Podcast appearances and mentions of david marquet

Joel Bancroft-Connors: Sustainable Value—Redefining Success Beyond Profit Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Joel has evolved his definition of Scrum Master success over time, moving beyond traditional metrics to focus on what truly matters: sustainable value delivery. While Agile principles clearly state the goal of delivering value continuously, Joel emphasizes that success isn't just about making profit - it's about creating sustainable profit through sustainable processes and people practices. He challenges Scrum Masters to consider their "people sustainability metric" and asks whether their approach supports long-term team health and organizational resilience. Joel's definition encompasses three pillars: delivering sustainable value, maintaining sustainable processes, and ensuring sustainability for people. This holistic view of success requires Scrum Masters to think beyond immediate outcomes and consider the long-term impact of their practices. In this segment, we refer to the book Turn the ship around! by David Marquet.  Self-reflection Question: What is your people sustainability metric, and how are you measuring whether your Scrum practices support long-term team and organizational health? Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Back to Basics Joel advocates for returning to the foundational retrospective format outlined in "Agile Retrospectives" by Derby and Larsen. Rather than getting caught up in complex or creative retrospective techniques, he emphasizes the power of following the basic steps: set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, and close the retrospective. Joel stresses that there's an important arc to retrospectives that shouldn't be overlooked. By taking time to properly gather data and following the structured approach from the agile retrospectives book, teams can achieve more meaningful and actionable outcomes. Sometimes the most effective approach is simply executing the fundamentals exceptionally well. In this segment, we refer to the book Agile retrospectives, by Derby and Larsen.  [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

This episode confronts the leadership trends of planting one's practice in only one model without room for growth and agility. Someone has to lead, AND there should be collaborative moments for team member contributions. We need both. Models referenced: situational, servant, transformational leadershipBooks referenced: Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet and Servant Leadership Characteristics in Organizational Life by DeGraaf, Tilley, and NealYouTube Interview with Captain Marquet: https://youtu.be/PbqTbGHd5K8?si=GmkQAvaBRiBO1-Fc

In this episode of the Veterinary Leadership Success Show, I'm joined by Dr. Mark Reeve, second-generation practice owner of Tea Tree Gully Veterinary Hospital in South Australia. Mark's approach to team development is anything but traditional—and it's paying off in spades.What started as a frustration with stagnant nursing careers and dusty procedure manuals became a mission to revolutionize learning in his clinic. Inspired by the leadership playbook Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet, Mark and his team have built a powerful in-house certification program that's giving his nurses real direction, satisfaction, and career momentum.From ditching the 200-page ops manual to introducing 60+ micro-certifications tied directly to pay and performance, Mark shares exactly how his practice transformed learning into a dynamic, gamified system that's increasing retention, boosting skill levels, and creating a culture of repeatable excellence.If you want your team to love learning, feel empowered, and stick around for the long haul—this episode is a must-listen.Episode Outline: [00:00] – Skills as Procedures[01:00] – Meet Dr. Mark Reeve: Second-gen vet and practice owner in Adelaide[03:20] – From James Herriot Roots to Modern Leadership[04:30] – The Problem: No CPD, no progression, high nurse attrition[05:50] – Enter Turn the Ship Around: A Navy-inspired pivot to career pathways[07:10] – Turning a Dusty Procedure Manual into 60+ Micro-Certificates[08:45] – Monthly Recognition, Mentorship, and Real Accountability[10:00] – Retention, Repeatability, and Pay Tied to Progress[11:45] – A Fairer, More Transparent Career Path (No More Tenure Bias)[14:00] – Going Beyond Basic Roles: Consulting, Clinics, Anesthesia & More[17:00] – The Impact on Training ROI & Vet Skill Uptake[20:00] – Curriculum Creation on the Fly—And Why Alpha Testing Works[25:30] – Certificates Built by Nurses, for Nurses[27:00] – Why Mark Doesn't Worry About Recruitment Anymore[29:15] – Soft Skills, Client Care & Team Ownership[31:00] – Scaling Learning with ChatGPT & Automation (Future Vision)[34:30] – The Power of Procedural Thinking[36:30] – From Lip Service to Long-Term Success Plans[38:15] – “Everyone Comes Home”: How Mark Built an Alumni Culture[39:45] – Building a Pipeline from High School to Hospital LeadershipResources:Book Mentioned: Turn the Ship Around by David MarquetConnect with Dr. Mark Reeve:Tea Tree Gulley Veterinary Hospital: https://www.ttgvet.com.auDr. Mark Reeve on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-reeve-a3419068/ Follow Dr. Dave Nicol for More Leadership Insights:Follow Dave: @drdavenicolLearn more about Veterinary Leadership Training: Veterinary Leadership AcademyEnjoyed this episode?Leave a review on iTunes and share it with your veterinary colleagues!Mentioned in this episode:Mentioned in this episode:Are you finding it impossible to carve out time for leadership tasks in your veterinary practice? Do you feel like you're

In this solo episode of the Everyday Business Problems podcast, Dave Crysler unpacks what it means to build an intentional culture—and why it's one of the most challenging and impactful things a leader can do. Drawing from over 25 years of leadership experience, Dave shares personal stories, lessons learned, and practical strategies for transforming toxic or fractured company cultures. Whether you're leading change after a leadership shift or experiencing a change of heart yourself, this episode gives you a real-world framework to start shaping a healthier, more effective workplace culture. What You'll Discover: Why culture isn't your mission statement—it's how your people feel on Sunday night. Three key pillars for intentional culture: empathy, kind candor, and clarity before action. How to rebuild trust in organizations with siloed departments and poor communication. Tips for leading with empathy and owning mistakes to earn buy-in from your team. How to respond when you've been part of the problem and are ready to change. The power of involving your team in shaping a shared vision for culture and performance. Book recommendation: Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet for leadership inspiration and practical culture transformation. Subscribe to the Business Systems Saturday Newsletter

I went in a different direction today than I thought I was going to go, but I think you're going to love it! Some quotes from the "Introduction" to a book I was listening to over spring break in Mexico last week. Really good insights for us on the language that we use to lead and to transform culture. Enjoy!For more information to help you on your road to becoming your best, check us out at SlamDunkSuccess.com or email me at scott@slamdunksuccess.com.As always, our background music is "Dance in the Sun" by Krisztian Vass.

Today on the Social-Engineer Podcast: The Security Awareness Series, Chris is joined by Roy Luongo. Roy is the Chief Information Security Officer for the United States Secret Service. He leads a team in the defense and information assurance of all USSS information systems and solutions. Prior to his current role he was the Director, Joint Mission Operations Center for Cyber Command, providing oversight of mission critical Cyber Operations infrastructures. He has also served as Chief, NSA Red Team and Technical Director for Interactive Operations for the NSA. Roy is a retired Army soldier with 20 years' service within the Intelligence and Cyber career fields. [March 17, 2025]   00:00 - Intro 00:17 - Intro Links: -          Social-Engineer.com - http://www.social-engineer.com/ -          Managed Voice Phishing - https://www.social-engineer.com/services/vishing-service/ -          Managed Email Phishing - https://www.social-engineer.com/services/se-phishing-service/ -          Adversarial Simulations - https://www.social-engineer.com/services/social-engineering-penetration-test/ -          Social-Engineer channel on SLACK - https://social-engineering-hq.slack.com/ssb -          CLUTCH - http://www.pro-rock.com/ -          innocentlivesfoundation.org - http://www.innocentlivesfoundation.org/                                                01:55 - Roy Luongo Intro 02:44 - The Path to CISO of the Secret Service 04:58 - Cybersecurity in Early Education 07:50 - The Entry Level Catch-22 12:24 - Quantifying Risk 14:27 - The Best Way Forward 16:51 - The Effects and Future of AI 20:06 - Understanding Your Needs 22:11 - Advise to Young Roy 24:56 - The Cost of Training 29:01 - Mentors -          Ed Skoudis -          Brigadier General Brian D. Vile -          Shawn Turskey 29:55 - Lollipop Moments -          TEDxToronto - Drew Dudley "Leading with Lollipops" 31:33 - Book Recommendations -          Cybersecurity Canon - Rick Howard -          Kingpin - Kevin Poulsen -          Turn the Ship Around! - L. David Marquet 33:49 - Wrap Up & Outro -          www.social-engineer.com -          www.innocentlivesfoundation.org

Thomas Perry’s THE LITTLE BOOK OF IMPEDIMENTS: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Impediments-Thomas-Perry/dp/1523485507 Tom’s bio: https://hyperdriveagile.com/trainers/tom-perry Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlperry/ Mentioned in this episode: David Marquet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYXH2XUfhfo Books by David Marquet: https://www.amazon.com/stores/L.-David-Marquet/author/B008GHTFN2?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true Culture Code: https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Code-Secrets-Highly-Successful/dp/0804176981 The post 294 Performance Mangament & Agile first appeared on Agile Noir.

