Podcast appearances and mentions of barry o reilly

Barry O'Reilly Barry O'Reilly is an entrepreneur, business advisor and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation.   Barry is the co-founder of Nobody Studios, a crowd-infused, high-velocity venture studio with the mission to create 100 compelling companies over the next 5 years.   Barry is author of two international bestsellers, Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—part of the Eric Ries series, and a HBR must read for CEOs and business leaders. He writes for The Economist, and is faculty at Singularity University. On today Show we Talk about:   What is Agile and how is it used? What is Nobody Studios and what are the goals it wants to accomplish? How is one able to live all around the wrong while progressing their career? What was it like to know Elon Musk when he just founded his first company Zip2?   Connect Barry   Website https://barryoreilly.com/ Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryoreilly/

Rich Sheridan, world-renowned entrepreneur and bestselling author of Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer, is on a mission to inspire organizations to create joyful cultures. He is the CEO and Chief Storyteller at Menlo Innovations, recognized by Inc Magazine as the Most Joyful Company in America. People from all over the world have visited Menlo to see firsthand the unique culture and systems at the company. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Rich to this week’s Unlearn Podcast to talk about how leaders can inspire joy at work. Listen to Your Intuition Rich’s experience at “one of the highest-flying entrepreneurial tech firms” motivated him to listen to his instincts. He tells Barry that they were so far removed from what their customers wanted, that he knew instinctively they would not survive. His intuition proved correct. “They weren’t learning anything,” he remarks; “...they were only applying what they learned from years past.” He vowed to do things differently in his own company so that they didn’t make the same mistake. “All of us have that little place in our guts when something goes wrong… I just learned to pay attention to that signal,” he tells Barry. Look For the Opportunity When things aren’t going well, that’s where the opportunity is. Many systems exist because they helped you get to where you are, but “there are bits that calcify”, Barry says; leaders need to be true to themselves and see where changes need to be made. Rich points out that when things are going wrong, the leader must become a student again. He recommends going to books first: read the first 30-40 pages, and if it resonates with you, keep reading. You may discover a new idea or an opportunity that will help your company grow. Experiments Over Meetings “Let’s try it before we defeat it.” This simple change of approach has inspired dramatic change in many organizations, Rich says. Ideas need a chance to be proven before being discarded, because only then would you really know if they work. “I think that word ‘try’ is probably one of the most underutilized but most important behaviors for companies to do innovation,” Barry argues. “Take an approach that says take action versus take a meeting,” Rich agrees. He and Barry discuss the benefits of doing small experiments. When you create a culture of experimentation, your systems will always evolve. The leader’s job is to foster that culture by driving out fear: “My role as a leader [is] to pump fear out of the room,” Rich emphasizes. He shares how his daughter inspired him to unlearn leading through fear. It takes self-awareness and a good dose of humility to acknowledge where you’re going wrong and to course correct, Barry comments. He tells Rich that he has learned to be more intentional about who he chooses as role models because our own leadership behavior is conditioned by our models. Looking Ahead The biggest challenge of the pandemic is loneliness and isolation, Rich says. However, coming back together will likely be as difficult as the separation was, and it will take a while to get over the anxiety. He believes we will continue to embrace the new ways of working we learned during the pandemic. He and Barry agree that we see each other as whole persons now, because of this experience. As such, we will continue to be more empathetic and see each other’s humanity, building deeper relationships and a stronger culture. The past year has also reinvigorated his entrepreneurial spirit, Rich says. Full show notes can be found at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources Rich Sheridan on LinkedIn | Twitter  Rich Sheridan books Menlo Innovations Chatter by Ethan Cross

Margaret Molloy and Barry O’Reilly connected by following each other’s podcasts and work. Margaret grew up in Ireland, and attended Harvard in the US. She currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Siegel+Gale, a leading brand strategy and design experience agency. She is a recognized leader in diversity and inclusion, and has built a global community around her How CMOs Commit podcast, as well the popular panels she regularly convenes. Simple is Smart “I study topics deeply to understand them profoundly, to be able to communicate them simply,” Margaret tells Barry. Being able to distill a brand to its essence and then communicate that in clear, simple language is very compelling, she argues. COVID-19 has only amplified the value of simplicity as it removes “cognitive tax” during this stressful time. “I believe the buying public will reward brands who truly appreciate the opportunity to remove that cognitive tax... Simplicity is just another way to say removing friction,” she remarks. Barry adds, “When you can create these simple, clearly understood messages, that's what connects with people.” Illuminating Blind Spots It’s an act of courage and grace for someone to show you your blind spot. Understandably, it’s common for your first reaction to be defensiveness. This was certainly Margaret’s initial reaction to being told by an attendee that her gender-equal panel did not reflect ‘The Future of Branding’ as the name promised since it was not racially diverse. The experience challenged her view of herself and showed her that race was her blind spot. “Shortly after that I caught myself, and I realized I had just received probably the most constructive feedback I had ever received in my career,” she says. She had to unlearn her mental model of being color blind: she needed to be color brave. “Ever since that day I have worked to build my network and extend myself to make sure that I have diverse representation on our panels,” she points out. Interestingly, it was because someone else illuminated his own blindspot, and he learned from the experience, that the attendee felt inspired to pay it forward to Margaret. From Defensiveness to Curiosity It takes courage to listen to and accept feedback that’s “contrary to what you believe to be true of yourself”, Barry comments. He asks Margaret how she is able to get past defensiveness in those moments. “The heart and soul of it is curiosity, and what I've learned over the years is that curiosity and judgment can't coexist,” she responds. Taking a posture of curiosity helps you move from judging yourself or defending your position, to growth. It’s really hard to take criticism in areas where you feel accomplished, she says, but being curious helps. “The older I've become, I've actually become more curious... The unlearning for me is that you don't have to have all the answers. In fact, your impact is much more a function of your ability to frame good questions.” Looking Ahead Margaret believes that the evolution of brand as customer experience will continue to play out in the future. An aspect of this evolution will include how companies demonstrate their purpose and how customers discern their authenticity. She believes that forward-thinking marketers will shift focus from buyers to users in order to build community and ultimately, customer loyalty. She advises listeners to “look out for companies who build products out loud…” Barry agrees that the traditional paradigm of secrecy about upcoming product features and releases should be changed. It’s one of the reasons they founded Nobody Studios, he says. Read the full show notes at BarryO'Reilly.com Resources Margaret Molloy on LinkedIn | Twitter Siegel+Gale How CMOs Commit with Margaret Molloy

Mark McNally has seen the upside and downside of new company ventures. He has been involved in 14 startups, as a senior executive or CEO each one building on the lessons he learned from the one before. Barry O’Reilly describes him as a “radical thinker, venture innovator, founder and Chief Nobody at Nobody Studios.” Mark’s bold vision to create 100 compelling companies over the next 5 years was so intriguing to Barry that he jumped at the opportunity to join Mark on the boldest bet of their careers. In this week’s show, they discuss the vision for Nobody Studios, as well as their lessons learned and unlearned over the years as entrepreneurs. And why now is the moment for the missing piece of the venture ecosystem . The Bold Vision For Venture  “...What we're about to do next is launch a venture studio together with an amazing collection of diverse innovators, entrepreneurs, and creators who want to change the way new companies are created, sourced, explored, and scaled to sustainable businesses,” Barry tells listeners. “But not only that, we're going to be the first company to make venture investing accessible to the masses by crowdfunding the company to enable anyone to own equity in the studio and every single company we create in the future forever.”  Missing out on making simultaneously exploring companies of the future frustrated Mark. “I decided I really wanted to create a vehicle that allowed people to be more involved and more aggressive in making bets on things that aligned with their vision of the future,” the result is Nobody Studios. People First Nobody Studios’ founding principle is people first. If you have ideas and talent, no matter where you are in the world, the company invites you to join them on their journey. “I'm a big believer that if we focus on building up people around us, then our journey will be just fine,” Mark remarks.  Making people part of something bigger is in the company’s DNA, he tells listeners. Transparency is another of their key tenets. “We're giving them [people who get involved] this kind of really open access to how this grows,” Mark says. Another powerful principle is learning from one another: “As much as we're mentoring people that recognize their gaps, we're also letting them mentor us.” To achieve their goal of building 100 companies in five years, Barry says that they have to build a system to get ideas to market as quickly as possible. He is excited about the unique incentive structure, where you’re rewarded for your contribution across the company’s portfolio. Why Venture Capital Needs Venture Studios Our purpose at Nobody Studios will be to de-risk pre-seed stage business ideas. We’ll do this by minimizing the time, speed, and capital involved in validating truly repeatable, scalable business models before significant venture investment.  Venture capital investors usually wish they could: Stop an investment; Split one company into multiple companies; Merge several companies into one company;  Pause companies when the timing isn’t right; Optimize talent by putting players in their best positions over time. Making Wealth Creation Accessible To All For Nobody Studios to accomplish the goal of 100 companies, we’ll need a tremendous amount of talent, capital, influence, and ideas.  There's a whole array of opportunities for you to get involved: Becoming part of the effort in some capacity, whether part-time or freelance, joining Nobody Studios itself, or one of the companies that we create.  Investing. We're actually going to be the first venture company to offer equity in the studio through crowdfunding.  The potential upside is pretty fantastic for anyone involved, because the equity will be spread across the whole portfolio of businesses.  Meaning you wouldn’t be betting on just one company—you’ll have a stake in every company we create, forever!  Resources NobodyStudios.com  Nobody Studios on LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook 

Kai Haley is the Head of UX Methods and Practice at Google and the founder and leader of the Google Sprint Leadership Academy. She is an expert at leading change, creating movements and creating high performance teams. Barry O’Reilly says of her, “She was one of the first people to embrace design sprints at Google and helped formulate that practice, codify it, and has coached hundreds - if not thousands - of people how to use these tools to identify product visions, drive successful user-centered products, and build cultures of innovation all across Google and outside.” She joins Barry in this week’s show to talk about how design sprints started, lessons she unlearned along the way, and the importance of designing for people first. Looking Outside Look for patterns and inspiration outside of your field, Kai advises. “I do gravitate towards looking outside of wherever I'm focused right now to how are people solving things over here, or what inspiration could we gain from something else?” she says. Her undergraduate study in anthropology helps her to keep the human and cultural connection top of mind in any design project. “When I'm looking outside of the discipline of design I'm keeping my eyes on the people and who this is for and who are we trying to solve these problems for,” she tells Barry. Origin of Design Sprints Creating a high performance cross-functional team requires a shared language and a shared idea of success. Getting design sprints off the ground meant that Kai and her team needed to bring together elements of design thinking, user research, business methods and psychology. The term ‘sprint’ was used to get the engineering team to buy in, as they were already used to ‘agile sprints’. Kai tells Barry that the first sprints were just four hours long, while other people were running longer sessions. Starting small gained her buy-in as everyone praised how impactful the exercise was, and asked for more. Her manager soon asked her to have one every two weeks. “In a very small and quick way I was able to get what we needed as a team, which was shared vocabulary, shared understanding of success, ideation, and then we could choose a direction together and then send people off to start executing against it,” she comments. Key Lessons Barry asks Kai to share the key lessons from her design sprint journey. She explains that every design sprint would be different, so when she trains people she doesn’t use a rigid framework. Instead she wants them to focus on the goal to accomplish; she wants them to use the tools she teaches and modify them for their unique circumstances. “How are you going to get alignment and buy in before you even get people into the room? And then once you get them into the room, how do you make sure you don't waste their time?” she asks leaders to consider.  She and Barry discuss other key lessons, including: It takes attention and focus to help people learn how to learn. Nurture a culture that encourages people to try things. Think about the humans you are designing for. Kai advocates for an inclusive co-creation approach. “Movements are really important because they give people something to believe in.” Share a common vision and metric of success. Start where you can show the impact. Focus on the people who want to change. Read the full show notes at BarryOReilly.com Resources Kai Haley on LinkedIn | Twitter

In this episode of the Agency Intelligence podcast, host Jason Cass interviews Daniel Seong, Founder of Great Park Insurance. Daniel talks about his approach in the insurance industry and what he has achieved. Episode Highlights: What does Daniel attribute his success to? (9:45) Daniel shares his background. (11:31) How did Daniel feel about his move to America from Korea? (15:36) Daniel shares what he has learned from the past year. (17:38) Does Daniel believe that delegation has been part of his success? (19:13) Daniel discusses leadership and his team culture. (21:13) What’s the main reason why agents don’t delegate? (22:12) What are some of Daniel’s onboarding goals? (30:24) Daniel shares that he’s reading a book called Unlearn, by Barry O’Reilly. (42:19) Key Quotes: “I'm finding out that the team is here to step in. And, we'll figure it out. The service team left, but we figured it out. As long as the bond, the leadership, the respect for each other is solid and strong… people are willing to chip in.” - Daniel Seong “As leaders, we have to keep pushing that envelope because we expect a lot of things from our staff and our team members, but yet we don't push ourselves. The staff needs to see that.” - Daniel Seong “Everybody just needs to do their part. No matter how big or how small they think it is, everybody matters. As long as the leader is conveying that one single direction, with time, it all works out.” - Daniel Seong Resources Mentioned: Daniel Seong LinkedIn Great Park Insurance Agency Intelligence Reach out to Jason Cass

Barry O’Reilly and this week’s guest, Zhamak Dehghani met 10 years ago when they worked together at ThoughtWorks. Zhamak is currently the Director of Emerging Technologies at ThoughtWorks and the creator of Data Mesh, which Barry describes as “one of the most exciting paradigm shifts in how we manage data at scale.” He and Zhamak discuss why traditional data architecture models are failing and how applying product thinking principles to data management is a way to harvest the data’s full potential. “This show,” Barry remarks, “is for those who are curious to understand how to bring the convergence of product thinking, data management, and distributed systems development together to create platforms and products of the future.” Early Values Zhamak has always believed in distribution of responsibility and decentralization of ownership. She finds that these design principles are more compatible with real life. Colleagues taught her the Unix philosophy early in her career which now forms the basis of her data management approach. “They taught me those wonderful ideas to build systems and programs that do one thing and one thing really well. But most importantly they work together really well,” Zhamak says. “‘Simple is beautiful and beauty is the truth’... Reduce systems to their simple principles; then together can emerge complex behaviors.” She saw an opportunity to bring the UNIX principles to data. Challenging Assumptions It often takes someone new to a system to point out obvious flaws to long-time practitioners. Zhamak says that when she came into the world of big data, she was agnostic to the accepted assumptions, so she felt free to challenge them and conceive a different paradigm. For some reason when it comes to data, people eschew UNIX principles and see it as something to be centralized. Unsurprisingly, a data lake becomes monolithic and departments become siloed. Reimagining the world of data requires a new language, she points out: “The moment you need to imagine something different you need to use a very different language.” Instead of seeing data as an asset - which you want to hoard and get more of - Zhamak advocates that data can be seen as a product which should be used to serve internal and external customers. Barry adds that the idea of the single source of golden data makes companies unable to move as they get bigger. Move to Product Thinking Barry comments that the shift towards product thinking started with Amazon. Their monolithic database was preventing them from scaling. “They realized that they needed to create these smaller, more autonomous units that had the capabilities to build things just like product teams. This is where this notion started to emerge from changing the organizational design... both technically and just how teams would work together,” Barry says. In this new way of working, teams could experiment and own outcomes. They could make small, quick changes and see the effects.   What is Data Mesh? Instead of trying to fit data into a mold, Zhamak feels that its dynamism should be embraced. “Create an architecture and ownership of data that starts with the assumption that data can be useful and shareable and trustworthy right at the point of origin; and then allow for different domains and different aggregations, different projections to get created as a mesh picture,” she posits. She explains how this new view of data impacts ways of working and the type of platform a company would create. The four principles of the Data Mesh philosophy are, “domain ownership of the data; data as a product; self serve data platform to enable autonomous teams; and a federated computational governance to balance the interoperability of a decentralized world with the trust and security built-in.” Read the rest of the show notes on BarryO'Reilly.com Resources Zhamak Dehghani on LinkedIn | Twitter Data Monolith to Data Mesh article Data Mesh Principles article

On reading Lean Enterprise, this week’s guest, Chris Goddard, reached out to Barry O’Reilly several years ago to help implement its principles and practices at his company, G-Research. Chris has been with G-Research, a leading quantitative research and technology company in the algorithmic investment space, for almost 20 years. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer there. Barry says of G-Research, “Working with the team has really helped me evolve my thesis on the power of gathering and synthesizing data to inform your products and business model investments, much of which is actually captured in my latest article, Precision Product Creation…”  Becoming a Leader Being thrown into a job that he didn’t sign up for turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Chris. “What it really taught me was how the ecosystem of everything hung together;” he says, “how you needed to think about the building blocks as being bigger than just lines of code…” That experience set him up to progress to more strategic roles over his 20-year career at G-Research. He says that it’s important for leaders to ask good questions and to look for inspiration outside their field. Also, you have to accept that you will be wrong sometimes and face up to your mistakes.  Signals of Change and a Culture Shift At a certain point, the strategies that brought you success in the past no longer suffice. At that point, a leader needs to move in another - often counterintuitive - direction. G-Research’s founder asked Chris, “Why does it feel like it's not working? Like we were adding more resources and that the business was doing well, but it felt like it was getting harder.” Chris tells Barry about the changes happening in the company, as well as how he realized that the company needed to shift their focus from functionality to developing their craft. With Barry’s help, Chris says, the company underwent a culture change. He jokes about the ‘Barry Post-Its’ that now decorated the previously bare walls. “It felt like it just cracked open the creativity that was in the business,” he comments. Becoming More Open The transition from developing all their own software to embracing open source is just one of the culture changes G-Research adopted. Barry comments that he admires the spirit of the team - he loves how they see ideas as hypotheses that they openly challenge. Chris remarks that they also started measuring more: they wanted to see how the new methods were impacting the company. He and Barry talk about the risk metric that G-Research used to measure speed to market. Interestingly, the team itself also grew more close-knit. They each wanted to learn about what their colleagues were doing, and took pride in being part of the team. The Power of 10,000 Using open-source software is like getting “the power of 10,000 engineers when you only have a few hundred,” Chris argues. He tells Barry that it comes down to what you’re contributing to open source. You don’t have to expose your IP, but if you can solve general problems that many people have and put the code out there for them to use and modify, it will benefit everyone. You’re also showing the quality work you do, he says.  Looking Ahead and Top Tips Chris is thinking more about what could be around the corner technology-wise, particularly exploring how best to use the public cloud even while investing in private data centers. Barry asks him to give advice to a leader who senses that their future success is being limited by their present actions. Chris advises such leaders to keep in touch with the people doing the job, keep abreast of technology trends and read a lot. He stresses that sometimes you just need to “stew on it.” He remarks, “Actually if you sometimes just let your mind tell you the answer you'll find it's there. You just have to kind of quiet down a bit.” Resources Chris Goddard on LinkedIn Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman Download Barry’s latest article: Precision Product Creation 

Barry O'Reilly shares how the Cycle of Unlearning is a new way of thinking and a new way of leading organisations in every industry. It's not difficult to learn more. What is difficult is to know what to unlearn, what to stop, and what to throw away. This is the paradox of success. While thinking and doing certain methods may have brought you success in the past, it's almost certain they won't continue to bring you success in the future. We discuss the importance of unlearning How Serena Williams unlearned her way to success The Origins of Disney's Magic Band And much more. More about Barry here: https://barryoreilly.com

Quincy Caroll has a passion for delighting users, fans, and communities through world-class mobile, web, and computer applications and services. Quincy is this week’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast. He and host Barry O’Reilly discuss the bold product decisions he experienced while working on initiatives such as GarageBand at Apple, pivoting eBay’s search algorithm to scaling Crunchyroll, the world-leading Manga streaming platform from 300,000 to 3 million users.  A Product Person Quincy changed careers several times throughout his professional life. What he learned along the way helped him to become a “product person”. Barry asks him to explain some of the things he learned about himself during this period. Quincy responds that being a product person allowed him to work with all kinds of people. The diverse perspectives and experiences are invaluable in developing products, he comments. He is happy that the focus is now on group mentality and fostering team success. “Now it’s about the actual function of the role as it is, like either mentoring other people or setting up the team in such a way that the chemistry is right.” Getting The Timing Right Companies, products, and projects are all about the right timing. How they come to be and how they ultimately develop depends on the time spent on them and what concepts and disciplines are used to create them. Barry comments that craft discipline is a concept that is still forming even now. He remarks on Quincy’s time at eBay. Quincy adds that during his time there, he worked on, and was able to complete, significant platform-level projects within eBay’s system. However, he also faced the challenge of convincing the company not to end certain projects. Many organizations face this same challenge, Quincy comments: they either end projects too quickly, or let them run for too long. Quality over Quantity Quincy and Barry discuss the challenges of business owners who are rigid regarding product development. Barry comments that many people have challenges getting their ideas launched and supported due to these owners. “Companies need to look at different variables to create quality rather than quantity,” Quincy says. One such variable is an employee’s working process. Employees may structure their entire working process around a particular method to get a desired outcome. He warns that changing their structures in hopes of improving company profitability may have adverse effects. He advises that these kinds of issues can be resolved by testing new technologies and analyzing the resulting data to decide what methods work. Cultural Crystallization Cultural crystallization is unraveling an original framework into its components and deviating from the established norm. For companies to develop, they need to crystallize the culture of not only the company but also the industry and the product. They need to unravel the cultural framework around promotion. To do this, product developers need to be heard. Quincy gives an anecdote of presenting a product to the heads of department through the use of comic books. Through this innovative way, he was able to keep the board members actively engaged while informing them about his product. Barry comments that the conventional ways of promotion and pitches through slides are boring and outdated and that we need to keep things fresh and engaging. The Age of Information We live in the age of readily accessible information. Quincy talks about being able to liaise and engage in product development with people around the world. Leaders need to capitalize on that to help build production. The tools are there and we must use them, he emphasizes.  Resources Quincy Caroll | LinkedIn

Diana Kander is a New York Times Bestselling Author, an entrepreneur, and keynote speaker. Barry O’Reilly likes to reference her Ted Talk and $1 experiment in many of his videos. Diana has spent her career challenging assumptions and asking thought-provoking questions. Barry welcomes her to this week’s show as they discuss tips and tricks that lead to innovation. The Road to Innovation Her parents’ ability to essentially create something from nothing fed Diana’s urge to get into entrepreneurship and innovation. Her immigrant parents had to work hard to provide for the family. Through their hard work, they were able to build their own business.  New Mindset, New Growth One of Diana’s biggest unlearning experiences happened while starting up her own business. She gives an anecdote of her interaction with a high growth program leader. She talks about having to change her mindset and approach to business due to that interaction and how it grew her company 1000% in one year! Barry adds that breaking free of existing behaviors within that frame and thinking big but starting small can help a business grow. Saying No and Letting Go “Good strategy means you say no, even to customers you know,” Barry says. Customers you go after are the customers you will get, Diana emphasizes. Sales from larger companies will take longer to get, but the return is worth it. She says that you should say no to companies that can prevent you from going after the kind of business you really want. She cites her experience of letting go 90% of her own customers so she could have more growth and profitability. Barry iterates that being serious about your business growth means sometimes letting go of existing customers. Quality Decision-Making Making decisions on a 1 to 10 scale allows you to make higher quality decisions. Diana says that many people are misguided on how to say yes to things because they think about decisions as a yes or no binary, rather than on a scale of one to ten. In the business decision-making process, it’s important to have people around you who can help you find ways to work through hard decisions. Pivot Indicators Diana calls the things we monitor to inform our decisions, ‘pivot indicators.’ There should be systems in place - such as a decision-making rubric - that monitor the outcomes of our decisions and help people make progress in uncertain situations. Diana says that your decision-making rubric is a living document that will evolve as you do new things and experience what works. She adds that she has a decision diary for when she’s making tough decisions, with a checklist for those decisions. “50% of decisions are probably wrong because you have limited information,” Diana expresses. Looking Ahead Diana is currently focused on leading people through innovation, creating an environment that helps them get through an innovation project, and big transformation within a company. Diana’s tips to managers are to create pivot points within their work environment, give employees their space to do their tasks, and trust their employees to achieve the business’ desired outcomes. Resources Diana Kander | Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Website

This week’s guest, Annette Gabriel, is enthusiastic about helping leaders and teams adopt higher performance practices. Annette is a former Senior Director of Human Resources at Pepsico. Barry O’Reilly describes her as “one of the people who just shines when you hear her stories.” Annette and Barry discuss the framework of agility, and how to let teams lead. Agility Mindset Leaders who adopt an agility mindset are eager to explore the world around them. Annette says that she views each job as a learning opportunity and a new experience whether she ends up liking it or not. Barry comments that trying and even failing is part of the process: you just have to recalibrate when things don’t go as you planned. If more people adopted an agility mindset, they would be open to trying new ways of working.  Unlearning Moments Barry asks Annette to relate some of the mistakes she made along the way, and what she had to unlearn. “Trying to do too much at once whilst still trying to influence the leadership layer of the company,” she begins. She gives an anecdote of going at the leadership layer with working programs that failed because they were too complicated. She was still learning the programs while trying to share and develop them, so she should have taken more time to fully understand them before presenting to company leaders. Barry comments that leaders often find it hard to just get out of the way and let front line staff have more authority. However, when they start to see the values and principles come to life and the positive outcomes of them, it becomes easier for them to trust the process. Being Agile “There is no one way to be agile,” Annette remarks. “Being agile is actually pivoting and adjusting for what you need at that moment, at that time based upon what you've learned, what information you've gathered and what you've learned from testing,” she continues. It’s a common misconception that processes have to be standardized to be successful, Barry comments. A better approach is a localized one: focus on equipping teams to adapt based on the context. First Follower Concept “A champion can bring [the team] along a lot more quickly if you give that champion the license to take the team through [training],” Annette says. She advocates the importance of ‘first followers’. “A first follower,” Annette explains, “is that champion who is going to make the extra time investment and go deeper on things, when they try to pull a group into an exercise or facilitate a discussion.” She reiterates that these individuals are influential in reaching more people and bringing them onto the new plans and directions the organization may take. The Team Leads The Way Barry expresses that at times senior level management believe that they have all the answers and that this can create challenges within the organization. He adds that processes designed to make things work often keeps progress back because those processes rely on one or two people signing off a document. It is better to empower the hundreds of frontline workers - who deal with the issues and know what exactly the problems are - to come up with the solutions. Annette agrees and adds that a well-constructed team with all the right capabilities will be experts at resolving issues. Looking Ahead Not knowing what’s ahead is what excites Annette the most. She’s looking forward to her ‘next great learning experience.’ Her advice to leaders who may be struggling with unlearning: play along and see what happens, you may not always like the result but it will always be a learning experience. Resources Annette Gabriel on LinkedIn

Welcome to the Unlearn Podcast’s second Ask Me Anything, something that is fast becoming an annual tradition. This episode is a kind of retrospective, a chance to not only answer questions from listeners all over the world but a chance to reflect on the year that has happened - the challenges as well as the opportunities.  Here’s to 2021 – and now, 10 answers to 10 questions. ·        What has been the most important characteristic that has helped you lead through COVID? ·        As a leader, what advice would you give your younger self for managing such an accelerated period of change? ·        What was the biggest shift for you personally in your approach to leadership this year? ·        What are the key traits and habits that leaders need to adopt to lead in this new world of work? ·        You often talk about collaboration fit — can you elaborate on it? ·        What’s been your most interesting video conference experience in 2020? ·        What are your principles of work? ·        What one change have you made to help you for 2021 and beyond? ·        What’s the most interesting research you’ve discovered this year? ·        What’s your favorite book you read this year? Further Listening: Role Modeling Culture Transformation with Christian Metzner Product Management For Large Scale Innovation with Secil Tabli Watson Help Others Win with Steven Leist Resources: How to be an Anti-Racist Strong Towns

Business advisor and author Barry O’Reilly joins George this week to discuss why ‘copy and paste’ transformation doesn’t work, why being able to rapidly test a hypothesis and ask good questions is imperative to business success, and how to align your team around the deeper issues. 

