Podcast appearances and mentions of Jeff Sutherland

Jeff is the co-creator of Scrum and a leading expert on how the Scrum framework has evolved to meet the needs of today's business. The framework he developed in 1993 and formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber has since been adopted by the vast majority of software development companies around the world. However, Jeff realized that the benefits of Scrum are not limited to software and product development. He has adapted this successful strategy for several other industries, including finance, healthcare, higher education, and telecom.   As the CEO of Scrum Inc. Jeff sets the vision for success with Scrum. He continues to share best practices with organizations around the globe and has written extensively on Scrum rules and methods. With a deep understanding of business process — gleaned from years as CTO/CEO of eleven different software companies — Jeff is able to describe the high-level organizational benefits of Scrum and what it takes to create hyperproductive teams.   Topics of Discussion: [:35] Introduction of Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum. [3:47] Jeff Sutherland's background: His experience at West Point and lessons in making work visible. [5:19] Fighter pilot experiences that influenced the operational side of Scrum. [6:02] Transition to the Air Force Academy and work in AI at Stanford. [7:38] Learning complex adaptive systems and the origin of Agile from complex systems theory. [8:30] How complex systems theory impacts Scrum and Agile teams today. [9:25] Jeff's first experiences applying Scrum in the banking industry. [11:25] The development of Scrum and the 2001 Agile Manifesto. [12:57] Making work visible and organizing teams, from West Point to Toyota to the Agile Manifesto. [13:23] Fast forward to 2024: Issues in Scrum and Agile practices, including sprint lengths and backlog grooming. [14:34] Jeff's new book: First Principles in Scrum and its relation to Scrum technology stacks. [16:23] Building autonomous systems: Lessons from radiation physics, AI, and complex adaptive systems. [19:16] The influence of autonomous robots on the creation of Scrum. [21:14] Discussion of Scrum and AI, leading to “Extreme Agile.” [22:47] Predictions for the future of Scrum and Agile: Teams becoming 30 to 100 times faster by 2030. [23:37] Example of AI in action: Developing a system to handle expense reports using Scrum principles. [29:37] Challenges with AI-generated code and the need for strong software architecture knowledge. [33:24] The importance of following Scrum “by the book” to achieve hyperproductivity. [35:30] Jeff's closing advice on adapting to extreme agile to stay competitive by 2030.   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo “How the Agile Manifesto Came To Be” Become a beta tester for Jeff Sutherland's AI software project for expense reports: support@quickaireports.com   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Guest Bio:  Dave Snowden divides his time between two roles: founder & Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge and the founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at the University of Wales.  Known for creating the sense-making framework, Cynefin, Dave's work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making.  He has pioneered a science-based approach to organisations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience and complex adaptive systems theory.  He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style. He holds positions as extra-ordinary Professor at the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch and visiting Professor at Bangor University in Wales respectively.  He has held similar positions at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Canberra University, the University of Warwick and The University of Surrey.  He held the position of senior fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies at Nanyang University and the Civil Service College in Singapore during a sabbatical period in Nanyang. His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and also won the Academy of Management aware for the best practitioner paper in the same year.  He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on knowledge management. He is a editorial board member of several academic and practitioner journals in the field of knowledge management and is an Editor in Chief of E:CO.  In 2006 he was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence and in 2007 was appointed to an NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research. He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity; during that period he was selected by IBM as one of six on-demand thinkers for a world-wide advertising campaign. Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector. His company Cognitive Edge exists to integrate academic thinking with practice in organisations throughout the world and operates on a network model working with Academics, Government, Commercial Organisations, NGOs and Independent Consultants.  He is also the main designer of the SenseMaker® software suite, originally developed in the field of counter terrorism and now being actively deployed in both Government and Industry to handle issues of impact measurement, customer/employee insight, narrative based knowledge management, strategic foresight and risk management. The Centre for Applied Complexity was established to look at whole of citizen engagement in government and is running active programmes in Wales and elsewhere in areas such as social inclusion, self-organising communities and nudge economics together with a broad range of programmes in health.  The Centre will establish Wales as a centre of excellence for the integration of academic and practitioner work in creating a science-based approach to understanding society.   Social Media and Website LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dave-snowden-2a93b Twitter: @snowded Website: Cognitive Edge https://www.cognitive-edge.com/   Books/ Resources: Book: Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World by Dave Snowden and Friends https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynefin-Weaving-Sense-Making-Fabric-World/dp/1735379905 Book: Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hope-Without-Optimism-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0300248679/ Book: Theology of Hope by Jurgen Moltmann https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theology-Hope-Classics-Jurgen-Moltmann/dp/0334028787 Poem: ‘Mending Wall' by Robert Frost https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall Video: Dave Snowden on ‘Rewilding Agile' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrgaPDqet4c Article reference to ‘Rewilding Agile' by Dave Snowden https://cynefin.io/index.php/User:Snowded Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and Chaos) In Times of Crisis https://cynefin.io/index.php/Field_guide_to_managing_complexity_(and_chaos)_in_times_of_crisis Field Guide to Managing Complexity (and Chaos) In Times of Crisis (2) https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/managing-complexity-and-chaos-times-crisis-field-guide-decision-makers-inspired-cynefin-framework Cynefin Wiki https://cynefin.io/wiki/Main_Page   Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku:  Dave, thank you for making the time for this conversation. I read in your, your latest book - the book, Cynefin: Weaving Sense Making into the Fabric of Our World, which was released, I believe, in celebration of the twenty first year of the framework. And you mentioned that in your childhood, you had multidisciplinary upbringing which involved lots of reading. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Dave Snowden:  I think it wasn't uncommon in those days. I mean, if you did… I mean, I did science A levels and mathematical A levels. But the assumption was you would read every novel that the academic English class were reading. In fact, it was just unimaginable (that) you wouldn't know the basics of history. So, if you couldn't survive that in the sixth form common room, and the basics of science were known by most of the arts people as well. So that that was common, right. And we had to debate every week anyway. So, every week, you went up to the front of the class and you were given a card, and you'd have the subject and which side you are on, and you had to speak for seven minutes without preparation. And we did that every week from the age of 11 to 18. And that was a wonderful discipline because it meant you read everything. But also, my mother was… both my parents were the first from working class communities to go to university. And they got there by scholarship or sheer hard work against the opposition of their families. My mother went to university in Germany just after the war, which was extremely brave of her -  you know, as a South Wales working class girl. So, you weren't allowed not to be educated, it was considered the unforgivable sin. Ula Ojiaku:   Wow. Did it mean that she had to learn German, because (she was) studying in Germany…? Dave Snowden:  She well, she got A levels in languages. So, she went to university to study German and she actually ended up as a German teacher, German and French. So, she had that sort of background. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  And was that what influenced you? Because you also mentioned in the book that you won a £60 prize? Dave Snowden:  Oh, no, that was just fun. So, my mum was very politically active. We're a South Wales labor. Well, I know if I can read but we were labor. And so, she was a local Councilor. She was always politically active. There's a picture of me on Bertrand Russell's knee and her as a baby on a CND march. So it was that sort of background. And she was campaigning for comprehensive education, and had a ferocious fight with Aiden Williams, I think, who was the Director of Education, it was really nasty. I mean, I got threatened on my 11 Plus, he got really nasty. And then so when (I was) in the sixth form, I won the prize in his memory, which caused endless amusement in the whole county. All right. I think I probably won it for that. But that was for contributions beyond academic. So, I was leading lots of stuff in the community and stuff like that. But I had £60. And the assumption was, you go and buy one massive book. And I didn't, I got Dad to drive me to Liverpool - went into the big bookshop there and just came out with I mean, books for two and six pence. So, you can imagine how many books I could get for £60. And I just took everything I could find on philosophy and history and introductory science and stuff like that and just consumed it. Ula Ojiaku:  Wow, it seemed like you already knew what you wanted even before winning the prize money, you seem to have had a wish list... Dave Snowden:  I mean, actually interesting, and the big things in the EU field guide on (managing) complexity which was just issued. You need to build…, You need to stop saying, ‘this is the problem, we will find the solution' to saying, ‘how do I build capability, that can solve problems we haven't yet anticipated?' And I think that's part of the problem in education. Because my children didn't have that benefit. They had a modular education. Yeah, we did a set of exams at 16 and a set of exams that 18 and between those periods, we could explore it (i.e. options) and we had to hold everything in our minds for those two periods, right? For my children, it was do a module, pass a test, get a mark, move on, forget it move on. So, it's very compartmentalized, yeah? And it's also quite instrumentalist. We, I think we were given an education as much in how to learn and have had to find things out. And the debating tradition was that; you didn't know what you're going to get hit with. So, you read everything, and you thought about it, and you learn to think on your feet. And I think that that sort of a broad switch, it started to happen in the 80s, along with a lot of other bad things in management. And this is when systems thinking started to dominate. And we moved to an engineering metaphor. And you can see it in cybernetics and everything else, it's an attempt to define everything as a machine. And of course, machines are designed for a purpose, whereas ecosystems evolve for resilience. And I think that's kind of like where I, my generation were and it's certainly what we're trying to bring back in now in sort of in terms of practice. Ula Ojiaku:  I have an engineering background and a computer science background. These days, I'm developing a newfound love for philosophy, psychology, law and, you know, intersect, how do all these concepts intersect? Because as human beings we're complex, we're not machines where you put the program in and you expect it to come out the same, you know, it's not going to be the same for every human being. What do you think about that? Dave Snowden:  Yeah. And I think, you know, we know more on this as well. So, we know the role of art in human evolution is being closely linked to innovation. So, art comes before language. So, abstraction allows you to make novel connections. So, if you focus entirely on STEM education, you're damaging the human capacity to innovate. And we're, you know, as creatures, we're curious. You know. And I mean, we got this whole concept of our aporia, which is key to connecting that, which is creating a state of deliberate confusion, or a state of paradox. And the essence of a paradox is you can't resolve it. So, you're forced to think differently. So, the famous case on this is the liar's paradox, alright? I mean, “I always lie”. That just means I lied. So, if that means I was telling the truth. So, you've got to think differently about the problem. I mean, you've seen those paradoxes do the same thing. So that, that deliberate act of creating confusion so people can see novelty is key. Yeah. Umm and if you don't find… finding ways to do that, so when we looked at it, we looked at linguistic aporia, aesthetic aporia and physical aporia. So, I got some of the… one of the defining moments of insight on Cynefin was looking at Caravaggio`s paintings in Naples. When I realized I've been looking for the idea of the liminality. And that was, and then it all came together, right? So those are the trigger points requiring a more composite way of learning. I think it's also multiculturalism, to be honest. I mean, I, when I left university, I worked on the World Council of Churches come, you know program to combat racism. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes, I'd like to know more about that. That's one of my questions… Dave Snowden:  My mother was a good atheist, but she made me read the Bible on the basis, I wouldn't understand European literature otherwise, and the penetration guys, I became a Catholic so… Now, I mean, that that was fascinating, because I mean, I worked on Aboriginal land rights in Northern Australia, for example. And that was when I saw an activist who was literally murdered in front of me by a security guard. And we went to the police. And they said, it's only an Abo. And I still remember having fights in Geneva, because South Africa was a tribal conflict with a racial overlay. I mean, Africa, and its Matabele Zulu, arrived in South Africa together and wiped out the native population. And if you don't understand that, you don't understand the Matabele betrayal. You don't understand what happened. It doesn't justify apartheid. And one of the reasons there was a partial reconciliation, is it actually was a tribal conflict. And the ritual actually managed that. Whereas in Australia, in comparison was actually genocide. Yeah, it wasn't prejudice, it was genocide. I mean, until 1970s, there, were still taking half -breed children forcibly away from their parents, inter-marrying them in homes, to breed them back to white. And those are, I think, yeah, a big market. I argued this in the UK, I said, one of the things we should actually have is bring back national service. I couldn't get the Labor Party to adopt it. I said, ‘A: Because it would undermine the Conservatives, because they're the ones who talk about that sort of stuff. But we should allow it to be overseas.' So, if you put two years into working in communities, which are poorer than yours, round about that 18 to 21-year-old bracket, then we'll pay for your education. If you don't, you'll pay fees. Because you proved you want to give to society. And that would have been… I think, it would have meant we'd have had a generation of graduates who understood the world because that was part of the objective. I mean, I did that I worked on worked in South Africa, on the banks of Zimbabwe on the audits of the refugee camps around that fight. And in Sao Paulo, in the slums, some of the work of priests. You can't come back from that and not be changed. And I think it's that key formative period, we need to give people. Ula Ojiaku:  True and like you said, at that age, you know, when you're young and impressionable, it helps with what broadening your worldview to know that the world is bigger than your father's … compound (backyard)… Dave Snowden:  That's the worst problem in Agile, because what, you've got a whole class of, mainly white males and misogynism in Agile is really bad. It's one of the worst areas for misogyny still left, right, in terms of where it works. Ula Ojiaku:  I'm happy you are the one saying it not me… Dave Snowden:  Well, no, I mean, it is it's quite appalling. And so, what you've actually got is, is largely a bunch of white male game players who spent their entire time on computers. Yeah, when you take and run seriously after puberty, and that's kind of like a dominant culture. And that's actually quite dangerous, because it lacks, it lacks cultural diversity, it lacks ethnic diversity, it lacks educational diversity. And I wrote an article for ITIL, recently, which has been published, which said, no engineers should be allowed out, without training in ethics. Because the implications of what software engineers do now are huge. And the problem we've got, and this is a really significant, it's a big data problem as well. And you see it with a behavioral economic economist and the nudge theory guys - all of whom grab these large-scale data manipulations is that they're amoral, they're not immoral, they're amoral. And that's actually always more scary. It's this sort of deep level instrumentalism about the numbers; the numbers tell me what I need to say. Ula Ojiaku:  And also, I mean, just building on what you've said, there are instances, for example, in artificial intelligence is really based on a sample set from a select group, and it doesn't necessarily recognize things that are called ‘outliers'. You know, other races… Dave Snowden:  I mean, I've worked in that in all my life now back 20, 25 years ago. John Poindexter and I were on a stage in a conference in Washington. This was sort of early days of our work on counter terrorism. And somebody asked about black box AI and I said, nobody's talking about the training data sets. And I've worked in AI from the early days, all right, and the training data sets matter and nobody bothered. They just assumed… and you get people publishing books which say correlation is causation, which is deeply worrying, right? And I think Google is starting to acknowledge that, but it's actually very late. And the biases which… we were looking at a software tool the other day, it said it can, it can predict 85% of future events around culture. Well, it can only do that by constraining how executive see culture, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then the recruitment algorithms will only recruit people who match that cultural expectation and outliers will be eliminated. There's an HBO film coming up shortly on Myers Briggs. Now, Myers Briggs is known to be a pseudo-science. It has no basis whatsoever in any clinical work, and even Jung denied it, even though it's meant to be based on his work. But it's beautiful for HR departments because it allows them to put people into little categories. And critically it abrogates, judgment, and that's what happened with systems thinking in the 80s 90s is everything became spreadsheets and algorithms. So, HR departments would produce… instead of managers making decisions based on judgment, HR departments would force them into profile curves, to allocate resources. Actually, if you had a high performing team who were punished, because the assumption was teams would not have more than… Ula Ojiaku:  Bell curve... Dave Snowden:  …10 percent high performance in it. All right. Ula Ojiaku:  Yeah. Dave Snowden:  And this sort of nonsense has been running in the 80s, 90s and it coincided with… three things came together. One was the popularization of systems thinking. And unfortunately, it got popularized around things like process reengineering and learning organization. So that was a hard end. And Sanghi's pious can the sort of the, the soft end of it, right? But both of them were highly directional. It was kind of like leaders decide everything follows. Yeah. And that coincided with the huge growth of computing - the ability to handle large volumes of information. And all of those sorts of things came together in this sort of perfect storm, and we lost a lot of humanity in the process. Ula Ojiaku:  Do you think there's hope for us to regain the humanity in the process? Because it seems like the tide is turning from, I mean, there is still an emphasis, in my view, on systems thinking, however, there is the growing realization that we have, you know, knowledge workers and people… Dave Snowden:  Coming to the end of its park cycle, I see that all right. I can see it with the amount of cybernetics fanboys, and they are all boys who jump on me every time I say something about complexity, right? So, I think they're feeling threatened. And the field guide is significant, because it's a government, you know, government can like publication around effectively taken an ecosystems approach, not a cybernetic approach. And there's a book published by a good friend of mine called Terry Eagleton, who's… I don't think he's written a bad book. And he's written about 30, or 40. I mean, the guy just produces his stuff. It's called “Hope without Optimism”. And I think, hope is… I mean, Moltman just also published an update of his Theology of Hope, which is worth reading, even if you're not religious. But hope is one of those key concepts, right, you should… to lose hope is a sin. But hope is not the same thing as optimism. In fact, pessimistic people who hope actually are probably the ones who make a difference, because they're not naive, right? And this is my objection to the likes of Sharma Ga Sengi, and the like, is they just gather people together to talk about how things should be. And of course, everything should be what, you know, white MIT, educated males think the world should be like. I mean, it's very culturally imperialist in that sort of sense. And then nobody changes because anybody can come together in the workshop and agree how things should be. It's when you make a difference in the field that it counts, you've got to create a micro difference. This is hyper localization, you got to create lots and lots of micro differences, which will stimulate the systems, the system will change. I think, three things that come together, one is COVID. The other is global warming. And the other is, and I prefer to call it the epistemic justice movement, though, that kind of like fits in with Black Lives Matter. But epistemic justice doesn't just affect people who are female or black. I mean, if you come to the UK and see the language about the Welsh and the Irish, or the jokes made about the Welsh in BBC, right? The way we use language can designate people in different ways and I think that's a big movement, though. And it's certainly something we develop software for. So, I think those three come together, and I think the old models aren't going to be sustainable. I mean, the cost is going to be terrible. I mean, the cost to COVID is already bad. And we're not getting this thing as long COVID, it's permanent COVID. And people need to start getting used to that. And I think that's, that's going to change things. So, for example, in the village I live in Wiltshire. Somebody's now opened an artisan bakery in their garage and it's brilliant. And everybody's popping around there twice a week and just buying the bread and having a chat on the way; socially-distanced with masks, of course. And talking of people, that sort of thing is happening a lot. COVID has forced people into local areas and forced people to realise the vulnerability of supply chains. So, you can see changes happening there. The whole Trump phenomenon, right, and the Boris murmuring in the UK is ongoing. It's just as bad as the Trump phenomenon. It's the institutionalization of corruption as a high level. Right? Those sorts of things trigger change, right? Not without cost, change never comes without cost, but it just needs enough… It needs local action, not international action. I think that's the key principle. To get a lot of people to accept things like the Paris Accord on climate change, and you've got to be prepared to make sacrifices. And it's too distant a time at the moment, it has to become a local issue for the international initiatives to actually work and we're seeing that now. I mean… Ula Ojiaku:  It sounds like, sorry to interrupt - it sounds like what you're saying is, for the local action, for change to happen, it has to start with us as individuals… Dave Snowden:  The disposition… No, not with individuals. That's actually very North American, the North European way of thinking right. The fundamental kind of basic identity structure of humans is actually clans, not individuals. Ula Ojiaku:  Clans... Dave Snowden:  Yeah. Extended families, clans; it's an ambiguous word. We actually evolved for those. And you need it at that level, because that's a high level of social interaction and social dependency. And it's like, for example, right? I'm dyslexic. Right? Yeah. If I don't see if, if the spelling checker doesn't pick up a spelling mistake, I won't see it. And I read a whole page at a time. I do not read it sentence by sentence. All right. And I can't understand why people haven't seen the connections I make, because they're obvious, right? Equally, there's a high degree of partial autism in the Agile community, because that goes with mathematical ability and thing, and that this so-called education deficiencies, and the attempt to define an ideal individual is a mistake, because we evolved to have these differences. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes. Dave Snowden:  Yeah. And the differences understood that the right level of interaction can change things. So, I think the unit is clan, right for extended family, or extended, extended interdependence. Ula Ojiaku:  Extended interdependence… Dave Snowden:  We're seeing that in the village. I mean, yeah, this is classic British atomistic knit, and none of our relatives live anywhere near us. But the independence in the village is increasing with COVID. And therefore, people are finding relationships and things they can do together. Now, once that builds to a critical mass, and it does actually happen exponentially, then bigger initiatives are possible. And this is some of the stuff we were hoping to do in the US shortly on post-election reconciliation. And the work we've been doing in Malmo, in refugees and elsewhere in the world, right, is you change the nature of localized interaction with national visibility, so that you can measure the dispositional state of the system. And then you can nudge the system when it's ready to change, because then the energy cost of change is low. But that requires real time feedback loops in distributed human sensor networks, which is a key issue in the field guide. And the key thing that comes back to your original question on AI, is, the internet at the moment is an unbuffered feedback loop. Yeah, where you don't know the source of the data, and you can't control the source of the data. And any network like that, and this is just apriori science factor, right will always become perverted. Ula Ojiaku:  And what do you mean by term apriori? Dave Snowden:  Oh, before the facts, you don't need to, we don't need to wait for evidence. It's like in an agile, you can look at something like SAFe® which case claims to scale agile and just look at it you say it's apriori wrong (to) a scale a complex system. So, it's wrong. All right. End of argument right. Now let's talk about the details, right. So yeah, so that's, you know, that's coming back. The hyper localization thing is absolutely key on that, right? And the same is true to be honest in software development. A lot of our work now is to understand the unarticulated needs of users. And then shift technology in to actually meet those unarticulated needs. And that requires a complex approach to architecture, in which people and technology are objects with defined interactions around scaffolding structures, so that applications can emerge in resilience, right? And that's actually how local communities evolve as well. So, we've now got the theoretical constructs and a lot of the practical methods to actually… And I've got a series of blog posts - which I've got to get back to writing - called Rewilding Agile. And rewilding isn't returning to the original state, it's restoring balance. So, if you increase the number of human actors as your primary sources, and I mean human actors, not as people sitting on (in front of) computer screens who can be faked or mimicked, yeah? … and entirely working on text, which is about 10%, of what we know, dangerous, it might become 80% of what we know and then you need to panic. Right? So, you know, by changing those interactions, increasing the human agency in the system, that's how you come to, that's how you deal with fake news. It's not by writing better algorithms, because then it becomes a war with the guys faking the news, and you're always gonna lose. Ula Ojiaku:  So, what do you consider yourself, a person of faith? Dave Snowden:  Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  Why? Dave Snowden:  Oh, faith is like hope and charity. I mean, they're the great virtues… I didn't tell you I got into a lot in trouble in the 70s. Dave Snowden:  I wrote an essay that said Catholicism, Marxism and Hinduism were ontologically identical and should be combined and we're different from Protestantism and capitalism, which are also ontologically identical (and) it can be combined. Ula Ojiaku:  Is this available in the public domain? Dave Snowden:  I doubt it. I think it actually got me onto a heresy trial at one point, but that but I would still say that. Ula Ojiaku:  That's amazing. Can we then move to the framework that Cynefin framework, how did it evolve into what we know it as today? Dave Snowden:  I'll do a high-level summary, but I wrote it up at length in the book and I didn't know I was writing for the book. The book was a surprise that they put together for me. I thought that was just writing an extended blog post. It started when I was working in IBM is it originates from the work of Max Borrasso was my mentor for years who tragically died early. But he was looking at abstraction, codification and diffusion. We did a fair amount of work together, I took two of those aspects and started to look at informal and formal communities in IBM, and its innovation. And some of the early articles on Cynefin, certainly the early ones with the five domains come from that period. And at that time, we had access labels. Yeah. And then then complexity theory came into it. So, it shifted into being a complexity framework. And it stayed … The five domains were fairly constant for a fairly long period of time, they changed their names a bit. The central domain I knew was important, but didn't have as much prominence as it does now. And then I introduced liminality, partly driven by agile people, actually, because they could they couldn't get the concept there were dynamics and domains. So, they used to say things like, ‘look, Scrum is a dynamic. It's a way of shifting complex to complicated' and people say ‘no, the scrum guide said it's about complex.' And you think, ‘oh, God, Stacey has a lot to answer for' but… Ula Ojiaku: Who`s Stacey? Dave Snowden:  Ralph Stacey. So, he was the guy originally picked up by Ken when he wrote the Scrum Guide… Ula Ojiaku:  Right. Okay. Dave Snowden:  Stacey believes everything's complex, which is just wrong, right? So, either way, Cynefin evolved with the liminal aspects. And then the last resolution last year, which is… kind of completes Cynefin to be honest, there's some refinements… was when we realized that the central domain was confused, or operatic. And that was the point where you started. So, you didn't start by putting things into the domain, you started in the operatic. And then you moved aspects of things into the different domains. So that was really important. And it got picked up in Agile, ironically, by the XP community. So, I mean, I was in IT most of my life, I was one of the founders of the DSDM Consortium, and then moved sideways from that, and was working in counterterrorism and other areas, always you're working with technology, but not in the Agile movement. Cynefin is actually about the same age as Agile, it started at the same time. And the XP community in London invited me in, and I still think Agile would have been better if it had been built on XP, not Scrum. But it wouldn't have scaled with XP, I mean, without Scrum it would never have scaled it. And then it got picked up. And I think one of the reasons it got picked up over Stacey is, it said order is possible. It didn't say everything is complex. And virtually every Agile method I know of value actually focuses on making complex, complicated. Ula Ojiaku:  Yes. Dave Snowden:  And that's its power. What they're… what is insufficient of, and this is where we've been working is what I call pre-Scrum techniques. Techniques, which define what should go into that process. Right, because all of the Agile methods still tend to be a very strong manufacturing metaphor - manufacturing ideas. So, they assume somebody will tell them what they have to produce. And that actually is a bad way of thinking about IT. Technology needs to co-evolve. And users can't articulate what they want, because they don't know what technology can do. Ula Ojiaku:  True. But are you saying… because in Agile fundamentally, it's really about making sure there's alignment as well that people are working on the right thing per time, but you're not telling them how to do it? Dave Snowden:  Well, yes and no - all right. I mean, it depends what you're doing. I mean, some Agile processes, yes. But if you go through the sort of safe brain remain processes, very little variety within it, right? And self-organization happens within the context of a user executive and retrospectives. Right, so that's its power. And, but if you look at it, it took a really good technique called time-boxing, and it reduced it to a two-week sprint. Now, that's one aspect of time boxing. I mean, I've got a whole series of blog posts next week on this, because time boxing is a hugely valuable technique. It says there's minimal deliverable project, and maximum deliverable product and a minimal level of resource and a maximum level of resource. And the team commits to deliver on the date. Ula Ojiaku:  To accurate quality… to a quality standard. Dave Snowden:  Yeah, so basically, you know that the worst case, you'll get the minimum product at the maximum cost, but you know, you'll get it on that date. So, you can deal with it, alright. And that's another technique we've neglected. We're doing things which force high levels of mutation and requirements over 24 hours, before they get put into a Scrum process. Because if you just take what users want, you know, there's been insufficient co-evolution with the technology capability. And so, by the time you deliver it, the users will probably realize they should have asked for something different anyway. Ula Ojiaku:  So, does this tie in with the pre-Scrum techniques you mentioned earlier? If so, can you articulate that? Dave Snowden:  So, is to say different methods in different places. And that's again, my opposition to things like SAFe, to a lesser extent LeSS, and so on, right, is they try and put everything into one bloody big flow diagram. Yeah. And that's messy. All right? Well, it's a recipe, not a chef. What the chef does is they put different ingredients together in different combinations. So, there's modularity of knowledge, but it's not forced into a linear process. So, our work… and we just got an open space and open source and our methods deliberately, right, in terms of the way it works, is I can take Scrum, and I can reduce it to its lowest coherent components, like a sprint or retrospective. I can combine those components with components for another method. So, I can create Scrum as an assembly of components, I can take those components compared with other components. And that way, you get novelty. So, we're then developing components which sit before traditional stuff. Like for example, triple eight, right? This was an old DSDM method. So, you ran a JAD sessions and Scrum has forgotten about JAD. JAD is a really…  joint application design… is a really good set of techniques - they're all outstanding. You throw users together with coders for two days, and you force out some prototypes. Yeah, that latching on its own would, would transform agile, bringing that back in spades, right? We did is we do an eight-hour JAD session say, in London, and we pass it on to a team in Mumbai. But we don't tell them what the users ask for. They just get the prototype. And they can do whatever they want with it for eight hours. And then they hand it over to a team in San Francisco, who can do whatever they want with it in eight hours. And it comes back. And every time I've run this, the user said, ‘God, I wouldn't have thought of that, can I please, have it?' So, what you're doing is a limited life cycle -  you get the thing roughly defined, then you allow it to mutate without control, and then you look at the results and decide what you want to do. And that's an example of pre-scrum technique, that is a lot more economical than systems and analysts and user executives and storyboards. And all those sorts of things. Yeah. Ula Ojiaku:  Well, I see what you mean, because it seems like the, you know, the JAD - the joint application design technique allows for emergent design, and you shift the decision making closer to the people who are at the forefront. And to an extent my understanding of, you know, Scrum … I mean, some agile frameworks - that's also what they promote… Dave Snowden:  Oh, they don't really don't. alright. They picked up Design Thinking which is quite interesting at the moment. If you if you look at Agile and Design Thinking. They're both at the end of their life cycles. Ula Ojiaku:  Why do you say that? Dave Snowden:  Because they're being commodified. The way you know, something is coming to the end of its life cycle is when it becomes highly commodified. So, if you look at it, look at what they are doing the moment, the Double Diamond is now a series of courses with certificates. And I mean, Agile started with bloody certificates, which is why it's always been slightly diverse in the way it works. I mean, this idea that you go on a three-day course and get a certificate, you read some slides every year and pay some money and get another certificate is fundamentally corrupt. But most of the Agile business is built on it, right? I mean, I've got three sets of methods after my name. But they all came from yearlong or longer courses certified by university not from tearing apart a course. Yeah, or satisfying a peer group within a very narrow cultural or technical definition of competence. So, I think yeah, and you can see that with Design Thinking. So, it's expert ideation, expert ethnography. And it still falls into that way of doing things. Yeah. And you can see it, people that are obsessed with running workshops that they facilitate. And that's the problem. I mean, the work we're doing on citizen engagement is actually… has no bloody facilitators in it. As all the evidence is that the people who turn up are culturally biased about their representative based opinions. And the same is true if you want to look at unarticulated needs, you can't afford to have the systems analysts finding them because they see them from their perspective. And this is one of one science, right? You did not see what you do not expect to see. We know that, alright? So, you're not going to see outliers. And so, the minute you have an expert doing something, it's really good - where you know, the bounds of the expertise, cover all the possibilities, and it's really dangerous. Well, that's not the case. Ula Ojiaku:  So, could you tell me a bit more about the unfacilitated sessions you mentioned earlier? Dave Snowden:  They're definitely not sessions, so we didn't like what were triggers at moments. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Dave Snowden:  So, defining roles. So, for example, one of the things I would do and have done in IT, is put together, young, naive, recently graduated programmer with older experienced tester or software architect. So, somebody without any… Ula Ojiaku:  Prejudice or pre-conceived idea... Dave Snowden:  … preferably with a sort of grandparent age group between them as well. I call it, the grandparents syndrome - grandparents say things to their grandchildren they won't tell their children and vice versa. If you maximize the age gap, there's actually freer information flow because there's no threat in the process. And then we put together with users trained to talk to IT people. So, in a month's time, I'll publish that as a training course. So, training users to talk to IT people is more economical than trying to train IT people to understand users. Ula Ojiaku:  To wrap up then, based on what you said, you know, about Cynefin, and you know, the wonderful ideas behind Cynefin. How can leaders in organizations in any organization apply these and in how they make sense of the world and, you know, take decisions? Dave Snowden:  Well, if there's actually a sensible way forward now, so we've just published the field guide on managing complexity.  Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Dave Snowden:  And that is actually, it's a sort of ‘Chef's guide'. It has four stages: assess, adapt, exert, transcend, and within that it has things you could do. So, it's not a list of qualities, it's a list of practical things you should go and do tomorrow, and those things we're building at the moment with a lot of partners, because we won't try and control this; this needs to be open. Here's an assessment process that people will go through to decide where they are. So that's going to be available next week on our website. Ula Ojiaku:  Oh, fantastic! Dave Snowden:  For the initial registration.  Other than that, and there's a whole body of stuff on how to use Cynefin. And as I said, we just open source on the methods. So, the Wiki is open source. These… from my point of view, we're now at the stage where the market is going to expand very quickly. And to be honest, I, you know, I've always said traditionally use cash waiver as an example of this. The reason that Agile scaled around Scrum is he didn't make it an elite activity, which XP was. I love the XP guys, but they can't communicate with ordinary mortals. Yeah. It takes you about 10 minutes to tune into the main point, and even you know the field, right. And he (Jeff Sutherland) made the Scrum Guide open source. And that way it's great, right. And I think that that's something which people just don't get strategic with. They, in early stages, you should keep things behind firewalls. When the market is ready to expand, you take the firewalls away fast. Because I mean, getting behind firewalls initially to maintain coherence so they don't get diluted too quickly, or what I call “hawks being made into pigeons”. Yeah. But the minute the market is starting to expand, that probably means you've defined it so you release the firewall so the ideas spread very quickly, and you accept the degree of diversity on it. So that's the reason we put the Wiki. Ula Ojiaku:  Right. So, are there any books that you would recommend, for anyone who wants to learn more about what you've talked about so far. Dave Snowden:  You would normally produce the theory book, then the field book, but we did it the other way around. So, Mary and I are working on three to five books, which will back up the Field Guide. Ula Ojiaku:  Is it Mary Boone? Dave Snowden:  Mary Boone. She knows how to write to the American managers, which I don't, right… without losing integrity. So that's coming, right. If you go onto the website, I've listed all the books I read. I don't think… there are some very, very good books around complexity, but they're deeply specialized, they're academic. Gerard's book is just absolutely brilliant but it's difficult to understand if you don't have a philosophy degree. And there are some awfully tripe books around complexity - nearly all of the popular books I've seen, I wouldn't recommend. Yeah. Small Groups of Complex Adaptive Systems is probably quite a good one that was published about 20 years ago. Yeah, but that we got a book list on the website. So, I would look at that. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. Thank you so much for that. Do you have any ask of the audience and how can they get to you? Dave Snowden:  We've open-sourced the Wiki, you know, to create a critical mass, I was really pleased we have 200 people volunteered to help populate it. So, we get the all the methods in the field guide them. And they're actively working at that at the moment, right, and on a call with them later. And to be honest, I've done 18-hour days, the last two weeks, but 8 hours of each of those days has been talking to the methods with a group of people Academy 5, that's actually given me a lot of energy, because it's huge. So, get involved, I think it's the best way… you best understand complexity by getting the principles and then practicing it. And the key thing I'll leave us with is the metaphor. I mentioned it a few times - a recipe book user has a recipe, and they follow it. And if they don't have the right ingredients, and if they don't have the right equipment, they can't operate. Or they say it's not ‘true Agile'. A chef understands the theory of cooking and has got served in apprenticeship. So, their fingers know how to do things. And that's… we need… a downside.. more chefs, which is the combination of theory and practice. And the word empirical is hugely corrupted in the Agile movement. You know, basically saying, ‘this worked for me' or ‘it worked for me the last three times' is the most dangerous way of moving forward. Ula Ojiaku:  Because things change and what worked yesterday might not work Dave Snowden:  And you won't be aware of what worked or didn't work and so on. Ula Ojiaku:  And there's some bias in that. Wouldn't you say? Dave Snowden:  We've got an attentional blindness if you've got Ula Ojiaku:  Great. And Dave, where can people find you? Are you on social media? Dave Snowden:  Cognitive. Yeah, social media is @snowded. Yeah. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Two websites – the Cognitive Edge website, which is where I blog, and there's a new Cynefin Center website now, which is a not-for-profit arm. Ula Ojiaku:  Okay. All these would be in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time, Dave. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Dave Snowden:  Okay. Thanks a lot.