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website SkiptheQueue.fm.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter  or Bluesky for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.Competition ends on 5th March 2025. The winner will be contacted via Bluesky. Show references: https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakmensah/Zak Mensah is the co-CEO of Birmingham Museums Trust. He is passionate about helping their service make an impact by focusing on the needs of over 1 million visitors. He is encouraging the organization to adopt a "digital by default" approach. Zak's mission is to ensure that their people, skills, and services remain adaptable to the rapidly changing landscape of the cultural sector. He is exploring new ways of doing things, including innovative business models, partnerships, and arts-related KPIs, while sharing as much as possible publicly.With a background in staff development and digital, Zak has been involved with the web since the late 90s and has seen its influence grow in all aspects of life. Prior to joining the arts sector in 2013, he helped small businesses, charities, Jisc, universities, and the Heritage Lottery Fund "do" digital well.Zak also runs his own consultancy to promote positive change and keep his skills sharp. His goal is to make a ruckus. https://www.vam.ac.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyakino-wittering/Amy Akino-Wittering is Head of Operations and Commercial at Young V&A, which opened July 2023 and recently won Art Fund Museum of the Year and Kids in Museums, Family Friendly Museum of the Year awardsResponsible for the general management of Young V&A she directly manages the visitor experience and teams, catering contract, volunteering and back of house operations, collaborating closely with central V&A colleagues to deliver operations and income for Young V&A. Previously Amy worked at V&A South Kensington as Senior Visitor Experience Manager-Sales and was on the opening project team leading on visitor experience and retail at Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery.She started her career at Imperial War Museums working across sites from assistant to management roles in Retail and Admissions and systems management.  https://www.hampshireculture.org.uk/​​https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-sapwell-b3b2a281/Paul Sapwell has been Chief Executive at independent arts and culture charity Hampshire Cultural Trust since 2018, having joined the trust in 2016 as Chief Operating Officer following an early career primarily in hospitality and leisure. Paul is a passionate believer in the transformative power that cultural experiences can have on the wellbeing of individuals and communities, and a prominent advocate for the role of commercial growth, underpinned by a flexible, entrepreneurial team culture, in sustaining museum and arts organisations. Transcription: Paul Marden: The museums and culture sector are facing unprecedented headwinds. Static or reducing funding from local government, fewer grants from trusts and foundations, all while dealing with increased people costs. The continued headwinds from cost of living crisis. But this sector continues to deliver more with less and support the cultural life of our country. Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue. I'm your host, Paul Marden and in today's episode recorded the Science Museum at the Association of Cultural Enterprises View from the Top event. I'm joined by Amy Akino-Wittering, Head of Operations and Commercial at Young V&A. Zak Mensah, Co CEO of Birmingham Museums Trust, and Paul Sapwell, CEO of Hampshire Cultural Trust. Paul Marden: And we're going to talk about how the cultural sector can innovate in order to thrive. Anyone that's listened to the podcast before will know. And this is the nervous bit. Paul Marden: We always start with an icebreaker question which my lovely guests victims have not been prepared for. So, Zak, I'm afraid you go first, my friends. So if you were a cartoon character, which cartoon character would you be? Zak Mensah: That's easy. I think I would be the thing that gets chased by the. Is it the wild Cody who runs around all his home? But I'd be the. What's the little, the stupid Roadrunner. Yeah, so I would be Roadrunner because you constantly are literally running 100 miles an hour and then a giant piano lands on you at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, but you respawn on the Monday and you start all over again. Pretty much feels like me. Paul Marden: I love that. I love that. Amy, you're next. Let's think of all of the inventions over the last hundred years that were offered. Flying cars, those sorts of things. What is the one thing were promised that you really miss and think we really need in our lives? Amy Akino-Wittering: I think a Time Turner, which is basically from Harry Potter. Basically you can just go and do things like six. They do six days all at once. Paul Marden: You can be Hermione if you've got a Time Turner. Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, great. Paul Marden: Excellent. I love that, Amy. Thank you. Paul. Paul Sapwell: You said these were going to be under no pressure. I wouldn't have liked. I wouldn't have liked either of those. Paul Marden: Oh, well, you're not going to like this one then. I'm sorry, mate, I'm, I, I live in Hampshire. Paul runs Hampshire Cultural Trust. Paul. Paul Sapwell:  Oh, even better. Paul Marden: Saints or Pompey? Paul Sapwell:  Oh, blimey. Okay, well that's, I'm an Arsenal fan. Paul Marden: So there we go. Paul Sapwell: I couldn't possibly answer Saints or Pompey? I mean, we border both. So I would just be in so much trouble if I pick one or the other. So I can. I've got to get out. Paul Marden: Are you dodging that one? Paul Sapwell: Yeah. I thought you might watch Arsenal regularly. Paul Marden: I thought you might. So we are going to start with a question from somebody from the audience, a young man named Gordon. Apparently he might be a millennial. And he says, After 15 years of turmoil, financial crash, austerity, Brexit, Covid, we face continuing cost of living issues, rising national insurance and a Trump presidency. Are we doomed in 2025? Or to put it slightly better, what are the biggest risks for your organisation and the wider sector, and what are you each doing to thrive in the year ahead? And I'm going to start with you, Paul. Paul Sapwell: That's an easy question, isn't it? Paul Marden: You can thank young Gordon. Paul Sapwell: Brilliant Gordon, Yeah. I mean, I think 2025 is going to be an incredibly tricky year, but to sort of look further than that. I'm certainly an optimist, but I think we're in a time of transition, particularly in terms of our sector, in the cultural sector, in terms of what's going to fund us and what's going to sustain us going forward. You know, I think the years of the level. I think a lot of the speakers have touched on it, but the years of the level of public sector funding is, whatever happens with this government and next is going to be going down and we just have to face that. I run an organisation which we started out in 2019. We're about 85% publicly funded. Now we're 34% publicly funded with the same turnover, I hasten to add. Paul Sapwell: And so we've made a good go of it, but I think the headwinds this year are really difficult. That said, I think that we have to be confident investing for the longer term and particularly, obviously, in this conference in areas of commercial growth. I think that, okay, the growth projections have been downgraded. I am confident that we will, as the decade continues, move into a period of growth. And we've got to be looking at the long term rather than the short term. The trick is, of course, not running out of money in the short term. And that's a really difficult place to be. Paul Marden: In the water, just here. Paul Sapwell: I don't have an easy answer to that, but I think fundamentally, you've got to give the customer what they want and the customer is still there. Paul Sapwell: And we have a fantastic product. But we've got to certainly pivot much further towards what customers want commercially, in my view, than putting as much emphasis as probably we did 10 years ago on trying to find more and more public funding, because I think that's going down. Paul Marden: Zak, have you got any thoughts on that? Zak Mensah: Yeah, I mean, in terms of money, just generally people want to back winners. So I think one of the difficult things that internally we can all say it's doom and gloom, because it does feel that doom and gloom. There are definitely days, weeks and months. I think it's right to say that it's doom and gloom. Like you can be optimist but still understand it's difficult time. And I think a lot of our, you know, a lot of our workforces certainly feel that, it can feel very difficult because every year they ask, will they have their job? Right. And that's a really fair question to ask. And we sometimes as leaders kind of say, “Oh, if we can get through the next two years, but two years for normal staff are sometimes a very long time to try and say, “You or may have not have a job to make life through.”Zak Mensah: So I think that's something I always think back in back of my mind. I think a lot of the difficulties, whichever flavour of government is about understanding how to be more savvy, about understanding the trends, about things that are fundable. Because there are lots of things that were funded 10, 20 years ago, that money has dried up. And so we've all got to think about, for example, a lot of people now looking at, well, being a speaker this afternoon was talking about more on EDI, for example, and how younger people certainly are interested in having more of a purpose driven business. Is how for us, we can make sure we're focused on the, what I was called, the user need. So the needs that people use us. Zak Mensah: Because if you can concentrate and focus on what they want, whether it be money, otherwise that ultimately does lead to a business model. Because there's no point saying just because museums and galleries have been around for 100 to 200 years, they have an absolute right to exist. The only way they exist is because every decade or whatever there's another crisis comes along and a group of people, including ourselves here, live in this room, but also listening to this make it happen. Like, we've got to convince councillors, government, businesses to be part of that journey. Because the funny thing I will say is that, you know, at Birmingham Museums, the art gallery was founded in 1885 by industry people. It was industry people that founded it. It was industry people who wanted the city to have great arts. Zak Mensah: And so now we're turning back to those same people and saying, "We need you to now step up and contribute." It doesn't always have to be money. It could be in kind support, could be advocacy. That's the kind of thing that we need to do as leaders right now, in addition to the normal making the money work and stretch as far as we can. Paul Marden: Absolutely. Amy, what are you doing at Young V&A to thrive in the year ahead and face some of these challenges? Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, absolutely. So we've now been open for just over two years, so I feel kind of, well, coming up to two years. And so I feel we're kind of in that stage where we kind of opened and sort of just try to make sure that we are operationally savvy. And last year was very much about refining that. And I think this year is very much about what's next and how can we build upon kind of success of opening, looking at ways in which we can innovate through doing new kind of commercial opportunities, but also how can we develop our audiences. And as well as part of kind of the wider V&A, we've got two more sites opening as well. Amy Akino-Wittering: So how as an organisation are we going to work together to kind of be in this new family of sites and work together through there? So I think for us in the kind of coming year is all about, what's next? We've opened the door. We started with a really strong foundation and a really strong vision, but then how can we keep on innovating and keep iterating that to improve? Paul Marden: Excellent. I'm going touch on stuff that Lewis talked about a minute ago. One of his reflections I really liked was thinking about how do we create a space for colleagues to engage with some of these really important issues that have been on the PowerPoints. Zak, maybe you could start. What do you think your organisation can do to act as bottom up catalyst for change as opposed to trying to drive these changes from the top down? Zak Mensah: I think the first thing is about understanding that there are a lot of people who do want to be able to voice their hopes and fears around a whole host of subjects, whether it be specifically around, if you're ethnic minority, about your fear of living in the UK, if you have climate, lots of important subjects people want to talk about. You know, I think certainly internally, and I'll be very clear about this, I think there's a very different view sometimes about the difference between internal and the external voice of the organisation. So what we see a lot of is staff individually believe that as a service there are lots of things we could and should be talking about publicly that may or may not directly align with how as a leader we see it. Zak Mensah: So, you know, there are lots of fights we do get into. We can't get into every single fight. And sometimes there's a real fine balance around what we decide to go for. So if you take during Black Lives Matter example, me and Sarah Shropshire started in November 2020, there was an expectation that immediately we would be like the spokesperson for the whole museum sector about black and brown issues. And like, it's really hard to say, actually. I am not speaking on behalf of every single person in the whole country. I do take it seriously and we set up internally ways people to talk about it, but didn't always feel appropriate. Zak Mensah: And I'll give another example is around, for example, war. Any one time there's something like 15 global conflicts happening and, you know, we talk and go backwards and forwards internally sometimes about, you know, do we talk about them publicly? If we talk about them internally, how we talk about them, do we single one out or do we talk about them all? Are they equal? How do you equally talk about things are very horrific for a number of people?Zak Mensah: And knowing that we've got staff from dozens of countries who all have different views on how their homeland or area they're interested in is impacted. Things are very horrific for a number of people. But I do think that there's always. It's always really tricky because the best conversations and the best conversations need care and a lot of the conversations happen in like, pockets that we have no control over. Zak Mensah: And so it's again, how do you set an environment as a leader that is allowing the bottom up to do their own thing, but in a way that isn't going to be detrimental to the whole workforce? Because I think it is. Again, I mentioned it's been. It's really tricky and that's the simple truth. It is no easy answer to these things because if it was easy, we'd all solved it. Yeah. But acknowledging it there, it's the elephant in the room, I think is really important and growing to be more and more important for us as leaders. Paul Marden: I think Lewis was saying it's really important to know where you stand on issues and it is okay for you to have a stance on issues that says, I'm not going to make a stand on this one issue. I thought that was a really interesting perspective. Imy's talk. I think were talking a lot about the journey of Titanic Belfast, which I love as a museum, to go to a museum that emotionally moved me as much with so very few actual artefacts. I just think it's an amazing storytelling experience. But you talked a little bit about the team and what you do to be able to nurture that team. And one of the things that we're talking about is trying to get 110% out of everybody getting to more with less, getting them to innovate. Paul Marden: How do you balance all of those challenges and not break the people and maintain a 98% retention rate like Titanic does? Paul? Paul Sapwell: Well, maintaining a 98 retention rate, I think fairly unprecedented and huge congratulations. I mean, I think it follows on a bit from what Zak was saying, actually. You know, it's tough, isn't it, being leaders in terms of whether you're making that kind of external message or whether you've got a tough internal message. I mean, I've always taken a stance that you've got to be as transparent as you possibly can be and people will go a long way with you if it doesn't appear that things are being taken in a dark room somewhere. And I think for us, what we've tried to do is to put in the mechanisms for that to happen. I've been really fortunate to work with a fantastic people director, Hampshire Cultural Trust. Paul Sapwell: One of the first things, I think you've also got to make a stance, by the way, on people being important. One of the first things I did as CEO was say we need a people director. It's quite rare in the heritage sector. I came from hospitality, it was the norm. It's an odd thing that people and HR doesn't always sit at the top table. Sometimes it's sort of delegated down in operations or even finance. So I think that's really important and we needed a strategy and part of that is putting in place a lot of the stuff that you talked about of the Titanic, which I think is really impressive. And we're somewhere on that journey, but not quite as far along, but proper employee forums where you listen. Paul Sapwell: I meet with an employee elected employee forum quarterly and talk to them about all issues with nothing off the table. We also have an EDI group with a mix, again, senior leadership on there talking about these issues. And I think that, you know, if there was one thing I would say it's, you're not always going to be able to give easy answers, are you? This year we're being hit with an enormous national insurance hit to the staff costs and that is going to affect pay. I can't pretend that it isn't. And if we're going to not run out of money in the next few years, we're going to have to give less of a pay increase this year than we would like to. Paul Sapwell: But we've been talking about that openly since it hit and I hope that our team will go, will understand, but obviously that doesn't make it, make it easy. And I think the same is true with the issues that you're talking about. You can't take a stance on every single issue that comes through each of these forums every quarter, but you have a conversation about it. And I think that's the most important bit for me. Paul Marden: Amy, I'm going to segue wide away from today's talks. Regular listeners will know that I'm a Trustee of Kids in Museums and I was chatting with my fellow trustees about today's event and we wondered, given the impact of the cultural sector, on the impact that it has on the lives of young people and how there are so many challenges at the moment for disadvantaged young people to engage in the sector. You know, we all know that post Covid, many schools have cut their school visits into museums and galleries. I pick you because Young V&A was the winner of Kids in Museums Family Friendly Awards last year. So let's just start with you and talk about what are the innovative things that you've done to break down barriers to encourage children and families to engage in the museum. Amy Akino-Wittering: Yes, of course. So Young V&A when we kind of opened its entire purpose is about engaging children. It's all about kind of that creative confidence in Generation Alpha. And so the whole museum has been designed with and for young people. So its target audience is between naught to 14 year olds. We spoke with over 22,000 young people in the development of the museum to hear what do they want from it. I think there's a survey which said that 40% of children thought that museums were boring and it weren't places for them. So, well, what can we do as we've got this opportunity to redevelop, to make sure that it is a place that people want to go and enjoy and be themselves. Amy Akino-Wittering: And so that was kind of like the North Star in terms of what every kind of decision in the kind of opening and making and running of Young V&A is really centred around this as well. And so it goes from the aesthetic in terms of the height of things, the bright colours from this swirling staircase that we have at Young V&A, which came from an idea that someone wanted to helter skelter in the space to the tone of voice in our interpretation and also how the objects are displayed. We've got objects from across the V&A, we've got over 2,000 objects. But it's not just the museum as was the Museum of Childhood collection, it's from across all of the different departments of the V&A. And it's been curated with that kind of child centred and child focused way. Amy Akino-Wittering: Co design is also a really kind of core part of it as well. So we kind of co designed with local audiences and children for various design displays and also co curation. So each gallery was co curated between the learning team and the curatorial team as well. And then obviously we've kind of got to actually open the building and have a team to deliver that visitor experience. And again, that is all very much fed through that audience lens. And so we looked at our structures of, you know, what types of people do we want in the space? You know, our core audience are children. We need people who want to engage with that audience. It's a very specific kind of audience, but also we are a hyper local organisation as well and so how can we encourage applicants from the local boroughs? Amy Akino-Wittering: So we drove a very inclusive recruitment process where we basically did a behaviour led process for recruitment, we redid all the job descriptions, went out into our local community, did workshops and CV surgeries and basically just made it as easy as possible for people to apply and get interview. And the kind of core things that were looking at was behaviours. We can teach people how to go on a till or to learn how to do fire evacuations, but actually it's much harder to get people because that's what the job is. You know, the majority, you know, all your visitors will come to a touch point with the front of house team. They are your most important ambassadors. Amy Akino-Wittering: So we need to make sure that we've got the best kind of resources and time and structure in place to support them, to give the best possible experience that we can. So we spent a lot of time doing that. We spent a lot of time as well working Kids in Museums come in and do training about specific family engagement training as well, which has been really beneficial. And then also we really believe that, you know, the customer experience, the visitor experience is directly impacted by the employee experience. You can't expect the team to deliver this amazing, joyful visitor experience if actually they're pretty miserable behind the scenes. So how can we make sure that the structures that we have and the environment that we have is reflective of how we want them to be on the floor as well? Amy Akino-Wittering: So we make sure that we have forums to make sure that, you know, people can have their say. We make sure. So we did this team charter, which was this sort of collaborative effort to see, like, how do you want to feel in the workplace, but also how do you want your visitors to feel? And actually, it was all very similar in terms of the outcomes that came from that kind of exercise. And it's these kind of agreement that we have together to how we're going to work together and those kind of things which we do to ensure. It's that kind of frequent communication and making sure that we're on the same page and it kind of brings that joy which then comes out to the visitors. Amy Akino-Wittering: And that is kind of I think all those things together has all really helped in terms of when someone comes into the space, children, they're front and centre. They really feel like it's a place for them and they've got kind of people around them which really get them and that they will help facilitate their curiosity and things like that. So that's what we've done. Paul Marden: Amazing. Paul, have you got some thoughts? Paul Sapwell: Yeah. I love what you're saying about the visitor. The visitor services guys on the front desk. I mean, they are the most important people, essentially, and that's why I was nodding vigorously. I think that's part of what I was talking about earlier in terms of pivot into more of a commercial view, because a commercial company completely relies on their customer who comes in. And I think my experience of being in an organisation that's moved out of being run predominantly by a council to one that's independent now was, I've got to be honest, at the start, that wasn't how it felt. Paul Sapwell: And actually you could produce big lists of visitor figures, but ultimately, if they went up or down, it didn't really matter because the funding was going to stay the same, whatever, and there would be other metrics, and I think that's the big shift in mentality, because if you don't give the customer what they want, and that means really valuing people on your front line. And, you know, we've had conversations at the Museum Association about it, about how there's almost been that divide in museums between the people who talk to your customers and the museum staff. And I think that's a really. Or people who would see themselves doing proper museum work. And I think that, you know, that's something we've got to. We're moving in the right direction, but we've got to move quicker. Paul Marden: All of our best memories, aren't they, of going to these places are not necessarily about the amazing artefacts, it's the stories that your team tell people when they interact with them. You feel so happy as a result of it. I think of some amazing experiences. Zak, have you got any thoughts on this? Innovative ways in which we make museums family friendly, how we encourage make them more children friendly? Zak Mensah: Well, the first thing is it's something like 50% of people have children. And so knowing that is in the UK is a thing. Just knowing that as a fact. Right. Means that thinking then about families who will come, but also the staff workforce. Because again, like, you know, if your staff, you're your biggest advocates we just talked about is making it friendly for people to have children in the workforce means that most people recommend it and word of mouth is the biggest way that you can influence people and then from that when people come. So we've got nine venues overall pre pandemic, have a million visitors a year. Zak Mensah: We say we're family friendly, but I've got two young children and quite often the experience, not just my place, but other places doesn't actually say match up with that because like just saying to a seven year old, you must love art, doesn't really work, right, if it's Blue. Paul Marden: Can't tell them. You can't just make them like, yeah. Zak Mensah: I can't tell anything because anyone in my family anything. If you convince about bluey=, then you've got another chance. But you know, you've got to think about actually what is their experience going to be. So, you know, have you got picnic area? Have you got toilets? Lots of toilets. Do you allow your staff, for example, in previous roles? We allow people, if they want to do potty training, they could do potty training in the gallery. Because the reality was if they didn't use the potty that they had in their bag, it was going somewhere else. And so I remember watching in horror as someone literally tried to scoop up a child and move their parent out of a gallery to start to go to the toilet. Zak Mensah: And I was like, there was no way they were going to make it out that door. I would love to have that CCTV footage because I bet that was quite interesting. But, you know, it sounds, you know, some sort of flippant and fun. Zak Mensah: But that's the little thing because like all those little things about making it, you know, enjoyable. Because if you can make it enjoyable for the. For the parent or the guardian, you can make it fun for the, you know, for the kids. You know, you have to have sharp crayons and pencils. Whatever it is, like always things that's really kids don't want much. That's the little thing because like all those little things about making it, you know, enjoyable. Right. Like, if you can give them almost that version of experience to make people think it's good. Because I think we sometimes dissociate the child's experience with the fact they're with someone else. So actually you've got to make it good for the people that they're with. And quite often people do it, you know, who take. Zak Mensah: They might take the extended family. So they'll say like, you know, I'll take my niece or whatever, I'm there. And they don't usually actually have to have the children. So sometimes they need help as well, you know, to make sure the experience. Paul Marden: Extra needs to be able to solve the kids' problems. Zak Mensah: Absolutely. So for me it's about making it that friendly from that perspective. So often with school trips, for example, it's how can you make the school trips fun? Because I see quite a lot of kids on school trips that they sort of being marched through and forced to go. So then they're less likely to recommend it to their parents and their parents just like to come. So for me, it's kind of like trying to use that learning visit which often people's first. Most people tell me, I've been to museum as a child and they usually get towards school age, secondary school, and they don't go anymore. Paul Marden: Yes. Zak Mensah: So it's like, how do we make sure that. I don't think as a sector where family friendly enough, other than those people who already are super engaged, they make the kids have fun. I'm probably talking about my trauma now. Paul Marden: Let's return today's speakers. Let's just talk a little bit about Mike's discussion of using behavioural models to influence buying decisions. Yeah. What are the biggest behavioural barriers that you see within your organisation? In terms of visitor experience, from kind of awareness through to decision making, what could you do? What could you change? Zak Mensah: So the first obvious one is a lot of people are terrified of being in spaces because they're not sure how to behave. There's this weird secret code that doesn't. It's not actually written down anywhere that people think the museum experience has got to be quiet, that it's got to be. That you've got to know what you're looking at. It can't just be fun. And actually having. Just having fun is a really important part of what you want to do. So for us, I think the problem is, as well as once you work in the sector, those barriers are invisible because you just work there. You feel comfortable now coming. Yeah. And so the behaviour part is super interesting. And so, for example, it's a phrase I sometimes use around, like. Zak Mensah: It's around this idea of, like, “People like us do things like this”, which I stole from Seth Godin. So, you know, what we did, for example, is w e now don't have staff uniform because we've got quite a diverse. We're dividing diversity in Birmingham and we want people to feel comfortable and recognise people outside the building who then might be going, like, sure, I might. Hoodies, for example. If you wear a hoodie, you might own. The museum's. Not for me, the museums for other people who wear suits, etc. So actually, if they see staffing. Yeah, if they see staff in hoodies or whatever, in hijabs or niqab, whichever outfit they want to wear, then that is a signal about those people are welcome. Zak Mensah: That's one example where that idea came from the team about how we can show and tell and do what we say we're going to do, rather than just saying, “Oh, but we're really friendly museums are great and come in.” Because actually they are intimidating from the outside. They're often intimidating intellectually. Paul Marden: Yep. Zak Mensah: The train, the media, all the time is being really high brow all the time. So it's like actually we. We have to find ways to accept that those barriers exist. And that often means finding people who don't use you to actually tell you that. And we've just finished a citizen's jury, for example, which had almost 30 people who are representative of the city come in and 80% of them at the first meeting said they didn't think the museum is relevant to them. Those are ordinary people who live in the city who. That's 80% of those people. Four in five people don't think the museum is relevant for them, even though we know that we could make it relevant to them. And that was a really sad, shocking figure, but also is motivating. Zak Mensah: And I think our job, you know, as leaders is how do we help people feel inclusive, to be an inclusive space and then like. And go for it. Paul Marden: Excellent. Thank you, Amy. Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, I think a lot of what we have done as well is to try and go out of our four walls of Young V&A as well. So we do a lot of kind of community engagement as well through kind of the learning team as well as for volunteering programme. Like we rocked up at stores at Whitechapel Market and kind of saying, “This is our kind of programme”, just chatting with people where they haven't heard of Young V&A even though it's down the road. And so it's like, how can we, yeah, kind of go out and about and also kind of advocate across as well. And then also it's like when people do kind of take that step to actually go onto our site and then come into the building making sure that the visitor experience is as inclusive, as welcoming as possible. Similar. Amy Akino-Wittering: We also just have aprons and they can wear whatever they want underneath and just again, so as people feel relaxed and they feel when our audiences come in, they say, oh yeah, no, that's something that I might wear. Or you know, they just feel more kind of settled and at home. So that's something that's really important that we kind of do as well. Paul Marden: Lovely, Paul. Paul Sapwell: The biggest challenge for us, I mean being a smaller organisation and a brand that isn't known. As well as it could be, I think our biggest challenge now is that customer journey from online through to what you get when you arrive and we're not consistent enough. And I know we'd all talk about this forever but you know, big commercial organisations do this really well. You know, you're going to sell a ticket within a couple of clicks from a social media piece, you're going to get a follow up email that looks exciting and you know, then your product is either going to arrive or you're going to arrive at it and it will be like you thought you were buying. And I'm not sure that we always do that. Paul Sapwell: I've got to be honest and I think to do that you've got to put a lot of investment in it. And that's what we're part of the strategy that we've launched, we launched back in November is about that. Paul Sapwell: And again, that comes back to, you know, commercial mindsets that matters. It matters that we put the right image in whatever way that is to the right customer who we're trying to attract. We've got to understand those customers better and then make sure that's, that's seamless. And, you know, we run 20 venues. They're really different. We've got everything from the Great Hall, Mediaeval Hall in Winchester, which is full of people on from travel trade have come off of cruises and things. And then we've got Milestones Museum in Basingstoke, which is a sort of family living history museum. Paul Sapwell: They don't get any international tourists. So having a really limited pot of marketing to be able to go all these sort of areas is really difficult. But I think that would be the challenge. But thinking about it holistically, really, because it's the same person who clicks on the social media ad to the person who ends up arriving in your venue. And that needs to be really consistent. Yeah, it sounds like cash is the barrier. We're going to try and work with it. But that's the important bit for me. Paul Marden: I'm grinning like the village idiot because this is what I advocate all the time. I'm looking at my marketing friends in the audience who would also share. Share your thoughts on this. We know from the Rubber Cheese survey that it's eight to 10 steps it takes people to checkout. I tried to buy tickets for an aquarium last year and they made me enter a password along with the names and addresses of everybody that was joining me and then told me off three times for getting the password wrong in the checkout process. I had to be really to buy those tickets and. Paul Sapwell: Well, yeah, you touch on. Yeah. I mean, we could have a whole conversation, but no, I mean, we love a complicated ticketing system in the cultural sector, don't we? I mean, with all the right intentions. I mean, even the list in some places of different concessions. I mean, you don't want to go. I think I'm that or I'm that. You know, and it's done with the right intention. But it's an enormous barrier. Paul Marden: Yeah, completely. Paul Sapwell: And you know, we make things so complex and I don't have the fix, but I know we've got to fix it. And that means putting sort of. Again, learn from companies who do this really well rather than. Yeah. Looking for ideas ourselves. Lots of people do it really well out there. That's what we got to do. Paul Marden: Thinking of lots of my team who might think that this is something somebody should solve. Zak Mensah: The fix is simple, isn't it? Because you just said then that there are other people doing it well. What we're not really good at artists actually copying people. Zak Mensah: Like just copy someone else who's done it better than us. It's really. It really does annoy me. Let's just say that what always happens is that we make decisions by committee, don't we? So it would have been two steps, but then someone from marketing said, but you've got to have a newsletter. And someone from another team would say, “You've got to also ask for this. And then you've got to do this. Then you've got to try and get the kids to come for school trip.” Before you know it, people mean well and they've made it really complicated. I think sometimes it's like, actually, let's just do the simplest thing. Let's do all the hard work to remove those barriers and then we can try and flog them stuff when they get there. Paul Marden: So friend of mine, Andy talks a lot about you don't go to a fine dining restaurant and walk up to the maitre d and he says to you, “Would you like a table, by the way, are you going to have dessert? And would you like a coffee? And what are you going to have for your starter main course and dessert? Oh, right, I'll take you to your table.” You have a conversation with people and you lead them and you don't try and pack everything into the very first time you ever talk to the potential client. Zak Mensah: Which is why Greg's does so well. Paul Marden: Yeah, look guys, I could carry on about this conversation, but we are the barrier to everybody getting to their drinks and nibbles and so we've got. Paul Sapwell: Including us. Paul Marden: I know, sorry. We've got a couple of things that I must cover. So we always ask our guests for a book recommendation. It can be a novel, it can be work related. So Zak, would you like to go first with yours? Zak Mensah: Yeah. Turn the ship around! I think it's David Marquet. It's a book about a nuclear submarine commander who basically realises all these stupid rules. And so he just said to everyone, just tell me you intend to. So say to him, I intend to turn the ship left, I intend to take holiday, etc, because he realised that there were so many stupid rules and I think museum will have loads of stupid rules. It's a really good thing. And I know most of you won't read the book because most people say, “Yeah, I'll read it. They don't read it.” There's a 10 minute YouTube video. Surely you can spend 10 minutes of time if you can't be bothered to do that. There is literally a 30 second Wikipedia article about it. But please don't do it. Paul Marden: Zak feels very strongly about this. Paul, your book recommendation, please. Paul Sapwell: Well, last year I read Wild Swans by Jung Chang and I'm trying to find a way of getting into a business conversation. I think there's so much that comes out of that book, but I think, yeah, striving for Utopia is often, you know, the book. Right. Most people in terms of living under communist China and we know we could go on about utopian things that haven't worked, but I think there's, for this conversation, that's perhaps where we need to think, you know, going forward here. There isn't a sort of utopian way that things should be done for our sector. There is, you know, we're making our way here and yeah. Obviously it's a fantastic book. Paul Marden: Excellent. Thank you, Paul. Amy, your recommendation? Amy Akino-Wittering: Yeah, so mine isn't linked to like professional development at all. Mine. Paul Marden: Well, you did have one. Amy Akino-Wittering: Well, I did have one and you were like, no, just go for your favourite one. So I was like, Persuasion by Jane Austen. It's a classic. Paul Marden: We've got, we've got big anniversary at the moment, haven't we? In Chawton where Jane Austen lived has got big thing about 200 years, 250 years? Amy Akino-Wittering: Celebration for the whole year. So I'm gonna go in. Paul Sapwell: Yeah, everyone's trying to get in on this, by the way. I just have to put this out there. You know, she was born in Hampshire. Paul Marden: I know. Paul Sapwell: Born in Hampshire, actually. Born Basingstoke. Paul Marden: I know.Paul Sapwell: Yes. Paul Marden: There's a lot of celebrations for Jane this year. Paul Sapwell: Yeah, everyone's trying. I've seen so many angles for her. Oh, she was here and she went to the toilet. Fair enough. I mean, it's a big celebration. Paul Marden: If you'd like a copy of the book or any of these books, head over to Bluesky and like and repost the show announcement saying, I want Zak, Paul or Amy's book. And the first person to do that will get the book sent to them. Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please leave us a five star review. It really does help more people to find us and remember to follow us on Bluesky , X or Instagram for your chance to win the book. Thank you very much, everybody. Paul Sapwell: Thank you. Amy Akino-Wittering: Thank you. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsDownload the 2024 Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey Report

This is a special episode, where I introduce the "Big Agile Questions" survey and review some of the questions that you've already submitted! Thank you all who did! You can find the submission form here. Submit your questions, as we will be reviewing these in future episodes! To join 25,341 other Agilists on our Newsletter (˜1 post/week), visit this page, and join. The Power of Asking Better Questions At every major turning point in history, from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, progress has begun with asking better questions. The Agile movement itself started with the authors of the Agile Manifesto questioning traditional software development methods. Now, in 2025, with significant changes in the industry including PMI's acquisition of the Agile Alliance, the community faces a crucial moment to shape its future direction through thoughtful inquiry and reflection. "Throughout history, the biggest leaps forward have come from people willing to ask difficult, sometimes even quite challenging, questions." The Future Beyond Agile

Chapter 1 What's Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet"Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet is a leadership book that shares the author's experiences as a U.S. Navy submarine captain. Marquet emphasizes the importance of empowering individuals to take ownership of their work rather than following a top-down command structure. He details how he transformed the USS Santa Fe, a struggling submarine, into one of the best-performing ships in the fleet by promoting a culture of competence and control at all levels. The book introduces concepts like ‘leader-leader' rather than ‘leader-follower,' encouraging leaders to foster an environment where employees are encouraged to think critically, make decisions, and become actively engaged in their roles. Through practical insights and anecdotes, Marquet illustrates that when individuals are trusted and given responsibility, performance and morale improve dramatically.Chapter 2 Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet Summary"Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet is a leadership and management book that recounts the author's experience as a U.S. Navy submarine captain. Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, a submarine that was struggling with low morale and poor performance. Instead of maintaining the traditional top-down leadership approach, Marquet implemented a new philosophy of leadership that he termed "leader-leader" rather than "leader-follower." Key Themes and Concepts:Empowerment and Ownership: Marquet emphasizes the importance of empowering individuals at all levels of an organization. He believed that by giving his crew members ownership of their tasks, they would feel more engaged and responsible for their work. Instead of merely following orders, crew members were encouraged to think critically and make decisions.Control vs. Competence: Traditionally, leaders feel the need to maintain control over their subordinates, which can lead to bottlenecks and disengagement. Marquet argues that leaders should instead focus on building competence within their organization, allowing team members to operate independently with confidence.Communication and Trust: Effective communication is critical in any organization. Marquet cultivated an environment where crew members felt safe to express their ideas and concerns. Establishing trust among team members led to improved collaboration and innovation.Intent-Based Leadership: Instead of the typical command-and-control structure, Marquet introduced the concept of intent-based leadership, where leaders communicate their intent and the team members take the initiative to act. This shift encourages proactivity and adaptability in teams.Decentralizing Decision-Making: Marquet restructured the decision-making process, allowing more junior crew members to make decisions on their own. This approach not only reduced the burden on leaders but also allowed for quicker and more effective responses to challenges. Results:Under Marquet's leadership, the USS Santa Fe transformed from one of the worst-performing submarines in the fleet to one of the best. The morale and engagement of the crew improved significantly, showcasing the effectiveness of his leadership approach. Conclusion:"Turn the Ship Around!" serves as a practical guide for leaders looking to inspire and empower their teams. Marquet's experiences demonstrate that leadership can be transformative when leaders focus on enabling their people to take ownership and responsibility for their work, ultimately leading to better outcomes and a stronger organizational culture.Chapter 3 Turn the Ship Around! AuthorL. David Marquet is a retired United States Navy captain best known for his innovative leadership practices which he documented in his bestselling book "Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders." This book was first published in 2013...