Sara Wood is the CEO of Kaluza. She is a product leader, non-executive board member and a “builder at heart” who has even helped the UK with its Covid systems. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Sara to this week’s show as they discuss changing technology and the effects of the pandemic on the energy sector. Transitioning Across Domains Sara’s wide-ranging experience has enabled her to go from place to place through the lens of “what is interesting here, what’s interesting about the technology there”. She is essentially “a builder at heart”, she says. Barry asks her what advice she would give to someone who wants to transition from one domain to another. She responds,  “I think the combination of really being curious about the world around you, about where technology is going, and adaptable to what you find on the other side of that.” The Platform Play and Supply Chain Sara learned supply chain in the fashion industry at Gap. She moved to Farfetch because she was impressed with that company’s platform play, particularly the impact it would have on supply chain. At Kaluza, she sees technology and data as the platform that would enable the transition in the energy industry. What we do now with regard to the climate crisis will inform the future, she points out. She laments that the existing data and technology is not being put to use as they should be. To her, she tells Barry, a platform approach is about “how do we empower people in their homes who are just living a normal life to both understand how they participate in the energy ecosystem and adapt behavior?” She finds that using the technology and data to empower customers and give them more choices is fueling demand for sustainable energy. Platform Thinking Trends and data that exists within the teams she works with, are all information Sara pools together into her platform. Barry applauds this “platform thinking.” Sara says that she jumps into a new industry with a fair amount of curiosity. She believes that product leaders who adopt this mental model are the “CEOs of the future” and are building a system to “create conditions for success.” Her teams have since adopted her approach. Going Remote As a platform technology company, going remote due to the pandemic was relatively easy for Kaluza. The company’s pace of growth has continued. Additionally, during the lockdown, Kaluza was able to fully migrate one of its customers into its newly updated platform. Pride of Work People need to feel connected to the job that they’re doing. For example, Barry says, the workers at Tesco light up when they see how they’re able to help customers. Small acts of kindness and recognition can have a great effect, and leaders should ensure that their teams are able to see the benefits of their hard work. Looking Ahead  Sara is looking forward to applying her skills and experience to making energy simple, cheap and safe. She is anticipating that the world would rely less on things that are damaging to the environment. Resources Sara Wood on LinkedIn

Barry O’Reilly welcomes Rick Weil onto this week’s show. Rick Weil is a Head of Global Product and Analytics at Amazon. He started off as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, then worked at General Dynamics and Microsoft before his current position at Amazon. Rick and Barry discuss key human-centered approaches to unlocking team motivation and performance. [Listen from 00:34] A Positive Culture “When you can create this culture where everybody wants to help each other towards a shared goal, you've unlocked some incredible opportunities for performance,” Rick comments. He is focused on creating a positive culture in his working environment where peers selflessly help each other excel versus competing with each other. He stresses taking time to listen to his employees and their concerns, as well as deliberately stepping back at times to let team members address challenges on their own. This is especially important when managing ‘managers of managers’ and dealing with internal conflict. [Listen from 6:51] 360° Feedback Barry asks Rick some of the things he noticed about himself that have evolved over time. One of the many things Rick has learned at Amazon is the power of “taking check x-rays” and using 360° feedback to identify leadership patterns to pay attention to. This helps us know what levers to pull to improve team culture and performance. Rick also talks about the importance and power of genuinely caring for people in the workplace over following scripted leadership behaviors. “Just because I can read all these books on leadership and follow the recipe doesn't make me a good leader,” Rick comments. As a leader you need to find ways to effectively sense how your teams are doing at the human level and connect the personal needs and motivations of your team to business goals to drive organizational change. “Mission First, People Always”, Rick says. [Listen from 14:00] Leadership and Relationships Being a transformational leader is rooted in building strong relationships with the people you lead and work with. One way to do this is through intentional question asking. We often use questioning to assess the health of work operations, yet the true power (and intrinsic leadership fulfillment) comes from getting to know people at the human level, teaching, developing, and being part of your teams’ career journeys. Ask how your team members are doing (and mean it). Get to know about their aspirations and what’s important to them. And for leaders where this genuine, human-centered approach may not come natural, Rick urges them to give caring a try. “Care about people. That will change your perspective, it'll impact your mindset,” Rick expresses. When you look at leadership as a platform for positive human impact and not as a position of individual power, it changes the way that you think about life and work, and directly correlates with the performance of your team. [Listen from 21:00] Looking Ahead Barry asks Rick what he’s looking forward to. He responds that he is looking forward to his partnership with the Project Management Institute (PMI) and developing a product, called Kickoff, which is an intuitive, web-based guide to project management. There are so many resources available for project and program management practitioners, but few for non-PMs who need to know how to better get project work done, essentially to know PM “as a skill”. Kickoff starts with basics, includes helpful templates and examples, and is aimed at helping individuals get acquainted with the fundamentals of project management. This product has the potential to fundamentally enhance how work gets done for millions of people, from students putting together class projects to start-ups creating new products and support functions tenured PMs who need project support from other, non-PM team members  [Listen from 33:58]. Resources Rick Weil on LinkedIn

Peter Economy is The Leadership Guy on Inc.com and has worked closely with some of the nation’s top business, leadership, and technology thinkers.  Peter is a best-selling business author, ghostwriter, developmental editor, and publishing consultant with more than 100 books to his credit (and more than 3 million copies sold). And for more than a decade served as Associate Editor for Leader to Leader magazine—published by the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum in New York City. Peter taught MGT 453: Creativity and Innovation as a lecturer at San Diego State University is on the National Advisory Council of The Art of Science Learning, and is a founding member of the board of SPORTS for Exceptional Athletes. A graduate of Stanford University (with majors in Economics and Human Biology), Peter has worked closely with some of the nation’s top business, leadership, and technology thinkers, including Jim Collins, Frances Hesselbein, Barry O’Reilly, Peter Senge, Kellie McElhaney, Jeff Patton, Marshall Goldsmith, Marty Cagan, Lolly Daskal, Guy Kawasaki, Emma Seppala, William Taylor, Jim Kilts, Jean Lipman-Blumen, Stephen Orban, Ken Blanchard, and many others. In our previous episode of Your Partner In Success, Peter talked about his book 'Wait, I'm the Boss?!?: The Essential Guide for New Managers to Succeed from Day One' and why he wrote it.  Website

Barry O’Reilly is pleased to welcome Secil Tabli Watson, Executive Vice President for Digital Solutions for Business at Wells Fargo. In this week’s show, Barry chats with Secil about the techniques she uses to drive innovation in both retail and business banking environments. She shares the lessons she unlearned in the process and how to bring product management principles into a large organization in a way that drives innovation. First Lesson: Speak The Customer’s Language Secil’s first assignment as a digital channel manager 18 years ago was to make Wellsfargo.com into a buying site. She focused on language that was customer-focused, rather than the bank-centric. “We brought in the capabilities and the competency of doing user research and understanding customer tasks and understanding their behaviors and motivators and really putting that into the language,” she says. In addition, they transformed the architecture of the website so that it was more customer driven. [Listen from 1:55] Staff People to Outcomes Not Products If you’re struggling to move from project-based teams to outcome-based ones, Secil advises that you reframe how you think. This was a critical unlearning for her, she remarks. She shares an example of how she recast her thinking about a project from product to outcome, as a result of which her team was able to see themselves as responsible for a broader outcome, and partner with other departments to make it happen. She advises listeners to break the project into phases with quick wins, and gives insight into how to create cross-functional teams with as little awkwardness as possible. “If you ask a little bit at a time from people, they're more willing to help,” she points out. [Listen from 6:50] B2B Customer Relationships Are Deeper Businesses with B2B customers can develop deeper relationships with them. Because their B2B customers are fewer in number, Secil says, they are able to communicate on a more intimate level over a longer period of time. She asks her B2B customers, “How do you feel?” because it elicits deeper answers. “And I'm also then able to ask the question, Why?” Secil remarks. “I can ask the question as many times as I want to try to get down to a deeper meaning and a deeper need or a desire or a business problem that the customer may be having.” She and Barry discuss why co-creating with your customers - as counterintuitive as the idea appears - is their favored approach. “It builds more trust and actually derisks more of your relationship,” Barry comments. [Listen from 15:20] It Only Takes 10 “...it doesn't take more than 10 people to do things but you have to get the right 10 people,” Secil argues. Her job, as she sees it, is to figure out what to do differently so she can identify those 10 people quickly in her large organization environment. Barry comments that if more companies adopt this approach they would see greater success. [Listen from 29:35] OKRs are not for Compensation Secil and Barry agree that while measuring performance is important, performance metrics should not be tied to compensation, as pay for performance inhibits innovation. Secil believes that the team should win together and learn together; they should not compete against one another. “There is nothing more we could do to make a better team other than enable them to learn,” she says. [Listen from 36:00] Looking Ahead Secil is excited about the current trend to apply product management principles and skills in atypical areas, such as for thinking through outcomes and tactics for diversity and inclusion efforts. Barry comments, “I think everybody can take these principles and methods and apply them to build better experiences for people.” [Listen from 43:35] Resources Secil Tabli Watson on LinkedIn

Barry O'Reilly - entrepreneur, keynote speaker and author of 'Unlearn' and 'Lean Enterprise' - was interviewed by #nexxworks Content Director Laurence Van Elegem about unlearning (what it is, why we need it and how you can achieve it), thinking big, starting small, psychological safety, asking questions, values, becoming outcome (instead of output) focussed, learning anxiety, survival anxiety, vulnerable leadership and many more things. Find out more about innovation and the future of your company on nexxworks.com!

This week’s guest is a leader who role models change. Christian Metzner is Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Volkswagen Financial Services UK. Barry O’Reilly describes him as someone who is “constantly staying curious and getting outside his comfort zone; and you only have to spend time with him and his team to realize how much his actions inspire others.” Christian and Barry discuss the role of leadership in inspiring organizational culture.   Initiating Change Christian has learned to step out of his comfort zone and reflect on what other leaders and cultures are doing better. Emphasizing that the one with power needs to initiate the change, he says, “If you are the one in the position with the power, then you need to open up first. You can’t expect others to change if you’re not leading the way.” Hacking Culture Innovation is often the result of challenging yourself and pushing your boundaries. “You don't come to innovation if you only go one mile faster every day,” Christian points out. “You have to push boundaries... Try to find the 5% to 10% where you can challenge your behaviors, where you can challenge people who might be stuck in their thinking.” He advocates using cultural hacks - low effort steps that can be implemented quickly, but which have high emotional impact - and shares examples of cultural hacks that he successfully implemented. Barry comments that these small changes often create ripple effects throughout an organization. Being a Leader “My simple understanding of leadership is... to remove your blockers and to make you better on a day-to-day basis.” Christian sees learning from competitors and his team as key to creating a culture of innovation: an environment where everyone is on the same playing field. “IT is - next to the capital market - the single biggest threat to an organization like ours,” he points out. “And we need to get our job... absolutely right to enable our commercial colleagues to come up with great products and services for our real end customers.” Trade-offs in Decision-Making Barry commends Christian’s ability to take “a little bit of information and make a decision and then getting more information…” He asks Christian to describe his process and the trade-offs of this approach. Christian responds that transparency, engagement, and iterating in short cycles are the key elements in this approach. The current crisis demands different behaviors, he argues. “We’re not playing the game big fish against small fish anymore,” he says. “We're playing big fish against fast fish, and that requires a different behavior.”  Build Systems Around People “It's less the individual [than] the systems and the structures that are in place to help them succeed,” Barry comments. “If more companies started to recognize that they’re designing systems around people to make them successful… that’s a massive transformation that... would have a huge impact on their company.” “Let's bring people into a role where they can flourish, where they are allowed to bring in their strengths,” Christian adds. Looking Ahead Christian says that he wrote a framework in the early days of the COVID crisis that has guided the company’s decision-making. The framework focuses on three dimensions: decisiveness, simple communication, and taking care of one another. He speaks of dealing with the pandemic in phases: they are entering the phase of renewing the company, so they are using what they learned in the previous phases to inform their approach. In particular, he is excited about how the company will maintain pace and flexibility so that they can provide the best possible customer experience. Resources Christian Metzner on LinkedIn

Katie Anderson is a leadership coach consultant and author, best known for inspiring individuals and organizations. She started off in public health research then moved to Japan in 2015. Barry O’Reilly welcomes her to the show as she shares the lessons she learned in Japan on how to deepen your leadership skill. Learning Lean at the Source Her life in Japan inspired Katie to learn lean at the source as she had already been applying Toyota production principles in the healthcare system. Moving away from academia and research was her big pivot as she transitioned from public health into her own consulting practice.  [Listen from 2:30] Leading With Intention Katie advocates leading with intention and orienting your actions in the direction of the behaviour that will achieve your desired purpose. Now that she was in a position where she had to help other people solve problems, she realized that her mindset and approach needed to shift. She needed to show up in a different capacity: she had to be a model and guide instead of simply going in and doing it all on her own.  [Listen from 6:25] Effective Leadership Role People need alignment: they need to know what the target of the organization is in order to meet that target. If leaders don’t have clarity on what the target is, it is unlikely that the employees will. Barry comments that if employees don’t know what direction has been set by leaders, that’s a failure of the leadership team. You can have activity without vision, but not in a meaningful direction. [Listen from 13:00] Hoshin As a Tool Hoshin is about identifying the top strategies in the organization, and how the next level down contributes to achieving those strategies. It is anchored in the scientific method, and a deep process of reflection. It provides the organization with the real data, whether positive or negative and allows for the leadership team to make better and accurate decisions based on that data. [Listen from 21:45] Looking Ahead Katie is looking forward to hearing listeners’ reflections on her stories and experiences. She is excited to continue to amplify her message. She is also committed to continue helping individuals connect with their intention and their purpose, in order to achieve their desired goals. [Listen from 34:25] Resources KBJAnderson.com

Daniel Elizalde is the VP and head of IoT for North America at Ericsson. He’s spent more than 20 years working in industries, from manufacturing to aerospace and energy. Today, Daniel also teaches courses on the decision framework that he’s created. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Daniel to this week’s show to discuss how much the concepts of IoT have changed, and the impact of technology on the current world. The Evolution of IoT Once Daniel learnt of the IoT concept and recognized it in the way he did his work, he started cataloguing and creating frameworks and approaches. With the advancement of technology, you can now plot a system of sensor data points on a graph, which would have taken a year to put together previously. The advancement of technology also led to the scaling back of employees and time. Daniel encourages adapting the product psyche and learning what you can do today so that you can take advantage of the technological curve in the future. [Listen from 1:50] Looking the Other Way Around “Building relationships is the most important part to get things done,” Daniel says. Barry parallels the IoT system with the people working in a well-functioning unit: the technological idea and the people idea is what drives the performance. Daniel talks about introducing new ways of application to Ericsson, and helping the company to unlearn some of its long held strategies to adapt to the current times. Daniel says he’s always looking the other way around to determine feasibility and what the customers really want. [Listen from 15:00] Building Capability Driving results, for Daniel, involves discovery and getting more projects from other units in order to apply their concepts to Ericsson. Daniel describes what has worked for him in terms of expanding technology in the company. He discusses monetizing 5G networks as they emerge, focusing on customers’ problems and adding value. “Your capability is the knowledge you’re accumulating in your organization, and making good decisions based on what you’re learning,” Barry comments. [Listen from 23:25] Looking Ahead Daniel is excited to see how 5G is applied in the coming years and how it will level the technological playing field. He is looking forward to individuals being able to build on 5G just like the Internet. He is also looking forward to seeing the things people had talked about ten years ago becoming a reality in the not too distant future. [Listen from 41:05] Resources Daniel Elizalde on LinkedIn Daniel’s blog & podcast: danielelizalde.com  D-15 IoT Studio at Ericsson: https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/experience-centers/d-fifteen/d-15-iot-studio

Diana Stepner is the VP for Product Management of Innovative Learning Solutions at Pearson. She enjoys building product experiences that customers love as well as weaving innovation, experimentation, and technology into actionable product visions and roadmaps that accelerate growth. Barry O’Reilly welcomes Diana to this week’s show as they discuss finding her voice and why a product management approach to leadership is valuable in these times. Finding Her Voice Barry comments, “We often figure out what we want to do as we do things and learn our way through them.” Diana explains that she had to unlearn the notion that a leader must be the loudest person in the room and know all the answers. A point from an article she read - that great leaders spend more time listening and asking questions than talking and giving answers - helped her realize that her natural leadership style was indeed valid. Encouraging others to contribute, bringing people into the conversation who might not have felt comfortable to speak before, was the right way for her. The Power of Pausing Pausing to think, to process and analyze information before responding, helps you make better decisions. Diana says that she had to unlearn making snap decisions and jumping to conclusions. “What I've had to do,” she says, “is take a step back when I've got a lot of information that I need to synthesize; to open up more towards other ways of addressing an approach; think about a more broad perspective; and then evaluate a couple of different opportunities initially, test them out and then be able to determine what's the right way to proceed.” Pauses are ok, Barry emphasizes, and we should make more space for them in communication. A Period of Unlearning Many companies are going through a sense of unlearning, Diana says. She and Barry discuss the changes that are happening in companies currently: they are realizing the power of having diverse representation so they are listening more. Diana remarks that those companies that make the effort to have these changes stick will benefit in the long run. “If you don't define the outcome, if you don't make the data available, if you don't look at the reality of what's happening and make changes to move towards the direction you want, nothing is going to change,” Barry adds. While change may be difficult and uncomfortable, good can come from it. Advice for Leaders Barry asks Diana to share advice for leaders who want to adopt her leadership approach. She gives several tips including: Expect change. Learn from those around you. Find ways to empower those you work with. “I think it’s by the creation of a space where people feel comfortable to speak up and to share their voice, where you can truly have a tremendous amount of impact,” she says. Looking Ahead Diana says that she tries to find the good in everything that is happening right now. She is excited to see the acceleration of trends: things that we thought would happen in the future are happening today. More companies are encouraging a culture of experimentation now to get an insight into the future, she says. Barry comments that he is glad that more people are realizing that no one person has all the answers, and that our best bet moving forward is to learn our way through together. Diana hopes that we continue to normalize remote working as the pandemic has proven that we can be productive outside of the workplace. Resources Diana Stepner on LinkedIn

Barry O’Reilly is delighted to welcome Alexander Osterwalder, famed author of The Business Model Canvas, The Value Proposition Canvas and most recently The Invincible Company. Alex is also an entrepreneur and speaker, and one of the world’s leading experts on innovation and entrepreneurship. In this exciting episode, they discuss some of the aspects that help innovation and entrepreneurship flourish, including how business leaders can identify what they have to unlearn to be successful in the future.  Failure is a Door to Opportunity Oftentimes we overstate failure, and we don’t look for the opportunities that come out of it. Alex relates how failure often turned out to be a door to new opportunities for him. “I think you just have to be ready to embrace the surprises that life gives you and learn from every failure,” he says. He advises listeners to own their failures and don’t blame others. “If you focus on the positive, all of a sudden you know how to instrumentalize failure.” Entrepreneurs distinguish between reversible and non-reversible decisions, so they can make calculated bets. While failure is never the goal, it is an inevitable consequence and a good thing. You can become more dispassionate about failure if you view it as experimentation, Alex posits. You Get Better Over Time You get better at innovation and entrepreneurship over time. Most successful entrepreneurs are 40 years and over, and have been through several startups. They learn what not to do through practical experience. However, Alex says, you also need to learn the technical aspects of entrepreneurship and innovation. Stay Humble “No company is invincible,” says Alex, “but companies that constantly reinvent themselves because they don’t believe they’re invincible, those are the ones who are going to stay ahead.” Staying humble and keeping the mindset that there is always something new to learn, some new way to reinvent your company, is the difference between growth and stagnation. Barry adds, and Alex agrees, that successful leaders are always creating scenarios that take them out of their comfort zone. Alex shares an exercise he does with leadership teams to help them visualize their current state, and recognize what they need to do differently. Create the Environment for Innovation “As a leader you don’t pick the winning ideas; you create the conditions for the winning ideas and the winning teams to emerge,” Alex remarks. Research shows that only four out of every 1000 projects will succeed, so leaders need to foster an ecosystem for those winning ideas to surface. He describes a practical system companies can adopt to incrementally fund winning ideas. He emphasizes that innovation and execution must work in harmony to enable each other. Barry comments that entrepreneurs should ask, “How quickly can we get these ideas in front of people to see? Should we build it and then test? Can we execute it?” Alex and Barry discuss why innovation is a moral obligation for companies. “My belief is innovation is almost a moral obligation - not to create more money but actually to create more stable jobs,” Alex says.  Looking Ahead Alex is excited about the boost of distributed work that the pandemic has accelerated. He loves that the software tools being adopted are leveraging human creativity, and sees huge opportunities coming out of this difficult period. Resources AlexOsterwalder.com The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World’s Best Business Models

Barry O’Reilly welcomes authors Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. They are the co-authors of a new book which details their practical system to have difficult conversations in a productive manner. The book is entitled Radical Alignment: How to Have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life.  How the System Originated Alex and Bob describe how the Radical Alignment system started. It was a tool they used in their own relationship and that they taught to others. Often people would reach out to them afterwards about implementing the tool in other contexts. It soon became apparent that they had something valuable that they could share with the world. Four Simple Steps The heart of the Radical Alignment system is four simple steps, Alex points out. “As a couple, or even as an individual or as a team, you share your intentions, concerns, boundaries and dreams.” Bob explains that they usually constrain the system to a topic and he illustrates how the system would work in the context of the current pandemic. Barry comments that he finds the system practical and applicable. “I felt like it was very explicit about what things matter, what was I going to do, and I could act on it straight away,” he says. How To Have Difficult Conversations Conflict often develops because there’s a missing conversation, according to Fernando Flores. “More often than not,” Bob adds, “the missing conversation is just some key little piece of context that you don't have, that really explains the person's behavior.” He shares an example of how context changed his perception from annoyance with his neighbor to acceptance. Alex remarks that this system brings structure and ease to her communication. “For me the most valuable thing about this structured conversation is that it gives me a way to organize my emotions and my thoughts and my desires.”  The Goal is Binding People Together Radical alignment essentially is about binding people together. Although the first three steps are vital, they can be somewhat utilitarian, Bob comments. The fourth step - talking about your dreams - is inspirational. He describes the physiological effects of sharing dreams, which results in binding people together as a group. Alex emphasizes that there are important rules for having these conversations: no cross-talk, no arguing points, you must listen to each other. The objective is to develop tactical empathy, which is simply understanding where each person is coming from. Other Important Lessons Barry, Alex and Bob share some important learnings and unlearnings about being radically aligned: People want to have difficult conversations but don’t have the tools to do so. Alex says, “Don't talk about anything important when either of you are hungry, angry, lonely or tired. We adapted that to be AHA - angry, hungry or alcohol.” Reason and emotions are intimately intertwined. “Teams fall apart because people can’t get along, because people don’t understand each other,” Bob comments. “...The big lesson of the last few years is how much I need to actually listen and to take on somebody else’s perspective before I have an opinion about it.” People may not understand how useful a tool is unless they use it. Trust is a lubricant that helps diverse people work together. Looking Ahead Alex is excited about how their tool is helping mom entrepreneurs. Bob wants to see people bring their whole selves to work. He hopes that this tool, that has been so impactful in their lives, can impact many others. Resources Radical Alignment: How to Have Game-Changing Conversations That Will Transform Your Business and Your Life