In this episode, Kate Megaw joins Brian Milner to share simple but powerful techniques that can turn those soul-sucking meetings into dynamic, action-driven conversations. If you're ready to make meetings worth attending, this one’s for you! Overview Brian Milner and Kate Megaw uncover the secrets to running highly effective and engaging meetings. They tackle common facilitation pitfalls, the staggering amount of time wasted in ineffective meetings, and how simple tweaks can transform team collaboration. Kate shares practical strategies for keeping participants engaged, fostering psychological safety, and ensuring meetings lead to real action—because no one has time for another pointless meeting. References and resources mentioned in the show: Kate Megaw ARCLight Agile Katanu Katanu’s Facilitator Certification Course Katanu Resources #44: Transformations Take People with Anu Smalley Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Kate Megaw is the Founder and CEO of ARCLight Agile, specializing in helping organizations create empowered, high-performing teams through agility and collaboration. A dynamic Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Team Coach (CTC), and Project Management Professional (PMP), Kate is a sought-after speaker known for sparking ‘aha’ moments that drive real transformation. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as I always am, Brian Milner. I'm with you as your host. But today I have the one and only, amazing Kate McGaw is with us. Kate, thank you for coming on. Kate Megaw (00:17) Thank you for having me. Brian Milner (00:19) Absolutely. If there's some of you out there that aren't familiar with Kate, she is a CST, a Scrum trainer like myself. She's also a certified team coach. And she also has the other side of things, the dark side. She's a PMP. So she has that project management kind of background that she brings to the table as well, which I think is awesome. She's a CEO of a company called Arclight Agile. And she's a co-founder of one of our favorites here that's come on the show, Anu. But they team up together. So it's Kate and Anu. And so their company is Katanu. I love it. love it. So why we decided to have Kate on is because Kate and Anu both have done a lot of work around facilitation. And we did have a user request. Kate Megaw (00:57) That's it. Brian Milner (01:09) to have an episode where we focused on facilitation. And listeners of the show know there's nothing I love more than being able to fulfill listener requests here and try to do those as soon as possible. So let's dive in. Let's talk about facilitation. It's a funny word. There's lots of different misconceptions and things about it, I'm sure. What do you find people misunderstand most about facilitation? Kate Megaw (01:34) think one of the key misunderstandings around facilitation is that you're part of the meeting, you're part of the event, you're actively involved. And when you're facilitating, you're actually, taking a step back because you are accountable for making sure that everyone is speaking and that we're keeping an eye on the agenda and things like that. And if you are actively involved in the discussion, You can't be doing that because you're missing body language. You're missing people who need to talk and who aren't talking. So I think one of the main misconceptions is, or that people forget is a facilitator is neutral. So if, for example, you have a scrum master facilitating a retrospective and they need to be actively involved in the retrospective, they should be inviting somebody else in to facilitate it. and I think We're beginning to see a lot more interest in it now because it's one of these key things. If it's done badly, people generally will notice. If it's done well, hopefully you don't notice that much other than, you know what, that meeting was very efficient. We achieved the goal and I feel as though it was worth my time. One of the things I like to say to people at the end of a meeting is the fist of five, how worth your time was this meeting? And I'm looking for fives or fours. If we're getting threes, twos and ones, we've not facilitated it well, or the meeting didn't achieve its agenda and things like that. think a lot of the statistics around facilitation that have come out recently, and you and I were talking about these briefly before we started that the average at the Microsoft trend index shows us that average time spent in meetings by employees at the moment is 21 and a half hours a week, which is an increase, I know, an increase of 252 % since the pre-pandemic. So. Brian Milner (03:36) That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, that's more than half of a work week, right? I mean, we're spending more than half our work week in just locked in meetings. So you're right. We had this conversation beforehand and you were telling me that stat and it just kind of floored me that we're spending that much time in meetings. But it was the next one you told me that really floored me. And it's a combination of these two, I think, that people need to really grasp onto. So tell them what you told me next. Kate Megaw (03:49) Mm hmm. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So the next one is that the Harvard Business Review indicates their research, 67 % of meetings are considered by executives to be failures. So if we look at the financial impact of that, and this is something I didn't share with you, but the financial impact of that is for a company, imagine you have a company with 100 employees, unproductive meetings are wasting upward of $1.7 million a year. If you have a thousand employees, increase that number. it's one of these things that it is not difficult to do. It is just understanding why we need someone in the facilitator role. And the basics around the basic facilitation, the basic getting ready for the meeting, facilitating during the meeting and properly closing the meeting. takes those unsuccessful numbers up to successful numbers where you're getting those fives and people are sort of, yep, that meeting totally achieved the purpose and the outcome and it finished early. So I've got 20 minutes back before my next meeting. Brian Milner (05:24) Yeah, it's so incredible that combination of those two stats. I thinking that we're spending over half our time in meetings and that 67 % of them are failures, we're having a lot of them and we're not doing them well, clearly. Kate Megaw (05:36) Absolutely. I think with, I don't know with Zoom, well, I think with Zoom, it's got easier to have meetings. So we're probably having meetings where we don't need to have meetings. That's one of my favorite things to ask is, does this need to be a meeting? Or are you just going to talk at me and roll data out? In which case, send it to me in email. Don't tie me up for a meeting. Brian Milner (05:44) Yep. Kate Megaw (06:02) Because so many meetings are a waste of time that a lot of people are spending meetings multitasking. So we're taking an hour for a meeting that we could do in 25 minutes if people were 100 % engaged and following the agenda and things like that. Brian Milner (06:22) Yeah, yeah, that's so fascinating. it seems like such a, it's hard to believe that there's not more of that skill in just basic business training, right? Because if we're having all those meetings, then it would seem natural that there would be more segments that would say, you know, a little facilitation skill for, you know, a, you know, bachelor's in business, you know, like that might be a little helpful, right? Kate Megaw (06:41) Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a small investment for something that will make a huge difference. I mean, one of the things Anu and I have been working on is the mnemonic of ready, reach, and wrap in order to make sure we have effective meetings. And the ready part of it is setting the foundation. So before you even get to your meeting, this is ahead of time. You're understanding, okay, what are the Rs? What are the roles and responsibilities? So if I'm facilitating, then who are the decision makers? Who is mandatory? Who's required to be there? Who are the, you can come if you want. Let's stop doing meetings to 30 people and expecting 30 people to show up. So we've got to understand the roles and responsibilities. The other, the E for the ready is expectations and engagement. Brian Milner (07:29) Ha ha ha. Kate Megaw (07:41) So if the expectations are that this is an interactive meeting, we're using Lucid or Mural or Mira, whatever tool we're using, it's going to be collaborative, webcams are going to be on, multitasking is going to be at a minimum, everyone knows going into that meeting what the expectations are. And then the A again is the agenda and the alignment. The agenda should be very clearly saying these are the items that the D is making sure where we have defined the purpose and the outcome. So every meeting, we need to know what the purpose of the meeting is, what the outcome of the meeting is, and they should be included in the agenda. We shouldn't be accepting meetings. Imagine the power of being able to decline a meeting if it didn't have an agenda in it. And if you think about it, why do we attend meetings? Brian Milner (08:27) Ha Yeah. Kate Megaw (08:33) with no agenda and people turn up to the meeting and said, okay, so what's this meeting for? Pretty sure we've all got better things to be doing. So make sure for every meeting we have a defined purpose and outcome. And then the why is making sure we as facilitators have your logistics ready. If it's Zoom, if we're using a remote whiteboard, do people need to practice it? Do we need to set up an environment? Do we need to make sure webcams are on? All that type of thing. So a huge amount of meetings would be better if we did nothing other than better planning with the roles, responsibilities, the expectations, the agenda, the defining the outcome and the logistics. If we just did that. Brian Milner (09:09) Yeah. Kate Megaw (09:23) I bet we're going to see the amount of productive meetings increase considerably. Brian Milner (09:29) Yeah, there's so much transfer here too as well, just to the normal scrum meetings that we have because, you know, one of the things I'll talk about lot in class is just to say, you know, you can't just expect to show up to something like Sprint Planning and have it go smoothly. You have to put in some work beforehand and get ready for it. Same thing with like a Sprint Review. You got to put in some work beforehand and make sure you know who's going when and who's speaking, you know, that speaking order and all that stuff. Kate Megaw (09:42) Yeah. Brian Milner (09:55) goes miles in making those more successful meetings. But the other thing that really interested me in that is you talk a little bit about purpose and that we don't really understand the purpose of the meetings. And that's something that's really stuck out to me is when I talk to people who don't like their Scrum meetings, it feels like 90 % that is just Brian math, but it feels like 90 % of the time, right? Feels like this. It feels like 90 % of the time. Kate Megaw (10:04) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (10:20) that the people who have a problem with those meetings don't know the purpose of the meeting and that's really the root cause of it, right? If they knew why we were here, then the meeting makes sense. Now I understand what we're trying to do. Kate Megaw (10:26) Yep, absolutely. And I think one of the interesting things, I would love to repeat these numbers around the Scrum events, because I think by default, the Scrum events do have a purpose. They do have an outcome. We know what the roles and responsibilities are. We know what the expectations for engagement are. So I think the Scrum events are much more productive than your average event. Brian Milner (10:41) Yeah. Kate Megaw (10:59) But I do feel if we don't have well-facilitated Scrum events, that's where we get our criticism, or, this meeting was a waste of time. Okay, well, let's look at our facilitation and see, it an error in planning or was it an error in expectations? But it always surprises me when people say, well, Scrum's just so many meetings. And I'm so... No, we should have fewer meetings and if they're well facilitated, we need all of those meetings. So it's not as though we're having a meeting for meeting sake, which I think is unfortunately something we can't say for our non-scrum events. Brian Milner (11:43) Yeah, yeah, I mean, I go so far as to say, if you don't understand the purpose of it, don't show up. I mean, there's really no need to be there if you don't know what we're trying to get out of it. One other little side correlation there too, because this kind of ties in a little bit to some of the stuff I did this last year in kind of studying a little bit about neurodivergency and different neuro types and that kind of thing. And one of the things I found really fascinating was certain neurodivergent types, Kate Megaw (11:48) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (12:12) really need to have an agenda in advance. And if they don't, then it just raises their anxiety level. they're just, you even not, you know, neurodivergent types, just regular, normal, you know, neurotypical people. There are those that just don't respond well when you're just throwing out a blank slate and saying, give us your best idea, right? They need time to process and think in advance and Kate Megaw (12:15) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yep. Brian Milner (12:38) And so yeah, if we could send out that just the day before, it's not that much work. It's just one day earlier, right? It's actually the same amount of work. It's just doing it a day earlier. Right. Kate Megaw (12:45) Absolutely. Absolutely. It's just better organized. Yeah. I mean, I even on my team meetings, I know some members of my team want to know, because I always like to start them with segue questions and some of my team completely fine. Ask them a question, favorite food or you want to have any sort of segue question and they're fine with it. But I have my thinkers who want to think about it ahead of time. So I think it's important when we're facilitating any event that we understand the audience. How many of the audience are going to want to maybe read a document ahead of time? How many of the audience are, you know what, they can think on the feet, I can throw anything at them, but there are others that do need the preparation. yeah, I think that the planning that we do, if we can do it just slightly ahead. And then things like when we get into the meeting, of the mnemonic that we use for actually facilitating during the meeting is the mnemonic of reach, which is we're guiding the process. The very first thing we do when we go into the meeting is we review the agenda and open the meeting. So here's the agenda. I've got the agenda visible. mean, what the agenda that we use in classes. Is the to do doing and done. I use that for all my meetings. I've got that up on the virtual board and the topics of the meeting are moving across to doing and done because then our visual people can see how we're doing. But the reviewing, at the start of every meeting we said, OK, let's just review the agenda. Let's just remind everyone this is the purpose and this is the desired outcomes. And if the right people are not in the meeting. There's no point having a meeting that we cannot achieve the purpose and the outcomes because we don't have the right people. So, I mean, I always say open it, open it with a segue question and things like that, but level set on the agenda. And then the middle part of the meeting is the bit that people are familiar with, which is the gathering ideas. It's exploring. It's the A is the assessing, making sure we've got the collaboration and the discussion and the... Brian Milner (14:39) Yeah. Yeah. Kate Megaw (15:07) The C is our concluding, are we doing dot voting or is somebody else who makes the final decision? But the H is the one that we often forget at the end, which is let's highlight the action items from the meeting. Let's make sure we know what it is, who's accountable for it, when it's going to be done by, and then close the meeting. mean, you... Brian Milner (15:18) Hmm. Kate Megaw (15:33) you and I will both close out our classes. Maybe we use one word, maybe we use, give us a statement, all sorts of different things, but we forget to close out meetings. go, time's up. Okay. Bye everyone. And we've not reviewed the, this is what we're going to do for next time. And we've not formally closed the meeting, even if it's as simple as one word, but we've got to open and close it. Sorry. Passionate about that. No. Brian Milner (15:44) You You mean that's not how you close out a class? I've been closing classes like that for years. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, exactly. Ding, sorry. Kate Megaw (16:03) Yes, sorry, time's up, clunk. Yeah, sorry, dog's barking, dog needs to go out. So, but yeah. Brian Milner (16:11) Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, no. And there was something I came across just in trying to put together materials for classes where we have little segments on facilitation in it. Because I think sometimes there's a lot of focus on the different various techniques, like fist to five or thumbs up or whatever. There's different kind of techniques. I'm not trying to belittle those. Those are things we need to know. But. Kate Megaw (16:21) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (16:36) One of the things I came across was that the root word of this thing is this Latin word, facilius. stands or it means literally to make easy. And I've always had that kind of in the back of my mind when I'm a facilitator is like, what are they trying to do? And whatever they're trying to do, just, my job is just to make that as easy as possible, right? You know, it's always difficult when you're trying to make a decision and you have no direction about how that decision is going to be made. Kate Megaw (16:46) Yeah. Brian Milner (17:05) But a good facilitator can give the structure to it and say, no, no, no, it's OK, I got you. We're going to go through this little journey together, and we're going to end in this other side, and you're going to have something to take away from it. Kate Megaw (17:16) Yeah, we're going to have heard everyone's voices as we go through. We're not going to let one person dominate the conversation. We're going to use techniques like, that's a great point. Can we also check in on the other side of the table? Let's hear some counter points here. It's pulling people in, it's summarizing. So if I'm hearing you correctly, Brian, you're saying A, B, C, D. It's all of that going into it. And I think one of the other... big has when we teach facilitation is the facilitator is not the scribe. So people say, well, I'm the project manager or I'm the facilitator. need to be taking all the meeting notes. And I'm like, well, what direction is your head pointing when you're taking notes? And it's down at a piece of paper. So you're not seeing who's yawning because you're tired and you need to take a break. You're not seeing people who are confused or wanting to talk and things like that. sort of either you turn on the AI tool and have the AI tool summarize the meeting for you. Do check it before you submit, it out or B have everyone in the meeting as a grown ass adult. They can take their own agenda items. mean, their own action items, have an area on your virtual board or in the room you're having the meeting in that is action items. And again, what is it? Brian Milner (18:18) Sure. Kate Megaw (18:36) Who's gonna be doing it? When's it gonna be done by? And I think one of the key criticisms of meetings is, and you'll hear this as well, particularly by retrospectives is, well, nothing changes. And I'm sort of, well, who has the action item? well, there isn't an action item. And I'm sort of, at the end of every meeting, we should be doing the mnemonic we use here is rap. The first thing is retrospect. Brian Milner (18:53) you Kate Megaw (19:04) How was this meeting? We talked about the fist of five. Give me one word. Anything we need to do differently next time. And then the A is make sure we have all of these action items assigned to someone. And then the P is the one we forget about. Tracking that progress. How are we going to hold each other accountable for making sure that something changes as a result of the meeting? So. Brian Milner (19:22) Mm-hmm. Kate Megaw (19:31) If we're doing retrospectives, if the team is voting whatever technique they're using to choose the one thing they want to do differently, how do we make it visible? Do we put it on our scrum board somewhere? Do we talk about it every day as part of after we've done daily scrum? How are we doing with the communication techniques that we wanted to try and do differently going forward? We've got to have that visibility. Otherwise nothing changes. Brian Milner (19:57) Yeah, yeah, that's so awesome. I completely agree. And that's something that I think you're right is missing, not just from retrospectives, but just a lot of meetings in general. We don't really understand, all right, well, what's the takeaway? What's the thing we need to do as a result of this to make this not a waste of our time, to make this something that was a useful, not the 67 % that were failures, but something that actually leads to success. I want to. Kate Megaw (19:59) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, yes, so that we're not having the same meeting again next week and the week after and nothing's changing. Brian Milner (20:30) Exactly. Exactly. I want to ask you one question about facilitation. I've heard this a lot in regards to retrospectives, but probably it's more a facilitation thing than it is a retrospective thing. But I think probably the number one question we get from people about retrospectives is, how do you handle a quiet team? so I'm just kind of curious. When you talk about facilitating and working with individuals who are a little more introverted, Kate Megaw (20:50) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (20:57) or just not as comfortable speaking out in public, are there special considerations or are there things that you do differently just to try to accommodate and make those people feel more comfortable when you're facilitating them? Kate Megaw (21:09) So yes, several things. So one, I will look at a theme. So do they have a team name and do I want to set up a mnemonic around the team name to gather the data? Are they a visual team? Do I want to do something like the sailboat that's interactive and people can add things to the board? Are they a movie buffs? Do I need to do a Star Wars themed retrospective? So I'll generally try and find something to connect the team. I've done it before where I'm working with airlines. Okay, what is it keeps our planes in the air? What is it that grounds our planes? What are the storm clouds we need to be aware of? What are causing bumps during the air? So all of that type of thing, it's a theme relevant to the team. And I generally will find that if I can start a team talking, I can keep them talking. So if... one of the ways that I will often start a retrospective is if the retrospective, if your last retrospective was a ride at Disney, what ride would it have been? and get them talking or give me one word that describes the last retro or in a scale of one to the, mean, the last sprint, give me one word that describes it or scale of one to 10. How well do you think we did at the last sprint? But I love to get people talking. If I'm in the office, I sort of adapted the Adam Weisbart's retrospective cookies and I'll use candy bars and I'll wrap questions around candy bars and the team grabs a candy bar and there is a question on it which they answer and then other people in the room will then answer as well. Maybe things like, what can I do to better support you as a scrum master? Or, What can we do to better support each other as team members? So I think it's getting people talking, making sure the big reminder for me is as a facilitator, if you did not write the Post-It note, you should not be reading the Post-It note and you should not be moving the Post-It note. The team owns the Post-It notes. Everyone should be adding their own Post-It notes, whether it's virtual or in person. Brian Milner (23:07) Yeah. Kate Megaw (23:28) They should be grouping their own Post-it notes. They should be moving them. And the other one, people always say, well, what happens if there's the elephant in the room and this thing on the board that nobody wants to talk about? And I'm said, well, often I will say, okay, I'm going to add, we're going to do something different for this round. This time, I'm going to ask you to introduce something you did not write on the board. And let's talk about, I'm going to ask you to choose a topic and we're going to talk about that. Just read it, you read it out. Brian Milner (23:39) Yeah. Kate Megaw (23:58) and then we'll have a discussion around it. So as a facilitator, I can uncover the elephants in the room without anyone feeling too uncomfortable. Brian Milner (24:07) Yeah, that's great stuff. of parallel to this, think is kind of, I know we've, I've heard you talk about this, but the sense of safety in the room and just that people feel safe to talk about that. Are there things we can do as facilitators to actually raise that sense of safety? Kate Megaw (24:25) There are absolutely, there's a lot of things we can do. And I, every now and then I will hear something and I will just cringe. And there's, well my team doesn't really like sharing. They're not honest in the retrospective until the CTO disconnects from the retrospective. And I'm sort of, okay, so maybe what do you think this is maybe telling us? I'm sort of retrospectives are Vegas rules. It is the team. I will do retrospectives even with non-scrum teams, but it is the team that is there. There are no visitors. It is the team only. The other thing that makes me cringe is, yes, well we sent out the minutes of the retrospective and I'm sort of, excuse me, the retrospective again, Vegas rules. What is the one thing we're going to do differently as a team in the next sprint? Okay, is everyone okay if I put this up on our scrum board so it's visible? Brian Milner (25:07) Ha Kate Megaw (25:20) Okay, that's the one thing we're taking away. But back to the question you were asking, one of the biggest signs of a lack of psychological safety is that the team just doesn't want to talk. They're worried that the minutes are going to be captured. Somebody, one of the leaders is in there and, well, everyone's fine with my leadership. They're completely open and honest in front of me. And I'm sort of, okay, let's try a retrospective then with you there. Brian Milner (25:32) Yeah. Kate Megaw (25:50) And then we'll also try retrospective without you there. And let's see which one is more comfortable because otherwise it's a, it's a colossal waste of time. If nothing's going to change, why are we wasting sort of 45 minutes to an hour or even doing it? So I think that the psychological safety is a key one, making sure it is the right people, making sure that minutes are not being captured. The other thing is. A lot of times people say, well, I need to capture it because I need to bring all of the information again next time. And I'm sort of, no, you're trashing the Post-it notes. You're trashing the mural board, whatever. You're starting from scratch next time. they're sort of, well, I'm going to lose all this information. I'm sort of, no, if it's important enough, it's going to come up again next time. Brian Milner (26:23) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And things change, right? mean, what the universe of things we might identify this sprint could be entirely different for next sprint. I've always loved, Jeff Sutherland had this phrase, he would say about it to say that, you have to remove that one big thing. And when you move that one big thing, then the system adjusts and you don't really know where the next bottleneck is going to come from until you remove that one big thing. Kate Megaw (26:58) Yeah. Brian Milner (27:02) So it's likely to be somewhere you wouldn't expect. so you can't just hang on to your number two issue from one retrospective and then say, well, next retrospective, we'll just do that and we can cut out having the conversation because we identified important things in this one. Kate Megaw (27:14) Yeah. And it anchors the tea. It stops the creativity. that's the other thing with retrospectives. I occasionally will work with a client and there's the, oh yes, we've been doing what's going well and what's not going so well every two weeks for six months. And I'm sort of, it's not really any wonder your team's bored out of their minds at retrospectives and nothing new is coming up. There's so many websites out there. Brian Milner (27:41) Yeah. Kate Megaw (27:42) that retrospective should never, in fact, no meeting should ever be boring because we should always be opening and closing a meeting in a creative way. Even if it's, mean, one of the things that we like to do in the morning of class is have music. So when people are joining, the energy is there so that we're getting that interaction and things like that. So people are starting on a high and then... I mean, you'll notice in the afternoons people begin to yawn, especially after lunch. Okay, you know what? It's been 65 minutes. Let's take a break. Let's do a segue question at break. So when we come back, show us something on your desk that tells us a bit about you. Or one of the ones I like is go stand up, go and look outside and come back and tell us something you saw outside. We have chickens. We have all sorts of things that people are saying. but it's encouraging them to get up and go get some oxygen in their system, take a break and then come back and then it's more engaging. But if as a facilitator, I'm not planning that type of thing, the energy is going to go down and I'm not going to achieve the purpose of my half day event or my one day class, whatever it is. Brian Milner (28:56) Yeah, it doesn't happen by accident. It's all very intentional. Well, this is fascinating. And we could have this conversation for another several hours, I'm sure. I just wanted to let everyone know that in case you were scrambling to write down these mnemonics and other things, we're going to link that in our show notes. So you can go to our show notes, and we'll put you over to Katanu team. Kate Megaw (28:58) No. Yep, absolutely. Yep. Brian Milner (29:20) Katanu, I keep on saying cat and Anu, trying to say it right way. Yeah, but we'll link you over them so you can get those three Rs for meetings and know kind of what each one of those little letters stands for in there. Kate Megaw (29:24) Yeah. Brian Milner (29:33) This has been really eye-opening for me and it just is a fascinating topic and it's so delightful just to hear the intentionality and how we can do simple things. They're not hard things, but simple things that make such a huge difference. Kate Megaw (29:48) Yeah, yeah, mean, that's the key. This is not rocket science. It's one or two simple things that helps us take that if we are going to spend 20 % or 20 hours a week, which is half of our time in meetings, let's at least make sure they're productive meetings so that we're not literally burning money by having unproductive meetings. Brian Milner (30:12) Yeah, absolutely. Well, I also forgot to mention here at the beginning, and we'll put this in the show notes as well, but Team Katanu also has a facilitation course. The Scrum Alliance has a certified Agile facilitator designation that you could obtain if you were interested in that. We'll link that off as well. But yeah, I couldn't recommend any better people for you to take that from than Kate in a new idea. We were saying that she had a, when she was younger, used to have the nickname Cat, and now everyone's calling her Cat from that. Well, thank you again for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it. Kate Megaw (30:46) Yep. Yep. Thank you very much for having me, Brian. And I look forward to hearing amazing facilitation stories from everyone once they've implemented some of this stuff. Brian Milner (31:03) Absolutely.

In this episode of Think Bigger Real Estate, we sit down with industry leader Jeff Sutherland to discuss the game-changing power of collaboration in real estate. From leveraging referral partnerships to structuring a high-performance calendar, Jeff shares invaluable insights on how top agents build success through relationships. Whether you're looking to scale your business, improve efficiency, or create a lasting impact, this episode will show you how collaboration is the key to going further, faster. 

154: In diesem Video, welches wir beim Norddeutschen Rundfunk live aufgenommen haben, erzählt Swantje Allmers von ihrer persönlichen Reise als Workaholic. Erfahre, wie sie die Warnzeichen von Burnout ignorierte, welche körperlichen und emotionalen Konsequenzen das hatte und wie sie schließlich den Weg zurück zu einem gesunden Gleichgewicht fand. Dieses Gespräch ist für alle, die sich zwischen Karriere und Selbstfürsorge verlieren, und zeigt eindrucksvoll, warum Work-Life-Balance mehr als nur ein Trend ist. Hört in diese Folge, wenn ihr nach Tipps sucht, um Überarbeitung und Stress zu vermeiden, und Inspiration braucht, um den eigenen Anspruch an Erfolg neu zu definieren! Swantje Allmers ist Autorin, CEO und Gründerin der NWMS GmbH und eine der gefragtesten Stimmen zum Thema HR und Arbeitswelt. Nach dem Wirtschaftsstudium und mehrjähriger Forschungstätigkeit baute sie als Head of Corporate Planning die damals neu gegründete Unternehmung TUI Cruises mit auf und spezialisierte sich im Anschluss auf die Bereiche Organisationsentwicklung, agiles Arbeiten, Selbstmanagement sowie Change und Transformation. Sie unterstützt Executives, Teams und Unternehmen bei aktuellen Herausforderungen. Gelernt hat sie bei den Besten ihres Faches, wie z. B. NLP von Richard Bandler, Scrum von Jeff Sutherland, Holacracy von Brian Robertson, GTD von David Allen, Habits von BJ Fogg und LAB-Profiling von Shelle Rose Charvet. Gemeinsam mit Michael Trautmann und Christoph Magnussen hat sie den Bestseller „On the Way to New Work“ geschrieben, wurde 2023 als eine der 99 wichtigsten HR-Stimmen ausgezeichnet, erhielt den DRX Award als HR-Content Expertin und ist LinkedIn Top Voice „Job und Karriere“ 2024.