No guests today! Instead, I'll be taking questions from the Building Better Games discord and answering them. I cover10 questions including the challenges with AAA dev, the rise of co-dev, and what production careers look like. Enjoy! Question #1 : How do you ensure that you (the royal you) are making a game that will be fun for players, not just fun for its designers to make? (Or maybe in this context - what are the ways in which production can support product management and ensure the sprint-to-sprint goals align with what internal player advocates are asking for?) Question #2 : What would you say needs to happen to make the big players more competitive / successful again? Question #3: Do you think there's an observable trend towards an increased amount of codevelopment as a way to mitigate costs/risk? What issues do you see this posing for coherent design and production if there is an increasing reliance on external development partners?   Question #4: There are clear signs when certain aspects of a game are lacking - incoherent design, low quality assets, buggy software. What are the player-facing symptoms of a game that is lacking in production or leadership competencies?    Question #5: Production organizations at larger game studios often suffer from issues of structure, such as a substantial number of producers, senior producers, and even lead producers all rolling directly up into an overburdened production director, because there doesn't seem to be an understood space for a “producer manager” between frontline production and executive/director-level production leadership. What is the rationale for this gap when manager is a well-understood conceit in other gamedev disciplines (e.g. designers will have design managers reporting to a design director, artists will have department managers reporting to a director, engineers have managers between them and directors, etc.)?  Is it just that production is typically not a large enough organization to merit managers? That producers are seen as organized and not in need of more traditional personnel management? Question #6: How can you become better at your role as a producer when you aren't at your job? Or in other words, how can you get better at what you do aside from getting more experience?   Question #7: For mid- and senior level producers: What does a career development track look like? Often it seems like the only future for a highly competent producer is executive producer (a stretch for many and not a realistic path for most) or production director, which itself is a rarified commodity at larger developers. What are the progression opportunities an IC producer should be considering? Question #8: As the only Production guy on my team (and 1 of 3 "operations people"), how would you deal with getting questions and answers when you have nobody around to rubber ducky with?   Question #9: When talking about the past, how can you learn to abstract experiences and look past the specifics? Are there any resources you recommend for learning how to tell stories so that you're not bogged down in the details of history?   Question #10: How are game developers selecting and setting up test groups to see their players are enjoying the game and it's a good market fit? Are there aspects of this process that could see refining and improving? Or common pitfalls other developers tend to see in this process? LinkedIn for Steve Bromley (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevebromley/) and Graham McAllister (https://www.linkedin.com/in/grahammcallister/) Steve Bromley's Book: https://gamesuserresearch.com/book/ Graham McAllister URL: https://grahammcallister.com/ Steve Bromley URL: https://gamesuserresearch.com/ Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat by Clinton Keith: https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Game-Development-Addison-Wesley-Signature-dp-0136527817/dp/0136527817/ Lean from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Trenches-Managing-Large-Scale-Projects/dp/1934356859/ Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace: https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649/ Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet: https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Ship-Around-Building-Breaking/dp/0241250943 Our discord community is live! Join here to engage with leaders and producers in game dev looking to make our industry a better place that makes better games: https://discord.gg/ySCPS5aMcQ   If you're interested in an online course on becoming a better game producer, head here: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/succeeding-in-game-production   Subscribe to our newsletter for more game development tips and resources: https://www.buildingbettergames.gg/newsletter   Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-carcich/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@buildingbettergames Spotify Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6QD5yIbFdJXvccO8Z5aXpm   Help us create more amazing content! Join us on Patreon today: https://www.patreon.com/BBGOfficial  

David Marquet: Leadership is Language David Marquet is the former commander of the U.S.S. Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered attack submarine. Under David's command, the ship had an impressive turnaround, achieving the highest retention and operational standings in the Navy. David is the author of the bestseller Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders* and his newer book, Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don't*. In this rebroadcast, David and I explored the seven sins of questioning. David shared the story of the ill-fated El Faro and how we can discover better information in leadership by making the shift from self-affirming to self-educating. Seven Ways to Ask Better Questions Instead of questions stacking, try one and done. Instead of a teaching moment, try and learning moment. Instead of a dirty question, try a clear question. Instead of a binary question, start the question with “what” or “how.” Instead of a “why” question, try “tell me more.” Instead of a self-affirming question, try self-educating questions. Instead of jumping to the future, start with the present, past, then future. Resources Mentioned Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don't* by David Marquet Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders* by David Marquet Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

Sara Caldwell: Human-Centric and Transformational Leadership for Agile Teams Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Sara shares her experience with a healthcare project aimed at digitizing care workers' documentation processes. Despite innovative technical solutions, the team overlooked user empathy, leading to adoption challenges. Engineers who shadowed care workers discovered crucial insights that transformed their approach. Sara reflects on the importance of direct user engagement and how to prevent anti-patterns, like distancing engineers from end-users, in product development. Featured Book of the Week: Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan This transformative book emphasizes the need for organizations to be person-centric and complexity-conscious. Sara shares how Brave New Work inspired her to rethink operating systems for teams. Along with Leadership is Language by David Marquet and Radical Candor by Kim Scott, she discusses actionable lessons to improve leadership and team dynamics. These books provide a blend of theory and practical strategies to create empowered, high-performing teams. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

“Dans beaucoup de boîtes, il y a le mythe du CTO qui est le plus fort et connaît tout.” Vraiment ?

Damo and Tisha open the episode by discussing workplace arguments. Damo reads a comment responding to a PTSF YouTube short. Tisha explains why she “quit” social media. Is retirement really so hard? Prayers to everyone who has been impacted by this current Hurricane season. The Navy is celebrating our 249th birthday! Make sure you do it in accordance with the policy. The Exceptional Family Member Program (EFMP) has had some major changes that everyone isn't pleased with and we want to understand why. Damo and Tisha review the updates to MyNavyPortal. What's the difference between GMT and CMT? The Navy has surpassed our recruiting goals this year! This is definitely a win, considering we were not expecting it. It's Domestic Violence Awareness Month and we want to highlight the Family Advocacy Program (FAP) again. A “Do Better” from a listener is read. Damo and Tisha provide a little feedback. Tisha takes Damo on a personal journey about a “Karen” at her job. A Guardsman is trying to sue the government for Malpractice following a botched surgery in Walter Reed. Remember to follow the ‘Permission to Speak Freely' podcast on TikTok, Facebook, Discord, Instagram, and Twitter, and subscribe on YouTube.   To have your “Do Better” reviewed on a future episode please get in touch with us at ptsfpodcast@gmail.com.       Keep up with the ‘Permission to Speak Freely' podcast on our social media and YouTube - https://linktr.ee/Ptsfpodcast   Links from this episode: U.S Navy Birthday Resources - https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/commemorations-toolkits/navy-birthday.html   Dissolution of EFMP Categories - https://mccareer.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/dissolution-of-navy-efmp-program.pdf   Common Military Training - https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Portals/55/Messages/NAVADMIN/NAV2024/NAV24209.txt?ver=s2MalZl5dN1qGOqyeF0Brw%3d%3d   Navy surpassed Recruiting Goals: https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/10/02/navy-bounces-back-surpasses-recruiting-goals-for-fiscal-year-2024/   Family Advocacy Program Resources - https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Support-Services/Culture-Resilience/Family-Advocacy/   Malpractice Suit: https://www-military-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.military.com/daily-news/2024/06/24/paralyzed-during-surgery-walter-reed-guardsman-asks-supreme-court-consider-feres-doctrine-challenge.html?amp       Books of the Week: Damo - Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (L. David Marquet)- https://davidmarquet.com/turn-the-ship-around-book/   Tisha - Damaged but Not Destroyed: From Trauma to Triumph (Michael Todd) - https://www.iammiketodd.com/damaged-but-not-destroyed       Additional Credits: PTSF “Theme Music” - Produced by Lim0

Laura West: Coaching for Leaders Fellow Laura West is a seasoned leader and researcher with many years experience executing and training others in data analysis and strategy. She's led large teams across several organizations, holds a Ph.D. in linguistics, and is an alum of the Coaching for Leaders Academy. She was selected as one of our new Coaching for Leaders fellows and has taken on a leadership role in supporting our current Academy members. What do you do when you get a request from a stakeholder, but don't have the resources to fulfill it? That's a reality almost every leader faces. In this conversation, Laura and I discuss both the mindset and tactics that will help you respond well. Key Points Rather than an immediate “no,” spend an hour working through some steps to creatively problem solve around the request. Show your work. When you respond, share who you've talked with and what's already been considered to respond to the request. Present options by summarizing 2-4 paths forward and your recommendations. Be the data person. Highlight trends over time that help influence different business decisions and maintain your credibility. Prioritize. But tell, don't ask. Take the lead on identifying what's important on behalf of the stakeholder and begin the work. Resources Mentioned Responding to Stakeholder Requests With Limited Resources by Laura West (free membership required) Related Episodes The Way to Turn Followers Into Leaders, with David Marquet (episode 241) How to Start Managing Up, with Tom Henschel (episode 433) The Way to Influence Executives, with Nancy Duarte (episode 450) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

In this episode, Riki gets to chat to with L. David Marquet, former submarine captain of the USS Santa Fe and renowned author of Turn the Ship Around!. David shares his unique insights on leadership, drawing from his experience turning a struggling crew into one of the best-performing teams in the Navy.  Key topics include:  Driving for Excellence: How leaders can set high standards and inspire teams to continuously improve.  Thinking and Action: The importance of aligning thought with action for effective decision-making.  Shifting to a Learning Zone: Why fostering a culture of learning leads to better long-term outcomes.  Leadership is About the People: David emphasizes that leadership is not about the leader, but about empowering those you lead.  Bias of Action and Ownership: How encouraging a bias towards action can foster a deeper sense of ownership and responsibility in teams.  We also dive into some of the key principles from David's book, such as:  Control the Clock: Instead of rushing to decisions to prove competence, take the time to ensure the best possible outcome.  Improve Outcomes, Not Just Prove Ability: Focus on making meaningful progress rather than simply demonstrating skill.  This conversation is packed with practical lessons for anyone looking to lead with purpose and create a high-performance environment. Don't miss it!   

James Gifford: When Autonomy Becomes Anarchy, Navigating Agile Team Independence Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. James shares a story from a healthcare company formed through acquisitions. He explores what happens when team autonomy goes too far and becomes anarchy. James also describes how one team's culture shifted from a focus on quality to a lack of basic practices, leading to degrading product quality. What non-negotiables did James identify as crucial for balancing team autonomy with organizational standards? How can leadership play a role in setting appropriate constraints for autonomous teams? Listen to find out! Featured Book of the Week: "Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet James discusses the profound impact of "Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet on his approach to leadership development. How does this book's principles apply to creating effective leadership at all levels of an organization? James shares insights from his experience developing a leadership curriculum aimed at empowering decision-making at the front lines. What key patterns does he highlight for leaders looking to succeed across various organizational levels? Listen to find out. Note that David Marquet has been a previous guest on the podcast. [IMAGE HERE] Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM's that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!     About James Gifford James Gifford, a notable Agile/Lean coach and ProKanban Certified Trainer, is also a co-founder of Agile Uprising. He envisions a future where companies integrate Lean principles and Agile methodologies effortlessly, cultivating organizations that are dynamic, resilient, and centered around customer-focused products. You can link with James Gifford on LinkedIn and connect with James Gifford on Twitter.

Dustin Lanier explores the idea from L. David Marquet's "Turning the Ship Around!" about decentralizing decision-making authority to those closest to the relevant information. He highlights how empowering individuals at the local level can accelerate crisis response and enhance operational efficiency.

Silvana and Tegan watch Season 4, Episode 19, "Prodigy".  Cadet Hailey is introduced and we are told rather than shown that she is an insubordinate know-it-all and the powers that be want to throw her out of the academy. However, Sam wants to use her brain for good at the SGC so she brings her along to a mission to show her what she can use her intelligence for. SG-1 minus Daniel Jackson visit a moon (it's NOT a planet!) to supervise a team of scientists are studying....something? It's not really clear but they do encounter electricity bugs which the scientists immediately put into captivity which is always a good idea, right? Dr. Bill Lee is introduced in this episode and this is one scientist Silvana and Tegan actually like. Unfortunately for the other scientist named Bill in this episode, there can only be one one Bill.  It's just the rules.  Cadet Hailey and Major Carter have opposing opinions about what's happening with the electricity bugs. And Jack has to make the call and Cadet Hailey is adament that she needs to know who was right, even at the very end of the episode. Unfortunately,  David Marquet's "Greatness" Video mentioned in this episode. Check out our website, socials, and tier rankings on our Linktree.

In a 10 minute extract from the full session, Dustin offers training inspired by L. David Marquet's Ladder of Leadership, a concept from his book Turn the Ship Around. Drawing from his experience transforming a struggling submarine into a top performer, Marquet's approach emphasizes empowering employees to make decisions within set parameters while maintaining overall responsibility for the organization's well-being. This approach embodies the growth mindset Civic is aiming to cultivate.