Susan O’Malley is an expert at building high performance teams and culture. This is the passion that influenced her work at Google, as well as her current position of Senior Director at IDEO. She joins Barry O’Reilly on this week’s show to share her inspiring story. Being Open to Following Your Heart Few people approach new opportunities with the openness that Susan displays, Barry comments. She credits her mindset to a love of learning and the ‘harmonizer’ role she embodied as a middle child. It deepened when she joined Google in its early years. “I literally saw the product changing the world and changing people’s business models,” she says. “…And it gave me this tremendous sense of optimism around what technology can do, not just for the big guys, but actually for the little guys and the guys in the middle. That was a really, really inspiring thing.”  What Makes Great Leaders Susan looked to the great leaders around her for traits she could cultivate in her own life. From her observations, great leaders were charismatic, fair, intentional and they succeeded at whatever they put their hand to. Barry adds about great leaders, “...they all seem to be working in a different field than they originally trained, and yet they really cultivated this capability to continuously adapt to changing circumstances. And they build systems that allow them to explore uncertainty very intentionally; they build a lot of fast feedback mechanisms into things. They're very curious to get outside their comfort zone.” The Value of Authenticity Authenticity is about being yourself. Susan says, “It helps other people be attracted to what you’re trying to do. It helps us communicate. It helps us produce amazing results in other people… Our job is to cultivate companies and teams where we have a great mix of people, and where people can really be themselves so that we can all find this energy and find this collaboration that's gonna take us to the next level.” Barry comments that being inauthentic demands energy, while just being your true self gives you energy. Living Your Values Performing at your highest level as an organization demands living out your values. Susan relates that she had to unlearn several ideas when she joined IDEO, including how to embrace ambiguity and how to work with designers. She now teaches these lessons to her coaching clients. “It’s not about your performance, and it’s not about what you know,” she tells her clients. “It’s about the things that everybody can make together.” Creating this kind of high performance environment means knowing your culture, she points out. She describes how leaders and teams can create the culture they aspire to. Focus on the Process Not the Outcome High performance is more about perfecting the process rather than the outcome, according to Susan. Barry adds, “The result is secondary to figuring out what's the real problem here and having a good process to explore it. And if we do that well, we're gonna be taken to the direction that we should go, that's probably not where we thought we would be at the start.” Susan shares practical tips including the Hierarchy of W’s and having Torque Partners. Looking Ahead Susan is coming to understand more and more how important culture change is in building an organization that will succeed. She is delving into talent design: helping organizations identify, retain and develop the talent they need to win. Resources Susan O’Malley on LinkedIn IDEO.com  Books referenced: Nine Lies About Work - Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall Dying for a Paycheck - Jeffrey Pfeffer Building Microservices - Sam Newman Unleashed - Frances Frei and Anne Morriss

This week’s guest, Tendayi Viki, is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer. A prolific author, he has written three books and is a regular contributor to Forbes magazine. His most recent book, Pirates in the Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation, is a manifesto on how to drive corporate innovation in large organisations. He and Barry O’Reilly chat about how he helped organizations drive and scale innovation, including key unlearning moments along the way.   Good Enough Is Better Than Perfect In an interesting twist of fate, Tendayi ended up in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business under the tutelage and mentorship of innovators like Steve Blank. He says that this was the turning point for him to converge his psychology training with entrepreneurship and innovation. He recounts two major unlearning moments, the major one of which was his tendency to over-edit. Barry describes this as a classic trap: we want our product to be perfect before we publish, but the better approach is to make it good enough, put it out there and start the conversation. In the academic world, Tendayi points out, your ideas evolve in private; but the innovation world is the opposite as your ideas evolve in public. This makes you vulnerable and takes courage, but the feedback you receive makes your product better. Earn the Right to Criticize You have to earn the right to criticize, according to Tendayi. People will only follow you when they see you as a partner on their journey, when they feel that you understand their struggle and have their best interests at heart. Helping Successful Ideas Evolve There’s no way to tell which of your ideas will succeed, so invest in many ideas and see which ones pan out. Tendayi remarks, “The fundamental theory of innovation is the theory of an entrepreneurship ecosystem… and in that ecosystem the evolution of successful ideas is actually pretty random. We don't know what's going to succeed and what’s not going to succeed. What we do is just throw things at the wall: we invest in a whole bunch of stuff and then we see what succeeds and what fails.” He emphasizes that you cannot choose winning ideas yourself on day one. He tells leaders that they have to provide the context for the best ideas to bubble up. Double down once you see what works. Coaching the Team Training is not enough: build organizational habits that allow the training to become a repeatable process within your organization. Tendayi explains why he uses this approach when working with large organizations. Coaching the team - both the leaders and employees - involves helping them incorporate this new mindset into their daily routine. Leaders in particular need to be deliberate about what they say and the questions they ask. Their questions should help to bring out the best in the team. What Lean Startup Is Not Lean startup is not a way to make any idea you have work. In fact, the majority of times it will tell you what doesn’t work. “What lean startup does is it allows you to find things that don't work, quicker and cheaper, so you can stop working on that stuff and double down on the things that work,” Tendayi says. He shares practical tips for incorporating the lean startup culture into a large organization, including creating artificial scarcity, which instills the discipline of focusing on what you need to do to be successful. Looking Ahead Tendayi is working on completing ongoing projects, including the Insight Strategyzer tool and a new book entitled Right Question Right Time. His next step, he says, is to return to his academic roots to research the psychology of uncomplacency. Resources TendayiViki.com Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation

Barry O’Reilly talks with social scientist and author of Tiny Habits, Dr. BJ Fogg on this week’s Unlearn Podcast. BJ is a Research Associate at Stanford University and creator of the Fogg Behavior Model in which he teaches people how to adapt their behavior based on the challenges they want to solve. His students include the co-founder of Instagram, as well as several other product, app, and service developers who create solutions using the models and methods he teaches. A Natural Experimenter “There’s a real skill about recognizing different patterns and seeing a trend and bringing it all together to create a new field,” Barry comments. He describes BJ as a natural experimenter, as he was able to converge his love of rhetoric with scientific study to create the new field of persuasive technology. BJ points out that it’s not a straight path: “You kind of stumble into learning and unlearning moments—you find what works and what doesn't; and certainly do by being curious to explore new paths, design experiments and get insights through research.” How To Make Change Sustainable Lasting change has these two characteristics, according to Fogg: Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? These two maxims are foundational to Fogg's systematic approach, Behavior Design, that helps people make the sustainable changes they are aiming towards. BJ describes how he discovered this new domain by setting himself up to be free to pursue his goals in the way he felt was best. Once you have a little support to independently sustain yourself for a while, he says, you realize that you can take more risks than you thought before. Barry adds, “Our ability to continuously adapt our behavior and thinking to changing circumstances is probably the most important skill we may need.” Just Get It Out There “Design the experiment. Crank it out. The first you're gonna mess up on. So just do it, learn, change and then do the next one,” BJ advises. Instead of trying to get it perfect, just get it done and put it out. The market will tell you what you need to improve and how to iterate. This is a key tenet of Behavior Design, BJ says. He illustrates this idea with an interesting story about how he forced his students to create a Facebook app in a seemingly impossible deadline. An important lesson he took away from that experience, he says, is that simplicity is key. It was the simple apps that really took off: “10 weeks later it engaged over 24 million people on the Facebook platform and some of them were making lots of money.” Looking Ahead As BJ looks to the future, he comments that now is the critical time for behavior change. He feels a responsibility to help people get through the current pandemic and social justice issues using his behavior change system. It’s a system that you can apply to any problem, so he wants to teach people to use the system to tackle these challenges. He also talks about the focus mapping tool that he is launching to help users match themselves with new habits or behavior changes that are right for them. Resources BJFogg.com TinyHabits.com

Barry O’Reilly and Jeff Gothelf have been best friends ever since Jeff reviewed Barry’s first draft of Lean Enterprise and told him it sucked. They have worked together as co-authors of the Lean series, and as consultants to Fortune 50 clients. Jeff joins Barry on the Unlearn Podcast this week to talk about his new book, Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You.  Push vs Pull The higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the fewer the jobs and the fiercer the competition. You have to constantly push your way through. Jeff woke up on his 35th birthday and made the unsettling realization that he would soon be battling younger, better-skilled people for a job. He understood that this was untenable, so he vowed that he wouldn’t look for jobs anymore, rather he would have jobs look for him. He tells Barry that pulling job opportunities means telling the world explicitly who you are, where you could help them, where people can find you and what problems you can solve for them. First Steps Why do you exist? How can you help people become successful? Being forever employable involves self-assessment. Jeff says that the first step he took was to examine what he was good at and what value he had provided up to that point. Then he thought about his audience and where the market was trending. “...if you're going to plant a flag somewhere you want to plant it in a growing market rather than ... one that's shrinking,” he points out. Your Personal Brand You have a story to tell that no-one else has: storytelling is how you differentiate yourself. Jeff tells listeners that we all have a unique perspective, and it’s how we build our personal brand. He and Barry talk about sharing their stories and fighting the impostor syndrome. “People massively underestimate themselves,” Jeff says. He coaches people how to find the self-confidence to pursue their goals, a trait that is critical if you want to be successful. Barry says that doing something you enjoy gives you confidence because your passion shines through. Catching The Wave Recognizing a problem, tracking the trends, then adopting a position and sharing it, orients you to catch the wave of new opportunities. Jeff describes how sharing his ideas attracted many unforeseen opportunities. “All of a sudden this conversation goes global and that begins the pull,” he shares. “All of a sudden I start to attract new opportunities because the story and the conversation and the sharing has become so powerful. Giving all this stuff away starts to attract all these new opportunities my way.” He shares how each new opportunity gave him the confidence to take another step, until he could confidently transition into full-time entrepreneurship. Barry comments, “One of the things people also need to unlearn is this isn't like from 0 to 100% overnight.” It takes small, continuous steps and a constant process of experimenting, evolving and reinventing and growing the things you already do. Counterintuitive Leadership A great leader does not purport to have all the answers, Barry says. Instead, it’s someone who is authentic and vulnerable and willing to learn. Jeff says that he is unlearning the fear of becoming vulnerable in public. He finds that his personal struggles resonate with people. He is becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable, which Barry notes is the mark of a successful leader. Jeff is driven by enthusiastic skepticism as coined by Astro Teller: there’s always a better way to do something the next time around. Looking Forward Jeff is looking forward to the launch of Forever Employable and the new opportunities it brings his way. Resources JeffGothelf.com Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You

Master Communicator Podcast Episode # 80 with Barry O'Reilly. Barry is a business advisor and entrepreneur. He also wrote 2 books about sales called Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. Unlearn talks about how to innovate in new ways to find new success. Lean Enterprise talks about how companies are able to innovate at scale to maximize success. In this interview Barry talks about the good leadership skills he's had to develop and how communication is vital for any company to run effectively, You can learn more about Barry on Linkedin @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/barryoreilly/

Barry O’Reilly welcomes Kanika Tolver to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Kanika is the bestselling author of Career Rehab and founder of a consultancy business of the same name. She has coached hundreds of clients, helping them discover opportunities to do their best work and to find higher performance roles that are better suited to them. How To Break Up With Your Job Despite fear and anxiety about job security, especially in this COVID-19 pandemic, Kanika says, that you shouldn't be afraid to seek the right job or to break up with the wrong one. She and Barry discuss practical advice:  Turn your anxiety into accomplishments. For example, you can upskill by getting a new certification, and expand your network. Connect with recruiters or hiring managers who can help you get a new position. Join a new online community. Apart from learning new skills, you may be able to connect with experts. Fearlessly resign when you know you’re prepared. To prepare, think about what you need to do to get ready, what you can learn, and who you can connect with or who you know that can refer you. Taking these small steps builds your confidence to fearlessly resign. You Are The MVP Whether you're thinking of changing careers or starting a business, think of yourself as the product. The first step is a Career Rehab Diagnosis, a self-assessment of what is and isn't working in your career. Make adjustments based on what you discover. Next, Kanika says, list your career, education and personal goals. The next step is to think about financial goals and culture fit. Barry comments that it takes so much unlearning for people to recognize that they deserve to have a fulfilling career in a place where they’re recognized for who they are and what they bring to the table. Kanika cites Barry’s book about reevaluating past behaviors. We need to stop thinking that we should conform to fit the company culture. Instead we must recognize that we’re the MVP (minimum viable product), and negotiate job offers with this mindset. She remarks, “They should be just as happy to have you as you are to have them. So I think when we shift our mindset to looking at ourselves as products and services - we have unique offerings - then it changes the direction of the conversation. Instead of you just praising the company, no - praise yourself and then get with the right company.” Divorcing The Job For The Dream Innovating your behavior is imperative to live your dream. Incorporate continuous feedback as it helps you to continuously improve. Another key point is that you should never settle in your career or your business. You have to be resilient in order to be successful. Kanika also shares the following advice: You have knowledge and skills from your job that you can transfer into your new business. Start creating your personal brand: you need a track record before you can divorce your job and marry your dream. Don’t overthink it. Just do it. Consistency is all it takes. Looking Ahead  Kanika is excited about the future of the workplace. The current crisis has proven that workers can still add value working remotely, so she expects more companies to transition into remote. She is also looking forward to more virtual events so new speakers can get an opportunity to spread their message. Information sharing and online networking is being normalized, she believes, and she is looking forward to seeing how businesses and careers pivot during this period, as people develop new communication skills. Resources Website: KanikaTolver.com  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Career-Rehab/dp/1599186519/

Good leaders know they need to continuously learn, but great leaders know when to unlearn the past to succeed in the future.In this podcast, Barry O’Reilly shares the system he uses to help Fortune 500 executives and business leaders rethink their strategies, retool their capabilities, and revitalize their businesses for stronger, longer-lasting success. The best-selling author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise talks with PMI COO, Joe Cahill, about how to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, identify what to stop, what to keep, and what to change to unlearn, relearn and breakthrough to achieve extraordinary results.PMI community members can access Barry O’Reilly’s recent report on why Scaling Innovation Means Descaling Work is at https://barryoreilly.com/resources/

Michael Bungay Stanier is the bestselling author of The Coaching Habit. He is part of the Thinkers 50 and has been named the number one Thought Leader in Coaching this year. Michael joins Barry O’Reilly on the Unlearn Podcast this week to share insights, including how to measure success and pivotal lessons that shaped him. An Unconventional Career Path There is a saying that inspiration is when your past suddenly makes sense. Certainly, several experiences in his early career showed Michael that he needed to work for himself in order to be at his best. He recounts that the turning point for him was 20 years ago when he was fired from the last company he worked with. That’s when he started his own business. Three Memorable Lessons Barry asks Michael about the lessons he’s learned over the years. Michael responds with the three pivotal lessons that he remembers to this day: You need to understand who you work best with. He is a great leader to his ideal clients, Michael says. “I'm great at having people's backs; I'm great with people who take responsibility and accountability; I'm great with people who have just been waiting... for the wind beneath their wings… In terms of figuring out who influences and nudges and helps shape people's journeys, you’ve got to get the right match between the right people.” The power of No. “Part of what I've learned is that the more courageous I can be about what I say no to and the fewer things that I say yes to, the more likely it is I'm going to make a difference in the world.” A lesson that stands out for Barry from The Coaching Habit is that if you’re going to say yes to something, that means you have to say no to something else. There’s great discipline in being able to say no. Be careful about what you measure as success. Barry and Michael talk about the insidiousness of vanity metrics: sometimes the metric becomes the target and you do anything to achieve it, oftentimes destroying the bigger win that you’re looking for. Michael says that how he measures success is to constantly keep in mind “the bigger game.” He describes how he used this principle with his book.  Serendipity or Intention? Is success intentional or serendipitous? How do we create success? Barry posits that it starts with systems: when you have big aspirations you need to think big but start small. Michael agrees that “intentionality is what allows serendipity.” Taking steps towards your goal is what prepares you to notice opportunities that you can capitalize on. Advice That Has Shaped Michael’s Life A question from his Latin teacher helped Michael decide to become a Rhodes Scholar. Commendation from a past employer helped him see himself as a force for good. And a frustrated directive from his friend to focus helps him “find the focal point that allows [me] to play but also creates the boundaries in which [I] play so that there's a coherence to the stuff that [I] do.” Barry adds that we all need to have a system for who gives us feedback and helps us become aware of our blind spots. Michael comments that the deepest level of feedback is to speak to a person’s being rather than their doing. “To speak to somebody's inherent qualities as to how you see them and how you experience them is a very powerful active leadership,” he remarks. Looking Ahead Michael has launched a podcast called We Will Get Through This, where he talks with interesting people about building resilience at the personal, team and organizational levels. He says that he is still figuring out how he will serve next, but he is disciplining himself to say yes less so that he has the space to see what emerges. Resources MBS.works TEDx Talk: How To Tame Your Advice Monster   Michael’s new book The Advice Trap is out, and it's pretty good. Don’t forget to get his international bestseller, The Coaching Habit.

Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Amy Jo Kim to this week’s Unlearn Podcast. Amy is a game designer, startup coach, and author of Game Thinking. She has worked on the early design teams of games such as Rock Band and The Sims, and has helped many companies, including Netflix and eBay, find their customers to help them scale. A Cooperative Designer Amy describes herself as a social game designer. She is enthusiastic about teamwork, having learned many lessons about creating a collaborative environment from working in music bands and modeling great bandleaders. One of those lessons that she now teaches in her Team Accelerator program is how to “make everything gel so we don't even remember whose idea it was… just getting the work done in a really focused yet creative way.” Many opportunities opened up for her Amy when she found a tribe of like-minded people. She tells Barry that she found mentors that she could click with and saw a way that she could contribute immediately to a much larger team. Go After The Early Beachhead “...If you're innovating you can't just go after your average customer in that market,” Amy posits. “You have to capture this narrow early beachhead market first.” As early as 1961, Everett Rogers of Bell Labs found that innovations always start by capturing the early market before going into the early and later mainstream. Amy has taken these insights from innovators like Rogers, Jeffrey Moore, and Will Wright, and made them accessible through a step-by-step program. She shares how these principles were lived out in building out The Sims, and in companies such as eBay and Netflix. “...There's so much you can learn and get out of iterating ideas with [your early beachhead] that it gets you to a point where you can get a vector in the direction and build out for the next layer of people around them,”Amy adds. Early adopters or beachheads have these three characteristics: They actually have the problem that your product solves; They know they have the problem and are willing to try anything that might help; They're taking actions that demonstrate they're trying to solve the problem. Game Design Is About Customer Journey The best game designers create a customer journey and then use mechanics such as gamification to deliver that journey. While shaping behavior with rewards - the basis of gamification - may deliver short-term lift, it does not provide long-term engagement. Barry comments that tapping into intrinsic motivation is a delineation towards game thinking. Step one in designing for intrinsic motivation, Amy says, “is understanding that the best use of any game mechanics or progression mechanics is to support a journey.” The framework Amy details in her book gives a synthesized approach to building an engaging customer journey. The core, she says, is how your product transforms the user into the person they want to be. “If you think about creating a product that gets better as the customer becomes more skilled, you'll be really getting to the heart of it.” Barry comments that Amy’s work is about helping the person to be the best they can be, realizing that struggle is part of the journey. “All the best things we do in life,” Barry says, “requires to test our character, to cultivate skills and behaviors in ourselves that we don't have, to grow as individuals.” The mental model - the story that’s unfolding in the customer’s head -  is at the heart of intrinsic motivation, Amy points out. She advises mapping out the story building up in the customer’s mind to understand their point of view. This will drive retention, she says. Looking Ahead Amy is excited about the explosion of creativity that’s being unleashed because of the pandemic. She says that it’s “so much good that’s happening for the planet.” Resources GameThinking.io  https://amyjokim.com/  https://twitter.com/amyjokim  https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyjokim/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jS5pCo5v8MoF6GjpGiXBw

Ronan talks to Professor Barry O' Reilly of Assert & UCC who was involved with the development of the COVID-19 Remote Early Warning System also known as CREW. Professor O'Reilly talks about how the idea of CREW came about, how it works and what you need to use it. Professor O'Reilly also talks about how easy it is to implement and if they are thinking about selling it in other countries.

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by his colleague and return guest, Quincy Jordan! Quincy is a Principal Transformation Consultant and Agile Competency Lead who has been with AgileThought for just over two years. Prior to AgileThought, Quincy was the Transformation Lead for Pivotal’s Atlanta Office, where he consulted with clients to help them reach enterprise scale. Quincy also served as a Principal Consultant and Agile Coach at SCRUMstudy.com for over six years.   In this episode, they’re going to be discussing portfolio management. A lot of times, Agility is thought of as team practices or activities that go around the team. And yet, there’s a lot of disruption and a lack of clarity that can happen when the higher-level contacts around those teams aren’t set. And a lot of times, that vision and strategy are being set at the portfolio level. So in Dan’s and Quincy’s discussion today, they shed some light on Lean and Agile portfolios in particular, as well as how portfolios fit into Agile ways of working and how it could help. They also provide actionable advice around how to keep the communication clear and transparent, key takeaways around the sustainability of the portfolio, and how to add Agile or Lean components to portfolio management.   Key Takeaways How to add Agile or Lean components to portfolio management: Make sure that alignment is there (when you don’t have alignment from the portfolio level you run into a lot of challenges around teams not being clear about why they’re doing the work that they’re doing and the overall vision) Capture the vision through a framework (like OKRs) to add clarity Make sure that alignment is created and that there is a concise and clear vision that everyone can execute on Ensure that the team knows where the organization is going (so that they know what that the goals are beyond just delivering on a project) Good alignment from the top-down is critical You don’t want to spend time on products that are not going to bring value, so the portfolio of products needs to be constantly reprioritized and reevaluated Make sure that the team is not putting emphasis or focus on products that are not bringing value to the portfolio of products Ways to keep communication clear and transparent: Once alignment is established and everyone understands what the vision is, you then have to make sure that everything/everyone is very transparent about them Establish good, clear, and frequent communication Potential downfalls with portfolio management and agile transformations: forgetting to communicate on a frequent basis with those on the ground who are helping to bring this vision to pass (when people aren’t clear on the ‘why’ they don’t have as much of an invested interest in the outcome) Make sure communication is flowing both ways Value mapping can be a valuable method for making the value creation visible, which improves communication and understanding Within a portfolio of products, you can utilize Kanban boards which will show all of the products within that portfolio that are in flight and all of the teams that are supporting those products (they’re also highly visible to all the teams and it’s a nice transparent way for people to see how their team fits into the bigger picture) Key takeaways around the sustainability of the portfolio: Within the portfolio, you want to make sure that you’re looking at the cross-team dependencies and using an appropriate model that will allow the management of the portfolio to be sustainable To make things sustainable, you need to look at what the post-transformation sustainability and the overall sustainability model looks like Conduct change in a series of ‘push and let go’ Have a portfolio combined of different horizons (reference the ‘Three Horizons Method’) You don’t want to spend so much time keeping the lights on that you end up being a ‘blockbuster video’ (i.e. remember to look ahead at Horizons 1 and 2 as referenced in the ‘Three Horizons Method’)   Mentioned in this Episode: Quincy Jordan OKRs “How to Avoid OKR Fake News — Felipe Castro at the OKR Forum Amsterdam 2019” Video Value Mapping McKinsey’s Three Horizons Model   Quincy Jordan’s Book Pick: Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, by Barry O’Reilly   Want to Learn More or Get in Touch? Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com! Email your thoughts or suggestions to Podcast@AgileThought.com or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

In our very first episode, we’re taking this opportunity to interview Barry O’Reilly about his book Unlearn. I’ll be talking to Barry about how Unlearn aims to get us to change the behaviours and mindsets that prevent you and your businesses from moving forward. To then relearn new skills, strategies and innovations that can help you break old habits and encourage new ways of thinking by opening up to new ideas and perspectives to achieve extraordinary results. Show links:Book: UnlearnExec CampFollow us on Instagram @breaking_backs Email me here: info@breakingbacks.co.uk

Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Temi Ofong to the Unlearn Podcast. Temi is the Chief Operating Officer for Corporate Investment Banking at Absa, South Africa’s most influential bank and one of the largest banks on the African continent. Temi describes his journey to his present role as an incredible learning curve. He shares the lessons he learned and unlearned throughout his career, in particular, the importance of putting people first to achieve success. Empathy As A Superpower “If you're not able to connect with the person's journey and history and context, it's very difficult to get the best out of them because you don't really understand what motivates them,” Temi points out. Barry calls empathy a superpower. People who develop empathy always get the best information which informs how they behave and helps them to be successful in different environments. “Ultimately business is about people,” Temi adds. “Life is about people… The biggest thing you’ve got to unlearn or learn… is people and what motivates people, what makes them tick…” He illustrates how this principle helped him in the build out of their corporate banking business. Unlearning A Common Leadership Myth  One of the most common myths about leadership is that a good leader does it all on his or her own. However, Temi points out that his biggest breakthrough actually came as a result of his coach. Many times the attitudes and behaviors that brought you success thus far, are not the same ones that will take you further. The right coach, he argues, can lead you on a journey of unlearning which will help you enhance your performance. Barry says that getting a coach helped him accelerate exponentially.  Leaders also need to unlearn: How to be vulnerable; How to harness EQ; What motivates their people. The Notion of Collective Success A leader’s job is to create the environment for other people to succeed. “Ultimately it comes down to the notion of collective success,” Temi adds. People need to feel that they are part of the team, that their work is contributing to the success of the organization. “It’s about trying to create as many points of connection and collaboration where everybody feels that together they can achieve more,” Temi says. Temi shares insights about what led to his bank’s successful multi-year transformation program: It was a bank wide effort. There was a specific deadline. The team was willing to use a new approach. They trusted one another. They revamped how they tracked success and how they dealt with failure. They started with one project, then iterated. They invested in training colleagues. Frequent Evidence of Success Nothing builds trust faster than seeing evidence of a new way of working, Barry says. When they see regular progress, leaders feel more confident about new methods. This kind of collaboration builds trust, momentum and rapport. “That’s where you see real transformation in organizations, where people go through an experience together and deliver something beyond their expectations,” Barry comments. Looking Ahead Temi says the next step is to take what they learned in this project and implement it throughout the bank. Now that they are emerging from this multi-year project where they were focused internally, they have to make up any ground they lost in the market and accelerate past the competition. “The pieces that I focus on are the human parts,” he says. “I see my job as being to help them think through problems but without diminishing their accountability… it's a team sport and in that team we all play our part and I think that's a very important perspective to have as a leader.” Resources Temi Ofong on LinkedIn

Jennifer K. Hill speaks with best-selling author and consultant, Peter Economy. Peter shares tips from his latest book Wait, I'm the Boss?!? In the interview, Peter emphasizes the importance of compassion as a leader and offers suggestions on how to delegate and create thriving teams. inc.com/author/peter-economy Peter Economy is a best-selling business author, ghostwriter, developmental editor, and publishing consultant with more than 100 books to his credit (and more than 3 million copies sold). Peter’s latest book is Wait, I’m the Boss?!? – published by Career Press. He also helped create Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results; Everything I Learned About Life I Learned in Dance Class; The Leadership Gap: What Gets Between You and Your Greatness; Managing For Dummies; Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product; The Management Bible; Peter Isler’s Little Blue Book of Sailing Secrets; and many more. He’s the Leadership Guy on Inc.com and served for many years as Associate Editor for Leader to Leader magazine—published by the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum in New York City. Peter taught MGT 453: Creativity and Innovation as a lecturer at San Diego State University, is on the National Advisory Council of The Art of Science Learning, and is a founding member of the board of SPORTS for Exceptional Athletes. A graduate of Stanford University (with majors in Economics and Human Biology), Peter has worked closely with some of the nation’s top business, leadership, and technology thinkers, including Jim Collins, Frances Hesselbein, Barry O’Reilly, Peter Senge, Kellie McElhaney, Jeff Patton, Marshall Goldsmith, Marty Cagan, Lolly Daskal, Guy Kawasaki, Emma Seppala, William Taylor, Jim Kilts, Jean Lipman-Blumen, Stephen Orban, Ken Blanchard, and many others.

Peter Economy is The Leadership Guy on Inc.com and has worked closely with some of the nation’s top business, leadership, and technology thinkers.  Peter is a best-selling business author, ghostwriter, developmental editor, and publishing consultant with more than 100 books to his credit (and more than 3 million copies sold). And for more than a decade served as Associate Editor for Leader to Leader magazine—published by the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum in New York City. Peter taught MGT 453: Creativity and Innovation as a lecturer at San Diego State University, is on the National Advisory Council of The Art of Science Learning, and is a founding member of the board of SPORTS for Exceptional Athletes. A graduate of Stanford University (with majors in Economics and Human Biology), Peter has worked closely with some of the nation’s top business, leadership, and technology thinkers, including Jim Collins, Frances Hesselbein, Barry O’Reilly, Peter Senge, Kellie McElhaney, Jeff Patton, Marshall Goldsmith, Marty Cagan, Lolly Daskal, Guy Kawasaki, Emma Seppala, William Taylor, Jim Kilts, Jean Lipman-Blumen, Stephen Orban, Ken Blanchard, and many others. In this episode of Your Partner In Success Peter will talk about his book 'Wait, I'm the Boss?!?: The Essential Guide for New Managers to Succeed from Day One' and why he wrote it. He says " Unfortunately, few organizations devote much in the way of time or money in training their managers, yet they expect them to take on important responsibilities quickly.  Website

Karen Tay, Smart Nation Director for the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore, is on a mission to transform Singapore into the world’s leading smart nation, where technology is used for maximum public good.  She chats with Barry O’Reilly about how she is helping to modernize government by applying product development thinking to policy, organizational and talent development. She shares how this is changing the way the Singaporean government works.  [note: this was recorded before the coronavirus outbreak in the US. If you want to chat about how these insights pertain to Government management of the coronavirus, Karen is happy to chat] User-Driven Design In charting directions for a country, being responsive to citizen sentiments is important, but there is also a place for Governments to exercise leadership in decision-making, eg. the decision that investing in preschool education is critical to social mobility, decisions on how to manage crises such as the coronavirus. Regardless, how the central government implements their decisions should be driven by user behavior. Karen points out that using an iterative process is beneficial in many cases. She relates that they combined user research and iterative testing for policies in the Ministry of Education and found that stakeholders felt more engagement and ownership of the new policies. You have to be willing to listen to what your educators need and want from your product, and change it to something they are willing to implement, Karen says. Barry agrees that you should use user data to reframe your problem, then look at ways to improve. Make Customers Feel Valued Karen and Barry discuss several unlearning moments in Karen’s career. She points out that in government it’s not about what ideas you have, rather whether you can execute them. She says that she was surprised by how little she needed to get something done. She found that it was often as simple as listening to her potential customers’ needs and designing around them, instead of feeding into prevailing assumptions. “You want to make [your customers] feel that you thought about them when you designed the product,” Karen says. Go Deep First When you’re trying to build a policy or product, you must “go deep first,” Karen says. “You need to really get to know the people you're trying to serve… Focus on building that relationship and that trust with the community. Everything else - the dividends - come later.” As you respond to those needs, you learn more about how to scale later on. Barry agrees. He argues that a one-size-fits-all solution never works because each company and culture is different. “The way to scale innovation is actually to descale it, to start with a small group of people. Go very deep with a narrow focus and demonstrate new behaviors. Show what works and doesn't work in your context,” Barry emphasizes. It’s All Relational Building talent pipelines and communities is all relational. Magic happens when you get to know people as human beings, Karen says. You achieve outcomes by connecting on a human level: people feel inspired to change when they have an emotional connection to the change you’re trying to make. Barry comments that the most successful leaders role model the behaviors they want their employees to adopt. Looking Ahead Karen outlines several differences between engineering culture and management culture. She wishes that more hierarchical organizations would adopt the hands-on approach of engineering culture. This is the experience economy, she argues: people want to feel that your company is thinking about them, that they are valued. In fact, you should see all your customers and your employees as ambassadors. As such, you should treat them well and create an amazing experience for them. Resources Karen Tay on LinkedIn

Gerry and Andy discuss the new plans for Design Politics 2020 in the light of the coronavirus situation, a bumper crop of books in Andy's Book Corner for your reading now that you're stuck at home all day, a study in how Canadians go to the toilet, and Gerry gets out his guitar and sings... No, really. Please help us with our conference survey! https://thisishcd.typeform.com/to/Kwhmnw This is HCD Design Politics Conference site Power of Ten with Andy Polaine EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion ProdPod with Adrienne Tan Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran Andy's Book Corner Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read by Kristen Ghodsee, which is really a good book about writing in general. Great for design researchers. Hat tip to Chris Hayward for this recommendation. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz – well-written and depressing at the same time. Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results by Barry O’Reilly. Lots of great insights personal and organisational change. (Barry is, in fact, Irish – Andy got it wrong in the podcast). Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell. Beyond The Prototype: A roadmap for navigating the fuzzy area between ideas and outcomes by Douglas Ferguson. Connect with This is HCD Follow This is HCD us on Twitter Follow This is HCD on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!) Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel Read articles on our This is HCD Network on Medium Support the show.

Gerry and Andy discuss the new plans for Design Politics 2020 in the light of the coronavirus situation, a bumper crop of books in Andy's Book Corner for your reading now that you're stuck at home all day, a study in how Canadians go to the toilet, and Gerry gets out his guitar and sings... No, really. Please help us with our conference survey! https://thisishcd.typeform.com/to/Kwhmnw This is HCD Design Politics Conference site Power of Ten with Andy Polaine EthnoPod with Jay Hasbrouck Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion ProdPod with Adrienne Tan Getting Started in Design with Gerry Scullion Talking Shop with Andy Polaine and Gerry Scullion Decoding Culture with Dr. John Curran Andy's Book Corner Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read by Kristen Ghodsee, which is really a good book about writing in general. Great for design researchers. Hat tip to Chris Hayward for this recommendation. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz – well-written and depressing at the same time. Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results by Barry O’Reilly. Lots of great insights personal and organisational change. (Barry is, in fact, Irish – Andy got it wrong in the podcast). Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell. Beyond The Prototype: A roadmap for navigating the fuzzy area between ideas and outcomes by Douglas Ferguson. Connect with This is HCD Follow This is HCD us on Twitter Follow This is HCD on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter (we have lots of design giveaways!) Join the practitioner community on This is HCD Slack Channel Read articles on our This is HCD Network on Medium Support the show.

Alberto Savoia had a successful career as Chief Technology Officer in major companies such as Sun Microsystems, SunLabs, and was Google’s first Engineering Manager. As an entrepreneur, however, he realized that building the right thing was more important than building things right. He chats with Barry O’Reilly about the pivotal unlearning moments in his life and his new approach to product development. The Beast of Failure You work hard to create a great product, you launch it and the market rejects it. That’s one of the most painful experiences for any software developer. Alberto relates his first experience with ‘the beast of failure’: even though the market told them “if you build it, we will buy”, they did not actually buy. Alberto says that this failure felt as if someone had pulled the rug from under him. However, it was also a seminal unlearning moment for him. The first lesson he took away was that if you’re building the right ‘it’, you will find a way to succeed in the market. The second lesson was that you have to own your failures before you can move forward. Unlearning Market Research There is an 80% chance that the original version of any idea will fail. As such, Alberto now goes into a venture expecting failure, and the market has to prove him wrong. Optimizing to be wrong rather than to be right, flips traditional market research on its head. Barry comments that it’s at the heart of the scientific method since you have to conduct experiments to invalidate your hypothesis; if you can’t invalidate it, then it’s probably a good hypothesis. Alberto’s most important experiment to test his ideas is his ‘skin in the game meter’. Asking the market if they will buy if you build is due negligence, he argues; that’s just promises and opinions. Instead, he tells them, “If you buy, we will build.” The ultimate demonstration that someone wants a product is when they put down a deposit. Money is the ultimate skin in the game, as Elon Musk’s example proves. Pretotyping Engineers usually know whether a product can be built. The uncertainty lies in whether it should be built. Alberto says that when he looked at how creators approached this problem, he saw many examples of pretotyping. A pretotype is something you build before you start to build something that works; for example, how Jeff Hawkins developed the Palm Pilot. The only data that is valuable, Alberto says, is YODa - Your Own Data. Just as Hawkins did, Alberto only counts YODa that is backed up with skin in the game. Barry adds that YODa has the ability to shift mindsets. He has found that the people who own their results, and are continuously learning and unlearning to enhance their product, get exceptional results. Change Takes Time Logic does not convince people to change their age-old thinking. It takes time and dedication to get people to buy in to new ideas and methods. Start with one project, Alberto advises, and incorporate some traditional techniques. Let them experience the results firsthand: that will start to open their minds up to a different way of thinking and acting. Barry agrees that logic is not enough to change minds or behavior. “You have to act your way to a new culture,” he says. “You start to see the world differently when you do things differently, and that’s what challenges your mental model and shifts it.” Looking Forward Alberto has written a book to teach entrepreneurs and innovators about pretotyping, so they work on ideas that are likely to succeed. He advises them not to depend on luck and to assume failure. If you iterate enough, however, you will find the idea that succeeds, he says. That is how to play in a systematic way. “Unlearning is learning. It just takes courage to flip it around.”  Resources AlbertoSavoia.com

For 20 years, Jen Grace Baron has sought to discover the secrets of sustaining inspiration. Her findings are the subject of a book which she co-authored with Allison Holzer and Sandra Spataro, entitled Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life. She chats with Barry O’Reilly about his interesting topic in this week’s show. What makes it worthwhile? In entrepreneurship, as in life, there are going to be tough days. Jen says that she and her co-authors asked each other, “What is the difference that we want to make that will make bad days worthwhile?” Inspiration is a muscle and a resource Jen’s research proved that the traditional view of inspiration is erroneous. Inspiration isn’t something that happens to you. In fact, it can be generated: inspiration is a muscle that you can build and it’s a resource that organizations should manage. She outlines three ways we get inspired:  We inspire ourselves; We are inspired through, with and by others, mainly in relationships; We’re inspired through situations.  Jen adds that there are predictable pathways, or engines, that people use to inspire themselves. Rituals and culture Barry and Jen talk about how simple ‘reset rituals’ spark inspiration and prepare us for success. Systematized rituals are essentially the building blocks of great culture. Culture, Jen says, is the hardest thing you’ll ever build in your company, but it’s the most precious. Barry adds that exceptional leaders role model the behaviors they want their people to adopt. Sustained change does depend on leaders, Jen agrees, which often means unlearning past beliefs and behaviors. The desire for the change has to be stronger than the fear of changing, she says. Am I inspiring? Many leaders believe that they are not inspiring, or that being inspiring is the same as being charismatic. Jen describes the strategies and tools she uses to help her clients see their strengths and uniqueness. Barry comments that our capabilities are often our blind spots because they come so naturally to us. However, we inspire others just by being ourselves. Inspiration is about being authentic; it’s about knowing our strengths and how to use them, Jen adds. Situational leadership is also an essential element of inspiration as leaders today must be agile. Some engines of inspiration We’re inspired by people who share their fallibility and vulnerability with us. Jen comments that just needing other people, and expressing that, is magnetic and inspiring. She shares an important unlearning story from her own life. It was humbling, difficult and uncomfortable, she says, but it taught her how to be a better leader. Another engine of inspiration is overcoming adversity. Past constraints have motivated and inspired many people to succeed. Jen explains that a surprising engine of inspiration is failure, loss and grief. She shares the story of Dr. Joe Kasper to illustrate that grief can be a deep source of inspiration and can be channeled for good. Finding your inspiration If you can reflect on traumatic events, failure, loss or grief, Jen says, and find ways they can serve you, you will grow stronger. This is called Post-Traumatic Growth. Barry asks the best way someone can figure out what will inspire them. Jen responds that inspiration helps you have your best days more often. As such, write down what your best day looks like for you, and why. What’s next for Jen Jen wants to work with companies to measure inspiration and build inspiring partnerships to increase it. Resources Dare To Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration In Work and Life

Testing Business Ideas with David J. Bland David Bland’s work includes the product death cycle, a classic anti-pattern innovators and entrepreneurs fall into when trying to create a new product. He highlights that building what customers say they want is not the way to be successful; instead, ideas need to be tested to see what they need to succeed. In this week’s show, Barry O’Reilly and David discuss his new  book, Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation, including what it takes to do experimentation right. Stick To Your Vision or Walk Away? “It doesn’t matter how beautiful something looks, or who you think your customer is, if they don’t want it they don’t want it.” His early experience in a financial services startup taught David this valuable lesson. He says that at some point you have to decide whether to stick to your vision and pivot to another segment, or walk away. Having the market reject your hard work is humbling because you personally attach yourself to what you’re creating. However, David comments that the way to move forward is to listen to the data. Being Open To Being Wrong Your vision may need to be tweaked in some way for you to be successful, David says. As such, leaders should adopt the mindset that they’re testing their vision against reality and that they might be wrong. Unlearning Ideas About Experimentation Barry asks David to comment on what organizations need to unlearn about experimentation. David responds that much of it boils down to leadership mindset. People usually become leaders because they are experts in some area and have proven that they can produce results. It’s an ego-driven path, David says. If you’re not careful, you can become a CEO who still thinks that it’s all about you. Building a culture of experimentation means however, that you have to create more leaders around you. Barry adds that so many leaders are used to managing to output-based measures of success. Asking them to measure outcomes seems an alien concept, so they are resistant to the idea. David says funding is another area organizations need to unlearn. He contrasts the traditional method of annual budgeting for projects with the concept of internal VC funding, and explains why the latter is better suited to experimentation. Big Leadership Questions Technology is changing the world so quickly that organizations need to be able to adapt. The static business model that can run for years without change cannot survive in today’s market and economy, David comments. A very important question leaders need to consider is, What would happen if a startup is created today that would make us obsolete?  Barry adds that another question leaders should ask is, What would stop us investing in this idea? It’s not enough to optimize only for the happy path; pairing it with metrics that tell you when to kill an initiative creates a clearer picture of what success would look like. Start Manually David shares the story of an SMS dating app to illustrate that you can use manual processes to test the validity of a business idea without building sophisticated features. You can use what you learn to find a strategy or automate a process to scale. It also de-risks the process, Barry comments, as you find out if anyone cares about your product, if anyone would use it, and if you should build it. Starting manually makes for safe experimentation since you’re only investing your time, but you learn so much. Looking Ahead David hopes to influence change in funding startups, as he believes that it should be based on evidence rather than emotion. Resources Testing Business Ideas book David Bland on Twitter

Let’s Fix Work Episode 93: This week I am introducing you to Barry O’Reilly, a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry authored both Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. If this isn’t enough cred, he is also the founder of ExecCamp plus faculty at Singularity University. He is truly a super cool guy.  Barry is an expert on how to question your beliefs and how to unlearn things. During the episode, we talk about learning your assumptions, your beliefs, and the things you thought to be true which may not be true. Next, we take all of these things and discuss how each may be holding you back personally and professionally. Barry has some practical tools, tips, and techniques to help you move yourself towards greater success in your career and in your life. Tune into this episode of Let’s Fix Work to learn how to achieve your goals and how to stop failing over and over.    In this episode you’ll hear: What it means to unlearn something and how you can do it. How to identify what's outdated and what's still working in your personal and professional lives.  Some circumstances which cause you to fail plus how to unlearn the things getting in your way of success. How it is important to ask yourself, “What would be my success story?” Why it’s important to think big when you are working to unlearn something. How leaders and corporations can look at unlearning differently.   Resources from this episode:Unlearn How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale Barry O’Reilly on LinkedIn Barry’s Blog Barry’s Unlearn Podcast Laurie on Instagram Laurie on LinkedIn Read more from Laurie Work with Laurie   *** EPISODE CREDITS: If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment. He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com   

Barry O’Reilly of Black Tulip Technology discusses Antifragile Architecture, an approach for designing systems that actually improve in the face of complexity and disorder.

Barry O’Reilly of Black Tulip Technology discusses Antifragile Architecture, an approach for designing systems that actually improve in the face of complexity and disorder. Host Jeff Doolittle spoke with O’Reilly about the characteristics of antifragility and the nature of complexity in software systems and business environments. Various processes and practices were discussed for applying the […]

Barry O’Reilly opens Season 2 of the UnLearn Podcast by commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. He welcomes special guest Dr. Ed Hoffman, NASA’s first ever Chief Knowledge Officer. Ed is a Senior Lecturer at Columbia University School or Professional Studies, and serves as Strategic Advisor for the Project Management Institutue. In these roles he works with industry leaders to develop capabilities in leadership, projects, teaming, and future of work dynamics. He is a sought-after consultant and speaker, and the co-author of Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects.  Knowing Why Knowing what you’re doing is important, but it’s also critical to know why. Ed has always believed that NASA’s work contributes to the good of humankind. His thoughtful response to the interesting test Deputy Administrator Dr. Hans Mark put him through during his internship, proved that he knew why he was there. Barry comments that we can achieve amazing outcomes when we are connected to mission, when we know why we’re doing what we’re doing. It Starts With The People The best organizations have thoughtful, effective leaders; they build teams who are themselves leaders; and they share a common mission. Ed says that when you work with people that you respect and care about, when you have a sense of purpose, and you feel that your skills are being utilized, then work feels like a special place. Barry asks how leaders can build such high-performance teams. Ed responds that the best leaders create - and are part of! - the best teams. “It starts with the people aspect,” he says. A sense of pride, appreciation and gratitude, and commitment to the dream are components of the best teams. Only then should the management part come in, Ed says. A Lack of Communication Leads to Tragedy Ed relates how a lack of communication and collaboration at NASA led to the 2003 Columbia tragedy. When you’ve had a period of success, it’s common to feel pressure to produce faster results. Communication between teams often suffers and that’s when danger happens, Ed says. The Discovery mission six years later was successful because of the high level of communication and collaboration. The psychological safety to talk about anything is the most important ingredient in teamwork, Ed insists. Barry adds that information-sharing is crucial because making good decisions depends on having high quality information. A Process of Unlearning  Putting yourself in an uncomfortable environment, where you have to actively learn, synthesize information and present it back for feedback, is a form of iterating, and a powerful mechanism for personal and team growth, Barry says. Ed had to go through this process of unlearning when he assumed the leadership of NASA’s Program Project Management Initiative. What he had in his favor, he says, was that he knew what he didn’t know. He has learned that knowledge is profoundly social: the answers are out there in the community, so the best teams learn from each other. Ed says that he is in awe of his technical and engineering colleagues because they’re doing work that he can’t understand. Enjoying the people you work with, appreciating them and the work you do together helps the whole team grow. Be in tap with what you enjoy, Ed advises. “It’s not work when you love something,” he says. A meaningful interaction with a mentor was another powerful unlearning moment for Ed. Thanks to his mentor, his approach to finding solutions now involves setting up boundaries to know whether something is working, as well as the tools to recover. All of this has to do with an emphasis and commitment to building reflective leadership skills for learning and unlearning. Resources Dr. Ed Hoffman 

In this finale episode of Season 1, Barry O’Reilly takes the time to answer questions posed by listeners. He reached out via social media and allowed his followers to ask him anything about himself, the podcast, or things they might want to learn and unlearn. Here are several of the questions posed and Barry’s answers: Q: What takes up too much of your time? (Helen, Melbourne AUS) A: Noisy notifications. Non-specific interruptions that disrupt my flow are frustrating for me. I don’t like interruptions or context switching because it limits my progress. Q: How do you measure success for the podcast? (Caroline, New York USA) A: I’m more interested in outcome-based measures of success. I know it’s going to be a great show when a guest says “I’ve never shared this story before,” or “I never thought of it like that.” Those authentic conversations, and getting feedback from listeners that they feel they’re part of them, are really powerful for me.  Q: What has been the single best day of 2019, and why? (Prithi, Bangalore IND) A: Being sent a photo of Serena Williams reading Unlearn. It was especially poignant because watching her story on TV was a major unlearning moment for me. It forced me to acknowledge that there were things I needed to adapt in myself to achieve the outcomes I wanted. Seeing her reading my book was inspiring and felt like a closed feedback loop. Q: What’s the most counterintuitive skill to unlearn? (Simon, San Francisco USA) A: Definitely the concept of coaching. We seem to think that only people who are underperforming need coaching. However, the highest performing persons have and actively seek out coaches to help them improve. Coaching has certainly been one of the best investments I’ve ever made in myself. Q: Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable is nearly impossible for me. What do you do to actively get uncomfortable? (Kirstie, Helsinki FIN) A: Actually, I feel uncomfortable if I’m not doing something uncomfortable! Trying new things, embracing counterintuitive ideas challenges your thinking and your belief systems, but it also gives you evidence that either supports your original beliefs or the new idea. I encourage you to think about one small step you can take on the edge of your comfort zone. How can you improve by even half a point? Get someone you trust to rate you in that area at the beginning, then at the end of one week. Q: It’s often said that the biggest blocker to success is fear? How do you unlearn fear? (Adrian, Johannesburg, SA) A: By thinking big but starting small. Taking small steps lets you find out what works and what doesn’t. You being to feel successful. As you continue to take those small steps, you improve and gain momentum. You start to see change happening. This is the antidote to fear: small wins create belief, show evidence and make it safe to fail. Q: What’s the best piece of advice you have been given? (Yuko, Tokyo JPN) A: That you don’t only get one shot at success, there are actually many. Entrepreneurship for me is about life and life is about growth through learning experiences. When things don’t go the way you want, the trick is to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and get ready for your next shot. As my cousin Phillip would say: “if you’re still breathing you haven’t failed. Make sure you learn something for the next spin and go get inspired and do it again.” What To Expect in 2020  Barry says that in the next iteration of the Unlearn Podcast, he will be interviewing guests from a broader range of industries, not just technology. He’s excited to hear about their journey to unlearn.

