coach if I don't have knowledge and understanding about the topic? I often say, if you don't have a deep knowledge about the process or topic you're coaching on that might actually be helpful because if you have you're probably going to be sucked in by your own ideas.

And at some point you're going to start to, yeah. What do you think about this? Have you thought about this? Yeah. This is not coaching. I mean, this is consulting, counseling, sparing solving problems together. So then people ask, so how can I coach them without? You know, without, if I don't have knowledge, how can I coach?

Basically we can by coaching on the how, on the meta level of how people approach things and help them do it in a scientific way. And that's kind of this, the secret power of the coaching kata, you could say. So it helps the coach to move to this meta level. And then instead of, you know, talking about the topic, coach people on how they work towards the target, help them to do it in a scientific way and not challenge what they do to reach their target and compare it with our own ideas.

So these are two common struggles if you ask that. So it's like, Hey, coaching isn't just asking any kind of questions. And if you start entering your own ideas. It's like, Hey, how can I coach my team? So they come up with the idea I had in mind, right? This is not coaching.

[00:30:16] Joe Krebs: Okay. Yes. I think that's

an important differentiation on what is coaching or not thanks for that.

Tilo, now somebody might be listening to this and this sounds all very interesting. I would like to try this but my organization does not have a culture of scientific thinking nor does it have coaching culture. How do they get started? And most importantly, let's just say, like, it's a slightly bigger or large organization.

How do they scale that across an organization, that kind of thinking combined with coaching if they don't have that experience and that expertise, how do they get started?

[00:30:52] Tilo Schwarz: So first let's look at the arrival point. What is it we need to achieve? So finally, or ultimately two things have to come together. And that is good coaching skill on all levels of the organization combined with working on important goals. I mean, we're coaching for developing people so they can reach challenging goals, which means having managers with good coaching skills on all levels of the organization is the bottleneck.

That's the big hairy thing to be addressed. So how can we get started towards that? So step one, start small. This is not like you don't start with a program two day training for all managers hand out the question card. Please don't do this. So it's start with building a first group of good coaches because this gives you.

gives you, you know, a, like, like a crystal, you know, a crystal starts with a seed. So this is about building the seed. It also is provides you with a proof of concept. So start small, build a first group of good coaches. Now, how do you do that? These coaches need to get an intuitive feeling of a scientific way of working.

I mean, rationally, this is totally clear. But in the moment when you hear the answer, just like the ski coach, when you go down the hill, now your ski instructor needs to have a picture in mind. And if you do a left turn, she will compare what she sees you doing with the picture. If she hadn't had that picture she couldn't be your ski instructor, right?

So this is what I call a coach's reference. So before we can coach, we need to build this reference or this kind of goes together. No reference, no coaching because you can ask the questions, but any answer goes, right? What's a good answer? What's a bad answer? So these coaches need to build this intuitive feeling of a scientific way of working.

Otherwise they won't be able to coach for scientific thinking in their teams. Otherwise, they would be asking the questions, but would not focus on the meta level. They will probably use their content, their technical knowledge, and try to coach people towards what they have in mind. So you could say wannabe coaches should have a coach first.

So how do you do it? Find a good coach. And what I mean here is not just any kind of coach, but someone that has particular experience in practicing coaching kata. Right. At the beginning, this person is likely coming from the outside and that's okay. And it just kept, I mean, by the way, this is a huge upside of Toyota Kata because over the last 10 plus years really a global base of practitioners has developed like grassroots.

Yeah. There's likely going to be somebody in your region, so find someone in your region who can help you get started. Then of course, also the Kata Coaching Dojo is an accelerator for learning to coach. You, it's, you could think of it like a flight simulator, what a flight simulator does for pilots the Kata Coaching Dojo does for coaches.

So offering frequent coaching practice in a safe space. And then once you got that first, the seed, this first group of internal coaches. Start growing the crystal, yeah. So link coaching, so develop more coaches step by step, because now you have these coaches and they can coach the next, you know, group and exactly.

And then at that point, it's very important to think about this second aspect. So that is link coaching to working on strategic goals. So coaching people as part of their daily work, working towards relevant, meaningful goals. And once you're at that stage basically there's another good book actually at that stage, it's called Toyota Kata Culture that describes that kind of, you know, from the seed to the crystal, how do you do it?

And, Combining good coaching with working towards strategic targets on all levels, that is when the power unfolds exponentially. Okay. So now the rocket is off the launching pad. Yeah. Because really what we see happen is people can outperform the expected through practicing scientific thinking.

and with the help of a coach. And I firmly believe, and that is why Jeff and I wrote this book. It's like this book describes this journey for the individual, the coach, as well as for the organization. So from the starting point to the seed, to growing the crystal and combining it with working on strategic goals.

You know, and we firmly believe you and the listeners, yeah your team can do it too. They need you as a coach and the coaching cata can help you become that kind of coach, the coach you always wanted to be and the coach your team needs you to be. Right. And that is why our book has this title, Giving Wings, yeah?

So just like Denise is giving wings to her team, you can give wings to your team.

[00:36:09] Joe Krebs: And Tilo, I could not even think of better words to end this podcast episode here with you. Giving wings to our teams. Thank you for coming on, talking about coaching, Kata coaching in particular with the with the listeners here in the Agile Kata series on Agile FM.

Thank you so much.

[00:36:28] Tilo Schwarz: Joe, thank you. It's been a pleasure.