Re-releasing one of DAT's most popular episodes! Dr. Jesse Green is back on the podcast to share more real-life experiences of a dentist. In this episode, Dr. Green shares with Kiera how to move your practice from being profitable to scalable. He shares specific insight about: How to become a training institution How to best back away from the business And how to overcome the fear of giving over your practice It may be a hard pill to swallow, stepping back into a role where you're no longer the primary profit generator, but Dr. Green shares how other doctors of all shapes and mindsets have managed to do so. About Dr. Green: Author, speaker, and entrepreneur, Dr. Jesse Green is a leading dental business coach. He established Savvy Dentist to support dentists to develop financial intelligence, have more time and work less, create high performance teams, and master the art of patient flow. Episode resources: Connect with Dr. Jesse Green Listen to episode 414, How To Be a Savvy Dentist Reach out to Kiera Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:05.806) Hey everyone, welcome to the Dental & Team podcast. I'm your host, Keira Dunt, and I had this crazy idea that maybe I could combine a doctor and a team member's perspective, because let's face it, dentistry can be a challenging profession with those two perspectives. I've been a dental assistant, treatment coordinator, scheduler, filler, office manager, regional manager, practice owner, and I have a team of traveling consultants where we have traveled to over 165 different offices coaching teams. Yep, we don't just understand you, we are you.   Our mission is to positively impact the world of dental. And I believe that this podcast is the greatest way I can help elevate teams, grow VIP experiences, reduce stress, and create A -Teams. Welcome to the Dental A -Team Podcast.   The Dental A Team (00:52.866) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kira and you guys, I have a very special guest that I am excited to bring to the show today. I was on his podcast just recently and obviously we want to have him back on our podcast, share a wealth of knowledge and believe it or not, he is actually from Australia. So it is early tomorrow and his time. he said Australia just opened up. So I think his highlight of his day was being able to get a haircut. think all of us here in the States can remember that day.   but I'm so, so excited to welcome Dr. Jesse Green to the show. How are you today? I'm really well, Kira. Thank you so much for having me on the program. I'm really, really, really, really happy to be here to talk to you today. absolutely. I'm so glad. And your haircut does look good. I see you on zoom. It does look nice. It good. It felt fantastic. Honestly, as well as things you appreciate the little things in life and you think how good is a haircut? It's   It's like this luxury that we used to take for granted. Now it feels very luxurious. I absolutely, remember luckily I had just come back from Antarctica when the pandemic hit and I had, so coming back from Antarctica, I got my hair done. got my eyelashes done. got my nails done. Cause I had been gone for three weeks anyway. And so I felt very lucky, but Ooh, towards the end of that shutdown, I was like, man, I was having to learn how to cut my husband's hair again. man. Took me back to pharmacy school days.   I agree. I remember a meme and they said, next time there's a pandemic, can we say that barbers and beauticians and cosmetologists can be considered essential business? And it's got this guy with hair cleared out into his nose. I felt it was very fitting. So, hundred percent. So Jesse, I just wanted to kind of talk to us about how you even got to where you are. I know the topic today that we want to go into is how to earn more while working less. You also talked about how to have a very   a productive associate dentist. So you've got a wealth of knowledge, but just so our listeners know, kind of just give us a quick background and bio on how you even became known as the person who earn more and work less because I'm so excited to learn about that today too. thank you so much. So I'm a dentist by profession. And so like most of your listeners, I did the usual dental school thing, but prior to dental school, I had a business and I was always   The Dental A Team (03:13.74) really interested and engaged in business, loved it. Did the university thing like everyone else, kind of then found my way into clinical practice and really knuckled down and focused on that. And then I was a dentist in the Navy and I learned a lot about leadership and process and, and organizational structure. And then when I went into my own practice, I did traditional practice management kind of teaching. And while it was good, it was fine. We certainly had a business.   producing good money, but in actual fact, I was so tired, so burnt out, so stressed out. My kids were little. was doing dentistry during my work day. Then I'd come home, have dinner with the kids, and then I'd be trying to do payroll or other, you know the how it goes. You know the story, right? And I was, and I was tired and stressed and burnt out. So what I did is I then sold that business and I didn't quite figure out how to fix it until I started a different business, which was around.   I was building websites, running SEO, PPC campaigns. And then it was when I ran that business and I kind of got out of the dental head space and went, my God, I remember all these lessons that I had when I was a kid with my first business that I'd learned that I didn't ever apply to my dental practice. I had this massive, honestly, it was a face palm. I mean, you just go, I can't believe I did that. Jesse, what were you thinking? Clearly not. So then I started thinking about all of the traditional.   practice management techniques and how we could adapt some of those and replace some of those so that businesses can have a true business rather than self -employment. So that's kind of how it came about. I love that because you're right. And the way you just described dentistry is how dentist life is working with so many dentists. I think that that's the life of an entrepreneur as well. I mean, you see lots of different businesses yourself and I think it's just that like, just never feels like there's enough hours in the day, but like you said,   There's got to be a better way to do this. think of it constantly. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I see a lot of people who are way more successful, very, profitable and they don't work crazy hours. They have a true life. Like how do they do that? So I'm excited to have you just dive into that. And I'm excited to see where this podcast rifts and goes to. I also love that you are a dentist as   The Dental A Team (05:31.352) That's why I wanted you on this show. Like let's talk about real life experiences of a dentist and how to, like you said, earn more and work less. That's a mantra that I have. We're actually working on an office manager planner that's called do less, create more. because I think it's really that mentality. So Jesse, take it away. I just want to hear like, your knowledge, tell us how to earn more and work less. Like you figured this out. So share the secrets with us. I'm ready.   Well, thank you. Thank you for that, for that, yeah, free rain. I'm also going to tell you that I learned it the hard way. I learned it. I learned it through experience. learned it easy way. I'm going to learn from you. Well, that's what we want. Right. That's what we're going to give our listeners. But the reason I say that is because everything I've done, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, Kira. So I just want to start this conversation by saying, I'm not perfect. I didn't get this. wasn't, you   born with some sort of insider knowledge around this. had to learn this through trial and error and bumps and grazes and bruises. But think that's really important. I'm going to jump in right there because I think so often we sometimes hear people say, this is how I got there. And we think, well, they were just born that way, or it was just naturally given. And so I really love that. Like, Hey guys, with hard work, learning from great mentors like Jesse, you can be there too. And not limiting yourself is to me a huge, huge piece of what this is all about. So   Continue on. I'm cheering right alongside of you. Like, yes, go. You're not just this like dipped from, from heaven Hercules. man. If only, so here's what I learned. one of the things that I learned is we, we spend so much of our time doing clinical work and we do that because we want to make a dollar and we understand the necessity of making dollar, but it's also what I call a golden handcuffs. And at some point we need to.   lift our gaze from the patient who's in the dental chair in front of us and start surveying our surroundings. So typically there's a couple of different levels of practice that we see a profitable practice, scalable practice and a valuable practice. And so a profitable practice is that typical practice where the dentist is going to work, doing the dentistry, going home at night, doing the payroll sort of thing. And you can actually make quite good money out of that. mean, this is the trap is you get used to the money.   The Dental A Team (07:51.652) You get used to the toys, you get used to the lifestyle and you get on this treadmill and you keep thinking, my goodness, I've got all this stuff, but I don't have time for my kids. so working harder is not the answer. so let me just repeat that for all the dentists here who are really conscientious, who are normally the people that work hard, the good people that work hard. And we just want   not work quite so hard, but work a little differently. We want to shift our focus. And the way that we cross from a profitable business to a scalable business is by crossing what we call the leverage line. so the leverage line is at that point, you've got a practice owner who's no longer the primary revenue generator. You've created a team and this is your work, right? This is what you help a lot of people with creating what we call a self -managing team, a team of   that know what to do, they know how to do it. We've given them the resources to do their job really well. They know what success looks like. We've got some success metrics in place, but those people come internally motivated to do well. Okay. So we're not having to put the defibrillator on them every day to heart start them. They come with batteries included. And so when we've got a self -managing team and we've got our systems and processes, we're now starting to create some leverage.   How do we get to that point? How do we make that leap? And it is a bit of a leap. And because you guys are North American, I'll try and use a baseball metaphor to go from profitable business to scalable business. It's like going from first base in baseball to second base. can't get to second base by keeping one foot on first. There is a moment in time where you have to leave first base.   And you have to run towards second. And when you're in the middle of the two bases and you're not, you're not yet on second, but you've left first, it's uncomfortable. It's uncertain. And there's doubt. And so managing that emotional journey is really important because the natural tendency for us is to run back to what's comfortable rather than pushing forward. Now, the way we push forward is to understand that making money all day, every day.   The Dental A Team (10:09.217) is a great short -term fix, but it is also what's going to keep us stuck on first base. So we need to dedicate some of our time to building that team, to becoming really good at training people, to being really good at finding great talent, training great talent, bringing them on. And that means we need to take on a mindset of becoming almost a training institution so that we can take these wonderful people and get them up to speed so that they can join   The freeway, it's like an on -ramp onto the freeway, get them up to speed really, really well. When we do that, we build the resources for them to use. We now can start hiving off activities that we don't want to do. So that's where the delegation comes in. Now, of course, this is nothing new. This is quite rudimentary. It's quite basic, but what is the hard part is actually letting go. Kirit, let me ask you a question.   Of all the dentists you know, what proportion do you think tend to have perfectionistic tendencies? Oh, you know, every single one of them. Me included, me included. And that's what I did wrong in my first practice. That's what I did wrong. I had to learn and as I've gone through other businesses to learn that 80 % is okay. 80 % done by someone else is a hundred percent awesome. Yes.   Yes, I love that. Did you guys hear that? 80 % done is a hundred percent awesome. Yeah. So let's get our team members out there being prolific. They may not be perfect, but they'll be prolific. They'll get through a lot of work for you if we let them do it and we resist the urge to micromanage. So how do we get away from micromanaging? Now, one of my good friends and other dentists in the United States gave me a wonderful book called Turn the Ship Around.   And for your listeners there, I'd really encourage you to grab hold of it. The author is a wonderful guy, David Marquet. He's a US Navy submarine commander. And what he talks about is developing a leader -leader model. So rather than teaching people what to do or telling them what to do, we want to teach people how to think like us. Not just to do what we asked them to do or to be task -oriented, we want to develop their thinking. So when our team members come to us and say, yeah, Kira,   The Dental A Team (12:29.793) You know, this has happened. What should I do rather than because you've got the answers at your fingertips rather than saying, Hey Bob or Hey Mary or Hey Susie, this is what I think you should do and give them the answer. By doing that, we're actually training them to come to us all the time. So we want to be able to go with them and say, what do you think we could do? What else could we do? What risks do you see with that type of action? What do you think I'm thinking about and start that conversation so they can understand your thought process?   Now, again, it sounds really simple and it's simple, but not easy. Simple, but not easy. So that, would be a starting point there. Now I'm happy for you to guide me, direct me wherever you want me to go with this conversation. Okay. Number one, I love it because we just talked about number one is I think, I think for me it's accepting that I'm going to have to leap and go into that scary zone. Like you said, it is very easy. Like I think it's that, that control, that safety net   false security of, know that if I work here though, Jesse, I know I can make money. know I can sustain my lifestyle. I know that I can continue to live this way. However, I think it gets to a spot where when does that hamster will become no more? When do you want to say like, I don't want to do this anymore. I feel like until you get to that breaking point where you say enough's enough, you won't want to jump from first base to second base. you use that really great analogy.   But I think when you are there and I know I'm there, I say it all the time, I'm like, you know, there's gotta be a better way to do this. And I have the confidence in me. I've trained myself that, hey, Kira, you know that if it fails, guess what? Worst case scenarios, you're just gonna go back and do it all over again. Like I know I can grow a business. I know I can make it profitable. So like that's already a given and it doesn't matter recession, no recession, pandemic, whatever it is, I believe that people who can build businesses can do it again and again and again.   and so my thought is, so for me, it's a challenge and excitement of like, okay, fantastic. Like you said, this is a profitable business and now we're going into a scalable business. So that leap is, I really love that you talked about having that team do it for you. And I know I get guilty of this often today. I was about to answer an email and I was like, this is literally does not need my answer. I don't need to approve this. can, like, does it really matter? The answer is no. So I just wrote back and said, you have full control on this. I know you know it   The Dental A Team (14:55.363) Just, just take care of it. know you know what to do and you're going to do the best thing. I've trained them. I've trained them. Like you said, it's a training thing. I also loved a lot of the questions you mentioned of asking them to think like leaders and owners versus just telling them because that's more of a long -term game versus a short -term just constantly feeding them. So then I'm curious, like, okay, great. We've got an awesome team in play, but I feel like to really know that you've got this awesome team and play, you do have to make that jump to see does this team actually know how to execute? Because if you're always   They don't have to execute. that's where, that's where I actually go on vacation to see if they sink or swim. Like, good luck. Well, that's exactly, that's exactly the right. he's, that's a really good point you're bringing up and thank you for bringing up because you've actually, answered the question and one of my clients, is a lovely, lovely guy and, his name is Barry and Barry in our community takes more holidays than anyone I know. And he is a really good business owner.   And the way he started stress testing his system, stress testing his team was exactly that. He'd take a holiday. He had take note of what didn't work when he got back and he'd just make some notes and go, Hmm, I've got to fix that. Now I'd like to just leave your listeners with a thought process. Every headache, bottleneck, pain in the neck comes back to a deficiency of assets. So what do mean by   Specifically, there's lots of different types of assets, but in a dental practice, there's a couple of broad categories. There's, you know, there's the goodwill of the business, you know, the patient base, there's the team as an asset, there's the cash, there's the physical infrastructure. But what I'm referring to here specifically are the intellectual property assets. What are the systems, processes, checklists, cheat sheets, whatever else you need to have in place. So when it comes back to these bottlenecks or things that go wrong, we go, hmm.   What asset do we need to create in our business so that if I teach someone how to use that and they've now got the resource to do it and they've got the confidence to do it. If I go away next time, that thing should not break again. And so it's that constant iterative process. to take that metaphor or to give you another case study around that, one of my clients.   The Dental A Team (17:15.311) Uh, really lovely lady. Um, when she was working with us, she was taking home about $350 ,000 a year out of her practice. Yeah. Which is okay. She was working four days a week, about 46 weeks of the year. So it's 184 days. And what we did with her is we did exactly the process I've just shared with your listeners already. And she was able to take her take home money from 350 ,000 to about 1 .1 million and   a day and a quarter a week. So she went from four days a week to a day and a quarter. It wasn't really a day and a quarter week. was 65 days a year, but 65 divided by 52 is a day and a quarter on average. here's the thing. That was great. She loved it. And that's a wonderful headline number to talk about. it, and it makes me sound like an amazing coach. I'm not, she was an amazing client, but here's what I want to say. We made a mistake. This is, this is really important. It sounds   better than it is. The mistake was that in that time out, she went traveling around the world. This is pre -COVID. She went traveling around the world. And what happened is some of those systems, some of that team structure started to erode and to collapse. Yep. And what happened, so here's the thing, is when you get into that scalable space, that when you're starting to create that time, freedom and flexibility, you're still there as the leader.   You're still there setting the vision, the direction, the concept of just being absent. I don't think is entirely sustainable. I don't think you can be on the beach drinking Pina coladas 365 days a year. Maybe, maybe you can, but what we had to do for this client is we had to reinstall a leadership team. So this is the next thing is now we have to build a more robust structure for her. And now.   She still works less than 60 days a year. She's making more money than she was before, but now she's not the only leader in the practice. She's developed a leadership team as well. So I think, yeah, it sounded great upfront and it was great upfront, but she pulled out of the business too soon before she was replacing herself as a leader. And I think even with that team, she's still going to be there to walk the corridors, to set the vision,   The Dental A Team (19:33.227) Yeah. Be the culture champion to do all those sorts of things. Absolutely. And I love that you brought that up because I think so often there's kind of this mindset of if I do it right, I don't have to be at my job and it will be, I think my favorite phrases, it will, what do they say? It will just run on autopilot. That's the phrase that I hear often like, Kira, I just want my practice to run on autopilot. But I love that you point out as leaders, as CEOs, your job is to set the vision. Your job is, I like the phrase you use of culture champion.   really set those that that is your job to do and instill that it's there and to have a leadership team that can continue to drive forward. But my question is to you though, Jesse is what did she do to increase her income that much? She's working less. What were some of the things that she was able to do? Is that having, like you said, a rock star associate producer? Because a lot of times bringing in associates, people are scared they're going to make less. So can you give any insight of how was she able to have more take home pay working less hours? Because I think people kind of get funny in there and   feel that if they work less hours, their income will drop as well, which clearly you've proven. Don't leave your job. You still need to do your job of being there, making sure you're having those people in play. But what were some of the things she was able to do to increase that take -home pay for herself while working substantially less hours? Yeah. So it's a great question. And I also point out this was a two and a half year process as well. again,   I want to make sure we set the expectations of your listeners. is not a good thing. can't just do this tomorrow. I know it's not a magic button. There's no silver bullet. I'm sorry to be the one to, tell you that Santa's not real, but there's no magic bullet. so I feel like now, now I'm going to be unpopular. I hope none of the kids are listening. But look, here's what happened. You're absolutely right. She had very productive associates and what we did over that period of time.   is we were able to help those associates become more more productive. And there was three key things that those associates or three key skills that those associates needed to master. The first one was that they needed to master the ability to build their own appointment book. They need to build a following. So they needed to know a lot about internal marketing, making sure their patients were happy to give them a great clinical experience, clearly to make sure they get a great customer care experience.   The Dental A Team (21:54.541) But from the dentist's point of view to keep rebooking those patients to make sure they're coming back for their scheduled maintenance, we call it a recall system here. I'm not sure what the phrase would be. Same, same. So that makes sure they're coming back for their recall appointments, all of those sorts of things to make sure they're building value for those appointments so that the patients understand why they're coming back, why that treatment is important. The second skill they needed to learn was the ability to master case presentation.   Right? They needed to be able to offer treatment. Firstly, I beg your pardon, they needed to be able to comprehensively diagnose, you know, rather than patch and plug dentistry, they wanted to take a holistic view of the patient's mouth to recommend appropriate clinical care, the same sort of care that offer their mother, and then to be able to present that in a way such that it was accepted. So they needed to learn those skills. And the third skill that they needed to learn.   was the ability to deliver high quality work in an efficient manner. And that comes back to workflow, it comes back to utilizing your auxiliary staff, your dental assistants, other people, just the usual sorts of things about four handed dentistry, rubber dam techniques, all those sorts of clinical things. And to be able to do predictable, high quality dentistry efficiently. And that was the skills.   And the big mindset that united all of those three points, the mindset that those associates adopted was one of being an intrapreneur. So I like that phrase. Yeah. So they, they viewed themselves as their own unit within the business. know, they took responsibility for themselves. They took responsibility for their business. They took responsibility for their productivity.   they took responsibility for the clinical care. And that was a culture shift. It was a mindset piece. And again, that took a little bit of time. And so that was a key thing. Now, in addition to the associate dentists, I don't know exactly how this translates to the United States, but in Australia, we have oral health therapists and they're, they don't have a full dental degree, but they can do quite a lot of restorative dentistry. So what we did in that process,   The Dental A Team (24:09.419) is we used everyone's skillset to the maximum that we could. So we built the team up and we pushed the work down. So we trained the dentist, we trained the oral health therapist, we delegated everything that we could to the oral health therapist. So the dentist's work or the dentist's time was used for its highest and best use. And then that meant that the principal dentist was delegating to the associate dentist as well. So her time was used for his highest and best use.   And so it was just this process of training people, delegating, training people, delegating. And so that cycle continued. I really liked that you, just said that because I think so many, I'm curious, like you might have a, an answer to this because as you said that training up an associate dentist to take over your schedule, sometimes it was very scary, Jesse. some doctors feel like that's their identity.   that if an associate dentist takes over my book of business, I even have a practice anymore? And for your oral health therapists or specialists, we call those like EFTAs. So experienced, expanded function dental assistants that can literally do that. But I have quite a few offices that have these EFTA dental assistants and the dentist will not leave the room. They will do the filling even though they don't have to do the filling because now they have somebody that can do it for them. They could be seeing more patients.   People ask me often how I was able to 365 ,000 a month in a five -op practice. Well, we literally had three columns of doctor production and you better believe I had big production next to each other and we would prep, prep, and then we had like an implant that an assistant couldn't help us with. And then our assistants were working while our dentist was over doing high, high level implant sedation cases. And per hour we were cranking.   but we were very, very, very talented at what we did. We had lots of trainings with our assistants to make sure they were doing just as good, if not better clinical work. how do you, Jessie, what do you say to these people who hear you and they're like, that's a really great idea, but I like to do the fillings or I am scared that if I pass it to my associate, my associate is not as good as me. so, or I feel like it's ego. feel like ego just runs it so much   The Dental A Team (26:23.725) So many people stay in this loop for a long time because they aren't willing to train. So do you have any tips of thoughts for that? Maybe you experienced that, maybe this dentist experienced that because I don't think it's, I don't think the ego is bad. think the ego is a natural part of life. I also think being afraid to give up your practice that you've grown to someone else is a very normal feeling. But do you have any thoughts of how people can overcome that or how you've helped people overcome that fear? Are you guys sick of trying to figure it out on your   I know I am. When I'm trying to run a business, sometimes I just think like, there's got to be a better way to do this. And so for me, my answer has been to find someone who's done it and does it really, really, really well. Like I'm talking the best of the best of the best. I want someone who's been in my shoes, somebody who understands what I'm going through. When I was looking for the consulting business, I found a coach who literally has run a consulting business. Well, that seems like the perfect fit. So you guys right now,   We have a few spaces open in our platinum consulting that is in the consulting where we actually come to your practice. We help you get systems implemented. We don't just tell you what systems implement. We actually implement them with you and for you guys. It is one of the best investments I've ever made is to hire a coach who understands the business I'm in, who's lived it, who's done it. And that's what we in the dental team do. We literally physically fly to   So if you're sick of trying to figure it out on your own, if you just want somebody who understands you, join our platinum. I'd love to have you. I'd love to have our consulting team come out and see you, be in your office, be with your team and truly help you get onto the easy path of dentistry. It doesn't have to be hard. So join us in the platinum. We'd love to have you.   Yeah, sure. And it's a great question. It's probably the question that needs to be answered, isn't it? It's the thing like, yeah, Jesse, I get it intellectually. makes sense. I, you know, I see it all happening, but how do I do it? Right. So I, yeah, this is the emotional journey. This is the emotional journey. And this is why I mean managing the emotional journey is as important as managing the intellectual or the numbers journey around it. So you're absolutely correct. So,   The Dental A Team (28:39.947) I struggled with this as well. This was part of why my first practice, you know, I didn't scale it because I just had all this stuff. A couple of things I'll share with you, in no particular order. I'll drop out a few things and hopefully, God willing, I'll be able to tie these into a nice neat bow at the end of it. Perfect. So I remember a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Necker Island, Richard Branson's Island   We spent some time with Richard Branson and he was talking about how he runs all these businesses. And he made a comment, which I've read in one of his books as well. And that was about training. know, people often worry about, you know, if I train people up and they leave, you know, aren't I just training the competition, so to speak. And his point was, well, what if you don't train them and they stay? Great question. I like the flip of the mindset.   And I went, wow. So for me, that was a light bulb moment to really see my business as a training institution. Now, what we needed to do with the transition of patients from the principal to the associate, there's a couple of things around this. we have a process, which we call pass the baton and patient transfers. And essentially it's about handing over the patient and being for the associate to be able to leverage the relationship.   that the principal has with them. And I'll explain that in a moment. But if the principal is really worried, maybe just start handing over a few things. Maybe hand over one filling at a time. It doesn't have to be, I'm going to send my entire patient base to my associate in one fell swoop. Maybe let's get used to just handing off one particular procedure. Maybe it's a class one occlusal composite resin.   Maybe it's endodontic treatment. Maybe it's whatever it is that you don't love to do or in your heart of hearts, you know, it's not your strong suit because we all have clinical areas that we know we're not great at or not as strong as other areas. So let's think if you're worried, let's do a dip in the water, know, dip our toe in the water and see how we go. But the way to do that is really about saying, know, Kyra, there's this restoration that we need to do on the lower right -hand   The Dental A Team (30:58.823) And, you know, this is obviously not going to get any smaller. it's going to get bigger if we don't tackle it. And so, I really would like to see this tooth treated as a matter of priority. Now, the challenge I've got is that my diary, is full for the next couple of weeks or months, whatever it is. And I don't really want to wait that length of time to get onto this feeling. I think we need to do that sooner. What I'd really love to do is to book you in with my associate, Peter. Peter's a fantastic dentist. does this all day, every day. And in   Peter's the person I see for my own dentistry. What if we were to get this filling done with Peter and then we can pick up the rest of the treatment plan as we move forward from there. So even if it's just handing off a procedure here or there, just to get things moving, just to build that confidence and then over time we can start transferring patients more fully. And we can even get, if you want to, you can get into a shared care model. I've got a couple of clients that do shared care. So   The patient will come in, they'll have the restorative dentists doing the bread and butter restorative dentistry. We'll have our crown and bridge expert, which is the principal, doing the crown and bridge and the high production work. We'll have our therapist or hygienist doing the hygiene or whatever it is. So again, we can introduce that to new patients and say, here at our practice, we adopt a shared care model. And what that means is that every step of the journey, you are getting our very best team member for this particular part of the treatment plan.   I'm going to coordinate that treatment plan for you, but I'd like to introduce you to my colleagues as we go through this so that you can get the very best set of hands working on you as we go through this treatment plan. So that's another way of doing it as well. really love that, Jessie, because I think you brought up quite a few things that I would like to highlight. And number one is you edify every person who's going to be taking the treatment. And I can tell genuinely, you do think that they are really fantastic. You've done a great job training them.   So you have full confidence. And as a patient hearing that from my dentist that I love, and I mean, instantly I had this interesting thought of when we go to the hospital, we don't expect one doctor to take care of our entire body. have the endocrinologist, we have the heart and vascular, we have the neurosurgeon. So why do we expect everything to be the exact same in our mouth with just a dentist? And so I think like that was a mind shift I have never thought of. so I appreciate you saying that, helping me have a light bulb moment.   The Dental A Team (33:19.603) and I really love that you just edified every single person, like they're going to be fantastic. And you instilled your confidence in that other person. I am going to ask, as we wrap up, how do you, you specifically decide that you are ready to start having less production in your schedule? Because the fear I know a lot of dentists have, and I don't know this, I'm not a dentist. So it's that fear of, okay, Jesse, I heard you. I've trained my team up. I've got a great leadership team. I've heard.   And don't worry, we'll do another podcast guys. Jesse and I will get on another one. So you guys were learning from profitable to scalable. And then what was your last tier? What's the last year? Valuable. Valuable. Scalable to valuable. So we got to still learn how to get valuable. But reality is, okay, I've learned that I'm profitable. Now I'm going to go to scalable, but I'm real scared to have this associate and to start leveraging because I'm terrified that my paycheck is going to go down. So how do I   That that's not going to happen. How do you like make that leap? Because I think that that's what holds people in this circle forever. They're like, I'm fine. I'll just have one practice. I'm literally speaking to a dentist right now. I know he listens to this podcast. So I'm hoping that we can answer this. A couple of them, they're like, I don't want an associate. I don't want to give this over because I won't have anything to do. My paycheck will go down. So what do you say to them? How did you do that for you? So it's a really good, great question. And again, it's a really important question to answer. The key is this is it's   process of gradual reduction. not again, my client didn't go from 184 days to 65 days in one step. What we did is we looked at, if I stop working one day a week or half a day a week, how much am I producing in that half day, one day, whatever it is. For easy mathematics, let's just say I produce $5 ,000 a day. Ease of maths. Maybe it's more, maybe it's less, it doesn't really matter.   Let's just say, so if I give up a day of dentistry, I want to net $5 ,000 from my associate. Now, if we've trained our associates and they're productive, that's great. That's a big help. So A, we've got to train them to be productive first. But what I'd be saying is what do I need to, you know, what do I pay my associate? Now in Australia, our associates are often paid a commission of billings. that how works for you well? Yeah. So let's just say hypothetically,   The Dental A Team (35:42.594) 40%. So a dentist gets 40%. So we would get 3000 of a $5 ,000 associate day. That would mean if I was going to give up $5 ,000 of my own production, I would need net $5 ,000 back from the associate to be in the same financial position. And so then I work at how many associate days do I need to replace my one day with?   Okay, so in this example, it's roughly one and three quarter days of associate time. By the time I pay the associate their commission, that I would now be back to where I was previously. My paycheck remains the same. In fact, it's probably a little bit higher because I'm not paying for a dental assistant twice. I'm paying for it once with the associate. So all of those things would work out. Now,   This is a big question with a long answer that I'm trying to provide concisely. We would run some financial modeling on that and we would go, okay, what's my billing? What's my commission rates for the associates? What are they producing right now? How can we step them up? How can we help them produce more so that we're getting closer to a one -to -one trade? That's really what we're trying to get to.   I feel like that's a little bit of a messy explanation. I hope it landed. hope it makes sense. pretty clear because it just as simple math that is math of how much do I need my associate to work to replace my income? How do I get them there? How do I make them more productive? So that way at the end of the day, associates happy, they're doing super great. They're happy because we've got a very productive schedule for them. So they're killing it. And it's also replacing the income that I would quote unquote be losing. now I'm not losing.   I've actually created an engine that generates income when I'm not working, which then I'm guessing leads you into your valuable level. Yes. Is where that would go. So a hundred percent. just really quickly on that, that then ties into other conversations around capacity. It ties into conversations around patient flow. It ties into all of those other things that come off the back of that. For sure. Absolutely.   The Dental A Team (37:57.491) That's just like a whole nother can of worms. then it's like, well, great. That is a whole can of worms. can say that next time. know my associate, but I don't have space to put this associate. So now I've got to do a build out and now I've got to get them to produce even more because I got to pay for the build out to get them to produce enough. So it just feels like too hard. But like you said, financial modeling, I think is a great idea because when you can see it in writing, you start doing small chunks at it and you'll see that it will pay for itself. Like one operatory usually is paid for within one to two months of production maximum.   It doesn't take that long to pay off that operatory with production running through it. Then they're producing while you're producing. So you're actually not losing anything. And then they're making money when you're not on that day and they've already covered themselves and the practice can still continue on. there's, to me, I'm with you, Jessie. I see it. I've seen it done so many times, but also you and I are on the other side of this business model because we've seen it done so many times that we know it works. So then how does it kick off into valuable? I get a quick wrap up.   which I don't think is fair for you. So we'll definitely like do another one and talk more about this, but I love this idea of how you can earn more without work with working less. So keep, keep it going. I'm excited. I can get out on business all day long. So, well, I think we could do both do that. So I love this conversation. So do you remember we spoke about going from a profitable scale? All we needed to cross the leverage line to go from scalable to valuable. need to cross the enterprise line. So it's understanding what the drivers of enterprise value are.   And so there's a couple of things I just want to share with you around how I built that model. That model used to be called profitable, scalable, sellable. And I changed it because I'd have so many conversations with dentists where they'd be saying, you know, I don't really want to sell my practice. You know, I get it, but you could, and you could do it easily and for a lot of money. And so I changed the language from sellable to valuable because what we're creating there is an asset. Right. And   In profitable, you've created a job. In scalable, you've created a business. In valuable, you've created an asset. So this is the key transition and the mindset shifts as well. So you go from being self -employed in profitable to being a business owner in scalable to being an investor in valuable. That's the different mindset that we bring to this.   The Dental A Team (40:23.975) When we think about the enterprise value line, really what we're trying to do in all of this, the big drivers of enterprise value are really about risk management and how do we reduce risk and then how do we drive earnings. So if we look at the value, again, I know anyone listening to this is an expert in valuation, probably cringe when I say this, but value is often described as the repeatable sustainable earnings times a multiple.   So we want to drive the earnings, which we've spoken about briefly already, and we want to be able to have a higher multiple. And what determines that multiple a lot is risk. So how do we de -risk the practice? So if I'm going to sell that practice, how could the next person come in and reproduce my results consistently from day one? And that comes back to identifying risk. And the biggest risk, of course, is key person risk. Right.   So we want to be able to not just replace the principal dentist to create the leverage that we spoke about at Scalable, but we want to identify the other key people in our team. We want to make sure that we have built training pathways into the practice for all the roles, not just for the associate dentist, but for your dental assistants, for your therapists or hygienists, for your expanded function dental assistants, for your receptionists, for your practice managers, all of those people. So we want to be able to...   replace people. I'm not trying to diminish people as I say that we want to be able to replace people if someone leaves the team quickly, well and reliably. Yep. So it's about understanding that. again, the other thing that I spoke about, repeatable sustainable earnings. If you've ever looked at subscription models, you and I probably live in this world a   I don't know about your business, we run a subscription based business and subscription based businesses that recurring revenue is more valuable because it's more predictable. Now in dentistry, there's a lot of talk about, do I have a subscription model and membership model? And that you could definitely do that. That's fine. But interestingly, we have the recall system, like din as a subscription model. So I was thinking, was like, it's not membership guys. It's your patients are actually a membership program.   The Dental A Team (42:50.611) Like because it comes every six months and that's what insurance is set up. That is literally a subscription model. That's genius. I had never thought of it that way. It's right there for you, right? So we want to make sure that we are really dialing in that repeat business. We want to make sure that we have predictable income and we can project with confidence that, you know, you were doing $360 ,000 a month, I think you said. And so we want to be able to know that next month I'm going to do $360 ,000 as well.   And the month after that, and the month after that, what we don't want is a roller coaster of revenue. We want to see stability of earnings growth. So stability of earnings growth is a metric that Warren Buffett uses to value companies. And so we want to see stability of earnings growth while we're de -risking the business. So I'm sorry that I've kind of a whole lot of stuff in there. Don't apologize because this is actually one of the number one reasons I love to podcast is because I get to talk to really cool people like yourself.   I get a geek out on dentistry. got a geek out on business. The two things I actually love to talk about. And for me, it was fun because these are things that I think about independently, but I don't have a lot of people to talk to about this because I'm supposed to coach it to a lot of people. I'm sure you feel similarly. We have a lot of clients who are coaching this, but to have somebody that I can talk to about these things, geek out with you on it. And I love that you talked about this valuable asset because I love to not think of always having this   because I was actually just talking with another financial investor advisor, dentist advisors, Ryan and I had this conversation the other day and he was talking about how sometimes once our business becomes this profitable asset, sometimes it actually makes more sense to keep it versus sell it because you're actually more profitable long -term because you've created this money -making machine. You're giving amazing value. You're providing incredible jobs.   that it actually is way more profitable than selling it off for millions. And let's be real, most of the people who build these businesses are highly driven entrepreneurs. So give yourself six months and you'll be building another business. why not keep the one that's super profitable, keep that thing churning and use it for other ideas. So I love that you talked about it as an asset. I just hope that the people listening today, I did a podcast with an author, his name's Jeffrey Shaw. He did the self -employed life, very, very talented author.   The Dental A Team (45:11.387) And I remember he and I talked about what makes really successful business owners. And we think that the key tipping point is business intrigue. Those who are intrigued by business, these conversations you and I are having, Jesse, because these are the things that spur the innovation, that spur the hard work of building that training facility, that gets you to dig deep and build a team of leaders. So that way you can pivot from base to base, like we just discussed. So go from profitable, like you said, and I love the imagery of like you're self -employed. Then you become a business owner.   And then what did you call it? Remind me. Investor. An investor. Like even just those mindsets are such different mindsets of how you view your business and where you're providing it. So Jesse, I loved it. I thought it was one of my favorite podcasts actually, and I hope all the listeners did. So Jesse, know you obviously work with dentists. You are a dentist. If people want more, I know you've got your podcast as well. just kind of share how people can get more Jesse Brown in their life like I need in my life. Sure. Well, you can find me at SavvyDentist .com.   the podcast is there. Come and have a listen. This is the sort of stuff we talk about and, Kira and I come and listen to the conversation Kira and I had on my podcast, which was about recruitment and ice cream. It's really, it's a great episode that Kira shared with our audience. So, that was great, but yeah, head across to savvydentist .com or join us on the, in the Facebook group, savvy dentist Facebook group. And we'd love to see you there. So yeah, you just, it's brilliant. Brilliant. I love it so much, Jesse.   Guys, check it out. Jesse, thank you for your time. Thank you for, I mean, sharing your nice haircut with me too. It was so fun to sit here and just feel like we were hanging out together. when Australia opens up to the rest of the world, you'll be one of my first people I want to come see. So super great to have you. So thank you again for being here today. thank you so much for having me. And we can't wait to see you down under. It would be great to have you here and I'd love to catch up and have a beer. Absolutely. All right, you guys, thank you all for listening and I'll catch you next time on the Dental Elite Team podcast.   The Dental A Team (47:06.003) That wraps it up for another episode of the Dental A Team Podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next  