Tanya Cordrey started her career as a journalist for a road haulage magazine. Today she serves on several boards and consults with many leading organizations. She has led teams and international expansions in companies such as BBC and eBay, and oversaw the transformation from print to digital media at The Guardian Media Group in her role as Chief Digital Officer. She joins host Barry O’Reilly to discuss her role in leading difficult change in often very traditional organizations. Doing Something Different Doing something different can lead to new and wonderful opportunities. Tanya’s unconventional decision to do an MBA to pair and contrast with her literary arts degree resulted in creating the opportunity for her to lead a strategy team at the BBC and later to be recruited as part of the European executive team for BabyCenter. Barry comments that many people don’t realize the challenges involved when you’re trying to do something different. Tanya says that she seeks out high-paced environments. She takes calculated risks that she believes will yield good results, like the MBA and working with technology. Both decisions gave her in-demand skills and an advantage in the market. Identifying Scalable Opportunities Convincing stakeholders to grasp new opportunities is often a difficult task. However, being clear on your vision and giving them a taste of the expected results makes the task easier. A little survival anxiety can help as well!  Tanya and her colleagues wanted to convince eBay to introduce fixed price selling—her data supported it. They were turned down initially but were later told that if other countries wanted it, they could give it a try. The international partners were all interested. At the time, Amazon was talking about launching its marketplace, which spurred the decision-makers to see fixed price selling as a defensive maneuver. The project was eventually rolled out, to phenomenal success. Within a few days of seeing the results around the world, eBay US also rolled out fixed price selling. This experience taught Tanya to think big, and use data to support her beliefs. She says that it was the first time one of her ideas led to such a huge impact on revenue. By leveraging external competitors to accelerate action, and collaborating with many different stakeholders, she was able to cause a huge transformation. Shaking Off Existing Paradigms Leading change, especially in traditional companies, involves unlearning your tried and true methods and learning what works in the current context. Having spent several years in purely digital companies that were largely data-driven, Tanya found that using charts and logical arguments derived from the data didn’t really work at The Guardian.  Tanya learned that she had to appeal to hearts as well as heads in order to persuade the media giant. Barry agrees that you need a well-constructed value hypothesis grounded in evidence and data, as well as an aspirational vision and mission to show people where you want to go. Three Phases of Change Tanya’s says The Guardian’s transformation fell into three phases: Phase 1: Changing as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Phase 2: Communication. Phase 3: Cross-functionality. Resources Tanya Cordrey on LinkedIn | Twitter

Stephen Orban found an old TI-99 in his uncle’s attic when he was eight years old. The first thing he did, he says, was take it apart to learn how it worked. Soon he was writing programs to make things move around on the screen. He knew since then that he wanted to work with computers. Throughout his career he has brought exponential technology to many traditional organizations, such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones. He is now leading a new initiative in Data Analytics at AWS.  Killed by Traditional Technology It was during his tenure at Bloomberg that Stephen became infatuated with cloud computing. He relates to Barry O’Reilly that they were experimenting to create new businesses. However, the traditional method of trying to build best-in-class technology was making the process slow and expensive. We were building too much into disaster recovery and business continuity for things that might not even be there tomorrow, he says. He recognized that cloud computing would allow them to test and scale on demand, only using the resources they needed. When he moved to Dow Jones he pushed towards using cloud technology and dev-ops methodology, which allowed them to create a more agile organization. Unlearning Leadership Massive technology changes come with people changes. Stephen soon realized that the way he led at Bloomberg would not work at Dow Jones. Barry comments that it’s almost a reflex to use the behaviors that brought us success in the past. However, those same behaviors may not yield success in a new context. Stephen says that he failed as a leader for the first six months. His advisor told him that there’s no glory in being the only one at the finish line. From that day, he says, he learned to be more empathetic and open instead of the top-down leader he previously was. He wanted his team to buy in to his vision. In order to share their wins, he increased communication with employees from quarterly to monthly town hall meetings. Team members were invited to share what they were doing and how it was aligned to the broader vision. Barry says that when you recognize that you’re not driving the outcomes you want, the first step is to acknowledge it. He commends Stephen for the subtle but impactful changes he made. Building Cross-Functional Teams When Stephen decided to change the siloed IT functions into two cross-functional teams, he expected everyone to be as excited as he was. Each team was responsible for a measurable customer outcome. This required unlearning silos and learning cross-functional team behaviors. Stephen relates that the engineers were not pleased. It was hard for them to understand this new paradigm, and Stephen comments that it was hard for him to lead through the change. Barry comments that a first step is to help people feel successful as fast as possible. If they have some quick wins, they would be more willing to embrace the new behaviors. To reinforce the paradigm shift, the IT department was renamed Dow Jones Technology. Respected persons in the company started to share positive stories about the impact of the new changes, and the metrics showed that the new methods were working. Barry agrees that metrics paired with local success stories leads to breakthroughs. Looking Forward Stephen now works at Amazon, an organization that has a very high performing, well-prescribed culture and operating model. He is excited about the pace of innovation that’s going to happen. Those who can’t move fast enough will feel the impact on their profitability, he says. Don’t be stuck in analysis paralysis, he advises; there are lots of opportunities to start and learn what works and what doesn’t for your organization. You can’t think your way to a new culture, Barry adds, you have to act your way there.

Bret Weinstein on The Jim Rutt Show, Barry O’Reilly on The Product Experience, Dave Farley on Engineering Culture at InfoQ, Jim Mattis on Coaching For Leaders, and Ben Mosior on Agile Uprising. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting November 25, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. BRET WEINSTEIN ON THE JIM RUTT SHOW The Jim Rutt Show featured Bret Weinstein with host Jim Rutt. Brett talked about the sustainability crisis (not necessarily related to climate) in which we are using resources and creating waste in a way that, mathematically, cannot continue indefinitely. Jim added that half of the mass of large animals on earth are now humans and domestic animals, most of which are cattle. He says this tells us that we are at or beyond the ability of our ecosystem to allow us to carry on the way we have been. Jim believes that the engine that is driving us toward eco-cide is the pursuit of money-on-money return powered by psychologically-astute advertising that got underway in the 1930s and is now reaching near-perfection with the highly-instrumented attention-hijacking mechanisms of social media. He compared it to the paperclip maximizer idea in artificial general intelligence. Brett says that the way you can tell that AI algorithms are out-of-control is to look at the behavior of people in the best position to understand the power of these algorithms. Defectors from Facebook or elsewhere describe the extreme measures they go through to retain control of the own lives in the face of algorithms they had a hand in writing. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep24-bret-weinstein-on-evolving-culture/id1470622572?i=1000456522456 Website link: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/bret-weinstein/ BARRY O’REILLY ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Barry O’Reilly with hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver. Lily asked Barry where his notion of “unlearning” came from. Barry said that while writing the book “Lean Enterprise,” he had an “aha” moment in which he realized that, while teaching people new things was tough, what was even harder was getting them to unlearn their existing behavior, especially if it made them successful in the past. Randy asked Barry what signs indicate when you are unlearning well as opposed to simply getting lucky. Barry says that a lot of people think knowing when to adapt is serendipitous or intuitive to other people, but there is a system you can learn that can make the process intentional and deliberate. People get stuck. They stick to the sets of behaviors that they know and understand or that feel comfortable to them. When those behaviors aren’t driving the results or outcomes that they are aiming for, often people’s natural reaction is to point at other people as the cause of the failure. If you’re serious about making progress, you have to own the results. You have to ask yourself what you can do differently to change the outcomes that you are getting. You need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You need to think big about the aspiration or outcome you are trying to achieve, but you start small as you start to relearn. Starting small creates safety. You get a fast feedback loop, learn quickly, and you feel successful as you try new behaviors. Barry asked Lily and Randy where most people in product roles spend most of their time and they said, “meetings.” They estimated that the effectiveness rate for such meetings was about 50%. As a product manager, Barry says, he would be trying to make that number better, but most people blindly walk into meetings and never make any changes to how meetings are run. Barry gets leadership teams to describe a better outcome and one small thing they can do to make things better. For meetings, one team came up with a simple step: five minutes before the meeting would end, the leader would stop it and ask the team how effective they thought the meeting was and what outcomes they were taking away from the meeting. When a leader starts to demonstrate a new behavior in meetings like pausing five minutes before the end and asking people how effective the meeting was, other people start to take these behaviors back to their teams. Role modeling these new behaviors in your organization can have a systemic impact because people see you trying out these new behaviors and that inspires them to be serious about making their own improvements. Berry went on to say that the belief that you cannot influence these kinds of changes needs to be unlearned. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/learning-to-unlearn-barry-oreilly-on-product-experience/id1447100407?i=1000456659421 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/learning-to-unlearn-barry-oreilly-on-the-product-experience/ DAVE FARLEY ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY AT INFOQ The Engineering Culture at InfoQ podcast featured Dave Farley with host Shane Hastie. Shane asked about Dave’s talk about taking back software engineering. Dave says that software engineering is a term that is falling out of favor. People started to think of software development as a craft and of themselves as craftspeople. Working on high performance trading systems, he adopted practices that he considers a genuine engineering discipline and this made a dramatic difference in performance, effectiveness, quality, and speed of development. He says we’ve been too prescriptive in trying to define what software engineering means. An engineering discipline for software need to be general enough to still be true in a hundred years. He says we suffer in our industry from not having very many measuring sticks and we choose technologies, processes, and approaches based on who is the most persuasive person or guru. His talk was about five principles that are likely to be durable, broadly applicable, and broadly acceptable to people. First, we’ve learned that planned approaches don’t work. Working iteratively through a process of discovery is foundational. Second, we’ve discovered from continuous integration and delivery that fast, efficient, high quality feedback has a dramatic impact on our ability to move forward with confidence and quality. Third is being experimental and adopting the scientific method. Fourth is working incrementally, building software from a modular point of view, and growing complex systems from simple systems. Fifth is being empirical and testing what we build against reality, learning from that, and adapting. Shane asked whether these ideas are just common sense. Dave agreed that they are common sense but they are uncommonly practiced. He says that the majority of his own career in software development was built around guesswork. They would guess about what users wanted, guess about whether the software was going to be fast enough, resilient enough, and scalable enough, and guess about whether there were going to be bugs in it. They would guess about these things instead of testing these things as an experiment. He cited Extreme Programming and Continuous Delivery as genuine engineering disciplines. Shane pointed out that this requires a significant level of discipline that is rare in our industry. Dave agreed and gave the example of the team he worked with to build the trading system mentioned earlier. They were not only the best team he worked with, but also the most productive, solving problems in genuinely original ways, and they did it all by consciously adopting these techniques. It wasn’t because they were smarter than other teams, but because of their disciplined, agile approach. Shane asked how we can get a more experimental mindset in software development. Dave says we first need to get more data-driven and figure out useful measures to apply. For example, in high-performance software, we want to know things like how fast, what throughput, what latency, and what percentage of messages need to get through at a particular rate. The difference between an engineer and anyone else is that engineers spend a lot of time thinking about how things can go wrong. He gave the example of how he does Test-Driven Development: before he runs a test he has just written, he will say what error message he expects to get. This is a genuine experiment: he forms a hypothesis and he’s precise about the nature of the failure he is expecting. Shane asked Dave for his opinion about pair-programming. Dave considers pairing one of the most powerful tools an organization has to start becoming a learning organization and he considers pairing a foundational idea for establishing engineering rigor. Shane asked how we can convince the individual hero developer that it is a good idea to work with somebody else. Dave encourages his clients to experiment with pair-programming and you cannot do that for an hour or two. He encourages a minimum of a sprint or two and he combines it with rotating people who are in the pairs (also known as promiscuous pair-programming). In his experience, when you ask people who have never paired before it to pair, the majority do not want to. After they have done it for a reasonable period of time, the majority then want to keep doing it. Often, only a small number of people hate it and will never like it and companies need to make a tough decision about what to do about that. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dave-farley-on-taking-back-software-engineering/id1161431874?i=1000456425449 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/interview-dave-farley JIM MATTIS ON COACHING FOR LEADERS The Coaching For Leaders podcast featured Jim Mattis with host Dave Stachowiak. Dave asked about 1990 when Mattis was in the Saudi Arabian desert, preparing for an invasion that would become the first Gulf War. He employed a technique called the focused telescope. Mattis said that he faced the challenge of information flow. Leaders typically have sufficient information somewhere in their organization, but the pipes of information flow need to be open such that this information is available in time to make decisions. Mattis would take young, capable officers who would go out to units that were executing the mission and those officers would clarify and confirm to the attacking commanders the mission and report back to Mattis. This opened up the information flow in real-time to make better decisions. Dave asked where Mattis got the idea. Mattis said that every time you are promoted in the military you are given a new reading list and he got this idea from the readings. Dave then asked about 2001, when Mattis was in command of the marines in Afghanistan searching for Osama Bin Laden. Mattis said that he had shifted from being under a naval commander to an army commander and he did not spend the time getting to know his new commander. When intelligence came in that Osama Bin Laden was in the Tora Bora region, he knew they needed to stop him from escaping to Pakistan. Mattis had studied the Geronimo campaign of the U.S. cavalry in the late 1800s and saw how they set up communication stations to track activity on the border. He wanted to do the same to block escape routes in Tora Bora. He forgot the inform his boss and his boss did not understand the urgency of the situation or the plans to block Bin Laden’s escape. He says you have to ask yourself three questions everyday: “What do I know?”, “Who needs to know?” and “Have I told them?” Dave then asked about 2003 when Mattis was commanding a division to remove Saddam Hussein from power. One of his colonels was failing to move with haste. Mattis says that the officer, who he admires to this day, had a tempo that was less than needed at the time and Mattis determined that he was asking this officer to do something that was beyond his moral ability to do. Mattis said that war is a harsh auditor of your recruiting, your equipment, your training, and your leadership. He needed everyone in the fight and he knew he had to delegate the decision-making to the lowest competent level but it had to be consistent with his intent which was to move fast enough to confront the enemy with cascading dilemmas to prevent them from digging back in. So he removed that officer from command. Dave then jumped ahead one year to 2004 in Fallujah when four allied contractors were killed and Mattis had a plan to recover the bodies and track down those responsible. The President of the United States made the decision to attack the city instead. Dave asked Mattis what kept him from resigning in this situation. Mattis reminded us that the military has civilian control. When the civilian leadership says to do something, you keep faith with the constitution and get on with it. Mattis had read enough history to know the challenges associated with attacking a city with 300,000 innocent civilians. Mattis’s idea was to work with the other tribes in town that were repulsed by this terrorist activity and to use the spies they had in the city to hunt down the perpetrators. Given the known brutality of urban fighting, this was a better plan, but they were ordered to attack instead. Mattis said he could have resigned but the 19-year-old lance corporals in his army of 23,000 couldn’t quit and he wasn’t going to leave them on the battlefield. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/440-leadership-in-the-midst-of-chaos-with-jim-mattis/id458827716?i=1000456425891 Website link: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/leadership-chaos-jim-mattis/ BEN MOSIOR ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Ben Mosior with host Jay Hrcsko. Ben started out as a sysadmin and started taking more interest in the people side of technology. He now runs a company called Hired Thought where he makes systems more purposeful. Ben came across Wardley Mapping when people he was following in the DevOps community started to reference it. At the time, he was dealing with a difficult decision about whether to spend money that was tied to buying server hardware and thereby shifting attention away from the cloud that had been his focus. He learned that Wardley Mapping was a way to make sense of these kinds of situations and make a good call. He ultimately decided to decline to money and he now had an explicit strategy where before he had none. Wardley Mapping highlighted how much he originally didn’t know what he was doing. Ben describes a Wardley map as being two things: a visual way to represent a system oriented around users and a way to articulate how parts of that system are changing. It is a directed acyclic graph where position has meaning. The x-axis represents evolution and describes how the components of a business, such as activities, practices, data, and knowledge, change over time. They start in the uncharted space where nobody has seen it before, nobody understands it, and it fails much of the time. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the industrialized space where everything is known, is ordered, is boring, and failure is surprising. Having a way to express where a business component is between those two extremes informs how to treat that business component. They talked about the y-axis and how it represents the degree to which the business component is visible to the user. Ben says the y-axis is useful for thinking about what parts of the system the user cares most and least about. Mapping is intended to be an extremely collaborative activity. The map helps us share a common model for how we think about a space. Ben referenced George Box’s quote about all models being wrong and the scientist needing to be alert to what is importantly wrong about the model while ignoring those aspects whose approximate nature, or wrongness, makes the model no less useful. A map helps highlight when the model of your system is wrong in a fundamental way. When people look at a map and talk about it, you start to work towards consensus on understanding the system and start running into label conflicts. Producing the map artifact enables us to challenge it, talk to each other, and be transparent about what we think it is. The artifact itself is just one step in a five step process called the strategy cycle.  The five factors in the strategy cycle are purpose, landscape, climate, doctrine, and leadership. Purpose is the game we’re playing. It is why you come to work everyday. The landscape is the map. It represents the competitive landscape. Climate is the rules of the game, the external forces acting on that landscape that we don’t have control over. Doctrine is how we train ourselves, the principles that we choose to apply universally, such as always focusing on user needs. Last is leadership, the decision-making part that integrates all the rest. Ben says that we often jump straight from purpose to leadership and the process of sitting with the context of the other steps helps us make better decisions. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/wardley-mapping-with-ben-mosior-hired-thought/id1163230424?i=1000456388231 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/wardley-mapping-with-ben-mosior-hired-thought LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Brandi Olson on Agile Uprising, Judy Rees on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, J. J. Sutherland on Agile FM, Angie Jones on Developing Up, and Eric Ries on Unlearn. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting November 11, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. BRANDI OLSON ON AGILE UPRISING The Agile Uprising podcast featured Brandi Olson with host Andy Cleff. Andy asked Brandi about what she means by multitasking. At the individual level, she says we use the word multitasking to describe what is happening when we are trying to do more than one thing at the same time. It is a misnomer though because our brains do not actually do more than one thing at the same time. Her bigger interest is in what happens when you have groups of people trying to multitask all day long. She calls this “organizational multitasking.” Say you have a team and they have a backlog. Organizational multitasking happens when somebody tells that team, “You need to get all ten of these things done this week and you need to start them all and I want to see the progress you are making each day.”  The opposite of that, organizational focus, happens when you say, “Work on this thing first before you work on the next thing.” At the team level, she says, there are a number of illusions about how to be more productive and effective. One illusion is that getting started on everything is the way to get it done and if everything is important we have to do it all at the same time. This breaks down because of the reality of how our brains work. Research shows that when a person has to juggle two projects throughout a day, they will spend 40% of their brain capacity and energy on context-switching. For three projects, energy devoted to context-switching jumps to 60%. Not only does this take time away from more productive work, but we don’t even notice the time we lost. A further cost of having entire teams of people running around at 40% brain capacity is that they are less likely to identify the real problems to work on and it feels like they cannot slow down to figure out what the real problems are. Andy asked whether the solution should come up at the individual level where someone starts to say, “No,” or is it something that starts at a leadership layer. Brandi says it is not a problem that can be solved individually. It needs to start with our leaders. Some of the problems that start to show up in these contexts are a failure to solve the right problems, a reduction in quality, an increase in employee turnover, a reduction in equity and diversity, and burnout. These problems typically get addressed by solving the symptoms. Andy asked what she does to help organizations separate the symptoms from the cause. Brandi says she does this by making the costs of multitasking visible. She told the story of a company that surveyed 600 companies and their HR leaders about the biggest threats to their workforce. Over 80% of those leaders said that employee turnover was the biggest threat. The company then surveyed the employees at those same companies and the employees overwhelming named having too much overtime and unrealistic work expectations. Going back to the same HR leaders, a fifth of them wouldn’t be doing anything about their turnover problem in the next year because the leaders had too many competing priorities. The overwhelming illusion that too many leaders buy into is that, while turnover and burnout are problems, we cannot do anything about it because there is too much important work to do. A further illusion is that we can capacity plan by cutting everybody’s time up; we can break up your time among projects and it will all add back up to 100%. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-cost-of-organizational-multi-tasking-with-brandi-olson/id1163230424?i=1000453339079 Website link: http://agileuprising.libsyn.com/the-cost-of-organizational-multi-tasking-with-brandi-olson JUDY REES ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Judy Rees with host Shane Hastie. Shane asked Judy if it is possible to have an effective remote meeting. She says absolutely and backed it up with an example of one of her own students telling her recently that participants in her remote meeting said that her remote meeting was better than an in-person meeting. Shane asked about the secret sauce of a good remote meeting. Judy says it is probably planning. She also said that when remote, each person brings part of the meeting room with them. She says people don’t realize how important the environment is to conversations. When you put people in a small space, they pay attention to small details and administrative kinds of things. For “blue sky thinking,” take people outside or to a room with a big view. In real world spaces, we already know where to find small rooms and rooms with big views, but online, we need to create equivalent spaces. You need not only to ensure that all participants turn up with a decent headset, cameras turned on, and light on their faces, but also to figure out the activities so that you have enough social time at the beginning, during, or end of the meeting. The beginning and end of the meeting are critical parts of a meeting. Online, we often miss out on these beginnings and endings and it affects the quality of the conversations. She also says that most people find it easier to engage and participate when the meeting is small. This connects with what Courtland Allen said on Software Engineering Daily about communities in the previous fortnight’s review. She says that if you can’t limit the space, you can limit presentation time to 5 to 7 minutes and get then people doing something. She also says to use breakout rooms and use liberating structures like 1-2-4-All (http://www.liberatingstructures.com/1-1-2-4-all/). Knowing Judy’s expertise in Clean Language, Shane asked how might Clean Language be used to enhance remote meetings. Judy says that teaching people on remote teams to ask more non-judgmental questions about what somebody means by what they say can have a profound effect. Because of the missing socialization in remote meetings mentioned earlier and the fact that remote teams often have more cultural differences than co-located teams, misunderstandings are more likely. Therefore, learning to ask questions to clarify in a way that doesn’t sound like an interrogation but helps both parties to get clearer more quickly becomes particularly valuable. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/judy-rees-on-effective-remote-meetings/id1161431874?i=1000450875620 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/judy-rees-on-effective-remote-meetings J. J. SUTHERLAND ON AGILE FM The Agile FM podcast featured J. J. Sutherland with host Joe Krebs. J. J. Sutherland is the CEO of Scrum Inc. and the son of Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum. J. J.’s new book is called “The Scrum Fieldbook.” Joe asked what made him pick such a title. J. J. said he wanted to write a book about all the places Scrum Inc. has been all over the world and the many different domains far beyond software. He also wanted to show how Scrum Inc. thinks about Scrum and what are the patterns and anti-patterns. He says that Scrum is a universal framework for accelerating human effort with applications in aerospace, banking, and even beer-making. No one does Scrum just to do Scrum. Scrum is designed to produce value, which requires knowing more than just the Scrum guide. It involves understanding why Scrum works the way it does, understanding complex adaptive systems theory, knowing that you need to empower your teams and ensuring your teams are the right size. Scrum is about running experiments and getting feedback from the customer and adapting to that feedback. He sees people spending six months to a year planning how to do Scrum before they even start. Instead, he says to just do something. That is where you’ll get the information to iterate towards the right thing. Joe expressed his appreciation as a Scrum coach for the chapter in the book on the difference between busy and done. When J. J. worked in radio, producers used to talk about how much effort they put into the radio programs and he would have to point out to them that no listener cares how hard you worked on it; they care about what comes out of the box. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jj-sutherland-agile-fm/id1263932838?i=1000453430262 Website link: https://agile.fm/agilefm/jjsutherland ANGIE JONES ON DEVELOPING UP The Developing Up podcast featured Angie Jones with host Mike Miles. Mike asked Angie what she considers the ultimate goal of code review. Angie says the goal is to ensure everyone is aware of and content with what is being contributed to the code base; it is not a nitpicking session or an opportunity to bash your least favorite developer. Code review is also a good way to catch missed requirements. Angie encourages code reviewers to review the unit tests just as closely as the implementation.  Angie says the best code reviews are those you block out time for and make part of your routine. They aren’t something you skim while you drink a cup of coffee. When she reviews code, she always pulls up the requirement in the spec, doc, or ticket to see that the code under review fulfilled it. She looks for whether the implementation is efficient and at the right level of abstraction. She says that code reviewers have the opportunity to think at a broader level and see opportunities for code reuse. Angie sees code review as a form of mentoring without having an official mentorship relationship. Official forms of mentoring can feel like an obligation for the mentor because they have to set up meetings, learn the mentee’s career goals. Angie says that code review is a more subtle form of mentorship that is just as powerful. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/code-reviews/id1156687172?i=1000452808997 Website link: https://www.developingup.com/episodes/46-dflXzZ1V ERIC RIES ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Eric Ries with host Barry O’Reilly. Eric described how he started his company IMVU and how, when wanted to do practices like split testing, he got pushback. People thought of it as a direct marketing technique, not a product development technique. He would argue, “Shouldn’t we use the scientific method to test our hypotheses?” He wanted customers involved from day one, he wanted to ship more frequently than was considered normal at the time. Looking back, he sees how extreme his ideas were at the time and is glad his cofounders didn’t fire him. As the company got more successful, his techniques got more controversial because the company now had more to lose. He said, “When you do things in an unconventional way, every problem the company has gets blamed on the unconventional method.” Barry pointed out that having to constantly explain the value of these unconventional methods likely made his thinking more resilient and could have been the seed for his next step. At one board meeting, he felt like he was going to be fired. He was tempted to apologize and compromise, but made the conscious choice to advocate for what he actually believed despite the potential negative consequences. He rationalized it like this: this is a small business and a small business is like a small town. In a small town, everybody knows everybody and he wanted people to know what he stood for. If people don’t like it this time and they fire him, okay. A day will come, he reasoned, when they are going to be in a situation where they need to get something done fast and will remember him because they know what he stands for. He radically misjudged the situation: the more he stood for those values and explained them, the more they resonated with people. If he hadn’t had the courage to put his career and reputation at risk, he never would have found out who the ideas resonated with. Eric says it wasn’t until later that he understood the importance of iteration happening within the context of a long term vision. Today, people understand Lean Startup as scientific hypotheses, a testing philosophy, small batches, and pivoting or changing strategy without changing vision. They know it is logically incoherent to have a pivot if you have no vision. Companies who were early disciples of Lean Startup, unfortunately, did not understand this and thought they could A/B test their way to success without any kind of vision. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-lean-startup-pivot-with-eric-ries/id1460270044?i=1000451993479 LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Show notesBarry moving to America and the "American Dream" [0:06:11]Experimentation as a lifestyle -- the kitchen table talk [0:13:14]Navigating uncertainty [0:15:09]Modeling behaviors [0:22:25]Barry's hack to get new perspectives on problems you don't know how to solve [0:24:12]Stumbling blocks in unlearning [0:26:36]Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and "time to think" [0:31:07]Barry's personal reflection practices [0:33:11]"We're trained for more" [0:35:19]How do I know I need to unlearn? [0:45:27]Hotseat: Barry puts Andrew through unlearning exercise on the spot [0:48:11]Andrew's embarrassing insight [0:54:50]The #1 obstacle to being a learner [1:00:04]"Steve always got it right" [1:02:24]How to make being wrong, feel good [1:04:09]Debunking the 10,000 hour rule [1:07:49]The levels of deliberate practice [1:08:24]Applying deliberate practice to day-to-day life [1:15:12]Building systems & countermeasures around yourself to be successful [1:18:42]The origin of the Enliven podcast [1:22:44]How to start a cultural transformation [1:26:37]Barry's #1 hack for meetings [1:33:01]People, companies, books, etc mentionedPeopleCarol DweckAngela DuckworthCal NewportAndy Grove & OKRsTom BilyeuK. Anders EricssonGibson Biddle (listen to Gib's episode on Barry's Unlearn podcast)Dr Ed Hoffman at NASABooks & PodcastsBarry's booksUnlearnUnlearn podcastLean EnterpriseMindsetGritSo Good They Can't Ignore YouDeep WorkDigital MinimalismImpact TheoryPeak: The New Science of ExpertiseMastery, by George LeonardThe E-MythOtherMcKinsey & the obligation to dissentDeliberate practiceAgileQuotes"If something important comes up, I'll put it on my calendar. But I'm going to make time for thinking."making two or three bets and exploring them well is better than making one hundred bets and half-assing them""I've been right a million times...and it's bought me jack shit.""Innovation is new insight that leads to better action""we're building these systems that are so example that we don't even know how they work""in all our meetings we just talk about output, the things we got done...if we're going to be agile we have to talk about outcomes""organizational transformation is just the collective impact of individual transformation"Lessons and key takeawayshow eager am I to get information that is contrary to my view?the essentials to unlearning: curiosity, ownershipreflection is a habit of top performerssigns you need to unlearnchallenge facing and not living up to expectationplace you're struggling or avoiding a challengetried everything can think of and not getting results you wantWhat's the real outcome you're aiming for?when frustrated with the obstacles, zoom back out to the outcomes in order to discover new things to trywe often know what to do...but we can't execute shared things on our ownAndy Grove and Steve Jobs "getting it right"create and cultivate a personal board of directors to re-energize and gain new perspectivesalways have agency for how we show up in a system—so it starts with us—and each of us has a