Aliona Zapanovici: Overcoming The “bus factor” Problem, Building Resilient Agile Teams Through Knowledge Sharing 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. A recurring issue Aliona observed in teams was the “bus factor,” where key knowledge was held by only a few members. This led to significant bottlenecks when unforeseen absences, such as during COVID or vacations, occurred. The reluctance of specialists to share knowledge, driven by fear of reduced importance, exacerbated the problem and demotivated the team. Aliona emphasizes the importance of knowledge-sharing and personal growth within teams and highlights the use of tools like a skills matrix to promote development and resilience. Self-reflection Question: How does your team approach knowledge-sharing and redundancy? Featured Book of the Week: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland  The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland provided Aliona with the deeper “why” behind the Scrum framework during her early days as a Scrum Master. It shifted her understanding from merely following Scrum practices to grasping their purpose. This book was pivotal in guiding her to explore her own motivations and the true essence of Scrum. [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Melissa Perri is the founder of Product Institute, author of Escaping the Build Trap, and host of the Product Thinking Podcast. She has worked with startups, Fortune 50 companies, and everything in between to help them build better products and level up their product teams. In our conversation, we discuss:• The history of the product owner role• The differences between product owners and product managers• How to transition from product owner to product manager• The evolution of and problems with the SAFe framework• How large non-tech companies can improve their product practices• Much more—Brought to you by:• Pendo—The only all-in-one product experience platform for any type of application• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster• Coda—The all-in-one collaborative workspace—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-owners-melissa-perri—Where to find Melissa Perri:• X: https://twitter.com/lissijean• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissajeanperri/• Website: https://melissaperri.com/• Product Institute: https://productinstitute.com/• Podcast: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Melissa's background(02:12) The rise of the product owner role(06:37) Understanding Agile and Scrum(08:27) Challenges in Agile transformations(10:41) The history of the product owner role(13:58) The Scrum Guide(15:43) Product owner responsibilities(21:01) Adopting Scrum in organizations(26:21) The origins and implementation of SAFe(35:20) Why Melissa doesn't recommend SAFe(40:33) Advice for implementing a digital transformation(49:12) An example of SAFe adoption(51:27) The value of experienced product leaders(56:53) Career paths for product owners(01:04:14) Transitioning from product owner to product manager(01:06:41) Be careful relying on certifications(01:11:43) Evaluating existing product owners(01:16:55) Final thoughts on Agile and product management—Referenced:• Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value: https://www.amazon.com/Escaping-Build-Trap-Effective-Management/dp/149197379X• Lean UX: https://leanuxnyc.co/• Scrum: https://www.scrum.org/• What is Extreme Programming? https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/xp/• Capital One: https://www.capitalone.com/• The Agile Manifesto: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/manifesto• Ken Schwaber on X: https://x.com/kschwaber• Jeff Sutherland on X: https://x.com/jeffsutherland• Kanban: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban• What is a kanban board?: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban/boards• Ron Jeffries's website: https://www.ronjeffries.com/• Jeff Patton on X: https://x.com/jeffpatton• The Scrum Guide: https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide• OpenSky: https://www.openskycc.com/• SAFe: https://scaledagileframework.com/• Dean Leffingwell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanleffingwell/• Capital One scraps 1,100 tech positions: https://www.reuters.com/technology/capital-one-scraps-1100-tech-positions-source-2023-01-19/• Product management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-management-theater-marty• Marty Cagan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cagan/• Jeff Gothelf on X: https://x.com/jboogie• Shruti Patel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shruti-patel-32bb573a/• Product Thinking Podcast: Mastering Product Focus: Balancing Legacy and Innovation with Shruti Patel: https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/2024/9/25/episode-190-mastering-product-focus-balancing-legacy-and-innovation-with-shruti-patel• Melissa Douros on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadouros/• Mind the Product: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/• Athenahealth: https://www.athenahealth.com/• McKinsey: https://www.mckinsey.com/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

“Carlos” … dans le monde de la CIB, son prénom suffit à inspirer le respect.Et c'est la première fois que Carlos Gonçalves se raconte dans un podcast. Rien que ça justifie que vous vous jetiez sur cet épisode exceptionnel.Carlos a démarré tout en bas de l'échelle, tombant un peu par hasard dans le monde de l'IT bancaire dans les années 90 - un moment de tournant technologique majeur.Année après année, il développe son Leadership comme aucune autre personne que je connaisse.Devops, agilité à l'échelle, Crafstmanship, Cloud : il propulse l'IT de la Société Générale au plus haut niveau technologique mondial - avec des années d'avance sur la compétitition.Il s'appuie pour cela sur des partenariats incroyables : avec Jeff Sutherland (pape mondial du Scrum), Werner Voggels pour AWS, Solomon Hykes pour Docker, Scott Guthrie pour Azure

Jeff is the co-creator of Scrum and a leading expert on how the framework has evolved to meet the needs of today's business. The framework he developed in 1993 and formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber has since been adopted by the vast majority of software development companies around the world. However, Jeff realized that the benefits of Scrum are not limited to software and product development. He has adapted this successful strategy for several other industries, including finance, healthcare, higher education, and telecom.   As the CEO of Scrum Inc., Jeff sets the vision for success with Scrum. He continues to share best practices with organizations around the globe and has written extensively on Scrum rules and methods. With a deep understanding of business processes — gleaned from years as CTO/CEO of eleven different software companies — Jeff is able to describe the high-level organizational benefits of Scrum and what it takes to create hyperproductive teams.   Topics of Discussion: [:35] Introduction of Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum. [3:47] Jeff Sutherland's background: His experience at West Point and lessons in making work visible. [5:19] Fighter pilot experiences that influenced the operational side of Scrum. [6:02] Transition to the Air Force Academy and work in AI at Stanford. [7:38] Learning complex adaptive systems and the origin of Agile from complex systems theory. [8:30] How complex systems theory impacts Scrum and Agile teams today. [9:25] Jeff's first experiences applying Scrum in the banking industry. [11:25] The development of Scrum and the 2001 Agile Manifesto. [12:57] Making work visible and organizing teams, from West Point to Toyota to the Agile Manifesto. [13:23] Fast forward to 2024: Issues in Scrum and Agile practices, including sprint lengths and backlog grooming. [14:34] Jeff's new book: First Principles in Scrum and its relation to Scrum technology stacks. [16:23] Building autonomous systems: Lessons from radiation physics, AI, and complex adaptive systems. [19:16] The influence of autonomous robots on the creation of Scrum. [21:14] Discussion of Scrum and AI, leading to “Extreme Agile.” [22:47] Predictions for the future of Scrum and Agile: Teams becoming 30 to 100 times faster by 2030. [23:37] Example of AI in action: Developing a system to handle expense reports using Scrum principles. [29:37] Challenges with AI-generated code and the need for strong software architecture knowledge. [33:24] The importance of following Scrum “by the book” to achieve hyperproductivity. [35:30] Jeff's closing advice on adapting to extreme agile to stay competitive by 2030.   Mentioned in this Episode: Clear Measure Way Architect Forum Software Engineer Forum Programming with Palermo — New Video Podcast! Email us at programming@palermo.net. Clear Measure, Inc. (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! How the Agile Manifesto Came To Be   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Today most tech companies engage in agile signaling - without even knowing it. They do nothing to make it easy to adapt to change, but put on a show to pretend they're agile. Many software developers and other professionals in the industry, even those with long careers, have never been on project with a truly agile software development process. And so it's not uncommon to hear software engineers and project managers talk about how much they "hate agile" behind closed doors. A select few understand what being agile really means. It means working together in a way where adapting to change is easy. For those unfortunate people, it can feel like gaslighting to work for these companies. Tech workers all over the industry are expressing more disgust with scrum and agile than ever. And when the SAFe, or "Scaled Agile Framework" arrived - it signaled a final nail in the coffin of many companies ever being able to realize the true benefits of being agile. In this episode I'd like to help you understand two things. First, we we need agile development more than ever today. With the arrival of AI, software projects are getting disrupted faster than ever and need to adapt. And who knows what the future could bring! I'll also help you understand 4 key events in the history of the software industry that caused the definition of the word agile to essentially mean "anything BUT change"! Join my Patreon:  https://thrivingtechnologist.com/patreon Learn about one-on-one career coaching with me: https://thrivingtechnologist.com/coaching TechRolepedia, a wiki about the top 25 roles in tech:  https://thrivingtechnologist.com/techroles The Thriving Technologist career guide:  https://thrivingtechnologist.com/guide You can also watch this episode on YouTube.  Chapter markers / timelinks: (0:00) Introduction  (1:31) 1. Do We Even Need Agile Development? (1:37) 1.1 Inability To Respond To Market Change (3:55) 1.2 Over Budget and Late Projects (5:50) 2. 4 Key Events That Co-Opted Agile (6:16) 2.1 Burn-Down Charts and Velocity Tracking (9:21) 2.2 Jeff Sutherland's Book (12:47) 2.3 Agile Certifications  (15:51) 2.4 SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) (21:12) Episode Groove Visit me at thrivingtechnologist.com Find me on X as @jaymeedwards Find me on LinkedIn as jaymeedwards

Bio Dr. Jeff Sutherland is the inventor and co-creator of Scrum, the most widely used Agile framework across the globe.  Originally used for software development, Jeff has also pioneered the application of the framework to multiple industries and disciplines. Today, Scrum is applied to solve complex projects in start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. Scrum companies consistently respond to market demand, to get results and drive performance at speeds they never thought possible. Jeff is committed to developing the Agile leadership practices that allow Scrum to scale across an enterprise.   Dr. Sutherland is the chairman and founder of Scrum Inc. He is a signatory of the Agile manifesto and coauthor of the Scrum Guide and the creator Scrum@Scale. Jeff continues to teach, create new curriculum in the Agile Education Program and share best practices with organizations around the globe. He is the founder of Scrum Inc. and coauthor of, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, that has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide.    Social Media:                 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffsutherland                 Twitter: @jeffsutherland Website: Scrum Inc https://scruminc.com               Books/ Articles: The Scrum Guide by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber http://www.scrumguides.org/index.html Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland The Scrum Fieldbook by JJ Sutherland Agile Competitors and Virtual Organisations by Steven Goldman, Roger Nagel and Kenneth Preiss https://www.amazon.co.uk/Agile-Competitors-Virtual-Organizations-Engineering/dp/0471286508 Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster Moving World by John P. Kotter Leading Change by John P. Kotter Process Dynamics, Modeling and Control by Babatunde A. Ogunnaike and Harmon W. Ray A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game by Jeff Sutherland, James Coplien, Mark den Hollander, et al    Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku: Hello everyone, my guest today is Dr Jeff Sutherland. He is the inventor and co-creator of Scrum, the most widely used Agile Framework across the globe. Originally used for Software Development, Jeff has also pioneered the application of the framework to multiple industries and disciplines. Today, Scrum is applied to deliver complex projects in startups and Fortune 100 companies. Dr Jeff Sutherland is the Chairman and Founder of Scrum Inc. He is a signatory of the Agile Manifesto and co-author of the Scrum Guide and the creator of Scrum at Scale. Jeff continues to teach, create new curriculum in the Agile education programme and share best practices with organisations around the globe. He has authored and co-authored a number of books which include Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time – which has sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. In this episode, Dr Sutherland shares the backstory of how he and Ken Schwaber developed the Scrum framework. I was pleasantly surprised and proud to learn that one of the inspirations behind the current Scrum framework we now have was the work of Prof Babatunde Ogunnike, given my Nigerian heritage. Dr Sutherland also talked about the importance of Agile Leadership and his current focus on helping organisations fix bad Scrum implementations. I'm sure you'll uncover some useful nuggets in this episode. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dr Sutherland.   Ula Ojiaku: Thank you, Dr. Sutherland, for joining us on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you here. Jeff Sutherland: Glad to be here. Looking forward to it. Ula Ojiaku: Fantastic. So could you tell us about yourself? Jeff Sutherland: Well, I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. And I always felt that I would go to West Point of the United States Military Academy, even at a very young age. And I finally made it there. I spent four years there. And I went on to a program where a certain number of cadets could join the Air Force. And I told the Air Force, if they made me a fighter pilot, I would move into the Air Force, which I did. I spent 11 years as a fighter pilot in the Air Force. And most of the operational aspects of Scrum actually come from that training. My last tour in the Air Force was actually at the US Air Force Academy, I was a professor of mathematics. And I had gone to Stanford University in preparation for that position. And I had worked closely with the, at the time he was Head of the Department of Psychiatry, became the Dean of Stanford who had studied under my father-in-law, he had become an MD under my father-in-law, who was a brilliant physician. And I was working on research papers with him, both at Stanford and at the Air Force Academy. And I asked him for guidance. And I said, I'm thinking about, given all the work we've done in the medical area. Starting in Stanford, I'm thinking maybe becoming a doctor - become an MD. And he strongly recommended against that he said, ‘you'll just go backwards in your career, what you need to do is you build on everything you've done so far. And what you have is your fighter pilot experience, your experience as a statistician, and a mathematician, you want to build on that.' So, I had already started into a doctoral program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, which was not far from the Air Force Academy. And so, I talked to my department Chairman there who offered me a position in the department running a large research grant, funded by the National Cancer Institute and so, I decided to exit the Airforce and join the medical school. While I was finishing up my doctoral degree. And as soon as my doctorate was finished, I became a professor of Radiology, preventive medicine and biometrics. I was a joint across multiple departments. And I was doing mathematical research on modeling, particularly the human cell on a supercomputer, (to) determine what caused cancer. And to do that required extensive mathematical research as well as the medical research. But at the end of the day, what we found was for any complex adaptive system, like a human cell, or a person or a team, they go through different states. And they're moved from one state to the next by some kind of intervention. And so, if you understand what causes those changes… turned out in the case of cancer, there were four different states that led to a tumor. And in every state, there were certain interventions, and if you knew what they were, you could prevent them and prevent cancer. Or you could even, to my surprise, take a cancer cell and make it go backward into a normal cell. So, this fundamental understanding is the theory behind Scrum. So, while I'm doing this all at the medical school, a large banking company came by and said, ‘you know, over the medical school, you guys have all the knowledge about the technologies; the new technology, we're using (for) banking, you're using for research.' And they said, ‘you guys have all the knowledge but we have all the money and they made me an offer to come join the bank'    Ula Ojiaku: [Laughs]You couldn't refuse Jeff Sutherland: Not just me, it was my family. So, I wind up as Vice President for Advanced Systems, which was effectively was the CTO for 150 banks that we were running across North America.   Each was, you know, a dozen, 50, 100 branches. And of course, we were mainly doing the software, installation and support to run the banking operation, which is largely computer stuff – (this) is what banks run off. And as we're building these systems with hundreds and hundreds of developers, one of the first things I noticed is that all the projects were late. And I look at what they're doing. And they're using this process where they spend, you know, six months defining requirements, and then they put all the requirements into a Gantt chart. And then they, they plan on taking six months to build something, but it's never done. Because as soon as they start testing that they find there's all kinds of things that are broken. So, virtually every single project of the bank is late. So, as a head of technology, one day I walked into the CEO's office and I said, ‘Ron,  have you noticed all your projects are late?' He said, ‘Yes'. He says, ‘Every morning at least five CIOs or CEOs of the banks, they call me up.' And he says, ‘they scream at me.' I said, ‘wow', I said, ‘You know, it's going to get worse, not better. Because these guys are using this, these Gantt Charts.' And I showed him one. And then being a mathematician, I mathematically proved that every project would be late at the bank. And he was stunned. And he said, ‘what should I do?' I said, ‘we need a completely different operating system in the bank.' This is back in 1983. ‘Let's take one business unit. Let's take the one that's losing the most money, okay, the worst business unit' Ula Ojiaku: They have nothing to lose then. Jeff Sutherland: And it was the automated teller division that was rolling out cash machines all over North America. It was a new technology and they had a ton of problems. So, I said, ‘let's take that unit and every one, sales, market, support, installation, we're going to split them down into small teams. And we're going to have Product Marketing come in on Monday with a backlog prioritized by business value. And at the end of the week, on Friday, we're going to deploy to 150 banks.' ‘And I'm going to train them how to land a project every week, just like I trained fighter pilots to land aircraft. I'm going to give them a burndown chart, we're going to throw away the Gantt Chart, I'm going to give them a burndown chart to show them how to land the project.' So, he said, ‘Well, that's gonna be a big headache.' I said, ‘look, the bank needs to be fixed.' He said, ‘Okay, you got it.' So, I took that unit. I told them, ‘I know it's gonna take several weeks,' today we call them sprints, ‘for you to be successful.' Because as new pilots, trained to land, these high-performance jets, they tend to come in high and then they have to come around and try to land again, they over and over, they practice until they can nail it. And it took them six weeks, six sprints to actually nail the end of the week (and) deploy (to) 150 banks. But within six months, it became… it went from the worst business unit in the bank to the most profitable business unit in the bank. And the senior management said, ‘you know, Jeff, here's another 20 million dollars to throw at whatever that thing you're doing  it's the most profitable thing in the bank, we're gonna put more money in that. So that was the first prototype of what we call today Scrum at Scale. Now, I've been CTO of 11, or CTO or CEO of 11 different companies. And for the next 10 years, I prototyped that model and advanced technology teams until in 1993, at a company called Easel Corporation, we found that because of the tooling we were building and selling to customers, we needed to build the tool with what today we call Agile Practice. Ula Ojiaku: Yes Jeff Sutherland: And we need to train the customer to use the tool by having teams do an agile practice. So, in order to train our customers properly in 1993, we actually had to formalize what I've been prototyping for 10 years. And we wrote it down and at the time we were reading this paper, we're going through 1000 papers in the journals I, you know, I had done many new technology. And, in every one of them, you have to read everything that's ever been done so that you can go beyond. You can use everything that's been done, but then you go beyond, okay? Ula Ojiaku: Yeah Jeff Sutherland:  So, it's a tremendous amount of research to launch new technology. And at about the 300th paper in our file, it was a paper out of the Harvard Business Review, which really surprised me, by two Japanese Business School professors, Professors Takeuchi and Nonaka. And in there, they described the best teams in the world. They were lean hardware teams that reminded them of a game of rugby, they said, ‘we're going to call what they're doing Scrum Project Management.' So, I said to the team, ‘we need a name for this thing that we're going to train our customers in, and let's call it Scrum.' And off we went. So, for the next two years, we were actually using Scrum within Easel deploying products. But it was not public, to the general industry. And Easel got acquired by a larger company. And at that time, I felt that this needed to be rolled out into the industry because we had benchmarked it with the best tooling in the world from the leading productivity company, and showed that it was… that (it) went 10 times faster. The quality was 10 times better, which is what you need for a new technology innovation. And so, I felt it was ready to go to the industry as a whole. So, I called up an old friend, Ken Schwaber. And he was a CEO of a traditional Project Management software company, a waterfall (methodology). He sold these methodologies with 303 ring binders, a software package that would make Gantt Charts. So, I said, ‘Ken, I want you to come up and see the Scrum, because it actually works and that stuff you're selling doesn't work – it makes projects late.' And he agreed to come in, he actually came up, he met with me. He stayed for two weeks inside the company, working, observing the Scrum team. And at the end of those two weeks, he said, ‘Jeff, you're right. This really works - it's pretty much the way I run my company.' He said, ‘if I ran my company with a Gantt Chart, we would have been bankrupt a long time ago.' So, I said, ‘well, why don't you sell something to work that works instead of inflicting more damage on the industry?' So, he said so we said ‘okay, how (do) we do it?' I said, ‘it needs to be open source, it needs to be free.' Ken felt we needed to take the engineering practices, many of which appear today in extreme programming… Ula Ojiaku: Yes Jeff Sutherland: …and let Kent Beck (creator of eXtreme Programming, XP) run with them because Kent had been sending me emails, ‘Jeff, send me every...', he had been following the development of Scrum, ‘…send me everything on Scrum, I'm building a new process. I want to use anything that you've done before and not try to reinvent anything.' So, he (Ken Schwaber) said, ‘let Kent take the engineering practices, we'll focus on the team process itself.' And we agreed to write the first paper on this to present at a big conference later that year. And writing that paper was quite interesting. Ken visited DuPont Chemical Corporation, the leading Chemical Process Engineers there that they had hired out of academia to stop chemical plants from blowing up. And when Ken met with them, they said, describe what we were doing in the software domain. They said, ‘you know, well, that process that traditional project management is a Predictive Process Control System. We have that in the chemical industry.' ‘But it's only useful if the variation in the process running is less than 4%.' They said, ‘do you have less than 4% change in requirements while you're building software?' Ken says, ‘no, of course not! It's over 50%!' And they started laughing at him. They said, ‘your project's going to be exploding all over the place.' ‘Because every chemical plant that has blown up has been somebody applying a predictive control system to a system that has high variability. You need to completely retrain industry to use Empirical Process Control, which will stop your projects from blowing up. And they said, here it is, here's the book, they had the standard reference book for Chemical Process Engineering. And in there, there's a chapter on Empirical Process Control, which is based on transparency, inspection, and adapting to what's happening in real time. Okay, so those are the three pillars of Scrum that are today at the base of the Scrum guide. Ula Ojiaku: Do you still remember the title of the book that the chemical engineers recommended to Mr. Schwaber by any chance? Jeff Sutherland: Yeah, so I have a, when I do training, I have a slide that has a picture of the book (Process Dynamics, Modelling and Control). It's written by Ogunnaike and Ray. But that is the root of the change that's gone on in the industry. And so then from 1995, forward, Ken and I started working together, I was still CTO of companies. And I would get him to come in as a consultant and work with me. And we'd implement and enhance the Scrum implementations in company after company after company. Until 2001, of course, Scrum was expanding but Extreme Programming in 2001, was actually the most widely deployed. They were only two widely-deployed agile processes at the time of Scrum and Extreme Programming. Extreme Programming was the biggest. And so, the Agile Manifesto meeting was convened. And it had 17 people there, but three of them were Scrum guys - that had started up Scrum, implemented it in companies, four of them were the founders of Extreme Programming. And the other 10 were experts who have written books on adaptive software development or, you know, lightweight processes, so, industry experts. And we, we talked for a day and everybody explained what they were doing and there was a lot of arguments and debate. And at the end of the day, we agreed because of this book, Agile Competitors, a book about 100 hardware companies - lean hardware companies, that have taken Lean to the next level, by involving the customer in the creation of the product. And we said, ‘we think that we all need to run under one umbrella. And we should call that Agile.' Ula Ojiaku: So, did you actually use the word umbrella in your (statement)? Oh, okay. Jeff Sutherland: Often, people use that right? Ula Ojiaku: Yes, yes Jeff Sutherland: Because at the time, we had Agile and Extreme Programming, and now everybody's trying to come up with their own flavor, right?  All under the same umbrella of ‘Agile'. And that caused the both Scrum and Extreme Programming started to expand even more, and then other kinds of processes also. But Scrum rapidly began to take dominant market share, Scrum today is about 80% of what people call Agile. The reason being, number one, it was a technology that was invented and created to be 10 times better. So, it was a traditional new technology developed based on massive amounts of research. So, it worked. But number two, it also scaled it worked very well for many teams. I mean, there are many companies today like Amazon that have thousands of Scrum teams. And Extreme Programming was really more towards one team. And (reason number) three, you could distribute it across the world. So, some of the highest performing teams are actually dozens of teams or hundreds across multiple continents. And because of those three characteristics, it's (Scrum has) dominated the market. So that brings us to in 2006, I was asked by a Venture Capital firm to help them implement Scrum in their companies, they felt that Scrum was a strategic advantage for investment. And not only that, they figured out that it should be implemented everywhere they implemented it within the venture group, everybody doing Scrum. And their goal was to double their return on investment compared to any other venture capital firm. They pretty much have done that by using Scrum, but then they said, ‘Jeff, you know, we're hiring you as a consultant into our companies. And you're a CTO of a healthcare company right now. And we don't want to build a healthcare company, we want to build a Scrum company.' ‘So, why don't you create Scrum Inc. right here in the venture group? We'll support it, we'll do the administrative support. We'll write you a check - whatever you want.' So, I said, ‘well, I'm not going to take any money because I don't need it. I understand how that works. If the venture capital firm owns your company, then (in the) long term, you're essentially their slave for several years. So, I'm not taking any money. But I will create the company within the venture group. If you provide the administrative support, I'll give you 10% of the revenue and you can do all the finances and all that kind of stuff. So, that's the way Scrum Inc. was started to enable an investment firm to launch or support or invest in many dozens of Scrum companies. Ula Ojiaku: That's awesome Jeff Sutherland: And today, we're on the sixth round of investment at OpenView Venture Partners, which was the company the six round is 525 million. There's a spin out from OpenView that I'm working with, that has around this year, 25 million. And over the years, just co-investing with the venture group I have my own investment fund of 50 million. So, we have $570 million, right this year 2021 that we're putting into Scrum companies. Agile companies, preferably Scrum. Ula Ojiaku: Now when you say Scrum companies is it that they facilitate the (Scrum) training and offer consulting services in Scrum or is it that those companies operate and you know, do what they do by adopting Scrum processes? Jeff Sutherland: Today, Scrum Inc sometimes help some of those companies, but in general, those companies are independently implementing Scrum in their organizations.   Ula Ojiaku: Right Jeff Sutherland: And okay, some of them may come to Scrum training, maybe not. But since Scrum is so widely deployed in the industry, Scrum Inc, is only one of 1000 companies doing Scrum training and that sort of stuff. So, they have a wide variety, wide area of where they can get training and also many of the startups, they already know Scrum before they started the company. They are already Agile. So, what we're interested in is to find the company that understands Agile and has the right team players, particularly at the executive level, to actually execute on it. Ula Ojiaku: No matter what the product or services (are)… Jeff Sutherland: Products or services, a lot of them are software tooling companies, but some of them are way beyond that, right? So, turns out that during COVID… COVID was a watershed. The companies that were not agile, they either went bankrupt, or they were crippled. That meant all the Agile companies that could really do this, started grabbing all the market share. And so, many of our companies, their stock price was headed for the moon during COVID. While the non-agile companies were flatlined, or are going out of business, and so the year of COVID was the best business year in the history of venture capital because of Agility. So, as a result, I'm spending half my time really working, investing in companies, and half of my time, working with Scrum (Inc.) and supporting them, helping them move forward. Ula Ojiaku: That's a very impressive resume and career story really Dr. Sutherland. I have a few questions: as you were speaking, you've called Scrum in this conversation, a process, a tooling, the technology. And you know, so for some hardcore Agilists, some people will say, you know, Agile is all about the mindset for you, what would you say that Scrum is it all of these things you've called it or would it be, you know, or it's something (else)...? Jeff Sutherland: So, certainly the (Agile) mindset is important. But from an investment point of view, if the organization can't deliver real value, quickly, agile is just a bunch of nonsense. And we have a huge amount of nonsense out there. In fact, the Standish group has been publishing for decades. 58% of Agile teams are late over budget with unhappy customers. So, when you get these hardcore Agilist, that are talking about mindset, you have to figure out ‘are they in the 42% that actually can do it or are they in the 58% that are crippled?' My major work with Scrum Inc. today is to try to get to fix the bad Scrum out there. That is the biggest problem in the Agile community. People picking up pieces of things, people picking up ideas, and then putting together and then it doesn't work. That is going to that's going to be really bad for agile in the future. If 58% of it continues not to work. So, what we found, I mean, it was really interesting. Several years ago, the senior executive (of) one of the biggest Japanese companies flew to Boston wanted meet with me. And he said to me, ‘the training is not working in Japan for Scrum.' He said, ‘I spent 10 years with Google, in Silicon Valley. So, I know what it looks like what actually works. And I can tell you, it's not working in Japan, because the training is… it's not the training of the Scrum that is high performing. And in fact, our company is 20% owned by Toyota, and we are going to be the trainers of Toyota. And we cannot deliver the training that's currently being given to Toyota, it will not work, it will not fly. And we want to create a company called Scrum Inc. Japan. And we're a multibillion-dollar company, we're ready to invest whatever it takes to make that happen.' To give them the kind of training that will produce the teams that Takeuchi and Nonaka were writing about in the first paper on Scrum. And as we work with them to figure out what needs to be in that training, we found that the Scrum Guide was only 25% of the training. Another 25% was basic Lean concepts and tooling, right? Because the original Scrum paper was all about Lean hardware companies. So Lean is fundamental to Scrum. If you don't understand it, you can't do it. And then third, there are certain patterns of performance that we've developed over the years, we spent 10 years writing a book on patterns - Scrum patterns. And there's about a dozen of those patterns that have to be implemented to get a high performing team. And finally, scaling to multiple teams. It turns out, right about this time I started working with the Japanese, I was at a conference with the Agile Leadership from Intel. And they told me that they'd introduced Scaling Frameworks into Intel division, some of which had more than 500 Scrum teams in the divisions and the Scaling Frameworks had slowed them down. And it made the senior executives furious and they threw them all out and they said, we did not want to hear the word Scrum at Intel anymore. But you guys need to go twice as fast as you're going now. So, they came to me, they said, ‘we're desperate. We have to go twice as fast. We can't even use the word “Scrum”. What should we do?' And they blamed me, they said, ‘Sutherland you're responsible you caused problem, you need to fix it.' So, I started writing down how to do what today we call Scrum at Scale. And everybody, you know, most of those people in the industry were implementing IT scaling frameworks. They were all upset. ‘Why are you writing down another framework?' Well, it's because those IT frameworks do not enable the organization to show Business Agility, and win in the market. And in the best companies in the world, they're being thrown out. So, I've had to write down how do you add, how do you go to hundreds and thousands of Scrum teams - and never slow down as you're adding more and more teams. You know, every team you add is as fast as the first team when you start. Yeah, that's what Scrum at Scale is all about. So, there's two primary things that I'm focused on today. One is to fix all this bad Scrum. Second is to fix the scaling problem. Because it turns out that if you look at the latest surveys from Forbes magazine, and the Scrum Alliance on successful Agile transformations - I learned recently, that almost every company in the world of any significance is going through an Agile transformation or continuing transformation they'd already started years ago. And 53% of them do not meet management expectations. And the MIT Sloan Business Review did an analysis of what happens if an agile transformation fails, and 67% of those companies go out of business. So, this is becoming really serious, right? To be successful today, if you're competing in any significant way, you have to be agile. And number two, if you try to be agile and fail, you have a 67% chance going out of business. And the failure rate is 53%. So, this is the problem that we're wrestling with. And half of that 53% failure is due to the bad Scrum we talked about, but the other half is due because of the leadership not being Agile. Ula Ojiaku: I was just going to say, as you said something about the leadership not being agile. In my experience, you know, as an agile coach in some organizations whilst the teams would embrace you know, Scrum and embrace Agility - the practices and the processes and everything. There's a limit to, you know, how much they can get done… Jeff Sutherland: Absolutely… Ula Ojiaku: …if the leadership are not on board. So… Jeff Sutherland: …you hit this glass ceiling. So, I've been, you know, giving presentations on Agile Transformations around the world. And I can remember multiple times I've had 300 people in the room, say, and I say okay, ‘How many of you are agile, in Agile transformations or continuing the ones you'd started?' Of course, everybody raises their hand. ‘How many of you have waterfall traditional management that expects you to deliver all the old Gantt Chart reports that we always got, and don't understand what you're doing?' There's 300 people in the room and 297 people raised their hand. I said, ‘you need to give your leadership the book by Professor Kotter called Accelerate.' Professor Kotter is one of the leading change experts of the world. Ula Ojiaku: And he also, yeah, He also wrote ‘Leading Change' as well - the book, yes. Jeff Sutherland: And in that book, he says, if the leadership of the Agile part of the organization is traditional in their mindset and requirements, the Agile Transformation will eventually fail 100% of the time. Ula Ojiaku: Those are sobering statistics in terms of, you know, the failure rate and how much of you know the success hinges on business agility and the leadership being agile as well and taking the time to know and care what it means. Yeah. Jeff Sutherland: And what's happening is that the Agile Leadership today, if you look at some of the companies that have been most successful during COVID, one of them is John Deere Corporation, the biggest farm equipment manufacturer in the world, probably the oldest. Their stock price went up more than Amazon during COVID. And the board of directors gave their Agile Leadership, the Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, the highest award in the Corporation for producing that result. So that's another reason I'm trying to communicate to Agile people. The success and survival of your company depends on you. You think your management's going to save you but no, if they are old-style people, they are going to run that company out of business. And you need to either save it before it goes out of business or run to another company before bad things happen. Ula Ojiaku: It's impressive that, you know, John Deere being a farm equipment manufacturer… I think they were ahead of the curve you know, (compared to some of their contemporaries in that industry as well) and embraced agile ways of working. Do you know how their Agile Leadership were able to quantify their contributions to the company? Jeff Sutherland: John Deere started to get Agile more than 10 years ago. So, they've been at it a long time. But in recent years, they really started to build… build internally… Agile leadership, you know, based on my work and they started applying that across the company. I mean, the major focus has not been software actually – it's been in other parts of the company. What has to happen to run a company that's building tractors? Well, there's all kinds of things that have to happen, you know - purchasing, there's legal, there's acquiring all the pieces, it's putting them together at the assembly line, you know, software is a piece of it. You know, that's probably the easiest piece to fix with Agile, it's the rest of the company that's the challenge. They have started doing that really well which is reflected in their stock price. Ula Ojiaku: Amazing. So, you said something about you know, you're out to fix a couple of things, the problem with bad Scrum out there. And, you know, the problem with scaling agile. Jeff Sutherland: Right Ula Ojiaku: So, with respect to the first one, the point about bad Scrum, what in your experience would be the root cause of bad Scrum implementations in organizations? Jeff Sutherland: There're about 11 things, that if you fix them, the team will go twice as fast. And it's multiplicative. So, you know, we have extensive data on, you know, really big companies. What's the difference between the fastest team and the slowest teams? The fastest teams are 2000 times faster than the slowest teams. So why is that? Well, first, the team has to be small. The optimal team size is four or five people. If you have a 10-person team, that's going to take at least 50% longer to get anything done. If you go out, look at the team size, you'll see companies have even not only ten-people teams, they have 15 people in a team, 25 people in a team, okay? Those teams are never gonna meet Agile performance. Second, the backlog needs to be really ready in a sense of small, it's clearly understood, it's properly prioritized. So, you need somebody managing that backlog that can get it right, because we have extensive data for multiple case studies showing the team's production doubles immediately. As soon as you get that backlog right. So you go into many companies, you'll see, there's still arguing about what's the top priority, right? Or everything's top priority. That's just gonna create a massive mess. Third, teams are constantly interrupted. You know, the only teams I know that aren't interrupted are people… these teams and defense contractors working on top secret stuff. And they work in a locked room, the door, it says ‘no managers can enter' and they don't get interrupted. But for the rest of us, there's always somebody coming in wanting something else done. And there's a way to manage that using a pattern we call the interrupt buffer. And if you don't have that pattern implemented properly, you're gonna go half as fast. If you're lucky, you might go half as fast. Ula Ojiaku: And what do you say the Scrum Master has a part to play in making sure the interrupt buffer is there and it's enforced? Jeff Sutherland: The scrum master needs to set this all up. Fifth, in high performing teams, we see this pattern called swarming, where multiple people are working on a story together. That increases the process efficiency, which doubles the performance of the team. So, if people are specialists working independently, that team is going to be really slow. So I'm up to number five, there are six more things, but you probably want to go through them. It's very clear, what makes agile teams suck, we know exactly why. And it needs to be fixed. So, I appeal to anyone listening to this help fix bad agile, it's hurting us all. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you for sharing that. Would this be in any of any of your books or in any of your articles that you've written? Jeff Sutherland: Yeah, it's everywhere and (in) everything I've written, but the best summary, it's the red book Scrum … Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work and Half the Time And we've had people pick, pick this up. A CEO in Kenya came to New York to one of my courses, he said, ‘Jeff, I just read your book. And I'm CEO with three new energy startups in Kenya. And my teams implemented that, and they're going… they're doing three times the work and a third of the time. So, your book is too conservative.' He says to me, this guy, he only read the book, he had no training. So, this book is enough to really get off on the right foot. And if you're having problems, it's enough to fix things. In fact, recently before COVID when we could get everybody together, we had an Apple employee in the class and she said, Jeff, do you know why Apple always meet its states? I said, no, you know, Apple is really secretive. They don't tell anybody anything. She says ‘it's because they do Scrum by the book.' So, I said, ‘What book?' She says, ‘The Red Book - Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work and Half the Time - they do it exactly by the book.' So, again, my message to the Agilists out there: Apple is winning. They are the most valuable company in the world. And it's because they do Scrum exactly by that book. So, you probably should read it. Ula Ojiaku: Definitely. So going by the book, would you say there's any wriggle room for adapting to one's context, or is it about you know, going, ‘check- we've done page 123…' Jeff Sutherland: Well, the whole thing about adapting is fundamental to Scrum. So, one of the things I'm constantly doing in my talks, training, is I'm going back to before Scrum and reading a paper from the leading researchers on complex adaptive systems, in which they mathematically proved, you model things on the computer, that systems evolve more quickly, if they have more degrees of freedom, up until you hit a boundary where the system goes into a chaotic state. So, from the very beginning in Scrum, maximizing the freedom and the decision capability of the team has been fundamental. And we talked about this as self-organization. Now, unfortunately, that term has been so misused, misunderstood that we had to take self-organization out of the Scrum guide. And what we inserted was self-managing. And we put next to it goals, okay, the theme is self-managing to achieve a goal. And to make that happen, they need a commitment to do that. And so, this is one of the fundamental things for Agile teams that work that they have that self-managing commitment to achieve a goal. And the teams that are not working, they're fuzzy about that, right. So, we want the maximum degree of adaptation, the thing that they don't want to change is the basic structure that's in the red book, if they change that, it has the control mechanisms to allow the maximum degree of self-organization - not to go off the rails. Ula Ojiaku: Right. Jeff Sutherland: So, we see a lot of Agilists, ‘oh, you know, let's just tweak the framework this way or that way.' And then the self-organization takes a team off the rails, and then they fall into that 58% that can't deliver, they're late, they're over budget, the customers aren't happy. And so, this is the really one of the hardest things to communicate to people. There're certain things that you absolutely have to be disciplined about. You have to be more disciplined to get a great Agile team than in all ways of working. And that discipline is what allows the maximum degree of self-organization and self-determination, right? So, understanding those two things together, you know, it makes it makes people's brain explode, right? It's hard. Ula Ojiaku: But it works. Jeff Sutherland: But it works right.  Ula Ojiaku: You've already mentioned a lot of books in the course of this interview session, and these would be in the show notes. So, would there be anything any final word of advice you'd have for the leaders that would be listening to this podcast in terms of their transformation journey? Jeff Sutherland: So, one of the things we did to Scrum at Scale is that the difference between that and most of the other scaling frameworks is that it's all about the leadership. So, we need an operating leadership team, that is a Scrum team that needs a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, backlog. And its objective is to improve the Agile implementation of the organization. On the prioritization side, we need a leadership team that, led by a Chief Product Owner, that is prioritizing backlog across the organization. So, you know, I've had the Chief Product Owner of Hewlett Packard in my course, he had a $200 billion portfolio. He learned from that class. Says this class is pretty good.' He said, ‘In just one slide I figured out how to get $20 billion more a year with no additional resources'. Just by understanding how to work the framework right? At the $200 billion level. Ula Ojiaku: And you're talking about the Scrum at Scale course, right? Jeff Sutherland: No, this was a product owner course. Product Owner course. He came to it. We're now doing a Scrum at Scale… we're actually doing a Chief Product Owner course. So, a Product Owners at Scale course which it has been really well received by the leading Agile Practitioners. (They) really like that because they need to work more in the large than in the small often. Ula Ojiaku: Definitely. That means this available on the Scrum Inc site? Jeff Sutherland: Yes. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. Jeff Sutherland: So, one of the things I would recommend I would really recommend is the Scrum Field Book. It's a bunch of case studies for organizations, large and small, that have tried to take the whole organization to Scrum. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Sutherland - it's been a great pleasure having you and hopefully we could have a you know, follow up conversation sometime. Jeff Sutherland: Yes. Thanks for inviting me and glad to do it again. Ula Ojiaku: That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com. Also share with friends and leave a review. This would help others find the show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com. Till next time, take care and God bless!    