What does it truly mean to embody courage when driving organizational change? In this episode of the Agile Uprising podcast, host Andy Cleff delves into the virtue of courage and its critical role in enabling meaningful change within organizations. Inspired by recent discussions on the Andy explores courage from a secular perspective, emphasizing its components: honesty, perseverance, vitality, and bravery. He shares insights from experts and offers practical advice for building courage muscles through small, consistent reps. Listeners are encouraged to reflect on courageous individuals they admire and to foster a culture of bravery and honesty in their lives and on their teams. Join Andy as he unpacks how courage can transform organizations and help them thrive amidst constant change. Show Notes & Links More on Brendan, someone I admire who has demonstrated profound courage over time: More on “Organizational Silence” Podcast on Organizational Debt All kinds of virtues: More on fear: The “Fear and Vulnerability” Retrospective: Embrace Dissent with David Marquet: and --- About the Agile Uprising If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a review, a rating, or leave comments on iTunes, Stitcher or your podcasting platform of choice. It really helps others find us.  Much thanks to the artist  from  who provided us our outro music free-of-charge!  If you like what you heard,     to find more music you might enjoy! If you'd like to join the discussion and share your stories,  please jump into the fray at our  We at the Agile Uprising are committed to being totally free.  However, if you'd like to contribute and help us defray hosting and production costs we do have a .  Who knows, you might even get some surprises in the mail!  

“If you aren't clear on what your values are and the way that you think about answering questions or making decisions, that doesn't empower people.” In this episode, Adam talks to Andrew Hall, co-founder of No Story Lost, a company that turns people's life stories into personalized coffee-table books. The two discuss Andrew's professional history as business-consultant-turned-entrepeneur to make the world a better place, the difference between academic lessons versus actual lessons learned when launching a startup, and the power of flow, empowerment, and decentralized decision-making. Like what you hear? Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn. Explore SAFe courses here. Check out the books mentioned in the podcast: Anything You Want by Derek Sivers and Turn the Ship by David Marquet.

In today's episode of the Better Leadership Team Show, I welcome David Marquet. He is a former US submarine force commander who transformed the USS Santa Fe from worst to first by empowering his crew. Marquet's revolutionary leadership approach, which treats crew members as leaders rather than followers, led to the highest retention and operational standing in the Navy. Marquet shares insights on the importance of language in fostering a culture of empowerment and ownership within teams. This conversation highlights how simple shifts in language, such as using 'we' instead of 'they,' and asking neutral questions, can transform organizations across various industries. Whether you're managing a hotel or running a nuclear power plant, these principles can be applied in any leadership role. Tune in to uncover the key principles behind turning followers into leaders and feel included in this universal approach.https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Ship-Around-Turning-Followers/dp/1591846404https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudgeshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjAm6F3uRc8 Thanks for listening! Connect with us at mike-goldman.com/blog and on Instagram@mikegoldmancoach and on YouTube @Mikegoldmancoach

Jeff Wetzler: Ask Jeff Wetzler is co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized innovation organization, and an expert in learning and human potential. His experience spans 25+ years in business and education, as a management consultant to top corporations, a learning facilitator for leaders, and as Chief Learning Officer at Teach For America. He is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and is an Edmund Hillary Fellow. Jeff is the author of Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs in Leadership and Life*. Leaders are not the only people who need to have difficult conversations in the workplace. Yet, leaders set the tone for how much people are willing and able to talk about hard things. In this episode, Jeff and I discuss how leaders can make it easier for those important conversations to happen. Key Points In one study of managers, most people admitted to remaining silent with their bosses and nearly 75% said colleagues also felt uncomfortable speaking up. Meet people on their own turf. Others are more likely to speak up if they are in a setting that's more comfortable for them. Leaders should consider shifting timing and/or medium to one that's of the preference for the person who doesn't have power. Explain why you're asking about a topic and your intention for a conversation at the start. Providing context prevents people from having to guess at your agenda. Set a mutual agenda for a conversation by asking a question like, “In addition to this, what else should be part of our conversation today?” Establish a tone for open communicating by radiating resilience. Words like these might help: “If I were in your shoes, I might be feeling frustrated or even resentful. If that's how you're feeling, I would understand completely. Please don't hold back.” Resources Mentioned Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs in Leadership and Life* by Jeff Wetzler Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes How to Ask Better Questions, with David Marquet (episode 454) The Way Out of Major Conflict, with Amanda Ripley (episode 529) How to Grow From Your Errors, with Amy Edmondson (episode 663) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

"Episode 16: Transforming Leadership Through Language - A Conversation with David Marquet" Description: Welcome to Episode 16 of "Clean At Work," where we are honoured to host David Marquet, an esteemed figure in leadership and organizational transformation. David, a former submarine commander and the author of "Turn the Ship Around" and "Leadership Is Language," shares his profound insights on the impact of language in leadership and decision-making. In this enlightening episode, David delves into the concepts of 'red work' and 'blue work' from his latest book, explaining how these frameworks can revolutionize leadership and organizational dynamics. He shares anecdotes from his time commanding the USS Santa Fe, illustrating how shifting language structures on the submarine led to remarkable outcomes. David also touches on his accidental discovery of clean language during his research and how it aligns with his leadership philosophy. He emphasizes the importance of moving away from coercive language patterns and adopting a more inclusive and exploratory approach to communication. Listeners will gain valuable perspectives on the subtle power of language in shaping decision-making processes and fostering a culture of collaboration and empowerment. David offers practical advice on avoiding binary questions, embracing probabilistic thinking, and fostering a safe environment for sharing ideas within an organization. Join us for this captivating discussion with David Marquet and discover how you can implement nuanced language strategies to enhance leadership effectiveness and drive positive change in your organization. About the Speaker David Marquet  Student of leadership and organizational design, former nuclear submarine commander, and named one of the Top 100 Leadership Speakers by Inc. Magazine. David is the Author of the Amazon #1 Best Seller: Turn the Ship Around!, and The Turn the Ship Around Workbook.  David's latest book, Leadership is Language, is a Wall Street Journal Bestseller and Financial Times Book of the Month selection. David imagines a workplace where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity, a place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work–a place where everyone is a leader. links: Here's the new playbook for leaders, Leadership is Language. [US] https://bookshop.org/p/books/leadership-is-language-the-hidden-power-of-what-you-say-and-what-you-don-t-l-david-marquet/12084546?ean=9780735217539 A free asset for you and your team are our leadership nudges. Marquet simplifies the concepts and mechanisms from the books into 1-minute bite-sized pieces on our YouTube channel because the reminders help people. It's called "Leadership Nudges" and we invite you and your team to subscribe. http://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges About the Hosts John Barratt (https://www.agileaffinity.com/) is passionate about empowering individuals, teams, and organisations to reach their full potential. Utilising a blend of agile techniques infused with the agile mindset, he is dedicated to helping organisations streamline, self-organise, and adapt to today's dynamic business environment. John's approach is deeply influenced by the systemic modelling skills he acquired from Caitlin Walker, which he continuously refines through ongoing training. His work primarily focuses on guiding organisations through the process of descaling and fostering a culture of self-organisation. Learn more about John's work at Agile Affinity. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarratt1/ Sarah Baca (http://www.nerdyknights.com/) is a coach, therapist, facilitator, and teacher who has a passion for using clean language to help others discover what makes them feel vibrantly alive. She has been working with organisations as an agile coach for over a decade, specialising in enterprise and leadership coaching.  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahjbaca/