Barry O’Reilly is pleased to welcome Martin Eriksson to the Unlearn Podcast. Martin is the co-founder of ProductTank and the Mind the Product conferences that have scaled and sustained themselves around the world.  Learning From One Another When he started ProductTank in the back of a London pub, Martin never imagined that his small meetup of 25 product managers would be the genesis of a community over 150,000 strong from 180 cities, or that they would be hosting 5 conferences around the world. Their goal was simply to learn from one another so they could be better at their jobs. That initial meetup took on a life of its own because many others had the same need. All of their growth has been inbound, Martin relates: people come to them for help in setting up local ProductTank chapters. Martin embraced those opportunities, seeing that the more the community expanded, the more people they could meet and learn from. Recognizing Opportunities and Gaining Momentum When you recognize that you’ve built something of value that your customers love and want more of, naturally, you want to grow. Martin’s approach was to think about the next step and move in that direction. ProductTank was continuing to expand to more cities and countries, so they decided to launch a conference to get big names from the US to share their expertise. Barry remarks that the power of momentum is often underrated. As you continue to do reps, you build momentum and eventually a movement. In the case of ProductTank, they were learning valuable lessons as they continued to meet and grow, such as how to work together and get the best out of one another. Soon Martin recognized the global potential of their fledgling company. Making A Great Experience for Everyone A successful conference prioritizes great experiences for everyone. The needs of attendees, speakers and vendors have to be catered for, and ample time must be given for people to learn and network. Barry asks how Martin ensures that these great experiences are part of every conference, especially as the company scales. It’s really all about people, Martin responds. They closely screen people who want to organize local ProductTank chapters or conferences to make sure that they share the same purpose. This is what has driven the strength of this community, he says. If you have the right people you can trust them to build on that experience. Mission and Shared Values One of the hallmarks of great business is that your mission statement centers around your customer as opposed to your business. Mind the Product encapsulates this in its mission statement: “Our mission is to make other people more successful by coming together to further our craft.”  Barry notes that these principles should be codified as you grow to not only attract the right people, but so that they behave in a way that protects the community and the essence of what you're trying to create. Some of the team values that guide Martin’s company are: We are an empowered and autonomous team; We should be excellent to each other; If we’re not winning, we’re learning; Hard work should be rewarding. Unlearning and Next Steps Two important lessons Martin would unlearn if he had the chance to start over would be to think bigger and embrace the opportunity sooner and to understand his brand and the market better. Building connections among regional and international communities is a powerful part of their mission going forward. There is a wealth of talent all over the world and we can learn so much from each other, Martin says. He sees it as his personal mission to reach out into his network and lift up stories and different ideas and ways of working. That sense of curiosity and willingness to learn empowers and motivates him. Resources MartinEriksson.com  mindtheproduct.com

Behavior Change for Women Leaders: Unlearn with Barry O’Reilly & Sabrina Braham | WLS 102 Behavior Change for Women Leaders (and Men) Are you afraid of making mistakes in business?  Are you... Award winning podcast with top women leaders who share tips & advice to help you advance your career, leadership & quality of life with Sabrina Braham MA PCC

Barry O’Reilly is excited to welcome Eric Ries to the Unlearn Podcast. Eric is an entrepreneur who currently heads the Long Term Stock Exchange. He is best known, however, as the author of the international bestseller: The Lean Startup. The principles of Lean Startup were birthed from seeing many startups and Silicon Valley companies fail for lack of customer engagement, slow iteration, and long feedback cycles—experiences that inspired Eric to think about different ways to work. He shares how he discovered, and subsequently helped people unlearn many of the methods that were holding them back, and relearn counterintuitive methods to help them succeed in situations of high uncertainty. Pioneering ChangeIn his early days at IMVU, Eric found himself constantly explaining why his new methods had merit. At one point he had to decide whether to continue to advocate for his ideas or agree to work the conventional way. He chose to advocate for what he believed in. He reflects that had he not had the courage of his convictions he would never have found out who his ideas resonated with. Counterintuitive ideas cause frustration and difficulty for people. If counterintuitive thinking is key to the success of your business culture, then you need to help people rewire their brains. To have reform, and move people to the next steps, you must find the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty: you can't be too radical, or too conservative. Principles and Long-Term VisionBusiness strategy must be guided by principles in the context of a long-term vision. Barry commends Eric for the iterations he made to his business over time, which were guided by a continuous loop of customer feedback and testing new features in small batches. Eric shares the many pivots he had to make noting that you can always change strategy, but keep the vision. Opening Minds Through EmpathyEric says that he has spent years trying to understand what would it take to change public companies from being short-term focused on multi-stakeholder long-term focused organizations. He would often face vehement opposition from officials when he promoted his ideas. He notes that when people vehemently oppose an idea, method or technique but their reasons are poor, it’s usually a signal that they’re reacting emotionally, trying to protect the status quo. Barry adds this is a behavior he also sees a lot when people don’t deeply understand why they’re doing what they are doing, missing underlying principles instead of sticking to the only practice they know. Eric is sympathetic because he understands: they’re trying to do a difficult, often thankless job, using the tools and techniques they’ve refined over years. He represents a threat to their comfort zone. He tries to understand what they care about so that his plans and ideas are compatible with their values. They appreciate his respectful approach and work with him to find a comfortable compromise. Empathy, he finds, is the path to greater effectiveness. Barry agrees that empathy is key. It leads to mutual understanding. If you are willing to listen to people and they feel that they're being heard, the quality of information that you get just skyrockets. When you have high-quality information and a good decision-making process, you have a better chance of getting the results you want. Changing the WorldOur grandparents built the institutions that were needed in their world, with the institutional infrastructure that their time demanded. Our world today is very different, and those institutions - hotels, hospitals, unions, schools and universities - are all collapsing at the same time. Eric says that we need to establish the institutional infrastructure that our time demands. If we fail in our responsibility to confront these problems on our society’s behalf, we will soon be replaced. ResourcesEric Ries 

David Bland is the Founder of Precoil and the Co-Author of Testing Business Ideas, along with Alexander Osterwalder. David talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about risk, generating evidence through experimentation, and listening to customers. David’s new book is a field guide for rapid experimentation. Through tactical examples, it describes what he’s seen with various teams and testing in the market. It also describes product and backend business model testing, in addition to 44 experiments organized from low strength of evidence to high strength of evidence. Key Points - Think about risk - I have this risk. Should we do this? Can we do this? Companies need to generate more evidence before jumping to build. Learn about desirable, viable, and feasible. - What has changed in the experimentation process? Originally landing pages were it. Now we need to think about the hypothesis we’re trying to test. Experimentation terminology and processes are being adopted by product managers. - Business Model Canvas - People stop with how to address risk and making that a repeatable process. Need to connect to outcomes. Discovery isn’t a phase. It’s continuous. Look at retail and automotive.  - Need for experimentation taking hold. Need to move fast and put learning into action. Learning from customers gets you farther.  - Companies need to teach experimentation. Democratizing process. Multi-year journey. - Innovator Skills and Talent: Creative problem solvers that can deal with uncertainty and take initiative. Find and give people a chance to be entrepreneurs. Exhibit behaviors that are customer-centric, data influenced, and willing to test the status quo. - Environment for innovators is crucial.  For More Information Check out David’s new book Testing Business Ideas at precoil.com, Strategyzer.com, or on Amazon. This week's podcast is sponsored by RSM - Audit, Tax, & Consulting Services for the Middle Market   For similar podcasts, check out: Ep. 164 – Josh Seiden, Author of Outcomes Over Outputs on Being Outcome Centric Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise   Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

David Bland is the Founder of Precoil and the Co-Author of Testing Business Ideas, along with Alexander Osterwalder. David talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about risk, generating evidence through experimentation, and listening to customers. David’s new book is a field guide for rapid experimentation. Through tactical examples, it describes what he’s seen with various teams and testing in the market. It also describes product and backend business model testing, in addition to 44 experiments organized from low strength of evidence to high strength of evidence. Key Points - Think about risk - I have this risk. Should we do this? Can we do this? Companies need to generate more evidence before jumping to build. Learn about desirable, viable, and feasible. - What has changed in the experimentation process? Originally landing pages were it. Now we need to think about the hypothesis we’re trying to test. Experimentation terminology and processes are being adopted by product managers. - Business Model Canvas - People stop with how to address risk and making that a repeatable process. Need to connect to outcomes. Discovery isn’t a phase. It’s continuous. Look at retail and automotive.  - Need for experimentation taking hold. Need to move fast and put learning into action. Learning from customers gets you farther.  - Companies need to teach experimentation. Democratizing process. Multi-year journey. - Innovator Skills and Talent: Creative problem solvers that can deal with uncertainty and take initiative. Find and give people a chance to be entrepreneurs. Exhibit behaviors that are customer-centric, data influenced, and willing to test the status quo. - Environment for innovators is crucial.  For More Information Check out David’s new book Testing Business Ideas at precoil.com, Strategyzer.com, or on Amazon. This week's podcast is sponsored by RSM - Audit, Tax, & Consulting Services for the Middle Market For similar podcasts, check out: Ep. 164 – Josh Seiden, Author of Outcomes Over Outputs on Being Outcome Centric Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise   Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Josh Seiden is the author of Outcomes Over Outputs, Sense and Respond, and Lean UX, in addition to being a designer, strategy consultant, and coach. He has worked with companies like S&P, Fidelity, and AMEX. He also started the Sense and Respond Press, which focuses on short, actionable books about innovation, product management, and digital transformation. Josh spends much of his time consulting and training teams to work together effectively and create business outcomes. In this podcast, Josh talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about applying outcomes over outputs. When thinking about being outcome-centered in a complex, emergent system, Josh suggests defining outcome as a change in behavior that creates business value. E.g.- Twitter. The challenge is to focus all work around outputs, rather than features. The highest level of outputs is impact, including revenue, costs, and customer satisfaction. Increasing customer satisfaction isn't solved through new features. Getting the outcome level right is a challenge. Outcomes must be measurable and observable. Testing these outcome assumptions is critical, as is collaboration among teams. E.g.- HBR.org Josh Seiden and Sarah Hudson will be at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit, Oct 20-22, in Lincoln, NE.  For more information For more information, see Joshuaseiden.com, on Twitter @jsiden, or check out Senseandrespondpress.com. For similar podcasts, check out: - Ep. 156 – Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking on Building a Culture of Innovation - Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO - Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Josh Seiden is the author of Outcomes Over Outputs, Sense and Respond, and Lean UX, in addition to being a designer, strategy consultant, and coach. He has worked with companies like S&P, Fidelity, and AMEX. He also started the Sense and Respond Press, which focuses on short, actionable books about innovation, product management, and digital transformation. Josh spends much of his time consulting and training teams to work together effectively and create business outcomes. In this podcast, Josh talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about applying outcomes over outputs. When thinking about being outcome-centered in a complex, emergent system, Josh suggests defining outcome as a change in behavior that creates business value. E.g.- Twitter. The challenge is to focus all work around outputs, rather than features. The highest level of outputs is impact, including revenue, costs, and customer satisfaction. Increasing customer satisfaction isn't solved through new features. Getting the outcome level right is a challenge. Outcomes must be measurable and observable. Testing these outcome assumptions is critical, as is collaboration among teams. E.g.- HBR.org Josh Seiden and Sarah Hudson will be at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit, Oct 20-22, in Lincoln, NE.  For more information For more information, see Joshuaseiden.com, on Twitter @jsiden, or check out Senseandrespondpress.com. For similar podcasts, check out: - Ep. 156 – Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking on Building a Culture of Innovation - Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO - Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Many of us are guilty of clinging to once-useful mindsets and behaviors, that were effective in the past, but no longer serve us in today’s rapidly evolving world. Executive coach, Barry O’Reilly shares how leaders can unlearn their outdated behaviors to take the next step forward for more effective leadership. If you are a business or tech leader, seeking practical approaches to evolving your organization into modern digital businesses, this is the podcast for you.

You always want to look back on your life and say that your path from point A to point B was linear. It almost never really is. Today’s guest on the Unlearn Podcast is Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals and Measures of Success, who started out as an engineer for General Motors. It’s been quite a journey. Today, he and Barry O’Reilly will be talking about how that kind of a shift can happen, and what he learned and unlearned along the way. Clashes of Culture You might not think that the worlds of manufacturing and healthcare have much in common, but having worked in both, Mark thinks they have plenty in common - especially when it comes to culture. People aren’t machines, but the culture of many hospitals and clinics echoes what you’ll find on the factory floor - especially in institutions that haven’t done much to modernize the way they manage and lead people. Barry points out that there are similarities in tech as well: every industry thinks it’s unique, but it’s all human systems and people working together to drive outcomes.  Unlearning Your Whole Career When you’ve invested years or decades into a career, you often feel like you need to stay in it. Having made a major career transition, Mark knows that doing so allows you to bring fresh insight into an organization that may not be expecting it, and when you’re in a wholly new environment, you’re in a better position to avoid the curse of expertise. Looking back, Mark wishes he’d unlearned top-down style management earlier - the benefits of engaging people in change are so many and so valuable.   Seeking and Finding Clarity Before you start optimizing for, or worse, applying a solution, you have to be exceptionally clear on what the problem really is, and what outcome you want to achieve. Mark and Barry discuss the ways this can manifest in different kinds of organizations, and the framework for problem-solving that Mark uses to help healthcare providers make changes to their operations with input from people working at all levels. The process is one that listeners will be familiar with: unlearn, re-learn and breakthrough!   The Courage to Change It’s easy to tell when something isn’t right, but it's harder to create a moment where people are open to truly unlearning and making changes. Mark notes that looking outside of your area of expertise takes a fair amount of courage - but many people are highly skilled in their specific profession and not in the other areas of running a business or managing a team. This is often problematic because when we’re faced with things we don’t know, or feel scared and threatened - our higher-order brains shut down. There is never going to be a ‘perfect’ time for a major change, so you might as well just get started.  What are the Top 3 Reasons to Do This? Management from the top-down usually doesn’t usually provide the results companies are looking for. It’s much more effective to lead as if you had no authority - by seeking input and finding out what makes people tick, and why they think the way they do. Something that Mark had to unlearn over the course of his career was that you can’t just tell people what to do, even if you’re wildly excited about helping them. Change has to be based on feedback and engagement with the people it affects. Mark has some insights on what makes people more open and receptive to change and leaves us with the thought that it’s okay to struggle with change. It doesn’t make you a bad person or a bad manager - it’s just something to figure out.  Resources Lean Hospitals  Measures of Success

Barry O’Reilly, is a business advisor, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and is the author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry is the founder of ExecCamp, the entrepreneurial experience for executives, and management consultancy Antennae. He wrote  an amazing book, “Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results” and he is also the author of “Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale.” We’re diving deep into “unlearning” and how it can help organizations thrive in this era. Contents How did you get into the study, research and practice of unlearning? A change in mindset What’s the learning organization and what’s unlearning instead? Recognizing what’s not working Learn fast and rapidly innovate Is disruption organizational or it happens at an individual level? How does the Cycle of Unlearning work? Not a one-and-done cycle What are the key characteristics of unlearning? Curiosity Ownership Commitment Recap of the key characteristics to master unlearning What’s status quo leadership and why it might be damgerous? Avoid to just copy and paste frameworks Define the outcomes Build a system to continuous innovation through unlearning How to use the Three Cultures Model to build a successful company? What are unlearning prompts? And why they matter? How do you know you need to unlearn? Is there a number one reason people don’t unlearn? Build a growth mindset Fixed vs. growth mindset Switch the focus from the person to the process Recap about growth vs. fixed mindset What suggestions do you have for executives to bring this process in their organizations? Key takeaways