Summary KeywordsBody, health, stress, day, impact, people, leader, sleep, stress response, eating, carbs, diet, function, drinking, brain, coffee, exercise, affect.IntroductionWelcome to episode 171 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. It is a pleasure to have Georgie Lane on the show with us today. Georgie's purpose is to help leaders regain their energy, and confidence and lead to better outcomes. Georgie is a specialist in all things health and wellbeing for leaders. Georgie holds degrees in management and health science. We are together today to discuss the importance of leadership health in leading excellence.  Let's get into the episode Georgie thanks for joining us.  We are proudly sponsored by S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.FREE Download: Georgie's Two-Week Health Challenge!Links: https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/downloads#healthEpisode Links:YoutubeFull episode: https://youtu.be/1JV-9WeM0d4Two-Minute Tip: https://youtu.be/NfxaahMab6oEnterprise Excellence Academyweb: Contacts Brad: Connect via LinkedIn or call him at 0402 448 445 or email bjeavons@iqi.com.au. Visit Georgie Lane on her website: https://www.pranahealth.com.auWhat's next?1.     Download the new resources https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/downloads2.     Join our next community meeting.  https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/community.Listen to another podcast, #70, How to Create an Agile Organisation using Scrum @ Scale, with Jeff Sutherland, Part 1. https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/podcast/episode/4db26ab9/70-how-to-create-an-agile-organisation-using-scrum-scale-with-jeff-sutherland-part-1 To learn more about what we do, visit www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com.Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.