Bio   Victor is a Lean/AGILE Strategy and Transformation Consultant, helping organisations in emergent environments navigate the path to a successful future via "Agile Ways Of Working". This usually involves developing and implementing Lean/Agile Strategies for these organisations, coaching & mentoring Senior Leaders, Managers and Teams in attaining the Agile Mindset that allows them to achieve high performance. Experiencing this evolutionary journey with clients from traditional ways of working to successfully achieving full Agility is his career passion. With a career path spanning over 30 years, starting as an accountant and Business Analyst, Scrum Master to being an Agile Coach today. His best skill amongst many is as a motivator and his work ethic is all around making work fun. Other passion outside work include helping Africa as a whole achieve Agility – Victor is the creator of the A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S Agile Culture Model and also an amateur chef, gastronome and suffering Chelsea FC fan. Victor lives in England with his family, 3 dogs and 12 fish. Interview Highlights 01:40 & 08:00 Childhood bereavement 04:00 The importance of adapting 09:45 A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S model 14:50 Using local language 20:00 WakandAGILITY 22:25 Sustainable transformation 29:00 Transformation buzzword 32:15 The importance of timing   Social Media   ·         LinkedIn: Victor NWADU | LinkedIn ·         Email: victor@wakandagility.com ·         Medium: Victor Nwadu – Medium ·         Twitter: @wakandagility   Books & Resources ·         The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement: Goldratt, Eliyahu M ·         Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet: Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders L. David Marquet ·         The Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations: James Surowiecki, Erik Singer ·         WakandAGILITY.com: Enabling Agility for Africa: Agile Training, Support and Networking | Wakandagility ·         The A.P.I.A.M. – R.A.T.S. MODEL | LinkedIn Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku So I have with me here Victor Nwadu, who is an agility strategist, Agile coach, everything-in-between, maestro. Victor, it's an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you so much. Victor Nwadu Thank you, Ula, thank you for having me. Thank you. Ula Ojiaku So let, just tell us, Victor, about your background. What are the things that you've experienced, that have shaped you into who you are today and how you've ended up to where you are professionally? Victor Nwadu I mean, just cutting to the flow, I'm from Nigeria. I'm also, like all Nigerians, educated in Nigeria and then for some, you know, reason found myself here in the UK. If I wanted to pick on anything that has, you know, brought me to where I am and what has driven me to who I am today, I think it's just, it's my childhood, right. I was born to working class parents that, you know, Catholic people that worked hard for everything they've got. And as a Nigerian, you are told, it's instilled in you from a very young age, what the benefit of hard work is. Unfortunately, I was traumatised at the age of 13 by the death of my mum. So, and yeah, left with five siblings and my dad was broken by the course of events, but, you know, at that young age getting to where I am, having to, you know, do what I had to do to get to school and all that and still have these five siblings with me as well. Ula Ojiaku Because you're the first. Victor Nwadu Yes, I'm the first. You know how it is, especially when you're Igbo, right, you're expected to be strong and do it. Ula Ojiaku Di-Okpara (First Born) Victor Nwadu Di-Okpara, you say, that kind of thing, you know, so, yeah. But thank God for today and I find myself here today talking to powerful people like yourself. And I mean, I think that that has made me stronger, and I miss my mum terribly, but if I look back, to be honest with you, the course of events in one's life really defines, helps one define one's destiny. And that's how, you know, so I believe that what I went through in life has made me stronger, you know? So, yeah. I came to the UK, became an accountant, funnily enough, I did what we need to do. Then I find myself being a BA then a, after systems accounting, because I loved computers and all that, you know, then find myself doing, I don't know if you know what SAP is, so I did that for a while. Met a chap, a BA guy that I was doing his invoice, I saw how much was earning and I said, what, Jesus, I mean, tell me what to do, man. I then became a BA from that, then became, at that time, luckily, Scrum was just coming into the industry and, you know, we, I found myself doing something called an Agile BA, that's how I got into Agile. Then became a Scrum Master, became an Agile coach, and the rest is history. So that's basically it in a nutshell. Ula Ojiaku That's interesting, that you started off as an accountant and now you're an agile coach. I mean, I'm not throwing stones. I started off as an Electronic Engineer and I'm an agile coach, but yeah, it's all about, what I'm trying to also tell young people, including my children, that what you start off with doesn't necessarily mean that that's the career you're going to have for your whole life, you know, there is a whole lot of options, but it's just about starting somewhere. Victor Nwadu Especially now, I say the same thing to my kids, especially my son. You need to be in a state of mind where you need to adapt. A lot of paradigm shifts are happening underneath us and, you know, you need to be ready, and you need to be ready to go and adapt to the present circumstances. Otherwise, you know, and this is why we do what we do. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, and I think it starts with a mindset as well, you know, just having that Agile mindset, not to flog it, but agility starts first with the mind. What's your take on it? Because things are changing to be able to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Victor Nwadu Exactly. I mean, so we are living in exciting times, like you know already, agility was born out of the times that we're living in. It all started with the internet and outsourcing and all that, the world becoming a small village and all that. Then, we then have this digital thing going on and the information age and that brought yourselves all sorts of fantastic things. Things are, because we are utilising and leveraging the power of technology, we find out that we don't need to do certain things. Unfortunately, some jobs have to go, but then new ones are coming in. So all these things started happening, and again, it's affecting generations right now. If you were Generation X like me, you would've seen at least three more generations in your time when these changes are happening. It's crazy. So we now have, how do we survive? You know, you survive by adapting. If you don't adapt, you become obsolete, extinct, and that has tailored it to the industry, and the way we work. And even now talking to you, I'm working from home, I have a home office, you know, and that makes it even more fantastic because I can work anywhere in the world. Right. So what it does now is that it creates a bigger competition, right, where anybody can apply for any job anywhere in the world. It also helps the earth, and I don't want to go into that working from home debate, but that's all these things that are happening are as the consequences of the various paradigm shifts that are happening. So we need to adapt, like you said, in the mind, our mind needs to be open to change. And we need to put ourself in a place where we leverage all the advantages of those changes for our own benefits and so yeah. Ula Ojiaku Well said Victor. I mean, I completely associate with what you've said so far and the changes that are happening, especially with technology. For example, the recent one that's making waves is like AI, you know, so we're now in, someone said we're in the knowledge, information age, but now it's something like augmented age. So it's not just about the information, but it's also about being able to leverage, you know, technology like AI to still do productive work. But it still ties back with being adaptable, being able to learn and unlearn, to remain creative because machines are not taking over anytime soon. Victor Nwadu They can't take over the creative aspect and we need to automate and become, the competitive edge now is about who does things quicker, who gets to the market quicker and who get to the customer quicker? Who satisfies the customer in terms of the value threshold. So yeah, that's what we are, you know, we're creative, but we'll still be the same, but if you don't have creative guys in your design and engineering design, or software design, you're still going to fall back into that obsolete group of people that don't change or are not changing as quickly as it should. So yeah, I agree totally with that. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. I know we went off into a rabbit hole, but I did want to just take you a little bit back to what you said earlier when you were talking about the things that happened to you that shaped you into who you are. And you mentioned your mum's death at 13, you know, I'm really sorry about that, and I can't imagine how tough it would be because my son just turned 13 and I can't imagine the difficulty it must be, well, you did say it must have been for you. You said events in one's life defines one's destiny. Can I, so my twist would be, because the same thing could happen to two different people and you have two different outcomes. So could there be something about how they react to it as well? Victor Nwadu Yeah, obviously. I mean, the way people react is the key, right. Yeah. So one person could react, have reacted, okay, fine. You hit the ground, I mean, you fall and you cry, and you get traumatised. Then you kind of rebuild yourself and stand up and keep going. And some people, it's just like a tough man's thing, right? It's a storming it and all that. So people stay in that trough, they never, some teams just stay there, they never rise above, you know, so some people, not because it's their fault, maybe their environment, maybe because resources that are not there to guide them, to help them stand up, you know? Yeah. We're not the same. So, yeah, I just happened to be who I'm hopefully strong enough to have been able to lead myself from that trough. Ula Ojiaku Well, you inspire me and I know that you are an inspiration to many other people as well, so thank you for sharing your story. So you did put together this model, agile culture model A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S. Can you tell us a bit about that? Victor Nwadu Actually, I have a little of pause on that. So it's something that, you know, that's been on my mind, the pet project, purely because, you know, some people are saying, are you trying to create another agile, and no, it's not. It's just like a clarion call to people that are coming to Africa and the Middle East to engage in a transformation process. We're looking at the way Agile is, when the forefathers of agile went to Utah to dream up this fantastic thing. I'm sorry, they were not thinking about Africa, they were thinking from their own Western perspective, right. And then we Africans, Agilists and change leaders from Africa, we know that things we've learned from what the manifesto and the principles have taught us, are not that straightforward in from where we come from. So it manifests itself with many of my colleagues in the West that have gone to Africa and met these challenges and have complained. And I say, yes, it's because we are totally different, mindset is different, the Western mindset is totally different. So I've kind of modelled it more to Africa and the Middle East, and mainly to Nigeria and South Africa because that's where I got most of my data from. And it's A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S it's actually Agile Practice in Africa and the Middle East. Okay. And the R.A.T.S, I get lots of stick from my friends, the R.A.T.S is just when I kind of listed out the main things, main factors, some of them not that bad, some of them, the bad ones, it just, the best way I could figure it out to make, to create a soundbite was, it came out as R.A.T.S. So you have your religious intrusion, the R is religious intrusion, the A is an age respect paradox, and the T, obviously time. The other one is secrecy cults, and the fifth one, which I've added on later on was language, the leverage language and that kind of stuff, right? So the religious one is the effect of religion in the way we work. If you go to any African or if you go to Nigeria today now, you will see, say for example, people doing their standup. The standup, daily standup is, that's supposed to take an average of 15 minutes. They will give an average of five minutes for prayers and, you know, the way we pray, evangelistic sometimes things more than that. And imagine a Muslim guy in that scene. You know, imagine a Western guy, a Western agile coach and like woah, really? You know, so you have that aspect of it. You also have the age respect paradox. So it's a paradox because yes, while people in the West understand age and respect, in Africa and in the Middle East we take it up a notch or two. You know, where sometimes actually the negative aspect is that somebody that is older than you now thinks because he's older, you cannot allocate well as part of a member of the team, you feel, oh, it's an insult for you to tell them what to do, which is wrong and very crude, but it happens, it happens. So we have that and we also have the African Time, so it's not fair to call it African because the French do it. It's not labelled an such connotative when the French do it… Ula Ojiaku I've been to different countries. They do it. I'm not going to name it, name them. Victor Nwadu Yeah. So, exactly. So the way it's been made to feel as if some kind of, like we, Nigerians and Africans started it. I don't really like it, but, you know, that has become something that of note and something that has kind of embedded itself in our culture and our behaviours. Yes, the French do it, but is in social circles, however, we've kind of brought it into professional, our professional lives, where we lack that discipline for some reason of keeping exactly to time. And that itself, obviously as you and I know, has an effect on cost of delay and all that kind of stuff. Ula Ojiaku And morale as well. Victor Nwadu The fourth one is secrecy cult. For some reason, we don't share knowledge. And I'm happy, agile is, has brought the fact that we need, when we bring transformation into an organisation, part of it is making the organisation at the end of the day, a learning organisation, where we collaborate and collaboration means we have to share knowledge, we have to share, you know, for us to win. Okay? So, yes, so for some reason in Africa, that doesn't take place as much as we would love to see that. The last I've put there is language, so this one is very important for me because, and Sophie Oluwole that's one of the, she's late now, but she's one of the people that have kind of been evangelising the need for us Africans to get rid of the Western language, like English or French. We should start teaching our kids chemistry, maths and everything, the academic learning journeys should start with our local language. It's easier on the brain, it's less stressful, and they learn. Then we can learn English later on, or however, we shouldn't waste time to learn a foreign language, then start learning the basics of academia, right. So if you look at it, it's timeframe itself is a waste in terms of agile thinking, right? So for me, I brought it into an agile space because you find out that, I have worked across global teams, right? And when, as an agile coach, you give teams freedom to please, create and design within yourself with your local language. Only come to me when you, you know, when you need to, when you need me. And then you'll normally find a language champion that will do the translation or whatever. And so you find out that it's easy, the engagement is easier, and they're loving you for giving them that freedom. So I've been bringing it to Africa to be the way we work in Africa so that we as teams are, we don't become too stressed or thinking of how we sound when we speak English. When we are designing, we are talking about, and when we are in an agile space, we are talking about and discussing with our local language, we are free, and you find out the mind is less stressed. So these ideas just keep flowing, the brainstorming session is fantastic, lively, because you don't have to, oh, let me think of how I'm going to put, structure this, my idea in English before I have to speak, it just comes out, like it's easier. So I think we have more benefits if we trace ourselves back into our local language, especially if the team is regional and everybody there is speaking the same language. Ula Ojiaku I was going to get there, so it seemed like you read my mind. I was going to say, but what if the team, because in Nigeria there are over 200 languages or 200 ethnic groups, since we've started off with Nigeria, you know, what happens? Because you might still have to go to a shared common language. Victor Nwadu That's a very good question. So, but the thing is, like most African, especially in India, places like India and even in the Middle East, we have a kind of broken English, we have a local slang anyway, that's a kind of, it's mixed with English, like in Africa, Pidgin, we call it Pidgin, it's a mixture of Creole and Hausa, Wazobia, that kind of thing going on there with English, everybody already speaks that language. Why don't we use that? So that's a tie breaker anyway, that, why don't we use that, you know? So yeah. So, but basically, when you go to places like Enugu or Kaduna, you tend to be of that particular region. But if we have a thought person there that's from other place, let's use our local vernacular to break that ice in terms of the way we speak and communicate. So that's my answer to that. Ula Ojiaku Okay. And where you have someone, if there's only maybe one person who's not of the culture, not from that country, doesn't know it, where does inclusion come in here? Victor Nwadu It's highly unlikely, but however if it happens, because in the small village that we have now, the global village that we have, I normally would have a language champion, somebody that's, you know, you should be able to find some kind of, somebody within the, just like your Agile champion, the team. You find somebody that can translate, right? Otherwise, I've developed all sorts of apps right now, where you can use something as Google translates. So when you, when you want to give important meetings and you want to write, you just do the one in English, then translate it to their local language and just send it out. Everybody will understand and they'll come back to you. So, yeah. But it's very rare, very, very rare, to find a place where the English language and French has not touched on this planet, or Spanish. So when that happens, you just, we just use tools that, simple tools are available to us, Google translate, use an Agile champion to kind of leverage and that, kind of make that disability or handicap a non-existence or minimise the impact of it in the way we communicate. Ula Ojiaku On a slightly off tangent point in terms of languages, Mandarin is also like going up there,  you can't ignore that.  So what have you been working on lately as you've talked about the A.P.I.A.M-R.A.T.S model, why you came up with it and how, in a little way, how it could be used, but what else have you been working on lately that you'd like to share with the world? Victor Nwadu Apart from work and all that, I give a lot to my people. I have tried to empower a lot of people, so I've created this WakandAGILITY group where we, it's a global support thing where we kind of give masterclasses to people that are coming into the industries from masters and Agile coaches already there, but want to, you know, so I kind of hold these master classes for free actually, because, I am looking at the scope of how we can kind of create, make sure that as Africa develops and becomes more hungry, resource hungry, we have the resources on the ground to accommodate those requests, right? Ula Ojiaku So skilled manpower, you mean? Victor Nwadu Exactly. We don't have it. So, and now to train up, agile training is expensive. So that's my own way of giving back. But apart from that, I've been working with people, great people, great change analysts, internationally based people like, I don't know if you know her, Mary Laniyan, she's based in the UK and we have a lovely woman that did African something sometime ago that invited me to Lagos Abiodun Osoba. We also, in fact, I think we have somebody, her name is Anu Gopal, she's even a powerhouse in agile affairs, I think one of those, yeah. I also have Etopa Suley from Canada. You know, all these guys who come together in the last Agile 20 something, we came off with the whole government manifesto for Nigeria. That was our presentation, it's fantastic, right? It is there on the internet right now, so yeah, so it's people like this I'm working with, we came up with the manifesto for good governance for Nigeria and many other projects like that. So yeah, that's what I spend my time doing behind the scenes, apart from work and spending time with my family. Ula Ojiaku That's really awesome, and I'm sure some of the listeners would want to know more about it. So we'll make sure the links are in the chat. Do you still do run these sessions? Victor Nwadu Yes, I do. It's keeping with the requests. I have a lot of requests, and you know. Ula Ojiaku So there is a question I have for you with respect to transformation, because as an Agile coach, I would expect that you've been involved in a number of transformation efforts with organisations in involving leaders and teams. Can there be a sustainable transformation without vision or strategy? Victor Nwadu So, it's possible for you to have a transformation, well a transformation, it's possible for that to just happen once, right? So it's like a rider, you know, you are told to ride through one end of the Serengeti to the other with dangerous animals and valleys and all that. With a horse, no compass. And you don't have a compass, you have a map or maybe don't have a map, you just know just face there, you get to the end, right? And you don't have a compass. You don't know the health of the horse and you just got on that horse. And yet, it is probable that you may be able to get to the end. But how sustainable is that? That is why the word sustainable that you use is very important. How sustainable is that for us to now create some kind of tourist pamphlet for other people to come behind us to use? It's exactly the same way. So it's probably, it's very, very probable for you to run this kind of transformation rather than just win with one team or whatever, then where's the playbook for those coming behind you, if you want to kind of multiply that, accelerate it within the organisation. So that's why sustainability is important. You know, how sustainable is that? How can we we create a model, or a playbook for us to use as an organisation for our own peculiar transformation, right? That's why it's important for us to have vision. I mean, you know, we need to have a strategy, you know, so the vision itself, first of all is the what and the why we are doing it, and all that kind of stuff. Then the strategy, the Agile strategy is very important. The Agile strategy itself is the vision plus how we're going to do it. Under it, in a timeframe, and how we're going to fulfil the objective required to actualise that vision, right? And with regard to the scope, timeline, course and the organisational culture. So that's the strategy. We need to have all that. When you have that and you place it, and you can start to kind of base it under the kind of, your playbook of entry, the change itself and the exit, then you have something to go with, you know? So, yeah, that's basically how it works. You cannot have a sustainable transformation without a clear vision, without a realistic strategy that kind of makes sure that all these aspects of the scope itself, the objective, the goals, and then taking into consideration the culture I dealt with, you know, you cannot have a, what is known as transformation, a sustainable one without having a transformation strategy. So that's it. Ula Ojiaku You may have touched on this, but I'll say, just going back to your Serengeti Crossing analogy. I mean if you are crossing, or the person has been assigned a horse cross, that it's important to say why are we crossing the Serengeti? Because it might be that if you evaluate the why it might be better for you to stay where you are and don't put yourself and other people in danger and waste resources crossing, just for crossing's sake. Victor Nwadu Yeah. I mean, all these things will come in when we are laying out the strategy and, you know, we will have the vision, somebody comes, you know. I have to say transformation is sexy nowadays. So the metaphor is dealing with the, the Serengeti itself is the transformation, what we assume to be all the wahala inside the transformation. Ula Ojiaku What is wahala? Beause not everyone understands what wahala is? Victor Nwadu Wahala means all the troubles in life, all the challenges you meet in everything. So we need to first of all understand that nowadays transformation is sexy. Where many organisations, I heard a rumour that many leaders engaged in these big companies engaged transformation purely for the benefit of their PE ratio in the stock exchange. It's a rumour, I haven't confirmed it, but I don't know how to confirm it, but I do know that it's very sexy to say your organisation is carrying out its transformation. Everybody wants to be a saviour, that's what we're doing. So that is part of the big problem and the challenges that we face as change leaders in the transformation, because the success of the transformation depends on the leaders and the person at the top. How committed they are to it. So the commitment of that leader is tasked from the top. If they don't have the buy in, if they're not convinced about it, they're just doing it for show, when push comes to shove, and it will happen, the challenges will come and hit you. Cultural challenges, personality challenges, the ego of leaders or middle managers, and you'll hit them as you already know. How committed is the leader at the top to come down and say guys, and create that space for us to be able to make this transformation happen? Because as the ultimate impediment remover, that person should be able to have the time, to have the commitment to come down to the team level, to the whatever program level, whatever, and be able to remove that impediment for that to happen. So if this leader or sets of leaders or whoever is given the mandate to commission a transformation doesn't have total commitment or is not bought in, is not doing it for some show or for some reason, it's not going to work. Ula Ojiaku Very true. Do you have any anonymised stories of your experience in guiding organisations in enterprise agility or transformation journey. Because one thing you've said, you know, transformation is sexy, it's really a buzzword. And if you ask two people, and they could be in the same leadership team, you know, C-suite team, what is transformation? And they'll give you different answers. It's just a buzzword, which means different things to different people. But do you have any story underpinning, you know, what you have said about leadership being key? Victor Nwadu If I give you all the stories, you're not going to leave here, right. However, I want to make a few things very, very clear that just standing in most organisations, that starts their transformation journey with a few teams, as you would expect. When they succeed in that they then call it an enterprise wide transformation. Where you take a few teams to delivering some funky, sexy, innovative products, that is not enterprise wide transformation, that's not business transformation or business agility, right. It is you showing that, and delivering a particular product as quickly to the customer, whatever works using agile ways of working. So there's that misconception there, that's the number one misconception that people think, oh, when we succeed with a few teams, yeah, we have, no, we haven't, because you still need to scale it, you know, to the entire enterprise, to non-IT enterprise to both upstream and downstream and all that. It is when your organisation as a whole, no matter how tall it is, can have a transparent view of where everything is, when an organisation can adapt to news in the market very quickly, when an organisation can innovate, it has the people they have been enabled to, to have a different idea, different mindset towards failure and seeing failure as a learning bridge, all those kind of mindset things, but happening in very large scale so that the organisation becomes a learning organisation, everybody's learning, we have a lot of COPs (Community of Practices), you know, that's when you say a transformation has been successful, that's when you can actually say the organisation has transisted from a traditional stoic, siloed set up to where we have open collaboration, and the cultures, mindsets and the culture have been changed in that the mindset of people that lead and those that make things happen is one, and they have this adaptive way of behaving. When something happens in the market, nothing shocks them. Even when it does, you have some, I understand some people even have an anti-disruptive, you know, when you come up with an idea in your organisation and you go back and you go out to the market and sell it, you become disruptive, you disrupt the market. However, some organisations as well are having anti-disruption strategies. If somebody else comes, how quickly can we respond? So those are the kind of things that shows that organisation has actually transisted from those traditional ways of working to an agile way of working. However, the other aspect I want to draw to our attention is about timing, when we are thinking of transformation. So for me, my advice is first of all, number one, to get the top person involved in it. Timing is very, very important. You need to have time for this transformation, to start this transformation. The time when you start transformation is very important. You don't want to start it when you have disruption in the market, things will not happen normal way, and it's better for you to do transformation in peace time, what I call peace time, before some major disruption, so that you can leverage what you've learned from that transformation in that, when that disruption happens. Timing is very important when you're carrying out a major transformation in your organisation, okay? You need to have committed leaders, leaders that are really committed to the cause, they're not just doing it for show and leaders should be able to come down and do Gemba walks, and see that what is actually happening in the kitchen is what their executive information system is relayed to them, right? There needs to be complete transparency from the top to bottom. So that we are sure that what the developers and the guys creating all our products are doing is exactly tied to the revision and objective of the executive. So that's part of it. And for me it's common sensical things that we already know. However, when we have transparency, this transparency increases trust. And it needs to start with the leader, he needs to show transparency by example, right? So it increases trust, and trust enables organisation-wide collaboration, right? So when teams start collaborating, teams that were locked in silos start collaborating, we start seeing silo breaking, and when you start breaking the silo, you start seeing aggregates, paradigm shifts happening. And that is when you now then see that almighty cultural change emerge. So it comes from, and transparency, it comes from transparency leading to trust, and trust leading to collaboration that breaks down silos. And when that thing happens, you start having all this shift because we now trust each other. There are no more silos, then the cultural shift that people say is hard to do, it is, however, if you follow this, if you allow this thing to flow the way I just listed, it'll flow in its normal cadence, right, without having to have unnecessary, you know It's not easy to have a cultural, don't get me wrong, when we are as change analysts and change agents, it's not easy for cultural change. No matter where we are in the world, people don't like change as a result. However, it starts with common sensical things like the leader taking the first step, the leader coming into, sometimes when you have a Gemba walk, you come into a meeting and you, like, for example, in some recent, not recent, about two years ago, where the leader came into a meeting or for an impediment that had been there, so kind of a Scrum of Scrum meeting, that had been a feature type impediment, and had been there for quite a while. And he came in and after they've had the conversation, he just raised his hand and everybody was surprised to see him and just said, what is it? And he kind of listed back to him, you know, this impediment that I've been there for roughly about almost a month was dealt with within two days. That is one of the major advantages where you have the leader there, and you need to ask yourself a question, what was causing the impediment delay? The verification of the impediments and the delay of the action of impediments before the leader came in. Middle management, also cultural things, bureaucracy, my space, your space, so the person at the top comes in and slashes through. If you have leaders that are prepared to do that, that have the time to do that, transformation will take its normal course without unfortunate circumstances happening. Ula Ojiaku You've said a lot of things in this time and space and they make sense to me, but is it possible, because you said transformation is ideal when done in peace time. How can you, it's almost like saying you time the markets. Because there are other people, many organisations that have admitted, for example, the Covid, the pandemic accelerated their transformation per se. Victor Nwadu Accelerated, but many of them died. You know, yes we have unforeseen circumstances that you cannot help that, right? Aliens landing on the planet and disrupting the world, you cannot help that, right? But I was saying that if you are given a time to select, so it's better for you to do it now before any, covid is part of it, but you also have market disruptions as well, right? So the best time would be when you think just kind of stability, because it starts from a small team, then expand. So you want to make sure that team is not distracted by bigger factors that may be beyond the help, the beyond the reach of the remediating powers of the leaders in the organisations, right. So that's given, if you are given, you know, if you can help it. If you can't help it, start it as quickly as possible, but you know, it's better to have it started in peace time. Ula Ojiaku Awesome, thanks Victor. I can see that you are quite passionate about what you are saying. So what books have you recommended to people about this topic or anything else and why? Victor Nwadu I have many books. The main book, that for me has kind of created powerful insights in the way I do my work, the way I even see life. One of them, the top one is The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Then the other one is Turn the…. Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet. We'll put it in the links. You know, I use that a lot. And it's just leadership should be, you know, it should be about enabling, self-managing, self-organising team. I mean, in the way we work nowadays, you can't know everything. And that was what the point he was trying to say that as a captain, yeah, he's supposed to know how they work, but the details, there are experts that is within his reach, there are the guys that are the experts, so enable them to do the thing and you just deal with it. And the third one will be this one. I just read this book, it's called The Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki. He was saying that data shows that if you take, if you ask people to solve a problem and a group of people from just non-experts, and you get the experts to predict that same problem, the crowd will be, the answer will be closer to the reality than the experts themselves. Why, I don't know, maybe it aggregates knowledge of the crowd coming together rather than experts, and the other point he was making also, is how the HiPPO opinion (HiPPO: Highest Paid Personality), like when you have a team of engineers and the manager comes in that meeting and you ask a question of how do you think we can do this and he gives his opinion first, his opinion is going to skew the answers of everybody else. So this is why it's important, where you have a meeting and some HiPPOs are there, let them be still, let us hear the opinions of the team, the ordinary members of the team before if they need to give their opinion, right? Otherwise we just have a skewed opinion and that opinion will not be the best for that particular question. So that is another very good book. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. So there are three books. The Goal, Turn That Ship Around, The Wisdom of the Crowds. So how can the audience find you or contact you? Victor Nwadu You can get me at wakandagility.com, you can get me at victor@wakandagility.com. You can get me at LinkedIn, Victor Nwadu, you just type it there, you'll see m there. Ula Ojiaku Any ask for the audience, or any final words, Victor? Victor Nwadu Final last words, yes, Agile is real. Agile is here. And so be inspired, be prepared, be Agile. First of all, you be inspired to change, to have that mindset to adapt to your present circumstances. You know, be prepared for future disruptions, for anything, and be Agile, right? That's it. Then you will definitely succeed. You will definitely live longer. You will definitely transcend all the challenges, all the Covid 19 time, even aliens coming to this world or whatnot. Ula Ojiaku So can we hold you to, to account for it? Can we take it to the bank and say Victor said if we're inspired, prepared, and agile… Victor Nwadu It will help. I mean, from my experience in life, it'll help if you're inspired, you have to be inspired. People that are not driven cannot achieve much. You need to be passionate about what you do. And then you need to be prepared. You need to be prepared by having the skillset, challenge yourself to learn, constantly learning. Then be agile, all those things that we do, your mindset, the way you think, you know, having agile ways of doing things, you know, having a different mindset towards failure. When you fail, it doesn't mean you have, you know, you've done anything bad or the end of the world, failure is a sign that that option is not going to work and you've learned something new, you pivot and try a new one. So if we have that kind of mindset, we'll be innovating every year, every six months, every three months. If we have a different attitude towards failure, so be inspired, be prepared, be Agile. Ula Ojiaku Thank you so much, Victor. It's been a pleasure having this conversation Victor Nwadu It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Ula. Ula Ojiaku The pleasure is mine. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: Agile.FM radio for the agile community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you again for tuning into another episode of Agile FM. This is the Agile Kata series. And today we're going to explore Kata from a leadership's perspective. And I have here with me Mark Rosenthal who is with Novayama that is his company. He's out of the West coast, United States, and we're going to explore a little bit together, leadership in conjunction with Kata, which is Series all about.We're gonna explore that angle a little bit. Welcome to the show, mark. [00:00:40] Mark Rosenthal: Thank you very much. It's looking forward to the opportunity. [00:00:43] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is awesome. I wanna go back in time with you and talk a little bit about an employment you had where you worked from home. [00:00:52] Mark Rosenthal: Oh, yeah. . [00:00:53] Joe Krebs: You didn't get a lot of phone calls until you got one.[00:00:56] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah. [00:00:57] Joe Krebs: And that was the one you got terminated. [00:01:00] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah. Bu Yeah. [00:01:01] Joe Krebs: But the interesting thing is you in your reflection, you had a, let's say a moment of realizing a lack of leadership skills. [00:01:14] Mark Rosenthal: Yes. And yeah, and really that was, and this is even better because this is really the kind of leadership that most conduct practitioners have to engage in, which is influence.You don't have formal authority you rather, you've got to, you have to find a way to influence the lead, the line leaders in the organization to be effective. And this is true for lots of cases. It's true whenever I'm bringing groups of people together that I can't tell what to do. And actually it's more true that you think even in the military, which is where I learned leadership.And it really was that. We tend to do, we practitioners tend to engage with the technical artifacts, and we put in the tools, we put in the mechanics, and we don't, and then we complain when the line leadership doesn't embrace the changes. And that is on us because if you look at a traditional Kaizen event approach, for example, in the world of, you know, of CI, but this would be equally true for somebody trying to get scrum in place or somebody trying to cause any change in the way the organization does business.I can describe the mechanics of the daily standup perfectly. I can describe, I can get all the scheduling. I can get the artifacts into place.If there isn't a engagement of the conversation about how we do it on a daily basis too, then it's going to fall apart as soon as that that, that goes away in the situation you're describing. I mean, it was even worse in a way, just because of the nature. It was an international organization and it didn't really matter where I worked, so I didn't work anywhere.Although I got a lot of frequent flyer miles. You know, going to Europe once a month, going all kinds of places. But what I was doing was making technical recommendations. And then, you know, they weren't getting picked up. And frankly, I wasn't earning my money. Yeah. And the key here for a change agent.Is it's not about the tools you're putting into place, the tools are there to create the kinds of conversations that need to happen in the organization between the leaders and between people, between groups of people. And once I understood that, then the paradigm changes completely because the experiments I run are testing whether or not I'm effective at moving the needle.About how these conversations are taking place. And that's kind of what I was talking about in the, you know, in the story that you're alluding to. [00:04:20] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So this is a life changing event for you, but also in your career, right? You had a lot of learnings coming out of this. [00:04:27] Mark Rosenthal: A lot of them, and they came later on.You know, I had, I was familiar with Toyota Kata at the time. But I was still in the position of trying to make people do it, and I can't do that. What I have to do is look at the dynamics in the organization and think in terms of it's not the mechanics of standing up a storyboard and getting them to go through the starter kata of grasping the current condition and all of that.It's about what actions what small experiment can I run? That I think that I hypothesize will nudge the conversation into, for example, talking about something a little more concrete than we had a good day or a bad day, which moves them toward measuring how they're doing, you know, in that example, that particular organization really had disdain for numbers because they made people look bad.So they didn't talk about them. I mean, they had them on displays, but nobody ever talked about them and the numbers they had on displays were lagging indicators. Yeah. It's interesting because you said like the words, if I remember correctly, like you said, like moving the needle, and I think that's also important from a leadership perspective, are we just in the operations mode of tools and features and keeping those alive or are we disrupting them?Yeah. Absolutely. Certain ways of working within the organization as a leader. Yeah, and you're going to be disrupting, you know, that's the whole point in a way. So when I want to begin to shift things I want to do is engage in the smallest change I can that's going to move things. And I'm going to try to do is to incorporate that change into something they're already doing.So in this example, there was already a daily production meeting. So rather than saying, we're going to have another meeting about improvement, rather than saying, you got to stop doing that way and start doing it this way, I can hook part of my agenda into the existing structure. So as a change agent, I want to look at what are they already doing?And can I grab any of that and just modify it in a way? That moves the conversation in the direction it needs to go. [00:06:58] Joe Krebs: Yeah, This is interesting, right? There's two things I would like to talk about, and I'm not sure which one should be first or not. I'll just take one and get started.Maybe it's the wrong order, but. We just went through a, or just two years ago, we somewhat ended the pandemic and we started going back to work. And your experience obviously from work from home was prior to to the pandemic. Now you had some learnings in terms of leadership and we see a lot of companies that are bringing the people back to work sometimes mandatory.And sometimes it's the leadership team that just feels like very strongly about that. So I want to just include that in terms of, it's very impressive right now. There's a lot of companies still work in that kind of dual mode or came back full time back on premises. What advice do you have based on your learning for leaders when you work this way?I don't know if you'd have any, but I'll just put you on the spot.[00:07:58] Mark Rosenthal: You know, that's a good one. You know, you're going to encounter resistance, but you know, this is a quote from Ron Heifetz out of Harvard, who Talks about this thing called adaptive leadership, which really is applying PDCA to leadership. And that's why I like it so much, because it follows the Kata pattern of grasp the current condition, make a, you know, make a judgment where you want to go next and run experiments to try to get there.And he said, and I love this, people don't resist change. People resist loss. Nobody gives back a winning lottery ticket. And so the people who are. are used to working with the cat on their lap and having be able to respond to their kids and all the awesome things that come from the ability to work from home are losing that connection that they have developed with their family.So that's what they're resisting. Typically, you know, I can't speak for everybody, but what's, you know, the flip side is what's the boss, what did the company lose when the people didn't come to the office? And that was the informal interaction that drives the actual conversation that gets stuff done.Yeah. And so that's what I didn't have, right? You know, we didn't have, I don't even think we didn't have video. We didn't, you know, I mean, this was a while ago. I think, you know, Skype was cutting edge stuff, right? [00:09:31] Joe Krebs: Hard to imagine, right? [00:09:32] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah yeah. You know, if I were to go back to the same situation, I would be having a lot more scheduled online sessions.With not just individuals, but with groups of people sharing their experiences with, in my case, with continuous improvement and what they're doing so that I didn't need to be there all the time, but I could work on keeping the conversation and the buzz going and get a better read for the organization.[00:10:09] Joe Krebs: Yeah. You mentioned that I've heard you say things like that leadership is a typical leadership. Yeah. What is authority. And then sometimes you do see that when you go back to, to work in, you know, in work environments where you're being asked and forced to come back to work versus adaptive leaderships, taking a different approach to something like that.But another quote you said, and maybe that's the other angle I wanted to ask you. . Is I heard you say a phrase that leadership is an activity, not a role. [00:10:40] Mark Rosenthal: And that's again, I want to make credit where credit is due. That's right out of, you know, Ron Heifetz work and a lot of it is taught at a place called the Kansas Leadership Center in Wichita.And so I want to make sure I'm giving credit where credit is due. . So in, there are, you know, there are cases where authority is a good thing. There are cases where you have to get something done fast. The building is on fire, evacuate immediately, not, hey, what do you think we should do?But even when there is formal authority, it's far more effective to use leadership as a role with the goal of developing other leaders. And, you know, this is if you know, are familiar with the work of David Marquet and his book, Turn the Ship Around on the submarine, you know, he, as the captain of the submarine had absolute authority.Yeah. And. And I read that book. I'm a former military officer. I was in the Army. Okay. We didn't get it. I did not go on a boat that was designed to sink. But you know, at the end of the story, he tells a story of, he. interprets a situation incorrectly, and he gives an order that was incorrect at the end of the story, and he is countermanded on the bridge with no captain, you're wrong, from the lowest ranking sailor on the bridge.Who countermanded an order from the captain of the ship. Yeah. And all it did was cause him to look back, reassess, and realize that this 22 year old kid was right. And that's what we want, right? Yeah. We want people to tell us if we're making a mistake. [00:12:29] Joe Krebs: Yeah, that's a key lesson. I remember this by listening, I listened to that particular book, which is also very eyeopening.Now, seeing a leadership like this, we see adaptive leadership. But it's obviously something you are embracing. There's a lot of books out there about leadership. That's a massive amount of books. And people could go wild, but you know, many of those are personal stories about what that person has embraced and you might find something very useful here now in certain areas of those books, but you might not 100 percent apply to your own.Yeah. That might leave the reader with, how would I approach this problem with all that wisdom that is out there and how do you combine and this is where I want to go with you here now in terms of leadership is how can the Agile Kata, the Kata, the improvement Kata, coaching Kata, how can the Kata ways of working scientific thinking.Help support leaders who are like, I want to create an environment like that. I want to have adaptive leadership. How can Kata help me with this? [00:13:37] Mark Rosenthal: Great point, because you know, all those books are those, as you pointed out, those people's personal stories. And it's interesting because all the, all of the stories about success have survivor bias.Built in and we don't, you know, they're in, in, in lean world, there's a commonly bandied about number that 85, 90 percent of all attempts to put it in the place fail. We read about the ones that are successful, but what we don't know is that the ones that failed probably followed the same formula.And it only works five or 10 percent of the time. That's really the story here. So what you, there isn't a cookbook and what you got to do is first understand the culture you're trying to build. Because if you don't have that in your mind deliberately, you're going to end up going wherever. But then.You've got to grasp your own situation in your own organization and then set that next target condition using Kata terms of, okay, I'm not going to try to get there all at once, but what's the one major thing I'm going to try to get in if I'm trying to change the change away and organization runs probably on a 90 day window.You know, if we're in industry or Kata, we set a target condition of a couple of weeks and no more than that. But, you know, these are bigger things. So where do I want to be at the end of the quarter? Where do I want to be, you know, in three months? And then that narrows my focus. And then I can just start working on that.And maybe it's just I'm going to, I'm going to get the staff meeting working. more effectively so that we're not trying to solve problems in the meeting. We're just talking about the status of problem solving. That's just a hypothetical example, but that was one place I try to take people for example.Yeah. And I was work on that. [00:15:45] Joe Krebs: So you work with leaders through. Coaching cycles. You coach them going through the four steps of the improvement Kata. And you help them to, as you say, move the needle. Towards more adaptive leadership. [00:16:04] Mark Rosenthal: And this is using adaptive leadership really to do it, right?So it's a meta thing in a way. And when I'm, you know, I'm really talking to the change agents out there, you know, the, and in, in the agile world, you know, the scrum master is a staff person who's the holder of the torch of what this is supposed to look like. So this is what. They can do us to work, you know, to say, okay, I know it's not perfect right now.What's the one thing I'm going to emphasize over the next 90 days to get it better? And maybe it's, you know, I'm just going to get the stand up to be less than 15 minutes. Okay. I just got to get people to just, you know, this is what they talk about. And then they pass the torch to the next person, for example, or the next pair in that case.[00:17:01] Joe Krebs: You are, I think by looking through your material a little bit and seeing where you're coming from, you're using a tremendous amount of powerful questions. Can you, again, I'm sorry to put you on the spot, but can you give possibly some like a, like an outline of how. What kind of questions you would be throwing so to make it a little bit more concrete.. We weren't listening to this like a leader or somebody who's receiving some form of coaching from you. And then what kind of questions it's powerful stuff. [00:17:38] Mark Rosenthal: . So the coaching Kata just to some background here and what Toyota Kata is just so that we got on topic is.What Mike Rother essentially did, and this isn't 100 percent accurate, but this is the effect, is he parsed a lot of the coaching conversations that were happening, you know, with leaders and learners at Toyota. And those conversations often are around A3, for example, which is just a piece of paper. And often it's just sounds like a conversation.But there were elements of the questioning that was, that were always present. And the way I describe it is he boiled all that down and was left at the bottom of the pot was the structure of questions that he published as the Improvement Kata. So I'm going to ask first, I'm going to go off the script first.What is your target condition? So I want to hear is where you're trying to go in the short term. And what will be in place when you get there? What is the actual condition now in between the two I'm really looking for is what's the gap you're trying to close between where things are now and where you're trying to go in that short term.Then we're going to reflect on the last step you took because you committed to take that step the last time we talked. So what did you plan as your last step? What did you expect? Because there was a hypothesis that if I do this, then I'll learn that, or this will happen. And what actually happened, And what did you learn?Then I'm going to ask, okay, what obstacles are now, do you think are now preventing you from reaching your target condition? And so really that's Mike chose the word obstacle because the word problem in the West is really loaded. Okay. Because a problem to a lot of people in industry is something I don't want the boss to find out.You know, another company I work for, I called them barriers, but it was before Kata was written. But if I go back and look at my stuff, this is basically the same structure. And that's just an enumeration of what person, the problem solver, the learner thinks are the problems. And as a coach, that's kind of telling me what they think right there, right?I'm beginning to see what they see because they're telling me, which one are we addressing now? It's important to address one problem at a time. And then based on that, and in being informed by the last step you took. What are you planning as your next step and what do you expect? So that's kind of the script going off script often just means asking calibrated follow on questions to get the information that I didn't get from the primary question.This is where, you know, if you're talking to Tilo Schwartz, he's got a lot of structure around that, which is really a contribution to the community. [00:20:51] Joe Krebs: Yeah, but your questions are not yes, no answers or status related, even the follow ups are investigative, kind of like bringing things to surface for the learner, not for you to receive a status.[00:21:07] Mark Rosenthal: What I'm looking for is, again, Toyota Kata jargon, their threshold of knowledge, the point at which, okay, the next step is probably learn about that. And there are times when, you know, even before we get to all the questions, if we encounter that threshold of knowledge, okay, great. We need to learn that.What's the next step in order to learn more about that? [00:21:32] Joe Krebs: Mark, this is this is really good. I was just like listening to Katie Anderson's book, and it was funny that you say problem in the Western world, not a very popular word and she makes tons of references in her book about. No problem. is a problem.[00:21:50] Mark Rosenthal: That's, yeah. That's the Toyota mantra. That's the Toyota mantra. [00:21:54] Joe Krebs: And yeah. So whatever you want to call it, you want to overcome it. If it's an obstacle, an impediment, or if it's a problem you want to overcome. [00:22:02] Mark Rosenthal: And that's a really good point about the culture. And I'm going to quote my friend, Rich Sheridan here, you know, fear does not make problems go away.Fear drives problems into hiding. Yeah. And we encounter that a lot where I go into a culture where everybody has to have the answers or everything needs to look good. And so asking them, what problems are you trying to solve here can be problematic. And so that's where the adaptive leadership part comes in, okay, I'm going to have to overcome the obstacle of that cultural hesitancy and find a way to help them get a shared sense of the truth. That they can talk to rather than talking to each other. And again, if I go into, you know, the, like the extreme programming world where I've got the cards on the wall, for example that is that shared sense of the truth. I can walk in and I can tell which pairs are working on which things and whether they're a hit or behind very quickly without having to ask anyone and there's nothing concealed is fully transparent.We go into industry, the purpose of the visual controls, the purpose of the status boards, the purpose of the Andon lights, the purpose of all of the lean tools, all of them is to put the truth of what's actually happening out there as compared to what should be happening so that we have an invitation to deal with it.[00:23:43] Joe Krebs: But they're tools. [00:23:45] Mark Rosenthal: But they're, but that's all the tools are, that's what they're for. Yeah. [00:23:50] Joe Krebs: That is great. Mark, I want to thank you for spending some time here talking from a leadership's perspective to the Agile FM audience and in particular in the Kata series to explore Kata and how Kata can influence.leadership and what you can do to embrace adaptive leadership while performing scientific thinking as a leader. And obviously your personal stories as well. So thank you, Mark. [00:24:14] Mark Rosenthal: Sure thing. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. ​