Stephane Kasriel on Unlearn, Melissa Perri on Build by Drift, Will Larson on Software Engineering Daily, April Dunford on Product Love, and Claudio Perrone on Agile Atelier. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting July 22, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. STEPHANE KASRIEL ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Stephane Kasriel with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked Stephane about what unlearning he has had to do as CEO of Upwork. Stephane said that when Upwork started, they developed software in a waterfall process. Development cycles were long and it was frustrating for people. When the product failed in the field, the level of investment was high and everybody would be pointing fingers at everybody else. When they switched to an Agile model, there was a lot of unlearning to be done. They stopped trying to specify everything up front and instead tried to build minimum viable products, get feedback from customers, and iterate quickly. When they went looking for Agile trainers in 2012, it was hard to find anyone willing and able to train Upwork’s remote teams. Many trainers at the time told them that being Agile meant being colocated. Today, there are many companies doing distributed Agile development and some best practices have been built up and shared. I liked what Stephane had to say about company values. He said that what you don’t want as a value is one in which you are a good person if you have it and you are a bad person if you don’t. You want instead to have values that say, “This company is not for everybody. If you don’t believe in these values, there are plenty of companies that more closely match your values and you should go there. But if you want to be here and you want to be successful, you should be excited about this company’s values.” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ceo-school-and-the-future-of-work-with-stephane-kasriel/id1460270044?i=1000443495925 MELISSA PERRI ON BUILD BY DRIFT The Build by Drift podcast featured Melissa Perri with host Maggie Crowley. Maggie started out by asking Melissa how she defined the build trap she references in her book Escaping The Build Trap (https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X/). Melissa says that the build trap is a situation an organization finds itself in when it gets too concerned with how many features it is shipping and not concerned enough with the value for the customer and the business that those features are producing. She says that these businesses fail to retrospect on the impact that the features they shipped had on customers and the business. Maggie asked how companies get into the build trap in the first place. Startups, Melissa says, don’t typically have this problem, but as they scale and get more money, the distance to customers increases, they talk to customers less, and have more runway. They tend to go into an execution mode where they just keep asking themselves, “What’s the next thing we can build?” and forget to go back to their customers and make sure that what they build for them is producing value for them. Maggie described the challenges Drift faces in having teams that locally optimize for particular features and Melissa says this comes back to how the company thinks about strategy. Small companies don’t need a strategic framework but, as you scale, you want all the new teams you are creating to move in the same direction and a strategic framework can help with this. Maggie asked what Melissa prescribes when she consults with a company that is stuck in the build trap. Melissa instead gave an answer on how she assesses a company before making a prescription. She first looks for how the company sets strategy and how it deploys it. Second, she looks to see if the company has the right people in the right roles. She also looks at whether the company has the right processes to learn from customers and incorporate feedback. Next, she looks at product operations, such as a cadence for revisiting decisions and the right data infrastructure to support decisions. Last, she looks at culture and how people are incentivized. Maggie asked what Melissa would change first if the company had problems in all of those areas. Melissa says that she starts by making sure the company has good product leaders and product managers who can learn from those leaders. Many companies had product leaders who didn’t start in product management themselves and can’t train or help the product managers. As Maggie points out in this podcast, this echoes what Marty Cagan said when she had him as a guest in an earlier episode. I referenced that Build by Drift episode in the 14th episode of this podcast, named Safety Is Not A Priority. Melissa says she spends a lot of time translating what the teams are working on into something that executives can get behind because executives don’t care about the list of features that the teams are shipping; they care about what those features are going to do. Melissa says that storytelling in these situations is about relating your story to the goals people care about. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/whats-the-build-trap-what-does-it-mean-for-product-managers/id1445050691?i=1000443704053 Website link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/fbfcff04 WILL LARSON ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Will Larson with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started by asking whether Will thinks Google, where they once had a very flat management hierarchy, could work with no managers today. Will said that today’s hyper-scaling companies are so fast-growing that you need people to help manage that growth while dealing with tools and systems that are constantly becoming out of date. Jeff asked about the psychological ramifications of working in an environment of rapid growth. Will said that the best part of rapid growth is every week you raise your head and look around and see some really smart, talented person who is sitting next to you and wasn’t there the week before and can help. During change, he says, you have to stay open. Don’t try to control the change but you can help to facilitate it. You should be aware of your needs and take action to ensure those needs are being met so you can be the person you want to be for longer, rather than peaking in your first months in a role. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/id1019576853?i=1000441481446 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/06/14/elegant-puzzle-with-will-larson/ APRIL DUNFORD ON PRODUCT LOVE The Product Love podcast featured April Dunford with host Eric Boduch. April talked about product positioning. She says that many treat the product positioning exercise as a Mad Libs-style template to be filled in. The actual thinking of how to position your product is often ignored. She says that the first thing you have to do is get a handle on what the real competitive alternatives to your product are in the minds of your customers. For many startups, their real competitor is Excel, or hiring an intern, or doing it manually. Next, she says, is to look at what you have feature-wise that the competitive alternatives do not. This is usually a giant list of things. As you go down this list, you ask yourself what value for customers each feature enables. She says that an interesting thing happens at this point: the value tends to theme out. There are usually two or three big buckets that three quarters of your features fall into. Those buckets get you to your differentiated value. That, she says, is your secret sauce. She uses the analogy of building a fishing net specifically for tuna. You have a choice. You can travel to the part of the ocean where you will find tuna and see if your net works or you can go to the part of the ocean where there are all kinds of fish, throw the net in, and see what you pull up. People at startups often think that a certain segment of the market is going to love their product, but they might be surprised to learn that there is a segment that they didn’t even think of that is actually dying for their product. You don’t want to get the positioning so tight that you exclude those people. You want to keep it loose, cast the net wide, and see what happens. April says she doesn’t believe in product-market fit. She says that nobody has given her a good answer to the question, “How do you know you got product-market fit?” You may have a product that people like, but if you don’t know why, you don’t know if it’s at risk of going away or tapping out its market. She asks, “If I can’t measure when I have product-market fit, why am I even trying to get product-market fit?” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product/id1343610309?i=1000441988263 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/productcraft/april-dunford-joins-product-love-to-talk-about-product-positioning CLAUDIO PERRONE ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Claudio Perrone with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Claudio talked about his Popcorn Flow model. He says that Popcorn Flow is based on a pragmatic anti-fragile philosophy and starts from the idea that inertia is our enemy and provides a set of principles and steps to fight inertia in organizations. I saw Claudio give a presentation on Popcorn Flow at the Agile Testing Days 2017 conference, so I was excited to find him being interviewed on a podcast. Popcorn Flow applies ideas from The Lean Startup to organizational change. As an entrepreneur, Claudio realized that in entrepreneurship you are dealing with an environment of extreme uncertainty and, as an Agile coach, he saw the same kind of environment of uncertainty in how people react to change. Lean Startup deals with environments of extreme uncertainty by running frequent experiments. Popcorn Flow applies the same approach of frequent experimentation to organizational change. Popcorn Flow is most known for its decision cycle of seven steps from which the POPCORN acronym is derived: Problems & Observations Options Possible experiments Committed Ongoing Review Next These steps are visualized like a Scrum board or Kanban board. Claudio gave an example of running through the seven steps for the problem of poor quality code: Problem: poor quality code Options: pair programming, test-driven development Possible experiments: pair program for three days and see if the code is better and see if we want to continue with the practice Committed: put a review date on the calendar for evaluating the results of the experiment Ongoing: Track the experiment as it proceeds Review: The experiment is not finished until you review it. Compare the reality against the expectation and discuss what you learned and what are you going to do next. Next: The review may indicate that you do not know enough yet, so you may choose to persist, launch a new experiment based on what you learned, or revisit the problem. I liked what Claudio had to say about Agile: “I felt it was about being humble. If we knew the perfect way of developing software, we would use the perfect way. It is because we don’t know that we start with what we have and we continuously inspect and adapt.” Claudio also talked about some of the principles of Popcorn Flow: If change is hard, make it continuous: borrowing ideas from continuous integration and delivery, replace big change programs with small incremental change and do it all the time. Small bets, big payoff (the venture capitalist principle): when you run a lot of experiments, it doesn’t matter that you failed. What matters is how much does it cost to fail and how much do you gain when you win. It is not ‘fail fast - fail often’, it is ‘learn fast - learn often’: without feedback, your experiments are not small bets and you are not experimenting; you are committing to what should instead be an option. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-9-experimentation-popcorn-flow-claudio-perrone/id1459098259?i=1000443480071 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2019/07/02/episode-9-experimentation-and-popcorn-flow-with-claudio-perrone/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Entrepreneurs tend to talk about the success, the fun and excitement of running a company. Fewer talk about struggles. Today, on the Unlearn Podcast, Barry O’Reilly talks to Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk. They get into what’s hard about the path to success, and at the end of the day, what really matters. No One Has All The Answers  Like many young CEOs and founders, Teresa found herself working with people who were older, more experienced, and with access to more resources than she did as a leader. She shares a key unlearn moment about discovering that no one really has all the answers - and how that gave her the confidence to start trying things to see what worked. Barry points out that trying is a learned behavior, and Teresa discusses how education and experience in design-thinking instilled in her the idea that your first attempt won’t always work: iteration is the key to achieving your goals. A Process for Decision-Making Very little about being a CEO is black and white - and coming from an environment where situations were more granular was a challenge for Teresa. She says sales is a lot like product development and gives us some insight on the similarities, and how she brought an outcome-based focus into her work as a product leader and later as a CEO. Every process has parts, and those parts can be modeled, measured and optimized. Our Defaults Can Be Unhelpful When people are working under stress, they tend to revert to the skills, strategies, and habits that they are the best at - it feels good, and more importantly, it feels productive. Barry and Teresa talk about how this tendency can actually work against people whose roles are less about producing, and more about helping other people produce, or taking a bigger picture view of the growth and direction of a company. This is especially challenging when every situation feels extremely high stakes. Letting Other People Help You Teresa recalls the scenario her company was navigating through during the economic downturn, and how critical it was to let her team play to their own strengths and be responsible for their outcomes - and importantly, create a space for them to be transparent with her about her work and responsibilities. During a particularly fraught time, Teresa wasn’t going to make payroll and ended up offering team members the option to become owners in the company. This had several beneficial outcomes and ended up giving her employees a unique learning experience, as well as company stock.    Defining Success on Multiple Levels After being a CEO, Teresa had to decide what came next. She experimented with different projects and determined that what she wanted to tackle was the waste of time and talent endemic in many startups, founding a new company to do so—Product Talk. Barry brings up how, as a solopreneur, it can be difficult to handle loss-aversion, and constantly feeling like you have to take every opportunity that comes along. Teresa’s answer to this is to try and make sure you have only awesome options to choose from and shares some examples of how she’s made that a part of her working life. What Feels Fun That Helps? Teresa used what she calls a divergent-convergent process to try many different options to help weed out what she didn’t want to do. Barry and she discuss how this applies to both business and to life, and why embracing an abundance mindset can help you identify and create many amazing options for yourself—therefore improving the options you end up selecting to succeed. Resources: Product Talk| LinkedIn 

Allen Holub on Deliver It, Jason Tanner on Drunken PM, Mary and Tom Poppendieck on Unlearn, Saron Yitbarek on Greater Than Code, and Dave Karow and Trevor Stuart on Deliver It. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting July 8, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. ALLEN HOLUB ON DELIVER IT The Deliver It podcast featured Allen Holub with host Cory Bryan. Cory started out by reviewing an article by Ron Jeffries called “Story Points Revisited.” Allen’s take is that the negatives around story points are more than just the potential for misuse; he believes story points have no value at all. He says the most important thing is to narrow your stories, not estimate them. He says estimates exist because of fear. The software development process is opaque to certain managers and, as a result, they want estimates to alleviate their fear, but when you are delivering every day, you can eliminate the fear without resorting to estimates. Cory asked Allen what product owners need to know about Agile architecture. Allen said that one of the mistakes that he sees product owners make a lot is they try to do a miniature up-front design and expect that to be implemented. When this happens, he says there is too much information captured up-front of what is going to be built during the sprint and not enough information captured during the sprint as a side effect of releasing code to users and getting their feedback. This leads to inappropriate architectures because when you do anything up-front, you start doing everything up-front. Your sprint planning starts involving architecture decisions, UI decisions, and UX decisions that may be wrong and you will not know if you are wrong until you release. In Allen’s view, the most important thing a product owner does is answer questions that come up during the course of development. He uses a “two-minute rule”: if a question comes up during development, the product owner needs to be able to answer within two minutes. Allen talked about how the constraints of a bad architecture can prevent you from ever being Agile. He says, “Agile has nothing to do with standup meetings and backlog grooming and all of those. The important thing is to get stuff into your user’s hands quickly.” Allen says that the architecture has to be focused on the domain. Where systems that are wrong go wrong is that they don’t map to the domain but to the technology. A change at the story level, which is where the majority of changes come from, ends up touching all the modules or layers of your system when your architecture is mapped to your technology instead of your domain. Allen says that when he does a workshop on Agile architecture, people raise their hands about halfway through and say, “All we’re doing is domain analysis!” The fact is, if the domain and code are matched to each other, domain analysis is architecture. One of the questions Allen asks when he gets a bunch of product owners in a class is, “How many of you talk to multiple customers multiple times a day?” Maybe 5% raise their hands. So he says, “Who in the organization does talk to multiple customers multiple times a day?” This is often met with silence. He asks, “What about Sales? What about Tech Support?” He says that if you can’t respond to customer kinds of issues as well as a salesperson or a tech support person could, you don‘t know the domain well enough to be helpful to the engineering team. Cory asked Allen what he thought of the distinction between regular stories and “technical” stories. Allen says that there is no such thing as technical stories. A story describes the users of your system performing some kind of domain level work to achieve a useful outcome. Fixing some technical thing like changing the color of a button in no way makes your end users’ lives easier; it does not help them do their work. Allen says that the role of the architect in an Agile environment is very different from what we traditionally think of, just like the role of a manager in an Agile environment. In Agile environments, the job of people who are in a leadership position is to make sure that you can do your job, not to tell you what to do. They communicate a strategic requirement, provide support, and remove the obstacles. The same, he says, applies to Agile architects. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep90-agile-architecture-with-allen-holub/id966084649?i=1000441313352 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep90-agile-architecture-with-allen-holub JASON TANNER ON DRUNKEN PM The Drunken PM podcast featured Jason Tanner with host Dave Prior. Dave started out by asking Jason why he believes the daily scrum is broken. Jason said that the daily scrum is broken because, first, most developers hate the daily scrum because most daily scrums take the traditional weekly project status review meeting and do it five times a week with the Scrum Master filling the role of the project manager. Second, he says, is that it is being done backwards. The center of attention should not be the Scrum Master, but the team and the sprint backlog. He says that the purpose of the daily scrum is misunderstood. The three questions don’t result in a plan but result in just an exchange of information. For what real daily planning looks like, he uses an analogy of driving down the road and seeing a bunch of plumbers’ trucks from the same company parked outside of a McDonald’s. Inside, they’re planning things like, “We’re going to the Johnson’s house at noon. Can you come over and meet me because it’s going to be a two-man job.” Jason says he hates the three questions. He says the subject of the sentence is not helping us in collective ownership of the sprint backlog. “I have my user story. I have my Jira ticket. I have five team members and we each have a ticket.” Shifting the subject of the sentence to “we”, he says, changes the behavior dramatically. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/jason-tanner-is-on-a-mission-to-fix-your-daily-scrum/id1121124593?i=1000441958371 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/drunkenpmradio/jason-tanner-is-on-a-mission-to-fix-your-daily-scrum MARY AND TOM POPPENDIECK ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Mary and Tom Poppendieck with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked Mary and Tom what we may need to unlearn since the Agile movement began. Mary says that Agile started as a reaction to what was going on at the time. The vast majority of people doing software engineering today weren’t around back then. One of the things Agile has to do is grow up to be not a reaction to bad things that happened in the past, but to be something that talks about, “What does it take to do good software engineering?” She contrasted the software engineers she speaks to today that expect to be handed a spec with the engineers she worked with early in her career who treated engineering as problem-solving. Tom talked about how many who are working to make organizations more agile attempt to solve problems with process. This assumes that the organization’s problems are process problems but they are actually architectural problems. This includes problems with the architecture of the applications they are evolving, problems with the structure of the organization, and problems with the structure of the relationships between the supporting groups and those who are benefitting from said groups. Mary talked about how Amazon AWS was one of the early organizations to understand that you need to give teams of smart, creative people problems to solve. As a result of having this insight, they organized the company in such a way as to optimize for this, such as by eliminating a central database which was heresy back in 2005. She called out AWS Lambda in particular because this product did not optimize for short-term shareholder value and would never have been approved at most companies because it reduced what Amazon was charging customers by five times. She attributes this ability to self-disrupt as being essential to Amazon AWS’s success. Tom talked about the fact that when you attempt to scale things up, you reach a point where complexity dominates any future gains and wipes them out. He says you instead need to de-scale: figure out how to do things in little chunks that are independent and don’t require coordination. He says that this is how cities have been organized for thousands of years. Mary said that she has been doing software since 1967 and has never seen anything last two decades and still be current. Agile is two decades old and cannot be current unless it is constantly adapting to what is current today. She brought up continuous delivery as a fundamental change in agile thinking. It changed the way we thought about how we structure organizations and teams and what kinds of responsibilities we should give to them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/solving-problems-safely-with-mary-and-tom-poppendieck/id1460270044?i=1000442018979 SARON YITBAREK ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Saron Yitbarek with hosts Arty Starr, Rein Henrichs, and Chanté Thurmond. They talked about the annual Codeland conference Saron is running and how it offers free on-site childcare this year. Saron says free on-site childcare at conferences today is where codes of conduct were a few years ago. She says that if her conference wasn’t making it easier for parents to attend, it wouldn’t be living up to their promise for inclusion. Chanté asked Saron what she learned in her transition from being a code newbie herself to the present day where she is running two podcasts, a software job, and a conference. Saron said she learned that it is important to be consistent in all your efforts, whether it is community work, your personal projects, or a project at work. Nothing gets built overnight and, for a while, nobody will care what you’re doing. If you want to do something great, it takes persistence and it takes you believing in yourself especially when you’re not getting external validation. Arty asked about what expertise in “newbie-ism” might look like. Saron says that it is about being comfortable in a state of frustration. She pointed to a study on the difference between those who finish a computer science degree and those who quit. The study said that those who finished the degree were comfortable being in a state of confusion: they knew that things were not going to make sense for a while and they were ok with that. A second thing, she says, that helps you become an expert newbie is realizing that almost all problems in coding are solvable. By contrast, in writing, there is no perfect essay. In journalism, there is a search for truth, but is truth attainable? In life sciences, we study nature all around us that we may never fully understand. She also says to keep your frustration external, avoid internalizing your failures, and she says to distance who you are from your work and the things you produce. Saron’s comment on being comfortable in a state of confusion triggered a Virginia Satir quote from Rein: “Do you know what makes it possible for me to trust the unknown? Because I've got eyes, ears, skin. I can talk, I can move, I can feel, and I can think. And that's not going to change when I go into a new context; I've got that. And then I give myself permission to say all my real yeses and noes, because I've got all those other possibilities, and then I can move anywhere. Why not?” Rein asked what Saron learned about teaching. Saron says that teaching is storytelling in disguise. She says that if we frame teaching opportunities as storytelling opportunities we can be better teachers. This reminded me of Josh Anderson’s comment on the Meta-Cast podcast that I referenced way back in episode 3, “Taking The Blue Pill Back To Sesame Street.” Rein brought up a theory of learning called conversation theory. In conversation theory, teaching happens as a conversation between two cognitive entities. You have to come to agreement and build a bridge with that other cognitive entity. It deconstructs the teacher-learner binary. The teacher themselves has to be a learner too. Chanté asked about the ethos at Code Newbie for being a learner and a teacher. Saron says they look to the community to pitch in. When someone asks a question, they encourage the community to answer. She contrasted Code Newbie with Stack Overflow. Code Newbie attempts to teach the learner from where they are and avoid the condescension that is common on Stack Overflow. She said that to create an environment where people are not afraid to ask questions, we have to be unafraid of being vulnerable ourselves. Go first, share your vulnerability, and share what you’re struggling with. The moment you start doing that, other people will be much more likely to raise their hands as well. Chanté asked Saron what resources she recommends for code newbies to learn to code. Saron said that the hard part isn’t finding resources but sticking with them when things get tough or boring. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/135-intentional-learning-with-saron-yitbarek/id1163023878?i=1000442022293 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/intentional-learning DAVE KAROW AND TREVOR STUART ON DELIVER IT The Deliver It podcast featuring Dave Karow and Trevor Stuart with host Cory Bryan. They talked about running experiments to learn about your customer. Cory asked how people can run such experiments at scale. David pointed out that having a way to run the experiment is one thing, but you also need to be able to rapidly make sense of the results in a repeatable, authoritative way. Trevor says it is all about assumptions, hypotheses, and documentation. Before you even start your experiment, you need to understand why you are running it in the first place. In other words, you need to establish what is going to change as a result of the experiment. Trevor says that much of the market is already doing experiments and they don’t know it. They just call it “using feature flags” and rolling things out incrementally. They just need to move one step further to slice and dice their user populations, roll things out for longer time periods to those users, and bring the resulting data into a form that facilitates decision-making. David talked about dog-fooding by starting your rollout of new features with your employee population, giving examples from Microsoft, where it takes a few weeks to go from the employee population to the full customer population, and Facebook, where it takes about four hours for the same kind of rollout. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ep91-product-experiments-with-trevor-and-dave-from-split/id966084649?i=1000442844631 Website link: http://deliveritcast.com/ep91-product-experiments-with-trevor-and-dave-from-split FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

Barry O’Reilly has had many mentors over the years, and among them, Mary and Tom Poppendieck have been some of the most inspirational. In today’s conversation, they talk about challenges the Agile community faces, debunk the myths of scaling agility, and finally, Mary and Tom reveal how they have stayed relevant for decades as they continue to coach, mentor, and help others. About Mary and Tom Neither Mary nor Tom started with software. Mary was an engineer who worked with problems that had life and death ramifications, and Tom was a physics teacher whose students contact him decades later to say ‘thank you - you made a big difference.’ They’ve written many of the seminal books and contributed much to the Lean and Agile movement and have seen fads and trends come and go. Barry asks them what has been their key insights over the years. When did you discover agile? Agile developed as a reaction to what was happening in the software industry in the late 1990s. Agile has to grow up, to no longer be reactionary when bad things happen, but to determine how to create GOOD software engineering from the start. She draws on her experience as a traditional engineer and shares a lesson about how proxies between engineers and people with problems are a bad idea. It’s a matter of trusting professional judgment. Tom observes that, too often, Agile tries to solve problems with processes. But the problem isn’t usually the process; it’s architectural. He talks about the different structures, from software to the leadership teams, that can lead to dysfunctional situations. If you want to solve a problem, you need to fix the structure. How Agile Can Grow There’s no simple answer to this, Mary points out because it depends on where you’re at. You can understand all the fundamental steps needed but if your team isn’t well-integrated, it will get you nowhere. She shares an experience with a company who had accepted a big contract they weren’t ready for. Mary recommended the ‘sync and stabilize' method and taught them how to use it. It didn’t just save their contract; it changed how they looked at their whole company. Tom highlights the non-technology component of software, the ‘wetware,’ or what happens with people. He points out that money isn’t the issue; it’s the shortage of passionate, creative people - especially in isolated IT departments that are treated as cost centers. Tom believes you should give them challenging problems and get out of their way. Teams Tailored to Problems Mary loves to talk about how organizations such as AWS and T-Mobile handle their organizational structure and customers.  When there is a customer problem, a team is brought together to solve it and integrate it into the rest of the services so everything works. That team is given a lot of autonomy, including trading immediate profits for better customer experience AND have accountability to ensure they are also adhering to operational excellence and profitability of their service. Ultimately, better customer experiences drive bigger profits. Tom makes an important point: scaling isn’t possible after a certain point. At some point, complexity dominates future gains and wipes them out, so you have to descale. In other words, you have to do things in ‘little chunks’ that are independent and don’t require strict coordination. Tom uses the example of a city and how it functions. Final Thoughts Part of what helps Tom and Mary stay current is that they are truly agile. Mary points out that she’s never seen anything in technology last two decades and remain current. Agile has been around for about that long, but has it been changing and adapting? Resources https://twitter.com/mpoppendieck http://www.poppendieck.com/ 

Manuj Aggarwal and Barry O'Reilly, the author of the Book "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results", and co-author of the international bestseller "Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale", discuss many things about the process of unlearning and relearning of organizations and individuals in order to achieve continuous success. What are you waiting for? Tune In Now!In this episode, we will learn about:Why do you need to unlearn and relearnHow to learn from the challenges you faceWhat unlearning – relearning isWhat success isHow to navigate while facing uncertaintyHow to convince others to unlearnWhat to do when you are failingHow to deal with business transformationCommon characteristics of successful organizations and individualsAbout Barry O'ReillyBarry O'Reilly is the author of "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results," and co-author of the international bestseller "Lean Enterprise: How High-Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale" —included in the Eric Ries series, and a Harvard Business Review. He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer, and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review.Barry O'Reilly works with business leaders and teams from global organizations that seek not to fear the future but invent it. He has been an entrepreneur, employee, and consultant. After several startups, his focus shifted towards the enterprise, where he has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation.Education: Barry O'Reilly is graduated from the Technological University Dublin in Business Information Systems and Management.Experience: Barry is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity's executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the globe.Links & Mentions From This Episode:Barry's website: https://barryoreilly.com/TetraNoodle consulting services: https://go.tetranoodle.com/boot-podcastTetraNoodle professional training: https://courses.tetranoodle.comThanks for Tuning In! Thanks so much for being with us this week. Have some feedback you'd like to share? Please leave a note in the comments section! Enjoyed the episode? Kindly share it with your friends. Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic episode updates for our "Bootstrapping Your Dreams Show!"Support the show

April Wensel on Software Developer’s Journey, Arup Chakrabarti on On Call Nightmares, Alistair Cockburn on Being Human, Brian Balfour on Product To Product, and Kent Beck on Unlearn. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting May 13, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. APRIL WENSEL ON SOFTWARE DEVELOPER’S JOURNEY The Software Developer’s Journey podcast featured April Wensel with host Tim Bourguignon. April talked about hiring for attitude and mindset over the technical skills of the moment. She distinguished between the fixed and growth mindset and talked about how hearing a statement from an interviewee like, “I’m just not good with people,” is a sign that the person is currently thinking with a fixed mindset. Tim asked her to describe her company, Compassionate Coding. At Compassionate Coding, April teaches workshops on emotional intelligence to technical people. These skills are often called “soft skills,” but she prefers to call them “catalytic skills,” because they help technical people catalyze the application and acquisition of their other skills. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/45-april-wensel-encourages-us-to-get-in-touch-our-core/id1079113167?i=1000434465519 Website link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/190346/982475 ARUP CHAKRABARTI ON THE ON CALL NIGHTMARES PODCAST The On Call Nightmares podcast featured Arup Chakrabarti of PagerDuty with host Jay Gordon. Arup talked about starting out in medical research and being exposed to the notion of on call because much of the research involved having access to cadavers that were only available in short time windows that required him, from time to time, to drive to the hospital on a Saturday night. At Amazon, Arup learned what it looks like for not just individuals to go on call, but for whole departments and companies to go on call. At Netflix, he worked with the “father” of Chaos Monkey and managed site reliability as Netflix built out the simian army. He told a story about a NTP time drift that alerted almost every team at PagerDuty. The SRE on call quickly diagnosed the problem as NTP, but their run list was broken, so getting things back took a while. During this time, Arup had to keep the engineers from disabling these constantly-firing alerts because that could have caused them to miss something critical. He says this incident taught him that incident response is a team sport. This led to a discussion about the importance of keeping things light during an incident and taking the issue seriously without taking yourself seriously. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-21-arup-chakrabarti-pagerduty/id1447430839?i=1000436439951 Website link: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/oncallnightmares/episodes/2019-04-25T04_08_18-07_00 ALISTAIR COCKBURN ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Alistair Cockburn with host Richard Atherton. Alistair talked about doing his Ph.D, being able to put the word “people” in the title of his dissertation (apparently a rare thing in academia), and how his heart sank when he realized that his own mentor’s dissertation on methodologies had already covered everything. Then he realized that if it really had covered everything, you could take it to any business in the world and it would solve their problems, but it doesn’t because businesses are made of people and no single methodology can solve all of the problems. Alistair says instead that methodologies and processes should be like tissues: you use them and throw them away. After two or three months, you have to change. He says there are some good things about process, one being that it provides a checklist, like that which a pilot and copilot run through before an airplane takes off. Often though, he says, processes are like drop boxes. You create them so that people don’t have to talk to each other. Companies that have communication problems often want Alistair to create a process for them to resolve those communication problems, unaware of the contradiction. Alistair often has the same advice regardless of the methodology a client has chosen. If a client says, “We do SAFe,” he says, “That’s fine, increase collaboration!” If a client says, “We refuse to do SAFe,” he says, “That’s fine, increase collaboration!” He also says he doesn’t have to teach collaboration because everyone already knows how. We just don’t want to.  Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/56-the-heart-of-agile-with-alistair-cockburn/id1369745673?i=1000435504887 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/afdb129e-9fcb-40e4-9243-b85f56f3e1b5.mp3 BRIAN BALFOUR ON PRODUCT TO PRODUCT The Product To Product podcast featured Brian Balfour with host Eleni Deacon. They talked about north star metrics, that is, having one metric that attempts to capture all of the most important dimensions of your business. Brian doesn’t believe you can capture this in one metric and instead prefers a constellation of metrics that includes: 1) a retention metric such as monthly/weekly active users, 2) an engagement metric that measures the amount of engagement and the trend over time for those active users, and 3) a monetization metric. He particularly doesn’t like revenue metrics because of their lagging nature and how they ignore actual usage. Being on a data engineering team myself in my current role, I liked what Brian had to say about how to approach data. He says companies need to take on the mentality that data is not a project with a start and end date, but a core part of building product that is meant to constantly evolve. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/north-stars-are-leading-you-astray-brian-balfour-reforge/id1293415837?i=1000436155421 Website link: https://omny.fm/shows/product-to-product-podcast/north-stars-are-leading-you-astray-brian-balfour-r KENT BECK ON UNLEARN The Unlearn podcast featured Kent Beck with host Barry O’Reilly. Barry asked about the system that Kent uses to help him explore uncertainty. Kent says he has habits that help. The first habit is that of reversing any sentence that begins with the word “obviously.” When somebody says, “Obviously, programmers can’t be trusted to test their own code,” he automatically thinks, “What if that’s not true?” A second habit is whenever somebody introduces Kent to a new model of thinking, he asks himself, “What would happen if I just acted like this model was true?” and he says that he applied that habit when reading Barry’s book Unlearn. Barry asked about what made Kent feel that the Test-Commit-Revert (or TCR) technique was worth exploring, since this required an unlearning of Kent’s own Test-Driven Development (or TDD) method. Kent says that he was disenchanted with asynchronous code reviews and used a third habit of looking further forward. During his tenure at Facebook, he experienced growth in the number of engineers from 700 to 5,000. At the time, people were anticipating the problem of having 10,000 engineers working together, but Kent followed the Bill Joy idea of looking six steps further, and looked into how 100,000 engineers would work together. His solution was Limbo, or asking “How low can you go?” to shrink the size of code that can be safely committed and put immediately in production and the TCR technique came out of that line of thinking. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/exploring-uncertainty-with-kent-beck/id1460270044?i=1000436242318 Website link: https://barryoreilly.com/unlearn-podcast/ FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCysPayr8nXwJJ8-hqnzMFjw Website:

Francesca Gino is a professor/affiliated with Harvard’s Business, Law, and Kennedy Schools. She is the author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break All the Rules in Work and in Life. She also recently published an article in Harvard Business Review on Why Curiosity Matters - The Business Case for Curiosity. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with Francesca, about when rule breaking happens and what happens to people that do it successfully. Curiosity Curiosity is an important driver behind the experience of rule breaking.  We are born with lots of curiosity, but it starts declining at five years old.  When people join new jobs, they have high curiosity, but in 9 months, their curiosity has dropped 20%. What can companies do to keep that high? What can organizations do to support curiosity? - Change the mindset about what curiosity can do.  - Good for business and leaders to model behavior. Ask What if we changed … - Hard to know what outcomes of questions are. As How and What questions. Are there different ways to measure curiosity? - Intuit has innovation and failure awards (lessons learned and comes with a party). - Wake for Startups ending - A company gave 1 hr for lunch and 1 hr for culture. Then opened a library in the manufacturing plant.  Rebel Talent - People who challenge rules for positive change - Talents include curiosity, novelty, perspective, diversity, and authenticity. - You can foster each trait. Releasing a sculpture from a block. Don’t have to be born a rebel, but bring those traits out.  Can curiosity be effective in moving an organization forward?  - Thoughtfulness by leaders.  - Develop Performance Goals and Learning Goals.  Obstacles to overcome? - Leadership level. Sense of fear. If you allow for curiosity, you’ll end up in chains. Allowing curiosity says I trust you.  - Employee side - Change starts with each one of us.  How do you hire Rebels? - Pay attention to answers matching skills. E.g. - Hiring people with different perspectives than you. If you want to find out more about Francesca or her book check out rebeltalents.org. There is a FREE test, with no email required, that tells you which type of Rebel you are.  If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Ep. 117 – Nicole Rufuku, Author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy Ep. 109 – Greg Larkin, Corporate Entrepreneur and Author of “This Might Get Me Fired” Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Francesca Gino is a professor/affiliated with Harvard’s Business, Law, and Kennedy Schools. She is the author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break All the Rules in Work and in Life. She also recently published an article in Harvard Business Review on Why Curiosity Matters - The Business Case for Curiosity. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with Francesca, about when rule breaking happens and what happens to people that do it successfully. Curiosity - Curiosity is an important driver behind the experience of rule breaking.  - We are born with lots of curiosity, but it starts declining at five years old.  - When people join new jobs, they have high curiosity, but in 9 months, their curiosity has dropped 20%. What can companies do to keep that high? What can organizations do to support curiosity? - Change the mindset about what curiosity can do.  - Good for business and leaders to model behavior. Ask What if we changed … - Hard to know what outcomes of questions are. As How and What questions. Are there different ways to measure curiosity? - Intuit has innovation and failure awards (lessons learned and comes with a party). - Wake for Startups ending - A company gave 1 hr for lunch and 1 hr for culture. Then opened a library in the manufacturing plant.  Rebel Talent - People who challenge rules for positive change - Talents include curiosity, novelty, perspective, diversity, and authenticity. - You can foster each trait. Releasing a sculpture from a block. Don’t have to be born a rebel, but bring those traits out.  Can curiosity be effective in moving an organization forward?  - Thoughtfulness by leaders.  - Develop Performance Goals and Learning Goals.  Obstacles to overcome? - Leadership level. Sense of fear. If you allow for curiosity, you’ll end up in chains. Allowing curiosity says I trust you.  - Employee side - Change starts with each one of us.  How do you hire Rebels? - Pay attention to answers matching skills. E.g. - Hiring people with different perspectives than you. If you want to find out more about Francesca or her book check out rebeltalents.org. There is a FREE test, with no email required, that tells you which type of Rebel you are.  If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Ep. 117 – Nicole Rufuku, Author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy Ep. 109 – Greg Larkin, Corporate Entrepreneur and Author of “This Might Get Me Fired” Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Introduction: This episode showcases some practices & principles that support teams be agile and adopt Flow principles in the digital world.  Fin Goulding is an expert in business and technical agility having worked as a CIO or CTO in some major organisations like Aviva, PaddyPowerBetfair, Lastminute.com, HSBC and Travelocity. Fin is the co-founder of Flow Academy with Haydn Shaughnessy and has co-authored two books, Flow and 12 steps to Flow. Flow is a book for changemakers, mavericks and innovators. It demystifies the business of digital transformation. Fin is a prolific blogger, public speaker and social media enthusiast. He is also a keen marathoner.  Podcast episode summary: This conversation spoke to the work Fin now does in helping teams and organisations navigate digital transformation.  Fin described the essence of his book, Flow, which is really a metaphor for work and how it should be, frictionless.  Fin shared how people can be with change through visualisation techniques, stand-ups and the like where meaningful work and outcomes are discussed rather than problems. He admitted to stumbling across Agile and how it now informs so much of his thinking regarding Leadership, Teams and the business of providing value for clients.    Fin is not just an IT geek but a cultural expert in terms of business and technical agility, he is also a keen motivator and communicator  His work concerns people and how they could work together and collaborate better across teams-its all about improving the way people work together to get at better outcomes for clients.  Leadership can be a misnomer especially when teams are self-managing, Leaders need to find their purpose and place with teams  The best teams forget hierarchies and find ways to work together to get the work done  Toxic members can sabotage team performance and the Leader can support the person or individual do their best work elsewhere.  Get good at working outside of your job description, think broad as well as deep Respect diversity and look to hire for diversity  Often getting at team performance means unlearning  and learning to be open to new ideas and ways of working  A leader needs to create the conditions for psychological safety which for Fin is about being genuine, humble and about telling stories He encourages team members to continually learn, to listen to things like podcasts to widen their perspectives. It is important to continuously learn Don't be a Vampire, the kind of leader who sucks the energy out of a team Finally, Fin shared some nuggets for listeners to consider –Employ visualisation techniques, find your purpose and work to identify your values and strengths to be best deployed on a team   Quotable Quotes: “helping people do their best work elsewhere” “As a Leader don't be a Vampire, sucking the energy out of a team”   Resources: the following includes the resources we alluded to over the course of our conversation Flow, by Fin Goulding and Hayden Shaughnessy  Designing your life; how to build a well-lived joyful life which applies design thinking to the most pernicious of life's problems by Bill Burnet and Dave Evans  Lean Enterprise by Barry O Reilly  Teaming by Amy Edmonson  FGoulding on Linkedin and Twitter  Goulding.io for Fin's blog

Unlearn With Barry O'Reilly TableXI is now offering training for developers and products teams! For more info, email workshops@tablexi.com. Summary Our guest today is Barry O’Reilly, author of the book “Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results”. In it, he sets out a process for defining outcomes, identifying behaviors that might help or hinder reaching the outcomes, and then unlearning existing behaviors and relearning new ones. We talk about how that process works, how to use it yourself, how it might fail, and what Barry unlearned for himself in the process of writing the book. We’d like to hear from you. What’s something you’ve needed to unlearn to reach success? Let us know at techdoneright.io/57 or on Twitter at @tech_done_right Guest Barry O’Reilly (https://twitter.com/barryoreilly): Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results (https://amzn.to/2EJtfBy). Unlearn website (http://www.unlearn.online). Author of Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale with Jez Humble and Joanne Molesky (https://amzn.to/2NOoSsX), barryoreilly.com (https://barryoreilly.com/). Summary 03:15 - Letting Go and Unlearning Past Behavior 07:17 - How to Achieve and Define Positive Outcomes BJ Fogg (https://www.bjfogg.com) Behavior Design (https://www.behaviormodel.org) 15:25 - Unlearning as a Continuous Cycle 20:25 - Think Big, Smart Small, and Learn Fast 26:14 - When People Don’t Succeed 29:03 - Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable 31:30 - Learning to Unlearn 33:00 - Focusing on Deliberate Reflection 34:55 - Unlearning and Leadership Roles 36:56 - Getting Started with Unlearning Special Guest: Barry O'Reilly.

Webinar by Barry O'Reilly March 6 from 1:00 - 2:00 ET Presented by Barry O'Reilly In this session, you will: Learn to use a systematic approach to adapting your behaviors and mindset in order to meet the demands of an exponential rate of innovation. Discover how to let go, reframe, and rethink past successes in order to succeed in the future. Identify and address the personal obstacles that you need to unlearn. Challenge your thinking, get outside your comfort zone, and achieve results beyond what you thought was possible. Effective leadership comes with a large learning curve. In today’s rapidly evolving business climate, this is truer than ever for seasoned leaders and entrepreneurs alike. Many leaders rely too heavily on past achievements, practices, and ways of thinking to drive positive business results today, but they often need to unlearn those behaviors before they can take a step forward. Join executive coach Barry O’Reilly as he breaks down a transformative framework that shows leaders how to rethink their strategies, retool their capabilities, and revitalize their businesses for stronger, longer-lasting success. "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results" shows leaders and entrepreneurs how to deliberately move away from once-useful mindsets and outdated behaviors that were effective in the past and embrace new behaviors that are effective in a world ripe with emerging technologies and accelerated change. Barry O'Reilly Barry O’Reilly is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry works with business leaders and teams from global organizations that seek to invent the future, not fear it. Every day, Barry helps with many of the world’s leading companies, from disruptive startups to Fortune 500 behemoths, break the vicious cycles that spiral businesses toward death by enabling culture of experimentation and learning to unlock the insights required for better decision making, higher performance and results. Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and co-author of the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—included in the Eric Ries series, and a Harvard Business Review must read for CEOs and business leaders. He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Barry is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity’s executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the globe. Barry is the founder of ExecCamp, the entrepreneurial experience for executives, and management consultancy Antennae. His mission is to help purposeful, technology-led businesses innovate at scale.

It's two Barrys in a row on the podcast, as my guest for Episode #335 is Barry O'Reilly and we're talking, in depth, about his latest book, Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results. Barry is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. See his full bio. Last week, I shared a shorter discussion with Barry that served as a preview of the webinar that he's presenting on Wednesday. You can find a link to register for the live webinar (or to view the recording) at leanblog.org/335. Barry and I chat about topics including 1) experimental approaches to entrepreneurship, 2) how leaders need to make it safe for people to try new things, and 3) why you have to unlearn before you can learn something new – that's the pathway that allows you to then achieve breakthrough results. These are good ideas in business and they also talk about the interesting case of tennis legend Serena Williams and how she reinvented her game to extend her greatness. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did and do hope you'll pick up the book.

A preview of an upcoming webinar to be presented by Barry O'Reilly on March 6. http://www.kainexus.com/webinars Why Great Leaders Must Unlearn to Succeed in Today’s Exponential World March 6 from 1:00 - 2:00 ET Presented by Barry O'Reilly In this session, you will: Learn to use a systematic approach to adapting your behaviors and mindset in order to meet the demands of an exponential rate of innovation. Discover how to let go, reframe, and rethink past successes in order to succeed in the future. Identify and address the personal obstacles that you need to unlearn. Challenge your thinking, get outside your comfort zone, and achieve results beyond what you thought was possible. Effective leadership comes with a large learning curve. In today’s rapidly evolving business climate, this is truer than ever for seasoned leaders and entrepreneurs alike. Many leaders rely too heavily on past achievements, practices, and ways of thinking to drive positive business results today, but they often need to unlearn those behaviors before they can take a step forward. Join executive coach Barry O’Reilly as he breaks down a transformative framework that shows leaders how to rethink their strategies, retool their capabilities, and revitalize their businesses for stronger, longer-lasting success. "Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results" shows leaders and entrepreneurs how to deliberately move away from once-useful mindsets and outdated behaviors that were effective in the past and embrace new behaviors that are effective in a world ripe with emerging technologies and accelerated change. Barry O'Reilly Barry O’Reilly is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry works with business leaders and teams from global organizations that seek to invent the future, not fear it. Every day, Barry helps with many of the world’s leading companies, from disruptive startups to Fortune 500 behemoths, break the vicious cycles that spiral businesses toward death by enabling culture of experimentation and learning to unlock the insights required for better decision making, higher performance and results. Barry is the author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, and co-author of the international bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—included in the Eric Ries series, and a Harvard Business Review must read for CEOs and business leaders. He is an internationally sought-after speaker, frequent writer and contributor to The Economist, Strategy+Business, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Barry is faculty at Singularity University, advising and contributing to Singularity’s executive and accelerator programs based in San Francisco, and throughout the globe. Barry is the founder of ExecCamp, the entrepreneurial experience for executives, and management consultancy Antennae. His mission is to help purposeful, technology-led businesses innovate at scale. Read Barry’s blog at: www.barryoreilly.com See what he has to say on Twitter: @barryoreilly

Karen Martin, award-winning corporate strategist and president of global consulting firm TKMG, is a leading authority on business performance and Lean Management. She’s also a highly rated speaker and author of multiple books, including Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance. Karen motivates organizations to develop more efficient work systems, grow their market share, solve business problems and accelerate their performance. She provides insights to improve organizational performance and inspire companies to create work environments that enable their entire workforce to excel. Listen to this week’s donothing podcast and learn about Karen’s journey to becoming a leader in corporate strategy and empowering organizations to boost their productivity and their people. Connect With Karen Martin TKMG Website LinkedIn Twitter Karen Martin's Books Clarity First The Outstanding Organization The Kaizen Event Planner Value Stream Mapping Karen Martin's Book Reccomendations Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results by Barry O’Reilly

Barry O’Reilly, Author of “Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results”, shares how to unlearn outdated behaviors and mindsets and embrace experimentation. Get the latest updates from the show at www.thisisproductmanagement.com.

Individuals get disrupted, not companies Barry O’Reilly is the Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. In this episode, Barry and Brian Ardinger discuss creating a culture of experimentation in enterprises and seeing everything as an assumption.  Barry came to the U.S. from Ireland and worked at City Search “putting people on the Internet.” He then joined a mobile games development company, which helped him develop an experimental mindset. After this, he moved to Australia to make next-gen content for E-learning in Southeast Asia. Finally, he joined a consultancy in London called ThoughtWorks, where he helped companies reinvent their portfolio management and learn how to fund and test ideas.  In Lean Enterprise, Barry’s first book, he highlights how to create experimentation in enterprises. Amazon does this well because the culture encourages cheap and fast experimentation. They can gather better data, unlearn existing beliefs, and learn new behavior which helps them break through and innovate. In Barry's new book, Unlearn, he says people recognize that they always have to be learning, but it’s tough to learn new things. The limiting factor is the ability to unlearn behavior especially when it’s made the person successful. Barry highlights the most bureaucratic regulated companies and describes how they are making amazing changes.  Barry also hosts Exec Camp, where execs leave their businesses for up to eight weeks to launch new companies that are intended to disrupt their existing companies. It’s like an accelerator for senior leaders. They learn and unlearn new things about themselves. For example, the International Airlines Group came to Exec Camp, to launch six new ideas to disrupt the airline industry. They tested ideas with customers and had to unlearn the behavior of pushing ideas on customers. They soon began to see everything as an assumption. We’re conditioned to believe that the way we solve a customer problem is the only way to do it, however, tech changes how we can solve problems. Individuals get disrupted not companies.  FOR MORE INFO To find out more, go to Barryoreilly.com on Twitter @BarryOReilly. You can also find his book on Amazon. If you liked this podcast, try Ep 99 Ryan Jacoby with Machine, Ep 43 Ash Maurya, Author of Scaling Lean, and Ep. 20 Lisa Kay Solomon with Design a Better Business GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Barry O’Reilly is the Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. He and Brian Ardinger discuss creating a culture of experimentation in enterprises and seeing everything as an assumption.  Barry came to the U.S. originally from Ireland on a student visa and worked at City Search “putting people on the Internet.” He soon joined a mobile games development company and created a popular game called Wireless Pets. Soon large corporations started calling asking the company to build games. This caused Barry to develop an experimental mindset. Soon Barry moved to Australia to build next-gen content for E-learning in Southeast Asia. Game design and game theory is teaching new skills in safe environment. It allows for rapid experimentation and behavior. Then Barry joined a consultancy in London called ThoughtWorks. They were pioneers in Agile software development where he worked with companies to reinvent portfolio management and how to fund and test ideas.  Barry’s first book, Lean Enterprise, highlights how to create experimentation in enterprises. Amazon does this well because they have a culture that makes experimentation cheap and fast. They are able to gather better data and are unlearning existing beliefs and learning new ones that can help them break through and innovate.    In his new book, Unlearn, Barry says people recognize that we always have to be learning, but it’s tough to learn new stuff. The limiting factor is the ability to unlearn behavior especially when it’s made you successful. Letting go and moving away from things that limit us, like outdated info. Barry highlights the most bureaucratic regulated companies in his book and describes how these people are making amazing changes.  Barry also hosts Exec Camp, where execs leave their businesses for up to 8 weeks to launch new businesses to disrupt their existing companies. It’s like an accelerator for senior leaders. They learn and unlearn new things about themselves. For example, the International Airlines Group came to Exec Camp, to launch six new ideas to disrupt the airline industry. They tested ideas with customers and had to unlearn the behavior of pushing ideas on customers. They soon began to see everything as an assumption.  We’re conditioned to believe that the way we solve a customer problem is the only way to do it. Tech changes how to solve problems. Startups are able to start with a blank set of assumptions. Individuals get disrupted not companies. If you are adapting your features and behaviors, you won’t be disrupted. May need to shift your tactics or beliefs.  FOR MORE INFO To find out more, go to Barryoreilly.com on Twitter @BarryOReilly. You can also find his book on Amazon. If you liked this podcast, try Ep 99 Ryan Jacoby with Machine, Ep 43 Ash Maurya, Author of Scaling Lean, and Ep. 20 Lisa Kay Solomon with Design a Better Business GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Für die 3. Episode des produktbezogen Podcast freuen wir uns Barry O'Reilly als Gast begrüßen zu dürfen. Er ist Autor des internationalen Bestsellers "Lean Enterprise" und spricht mit uns über sein neues Buch "Unlearn". Hier beschreibt Barry wie Verhaltensweisen, die uns in der Vergangenheit zu Erfolg verholfen haben, uns heute im Weg stehen. Dies ist eine Herausforderung für uns als Individuen, die uns aber auch sehr häufig im Geschäftsumfeld begegnet. Unternehmen verlieren den Anschluss, weil sie an ihren Erfolgsrezepten der Vergangenheit festhalten. Um Neues zu lernen müssen wir Platz schaffen und vergangene Verhaltensweisen wieder verlernen. Viel Spaß beim Zuhören.

Guest: Barry O'Reilly @barryoreilly Full show notes are at https://developeronfire.com/podcast/episode-391-barry-oreilly-comfortable-with-uncomfortable

My guest for this episode is Barry O’Reilly, who’s one of the authors of Lean Enterprise that discusses how high performance organisations innovate at scale. What’s especially interesting to me about Barry’s experience is that he’s worked a lot with large organisations. He’s for example the founder of ExecCamp, where he takes executives to retreats lasting up to 8 weeks, and helps them disrupt their own businesses. We talk about how organisations can transform their culture to support experimentation and better decision making. Barry also highlights couple of insights from his newest book, Unlearn.

In this track, Mandy Ross provides a quick overview of Value Engineering based on the concept of Value Engineering as developed by Barry O'Reilly, author of Lean Enterprise and the upcoming book, Unlearn. To learn more about Value Engineering, visit barryoreilly.com/blog.

Each faculty member of Singularity University has a different background. Barry O'Reilly focuses on the impact of new technologies, particularly in regards to the social impact they can have and has his own business coaching business executives on how to adopt tech in their companies, and leverage new tech to grow both their business and their teams. He says that initial discussions of new technologies are often met with caution and skepticism, but that do the right way, technology can help create data that can inform more efficient and beneficial business decisions, and overall change the world for the better. Barry discusses the effects of social media on this space, examples of how new technologies can augment or displace traditional business structures, and the challenge and necessity of being able to quickly re-train workers with the new skills and competencies that the changing technological landscape requires. He also discusses the changes that he already sees happening in the fintech industry, thanks to the blockchain, and the relative advantages of both start-ups and large established companies. For more information, or to get in touch with Barry O'Reilly directly, visit www.barryoreilly.com.

Yadin and Lauren talk with Barry O'Reilly, author of the Lean Enterprise about what issues are created when organizations refuse to adopt a learning mentality and neglect to foster rapid cycles of experimentation. [This Episode] Barry O’Reilly on Twitter: twitter.com/barryoreilly Barry's Courses: https://leanagile.study/ Yadin on Twitter: twitter.com/porterdeleon Lauren on Twitter: twitter.com/malhoit Tech Village on Twitter: twitter.com/TechVillagePod [Subscribe to the Show] On iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-village-podcast/id1292054891?mt=2 On Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Ihkncqii3l3zdabeplaxih463tq On Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/tech-village-podcast/tech-village On Android: http://subscribeonandroid.com/feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:331955204/sounds.rss On SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/techvillage [Sources] Harvard Review Article: https://hbr.org/2015/11/why-organizations-dont-learn Music By - Music for creators: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfwXVYfPFiMlzadS4ow80GA

Hear how business leaders from multi-billion dollar organizations are getting outside their comfort zone to take part in a transformational experience and embrace Lean Startup practices and principles that leave a lasting impact on individuals and their organizations.

Johannes Thönes talks to Barry O’Reilly, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, about his recently published book Lean Enterprise. A lean enterprise is a large organization that manages to keep innovating while keeping its existing products in the market. O’Reilly talks about the idea of scientific experiments and the build-measure-learn loop popularized by the lean-startup method. He shares […]

Art and Architecture of Ireland Volume iv: Architecture with 3 of its five editors Ellen Rowley, Livia Hurley and Hugh Campbell. Barry O'Reilly, Patricia McCarthy and Graham Hickey also contribute

Salve, Today we talk with Mathieu Martin, devtools team lead at Lightspeed, they develop POS (point of sale) software that’s used around the world and handle more than US$9 billion in transactions per year. In this first episode, we’ll talk about their organization and culture, and how that matches the use of cloud and devops. Feedback, corrections and suggestions are welcome. Leave them bellow or reach us on @_MindTheCloud or @dtsato or @rafaelrosafu or contact@mindthecloud.com. Have fun and Mind the Cloud. Your browser doesn't support the HTML5 audio tag Download the MP3 Shownotes Mathieu Martin (@webmat) Lightspeed - POS software Devops Montreal Lightspeed POS Numbers Process 9B$ a year in transactions Used in 30 countries by over 22 000 customers 270+ employees in 6 cities A total of 65M in VC funding in the last few years Picks “Keynote: Legacy by Chad Fowler” on YouTube - the same talk from Scala Days 2014, but more recent “Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale eBook: Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O’Reilly” on Amazon.com “Cloud Computing Concepts” on Coursera - learn core distributed computing concepts that underlie today’s and tomorrow’s cloud computing systems Credits and copyright The music used on the program is called “Impromptu in A” by DoKashiteru, licensed under the Creative Commons. This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, share it but don’t change it.

Gary O'Brien and Barry O'Reilly presenting Lean Enterprise at ThoughtWorks Live Australia in May 2014.