Scrum, you ask. Are we talking here about Rugby? Not at all. My guest on this episode is Rodrigo Quezada. Rod says he grew up with a pretty normal childhood until, during college, he was in a serious automobile accident that effected his ability to easily draw on childhood memories. I leave it to Rod to tell you about this. He went to college and graduated after which he entered the workforce. In 2015 Rod discovered a book entitled “Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” by Jeff Sutherland. I will not attempt here to describe what “Scrum” is. Rod is much more articulate about it than I. What I will say is that the art of Scrum takes creating and enabling teamwork to a new level. Scrum is all about teams working as cohesive units. I personally can see why one can say that using the Scrum model well may be a cause for more efficiency. This episode is to me quite engaging and worth the hearing. I think you will learn more about teamwork and perhaps you will discover a way to enhance how you work on projects. About the Guest: My name is Rodrigo Quezada from Mexico and I currently work as Principal Project Management at AT&T. During high school had a near-death experience at a car accident that compressed most of my childhood memories. They are there and can be retrieved by external triggers yet not by myself. Overall have awareness that had a childhood and within normal parameters as far as I can remember. Started my career path at the century start in procurement and was having a good time yet by 2015 a pivotal event happened when I ran across a book by Jeff Sutherland called Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. As failing at implementing traveled to the USA for training by Scrum.org and a new career path emerged. Implemented in the most empiric and lean way possible which aligns with the pillar of the Scrum system. Began a new undergraduate as computer engineering which was followed by a masters in data science and now a Phd in progress along with several professional certifications and a lot of learning. At this point in time would like to share this out as find it very beneficial to both individuals and organizations as, per the Scrum guide definition, it aims at “adaptive solutions for complex problems”. Ways to connect with Rodrigo: Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigoquezadareyes About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app. Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset. Thanks for being here. And for listening. We really appreciate it. Today, we get to introduce and interview Rodrigo Quezada. But we're gonna call him Rod and he said, That's okay. He asked me if I preferred Mike or Michael. And I said absolutely. So he's going to call me Mike. And I'm going to call him Rod. And I guess that works out pretty well. Rod has an interesting story to tell both about life in in his childhood and what he's doing now. And he's going to talk to us a lot about Scrum. And I'm not talking about rugby, necessarily. But we'll get to that. Anyway. Rod, I want to welcome you to and thank you for joining us here on unstoppable mindset.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 02:05 Thank you so much for inviting me, Mike. I'm very excited to be here, I think this opportunity to be able to share this out with with the team at large. I'm super excited about it. So then again, thank you. Well, absolutely.   Michael Hingson ** 02:19 And you're You're most welcome. And we're really glad that you're here. Rod, by the way, is in Mexico City. So I get to learn new things and refine old things every day. So Mexico City is an hour ahead of us. So it is about 1134 in the morning where I am and it's 12:34pm where he is so he's he's doing this during lunch. So I don't know whether you had lunch? Or we'll have to get through this. So you can go eat lunch, but we'll get there. Sure. Well, let's start by kind of going back and talking like I love to do about you growing up the early rod. So tell us about childhood and kind of what your experiences were like and and a little bit about you growing up?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 03:09 Absolutely. I think of myself as a fairly normal childhood. I however, during college, I had a car accident where most of my memories were, I'm not gonna say wipe out because they're there. They're just word kind of compressed somewhere in my mind. So I'm able to access memories of my childhood as long as somebody else triggers them. And happens a similar situation with music, I'm able to pretty much sing a song as long as the music starts. But as soon as the music ends, I cannot go ahead and play it again. And I cannot sing it. But if the music starts again, I can see it again completely. So it's very similar with my memories from my childhood. So as far as I know, it was a normal, happy childhood childhood. And that's as far as I can go.   Michael Hingson ** 03:58 Yeah. Did you so were you always in Mexico City? Is that where you grew up? Or where did you grow up? Yes,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 04:04 I was born. Yes, I was born and I live in Mexico City. Most of my life. There have been a few projects for work where I have been in the in the US for a couple of it was a couple of weeks and every now and then a couple of months. But but basically that and coming back. Yes. remote work for a long time. But but you based basically in Mexico City. Yes.   Michael Hingson ** 04:27 So you're pretty used to doing remote work already?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 04:31 Yes, actually, I was long before the pandemic that we had the COVID in the year. I believe that was 2020. Right? Before that as communications start to become more accessible. It was becoming much much more easier to talk around people around the globe at a fairly unexpensive way. So because of that it was fairly easy to work from pretty much anywhere. So I had the I guess I was lucky He enough to consider myself a knowledge worker and start doing that since probably say about year 2020 10 When I was working in the automotive industry,   Michael Hingson ** 05:10 what did you do in the automotive industry,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 05:12 I used to be a buyer, which later turned into a global responsibility bility becoming a Category Manager, specifically for rubber, later on adding plastics and gaskets. So I was in charge of global supply in order to make sure our facilities in Mexico in the US had the materials they needed in order for us to assemble the products for for commercial vehicles. Right.   Michael Hingson ** 05:42 Okay. And that kept you busy. What, when you were in college, what was your degree? And what were you studying? Well,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 05:49 my original major was in international business. Back then, by the time that I was just about to select my major, the we start getting some of these agreements like NAFTA, where we were able to start sending goods back and forth, because before that, there was not a lot of trading among at least not along among Mexican other countries. After that, it opened what it is wide open. And now we have globalization is a whole different landscape right now. But back then, there were not as many commercial agreements, and it was pretty trendy. And I thought that was interesting. And it started out in that route.   Michael Hingson ** 06:29 So did you end up getting your bachelor's degree in that?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 06:32 Originally? Yes. And once we unfold the story on Scrum, then everything changed. And I see a very different career path. Yes,   Michael Hingson ** 06:42 I gather and we'll we'll definitely get to that. But so when did you graduate? What year did you graduate from college?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 06:48 That was me in year 2000.   Michael Hingson ** 06:54 That was around the time you had your auto accident?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 06:57 Yeah, like, before I graduated, like it's probably happened somewhere along the lines of 9697.   Michael Hingson ** 07:04 All right, so it was a little bit before you graduated anyway. But yes, that was certainly a major change in your life. Where you were you laid up for a while, or our, how did it affect you other than suppressing memories? Well,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 07:22 I think on the bright side, it allowed me to have a visitor give life a much broader meaning I was I was super grateful that I was able to make it. The heat came in my on my side, I was driving, it was my fault. I started moving forward in order to cross and then a car was coming, and there was no way that he can be avoided. And it was interesting, because I look into this person, that driver, it was I look at her eyes. And it was almost like communication, that it's I think of it out of this world. It was like talking through through without talking if you know what I mean, there was like a moment where I was pretty much saying please, please, I want to I want to still be here a little longer. And I start watching a movie. Before that I start watching a movie of my life, like a lot of kind of pictures in a super fast space. And and that's when I realized that I was just about to no longer be here in this world. And that's when I was like, oh, no, please, I read a Ruby. And that's when I make these super quick communication and eat work and and she seared the wheels. And it still hit me for sure. But not not in my door. If he had been in my door, I would not be fortunate enough to be talking to a and sharing all of this. So once once they helped me realize what happened, I realized how fortunate I am to having a second chance in this life to make the best out of it and and validate and savor as much as possible. Of course, it's not always easy, but but definitely worth attempting to to enjoy it.   Michael Hingson ** 08:58 Well, and it's interesting, I've talked to a number of people who have had major crises in their lives, and have had to, to deal with that. And so many people have said, sort of the same thing, that having a second chance and really having the opportunity to go back and think about it. They realize that the second chance gives them the opportunity to try to do more meaningful things and to be hopefully better people but certainly gives them the opportunity to go off and better value life and what it brings.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 09:39 Yes, fully agree.   Michael Hingson ** 09:41 Yeah. And you know, I'm, of course, I had my own experience with that, needless to say, surviving being in the World Trade Center on September 11. And, and we had discussions about it my wife and I, especially when the press started getting our story and the decision that that I'm made and my wife agreed was that if we could help people move on from September 11, by me doing interviews and, and also, eventually also starting a speaking career. And if we could teach people a little bit more about blindness and disabilities and guide dogs and other things, and it was worthwhile. And I love to tell people now being in large part of keynote speaker traveling the world to speak. It's much more fun to sell philosophy of life than it is to sell computer hardware. So   Rodrigo Quezada ** 10:36 yes, it's   Michael Hingson ** 10:37 a whole lot more fun to do that. So I will always do that if I can. It's much more fun to do computer stuff. So I can't complain a bit. Well, so I'm, well, I'm very much glad that you're here. So we could do this podcast. So I really appreciate it, though, that you have learned to value life more. And that's a good thing to do. But you went into the to the automotive world, and how long were you doing that? I   Rodrigo Quezada ** 11:07 was in that industry for 13 years. Wow. And then what happened? Okay, he gets interesting, I was into project management handling these different kinds of prod projects. And I was looking for ways to be a little bit more productive. So I was doing that. And then I spotted a name, a title of a book that was called doing twice the work in half the time by the author, Jeff Sutherland. And I was like, Oh, this sounds like a book that I need to get into. Right. So I started reading it. And I was a pivotal moment in my life, or at least, yeah, no, it was in many different ways. So I start reading the book. And I was I have, I had almost, I have to try it at least. So I tried to implement it. And I wasn't not being lucky enough to say that I was successful. So I realized I needed additional understanding of it, and then I seek out for training back then, right now is certain it's a bit more accessible to have training online. But back then it was not in like late year 2015. But I was able to find a place called scrum.org that had this workshop. And that was lovely. That sounds about perfect. And so So I did, I traveled to the US got this training. And it was it was amazing that the environment was very energizing. And I was like, oh, gosh, this is so definitely it. And I was able to connect the dots that I was missing prior to just reading the book. And I came back super excited. And I told my boss, I know this is gonna sound really, really weird, but I want to go ahead and implement it even I still not an expert on this, but I want to give it a try. And if you don't mind, we're gonna play roles. And we can make it happen if you're willing to allow me to. And that's the way I started pioneering on using Scrum. So where were you working at the time? Yeah, I was working for Bendix, commercial vehicle systems. Bendix, I was based on Mexico City would enough is here. But eventually, I also got an office in our corporate facility. Back then it was located in Elyria, Ohio, very close to the Cleveland airport, about 30 minutes from there. And now they move over to Avon the corporate move over. So back then I was like, why don't, why don't we don't have a kind of like a team like the scrum team that I can refer to, but I was like, let me make you the product owner. And I'm going to be a little bit of a mix of a developer and a scrum master. Because our organization, I don't know if has changed ever since. But it used to be kind of like a matrix. So the the way the teams were set up, were very dynamic. So it was not a this is a specific team that we can call scrum team. But even then, that was enough raw material where to get started. And it was the most empirical way to do it. I was back then I was even using Excel as a way to visually track the work that was meant to be done.   Michael Hingson ** 14:10 Well, so far, first of all, what did your boss say when you said I want to try to put this into effect and so on? What was your boss's position?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 14:23 He was one of the directors for purchasing and aside of the fact of thinking that I was kind of crazy of doing something so something and nobody else seemed to be doing around us. I think he was more of why not? You already went through this training. So let's let's give it a shot. And interesting enough later on. I don't think I don't know if it was because of me or pretty disconnected. But the company has eventually moved over to using Scrum, which I was super happy when I heard they were about you about then I was at that point in time. I was no longer with the company but but it was I was super excited to hear that they weren't going to do that.   Michael Hingson ** 14:59 So, why Scrum? That is? Why, why that word. Give us a little bit of the origins and kind of maybe start to fill us in a little bit about what this is all about.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 15:14 Absolutely. A scrum comms. Scrum is the framework right? grandslam to atheris, with our Kench, whoever and Jeff Sutherland. So they together created this framework, and they have refine it and make it better and better over time. Were these idea of giving these a specific name, they describe it as referring to the game of rugby, rugby, where the team is very cross functional in that like, you go like here and I go here and we stay in an each position is more alpha, we transition into whatever needs to happen in order to make this work. So that's what they thought this is almost like, like, like doing Scrum when you when you're playing rugby. And that's the reason why they gave his name off a scrum to the framework. And what it happens is that within this framework, you set up yourself in small teams, but each team has everything it needs in order to accomplish its goals. So basically, is a small unit of people 10 or less, usually, that set up a scope and, and become or are allowed to become self organized in order to make everything work.   Michael Hingson ** 16:29 So does that team then work on a specific job a specific function? Or is it more general, kind of trying to understand a little bit about what the framework is and the whole process? Absolutely,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 16:44 the team is meant to be cross functional, because it has to handle the order or has to have all the resources needed to accomplish the goals that are set for for that specific team. Now, there will be times where a project is extremely complex, and one single team is not going to be able to do everything. So that's where you're able to what is called as scale or scaling, which basically means different teams are working on a small portion of a larger goal. But the outputs of the different teams combined allow for these one big thing for a company to be able to go happen. Maybe Maybe if I go ahead and describe how the framework breaks down into its components, that could be helpful to share. Let's do that. Okay, sounds good. So So basically, there's three roles, three artifacts, and five, it has changed names over time, sometimes we call them events, we call them ceremonies, or commitments, I think the most recent way to to frame them. And basically, within a team, you're going to have three roles. And there's going to be a product owner, who is the person in charge of maximizing value for the team. And that is a person that is a bridge between the customers or stakeholders and the team that is actually doing the work. So So that's more related to what we usually think of as a project manager. But this position in the scrum team becomes quite complex. And that's why there's a second role that is created that is called the scrum master. The scrum master accountability is efficiency of the team. So it's more geared towards the inside of the team, which is the communication with the product owner and the auditor role, which is the developer. So when we think of developer, it can pretty much be any function. Because scrum can be used in any industry, although it has a natural, a natural fit with anything related to technology and software and all of that, however, it can be expanded to pretty much any industry. So that will change the scope and therefore the composition of of a team. So for instance, let's say in a non tech kind of team, you could have somebody from marketing and somebody from accounting and somebody from I don't know, some sort of operations and that team combined is going to go and reach a given amount of goals. And and then that's kind of like the three roles of the team. The product owner, the scrum master and developer and the developer are the the people that actually make the work happen. The the go getters, let's think of it that way. And the team works as a cohesive unit, which means there's got to be a clear direction of what needs to be done. The supporting coaching by the scrum master and the team actually making that work happen. Once we transition from the roles to the artifacts, that's where pretty much how the work gets managed. You create what we call a backlog of work or product backlog items within this product backlog which is everything you can build or create or accomplish. Basically your list of goals are Wish List. And so far, I'm not going to find that you want me to elaborate on any of the points that already talked about?   Michael Hingson ** 20:07 No, I think you're, you're doing fine. Let me let me ask you a question though. Typically, in a team environment, there's a team leader, is that the scrum master in this case?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 20:18 Ah, that's a? That's a great question. It's a complicated question, by the way, that's fair, as us as a scrum master and product owner sharing that leadership accountability. But if you think of, if a stakeholder or a customer has a question, Who were they gonna direct their question to, that's gonna be the product owner. So in that classic regard, I think I'm gonna have to lean more towards the product owner would be that lead. However, from a team standpoint, kind of like the leadership tends to gravitate more towards the scrum master, because the scrum master is is willing and able to help the team, figure out or solve, actually understand which which impediments you might have, and find a way to solve them. Now, in a great scenario, when you're coaching as a Scrum Master, you're not trying to solve the problem for the team, you're just trying to help the team being able to solve it by themselves. So it's more of a facilitator. But it's also a leadership role. Okay,   Michael Hingson ** 21:22 so if the scrum master is more of a coach and a facilitator, in sort of the typical language of teams, and so on, then what is the product corner person,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 21:38 it's also a leader. But the broker will be more centered around the product itself than than the team or the team efficiency, because that's where the support from the scrum master comes from. So the product owner will be more more related to to figuring out the requirements and needs from the customers slash stakeholders, and translate that into a team in order for the team to work on that value maximizing goal. Okay.   Michael Hingson ** 22:08 All right, well, go ahead and continue sort of the explanation of how the whole the whole process works, then?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 22:14 Absolutely. So from the goals, we go to what are called the artifacts, and there are three, one of them is the product backlog, which is basically your inventory of everything that that we can go ahead and build related to a given product. From there, what you're going to do is that you're going to break him down in a small in a smaller chunk, which is where from everything that we could do, where are we actually going to commit to do and that's when you go into what we call the sprint backlog, which is basically a smaller one, wait a given timeframe in order to be accomplished. And once it is that will usually refer in in traditional project management as deliverable. We call it an increment in Scrum, which is the outcome of work from the team within a given timeframe. Now, that will take us over to the ceremonies because that timeframe happens to be one of those. But before I move over to the events or ceremonies, any any questions you might have regarding the in the artifacts, or the rolls?   Michael Hingson ** 23:20 I don't think so at this point. I'll keep thinking about it. But I'm just fascinated to hear this explanation.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 23:28 Thank you so much. So moving into the ceremonies, there's there's the container for the word, it's called a sprint. And it comes from from racing, right like like a short race called Sprint. So what you're going to do is that you're going to work on something, and it's going to be a month or less, usually in increments of weeks. So usually you're going to use the sprint stuff one week, two weeks, three weeks, or up to four weeks. But no more than four reason being you want to keep it a as a scope of work that is no longer than that. In order for you to make sure you collect feedback, which is one of the I think biggest benefits of using Scrum. You're not working on something for a long time. And then in the end, come back and say a marketplace live, what I got is more of I work in a little something and I collect feedback. And based on that feedback, I'm able to inspect and adapt. So the team is always working on the highest customer priority or value, value or valuable item. So that being said, you set up a cadence of your sprint, which can go from one week up until four. And that's it. Once you have the spring. You start your spring with a sprint planning meeting, which basically do us collectively as a team commit to a given amount of work and therefore an increment or increments by the end of the sprint. Once that happens, you have a daily meeting which too it's wondering it's worth it happens On a daily basis, and it's a meeting where you're going to synchronize with a team, you want to make sure that everybody is working towards the goal, and basically keeping the eyes on the ball. And then by the end, the close to the end of the sprint, you're going to have what is called a sprint review, which is where you showcase the work that has been completed to the customers largest stakeholders. And it's a great place for interaction and collaboration, because basically, you're promising something, then you are showing what you have committed to what you promise, and then you get understanding of the path moving forward. Sometimes the customer know exactly what they want. And sometimes they think they want something but then once they start to seeing that as something they can actually inspect, they might want something different. And that's great timing, because this chrome allows for rapid changes or ongoing changes. So I might go one a given route, but I want to change route. Absolutely, let's do it. And that's what these sessions are for is kind of like a working session where collaborate the team or the scrum team and the people that are going to be using the outcome of the work, meet to review and, and provide feedback to each other. And the last event, once that happens is a what is called a retrospective or retro where basically just the scrum team gathers and understand what are the what is the team doing right? What is the team, that what the team can improve, and basically include those small improvements. And that's where the continuous improvement portion comes in. Because every single sprint, if the team is working properly, the team is growing better and better over time.   Michael Hingson ** 26:44 Well, okay, so this is clearly a very structured organizational process, which I can appreciate. But you said a lot earlier that that what you really got intrigued about and what intrigued you with the the whole idea of Scrum, even before you necessarily knew the name was do twice the work in half the time. So why does this process really increase workflow?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 27:13 Great question. One, one of the answers is because of the communication flow, the fact that you are keeping keeping teams small enough allows every team member to be able to understand each other, if the team is too weak, like when you go to a party, right? If there's too many people in the table, you can talk to a few that are close to you, but you cannot understand what is happening by the end of the table. So it's very similar, because the team is small enough communication flows properly. And therefore you avoid misunderstandings. And you're able to communicate faster and better. Therefore, you become far more productive. The other thing that I think is a part of the answer is the level of autonomy of a scrum team is fairly large. So that allows the team to organize to better suit their own needs, which allows each of the team members to bring in the best of them, and then combine them into the pool of resources. So the fact that everybody is able to work in such a pace, and the team either failing or succeeding as one. I think that's part of the reason why it makes a team so productive. And last but not least, you you every spring, you work towards the goal. So there's no misunderstanding of Yeah, everybody's doing a little something. Now, by the end of the sprint, we're going to show the work that we have completed. So so we keep focused, and we make sure it happens.   Michael Hingson ** 28:46 So it sounds like in any company, where you have a fairly decent number of people, you're going to have a number of different Scrum teams. And each one is is working on a project or maybe a few teams are working on different parts of the same project. But who coordinates all of that. So it sounds like there could be essentially a scrum within a scrum then that you've got somebody who is overseeing what the various teams are doing.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 29:21 Yeah, interesting question that's probably gonna change from from company to company or industry to industry. Think probably should explain that. A Scrum is a framework is meant to work as a whole. I mean, you don't escape roles or escape ceremonies or increments, you use all of those elements. But once you have that basic foundation, which is basically the framework, pretty much the rest of the field is very flexible. It allows for us I was explaining like scaling for instance, if I have a larger project, one team is not going to be able to accomplish everything then we can Scale to two teams or three teams or four teams. Now, if we are to go that route, then yes, your point, we're probably going to need to use as an organization, some additional tools for managing that complexity across different teams. But as long as the teams are not working on the exact same thing, potentially, you're pretty much just setting goals, and letting them go work towards those goals. So so the self organization of the teams allows a lot of flexibility for the organizations as well, they just need to set the goals. And then the teams go work to make those goals happen.   Michael Hingson ** 30:34 Well, let me maybe phrased the question slightly differently, who sets the goals?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 30:41 Well, that's what we usually refer to as the stakeholders, but stakeholder can be pretty much usually is going to be like senior leadership levels, that are saying this is what we need. So depending on the size of the company, that's kind of like which level is setting which goals, but I think is gonna probably cascade down, it's going to be most likely many of these pros is going to be top down. Eventually, if there are some mature Scrum teams, you can actually let them run wild with Can you set up your own goals of what you can actually accomplish and make that kind of proposals bottoms up? That's definitely something that can be done as well.   Michael Hingson ** 31:17 Sure that and I can appreciate that. But in general, what you're saying is that there, there is someone or there is some part of the organization, as you said that the top leadership that essentially stakeholders sets the goals. And that's where the process begins, and then assigns or works with the people below them to decide what team is responsible for what goals?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 31:49 Yes, and that's where the communication takes place between these stakeholders and the product owner, in order to break it down for the team to work in that. Right.   Michael Hingson ** 32:00 Okay. And so, once the goals are assigned, then is it also true that someone keeps the the leadership informed as to how the team is going? Or is the idea you have to trust the team and let them do their job for a month, and not interfere with the dynamic of the team?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 32:25 What I'm saying? Absolutely, yes, I guess potentially, that sometimes that can actually happen, in my experience is more of less ongoing communication between the product owner and the stakeholders, even though we're working on a given set goal for each sprint, yeah, is usually potentially having these communication helps towards the same point in time, good practice to have a roadmap of what you're doing. And eventually the roadmap can as I said, it can change because of what we think of discoveries, right, or validated learning and, and kind of think of, there's an amazing book about that by Eric, oh, gosh, he's like, I almost could swear it's Reyes, it's called the lean startup. And there's something concept that brings that comes from this book called validated learning, which is sometimes and the reason why the scope of this team says is small, is because there's a lot of unknowns when you start a project. So there's things and assumptions that that kind of like could hold true over time. But the more the larger the project, the less likely they are. So you have a certain degree of assumptions, and you want to go try to test them as fast and early as you can. Which leads to a concept that we refer to in this Agile world as your fail fast, which doesn't mean you're trying to intentionally fail. But if you are going to fail, it's better to do it as fast as you can and get your lesson learn and move forward. Because that allows you to experiment a little bit, which pairs well with the empirical nature of this process. And it also helps on the Lean thinking, because you don't want to waste resources. So if a project is going to be canceled six months from now, I rather know what would not let leave that padding to that project and cancel six months from now and cancel it, let's say two weeks after getting started, right. And I'm thinking worst case scenario, right with a project canceled, more often than not, your project is gonna change paths in order to arrive to one that is actually your successful path. So you go from something good to I guess I'm learning this from a title of a book, right? But what kind of going from good to great, right? Because you are understanding your product better as you are building it. And that takes me over to a concept which I think is in the core of everything we're talking, which is the iterative and incremental nature of Scrum. So what you're doing is building a little something, you do an iteration, and then you stop. You inspect and adapt and based on your findings, and Next time around your next iteration is going to build on top of that. So that's what we call the incremental nature because you're always delivering something. And it's always better than the, the version you delivered before. Can   Michael Hingson ** 35:15 you give us an example and tell maybe a story of, of a project and how Scrum, really enhanced getting the project done? Can you actually, is it easy enough to tell an actual story and talk about your experiences with it?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 35:35 Yeah, absolutely. I'm kind of thinking across I know, I'd see for an example is like, oh, gosh, it's been a couple of years. So I mean, I've collecting experiences. Sure. And, yeah, plus the NDAs. Right, what I can and can't share about Sure.   Michael Hingson ** 35:54 When you just sort of in general.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 35:58 Okay, got it. Yeah, well, let me share this example. It happened in one team, where we had these cross functional setup of the team members. So each of them having a speciality or kind of like being a specialist with one thing. And what happened, eventually, when we started doing the work, there were a couple of team members that were doing a lot of work. And there were some of them that we, we see working every now and then. And that makes it kind of complex, because as long as every, you have like two options, right? If you're going to be cross functional allele, everybody, there's a little bit of everything now, that for sure, nobody's going to be as proficient as the specialist. But the whole idea is that we can rely on each other. So for example, if our our programmer gets a stock, and he can get some help from the tester, then the tester gets the program a little bit with some shadowing are helped by the programmer, and then they can both program a little bit. And that's an example of clean Croc cross function. But if you're not able to do that kind of thing, because of whatever risk management policies or even willingness by the team members to go outside of their usual line of work. And that was the case here. There were team members that said, this is what I do, this is what I want to keep doing. So what we end up doing is if if these team members are don't have some tech skills that we need, but there's this other activities that they can do, as long as they don't have to mess up with the complexity, complexity of programming, or managing certain technology tools, what we did was simplify that and create a web application for for low to no code, tech team members to be able to produce work in that application. And that helped because now they can do work in an ongoing basis, as opposed to having to wait until there was some no tech work for them. And that helped the team increases the throughput dramatically, because now different team members could actually be producing work in parallel, kind of like everybody working on something at the same time, and the output was increased significantly. So   Michael Hingson ** 38:14 with those team members that really were not very technically inclined in the process, it sounds like they may not have really embraced the whole scrum idea at the beginning. But what did they think by the end of the project?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 38:30 Well, I think by providing them tools and make their life easier, and they can actually contribute to the whole, I think that that was a pretty amazing experience for us all because it is great if everybody can like go ahead and do different functions, but it's not always possible. So if it is not, how can we think outside of the box and seal provide a solution that allows the team to be more productive? And that's what we did. And it was an amazing experience.   Michael Hingson ** 38:55 And I think that's really the issue here isn't that what you're really promoting is people thinking and innovative in different ways, collectively, so that you are able to fashion and create a solution may be where you didn't think there was one. But by working together by functioning as a team, and by valuing the team, you figured out? Well, we've got to do these additional kinds of tasks to make it possible for everybody to be productive. But that's what it's really all about, isn't it is everybody needs to be involved in the team and be be productive? And the team has to be concerned about that and really work to make that happen.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 39:39 Yes, I'm glad you mentioned that. It's almost like as simple as saving the best for last. The definition of a scrum includes the fact that it is creating adaptive solutions to complex problems. And where it connects very well. What you just mentioned is that it is more of a mindset. It works within a framework. Yes. But but all the pieces working together, it is really about a mindset of problem solving in a way that that, let's say sets up the field in order for you to be very successful. So it is a tool that embraces change and innovation and problem solving, I think to a whole new level, and that's what I think we need in this day and age. Because as we have evolved as a human species, we have also been facing challenges that we didn't have before, like, like, like global warming, and are things that that are like, gosh, how are we going to solve that, right? But we gotta find a solution. Because if we don't, our our, our future is compromised. So how do we manage and handle all these projects, and I think this might not be the only way to do it. But it's definitely one way to do it. And that's the reason what I consider myself such an advocate for Scrum. I think once you do it and understand what it's coming from, you cannot stop using it, I can't.   Michael Hingson ** 41:05 So you use it in, in work and everything that you do, what do you do now? Or are you working for a company now? Or, or what's your current job environment like?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 41:15 Yes, eventually, as I started gravitating towards technology related words and phrasing and things like that, I start exploring into a new career path. And by year 2018, I started a new undergraduate program for computer engineering. And I finished that when in 2020. And then I got into a master's in data science. And about that same timeframe, I was lucky enough to join at&t, where I currently work as a principal project manager working with Scrum teams. And And most recently, I also getting engaged pursuing a PhD in computer science as well. So once I started gravitating towards technology, I realized my passion for it. And that process Grom. And it started ignited me into a very different career path, which is what I currently do.   Michael Hingson ** 42:12 So did you bring scrum to a TNT or was AT and T already embracing that as a concept?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 42:18 Because fine, I think they're really for this specific project is something that was about to get started. So pretty much. There were a few people getting started with it with a project. And then eventually, there was a significant amount of additional of team members that were hired. When I started with them, I started actually as a scrum master. And eventually, by doing the work, I transition over to product owner. So I'm fairly familiar with with with all the roles as I was leaving doing development when I got started on a very empirical way since early 2015. Yes,   Michael Hingson ** 42:56 so as a product owner or as a scrum master. When I mean that, that isn't a full time job as such, that is, you don't just sit in monitor other people, you're directly involved in doing a lot of the work yourself, right?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 43:14 Yes, absolutely. Regardless of the role, yes. Right. And   Michael Hingson ** 43:18 so you are just as much a part of the working team as anyone else. Even though you have the additional responsibilities of being the product owner, the scrum master, which is understandable when a project is done. This is a question I've always found interesting with different kinds of teams, because a lot of times when there is a team effort to do something, when it's all over and it comes time to recognize the teams, the team leader gets recognition and the rest of the team doesn't necessarily get the same amount of visibility. How does that work in a scrum environment? Is it just the project owner, product owner or the scrum master that gets recognized or is is the company or the process such that it's understood that it's really the whole team that needs to get recognized not just one or one or two people,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 44:12 it has to be the whole team if you ask me, because everybody is pushing towards this successful outcome that is a team outcome. So So collaboration and teamwork is is kind of like the glue that binds everything together. So even though the product owner is representing the team and helping the requirements and understanding and communicating with stakeholders, interestingly enough, as we are used to traditional management positions, item kind of think of off meter or scrum master or product owner as we can think of them as managers, however, from my view is almost like not giving yourself that managerial title. In some words, maybe you're doing it but you are so part of a team that is hard to tell apart. I'm kind of like, am I am I like, like overseeing? Or am I actually kind of like silly and bold, but I feel that I'm part of the team. If the scrum team is working properly, you are part of the team. So so it's not like different layers of people managing and people doing even though Yeah, true developers are doing. But you're so close to them that that that line gets kind of blurry, if you know what I mean. It's like, there's no way I could accomplish this by myself, I needed the team to backup whatever I'm supporting as a product owner. And similar thing with with the scrum master, if I'm helping a team become more efficient over time, the team is better than better. And that serves a higher purpose for both the team and the whole organization. Maybe   Michael Hingson ** 45:44 more like viewing yourself as if you will, a senior member of the team in terms of experience or knowledge level subject matter expert that you're bringing to it. But that doesn't make you better, or a a person who is separate from the team. And I think that's a wonderful concept that you're still really part of the team. And it's all about how you best add value to the team. Yes,   Rodrigo Quezada ** 46:06 it's all about maximizing value as a team. Yes.   Michael Hingson ** 46:12 Yeah, that's, that's extremely important. Because in so many teams, in so many job situations, the boss regards themselves as the boss and everybody works for them. The team leaders, the team leader, everybody works for them. But they're not in a sense, as much a part of the team is they really ought to be   Rodrigo Quezada ** 46:33 Yes, true indeed. And actually, that remember that, when they, when they created this framework, they they took away titles, they didn't want to say you're the senior de surgir, the junior dad, because that's more related to a hierarchical kind of structure. They wanted to make it as if you're a developer, you're helping with creating and crafting and adding value to the product. So you are a developer. And that's it, you don't need to have a specific title as you are a QA or you are a software engineer, or you are a site reliability engineer, SRE is like you're part of the team. And that's it, you might have a speciality. And there's something that I almost forgot to mention. Within this world, we're very used to I do one thing, and I do that one thing very well. But there's this concept of a T and are m shaped professional, which basically means you're extremely good at more than one thing. So So you have a broad understanding of several things, but you're good at at one or more things. So in that regard, there's no limit also to your potential as somebody doing the work. So kind of, is kind of like a path to mastery and fulfillment. So if you're doing these just like well, then then eventually that takes you to higher levels. And that in turn, moves over to your personal life. And then suddenly you have a virtuous, virtuous, virtuous cycle. I believe there's a right way to say it, Mike. Yeah, so so it's kind of like, like, it's fun. And then work doesn't feel as well, kind of like the way we think of work, right? Because work becomes far more fun, and you enjoy it. And then you do what you like. And then you happen to do even better, because now you aren't kind of like, completely nursing what you're doing. But aren't   Michael Hingson ** 48:24 scrum master and product owner titles in of themselves? Or how, how is that in the scheme of things different than then having some other kind of title?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 48:37 No, no, that's fair enough. That's where I think Trump is making an exception. We have these two, these two positions that are having kind of like extremely specific accountabilities within the team, because, for example, right, we only want one point of contact with the team to talk to stakeholders, because otherwise it could be 10 people sense from a stakeholder standpoint, right? You want to talk with one person from the team? And that's why it's specific to the scrum I'm sorry, to the product owner. Right.   Michael Hingson ** 49:08 Okay. And, again, I think that gets back to what I said before, which is really, although they are titles, it's really talking more about your level of experience and some of the expertise that you bring to the team.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 49:24 Yes, absolutely. It's a cohesive, cohesive unit of professionals working together, which breaks down silos, right, because you're trying to collectively achieve something opposed to this is my part of the word. And that's the only part I care for. And this is more of approach of this is what we are working towards building together.   Michael Hingson ** 49:43 Right. And that's what teamwork is really all about, or should be really all about. And so often we we tend to really miss the whole point of what the value of the team is, and we pay more lip service to teamwork. then actually doing things to embody it and make it really a part of what we do. I know that when I hired salespeople and worked with salespeople, one of the things that I always said is my job is not to boss you around, because I hired you expecting that you already know what to do and how to do it. But my job is to add value to make you more successful. And it sounds like that is what you're really seeking in the whole scrum process as well. And why you have a scrum master and product owner.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 50:33 Yes, indeed. And previously, you mentioned something about when the project ends. And I think that comes to a different concept that I found extremely interesting, which is, with your teams being kind of like a group of people working together, and the longer they can work together better, they can read each other's mind and, and, and talk to each other without even talking. If you happen to have a team like that, that is happy working together. The other thing that happens is, your cost and time is pretty much fixed. So so the team from a company standpoint has the keeping costs, right. And time is pretty much going going in a pretty linear way. What I'm trying to explain is, the scope is what's changing over time with the team. So you can you can start adding new or different things to the teams. And if one project ends, a new one can begin. As long as you have a problem to solve. You can leverage on on on a scrum team or several Scrum teams in order to make sure you keep addressing the problems that you want to tackle as a as an organization or as a group, right. It doesn't have to be a company always. But we can certainly use companies as a quick reference point for Scrum teams.   Michael Hingson ** 51:47 You mentioned to me in the past that Scrum teams don't in Scrum and doesn't embrace as much some of the traditional tools like Gantt charts and so on, why is that?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 52:00 Correct. The Gantt charts are mainly used within traditional project management when you are considering that all your assumptions are gonna are going to hold true through the whole lifecycle of your project. And therefore your planning is perfect at the beginning. But as soon as US bottlenecks that were not foreseen in time, or, or potentially, let's say technical difficulties that you find along the way. And those were not accounted for in the original Gantt chart. So usually what ends up happening is that the Gantt chart starts to deviate along from the actual planning or actual action in place. So eventually you depart from somewhere very different from where you intended to arrive. So what what is scrum does, there's there's some metrics that are used, usually referred to as velocity, which is very subjective, because it means something different to different teams. So one team have a 50 story points velocity, and our team can have a 500 story points velocity, which might seem that 501 is much faster than the team which 50 points but it's so subjective that from a working standpoint, that one was 50 points can be actually delivering more work to the to the to the organization. But anyway, you can have these kind of like burn downs, or burn up charts that you can use to track sort of metrics of how the team is doing against the planning. But remember, that is based on short spans of time, so no more than four weeks. So even if you're meeting or missing your targets, it just meant to be contained within a small or short timeframe for you to understand, learn, adjust, and do it again. But do it better.   Michael Hingson ** 53:36 If you don't get a project done in the four week time that you originally set based on the scrum rules.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 53:44 That would be a problem. Most of the time, what you do is you break down into small chunks that are achievable within a sprint, we we can think of and then again, this might come back to if I remember correctly, this Eric Ries and the Lean Startup, there's something called an MVP or minimum viable product, which is basically from everything we can do, what is the minimum we can achieve. So if you plan yourself to at least achieve a little something, and then everything you can add on top of that before the sprint is over, I think there's a safe path to always have something to show for you as a team accomplishing something because if you if you kind of lean towards the all or nothing approach, either I believe or everything or I don't have nothing to show, there could be points in time where the risk is high. And you're going to show up to the review saying I didn't complete it my work, right? There's nothing to show. So what I'll probably suggest is, is take the MVP path, always have a little something that is something you can guarantee as a team that you can deliver. And then if you happen to have extra time within your sprint, go build on top of that and add more things to here's what we have completed by the sprint review.   Michael Hingson ** 54:53 So if something doesn't get done in the appropriate time, you really We have two potential reasons for that, that I can think of one is, you made the goal too large, or too, the team isn't functioning nearly as well as it should be. And that's an in both cases, that's something for someone to go back and reevaluate.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 55:20 And that's where the rhetoric comes in. Because every by the end of every sprint, you need to collectively as a team say, Okay, where do we miss? Where do we waste? And what do we knew earlier? What do we need to do a little bit different to fix that in the future? So you're always looking for ways to becoming better and better as a team, which is one of the things that I definitely love about this framework.   Michael Hingson ** 55:41 Yeah. And that was why I asked the question, because, again, it's all about the team making a collective decision or creating a collective understanding. And again, is all about the team. Yes, it is, which then can communicate with the stakeholders and so on. In case it's the stakeholder that screwed up. And the stakeholder hopefully understands what the scrum team is all about. And we'll accept the observations when that happens as well. Yes.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 56:18 And there was something else that you mentioned that it triggered. Yeah, at one point in time, you mentioned about the team recognition. The sprint review is not only between this, the product owner and the stakeholders for the sprint review, you have to have the whole team. So the product owner can be presenting. Yes. But the team is there. So there's kind of like very specific questions about things on the, of how the product was built, or how the product is working, or any What if coming from the either end users, customers or stakeholders. That's where the team can bring in their expertise, because they build it together. Right? So the team has a voice as well within the Sprint Review isn't is not necessarily only a steal your point like like just who is managing the team, it's more off. Here's the whole team that builds together. And any questions, here's a whole team in order to be able to answer as a team.   Michael Hingson ** 57:10 And that's what really makes this such an exciting concept, because it's all about the team. And and hopefully, when the team completes a project, if they really work together, then no one tries to separate the team and put different people from one team on to another team. They allow the team to continue to operate and be a cohesive unit. Yes.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 57:35 And there's one more thing that also Bond's things together, which is one of the pillars of Scrum, which is called transparency. The process is extremely visible to everybody in the organization. So what the team is working on what progress are having, everybody can actually go see. So whether the team is working these working items, which you should refer to, or at least I'm used to referring to them as PBIS, or product backlog items. Everybody can go see what the team is working on and how they're communicating and their evidences of work completed and everything else. So stakeholders don't always have to rely on whatever the product owner says. They can actually go and see what the team is doing. Because the process is extremely transparent to everybody. And for sure, the team as well. So So usually the work is not a sign that work is is kind of taken, right? How can I help? How can I contribute? So I go to the to the sprint backlog, and I grab a working item. And let's say me as a developer, I go work on that. And every now and then it's not, it's not. It's not recommended that it's done. But every now and then even other roles such as a scrum master can go ahead and take a little bit of work, even though it's not recommended can be done. So. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 58:49 Why should more people embrace the scrum concept of doing work?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 58:55 God, gosh, first and foremost, because, aside from the fact that it, it's fosters teamwork, and increases happiness levels on and promotes mastery from team members, which makes it ever more exciting, it helps you deal with that the solutions to complex problems borrowing from the definition of Scrum. So as long as you have complex problems to solve it, what you want to solve is pretty repetitive and fairly and linear and straightforward. Yearning, you're probably not going to need Scrum. But as long as it starts to deviate from something that is that predictable. You can rely on group of professionals working together as a unit in order to tackle together those those problems and come out with adaptive solutions. Cool.   Michael Hingson ** 59:46 If people want to learn more about Scrum and the process, how can they do that?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 59:54 I'll probably say start out with information that is already provided. it on the scrum guide. You look at it as that the scrum guide. It was created by Ken Ken Shriver and Jeff Sutherland, the creators of Scrum. It's out there on the internet. So so I'll probably say start there, because that's the guideline for the whole framework. And   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:16 what is it called   Rodrigo Quezada ** 1:00:18 the scrum guideline, okay. It's even trademarked. But it is open to the public, you don't have to even pay to in order to be able to read or things like that. And it's been translated to different languages as well. So I'll probably say start there, because that's, that's pretty much the epicenter from for the whole framework. However, if you want to learn a little more, there's different books out there and different organizations that can help in the process, including certifications and everything else. Guess one of them, for sure, is this book that started me with Scrum, which is called doing twice the work and half the time by Jeff Sutherland is definitely one of my top recommendations for Scrum. There's also two websites that I think of that are that are scrum.org. And there's other ways to that is called Scrum Alliance. Dot I believe that.com. But if I'm incorrect that.org Both both promote a lot of conversations and best practices on Scrum. So a lot, those are great resources. There's a lot more out there. But those are the ones that come top of mind.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:23 And is there a way if people want to talk to you and kind of get more thoughts from you about all this or just get to meet you? Is there a way for them to do that?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 1:01:32 Yeah, we could probably use LinkedIn for that. I haven't had a lot of civility. But I don't mind if I do because the whole purpose of this podcast was sharing this out loud with more people. I know what I know what up what I want that to be spread out, because I'm definitely a scrum enthusiast. So if there's way that I can help somebody else I'll I'll be happy to. So   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:59 how can they reach you on LinkedIn? What? What do they look for?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 1:02:06 Let me go seek my gosh, would it be okay if I sent it to you, I don't have it handy. Kind of like but but you can look for my name, Rodrigo. Queszada Queszada with a Z and Reyes with a Y in the end. And it's I think it's fairly accessible. Once you're into Lincoln system. Go ahead and spell all that for me. So sure, no problem. Rodrigo says spelled R o d r i g o, my first life name. Last name is Queszada. Which is Q u e z as in Zebra a d as in Daddy a. My other last name it which is Reyes R e y e s   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:51 There we go. So we can search for you on LinkedIn with that. So what are you doing? You're not working?   Rodrigo Quezada ** 1:03:00 Guys, I would rather work I'm usually doing some training. And aside of that, for sure. It's spending time with friends and family. It's a mix of of those. I have these reckless pursuit of understanding and training and eventually I'll find my purpose in life. I'm still in debt that I cannot say I have it. What I always feel I'm getting a little bit closer. So I hope I get there before. Before my end of   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:24 life. There you go. Do you do you have a family? Are you married or anything like that? Yes.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 1:03:28 I'm married. Two kids. Almost 10. Actually, they're just about to be 10. And, yeah, and also two bucks. So So yeah, I think.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:41 Yeah, so So that's six in the family. If you get four more, you can have a scrum team.   Rodrigo Quezada ** 1:03:48 Yeah, getting close. Yeah, keep   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:50 keep working on that. Well, Rod, this has really been very much fun and enjoyable. And I really appreciate you coming on and talking about Scrum. It's a concept I have not been familiar with. But I'm going to go learn more about it. I think it's fascinating. I think there are parts of it that as I listen to you tell it that I have used in the course of my life, although I never understood it and call it Scrum. But I appreciate it. And I think it's an extremely valuable thing. Anything to promote teamwork is always a good thing. So I want to thank you once again for being here. And I want to thank you for li

A metodologia ágil nasceu no final da década de 1990, mas foi na última década que uma aparente histeria coletiva começou. A partir daí, uma empresa sem aplicações da metodologia passou a ser considerada antiquada. Na ânsia de se mostrar atendo às tendências, muitas empresas correram para implementar, a qualquer custo, o tal do ágil. Na temporada Washing no mundo corporativo, a gente vai falar de coisas que as empresas dizem que fazem, mas na prática não é bem assim.

Summary KeywordsOrganisation, work, Lawry, people, leaders, guess, teams, behaviour, understanding, leadership, aligned, influence, talk, create, culture, measure, values, drives, excellence, drivers.IntroductionWelcome to episode 169 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. It is a pleasure to have Mr Lawry Scandar on the show with us today. This is one of the best shows I've ever recorded on how to lead excellence and achieve great results. Lawry is drawing from his career at Incitec and working with many other organisations. We speak about how to gain knowledge to lead out and take your organisation to a new level. We will explore leadership values, how to create self-led autonomous teams, shift your culture, and truly take your organisation to another level.We are proudly sponsored by S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.FREE DownloadsLinks: https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/downloadsEpisode Links:YoutubeFull episode: Two-Minute Tip: Enterprise Excellence Academyweb: Contacts Brad: Connect via LinkedIn or call him at 0402 448 445 or email bjeavons@iqi.com.au. Visit Lawry at his website: https://lawryscandar.com/What's next?1.     Download the new resources https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/downloads2.     Join our next community meeting.  https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/community.3.     Listen to another podcast, #70, How to Create an Agile Organisation using Scrum @ Scale, with Jeff Sutherland, Part 1. https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/podcast/episode/4db26ab9/70-how-to-create-an-agile-organisation-using-scrum-scale-with-jeff-sutherland-part-1To learn more about what we do, visit www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com.Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.

Summary Keywordsagile, lean, tip, customer, modular, dev-ops, amazon, agile mindset, product, scrum, framework, TPS, architecture, world, teams, extreme programming, Gemba, modularity, tech companies.IntroductionWelcome to episode 168 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. It is such a pleasure to have Catherine Chabiron and Fabrice Bernhard on the show with us today. Catherine is a board member of the French Lean Institute. Catherine is the former Director of IS Governance at Faurecia, a major French industrial group. Catherine is passionate about helping organisations overcome barriers to establishing hands-on, customer-centric, value-driven prioritisation and employee engagement. Today, We are discussing their new book Learning to Scale at Theodo Group.  We are proudly sponsored by S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy. Episode Links:YoutubeFull episode: https://youtu.be/aTPy77RYO4gTwo-Minute Tip: Enterprise Excellence Academyweb:  Contacts Brad: Connect via LinkedIn or call him at 0402 448 445 or email bjeavons@iqi.com.au. Catherine linkedin.com/in/catherine-chabiron-43ba6b16 and Fabrice linkedin.com/in/fabricebernhard  are available on LinkedIn.What's next?1.     Download the new resources https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/downloads2.     Join our next community meeting.  https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/community.3.     Listen to another podcast, #70, How to Create an Agile Organisation using Scrum @ Scale, with Jeff Sutherland, Part 1. https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/podcast/episode/4db26ab9/70-how-to-create-an-agile-organisation-using-scrum-scale-with-jeff-sutherland-part-14.     Look up Catherine's new book, Learning to Scale at theODO Group: https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Scale-Theodo-Group-resilient/dp/2958357023 To learn more about what we do, visit www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com.Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.

Alexandre Frédéric delves into a Personal Scrum tale inspired by Dr. Jeff Sutherland's meeting in Boston last fall. It's all about Dr. Sutherland playing with his book on Scrum titled himself: “Twice the Energy and Half the Stress” with his Fitbit controlling his blood pressure. That gave Alexandre Frédéric the idea of Twice the Exercise […] The post Twice the Exercise and Half the Meal Portions a Personal Scrum Story To Get Lean appeared first on Agile Lounge.

Q&A on the film Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning with the Oscar Nominated Visual Effects team from ILM including visual effects supervisors Alex Wuttke, Simone Coco, and Jeff Sutherland, and special effects supervisor Neil Corbould. Moderated by Mara Webster, In Creative Company. Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.