Robert Sutton: The Friction Project Robert Sutton is an organizational psychologist and professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. He has given keynote speeches to more than 200 groups in 20 countries and served on numerous scholarly editorial boards. Bob's work has been featured in The New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. He is a frequent guest on various television and radio programs, and has written seven books and two edited volumes, including the bestsellers The No A-hole Rule, Good Boss, Bad Boss, and Scaling Up Excellence. He is the co-author with Huggy Rao of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder*. We've all worked with someone who seemed just a bit oblivious. None of us want to be that kind of leader. In this conversation, Bob and I discuss key strategies for how to stop it and also prevent it. Key Points Privilege may spare you from hassles, but it doesn't come without cost. You risk being clueless about troubles in the organization. Power and prestige tend to influence leaders to focus more on themselves, less on others, and act like the rules don't apply to them. An antidote to oblivious leadership is less transmission and more reception. Measure two behaviors: (1) how much the leader talks vs. others in interactions and (2) the ratio of questions the leader asks vs. statements the leader makes. Either manage by walking out of the room or get in the details with ride alongs, direct help, and doing the work with folks. Be cautious about “managing by walking around” getting ritualistic. Hierarchy is inevitable and useful. The most effective leaders flex it and know when to be collaborative and when to be direct. Find people who will speak truth. Resources Mentioned The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder* by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes Use Power for Good and Not Evil, with Dacher Keltner (episode 254) How to Ask Better Questions, with David Marquet (episode 454) How to Help People Speak Truth to Power, with Megan Reitz (episode 597) How to Prevent a Team From Repeating Mistakes, with Robert “Cujo” Teschner (episode 660) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

Recorded almost a year ago (January 8, 2023), Shu discusses L. David Marquet's book, Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. This is the 47th meeting. Meetings 44-46 are unfortunately lost to time.

