Roasting Marshmallows

There’s a crisis in most workplaces. The pace of change, driven by technology, is accelerating. Change is happening more frequently. And the impact of these changes is often big.

The workforce also brings with them their distinct values, biases and opinions. And nowhere are these distinctions more striking than in the way they view leadership and “management.”

Invitations from executive leaders to members of the workforce causes a small, temporary, but very important change in how leadership communicates. Self-management is what actually scales, and invitation encourages it.

OpenSpace Agility can help you with this. And to help us with OpenSpace Agility, we have Daniel Mezick as our guest around the campfire.

Daniel Mezick is the originator of OpenSpace Agility, an engagement model for enabling authentic and lasting organizational improvement. He is also an Advisory Board member and co-Founder of The Open Leadership Network, a certification body and community of practice dedicated to implementing Open patterns and practices inside business enterprises worldwide.

Learn everything about Open Space from Daniel at a discount by using the code TOASTING, using the following links below:

OPEN SPACE IN ORGANIZATIONS, with OLN Level1 Certificate

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/open-space-in-organizations-with-oln-level1-certificate-tickets-146819341603

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-8-patterns-of-open-business-agility-with-oln-level1-certificate-tickets-162860097937

Daniel's website: https://danielmezick.com/

Daniel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmezick

After an earlier episode about SAFe, we felt it is only fair to put LeSS in the spotlight! While you cannot really compare the two, much like apples and oranges, they both promise to bring agility to the enterprise. Being a certified LeSS instructor, Viktor will show us how and why LeSS works for his clients.

Viktor is a Software developer, Agile Coach and Certified LeSS trainer with 17 years of experience in delivering enterprise systems and helping organizations with Agile transformations.

The old saying "hindsight is 20/20" is usually used when someone should've known better. It has a pretty negative or condescending tone to it, but for agile software development, it can be valuable to apply some hindsight when preparing for the next iteration of your product.

Indeed, reflecting on past performance and analyzing what worked and what did not can enable you improve over time, but many teams end up going through the motions every sprint, ticking off a bingo card.

In this episode, we debate among each other of our perceived effectiveness of periodic retros.

What do you think? Do you feel retrospectives are a vital part of making teams more and more effective or are they redundant and you should just address issues as they come up?

These might sound like a lot of different questions, but they all boil down to the same: are you happy at your work?

Today we are roasting marshmallows about our company history: why did we choose to leave our previous companies, and why did we choose to stay at FourScouts? Finding the right company will be different for everyone, but in this episode we will share our experiences with you and it might help you find the right company!

Everyone deals with their personal issues in a different way. At some point, your personal issues could affect your work: your concentration is affected, you might lash out at co-workers, or even worse, customers. 

Today, we are sharing our stories about how our personal life affected us at work, and how we dealt with them 

 Poor work-life balance can have serious effects on your mental health. However, work-life issues are common, and mental health experts are well-prepared to help you through any particularly rough patches. Don't hesitate to seek professional help if you feel you could benefit from a better work-life balance.

The legend says that when you promote a Senior Developer into a Manager, you end up with a subpar Manager and you lose a great Engineer. We have heard these stories of lose-lose outcomes over and over again. Then once in a blue moon we find that perfect blend of a skilled engineer who is competent, can clearly voice their ideas, understand the business domain, are tuned to the needs of the management as well as to the needs of the developers and can rally people towards a mutual goal. Then, we end up with an admirable Engineering Manager. 

On the topic of misalignment between development and management we talk with Phil Calçado, a Director of Engineering at SeatGeek. 

What can we learn from someone who headed engineering for companies with 150 million users and no revenue or with $150 million revenue and no users?

Have developers become too self-centered? 

What can engineers learn from a basic business education? 

Should you as a manager be technical then? 

How should you explain complex technical concepts to C-level management? 

What is the role of the manager and their accountability? 

And what happens if your realise that management is not for you? Can you go back to being a full time engineer?

Phil Calçado

Personal website: https://philcalcado.com/

On this podcast we have talked about start-ups before, but the mystic qualities that get attributed to them are by no means rooted in reality. You have to work hard, recognize opportunities and leverage your network to be able to potentially solve your customers' problems. 

Today, we are roasting marshmallows with someone who has been through this and ultimately ended up getting his start-up, linc.sh, acquired by Cloudflare.

Even though his start-up has been a success, when people ask Erwin that they want to have their very own start-up, his initial response usually is a very puzzled "why??". 

Erwin describes himself as an eternal developer, recovering management consultant and never satisfied with a status quo.

Erwin on twitter: https://twitter.com/evanderkoogh and linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evanderkoogh/

A book that can help companies achieve true agility is "Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy". Today around the campfire we have one of the authors: Jutta Eckstein.

Jutta Eckstein, works as an independent coach, consultant, trainer, author and speaker. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make agile transitions. She is experienced in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large, distributed mission-critical projects and has written about her experiences. She holds a M.A. Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. Product-Engineering, and a B.A. in Education.

She is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served on the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian and European conferences, where she has also presented her work.

Jutta on twitter: https://twitter.com/JuttaEckstein 

Jutta's website: https://www.jeckstein.com/

The book: https://www.amazon.com/Company-wide-Agility-Beyond-Budgeting-Sociocracy/dp/394799107X

How much are you able to learn on your own? For some people, reading books, articles, and going to certain training courses are all they need to keep steadily growing their skillset.

For teams however, things are a bit more challenging. Retrospectives are indeed a great help, but these are still from the team's own perspective. Sending a team to training could help as well, but how do you know what training to pick? Sometimes external help, in the form coaching, can be beneficial for you and your team.

Someone who does such coaching is GeePaw Hill, an independent software development coach. A geek for nearly 40 years, he has been doing, teaching, and coaching software using the various techniques of agility since the late '90s. He has worked with large teams and tiny ones all over the world, creating everything from satellite control modules to desktop graphics to that old standby, it-puts-the database-on-web-browser.

GeePaw on twitter: https://twitter.com/GeePawHill

GeePaw's website: https://www.geepawhill.org/

As a first today on roasting marshmallows, we have two guests! Ankita Sahni and Maike Visschedijk, who are both software engineers, and they will share with you their experiences on being a women in the tech industry.