Get ready for the glitz and glamour as "Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast" dives into the highly anticipated 2023 Oscar Nominations! In Episode 607, our hosts meticulously dissect each category, celebrating the outstanding achievements in the world of cinema. Join us as we unveil the nominees and share our insights on who might take home the coveted golden statuettes. OSCAR NOMINATIONS 2024 BY CATEGORY - 96th AWARDS       Best Picture AMERICAN FICTION Ben LeClair, Nikos Karamigios, Cord Jefferson and Jermaine Johnson, Producers ANATOMY OF A FALL Marie-Ange Luciani and David Thion, Producers BARBIE David Heyman, Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley and Robbie Brenner, Producers THE HOLDOVERS Mark Johnson, Producer KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas, Martin Scorsese and Daniel Lupi, Producers MAESTRO Bradley Cooper, Steven Spielberg, Fred Berner, Amy Durning and Kristie Macosko Krieger, Producers OPPENHEIMER Emma Thomas, Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan, Producers PAST LIVES David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler, Producers POOR THINGS Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone, Producers THE ZONE OF INTEREST James Wilson, Producer Actor in a Leading Role Bradley Cooper in MAESTRO Colman Domingo in RUSTIN Paul Giamatti in THE HOLDOVERS Cillian Murphy in OPPENHEIMER Jeffrey Wright in AMERICAN FICTION Actor in a Supporting Role Sterling K. Brown in AMERICAN FICTION Robert De Niro in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Robert Downey Jr. in OPPENHEIMER Ryan Gosling in BARBIE Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS Actress in a Leading Role Annette Bening in NYAD Lily Gladstone in KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Sandra Hüller in ANATOMY OF A FALL Carey Mulligan in MAESTRO Emma Stone in POOR THINGS Actress in a Supporting Role Emily Blunt in OPPENHEIMER Danielle Brooks in THE COLOR PURPLE America Ferrera in BARBIE Jodie Foster in NYAD Da'Vine Joy Randolph in THE HOLDOVERS Animated Feature Film THE BOY AND THE HERON Hayao Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki ELEMENTAL Peter Sohn and Denise Ream NIMONA Nick Bruno, Troy Quane, Karen Ryan and Julie Zackary ROBOT DREAMS Pablo Berger, Ibon Cormenzana, Ignasi Estapé and Sandra Tapia Díaz SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Amy Pascal Cinematography EL CONDE Edward Lachman KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Rodrigo Prieto MAESTRO Matthew Libatique OPPENHEIMER Hoyte van Hoytema POOR THINGS Robbie Ryan Costume Design BARBIE Jacqueline Durran KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Jacqueline West NAPOLEON Janty Yates and Dave Crossman OPPENHEIMER Ellen Mirojnick POOR THINGS Holly Waddington Directing ANATOMY OF A FALL Justine Triet KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Martin Scorsese OPPENHEIMER Christopher Nolan POOR THINGS Yorgos Lanthimos THE ZONE OF INTEREST Jonathan Glazer Documentary Feature Film BOBI WINE: THE PEOPLE'S PRESIDENT Moses Bwayo, Christopher Sharp and John Battsek THE ETERNAL MEMORY Nominees to be determined FOUR DAUGHTERS Kaouther Ben Hania and Nadim Cheikhrouha TO KILL A TIGER Nisha Pahuja, Cornelia Principe and David Oppenheim 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner and Raney Aronson-Rath Documentary Short Film THE ABCS OF BOOK BANNING Sheila Nevins and Trish Adlesic THE BARBER OF LITTLE ROCK John Hoffman and Christine Turner ISLAND IN BETWEEN S. Leo Chiang and Jean Tsien THE LAST REPAIR SHOP Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers NǎI NAI & WàI Pó Sean Wang and Sam Davis Film Editing ANATOMY OF A FALL Laurent Sénéchal THE HOLDOVERS Kevin Tent KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Thelma Schoonmaker OPPENHEIMER Jennifer Lame POOR THINGS Yorgos Mavropsaridis International Feature Film IO CAPITANO Italy PERFECT DAYS Japan SOCIETY OF THE SNOW Spain THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE Germany THE ZONE OF INTEREST United Kingdom Makeup and Hairstyling GOLDA Karen Hartley Thomas, Suzi Battersby and Ashra Kelly-Blue MAESTRO Kazu Hiro, Kay Georgiou and Lori McCoy-Bell OPPENHEIMER Luisa Abel POOR THINGS Nadia Stacey, Mark Coulier and Josh Weston SOCIETY OF THE SNOW Ana López-Puigcerver, David Martí and Montse Ribé Music (Original Score) AMERICAN FICTION Laura Karpman INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY John Williams KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Robbie Robertson OPPENHEIMER Ludwig Göransson POOR THINGS Jerskin Fendrix Music (Original Song) "The Fire Inside" from FLAMIN' HOT Music and Lyric by Diane Warren "I'm Just Ken" from BARBIE Music and Lyric by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt "It Never Went Away" from AMERICAN SYMPHONY Music and Lyric by Jon Batiste and Dan Wilson "Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)" from KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Music and Lyric by Scott George "What Was I Made For?" from BARBIE Music and Lyric by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell Production Design BARBIE Production Design: Sarah Greenwood; Set Decoration: Katie Spencer KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON Production Design: Jack Fisk; Set Decoration: Adam Willis NAPOLEON Production Design: Arthur Max; Set Decoration: Elli Griff OPPENHEIMER Production Design: Ruth De Jong; Set Decoration: Claire Kaufman POOR THINGS Production Design: James Price and Shona Heath; Set Decoration: Zsuzsa Mihalek Short Film (Animated) LETTER TO A PIG Tal Kantor and Amit R. Gicelter NINETY-FIVE SENSES Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess OUR UNIFORM Yegane Moghaddam PACHYDERME Stéphanie Clément and Marc Rius WAR IS OVER! INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF JOHN & YOKO Dave Mullins and Brad Booker Short Film (Live Action) THE AFTER Misan Harriman and Nicky Bentham INVINCIBLE Vincent René-Lortie and Samuel Caron KNIGHT OF FORTUNE Lasse Lyskjær Noer and Christian Norlyk RED, WHITE AND BLUE Nazrin Choudhury and Sara McFarlane THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR Wes Anderson and Steven Rales Sound THE CREATOR Ian Voigt, Erik Aadahl, Ethan Van der Ryn, Tom Ozanich and Dean Zupancic MAESTRO Steven A. Morrow, Richard King, Jason Ruder, Tom Ozanich and Dean Zupancic MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE Chris Munro, James H. Mather, Chris Burdon and Mark Taylor OPPENHEIMER Willie Burton, Richard King, Gary A. Rizzo and Kevin O'Connell THE ZONE OF INTEREST Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn Visual Effects THE CREATOR Jay Cooper, Ian Comley, Andrew Roberts and Neil Corbould GODZILLA MINUS ONE Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 Stephane Ceretti, Alexis Wajsbrot, Guy Williams and Theo Bialek MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE Alex Wuttke, Simone Coco, Jeff Sutherland and Neil Corbould NAPOLEON Charley Henley, Luc-Ewen Martin-Fenouillet, Simone Coco and Neil Corbould Writing (Adapted Screenplay) AMERICAN FICTION Written for the screen by Cord Jefferson BARBIE Written by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach OPPENHEIMER Written for the screen by Christopher Nolan POOR THINGS Screenplay by Tony McNamara THE ZONE OF INTEREST Written by Jonathan Glazer Writing (Original Screenplay) ANATOMY OF A FALL Screenplay - Justine Triet and Arthur Harari THE HOLDOVERS Written by David Hemingson MAESTRO Written by Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer MAY DECEMBER Screenplay by Samy Burch; Story by Samy Burch & Alex Mechanik PAST LIVES Written by Celine Song   Connect with Us: Website: www.ihatecritics.com Facebook: Everyone is a Critic Podcast Twitter: @criticspod Instagram: criticspod Patreon: patreon.com/criticspod Tee Public: CriticsPod Tee Public YouTube: CriticsPod YouTube Channel Featured Creators: Jeff's Art: Jeff Lassiter Art Sean's Reviews: Sean at the Movies Blog

Uncover the secrets of Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1's breathtaking visual effects. VFX supervisors Jeffrey Sutherland and Simone Coco share insights on collaboration, challenges, and the art of crafting cinematic magic. Step behind the scenes and explore the dynamic world where reality meets creativity.I was recently given the opportunity, by the folks at ILM, to talk to two VFX supervisors that worked on Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1. Namely Jeff Sutherland and Simone Coco. So as you might imagine I jumped at the chance and within 24 hours we were chatting. In this conversation we discuss their work on Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 and the unique challenges they face. They talk about the impact of practical elements on their VFX work, the importance of creating scale and believability, and the balance between realism and creativity. We also discuss the collaboration with stunt teams, the adaptation to new camera technology, and the always evolving role of VFX in filmmaking.They share their experiences in finding creative solutions and maintaining freshness and objectivity. Just so that you know who is who, Jeffrey is the first to speak after me, and Simone is the one with the Italian accent.All the linksThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5530733/advertisement

  How do I  help my team become agile?   Hello and welcome to episode 100 of the HSS.  If this hapesn to be the first episode you lsten to, in each episode I discuss a difefernt essential skill with the help of an expert. I have spoken to globally recognized authors, Harvard professors, military leaders, psychologists, pscyhitiatrics, people who have done scientific reserahc on how to become better at the so called "soft" skills to help you thrive in your career. I want to thank you for being with me in this learning journey. I started this alongside my graduate studies in Organizational Psychology at Harvard, and through my own career journey which at this time involves working with multiole technical teams to help them become high perfoming, and create an agile organization.  This is why today I chose to highlight this topic of agility because it embodies what soft skills are about, how to integrate human dynamics to deliver a solution.  In this episode I'll play some excerpts from some of the folks who co-created the famous Agile Manifesto, the base document for all things agile. Let's listen to Jeff Sutherland talking about what makes a great team, Jon Kern, on what we really need or don't need, to get things done faster, and Arie van Benekum on the essentials of collaboration. 

Check out the EduScrum website:https://eduscrum.org/free-welcome-tea-sessions/Summary keywordsstudents, work, teachers, learn, scrum, teams, companies, school, classroom, chemistry, agile, willie, class, retrospective, organisations, create, freedom, teach, give, processIntroductionWelcome to Episode 161 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. I am so pleased to have with us on this episode Willy Wijnands, a teacher of over 44 years, founder of EduScrum and Co-Creator of Light Schools. Willy is passionate about building trust, freedom, teamwork, engagement,  and personal development in the classroom. Willy has focused his career on developing the classrooms of the future for our generations to come. Through his work with EduScrum, Willy has defined a way to bring the best practices of Agile that so many of our largest organisations have used to create high-achieving, innovative cultures to the classroom. We are proudly sponsored by S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.Episode Links:YouTube Full episode: https://youtu.be/qMPB_9lyIXUEnterprise Excellence Academy: https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/podcast/episode/7ceb2bf0/161-agile-in-education-creating-self-lead-learning-teams-in-schools-with-willy-wijnands Contacts Brad: connect via LinkedIn or call him on 0402 448 445 or email bjeavons@iqi.com.au. Email: willywijnands@gmail.comLinked In Profile: linkedin.com/in/willy-wijnands-41077254Websites:https://www.eduscrum.nlhttp://aikido-kinomichi.nlhttps://lightschools.org What's next? Join our next community! https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/communityListen to our most popular episode with Dr Jeff Sutherland, Episode 6.·       YouTube Full Episode: https://youtu.be/yUhVUXnugxE?si=6BGaCwwFczyySXP_·       Two-Minute Tip: https://youtu.be/z7fAhzXfdCc?si=p6CZA-JQQRwYbP4f·       Enterprise Excellence Academy: https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/podcast/episode/4b42f880/6-the-amazing-story-of-jeff-sutherland-agile-and-scrumTo learn more about what we do, visit www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com.Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.

When you ask most women why they decided to leave their career and start a business, they will tell you that they wanted more freedom. But, years later, they are working more hours, for less money and are feeling less freedom than they did before. What's wrong with this picture? Well, in order to create a business instead of a job without benefits, we need to develop systems that are reproducible and start building a team (even if its just one part time, virtual assistant) to take on the tasks that you aren't good at. Spending the time and energy to learn how to do all the things necessary to run a small business is a trap, and systems and outsourcing are the way out of that trap. Today's guest, Kris Ward knows first hand that productivity is not getting more done, it's getting the right things done and delegating the rest. Here are a few takeaways from this episode

When you ask most women why they decided to leave their career and start a business, they will tell you that they wanted more freedom. But, years later, they are working more hours, for less money and are feeling less freedom than they did before. What's wrong with this picture? Well, in order to create a business instead of a job without benefits, we need to develop systems that are reproducible and start building a team (even if its just one part time, virtual assistant) to take on the tasks that you aren't good at. Spending the time and energy to learn how to do all the things necessary to run a small business is a trap, and systems and outsourcing are the way out of that trap. Today's guest, Kris Ward knows first hand that productivity is not getting more done, it's getting the right things done and delegating the rest. Here are a few takeaways from this episode

Aprenda a arte da agilidade estratégica com o OODA Loop, diretamente do LIVRO "Scrum" de Jeff Sutherland. Neste episódio explosivo de "Analogias Atômicas," desvendamos a ferramenta que transformará sua tomada de decisões em um ciclo de feedback implacável e certeiro. Sinta como se você estivesse no cockpit de um caça a jato, manobrando seu negócio através dos desafios com a precisão de um piloto de elite. Não é apenas sobre ser rápido; é sobre ser preciso, adaptável e, acima de tudo, eficaz. Prepare-se para elevar seu jogo empresarial a novas altitudes. resumocast.com.br --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/resumocast/message

In this episode of Dreams With Deadlines, host Jenny Herald dives into the dynamic world of marketing with Renata Lerch. Renata shares her career journey, highlighting the evolution of marketing's role beyond departmental boundaries and the integration of operational strategies in creating a seamless brand experience. From her extensive global experience to her deep dive into different methodologies, Renata explores how these frameworks have shaped her approach to marketing.Key Things Discussed: The integration of operational strategies in marketing, aligning it with broader organizational goals. The power of blending frameworks to foster adaptation and team buy-in. Practical insights into applying methodologies in marketing for improved collaboration, prioritization, and iterative success. Show Notes [00:00:38] The Evolution of Marketing and Agile Methods. Renata discusses her career journey, integrating operations into marketing for a cohesive brand experience. She mentions Lean, Six Sigma, Scrum, and Agile methodologies' impact, emphasizing the need for framework-agnostic approaches with systems and design thinking. [00:04:21] Applying Scrum in a Marketing Environment: Team Composition and Roles. The discussion highlights roles in Scrum translated to marketing teams. The product owner's role as a liaison is crucial, and the scrum master role's absence in small marketing teams is discussed. [00:09:03] Applying Empiricism and Lean Thinking in Marketing: Mindset and Frameworks. Renata stresses mindset shifts, invoking consumer perspectives, fostering collaboration, and using frameworks for decision-making and campaign building. Transparency, data democratization, and benefit mapping are highlighted. [00:14:14] Scrum Ceremonies in Marketing: Sprint Planning and Retrospectives. The importance of sprint planning, flexible sprint duration, and the significance of retrospectives in recognizing wins and enhancing team dynamics is discussed. [00:18:50] Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives: Combining or Delineating? Renata talks about the choice between separate or combined sprint reviews and retrospectives, based on agile marketing leaders' preferences and organization size. [00:20:02] Aligning Backlog, Product Goals, and Sprint Goals in Marketing. Prioritization, deadlines, and the interconnectedness of marketing with other departments shape the marketing backlog. The synchronization of marketing goals with company deliverables is highlighted. [00:28:16] Balancing Iteration and Quality: Definition of Done in Marketing. Renata talks about the challenge of balancing iteration and quality in marketing's definition of done, emphasizing compliance with brand standards, quality, and voice and tone. [00:30:17] Blending Frameworks and Fostering Adaptation in Agile Marketing. Renata discusses blending Scrum and Kanban, adapting to the team's comfort level, and gaining buy-in through iterative, open-minded, and data-driven approaches. [00:33:49] Embracing Scrumban for Visualizing Work and Managing Overload. Renata shares her Scrumban implementation experience, emphasizing the value of visualizing work and understanding team culture. [00:36:09] Overcoming Misconceptions and Embracing Flexibility in Scrumban. The challenge of people confusing Scrum's prescription with Scrumban's flexibility is discussed, focusing on understanding best practices that work for the team. [00:44:43] Quick-Fire Questions for Renata: Dream with a deadline: Renata's dream is to have a team that is highly focused and synchronized, both within the marketing team and across the organization, understanding priorities and interdependencies, and being aware of the company's direction. Advice for embarking on an agile transformation journey in marketing: Start small and iterate. Begin with one team or implement tools like Jira or Trello to initiate the agile process, and then gradually expand and refine the approach. Biggest fail in working with agile methods: Renata shared an experience where the CEO of an organization disrupted agile processes, causing confusion and undermining progress. The key learning was that while bottom-up initiatives can work, without top-level support, it becomes challenging to sustain agile practices effectively. Books that shaped Renata's thinking: Renata highlighted the significance of the book "Systems Thinking" as a paradigm-shifting resource. She also mentioned that books on meditation offer valuable perspectives on agile methodologies. Specifically, she found Donella Meadows' book to be incredible. Relevant links: Jeff Sutherland, Inventor and Co-Creator of Scrum Donella Meadows, lead author of the books The Limits to Growth and Thinking In Systems: A Primer Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows About the Guest:Renata Lerch is a visionary leader and Agile marketing expert with a passion for exploring the possibilities of Design Thinking and Artificial Intelligence Applications in Marketing. Renata is a published author, renowned speaker, and trilingual executive, skilled in motivating teams and transforming marketing strategies.Follow Our Guest:Website | LinkedIn Follow Dreams With Deadlines:Host | Company Website | Blog | Instagram | Twitter

BONUS: From journalism to Scrum Mastery, collected lessons on working with teams by Ian McGrady 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. Ian's journey from journalism to becoming a Scrum Master is a testament to his adaptable mindset and persistence. His transition stemmed from a unique start; he secured his first job due to his fast typing skills and a desire to meet Peter Jennings. Ian's persistence in seeking a meeting with Jennings honed his tenacity. The introduction to the Scrum Master role came through recognizing the news industry's agile, continuous delivery setup. Despite challenges, like sending out 400 resumes for just 3 interviews and a job offer, Ian's honesty on his resume and his ability to relate his existing skills to the software field were pivotal. In interviews, he remained coachable, acknowledged his learning curve, and emphasized genuine interest in others. He underlines the importance of not striving to be the smartest person in the room, instead focusing on collaboration and curiosity. From TV News Deadlines to Agile Leadership, learning how to work under pressure Becoming a Scrum Master has brought about significant changes and personal growth for Ian. Inspired by Jeff Sutherland's book "The Art Of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time," he realized the value of efficiency. Transitioning from TV News, where deadlines were paramount, he leveraged his experience to provide leadership to his team. Ian's principles and vision became guiding forces, focusing on extracting the best from individuals and incorporating it into the work. He emphasized stepping back to allow the team to shine and maximizing their value without personal dominance. His journey exemplifies transformation through collaborative leadership and value-driven mindset. Building the Foundation: Key Steps for Launching Effective Teams Launching new teams is a crucial process that Ian has garnered valuable insights from. Key lessons involve the necessity of team formation events, despite potential resistance from upper management. Addressing this as a communal effort, Ian suggests socializing the idea of team formation through specific activities. Four critical steps include creating a working agreement, establishing a workflow, defining a Definition of Ready (DoR), and a Definition of Done (DoD). These artifacts can aid in resolving conflicts. Ian recommends the book "Liftoff" by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies and advises using timeboxes to identify and address conflicts during team formation. Empowering New Teams: Strategies for Maximizing New Team Potential Addressing challenges faced by new teams in attaining maximum value from Scrum events, Ian shares insights and solutions. He recounts an NGO team's bureaucratic hurdles that hindered effective team startup events. Ian emphasizes the importance of focusing on delivering the essence of Scrum events and the Scrum Master's role in ensuring team value. He recalls an example where a team failed to update the board during the daily scrum, suggesting the live update approach to enhance visibility. He advises keeping work consistently on the board and centering the daily scrum on "done" work. Ian also recommends incorporating refinement into the workflow for improved outcomes. Turning the Tide: How Effective Team Formation Revolutionized Scrum Outcomes Ian shares a transformative case study highlighting the impact of team formation. He joined a team of talented individuals struggling with teamwork. After obtaining buy-in for a startup event from his boss, the team's performance improved drastically. Shifting from completing 3 items per month to 22, Ian recommends focusing on metrics that emphasize "done" work. Addressing the challenge of team composition, having reliable contributors was vital. Open communication and transparent norms facilitated tough discussions. Challenges during formation included gaining buy-in from all stakeholders and addressing pushback from senior management. Ian emphasizes that while some individuals may be natural stars, teams require nurturing for success. In this segment we refer to the OTOG mnemonic (One Team, One Goal) as a team effectiveness maximizing strategy. The One Team, One Goal approach is depicted in this blog post by Vasco Duarte.   About Ian McGrady Ian McGrady started in IT as a co-founder and Junior Project Manager at Blue Lotus Systems Integration and Data Conversion. There he co-authored an internal book about project management. He has worked as a Scrum Master in wagering, banking and healthcare. You can link with Ian McGrady on LinkedIn. 

Dr. Jeff Sutherland is the Founder and Chairman of Scrum Inc. He is credited with being one of the creators of Scrum, which is celebrating its 30 year anniversary in 2023, and is a framework for enabling business agility at scale across an entire organization. Sutherland's mission has always been to spread Scrum around the world to free people from what he calls “the incredible life-draining system they're working under.” His teachings consistently expose the archaic systems that hinder productivity, and he's at the forefront helping the world's biggest organizations make the transition to Agile. To further his efforts, Sutherland is also a co-creator of The Agile Education Program powered by Scrum Inc., a training suite providing the curriculum and educational standards that give individuals and organizations a clear path to implementing Scrum in a way that drives immediate business results. A graduate of West Point, Sutherland served as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War and later spent time conducting cancer research before immersing himself in the world of software development. With his expertise, Jeff has held the role of Chief Technology Officer at eleven different software companies, bringing a wealth of experience to each endeavor. In 1993, Jeff pioneered the concept of Scrum by launching the first Scrum team. While things have changed a lot since then (spoiler alert: those original month-long sprints were far too long), he has continued to play a pivotal role in expanding Scrum's ability to drive Agile transformation at organizations across industries including government, finance, healthcare, higher education, and telecom. Recognizing the transformative power of Scrum, Sutherland co-authored the bestselling book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, and later published A Scrum Book: The Spirit of the Game. Through his books and extensive knowledge sharing, he has become a respected figure in the Agile community. His passion for fostering energy, focus, clarity, and transparency in project planning and implementation has made scrum a highly sought-after approach for organizations seeking efficient and effective project management. We had a chance to sit down with Sutherland as he reflects on 30 years of Scrum, the new Scrum QuickStart offering and what the future holds for Scrum's biggest possible impact on the world.

Mit Kristine Schima-Voigt und Kay Liewald von der Niedersächsischen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Göttingen. In dieser Folge berichten Kristine und Kay von ihren Erfahrungen über die Einführung von Agilen Software Methoden, insbesondere Scrum, in ihrem Bereich der Softwareentwicklung. Agile Methoden wie Scrum, Kanban und andere finden eine immer weitere Verbreitung. Um so wichtiger ist es von praktizierenden Gruppen wie dem Team aus Göttingen zu hören. Und zum Abschluss geben Kay und Kristine Tipps für die Einführung von Scrum.Links:https://zenodo.org/record/7727988 Kristine's Vortrag bei der deRSE Konferenz 2023 über RSE an der Bibliothek in Göttingenhttps://zenodo.org/record/7715041 Kay's Vortrag bei der deRSE Konferenz 2023 über Scrum https://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/kontakt/abteilungen-a-z/abteilungs-und-gruppendetails/abteilunggruppe/software-und-service-entwicklung/ Die Webseite für die RSE Arbeitsgruppe in Göttingenhttps://lab.sub.uni-goettingen.de Der Blog von der RSE Arbeitsgruppehttps://www.agile-bibliothek.org Eine Gemeinschafts-webseite für Agile Softwaremethoden in Bibliothekenhttps://www.liberatingstructures.com Eine Zusammenfassung der Liberating Structureshttp://agilemanifesto.org Das Agile Manifesto (in Englisch)https://scrumguides.org Hinweise für Scrum (in Englisch)Und dann gibt es noch die "Klassiker", d.h. Bücher, über Scrum von Jeff Sutherland und Ken Schwaber. Support the Show.Thank you for listening and your ongoing support. It means the world to us! Support the show on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/codeforthought Get in touch: Email mailto:code4thought@proton.me UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie US RSE Slack (usrse.slack.com): @Peter Schmidt Mastadon: https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought or @code4thought@fosstodon.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

This episode originally aired in July 2021.    -------------------------------------------   As many organizations are talking today about becoming “agile” it is important to know what it really means. Dr. Jeff Sutherland (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffsutherland/) is the ideal person to discuss this. He is the chairman and founder of Scrum Inc., a signatory of the Agile manifesto, coauthor of the Scrum Guide and the creator Scrum@Scale. He is also the coauthor of the best selling book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. Today we talk about the misconceptions of Agile, the origins of the Scrum framework, and how his military experience and his work doing scientific computer modeling influenced him. For more resources, sign up for the newsletter at https://www.hardcoresoftskillspodcast.com/  Connect with me via https://www.linkedin.com/in/yadiraycaro/  

Win a place on training or in our community every May! https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/giveawayWhy do some companies soar after the COVID disruption, and many more go bankrupt? That is what we want to chat about today!Summary KeywordsOrganisation, product owner, scrum, companies, agile, Toyota, programme  s curve, people, enterprise, world, scale, big, create, stock price, real, started, prioritisation, cycle production.SA Partners Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.To learn more about what we do, visit www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com.Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.

Check out our Agile High-Performance Teams events: https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/trainingSummary KeywordsScrum, people, basics, scale, training, team, agile, flying, discipline, degree black belt, train, marching, leadership, north Vietnam, quicken loans, company, organisation, martial arts, hari.IntroductionJeff Sutherland needs no introduction in my eyes! Jeff is one of the creators of Scrum and a co-writer of the Agile manifesto. Jeff, throughout his career, has been a leading thinker, author, trainer and coach on culture and performance. Jeff has helped many of the largest organisations in our world implement Agile and Scrum to enable them to innovate and scale rapidly. Today we chatted about creating high-performance teams and the behaviours associated with them.We are proudly sponsored by S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.SA Partners Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.To learn more about what we do, visit www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com.Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.

Industrial Talk is speaking with Ivar Jacobson, Founder - Ivar Jacobson International about "Essence - The OMG Standard for Software Engineering and Development". Get the answers to your "Software Engineering and Development" questions along with Ivar's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview! Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2023. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy! DR. IVAR JACOBSON'S CONTACT INFORMATION: Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivarjacobson/ Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ivar-jacobson-international/ Company Website: https://linktr.ee/IvarJacobsonInternational MORE RESOUCES FROM IVAR JACOBSON: A LinkedIn article on ‘Learn More about Essence' https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learn-more-essence-ivar-jacobson-1f/ A meetup on ‘Essence for Agility' https://www.meetup.com/essence-for-agility/ with all previous recordings https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/essence-agility-ivar-jacobson-1e/?trackingId=5kyVtN35JtoQGhUzheqC%2BA%3D%3D Some of the Craziest Things…' a LinkedIn article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/craziest-things-methods-frameworks-ivar-jacobson/ Scrum Essentials Cards – Experiences of Scrum Teams Improving with Essence', An ACM Queue paper, Jeff Sutherland, Ivar Jacobson and Brian Kerr, https://bit.ly/3hCrVCq ”The Uncomfortable Truth of Software Engineering and How to Cure It” https://youtu.be/8pcCkwI4TA4, PODCAST VIDEO: https://youtu.be/GZdJ5cO2zcw THE STRATEGIC REASON "WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST": OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES: NEOM: https://www.neom.com/en-us AI Dash: https://www.aidash.com/ Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/ Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/ Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/ We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/ YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX: LifterLMS: Get One...

Join Lance Dacy and Brian Milner as they discuss the use of metrics in an Agile environment to ensure optimal performance without taking things in the wrong direction. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors podcast, Lance Dacy joins Brian to delve into the intricacies of utilizing metrics in software development to ensure optimal performance while avoiding incentivizing adverse behaviors. Listen in as he walks us through the three tiers of metrics that are crucial for Agile teams to consider in order to stay on course. He’ll share the tools required to gain a holistic understanding of an individual's performance and how leadership styles and stakeholders influence team-level metrics. Plus, a look at the common challenges that teams may encounter during their Agile adoption journey and how to overcome them. Listen now to discover: [01:18] - Lance Dacy is on the show to discuss metrics. [02:09] - Brian asks, are there ‘good’ ways to track performance? [02:32] - Lance shares why Agile doesn’t really lend itself to tracking performance. [03:57] - How to handle performance reviews. [04:32] - Lance shares the best way to measure individual performance. [06:40] - Measuring team contribution vs. standalone rockstar. [07:48] - What Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland say about the completeness of the Scrum Framework and why having a superhero on your team is bad. [09:45] - Lance shares the 3 tiers of metrics to measure when working as an Agile team to be sure their team is going in the right direction. [11:09] - Using tangible business-level metrics such as time to market for products, NPS, and support call volume to evaluate performance. [12:20] - How metrics, such as the number of work items completed per month, and cycle time, can be used to evaluate performance at a product level in an Agile environment. [14:10] - Lance shares standard metrics such as velocity, backlog churn, and work-in-process that can be used to evaluate things at the team level. [14:45] - Brian shares the importance of having a broader perspective to avoid having a distorted view of performance. [16:53] - How using tools such as Ishikawa (fishbone) diagrams can help you identify the root cause of the problem instead of the apparent cause. [17:22] - Individual velocity and other big metrics to avoid. [19:02] - How the balanced scorecard can help managers use ALL the information available to develop a comprehensive understanding of an individual's performance. [19:25] - The detrimental effects of using the wrong metrics to evaluate an individual's contribution. [21:29] - Brian shares the story of how a manager's bug squashing endeavor led to incentivizing the wrong behavior [22:31] - Lance references Stephen Denning's statement and reminds us that assumption testing is what developers do every day. [24:00] - Referencing the State of Agile Report statistics on what's stalling your transformation to Agile. [25:15] - Lance shares a behind-the-scenes look at how team-level metrics are affected by leadership styles and stakeholders. [27:05] - Lance shares the spreadsheet he's been using to track data for a Scrum team for over 5 years to understand why the team is not predictable and what they can do to improve. [31:38] - Got metrics management questions? Reach out to Lance. [31:46] - Why it’s imperative that you think of software development as R&D rather than manufacturing to arrive at the right metrics measurements. [33:26] Continue the conversation in The Agile Mentors Community. References and resources mentioned in the show: Join the More than 24k People Who've Trained to Succeed With Mountain Goat Software Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule #30: How to Get the Best Out of the New Year with Lance Dacy #31: Starting Strong: Tips for Successfully Starting with a New Organization with Julie Chickering State of Agile Report HBR's Embrace Of Agile The Agile Mentors Community Additional metrics resources mentioned by Lance Agile Metrics Business outcomes, product group metrics, unit metrics) KPI/OKR (Business Outcomes) Time to market, NPS, Support Call Volume, Revenue, Active Account, New Customer Onboarding Time, Regulatory Violations) Product Group Metrics Work items completed per unit of time (quarterly) % of work in active state vs. wait state Cycle time of work times (idea to done) Predictability (% of work items that reach ready when planned) Unit metrics Velocity, backlog churn, work in process, team stability Metrics Spreadsheet Team Size Tracking the size of our cross-functional team (typically Dev and QA), allows us to pair that number with velocity to play “what-if” scenarios in the future. Whether you count half of a person if shared, or whole, keeping it consistent throughout your tracking is what is important. Most teams simply count the number of developers and testers. Team Days Tracking the iteration length is also helpful in understanding a team’s performance. If the team has a 2 week sprint, then usually that is 9 development days of actual work. The 10th day is set aside for sprint review, retrospective, and planning. Committed Tracking what the team committed to completing within a sprint is crucial to understanding their predictability. The are the most uneducated at the beginning of the sprint and tracking what they think they can complete helps us in long term planning. Completed Tracking what the team completed is actually just tracking velocity above, but comparing it what they committed helps us understand their predictability index. Predictability Index (Pi) Software development is complex, risky, and uncertain. A skill that is sought after in this type of environment is predictability. The better we are at understanding what we can accomplish, then finishing what we said we would accomplish builds trust with our management team and customers. If we aren’t very good, tracking this metric often helps us get back to good by committing to less or more depending on our index. Example: Completed Items / Committed Items = Predictability Index (Pi) 25 Story Points / 20 Story Points = 125% 20 Story Points / 25 Story Points = 80% Just because a team has a high Pi, does not mean they are good at predictability. Don’t let high and low numbers fool you, focus on the variance from 100% instead of the actual number. An arbitrary number to shoot for is +/- 15% Pi (85% or 115%). Story Points / Per Day (SPD) Story points per day is just that, tracking how many story points per day of the sprint did we complete (Completed / Team Days). Story Points / Per Day / Per Person (SP/PD/PP) This perhaps is the most useful metric to capture throughout the process. Most of our teams do not have the luxury of maintaining a consistent size or make-up. Inevitably over the course of a few months, the team make-up will change. Once the teams change, velocity has to be reset. In addition, we may actually change our sprint duration over a long period of time (don’t change it each sprint). Once we change sprint lengths, it can jeopardize our pure metrics, velocity has to be reset. However, over all of our teams in a product, if we can capture the SP/PD/PP that our teams complete on average, we can begin to play “what-if” scenarios in long- term planning. Example: Completed / (Team Size * Sprint Days) 24 / (4 * 9) = 0.67 You can then average that number over 4-6 sprints or even the year. Defects While we understand that we won’t ever likely have a zero defect product, it is useful to track how many defects our teams are creating over time. There are usually 2 types of defects, internal and external. Internal Our definition of done should at minimum include that testing is taking place during the sprint with the idea that we would not allow a story to be called DONE if it had remaining defects. As such, an internal defect are the ones that were created while working on a backlog item in the sprint, that we have fixed before calling the item DONE. External External defects are those that have “escaped” our development process and were not discovered during our testing. In a sense, our customer discovered the defect and the work item will become a new backlog item for a sprint. Warranty We should strive to have the warranty concept built into our process. If you bought a car yesterday and the radio fell out, you could take it back and they would fix it fairly quickly. Our customers deserve the same service. Don’t manage a defect backlog, get used to fixing escaped defects immediately, while they are fresh on your mind (right after a sprint). It doesn’t take a long time to fix defects, it takes a long time to find them once identified by a customer. Defects per Story Point Tracking defects per story point help to understand velocity a little better. If you have a team that has drastically increased its velocity, have the defects have increased along with it? Defects per story point help us understand the relationship between a velocity and defects created. Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? It would be great if you left a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He’s passionate about making a difference in people’s day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Lance Dacy, known as Big Agile, is a dynamic, experienced management and technical professional with the proven ability to energize teams, plan with vision, and establish results in a fast-paced, customer-focused environment. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer® with the Scrum Alliance and has trained and coached many successful Scrum implementations from Fortune 20 companies to small start-ups since 2011. You can find out how to attend one of Lance’s classes with Mountain Goat Software here.

Join Lance Dacy and Brian Milner as they discuss the use of metrics in an Agile environment to ensure optimal performance without taking things in the wrong direction. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors podcast, Lance Dacy joins Brian to delve into the intricacies of utilizing metrics in software development to ensure optimal performance while avoiding incentivizing adverse behaviors. Listen in as he walks us through the three tiers of metrics that are crucial for Agile teams to consider in order to stay on course. He’ll share the tools required to gain a holistic understanding of an individual's performance and how leadership styles and stakeholders influence team-level metrics. Plus, a look at the common challenges that teams may encounter during their Agile adoption journey and how to overcome them. Listen now to discover: [01:18] - Lance Dacy is on the show to discuss metrics. [02:09] - Brian asks, are there ‘good’ ways to track performance? [02:32] - Lance shares why Agile doesn’t really lend itself to tracking performance. [03:57] - How to handle performance reviews. [04:32] - Lance shares the best way to measure individual performance. [06:40] - Measuring team contribution vs. standalone rockstar. [07:48] - What Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland say about the completeness of the Scrum Framework and why having a superhero on your team is bad. [09:45] - Lance shares the 3 tiers of metrics to measure when working as an Agile team to be sure their team is going in the right direction. [11:09] - Using tangible business-level metrics such as time to market for products, NPS, and support call volume to evaluate performance. [12:20] - How metrics, such as the number of work items completed per month, and cycle time, can be used to evaluate performance at a product level in an Agile environment. [14:10] - Lance shares standard metrics such as velocity, backlog churn, and work-in-process that can be used to evaluate things at the team level. [14:45] - Brian shares the importance of having a broader perspective to avoid having a distorted view of performance. [16:53] - How using tools such as Ishikawa (fishbone) diagrams can help you identify the root cause of the problem instead of the apparent cause. [17:22] - Individual velocity and other big metrics to avoid. [19:02] - How the balanced scorecard can help managers use ALL the information available to develop a comprehensive understanding of an individual's performance. [19:25] - The detrimental effects of using the wrong metrics to evaluate an individual's contribution. [21:29] - Brian shares the story of how a manager's bug squashing endeavor led to incentivizing the wrong behavior [22:31] - Lance references Stephen Denning's statement and reminds us that assumption testing is what developers do every day. [24:00] - Referencing the State of Agile Report statistics on what's stalling your transformation to Agile. [25:15] - Lance shares a behind-the-scenes look at how team-level metrics are affected by leadership styles and stakeholders. [27:05] - Lance shares the spreadsheet he's been using to track data for a Scrum team for over 5 years to understand why the team is not predictable and what they can do to improve. [31:38] - Got metrics management questions? Reach out to Lance. [31:46] - Why it’s imperative that you think of software development as R&D rather than manufacturing to arrive at the right metrics measurements. [33:26] Continue the conversation in The Agile Mentors Community. References and resources mentioned in the show: Join the More than 24k People Who've Trained to Succeed With Mountain Goat Software Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule #30: How to Get the Best Out of the New Year with Lance Dacy #31: Starting Strong: Tips for Successfully Starting with a New Organization with Julie Chickering State of Agile Report HBR's Embrace Of Agile The Agile Mentors Community Additional metrics resources mentioned by Lance Agile Metrics Business outcomes, product group metrics, unit metrics) KPI/OKR (Business Outcomes) Time to market, NPS, Support Call Volume, Revenue, Active Account, New Customer Onboarding Time, Regulatory Violations) Product Group Metrics Work items completed per unit of time (quarterly) % of work in active state vs. wait state Cycle time of work times (idea to done) Predictability (% of work items that reach ready when planned) Unit metrics Velocity, backlog churn, work in process, team stability Metrics Spreadsheet Team Size Tracking the size of our cross-functional team (typically Dev and QA), allows us to pair that number with velocity to play “what-if” scenarios in the future. Whether you count half of a person if shared, or whole, keeping it consistent throughout your tracking is what is important. Most teams simply count the number of developers and testers. Team Days Tracking the iteration length is also helpful in understanding a team’s performance. If the team has a 2 week sprint, then usually that is 9 development days of actual work. The 10th day is set aside for sprint review, retrospective, and planning. Committed Tracking what the team committed to completing within a sprint is crucial to understanding their predictability. The are the most uneducated at the beginning of the sprint and tracking what they think they can complete helps us in long term planning. Completed Tracking what the team completed is actually just tracking velocity above, but comparing it what they committed helps us understand their predictability index. Predictability Index (Pi) Software development is complex, risky, and uncertain. A skill that is sought after in this type of environment is predictability. The better we are at understanding what we can accomplish, then finishing what we said we would accomplish builds trust with our management team and customers. If we aren’t very good, tracking this metric often helps us get back to good by committing to less or more depending on our index. Example: Completed Items / Committed Items = Predictability Index (Pi) 25 Story Points / 20 Story Points = 125% 20 Story Points / 25 Story Points = 80% Just because a team has a high Pi, does not mean they are good at predictability. Don’t let high and low numbers fool you, focus on the variance from 100% instead of the actual number. An arbitrary number to shoot for is +/- 15% Pi (85% or 115%). Story Points / Per Day (SPD) Story points per day is just that, tracking how many story points per day of the sprint did we complete (Completed / Team Days). Story Points / Per Day / Per Person (SP/PD/PP) This perhaps is the most useful metric to capture throughout the process. Most of our teams do not have the luxury of maintaining a consistent size or make-up. Inevitably over the course of a few months, the team make-up will change. Once the teams change, velocity has to be reset. In addition, we may actually change our sprint duration over a long period of time (don’t change it each sprint). Once we change sprint lengths, it can jeopardize our pure metrics, velocity has to be reset. However, over all of our teams in a product, if we can capture the SP/PD/PP that our teams complete on average, we can begin to play “what-if” scenarios in long- term planning. Example: Completed / (Team Size * Sprint Days) 24 / (4 * 9) = 0.67 You can then average that number over 4-6 sprints or even the year. Defects While we understand that we won’t ever likely have a zero defect product, it is useful to track how many defects our teams are creating over time. There are usually 2 types of defects, internal and external. Internal Our definition of done should at minimum include that testing is taking place during the sprint with the idea that we would not allow a story to be called DONE if it had remaining defects. As such, an internal defect are the ones that were created while working on a backlog item in the sprint, that we have fixed before calling the item DONE. External External defects are those that have “escaped” our development process and were not discovered during our testing. In a sense, our customer discovered the defect and the work item will become a new backlog item for a sprint. Warranty We should strive to have the warranty concept built into our process. If you bought a car yesterday and the radio fell out, you could take it back and they would fix it fairly quickly. Our customers deserve the same service. Don’t manage a defect backlog, get used to fixing escaped defects immediately, while they are fresh on your mind (right after a sprint). It doesn’t take a long time to fix defects, it takes a long time to find them once identified by a customer. Defects per Story Point Tracking defects per story point help to understand velocity a little better. If you have a team that has drastically increased its velocity, have the defects have increased along with it? Defects per story point help us understand the relationship between a velocity and defects created. Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? It would be great if you left a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He’s passionate about making a difference in people’s day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Lance Dacy, known as Big Agile, is a dynamic, experienced management and technical professional with the proven ability to energize teams, plan with vision, and establish results in a fast-paced, customer-focused environment. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer® with the Scrum Alliance and has trained and coached many successful Scrum implementations from Fortune 20 companies to small start-ups since 2011. You can find out how to attend one of Lance’s classes with Mountain Goat Software here.

Bio  Chris Boeckerman is currently Vice President of Research & Development for Fabric & Home Care. Prior to this she was R&D Vice President for P&G Ventures, the company's internal startup studio that partners with entrepreneurs and startups to create new brands and businesses in spaces where the company doesn't play today.   Known as a “change agent” during her 30-year career with Procter & Gamble, Chris co-founded P&G's Lean Innovation movement, known as GrowthWorks, and has specialised in developing dynamic teams worldwide to strengthen the company's innovation capabilities.  Her impressive P&G career also includes more than 20 years in the company's Global Fabric Care business, working to create breakthrough innovations with iconic brands such as Tide, Ariel, Downy, Gain and Bounce.     Chris holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati.  She has been honoured as a YWCA Rising Star, is an active leader in the Girls in STEM program for P&G and across Cincinnati and serves on the Advisory Board for the Greater Cincinnati STEM Collaborative.     Chris resides in Cincinnati, Ohio with her family.    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-boeckerman-06577110/       Interview Highlights  Timestamp  02:12 - Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio  07:07 - Studying engineering in a cooperative education setting  12:25 - R&D Vice President at P&G Ventures  19:38 - Productive failure  37:00 - Co-founding GrowthWorks  44:30 - No one size fits all  53:22 - Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful , committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has    Books/ Resources Mentioned The Lean Startup by Eric Ries https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Startup-Innovation-Successful-Businesses/dp/0670921602/  The Startup Way  by Eric Ries https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06Y1G9RVC  The Leader's Guide by Eric Ries https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Leaders-Guide-Audiobook/B07K8WQHYW  New to Big: How Companies Can Create Like Entrepreneurs, Invest Like VCs, and Install a Permanent Operating System for Growth by David Kidder and Christina Wallace https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Big-Companies-Entrepreneurs-Permanent-ebook/dp/B07FC3C51Z  Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scrum-Doing-Twice-Work-Half/dp/1847941109  Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Four-Thousand-Weeks-Embrace-limits/dp/1784704008    Episode Transcript  Ula Ojiaku (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 (Guest Intro): My guest today is Chris Boeckerman. She is the Vice-President of Research and Development with the startup studio for Procter & Gamble that partners with entrepreneurs and startups to create new brands and businesses in spaces where the company doesn't play today. Known as a change agent during her 29 year career with Procter & Gamble, Chris co-founded P & G's lean innovation movement known as GrowthWorks and has specialised in developing dynamic teams worldwide to strengthen the company's innovation capabilities. In this episode, Chris talks about herself and gives us a glimpse into the influences that shaped her into who she is today and how she got into Procter & Gamble and developed her career, as well as her experience setting up GrowthWorks within Procter & Gamble. It was a very insightful conversation. I definitely will be listening to this episode again, because there were lots of gems and I know you will find it useful as well. So thank you again for tuning in and for watching. Without further ado, my conversation with Chris. Enjoy.  Ula Ojiaku  So Chris, thank you so much for making the time to join us on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. It is a great honour to have you here.   Chris Boeckerman  Oh, thank you. Thank you for asking me. It's a wonderful honour to be here.   Ula Ojiaku  Awesome. Now let's get to know you, Chris. Can you tell us about yourself, your background?  Chris Boeckerman  Sure. My name is Chris Boeckerman. I work at Procter & Gamble. I've been here almost 30 years, which is exciting, but going back to the beginning, so I'm actually born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I've never left. And it's kind of funny, when you're born in Cincinnati, many times you don't leave. I've been prepping my parents from the day I got my job at P & G that I would leave and I just, I never. I never left. So it's very fun, but yeah, so I'm born and raised. My family is still here, and yeah, I love it.   Ula Ojiaku  Wow. So you, based on what you said, it seemed like you had expectations growing up that you would leave. So what was it about, you know, the whole set up that made you end up not leaving Cincinnati?  Chris Boeckerman  I don't know that I ever thought I would leave because, like Cincinnati is a great place and a lot of people I know don't leave, but when I got my job at Proctor & Gamble, which is a multinational company, I expected that I might have to, but really no, I, went to grade school in Cincinnati and then high school. And then I ended up going into chemical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. And I co-oped and ended up, you know, getting this great job at P & G. So that's just kind of how it all happened, which is why I ended up staying in Cincinnati. It's a great place. It's a wonderful place to raise a family. I'm married. My husband works full time, at a company called Turner Construction. And, I have two children, my oldest child is 21 and he's at the University of Dayton doing mechanical engineering. And then my daughter is 17 and she's at a local high school here in Cincinnati. So, and my family and my husband's family, we met at the University of Cincinnati. So I think a lot of those things kind of keep you in a place.   Ula Ojiaku  I can imagine. Well, whilst I didn't grow up in the town I studied, I also graduated with an engineering degree, but it's an electronic engineering degree and I met my husband in the university as well. But that's about, you know, the parallel, I've moved a lot, I've kind of lived everywhere else in the world.  Chris Boeckerman  Well, what I'm happy about is, I'm so happy that I work at P & G, because P & G has introduced the world to me. And so I've been able to travel all over the place and then it sparked that interest in my husband and my family being able to travel. So we definitely, because of P & G we now know it, but I've just never lived anywhere else, that's all.  Ula Ojiaku  And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, you travelled when you wanted to. And I can only imagine, because that's not been my experience having family and friends, you know, it makes things easier as a full time working mother, a family person.  Chris Boeckerman  Yes, yes. I don't know how you do it otherwise. So I bow to you, to all my friends. It's difficult, but we all figure it out.   Ula Ojiaku  Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's great. So, what do you do, Chris? When you're not working, what would you say you do to recharge yourself?  Chris Boeckerman  Well, I am, as you've already found out, I'm very family oriented. And so, we are a family of SciFi lovers. And so we like movies and shows and things like that. We just celebrated my husband's 50th birthday at Disney at Galaxy's Edge.   Ula Ojiaku  Wow. Happy birthday to him.   Chris Boeckerman  I know, it was great. We both turned 50 this year, so it's a big year. But that was fun. We were able to get my son back from college and my daughter, and we were able to spend a fun long weekend there. We love rollercoasters and so we've organised family vacations around rollercoasters and getting to rollercoasters all over the world. And we all love to golf. And so that's something I picked up later. My husband's a wonderful golfer. And so now we really enjoy that as the kids have gotten older, I can spend more time golfing along with my full-time career, but yeah, so it's a lot of fun. I just really like to be outdoors. I think that's the common theme. I love to read, I love to do, but I love to do it outdoors. So that's my favourite.   Ula Ojiaku  Yeah, that sounds very interesting. The first and the only time I tried golf, I was so horrible at it. I think I gave myself an advisory, you know, just to do it not in public.  Chris Boeckerman  It's not for everybody, it's not for everybody.   Ula Ojiaku  Yeah. Okay. I also got the, when you're talking about yourself, that you studied chemical engineering at the University of Cincinnati. What made you choose that discipline, that line of study?   Chris Boeckerman  Yeah, and that's kind of a funny, it's kind of a funny story. So, my parents didn't get to go to college, but I've known since I can remember that I was going to college. So, they worked their whole life, I'm blue collar raised. The one thing I can tell you is I work hard. That's what, you know, my parents really instilled that in me. And so I really liked chemistry in school, and I was pretty good at maths. And so my counselor was like, oh, chemical engineering. My grandpa was actually a chemical engineer. So it was a familiar term, even though I think it's hard to just understand what engineering is by talking to people. But I did some shadowing and I thought, okay, engineering sounds good. And University of Cincinnati was close by, but they invented cooperative education. So, this kind of go to school, go to work. It helps pay for your school, and what I didn't even realise at the time is I'm a very practical person. And so University of Cincinnati was the best for me because I didn't always love the theory. I could learn it, I got the theory, but I'm an applied learner is what I've learned since then. And so by having a co-op job, I could take the theory, apply it, and then I loved it. And so I got the chance to co-op six quarters at P & G in all different parts of the company. So I got to see how, I got to see the company, the company got to see me. It's really how we hire now is through interns and co-ops. But back then, it was just perfect for me. So I'm so glad I made the choice. Like I said, when your parents don't go to college, I don't think you even realise there's that many opportunities, what all the colleges are. But I just got really lucky and then obviously had to work hard because engineering is extremely difficult, and like I said, I think if I wouldn't have had co-op, I may not have stayed in chemical engineering, but because I had the experience of what I could do with it, I made it through.  Ula Ojiaku  Well done you and it's people like you, that paved the way for people like us women to get more into engineering as well. So the co-op, was it the University of Cincinnati, did the university help you with getting the job with P & G as part of the studies?  Chris Boeckerman  Yeah, it's integrated into a five-year program at the University of Cincinnati. And so you have to co-op to graduate and therefore they have a very structured way of introducing you to many companies, and so they have great relationships with local companies, with national companies. And so, because you know you have to, it's just part of the curriculum, and so they work hard to make sure you get a job. You work hard to make sure you get a job, and then you graduate with experience. So, yeah, I encourage anybody who's going into engineering, even if it's not integrated, like it was at UC, to do internships over the summer. It's a very popular thing to do here in the US so like my son did internships, most of the colleges have support here to be able to do an internship or they have co-op abroad, learning abroad. Any of that I think is amazing.   Ula Ojiaku  Yes, it helps with the balance, you know, to know what reality is and what the theory is of this discipline. Okay. And how did you, you said you made it through, so how was it for you as a student?   Chris Boeckerman  I am the person that you should send anybody to who struggled, because I struggled. You know, in high school I was a straight A student, and I memorised everything. I, like I said before, I know how to work hard. I worked hard, grades were very important to me, but it was more of a memorisation thing in high school. I understood the problem solving up to that point, but then I got into university, and yeah, it was just a whole other ball game. One of the things that I think I just learned about engineering is, in the real world, you never have enough time. You never have enough money to do what you want to do. Well, engineering preps you for that because you walk into a test and there's not enough time to finish the test. You're never going to get the right answer. Right. And it's hard to go through that, but I think it creates this grit and tenacity of like, I just have to keep going now.  And that is, I mean, that's kind of what I learned when I got into the workforce, is that engineers are problem solvers and that experience, that difficult experience through school just preps you for real life. And you know, when you feel like you can't keep going, you're like, I am, let's just, you know, this is the way it is. There's not enough time. There's not enough money. We've got to keep moving.  Ula Ojiaku  Exactly, let's make the most of the situation. So, you were co-opting with P & G, they loved you and they said they wouldn't let you go. And here you are. So how did you get to your current position as the Vice President? You're now for R & D right?  Chris Boeckerman  Right, it's R & D Vice President in a part of the company called P & G Ventures, which I can explain. So I'll try to take 30 years and give you the shortened version of it. So I started with Procter & Gamble and I worked 20 years actually in the part of the business called fabric care, so Tide, Gain, Ariel, Lenor… like I could talk to you about laundry all day long. So I worked there for 20 years. I worked upstream, downstream, consumer facing, technical facing, internal, external. Like, if you're going to stay somewhere for 20 years, you better do it all, and it was a wonderful, great experience. I've always lived in Cincinnati, but I've had teams all over the world, and so, you know, getting to know the cultures and how people work and the diversity, it's just, it's been amazing. You know, even the different brands and the different countries was great. And so I did that for 20 years, loved it, but I had this wonderful boss who said, hey, it's time to go try something else. And so I went into corporate R & D, and I wasn't sure about it because I come from the business and I have a P & L and I know what I'm delivering to the company, but I really trusted her. And she said, this is where you should go. And the minute I met with the leader of that organisation, he convinced me because he said, hey, my goal is that we are tailwinds for the business units. So, we're not off on the side, but we have the time to look internally and externally at all the best practices. And then we become tailwinds for our businesses who don't have time to do that because they're running the business. And I just loved that vision. And you know, P & G, our mission, our purpose at P and G is to improve the lives of consumers every day. I always say I love my job. I don't love it every day, but I do really love my job. I think if anybody tells you, they love it every day, they're just lying, but I really do love my job. And I think it's because my personal mission in life is to nurture and inspire the people in my work, my community, my family, and P & G's mission and purpose to improve the lives of consumers comes together in a great place. And that role in particular, in corporate R & D, it all really came together because, you know, I did feel like it was a mission. So when I got into that organisation, it was when, I like to say Dollar Shave Club had happened to us. So it was something where we stand for irresistibly superior products, and that is what our business model was made of. And this was a new, digital business model and it was new to the world and we were trying to figure it out. And so right as I got into this role, the Chief Technical Officer, Kathy Fish, and the Chief Brand Officer kind of came to me and my boss and said, you know, the world is changing really fast and we need to make sure that we are sustainable in this changing environment. So can you go find out what's happening and figure out, you know, how to make sure that we survive, right. How to make sure that we can live in this changing world.  And so I was like, wow, that is like a very clear work plan. And I have no idea how to do that, right. It was very big, the company is big, it's a hundred thousand people, and you know, but I did what I do and I just went and started talking to everybody. And as I was talking to everybody, there were two very clear themes that came out. One was fear of failure, and the second one was that commercial and technical were working in silos. We weren't really a connected team, and so we just kind of looked around and said, what other industry or what other space is tackling these two issues in this dynamic world? And it was the startup Ecosystem. And so we just went to school. I mean, I, the number of podcasts I looked into, like everything I had to learn. We are lucky enough to be a big company. We were able to get to the likes of like David Kidder from Bionic and Ian Berkowitz and Eric Ries. And I could give you the five names of the people that I would go to, but we were lucky enough to get those experts to come in and counsel us, which, that's one of the things I'm so proud of us to do is we didn't pretend we knew how to do it. Yeah. And that's one of the advice I would give everybody is don't pretend, go seek external help, always, because they're always going to give you a different perspective. But anyway, we just kind of, that's how we got into lean innovation, that's how we got into, hey, there is a different way in which we can, you know, learn quickly, learn fast, fail fast. We kind of learned nobody wants to fail, but if you can fail fast and early, then it's, it feels much more like learning. How fascinating, why did that happen? If you fail later and expensive, that's bad. And so, you know, we were, we had to get to school on it. We had to learn how to do it. And then the organisation I was able to create really was a small organisation that was meant to enable the business unit. So we created a framework that was agile and could kind of meet the business units where they were and helped them to understand this is the framework that you can apply to wherever you're at in this journey, because we were all at a different place in the journey, but we enabled startups inside the company is the easiest way for me to talk about that.  And then I did that and now I got the great opportunity, about two years ago, to come into a part of the company called P & G Ventures, which had actually, they were the first part of the company to kind of work like a startup, and they worked internally and externally to start up, what are the next businesses going to be? So we have 10 existing business units. Their job was, how do you develop the next business unit, which, talk about a high hurdle. Right. But, so I basically got to take the five years of kind of learning and enabling the business units, and I got to apply it to one of the toughest problems, which is how do you create a new business unit in an already very big and successful company?   Ula Ojiaku  That sounds exciting. And the journey so far, it sounds really impressive and exciting. So, given that P & G, you know, already is renowned for, you know, research, the extensive research and development, would you say that you already had that culture where it's okay to fail because not everything in the research would, you know, go on to be commercialised and end up on the shelf, or did you have to also change people's mindsets towards failure to know that if you fail fast it's okay. You know, was there any, from a leadership perspective, did you need to change anything in terms of people's perception?   Chris Boeckerman  Yeah, I mean, we really did, and it's still, you know, it's never perfect inside of an organisation because, you know, it is a large organisation. It was more around though, the speed of learning is what I would say is the biggest difference, was get something out there faster, to let people react. So it was almost and we do, we have a great, behavioural learning mindset now as well, but it was earlier back then. Right. And so I think what happens is, you know, you have your standard, large base qualification tests. That was, you know, the standard process that we had, and it worked well, but the world was shifting. And so it was like, if you were going to need to be more dynamic in how you evolved it, you needed, we needed to follow more of what the lean innovation process would be, which is, you create a quick and early prototype. It doesn't have to be perfect because you're only going to test it with 10 people, get it out to those 10 people and you're going to learn much more, very fast. I always joked, I had this old project or I'm in a project I did a long time ago and I had a bad package, but I knew the product was amazing. And I had this team and the packaging group did not want to place this package. Of course, we all knew it was bad and nobody wanted to look bad, right. And I was like, listen, I promise, I'm going to get the highest level person to say, he knows the package is going to fail. Well, if that's okay, will you let us place this test? Because I've got to find out if the juice is good, right. I've got to find out if the product is good, and I promise when I come back, I'm going to have even better information about what the package needs to do to be amazing. And so, you know, this was what this was way before, but it like, it just took people, you know, a little bit of time. And they needed to be reassured that it wasn't going to come back on them, right. And it's the difference, it's not the qualification test or I'm spending a million dollars, it's a small test, but you just need to make sure you're intentional about that, right. And we did, we learned a ton. We learned that the juice was magical. The product was great, and the package was bad, and this is exactly what we needed from the package. And we wrote up probably the most beautiful package brief ever. So I really think that's the difference, is you had to make sure that there weren't repercussions. You had to take the risk lower. And if you can take the risk lower, then the failure, like I said, it's more of, oh, you learned that, awesome, you learned it fast, you learned it cheap and now we know what to go do. I always used to say in the early days of GrowthWorks, because everybody's polarised by the term failure, which I totally understand, but it was like productive failure is failure that enables you to know fast, cheap, and easy what to go do next. And as long as you do that, that is productive failure. I had these great managers one time who, I was very uptight about a very large test market that was going to get delayed. It was under my charge and I felt very responsible. And as you can tell, I'm very passionate and you can read my emotions on my face. So I walked into my two leaders and they're new too, they don't know me, so I don't have a relationship with them, but they can just tell, I haven't slept for a week and, like, things are bad and, you know, and they kind of looked at me and they said, hey, Chris, is this the worst thing that's ever happened to you at work? And I was like, uh, yeah, like million dollar test market, right. And they're like, oh, okay, we're going to talk to you about that tomorrow. Today, we're going to talk to you about things that have gone wrong in our career, and what we learned from them. And I just, this was a transformative conversation that my leaders, I'm so thankful, took the time because when I found out what went wrong in their history, I was like, that's not even close to what is happening. Put things in perspective, right. They really, they were able to put things in perspective for me, and they were able to help me see you learn more from your mistakes than your successes. Don't make the same mistake twice and make your mistakes, or do your failures as early and as cheap as possible. And you know, this was 10 years before I did GrowthWorks, but that stuck with me and it turned me, it turned me from a micro-managing crazy person, which is what I was doing at that time into a learning leader is what I would say. I learned to then, when things came to me that were surprising, I always try to say, no matter what the data is, I try to say, oh, how fascinating, why do we think that happened? And it's, you know, like the results are awesome, clean, fascinating. Why do we think they're great? Like, why do we think that happened? The results are bad, fascinating, why? Why do we think that happened? And what we learned is if leaders can approach everything that way, then the team moves into a learning mindset and you learn a lot faster. It's hard to do. And I don't do it every day. If my team were here with me, they would be like, we're going to remind Chris on Monday about that. So, you know, nobody can do it all the time, but that learning mindset, which is something P & G has, you know, focused on a lot, it makes all the difference in the world of creating a culture in which people can learn fast, because everything's fascinating and you need to understand why you got good data, just as much as you need to understand why you got bad data. That's just good science.   Ula Ojiaku  I love that term productive failure. I think this is the first time I'm hearing. So do you get to share your failures, you know, after experiments do you get to share that with the rest of the organisation or how does that work?  Chris Boeckerman  Yeah, I mean we try hard. We actually try hard in P & G Ventures, because anybody who's listening, who's done any type of venture, new business building type stuff, you have to shut down more things than you keep going and it's really hard to shut a program down, and so we really try to celebrate when we stopped something as much as we celebrate when we're moving forward, because Kathy Fish had this, she would say to us, she was our past, Chief R & D officer when we were doing GrowthWorks, and she was like, it's so important to shut things down because you need to shut the good things down so that you have people to work on the great things, right. And it's, but I'd say that that's the hardest thing to do. And we just did it this week and I compliment the team and it's so exciting to see it's not all roses all the time, I'm telling you, it's not, this is very hard work.  Everybody's job is hard, but when you have a team that really does the sprint together to get to the bottom of how big is it, how big is the problem? Does P & G have a unique, proprietary gift to solve it? And, you know, they come back and the answer is, hey, we did all the due diligence and we don't think that we should pursue it. It's like, I am so excited that they had the confidence and they gave us the confidence because you just want to be confident in your decision, whether it's to go forward or to not, this world of disruptive innovation is uncertain, right? It is just uncertain. It's hard to live in uncertainty every day. But if you have clarity of, we did the due diligence in the team, like I always used to say in GrowthWorks, I want the teams to shut the programs down, or the teams to be the ones that are driving it forward. But it's hard, it is hard to create a culture where people can be agile enough to move to different programs, and we are in the learning, we don't have it all figured out, but you know, we've been at it for a while, and so it's just really, it's exciting to be part of this organisation at this time, to see how far we've come.   Ula Ojiaku  Wow. So, for them, because you said something about clarity in times of uncertainty and, you know, the teams actually come to you and say, they've done the due diligence, it doesn't meet the criteria. That suggests to me that you've, you know, and you, as a leadership team have taken the time to sit down with them to identify what those clear criteria are. Are you able to share what these are, or at least the process, you know, that made you arrive to those criteria that is open and transparent to everyone that it makes the team, you know, that helps the team to determine if it meets the, it aligns with what P & G is looking for?  Chris Boeckerman  Right. Well, I can share it in general terms, right. And so a lot of people listening into the podcast would understand a funnel, right? You know, you have big, broad ideas in the beginning of the funnel and you're trying to figure out, and that's what this particular project was at, is you're trying to figure out really at that point in time, how big is the problem? It's got to be a problem big enough that P & G will care about it. Right. But the problem itself, that's more of a, how many people have it? How many solutions are out there already? What are the dissatisfiers with the solutions? So you kind of go through the essence of how big is the problem? And could we do something about it? So how big is the problem? Does P & G have a proprietary, unique reason why we should go after this versus somebody else? Do we have the capability and the technology, or do we have the partnerships? We do external scouting, right? So do we have external solutions that look viable? And then you put that together to figure out financially, what do the signals look like? Does it look big enough that it's going to be a business that P & G would care about? Because there are plenty of businesses. I've done this myself, I've fallen in love with the business, I want to do this business, and at the end of the day, it's not going to look attractive to P & G, you, at the end of the day, you are choosing to put resources on different programs at different times, and they have to not compete, that's not a great way of saying it, but they have to be big enough that it's worthy of putting a team on it. So we take a small team, they do that early work, and there's a sprint that you go to it, but it's not the same for everybody. Like it's not hard and fast numbers at this point in time. But it is all around, is the problem big enough? Do we have a reason to think that we can deliver a breakthrough solution? And then, when you put that together financially, does it look good? And so we have, I would say, what we have, the leadership team has determined is, there are some ranges that the teams work within, but what really helped this team in particular, which is something that I think people could value is we really enabled the team to focus, right? So they did this broad, like what are the parts of this problem that we think are interesting? And they did a sprint, they identified those spaces. We were like, great. We love it. Now, with that criteria go run some sprints to figure out quickly, how big is it? Is it growing? What are the gifts we have in the company? What is the quick scouting? And is this something that makes sense for, you know, P & G to create a new brand VR work or not. And they really, they came back and they said, thank you for the focus, we met with them every month after the sprint, we made decisions, but they made the recommendations and then they were like, this one isn't big enough, it's not growing, we're going to stop work on that one, do you agree? They were like, yeah, because you made such a compelling case, how can we not agree? And then the other, you know, the other, we were like, we are still really interested in the other two. Do you have enough time? And do you have the right people to do that? They went after it, they came back and you know, and then it becomes much more of a discussion because it's like, is it really something we should do? Is it something the other businesses have a better, do they already have a brand? It is expensive to create a new brand. So, we have amazing brands in this company. And so, many times it's like, wait, do we need to influence, or do we want to try to influence another brand to really take this on, because it's big and growing. So that's how it, early in the funnel, as we go later in the funnel, it becomes much more of, the first question is, could we do it, the second question is, should we do it? Right. And so the, should we do it is all based on can you create the business? Right, so then you really start pulling in all of the business aspects, the full qualification that we tend to do, transactional learning tests, incubations either in stores or in small markets or in direct to consumer. So you really start to get that behavioural and transactional data giving you the signals that this is a business. Janice Fraser, who was also one of these external experts, she would always say, you know you're ready to scale when you've put the variables together and you know where to pour the money to make it grow, you know where the money should be poured to make it grow. If you don't know where to pour the money, you're not ready to scale. And, you know, those are always, so it's complicated. Business is complicated. The channels are complicated, the platforms are complicated. So, you know, that's when you really have to figure out, do I have, you know, should I invest the big money in this? And I think one of the things that you have when you're doing intrapreneurship, you're creating startups inside the company, is you should be able to get through that funnel faster, if you can get all those parts to come together and that's, you know, that's our goal, that's what we're getting to. In P & G Ventures,  I mean, we have a new opportunity area around safe and effective insect control. And it's a brand called Zevo and it's amazing, right. And so it's nice to have a program that has been through those parts and is really kind of in that space now that we can all look to and, you know, say, all right, how are we looking compared to where they were looking at the time? Because it's like, that uncertainty and clarity, like you said, it is just uncertain space. You don't know, you can't predict a billion dollar brand, you just can't, but what are the things that you can start running after and you can learn fast and you can validate that gives you the signals at all different fidelities and levels to then go, all right, we're going. So anyway, that's the goal.   Ula Ojiaku  So, the listeners might be wondering, especially for those of us who are not so familiar with the intricate, you know, organisation, the way P & G is organised. So, what's GrowthWorks and then, what role did you play in that?   Chris Boeckerman  Perfect. Well, I ended up being able to be the co-founder of GrowthWorks. And GrowthWorks, in a simple term, is, a framework that you can apply to nurture startups inside the company. So, we are a big company and we know how to do big, big programs. Right. As we got into this disruptive world and we were being disrupted and, you know, we were looking for how to become agile, it, you know, it was sort of like we needed to shift how we did our innovation. And so we needed to be able to apply these principles from lean innovation, but in a way that made sense for P & G. So one of the things we learned, you know, very early on and everybody would know is, you know, at the end of the day, our goal is to build a business that we cultivate. We're not trying to sell to somebody. That's a very different aspect of being a startup, in a startup you want to get bought, right. But here we need to create a value creating business. And it is interesting during this time is when, Marc Pritchard, who's our Chief Brand Officer, really started to talk quite a bit about constructive disruption, and it was really important, and I think it's important for any big company to understand as they're doing this, is our job is always to build categories, to build the industry. We don't ever want to take the industry down. We want to build the industry. So we want to be disruptive, but in a building way, and so as we were thinking about that, it was just like, okay, there's probably three components that we were pulling together that you can apply, whether you're doing sustaining innovation, or disruptive innovation.   There's a, how do you learn, right. So it's the build, measure, learn, but how do you handle this, helping an organisation feel okay about sending five prototypes to consumers and not being concerned that it's going to fail. Right. So that is sort of the build, measure, learn loop. We base everything in the consumer love and the consumer need. And so we wrapped that together to kind of give it, this is how P & G applies the lean innovation model. There's also, how do you think about the type of innovation you're doing? And so, like I said, whether it's sustaining, disruptive or anything like that, but visualising that is really important, helping everybody understand, what are the new spaces that we're looking at? Placing lots of bets in these new spaces and knowing the high percentage is going to fail, right. And so, how do you measure progress in this uncertain space? That was a part of the framework as well. And then the last part of the framework was how do you organise to do this work? And I'd say the biggest thing we learned then is yeah, when you're early in the funnel, a small team can make tremendous progress, make it less hierarchical, let the team lead, leaders learn, because this is new. So I used to always joke. I was 20 years in fabric care, right. And so I would be working with an internal startup team in fabric care. And my 20 years of knowledge of fabric care wasn't what was helping the team. I was holding them back because I have all these biases of the past and they needed to go into the future and I needed to learn, so you just have to let the teams lead at that point in time and you have to learn, and be supportive. Then you do get to the point though, where my 20 years of knowledge of fabric care does become important. And that's where every startup runs into as well, is you get it to a certain point, but if you need to industrialise something, that is the core capability the company has, and you can't do that with three people, and you need hierarchy and you need to, so it's like, how do you take the best of both worlds and bring them together? And so that was how we had to figure out how to organise for where you're at and what you need at the time.  And then how do you shift to that when you need to shift it quickly? And so those were the three aspects, how you learn, what is the type of innovation you're going after, and then how do you organise, and that we made it a broad enough framework so that we have 10 business units and P & G Ventures who were at the tip of the sphere of doing this for the company anyway. And we were trying to help the rest of the company, but you wanted to give them that framework and then no matter what they were working on, could they fit themselves into that framework or could the framework enable them? And so we started as two people and our leader, and I was able to grow that organisation to about 25 people across every function of the company, but just a small group, like we just had, you know, 25 people out of a hundred thousand, right. But each of us were a function in the company, but we were one team across all functions. And so that's how we were able to kind of like be like the Navy Seals, we could come in and we could help support the business unit for what they were doing. And then the business unit would take it on. That was the only way we could become sustainable because we weren't, I never wanted to create a 500 person organisation.  Everything I learned about from all my predecessors who've tried this at other companies as well, that just gets to be too heavy. And it doesn't integrate into the entire company because you're reliant on the coaches or the experts versus our job was eventually like when we were about three years in and we kind of knew what we were doing, when we would come in and help train some part of the organisation, we would only do it if they offered up a person that would then take it from us and do the next training. And so, you know, then you start to really get into the fibre of the company to really drive the change. And it's not perfect, right. But it really was able to shift how we did our innovation and the BUs own it, right, the business units own it.   Ula Ojiaku  That's the only way it's going to be sustainable, if there's ownership from them.   Chris Boeckerman  Exactly. And they applied it in different ways, our beauty care business is very different than our fabric care business. So one size fits all was never going to work.   Ula Ojiaku  Oh my gosh, sorry, that was a theme at the conference I spoke at, you know, it was like, no, there's no one size fits all approach.   Chris Boeckerman  I'm very thankful that I had the support around me, and that the company invested to bring external people in, right. One of the people I haven't mentioned yet is Maxine Friedman and she started with Bionic and, you know, now has her own work that she does, but she was my partner day in and day out as we were trying to figure out how to make this change. And without having people like that near me, Karen Hershenson's an internal person that was with me. They're the ones that really helped me see it was more than us. And in order to make it more than us, we had to enable others. We had to give it away. So first we had to figure out what it was. So don't get me wrong. That was not easy. It took us an entire year of really crazy experiments that the business units did. And we were just learning and running and helping and doing everything that we could, but we were pulling together the learnings. We were strategically figuring out what was working and what wasn't working so that we could land within the first year with this framework. Then once we had the framework, then we had something more intentional that we could work with the business units on. And we showed up for free. That was the other thing is, when they called, we showed up, right? Like nobody paid for us, we were helping them, but then they started to pay with their people, and they became the experts who then moved it forward and they moved it forward in different ways, because the external experts were the ones telling us we've seen other companies try this, don't try to mandate, don't force it, help figure out an agile framework that people can fit for what they need. And to this day it still exists. I mean, I'm not on it anymore, there's a small team that's still is working through it and, you know, but the businesses own it. They're the ones who really drive it in the way that they need.   Ula Ojiaku  Wow. I respect your time. I could delve in more. I think, Chris, this is an official invite to have you back sometime, you know, for a sequel to this conversation.   Chris Boeckerman  I would love it. I would love it. This has been so much fun. I really, I have a ton of passion for this type of work and our motto in GrowthWorks was unleash people to unleash growth. I do think P & G has the best people. I think everybody thinks that about their company, but I just really, I believe it, you know, when I was 20 years in fabric care, when I was, you know, 5 years in GrowthWorks, and now in P & G Ventures, that we just have the best people. And as we unleash them, we're growing, and so it's just a ton of fun, so happy to come back.   Ula Ojiaku  Your passion shines through and for you to say P & G has the best people, speaking with you, I am left with no doubt about it because you are a great ambassador for that. So thank you for that. So, in terms of a few more questions, so what books, if you had, because you said you had to go to school to learn more about innovation and you got in coaches. Are there any books that have helped you, you know, in this learning journey?  Chris Boeckerman  Yeah, there's a group of books just on lean innovation that definitely helped. So the Eric Ries, like kind of trilogy of books, I would say is The Lean Startup, The Startup Way, but he also had a small printing of something called, The Leader's Guide, which I think you can only get on audio now. And Janice Fraser, Eric introduced us to Janice and she had a lot of that, that really helps you to figure out how to help an organisation, how to help leaders to bring this to life. So those were really critical. And then David Kidder from Bionic wrote a book called New to Big, and I would say that's a great synopsis of what they taught us. And so, that's a good one to go to. And then there's a Scrum book that, I'm going to have to look up afterwards to give you the actual title, but twice the work and half the time.  Ula Ojiaku  That'll be Jeff Sutherland, Scrum, How to do Twice the Work in Half the Time. Dr Sutherland was my guest a few episodes ago.   Chris Boeckerman  Yes, it was life-changing for me, not necessarily because I became, I did not become a Scrum master. We have people inside the company that have done amazing things, but that was the book where he really articulated the questions that we started to ask, that helped us with teams lead, leaders learn. So he articulated that leaders, you know, should ask, what did you learn? How do you know? What do you need to learn next? And how can I help you as a leader? And, you know, that simple articulation was really great for us. So those are the ones that I kind of went back to again and again, to really figure out how to do lean innovation. I have another book for you just in general to share, and that's called Four Thousand Weeks, and it's a productivity book that somebody had just shared with me and it's by Oliver Burkeman and this, I just really liked because it's made a big impact in my life right now. If you live to be 80, you live 4,000 weeks. So it puts a finite amount of time, which can be scary, but we all know is real. But what I loved about this, it's the first productivity book that I received the message because I'm sure other productivity books have told me this, but it's the first time I was able to openly receive the message that you cannot do it all, so stop trying. You need to be choiceful. You need to be intentional on what it is you want to do and what it is you're going to intentionally not do. And that was just really impactful for me. And I think it can be impactful for a lot of people that really, the quality of your life is based on the choices that you make, and it's part of the reason I'm here because I'm a very busy person, but I just decided, no, I really, this is a passion that I have. I have a unique experience, I would really like to share that with other like-minded people who are on this, you know, what I call rollercoaster journey. It is like high highs and low lows when you are a change agent in big companies, but it's so fulfilling. So that book just had a big impact on me, that I really am in control of my destiny, but I need to make some choices.  Ula Ojiaku  Well, I've made a note of those books and they would be in the show notes of your episode. So thank you for that. Would that be, if the audience wants to get in touch with you, how can they find you?  Chris Boeckerman  The best way is through LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn, and while I would love to talk to everybody in the world, right. The way that I kind of make my choices, like I just said, which is exactly when you reached out to me is, anything that enables P & G and you know, what, what we all have passion for, I make time for, so yeah, so LinkedIn is the best way.   Ula Ojiaku  Definitely. I mean, you're a busy person, so LinkedIn would be the best place. And any final words for the audience so we wrap this up.   Chris Boeckerman  Yeah. I think, you know, I think it just really is, if you can, you follow your passion and people are everything. I just, everybody in the startup world, everybody in a corporate environment will tell you that the team and the people, they make all the difference in the world. And I just have found through my career as well, the more I invest in the people, the better, and so, yeah, I mean, if there's a way that you can ever really drive together your passions and then the ability to kind of bring an amazing team around you, you can do anything. My favourite quote is, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has. It's by Margaret Mead. And I just really, I really believe it. I think, and, in what we've been able to do at P & G, we had the people, the groundswell, and we had the leadership support in, and you need both, but it just really starts with a small group of people that have a lot of passion and are amazing. And so that's what I would focus on.   Ula Ojiaku  Wow. Thank you so much, Chris. This has been an inspiring conversation, more like me learning from you. So I do think, and I know that the audience, the viewers and listeners would also find this episode very useful. So thank you again for your time.   Chris Boeckerman  Oh, thank you very much. And I've listened to all your podcasts now. And so I'm learning a ton from this forum as well. And just thank you for taking the time and doing it. I love your story and I was really happy to be part of it. So thank you.  Ula Ojiaku   That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show.   I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com  Take care and God bless. 

¿Te gustaría saber cómo planificar un proyecto… y conseguir que se cumpla?Decía el general Dwight Eisenhower que «En la preparación para la batalla siempre he encontrado que los planes son inútiles, pero la planificación es indispensable».Ese es el tema principal del programa de esta semana, donde compartiremos los aprendizajes de un caso práctico, y muy especial para KENSO… y esperamos que para ti, de la gestión de proyectos.Notas de programa(Las notas del programa están disponibles en https://kenso.es/episodio/227-gestionar-proyecto)Índice del programa(01:40) El caso práctico: ¡nuestro libro!(02:54) El plan de proyecto vs. la realidad(05:37) ¿De dónde salió la idea?(11:13) Recomendación: recurso(12:10) ¿Para qué queremos hacer esto?(18:12) La preplanificación(25:33) ¡A dar pedales!(31:48) Recomendación: herramienta(33:07) Superando los obstáculos(42:48) Resumen del episodio(44:22) Tu plan de acción(45:02) ¡Nos escuchamos muy pronto!Recursos mencionadosEpisodio 106: Establecer objetivos alcanzablesLibro: Scrum: El revolucionario método para trabajar el doble en la mitad de tiempo de Jeff Sutherland y J.J. SutherlandEpisodio 224: Cómo mejorar con Design ThinkingHerramienta de colaboración: BasecampEpisodio 219: 4 Retrospectivas para implementar la mejora continuaReseña de libro: Las trampas del deseo de Dan ArielyEpisodio 226: Qué hacer cuando incumples un compromisoGestor de tareas: MeisterTaskLa página web de KENSOEl canal de Telegram: Efectividad KENSONuestros cursos onlineSuscríbete al boletín electrónico de KENSOÚnete a KENSO CírculoKENSO Círculo es el club para personas centradas en mejorar su efectividad y vivir más felices.Un club a tu alcance porque a partir de 1€ al mes tendrás acceso prioritario a los episodios del podcast, podrás descargar un plan de acción para cada episodio, recibirás cada mes un episodio especial donde haremos una reseña sobre un libro de efectividad, disfrutarás de descuentos en los servicios de KENSO y de nuestra eterna gratitud por ayudarnos a mejorar.Más información & InscripciónComparte tus sugerencias¿Qué te gustaría escuchar en futuros episodios del podcast?Déjanos tus sugerencias de personas a entrevistar o temas a tratar en los comentarios de las notas del programa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Summary KeywordsPeople, organisation, Australia, learning, years, world, senior leaders, work, connect, Tasmania, opportunity, ideas, managers, process, happening, excellence, network, company, operators.IntroductionWelcome to episode 111 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. It is such a pleasure to have Mr Victor Caune on the show with us today. Victor more than anyone has helped so many people and organisations in Australia connect, go, see and learn from each other. Victor is a connector, educator and motivator extraordinaire. He has developed two of Australia's most successful Excellence networking organisations SIRF Round Tables and Best Practice Network. He is on the show with us today to share his approaches to connecting people and learning from each other to sustain and achieve Enterprise Excellence.We are proudly sponsored by S A Partners, a world-leading business transformation consultancy.Youtube Links:Full episode: https://youtu.be/4BEJo2w_GVMTwo-Minute Tip - https://youtu.be/55hLjZ0h2J8Two Minute TipBrad: Victor, what would be your two-minute tip mate for people in your area of expertise? This whole piece of connecting people networking, helping people go see and learn from each other?Victor: Be bold. Be prepared to have a go. Get outside of your comfort zone. Go to a conference, go to an event, introduce yourself to people, find out what's going on. So that's probably my tip.Brad: Yeah, nice.Victor: There's always someone out there doing interesting things, believe it or not. There's never a dull moment in your day if you go and talk to people, even on your holidays, or through work. It doesn't matter. There's always someone with a better approach or a better idea. But you've got to go and seek it. It just doesn't happen by itself. And nine times out of 10 people are really willing to talk and share about what they're doing. So that's what I find.  Even someone like yourself, I think you're doing a fantastic job with all of us. Brad: Thanks, Victor. Really appreciate it.         Victor: That's a serious comment. Brad: Yeah, well, I've learned from the best mate. Victor: I'm halfway through Jeff Sutherland's book on Agile and Scrum and thoroughly enjoying it. I enjoyed your presentation with him. He's a real practitioner and he's got the runs on the board. So again, it's a learning opportunity of just finding out what else is happening in the world.Brad: Yeah, I like Jeff too Victor, because he's... You know, the stuff that he's done is insane. But he does not tell people to just take what he does and apply it. He says create your own way, you know, learn from it, and create your own playbook. And I respect that.Victor: Well, that's what it is. Create your own playbook. Links Brad is proud to support many Australian businesses. You can find him on LinkedIn here. If you'd like to speak to him about how he can help your business, call him on 0402 448 445 or email bjeavons@iqi.com.au. Our website is www.bradjeavons.com.What next?1.     Join our membership page to access free planning resources.2.     Join our Enterprise Excellence online community.3.     Have a look at the Agile certified training that we offer. 

This week's short solo show explores a potentially transformational strategy you can put to work in your practice with as little as five minutes a day.   IT genius Jeff Sutherland first explored the value of a short daily team meeting in his book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.   Prav's been a big fan since reading the book shortly after its publication in 2014 and has since made daily scrums (AKA huddles) a feature at his group of practices and marketing agency.    In this episode, Prav looks at the origin of scrum as a software development tool, discussing how it can be adapted to a dental setting to transform the working week and boost business growth.   Enjoy!   In This Episode 00.47 - The daily scrum - an intro 03.00 - Scrum in practice 07.52 - Scrum in dentistry 12.27 - How to scrum 26.14 - In summary   About Prav Solanki Prav Solanki is an entrepreneur and dental marketer who has purchased, developed and exited a successful group of clinics. He is the director of The Fresh dental marketing and growth agency and founder of Leadflo—an advanced lead management system for dental practices.  

Did your parents ever force you into any activities?  Have you ever chosen not to do something because your parents were doing it?  Felipe Engineer- Manriquez is not your typical engineer!  Today we will be talking about the soap opera of scrum methodology! He uses walk up music in his keynotes to jolt the audience to life and learned public speaking from his daddy!  What can I get the audience to do?  Who can I connect with?  How do I rope them back in if I lose them?  What works and what doesn't?  Are you conditioned to play it safe?  Better Call Daddy: The Safe Space For Controversy. Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international keynote speaker, The EBFC Show podcast host, and proven construction change-maker from million to billion dollar-sized projects and companies worldwide implementing Lean and Agile practices. Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a Registered Scrum Trainer™ (RST), Registered Scrum Master™ (RSM), Registered Product Owner™ (RPO), and Registered Scrum@Scale Practitioner™ (RS@SP). The Lean Construction Institute awarded him the Chairman's Award (2019) for contributions to the Institute and the design and construction industry as a whole. Connect with Felipe https://www.theebfcshow.com/ thefelipe.bio.link Link to Dr. Jeff Sutherland episode mentioned in episode https://www.theebfcshow.com/scrum-in-construction-dr-jeff-sutherland/   Connect with Reena bettercalldaddy.com linkedin.com/in/reenafriedmanwatts twitter.com/reenareena instagram.com/reenafriedmanwatts   Me and my daddy would love to hear from you subscribe and drop a five star rating ratethispodcast.com/bettercalldaddy podchaser.com/bettercalldaddy https://youtube.com/c/BetterCallDaddy    

This week, Dan Neumann is joined by Christine Bush, a brand new Agile thinker.   In this episode, Dan and Christine are discussing Agile Transformations. As Lyssa Adkins describes, an Agile Coach is someone who has seen lots of different success and failure patterns over time. Change is never easy, and that is the reason why Dan And Christine are diving deep into the necessary features of a well-conducted Agile transformation.   Key Takeaways What is important when an organization is looking for an Agile Transformation? Transformations have to come from the top and leadership has to be committed to them. The leadership has to be ready to invest in education for the Team members of the organization and to guide them through the Transformation. Transformation cannot be an option. Middle-level managers are key to a successful Transformation, they need to be trained and guided in the process. What is next after the training is over? Agile Coaches are crucial in this stage since the application is a whole different story. Change can be scary. Let's experiment, instead of thinking about it in terms of winning or losing. Keep your eyes on the goal. Are some other roles instrumental when transitioning? There could be a lack of clarity on some roles at the beginning. All Team members are working together to deliver outcomes in short cycles with rapid feedback loops. The business stakeholders help with the requirements but sometimes they get confused by the new events.   “Don't just give them the title, buy them the tool, and expect the Agile process to work.”   Organizations want to be Agile but they don't give them the necessary coaching and facilitation that people need to be successful. Providing support is what enables Teams to become self-organizing and successful. Be patient; small victories can get a long way.   Mentioned in this Episode: “What is Agile Coaching?” by Lyssa Adkins Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland   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!

Nós já sabemos que as técnicas de Scrum e Kanban podem trazer grandes resultados para quem quer otimizar e melhorar sua forma de trabalho. Inclusive, já vimos por aqui alguns cases de sucesso em que as metodologias ágeis foram aplicadas a escritórios e departamentos jurídicos. Agora, é a vez de entendermos como tem sido a utilização dessas técnicas no Poder Judiciário. Um spoiler: além de aumentar a produtividade e a eficiência, também tem ajudado a motivar e melhorar a qualidade de vida da equipe. Para nos contar como é a rotina de uma vara federal e como tem sido o processo de implementação da agilidade, eu conversei com o Thiago Mesquita. Ele é Juiz Federal do Ceará. Juiz de cooperação e membro do Centro de Inteligência da Justiça Federal e Agile Master pela Jurídico Ágil. - DIREITO 4.0 PODCAST -Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/direito4.0podcastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/direito-4-0-podcastE-mail: podcast@floox.com.br -THIAGO MESQUITA -Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thiagomesquitatc/ - NOTAS DO EPISÓDIO -Trello: https://trello.com/pt-BRScrum. A Arte de Fazer o Dobro do Trabalho na Metade do Tempo, Jeff Sutherland: https://www.amazon.com.br/Scrum-Fazer-Dobro-Trabalho-Metade/dp/8544104517/ref=sr_1_2?adgrpid=84251817027&gclid=CjwKCAjw7cGUBhA9EiwArBAvorLY2u1HhUlvMWKpLHaGV-Leg89ZiRBLFH6qqDS_LLwML4DRX22veRoCvqAQAvD_BwE&hvadid=425986533289&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=1001566&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=9324703137438050289&hvtargid=kwd-861992144148&hydadcr=5687_11235287&keywords=livro+scrum+a+arte+de+fazer+o+dobro&qid=1653669191&sr=8-2Sprint, Jake Knapp e Outros: https://www.amazon.com.br/Sprint-Jake-Knapp-ebook/dp/B06XPPS4JW/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=Jurídico Ágil: https://www.instagram.com/juridico.agil/

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: So you want to be a charity entrepreneur. Read these first., published by Mathieu Putz on January 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. If you want to start a charity, you need to be learning constantly. You'll inevitably learn by doing, but it will save you a lot of heartache to also learn from others. If you're interested in potentially starting a charity or are already running one and want to continue improving your org, here's what we at Nonlinear think will be useful to read. We don't recommend reading these in order or start to finish. Skim them ruthlessly, jump around to the ones that seem relevant to you, and try to really engage with the ones that are genuinely useful to you. Blog posts Why founding charities is one of the highest impact things one can do Should I start a charity now or later? Great blog post about the benefits of starting something now vs later. How to increase your odds of starting a career in charity entrepreneurship. This post also touches on how to get a low-risk taste of startup life to see if you'll like it. TL;DR - do self-initiated projects with no oversight, ideally recruiting and leading a team of friends/volunteers to help. What traits make a great charity entrepreneur Which jobs will best prepare you to become a charity entrepreneur? Why top performers shouldn't go to university. There are better ways to signal competence Why EAs in particular are good people to start charities Top 13 Tools for NGO Founders. Want to particularly highlight Upwork where it's really easy to hire freelancers for innumerable small tasks that it's not worth hiring a full time person for. Startup Playbook by Sam Altman. Probably the most information dense piece of advice for potential founders. Just replace every mention of “business” with “charity” and “profit” with “impact” to get the most out of this. This is true for most forprofit startup material Paul Graham essays, notably What You'll Wish You'd Known How to Start a Startup Do Things that Don't Scale Charity Entrepreneurship's resource list. Lots of good stuff listed here. A Brief Overview of Recruitment and Retention Research by Animal Advocacy Careers. Blog post reviewing the evidence for different hiring and retention techniques, ordered by evidence base and effect size. I wish all research was done and presented this way. Charity Science's fundraising research. Fundraising is a keystone skill for charity entrepreneurship. Charity Science systematically researched all the major fundraising methods and compared how well they worked. I'd pair this with reading at least one book on fundraising. Fundraising for Dummies is good, though probably not the best. Takeaways from EAF's Hiring Round by Stefan Torges There Are No Walls. Short post about how to see how many options you truly have. Books How to Start a High-Impact Nonprofit by EA's very own Joey Savoie and Patrick Stadler. If you could only read one book, it'd be this one. Managing to Change the World. The best book on management Kat has ever read, and it just so happens to also focus on the particular issues charities face. Peter Wildeford wrote some good notes on it here. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This is a classic for a reason. How to Make a Minimum Loveable Product. Technically a blog post, but should be read after Lean Startup, so put it in this section. Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street (summary) Atomic Habits by James Clear. How to be productive as an individual. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland. How to be productive as a team. 4-Hour Work Week. Tim Ferriss is one of the most instrumentally rational people that Kat has ever encountered. Take his lessons, mix in a little EA epistemology, and cross-apply them to EA. Makebook. Ridiculously practical book about ...

Life gets busy. Has https://geni.us/scrum-free-audiobook (Scrum) been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now. We're scratching the surface here. If you don't already have the book, order it https://geni.us/scrum-sutherland-book (here) or get the audiobook https://geni.us/scrum-free-audiobook (for free) on Amazon to learn the juicy details. Get the full transcript, infographic, PDF, and animated book summary on our free app: https://www.getstoryshots.com (https://www.getstoryshots.com) About Jeff Sutherlandhttps://geni.us/jeff-sutherland (Jeff Sutherland) is a graduate of the US Military Academy with an engineering degree. He attributes his systematic way of thinking to his time working as a Vietnam fighter pilot. After working in the military for 11 years, Jeff became a doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. The University of Colorado is where he first became interested in IT systems development. He would eventually become a biometrics expert, an early innovator in ATM technology, and Vice President of Engineering or CTO at 11 different technology companies. Jeff attributes this success to following the foundations of Scrum.  Introduction https://geni.us/scrum-free-audiobook (Scrum) was groundbreaking when Jeff Sutherland introduced it as a way to improve human progress. Some describe the publication of Scrum in 2014 as being a pivotal moment in human history. Its name is borrowed from the game of rugby to emphasize the importance of intense teamwork. It is a strategy integrated into most of the world's top technology companies. We know it works, but this book outlines why it works. The book explores multiple real world  scenarios to explain how people struggle to conduct tasks with agility and efficiency. The author claims that Scrum strategies can solve this dilemma. Scrum orientation is found at the roots of many modern achievements. Jeff's system helped bring the FBI into the 21st century, for example. Scrum has also helped to reduce poverty in the developing world. This book is built upon insights Jeff gained from martial arts, judicial decision-making, advanced aerial combat, and robotics.  StoryShot #1: ATMs Were the Inspiration for Scrum Sutherland first identified society's flawed approach to productivity while he was helping to deploy ATMs throughout the US. He believed the traditional method of conducting software development, including the “waterfall” system associated with ATMs, was deficient. Sutherland also detested society's overuse of Gantt Charts that illustrate the schedule and status of piece parts of a project. He once stumbled across a Japanese paper, published in 1986, titled, “The New New Product Development Game.” This paper was written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, who focused on the importance of cross-functional teams in producing a faster and more flexible working environment.  StoryShot #2: The Scrum Fundamentals These are the takeaway messages, inspired by Takeuchi and Nonaka's paper, that formed the fundamentals of Scrum: Hesitation is Death - Do not hesitate for long. Instead, follow this series of actions: observe, orient, decide, and act. You need to know where you and your team currently are. Assess your options, make a decision, and then act on that decision. Look Outward for Answers - The most adaptive systems are those that learn from the surrounding environment. They observe the best features of other systems and apply them to their own. Teams Must Be Structured Correctly - For an organization to excel, its teams must be cross-functional, autonomous, and empowered. Don't Just Guess - Rather than guessing whether something will work, just do it. Plan what you want to do and then act. Check to see whether this action produced the desired outcome and then change your future decisions accordingly. Repeating this step in regular cycles will help you and your team...

This week I'm speaking with Felipe Engineer, a registered Scrum master and trainer. Felipe also leads the Lean construction program at McCarthy Building Companies and is the CEO and podcast host of the EBFC Show, which is dedicated to Lean construction. In this episode, Felipe and I go into detail about integrating Lean into construction. We also talk about Scrum, what it is and how Scrum can be used when you're in the construction industry. What You'll Learn This Episode: The importance of Lean in construction Felipe's podcast, The EBFC show What is Scrum How you can use Scrum in design and construction Lean tools and techniques that are used on a construction site The argument that Lean is too academic How you can start improving your work today About the Guest: Felipe leads the Lean Construction program for McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. Engineer-Manriquez is also the CEO and Host of The EBFC Show. The Easier, Better, for Construction Show allows people to make building easier and better share how. As a Registered Scrum Trainer™ (RST) endorsed by Dr. Jeff Sutherland, Felipe also co-created the Design and Construction Registered Scrum Master™ (RSM) curriculum with the Agile Education Program team. It enables RSM graduates to deliver construction project value and earn recognition in the International Registry of Agile Professionals™. Engineer-Manriquez is an active contributing member of the Lean Construction Institute (LCI) and is an approved instructor/facilitator and 2019 LCI Chairman's Award recipient for contributions to the Institute and the design and construction industry as a whole. Important Links: https://www.theebfcshow.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/engineerfelipe/ https://constructionscrum.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/leansolutions/support

SummaryOver the last 35+ episodes of this podcast, we've had a handful of book recommendations come up over the course of an episode. As we approach the holiday shopping season and begin to think about gifts for our family and friends, here are some book recommendations that may be just the thing.Key TakeawaysRadical Candor by Kim Scott - Available at Amazon or Bookshop.org4DX by CHris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling - Available at Amazon or Bookshop.orgThe Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford- Available at Amazon or Bookshop.orgScrum by Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland - Available at AmazonCalifornia Field Atlas by Obi Kaufman - Available at Amazon or Bookshop.orgMedallion Status by John Hodgman - Available at Amazon or Bookshop.orgThe Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez Alt - Available at Amazon or Bookshop.orgCreditsProduced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.ioEdited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.netHosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com

What's Up with Jeff Sutherland's Definition of a Scrum Master? Let's explore the options this situation presents. All of this and more are discussed in today's episode of Your Daily Scrum with Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley. What do you think? Let us know in the comments! Take a Professional Scrum with Kanban Course with Todd, Ryan, and Daniel Vacanti!https://www.eventbrite.com/e/professional-scrum-with-kanban-psk-online-certification-class-psk-i-tickets-167900832911 Buy Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems - https://amzn.to/3fMpH5a Join Ryan and Todd in a Professional Scrum Master course: https://www.scrum.org/agile-humans And make sure you subscribe to the channel! DISCLAIMER: Links included in this description might be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service with the links that I provide, I may receive a small commission. There is no additional charge for you! Thank you for supporting the channel so we can continue to provide you with free content each week! FTC DISCLAIMER: This video is not sponsored by anyone. Sharing Scrum knowledge to help you grow as a Scrum Practitioner and to solve complex problems. #scrum #agile #scrummasterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, Chad sits down with Jeff Sutherland, founder and CEO of Canine Biologics. With over 500,000 dogs in the US and Canada diagnosed with cancer each year, Jeff’s company addresses nutritional needs for dogs to fight terminal diseases based on tumor type. They discuss how Jeff started off as pre-med in college before shifting his focus to marketing, then to dental technology, and finally to IT with a master's in Artificial Intelligence before realizing his true passion…the health of dogs. Jeff shares how he was able to fulfill a dream of living in New Zealand thanks to an IT skill shortage at the time and how his dog inspired him to make the career change of creating restaurant-quality dog food with the proper nutrients that dogs need, and how an oncology vet inspired him to take a leap to create Canine Biologics. They end with a chat about travel bucket lists including the lakes region in Italy near Switzerland, Patagonia in South America, New Zealand, and Japan.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.