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with David Marquet. David served as the commander of the US Navy nuclear submarine, USS Santa Fe. When he took over, he changed the command-and-control leadership style and empowered his crew to turn the lowest-performing sub into the best performer in the fleet. David Marquet shared leadership lessons from this experience, which he also wrote in his bestselling book Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders. David Marquet also shared leadership insights from his latest book, Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don't. In it, David Marquet highlights how choosing your words can dramatically improve organizational decision-making and execution.  Some Highlights:- David Marquet on becoming the commander of the lowest-performing submarine in the US Navy - Why it's not the lack of leadership but the wrong kind of leadership that results in poor team performance- David Marquet on moving beyond the traditional approach to leadership - How David Marquet shifted his own and his crew's mindset to transition from permission-based decision making to intent-based decision making- Why leadership in most organizations still operates using outdated mindsets and approaches- David Marquet on what all leaders can learn from the communications breakdowns on the El Farro - The importance of language in leading organizations to better decision making and execution in the businessBooks Mentioned:- Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders - L. David Marquet- Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say and What You Don't - L. David MarquetConnect with L. David Marquet:LinkedIn: David MarquetIntent-based Leadership InternationalWebsites: https://davidmarquet.com/https://intentbasedleadership.com/what-is-intent-based-leadership/YouTube:Leadership NudgesConnect with Mahan Tavakoli: Mahan Tavakoli Website Mahan Tavakoli on LinkedIn Partnering Leadership Website

Frances Frei: Move Fast & Fix Things Frances Frei is a professor at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how leaders create the context for organizations and individuals to thrive by designing for excellence in strategy, operations, and culture. She regularly works with companies embarking on large-scale change and organizational transformation, including embracing diversity and inclusion as a lever for improved performance. In 2017, Frances served as Uber's first senior vice president of leadership and strategy to help the company navigate its very public crisis in leadership and culture. Her partner Anne Morriss and her are the authors of Uncommon Service and The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You. They are also hosts of Fixable, a leadership advice podcast from the TED Audio Collective, and they are recognized by Thinkers50 as among the world's most influential business thinkers. Their newest book is Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems*. A lot of us assume that going fast is reckless. There are certainly times when that's the case, but it's also true that leaders going too slow at the wrong time can make things worse. In this conversation, Frances and I discuss how to do a better job of moving quickly when it's time to address the toughest problems. Key Points Many of us believe that going fast is reckless and going slow is righteous. While there are times that is true, there are many examples where it's not. The fastest way to speed up your company is to empower more people to make more decisions. Dare to be bad at something. Deciding what not to address allows you to go faster at what you're best at. Two key elements of completing work are work-in-progress and cycle time. Most leaders address cycle time first and miss the more substantial work-in-progress opportunities. Create a way to fast-track projects that become important and build this into the culture of the organization. Resources Mentioned Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes The Way to Turn Followers Into Leaders, with David Marquet (episode 241) How to Solve the Toughest Problems, with Wendy Smith (episode 612) How to Approach a Reorg, with Claire Hughes Johnson (episode 621) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

James is a former watch commander in the UK Fire & Rescue service who now helps individuals and organisations as a Leadership coach, Facilitator, Keynote speaker with a drive to help Chang workplace culture through effective leadershipWe only feature the latest 200 episodes of the podcast on public platforms so to access our podcast LIBRARY with every episode ever made & also get access to every Debrief & Subject Matter expert document shard with us then join our PATREON crew and support the future of the podcast by clicking HERE A big thanks to our partners for supporting this episode.GORE-TEX Professional ClothingHAIX FootwearGRENADERIP INTOLyfe Linez -  Get Functional Hydration FUEL for FIREFIGHTERS, Clean no sugar  for daily hydration. 80% of people live dehydrated and  for firefighters this cost lives, worsens our long term health and reduces cognitive ability.Support the ongoing work of the podcast by clicking HEREPlease subscribe to the podcast on YoutubeSome of the subjects discussed in todays episode and links to find out more are below:James LinkedIn connection - (8) James Coomber | LinkedInJames website - Home | James CoomberLeaders eat last – Simon Sinek - Leaders Eat Last - Simon SinekPublic speaking TED talk Julian Treasure - https://youtu.be/eIho2S0ZahI?si=evxoo8aSWeGeSU8FWho is Richard stokes - (8) Richard Stokes | LinkedInTurn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into LeadersTurn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (Audio Download): L. David Marquet, L. David Marquet, Penguin Audio: AmaPlease support the podcast and its future by clicking HERE and joining our Patreon Crew

This season I am officially lunching coaching opportunities for us to work together so you can master skills we discuss here, become a high performer in your career and lead ahigh performing team.  To get the details first of these limited opportunities, go to hardcoresoftskillsppodcast.com and sign up to my newsletter.  The key question that seems to come up regularly how can we be better leaders?  I have spoken about this to various guests in my podcast  and on of the epiodes that resonated the most was from L. David Marquet. He was the commander of a nucelar submarine and author of various leadership books including the classic Turn the Ship Around.  For more resources, sign up for the newsletter at https://www.hardcoresoftskillspodcast.com/  Connect with me via https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/   

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 778 marks our return from Iceland.  WICKED trip, great country, great people!  We return with our interview with Bill Fox. Bill and I discussed his new book, , transformation, dialog, listening, and leadership. The many conversations Bill and I have had over the years leave me in a better place.   Bill states, “I believe that the great leaders and companies in the 21st century will go on a Forward Thinking journey and be built from the inside out.' The world has shifted, and new rules apply. It used to be that you would win by managing change, following best practices, working harder, or even smarter. It was the age of Industrial Thinking and people as profit-producing units. Bill's LinkedIn Profile Websites (Company) (Personal) (Blog) Email bill@billfox.co   Re-Read Saturday News This week in our re-read of L. David Marquet's, , Leaving Bluework Behind: Commit. Whether you classify thinking as System Two thinking or bluework, at some point you have to cross the barrier from contemplation to doing. Chapter Five focuses on reducing the barrier between thinking and action.  The process that bridges that barrier is commitment. The author begins the chapter by making the distinction between commitment and coercion.  Previous installments of our re-read of  (buy a copy)! Week 1: –   Week 2: –   Week 3: –   Week 4: – Week 5: –    Week 6: -   Next SPaMCAST  The Software Process and Measurement Cast 779 will wrestle with the question, when is prioritization micro-management? The answer is not straightforward but often can be yes. We will also have a visit from Susan Parente and her Not A Scrumdamentalist column.   

Chapter 1 What's Turn the Ship Around"Turn the Ship Around" is a leadership book written by L. David Marquet. It was published in 2012 and details Marquet's experience as the captain of the nuclear-powered submarine USS Santa Fe. He shares the story of transforming the ship's culture from a leader-follower model to a leader-leader model, where each member of the crew is empowered to take ownership and make decisions. The book focuses on the principles of empowering others, creating a sense of ownership, and fostering a culture of leadership. It has been widely praised for its innovative leadership approach and its practical advice on how to create high-performing teams.Chapter 2 Why is Turn the Ship Around Worth Read"Turn the Ship Around" by L. David Marquet is worth reading for several reasons:1. Unique leadership insights: Marquet shares his personal experience as a former nuclear submarine commander and offers a fresh perspective on leadership. He challenges traditional hierarchical command structures and advocates for a "leader-leader" approach, where decision-making is pushed down to the lowest level possible.2. Practical applicability: The book provides practical tools and techniques that can be applied in any organization. Marquet introduces concepts such as "intent-based leadership" and "creating leaders at every level," which can help individuals and teams become more empowered and autonomous.3. Real-life examples: Marquet illustrates his ideas with real-life examples from his time as a submarine commander. He candidly highlights the mistakes and challenges he faced and offers valuable lessons that can be applied in various professional settings.4. Engaging storytelling: The book is written in a storytelling format, making it easy to read and engaging. Marquet's writing style and narrative approach keep the reader captivated, making it an enjoyable read.5. Positive impact: "Turn the Ship Around" has had a significant impact on leadership and organizational culture in various industries. It has become a widely recommended book for leaders and managers seeking to create high performing teams and foster a culture of empowerment and accountability.Overall, "Turn the Ship Around" is worth reading because it provides unique leadership insights, practical advice, real-life examples, engaging storytelling, and the potential to positively transform an organization's leadership and culture.Chapter 3 Turn the Ship Around Summary"Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet is a leadership book that tells the story of how Marquet transformed the culture and performance of a nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Santa Fe.Marquet, a highly experienced and highly decorated naval officer, was unexpectedly appointed as captain of the Santa Fe. However, he quickly realized that the ship was plagued by a lack of trust, low morale, and poor performance. The previous leadership style on the Santa Fe was one of top-down command and control, where decision-making was concentrated in the hands of the captain.Marquet believed that this leadership style was flawed and would not allow the ship to reach its full potential. He decided to challenge the traditional leadership model and instead adopt a model of decentralized control and empowerment. He called this model “leader-leader” instead of “leader-follower.”In his book, Marquet outlines the key principles and practices he used to transform the Santa Fe. These include:1. Control by consent: Instead of giving orders, Marquet encouraged his crew to take ownership and responsibility for their roles. He emphasized the importance of gaining consent before making decisions.2. Competence: Marquet focused on building a...

In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli speaks with Stephen M.R. Covey. Stephen M.R. Covey is the New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author of The Speed Of Trust,  former CEO of Covey Leadership Center, and author of Trust And Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others. Stephen shares why many leaders are still operating with a command and control mindset and the need to develop the mindset and capabilities of becoming trusting and inspiring leaders. Stephen M.R. Covey shares stories and frameworks on how we can better understand trust in leadership and how trust and inspire leaders can unleash the potential of their teams and organizations.    Some highlights:-Stephen M.R. Covey on the crucial role that parents play in teaching responsibility, commitment, and initiative and how his father, Stephen Covey, applied trust and inspire principles in his parenting-On why traditional leadership models do not work with the changing world and in the new work environment-Stephen M.R. Covey on the stewardships of leadership-How leaders can lead behavior change in their organizations -Stephen M.R. Covey on the role trust plays in leadership and how leaders can become more trusting -The power of inspiring others and its impact on leadership-What it takes to become a trust inspire leader Mentioned:- Dr. Stephen R. Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People- David Marquet (Listen to David Marquet episode on Partnering Leadership)- Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, author of Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You- Jim Collins, author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't  Connect with Stephen M.R. Covey:Trust and InspireTrust and Inspire on AmazonSpeed of Trust The Speed of Trust on AmazonStephen M.R. Covey on FacebookStephen M.R. Covey on TwitterStephen M.R. Covey on LinkedIn Connect with Mahan Tavakoli: Mahan Tavakoli Website Mahan Tavakoli on LinkedIn Partnering Leadership Website

This episode was recorded in 2019 during lockdown and published on my first podcast titled The Peaky Agilist. The episode has been remastered and re-shared here. Join Paddy as he delves into the extraordinary journey of a nuclear submarine commander who found himself in uncharted leadership territory. Through the lens of his experience, we explore the challenges of relinquishing control and embracing empowerment within a high-stakes environment.

In this episode's discussions around the Community Table:  Our first question turned into a collaborative discussion around the Community Table with input from several other lawyers. How does a longtime attorney with her own firm finally shake things up, turn operations over to someone else, and focus on strategy and the practice of law? It's hard to let go of control, even with a consultant pitching in. How do you market when money is tight, cash flow is low, and you need more dollars in the door? Start by knowing your practice. What's the underlying issue, what kind of ship are you leading? From there you can spot opportunities and focus on revenue and marketing. Thinking of making a pivot or expanding from your current area of practice to boost revenue? Consider what you enjoy doing and think about what areas of the law generate consistent, timely cash flow.  Mentioned in this Episode: Gino Wickman, “Traction” Michael Morse, “Fireproof” Previously on the Un-Billable Hour, guest Michael Morse, “Your Firm? You Can't Do It All (And You Shouldn't Try)” ABA Techshow SMB Team The Rainmaker Institute WealthCounsel estate planning software L. David Marquet, “Turn This Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders” L. David Marquet, video, guest “Texas Business Radio” Join the next Community Table live. What's on your mind?

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by Christine Bush, an experienced Agile consultant, sharing how she got where she is on her Agile journey.   This episode is dedicated to those who might be new in the Agility field and are looking for guidance and inspiration to persist in moving forward on this continuous learning journey that the enables Agility. Listen to Christine's testimony about a Special Education Teacher and Agile expert, who applies and combines her training to assist organizations following Agile principles.   Key Takeaways Where did Christine start? Her education started in history and political science, but then turned toward the field of special education, where she spent almost five years.  Special education requires teachers to build specific curriculums adapted to each student's needs.  These skills are helpful now in Agile, while she helps clients achieve their particular goals. The reasons Christine turned her attention to a technology-related field: Writing a grant showed how passionate she felt about “management” tasks. During her time in special education, she researched, learned, and taught others about brand-new computer software. Christine started working for a Software Company. Joined the PMI Obtained her PMP Later, she got her PMI-ACP. Christine began her education on the Agile ways where she met all kinds of different professionals shifting to Agile. Willing to try on different roles What overlaps did Christine see between special education and a more technology-oriented environment? The common points among these fields were: - Implemented robust frameworks. - Research-based studies are in both fields' foundations. - Maslow's hierarchy of needs. - Problem-solving in general. - Collaboration and communication. - Coaching a Team. How is coaching similar in Special education and the Agile methodology? Coaching is done in different parts of the organization. Coaching is helping others grow; students or organizations. People enjoy down-to-earth examples that coaches give to define abstract concepts. Students of all ages love activities.   Mentioned in this Episode: PAL (Professional Agile Leadership) Blooms Taxonomy Turn the Ship Around! - David Marquet   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!  

The Coast Guard said all five passengers aboard the submersible that went missing on a deep-sea voyage to the Titanic are presumed dead. Josh Gates and L. David Marquet break it down. Peter Baker, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Joyce Vance, Randi Weingarten, and Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney also join.

We have an expert's comment on the lost submersible near the Titanic: Cardi B. Then, it's time another expert. David Marquet, retired U.S. Navy Submarine captain and author of “Turn The Ship Around,” joins the show. Marquet explains the biggest factors to grapple with in this story and the decision making that needs to be made around the rescue, the specific danger the passengers face, and the differences between how this sub and a Navy sub operate. He also explains the safety behind submarining and questions whether or not this specific rescue mission is worth it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Biden's son reached an agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors, although the U.S. attorney said the case was “ongoing.” Republicans widely criticized the deal.  Sam Stein, Katie Benner, Renato Mariotti, Tim Miller, Symone Sanders-Townsend, L. David Marquet, and RIchard Lardner join.

David Marquet joined the show to give his insight into the missing submarine and whether he has faith in the passengers being found alive. Have a listen to hear from an expert perspective...See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The international effort to find and rescue a missing Titanic tourist submersible continued Tuesday. The U.S. Navy is also sending crews and special lifting equipment to help if the missing craft can be found. Amna Nawaz spoke with retired Navy submarine captain David Marquet who explained how a possible rescue could be carried out. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Kwame Christian: American Negotiation Institute Kwame Christian is a best-selling author, business lawyer, and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Following the viral success of his TED talk, Kwame released his best-seller Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life back in 2018. He's also a regular Contributor for Forbes and the host of the number one negotiation podcast in the world, Negotiate Anything, which currently has over 5 million downloads worldwide. Under his leadership, the American Negotiation Institute has coached and trained several Fortune 500 companies on applying the fundamentals of negotiation to corporate success. He's also the author of the book How to Have Difficult Conversations About Race and the creator of Negotiable, an Online Community to Learn to Negotiate Anything. We often think about questions as a way to discover more — but have you also considered how your questions might influence? Kwame Christian and I discuss three key steps in order to persuade better through your intentional questions. Key Points Rapport questions help you make a connection with the other party and establish a baseline for how they communicate. A helpful place to begin on rapport is noticing something that you genuinely admire or are curious about in the other party. When gaining information, start broadly and then pull the thread when the other party leads you down a path. Beware that your role/positions can cause people to say more than they otherwise might. “What would it take?” is often a helpful way to illuminate a path forward. Even if you ultimately are more directive, laying the foundation through questions allows the other party to be heard and understand. Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes These Coaching Questions Get Results, with Michael Bungay Stanier (episode 237) How to Ask Better Questions, with David Marquet (episode 454) The Way Out of Major Conflict, with Amanda Ripley (episode 529) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.

In this episode of Moments in Leadership, host David B. Armstrong spends time with DUSN Victor Minella, otherwise referred to as “Dozen” where they spend time discussing various topics related to leadership from his enlisted time, his officer time, and finally in civilian leadership inside the Department of the Navy. DUSN Minella covers the importance of leadership in making organizations successful and the differences/similarities in leading civilians and military personnel. DUSN Minella emphasizes leaders should seek to understand their personnel as individuals and not merely names on a chart. He also believes the best organizations are those where everyone is held to the same standard, especially on the ethical side.  To make this happen, he stresses the importance of compassion and understanding junior personnel will make mistakes, the important thing is to understand why the mistake happened and ensure the person is still a member of the team.  While every leader is responsible for setting the culture and foundation, the episode also covers the need for ethical leadership to ensure personnel Live Their Oath. DUSN Minella says unethical leaders are one of the quickest ways to erode trust in a command and more broadly, citizens' trust towards the military.  The trust of people is firstly forged from competence and leaders must be able to triage and quickly learn. The transition from military to civilian removes the bonafides of the uniform and rolling up one's sleeves and getting involved helps in gaining trust and showing competence in the job. Losing military identity can be overcome by having job satisfaction, so picking the right job, and not just ‘a job' is vitally important in helping service members make their transition outside the military.  DUSN Minella discusses the role of the Senior Executive Service is to be an executive and not specifically to task but to give guidance when needed and support when warranted. Oftentimes being the ‘easy answer' fails to create teams where initiative becomes a part of the organizational culture. The role of innovation is critical to solving some of the most important issues facing warfighters today. Fostering a culture of mentorship, communication, and innovative ‘maverick' thought allows an organization to be agile and responsive to the needs of these warfighters.  DUSN Minella discusses how being ‘All-In' is essential for maximizing both individual opportunities and improving National Security. The commitment and the Oath means being ‘All-In' for the United States.     Overall, the episode is an insightful discussion about leadership, the importance of mentorship, and the need for leaders to build relationships with their subordinates. Thank you for supporting the project (below) Please consider supporting this project on Supercast: Moments In Leadership Supercast  Want to support the project AND look cool at the gym or when you take your blouse off for a working party? Grab a cool tee shirt here from Mission Essential Gear, where every order supports this project AND donates back to Patrol Base Abbate  Be sure to check out the sponsor of this show Fieldseats.com for virtual reviews of great firearms, optics and gear where at the end of the virtual review, they give theitem away to an attendee. Be sure to use CODE: “LETHALMINDS” for 10% off the registration to a virtual review and check out their Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts @filed_seats  [Terms and Conditions apply] Relevant Resources & Other Mentioned Episodes: [ADD REFERENCES AND USE THE LINKS IN SEPARATE DOCUMENT IN GOOGLE DRIVE TITLED  DUSN's Dozens: Live your Oath Be bold be kind Exercise Urgency Always OverprepareKnow your audience Be Genuine Be a StorytellerBe Brief Be Gone Be uncomfortableBe a Mentor AlwaysValue Enthusiasm Celebrate Opportunity and Success   Marine Corps Training and Education 2030 Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by L. David Marquet, Captain U.S. Navy (Ret) (not an affiliate link) What is Moments in Leadership?Moments in Leadership is a podcast where you will hear firsthand about the careers of senior military leaders as they share their unique and individual experiences. Moments in Leadership will immerse you in real-life stories where you will learn about the challenging situations these accomplished leaders faced and discover the lessons they learned early in their careers that were the most influential in developing their overall leadership style.  Conceptualized by a group of friends who served together as young officers in the early to mid-1990s sitting around a firepit telling funny leadership stories, Moments in Leadership is designed to provide some relatable context to the formal leadership training leaders of all ranks and services receive throughout their military careers through the power of storytelling. Why Should You Support this project? I realize all of the leaders who listen to the episodes are at different levels of life, and my goal is to be able to have this project remain free and available to anyone who wants it and your donations help go towards that. Your donations go towards offsetting my costs of producing high-quality episodes. Additionally, since this is a part-time hobby project for me, I'm forced to outsource a good deal of work to others to maintain a regular publishing schedule. Your donations help offset these costs as well.  Check out my Supercast site and see if any level is a good fit for helping:  Connect with Us:Visit the Moments in Leadership website: Follow us on Instagram: Follow us on Twitter: Email us: themiloffice@gmail.com Other Podcasts Interviews with David B. ArmstrongScuttlebutt Podcast EP 38Former Action Guys Podcast EP 161 Former Action Guys Podcast EP 141 Former Action Guys Podcast EP 60 Former Action Guys Podcast EP 54  About the Host:David B. Armstrong, CFA, is President and Co-Founder of Monument Wealth Management, an independent wealth management firm he started in 2008 in Alexandria, Va. David received his BA from the University of South Carolina in Government & International Relations and his MBA at the University of South Carolina's Moore School of Business in International Finance. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant through the Navy ROTC program and served on Active Duty in the Marine Corps from 1990-1997 as an Artillery Officer and then received a secondary MOS as a Tank Officer. He re-entered the Selected Marine Corps Reserves in 2003 and served in several billets across the Artillery, Tank, and Light Armored Reconnaissance communities. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in late 2018.

Wendy Smith: Both/And Thinking Wendy Smith is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and faculty director of the Women's Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware. She earned her PhD in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, where she began her intensive research on strategic paradoxes—how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory, yet interdependent demands. She has received the Web of Science Highly Cited Research Award for being among the 1 percent most-cited researchers in her field and received the Decade Award from the Academy of Management Review for the most cited paper in the past 10 years. Her work has been published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, and Management Science. She has taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard, and Wharton while helping senior leaders and middle managers all over the world address issues of interpersonal dynamics, team performance, organizational change, and innovation. She is the author with Marianne Lewis of Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creating Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems. In this episode, Wendy and I discuss the dangers of either/or thinking and how that tendency limits our effectiveness. We explore how to shift to both/and thinking in order to resolve the most challenging problems. Plus, we share key tactics that will help us do this in more practical ways. Key Points Framing a decision as an either/or will often minimize short-term anxiety, but limits creative and innovative long-term possibilities. While easy to see both/and opportunities for others, we're likely to approach things as either/or when it's ourselves. An outside perspective from someone who's not emotionally connected is helpful. Changing the question we are asking is the most powerful to navigate paradoxes. Moving up a level when facing tough decisions can help us see the big picture. Consider shifting from “making a choice” to “choosing” in order to lead us towards better outcomes. Resources Mentioned Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creating Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems* by Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis Interview Notes Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required). Related Episodes How to Ask Better Questions, with David Marquet (episode 454) How to Win the Long Game When the Short-Term Seems Bleak, with Dorie Clark (episode 550) The Leadership Struggles We See, with Muriel Wilkins (episode 559) How to Quit Bad Stuff Faster, with Annie Duke (episode 607) Discover More Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic.